US Politics
Trump again appears to misidentify bird species in series of ranting social posts about wind turbines: ‘Eagles going down!’
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President Donald Trump has again appeared to misidentify a bird species in a series of ranting social media posts about wind turbines, claiming, “Eagles going down!”
Trump has continued his smear campaign against wind turbines by claiming millions of birds are being killed by the energy producers and sharing photos that he incorrectly says are dead bald eagles.
In his latest attack against wind turbines, Trump shared a photo to Truth Social Friday of a bird lying limp in front of a wind farm and captioned it, “Eagles going down!” But the raptor in the photo is not America’s favorite bird. It’s a red kite killed in Spain, according to a 2011 article from The Telegraph.
In another post Friday, Trump shared a photo appearing to show a flock of birds flying near a wind turbine and wrote, “Killing birds by the millions!” The picture was shared on the photo site Flickr in 2006 by the Taiwanese environmental group Changhua Coast Conservation Action.
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Verifiable data on fatal bird collisions with wind turbines in recent years is scarce. But according to the MIT Climate Portal, studies from 2013 and 2014 found anywhere from 140,000 to 679,000 birds are killed by wind turbines in the U.S. annually.
A Fish and Wildlife Service memo from 2009 said an estimated 500,000 to 1 million birds are lost annually in the U.S. in oil field production skim pits and commercial and centralized oil field wastewater disposal facilities.
Trump also shared an article from Fox News Digital that reported the Department of the Interior was fining Orsted Onshore North America more than $32,000.
The publication said a notice from the administration accused the company of killing two bald eagles with their wind turbines in Nebraska and Illinois. A spokesperson for the wind facilities said Orsted will “continue to engage and cooperate with” the Fish and Wildlife Service on the matter.
Earlier this week, Trump was trolled by California Governor Gavin Newsom for sharing of photo of a dead falcon and claiming wind turbines are killing “our beautiful Bald Eagles.” Reacting to Trump’s post, Newsom’s press team wrote on X, “Dozy Don doesn’t know what America’s bird looks like???”
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Trump has long fought against wind projects while promoting the fossil fuel industry.
In 2012, years before he first ran for president for the first time, he appeared before the Scottish Parliament to oppose nearly a dozen turbines, which were ultimately built near his Aberdeenshire golf course.
During his second presidency, Trump’s regulators have sought to withdraw permits for six offshore wind projects on the East Coast and stopped the construction of two more, Politico reported earlier this month.
The Trump administration has also proposed new oil drilling off the coasts of California, Florida and Alaska.
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