If you want a proposal to succeed, it is usually better to address concerns from others, rather than to dismiss them. Dismissing concerns not only alienates the people bringing them forward, but also makes bystanders see you (and the proposal) as inflexible and rigid.

I am totally on the same page with you in most cases. Having said that, I've got doubts about the sincerity of people arguing against renewable power for environmental reasons. It's hard to take it seriously.

You can take bird deaths seriously without reducing build-out of renewables. The blades are painted all over, regardless. It doesn't cost appreciably more to put a stripe on.

Perhaps not, but if the stripe makes them more visible to the people living nearby, then they may not want the turbines there at all.

There are lots of things visible from my house that I don't want to look at. Power lines, poles, buildings, cars and roads come to mind. I believe if you own a thousand acres you get to look at what you want, otherwise it's not up to you?

Right, I mean there's some reasonable limits, but especially in the US we've normalized the idea that incumbent homeowners have broad sovereignty to veto nearly anything that happens within sight/driving distance of their homes.

There are lots of people who wish they had veto power, or who insist they have or should have veto power. None of those is the same thing as having veto power.

It really doesn't matter whether if it's "up to them" or not. If enough people object, then it ain't happening. No matter how beneficial the project is otherwise.

That's just the reality of the world we live in.

It’s just a tactic those people use to force rational actors to become irrational. We should just ignore those who would throw the baby out with the bath water, when it comes to environmental “concerns” like this.

It reminds me deeply of the various people who will use 'it doesn't have enough affordable housing' to argue against any housing development in general.

Yes but you also must make sure that addressing the concern does not create other larger issues.

The paint job might make the windmills more visible to humans and make people not want them on their land or within eyesight. This could lead to fewer being built and more dependence on fossil fuels which ultimately kill more birds.

I think it also could lead to lower life expectancy of the blades. Darker paint tends to lead to higher temperatures.

And warmer blades might be less stiff, decreasing efficiency, and with it increasing birds killed/GWh (but that’s not even guessing from my side; I don’t know whether stiffness would be affected, and I don’t know whether it would affect efficiency, or in what direction)

Possibly. But if they're moving at a decent rate through the air that should cool them somewhat.

> make people not want them on their land or within eyesight

I think that’s already the case. Better paint one black before someone has the idea to put ads on them, the only thing that could make them even less pleasant to have around

Time to patent the idea of putting LEDs on them that light up at specific times in their rotation ...

Do they spin at a high enough rate for that? If not, you could have some kind of person or service that records elapsed footage and speeds it up, although I don't know how that itself could become a viable service.

> the only thing that could make them even less pleasant to have around

Do you actually live near an installation of wind turbines? I don't, but I drive past many wind farms fairly regularly. I just can't wrap my head around this "they're so unpleasant" argument. They are aesthetically neutral at worst.

Seems to be the outcome of existing bias that is entirely unrelated to the aesthetic "pleasantness" of the wind farms. Trotted out by politicians that have a vested interest in subsidising fossil fuels, whose extent of suffering through the unpleasantness of wind farms is looking down at them from 30,000 ft.

If you're within a few hundred meters of one, the noise as well as the constant flickering shadows at certain points of the day can be maddening - but, very, very few people live that close to a wind turbine.

I drove past some rather large fields of them- perhaps it was the angle of approach, but seeing many large rotating blades just over the horizon while driving actually made me a bit nauseous. Similar to seasickness / motion sickness, I suppose.

I also have a strong dislike for the aesthetic, though my wife doesn't mind it much, so I guess it's a purely subjective take. Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is blindly shilling for politicians and oil companies is a bit extreme, though.

Of course. The blades should have LEDs mounted on them, programmed to flicker so they can play short video ads. Maybe ads about how various ecologically-conscious companies sponsored construction of the turbines so you should buy their jeans with the leaf logo. Or their hydrating bottle, which comes in a tastefully uncolored recycled cardboard box.

