We are now in a global fossil fuel crisis. With oil and liquefied natural gas from the Persian Gulf unable to reach international markets due to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, hydrocarbon prices have been soaring around the world and widespread shortages are emerging. Anyone who thought that the U.S. would be insulated from this dire picture thanks to its large domestic oil production has had a rude awakening: the average retail price of gasoline has risen more than $1 per gallon over the past month, while the price of diesel is up $1.60.
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:......" Read more at the link above.
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