During a recent visit to his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland—and seated beside U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer—the president launched into a rant about how windmills are “a disaster” that “kill all your birds.” And he’s got his administration on the case. “Wind projects are known to kill eagles,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tweeted last week, instructing his department to enforce the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to protect the nationally symbolic birds of prey from windmills. Burgum also said he was ending “preferential treatment” for wind energy and announced an investigation into how turbines “might affect migratory bird populations.” He even halted offshore wind leasing and began canceling other wind projects.
Trump has resented wind turbines since at least 2012, after learning of plans to build a wind farm near his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland. His reasoning wasn’t entirely coherent. “They’re horrible looking structures,” he said in 2012. “They make noise, they kill birds by the thousands, they’re really destructive and I don’t care who the environmentalist is.” He sued to prevent the farm, lost, and has been seething and ranting about it ever since. (The wind farm was completed in 2018.)
But he also gave the game away, adding, “And you can take a thousand times more energy out of a hole in the ground this big.” He spread his arms out—“This big. It’s called oil and gas. And you have it there, the North Sea, this big, that nobody would even see.” After all, Trump also shares with many other Republicans a hardcore, nihilistic commitment to fossil fuels, no matter the consequences (a commitment that is supported by millions in campaign donations).
Just four months ago, he called for gutting the very law that Burgum says he’ll enforce against windmills—the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which brought our national bird back from extinction—because he views it as burdensome to fossil fuel companies. Trump is also eviscerating protections for those particular birds, and many others, in at least two other ways, as The New York Times reported: weakening the Endangered Species Act by excluding habitat from the act’s protection, and diluting the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 by ceasing to penalize companies for accidentally killing birds.
Trump sounds pretty insane when babbling about wind power, but he’s smart to talk about birds, because humans love birds. About three in 10 Americans engage in birdwatching, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whether in their own backyards or—in the case of some 44 million people—on outings a mile or more from their homes. Birding is also a sizable industry, contributing $279 billion to the economy.
Trump’s apparent preoccupation with bird protection is petty, self-serving, cynical, and hypocritical—all familiar characteristics for this president. While he works to ensure that the fossil fuel industry gets to kill any and all birds that might stand in its way, he’s decimating millions of species through climate change and weaponizing public concern for birds against renewable energy—which is the one hope for saving our natural world from the ravages of fossil fuels. And it’s all because he was powerless to stop a wind farm from going up near one of his tacky golf courses.
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