Serious question: what do you find so “unpleasant” about wind turbines?

I find them extremely unnatural and spoiling any natural landscape. I live in a beautiful place on earth with very little human activities (nearly no agriculture or buildings) and would never accept if some were installed there.

Are you living off the power grid? If not, someone is seeing the infrastructure that powers your stuff. Even if you are, someone is seeing the infrastructure that makes your off-grid stuff.

I have never seen wind turbines installed in a "natural landscape", just in the middle of farmland.

They're often installed on ridges in mountainous/hilly areas.

Especially in white it has the aesthetics of a stackable plastic garden chair, it just makes the surrounding nature look like a trashy trailer park back yard.

> it is usually better to address concerns from others, rather than to dismiss them

It is often better....

Many ideas are designed to be refuted. The refutation spreads the ideas. It is part of the strategy. A "mind worm" (to coin a phrase) only needs to be repeated and it will do its job. Refuting it is repeating it.

So dismiss the speaker, attack the speaker's credentials and motivations ignoring the ideas. argumentum ad hominem, whilst rhetorically invalid, is the best tactic in those circumstances.

> A "mind worm" (to coin a phrase)

It's called a "meme" (in its original definition by Richard Dawkins). And this kind of forcing a rebuttal is "trolling". Dismissing this trolling is phrased as "Don't feed the troll!".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

And this particular example of trolling, is "concern trolling".

I'm imagining two conversations

A: We should use more windmills.

B: No, those kill too many birds.

A: You don't know what you're talking about, you have no credentials, and you are just motivated to stop renewables!

A': We can paint the rotors to avoid killing birds.

A' seems like a much better response even if A is accurate. Maybe you need to be A if you can't be A', but if you can...

"Wind turbines with a painted blade would still kill 1 million birds a year"

Doesn't help any. The number is already vastly smaller than cars or regular buildings or a single coal plant so making it even smaller willdo nothing if it'snot zero.

On the other hand, all too often the thinking goes:

- Something must be done

- This is something

- Therefore this must be done

Some ideas are just bad.

And, some ideas are good, and very, very cheap. There is no reason to avoid implementing those.

Building out wind saves birds from petroleum pollution. A bit of paint saves more. Why not?

If some wild paintscheme reduces the odds of wind being built...that's bad.

I'm not concern trolling.

Renewable energy is a huge win. Anything that hurts the chance of it being built is bad.

The very first comment guideline: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

You have no shred of evidence that even hints people would try to block construction of wind turbines because of asymmetric paint. It could just as easily make them clamor for more of them.

Next you get people who don't like the patterns or think there are better patterns. It's not a bit of paint for existing blades. It's appreciable weight added to the blades, to repaint.

Everyone in the US can easily identify the wind turbines, because of the uniformity. The uniformity and simplicity has inherent value in large projects (including large volume). White to dissipate heat or black to save birds (let the bats die either way?). It's not surprising that prolonging the state of the current environment may require short-term sacrifices.

This is Parkinson's Law (bikeshedding) in action, imo.

> This is Parkinson's Law (bikeshedding) in action, imo.

Common mistake, bikeshedding is the Law of Triviality[1], which is distinct from but often confused with Parkinson's Law,[2] likely because bikeshedding is also known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Something about wind power brings concern trolls just swarming out of the woodwork.

See, people will make up any kind of shit just to make shit up.

There is absolutely no value at all in uniformity of wind turbines. And they are not, in fact, uniform. Those erected earlier are smaller than those erected later.

The overwhelming majority of wind turbines that will be put up haven't been put up yet. So painting some blades black (or blue, or what have you) is no burden -- the blades have to be painted, regardless. Probably it will end up needing only a little bit of paint, like just the leading edge, so the thermal signature is moot.

> See, people will make up any kind of shit just to make shit up.

> The overwhelming majority of wind turbines that will be put up haven't been put up yet.

All the cars to be made haven't been made yet, so why rely on current cars for analysis? The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

> There is absolutely no value at all in uniformity of wind turbines.

