I had an epiphany. One that made me want to slap my head for not thinking of it ages ago. Trump HATES windmills. Both as a personal and policy matter. He’s pissed about seeing a windmill farm in the ocean off some of his properties, especially a golf course in the United Kingdom. He’s pissed because they are ‘environmental’ as in clean energy. He’s taken a LOT of money from the fossil fuel industry and wants to keep that spigot gushing out cash. So, while’s it’s not “declared” (yet) Trump’s been in a long-running “War Against Windmills.” (WAW? Or WAWF if you add the word farms?) I say instead of fighting him with reason just flatter him. Play on his VANITY.
As this article in the Daily Beast tells us he’s escalated things again, this time using national security as an excuse to shut down offshore windmills:
President Donald Trump escalated his war on windmills on Monday with his administration pausing all large-scale offshore wind projects under construction.
The administration announced that the work would stop effective immediately citing national security risks identified by the Defense Department.
The linked article cites the bullshit from the Department of the Interior about hitting the pause button to give it, the DOD and other agencies time to ‘work with leaseholders and other partners the time needed to assess and reduce alleged risks.’ As you might expect there was no mention on how long the holdup would be. But it’s pure Trumpian bullshit. However the costs for the producers and consumers of wind energy are quite real as the linked article explains. Even if there’s some increased cost to producers and consumers it’s worth remembering part of how big oil and big coal became that way was via political donations. Now, for Trump at least (since SCOTUS gave him immunity) bribery doesn’t have to be hidden anymore renewable energy would do well to do what the fossil fuel folks did and add it to the cost of growing bigger.
Not that he wouldn’t take an interest if fossil fuel executives complained to him about their every year record profits not being as high as they COULD be if there was no renewable energy. Like I said Trump wants their money and he’d want to do a little something something to keep them happy and the donations coming. However I firmly believe that the true heart of the matter is that Trump just thinks windmills are ugly. ESPECIALLY if they can be seen sitting there a few miles or so offshore from one of his seaside properties he’s overpaid for. Do you think for one second if one of his golf courses regularly had huge oil supertankers sailing within view of his freaking golf course he’d care? Maybe a little but he’d quickly get back to hitting bad shots and fudging his scorecard!
Trump thinks windmills are ugly. Some people think modern wind-turbines that generate electricity are graceful looking. Some don’t. We’re all entitled to our opinions. If Trump thinks they’re ugly fine. He’s entitled to his opinion like anyone else. What he’s not entitled to do is cripple an increasingly viable and cost efficient means of producing clean, renewable energy just because he wants to look out on an ocean with nothing but the sea to see.
However Trump is fine with certain things most of us find ugly. Like his name plastered on any surface he gains control over. The name Trump in great big letters on any building he can slap them on. I’m surprised he didn’t slap his name on the Kennedy Center with gold lettering! He’s that vain. He wants his name EVERWHERE, just like Saddam didn’t want anyone in Iraq to go anywhere without seeing a giant mural with HIS ugly mug on it. Trump’s vanity knows no bounds so I say when it comes to windmills use that! Give him what he would love.
PUT THE NAME TRUMP ON WINDMILLS!
Yep. Don’t charge him even a dime, just send out crews to slather the letters Trump on any windmill Trump wants. Hell, wind energy producers could if they had to sweeten the pot by paying Trump if they had to to get him to allow windmills with his ‘brand.’ He won’t live forever after all. In the meantime the energy farms can keep producing clean renewable energy and improving the technology to make it even better. Perhaps it’s time to try a ‘If you can’t beat him then suck up to him strategy.’ Point out how big and ugly refineries (and coal burning power plants) are and how few of them are out there. And those big oil supertankers operate mostly well offshore. People seldom see them when they aren’t docked at a loading or offloading station and even those are out to sea and well off the coast!
Wind Farms on the other hand are on land and often visible from shorelines and along highways. Talk to Trumpty about how many hundreds of thousands (I don’t know how many worldwide but I’ll bet its over a million) of energy producing windmills there are. If that doesn’t do the trick then again, suck it up and offer him a hundred bucks a year for each windmill with his name on it. That’s a cool million bucks for every ten-thousand windmills. Rope in enough countries and operators and I don’t see why before long 500k wind turbines, a half MILLION wouldn’t sign on. That’s fifty million bucks that Trump could pocket. Again, I can see it ramping up to a million windmills/turbines. A hundred million for Trumpty.
