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Ag Policy Roundup: New York Says Yes to Onions, No to Funding Solar on Farms

  New York: Solar Siting Bill Advances The Agriculture Committee on May 7 approved a bill that would prevent state funding from supporting commercial solar farms on farmland or sensitive environmental areas. Committee Chair Michelle Hinchey, D-Ulster, said her bill changes funding opportunities for solar fields but not the permitting process. “I believe we need renewable energy and we need solar development, but we need to be thoughtful and strategic about where we place them,” Hinchey said. The bill doesn’t address concerns from Sen. George Borrello, R-Chautauqua, that the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission has too much power to approve solar projects despite other regulations and local opposition. But he said the bill would cut off the funding solar companies need to make their projects profitable. “These people are not in the energy business,” Borrello said. “They’re in the government subsidy business.” The proposed funding ban would not apply to agrivol...
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Democrats Press Interior Chief on Wind and Solar Energy Hurdles

  Democrats pressed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum over the Trump administration’s policies throttling clean-energy projects. Democrats pressed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum over languishing clean-energy projects—a clash that has escalated since the Trump administration paid a company to halt its offshore wind plans. Rep. Jared Huffman (D., Calif.) said the administration has been “bullying offshore wind into abandoning billions in investments” and that the throttling of some renewable projects is “driving U.S. energy policy down a one-way street of fossil fuel dependency,” during a House Committee on Offshore Resources on Wednesday. “And now it’s crashing the car with the war in Iran.” “I know people keep saying it’s ideological. It’s not; there’s a real national security risk,” said Burgum, referencing recent offshore wind pauses that the Trump administration said were necessary for confidential security reasons.  Burgum spoke about increasing U.S. energy production, in par...
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Burgum Doubles Down on Renewables Permitting Freeze

  The Trump administration is not backing down from its discriminatory policies for approving wind and solar projects. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testified to Congress on Wednesday that his agency would appeal a recent district court ruling blocking it from enforcing these policies. “We reject the whole premise,” Burgum said during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing. Since Trump took office, the Interior Department has issued a series of memos and secretarial orders that systematically disadvantage wind and solar projects. Last July, it issued a memo requiring that nearly all approvals in the wind and solar permitting process be subject to additional reviews by the secretary’s office. A subsequent order required the agency to prioritize permitting projects with greater energy density, meaning ones that produce more power per acre of land, and deemed wind and solar “highly inefficient” compared with coal, nuclear, and natural gas projects. The policies amounted to a...
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After Solar and Wind Farms Suddenly Sprang Up, Citizens and Local Governments Sprang Into Action

  May 13, 2026 It is not unreasonable to ask how the alternatives movement, led by solar and wind, went from being the darling of the nation, the face of our energy future and something deemed worthy of billions of tax dollars in subsidies, to, within just a few years, being significantly impeded or outright banned by local governments in about a quarter of the country. Rural communities were most impacted by the projects. Some farmers were upset that their neighbors were selling or leasing their land to solar companies. They didn’t want to walk out their door and see hundreds of acres of neighboring land filled with shiny solar panels instead of corn, soybeans and wheat. Many states, including my home state of Ohio, passed solar-related laws that provided no avenue for local government to stop or even review the projects. Even if such authority existed, it was easy to empathize with farmers who were selling to solar entities. For many farmers, the solar deals were a way to get ou...
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Harvard Study Finds Wind Turbines Will Cause More Warming Than Emissions Reductions Would Avert

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  May 09, 2026   A few weeks ago, we wrote about how Gallup polling found 66 percent of Americans think the environment is getting worse despite the fact that air quality in the United States has improved dramatically since the 1970’s. This improvement was due in large part to the Clean Air Act and its subsequent amendments, as a reader noted. Another commenter stated that Democrats’ and Independents’ views of the environment likely shift when Republicans hold the White House because they view the environment as inextricably linked to climate, while Republicans don’t think about climate at all. The Gallup data appear to support this claim for Democrats and Republicans. Climate change was the top environmental concern for Democrats, with 72 percent worrying about it, while climate change ranked last for Republicans, with only 6 percent worrying about this issue. Share Independents, for their part, care about climate, but less so than other environmental issues like having acce...
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Tom Steyer Thinks California Is Ready for a Different Climate Message

  May 13, 2026   At a moment when few politicians are speaking out about climate change, Tom Steyer has thrust the issue to the center of the California governor’s race. Steyer, a hedge fund billionaire and Democrat, is a major climate donor and investor, and a former presidential candidate. In this campaign, though, his green message has been rooted in economics more than romantic environmentalism, which marks a larger shift in climate politics . He says California voters’ top concern is affordability, and the fastest way to lower their bills is by embracing clean energy. Steyer has a raft of policy proposals he says would help, including overhauling utilities, offering more generous state tax credits for electric vehicle purchases, expanding bond financing for clean energy projects and making it easier to build and add renewable power sources to the grid. California has historically been a climate leader in developing regulations, but it’s notoriously hard to build clean ene...
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Trump Administration Gets Strategic With Offshore Wind

  Among all the crazy ways that humanity is supposed to “save the planet” by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, offshore wind electricity generation has to be about the craziest. Between the expense of building and integrating the facilities and the intermittency of the output, the build-out of offshore wind infrastructure has threatened large and accelerating increases in consumer electricity bills. Despite lack of any demonstration of feasibility or cost of running the grid on offshore wind, the Biden administration (with support from Congress) threw tens and hundreds of billions of taxpayer funds into the industry in the form of open-ended life-of-project tax credits. The Trump administration came into office with a known hostility to offshore wind. However, its first efforts to shut down construction on these projects ran into a wall of judicial opposition. But rather than giving up, or embarking on years of appeals with uncertain outcomes, the administration has done some s...
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