Blowing Smoke: Trump’s Energy Plan
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The administration of Donald Trump is making an unbridled push to block renewable energy projects—including last week halting the placement of 54 wind turbines in the ocean south of Long Island, New York—and is pushing fossil fuels, among them coal. The burning of fossil fuels is the leading cause of climate change. Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.”
Meanwhile, a Long Island resident, Lee Zeldin of Shirley, who Trump named administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is cancelling on a sweeping basis environmental regulations, discharging EPA employees and, last week, stopping the collection of greenhouse gas emission data.
Further, on April 8th Trump issued an executive order directing the U.S. attorney general to identify “illegal” state and local climate, energy and environmental justice laws that “impede” domestic energy production and use and “take all appropriate action to stop” their enforcement. The order is titled: “Protecting American Energy From State Overreach.” It opens: “My Administration is committed to unleashing American energy.”
Reacting, “New York State leaders say environmental protects and policies will remain on track” despite Trump’s order “attempting to undo state climate laws,” began a piece in the Long Island newspaper Newsday headlined: “NY Won’t Alter Renewable Energy Policy.” It said: “State Attorney General Letitia James, Gov. Kathy Hochul and other state leaders pushed back, saying efforts will continue including…and building out renewable energy sources, as the state aims to get all electricity from emission-free sources by 2040 and reduce economywide emissions by 85% from 1990 levels by 2050.”
Also, Hochul and the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the co-chairs of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors, issued a statement saying: “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority. We are a nation of states—and laws—and we will not be deterred. We will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis that safeguard Americans’ fundamental right to clean air and water, create good-paying jobs, grow the clean energy economy, and make our future healthier and safer.”
New York Attorney General James declared: “The Trump administration cannot punish states that protect their residents” and “we’re not going to back down.”
Also on April 8th, Trump issued an order “to allow some older coal-fired power plants set for retirement to keep producing electricity” and to “lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands,” the Associated Press reported. It quoted Trump at the signing ceremony saying: “I call it beautiful, clean coal. I told my people, never use the word coal unless you put beautiful, clean before it.” Zeldin was present as Trump signed the order at the White House.
The Trump administration last week halted the building of the Empire Wind project 15 to 30 miles in the Atlantic south of the line between the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk counties, and 14 miles southeast of Manhattan. Its builder, Norway-based Equinor, says on its website that is devoted to the project, that “the Empire Wind Project will be the first offshore wind project to deliver power directly to New York City” and “potentially” provide electricity to 500,000 New York City homes.
“Just as construction was starting on a massive wind farm off the coast of Long Island, the Trump administration ordered an immediate halt,” said The New York Times. It noted that the Empire Wind project had “received all of the permits it needed to get underway.”
Hochul said she would “fight this decision every step of the way.”
On his first day in office Trump issued an executive order removing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, the principal international treaty on climate change. As for wind turbines, he has insisted that noise from them causes cancer, despite the American Cancer Society saying this is untrue.
Zeldin on April 11th speaking at a Long Island Association event in Woodbury, Long Island said: “The president has made it crystal clear…he is not approving new wind permits.”
Zeldin at the event boosted instead new gas pipelines including for New York State one carrying fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania to a hub in Albany. He noted that there is “a ban in New York” on fracking, but pointed to Pennsylvania where “all parties work together and they tap into the extraction of natural gas.”
Zeldin is a former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives with a district that included much of eastern and central Long Island. He left the post to run unsuccessfully against Democrat Hochul for New York governor.
There long was a major push to allow fracking in New York State drawing from the same Marcellus Shale formation that extends from Pennsylvania. Adding to the challenge to fracking—a term for hydraulic fracturing which uses fluids under high pressure and 600 chemicals to extract oil and gas from deep underground rock formations—were journalistic investigations, most prominently two HBO TV documentaries, “Gasland,” by Josh Fox.
They found how fracking regularly leads to gas and oil migrating into water. In “Gasland,” there are many scenes of people turning on water faucets, holding a lighter to what’s coming out, and flames erupting because of fracking. In New York State, fracking was banned in 2014.
The burning of coal emits carbon the worst, followed by combustion of oil and gas—including fracked gas, extreme in methane.
ProPublica, the nonprofit news platform, last week disclosed that the EPA “is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee [Zeldin], would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.”
“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting program documents the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data…guides policy decisions….Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time,” said ProPublica.
It quoted Professor Edward Maibach of George Mason University in Virginia saying it was “like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill. How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to America’s well-being and humanity’s well-being if we’re not actually monitoring what we’re doing to exacerbate the problem.”
The Guardian newspaper in January cited an analysis by the group Climate Power as key to Trump pro-fossil fuel policies. The Guardian reported: “Big oil spent a stunning $445 million through the last election cycle to influence Donald Trump and Congress, a new analysis has found” and which projected that the “investments” are “likely to pay dividends.”
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