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Trump Is Angry that Wind Turbines Routinely Knock Planes Out of the Sky by Jason Miciak PolitiZoom, January 29, 2023

A cement wall over a river is uglier than turbines.
There is no free power.

Donald Trump hates wind turbines.

For one thing, he fought the Crown in court in Scotland over the Crown's windmills. (Literally, belonging to the then Queen's estate. But any court action involving the government in the U.K., whether criminal or civil, the government is referred to as "the Crown," just as we would say "the District Attorney" or "the government.) Trump didn't like the view of turbines off the coast from his Turnberry golf club. So he has hated wind turbines for a long time.

Power doesn't come for free until we figure out how to engineer the positive fusion power recently discovered by physicists. It will happen, but no one knows whether that will be 15 years from now or 50. Otherwise, the only "free" power we have is the sunlight that warms the Earth for us.

Wind turbines do kill birds, some in more threatening areas than others. But dams kill salmon. The "Salmon River" in Idaho no longer has many "salmon," and "Redfish Lake" in Idaho, named after the red chinook salmon that used to inhabit the lake during mating season, no longer has salmon at all. Not to mention that a dam may be grand, but a cement wall over a river is uglier than turbines. There is no free power.

Petroleum spills, killing 50 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico, pipes break and get oil into precious farmland while also crossing land promised to Native Americans and First Nations. Then it heats the globe dangerously by pumping excess carbon.

Solar farms take up a lot of space used by local habitats and are still inefficient in the grand scheme of things, especially when compared to water turbine power or petroleum.

There is no free power.

But wind power is free from an aviator's perspective. Wind farms do not move around, and they do not grow. They are fixed at a certain elevation. If your little motorcycle plane can't get above the wind turbines, they are marked on maps, and you can go around them. So are mountains.

They do not build wind turbines one hundred yards from the beginning of a runway, nor the end. The aviation industry is a pretty cautious and meticulous group. Commercial planes cruise at heights too high to even see the turbines below. Cesnas fly at 10,000 ft.

So it is just typical Trump to say something to an audience so idiotic that even the MAGAs don't believe him but don't care that he's stupid. He did so this weekend.

From Time Magazine.

WELL, THAT WAS SOMETHING. BY THE TIME FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP LEFT A HIGH SCHOOL AUDITORIUM SATURDAY AFTERNOON—HIS RETURN TO THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL AFTER AN UNUSUALLY SLEEPY START TO HIS 2024 CAMPAIGN—HE HAD RICOCHETED OFF MANY OF HIS STANDBYS: INDULGING CONSPIRACY THEORIES, NURSING CONSERVATIVES' FEARS ABOUT RACE AND GENDER, AND OFFERING AN ALTERNATIVE REALITY TO HIS SUCCESSOR'S RECORD.

THE HOUR-LONG DIATRIBE SUGGESTED JOE BIDEN WOULD HAVE BEEN SHREWD TO THROW HIS SON, HUNTER, UNDER THE BUS, THAT THE TALIBAN WERE INCAPABLE OF FIGHTING AT NIGHT BECAUSE THEY LACKED "BINOCULARS," AND THAT WIND TURBINES ROUTINELY KNOCK PLANES OUT OF THE SKY. IT WAS, IN ESSENCE, A STANDARD TRUMP SPEECH, BUT WITH A MORE UNEVEN PACING, AND A LITTLE WEIRDER AND MEANDERING.

"Routinely." Name one. One. I'm sure it's happened because, damn, near everything happens once. It could have been one of those instances where someone used the most common last words of the dying: "Guys, watch this!"

And someone tried to fly in and around wind turbines. That's it.

Also, notice Trump was speaking in a high school gymnasium. I think that's relevant right there. No longer filling arenas. We might wonder where DeSantis would hold his rally. (Democrats hold speeches. MAGAs hold rallies.)

Related Pages:
Trump Administration Reverses Obama-Era Policy on Accidental Bird Deaths by Jennifer Dlouhy, Renewable Energy World, 12/28/17