Huh? Trump on windpower

It’s hard to believe the following, or maybe it’s not. The fact checking site, Snopes, confirms the following from our current President. Thanks to Dorothy W. for finding this.

“…We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it [sic] better than anybody I know. It’s [sic] very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured — tremendous, if you’re into this, tremendous fumes, gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So [a] tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything — you talk about the “carbon footprint” — fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything, right?

So they make these things, and then they put them up, and if you own a house within vision of some of these monsters, your house is worth 50 percent of the price. They’re noisy, they kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go, take a look, a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill some day. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life …”

Citation

The remarks included in the meme are shown in boldface above. Occupy Democrats did not misquote Trump and quoted word-for-word from his actual remarks, though the creators of the meme made slightly different punctuation choices to those we made.

They also left out a short section where Trump explained his purported knowledge of windmills: “I’ve studied it [sic] better than anybody I know. It’s [sic] very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none.” That gap should have been reflected in the quotation with the use of an ellipsis, but the omission did not distort the meaning or sense of what Trump said, and we therefore issue a rating of “Correct Attribution.”

Although his remarks were somewhat garbled at times, Trump appeared to have been making the point that the construction of wind turbines causes carbon emissions (“tremendous fumes”). For what it’s worth, it’s true that building and maintaining wind turbines does leave a carbon footprint, but analyses have shown that the overall negative environmental impact of wind power is far outstripped by that of the fossil fuel energy sources that wind power is intended to replace. 

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