It’s 2009. Robert Bryce is doing his fossil-fueled job attacking wind turbines for occasionally killing birds. He fails to mention the oil industry kills millions more.
It’s 2012. Robert Bryce is doing his fossil-fueled job attacking wind turbines for occasionally killing birds. He fails to mention the oil industry kills millions more.
It’s 2013. Robert Bryce is doing his fossil-fueled job attacking wind turbines for occasionally killing birds. He fails to mention the oil industry kills millions more.
It’s 2015. Robert Bryce is doing his fossil-fueled job attacking wind turbines for occasionally killing birds. He fails to mention the oil industry kills millions more.
It’s 2016. Robert Bryce is doing his fossil-fueled job attacking wind turbines for occasionally killing birds. He fails to mention the oil industry kills millions more.
It’s 2022. Robert Bryce is doing his fossil-fueled job attacking wind turbines for occasionally killing birds. He fails to mention the oil industry kills millions more.
Why the apparent break between 2016 and 2022? Because that’s when Trump was in power, and tried to roll back protections for birds, to allow the fossil fuel industry to kill more of them.
While Bryce always complains about a handful of eagle deaths from wind turbines, and not, say oil spill eagle kills, coverage at the time noted that “industry sources kill an estimated 450 million to 1.1 billion birds annually, out of an overall 7.2 billion birds in North America, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and recent studies.”
Going over to the Fish and Wildlife Service page on “threats to birds,” we find that while collisions with wind turbines may kill an average of 234,012 birds a year, which is bad, there’s also an average of 750,000 that die in oil pits. Why isn’t Bryce writing regularly about the threat to birds three times greater than wind turbines? And is being replaced by wind turbines, making them the bird-friendly option even before weighing in that climate change threatens two-thirds of all bird species in the US with extinction.
And that’s just the start! Every year nearly 599 million birds die flying into buildings, 214 million get hit by cars, 72 million get poisoned, 25 million hitting power lines, and 2.4 billion get eaten by cats. (Which admittedly sounds high, but averages out to 30-50 birds killed by each of the 50-70 million feral cats in the US, which seems pretty reasonable.)
Beyond the birds, fossil fuel pollution killed over 8 million people in 2018 alone.
And between 2003 and 2014, when Bryce was busy fearmongering about wind turbines and eagles, 1,333 oil industry workers died. According to a feature in the Denver Post, in 2014, “there was about one death per every 12 rigs'' in Colorado. “On average, that is one death every three months.” And Colorado was only the seventh-deadliest state for oil industry workers.
Not that Bryce cares.