The 2020 presidential race is continuing to heat up, and the contrast between each side’s offering couldn’t be much clearer. At a recent campaign stop in Iowa, Democratic presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Donald Trump for his suggestion that wind turbines are somehow linked to cancer, taking the opportunity to drag the administration and Republican Party’s lax at best response to the rising threat of climate change.
Discussing Trump’s utterly outlandish claim about the wind energy-cancer link, Sanders mockingly shared:
‘Trump is a profound scientist, somebody who’s researched the issue for years and uniquely came up with the conclusion.’
At an April 2 fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Trump had shared:
‘If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer.’
It’s unclear how anyone with even a basic knowledge of how the relevant elements work could arrive at Trump’s conclusion. Noise doesn’t cause cancer, let alone the noise from wind turbines. It sounds like the president has been diving too far into the rabbit hole of conspiratorial websites like InfoWars again — although there is another explanation. Trump has a personal grievance against wind turbines, having unsuccessfully sued the Scottish government in an attempt to keep wind turbines from going up near a golf course he owns there. From that stepping off point, Trump entered a new world of nonsense with his claim that wind turbine noise causes cancer.
Remarkably, White House communications staff refused to rebuff the president’s remark when pressed by reporters. All White House Director of Strategic Communications Mercedes Schlapp had was:
‘I don’t have an answer on that. I don’t have an answer on that. Yeah, I don’t have an — I really don’t have information on that right now… if I get a readout, I’m happy to update you on that.’
Of course, that’s not where the nonsense on this subject from the Trump White House ends. After a monumental report about the looming impacts of climate change emerged from his own administration, Trump told reporters he simply “didn’t believe” the findings, without, it goes without saying, offering any sort of tangible, follow-able lead as to why. He just refused the reality.
Sanders offered to his recent Iowa audience:
‘As I’m sure you’re all aware, Trump and I have a few differences of opinion. But maybe the most profound difference is that Trump is maintaining the myth that climate change is a hoax.’
The history of Trump refusing to accept the reality of climate change goes back awhile at this point to the time when as a private citizen he tweeted that it was a hoax invented by the Chinese. More recently, when confronted with evidence of the shift, he offered the grade-school level defense of pointing to the possibility of the climate eventually changing back.
In other words, there are few routes this guy apparently won’t take to avoiding the truth.
Should a Democratic president make it to the White House come 2020, they’d have an opportunity to turn the Trump administration’s refusal to address climate change around dramatically. There’s the beginning of a roadmap for that in the form of the Green New Deal, which calls for net-zero carbon emissions from the United States within ten years.
Featured Image via screenshot
