Why Climate Activists Threaten Endangered Species With Extinction

Last Saturday, police in New York arrested 70 people protesting the lack of attention to climate change. They unfurled a banner that read, “climate change = mass murder" with the word "change" crossed out and replaced by the word "emergency.” It was just the latest in a series of high-profile protests organized by an exciting new environmental group, Extinction Rebellion. In April, police in London arrested more than 1,000 people committing civil disobedience during a week of protests...One of the main demands of the activists is a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies like solar and wind farms. In many countries, wind turbines pose the single greatest threat to bats after habitat loss and white-nose syndrome. In some places such as Texas, where white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungus, has only recently arrived, wind turbines are the single greatest threat to bats. And scientists say wind turbines are the single greatest human threat to migratory bats, which live in different habitats during summer and winter months. Some, like the hoary bat, fly south to Mexico during the winter as insects become more scarce in North America. In 2017, a team of scientists warned that the hoary bat, a migratory species, could go extinct if the expansion of wind farms continues. “Unprecedented numbers of migratory bats are found dead beneath industrial-scale wind turbines during late summer and autumn in both North America and Europe,” writes Paul Cryan, a research biologist with the US Geological Survey. Wind turbines have also emerged as one of the greatest human threats to many species of large, threatened and high-conservation value birds, after habitat loss from agriculture. Wind energy threatens golden eagles, bald eagles, burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks, Swainson’s hawks, American kestrels, white-tailed kites, peregrine falcons, and prairie falcons, among many others. The expansion of wind turbines could result in the extinction of the golden eagle in the western United States, where its population is at an unsustainably low level. Any additional mortalities to the golden eagle threatens the species with extinction, scientists with US Fish and Wildlife warned 10 years ago, before the last decade’s massive expansion of wind farms...MORE