Saying there is not, is incorrect. In the very least, HAWTs are the same, which is what most people are think of, when talking about this topic.

> And they are not, in fact, uniform.

HAWT are, as they have no patterns, in the US.

Trolling is not welcome here.

The ironic reply is the icing.

Conversely, the thinking can go:

- You're proposing to change something

- That change might cause some harm

- Therefore this must not be done

It's a trolley problem, where you could do something, and might kill a few birds, or do nothing and stand by while nearly a thousand times more perish.

The concern wasn't dismissed. It was put into contrast with a much greater concern that is often overlooked.

Cats kill 2,400,000,000 birds per year in the United States alone. [1]

Wind power is 0.008% of that total.

I strongly suspect that there are better ways to spend the time and money to reduce avian mortality like neutering a few thousand cats.

[1] https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/

I think the solution is clear: we should start painting the cats

They already come in a variety of colours...

We need to fund some studies then.

Such as:

Are birds more likely to avoid black, white, orange, or polkadotted cats?

Is neon better than bright pastel?

Cats don't kill bald eagles (the opposite actually). That's why there is a fuss. The wind folks will probably take the easy win and skip the what-about.

I hope they do! A win is a win.

Not if they are merely being obstructionist and have no intention of engaging in rational and constructive dialog for a better outcome :)

At some point you are just playing into the filibuster games.

Sure, until the naysayers come up with a list of bullshit concerns so long that nobody would have the resources to deal with all of them.

At some point you have to acknowledge that certain people are acting in bad faith and just ignore them if you want to get anything done.

(Although in this case if the fix is just painting the turbines differently... you may as well do it)

Only when those concerns are brought forward in good faith.

Nobody legitimately thinks bird strike is a reason to stop a wind farm. It's just a convenient thing to bring up if you don't care about the environment but know your opponent does.

the concerns on wind energy are blown up artificially.

specific example from Germany is "the dangers of infrasound", which led to a highly restrictive anti wind energy "protective distance requirement" of 10 x height ("10H rule") in Bavaria.

And then someone figured the underlying study was off by three orders of magnitude, i.e. 1000x off.

yet the disinformation has sunk into the heads and wind energy now has an irrational and steep uphill battle.

It’s basically a misinformation Cold War by vested interests.

i can't find the papers now but it's also very well organized disinformation campaigns.

"The New Climate War" by M. Mann talks of this too.

Some might see such dismissals (of "useless" proposals) as a marker of a focus and honesty, and thus give the author of the competing proposal more attention.

I think that dismissals may improve one's standing within an 'in-group', at the cost of further hardening the opposition (by an 'out-group'). I generally see dismissals as indicators of arrogance, and signs that the author may not have thought through all the implications of their proposal.

If we could separate their entanglements, we would find that the cost of this or that sort of energy is nothing compared to the cost of systematically despising out-groupers.

It doesn't matter. Both are orders of magnitude less than cats.

"We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually" from "The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States" (2013)

Cats tend to kill small garden birds though, which are very common. Wind turbines take out eagles. I don't think a domestic cat could kill an Eagle. Although one of my cats thinks he could, and might be tempted to have a go.

Since you didn’t name the species, it’s hard to say whether they’re common or not, or verify that their populations remain stable while an ever increasing number of cats are given an unrestricted license to kill anything that moves if it happens to be small enough.

Relevant: “Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats' impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information“

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.1553

so statistically speaking, yes - because many domestic cats live near small gardens.

But there are lots of ground-nesting birds that have been decimated by cats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduced_mammals_on_seabird_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

I found the cognitive dissonance comment interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife#Cat_...

They do not just kill "common" birds, they have led to the extinction of several bird species. Keep your cats indoors.

> Keep your cats indoors

Are cats not naturally supposed to be outside?

There’s nothing natural about a domesticated species being spread around the world and allowed to roam free while simultaneously receiving care and protection from humans.

