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PresidentDonald Trumpmade a very bold — and very wrong — rebuke of wind power earlier this week.
“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 said.
Although there is no evidence to suggest a link between the noise generated from wind turbines and cancer,USA Todaypointed outthat some critics have linked wind farms to “annoyances that could disrupt sleep, induce headaches or even cause mild nausea.”
However, according to a 2014 report from theNational Institutes of Health, researchers found “that when sited properly, wind turbines are not related to adverse health.”
Politicoalso reported that Grassley, who went through the 1970s energy crisis, said he’s “going to give [Trump] some leeway when he criticizes alternative energy.”
“I’ve lived through it, he never has,” Grassley said.
Iowa is the leading producer of wind energy in the United States. According to theIowa Environmental Council, it was the first state to generate more than 30 percent of its electricity through wind power.
Additionally, although Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds acknowledged how important wind farms have been to her state’s economy, she said it’s “not my place” to contradict the president.
“You know how those things change,” she said, according to theRegister. “One year, coffee’s good for you. The next year, coffee causes cancer.”
Prior to his speech at the NRCC, Trump spread false claims about windmills in Michigan last week.
“If Hillary got in … you’d be doing wind,” Trump said during a campaign speech,according to Vox. “Windmills. Weeeee. And if it doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night. ‘Darling, I want to watch television.’ ‘I’m sorry! The wind isn’t blowing.’ I know a lot about wind.”
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“The truth is that a combination of wind, solar and other renewables, along with battery and smart grid technology, can provide continuous and abundant electricity,” Mann said.
Trump’s disdain for windmills predates his time in office.
In 2012, he railed against offshore wind turbines near the Trump International Golf Links in Scotland, saying that they would ruin the views,according toPolitico. OVer the years, Trump has tweeted at least 60 times about the project.
He has also repeatedly contended that windmillsare responsible forthe deaths of many, many birds.
“They kill so many birds. You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field,” he said in 2018 at a private fundraising event in New York,according toNewsweek.
Trump even suggestedin a 2012 tweetthat wind farms caused “the ‘programmatic’ killing of bald eagles.”
However, according to a2009 study, wind farms don’t actually kill that many birds.
The author of the study estimated that while wind farms killed about 7,000 birds in the U.S. in 2006, nuclear plants killed approximately 327,000 and power plants utilizing fossil fuels were responsible for the deaths of about 15.5 million birds.
source: people.com
