Our fos­sil fuel addic­tion pos­es a grave threat to bio­di­ver­si­ty: flood­ing coast­lines, acid­i­fy­ing oceans, severe droughts and oth­er effects of cli­mate change are threat­en­ing already hard-pressed habi­tats. In this con­text, cli­mate activists have embraced wind and solar pow­er, which are less con­tro­ver­sial than oth­er alter­na­tive ener­gy sources such as nuclear, bio­fu­els and dams. But wildlife advo­cates have urged cau­tion.

More birds will die as renewable energy grows. But what happens to these animals if the world falls short of its ambitions to limit climate change?

In recent months, envi­ron­men­tal­ists have chal­lenged a pro­posed off­shore wind farm that could dis­rupt whale migra­tion and mul­ti­ple solar projects that require cut­ting down for­est. In the Cal­i­for­nia desert, a pro­posed solar plant was reject­ed to pro­tect bighorn sheep. Just last week, the Burea of Land Man­age­ment approved a long-await­ed plan to appor­tion pub­lic lands in that region between con­ser­va­tion and renew­able ener­gy devel­op­ment — a plan that dis­ap­point­ed solar com­pa­nies and was cel­e­brat­ed by wildlife groups, although some envi­ron­men­tal­ists still think it did­n’t go far enough. Bird con­ser­va­tion­ists have been cri­tiquing wind tur­bines for decades.

Despite these con­cerns, many argue that ramp­ing up wind and solar as quick­ly as pos­si­ble is ulti­mate­ly what’s best for birds, whales, trees and sheep — not to men­tion humans. To dis­cuss how to think about wind and solar’s envi­ron­men­tal impacts in the age of cli­mate change, In These Times brought togeth­er Michael Hutchins, direc­tor of Amer­i­can Bird Conservancy’s Bird-Smart Wind Ener­gy Cam­paign, and Rebec­ca Leber, a cli­mate jour­nal­ist who has worked for Grist, The New Repub­lic and ThinkProgress.

MICHAEL: Cli­mate change is undoubt­ed­ly impact­ing our plan­et. How­ev­er, even if we agree that wind and solar ener­gy will play a role in address­ing cli­mate change, how we deploy them is impor­tant. We must do a bet­ter job of reg­u­lat­ing these rapid­ly grow­ing indus­tries to avoid seri­ous impacts on irre­place­able wildlife.

Birds and bats are the pri­ma­ry vic­tims of these renew­ables. In 2012 — when there were far few­er wind tur­bines than there are today—esti­mates ranged as high as 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats killed annu­al­ly by the fast-spin­ning blades in the Unit­ed States alone. Large, reflec­tive solar arrays look like lakes to some birds, who crash into them when they try to land. Some solar facil­i­ties reflect con­cen­trat­ed beams of light, scorch­ing birds as they fly by.

Ener­gy infra­struc­ture kills birds too: Road devel­op­ment can dis­place wildlife, alter habi­tats and inter­fere with ani­mal repro­duc­tion. Pow­er lines and tow­ers take out tens of mil­lions of birds each year through elec­tro­cu­tion or collision.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, while we have esti­mates, we don’t know pre­cise­ly how many birds and bats are lost at wind facil­i­ties. This is because wind ener­gy com­pa­nies refuse to share this infor­ma­tion with the pub­lic. Remark­ably, except in Hawaii, all fatal­i­ty data are col­lect­ed by paid con­sul­tants to the wind indus­try — a direct con­flict of inter­est. Two com­pa­nies recent­ly sued to keep their data secret.

Wind ener­gy com­pa­nies are sup­posed to con­duct stud­ies before they build their facil­i­ties to deter­mine how risky they’ll be to wildlife. But these stud­ies, too, are car­ried out by paid con­sul­tants. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, inde­pen­dent researchers have found that pre-con­struc­tion risk stud­ies often under­es­ti­mate the num­bers and types of ani­mals that actu­al­ly die once the tur­bines are oper­a­tional. As a result, more than 30,000 tur­bines have either been built or are planned for sen­si­tive areas for birds, includ­ing 5,500 exist­ing and 18,518 planned in the whoop­ing crane migra­to­ry cor­ri­dor. There are few­er than 500 of these endan­gered birds left in the wild.

Birds and bats per­form essen­tial ecosys­tem ser­vices, such as pest con­trol, pol­li­na­tion and seed dis­per­sal, and are worth bil­lions to the U.S. econ­o­my. They also eat mos­qui­tos, which are vec­tors of Zika and oth­er diseases.

We should absolute­ly devel­op wind and solar ener­gy, but we could be doing so much bet­ter. Renew­able ener­gy devel­op­ment has got­ten way ahead of the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work. Let’s enforce our wildlife pro­tec­tion laws and estab­lish no-build zones in areas that are espe­cial­ly crit­i­cal to birds and bats, such as major migra­to­ry routes and key breed­ing habi­tats. The Great Lakes are a prime exam­ple. Recent radar stud­ies have shown vast num­bers of migra­to­ry birds and bats mov­ing through this area in the spring and fall, fre­quent­ly fly­ing with­in the rotor-swept zones of wind tur­bines. Yet many devel­op­ers are plan­ning to build even more tur­bines close to the shore­lines and off­shore, plac­ing our wildlife at sub­stan­tial risk.

