The Two But Rule

CHAPTER 16Saving the World…with Your But

I hope you're feeling good. You should. We've just flexed our buts on some gnarly topics. And I'd like to think that you've been testing your Momentum Thinking skills on your own challenges along the way. Our buts should now be so toned and sculpted that they could, indeed, appear in a Marvel movie.

We're just in time, because like any Marvel superhero, we're getting the signal to save the day. Whole books could be written applying the Two But Rule to the many scourges of climate change, economic collapse, the next pandemic, nuclear/meteoric/zombie apocalypses, mass hysteria! But for now, we're going to look at just two challenges: balancing competing issues in wind energy and getting plastic pollution under control. By the way, make sure to drink a protein shake or something before tackling the plastic case. It's a big one! And then we will have arrived at the end of the book! (I know. I know. You want more, right? Me too, but I have to leave some cases for the sequels.)

Windy Buts

The otherwise harmonious worlds of environmental conservation and clean energy generation have a dilemma. The latter is building a ton of wind turbines that are killing between one and six million birds a year in the United States alone. Even though there are bigger things contributing to avian mortality, that's a lot of dead birds. And clean energy people don't want bird blood on their hands.

In the late 2000s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted ...