The Answer, My Enemy, is Blowing in the Wind

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The Answer, My Enemy, is Blowing in the Wind

There was a time, decades ago, when Donald Trump echoed the warnings about facing up to climate change and its devastating potential. He turned against that notion, as I will point out below, when “alternative energy” impinged on the view from one of his golf courses. But from the inception of his nascent presidency, green America is the nation’s enemy… Day one, President Trump declared a "national energy emergency", invoking the National Emergencies Act after pledging to support the domestic production of fossil fuels. But we’re already producing more than we can use. The notion of undefined statutory “emergency” (national security driven) creates the perfect ambiguity that Trump is using and will continue to use to reshape the United States. A word without limits found all over our federal legal codes.

Trump has pulled out of the Paris accord on climate change, he’s in the process of figuring out how to shut or defund every federal program – from DEI initiatives, green energy to “entitlements” and “woke” public schools – planning to cut taxes for the richest in the land (who do not need the cut at all; we are hemorrhaging new billionaires)… but there is a new friend/ enemy vocabulary in Trump assault on the deep state he despises to be replaced by a deep state designed by him.

Trump is now railing against “bird killing,” ugly “windmills” as a serious part of his war on green energy. In terms of the percentage of electrical generated from these green sources, the US is behind all of Europe, large segments of Latin America… and even China! As Adele Peters, writing for the February 1st FastCompany.com, tells us: “Trump has claimed to be an expert on ‘windmills.’ (It’s worth noting that windmill is an outdated term that originally referred to centuries-old tech that used wind power to turn stones to grind up grain; the modern tech designed for producing electricity is a wind turbine.)…

“But while actual experts say that wind is an important piece of meeting energy needs in the U.S., Trump has ignored the benefits to the grid, repeatedly claiming that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer (not true), that they ‘ruin the environment’ (definitely not true), and that if the wind stops blowing, you won’t be able to watch Trump on TV (not true: renewable energy is part of a mix on the grid, and batteries can also store power for use when it’s needed).” Bird strikes have been minimized and are probably less lethal than Trump’s own office and residential towers.

But what really seems to have enraged Trump against wind energy is aesthetics. A wind farm off the coast of Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland “ruined” the view from the local Trump International Golf Links (see bottom photo above). In a barrage of letters and other Trump pressures on local government to remove the wind farm, which produces enough electricity to power 80,000 homes, Trump likened it to “an ugly cloud hanging over the future of the great Scottish coastline.”

But Trump’s efforts focused on the UK judicial system. He filed a lawsuit. He lost. He was ordered to pay the legal fees of the victorious governmental entity… and the eleven wind turbines are whirling away, producing energy, not emitting those toxic greenhouse gasses that have created and sustained global warming. Just in case you wondered why, in Trump’s assault again clean energy, he has a particular antipathy for wind power.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you stop building and using wind turbines to generate electricity here, you will kill 77,000 (and growing) American jobs.