McKibben on Trump's anti-wind mania

Climate hero Bill McKibben has a grade-A rant about the stupidity of the Trump administration. In particular – one has to narrow down which of the myriad idiotic, corrupt, and damaging things one is criticizing these people for – he has choice words about Trump’s foolish anti-wind-power mania. I mentioned some of this recently, but Bill’s the perfect voice for this. Well worth reading in full, but here are some choice quotes (emphasis added).

I’m dedicating this newsletter to the topic of wind, because I think it distills the corruption and irrationality of our sad moment into its purest essence — 190-proof Trumpism, the stuff that blinds you if you guzzle it.

…To say that the national security grounds are bogus is to give them too much credit. As those radicals at the Financial Times explained, the security review used to take a “few days” to complete. These installations are on private land, far away from military bases. The government has used the same argument to try and block offshore wind farms, and the courts have overruled their objections.

…That this is stupid goes without saying. Those blocked projects constitute, the [Financial Times] says, about 30 gigawatts of cheap clean energy at a time when we desperately need it. But it also goes without saying that the blockage serves two purposes. One is to artificially increase demand for fossil fuel (and the other Trump-favored power sources, like the expensive array of nuclear reactors whose development the government is currently generously funding). The other is to serve his febrile rage at the wind farm built off his Scottish golf course all those years ago. A policy that feeds both his appetite for corruption and supplies his narcissistic hunger—well, that’s a twofer that can’t be missed.

Beyond the rant, there’s also good news. One area is “repowering” older wind farms: upgrading them with the latest, biggest turbines. This avoids a lot of the permitting, connectivity, and potential obstruction that can face new projects. There also continue to be advances in protecting birds from wind turbines. We love birds, and we don’t want them to be hurt by these things, so that’s great. That said, McKibben makes the crucial point that this downside of wind power is vastly overblown: “To be clear, wind turbines never come within an order of magnitude of avian destruction compared with tall buildings and power lines, not to mention domestic cats, not to mention the effects of climate change now setting off a generalized extinction crisis on this earth.”

Great stuff, as always, so go read it, and subscribe to his excellent newsletter while you’re there.