Wind turbines are not the only cause of bird deaths. It is a problem highlighted by Trump, and it does genuinely exist, but it is not the leading cause of death among birds.
The latest instance happened this week, during his testimony at the trial in which he stands accused of fraud in New York City. Former United States president Donald Trump has long been known for his obsession with wind turbines, which led him to declare in court that he is "not a windmill person". The origins of Trump's aversion to these installations go back a long way, to when he tried to block a wind farm project in Scotland, near one of his properties, in a legal battle against the Scottish government that he lost in 2015, shortly before becoming president.
In recent months, the current Republican candidate has continued to attack this enemy like a latter-day Don Quixote. Recently, for example, he linked the noise from turbine blades to rising rates of cancer among those living nearby, before going on to claim that the blades somehow drive whales "crazy". But above all, the former president often repeats with concern, these installations kill birds. In droves. At the base of any wind farm, according to Trump, there is a graveyard of birds, something he considers "very sad".
It is a refrain widely heard in our part of the world too, although the domestic variant seems to accuse wind turbines of "blighting the landscape", as "our own" Vittorio Sgarbi has been doing for years now. The ultimate aim is always the same: to delegitimise these installations by presenting them as having a major environmental impact. If one looks at the data, however, reality appears to be quite different, and the story of wind energy's role in bird deaths is grossly exaggerated, to borrow an old quip attributed to Mark Twain. This is not to say that wind turbines bear no responsibility for bird deaths, let that be clear — only that if we truly care about the health of birds, we ought to have very different priorities from wind energy.
Let us start with the data to get an idea of the overall picture. According to a study cited by MIT's Climate Portal, between 140,000 and 679,000 birds die every year because of wind turbines (the most recent figures are about a decade old and could be higher today). That is a lot, there is no doubt about it.
As mentioned, however, wind turbines are not exactly the only structures that birds tend to fly into: collisions with buildings in general are estimated to cause the deaths of 988 million birds per year, for example. Not to mention the enormous damage done by domestic cats, responsible for a silent massacre that costs the lives of between 1.3 and 4 billion birds a year. Some 69 per cent of the latter figure would be attributable to stray cats. And that is not all: a further 200 million individuals are estimated to die every year as a result of cars and other vehicles. It is therefore striking how much weight is placed on wind energy in this phenomenon, especially when one considers the damage caused by fossil fuels: coal extraction, for example, drives deforestation and thus the disappearance of entire ecosystems that are essential for many bird species. And then there are the consequences of pollution and climate change more broadly, which have an impact on the entire environment.
This obviously does not mean that the problem of wind turbines does not exist and need not be addressed: fortunately, some experiments have shown that it is possible to make wind turbine blades more visible by painting one blade of each turbine black. Using this method, bird deaths decreased by around seventy per cent.
The notion of wind turbines making noise and largely wiping out birds therefore has every appearance of being a bogeyman designed to discredit a clean and sustainable energy source (as well as one that is continuously growing). The figures actually tell an entirely different story, one in which fossil fuels and their supply chain are the main risk factor for these animals. But all of this — strangely enough — does not appear to concern Trump.
