1) to own the Libs
2) oil interests
These oil rich countries are no fans of clean energy.
Is it merely coincidence, then, that Trump is canceling wind and solar projects in the United States?
Previously Trump also canceled the largest solar project in the United States. Known as Esmeralda 7, the project planned in the Nevada desert would have produced enough energy to power nearly two million homes.
Then Trump went a step further: He is using tariffs to pressure other countries to relax their pledges to fight climate change and instead burn more oil, gas and coal [1].
The oil princes are getting their moneys worth.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/trump-internation...
how and why the republican/maga party wholeheartedly adopted Trump's grievances as their own is beyond me
https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-says-15bn-qatar-uae-c...
The jet was gifted to the American people. There's no reason why he should be allowed to fly on it. It goes in the library with the rest of the state gifts.
Generally utility scale solar buys cheap panels that aren't as energy dense as those purchased by rooftop consumers, so you could make the argument. However, the efficiency and energy density of the ever-growing turbines installed by utilities, particularly off-shore, are far more efficient than anything you would install yourself. E.g. average annual wind speed typically improves with altitude, and having a taller turbine can reach those larger sustained wind speeds. Whereas, utilities and consumers almost always install solar near-ish ground level and see the same sky, perhaps the utility installs in a sunnier corner of geography. Consumers potentially benefit from the shading of panels, and lower distribution costs.
The cost isn't as good as solar though. a 1kw turbine is expensive.
Edit: Looks like they were a bit late to veto it here though.
It seems to me this is very much intentional to keep oil demand up and prices high.
Gold painted wind turbines. Art of the Deal!
Who are we afraid of? If ICBMs are incoming to the Continental United States the world is ending. Regardless of whether we prevent wind farms in any of the 12,000+ miles of coastline.
Are we expecting missiles to come from the Gulf of Mexico? People always bend over backwards to justify this administration. It's tiresome.
It looks increasingly like a US vassal state for every year so that part wouldn't be so surprising.
Besides, the article you posted does not support your claim that Sweden blocked all offshore wind construction. On the contrary it refutes it by mentioning some greenlit offshore wind construction projects.
There are several other comments above that allege other countries have come to the same conclusion regarding offshore wind farms having a negative affect on radar.
I smell BS.
All other things equal, opening a literal breach in one of the white house's exterior wall seems like it would cause a "national security" issue if the construction project was not finished and the hole remained gaping afterwards.
This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones.
Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additional radars on and within the turbine farms themselves.
So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
The Brit’s have the right approach, just put radar on them so now you can see past them.
Same applies to how this admin forced layoffs at the green energy (hydro + nuclear) behemoth BPA [1] (which was funded entirely by ratepayers, not the federal government) then claimed an energy emergency to keep open coal plants serving the same geographies, coal plants that were already uneconomical and planned for shut down (or re-tooling to gas in the case of TransAlta's plant in WA). [2] Oh and they already re-hired some of the laid off staff at BPA because they overcut.
There is no point in taking these arguments at face value. It's an excuse generated after-the-fact, and in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.
[1] https://www.columbian.com/news/2025/mar/12/letter-cuts-at-bp...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/doe-or...
Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.
Good news? Net new solar and wind plants can come "online" in less than two years. Net new natural gas takes four years. Part of why 95% of new energy deployed last year were renewables in the US, not just the subsidies.
It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia.
A healthy grid should have all of the following - Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar
- Gas plants for surge power and base load when nuclear/solar/wind cannot take up the slack
- Battery storage for surge/storage during off peak
- Solar for very low-cost cheap energy during peak usage hours
- Wind for other power source ie when the sun isnt shining as much
source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).
Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.
So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.
Americans have no broad idea how anything works. Decades of attacks on our education system have left us civically illiterate (and for a lot of people, actually illiterate too.).
I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
> Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.
I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant
Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess.
I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.
Given that we are experiencing high costs and other barriers to construction, we can do at least two things: reduce red tape where it makes sense or where the risk is acceptable to help lower costs, or the US government can, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from basic research funding to direct subsidies, spend taxpayer money to try and alleviate costs.
Given that we supposedly (and I agree) need to build nuclear reactors to help power our country and given that we aren’t building them, we can optionally use both levers to encourage construction. There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good, and so having more of them must be more good.
This is not accurate.
Regulations are simply a tool we can wield to achieve desired outcomes within various risk and need-based calculations. More regulations can be good, for example we should ban highway billboards- that would be a good regulation. Or we can eliminate regulations - allow businesses to build more housing using pre-approved designs that meet existing zoning code. Neither is good or bad, except in that it helps to achieve some aim that society has.
