Desert Bats Face the Growing, Twin Threats of White-Nose Syndrome and Wind Turbines

[NNadir]

From Inside Climate News, coming in on my email news feed:

Desert Bats Face the Growing, Twin Threats of White-Nose Syndrome and Wind Turbines

Subtitle:

Protecting the Southwest’s winged mammals from the menaces coming to their roosts and their flight paths first requires changing the public’s perspectives of the keystone species.

Inside Climate News By Emma Peterson October 6, 2023

Excerpts:

It’s only a matter of time before Arizona identifies its first case of white-nose syndrome and the disease that has killed millions of bats in the U.S. spreads throughout the Sonoran Desert. But, in the meantime, the biggest threat to bat populations in the Southwest is wind turbines.

Roughly half a million bats die each year from wind turbine collisions. Just flying close to the wind turbines can be fatal—a blade slicing nearby creates enough air pressure to kill a bat that it doesn’t strike. The 2023 State of the Bats report predicts that four bat species in the U.S. could lose more than half of their population due to wind energy facilities in the next 15 years if no mitigation measures are taken.

While bird deaths have long been cited as a drawback of wind power, the turbine’s impacts on bats could have much larger environmental impacts...

...Approximately 70 species of bats live in the Sonoran Desert. Arizona alone is home to 28 species, second only to Texas in bat diversity in the U.S. Throughout the desert, the winged mammals are crucial for the reproduction and survival of iconic plants like the region’s giant saguaro cactus and the agave that makes tequila...

...But the desert’s bats are increasingly facing pressures that have been killing those in other regions for years, putting the Southwest’s plants and crops in peril as well...

...Before 2000, collisions with wind turbines accounted for only 3 percent of bat mortalities in the U.S., but that ratio rose to 35 percent in the following decades. Today, the only thing more deadly to bats than wind turbines is white-nose syndrome. The drastic change in fatality rates coincides with a substantial increase in the number of wind turbines in the U.S. There were 4,675 wind turbines constructed from 1980 to 1999, but that number surged to 58,888 between 2000 and 2021...

The industrialization of wilderness for an affectation that has proved completely useless in addressing climate change is, in my view, a crime.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[GenXer47]

1. useless because of the grid storage problem?

You packed a lot into that affection sentence but there is hope for renewables - the iron rust battery for example. Check it out:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renewable-grid/
The grid of the future will be built of highly diversified sources, all working together, once the storage issue is solved.

[NNadir]

2. Useless because a trillions have been squandered on it with zero climate result.

Energy storage, because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics is an obscenity, particularly because the fraction of energy generated by dangerous fossil fuels is increasing, not decreasing.

Thus all the energy storage garbage being installed today, which is environmentally unsustainable because of the mass requirements, is causing increases in the use of dangerous fossil fuels, driving climate change.

The analogy I finally came up with today to describe this grotesque fantasy: Building energy storage infrastructure when the world is increasingly dependent on fossil fuels is rather like buying furniture and leaving it out in the rain with no place to put it, because one has a fantasy that someday one will own a house.

Right now, we are at the annual minimum for carbon dioxide concentrations as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory, which I have been monitoring for many years, often reporting on the terrifying milestones, for example:

Data Corrections At The Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory and the 2023 Concentration Records.

In the 20 years I've been at DU, I have heard endless wishful thinking about the "grid of the future," and in fact, because I am an old man, I've actually been hearing about for close to half a century. The "future" about which I've been hearing for half a century is now. This Northern Hemisphere summer the planet burst into flames. While I've been listening to this endless cascade of wishful thinking that now amounts to denial here, at DU, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide rose by almost 50 ppm. Next April or May, we will see concentrations much greater than 425 ppm, perhaps 426 or more.

Data sources, NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory.

People lie, to themselves and to each other, but numbers don't lie: When I joined DU in November of 2002, the 52 week running average of increases over the values obtained 10 years earlier at Mauna Loa was 16.65 ppm/10 years = 1.66 ppm a year. As of last week, that number is now 24.24 ppm/10 years, 2.42 ppm a year.

The whole time people were telling me all about "the future."

If you check my journal on this website, you will see that generally, this article linked notwithstanding, I don't get my information from journalists, as I often joke that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.

Nova is generally a good show for popular science, but it's television, television managed by journalists. It requires some critical thinking, and where matters of energy are concerned, feigned or deliberate ignorance of the 2nd law of thermodynamics should have no standing. Storing energy wastes energy. It's a law of physics and cannot be repealed.

My environmental and energy writings on this site are overwhelmingly informed by the primary scientific literature.

Now, I fully understand that the reactionary impulse to return to the late 18th and early 19th century and make our energy supplies entirely dependent on the weather, precisely at the time we have dangerously destabilized it is exceeding popular.

However, no one should ever, under any circumstances, confuse popularity with wisdom. They are very different things; often diametrically in conflict.

The destruction of wilderness for a bourgeois affectation that has not worked, is not working, and won't work fills me with a sense of horror, particularly at a cost of trillions of dollars on a planet where nearly two billion people lack access to decent sanitation.

Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.

I manually entered the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars, more than President Biden has wisely recommended for the improvement of all infrastructure in the entire United States.

There is one, and only one, sustainable form of energy that is reliable and can address climate change: Nuclear energy.

With it we could have a sustainable environment, but all of the selective attention directed at it has left us holding the climate bag, not so much at expense to ourselves, but at the unimaginable cost that will be suffered by all future generations.

To me, the bats are more precious than any amount of bullshit about so called "renewable energy." The name itself for this mining dependent and land intense affectation is an oxymoron. It's not sustainable. It's not clean. It's not green.