Zinke's turbine story for the birds

We haven’t used canaries in coal mines in more than 30 years, but pretty much everybody knows the adage in some form and how it came to be.

Coal miners, unable to know what invisible gases were dangerous ina mine, brought a canary with them. Since the birds were more sensitive to the gases, their deaths would be a clear omen to miners that they needed to leave.

The process ended in 1986 when man created devices that could detect toxic gas levels.They worked better than canaries, and it meant we no longer had to kill canaries.

Now there’s a new threat. We have to apparently stay vigilant against the canary in the wind turbine. Huh?

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is pushing for efforts to increase offshore drilling, detailed the threat birds face due to evil wind turbines.

“We probably chop us as many as 750,000 birds a year with wind, and the carbon footprint on wind is significant,” Zinke said n a speech to oil and gas executives at the CERAweek Conference last week.

Estimates of turbine-related bird deaths are less than half of that, but let’s give Zinke the benefit of the doubt here while we do some comparisons.

Somewhere between 365 million and 988 million birds die annually in window collisions, according to a 2014 study.

So assuming the low-end of this study, a million birds die every day due to windows. And that’s just in the United States. Windows are 486 times as dangerous as wind turbines to birds.

But nobody’s calling windows a ecological threat. Most of us figure that’s Darwinism at work. The birds who don’t know what a window is get removed from the breeding pool.

Cats are blamed for the deaths of 1 billion to 3 billion birds every year. But nobody’s calling cats an ecological threat. That’s just what cats do.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates between 5 million and 50 million birds die every year hitting antenna towers. But there’s no brave “Tear down this antenna” speech coming.

It’s pretty much impossible to know how many birds are killed hitting airplanes, because we only hear about them when they take out an engine and pilots have to make emergency landings. But planes will continue to get people to and from destinations for the foreseeable future.

National Geographic estimates 500,000 birds are killed annually due to oil spills, and birds hit oil rigs just like they hit turbines, buildings and antennas. Shouldn’t that be brought up while you’re speaking to oil and gas executives?

If you’re wondeirng why you’re not hearing about that, it’s probably relevant to mention right now that Zinke’s three biggest contributors in his 2016 House race were companies involved with fossil fuels.

With every year, renewable energy is making leaps and bounds, and each attempt to dismiss it gets more transparent.

Seems like the adage we should be concerned with isn’t the canary in the coal mine, but one from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Kevin Wilson is managing editor of The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at: [email protected]