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Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

economist.com

251–260 of 413 posts

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#251

Or nuclear. There's that. Way less land occupation, no carpeting hillsides with solar panels, no ungainly windmills, no millions of pounds of toxic heavy metals to dispose of when batteries and panels go bad, and...oh....it works regardless of the weather.

...and also requires uranium mining and risks nuclear weapons proliferation. I prefer solar and wind.

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#252
post #36

Clearly nobody in the responses has stood next to an oil well or a wind turbine.

I've been on several frack sites. On one, it was literally raining oil and chem on everything as they were wirelining. I'll take the windmill thanks.

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#253

I worked in oil/gas for a long time. In addition to "windmills are killing all the birds", here are a few of the top green energy lies I've heard: 1. Solar panels are toxic, require more energy to produce than they generate, and can't be recycled. 2. EV's are worse for the environment than ICE vehicles. 3. Lithium mining is worse than oil/gas drilling. 4. Solar/wind prices are skyrocketing and everyone is abandoning…

Do you have sources as to why they are lies? I'm not doubting you, but simply saying they're lies is just as disingenuous as the people making the statements in the first place

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Felis Catus doesn't have a native range in any meaningful manner, IMO. They are a global species like us, because of us. You can't put that cat back in the bag no matter the .22 cartridges you expend.

That shouldn't stop us from trying to limit their growth. "The cat is out of the bag" so to speak, but a lot of the growth comes from runaway cats, or cats that have been abandoned by their owners (happens more often than you think) We could start by requiring all domestic cats to be sterilized, so that they don't breed. Then the cat population would be limited to certified breeders and wild cats. We could also have…

That's my take. I like animals, so I decided to not own any of them. I wonder how people manage to love their animals and remove them from their natural environment.

I know that we've come a long way and pets have had humans around them for ages, but to me it still feels like we're doing them harm. I know that nature is even harder, but it's not like pets decided to live that way.

It's also hard to understand why people love one species, but also breed others on an industrial level, so they can eat them more easily.

Probably going to get a few downvotes for this.

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#255
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous argument. Why on earth would people care about the birds in the context of natural processes compared to unnatural processes? This is a monumentally stupid apples and oranges “gotcha”.

> natural processes I'm curious, what are you thinking of when you say 'natural processes'? I hope it's not cats.

Symbiotic relationships are, in fact, a completely natural phenomena that is observed in non-human animal behaviour.

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#256
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we cared about birds we'd be aggressively controlling the cat population.

Generally we care about a bird species as a whole rather than about individual birds of that species. If something is killing birds, even a lot of birds, but in a place where those birds are abundant and whatever is killing them will just lower lower their equilibrium population a bit rather than set it on a decline or lower it so far that they might die out in the area then there generally isn't a lot of concern ove…

As a descriptive matter people do support a lot of species preservation efforts. But we have strong reasons to increase our care for birds and other sentient animals as individuals, with their own subjective experiences and the suffering and harms they endure. After all we already take that view when it comes to companion dogs. We know they can feel a range of emotions and we have as individuals and as society taken some steps to limit harms to dogs and promote their wellbeing. Caring for birds as individuals can be expressed in many actions, individual and political, but a powerful step many can take right now is to stop buying eggs and chicken meat and choose plant based alternatives instead.

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#257

I worked in oil/gas for a long time. In addition to "windmills are killing all the birds", here are a few of the top green energy lies I've heard: 1. Solar panels are toxic, require more energy to produce than they generate, and can't be recycled. 2. EV's are worse for the environment than ICE vehicles. 3. Lithium mining is worse than oil/gas drilling. 4. Solar/wind prices are skyrocketing and everyone is abandoning…

Do you have sources as to why they are lies? I'm not doubting you, but simply saying they're lies is just as disingenuous as the people making the statements in the first place

This is an HN comment thread, not a peer-reviewed paper on "lies convenient to the fossil fuel industries".

However, for your convenience, I used google to search for "are solar panels net energy positive" and found this as the 2nd link:

https://www.solarmelon.com/faqs/solar-panels-use-energy-manu...

This contains a link to at least one peer-reviewed paper:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3038824

I can almost guarantee that a similar process will elicit similar answers for every other point in the GP's list.

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clever of you to acknowledge but then glide over the wild exaggeration there. Still wrong, though: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1022937/history-nasa-bud... 1965 NASA budget in billions: $5.25 (the peak year) 1965 GDP: $743 billion giving us a NASA budget of 0.007 of GDP, or 0.7%

Apollo project is generally considered to have cost $25 billion, not $5 billion. Still, if we consider 0.007 of GDP in modern numbers, that's 2.65 trillion (2023) * 0.007 --> $18 billion. The fossil fuel industry receives $760 billion in subsidy. We're already spending more on energy; we're just spending it on the wrong energy.

You need to just admit error, not pivot.

5B is for 1965 alone, the peak year. As I said.

25B is the total over all years.

Re: Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling

#260
post #105

If we cared about birds we would be talking about reducing car traffic and saving more areas for wildlife. The argument against Solar and Wind with regards to wildlife preservation is almost always a distraction.

I think it's pretty clear if we cared much about anything we'd be doing a lot of things. But instead, we have this: We have a conversation like this one, I had it with my sister. We agree on this statement you've made in that conversation. Sister goes and buys a new gigantic SUV that gets 20 mpg. Understands we were just talking about how bad that is, but make a thousand excuses as to why she using the bad thing is a…

Many people struggle to motivate themselves to do their part on huge collective action problems like climate change. That's why national and international political action is needed, and in turn needs smaller groups of individuals to put in effort supporting campaigns for such action. That said lots of people do care in their daily lives and also put that care into practical individual action - and have a fun and meaningful time doing so. In my experience not owning a SUV or any car at all doesn't feel like "not having fun". It feels sensible and what I have good reason to do and it feels purposeful, a part of doing what I can to cause less harm in this world, from the lucky situation life has dealt me. I understand that some people really need a car for work, especially in car centric regions. But almost everyone has a range of other things where they can do their part and act to improve things.
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