Climate Plan Would Kill Hundreds of Millions of Birds and Bats

NCPA August 7, 2013

A newly published peer-reviewed study reports U.S. wind turbines kill 1.4 million birds and bats every year, while producing just 3 percent of U.S. electricity. The numbers reveal that President Obama's global warming plan will kill hundreds of millions of birds and bats while doing little if anything to reduce global temperatures, says James Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute.

• Even if no new wind turbines are ever built, turbine blades will slice 14 million birds and bats to death in mid-flight during the next decade.
• However, global warming alarmists say we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50 or even 80 percent.
• Given that most global warming alarmists also vigorously oppose hydropower, natural gas power and nuclear power, reducing emissions by 50 to 80 percent would require increasing the number of wind turbines roughly 25-fold.
• That means killing 350 million birds and bats in the United States every decade.

The number of bird and bat deaths would likely be much higher than that.

• Wind turbines produce power on an intermittent and unpredictable basis, meaning conventional power plants must remain cycling on a constant basis to fill minute-by-minute fluctuations in wind power.
• That means electricity produced by wind turbines is far from carbon neutral. Also, wind power companies have already cherry picked the best locations to place wind turbines. As wind power companies are forced to build their industrial wind farms on less productive sites, each new wind turbine and wind farm will produce less electricity than its predecessors.
• Accordingly, producing 25 times as much wind power means building a lot more than 25 times more wind turbines.

How would bird and bat populations be able to sustain themselves under such an onslaught? The answer is, most bird and bat populations likely couldn't sustain themselves and President Obama's climate plan would initiate an open-ended aviary genocide the likes of which we have never before seen.

Source: James Taylor, "President Obama's Climate Plan Would Kill Hundreds of Millions of Birds and Bats," Forbes, July 29, 2013.