Cats can live happy lives inside, they just need a bit of attention.

Ours get a couple of hours supervised outside time whilst on long leads. They can and do carry out hunting behaviours, but being on a tether and being supervised allows us to dramatically reduce their impact on wildlife to almost nothing.

Considering what they do attempt to catch whilst we are standing their, I'd imagine they would take a dramatic toll if we just let them roam free.

And only implied in your comment: they should not be alone. Not an excuse to go full catlady as 2 are plenty.

They are (in nearly every country) a foreign invasive species, so “naturally” they shouldn’t be there at all.

Aren't all animals?

I guess the ones meant to live in caves or underground would do fine indoors?

Not in North America!

Apex predators are surprisingly important, far out of proportion to their numbers.

Efforts to protect them have similarly outsized effect.

It's not just that small garden birds are very common, in general they've co-evolved with predators similar to cats and have adapted to deal with that (for example by nesting at height, having large broods, etc). There's some exceptions, mostly when cats get introduced to islands with few similar natural predators, but as a general rule it's probably not the most pressing problem. Large birds like eagles reproduce slowly and don't have the instincts to avoid wind turbines which in theory makes wind farms a serious threat to those species.

Raptors are more likely to take the houscat than the other way around.

Mammals such as rats and mice... which can carry many diseases including hantavirus, leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCMV), Tularemia and Salmonella...

It sounds like the implication here is that it's acceptable to use an invasive species to deal with pest problems. There are alternatives to dealing with pests that don't involve decimating bird populations.

In many many places domestic cats aren’t much of an invasive species. In north and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa there are similar cat species of similar size that take up a similar niche which were recently extinct (at least locally) many of which are closely enough related to housecats that they can interbreed.

One of the reasons to worry about domestic cats in some areas of the British isles is not to protect birds and the like, but to protect the closely related extant cat species that is getting its genetics replaced too much with housecat genetics. This wild cat used to have very broad ranges which disappeared.

Islands with no cat species don’t have this consideration of course.

Bird populations in places that should have and used to have catlike predators are and should be fine for the most part. Predators tend to help the population dynamics and health of prey species. Some people are just really uncomfortable with predation.

I don't know the specific numbers, and I've only just seen one or two studies (would appreciate an alternative numbers) - but if a three 3 billion bird reduction is almost a third of the total population in birds in North America since 1970s, and cats are killing at least 1.3 billion per year... I guess that's "fine for the most part"?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaw1313

The predation of cats is also unnaturally controlled as they are domesticated; people view them as pets primarily and thus prevent them from being killed (their predators are also heavily controlled - wolves, coyotes, etc). I don't see how you could compare that niche to previously extinct, naturally local species.

> I don't know the specific numbers, and I've only just seen one or two studies

You might as well cut you comment at this point.

One or two studies is more than the “zero” amount of data that’s been provided by anyone else at this point. I look forward to you sharing more specific numbers that counter the numbers I’ve provided.

The other way around: the domestication of the cat helped deal with pest problems.

Here's a question: suppose next year we mandate all cats are indoors unless they work on farms, and all cats allowed outdoors are sterilized. What happens to the small bird and mammal populations ten years later?

It’s even more the other way around, the native cat species basically domesticated itself finding hanging around humans for our density of vermin to prey on to be more advantageous than living in the wild. We didn’t go stealing cute kitties from the wild because they looked nice, we started taking care of the vermin eaters that migrated into our cities, especially the ones that had adapted themselves to be cuter and nicer to us.

We are not separate from the evolutionary process and several species have effectively domesticated us in order to survive better. Our civilization has created new habitats and we don’t need to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

You want to help your local bird populations? Plant oak trees.

Why oak, and/or what region does this advice apply to?

Advice applies to anywhere which has native oak species.

Oak trees serve as host to a particularly large number of species, many of them feed on the tree and serve as food for others year round along with acorns as food and species that feed on acorns as food. Oaks are keystone species as they have a particularly large positive impact on the local ecosystem.

