Who says presidential campaign rallies can’t be educational? At a recent rally in Summerville, South Carolina, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump digressed from his usual complaints about stolen elections and low-flush toilets to deliver this breaking scientific news: windmills are killing whales! (Who knew?)
The famously tender-hearted, twice-impeached former president revealed that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up onshore.”
It is worth noting here that Iowa is the second-largest producer of wind energy in the United States, only behind Texas, with 6,293 windmills, generating a whopping 62% of its power—which goes a long way to explaining why Iowa has so few whales.
Iowa’s current drought would have complicated life for any large aquatic animals so maybe it’s just as well windmills have kept our whale population mercifully small. I drove over the Ivanhoe Bridge yesterday and the Cedar River is so low, it looks like you could walk across it without having to roll up your pantlegs. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has warned that the river doesn’t have enough water to float a kayak without getting stuck. A 165-ton blue whale would have had even more trouble.
Mr. Trump backed up his announcement, claiming he saw three whales off the coast of South Carolina die “this weekend” as a result of the ravages of windmills. (Trump is a whale watcher? I thought he only watched cable TV.) He added, “The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think a little batty.”
Trump is speaking from experience. “I know windmills very much,” he said. Ever since offshore wind turbines were installed across from his golf resort in northeastern Scotland, he has been complaining they are “disgusting looking” and “noisy” and “threaten the migration of birds.” Trump claims just the sound of windmills “causes cancer”. He argues that wind power is unreliable. “It if doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night.” (Apparently nobody told him that electricity can be stored for later.)
Trump admits he has “a problem with wind.” Among the other hazards of wind turbines is that they kill “all the birds.” (If you have ever wondered why Iowa has no birds, now you know.) He said, “If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill because it’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery.” It is true that in North America alone over 300,000 birds are annually killed by wind turbines. But then, 3.7 billion birds are killed every year by cats. The former president has yet to weigh in on cats.
Some might question the accuracy of Trump’s warnings about windmills. After all, this is the same guy who stared at an eclipse without eye protection, claimed injecting bleach would cure COVID, declared climate change is a “hoax” and that exercise is pointless because a person, like a battery, comes with a finite amount of energy.
Facing 91 criminal charges, fraud, defamation and campaign finance violations, it is understandable if Trump is a little fuzzy on certain scientific details. He’s got a lot on his mind. Dreading the sight of rows of wind turbines lining his Scottish golf course, in an angry letter to Alex Salmond, the former First Minister of Scotland, Trump appeared to see into the future and wrote it would be “like looking through bars of a prison”. And, like a beached whale, there would be no wriggling out of that.