They really argue about birds?! Not insects? Flowers? Plants? Bees?
It’s a standard troll argument, yeah.
There are “grassroots” movements claiming significant environmental damage from converting farmland to solar farms. Seriously.
Over here, there have been groups who put dead birds (often roadkill) underneath wind turbines.
I think it’s because they can see the birds that turbines kill. The birds killed the the pollution fossil fuels cause are hard to notice and especially hard to link to the cause of death. When there’s dead birds around a turbine, it’s more obvious.
People don’t look at numbers. They’re driven by emotions, which favour what they can easily see and wrap their heads around. Or alternatively, what they are most scared of. Eg, nuclear power is far safer and less radioactive than coal. But that doesn’t matter. People are afraid of nuclear because of past incidents they heard about. The way coal kills people is so much harder to notice than a dramatic HBO series.
And infinity% more than nuclear!!
Habitat loss due to uranium mining is certainly a thing. As is heating up of rivers for cooling the plant.
And hundreds of times more people.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
Skimmed the article for the reason of bird death.
They look at habitat loss due to fossil fuel mining and at the impact of acid rain caused by burning fossil fuels and mentioned climate change.
I have a feeling that these numbers could be shadowed when looking at the deaths caused by air pollution from coal plants. But I guess that must be difficult to assess.
With about 17,000,000 gigawat hours of electricity from fossil fuels each year, that’s about 160 million birds killed by fossil fuels annually. Cats are estimated to kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds each year, why don’t we do something about the cat problem?
We do. Some regions attempt to spay and neuter all cats found, such as parts of the US. Cats are very good predators and many conservation focused areas struggle to deal with them as well.
I mean, I know that, I’ve done TNRs before. But what we do is very little compared to the scope of the problem.