“Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them…. This is noble, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” Asked Sancho Panza.
“The ones you can see over there,” answered his master, “with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.”
“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
“Obviously,” replied Don Quixote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Trump recently warned EU leaders that the rapidly proliferating windfarms are ecologically and economically detrimental, in addition to being an aesthetic disaster, spoiling Europe’s magnificent beauty. Unsurprisingly, mainstream leftist media exploded with mockery and attacks, comparing Trump’s advice to Don Quixote’s futile tilting at windmills.
Don Quixote’s windmills happened to be imaginary monsters, yet he was uncannily prescient, as today’s windfarms are a real and present danger. The giant turbines that currently disfigure our landscapes and seascapes waste fertile land and ocean space. They harm whales and annually kill hundreds of thousands of birds, including bald and golden eagles, burrowing owls, and migratory birds and bats. They are prohibitively expensive and perilously unreliable. Alex Epstein, a renowned expert on energy and economics, explains:
Yes, the sun is free. Yes, wind is free. But the process of turning sunlight and wind into useable energy on a mass scale is far from free. In fact, compared to the other sources of energy – fossil fuels, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power, solar and wind power are very expensive.
The basic problem is that sunlight and wind as energy sources are both weak (the more technical term is dilute) and unreliable (the more technical term is intermittent). It takes a lot of resources to collect and concentrate them, and even more resources to make them available on-demand…
For wind, needed materials include high-performance compounds for turbine blades and the rare-earth metal neodymium for lightweight, specialty magnets, as well as the steel and concrete necessary to build structures – thousands of them – as tall as skyscrapers…
And the wind doesn’t blow all the time… Where do you store solar or wind energy? No such mass-storage system exists… All of them require backup. And guess what the go-to back-up is: fossil fuel.
The windmills that Don Quixote battled produced grain. They were an actual source of nourishment, while windfarms today are a source of starvation. Relying on solar and wind-produced energy at the expense of fossil fuels or nuclear energy has numerous disadvantages. It leads to what the German people, heavily affected by unsustainable “green” policies, refer to as “energy poverty.” Many cannot afford to pay their energy bills, especially in the cold season, when heat is most needed and existentially important. Unreliable green energy causes poverty and starvation. Such policies would impoverish currently affluent countries and completely ruin already indigent ones.
Both Don Quixote’s character and Trump evoke images of courageous and determined fighters, often ridiculed and misunderstood. Don Quixote was an incurable romantic, a fearless solitary knight who fought against imaginary evils. Similarly, Trump is reminiscent of a Lone-Ranger type cowboy. His fighting spirit, however, is rooted in pragmatism and reality, and the evils he is combating are pervasive and palpable. Tilting at windmills was madness. Fighting against windfarms requires a different kind of bravery – the kind that affirms common sense to help ensure humanity’s survival and prosperity.
Alex Epstein concludes:
There’s no free lunch. And there’s no free energy. And that very much includes the highly expensive energy from the sun and the wind.
The 1965 musical Man of La Mancha, based on Cervantes’s Don Quixote, popularized the phrase “to dream the impossible dream.” Trump, in contrast, has revived the brutally attacked in recent years American Dream – an actual and very real dream, though impossible without courage.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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