In an interview with Fox News this week, former President Donald Trump, a climate change denier and unabashed ally of planet-warming fossil fuels, furthered his already-long record of exaggerating the wind industry’s impact on birds.
But this time, he leaned into his purported concern that wind companies are killing eagles without punishment.
“If you shoot a bald eagle, or an eagle of any kind, they put you in jail for two years,” he told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “Go under a windmill, see how many eagles are under there. Nobody goes to jail.”
This was a remarkably rich talking point considering the fact that during his presidency, Trump made it easier for the energy sector, including wind companies, to kill eagles and other migratory birds with impunity.
In late 2017, Daniel Jorjani, the top lawyer at Trump’s Department of the Interior and a longtime former adviser to fossil fuel moguls Charles and David Koch, issued a highly controversial legal opinion that effectively legalised all unintentional migratory bird deaths, including those caused by wind turbines, oil and gas operations, chemical spills and power lines. As long as a company or individual did not intend to kill birds, they were sheltered from prosecution.
The move broke with decades of legal precedent, effectively gutted the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and opened the door for gross negligence on the part of industry, as HuffPost reported at the time. Investigations into MBTA-protected bird deaths from industrial activities came to an immediate, screeching halt.
In 2020, a federal judge overturned Trump’s MBTA rollback. Yet in the waning days of Trump’s term, the US Fish and Wildlife Service issued a rule aimed at codifying Jorjani’s legal interpretation into regulation. The Biden administration quickly revoked the Trump-era rollbacks.
Now eyeing a second term in the White House, Trump has repeatedly peddled misinformation to attack wind energy while vowing to restore so-called fossil fuel “energy dominance.” During an April meeting with oil and gas industry executives, Trump reportedly solicited $1 billion in campaign donations in exchange for promises to roll back many of President Joe Biden’s green energy policies.
It is true that wind turbines often prove fatal for birds, including eagles. But what Trump doesn’t mention is that the number of birds killed by wind turbines each year is dwarfed by those killed by skyscrapers, power lines, and domestic and feral cats.
If Trump wins in 2024, migratory bird protections would likely be back on the chopping block. The newly adopted Republican Party platform, which Trump endorsed, promises to “unleash American energy” and “cut costly and burdensome regulations.”
And while Trump has tried to claim he knows “nothing about Project 2025,” the policy blueprint — a document that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration played a role in creating — specifically calls for reinstating the Trump-era MBTA rule.
Make no mistake, doing so would give industry, including wind energy companies, a green light to kill eagles and all manner of migratory birds without legal repercussions.