Peak environmentalism
“I’ve studied it better than anybody I know,” the president asserted in a bizarre segment from a weekend speech to young conservatives in West Palm Beach, Florida, close to his winter retreat at Mar-a-Lago where he is spending the holidays.
I particularly like “You know we have a world, right? So…the world is tynee.”
“They’re made in China and Germany mostly,” Trump said of wind turbines, of which there are more than 57,000 across the US, according to the American Wind Energy Association. “But they’re manufactured tremendous if you’re into this, tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.
“You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything, right?”
Since when does Trump give a damn about fumes spewing into the air?
Well he identifies as an environmentalist.
You can see his broken brain do that thing it does – it hears him say he’s an environmentalist and it goes PING! Cleanwaterandair. He interrupts himself when it goes PING: he changes his gesture from the shovel-shape to the thumb-finger circle shape, he stands up straighter, and he shouts: “I want THE CLEANEST WATER” and the rest of the stupid formula, including the phrase “crystal clean,” because the formula would not be complete without that. He returns to his One Big Idea which is that ranting about clean water and clean air is all there is to “being an environmentalist.”
Still trying to reconcile the apparent inference that the fumes and pollution from manufacturing wind turbines are worse than the fumes and pollution from, you know, burning coal for energy. I suspect that this is irreconcilable is a feature of the argument, not a bug, being Trump and all.
Doesn’t his whole obsession with wind originate from his Scottish golf course? I seem to recall that there was a proposed wind turbine project there, and God forbid some golfers have to look at “ugly” wind turbines while they play the back nine, so the Trump Organization crusaded against the project. Of course, you can’t get far with the “it’ll hurt our country club members’ feelings” as an argument, so they trotted out the old “wind turbines kill birds!” routine to give it an environmentalist fig leaf.
As with anything he learns (not that there are many such things), Trump assumes that nobody else knew it before he did. (“A lot of people don’t know this” = “I was just told this, and it was new to me.”) So he loves to “educate” audiences on the dangerous menace of wind power.