Do We Want to Kill More Birds & Bats?

I confess that I have a somewhat pernicious sense of humor, something I apparently share with Mother Nature. The white throated needle tail has been spotted in Britain only eight times since 1846. I know nothing about this creature except that it is a bird with a white throat and rather sharp tail feathers.

Recently forty stalwart limey bird watchers gather in the Hebrides, a group of islands just off the coast of Scotland, to catch a glimpse of this rare avian survivor. They got one, but unfortunately the guest of honor didn't survive. After two hours of ecstatic bird watching, the bird flew into a wind turbine and was flattened like a fly with a fly swatter.

There may be many morals to this story, but one is surely this: well-meaning plans often have unforeseen consequences. Wind turbines may be part of a smart energy package, though I have my doubts. What is beyond doubt is that they kill a lot of birds and bats. A study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimates bird fatalities from wind turbines at 573,000 per year. That includes 88,000 raptors, which is worth mentioning only because raptors are really cool. I know I'd be a poorer man if I never saw an eagle fly. I am not sure what seeing an eagle fly into a wind blade would do to my balance sheet.

The carnage is considerably worse for bats. Wind turbines apparently knock about 888,000 of these winged mammals out of the air every year. I really like bats. They are basically mice that scoop the air with big webbed fingers. Some of them use sonar to hunt for creatures I am less fond of, like mosquitoes. Some years ago I set up camp in the Ozarks just as the sun was setting. We were suddenly swarmed by mosquitoes. Then the bats came out and in about a half hour they had scoured Sylamore canyon clean of the pests.

I don't know how many bats we can afford to sacrifice annually to these gleaming white pinwheels, especially since bat populations are suffering a dramatic population decline due to a pernicious fungus. Nearly a million seems like a significant cost.

It is not a cost the wind industry needs to worry about. According to the Associated Press, the Obama Administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing eagles or other protected species. Instead, they had shielded the industry from any liability. This is not how they treat oil companies or power companies when birds drown in waste pits or fry on power lines. When a protected hits the fan it is, in principle, a federal crime. The Administration has resolutely kept a blind eye.

You can decide for yourself whether wind power, which generates 3.5% of our electricity nationally, is worth the loss of fur and feathers. If you pretend to care about all about our airborne cousins, you might be concerned that President Obama wants to double "renewable" energy sources by 2020. If wind power expands to contribute 7% of our power, what will that mean for birds and bats?

It is possible that technological innovations will produce less lethal fans. No one seems knows how to do that. It's also possible that, with more efficient turbines we can double the energy yield without quite doubling the number of blades. Still, a doubling of the energy yield will almost certainly mean more blades and that means that the dreadful numbers mentioned above will go up. A policy dedicated to expanding renewables will necessarily have to go on ignoring that.

President Obama has a great faith in the power of central planning. As Ron Bailey points out in Reason Magazine, his recent energy policy initiative amounts to a Soviet style Five Year Plan, only with less than four years to go. We know how central planning works and we can see it in the Administration's handling of the bird problem. When central planners decide to do one good thing, they usually commit to ignoring everything else.

The birds and the bats are not the only ones who will suffer from energy policies driven by pretty ideas. In his speech, the President praised Germany for "going all out in the race for clean energy". One of the results of that all out rush is that German households pay about three times as much for a month of power as their American counterparts. If you tell me that I have to chop falcons and bats into McNuggets in order to keep my house well lit at night and warm in the winter, I might reluctantly buy in. If you tell me I am going to kill those creatures so I can pay three times as much for electricity, I am opting out.

Comments

[Perspective Required]

According to this infographic: http://www.nssf.org/share/PDF/BirdMortality.pdf

It seems, if you can believe the numbers for total birds killed each year (3 billion, on average) by every source of mortality, 573,000 by wind specifically is... what? 0.42% vs. 32% just from flying into man-made structures alone. That's 950,000,000 per year from buildings. If you want to get upset about birds being killed by man-made things, use a little perspective.

Also, if you had the choice between having to live next to a wind turbine or downwind of a coal power plant... which would you choose? I'm not sure about you, but I can't think of a single person who ever died from wind poisoning.

It's often easy to forget that out of sight (tail pipe emissions, emissions from coal and gas, etc) doesn't mean out of your life. And I'm not talking even about CO2, I'm talking about everything else that's still getting dumped into the atmosphere.

When it comes down to dollars and cents, it always surprises me how many people prefer to to quietly poison themselves because it's a little cheaper and they can't "see" it. And then wonder why they have so many health problems later in life? But, I guess - in a society that lives for instant gratification, and can't draw a conclusion unless it's an instantaneous reaction to an action, we get what we ask for.

For a country that claims such strong faith, it's surprising how easily people write-off what they can't see.

[Ken Blanchard]

It makes sense to put things in perspective. Yes, buildings kill more birds than wind turbines. Still, it's odd to argue that it's okay to kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year with wind towers because we kill even more with other things.

Unfortunately, the choice is not between wind towers and coal or other fossil fuels. Wind towers have not reduced the use of fossil fuels in any country. In some cases, they seem to lead to an increase in carbon emissions, when coal plants are fired up and down as the wind blows or doesn't.

I wouldn't want to live downwind from a coal plant or next to a wind turbine. I also don't want to pay three times as much for electricity, as the Germans do.

[Perspective Required]

@Ken - It's not the case that it's OK to kill birds with wind, but that there are so many other things killing birds and bats out there at MONUMENTALLY higher rates, why is wind power being demonized for such a small impact? If you're truly concerned about bird and bat death, seek to address the major contributors, not the 0.5% contributor.

The only way to reduce the amount of electricity we use is reduce the amount of energy we use every day through various energy efficiency technologies, or by doing simple things around your home and work, like unplugging appliances, using less AC, less heat in the winter.

Wind power reduces the amount of fossil energy needed at a given time. Wind increasing fossil fuel/carbon emissions use is unsubstantiated. Again, i urge perspective: think about how much CO2 would be emitted into the atmosphere if there were no wind/solar/hydro energy sources and everything came from coal all the time?

Of course, no one wants to pay ridiculous amounts for electricity, but in the alternative, would you rather pay ridiculous amounts for health care related to pollution, or have to see mountains destroyed for coal below, or entire water aquifers polluted for natural gas extraction? It's a NYMBY attitude to say you don't want to live next to a coal plant, and support fossil energy. Some folks don't have a choice, and families suffer the health impacts. Poor families, that then require socially funded health care costing everyone more money in the long run.

To live in a better, healthier, cleaner world, we have to make smarter, less selfish choices that extend beyond ourselves.