It’s not like oil executives couldn’t match it. They could but if you look at the big picture they already have a good gig going and over the decades their share of the energy market WILL decrease but there will always be a need for them. It will take decades for renewables to shrink them to the point where they are ‘merely’ super rich instead of batshit insane rich and I suspect they will quietly, if grudgingly decide to live with a new reality.
So I’ll close with how I started. Trump thinks windmills are ugly and wants them GONE. However he’s vain beyond any measure and is HIS name was on the things they’d look pretty good and pretty damned quick. If he were to start getting fifty million (at least) for having his name slapped on them in no time he’d be talking about expanses of “Beautiful” windmills. Even calling them Trump Windmills or Trumpmills. I swear if he lived for at least a year after it started he’d start claiming HE invented the idea!
I know. It seems like crazy talk. But what the hell. What’s been tried so far to win him over sure as hell hasn’t worked. What everyone including brutal dictators know is some flattery will get all manner of things out of Trumpty. Think about it and for more than a few minutes. If you still think I’m crazy and need to voluntarily check into the psych ward at the VA then say so. But I think it’s worth trying.
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise, among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
“If that doesn’t do the trick then again, suck it up and offer him a hundred bucks a year for each windmill with his name on it. That’s a cool million bucks for every thousand windmills. Rope in enough countries and operators and I don’t see why before long 500k wind turbines, a half MILLION wouldn’t sign on. That’s fifty million bucks that Trump could pocket.”
You might want to recheck your math. One hundred times one thousand is only “one hundred thousand” (says so, right there in the number). Now, a THOUSAND windmills would produce a million bucks (that’s a thousand thousands–just like the Brits traditionally put it; their traditional “million” is what we would normally call a “billion”). The second half of your calculation was correct though–a half million times 100 would produce $50 million. So, I’m not quite sure where your “1000 windmills times $100 = $1,000,000” went astray when the “500,000 windmills times $100 = $50,000,000” was correct. Perhaps, because most of us here don’t typically talk about numbers exceeding the “thousands” level on a *personal* budgetary or income level?
It’s like thinking about putting large numbers into a more comprehensible frame. Like think of the number “one billion.” That’s a LARGE number that most people don’t really put a lot of thought into but, frame that number in “counting to one billion.” If you popped out of your mother with the ability to think and speak and you began counting one number per second–leaving aside the difficulty in saying “seven hundred, seventy-thousand, seven hundred seventy-seven” in just one second and also assuming you’re able to breathe and speak at the same time–you would hit “one billion” at one billion seconds. How long would that be in “smaller” units (hours, days, weeks, months, years)? Well, at the end of just one year, you would already be at 31,
Continuing/finishing from the above (hit the “enter” button by accident; note to self–in future, when a sneeze is coming on, move fingers away from the keyboard) you’d be at 31,536,000 (in words, “thirty-one million, five hundred thirty-six thousand”). At the end of a decade, 315,360,000 (“three hundred fifteen million, three hundred sixty thousand”) and when you’re roughly 31 years, 7 months and 2 weeks old, you’d finally hit “one billion.”
Instead of a “thousand” I meant to write TEN thousand windmills which would equal a million dollars for every batch of ten thousand. Being an old fart I do a lot of simple arithmetic in my head and when drafting the article yes, I recall wondering how much grift could Trump get out of this and started with the idea of a hundred bucks per thousand. Two simple and easy to grasp numbers. And yes, I came up with 100k. It was a simple matter to scale up to assuming five hundred thousand windmills and $50million in Trump’s pocket.
I’m not sure why I added in the ‘intervening’ notion of ten-thousand windmills. I guess I was trying to get readers to start with a smaller number to hit the million mark and that would take ten thousand windmills. Make it easier to get the point of how a hundred bucks per windmill could turn into a head turning number via taking a swag on just how many windmills are out there. I honestly don’t know but a half million seemed quite reasonable although I think it’s probably a lot more. Anyway as you note I left out a word that screws up my point.
Thanks for the catch. I’ll go back and fix that error in arithmetic.
Huh?
‘…a million bucks (that’s a thousand thousands–just like the Brits traditionally put it; their traditional “million” is what we would normally call a “billion”)’
That last bit’s wrong – we agree on a million Joseph , it’s after that the *traditional* British units (though we’ve generally conceded to your meanings these days) diverge. eg Our old billion is your trillion (10^12).
Seriously, good idea Denis.