Why Trump hates wind turbines:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/15/why-trump-hates-wind-tur…
If you are reading this article on or around April 15, 2022, it may be
because Donald Trump recently complained to Fox News’s Sean Hannity
<https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1514431787325431814> about wind
turbines. He ran through a familiar litany about the number of birds killed
by turbine blades and the purported cost of wind for generating energy. If
you have heard him talk about wind turbines (or, as he calls them,
windmills), you have heard what he told Hannity.
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for hating wind turbines are outdated or wrong, and he will dig in simply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.
This is what we should expect of all of his most fervently expressed
political views.
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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.
It was not as smooth a path as Trump would have hoped. The local government
originally rejected
<http://www.golfdigest.com/story/donald-trump-golf-courses-scotland> his
proposal, out of concern that the area where he hoped to build was
environmentally sensitive. The national government stepped in on Trump’s
behalf, however, and construction began in 2010.
What Trump appears not to have known when he bought the land, though, is
that three years prior
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3109206.stm> a new offshore
wind farm had been proposed. Following preparatory work, a formal
application for construction was filed in 2011
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-14408064>.
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
<https://www.indiewire.com/2011/05/lies-goons-and-eco-destruction-new-doc-sh…>
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
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-14923612>
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”
<https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-20608607> in
an award sponsored by the Glenfiddich whisky brand, prompting Trump to ban
the liquor from his properties. There was also a documentary.
This was also the point at which Trump’s opposition to wind turbines became
intermingled with politics. He began assailing Scottish officials on
Twitter, including at least one official who had helped him overcome local
opposition in the first place. He started tweeting regularly
<https://www.thetrumparchive.com/?searchbox=%22wind%22&results=1> —
hundreds of times — about the purported threats posed by wind turbines.
Turbines are “disgusting looking,” “noisy” and “bad for people’s health,”
he claimed. They “threaten the migration of birds.” They are “ruining the
beauty of parts of the country.” They are “bad for the environment” and
“cause tremendous damage to their local ecosystems.” They are “a scourge to
communities and wildlife.” They kill so many birds that they “make hunters
look like nice people.” And so on.
In a familiar pattern, Trump took isolated anecdotes or unconfirmed
accusations and elevated and exaggerated them to try to overpower his
opponents. At one point in early 2013, for example, he shared a story about a
wind turbine collapsing
<https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270029/UK-weather-Heavy-floods-wr…>
in
an effort to persuade a Scottish lawmaker he had worked with previously to
block the proposed wind farm.
But he also intertwined his attacks on wind power with *American* politics.
The release of Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” brought increased
attention to climate change in the United States, with politicians
generally lining up in support of efforts to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions. In 2009, that included Trump himself, one of the
business-community signatories to an ad that ran in the New York Times calling
for action
<https://grist.org/politics/donald-trump-climate-action-new-york-times/>.
The election of Barack Obama and the emergence of the tea party movement,
though, overlapped with a federal effort to curtail emissions that quickly
became a point of political opposition
<https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/science/earth/26climate.html> for
Republicans. By the end of Obama’s first term, climate change was firmly
embedded in the culture-war fight, with the GOP criticizing his efforts to
expand green employment and energy production. Trump was by then flirting
with a presidential run
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/06/2012-was-closer-t…>
and
folded his complaints about wind energy in Scotland into his social-media
patter here in the United States.
That campaign didn’t go anywhere. When Trump did decide to run, four years
later, he focused far more on immigration than climate. In an interesting
episode in November 2015, though, the primary front-runner was forced to
confront his anti-wind past.
At a town hall in Iowa
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/19/donald-trump-hate…>,
a woman whose husband worked for a local turbine manufacturer asked Trump
if he supported subsidies for wind energy production. Trump had very
publicly scoffed at these subsidies repeatedly — but he was also a guy who
had spent decades figuring out how to close the deal. So here was a voter
whose vote he needed, and suddenly Trump’s position went from “never” to
“I’m okay with subsidies, to an extent.”
That was about as close to an embrace of wind power that Trump would offer.
Once elected, he dropped any sense of wanting to appeal to those who didn’t
already support him and mocking wind turbines became part of his
campaign-rally shtick. He would regularly push the line of his complaints,
as when he suggested that maybe the sound from wind turbines causes cancer
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/03/trump-claims-that-wind-f…>.
It … doesn’t.
It was never really clear that he even understood the basic elements of
climate change
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/03/its-possible-that-trump-…>
that
would explain why wind energy was useful. But that was beside the point. He
had a go-to applause line that hit all the right enemies: liberals,
hippies, environmental weirdos and so on. So he deployed it over and over
again, partly because it worked and partly out of habit.
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
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/bald-eages-dead-wind-farms.html>.
(Initial research suggests that painting one blade black
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/black-wind-turbine-blades-help-bi…>
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 <https://www.audubon.org/news/trump-birds-drop-dead> a law
protecting those birds and by the fact that Trump is a big proponent of
another, much more frequent killer of birds: buildings
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/07/how-many-birds-killed-b…>
.
