Wind industry big lies no 3: wind turbines are eco-friendly

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of all the many lies put out by the subsidy-troughing scum-suckers of the wind industry and their greenie fellow travellers, the biggest porkie of the lot is this: that wind turbines are eco-friendly.

In order to believe this tosh, you'd first have to accept the warped view that being eco-friendly can legitimately entail wiping out millions of bats and birds. It is a measure of just how intellectually and morally corrupt Big Green has grown over the last few decades that many self-professed environmentalists actually cleave to this belief. Why else would they expend so much energy trying to defend – or distract from – the indefensible truth: that wind farms around the world are destroying rare species on an industrial scale?

If you haven't already, I'd heartily recommend the article in this week's Spectator by Oxford ecologist Clive Hambler. He doesn't pull his punches on the devastation being wrought by wind turbines.

Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year. And these figures may be conservative if you compare them to statistics published in December 2002 by the California Energy Commission: ‘In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.’

It's not just the quantity of birds and bats being killed that worries Dr Hambler, but their rarity.

Because wind farms tend to be built on uplands, where there are good thermals, they kill a disproportionate number of raptors. In Australia, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle is threatened with global extinction by wind farms. In north America, wind farms are killing tens of thousands of raptors including golden eagles and America’s national bird, the bald eagle. In Spain, the Egyptian vulture is threatened, as too is the Griffon vulture — 400 of which were killed in one year at Navarra alone. Norwegian wind farms kill over ten white-tailed eagles per year and the population of Smøla has been severely impacted by turbines built against the opposition of ornithologists.

Nor are many other avian species safe. In North America, for example, proposed wind farms on the Great Lakes would kill large numbers of migratory songbirds. In the Atlantic, seabirds such as the Manx Shearwater are threatened. Offshore wind farms are just as bad as onshore ones, posing a growing threat to seabirds and migratory birds, and reducing habitat availability for marine birds (such as common scoter and eider ducks).

This is indeed one of the great environmental scandals of our time. So why don't we hear about it more often? Dr Hambler has his suspicions:

First, because the wind industry (with the shameful complicity of some ornithological organisations) has gone to great trouble to cover it up — to the extent of burying the corpses of victims. Second, because the ongoing obsession with climate change means that many environmentalists are turning a blind eye to the ecological costs of renewable energy.

Indeed. And where are our own RSPB on this? Are they doing their bit to fight the menace posed by bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes?

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