New Film ‘Blown Away’ Wrecks the Myth of Wind Power

Steve Cortes, founder of the League of American Workers, has recently branched out into short documentary filmmaking. His latest piece, Blown Away: Exposing the Wind Scam, pulls no punches in exposing the fraud of wind farms.

Cortes packs a lot of information into a digestible documentary format—his films run about the same time as a medium-length podcast. In 24 minutes, Blown Away lays waste to the underlying assumptions that wind energy could ever replace fossil fuels in the ever-increasing demand for electricity in America and across the globe.

From a TV Show to a Documentary

The germ of the documentary, according to Cortes, came from a moment in a television series that went viral on social media. Landman, a drama on Paramount+, stars Billy Bob Thornton as an oil company employee who works in the field and handles the business side of drilling. In one episode, Thornton’s character rants about the amount of petroleum used to make and operate wind turbines, and how “renewable energy” could never overtake fossil fuels for our energy needs. Understandably, that scene in a popular series caused significant reaction on both sides of the debate.

Cortes took that moment and ran with it.

Right out of the gate, he comes strong with the realities of wind power—and their failure to match the hype:

These windmills, they’re giant. They’re disgustingly ugly. They’re bad for the environment, especially animals. And they are one gigantic, expensive scam. Once you know the full truth of the wind scam, you will be blown away.

He traveled to New Mexico, which has the second largest deposits of oil and natural gas of any state in America. That makes this state an odd choice for the implementation of the Green New Deal, and yet it has the largest wind farm being built in America.

Bringing the Receipts

In a little less than half an hour, Cortes talks to a think tank president, a Senate candidate, and a Navajo tribal leader—all of whom oppose this wind project. He also quotes a Danish political scientist who has made a career of studying the economic effects of environmentalism.

Paul Gessing, the president of the Rio Grande Foundation, says the politicians who run New Mexico “like the money that [energy] spins off that they get to spend, but they don’t understand the importance of the industry.” He says the current governor could achieve her environmental goals if the state moved to natural gas instead of green energy. Gessing points out the extreme poverty rates on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico that the state could solve with high-paying jobs in the energy sector.

Cortes then goes to the Navajo Nation to back up that assertion. He speaks with Myron Lizer, the former vice president of the Navajo Nation, who wants to see those jobs lift everyone in New Mexico to a higher standard of living. He explains Donald Trump winning the American Indian vote in 2024 by a wide margin by pointing out the decades of economic neglect the reservations have received. Lizer says they know they need jobs and industry to pull the reservations out of poverty, and that they need the federal government’s help to direct policy toward economic development. He says energy development on tribal lands could provide that industrial development they need.

To back up his claims about the expense of wind energy, Cortes quotes Bjorn Lomborg, who demonstrates in a simple graph that the more a nation relies on renewable energy, the more expensive their power—to the point that those nations have actually de-industrialized because they can’t afford to run industry on renewable energy.

Then he pivots to debunking some of the myths put out by climate hysterics, like the notion that natural disasters have gotten more severe due to global warming. He debunks that by showing that the area burned by wildfire across the globe has dropped precipitously since 1901—it hasn’t increased, despite the claims of the hysterics.

His discussion with a former candidate for U.S. Senate drives home the point that New Mexico doesn’t have to be one of the poorest states in the nation, with its vast wealth of energy resources just waiting to be mined and pumped. Alisa Martinez points out that New Mexico has blocked much of the ability of the state to open up its extraction industry for development when it passed the Energy Transition Act in 2019.

All of these examples show just how badly New Mexico’s reliance on renewable energy has destroyed its ability to prosper economically.

Packing a Punch

Blown Away gives viewers several key facts that show how badly renewable energy performs—all in a little over 24 minutes. Green energy destroys economies, it makes electricity prohibitively expensive, and it does far more damage to the environment than any presumed benefits. This short documentary will give you the facts you need to understand both sides of the argument.

The next time you find yourself debating with a global warming alarmist, Blown Away will give you enough ammunition to sink your opponent’s argument and prove that wind power simply can’t compete with fossil fuels.