President Donald Trump, a frequent critic of windmills, claimed in a post on Truth Social that the renewable energy source increases the cost of energy and is killing birds and the “bad” politicians who support it.
Why It Matters
Trump has long been an opponent of wind turbines. He campaigned on expanding fossil fuels for American energy and paused federal wind permits while ending tax credits that had supported renewable developments in the U.S.
What To Know
“Amazing phenomenon — Any Country that relies on Windmills is DEAD,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon. “Their Energy Costs have gone through the roof, and their populations are angry. Windmills aren’t only killing the birds, they’re ‘killing’ lots of bad politicians who are losing their jobs because of them!”
After returning to office in January, Trump declared a national energy emergency and signed an executive order stating that federal wind leasing programs suffered from “various alleged legal deficiencies.”
The order said that these could result in “negative impacts on navigational safety interests, transportation interests, national security interests, commercial interests, and marine mammals.”
In August, the Department of Commerce announced it would be expanding the scope of the Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum to include 407 new product categories, including wind turbines and their “parts and components.”
In 2023, Trump also falsely claimed at a South Carolina rally that wind turbines had killed a large number of bald eagles.
“Wind turbine collisions kill way less birds in the U.S. than domestic cats or building collisions,” Elie Bou-Zeid, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, told Newsweek. “If he is worried about birds, he should let more Haitian immigrants into the U.S., since he says they eat the cats and the dogs.”
Bou-Zeid continued: “Wind turbines produce the cheapest electricity in the U.S. of any source, 25 percent cheaper than combined cycle gas, which is the cheapest source of electricity from fossil fuel. So, Trump is hallucinating facts and vomiting them on social media, as usual.”
What People Are Saying
President Donald Trump on Truth Social in August: “Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS.”
Trump, at a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland in July: “Wind is the most expensive form of energy. And it destroys the beauty of your fields and your plains and your waterways. And look, look out there—there’s no windmills. But if you look in another direction, you see windmills. If, when we go to Aberdeen, you’ll see some of the ugliest windmills you’ve ever seen. They’re the height of a 50-story building. And you can take a thousand times more energy out of a hole in the ground…It’s called oil and gas.”
What Happens Next
Whether Trump makes further statements or policies on wind energy remains to be seen.
The post Donald Trump Launches Fresh Attack on Windmills appeared first on Newsweek.
