President Donald Trump left many scratching their heads again this week with the repeated claim that his father was born in Germany (he was born in the Bronx). However, the most curious moment came with this statement to the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual spring dinner: “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer.” The basis for this claim remains a mystery.
Trump has long been a critic of low polluting, renewable energy despite the rapid shift of many countries to such alternative energy sources. However, the idea that windmills cause cancer has left many looking for any source for such a statement.
Trump has hated windmills after ever since a battle in Scotland over a plan to build a wind farm near his golf resort in Aberdeen. He called the windmills “ugly” and fought to stop the program.
The American Cancer Society is hardly passive when it comes to cancer sources. However, a spokesperson told the New York Times that “The American Cancer Society is unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer.”
What is troubling for many is that, while there is no connection between windmill noise and cancer, there is ample evidence that the fossil fuels pushed by President Trump kill a huge number of people each year. The changes in relaxing coal pollution limits by the Trump Administration were estimated by his own EPA to add 1,400 additional premature deaths each yearby 2030.
The claim that windmill cause cancer is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s much-mocked statement that trees produce more pollution than cars. Even his own press secretary got into trouble with Reagan for mocking the claim on Air Force One.
In this case, even Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley have described Trump’s claim of windmill noise causing cancer as “idiotic.”
The why bother crowd is in full flight from reason and literacy.
Karen S.,
I think it was between Bakersfield and Barstow that I saw acres and acres of solar panels; black panels on fields just about as far as the eye could see.
You might know that particular area and project as a Californian.
Mighty pretty spot😏.
For everyone mocking Trump’s assertions about wind turbines, here is an article from the National Institute of Health:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653647/
“Canadian family physicians can expect to see increasing numbers of rural patients reporting adverse effects from exposure to industrial wind turbines (IWTs). People who live or work in close proximity to IWTs have experienced symptoms that include decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression, and cognitive dysfunction. Some have also felt anger, grief, or a sense of injustice. Suggested causes of symptoms include a combination of wind turbine noise, infrasound, dirty electricity, ground current, and shadow flicker.1 Family physicians should be aware that patients reporting adverse effects from IWTs might experience symptoms that are intense and pervasive and might feel further victimized by a lack of caregiver understanding.”
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I am not aware of a proven link to cancer. However, cancer can often take at least a decade to manifest symptoms. It is going to take time to fully understand the long term health consequences of close proximity to wind turbines. It is also inherently unfair for those who do not live near industrial or private wind turbines to dismiss the health concerns of those who do. I think that there is not currently sufficient evidence of a cancer link, but certainly evidence for other serious health risks, as well as damage to property values.
Karen S.,
It’s difficult to isolate or attribute to any set of symptoms to a single factor.
For example, one may live near a wind mill, but also, L4D might live nearby.
In that case, how would you sort out the primary causes of the “decreased quality of life, anxiety, stress, sleep disturbances, headache, depression”, etc.😉😎😄😂
Karen S.
PS…I forgot to mention “damage to property values”.
Holland has had them for decades!
I took it to be a mimic of the garbage claims routinely pulled by the uneducated Greens.
TRUMPS SEEKS TO DEREGULATE REGARDLESS OF PUBLIC WELFARE
The biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump’s agenda of deregulation — or maybe we should call it “deregulation,” because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.
Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what’s going on.
One is the administration’s plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It’s not as if we’ve seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?
Now, you could see the Trump administration’s willingness to trust the meat industry to keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule. And there’s something to that, but it’s not the whole story, as illustrated by another event: Trump’s declaration the other day that wind turbines cause cancer.
The Trump administration wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of mercury from power plants. And in pursuit of that goal, it wants to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from taking account of many of the benefits from reduced mercury emissions, such as an associated reduction in nitrogen oxide.
But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids — but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.
So it’s deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others. What’s going on?
Part of the answer is, follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.
There are probably other things, too. If you’re a party that wishes we could go back to the 1950s (but without the 91 percent top tax rate), you’re going to have a hard time accepting the reality that hippie-dippy, unmanly things like wind and solar power are becoming ever more cost-competitive.
