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Feb 1, 2023 · A 2022 article by the fact-checking site BirdFact noted that while there are estimates that up to 450,000 birds a year are killed by wind turbines in the U.S., it pales in comparison to other...
- 32 sec
- Tom Norton
Dec 24, 2019 · In reality, wind turbines kill far fewer birds in the U.S. than cats, buildings or cars, according to a 2015 study. President Donald Trump frequently takes aim at wind turbines in his effort to...
- Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder
- Senior Writer
Sep 12, 2023 · One inconvenient truth for the clean energy industry – and a source of seemingly great concern to the fossil fuel lobby – is the indisputable fact that wind turbines kill birds....
- Overview
- Do wind turbines kill birds?
- Fact-checking Trump's other claims about wind energy
Cats, glass windows and vehicles: These pose the biggest threats to birds in the United States. But President Donald Trump is continuing to falsely claim that wind turbines are to blame for the deaths of the nation's birds.
During Thursday night's final presidential debate between the president and former Vice President Joe Biden, Mr. Trump reiterated his stance against wind energy with a peculiar claim: It "kills all the birds."
"I know more about wind than you do," Mr. Trump told Biden when moderator Kristen Welker turned to the topic of climate change. "It's extremely expensive. Kills all the birds. It's very intermittent. Got a lot of problems."
Biden touted solar and wind power as fast-growing industries in the U.S. that offer high-paying jobs, and refuted one of the president's previous false claims that windmills somehow cause cancer.
According to a recent study, North America has lost more than a quarter of its bird population since 1970, a possible sign of an ecological crisis. And while wind turbines are responsible for some bird deaths, they are nowhere near the biggest threat to bird populations in the nation.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, cats are the number one threat to birds, responsible for approximately 2.4 billion bird deaths each year. Collisions with building glass are the next deadliest threat, killing about 599 million birds, followed by collisions with vehicles, which cause about 214.5 million bird deaths.
Collisions with electrical lines and communication towers, ingesting poison, and oil pits are also more deadly for birds than collisions with wind turbines, which cause about 234,000 bird deaths per year on average.
"Bird kills [by wind turbines] are limited to less than 0.02% of the total populations of songbird species, and orders of magnitude less than other causes," the president's own Department of Energy says on its website. "Over the past two decades, the impact of wind development on birds has been greatly reduced by improvements in turbine design and particularly through improved project and turbine siting."
Millions of acres of bird habitat are additionally lost or degraded each year due to development, agriculture and forestry practices. Only through habitat restoration and protection can the long-lasting impacts on bird populations be mitigated, officials say.
In January, the Trump administration tried to eliminate penalties for industries that kill migratory birds, weakening a century-old bird protection law. A federal court recently blocked the rollback, siding with environmental groups.
Mr. Trump has long been against wind energy, claiming in 2019 that windmills reduce the value of nearby homes by 75% — a claim that has been refuted by multiple studies, which either show no negative impact or values falling in the single-digit percentages.
In the same speech, the president also claimed that noise pollution from turbines causes cancer — a claim that has never been validated. "The American Cancer Society is unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer," the organization told CBS News on Friday.
In comparison, pollution from coal plants, which Mr. Trump has championed, is linked to heart disease, respiratory issues and lung cancer.
As for the president's claim that it's "extremely expensive," prices of renewable energy have fallen dramatically. In most of the U.S., it's now cheaper to build a new solar or wind farm than to keep an existing coal plant running.
And Biden's assertion about renewable energy providing a plethora of new jobs backed up by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says the fastest-growing occupation in the U.S. is wind turbine service technician.
The president also claimed Thursday night that wind power is "intermittent," echoing past claims that people will lose power on wind-free days. However, energy generated by turbines is fed into the electrical grid, which is able to handle the variability of any power source.
- CBS News
- Sophie Lewis
- 12 min
Feb 24, 2020 · Communication towers kill 6.6 million birds a year. Two hundred million are killed by cars, and building windows kill 600 million. “What kills more, turbines of buildings?”
- 3 min
Apr 9, 2024 · MIT Professor Michael Howland returns to the podcast to answer a listener's question about the risks of wind energy to birds—and explain how wind turbines compare to coal plants, power lines, office towers, housecats, and other threats to birdlife in the modern world.
Do windmills kill birds? Yes, windmills do indeed kill birds and bats. Despite being the cleanest energy source, it is responsible for causing significant unnatural death of birds and bats. Ways in which Windmills cause deaths in birds: Collision. The first is by direct collision.
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