The regulation or lack there of, of nuclear energy in the United States has absolutely nothing to do with Boeing airlines screwing up some plane designs. Drawing a conclusion that nuclear energy must be regulated (it is) or over-regulated (it probably is or else we would build more), because of a belief that Boeing airliners weren’t regulated enough is, to put it lightly, nonsense, and you are mistakenly using the application of some regulation or lack of causing some bad things to happen, to imply that more regulation in another area would mean good things happen through this framework of regulation == good.
And further, if you’re going to suggest that Boeing is effectively unregulated, which is untrue in practice and in principal, then I’d argue that was for the best given that it is a hugely successful company that employs tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions have flown and continue to fly on their airlines every single day safely and without incident.
If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people.
This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.
Would to prefer underregulating it?
How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
No
> How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
Difficult problem. The issue right now is that nobody wants to be seen to remove a regulation from a nuclear. One of the biggest things is that ALARA/LNT needs to go away. It is not useful, and it is not based on good modern science
Creating new assessments based on modern research would be good and there is already a ton of evidence around that could be foundational for making real science based changes
That's when storage is not considered. Once storage is factored in, the LCOE becomes anywhere between $5 to $20. In the US, solar makes a lot of sense in the southern states, less sense in Midwest and WA.
That being said, the US still has plenty of capacity to accommodate more "sewer grade" (no battery backup) solar generation. It will provide easy CO2 savings and it can work well with flexible power consumers (AI training datacenters).
More power is always good (see china being 1# in solar, nuclear and wind lol), and it's known that the cost of energy directly correlates with growth right now there is no excuse for cutting any federal workers in the energy industry.
Even though you can partially work around the issue with better onshore equipment or just placing the stuff on the other side of the interfering equipment it is still a step down from not having any interference in the first place. Especially if you want to keep your listening equipment secret.
So obviously the government can spend some of that $1T military budget on fixing their coastal radar.
I thought Massachusetts just won in court to get their money or construction resumed, wonder if this means they have to go back to court.
By has become, you mean always has been, right?
Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?
That said, Democrats have also been trying to stop offshore wind farms for years (e.g. Vineyard Wind), so there is probably bipartisan support.
The orange shrimp pulling the “national security” card now, on the same day as he also creates a new Greenland debacle, is very clearly simply an attempt to strong arm the danish govt into Greenland concessions (in turn simply to please his fractile lille ego)
Trump has been charging at windmills ever since he was defeated in UK courts in a case where he didn't like that wind turbines (that provide enough power for 80,000 homes) could be seen from his golf course.
There is data on what wind turbines do to radar.
Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking. One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt). The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill.
There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.
There's obviously some sort of arms race occurring and some of it is public.
The world in on the precipice of many technologies advancing at an all too rapid pace. The idea that technology will become tightly regulated isn't inconceivable.
FYI Sweden did the same thing last year. There is likely a (drone) reason, it's all but completely clear.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-swe...
But thats nothing to do with turbines. Its not like russia are hiding behind wind turbines launching drones between them.
They are just sitting there, well within radar range launching away. they also have AIS on, so its not like they are hiding.
Also if you look at where they are: https://openinframap.org/#8.13/51.48/1.67 there is plenty of overlap for existing radar to overlap.
Also they are the perfect platform for extending your radar network. they are tall, well connected and widely spaced.
What are the enforcement mechanisms here if the states in question---MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, and VA---just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building? I'm not saying they should but at this point rule-of-law has fallen apart so badly that I literally don't know what happens when the government invents a new rule and people just... disregard it. (Particularly if state-level enforcement decides not to play along.) Do they bring in the FBI? Military?
To punish more fully, just illegally withhold federal funds for whatever is most hurtful. Highways? Education? Healthcare?
And to your direct point, I’m sure someone could whip up a reason for the military to take over and shut down the sites if they don’t comply - this _is_ a national security matter after all.
Court system stops any of that? Just comply (or pretend to) with the letter of the ruling and try another barely-distinguishable but arguably different illegal method for the next few months while the gears of the court system grind.
What is _meant_ to stop the executive branch (meant to ‘execute’ the will of Congress, not just follow its own desires) going rogue is impeachment by Congress, but that seems like a far off prospect.
As the article also touches upon, this already happened in the particular case of Revolution Wind: There, work, was forced to stop in August, then in September a federal judge blocked enforcement of the block, and work continued:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/judge-orsted-revolution-wind...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/offshore-wind-develo...
