Donald Trump’s weird obsession with eliminating clean energy and destroying America’s $40 billion offshore wind industry keeps rolling along. Yesterday, the administration ordered the cancellation of the New England Wind 1 and 2 projects, which together would have generated enough electricity to power 900,000 homes.
It’s the third major offshore wind project the administration has halted in less than two weeks, and follows last month’s abrupt stop-work order on the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island, which was already 80 percent complete. That move put hundreds of workers out of jobs. The administration is also “considering” ordering a halt to the four other offshore wind projects currently under construction, once they come up with an excuse.
Also yesterday, The New York Times reported (gift link) that the White House has ordered multiple federal agencies to “draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry,” dragging in agencies that don’t normally have anything to do with energy policy. The goal seems to be coming up with any possible crank theory that might provide a pretext for shutting down wind projects.
At the Health and Human Services Department, for instance, officials are studying whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health. And the Defense Department is probing whether the projects could pose risks to national security.
The answers to both research questions, we should add, is fuck you, no, you’re just making shit up and you know it.
Also ALSO yesterday, Joseph Ladapo, the weird snake-oil quack fraudster whom Ron DeSantis chose to be Florida’s state surgeon general when the pandemic made Republicans decide science was a dirty liberal plot, announced that the state will eliminate all vaccine mandates, including for school attendance.
“All of them. All of them,” Ladapo said during a news conference as the crowd stood and erupted in applause. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.” He said the Florida Department of Health will work in partnership with the governor.
He said forcing vaccine mandates is “wrong” and “immoral.”
Clean energy is a national security threat. Keeping children alive is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Welcome to 2025.
I’m not surprised when rightwing loonies espouse weird, irrational ideas that run counter to science and what we like to think of as reality. I’ve personally been fascinated by creationists and fringe conspiracy freaks since the Reagan years.
I just never thought such delusional stuff would ever become national policy. Or that so many people would not just shrug and go along with it, but would eagerly embrace the Mad King, indulge his delusions, and defend his executive order commanding all Americans to purchase a set of beautiful new invisible clothes like his, with tactical versions being issued to the military, naked National Guard troops patrolling the streets of major cities, and lawsuits against any media outlet that says “Hey, you’re all butt-naked!”
After all, Reagan notoriously declared in 1981 that “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” but he never ordered the EPA to stop regulating auto emissions and put catalytic converters on the national forests.
Sure, Reagan did appoint anti-environmental activist James Watt as Interior secretary, and the polluter-friendly hack Anne Gorsuch Burford as EPA administrator, and she filled the agency with people who had ties to industry.
But back in those days, when we had onions on our belts, direct ties to polluters was a scandal that led to the firing of one of Burford’s top deputies, as well as the ouster of Burford herself after she was charged with contempt of Congress. Now all that is just a job qualification, as is the willingness to enthusiastically support whatever fringe bullshit Trump gloms on to.
With wind, the fringe bullshit is rooted in part in Trump’s long resentment that he couldn’t stop an offshore wind farm from being built in sight of one of his golf courses in Scotland 14 years ago. It’s compounded by his hatred of climate science, which he seems to really believe is just a sneaky fake plot by liberals/China (same thing) to shake down the US government and send money to countries he doesn’t care about. Trump also needs to destroy everything Joe Biden ever did as president, because Biden stole the 2020 election. It’s a pretty powerful combination of resentments; the fact that Big Oil is a huge donor and enabler helps, too. I suspect that in his war against wind energy, resentment and greed are so intertwined that Trump couldn’t tell you which motivates him more.
Vaccines, on the other hand, are a stranger matter when it comes to Trump. When he ran in 2016, he was already espousing the specious idea that vaccines cause autism, but during the pandemic he wanted everyone to love him for personally developing the COVID vaccine. By choosing RFK Jr. as his HHS secretary, Trump placed himself firmly in the anti-science camp. Trump has always struck me as an armchair crank on vaccines, though, happy to believe whatever bullshit motivates his supporters, but lacking the deep personal animus he has against clean energy, especially wind. He seems mostly content to let Kennedy be the head lunatic in charge of wrecking public health, which is entirely bad enough.
