Dr Hannah Ritchie

speaker

48 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 18 Apr

Dr Hannah Ritchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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More or Less · Is Trump right that wind turbines are killing millions of birds? · 18 Apr 2026 podcast

Yeah, so my estimate is that wind turbines probably kill between one to two million birds every year in the US.

But to put that in context of other hazards, kind of top of the list is cats.

Now, cats probably kill just over two billion, so a thousand times higher than my estimates for wind turbines.

Those figures come with a lot of uncertainty.

They're not precise in any way.

I tried to figure out how many birds do they kill per cat,

And it works out around 20 per year for a kind of feral outdoor cat.

Now, that probably seems reasonable to me.

Buildings and cars and trucks are also very high on that list.

So they kill maybe 600 million for buildings and around 200 million for cars and trucks.

There are other big hazards like pesticides, communication towers.

They are kind of in the order of magnitude of millions to tens of millions.

And obviously these hazards just don't get the same attention in terms of policy and media attention as wind turbines do.

So I think the number is maybe correct, but I think the context surrounding it is missing to help us understand whether there should be a barrier to us deploying wind power or not.

Some of the best estimates I've seen have been in the range of maybe 10 to 20 billion.

So when you're thinking about the threat from wind turbines, you're talking about maybe 1 million relative to 10 to 20 billion birds in total.

So as a share of the total bird population, the threat is reasonably small.

I don't think the death toll from wind turbines should stop us from deploying wind power for a couple of reasons.

I think the first one is that we are actually deploying clean energy for a reason.

And part of that reason is to mitigate climate change.

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