And “what happens” seems to be that rather than appeal, the rule-of-law deniers apparently choose to not care? Work has stopped again:
https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2025/12/revolution-wind-and...
If things fall apart so badly that the CG, USN, and Treasury don't matter - then who's paying the bills for any offshore construction, and who's protecting anything that is built from looting or seizure?
Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.
It's all bullshit.
That occurred a long time ago with the destruction of USAID and arbitrary firing of large numbers of federal workers.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-024-10000-8
In a nutshell, this is what Trump was elected to do to minorities, women, trans, blue states, Europe, China, everyone.
"The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande ... The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered." [https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...]
Seriously, the pardons alone make this the most pro-crime administration in my lifetime. Probably ever.
If you're talking about coal miners, David Frum joked / observed that there are more yoga instructors in the US than coal miners:
* https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...
Yoga instructors, assemble!
That began almost the moment this administration came into power.
1) the US has lots of oil reserves, which would lose lots of value if everybody was using renewables 2) oil is the main driver for dollar demand, as oil is paid in dollar, allowing the US to have lots of debt relatively cheaply
That's also the reason why he wants to tell Europe to stop using renewables, and that's the reason why he is threatening Venezuela - because they have the biggest oil reserve and started selling it in different currencies.
Now whether that whole genius strategy to gain wealth through geopolitics is worth an extinction event is a different story.
What's interesting is that the strategy you suggest (tell Europe to stop using renewables, attack nations that compete with US oil sales) only motivates other nations to move away form oil. It's a terrible strategy if the intent is to sell more US oil. Renewables are far more sustainable in many regards, and bolster national energy security while remaining on fossil fuels leaves them weak wrt energy security.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-media-fusion-power-company-...
China understands and is gunning for Nuclear and Solar. Geothermal and wind are nice but too location dependent.
I still thinks it's missing important details, but the US making wars to get more oil doesn't fit reality at all.
Between MAGA blocking wind and Progressives blocking nuclear, the US is left with solar and carbon.
Solar is fine, but it needs a 24/7 base. Unfortunately it increasingly appears that base will remain carbon.
The price of new solar+battery and wind should be pushing fossil fuel energy prices off a cliff right now, unless you live in a petrostate.
But we don't do this. So all else being equal, I would suggest we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear, if we are longer worried about price
I like nuclear. The funny thing about nuclear power and the mercenaries promoting their startups about it is, you will still have to convince democrats about it. Because occasionally they are in power, and nuclear, as is often criticized, takes a long time to build and a short time to turn off haha.
Close, but one minor correction.
Multiple studies have found that it would be cheapest to DEstruct coal plants.
Literally demolishing them and replacing them with battery + solar is more cost effective than continuing to operate them in 99% of cases.
“Cheap” only if you exclude indirect costs due to emissions (both localized effects and less-localized.)
> we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear
nuclear is not renewable (it is low carbon, a feature that is also true of renewables in general, but it is not, itself, a renewable.)
It can be effectively renewable for all practical purposes, but there's an aversion to breeder reactors. Over 95% of the existing 'waste' could also be consumed by breeders.
Breeder reactors reduce long-term waste issues, but they don't make nuclear renewable.
Its not clear cut.
Part of the reason why electricity is so expensive in the UK is that its tied to natural gas prices. some of it is CFD, but most of it is because a lot of our power comes from natural gas.
We pay for gas on the open market because we aren't self sufficient for gas any more.
Yes solar is cheaper to deploy, but its not as useful on its own. Wind is far far better in the winter.
What we should be doing is getting nuclear plants built. Small ones ideally, but a few bigguns will do. Then we won't be so reliant on natural gas. We also need to get those extra transmission cables built.
(note we could have built 10 nuclear power plants, well EDF at 2002 power prices, but the present government balked because nuclear is bad yo.)
Many of the new wind farms get a fixed price for energy and when the wholesale price is about that the excess gets channeled into a fund that is used to reduce consumer prices
> Average prices are best used to measure the price level in a particular month, not to measure price change over time. It is more appropriate to use CPI index values for the particular item categories to measure price change.
I’m not doubting that (inflation adjusted) energy prices have gone up but this graph is misleading to represent it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Golf_Club_...
compared to the general motor market in the USA? I think thats out by a few orders of magnitude.
Radar shadow is vaguely plausible, if your radar is shit and needs replacing.
it also requires your hydrophone network to not be working that well either.
He hates offshore wind production because it gets in the way of his ocean views at his resort.
ChrisArchitect•2h ago