The Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico was widely cited as the world’s single largest polluter during the 1960s and early 1970s. Some people claimed (erroneously) that the smoke plume could be seen in a Gemini 12 satellite photo. Regardless, the air was very dirty in Northern New Mexico at the time, and the power plant was the cause.
As a high school student, I worked with Mike Williams (pictured below) and his wife Mary Lou on a number of environmental projects, including this one. Arizona Public Service eventually put electrostatic precipitators on the stacks, and cleaned the air up.
28 Aug 1977, Page 15 – Albuquerque Journal at Newspapers.com
09 Jul 1971, Page 8 – Tucson Daily Citizen at Newspapers.com
This is what US coal fired power plants look like now – the Rawhide Generating station near Fort Collins. They are very clean.
The battle to clean up coal is over in the US, and now I fight the #1 environmental threat – wind farms.
blades on the more than 4,000 windmills have been chopping up tens of thousands of birds that fly into them, including golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, burrowing owls and other raptors.
Center For Biological Diversity
Wind farms also kill huge numbers of bats, which are critical to the ecosystem. Like the endangered Long-Nosed bat which pollinates Saguaro Cactus.
Unfortunately the environmental movement has been hijacked (and bought out) by climate scamsters, and now are a huge part of the problem. That is why long time environmentalists like myself and Patrick Moore are fighting these slimeballs.
The federal government needs to rescind wind farms forgiveness for killing protected birds. I tweeted the last Interior Secretary but heard nothing back.
US skyscrapers are killing over 1 billion birds a year… so why aren’t you fighting against that?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/07/how-many-birds-killed-by-skyscrapers-american-cities-report
And the quoted eagle deaths in the Us regularly exceed actual population estimates… you CANNOT extrapolate the uniquely bad set up at Altamont pass to the rest of the USA. Modern wind farms have neither the same design or same type of site.
You don’t understand the difference between raptors and sparrows?
Griff, the Guardian is not a reliable source, it’s obviously a ‘whataboutism’ effort to deflect blame from wind turbines. And the figures are an estimate i.e. essentially made up. The pavements would be littered with dead birds.
Birds do fly into windows, most leave a ghost impression and fly right off, a small proportion are stunned and quickly recover even after falling hundreds of feet – I’ve seen this myself. I’ve never found a dead one.
An argument about climate change (supposed) is that it is one more pressure contributing to extinctions – so why add another in the form of dangerous heavy moving machinery in the mass industrialisation of the land and seascape?
It’s nuts.
Knowing how these clowns set up their “studies”, I’m picturing live sparrows, dove, and chickadees being shot out of a high powered air gun at bullet proof glass. Then they calculate survivors and extrapolate.
I have actually seen a few birds that killed themselves by flying into panes of glass. The building of the professional school I attended seemed to be particularly adept at luring birds to their deaths. In the three years I attended, I saw at least 6 meet their doom.
You are a LIAR, griff.
And how many magnitudes more windows are there than wind turbines.
The ratio of number to kills/ building would be absolutely INFINITESIMAL compared to that of kills/wind turbines, even if the Gruniad article wasn’t pure and utter BS !!!
“Skyscrapers kill over a billion birds a year…”. Why worry about that murder down the street when cars kill about 30,000 people a year?
Griff
Good idea to lobby for window treatment on skyscrapers.
This article talks about what we can do to the windows of smaller buildings.
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/why-birds-hit-windows-and-how-you-can-help-prevent-it/
Federal government needs to hold wind farms to same standard as every one else when it comes to killing birds.
Wind farms seem also to kill insects :
“1200 tonnes of insects to be destroyed
1200 tons of insects will be destroyed by the rotors, which is 1200 billion insects. One of the authors estimates that this corresponds to the size of the insects destroyed by 40 million cars. Remarkably, the decline of flying insects and the expansion of wind turbines over a total height of 100 m to 200 m coincided 15 years ago. Coincidence? We do not know.”
From Notrickzone :
https://notrickszone.com/2019/04/06/newest-climate-model-still-useless-german-scientist-says-and-green-energy-turning-into-an-ecological-disaster/
It is the food chain (from insects to birds, bats and rapaces) and hence the ecosystem that is endangered by the green ecodisaster.
I’ll be driving through NM and be AZ tonight on I-10. Team partner currently driving. Closing in on Van Horn, TX. We’ve driven through some heavy thunderstorms in TX.
We’re at the bird chopper killing fields on I-10 right now. 460 mi to go to get to Hayward.