Why Trump hates wind turbines [View all]

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The Washington Post has a good article on why TFG hates wind turbines

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/15/why-trump-hates-wind-turbines/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjIxOTU5MzciLCJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjUwMTE1OTUyLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNjUxMzI1NTUyLCJpYXQiOjE2NTAxMTU5NTIsImp0aSI6ImRhNzViYTY1LWU4YjQtNDI4Yy1hZjU0LTM0ZDNhZTFhYTM5MSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9wb2xpdGljcy8yMDIyLzA0LzE1L3doeS10cnVtcC1oYXRlcy13aW5kLXR1cmJpbmVzLyJ9.46Slq8CAtV94_N8EvvwAGULQO1Qrz_Dht9dJA8Z4XOc

If you are reading this at any other point in the future, you are reading it because Trump offered Hannity or someone else the same complaints on the same subject. You are reading this article because you were curious enough to finally Google “why does Donald Trump hate windmills” and, thanks to the magic of search-engine optimization, landed here.

Because Trump will never stop complaining about wind turbines. It is perhaps his oldest political opinion and one that is almost completely impervious to any reason. In that light it’s instructive: No one will convince Trump that he’s wrong about wind turbines or that his rationales for hating wind turbines are outdated or wrong, and he will dig in simply because people are telling him he’s wrong......

The particular story of the wind turbines begins 16 years ago in Scotland. In 2006, Trump bought a large chunk of property on the country’s northeastern coast with the goal of turning it into a golf resort. Six years later, it opened as Trump International Golf Links......

What Trump appears not to have known when he bought the land, though, is that three years prior a new offshore wind farm had been proposed. Following preparatory work, a formal application for construction was filed in 2011. And that’s when the war started.

At the outset, Trump had only one concern: that the offshore turbines would ruin the view from his course. After all, he clearly had no objection to environmentalism; at one point he insisted that his proposed resort “has received tremendous support from environmental groups” and that the resort was “actually the greatest thing I’ve ever done for the environment.” In short order, Trump filed a complaint against the farm.

Trump’s relationship with the Scots deteriorated. In part it was because he launched a war against a local family whose property he wanted to buy — a war that he won in court but led to his being eviscerated in public. Michael Forbes, one of the people resisting Trump’s buyout effort, was named “Top Scot” in an award sponsored by the Glenfiddich whisky brand, prompting Trump to ban the liquor from his properties. There was also a documentary......

Because this is meant to be a compendium of Trump’s views on the subject, we should quickly run through some of his claims and debunk or contextualize them. So:

Wind turbines can kill birds, as a New York Times story that ran the week of his April interview with Hannity discussed. (Initial research suggests that painting one blade black reduces this risk.) But Trump’s complaints about saving migratory birds are undercut quite a bit by the fact that his administration tried to hollow out a law protecting those birds and by the fact that Trump is a big proponent of another, much more frequent killer of birds: buildings.

Wind energy is a relatively inexpensive form of energy. And while it is dependent on wind (obviously), there are systems (batteries) that can store energy for times when wind is in lower supply. It’s also not the case that Texas’s power outage in the winter of 2021 was a function of freezing turbines.

The United States imports a lot of wind turbine parts from overseas, but there are hundreds of domestic manufacturers as well (as in Iowa). Part of the push a decade ago was for the country to invest more in the production of turbines, solar equipment and batteries in the United States to not lose an economic advantage, but that push was stymied in part by political opposition to spending money on green energy.

That Trump keeps making broad and often outdated claims about wind energy is not surprising. This is what he does!