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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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9 minutes

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