Notes from an Environmentalist.
Tilting at Windmills, Donald Trump vs offshore wind turbines.
Chapter 7
Tilting at Windmills
Donald Trump
The day after Gloucester’s anti-wind rally a flotilla of boats from Cape Cod, New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket steamed 14 miles south to Vineyard Wind’s AW-38 turbine to support fossil fuels and protest offshore wind energy.
But why was Trump their champion and Biden their enemy? President Biden had made it a priority to get offshore wind farms approved so the United States could meet its “30 by 30” goal of producing 30% of its energy from green sources by 2030. His administration had already approved six offshore wind projects in the past three years.
But that progress would come to a crashing stop if former President Donald Trump was elected.
Trump held one of his notorious grudges against wind mills ever since he had battled Scotland over its plans to build an offshore wind farm within sight of one of his golf courses. Not only did he lose the case, but Scotland required him to pay its lawyers’ fees, which particularly rankled the disgruntled ex-President.
Since then, he made tilting at windmills one of his weirder obsessions.
“If you have a windmill anywhere near your house congratulations, your house just went down 75% in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. And of course it’s like a graveyard for birds.”
“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. We could put a little statue for the poor birds.”
Then there is his concern for whales.
“They are washing up ashore. You wouldn’t see that once a year - now they coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
It turns out he had fallen prey to astroturfing. The practice of using dark money to create and fund fake grassroots organizations with misleading names like “Green Oceans,” a group of wealthy oceanfront home owners, which had been battling a Revolution Wind’s project to build a hundred turbines off toney Little Compton, Rhode Island.
They were supported by Atlas, a network of Non-profits clandestinely funded by the fossil fuel industry and the Uber Industrialist Charles Koch. They suggested nuclear fusion would be an excellent alternative to wind turbines even though windmills were already producing inexpensive green energy while nuclear fusion lay in the distant future, if in fact it ever makes economic sense.
On August 28th the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a biological opinion that stated that pile driving noise associated with wind turbine construction does not jeopardize the existence of endangered whales, fish, or sea turtles.
Environmentalists agree that birds may fly into the wind turbines but far fewer than the number of birds that die from flying into windows, are electrocuted by power lines or are killed by domestic cats.
Of course, the anti-wind demonstration was also about fish. There the evidence is unequivocal. Offshore turbines are boon to fish.
When you install a turbine, fish find it quickly and thrive on the assemblage of kelp, crabs and tunicates that feed on the conveyor belt of plankton streaming by.
Recreational fishermen find excellent fishing around turbines as they do off offshore oil platforms. If commercial vessels avoid navigating through the turbines, they will create a marine reserve producing larger, more fertile fish that will produce eggs and larvae destined for more depauperate fishing areas.
Finally nobody could figure out where the ex-President got the idea that windmills cause cancer.