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Donald Trump hates clean energy.
Obviously, the president hates lots of things: Immigrants, the media, NATO, and sound monetary policy, to name just a few.
But of all Trump’s many grievances, none is quite so petty and pathological as his loathing of wind energy.
The attacks on solar panels and electric cars can be chalked up to his belief in the holy gospel of hydrocarbons. But the windmill thing is personal.
Independent journalist Philip Bump traces it back to 2011, when Trump tried and failed to kill an offshore wind farm he thought would ruin the view from the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. A film documenting his battle with the club’s neighbors made Trump a national figure of scorn 15 years ago — and the Scots haven’t warmed to him since.
Trump’s rage against the wind machines hasn’t lessened either. He claims that they cause cancer, make whales crazy, and kill so many birds “they make hunters look like nice people!”
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Back in the White House, he tried to block wind farms wherever he can. And now, finding himself thwarted by the courts, he’s hit on a new plan to exact his revenge.
As reported by the New York Times, Trump hopes to bribe energy companies not to erect wind turbines. During a self-inflicted energy crisis, when gas prices are soaring, he wants to take hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money and use it to set back the wind energy industry for a decade.
It’s an “emergency”
On his first day back in office, Trump declared a national energy emergency.
“We need a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy to drive our Nation’s manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and defense industries, and to sustain the basics of modern life and military preparedness,” he wrote.
And yet, the very same day, he signed a memorandum withdrawing the entire Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing and directing the Interior Department to conduct a review to determine whether existing wind farm leases could be terminated. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who signed legislation creating a Clean Sustainable Energy Fund when he was North Dakota’s governor, immediately declared a moratorium on “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.”
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