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Offshore Wind’s Existential Crisis at Climate Week

  American offshore wind’s existential crisis was laid bare at this year’s Climate Week. California and New York officials gathered on Tuesday at the New York Bar Association in Manhattan to tell attendees of the annual climate action mega-event about their efforts to hold the Trump administration to account. After Trump regulators upended wind projects off the East Coast and struck buyout trades with energy developers to ditch ocean wind leases, both states filed fresh legal action against the administration, targeting what they said were egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars that canceled once-promising projects that would’ve given gigawatts of power to grids expecting energy demand to spike. “Every megawatt in offshore wind power is not a megawatt of fossil fuel generated power. That’s really important. That means fewer emissions that contribute to respiratory and cardiac disease,” Lem Srolovic, bureau chief of the New York attorney general’s environmental protection bureau, s...
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Trump Keeps Wind Farms Waiting Despite Court Ruling

  A federal judge ruled in early August that the Trump administration’s freeze on vertical height clearances for wind turbines was likely illegal. More than a month later nearly all of the wind energy projects remain on pause, as federal officials add new red tape that industry representatives say runs afoul of the court’s edict. Let’s catch-up quickly on the American wind sector’s existential dilemma: the federal government has control over airspace higher than 200 feet from the ground and wind farm turbines essentially always enter that sphere of control. For at least a year and a half, the Trump administration through the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration has slowly gummed up what industry and former government officials have said was once a rote, benign bureaucratic process for ensuring turbine rotation didn’t interfere with flight patterns or radar at nearby airports. So, Trump is delaying key approvals even for wind projects on private land, a wo...
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Ban Gas, Pay More.

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  Electricity prices across the US are, pardon the pun, rising at shocking rates. According to the Energy Information Administration, residential electricity prices in June were 5% higher than they were in June 2025 . The average price of electricity in American homes is now about 18.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. In 2016, that same amount of juice cost US residential consumers 12.5 cents. Thus, over the past decade, consumers have seen their home electricity costs jump by 46%. What’s driving the surge in power costs? According to a June report by Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy , the price increases “were driven primarily by investments in distribution and transmission networks, fuel volatility, routine maintenance, and policy mandates rather than load growth.” Of course, there are different theories for the jump in power costs, and price increases vary, a fact highlighted on a handy new website, bluestateshighrates.com . Regardless of what’s driving those higher prices, the...
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Wind Power Has Benefitted North Dakota. So Why Have Residents Soured on It?

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  George Wolff offered a cautious greeting through the window of my rented F-150. He was fresh from tending livestock, which explained the dried mud on his forehead and shirt. His boots and jeans were soiled with barnyard muck, his ballcap tipped back to cool his brow.  It was a warm, breezy May day in Wishek, North Dakota, with wind speeds hovering around 20 miles per hour, gusting to the low 30s. Angus cattle foraged on a hillside pasture behind Wolff’s barns. Two John Deere tractors sat idle off the driveway. Planting season was over, but a dry spring had slowed the arrival of this year’s wheat, corn, and soybeans.  “What can I do for you?” asked Wolff, a fourth-generation farmer. The answer was about a half mile behind him, rising above his land like an enormous pinwheel.  That 3-megawatt turbine, one of two on Wolff’s 3,500-acre property, is part of Badger Wind Farm. The 92-turbine, 250-MW project was brought online in January by the Danish energy giant Ørsted...
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Necessary Inventions

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  Sep 05, 2026   “Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.” – Richard Bach Among the most ironclad, stone-cold, lead-pipe-lock bets of history is that aggregate primary energy consumption is a curve that goes up and to the right . Longtime readers will be familiar with the physical foundations for why this is so: The human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy; one must harness primary energy to temporarily prevail in that struggle; one’s standard of living is thus measured by how much primary energy is on offer for the task; and all humans everywhere want a higher standard of living. Wars, famines, political crises, and pandemics come and go. Degrowth nutters and carbon-counters ebb and flow in their political influence. Social shaming to make do with less—an impulse that invariably emanates from do-gooders already flush with abundance—occasionally bends localized policy for short perio...
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New York’s Climate Law Flops in Court

  The progressive government raid on fossil-fuel producers hit a roadblock this week, with a federal judge striking down a New York law that would make companies pay reparations for their worldwide CO2 emissions. Sorry, climate change doesn’t let states ignore the Constitution. Democrats in Albany in 2024 passed a law that required fossil-fuel companies to cough up $75 billion to compensate for alleged damage from their CO2 emissions. “This landmark legislation shifts the cost of climate adaptation from everyday New Yorkers to the fossil fuel companies most responsible for the pollution,” Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said at the time. Under the law, the state apportions liability among three dozen or so companies that sold fossil fuels in the state based on their estimated contribution to global CO2 emissions dating to 2000. This amounted to a giant tax on the companies—many of which don’t operate in New York—their customers and shareholders. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fossil-f...
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