President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum
But the Trump administration hasn’t allowed these short-run distractions to divert it from its long-run goals: It remains deeply committed to killing renewable energy, especially wind power, and increasing America’s reliance on fossil fuels.
True, some of the administration’s attacks on wind power have failed: Its efforts to throttle offshore wind development by ordering developers to stop work on projects that are already underway have repeatedly been overruled by the courts. But the administration is continuing to block development of onshore wind and solar power by freezing the issuance of federal permits.
And on Monday the Interior Department unveiled a new tactic in its war on wind: It announced that it will pay TotalEnergies, a French energy giant, almost $1 billion to not produce energy — specifically to abandon its plans to build two large wind farms off the East Coast.
To understand the Trump administration’s motives in its campaign to kill renewable energy, one must realize that this campaign is both economically self-destructive and, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuel industry, deeply unpopular.
Fifteen years ago wind and solar power were still relatively marginal energy sources, which those hostile to their development could portray as unproven and uneconomic. Today they are major contributors to energy supply in many nations — and in some U.S. states. Perhaps most notably, as the chart at the top of this post shows, renewables — mostly wind, but with a growing role for solar — now account for more than a third of electricity generation in Texas, America’s largest producer of electricity and not exactly a state run by environmental extremists.
Even more impressively, renewables have dominated the growth in Texas’s electricity generation in recent years:
You almost have to admire the administration’s persistence, its determination to turn back the clock on energy even though renewables are big business, its tenacity in trying to block new, secure energy sources even in the face of a global energy crisis. But what’s this all about?
The administration has argued that offshore wind farms are a threat to national security, supposedly interfering with radar. But that doesn’t explain the efforts to block onshore wind and solar, and the courts have remained unconvinced. In announcing the buyoff of TotalEnergies, the Interior Secretary claimed that wind power is expensive and unreliable; but in that case why is it necessary to pay private companies not to develop it?
Campaign finance is part of the story. At this point, political contributions from fossil fuel companies go almost entirely to the GOP, while alternative energy favors Democrats.
Beyond campaign finance, fossil fuel interests, especially but not only the Koch brothers, have spent many decades promoting hostility to renewable energy and any effort to mitigate climate change. They have done so by every means possible, including faux environmentalism. When Donald Trump makes bizarre claims about how wind power is massacring birds and “driving whales crazy,” he’s getting his fantasies, whether he knows it or not, from the fossil-fuel propaganda machine.
Now, this long-term project has had limited success at moving the broader public, which remains favorably disposed toward renewable energy. In fact, as late as 2020 large majorities of rank-and-file Republicans held favorable views of both solar and wind power. Those views have shifted against renewables in Trump’s second term, but even now they aren’t nearly as extreme as the views of the Trump administration. And according to Pew, a substantial majority of Americans still believes that promoting wind and solar is “a more important priority” than promoting fossil fuel production.
But the right-wing elite is completely anti-renewable.
In large part this reflects long-term indoctrination by fossil-fuel backed think tanks and media. In addition, however, to make sense of the right-wing elite’s intense hostility to renewable energy one needs to think about psychology (psychology that the fossil fuel cabal exploits.)
Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as “woke.” Real men burn stuff.
What this reflects, I believe, is a common factor underlying many right-wing obsessions. Why cling to fossil fuels in the face of a technological revolution in energy? Why valorize “warrior ethos” and bulging biceps in an age of drone warfare? Why build economic policy around a doomed attempt to bring back “manly” jobs? At a deep level, I’d argue, it’s about nostalgia for an imagined past in which brawn mattered more than brains, combined with, yes, a hefty dose of insecure masculinity.
The world keeps declining to cooperate with these macho dreams. Tariffs aren’t bringing back blue-collar jobs. Setting out to “destroy the enemy as viciously as possible” — as Pete Hegseth said Tuesday — isn’t winning an easy victory over Iran. And turning our back on the energy revolution, even paying the private sector to reject new technology, means both making America less secure and ceding the future to other countries that aren’t ruled by MAGA’s obsessions.
But that appears to be a price both fossil fuel interests and the Trump administration are willing to pay.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.
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