Is Trump right that wind turbines are killing millions of birds?
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Why does Trump criticize wind turbines for killing birds?
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Hello, and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast. We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news, and in life, and in the sky. I'm Charlotte MacDonald. If there's one thing Donald Trump definitely doesn't like, it's wind turbines. Or windmills, as he calls them.
You know, the windmills. Boom, boom, boom. They kill so many birds.
What evidence supports or refutes Trump's claim about bird deaths?
You look underneath some of those windmills, it's like a killing field of birds.
It's been suggested that Trump's dislike of windmills goes back to a golfing dispute. In the early 2010s, a brave soul proposed building a wind farm off the coast of a golf course he owns in Scotland. Trump fought back, labelling the wind turbines monsters and even testifying against the plan to the Scottish Parliament. But it's the cost to bird life that now seems his main concern.
But I've restricted windmills in the United States because they also kill all your birds. You know, they wipe out. You know, it's interesting. If you shoot a bald eagle in the United States, they put you in jail for five years. And yet windmills knock out hundreds of them. They don't do anything. You know, the thing makes it so. And of course, it's like a graveyard for birds. If you love birds, you'd never want to walk under a windmill because it's a very sad, sad sight. It's like a cemetery. We put a little statue for the poor birds.
Earlier this year, he posted on Truth Social claiming wind turbines were killing birds by the millions. But is he right? Do wind turbines kill millions of birds a year?
It's not completely wrong.
How many birds are actually killed by wind turbines each year?
I think with this statement, the S on the millions is probably doing some heavy lifting.
This is Dr Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor at Our World in Data and Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford.
I think my best estimate is that in the US, wind turbines probably kill between one and two million birds every year. So with the million statement, that's broadly right, but I think it's missing a lot of context.
OK, let's get into the details of this number. And let's start with the basics. We're going to focus on the United States because that's what Trump's comments were referring to. And it's where we have reasonable data. How do we count how many birds are killed by wind turbines each year? It turns out those bird cemeteries Trump was talking about aren't far from the truth.
Yeah, so figuring this number is very difficult. I mean, there's no big national database where we store all of the different birds killed by wood turbines every year. It's often extrapolated from the smaller scale studies. So what researchers will do is that they'll go out to a wind farm and they'll basically count the number of bird carcasses that they find.
Sounds like a fun way to spend your weekend. It's important to note that these studies only measure the birds killed by onshore wind farms. It's much harder to measure birds killed by wind turbines in the ocean and the data on that isn't reliable. Anyway, you can use the data from counting dead birds to calculate a rate of deaths per wind turbine. Hannah found all the studies she could that did this to see if they agree. They did not.
What challenges exist in counting bird deaths caused by wind turbines?
So most of the studies I looked at were in the range of four to 18 birds killed per wind turbine per year. So that's a fourfold difference. So the difference there is large.
The problem is that dead birds are hard to count. Sometimes small birds get missed. Sometimes wild animals eat dead birds before they're counted. The number and type of dead birds also varies depending on the location.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why does Trump criticize wind turbines for killing birds?
0:00–1:29
2
What evidence supports or refutes Trump's claim about bird deaths?
1:29–2:55
3
How many birds are actually killed by wind turbines each year?
2:55–4:33
4
What challenges exist in counting bird deaths caused by wind turbines?
4:33–6:19
5
Which bird species are most at risk from wind turbines?
6:19–8:04
6
How do wind turbine bird deaths compare to other hazards?
8:04–9:52
7
Should the bird death toll affect our use of wind power?
9:52–10:38