Number of Birds Killed
19th July 2010
Alex Tabarrok does the numbers.
Number of birds killed by the BP oil spill: at least 2,188 and counting.
Number of birds killed by wind farms: 10,000-40,000 annually.
Somehow I don’t suppose that PETA and the Sierra Club will be bashing wind farms quite as much as they bash BP. Ya think?
July 19th, 2010 at 10:44
During the Exxon Valdez misadventure, there was some conjecture that Exxon couldn’t find all the dead birds because some of them sank. (Yeah, I know, oil and dead things usually do float, but Sierra Club was pushing a theory to try to get more $$.) EPA went out in a boat with an oil boom, put oil in the boom, then killed a number of ducks and threw them in the boomed off oil to see if they would sink. (Unsurprisingly, they didn’t sink.) The total number of birds killed by EPA far surpassed those killed by Exxon. The only news media to cover this was NPR. Yeah, THAT NPR. The whole thing was so obscene that even NPR couldn’t stomach it.