Donald Trump believes a lot of stupid things.
He believes that “the human body is like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depletes.”
It’s true. He’s said this more than once — in interviews, on the record, with actual journalists.
More than once, he proposed dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane to destroy it.
He said that Democrats “want to legalize abortions post birth.”
Rather than admitting to making a simple mistake, he used a Sharpie to alter the path of a hurricane on a map, making it appear as if he were correct, even though every single American could see that the map had been changed with a Sharpie.
He thinks global warming is actually a good thing “because we’ll have more oceanfront property.”
He thinks that wildfires can be curtailed by “sweeping the forest.”
And how could we forget the unforgettable:
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”
Donald Trump believes a lot of stupid things, but I think his stupidest belief is that wind turbines are bad.
Trump’s aversion dates back about 14 years, when he objected to offshore wind turbines visible from his Menie golf course in Scotland near Aberdeen. He described them as “ugly,” “monstrosities,” and a “blight” spoiling his ocean views.
But since then, his objections have evolved to include:
- Wind energy is a “scam” or “con job,” and is blamed for rising electricity prices, which is utterly preposterous.
- Turbine noise causes cancer, which is abjectly false and so stupid even to suggest
- Windmills disorient and kill whales, for which there is no evidence
- Turbines “rust and rot in eight years” and can’t be buried, when in reality modern turbines are built to last around 30 years and are roughly 90% recyclable
- The ground beneath wind turbines is littered with piles of dead birds
The last claim is at least valid in that wind turbines do kill birds that fly into the blades. In fact, it’s estimated that 140,000–500,000 birds are killed every year by wind turbines, but that places wind turbines just seventh on the list of top killers of birds.
But it gets better:
- Cats are estimated to kill 2.4 billion birds per year in the U.S.
- Buildings are estimated to kill 365–988 million birds per year.
- Vehicles kill an estimated 89–340 million birds per year.
- Power lines, communication towers, and pesticides also kill hundreds of millions of birds per year combined.
This makes death by wind turbine less than 0.0096% of the total bird death, or about one in every 10,000 bird deaths.
In fact, there are 70,000 wind turbines in the United States today, meaning that each wind turbine is killing about seven birds each year at most.
The suggestion that piles of dead birds litter the ground beneath a wind turbine is ridiculous. Statistically speaking, there might be 5-7 dead birds below each wind turbine in the United States, but only if all the deaths took place in the same week.
The claim that wind turbines are killing too many birds to exist is stupid.
All of this wind turbine stupidity — and the subsequent harm it causes when Trump and his administration remove incentives for energy producers to build more turbines simply because he has decided in his toddler brain that wind turbines are ugly and evil — makes me love this ad for Vattenfall’s Wind Farm Seaweed Snacks.
I love it when celebrities are willing to stand against stupidity, even when that stupidity is being spewed by a convicted felon and former best friend of an infamous sex trafficker who was found by a jury of his peers to be guilty of sexual assault but who also currently occupies the White House.
