Thank you, Mr. President, for the timely attention. My recent book about windmills, or what we call wind turbines, has been languishing in a New York warehouse not far from Trump Tower–until now, that is. Today, windmills are the talk of the country–all because of you.
In appreciation, I am sending you a copy of my book, free of charge. No need to send the Secret Service to fetch it. I’ll have it delivered to your door.
I know you’re a busy man, what with all the golf you play. And my book is quite a tome, at 560 pages. That’s a lot to read in one sitting, even for an avid reader.
There are lots of pictures, though–more than 400, in fact. There are photos of many different kinds of wind turbines and the people who use them. There’s even a photo of wind turbines with a nude figure in the foreground, well, at least a bronze mermaid baring all. (You know how risqué those Danes are.)
Note: The following appeared as an op-ed in the Bakersfield Californian on 7 April 2019.
I encourage you to flip through the pages. You don’t know, you might find a windmill you like, one that you can use at Mar-a-Lago. They’re great tourist attractions. Those Canadians have one right in downtown Toronto, at Exhibition Park. So does Cleveland, right next to the football stadium. The Brits have a lot of them, too, including a big one for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Of course, why stop with one? The Scots love them as well. You could put one at your estate in Aberdeenshire. Maybe the folks who built those windmills in the sea near your golf course could help.
No, you needn’t worry about the windmills attracting sharks. That’s just a myth. They don’t make you sick either, or breed mosquitoes, sour milk, flatten crops, drive snakes out of the ground, desiccate the soil, or slow the rotation of the earth, ruin foie gras (those French), or turn wine (the French again).
Windmills do offset air pollution, which kills both those who support you and those who don’t. You can find the details in the chapter on the environmental impacts and benefits of wind energy. Windmills have the lowest greenhouse emissions of any technology except hydro, and they use even less water than solar. That’s important to your supporters in arid states like Arizona.
Nor should you fret about windmills lowering your property values. They don’t. In fact a large government study found that they actually improved property values. But the data wasn’t statistically significant and being sticklers for factual detail, we won’t mention that study again.
Your evangelical followers should welcome wind energy’s help in fulfilling the biblical injunction to protect creation. Renewable energy, including the wind, is the only moral choice we have if we want to avoid the damage to creation caused by burning fossil fuels. That’s the sentiment of the Benedictine nuns at the Sacred Heart Monastery in North Dakota. The faithful have long acknowledged that wind energy is the breath of the good Lord, bringing us our daily bread in days past and bringing us clean electricity today.
You’ll also be pleased to know that Texas gets 17% of its electricity from wind, and Iowa gets 34%. Both states voted for you–unlike California, where less than 5% of the state’s electricity comes from wind energy. If you’re still confused about wind’s benefits, I’m sure Senator Grassley of Iowa, one of your strongest supporters, can educate you, as can the many American farmers and ranchers who receive thousands of dollars in royalty payments from wind generation every year.
You’ll find all of this and more in that big book I’m sending you. In it you’ll find all you need to know in order to answer questions from those pesky reporters and irreverent comedians about the significant role wind can play in our nation’s energy future.
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Paul Gipe is the author of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us. He has worked with wind energy for more than four decades.
