They also raised about 110,000,000 birds that otherwise would never have been born. This is completely irrelevant to wind turbines or any other power generation tech - the impact on wild birds is what is of concern, because, by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have.
> "by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have."
(but we can; the UK has 30 million homes; if 500,000 of them put up wild bird feeders, that would lead to more wild birds. Again the context of the comment was the shock value of $bignum not a comment on specific species or habitats or desired outcomes).
It isn't completely irrelevant; they didn't mention wild birds, or any wider context - the way they commented was as a shock number, the intent of that is "wind turbines kill $bignum, stop wind turbines". The relevance of the much bigger shock number is to put it in context - human activity slaughters a lot of animals.
Okay, something else which affects wild birds: "Bird corpses were counted - and, where possible, identified - at 166 locations throughout Britain during the summer of 1985. The survey covered all roads except motorways. It is the most recent such study, and the most comprehensive. The results were depressing. A minimum of 30 million birds are killed on Britain's roads every year. Depending on the assumptions made in the statistical analysis, the death rate could be even higher: 70 million a year is not impossible."[1] And that's as well as wild rabbits, hedgehogs, badgers, foxes, deer, and so on killed by cars which wind turbines don't affect.
So the wildlife in the UK would be much better off if we built more viable alternatives to driving and road trucking than if we scrapped wind turbines. We can also note that people are working on wind turbines that don't kill birds, e.g. [2]. It's not a fixed fact that all wind turbine designs do the same damage.
In the context of a world where fossil fuel propaganda really does exist[3] and Trump's recent executive order on unleashing energy generation where he tells government departments to look for all kinds of energy sources on their land - geothermal, hydroelectric, oil, gas, anything - except wind or solar - exists, and in the wider climate change context where there isn't a magically perfect answer - and where the UK is uniquely well suited in Europe to wind power - it can't just be left that "sensational $bignum means stop wind turbines" with nothing else mentioned.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 - Climate Town video on how the gas industry sets up groups of 'concerned citizens' which pay social media influencers to post about how great cooking with gas is, and agitate politically while obscuring the source of their funding, among other things.
While indeed irrelevant for the original point. I would encourage you to educate[1] yourself on the life these birds have before you make claims we're doing them a favour by bringing them into existence.
I made no such claim, I was only mentioning that in relation to the fact that population size of domestic birds is not impacted at all by the massive killing, while population size for wild birds might be dramatically impacted by a much smaller number of deaths.
I find the horrors of industrial animal farming horrendous, while not having a moral problem with the idea of raising an animal in decent conditions for slaughter.
