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

economist.com

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

#361

Post by arcticbull »

jodrellblank wrote: post #282
arcticbull wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> " 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. " Humans eat 8 Billion chickens per year in the US alone: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287530/chicken-beef-fac... Some 15 MegaKilos of chicken: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/chicken-c...

Those are domestic chickens. Cats kill wild birds. Does that make sense?

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

#362

Post by osigurdson »

smileysteve wrote: post #264
osigurdson wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl was good then?

In the micro, no, see the part about death. In the macro, it created a nature preserve that humans will barely visit, won't hunt in, won't deforest; and requires no active enforcement to keep that way.

So positive NPV in a sense?

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

#363

Post by adastra22 »

yellow_lead wrote: post #156
awiejrilawej wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious, why are there so many extraordinarily pro-nuclear people on this forum? And how many of them have greater than zero experience with nuclear anything? I worked in the nuclear power industry for a decade and people in the industry are not as maniacally pro-nuclear as the people in this forum.

I think it's because the enormous costs of plant construction are not well understood. Or maybe, we think these costs can be reduced greatly.

The latter. Costs are artificially high. Indeed in a weird roundabout way they are mandated to be high. It has nothing to do with actual needs.

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

#364

Post by adastra22 »

bittercynic wrote: post #67
janmalec wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I introduce you to our lord and saviour nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy is a little scary to me because I suspect it makes it more economical to build nuclear weapons. -Many more people become atomic experts, and they may be hired by weapons programs in the future. -We will learn how to deal with nuclear materials more efficiently - good for energy, but maybe also good for building weapons. -With more nuclear material being manufactured for energy, will it be easier to hid…

Nuclear weapons have very little to do with nuclear energy.

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

#365

Post by adastra22 »

osigurdson wrote: post #109
renaudg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and planes crash and it's spectacular, but they're still the safest means of transportation by far.

Planes are fast though. Even if less safe that cars we would still use them.

And nuclear is cheap. It is literally free energy.

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

#366

Post by adastra22 »

smileysteve wrote: post #264
osigurdson wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl was good then?

In the micro, no, see the part about death. In the macro, it created a nature preserve that humans will barely visit, won't hunt in, won't deforest; and requires no active enforcement to keep that way.

You have a strange, anti human morality.

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

#368

Post by Grimburger »

belorn wrote: post #357
wanderingbit wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're bringing it up because cats are indeed the #1 killer of birds, and so for people who care about maintaining bird populations (presumably people who read this article) it would be better to focus on solutions that decrease the damage cats to do birds, rather than the damage wind turbines + oil-and-gas plants do to birds. Of course, if you care about birds you're going to try to solve it across multiple…

Are the bird species that cat kills the same ones that "wind turbines + oil-and-gas plants" kill?

Cat kills are basically indiscriminate, from anecdotal evidence I'd say that turbine strikes are probably not and certain species are more likely to get hit. In Australia at least there's species who routinely get hit by cars and others which rarely do.

That said, the enormous delta in raw numbers makes this line of argument quite spurious. Wind turbine bird strikes are magnitudes smaller than deaths from domestic cats.

> Collectively, roaming pet cats kill 546 million animals per year in Australia

https://invasives.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Pet-cat-...

> Cats kill more than a million birds every day across Australia, according to our new estimate — the first robust attempt to quantify the problem on a nationwide scale.

> By combining data on the cat population, hunting rates and spatial distribution, we calculate that they kill 377 million birds a year.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/cats-killing-one-mill...

> a report on bird and avifauna mortality commissioned by AGL Energy for its Macarthur Wind Farm found that 10.19 birds were killed by each turbine in a 12 month period. This equates to over 1 400 birds killed at the Macarthur Wind Farm alone and over 21 000 if extrapolated across the country.

This is likely underestimated due to scavenging but still magnitudes of difference.

https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/committees/sen...

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

#369

Post by laurencerowe »

vixen99 wrote: post #267
saalweachter wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've convinced me: we should replace all cats in the US with wind turbines.

And wind turbine manufacturers would agree: UK December wind generation: Generation: 2.6 TWh Subsidy/MWh : £86.68 Market Price/MWh: £75.00

Where are these figures from?

Older projects were subsidised much more but around half the current wind capacity has been built from 2016 with far less subsidy.

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