If you have MAGA relatives like I do, who like to assail clean energy for gobbling up farmland for solar farms or who echo Trump's hatred for wind turbines, here's a good chart to keep handy in your filing cabinet when they make the fake claim that the turbines kill a significant number of birds:
Note the source on that chart: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The total number of bird deaths shown on the chart is 3,316,834,012 — a number that, I note, does not include deaths resulting from habitat loss and/or climate change.
A bit of arithmetic gives us these percentages for the cited sources:
- Cats: 72.4%
- Collision – building glass: 18.1%
- Collision – vehicles: 6.5%
- Poison: 2.2%
- Collision – electrical lines: .8%
- Electrocution: .2%
- Collision – land-based wind turbines: .007%
So that's... four? orders of magnitude difference between killer cats and wind turbines. If MAGA folks were really worried about infrastructure, they'd advocate removing windows, cars, and electrical lines.
Seems like a misplaced bit of worrying, or more properly, an intentionally malicious and motivated accusation. Gee whiz, they never do that.
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