US President Says Windmills Are Bird Killers as He Tries to Revive Coal Industry

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-says-windmills-are-bird-killers-he-tries-revive-coal-industry-1079910

by freediver • 8 years ago

46 36 8 years ago

newsweek.com

bayesian_horse• 8 years ago

Good luck, President Quixote.

Viperus• 8 years ago

I wish I could upvote this comment much more!

grecy2• 8 years ago

Australian politicians have been pushing "clean coal" for a few years now.

In cases like these it's so blatantly obvious there is big money on the line for the existing coal industry and they have obviously paid very big money to be protected. Anywhere else in the world it would be called corruption or bribery, but in our shiny world those words are banned so new speak says we simply call it business as usual in politics.

dwd5• 8 years ago

There are also genuine people trying to look out for local communities that rely on the coal.

I personally know the director of Clean Coal Victoria from before he was mine manager at Loy Yang and worked for the Country Roads Board. He's trying to find a solution but it's too late for coal now.

voodootrucker• 8 years ago

genuine people trying to look out for local communities that rely on the coal

"genuine people" try to do all kinds of harmful regressive stuff. It does not excuse the outcomes of their actions for the world at large.

flukus• 8 years ago

How many of those communities would have been suitable for large wind/solar/battery installations, or at least near suitable locations? The Latrobe Valley area already has a lot of the infrastructure built to accommodate the coal power plants that green energy could piggy back off, but they fought too hard and too long in favor of coal and the projects went elsewhere.

I personally know the director of Clean Coal Victoria

You know a snake oil salesman, clean coal was never, ever going to be real whether he realizes it or not. The false promise of clean coal probably did more to hurt those communities.

grecy2• 8 years ago

There are also genuine people trying to look out for local communities that rely on the coal.

And there were genuine people trying to look out for communities that relied on asbestos mining, on lead paint factories, on DDT production plants and a million other examples.

Yes, lots of people will lose their existing job when we stop burning so much coal, but that's a good thing. We need to move forward, we need to do better than we're doing now.

We can't stop making things better because we want everyone to remain employed in the same industry they are now!

kraigie4• 8 years ago

He's trying to find a solution but it's too late for coal now.

There's already good solutions that have had decades of use.

Ship it (by rail) to stranded renewables, convert to coal gas and or use Fischer trope to convert to oil or propane then ship that back.

Heck there's even work on gas to biocoal, all the nasty stuff can be left behind and you get a nice clean burning substitute that can complement pure renewables in shortage periods. Rail is likely to be near coal mining areas anyway, so short branch lines or reactivation of old routes can be built at relatively low cost. The entire process could be lower than the electrical needed as distribution can continue to the end user along existing depot routes using cointainers.

Might even qualify for any renewable tax breaks and the like.

The problem is oxidation.

swebs• 8 years ago

Anywhere else in the world it would be called corruption or bribery

In the United States it's called "lobbying"

piquadrat• 8 years ago

Is it me or does that article not even try to fact check Trumps assertion that wind mills are killing fields for birds? What a piss poor try at "journalism".

https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...

tl;dr: wind mills kill something like 10'000-40'000 birds per year, compared to e.g. cars at 60-80 million, and cats in the hundreds of millions.

kraigie4• 8 years ago

Also United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000 and fossil-fuelled power plants 14.5 million. In other words, for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,118 birds. You would think that would be journalism worthy.

Plus Windmills only tend to kill birds in high numbers when built in migration paths.

Fortunately it's a bit easier to build them else where and send electricity than it is to relocate highways.

Zealotux• 8 years ago

I'm wondering if it's truly fair to compare raw figures, I'd assume that you need to take in account the number of birds killed compared to the energy produced, as far as I know wind turbine are a very small part of energy production in the US.

dwd5• 8 years ago

Shallow thinking at its worst, the facts tell a different story.

https://blogs.umass.edu/natsci397a-eross/whether-or-not-wind...

woofdogwoof• 8 years ago

Even the coal industry knows they are dead. This nonsense is coming from somewhere else.

