Just like the Grinch, Donald Trump has told communities across the East Coast that they could say goodbye to lower energy costs and thousands of high-paying jobs by cancelling all federal leases for five offshore wind farms, including the Empire Wind 1 project off of New York and others in New England and Virginia.
It wasn’t all too long ago that Republicans insisted that theirs was not an ideological opposition to renewable energy but a pragmatic desire to maintain energy independence, keep electric costs down and infill an increasing demand for power among Americans. We doubt that that was ever really a genuine opinion, but the lie is being conclusively put to it now as Trump attempts to kill projects already underway, with investment and energy generation expectations already in place, for what seems to be no practical reason at all.
The only rationale the federal government has deigned to provide are entirely unspecified national security concerns, which, as for many would-be authoritarian governments before it, have become a tenuous catch-all for the administration simply doing whatever it wants without public explanation. Let’s talk about the actual national security concern here, which is that fossil fuel is a depletable resource whose production and use contributes to damaging climate change, which has already had catastrophic impacts across the country that will only pale in comparison to what’s coming down the pike.
While a lot of oil and gas production happens domestically, we also import a lot of this fuel, which makes us more dependent on other countries. You know what doesn’t have to be imported and doesn’t have deleterious effects on the climate? Wind, which will always blow mightily off our coasts (if there’s no more wind, we have far more serious problems). Plus, renewable energy projects don’t pollute in any way.
These are the precise reasons why we celebrated Gov. Hochul’s efforts to get the Empire Wind 1 project — which is slated to generate electricity for up to half a million homes in the state while creating 1,500 jobs — back on track after the first time that the Trump administration tried to derail it in the spring.
Trump relented and Empire Wind 1 resumed and Hochul said that she would be open to approving a big gas pipeline that Trump favored. She later did authorize the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline. Both wind and gas are needed, as is nuclear.
With Trump, all commitments are temporary, it seems, as he’s now trying to kill not just Empire Wind, but all offshore wind projects. Mealy-mouthed rationalizations aside, it’s obvious that this is in service to his buddies in non-non-renewable energy — though this is a dwindling group as even the big legacy oil and gas producers have come around to the realization that renewables are the future, exemplified by their own trade group coming out against this move.
We need more energy, not less and Trump’s actions threaten the economic stability of everyone, as cancelling five already-planned and largely financed wind farms with a projected capacity of almost six gigawatts will.
Once more, it will probably require a mix of political pressure and litigation to remind Trump that he is not a king that can rule by diktat and reshape entire aspects of our economy and society on his whim, or more likely on the whim of whomever caught his ear in the Oval Office. We need these wind farms.