What’s most striking about the new war on offshore wind is the amount of effort, across multiple agencies, being focused on the matter, which is especially surprising in a government whose hallmarks are laziness and chaos. It’s still half-assed and improvised, but it’s some very intense halfassery. The Times reports the effort is being led by two top Trump aides, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Acting President Stephen Miller, although we do have to wonder whether Miller resents spending even a moment away from his true passion, laying the foundation for a white nationalist ethnostate. And the cross-agency nature of the effort is also a surprise.
We know Trump would hate the comparison, so we’ll make it: It’s reminiscent of Joe Biden’s commitment to a “whole-of-government” approach to climate action, only evil and driven by stupid bullshit.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — who as governor of North Dakota happily promoted Clean Energy Week every year and touted the fact that a third of the state’s electricity came from wind — has shifted in the prevailing foul wind from his boss, going all in on the idea that offshore wind farms are a “security threat.”
“In particular there are concerns about radar relative to undersea, and it doesn’t have to be a large Russian sub, but undersea drones,” Mr. Burgum said on CNN last week, referring to the decision to halt construction at Revolution Wind. “People with bad ulterior motives to the United States could launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm. The radar gets very distorted if you’re trying to detect and avoid if you’ve got drones coming.”
Numero Uno, bullshit, and Numero Two-o, radar doesn’t work underwater, that’s sonar. But as the Times points out — too many paragraphs later — the Pentagon already studied potential disruptions to radar from wind turbines, and concluded that problems “can be offset with planning and technological upgrades.” As for “underwater drones,” retired Navy Commander Kirk Lippold told the Times, if they ever reached US territorial waters, wind farms or no, “that would be an incredible intelligence and military failure. […] They’re making some very specious arguments to try to justify shutting these wind projects down.”
Same for Kennedy and his fretting that electromagnetic fields from undersea cables might harm whales before he can tie their sawed-off heads to the roof of his car. An Interior Department study last year found that at most, cables on the sea floor might affect some species right next to them, but that broader effects were “nonsignificant.” It’s always just bad faith and dissembling, claiming that a relatively minor concern is an enormous roadblock. Hell, that was the entire focus of the Energy Department’s bogus “assessment” of climate science released in August: Nitpicks elevated to a pretense that established science is unreliable.
The official stupidity is just as strong with Ladapo’s announcement — in the gym of a private Christian high school — that Florida will no longer require children to be vaccinated to attend school. It’s long on rhetoric about “freedom,” but extremely lacking in science. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Ladapo pretended to be concerned above all with ethics, as if promoting the spread of deadly diseases as a matter of “choice” is ethical:
“Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body?” Lapado said. “Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.” […]
“You want to put whatever different vaccines in your body, God bless you. I hope you make an informed decision,” Ladapo said. “You don’t want to put whatever vaccines in your body, God bless you. I hope you make an informed decision. That’s how it should be.”
What scientific evidence did Ladapo offer for the decision? Hey, you just read it. Nothing but God talk. DeSantis, at the same event, added that federal government “minions” in public health had gone too far during the pandemic, and “Entrenched elites were turning toward coercive measures,” so hooray, no more of that.
That’s the state of reality now. And the torrent of official bullshit is having an effect: A Gallup poll last year found that just 51 percent of Americans said the government should mandate vaccinations against childhood illnesses, down from 62 percent in 2019 and a far more reassuring 81 percent back in 1991.
Let’s go back to Reagan and his stupid line about trees causing pollution for a moment. As is so often the case with cranks, Reagan started with a tiny bit of fact, but got it all wrong, too: Trees actually do produce volatile organic hydrocarbons that can contribute to smog, but they always have, and that has fuck-all to do with the far more dangerous amounts of pollution spewed by vehicles and industry.
Not surprisingly, though, that fragment of (skewed) reality too has become part of the litany for science deniers: “You know, the greenies all slammed Reagan for saying trees cause pollution, but he was right all along.”
How far we’ve come, huh?
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[NYT (gift link) / NBC News / CBS News / WBUR / NYT / CNN]
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