Windmills - Like the Sierra Club national group, I am supportive of wind energy because it is much less destructive to the environment than traditional fossil fuels and, unlike them, is a sustainable source of energy. I have heard that some local Sierra Club members are not as supportive of wind energy, due to concerns about potential bird strikes from windmills.

 

To look into that issue, I'd like us to become more educated about windmills and the environmental threats they pose here in CC. Let's talk to people who live under windmills and hear what they have to say for anecdotal information. And talk to any professionals we can find on the subject, perhaps someone doing research on the subject.

 

Since bird strikes are a concern, we might also talk to a local architect to find out if there are "best practices" that we could encourage the city to require of all new buildings in this area to make them more bird-friendly, since buildings pose a much greater threat to birds than do windmills.

 

Also, we might invite someone to talk to us about the damage that feral and domestic cats do to bird populations, then come up with suggestions for the city on how to minimize impact from those cats through more/better programs.

 

Sierra Club article: http://vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/201303/wind-power-turbine-technology-birds.aspx
[... turbine collisions account for only 3 out of 100,000 human-caused bird deaths. Birds are killed in numbers many orders of magnitude greater by collisions with buildings and power lines, poisoning from pesticides, and predation by domestic cats.]

 

Another interesting article that mentions a partnership that Sierra Club National is a part of -

Quotes from that article:

"This kind of early-warning radar technology has been deployed at wind farms along the Texas Gulf coast during the spring migration of songbirds."

"They want to do it because they are conservation-mined, too. Many people in the wind industry work in the industry because they believe they're doing something to reduce the impacts of climate change, which many believe is the single biggest threat."

 

I'd like to see our Sierra Club group be FOR something, as many people think of Sierra Club as being AGAINST things. Encouraging wind energy companies to develop here while ensuring that the wind farms are placed in the right places would be a really positive thing for the Sierra Club to support.