Donald Trump Claims Wind Power Noise Causes Cancer
Donald Trump, it’s fair to say, is not a big fan of wind power.
During the 2016 presidential campaign and even before, the president had often denounced wind power and other alternative energy sources. In 2016, per The Hill, the then-presidential candidate said that wind power “kills all your birds.” More recently, in an interview last week with Sean Hannity (per The Inquisitr), Trump claimed that wind power wasn’t dependable because wind “only blows sometimes.”
This week, Trump made another claim about wind power that he hasn’t made before, nor it appears that anyone else has either.
In a speech to a fundraising dinner for the National Republican Congressional Committee, per New York magazine, Trump critiqued the energy policies of his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary wanted to put up wind, wind,” the president said. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer.”
He added that the windmills are “like a graveyard for birds.”
“If you love birds, you never want to walk under a windmill, because it’s a sad, sad sight,” the president added.
There is no scientific basis for the notion that noise from windmills- or any other type of noise, for that matter – can cause cancer. Birds are safer around windmills than they are among some other sorts of energy. While wind power has not established a record of causing disease, one type of energy favored by the president – coal – absolutely does.
In addition, wind power goes into an electricity grid with all other forms of power, which means that areas don’t lose power during times when the wind isn’t blowing.
It’s also not particularly common in politics for a president, or a candidate, to trash the proposals of his defeated opponent. In this case, nearly three years after the election.
Trump tells Republicans wind turbine noise causes cancer, because he is deranged https://t.co/vXafmyE7Ni pic.twitter.com/jUbyW4kC3B
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) April 3, 2019
It’s unclear where exactly Trump got such a negative impression of windmills and wind power. There are windmills in Atlantic City, where the president owned casinos for many years, but they weren’t operational until he was just about on his way out of there.
Also at the speech, as live-tweeted by reporter Manu Raju of CNN, the president asked members of Congress to be “more paranoid than they are” about elections because “I don’t like the way the votes are being tallied.”
Another reporter, John Fritze of USA Today, quoted Trump as saying that the speech would probably be leaked to the media, even though it was not off the record and was being shown live on C-SPAN.
