Yes, this is just the latest attack angle. Office buildings and cats kill ~4 orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines (https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...). Let's also not wonder about the land cost of pumps/pipeline/refineries, or the rare metal content of the cracking catalysts, catalytic converters on all of the IC cars.
The arguments start from bad faith attempts to sabotage mass adoption of renewable energy. Some people aren't using them in bad faith, but are just useful spreaders of them.
Yeah. There is no modern consumption without detrimental effects. And the thing is that the total effects of a system are difficult to estimate even for experts.
And when we talk about birds, let's not forget the devastating effect of light pollution, which seems to get only worse with the availability of cheap, power-efficient LEDs...
Some modern consumption is far better than others. Plant based meat substitute is generally much better than beef. Electric vehicle are much better than non-electric. LEDs are better than incandescent (light pollution is much less severe problem than climate change, obviously, and solving it simply involves turning of lights).
Solar and wind are diffuse, low-density, energy sources. This is why you need to use a lot of land to collect that energy and therefore a lot of panels and turbines. This also implies a lot of land for mining the necessary metals, and a lot of land when they are inevitably decommissioned. There are costs to this in a world which has a growing population numbering in billions and growing per/capita energy needs and which is going through environmental collapse already.
This is NOT a bad faith argument. Wind and Solar may never be viable outside of niche areas. Wind and Solar may not even be that great against climate change given that they are not viable without fossil fuel base-load (natural gas companies are some of the biggest proponents of wind and solar these days).
Nuclear just so happens to be an energy source that doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't need fossil-fuel base-load, and has minuscule land-use requirements. All I argued is that it is inevitable that we will have to rebuild our nuclear infrastructure because there aren't any other options.
The arguments start from bad faith attempts to sabotage mass adoption of renewable energy. Some people aren't using them in bad faith, but are just useful spreaders of them.