Editor Note: This post is part of the three-part series with Part I yesterday on Biofuels and Solar and Part III tomorrow on The Big Picture.

“Environmentalists are focused on banning plastic straws! Their inability to differentiate between imaginary, wildly inflated ecological problems and not the here-and-now issues of renewable energies is what the UN powers should address–but will not.”

Mandated, subsidized wind energy requires millions of acres for turbines and ultra-long transmission lines, plus billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines produce intermittent, unreliable electricity that (absent subsidies) costs much more than coal or gas-fueled electricity – and must be backed by fossil fuel generators that must go from standby to full-power many times a day, very inefficiently, every time the wind stops blowing.…

“LEEDCo/Icebreaker would do well to abandon its hoped-for permit from the OPSB. The obstacles and problems have been pointed out repeatedly by experts, individuals, birding organizations, ecologists, in consultations, letters, formal legal presentations; enough to fill volumes. Its ten-year-long attempts to capture subsidies while overlooking viable and responsible care for the environment are unsustainable.”

“This proposal has so many indisputable strikes against it,” says Bryan Ralston, president of the Lake Erie Marine Trades Association. “We’re calling for the OPSB to reject it outright. It cannot be justified economically. It will raise, not lower, consumer’s electrical rates. It cannot survive without taxpayer subsidies. It’s an environmental disaster and it will become an industrial size turbine graveyard in the future.”

Over the years, I have followed the aspirations of Lorry Wagner’s LEEDCo wind project—now the Icebreaker Wind project of Fred Olsen Renewables, Inc.…

More than just audible sound, grinding, whomping, blade pass whooshes, an ever-present hum, industrial wind turbines have a silent, below audible impact. It is not like a day contamination/harm at work where people can go home at night for relief. With industrial wind projects literally engulfing homes and rural areas, there is little or no escape.

Wind turbines appear to be at the apex of producing human discomfort, annoyance, and harm. In particular, infrasound and low-frequency noise (ILFN) harm because of impacts unique to this concoction of noise.

More than just audible sound, grinding, whomping, blade pass whooshes, an ever-present hum, industrial wind turbines have a silent, below audible impact. It is not like a day contamination/harm at work where people can go home at night for relief. With industrial wind projects literally engulfing homes and rural areas, there is little or no escape.…

There was shock, surprise, and humor in the media when Trump not only denounced wind “mills” for intermittency, lack of predictable value, property losses, and bird kills but also topped his discussion with

“They say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”

Is President Trump correct in his five critical points? Even the last one? Or is it possible, as Trevor Noah suggested, turbines might be the only things that don’t cause cancer.

1. Intermittency

Electricity must be consumed the moment it is produced. Storage to allow deviations is prohibitively expensive in all but the rarest of settings. And it has always been this way.

Trump said, “Honey I’d like to watch TV tonight: are the turbines working?” And then his quotation from the Washington Republican fundraiser:

“Is the wind blowing?…