When it comes to wind and solar ener­gy, prop­er place­ment is every­thing. Let’s keep them out of crit­i­cal wildlife areas.

REBEC­CA: Humans put a lot of stress on wildlife. Like you say, renew­able ener­gy is one source of it. Also on the list of dan­gers to birds are tall build­ings, cars, cats and — by the way — the coal, oil and gas indus­tries. With all that con­sid­ered, wind and solar ener­gy fall far down on the list of threats.

But the real­i­ties fac­ing wildlife right now hard­ly com­pare to what hap­pens if we don’t address the biggest stres­sor of them all — cli­mate change. Like you say, more birds will die as renew­able ener­gy grows. Except there’s some miss­ing con­text there: What hap­pens to these ani­mals if the world falls short of its ambi­tions to lim­it cli­mate change?

If we don’t act, or we do too lit­tle to stop ris­ing green­house gas emis­sions, the world could warm by more than 4 degrees Cel­sius by the end of the cen­tu­ry. This would be dev­as­tat­ing for wildlife: Esti­mates vary wide­ly, but a 2015 study pub­lished by evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist Mark Urban in Sci­ence finds that one in six species could face extinction.

If we do act, and replace fos­sil fuels with renew­able pow­er, we might just have a shot at lim­it­ing warm­ing to the world’s agreed-upon goal of 2 degrees Cel­sius. Then, species will still be at risk — but it will be about one in 20, accord­ing to Urban’s study. This is still a lot, but it means there’s a huge dif­fer­ence between doing noth­ing and tak­ing action.

For birds specif­i­cal­ly, the Nation­al Audubon Soci­ety expects almost half of all North Amer­i­can bird species to be threat­ened by cli­mate change. Around 20 per­cent of bird species will see their range decrease by 2050, and anoth­er 32 per­cent could be added to that num­ber by 2080.

We’re just begin­ning to see cli­mate change play out in the real world. One unset­tling aspect of the prob­lem is how it will sig­nif­i­cant­ly exac­er­bate ongo­ing bio­di­ver­si­ty loss, increas­ing the poten­tial for a mass extinc­tion. Just this year, cli­mate change claimed its first mam­mal extinc­tion: a rodent called the Bram­ble Cay melomys, which was native to an island in the Great Bar­ri­er Reef.

Con­ser­va­tion efforts of the past and present have often been focused on tar­get­ed cam­paigns to pro­tect threat­ened species from what­ev­er obsta­cle humans have thrown in their way. But cli­mate change is a dif­fer­ent kind of chal­lenge than we’re used to. It changes entire regions and habi­tats by alter­ing rain­fall, melt­ing glac­i­ers, rais­ing tem­per­a­tures and more. It harms all kinds of ani­mals — includ­ing us.

Wind and solar don’t just play a small role in the world’s response to ris­ing car­bon pol­lu­tion — they are a pri­ma­ry strat­e­gy. Replac­ing the Unit­ed States’ reliance on fos­sil fuels will require hun­dreds of thou­sands of new wind tur­bines, not to men­tion tens of thou­sands of new solar plants (not includ­ing rooftop), accord­ing to Stan­ford engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor Mark Jacobson.

That’s a lot of wind and solar we need to build in the next few decades.

MICHAEL: One of the most com­mon excus­es for the rapid, inad­e­quate­ly reg­u­lat­ed growth of com­mer­cial wind and solar facil­i­ties is that they are far down the list of bird killers. Fer­al cats, tall build­ings, pes­ti­cides and oth­er ener­gy sources take a greater toll.

But wildlife loss­es from renew­able ener­gy are still not triv­ial, and they’re grow­ing. Bird fatal­i­ties from wind tur­bines alone could reach sev­er­al mil­lion annu­al­ly if and when wind pro­vides 35 per­cent of our elec­tri­cal pow­er. And for some rare or endan­gered species, like whoop­ing cranes, even a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of deaths can threat­en an entire population.

The North Amer­i­can Bird Con­ser­va­tion Initiative’s 2016 State of the Birds report con­clud­ed that ful­ly one third of our native bird species will require focused con­ser­va­tion action to ensure their future. Renew­able ener­gy may just be one part of human­i­ty’s cumu­la­tive impact on birds, but this isn’t the time to blow off or weak­en reg­u­la­tions on threats of any sort.

Yes, warm­ing is one of those threats, but con­ser­va­tion ecol­o­gist Sean Maxwell and col­leagues, writ­ing in Nature, have recent­ly ques­tioned the grow­ing ten­den­cy of the media to focus exclu­sive­ly on the dan­gers of cli­mate change. Their analy­sis of 8,000 species showed that the most imme­di­ate threat to bio­di­ver­si­ty and ecosys­tems is not cli­mate change, but over­ex­ploita­tion and agri­cul­ture. They con­clude that attempts to deal with cli­mate change should not ​“over­shad­ow more imme­di­ate pri­or­i­ties for the sur­vival of the world’s flo­ra and fau­na.” As we address warm­ing we need to make sure we actu­al­ly have wildlife left to save.

