According to the US Fish & Wildlife service, wind turbine deaths are tiny compared with many other human causes.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds....

Currently there aren't that many wind turbines. I imagine the proposal is to have at least 100x the number to replace all of the fossil fuels. Imagine the planet covered with wind turbines.

If you look at the chart in the link, 100x-ing wind turbines, if it was linear, would still be a tiny number of bird deaths compared to other sources.

Well, we are trying to reduce the other numbers. 10 million in the US is still a big number. We are 4% of the world population. As per capita energy use increases throughout the world, we're going to generate a lot more clean energy.

http://world.bymap.org/ElectricityProduction.html

Is there a reason we need to kill tens of millions of additional birds every year so we can have "clean" energy?

10 million in the US is not a big number, relative to other sources of bird deaths. As long as it's insignificant, you'll have a hard time convincing people that it's significant, and should stand in the way of saving the planet.

This is akin to complaining that your cancer treatment causes your hair to fall out. Yes it's unfortunate, but it's also a crucial part of the only realistic solution we have to far more urgent problems.

Adding 100x will still have wind turbines 100 times more innocuous than cats [0].

[0] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/north-america-win...

1. It's a made up fact. http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...

2. Cat's killing birds doesn't make it acceptable for humans to kill birds by the tens of millions.

Both fair points, but your link states that cats' killing statistics are perhaps exaggerated, not completely false, and we don't know by how much.

My (seemingly incorrect) assumption would imply that even if we remove all wind turbines we would only make a dent of about 1/10k. It is still a reasonable observation unless we find out the cat kill stats are off by four orders of magnitude.