Edited from: “Donald Trump Is Trying To Kill You” by Paul Kruman
This evening’s NEW YORK TIMES
Oh boy. Sensational nonsense from “Kruman” i guess you meant to spell Krugman
Do strict regulations always work? Oh let’s look and see. Lets examine the worker’s paradise of China run by the communist party
‘
er I guess it’s not so strict; strict in theory only. In reality the all powerful Leftist Communist party is a racket of hoodlums who take bribes by the billions to ignore their own rules. So all the poisonous aldulterating food producers have to do is bribe a Chicom offical and they can do what they want! Worker’s paradise, remember that!
https://www.scmp.com/topics/china-food-safety
by contrast free market capitalism of America never looked so good!
Excellent! Rather than address the utter failure and imbicility of the day glo bozo, toss out a throw-away reference to China, as if such a random sub-reference would convince anyone here that the criminogenic administration of klown kar buffoons is anything but a tragi-farce. Nice work; please post more materials Just. Like. This. Thanks for playing, so sorry for your loss and your condition.
this is to “but hannity said the ticking sound would stop!” kurtzie
How bizarrely off message. Opine about conspiracy false equivalence much?
is likely to come from – but like the rest of the curiously ridiculous comment has no foundation in facts…. as usual. How can you believe people whose main operating principle is it’s ok to lie every day?
Rejected for lack of credible source.
Two years ago, 14 windmills were erected within a 1/4 radius of my neighborhood. The first few months went by with few problems. Yes, the noise was almost unbearable on windy nights but seemed to result only with a few hours of lost sleep. My next-door neighbor, a light sleeper, couldn’t take the wind sounds and decided to sell his home. He got one offer of about 50% less than his asking price. It wasn’t even enough to pay off his mortgage.
Then, my other next-door neighbor developed a rare type of ear cancer that is believed to be caused by windmills. Now, it seems about half of the neighbors have this rare ear cancer. Nobody can sell their houses because the prices are too low. When the residents finally die, their heirs sell the deceased people’s homes for enough money to pay for a modest funeral.
You can take the things that Trump says seriously and know that he is 100% correct. Avoid these windmills if you can. For scientific reasons that can’t be explained here, the color orange seems to protect the ears from the cancer particles. Simply wearing an orange cap or dying your hair orange might save your life after the wind profiteers erect their windmills of death in your neighborhood.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=link+between+noise+exposure+and+cancer&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DROsAmf7UCf0J
I haven’t looked into a possible link between noise and cancer, but I noticed in a quick Google search that there is some material about a “possible” link.
I’ve observed what they can do to the landscape, but I’ve never been close enough to them to hear them.
A young former neighbor worked on assembling and maintaining windmills….his job required a lot of agility and a certain level of conditioning to climb the wind mills.
He broke his leg once….I think on a motorcycle…and had to fully recover and work his way back into condition before he could get back to his job.
When I’ve driven to LA, I think it’s around Indio? that there are huge numbers of windmills.
I don’t know about a link to cancer, but you can feel the noise of a wind turbine in your sternum and on your eardrum. It is a strange, incessant thumbing. I think it’s referred to as chopping the air. Wind turbines are especially infamous for lowering the value of your home.
It was a mistake to carpet miles of CA in windmills during the beta test phase of wind technology. Of course they can design a solution to chopping up endangered migratory birds and bats. Of course they can solve the horrible chopping sensation. That has got to impact wildlife.
But they did not wait for the technology to be ready. Environmentalists got all excited and threw our money into beta technology. That was because we were told the world was going to end 20 years ago because of global warming. If you go back and read those scholarly articles, and statements from academia, we were supposed to already be under water by now. This mass hysteria keeps whipping people into a frenzy, and then they don’t make rational choices that do any good. We waste our time, money, and resources without much to show for it. In fact, I think wind is going to turn out to be a dead end when we look back at this point in time. One of the technologies that future generations never heard of.
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2015/09/23/do-wind-turbines-lower-property-values/#56c04fa348cb) “The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that generating 20% of electricity (which is likely the highest we could go, see here) with land-based wind installations would demand at least 20,000 square miles, or the size of Maryland and Vermont combined. By comparison, all U.S. nuclear power plants, which produce around 20% of power, occupy only 110 square miles.”
“Reduced property values from wind farms is in stark contrast to the “shale gas revolution,” which has created “thousands of new millionaires” of property owners.”
We need to stop being so easily led.
