Donald Trump, an energy expert who knows that oil companies like him, just couldn’t stop ranting about how much he hates wind power when he spoke at a fundraising dinner with fossil fuel company executives last week, the Washington Post reports (gift link).
“I hate wind,” Trump told the executives over a meal of chopped steak at his Mar-a-Lago Club and resort in Florida, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
“I hate wind” is a reasonable, adult thing to say, especially if you are running for the most powerful office in the world. The Post says he regularly brings it up in fundraising meetings, and that Trump’s stance (wide)
poses a potential threat to one of the linchpins of America’s clean-energy transition, according to more than a dozen Trump allies, energy experts and offshore wind industry officials.
Golly, ya think? Still, it’s an important reminder: Donald Trump doesn’t just like fossil fuels, he hates renewable energy with unreasonable passion, as if a handsome, sexy, much younger wind turbine had made fun of him on national TV at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, and then gone back to the White House to watch the Bin Laden raid play out.
The Post story goes on to detail why energy experts consider wind an essential part of the new energy resources the world will need to meet decarbonization goals, which Trump doesn’t believe in. The story also quotes William Perry Pendley — one of those fucking acting agency heads (Bureau of Land Management, for three fucking months in 2020) — who explained that in a second Trump regime, “the priority has to be oil and gas. […] I don’t think there’s a reason to press forward on wind.”
Trump also told the gathered oil and gas execs all his wonderful plans to recarbonize the atmosphere, promising he would open up new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, approve drilling permits more quickly, undo Biden’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export terminals, and reverse anything Biden has done to encourage electric vehicles, too. Each of the fossil energy honchos got to talk at Trump for about five minutes, according to the unidentified insider, even if all he heard was the sound of satchels of money landing on a table.
Pointing out the window to the Atlantic Ocean at one point, one attendee said, the former president claimed that offshore wind turbines break down when they are exposed to saltwater — though these projects are designed to resist saltwater corrosion.
Near the end of the meeting, Trump told executives that they should contribute to his campaign — the leader of his main super PAC was in the room — because he was trailing Biden financially. His policies would be much better for the oil and gas industry than those of Biden, and he’d do much of what they wanted “on Day 1,” he said.
You know, so that Joe Biden won’t sell out America to special interests.
The article also mentions the rough year offshore wind development has had, not due to any problems with the tech but because contracts that were written in the days of near-zero interest rates were borked by supply-chain problems, inflation, and especially by high interest rates. Despite those problems, the Post says,
Democrats are doing their best to lock in commercial-scale offshore wind projects before Trump has a chance to halt them. The Biden administration has already approved eight, including one that is up and running. Democratic governors in the Northeast have also reinforced their commitments to deploying more offshore wind energy, regardless of the balance of power in Washington.
If Biden were to win a second term, he would be in a position to accelerate offshore wind along the Gulf and West coasts, and add more capacity to the Atlantic. Once those steel turbines were anchored to the ocean floor, they would be hard to scuttle — one reason the stakes now are so high.
So yeah, while democracy itself is on the ballot this year, it’s also an election that will decide whether the US keeps moving forward on addressing climate change, or we just give up on that for another four to thirty years. That would be very bad.
That’s what we need to focus on, and not so much Trump’s bizarre claims about wind turbines causing cancer, although sure, credit to the Post for doing due diligence and noting that “There are no known instances of wind farms causing cancer,” and that cats are far more deadly for birds than wind farms, too.
One thing to take some hope from: Renewable energy, especially solar, is now becoming so cheap that building new fossil powerplants makes little sense, and that’s unlikely to change even if Trump were to take power again. It’s just economics. But he would also have enough leverage over the government that he could substantially slow the energy transition, with disastrous effects.
I say we go with the guy who isn’t afraid of a good breeze.
[WaPo (gift link) / Canary Media]
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