Donald J. Trump once again revived his years-long crusade against wind turbines this week, and this time he brought his own fact-check along with him.
The President used Palm Springs, California as his opening target, describing the area’s wind farm as looking “like a junkyard” full of “old ones, rotted ones” that are “falling down all over the place.” From there he moved to blade disposal, claiming turbines can’t be buried because “the fiber that the blades are made out of should not go in the ground because it’s going to poison the ground.”
Then, unprompted, he added the part that undercuts the whole rant: “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it’s not going to go in the ground, what do you do with it, put it up in the air?”
So the rationale behind Trump’s stated goal of having “hopefully no wind farms approved” is a claim the President admits, in the same breath, he can’t confirm.
For the record: turbine blades are fiberglass composite, which is genuinely difficult to recycle and has historically ended up in landfills — that much checks out. We’ll give him that. Sort of. However, “hard to recycle” isn’t the same as “poisons the ground,” and it’s not the binary Trump is presenting; recyclers have been breaking blades down for reuse in things like concrete additives for years. It’s not landfill-or-nothing.