Produced by ElevenLabs and Information Over Audio (NOA) utilizing AI narration.
Donald Trump continuously warns that wind generators are killing birds. Final evening in Wisconsin, he raised a brand new and reverse concern: They’re resulting in fewer hogs being killed.
At a town-hall occasion, a younger man requested the previous president about the price of meat, and he replied with a meandering reply that by some means linked wind farms to a lower in bacon consumption. As with plenty of Trump quotations, you need to learn or watch it at full size to even try and comply with it.
“Groceries, meals has gone up at ranges that no one’s ever seen earlier than. We’ve by no means seen something prefer it—50, 60, 70 %,” he stated. “You check out bacon and a few of these merchandise and a few folks don’t eat bacon anymore. We’re going to get the vitality costs down. After we get vitality down, you understand, this was brought on by their horrible vitality—wind, they need wind far and wide. However when it doesn’t blow now we have a little bit drawback. This was brought on by vitality. This was actually brought on by vitality, and likewise their unbelievable spending. They’re spending us out of wealth, really, they’re taking our wealth away, nevertheless it was brought on by vitality.”
When you break it down into element elements, it’s not fairly as erratic, nevertheless it’s nonetheless nonsensical. Trump is saying that the Biden administration has pushed for an enlargement of wind energy. That has, in his view, pushed inflation, which has made grocery costs greater and compelled cost-conscious buyers to chop down on consuming bacon.
That’s considerably coherent, as a idea. The issue is that almost none of it’s true.
Right here’s what’s proper: Biden has pushed to increase wind energy. In actual fact, U.S. manufacturing of each vitality class besides coal is at a file excessive. Bacon costs have additionally risen because the begin of the Biden administration, a part of broader inflation over the previous few years.
However little proof connects this stuff. Larger wind manufacturing ought to drive down general vitality prices—greater gasoline costs, which customers observe carefully, however. (Trump is correct that generators don’t flip when the wind doesn’t blow, although different vitality sources live on.) Biden’s large push for wind got here within the Inflation Discount Act, and though that legislation was improperly (and cynically) named, it additionally doesn’t appear to have produced inflation. Particularly, bacon costs are decrease than they have been when it was handed.
Who is aware of the place Trump got here up with the bacon instance, which he has talked about within the context of inflation earlier than. He affords no specifics, and it has the ring of his doubtful “sir” tales. Economists have noticed that bacon is sufficiently beloved that demand for it stays pretty steady, even when costs rise. Grocery costs have risen nowhere close to 50 % general.
(One irony is that many environmentalists who again renewable vitality would possibly nicely cheer if wind energy did produce a discount in bacon consumption. Meat manufacturing, and particularly the large farms that produce a lot of the pork that Individuals eat, is soiled and extremely polluting.)
Trump’s riff is an instance of the remarkably convoluted means that he phrases many statements. You possibly can often kind of comply with the place he’s going, however determining the small print requires painstaking parsing—particularly when the underlying claims are off base. For a person who hates wind energy a lot, Trump certain produces plenty of sizzling air.