Hydro­elec­tric dams were once tout­ed as clean, renew­able ener­gy. Now they’re being torn down because of their neg­a­tive impacts on wildlife, such as inter­fer­ing with salmon migra­tion and depriv­ing delta habi­tats of essen­tial silt deposits. With­out prop­er reg­u­la­tion and mon­i­tor­ing, com­mer­cial wind and solar facil­i­ties may prove equal­ly misguided.

Many peo­ple view large-scale wind and solar ener­gy as our only hope against green­house gas emis­sions, but alter­na­tive approach­es exist: for exam­ple, for­est, wet­land and bio­di­ver­si­ty con­ser­va­tion, increased ener­gy effi­cien­cy and a reduc­tion in meat con­sump­tion. We can also dis­trib­ute solar pan­els across our already built envi­ron­ment; we have the tech­nol­o­gy now to put solar on roads and in win­dows. In aggre­gate, these alter­na­tives could be as effec­tive as — but far less destruc­tive to wildlife than — large, poor­ly placed com­mer­cial wind and solar projects.

The U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy and the wind ener­gy indus­try should also sup­port the devel­op­ment of blade­less, bird- and bat-friend­ly wind-ener­gy tech­nol­o­gy, though they’ve shown lit­tle inter­est in doing so. Entre­pre­neurs like Sheer­Wind, Kohi­lo and IceWind have been test­ing safer alter­na­tives, and as they become com­mer­cial­ly avail­able, indus­try will have even less of an excuse to con­tin­ue build­ing the more lethal variety.

If we can use bet­ter place­ment, improved tech­nol­o­gy and alter­nate cli­mate change mit­i­ga­tion strate­gies to reduce wildlife mor­tal­i­ty, why wouldn’t we? Too many peo­ple have embraced renew­able ener­gy with­out ask­ing the hard questions.

REBEC­CA: There was one sta­tis­tic in the August Nature study you cit­ed that jumped out to me: Cli­mate change is cur­rent­ly affect­ing 19 per­cent of threat­ened and near-threat­ened species.

As glob­al aver­age tem­per­a­tures rise above the 1 degree Cel­sius aver­age warm­ing we’ve already expe­ri­enced, that per­cent­age will climb high­er. Warm­ing is not a sta­t­ic threat, and will throw new obsta­cles in the way of humans and wildlife. In fact, the authors acknowl­edge cli­mate change will be an ​“increas­ing­ly dom­i­nant prob­lem in the bio­di­ver­si­ty crisis.”

Cli­mate change already ranks as a big­ger threat than ener­gy pro­duc­tion, which encom­pass­es oil, coal and renewables.

The top threats to wildlife here, like overzeal­ous log­ging and agri­cul­ture, also hap­pen to be caus­es of cli­mate change — but we can’t set aside wind and solar pow­er in favor of focus­ing sole­ly on defor­esta­tion and non-fos­sil fuel caus­es. The Unit­ed States, which still gets about a third of its elec­tric­i­ty from coal-fired pow­er plants, is going to need to run on clean­er pow­er sources, and so will oth­er coun­tries. To meet glob­al cli­mate goals, we need an alter­na­tive source that can com­pete with fos­sil fuels on cost and reli­a­bil­i­ty. Wind and solar are get­ting there fast.

On your last point, that too many embrace renew­ables with­out look­ing hard at their con­se­quences, you have an unlike­ly ally: Don­ald Trump. Hear me out: Trump assert­ed this sum­mer that ​“wind kills all your birds. All your birds, killed. You know, the envi­ron­men­tal­ists nev­er talk about that.” (In that speech, he also bragged, ​“I know a lot about solar.”)

Clear­ly, look­ing at our own dis­cus­sion and oth­ers, envi­ron­men­tal­ists do talk about that, and many are tak­ing this issue seri­ous­ly. Just look at what the wind indus­try has done vol­un­tar­i­ly in the past few years, imple­ment­ing sev­er­al reforms to reduce bird deaths, like shut­ting down at cer­tain times and using radar to detect approach­ing flocks. That’s thanks to envi­ron­men­tal­ist pres­sure, and more birds and bats are bet­ter off for it.

But it’s impor­tant to con­sid­er the con­text in which these issues are brought up, so we don’t play into rightwing talk­ing points. If we are seri­ous about cli­mate change — which the Repub­li­cans cer­tain­ly aren’t — we can’t use wildlife as an excuse to oppose all poli­cies sup­port­ing renew­able growth or cli­mate action. That’s what Trump and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives have tried to do, and in the same breath, they argue that it’s bet­ter to just wait and see if cli­mate change is real­ly so bad. They say it isn’t worth the cost now.

There are huge poten­tial costs to future gen­er­a­tions we must con­sid­er, too. One of the most humane things we can do for future wildlife is to do all we can now to pre­vent glob­al warm­ing from spi­ral­ing out of control.