Transcript in full: What Trump and Biden said on wind in the final US presidential debate

Donald Trump and Joe Biden jostled for votes in the final days of the presidential campaign as more wild claims from the incumbent left fact-checkers around the world scrambling to keep up.

There was a fundamental and explicit divide over wind, solar and the climate that did not substantively go beyond current policies (such as the US Bill targeting 25GW of offshore wind by 2030) that have already been outlined in the run-up to the November 3 vote.

Here is a transcript of what they both actually said about climate in general, and wind in particular:

Trump: “It came out, and said very strongly – $6,500 would be taken away from families under his plan [Biden], that his plan is an economic disaster. If you look at what he wants to do, you know, if you look at his plan.”

Biden: “Nothing to do with the climate?”

Trump: “You know who developed it? AOC+3. They know nothing about the climate. I mean, she has got a good line of stuff, but she knows nothing about the climate, and they are all hopping through hoops for AOC+3.”

[Here, Trump was referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and three of her Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives: Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.]

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Trump: “Now look, a real plan costs $100 trillion. If we had the best year in the history of our country – for 100 years – we would not even come close to a number like that. When he says buildings, they want to take buildings down because they want to make bigger windows into smaller windows. As far as they are concerned if had no window it would be a lovely thing. This is the craziest plan that anybody has ever seen.

“And this wasn’t done by smart people, – frankly, I don’t even know how it could be good politically. They want to spend $100 trillion – that’s their real number [in fact Biden unveiled a $2 trillion package]. He has tried to say it was six. They want to knock down buildings and build new buildings, with little, tiny, small windows, and many other things. It is crazy, you will destroy our country.”

Biden: “I don’t know where he comes from. I don’t know where he comes up with these numbers. $100 trillion? Give me a break. This plan has been endorsed by every major environmental group and every labour group because they know the future lies in us being able to breathe, and they know there are good jobs in getting us there.

“And by the way, the fastest growing industry in America is solar energy and wind. He thinks wind causes cancer – windmills. It’s the fastest-growing jobs and they pay good prevailing wages, 45-50 bucks an hour. We can grow and we can be cleaner if we go the route I am proposing.”

Trump: “We are energy independent for the first time. We don’t need all these countries that we had to fight a war over because we needed their energy. We are energy independent. I know more about wind than you [Biden] do. It is extremely expensive, kills all the birds [recent research found ‘Almost no birds die’ in collisions with wind turbines].

“It’s very intermittent, it’s got a lot of problems, and they happen to make the windmills in both Germany and China. And the fumes coming up, if you are a believer in carbon emission – the fumes coming up to it make these massive windmills, is more than anything we are talking about with natural gas, which is very clean.”

Biden: “Find me a scientist that says that.”