| HEATHER COX RICHARDSON |
| AUG 31 |
Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.
These cancellations reflect President Donald J. Trump’s apparent determination to kill off wind and solar power initiatives and to force the United States to depend on fossil fuels. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. Former president Joe Biden made investing in clean energy a central pillar of his administration; Trump often seems to construct policies mostly to erase the legacies of his predecessors.
Reversing the shift toward renewable energy not only attacks attempts to address the crisis of climate change and boosts the fossil fuel industry on which some of Trump’s apparent allies depend, but also undermines a society based on the independence of American workers. In 2023, about 3.5 million Americans worked in jobs related to the renewable energy sector, and jobs in that sector grew at more than twice the rate of those in other sectors in what was a strong U.S. labor market. The production of coal, which Trump often points to as an ideal for American jobs, peaked in 2008. Between then and 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60% in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving a total of about 40,000 employees.
Another cut last week sums up the repercussions of the administration’s attack on renewable energy. On August 22 the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year. As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033………….
Historically, a system in which local economies support small businesses and entrepreneurs promotes a wide distribution of political power. In contrast, extractive industries support a system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals. The extractive systems in the pre–Civil War American South, where cotton concentrated power and wealth, and later in the American West, where mining, cattle, and agribusiness did the same, nurtured political systems in which a few men controlled their regions.
As president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Chrissy Lynch said in July after the Republicans passed the budget reconciliation bill cutting clean energy tax credits: “Working families shouldn’t have to purchase energy from billionaire oil tycoons and foreign governments or let them set the price of our energy bills.”
Her observation hit home earlier this week, when Joe Wallace, Costas Paris, Alex Leary, and Collin Eaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that the comments of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump at their meeting in Alaska on August 15 in which they talked about doing more business together were not vague goodwill. ExxonMobil and Russia’s biggest energy company, Rosneft, have been in secret talks to resume a partnership to extract Russian oil, including in the Arctic, that had been severed by Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.