Why, thank you for your anecdotal tales. I guess to make your commentary relevant, someone should have requested that everyone feel free to contribute some personal tales of woe regarding wind turbines, even if they’re not actually “real” but just sound like a good story. Thanks for playing, but google “relevance.”
this is to “sometimes when I want to draw attention, I just make up sh*t for the hell of it” dustie
Have you watched the actual clip? It’s clearly a joke
But can we prove that they don’t cause cancer?😏
Honestly, those godawful wind turbines have absolutely ruined the vistas in West Texas !!!! If I had to live out there and look at what had once been a gorgeous western painting, brought to life, now littered with noisy, bird slice-and dice turbines, I do believe the stress could give one cancer. We was so sad when they first started popping up in Texas.
The Kennedys, esp. Teddy, did not want them out in the bay there at Hyannis. He did not want the turbines spoiling his view..So guess what? No turbines near Hyannis!
“we was so sad” ??? I sound like George Bush, Jr.
there is no reason to believe they cause cancer. that was a typical off the cuff silly remark from Trump.
however they do have environmental impacts
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-wind-power
more importantly some “renewable energy sources” tend to operate irrationally, that is to say, for example in a way that spends ten calories for every eight they may produce, when all fabrication and installation and operating costs are accounted for… ethanol supposedly is, i have heard, but subsidies keep it going. so let’s take this silly remark and make something useful to consider out of it
VETERAN REPUBLICAN SENATOR..
IS ‘FATHER’ OF WIND ENERGY TAX CREDITS
CHARLES GRASSLEY CALLS TRUMP’S COMMENTS ‘IDIOTIC’
Count Chuck Grassley as among those displeased by President Donald Trump’s attacks on wind energy.
The longtime Iowa GOP senator told Iowa reporters on Wednesday afternoon that Trump’s comments implying turbines cause cancer was “idiotic.” Then he explained to Capitol Hill reporters that the president needs to stop railing against wind power.
“Pretty simple. I wish his staff would tell him I’m the father and now the grandfather of wind energy tax credits. I don’t think he knows it, or I don’t think he’d make those comments that aren’t quite appropriate,” Grassley said.
He said Trump’s cancer comments were probably “tongue in cheek” and chalked up his divide with the president on generational differences and that Grassley was more experienced with the energy crisis of the 1970s.
Trump said at a fundraiser on Tuesday night that “if you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations. Your house just went down 75 percent in value.” He added: “They say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”
The conservative Grassley said that he has to teach a lot of new politicians about wind energy and Trump is no different. And as far the cancer claim, which has no factual basis, Grassley called it “tongue in cheek.”
“I’ve lived through it, he never has, so I’m going to give him some leeway when he criticizes alternative energy. Because I’ve gotta do it with 85 percent of the people that are new since we developed all of this and they think it’s stupid that we have wind and solar and everything else, except for a few progressives,” Grassley said. “I’m not a progressive but I’m in favor of alternative energy.”
Edited from: “Grassley Schools Trump On ‘Idiotic’ Wind Turbines And Cancer Comments”
Today’s POLITICO
Just yesterday we were discussing the possibility that Trump is in the early stages of dementia or has a medical condition imparting his faculities. We were also discussing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric in the 2016 campaign.
Now here it is, one day later, and we have this latest episode of Trump uttering something totally stupid. Is it dementia or just another case of Trump shooting his mouth off regardless of facts?
Thanks to Trump, hundreds of deluded yahoos might now believe that wind turbines are part of a conspiracy to ‘generate cancer’. Historically we depended on presidents to avoid statements that disturbed unbalanced people. One can only conclude that Trump is unbalanced himself.
P Hill – people with dementia forget the names of those around them. They will look at their own glasses and not recognize them as their own, thinking they should still have the pair they had 20 years ago. They will forget common everyday words.
Since there is a 1/3 chance of anyone over 75 having dementia, then an annual or biennial cognitive health screening is a good idea for anyone in an important job.
I watched someone slowly die from Alzheimers. It is an evil disease. For a long while, the patient feels lost all the time. Doesn’t know where they are, doesn’t recognize anyone, and little by little, loses the ability to understand language. At some point, they will forget how to swallow, and start choking on food and drink. A lot of Alzheimers patients have relatively healthy bodies for their age, so this torture can draw out for years.
