President Trump has claimed that wind turbines are an ecological “con job” blighting the countryside, killing birds and driving whales “loco”.
During a press conference with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, he said: “I say to Europe, we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery, our valleys, our beautiful plains.”
On the third day of his visit to Scotland, Trump said that the wind turbines had ruined the view from the 18th hole of his Ayrshire golf course.
President Trump met the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Turnberry
JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP
“Today, I’m playing the best course, I think, in the world,” he said. “Turnberry, even though I own it, it’s probably the best course in the world. And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills. It’s like, ‘Great, at the end of the 18th’. I said, ‘Isn’t that a shame?’ What a shame.”
He added: “It’s the most expensive form of energy. They’re made in China, almost all of them. When they start to rust and rot in eight years you can’t really turn them off, you can’t burn them. They won’t let you bury the propellers, the props, because there’s a certain type of fibre that doesn’t go well with the land.
“That’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them because the fibre doesn’t go well with the land. In other words, if you bury it, it will harm our soil. The whole thing is a con job.”
He claimed the turbines were being peddled by “environmental hacks” but were not ecologically friendly as the fibres from which they are made do not break down. Trump also declared that wind turbines harmed nature with their noise and killed birds that were struck by the blades.
“It kills the birds. They’re noisy. You know, you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore and over the last short period of time they had 18, because it’s driving them loco,” he went on. “It’s driving them crazy.”