Seven attorneys general from blue states have just filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for ending a massive deal with the French company TotalEnergies that would have covered the northeastern coastline with wind farms. Originally signed off by the Biden administration, Trump decided in March to refund TotalEnergies close to a billion dollars and asked them to invest that money in fossil fuel plants instead.
Naturally, most journalists reporting this story have depicted Trump as being a corrupt, anti-environmentalist dullard with a “Quixotic hatred of wind power” and the leftist politicians like Kathy Hochul as pragmatic leftists who hope to “meet our energy needs, create good jobs, and help secure American energy independence while reducing emissions.” They even go further by reframing the refund as an outrageous plot to pay “a French company $1 billion dollars to not build offshore wind farms.”
To be clear, the Trump administration is managing taxpayer funds in the interest of maximizing value for Americans. This is not a matter of him safeguarding his golf courses from the sight of hideous wind turbines blighting the landscape, but of ending what has become a massive boondoggle benefiting no one except the con men pushing it. By now, everyone should realize that wind power is inefficient, wasteful, ugly, and counterproductive.
Several years ago, one could make a plausible case for wind power, but even ardent environmentalists have finally given up the effort. In his book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future, British writer Oliver Franklin-Wallis does what he can to condemn Western overconsumption (although it is estimated that industry accounts for 97 percent of all waste, much of it generated in the Third World), but he is forced to criticize wind turbines since they produce a larger carbon footprint in their construction and installation than they produce in renewable energy. Policy writer Edward Ring breaks down the numbers here.
Moreover, Franklin-Wallis, along with others like Michael Shellenberger, acknowledges that wind turbines are nearly impossible to recycle, which is especially bad since they require so many tons of valuable raw materials for construction. Because these materials are synthesized with a multitude of resins and polymers that can’t be taken apart and reused, most defunct turbines are simply left to deteriorate. This can sometimes even lead to large pieces of fiberglass shards from broken-down wind turbines to float ashore.
Setting aside these objections and assuming that engineers discover a way to make more recyclable, cost-efficient wind turbines, there is the more obvious problem that wind farms take up vast amounts of space and rarely work as intended. In my home state of Texas, where there is abundant open space with plenty of wind in the West, the wind farms are an oppressive eyesore, and a good portion of them never turn.
This is to say nothing of the noise these wind farms make, making the residents at nearby small towns miserable and sleep-deprived. Once an adjacent field or shore is installed, there is nothing they can do. Perhaps for limousine leftists who live in the city far away from the sight and sound of wind farms, this is a feature and not a bug: They can effectively punish MAGA voters in rural America and make a fortune and virtue-signal in the process.
And what about the wildlife affected by wind farms? Far from being a mere meme — although Trump’s desire to be a whale psychiatrist is objectively hilarious — wind farms kill countless birds and marine life. Considering the recent conservationist hysteria in Germany over Timmy the Whale, the late humpback whale that kept beaching itself, what would one make of hundreds of “Timmies” beaching themselves because of offshore turbines or thousands of American bald eagles (raptors are especially vulnerable) being torn to pieces by onshore turbines?
By contrast, fossil fuel power plants have none of these problems. They take up far less space, use up far fewer raw materials for construction, and most importantly, they produce much more electricity. Sure, their operation produces more carbon emissions than that of a functioning wind turbine, and they depend on nonrenewable (yet abundant) oil and gas, but these drawbacks are nothing compared to the problems of wind farms. And as more energy-hungry AI data centers are built, the need for efficient, reliable energy has already increased exponentially.
Thus, to call for the construction of ever more wind farms at this moment is beyond anachronistic and absurd.
Then again, perhaps this is the real point of the leftist AGs opposing what should be obvious common sense. Beyond trying to thwart Trump and demoralize his supporters with ugly, useless wind farms, they want to roll back the clock and stifle innovation and economic growth. By deliberately making energy scarce and slowing technological advancement, leftists can continue their dominance over the economy, the government, and the culture at large. While most Americans would rather avoid the stagnation, mediocrity, and collective backwardness of Western Europe and Canada, many leftist elites desperately seek to emulate them.
To his great credit, President Trump and his administration are having none of it. He understands the key to a strong economy is cheap, abundant energy — and that wind farms are not cheap, nor do they create much energy. Moreover, they are not even that clean and end up doing significantly more harm to the environment than otherwise.
These reasons might not matter to those whose very raison d’être is opposing Trump and everything he stands for, but for those leftists who pretend to care about the environment and human progress, they should pay closer attention. In supporting these renewable energy scams, particularly wind farms, they become the bad guys on this issue, not Trump.
