Tuesday 13 February 2007

Wind Farms Don't Kill (many) Birds. Fact.

...well, not many anyway. A while ago now, David Bellamy accused wind farms of killing thousands of birds. Notwithstanding the fact that Bellamy, a childhood hero, has now gone mad and is gibbering on about things like global warming being made up, some people who are against wind farms noticed and starting using his support like it was some sort of argument winner.

Now it was clearly untrue (I've lived near windfarms and never noticed piles of dead birds), but without any peer-reviewed proof I was stuck. After all, buildings, cars, cats and so on kill far more birds and only an idiot would claim otherwise. I was therefore quite happy to see this study which shows that wind farms don't in fact kill any noticeable number of birds after all. Yay! I guess the NIMBYs, Neocons and other assorted idiots will now have to try to find another reason not to build wind farms other than the pretty selfish 'I don't like looking at them' argument.

3 comments:

Joe Taylor said...

A blow for Bellamy indeed. Perhaps he could turn his fire on my parents' dining room window that so cruelly extinguished the life of an itinerant owl the other week?

Liberal Polemic said...

Perhaps they will argue that wind farms are not very economical.

Without public subsidy, there'd hardly be a wind turbine to be seen.

Dominic said...

Hmm.. well, they hold up pretty well with other forms of power as it is, but when you consider the 'cost' of pollution from coal, gas, etc then wind stacks-up pretty well. If you want to talk about subsidy, just look at nuclear power - that's receives way, way more subsidy than wind, and look at the environmental legacy that leaves...