I have a private pilot licence and flew near Coal Plants here in Australia. You can smell the coal plant long before you can see the coal plant outside if you’re flying at lower altitude (not sure about much higher, since I’ve only approached them probably at less than 3500ft)
It really gives some perspective just how unhealthy they are. People think you only smell them when you’re near the smoke stack, but the smoke stretches a huge distance at higher altitude
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.
And infinity% more than nuclear!!
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.
They really argue about birds?! Not insects? Flowers? Plants? Bees?
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.
