More from Robert Bryce's book "Power Hungry" . Chapter 11 deals primarily with T. Boone Pickens and his attempt to sell Americans on his plan. Of course, and no surprise to me, the Pickens plan was just an elaborate way of separating taxpayers from their money. However, there was one piece of information that I found interesting in chapter 11 concerning wind farms and that gets very little press:
1) Oil companies and power utilities have been fined heavily for killing birds. Many of which are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA).
2) Despite the fact that wind mills are very effective bird Cuisinarts, they seem to have been exempted from MBTA.
3) “Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year are being killed by U.S. turbines.” This includes golden eagles.
4) Wind turbines also threaten bats.
At the end of this chapter, I concluded that the environmental movement and wind farm advocates consider birds to be an acceptable collateral damage on the road to the renewable energy utopia. Funny that they don’t hold wind power as accountable as other forms of energy generation when it comes to preserving nature.
1 comment:
Great post. And the only produce juice when there's wind, too.
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