• mayo@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think any of us should be making assumptions about how many birds/bats are being killed without looking up the numbers. At least back when I was in school and learning about windmills (a decade ago) there were concerns because wind farms were often located along migratory pathways for birds. And it’s not just ‘birds’ that die, it can be an important species within the trophic level that gets decimated, and then there are consequences of that felt within the food web. It’s not as bad as a city, but we’re talking about introducing something new into the environment, and people should talk about the potential issues. We should be able to have both sides arguments about this stuff, since we’re still likely to agree it’s the right choice to replace carbon plants.

    If you were an ecologist it wouldn’t be so easy to claim others are ignorant when they bring up concerns about renewable energy harming the natural spaces they are introduced into.

    • Stoneykins [any]
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      1 year ago

      This is an argument for differently designed windfarms, at best, and you are defending propaganda.

      • mayo@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        My opinion about this comes entirely from a course I took in school a long time ago so you’re making the claim that science is propaganda here and I’m not going to agree with that.

        • Stoneykins [any]
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          1 year ago

          Not all propaganda is untrue. Sometimes it is more tactical. In this case, implying one true thing is more important than it is.

          All construction projects of all types have been having impacts on the animals that are displaced or effected for a while, and we do need to have concern for it and change many things, from infrastructure designs to materials used and how they are manufactured.

          But inflating this concern over these birds related to windmills is intended to bring hesitation to people who are concerned about the environment that would otherwise support these necessary changes to our power grid.

          There will always always always be less damage to environments from windmills than there is from equivalent power fossil fuel use. Implying otherwise is dishonest. Look at any image of a strip mine and tell me that causes less damage than windmills

          • mayo@lemmy.today
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            1 year ago

            I guess I had considered propaganda to emanate from dishonest sources and took my cooky professor quoting legit sources as not being part of that group, but even facts can be misrepresented. I don’t think the intention of my comments were to elevate coal or any other dirty energy source.

            The point of those studies wasn’t to disrupt development of renewables but to prompt engineers and planners to design systems which limit the harmful effects observed in the first generation of windmills. They are good things to review and know about.

            It’s hard to bring up complex topics on the internet because we can’t all be experts at everything and it’s easier to lump people into for/against camps. That’s not at all where I’m coming from, but that’s how I’ve been assigned by mentioning “the other side” of a complex topic.