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Don't underestimate the power of money spend by the U.S. oil,gas,coal industry. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...

I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"

Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-...

and the noise causes cancer

Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.

As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.

Per-windmill bird fatalities are much, much lower for new windmills. They made some cosmetic changes that scare the birds off.

Also, it turns out that bird flight patterns are very stable from year to year, so they study flight patterns, and place the windmills out of the way.

Yeah, see the reply I left with your sibling. I am in full agreement with you and wrote my comment way too quickly because I was trying to rebut the argument that windmills are in any way responsible for some crazy number of bird deaths.

Domestic cats kill on the order of 100x as many birds as windmills do.

Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes.

Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.

Yeah, I'm your parent and I think I wrote that reply without reading it over because I was attempting to point out, with numbers, how absurd it is that anyone would say "windmills are bad because of how many birds they kill" as if that's a logical argument vs. the countless other things that kill birds en masse.

Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).

Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s

Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him

True Bird Lovers only care about bird fatalities from windmills. Oil spills, buildings, and cats don't register.

> Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term.

Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot.

Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there.

Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it.

This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.

People voted in repeatedly a visibly primitive person (plus quite a few other things but lets not go there now), then they get primitive behavior.

An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?

I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.

Since you wrote "honest question" I feel like I should answer... I expected what's happening and I expect even worse in the future. And goes to show you (I!) can still be shocked even when you're expecting some pretty rough stuff.

This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.

So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.

> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on

I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.

This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.

It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.

In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.

Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.

I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.

I've just grown to really respect older people who manage to stay excited and optimistic. It's so much easier to become a cynic, and I think it required effort on their end to try and be a positive person.

Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.

> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency

Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.

The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.

That elections are "competitive" is utterly irrelevant in a political system where local, state, and federal legislation is almost exclusively drafted by lobbyists. Lobbyists who in addition to supplying pre-written legislation also supply staffers with pre-formatted position statements to distribute to anyone who bothers contacting their office about said.

In practice that "competition" you seem so taken by produces nice sound bites and some column inches on whatever culture war rag is being waved in the face of the citizenry, and literally nothing of substance that addresses any of the myriad slow burning economic and systemic crises that have been building for the last 40 years.

Using agriculture as a microcosm for the larger economy there has been nothing proposed much less ratified to address the complete chokehold Monsanto, John Deer, Cargill, and Tyson Foods have on every aspect of the agricultural industry . And they've had literal decades to make a move.

Princeton University released a study 16 years ago that concluded the US was a de facto oligarchy and if anything legislative capture has only deepened in the US since then. Hell at the local level I've watched the county planning board float a ballot initiative to greenlight a major construction project which was soundly rejected by local voters. Net result: 5 years later they broke ground on the project anyway. So you can tell me there's movable needles out there until you're blue in the face, let's see some reciepts.

> So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power

Quick question: how many _months_ total in the last quarter century have the Dems had the Presidency, Senate, and House at the same time.

The answer is 47. Forty seven total months. Out of 300. We got the ACA (Obamacare) and the Inflation Reduction Act during those brief time periods, too.

The ACA was poorly camouflaged pork for the insurance industry and healthcare statistics have continued to decline since it was passed. Who did the IRA pay off?

> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.

I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.

63.45% voted last time. Thats not a minority.

  > I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be,

Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like.

The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.

Don’t leave us hanging, what exactly is happening at the crime scene?

Read the news.

- Trump received $4B in bribes last year.

- Widespread arrests and murder / deportations of US citizens.

- Federal agents routinely kidnap pregnant child abuse victims so they can be transported to Texas where they're denied health care + forced to carry their assailant's child to term.

- Blowing up fishermen + using the footage in weird 80's movie montage propaganda films.

- Installing censors at most news organizations in the US.

And literally hundreds of comparably bad stories. They arrive at a rate of 2-3 per day, and have been for over a year.