- Wind energy is a relatively *in*expensive form of energy
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/renewable-energy-p…>.
And while it is dependent on wind (obviously), there are systems (
batteries
<https://www.energy-storage.news/large-scale-battery-prevents-dutch-wind-far…>)
that can store energy for times when wind is in lower supply. It’s also not
the case
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/climate/texas-blackouts-disinformation.h…>
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
<https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/wind-manufacturing-and-supply-chain> 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!
What is remarkable is that this particular thing has become so fixated in
his patter. Before mentioning the subject on Hannity’s show in April, he
did so in March
<https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-windmill-rant-nel…>
and
in January
<https://people.com/politics/donald-trump-revives-gripe-about-windmills-in-r…>.
He can’t resist it. It’s simply part of his political worldview, however
mottled with error and despite the bizarre genesis of his obsession.
After a brief victory for Trump’s efforts to block the wind farm off the
coast of Scotland, it was built and began operation in 2018. It has an
installed capacity of 96.8 megawatts of energy
<https://group.vattenfall.com/uk/what-we-do/our-projects/european-offshore-w…>,
enough to power 80,000 homes. There are no reports of turbines collapsing
and no known incidents of noise-related cancer.
In photos of the course at Trump’s resort posted on Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/1016046089/trump-international-…>,
no turbines are visible in the distance.
Trump Administration Delivers Historic Progress on Offshore Wind
Continues to fulfill promise of a secure energy future for Americans
10/18/2018
Last edited 9/29/2021
Date: October 18, 2018
Contacts: Interior_Press(a)ios.doi.gov
Stephen Boutwell (BOEM) 703-787-1531
*WASHINGTON* – Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke
announced three major developments in American offshore wind energy
spanning from coast to coast. Continuing with the Trump Administration's
all-of-the-above energy policy, the Secretary spoke at the American Wind
Energy Association’s Offshore Wind Conference and announced 1.)
much-anticipated wind auction in federal waters off the coast of
Massachusetts; 2.) the environmental review of a proposed wind project
offshore Rhode Island; and 3.) the next steps to a first-ever wind auction
in federal waters off of California.
“I'm very bullish on offshore wind, and harnessing this renewable resource
is a big part of the Trump Administration's made in America energy
strategy,” *said Secretary Zinke*. “We are always looking at new ways to
increase American innovation and productivity to provide abundant and
affordable energy for our homes and manufacturers. I think this is a win
for America. Working together with states, fishermen and the energy
industry, we are making offshore wind a reality, and these three historic
announcements are proof.”
Wind Auction Offshore Massachusetts
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will hold the next offshore
wind auction – to include nearly 390,000 acres offshore Massachusetts – on
Dec. 13, 2018. Nineteen companies have qualified to participate in the
auction for the Massachusetts Wind Energy Area, demonstrating continued
strong commercial interest in the U.S. offshore wind market.
“The Massachusetts sale has a lot of potential for both energy and economic
activity,” *Zinke said.* “If fully developed, the wind auction could
support approximately 4.1 gigawatts of power to supply nearly 1.5 million
homes. This is just one example of the importance of fostering wind energy
as a new American industry.”
For more information, including a map of the Massachusetts lease areas and
information provided in the Final Sale Notice, which will be published in
the Federal Register on Oct. 19, visit the BOEM website at
https://www.boem.gov/Commercial-Wind-Leasing/Massachusetts/Lease-Sale-4A/.
Environmental Review of Wind Project Offshore Rhode Island
BOEM will publish a Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact
Statement for the Construction and Operations Plan for the South Fork Wind
Project offshore Rhode Island. If approved, the plan would allow
construction and operation of up to 15 turbines that connect via a
transmission cable to a grid in East Hampton, New York - the east end of
Long Island. The project is approximately 19 miles southeast of Block
Island. The notice will be published in the Federal Register on Oct. 19 and
will have a 30-day public comment period closing on Nov. 19.
For more information, including how to comment and locations of upcoming
public meetings please visit: https://www.boem.gov/South-Fork/.
Call for Information and Nominations Offshore California
In what could result in the first West Coast offshore wind auction, BOEM
will publish a Call for Information and Nominations (Call) to identify
companies interested in commercial wind energy leases within three proposed
areas off central and northern California. This is the first step towards
offering a location for wind leasing.
The three Call Areas include 85 whole Outer Continental Shelf blocks and
573 partial blocks and together comprise approximately 1,073 square miles
(687,823 acres). The Call will be published in the Federal Register on
Oct. 19 and will have a 100-day public comment period closing on Jan. 27,
2019. For more information on the Call, including a map of the Call Areas
and how to comment, please visit: https://www.boem.gov/California/.
Additional Background
Through BOEM, the Department of the Interior manages 12 active commercial
wind energy leases off the Atlantic covering nearly 1.4 million acres.
Interior expects additional leasing offshore both the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts moving forward, involving active stakeholder engagement, and
providing increased transparency and efficiency throughout the permitting
process. For information on the Department’s Offshore Wind Program, please
visit: https://www.boem.gov/Renewable-Energy/.
