Quote Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit
A) Wind turbines kill birds. Lots of birds. They slice through birds like a,...well, like a giant metal blade spinning quickly through the air. And it's expensive. Solar is very dependent on the sun, and more expensive than naural gas/oil.
Not that many actually, 1 to 2 per year per turbine is the U.S. estimate (and often less than that.)

Windows kill birds yet we haven't decided to take out all the windows or stop building structures with windows. Estimates for all building including houses range from 100 million to 1 billion birds/year.

The rate for a large turbine is about 2 birds per year. I hit about 1 per year driving (antennae clip them in the early evening typically.) Vehicles take out 60 to 80 million/yr.

Electrical transmissions lines take out ~130 to 174 million birds per year.

Wind Power Bird Kills in Perspective

Lots of other things like communication towers, pets, agriculture, etc.

B) So you see the wisdom of opening Alaska to oil drilling.
Nope, it's a snake oil solution to fool those who haven't looked through the numbers. It is very much like Bush's pledge in 2000/2001 to drill our way out of needing to do energy conservation. Some policy that was. Here we are threatening $70/bbl...falling behind even faster than before. The amount of ANWR production at its peak won't be able to keep up with our *increase* in consumption. It will be hard put to even keep up with the decline in production from existing fields. That is if you look at the current govt. estimates of what the field can produce.

I propose that the wise thing to do is to get everyone else to pump out all their oil first...makes ours much more valuable. I would rather make 10x as much 10 years later, rather than make 1x today. Strategic thinking doesn't get me very far in today's society though.