I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. The grief of watching a beloved relative slowly be tortured to death is difficult to describe, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Medication didn’t help, at least at the time. This is a public health crisis we ignore at our peril.
It is not a diagnosis to be thrown out there for political purposes.
The most fair response is to enact legislation that would require every member of Congress, SCOTUS, the President, VP, and every other person in a position of power to undergo cognitive health tests as part of their physical on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have to wait until the people closest to them get them tested. I have some concerns about Nancy Pelosi, for example, but instead of singling her out for a forced exam, just require everyone to add it to their physical.
And if their physical is clean, then the accusations should stop.
Trump took a cognitive test in 2016, and it was clean. While I believe that cognitive tests should be part of a physical, if it’s clean, then don’t accuse them of dementia. For example, Obama often made gaffs such as there were 57 states. He said a tornado that killed 12 people killed an entire town of 10,000. He said he saw many fallen heroes in the audience.
There were a lot of gaffs and blunders like that. It’s live television. I don’t think Obama had dementia, that he thought there were 57 states, or that he thought there were zombies in the audience. If I had a job on live television, I would be comedic gold. I would be a never-ending source of spoof reels. People forget that they forgave Obama these blunders, but accused Trump of dementia for his own.
“hundreds of deluded yahoos might now believe that wind turbines are part of a conspiracy to ‘generate cancer’.”
That is the funniest thing you have said in months. probably there are. lots of cranks out there. lol
Trump is a genius, he says goofy stuff like this just to keep you guys busy complaining about a trifle. GENIUS!
Yet another example of why Trump is such a yuge embarrassment to this country. As another poster noted, people on this blog either believe what he says at face value or somehow try to rationalize it. It’s a big deal when the POTUS claims that something is a carcinogen. In addition to fabricating the story about the noise from windmills causing cancer–as Turley reported above, he repeated the claim that his father was born in the EU, a statement he has made several times before. Also, he repeatedly couldn’t say the word “origins”–he kept mispronouncing it as “oranges”. He was trying to undermine the Mueller report by claiming that the FISA warrants shouldn’t have been issued because of suspicious “origins” of the facts alleged therein. These latest gaffes are either more proof of his narcissistic, and maybe sociopathic personality disorder or maybe early onset dementia. His father died of Alzheimer’s. These can be early signs of decline.
There are many wind turbines in the desert. There are, indeed, many health problems associated with them, although I have not heard of cancer. I think he is confusing that with high voltage power lines. In addition, they kill migratory birds and bats and blight the skyline.
The low, constant, thumping sound is absolutely maddening. If you put up a wind turbine, your neighbors would not like you. I looked at a house for sale with wind turbines, because I was interested in generating my own energy. However, you could feel the constant sound in your bones. You could hear it in the house. Your animals would have no relief. The cost for maintenance and repairs was truely atrocious.
I wish Trump had not said that, half the people on this blog will believe it. And I’m sure some republican in a deep deep red state is sponsoring a bill to outlaw wind.
I’m sure some republican in a deep deep red state is sponsoring a bill to outlaw wind.
I understand your fear. This would directly target your 1st amendment right to free speech. Don’t worry, us constitutionalists will protect you.
Only to cover the wind breaking out your backsides.
‘We constitutionalists’ or at a stretch us meant to be “USA Constitutionalists.’
Both work. 🙂
Trump said “noise” causes cancer, not “windmill noise.” I have no idea if that is true, but I do find noise to be very stressful. Prolonged noise is used as a form of torture, and for me, it would be highly effective. And I believe that any type of long-term stress to the body would cause cancer. However, fossil fuels are far more damaging, and as the population increases, the number of people barreling around in huge trucks and SUVs, spewing pollution is having an increasingly deleterious impact on the air you breathe.
However, the idea that windmill cause cancer has left many looking for any source for such a statement.
Once again the President has people chasing their tail over some ridiculous comment. Is he signing an EO on this or negotiating a not-a-treaty with foreign governments on this? Whatever happened to measuring Presidents based on what they do?
The only issue with wind turbines: Wind turbines generally require preventative maintenance checkups two to three times per year. The maintenance costs will increase as it gets older.
Another issue is going electric. That would be using lithium batteries. Sooner or later they need to be replaced. Are lithium ion batteries hazardous waste?
