Here is an article about energy -- fossil fuels versus renewable and Trump's stories about it. Good article.
--Kim
I just watched a video of Donald Trump telling a crowd in Texas that solar panels kill all the animals. He said, "The animals jump on them and they fry."
Well, I have solar panels on my travel trailer - and they’ve never fried an animal.
The thing about Trump is - he almost never makes stuff up from scratch. He grabs a real fact, gets it about halfway right, and wraps it in a story so wild that it sounds like he read a report somewhere. And we all know he didn't read a report.
A lot of times when he says stuff that sounds insane - I’ll look up what he’s talking about - and I always come to the same conclusion.
He was told about an incident with no context - and his brain filled in the rest.
So - let's trace where this one came from - cause it shows how his brain works. A lot of people think he's just lying - but I think he believes most of what he says - and I think he's easy to steer. You just feed him part of a story - leave out the rest - and let him fill in the gaps himself. Then he thinks he figured it all out on his own.
He's never gonna fact-check himself - but it’s insane that no one working for him seems to either. But we can.
Okay - so regular solar panels do get hot. These are the flat black ones on roofs and in most of the big solar fields going up across the U.S. On a brutal summer day, they can hit about 149 degrees. That's usually about 36 degrees hotter than the air around them. It's about as hot as the hood of a of my black truck in the Memphis summer heat. You wouldn't want to put your hand on it and leave it there.
But - a solar panel still isn't a frying pan.
A stove burner gets hundreds of degrees hotter than that. Birds land on solar panels all the time.
They sit on them, hang out in the shade underneath, and build nests around them. Farmers even let sheep graze under them. Nobody's scraping a crispy grackle off their roof.
So where did the frying story come from?
Well - there's a real place behind it.
It's a solar plant called Ivanpah - and it sits in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada border. Ivanpah doesn't use regular panels at all. It uses about 350,000 mirrors to bounce sunlight onto three towers that are each about 40 stories tall. That focused light gets so hot that birds flying through it can catch fire.
Workers there even had a nickname for those birds. They called them "streamers" - cause of the smoke trailing behind them. A 2016 report said about 6,000 birds a year died there from burns and crashes.
That's a real problem - nobody wants birds catching fire. But - it's not a problem with solar panels in general. It's a problem with one weird, expensive plant.
And here's the part that Trump either doesn’t know - or left out on purpose - Ivanpah is shutting down.
PG&E - the plant's biggest customer - backed out of its contracts years early. Two of the plant's three units are set to go dark this year. The reason is simple - regular solar panels got so cheap that the mirror-and-tower setup couldn't keep up.
So - the one kind of solar that actually burns birds is actually being killed off by the same panels Trump is calling bird killers.
He took a heat problem from a plant that's already on its way out - then he mixed it with the fact that normal panels get warm. What came out was a story about animals jumping onto glass and sizzling. It's wrong - but it sounds right if you only know about 10% of the story.
Now - solar farms do have some real downsides for wildlife.
Building them can tear up land where animals live. Some scientists think water birds might mistake big dark solar fields for lakes and crash into them. Those are fair things to argue about. But they’re problems to solve - not reasons to kill the whole industry - just think about this:
Oil field waste pits kill 500,000 to 1 million birds a year.
If anyone tries to sell you on solar being bad for wildlife - just remind them that it’s estimated that to fossil fuel power plants kill about 14.5 million birds a year. That estimate counts deaths from mining, crashing into or getting electrocuted by plant equipment, and poisoning from acid rain and mercury.
Meanwhile, his half-true story - the one with all the holes and none of the context - the one about solar killing all the birds - which is actually between 50k and 130k a year - is being used to rewrite policy.
This month, the USDA changed the rules for a program that helps farmers pay for solar. Now solar projects on farmland can't get that money if they use parts from countries like China - and that knocks out almost all of them.
That program helped farmers put panels on their land, lower their power bills, and sell extra power back to the grid. It got cut right when farmers are already getting squeezed on fuel, fertilizer, and everything else.
Now - think about who wins if solar loses. It's not hard to guess who's in his ear whispering to him how bad solar is.
And it’s easy to say it's all about oil and gas companies not wanting to lose money - or power. But - it's a little more complicated than that.
A lot of folks still don't understand that the U.S. is already the No. 1 producer of oil on the planet - by a lot. We pumped a record 13.6 million barrels of oil a day in 2025. That's about 40% more than Russia or Saudi Arabia - the next two biggest producers. The EIA expects about 13.8 million barrels a day in 2026, which would be the most in U.S. history.
That makes us the biggest oil producer of all time - not just the biggest right now.
It's the same story with natural gas. The U.S. has been No. 1 since 2009 - and we make about 26% of the world's natural gas on our own. Three U.S. regions each make more gas than most whole countries.
Coal is the one place we aren't on top - that's China.
So - the "drill, baby, drill" crowd has gotten us all into a real mess. The original goal was for us not be hooked ok foreign oil - but now we’re just hooked on our own supply.
The more oil and gas we pump, the more the country gets built around pumping it. The more it's built around pumping it, the more people lose when the world stops buying.
And those people aren't just oil bosses.
Alaska and North Dakota get more than half of their state tax money from oil and gas. New Mexico and Wyoming get about a third of theirs. That's how those states keep other taxes low. About 114,500 people work directly in pulling oil and gas out of the ground. Families all over Texas get a check every month for the oil under their land. Whole towns in West Texas, North Dakota, and Appalachia depend on this stuff.
But - most of that can be fixed. Clean energy already employs more Americans than fossil fuels do. Texas is the biggest oil state in the country - and it's also the fastest-growing solar market. Farmers and ranchers can rent their land out for solar and get checks for 20 or 30 years. The new jobs aren't always in the same towns - and they don't always pay the same - so it would take real planning. The money is there if anybody wanted to use it that way.
The one thing that's hard to fix is the tax money. You can tax a barrel of oil - but you can't tax sunshine.
So instead of a plan, we get a scary story about fried birds.
The people with the most to lose make sure that's the only story we hear. The oil and gas industry spent about $219 million on the 2024 elections - and 88% of it went to Republicans. Nearly $23 million went to Trump and the groups backing him. That buys a whole lot of whispering.
Meanwhile, the market isn't waiting around.
Solar and batteries made up 91% of all the new power added to the grid in the first three months of this year. In May, solar made more electricity than coal for the first time in U.S. history. During this summer's heat wave, solar powered about a third of Texas - and the grid held up without price spikes or emergency orders.
That's the real mess.
We're the biggest oil producer in history - and the rest of the world is moving toward solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries that China mostly makes. Ivanpah lost cause cheaper panels beat it. The "drill, baby, drill" crowd is about to learn the same lesson on a much bigger scale.
They aren't protecting the animals. They're protecting the throne.
But a change is coming - whether anyone likes it or not - we’re just wasting time and money fighting it.
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