Is Trump right that wind turbines are killing millions of birds?
Investigating the scale of bird deaths caused by wind turbines
US president Donald Trump is no fan of wind turbines, or windmills as he calls them.
Not only does he think they ruin the view from a golf course he owns in Scotland, but they are also deadly to birds.
“If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill,” he said in 2019.
“It’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery. We put a little statue for the poor birds.”
Earlier this year he posted on Truth Social saying that wind turbines were killing “millions” of birds.
But is that true? We speak to Dr Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor at Our World in Data and senior researcher at the University of Oxford, who has dug into the numbers on bird mortality and wind turbines.
Credits:
Presenter: Charlotte McDonald
Producer: Mhairi MacKenzie
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound mix: Sue Maillot
Editor: Richard Vadon
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- Sat 18 Apr 202604:50GMTBBC World Service except Australasia, East and Southern Africa, East Asia & South Asia & Live News
- Sun 19 Apr 202604:50GMTBBC World Service East and Southern Africa
- Sun 19 Apr 202608:50GMTBBC World Service Europe and the Middle East & West and Central Africa only
- Sun 19 Apr 202610:50GMTBBC World Service except East and Southern Africa, Europe and the Middle East & West and Central Africa
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