Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil-and-gas drilling • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by pvaldes » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #290

callalex wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You provide quotes but no attribution for those quotes.

Fair point. This is the original article in nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380?WT.mc_id=FBK_NCOM... "Methods: We searched JSTOR, Google Scholar, and the Web of Science database [...] within the Web of Knowledge search engine [...] to identify studies that document cat predation on birds and mammals" "We initially focused this search on US studies, but due to a limited sample of these studies, we expan…

not to mention that there is a huge bias in bibliography by design, because any predation study of type 'we didn't found any evidence of wild animals preyed by cats in our place' wouldn't be published.

If you base your search on bibliography you are pruning all the negative results. This is like removing all negative numbers before calculating an average value.

We need to remember also that "Local cats killed minus 1000 birds", would be a perfectly acceptable result [1] that is excluded from the search and the article.

[1] (= Cats save 1000 birds by killing egg-eating rats)

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

#312

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

Note that there has been a concerted effort to discredit windmills by the oil-and-gas industry to portray them as meat grinders for birds with the same photographs and handy boilerplate text distributed to various "special interest groups" (read: astroturfers) all over the globe to try to stave off the inevitable. And all of this is perfectly legal. They did the same with whales.

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

#313

Post by goodSteveramos » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:40 PM UTC

standeven wrote: post #250

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…

Calling every dumb argument against the mainstream climate movement a "lie" without further explanation is the kind of "pick a side" logic that entrenches climate change deniers.

1. Yes, solar panel production is not particularly good for the environment but not any more so than many other common industrial processes and the panels themselves are perfectly safe. Yes that used to be true decades ago, but not anymore. For many years now solar panels generate more energy than they took to make after just a few years operation. Yes, but the fact that they are not particularly recyclable doesn't matter at all because we are never going to run out of sand.

2. Yes, EV's can have larger carbon footprints that ICE vehicles in the few areas where almost all electricity is from coal. But outside of that specific case EVs are always at least slightly better, typically by 20-30%.

3. Yes, it can be argued that lithium mining is worse than oil/gas drilling but it's not clear cut and would only be worse for the local environment if at all. The effect on climate of oil and gas drilling is always going to be far far worse.

4. No, Solar/wind prices are clearly falling and more solar/wind gets installed every year.

5. Yes, solar/wind are intermittent, so they can't be used alone, but work great when paired with investment in longer transmission lines, grid storage and non-intermittent carbon free sources.

For point 6 I can only say that people are will be less likely to make blanket denials if you tell them the truth in a non-judgemental way, respect their intelligence, and are forthcoming with the problems and challenges of addressing climate change.

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

#314

Post by jewayne » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:41 PM UTC

cpx86 wrote: post #302

jewayne wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we accept that we are responsible for minimizing the suffering of both domestic and wild animals, isn't the logical conclusion that we need to drive those species to extinction as quickly as possible, thus completely ending their suffering? I mean, you are explicitly talking about ending our symbiotic relationship with the domestic chicken. We certainly would not have 20 billion chickens in the world if we all sto…

That is an interesting argument. Do you believe that the same would apply to humans? I.e. if someone wishes to minimize the suffering of humans, is the logical conclusion that they should pursue omnicide?

To be clear, I don't believe in that goal in either case. But yes, the only way to truly end human suffering would be to end the humans.

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

#315

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:42 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #280

imafish wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to stand next to either? They are not exactly located in urban areas...

I have stood at the very base of Wind Turbines multiple times. They are awesome, in the traditional sense of the word. A giant tower with an engineering marvel of a prop that slowly turns, nearly noiselessly sapping energy from nation sized air masses that continuously convect due to the immense amount of light and heat energy pouring into our atmosphere 24/7. They look futuristic, and yet at the same time so simple…

I've lived within 200 meters of a massive windfarm and out of 365 days per year I would typically be able to actually hear them for maybe three or four of those and when the sun was just right (for a couple of minutes on those days when the sun lined up with the house and the windmills) there would be some shadows.

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

#316

Post by anthomtb » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:43 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #235

botanical wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. Wind turbines killing birds is a disingenuous argument when it comes to climate change. > Birds of prey in Africa experiencing population collapse, study finds > new research used road surveys to find that nearly 90% of the 42 raptor species studied had experienced declines, with more than two-thirds showing evidence of being globally threatened. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/birds-o…

> Agree 100%. Wind turbines killing birds is a disingenuous argument when it comes to climate change. If the people involved in this conversation actually cared about birds, they wouldn't be worried about either. They'd be worried about cats. Cats kill about 20-55% of the entire US bird population every single year. Somewhere between 1.3B and 4B birds per year in the US alone. [1] And an order of magnitude more small…

My indoor cats haven't killed any birds in their lives.

My windows, on the other hand, take out a few every year.

Really though, I know the term "bird brain" exists in my North American lexicon but birds aren't THAT dumb. They can fly around large, opaque, moving objects with a rather high degree of accuracy.

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

#317

Post by fsflover » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:44 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #307

fsflover wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> saying " the claim that these are lies are just as disingenuous as the claims themselves " I didn't say that, but I do think that providing links is helpful.

quote: simply saying they're lies is just as disingenuous as the people making the statements in the first place paraphrase: the claim that these are lies are just as disingenuous as the claims themselves claim: I didn't say that I confess that I can't quite see the difference.

I'm not @jairuhme.

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

#318

Post by k__ » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:48 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #278

arghwhat wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, such argument is whataboutism. Bigger problems do not invalidate smaller ones. The only case where your point would matter is if we could only fix one or the other - human- or cat-induced damage - but that is not the case. They can be addressed independently and in parallel. I like cats though...

No, that's not what whataboutism is. Whataboutism is if someone says something like "Oh, yeah well, we have a bigger problem - humans kill more, so who cares about cats?" No. I'm literally saying that when it comes to cats killing birds, there is no problem. There's no radical ecological devastation happening. There's nothing to fix. What is happening is that the number of birds killed by cats is emotionally large, s…

However, the cats differ from spiders.

They wouldn't exist in such large masses if they weren't bred and fed by humans.

So, there is at least the argument to make, that if we didn't hoard so many cats, the naturally occurring ones would probably kill less birds.

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

#319

Post by Loughla » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:49 PM UTC

Grimburger wrote: post #309

SamBam wrote: post #25

The local birds killed by oil drilling aren't even what we should be comparing to. Even if that number were zero, bird populations world still be better off in a world powered by wind turbines than oil and gas. Global warning is coming for birds too. Global warming poses an "existential threat for two thirds of North American bird species" [1] and obviously a similar proportion of bird species around the globe. 1. ht…

Domesticated cats are by far the biggest threats to birds worldwide. You won't see anti-wind advocates talking about curfews or outright banning them though.

That's because cats are not a power source?

I'm genuinely confused how they would even be part of this conversation.

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

#320

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 9:59 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #200

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cats are a scapegoat to deflect the incalculable damage done to wildlife by humans themselves, their industries and habitat expansion.

They're not a deflection, the domesticated cat is in fact one of the incalculable harms done to the environment by humans. They're an extreme environmental problem that humans created and are solely responsible for.

The topic is how much damage is done to birds by energy production methods (even more specifically, wind vs oil & gas), not by all things. Cats are a deflection from that topic.