Lots of birds eat mostly insects and only sometimes seeds, oak trees provide year round supplies of insects for birds to eat, in a wider variety and number than most other trees.

Absolute fatalities are not a useful comparison, in fact they are meaningless without the context of the proportion of each source of power. The same study provides adjusted numbers per GWh in the abstract:

0.3 to 0.4 fatalities per GWh for Wind farms and nuclear power

5.2 fatalities per GWh for fossil fueled power stations

i.e Wind and Nuclear cause between 5.8% and 7.7% fatalities per GWh compared that of fossil fuels.

Yes, numbers that mean something, and may be compared with other meaningful numbers, is a necessity for useful reporting.

There was a very dumb Two Bit da Vinci vid recently on YouTube about a big advance in dehumidifier tech. It had lots of numbers, but none of the meaningful numbers. The meaningful numbers they did not say were that it captured moisture 2.4x cheaper than current methods, but still 60x more expensive (in kWh/L) than desalination.

There is a hell of a lot of basement dehumidification going on, so switching to the new method will be very valuable. But it won't supply drinking water.

In other news, desalination is astonishingly cheap nowadays. It just needs cheap, opportunistic power, and could be built out everywhere. Inland, aquifers that are a little too salty for irrigation could be put into use.

That 20,000 number is off by at least an order of magnitude just for US bird wind turbine deaths. Turbine construction has been accelerating, so the 2013 numbers cited below are low.

https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/

Even off by an order of magnitude, it's still 2 OOM below GP's rate for fossil fuels.

> With wind power killing 20,000 birds a year, and fossil fuel extraction killing 14,000,000 in the same time period... does it matter?

That depends. Do we need to increase wind power production 1000x to replace fossil fuels? Or 100x?

It doesn't matter, but it looks bad to have piles of dead birds below the turbines, and it makes the employees sad.

If you can fix much of it with some paint, most people would do it.

Ask anyone deep in the wind or RE development industry! It does matter, because policymakers (at least in the US) have decided it matters though law, regulation, and treaty. It doesn't ultimately matter (practically) if policy doesn't conform to your moral calculus. *even if it is a sensible calculus

It does, because we could apparently reduce that 20k down to 6k, which lets us scale wind power up even more while looking after the planet even better.

We need to reduce our negative impact on the earth as much as possible. So a simple action which results in a 70% harm reduction is a huge win!

We could, but it might drive up prices of wind turbines a little bit. It's only a little you would say, but there are also other proposals to e.g. do away with forever chemicals in some components of wind turbines. If you follow all of them, eventually wind turbines cease to be cheaper than conventional energy.

The ultimate metric would be "killings per megawatt hour".

> Within the uncertainties of the data used, the estimate means that wind farms killed approximately 20,000 birds in the United States in 2009 but nuclear plants killed about 330,000 and fossil fueled power plants more than 14 million.

This falls along the lines of planting trees for CO2. Sure I could do it and feel good but maybe there's a more effective way to go about it. I wouldn't tell anyone not to plant trees though.

Air pollution supposedly kills 2,000,000 people a year. Nuclear energy has killed far less than that in its entire history. Debates around this topic tend to have no basis in rationality at all, and many of the most vocal “environmentalists” are really just extreme anti-consumerist or anti-capitalist.

Talk to somebody from the anti-wind lobby of environmentalists and you’ll likely discover their preferred solution is that we simply stop using energy for things like heating, or watching tv, or using our computers…

Not all birds are equal. I believe the turbines are making a sizable dent in birds of prey, whereas the 14m is probably a variety of birds.

Since the inevitable result is 14,000,000 killed by fossil fuel extraction + another 20,000 from wind turbines, it seems silly to just hand wave these things away.

We currently need fossil fuels. We don't currently need wind turbines. There's plenty of other energy sources that are better and don't directly kill birds.