Not long ago a gentleman emailed me about an article he had written about a year ago on the problems of bird kills and wind generators. He felt it was wrong of me to write the article, because there are billions of birds in the world and some lost to wind turbines is not a big deal. Apparently, he felt that alternative or renewable energy was more important to humanity than a few dead birds. Feel in this condemnation:

I’m sure you’re a good boy, really. Maybe we could get the statistics on his “bird kills in the car wash.” Perhaps I could provide the grids for my wind generators, possibly bearing the unnecessary killing of unwanted birds and the cost of the new blades. Do you really know how many birds there are in the world? His article was vague at best and no actual figures were released. It just “kills more birds than the mini Santa Barbara, CA oil spill.” Woof! An epiphany! Intelligence at its finest.

Maybe you could put aside all the ego boost, character development, comments from friends and family and write something that makes sense. Maybe even something tangible that gives us faith in higher education or the benefits of renewable energy. I’m dumber for reading your article, not being that smart to begin with. It must have been a timeline issue.

Hmm, it’s interesting how many verbal attacks from people who deny reality, so if you wonder how the world is becoming so politically correct, it’s because people are afraid to speak up, because someone might give them a hard time. . And the complainant was right in one respect; Yeah I guess I’m a nice guy, although that’s not necessarily relevant to wind turbine “bird kill” problems.

And keep in mind that I am not an environmentalist at all, I just like to point out the hypocrisy in all of this. Environmentalists sue developers on behalf of animals, insects, endangered species, but when it comes to something they support, do they look the other way? Ah, the perfection of hypocrisy, I love it. The truth of the matter is that we can design better wind turbine blades with less drag and much more efficient. So maybe we need a lot less relative wind speed to be worthy and we can do it in a way that doesn’t kill the birds, everyone wins. Instead, politically correct environmentalists lash out and then turn the other way when the law of unintended consequences hits one of their wind turbine blades.

From your jokes about car washes, you seem to have learned that I was once in the car wash and bird business, yes any sewage runoff would harm the ecosystem (birds too). In fact, when the Federal Clean Water Act was instituted in 1972, environmentalists declared that thousands of birds died in Santa Barbara from an offshore oil spill. But then the number dropped to 163, then to about a third of that. Surprisingly, Nixon decided to advance the federal Clean Water Act for media generation and public relations purposes back then. It worked for him.

In the defense of the critic of my article, you are correct that perhaps the article did not indicate how many birds were killed, because it varies, crows seem to be able to learn quickly and stay away from them, but migratory birds often do not. I know this because our company had cleaning contracts to clean the wind turbines and we always saw dead birds underneath them. Like, I said, I’m not an environmentalist. The number of birds always varied, sometimes from 3 to 4, sometimes from 1 to 2, and sometimes an entire group. Oh well, there are a lot of birds in the California desert, I always thought so.

Of course, in 2005, USA Today did a story claiming that wind turbines kill tens of thousands of girlfriends every year, so it has become clear that wind turbine environmentalists want to eat the cake and kill the birds too. . And, is it really fair to attack the information messenger, especially considering I wrote probably 500 or more articles on environmental causes, everything from Ocean Dead Zones, Exhaust Schematics, Solar, Wind, Recycling, whatever? Well, in any case, this is just another example of environmental hypocrisy and how all this hot air is really for the birds.