Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Trump's shaky grasp of renewable energy

Well, Donald Trump (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) managed to get through three presidential debates without having to answer any serious questions on climate change or energy policy. Shameful! But he has come out since then to make his opinion of renewable energy abundantly clear, in an "interview" on Atlanta's vehemently pro-Trump WSB radio network (starting at 6'25").
Grist has fact-checked this little tirade, and it came up with no less than 17 falsities in just two minutes of Trump-blather. Grist has done a good job of linking their fact-checks to other websites, but very briefly:
 
Trump: "there is such a thing as clean coal"
Baltimore Sun: "Clean coal is a myth and more a marketing term than scientific reality"
 
Trump: "wind and solar...[is]...not working on large-scale"
Mid-West Energy News: "Utility-scale solar capacity has nearly tripled since 2014"
 
Trump: "It’s just not working"
Power Magazine: "More than 18.2 GW of wind power capacity is currently under construction or in advanced stages of development in the U.S."
 
Trump: "Solar is very, very expensive"
FuelFix: "Rooftop solar is down 54 percent. Utility-scale solar farms are down 65 percent."
 
Trump: "Wind is very, very expensive"
Bloomberg New Energy Finance: "Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K."
 
Trump: "it only works when it’s windy"
GE Renewable Energy: "GE’s brilliant turbine platform includes battery technology"
 
Trump: "wind is very problematic"
National Resource Defense Council: "Clean Power Plan’s goals have become even more readily achievable as the electricity sector is already shifting to clean energy"
 
Trump: "they are destroying our energy companies with regulation"
Reuters: "Chevron sees big profits in California despite regulations"
 
Trump: "They’re absolutely destroying them"
Fortune: "among the Fortune 500’s most profitable companies[,] [t]ech giants, banks, and oil-and-gas producers all have outsized influence"
 
Trump: "Palm Springs, California - it looks like a junkyard"
 
Trump: "each one is made by a different group from, all from China and from Germany, by the way"
US Dept of Energy: "U.S. wind energy production and manufacturing reaches record highs"
 
Trump: "look at all these windmills. Half of them are broken"
Twitter: "I've driven through the wind turbines six times in the last week, and I'm not sure what he's talking about. Most of them work."
 
Trump: "it looks like a poor man’s version of Disneyland"
PhotoShelter: "[picture]"
 
Trump: "It’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen"
New York Times: "The Ugliest Dog in the World"
 
Trump: "it kills all the birds"
USA Today: "Wind turbines kill far fewer birds in North America than do cats or collisions with cell towers"
 
Trump: "they’ve killed so many eagles"
PolitiFact: "Trump inflates wind turbine eagle deaths"
 
Trump: "these windmills [kill] them by the hundreds"
The Desert Sun: "the agency has retracted that number and said most of the eagle deaths actually occurred elsewhere in California"

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