Don Quixote tragically tilted at windmills, mistaking them for monsters. Donald Trump, on the other hand, recognizes the real monster — the subsidies, the blight, and the lies — behind the spinning blades.
“The other thing I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States,” Trump said during trade talks with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
“They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains. It’s the most expensive form of energy. It’s no good,” Trump said to an audience that must have been aghast at his politically incorrect audacity.
“When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn them off, you can’t bury them, they won’t let you bury the propellers – you know, the props – because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say, the environmentalists say you can’t bury them.”
And yet so many so-called environmentalists insist on windmills.
Before we go any further, I’ll admit it: I freaking hate windmills. I was born in 1969 and am just (barely!) old enough to remember when the highways were littered trash. At some point during my youth, the signs went up threatening a stiff fine — $100 in pre-Carter inflation money — for littering. It wasn’t long before the highways were almost entirely free of garbage.
My grandparents had a cabin on the Gasconade River, and a little johnboat. We kept a gallon milk jug in the boat, with about a third of it cut away to make into a large scoop, perfect for getting trash out of the river. They paid a 25-cent bounty for each piece collected. Before the ’70s were over, nobody collected the bounty any longer and eventually we threw the milk jug out.
Anyone who remembers Los Angeles smog before the EPA made them clean the air knows how bad things were.
Americans cleaned things up because we’d let our beautiful country get dirty. Sometimes the cleanup came in the form of fines and regulation, sometimes just volunteers tidying our little stretch of river. But the results added up.
Something went wrong along the way from those “Keep America Beautiful” I saw everywhere as a kid to today. Our own government — the same one that once spearheaded the movement to re-beautify the country — spends ridiculous amounts of money littering the landscape with ugly windmills that produce unreliable power and eventually leave a toxic mess for somebody else to clean up with even more ridiculous amounts of money.
And the sheer amount of space they occupy… it’s senseless. Nuclear plants require an average of 832 acres per 1,000 megawatts of 24/7 reliable power. To get that much unreliable power out of windmills requires around 85,000 acres. It’s obscene.
I sicced both Grok and ChatGPT on the numbers, and their results were similar enough — and in line with what I’ve read elsewhere — for credence.
But here’s what wind power really comes down to: economics. Trump absolutely nailed it when he said, “You need subsidy for wind, and energy should not need subsidy. With energy, you make money, you don’t lose money.”
That’s exactly right.
Trump isn’t tilting at windmills — he’s trying to slap some sense into the cult that worships them.
Recommended: Suppose They Threw a Protest for Stephen Colbert and (Almost) Nobody Came?
Get exclusive access to my Thursday Essays, Florida Man Friday, and the Five O’Clock Somewhere live video chat with Stephen Kruiser and Yours Truly. It’s all part of your VIP membership — and right now, you can join for 60% off with promo code FIGHT.