I’m not a conspiracy guy, but Trump is making a believer out of me. I think he’s financially indebted to the Russians, way prior to the elections, like 20 years, and when they managed to manipulate him into the Presidency he was stuck. Which is why he would never release his financials, because it would prove the Russians have him by the balls, and that he has far less money than anyone would believe. A broke Trump is a impotent Trump, a broke Trump that is owned by the Russians is the equivalent of a traitor.

The American people need to be unified in voice to demand that his financials are released. It should be the rallying cry of the nation, a drumbeat that keeps getting louder every day.

badrabbit• 8 years ago

That makes a lot of sense,but don't ignore the pee tape.

Americans want to be divided,not united. Both Trump and Obama are to blame. Americans unite only when an external force attacks the homeland (9/11,pearl harbor). Too much of under-appreciated peace and prosperity led to this.

dmos62• 8 years ago

Check out the last episode of Dirty Money's Season 1. It's titled "The Confidence Man", if I'm not mistaken. It's on Trump. It's a very good episode, and offers a slightly different theory.

XorNot• 8 years ago

He's still screwed long term - once he's no longer president the Republicans and Fox News will lose all interest in defending him, but the multiple investigative journalists, actual FBI agents and the like will still have career-making expose's and criminal prosecutions to be gained from following up every lead and shady deal he's ever made.

cimmanom• 8 years ago

But how much damage can he do to the country before then? And will all or even most of it be reversible? In our current political climate?

NTDF9• 8 years ago

Personally, as a moderate, I'm not going to accuse him of being a traitor until proven. But I demand that he proves he doesn't have any dubious ties and how much his properties have earned under his Presidency. If there was so much drama around the birth certificate of a US citizen President, I want to have even more clarity on their financial ties and demand that they don't sell our country.

As much as I hate to say, this administration looks like third world corruption at its finest. Willing to be proven wrong though!

mtgx• 8 years ago

This is coming from someone who drugs and keeps kids in cages and launches MOABs against "terrorists' families".

It's the birds that pull at his heartstrings, though.

NeedMoreTea• 8 years ago

In the years before the UK had any onshore wind, but some were wanting to start, this was a claim commonly heard in the media.

Fast forward 20 or 30 years; turbines are common, birds unaffected and all the predictors of doom are quietly back in the woodwork free of any consequences from their disingenuous bullshit.

Of course some bird species are in huge trouble - mainly, it turns out, due to the catastrophic loss of insect species thanks to our farming practices.

smcl• 8 years ago

Well no actually he said that birds kill windmills and also threw in a confused comment that coal is indestructible. The full transcript is insane:

You remember Hillary with the coal, right? Sitting with the miners at the
table. Remember? That wasn’t so good for her. So the people of West Virginia
and all over, you look at Wyoming, you look at so many different places where
they just – Pennsylvania – where they loved what we did. And it’s clean coal
and we have the most modern procedures. But it’s a tremendous form of energy,
in the sense that, in a military way, think of it. Coal is indestructible.
You can blow up a pipeline. You can blow up the windmills. Y’know, the
windmills boom, boom, boom. [shoots gun] Bing. That’s the end of that windmill.
If the birds don’t kill it first. The birds can kill it first. They kill so many
birds. You look underneath some of those windmills and it’s like a killing field,
the birds. But that’s where they were going to, they were going to wind-a-mills.
What happens when the wind doesn’t blow? Well then we have a problem. Okay, good.
They were putting them in areas where they didn’t have much wind, too. And it’s a
subsidy. You need a subsidy for windmills. Who wants to have energy where you
need subsidy? So the coal is doing great.

ekblom• 8 years ago

My brain hurts!

mdrzn• 8 years ago

The birds can kill it [the windmill] first. They [the windmills] kill so many birds.

Sounds like either an oxymore or someone can't fully express their thoughts.

krapp• 8 years ago

Sounds like either an oxymore or someone can't fully express their thoughts.

Bear in mind, Trump was elected in part precisely because he can't fully express his thoughts in the way a "politician" would. He doesn't appeal to his base through rational argument but emotion.

