On Chinese windmills and food prices, Trump is right, Times is wrong -
Ira StollThe New York Times employs a "fact-check" reporter,
Linda Qiu, who the paper uses to fact-check President Trump but
not New York City's truth-stretching Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Qiu's
latest article tackles Trump's big speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
It manages to mangle both what Trump actually said and what the truth is.
- The Times fact-check says Trump "made a host of other inaccurate claims that The New York Times has previously fact-checked," among them, "He falsely claimed that China had no wind farms. (China has more wind farms and wind power capacity than any other country.)"
Actually, here is the language from Trump's speech, according to a
transcript posted by the World Economic Forum:
- China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet, I haven't been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that? That's a good way of looking at it. They're smart. China's very smart. They make them. They sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them, but they don't use them themselves.
They put up a couple of big wind farms. But they don't use them.
They just put them up to show people what they could look like...As for Trump's basic point that China gets most of its energy from coal, not wind, even if you rely on China's own unreliable data, the International Energy Agency
lists coal and coal products as 71 percent of China's energy production, and
solar, wind, and other renewables combined at 5.4 percent...
