President Donald Trump offered the United Kingdom some unsolicited advice about its use of “unsightly windmills” to generate clean energy.
The president has been fixated on wind turbines ever since they ruined the view, in his opinion, from his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.
The British government—which recently established a new trade framework with the United States—should instead embrace the aesthetics of offshore oil rigs and tankers, he wrote Friday in a social media post.
“Our negotiated deal with the United Kingdom is working out well for all,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I strongly recommend to them, however, that in order to get their Energy Costs down, they stop with the costly and unsightly windmills and incentivize modernized drilling in the North Sea where large amounts of oil lay waiting to be taken.”
Wind turbines are one of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s flagship strategies to cut carbon emissions and achieve net zero by 2050, The Independent reported. His Labour Party government wants to end North Sea oil and gas production and instead focus on wind and solar.
For years, Trump has railed against turbines, saying they destroy property values, kill birds and whales, and even cause cancer.
Scientists say that the sound from wind turbines does not, in fact, mutate cells in the human body to cause cancer, nor do the turbines kill whales. Studies have also found that property values are not significantly affected by nearby turbines.
It is true that windmills do kill birds—the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates about a quarter-million per year. But that number is far less than other man-made obstacles such as power lines, vehicles, and buildings.
Trump nevertheless said at a December 2023 campaign rally, “They kill all our birds. If you want to see a bird cemetery, go under a windmill sometime. You’ll see birds like you never saw. If you love birds, you’ll start to weep.”
His vendetta against wind turbines began in 2003, when he learned the Scottish government was planning to construct a wind farm with 11 offshore turbines near a property he had purchased to build a golf course.
“I am not thrilled. I want to see the ocean; I do not want to see windmills,” he complained at the time.
When construction began in 2011, Trump filed a formal complaint against the Scottish government in an attempt to stop “the horrible idea of building ugly wind turbines directly off Aberdeen’s beautiful coastline.”
Construction on the wind farm nevertheless began two years later, and all of the president’s legal efforts to block it failed. Soon after the U.K. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in 2015, his tirades against wind power began.
During a speech on energy policy in 2019—the same year his golf course was ordered by the Scottish government to pay almost £225,000 to cover the legal costs of the failed suits—he went on a particularly bizarre tangent about the reliability of wind power.
“And then, all of a sudden, it stops; the wind and the televisions go off. And your wives and husbands say, ‘Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight. But the wind stopped blowing, and I can’t watch. There’s no electricity in the house, darling,’” he said.
Earlier this year, the British government imposed a higher tax on North Sea oil and gas producers, prompting Trump to advise the U.K. to “get rid of windmills!”
Then in mid-April, the administration issued a shocking stop-work order on a $5 billion wind farm being built off the coast of Long Island, New York. After a month of frenzied meetings with business leaders and administration officials, work was allowed to resume this week, The New York Times reported.
The president’s Friday Truth Social post didn’t mention the New York project, but it did reference both Aberdeen, which is about a 20-minute drive from his golf course, and the U.K. oil and gas tax.
“A century of drilling left, with Aberdeen as the hub. The old-fashioned tax system disincentivizes drilling, rather than the opposite. U.K.’s Energy Costs would go WAY DOWN, and fast!” he wrote.
The post Trump Rails Against Another Country’s ‘Unsightly Windmills’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
