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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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Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore

  By Matthew T. Huber Dr. Huber is a geographer and the author of “Climate Change as Class War:  Building Socialism on a Warming Planet .” Sam Forstag, a Democrat running for Congress in Montana, is in many ways a familiar kind of progressive: He is a union worker calling for taxing the rich and expanding Medicare for all Americans. But there’s one topic he appears to avoid, in his platform and in public forums. When  asked  recently about the growing threat of wildfires and drought in the West, he discussed a terrible ski season and record-high temperatures, but did not name the climate crisis directly. The Democratic U.S. House candidates Trey Martin, a union ironworker in Oklahoma, and Chris Reichard, an electrician and veteran running in Missouri, are also steering somewhat clear of what was once a centerpiece of many progressive political campaigns. Even in a blue district in Minnesota, Kaela Berg, a Democratic state legislator who works as a flight attenda...
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Trump’s crackdown on China-linked solar firms stalls U.S. factory boom

Summary Installers, banks, insurers shun China-linked U.S. solar factories Industry awaits guidance on new subsidy restrictions Financing delays threaten new U.S. power capacity as demand soars   May 8 (Reuters) - Top solar companies, banks and insurers have stopped doing business with at least a half dozen recently built U.S. panel factories because of uncertainty  over whether their ties to China could disqualify them from clean-energy subsidies , according to industry executives and documents reviewed by Reuters.   The shift, driven by new Trump administration policies, jeopardizes more than a third of  U.S. solar capacity in factories initially built by Chinese ​firms.  Details of how the policy uncertainty is driving installers and insurers away from U.S. solar factories with China ties have not been previously reported.   The emerging effects dovetail with U.S. President Donald Trump’s broader efforts to  block  Chinese companies from the U....
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Trump Is Getting Away With Murdering an American Industry

  President Donald Trump is now effectively blocking any new wind projects in the United States, according to the main renewables trade group, using the federal government’s power over all things air and sky to grind a routine approval process to a screeching halt. So far, almost everything Trump has done to target the wind energy sector has been defeated in court. His Day 1 executive order against the wind industry was found unconstitutional. Each of his stop work orders trying to shut down wind farms were overruled. Numerous moves by his Interior Department were ruled illegal. However,  since the early days of Trump 2.0, renewable energy industry insiders have been  quietly skittish  about a potential secret weapon: the Federal Aviation Administration.   Any structure taller than 200 feet must be approved to not endanger commercial planes –  that’s an FAA job. If the FAA decided to indefinitely seize up the so-called “no hazard” determinations process, le...
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Two Bets On The Future Of Wind Energy: Who Is Right?

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  May 06, 2026   Francis Menton   Two articles from the New York Times in the past couple of days describe the widening divergence between the approaches taken by the U.S. and China on the subject of wind energy. I apologize that these pieces are behind the Times’s paywall, but remember that I subscribe there so that you don’t have to. On Monday (May 4) the article was about the status of wind energy development in the U.S., with the headline  “More Than 150 Wind Projects Stall as Pentagon Delays Reviews.”   Tuesday’s (May 5) piece covered the same subject in China, headline  “China’s Big Bet on Wind Power Is Paying Off.” These articles once again illustrate the extent to which the U.S. and its people are uniquely blessed in the world. Our biggest blessing is that we have been bequeathed by our forebears with the freest economy in the world, and with structural obstacles that make it very difficult for politicians to undo that. But almost as big a blessing ...
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Trump administration cites national security to widen clampdown on wind farms

  May 3, 2026   The Trump administration  has brought US onshore wind development to a halt  citing national security concerns, representing  a major escalation  in the president’s crusade against renewable energy.   Approvals for about  165 onshore wind projects on private lands  are being stalled by the Department of Defense, including wind farms which were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations and some that typically would not require oversight by the department, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and people close to the matter.   Wind farms require routine approval from the defence department to ensure they do not interfere with radar systems. This typically involves the level of risk being assessed and the developer paying an agreed sum for the army to update its radar filter system so it can locate the windmill. Some projects can be deemed not to pose a risk due to their distance from ar...
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You Can’t Trust ‘Climate Economics’

  The scientific journal Nature in December  retracted  one of the most influential climate economics papers of the past decade. The paper, by Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann and Leonie Wenz, claimed that unmitigated climate change would cost the global economy $38 trillion a year (in 2005 international dollars) by midcentury. It was the second-most-mentioned climate paper by the media in 2024, according to  Carbon Brief . The paper was cited by central banks and governments to justify aggressive climate policies. Then it collapsed . The authors  acknowledged  that its errors were “too substantial” for a correction. Nature retracted the paper more than 18 months after first learning of its problems. Most media coverage treated this as an unfortunate aberration in what is otherwise settled science. The retraction, however, isn’t a one-off.  It revealed a crack that runs much deeper  into the foundation of climate research. Eco...
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