Former US President Donald Trump gave the wind power industry a blast from the past when he launched into a vintage rant against “windmills” in response to a question on the war in Ukraine.
Trump delivered his tirade – familiar from his time as President – when asked how the crisis in eastern Europe could play out.
“I said this a long time ago – we are playing right into their hands, green energy,” Trump told the Full Send podcast on You Tube.
“The windmills – they don’t work, they’re too expensive, they kill all the birds, they ruin your landscapes. And yet the environmentalists love the windmills.”
Trump said he had wind “way down” during his time in office before claiming that turbines last just 10 years before “rotting and rusting”.
Only an assertion that turbines cause cancer was missing from the list of Trumpian grievances against the green sector, a hostility he apparently shares with Vladimir Putin who once flagged concerns over wind power's impact on “worms and birds”.
Trump also weighed in on European energy policy, asserting that he warned former German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the dangers of over-reliance on Russia, and claiming “until I came along nobody knew what Nord Stream 2 was”, referring to the gas pipeline put on hold by her successor Olaf Scholz.
Trump’s hostility to the wind industry stretches back to before his four years in office. He famously fought a long, costly and unsuccessful battle to stop Vattenfall building an offshore wind farm off Aberdeen, Scotland, citing the impact on views from his luxury golf course.
