Green Leaf Report

At the WindPower 2008 conference I spoke with a University student from North Carolina manning the North Carolina Renewable Energy booth.  He was part of a community outreach program for solar and wind; when I asked him how that was going for him, he said people in North Carolina tended to complain in the community meetings that the wind turbines would kill birds.

I’ve written about this bird/wind energy issue in the past, and we should also mention the cat/building comparison - where in the US cats are estimated to kill one billion birds annually, and buildings are estimated to kill 100 million to one billion birds annually.  Wind turbines are estimated to kill around 10,000 birds annually, with much of that effect from older turbines, and much due to the fact that birds tend to crash into any physical structure.

But since this student was from North Carolina, I asked him if anyone compared the possible risk of bird deaths to the effects of mountaintop mining for coal in the Appalachian mountains.  I was alerted by a fellow blogger recently that North Carolina was considering a ban on this practice of removing the topography of a mountain to acquire the coal below the surface.  Certainly the wind turbines are preferable to coal, with every stage of the coal process extracting such an environmental cost. 

If the North Carolina birds are quivering in fear over anything, I doubt it’s the possible addition of wind turbines near the coast.  I imagine the loss of habitat from the disappearing mountains and the plumes of pollution released from coal plants hurt a little bit more. 

Sign the petition to end mountaintop mining today, and write your congressperson.