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

Just as a response to some that think this is indications of some conspiracy, or a billionaire president on the take from coal interests or whatever else.

- Ignore the pros, why shouldn't we have coal? It has negative effects connected with climate change.

- Ignoring the cons, why should we have coal? It's represents a good amount of relatively high paying jobs with no barrier to entry. This [1] article gives a fair overview of employment. There's about 174k jobs directly involved in the coal industry. The number of jobs that are indirectly supported by the industry is more open to 'massaging' but ranges from the hundreds of thousands to the coal industry's estimate of > 1 million. It's not a huge number of jobs, but what is unique about these jobs is the compensation and skills requirement. The skill requirements for much of the work are nothing but an able body and ability to learn. And the average earning for non-supervisory roles is about $22/hour.

The current president is not so concerned about the consequences of climate change - thus from his worldview he's going to see the argument against coal as being little more than a push to make these jobs just disappear. And this stands to be devastating to some states, and especially to some of the states that helped put him in office. For instance the entire labor force of West Virginia is 785k people, and of those you have 20k in mining alone and some multiple of that in coal dependent jobs. That's a huge part of their entire economy and laborforce. People constantly bemoan the lack of good paying jobs for those without in-demand skills, and this is one of the few industries where people without a strong technical background can get those very jobs.

I don't agree with Trump on this, but I also don't see why so many people seem to have difficulty seeing how people can come to different conclusions on things. People have different worldviews, and this is not only okay -- but a very good thing. And when you take even the briefest of moments to try to see things through somebody else's eyes, you'll often find that their actions make perfect sense, even if you might indeed disagree with them.

[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Coal_and_jobs_in_the_U...

kthejoker2• 8 years ago

If we baked the negative externalities of coal directly into the business their profits and wages would disappear in a heartbeat.

It is only by destroying my great grand children's enviornment that we can achieve the ends you list here.

And we're talking about 10,000 birds dying in windmills. The disconnect and diversion is the real issue.

If he got up and said what you said at least that worldview could be confronted with facts.

TangoTrotFox2• 8 years ago

He does say these things - time and again! But in less formal speeches he rolls with the audience and often says things that sound pretty dumb when taken out of context. And some things that are pretty dumb even in context. In any case the media has plenty of dumb things to pick from. And they generally choose to spend 100% of their time on the dumb things and 0% on the meat of the issues. And thus when you rely on the media to inform you, it makes it look like his arguments are based on the dumb things, exactly as this article tries to do.

Here [1] is the video, from the point his comments from this thread. It was just a hoo-ra speech, not a policy discussion -- just going over his achievements and playing in with the crowd. By contrast here is a transcript from trump signing the executive order on 'energy independence' which he lays out his views and motivations for what he's doing. [2] Here's [3] it in video format if that's your thing.

Note how the post you're responding to is downvoted. We're turning into a society where people want to hate the 'other side', and of course this is true to all 'sides.' And the media is feeding into this, and likely hold some responsibility for it. And so it's becoming increasingly difficult to get anything like a meaningful discussion of any issue within the media. Instead, they (and again this holds equally true for both sides) simply try to evangelize as much as they can for one side while demonizing and working to humiliate the other side so much as possible. This is not a good environment for discussion of issues where people may, at some point, be forced to agree to disagree.

[1] https://youtu.be/N-ReqYXmaZo?t=1240

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdkThe_O50M

kraigie4• 8 years ago

At that point biomass becomes a better option to fill coals role.

kraigie4• 8 years ago

In that case, biomass is the best renewable fuel source. Why not switch them over to biocoal?

You'd probably need a larger workforce as relocating some of the senior people may be required and some more loggers,but that's a selling point.

vixen99• 8 years ago

According to http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mort... the biggest threat by far is windows.

dole• 8 years ago

Trump's been on the losing end of a wind power fight offshore of one of his Scottish golf courses, one of the reasons why Trump supposedly cares so much about these terrible, disgraceful windmills.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-38069... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/donald-trump... https://qz.com/1291269/the-scottish-wind-farm-donald-trump-t...

US President Says Windmills Are Bird Killers as He Tries to Revive Coal Industry

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