Trump says windmills ‘kill everything’ in meandering interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity

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Former President Donald Trump said windmills “kill everything” in a meandering interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.

Slamming the Biden administration’s energy policy during the Wednesday night call-in with Fox, Mr Trump claimed: “We’re not going to be energy independent two months from now. They’re making windmills all over the place to ruin our land and kill our birds. To kill everything.”

“And they’re very intermittent, as you learned from watching over the last four months, it’s intermittent energy, it's not good. It’s not going to power our great factories,” Mr Trump added.

In February, during the power outages in Texas, Governor Greg Abbot told Mr Hannity: “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America”.

He went on to claim that “our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 per cent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis... It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary”.

Mr Abbott’s own energy department said most of the lost energy stemmed from power-generating systems not being properly winterized, such as pipelines for fossil fuels. But despite that Mr Abbott’s claims were disproven, conservatives have echoed his statements.

While sources of renewable energy did partially fail during the winter storm power outages, they only made up 13 per cent of power outages while contributing around 25 per cent energy supply in winter, The Washington Post reported.

Mr Trump has also made evidence-free claims about wind power in the past.

“If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 per cent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer,” the then-president said at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual spring dinner in 2019

Mr Trump’s comment that windmills “kill everything” was quickly mocked by critics on Twitter.

“It’s true. Last time I saw a windmill there was nothing left living in a hundred miles. Then I died,” one user wrote.

Daily Beast contributing editor Justin Baragona added: “Trump was given a full half-hour on primetime TV to comment on the Biden-Putin summit and the current state of national politics and the most standout moment, by far, is him saying windmills ‘kill everything’.”