Mark Duchamp

Freelance Writer

Mark Duchamp is a retired businessman who spent 14 of his golden years (so far) researching the pros and cons of wind farms. He has become a controversial expert on the subject of bird and bat mortality from interactions with turbine blades. Having denounced the conflict of interest that makes wind farms financially-rewarding to many ornithologists and bird societies, he is not exactly popular among them.<br /> <br /> His further investigations led him to the conclusion that the heavily-subsidized wind industry neither saves on the consumption of fossil fuels, nor on emissions of CO2 - sometimes increasing them overall. He showed that the wind's intermittency and variability make it necessary to run fossil fuel power plants in back up at all times, consuming more fuel and emitting more CO2 than in normal operating mode (like a car in city traffic as opposed to highway driving).<br /> <br /> He wrote over 200 articles in three languages and has been, successively, Spokesperson for the Asociación Cultural y Ecologista de Calpe, Spain; top guest writer for the online ecological media Iberica 2000; and co-founding CEO of the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW). He is presently the co-founding president of Save the Eagles International and the co-founding chairman of the World Council for Nature (WCFN).