President Donald Trump on Tuesday ripped into “stupid” wind turbines and solar farms for killing wildlife, destroying landscapes, and being inefficient.
The president tore into the green energy industry for over five minutes during a cabinet meeting, attacking wind and solar for being too intermittent and reliant on subsidies to be viable energy sources.
“Wind is a very expensive form of energy. It’s very bad for your beautiful surroundings, the plains and the valleys and the birds dying all over the place, you know, the whole thing is a disaster,” said Trump.
“Those big solar fields, they’re taking our farmland. Our farmers are, like, mortified by it. They hate it,” he continued. “It’s very, very inefficient and very ugly, too. You know, probably better than a windmill, but you go around and you see all these things that are 3 miles long by 3 miles wide, and you say, ‘What the hell is that?’ And it’s a lot of plastic from China. It’s plastic, black plastic from China.”
China is the global leader in green energy manufacturing with around “60% of the world’s manufacturing capacity for most mass-manufactured technologies,” including solar cells, wind systems, and batteries, according to the International Energy Agency.
China has invested heavily in renewable energy as it seeks to curb its reliance on oil imports. It also continues to build coal-fired power plants to meet its energy needs and is the world’s largest polluter.
Trump last signed the landmark “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that included the president’s priorities for his energy agenda, including encouraging fossil fuel development and cutting tax credits and subsidies for green energy.
“We’ve reintroduced clean, beautiful coal because, you know, you can do a lot with coal now, clean beautiful coal and natural gas and all of the other things that we have. But we don’t want wind and we don’t want solar because they’re a blight on our country,” said Trump. “They hurt our country very badly, and smart countries don’t use it.”
“We need the kind of thing that’s going to fire up our plants, and it’s not going to be wind, you know. It’s very intermittent, as you probably know. But they’ve spent a fortune. They’ve spent trillions of dollars on this stuff,” he continued.
Trump ended his monologue expressing regret that “wind” has not proven itself to be a significant source of energy “because it sounds so good, doesn’t it? ‘Wind, wind.’ But it’s not.”
It’s these ugly machines, and they’re all made – you’ve got to see – some are a little taller, a little shorter. They’re made by different companies. They have different stocks. They have different blades. They have different everything. It is so horrible,” said Trump.
“If you look at smart countries, they don’t use it. Smart countries don’t use it, and we’re now a smart country. We’re a brilliant country. We’re not smart. We’re brilliant now. We’re going to be a brilliant country. We have to be, because we have to catch up for some really stupid people that did a bad job,” he added.