Donald Trump’s war on wind He is out for revenge

In 2019, President Trump lost a years-long battle against a North Sea wind farm that he complained marred the views from his Scottish golf course. Ever since, he has been an opponent of wind farms, which he claims are ugly, cause cancer, and kill marine life. That was the purported reason for his decision in April to have the Department of the Interior stop construction of Empire Wind, a planned 810-megawatt wind farm off Long Island, NY.

The project was back on in May, thanks to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has somewhat improbably emerged as a savvy dealmaker. Hochul allegedly agreed to allow a natural-gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to the Empire State in exchange for approval for the project. (Her office denies a quid pro quo.) All of which raised obvious questions about why the Empire Wind project was halted, at great expense to its Norwegian developer, Equinor. Beyond slogans ready-made for Fox News, does this administration have an energy policy? 

Trump’s approach to wind power resembles his approach to, well, pretty much everything: universities, Ukraine, tariffs. For all the talk of a second term more professional than the first, things have reverted to the mean, a kind of chaotic ambling that seems to lack purpose other than personal whim.  

Empire Wind turns out to have been an exception. Citing vague national security and environmental concerns, Trump has cancelled $679 million for a dozen offshore wind-farm projects in various states of completion. In addition to cutting off funding, his administration ordered work to be stopped at the giant Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, which has cost more than $6.2 billion to build and was close to completion. According to The New York Times, he is also planning to shut down work on a 114-turbine wind farm off the Maryland coast. New England 1 and 2, off the Nantucket coast, are also in trouble. 

“Under this administration, there is no future for offshore wind,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said recently at a natural gas conference in Milan.

It is true that some scientists have concerns about how marine life will be impacted by wind farms in the long run. Energy analysts also worry about the consistency of renewable sources like wind and sunlight, though those concerns have been mitigated as of late. As is the case with vaccines, Trump is aware of these anxieties, and that some share of his opponents harbour them, whether they be NIMBY homeowners or MAHA parents. That gives him just enough room to push his agenda through. 

It does not help that the pro-science crowd can all too easily fall into climate doomerism or dismiss concerns about wind farms and solar arrays as ignorant recalcitrance. This, too, unwittingly plays into Trump’s hands. “It’s a hard time to be working in offshore wind,” policy analyst Mariel Lutz of the Left-leaning Center for American Progress told me.

Wind farms can be unsightly — if you are fortunate enough to have ocean sightlines to begin with. When it comes to his anti-wind campaign, some of Trump’s backers can be found in liberal enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard, where you will see yard signs opposing a wind farm off the coast next to fading Harris-Walz placards. The still-formidable Kennedy clan helped scotch a Cape Cod wind farm in 2017, lest the views from their Hyannis compound suffer.

Nor is it just the rich. There is also opposition in rural communities, where there are people, not just cormorants and dolphins, to consider. Wind farms can be loud, but a recent epidemiological study found no correlation to other illnesses. Still, people have concerns about enormous turbines in their backyards (well, fields). And no one is savvier at playing on people’s fears than Trump.

Yet the helter-skelter approach has significant downsides. According a brief Lutz co-authored, various offshore wind projects along the northeastern seaboard that are now stalled were to provide some 12,000 direct and 1,500 indirect jobs. 

There will also be an impact on the business climate. Of Revolution Wind, energy analyst Leon Stille wrote in a trade publication that “to pull the plug so late in the process… sends a chilling signal to investors: no matter how advanced a project may be, no matter how rigorous the permitting process, politics can still override economics at the final stage.”

In response to my request for an explanation, a White House spokesman emailed a statement claiming that “Under Joe Biden’s Green New Scam, offshore wind projects benefitted from preferential treatment, rushed reviews, and haphazard vetting, while the rest of the energy industry was put on pause”. The Department of the Interior will, it said, restore “basic evaluations of national security, commercial fishing, and environmental concerns” and has “unshackled traditional American energy sources such as domestic oil, gas, and nuclear power”.  

It is true that Biden preferred a much quicker transition to renewables than most conservatives, but does anyone really believe he “rushed” the regulatory process? That is, to put it mildly, not a sin of which most Democrats stand guilty. Undoubtedly, Biden sought to discourage the extraction and use of fossil fuel, but the United States is still the largest producer of crude oil in the world. 

Trump is engaging in the kind of heavy-handed socialist-style government control conservatives supposedly abhor.

“It just seems crazy to stop these projects at this point,” Richard L. Sweeney, an energy economist at Boston College, told me in an interview. According to the latest iteration of Lazard’s annual report on the energy sector, “utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidised basis”. That report found that the cost of building gas combustion engines has reached a 10-year high.

“Natural gas is insanely expensive where I live,” Sweeney said. He points out that building out liquid-gas infrastructure in the northeast (terminals, pipelines) is simply unrealistic. 

And the dream of a resurgent coal industry will remain just that. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Trump’s beloved coal plants are closing, their total energy generation projected to fall to 145 megawatts in 2028, down from 172 megawatts this year. Analysts expect that decline to continue. Some of that has to do with the profusion of cheap natural gas, along with the rise of renewables and new environmental regulations — but whatever the reasons, it is happening, and it is not likely to be reversed. 

Trump campaigned on slashing inflation, but energy prices have proved especially intractable. Such increases can sometimes be attributed to short-term shocks, but that does not appear to be the case. Instead, energy experts point to longer-term, steady increases in the cost of transmission and distribution, partly due to new energy demands stemming from the need to build power-hungry data centres, which Trump has signalled he very much wants to do. 

Republicans used to say they were for an all-of-the-above energy policy that doesn’t hamper the fossil-fuel sector but also encourages, if only lukewarmly, the build-out of renewable energy. But as is the case with so much else (foreign policy, free speech, immigration), Trump considers it a merit to move away from conciliatory Mitt Romney-style conservatism. 

Still, basic economics dictate that Trump’s war on wind is a terrible idea. And it seems more personal than ideological, driven by his desire to avenge the loss in Aberdeen. Notably, he is not waging a similar campaign against solar energy. 

“Let the market decide,” Sweeney says. That used to broadly reflect the conservative approach, whether it came to the value of a Harvard education or the wisdom of building a wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. It’s disturbing to see policy undertaken in such a slipshod and biased fashion, and to see obeisant executive-branch officials, including Burgum, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin parroting Trump’s claims. 

In something of a surprise, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who is usually deferential to a fault, came out in support of a wind project off the coast of Virginia, where energy needs are spiking because of the heavy concentration of data centres. And while the President’s campaign against offshore wind is mostly going to harm coastal blue states, the three states with the highest amount of energy generated by wind are Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa — about as red as they get.

To be sure, there are legitimate debates between conservatives and progressives about how urgently we need to transition away from fossil fuels (and there are, of course, people who don’t think we need to do so at all, though their ranks are dwindling). But it is hard to think of anyone whose political fortunes aren’t directly dependent on Trump who thinks letting his personal grievances dictate our energy policy is a good idea. Nevertheless, here we are. Lutz, the policy analyst, conceded that the future of the sector is uncertain. “We will keep fighting,” she said. 

---