President Trump: Wind Turbines Cause Cancer

President Trump: Wind Turbines Cause Cancer


President Donald Trump speaking during the National Republican Congressional Committee Annual Spring Dinner on April 2, 2019.

President Trump thinks wind turbines are “disgusting looking,” obstruct the view from his golf courses, and contribute to “wind turbine syndrome,” a made-up psychosomatic condition invented by a single doctor who based her findings on hearsay from 38 people. And on Tuesday, Trump repeated a dubious claim that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. Seriously.

At a fundraiser Tuesday night, Trump said that, “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. You tell me that one, okay?”

In 2012, Trump Tweeted an article linking wind turbines to a host of health problems -- epidemiologist Carl V. Phillips claimed that wind turbines cause sleep, stress and mood disorders, though he admitted that “scientists don’t know exactly how turbines cause the health problems.”

Phillips also acknowledged that “he hadn’t compared people’s health both before and after wind turbines go up.”

But that’s fine. Phillips isn’t a medical doctor – like Nina Pierpont, a pediatrician who invented the term “wind turbine syndrome,” based on hearsay from 38 people, none of whom she met in person or medically examined.

Dr. Pierpont’s findings have inspired countless conspiracy theories since her landmark 2009 book “Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment.” Many of those theories originated on 4chan, a popular hotbed of crumb-spewing nonsense.

This leads back to Trump, who repeated a dubious claim that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because no reputable person or organization corroborates this theory.

"The American Cancer Society is unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer," the organization said in response to Trump.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was less kind, calling Trump’s claims “idiotic.”

“I’m told that the White House respects my views on a lot of issues,” Grassley said. “(Trump’s) comments on wind energy — not only as a president but when he was a candidate — were, first of all, idiotic, and it didn’t show much respect for Chuck Grassley as the grandfather of the wind energy tax credit.”

Iowa generates more than a third of its electricity from wind power.

Read more about this here: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-claims-wind-turbines-cause-cancer-reigniting-long-feud-2019-4