I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States says. It’s one of the cheapest. Donald Trump tells lots of dopey lies about wind. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, it just went down seventy-five percent in value.” No, studies have found virtually no impact on home prices. “The whole thing is a con job. Germany tried it, it didn’t work.” No, wind is Germany’s largest source of electricity. “You won’t find any wind farms in China.” No, China has more wind farms than the rest of the world combined. “You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill. You’ll see more than you’ve ever seen in your life.” No, wind turbines cause 0.01 percent of bird deaths, orders of magnitude fewer than cats, cars, or windows. ”The turbines start to rust and rot in eight years.” No, they don’t. They just don’t. It is true, as the president often points out, that wind farms do not generate power when the wind isn’t blowing. But electric utilities in Republican-controlled Texas, which is America’s top wind-producing state despite its oil-soaked politics, are aware of this meteorological complication, which is why the story that Trump loves to tell about a Texas woman on a windless night rings about as true as his carcinogenic turbines or loco whales: “She says to her husband, ‘Is the wind blowing? I’d love to watch a show tonight, darling, but the wind hasn’t blown for three days. Darling, please tell the wind to blow.’” It’s all bullshit, darling — but consequential bullshit, because the president of the United States has launched an all-out war on the wind industry. He has not only cut off federal subsidies, he has also weaponized the federal bureaucracy to block new turbines, from the Department of Transportation, which is reviewing their alleged risks to planes and railroads, to the Department of Health and Human Services, which has suggested they might emit electromagnetic death rays. The Departments of the Interior and Defense have even shut down work on offshore wind farms already under construction, concocting bogus national security justifications about how they might interfere with military radar or somehow facilitate underwater drone attacks. Much of the commentary about Trump’s anti-wind campaign has emphasized its hypocrisy. He claims to want Energy Dominance — he declared a national emergency because our energy supply is supposedly inadequate — but he is relentlessly throttling a fast-growing energy source that already provides ten percent of our electricity. He claims energy prices are too high, but he is regularly intervening in energy markets to prop up exorbitantly expensive coal plants while cracking down on affordable wind. He is using bird protection laws to harass wind developers while loosening those laws for oil and gas companies that kill far more birds. He is forcing lickspittle lackeys like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — who was a wind supporter when he was governor of North Dakota! — to spew preposterous talking points about how wind doesn’t work. Yes, it’s all hypocritical. But it’s also terrible. As naive as it sounds, presidents should not lie. Presidents should not flout laws and gouge consumers and pretend to care about birds and whales in order to cripple industries they hate. What’s really terrible about Trump’s jihad is that wind power is clean power, while his beloved coal and gas plants emit greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. He claims that climate change is a hoax, but that is rubbish, too. Climate change is real, it is here, it is man-made, and it really is a problem. There hasn’t been this much carbon in the atmosphere in three million years. The earth has not heated this quickly in 485 million years. Global warming is already contributing to vicious wildfires in California and even Siberia; freakish heat waves in Arizona and West Africa; unprecedented ice melts in Greenland and Antarctica; catastrophic floods in North Carolina and Pakistan; and biblical swarms of locusts in India and Kenya. The last ten years were the ten hottest years on record, and swarms of locusts are generally reliable indicators that things are not going so well. BC That said, some climate activists have an annoying habit of exaggerating how badly things are going. Global warming is making droughts and floods worse, but it is not making them happen. In fact, global warming does not always make everything worse; tropical hurricanes, for example, do not seem to be getting more frequent, defying a lot of shrill eco-catastrophism. Apocalyptic rhetoric about how it’s game over for the climate if we do not cut greenhouse emissions 43% by 2030 is not only annoying but wrong. There’s no such thing as game over for the climate. Carbon gradually accumulates in the atmosphere, so the earth gets a tiny bit warmer every time a fossil fuel is combusted or a forest is clear-cut. So it’s true that the more carbon we emit, the worse disasters such as Superstorm Sandy or the current mega-drought in the Horn of Africa will get, and that the earth will keep getting warmer until we somehow start removing more carbon from the sky than our cars and buildings and power plants and deforestation and wildfires are putting up there. But there is no inflection point where we all suddenly die or are all doomed. There is only better and worse. And some things are getting better. The costs of wind energy and especially solar energy — as well as batteries to store wind and solar electricity when it isn’t windy or sunny — have plummeted. A global clean-energy revolution is underway; ninety percent of new power plants are now zero-emissions. Less than two decades after the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? bemoaned humanity’s unbreakable addiction to gasoline-fueled transportation, a quarter of new automotive sales are now
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