I’ve always been a big fan of windmills, and of birds. In yesterday’s WSJ, Robert Bryce makes a case that these giant turbines are getting a free ride by not having to account for all of the birds that their spinning turbines kill. Bryce claims that oil companies have had to pay in federal court for the deaths of birds covered with spilled oil, yet “the wind industry has been given a ‘get out of jail free card,’ since they’ve killed thousands more birds than other industries.
Altamont Pass is what you drive through when you go from LA to SF by car, and up here, an average of 80 golden eagles die each year, sheared by the whirring older technology turbines. A study showed that a whopping 10,000 birds, all protected by the migratory bird act, die every year here.
Yet why persecute the wind turbines? What about that fierce killing machine that lives among us? Housecats are responsible for at least one billion bird deaths every year. But, Bryce writes, when these attacks happen, nobody brings them to court like they do oil companies.
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