“[Hannah] Ritchie ends with suggestions for better results for wind’s avian mortality problem, including ‘Turn off wind turbines at very low speeds when bats are around … Don’t put wind farms in high-risk areas for birds and bats … Paint the turbines Black … Play alert noises to bats and birds to deter them.’ But … these things limit wind siting, increase costs, and/or annoy local neighbors.”

A social media post by Hannah Ritchie (sustainability researcher, University of Oxford) on industrial wind power is worth revisiting. She works within the climate alarm/forced energy transformation narrative (“Bird species are under threat from climate change”) but considers the question:

It would be worrying, then, if a move to low-carbon energy increased pressures on bird populations. That’s a common concern as countries move to wind power.

“Inner organs are sensitive for sound and vibration. The current state of knowledge on mechano-transduction together with known oscillatory and oxidative stress effects, point in the direction of our hypothesis and should be reason for urgent precautionary actions and further research.”

It is a very technical subject–but certainly one for deep ecologists that see humankind being a cancer to optimal, fragile Nature. Industrial wind turbines, huge and disruptive in the open space, are certainly man-made and subject to the guilty-until-proven-innocent doctrine of the “precautionary principle.”

Infrasound and low-frequency noise (ILFN) is an important issue that wind apologists do not want to discuss or debate. MasterResource posts by Stephen Cooper and others over many years have made a case that “what you cannot hear can hurt you.” As one critic put it:

More than just audible sound, grinding, whomping, blade pass whooshes, an ever-present hum, industrial wind turbines have a silent, below audible impact.

“The construction of wind farms … on the East Coast of the United States … is a big issue because it is a source of considerable noise.” (Arthur Popper, below)

In Phys.Org, Emily Nunez (University of Maryland) recently interviewed Arthur N. Popper, professor emeritus, University of Maryland’s Department of Biology, a specialist in the ecological impacts of underwater sound. “Offshore wind farms can be an energy boon,” she begins the article, “but does their noisy construction bother marine animals?”

She introduces the issue as follows:

… Popper … worries that the use of pile driving to construct offshore wind turbines could potentially harm fishes. Only two offshore wind farms are operational in the United States, but many more are in the works, including two projects planned for Maryland’s waters and a third project approved for construction off the coast of Virginia.

“Myth One: There is a fossil fuel funded effort to stop clean energy”. Fact: there IS a lot of fossil fuel money in the renewable energy space. But 100% of it goes to the PROPONENTS of renewable energy like the Sierra Club and Michigan Conservative Energy Forum. And the vast majority of renewable energy developers in Michigan are fossil fuel entities themselves.

How should government-enabled projects that deprecate the environment be handled by local opponents? This is a debate with two sides. Michael Giberson argues that private property rights trumps the taxpayer in such cases. I argue that government intervention to block government intervention regarding projects on private land is justified. (Debate here.)

Ideally, this controversy would be bypassed by a separation of government and energy. And it should be.…