No… and yes. According to the U.S. government, lithium ion batteries aren’t an environmental hazard. “Lithium Ion batteries are classified by the federal government as non-hazardous waste and are safe for disposal in the normal municipal waste stream.”
I worked in a lithium battery factory & left in 6 months. About 1 year later, the battery factory caught fire, exploded & burnt to the ground. There were fatalities. The owner liked to gamble at horse races & Las Vegas.
Was there a point to all that unsupported subjective mish mash?
When you die of lung cancer the “cause of death” put on a death certificate or other public list of fatalities will not be tobacco. Even if you smoked for 60 years or so. Smoking is dumb. We need to educate our kids so they do not start vaping or smoking tobacco. Went in dumb, come out dumb too.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448502/
It depends on the jurisdiction….the trend over the past 30-35 years has been for noting tobacco use as an underlying cause.
If an alcoholic dies of cirrosis of the liver, the “cause of death” will not likely read “alcohol”.
The certificate form may have a provision for noting alchohol as a/the cause, but the specific disease itself will be in “the cause of death” part.
If you overdose on opioids they will say the cause of death was bla bla.
What is troubling for many is that, while there is no connection between windmill noise and cancer, there is ample evidence that the fossil fuels pushed by President Trump kill a huge number of people each year.
I think you meant to say that fossil fuel use can produce a gross injury to life expectancy. The question at hand is whether or not it produces a net injury, and that depends on the alternative courses of action. I take it opportunity cost is a notion lawyers just don’t get.
That’s a reasonable way to look at energy sources as they relate to health. Until some much later period in time when we (the species) may be desperate, coal has been almost universally adjudged to be dangerous to both our immediate health as well as ultimately health affecting environmental problems. No doubt the health benefits of various energy options in terms of economic success should be in the equation.
I recommend Enlightenment Now as a significant book of last year which doors this kind of long view analysis and determines that we are doing pretty well so far with our civilization, though clearly serious dangers are possible.
The comment served as proof of a troubling degree of unsupported commentary…and not much else .
JT seems to prefer silliness to substance in his columns. I don’t get it.
That would require objective thinking and reasoning. There in lies the problem.
The President says it, so it must be newsworthy.
Climate change action resisters have explained to me that they resist climate action because right now those who are invested in fossil fuel and those who use the most fossil fuel, now hold the most power. Climate change action advocates want to take that power away and take power for themselves. Other countries want to weaken the US.
That may all be accurate except for the last part. Climate change action advocates want to sustain life on earth. Power is not something they ever think about. Most people have no interest in dominating others.
Sam – there is a difference between smart action and ignorant, self-destructive action.
Were fossil fuels to be banned, for example, there is no infrastructure to take their place. Due to their innate constraints, wind and solar cannot take their place. There is resistance to nuclear energy. Trucks and planes cannot be electric at this time.
There are no functional electric tractors, excavators, and other heavy duty farm machinery.
There would be mass starvation because there would be no way to use high throughput machinery in the fields, processing by hand produces less, and no way to transport the food to grocery stores. There would, in fact, be no way to ship anything.
There would be almost no plastics, no phones, computers, laptops, Kindles, medical tubing, medical devises, many medicines themselves, no asphalt, no natural gas, no propane, a lot of sporting equipment would be gone…The list would actually be extensive and impact every aspect of our society, drastically shortening lifespans.
In addition, every tree on Earth would likely be cut down, as nearly happened before. We would need masts for sailing ships again, as there would be no combustion engine ships. We would need to cook our food and heat our homes to survive winter. We would go back to burning dung and peat, and the cities would be black with smoke again. This, too, would drastically reduce lifespan.
We would go back to preindustrialized times when the average lifespan was around 40. We were in danger of denuding the planet of all trees once before. At current population levels, it would be a reality. This would destroy the terrestrial lungs of the planet. The belching smoke and acid rain would likely off marine phytoplankton, which produces the rest of our oxygen. All aerobic life on Earth would smother and die, and their decomposition would further poison streams and the atmosphere.
The only life on earth left would be anaerobic. If the Earth significantly cooled without its forests, then most of that life would snuff out, too.
Such foolish actions taken out of a spirit of delusions of grandeur could usher in dystopia and then the highest ELE ever, not only for us, but all aerobic life on Earth. Mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects…all of it gone in the name of saving the planet.