Don’t let him mislead you: To start with, wind farms produce electricity far more cheaply than coal- or oil-burning power plants.
The mind works in mysterious ways.
Who should pop into my mind when I was rewatching one of my favourite movies, the original Thomas Crown Affair in which Steve McQueen plays a dashing criminal who cleverly gets away with a bank heist? None other than Donald Trump. Nothing to do with any criminal activity. Plenty to do with windmills. That’s because of the film’s theme song, Michel Legrand’s The Windmills of Your Mind, the winner of the 1968 Oscar for best original song.
Why the Trump connection? Because I had just listened to Trump’s tirade about “windmills that destroy everything, the most expensive energy there is, they ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
All of that is wrong. To start with, wind farms produce electricity far more cheaply than coal- or oil-burning power plants. When Trump promises that if elected he will sign an executive order banning offshore wind farms, he is playing to the fossil fuel industry, hoping for even more campaign funding.
Don Quixote mistook windmills for giants and attacked them. That actually seems rational when compared with the attacks launched by Trump against “windmills” in Trumpese.
First of all, these giants are not windmills, they are wind turbines. The term “windmill” traces back to a time when wind energy was used to turn large, round stones that would grind grains. It is therefore incorrect to refer to today’s installations as windmills, since they have nothing to do with milling. The rotating blades are linked to a turbine that generates electricity.
Trump’s battle against “windmills” began back in 2006 after he had purchased seaside land for a golf course and subsequently learned that a wind farm was being planned offshore. This annoyed him because it would disturb the view and possibly eat into profits. His attempts to prevent the construction of the wind farm turned into a feud with the Scottish government, and in Trump’s mind, converted the wind turbines into giants that needed to be attacked. His weapons were words. Irrational ones. They continue to be spewed out to this day.
“You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody.”
What are we to make of this grammatically curious claim? That Trump knows more about the subject than all the engineers, physicists, environmentalists and materials scientists who are involved in the design of these turbines? From what book did he learn that the sound of the turbines causes cancer? Or that the electricity will go off if there is no wind? In his own inimitable words, “All of a sudden, it stops; the wind and the televisions go off, and your wives and husbands say, ‘Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight, but the wind stopped blowing and I can’t watch.’”
Of course, this is not so. The electricity generated by the turbines can be stored. Trump has also incorrectly stated that the turbines spew greenhouse gases into the air and capped off this bit of nonsense with the non sequitur, “You know we have a world, right? So, the world is tiny compared to the universe.” Well, at least he got the size comparison right.
He got something else right. Sort of.
“You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen in your life.”
I’ve actually seen these behemoths close up. They do sort of look like giants. But there was no bird graveyard underneath. However, it is true that the turbines are a hazard for birds. There are all sorts of estimates about how many birds are killed by wind turbines a year, but it is a lot less than the millions that are killed by crashing into windows and tall buildings such as Trump Tower. Then there are the estimated 4 billion birds killed every year in the world by domestic cats. So far at least, Trump has not claimed that his promise to deport immigrants who eat cats will save birds.
Trump often laments that the “windmills” are ugly. That of course is in the eyes of the beholder. To me, they look quite majestic, technological marvels. He argues that “after 10 years they look like hell and start to get tired, old.” Actually, they last 20 to 30 years before they “get tired and old.”
And there is a real issue here. What do you do with the decommissioned turbines? Since the blades can be 100 metres long, burying in a landfill is not a viable long-term option. Made of polyester or epoxy resins reinforced with glass or carbon fibres, the blades are difficult but not impossible to recycle in some way. They can be ground into small particles to replace sand and clay in cement or cut up and used in construction to reinforce concrete. Blades can even be converted into poles for power lines. Ideally, the blades would be chemically broken down to extract the resins used that could then be used to make new blades, a challenge that several companies are addressing.
Trump has also famously called climate change a hoax and railed against electric cars, claiming that they don’t work in the winter and that they can’t travel very far. Supporters of electric cars should “rot in hell,” he has said. I guess that’s my destiny then. However, his recent romance with Elon Musk has tempered his attack on electric vehicles somewhat because as he eloquently stated, “I’m for electric cars. I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”
We need politicians to push for fossil-fuel alternatives. Is there a chance that Trump will get on the bandwagon? Not likely. Unless somehow a Sancho Panza emerges. Sancho, if you recall, was Don Quixote’s sidekick who doesn’t share his delusions and offers some earthy wisdom.
“Now look, your grace,” Sancho says, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
The last stanza of Windmills of Your Mind ends with: “like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.” Sometimes those circles in some politicians’ minds need to be straightened out.
Joe Schwarcz is director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society (mcgill.ca/oss). He hosts The Dr. Joe Show on CJAD Radio 800 AM every Sunday from 3 to 4 p.m