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Federal judge lifts administration halt of offshore wind farm in New England
- esseph 1y agoMy theory is that he wants to use the sale of US fossil fuels to pay off the debt. Maybe that's bogus, just my uneducated opinion! (I also think it's incredibly shortsighted)
- margalabargala 1y agoIn terms of being able to pay off a debt, having more resources (power from wind and fossil fuels) is strictly better than less (just the fossil fuels). So that's not even remotely economically sound or logical. In conclusion you're probably right.
- bawolff 1y agoI suppose hypothetically if he significantly increased royalties/export fees/whatever and joined OPEC to manipulate the price of oil, it might help. Obviously that would be crazy.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> if he significantly increased royalties/export fees/whatever and joined OPEC to manipulate the price of oil, it might help Joining OPEC would subject the United States to production quotas. We're the world's largest oil producer. But we're also the largest consumer.
- margalabargala 1y agoBut, like, even in that eventuality, it would be better for the US to have a bunch of wind power so we can export more oil.
- esseph 1y agoI agree! I'm just brainstorming at this point but it's basically like guessing in a game of Texas Holdem.
- Tostino 1y agoWhy would hamstringing a domestic clean energy project be a good idea in that case? The less gas we use domestically, the more we can sell on the international market.
- guelo 1y agoIf he cared about the debt he wouldn't have added $4 trillion extra to the debt with the ridiculous One Big Beautiful Bill.
- WaltPurvis 1y agoExporting fossil fuels nets the government <$150 billion per year, while the federal government's debt is >$37 trillion (and growing by trillions per year). It's impossible to expand the sale of fossil fuels enough to make any kind of noticeable dent in the debt.
- roamerz 1y agoWhile 150 Billion isn’t going to solve our deficit issue it will help. By comparison that is almost 3 times the total $$ of military assistance we have provided to Ukraine since the invasion began.
- codezero 1y agomost of that money wasn't cash assistance but the retail value of old military equipment we sent them as a write down, equipment that was already paid for by taxpayers.
- jjk166 1y agoThis illuminates how little has been provided to Ukraine more so than the benefit of increasing government revenue by such a modest amount.
- plorg 1y agoIt wouldn't cover half of the deficit he's added just this year.
- nielsbot 1y agoDon't overthink it. I'd bet people in his admin and adjacent to it benefit from the existing fossil fuel regime and will do anything to stall progress on renewables Trump is a monster who would throw his own children into a furnace if it made him richer.
- macintux 1y ago> Trump is a monster who would throw his own children into a furnace if it made him richer. While I agree in broad details, his kids seem to be the only people to whom he has any sense of loyalty. Everyone else is expendable.
- nick49488171 1y agoThe only debts he want to pay off are those in his personal accounts.
- phkahler 1y ago>> My theory is that he wants to use the sale of US fossil fuels to pay off the debt If that were the case, he should be happy for alternative energy projects to free up some fuel for sale.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoWhich would mean US need to consume less so there’s more left to export…
- TinkersW 1y agoHe passed a major bill that drove up the debt massively recently, he clearly has zero interest in reducing the debt, just convincing rubes that he does.
- thrance 1y agoHe doesn't even have to convince his rubes of anything anymore. He can just go "the debt is fixed" and they all instantaneously believe it is. Straight out of Orwell's.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoContext: > President Donald Trump has made sweeping strides to prioritize fossil fuels and hinder renewable energy projects. Trump recently called wind and solar power “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” in a social media post and vowed not to approve wind or “farmer destroying Solar” projects. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” he wrote on his Truth Social site this week.
- jacquesm 1y agoIt's the 2nd installment of the years of stupidity so technically that is a little bit right. That 'scam of the century' is powering a good chunk of the USA grid but never mind the details.
- nielsbot 1y agoTrump would have to have human empathy to look into the details. He doesn't have any.
- raverbashing 1y agoAlso would have to understand math. Which seems to be a bit difficult
- dzhiurgis 1y agoWasn’t the actual change that they won’t give out subsidies for solar farms on of best farmlands (which wasn’t happening anyway)?
- softwaredoug 1y agoShadow docket here we come.
- djohnston 1y agoThat sort of instability is so damaging beyond the boundaries of his term. Hopefully this restores a bit of confidence.
- ascendantlogic 1y agoThe Supreme Court is determined to give him unfettered power to do whatever he wants so I'm sure once it reaches them they'll strike down whatever the lower court does to stop him.
- adrr 1y agoAmazing how Trump gets unfettered power and Biden gets reeled in. Almost prevented Biden from rolling back a Trump EA when Biden was in power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden_v._Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden_v._Texas
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Amazing how Trump gets unfettered power and Biden gets reeled in If we look at how often the justices voted in favour of each administration in emergency applications when the government was the filer, we get Sotomayor and Jackson favouring Biden with a 77-point margin (88 to 11 percent and 77 to 0 percent, respectively), Alito favouring Trump with a 77-point margin (95 to 18%), and Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts with 48, 26 and 21-point margins [1]. On the whole, Trump has been successful 84% of the time against Biden's 53%. But my point is that the partisan fracture of our court--on the level of individual justices--has been happening for a while. (The fact that we have (a) Alito, who's a hack and (b) a decadelong conservative majority is more explanatory than e.g. Barrett or Roberts having gone to the dark side.) [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/politics/supreme-court-emergency-docket-partisan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/politics/supreme-court...
- wahnfrieden 1y agoWould you characterize the items they hand to the court as similarly extreme and unprecedented in both ways? If one side is providing milder work, then I would expect higher agreeability. Otherwise there is something fishy with both sidesing it. Obviously it is impossible to answer this without projecting some bias. But I don't think that makes it unanswerable.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago"Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, 'Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless. 'What giants?' asked Sancho Panza. 'Those you see over there,' replied his master, 'with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.' 'Take care, sir,' cried Sancho. 'Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone.'"
- sandworm101 1y agoMandatory xkcd. https://xkcd.com/556/ https://xkcd.com/556/ https://youtu.be/kRuqPKcxMZY https://youtu.be/kRuqPKcxMZY
- noncoml 1y agoSC is gonna shut it down. Anyone taking bets?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Anyone taking bets? Polymarket is, at least for tariffs [1]. [1] https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-supreme-court-rule-in-favor-of-trumps-tariffs?tid=1758586528377 https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-supreme-court-rule-in-...
- abduhl 1y agoSo is everyone else invested in the stock market.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoI can't stand people posting this website on HN. Polymarket is a bunch of gambling addicts just throwing money at a wall - there's no market research or actual backing insight. It has such intellectual rhetoric as: > if you look closely, you can see DUMFUQ Sucks-His-Balls BUYING HIGH, then SELLING LOW! Dumfuq SUCKS-HIS-BALLS must have confused this for a Ceasefire market to trade like shit!
- spangry 1y agoThen why don’t you go bet against these people? You could be rich.
- nixpulvis 1y agoBetting against a dumb bet isn't automatically smart.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoBet against both sides? Buddy, I take it back, maybe that site is appropriate for some of HN.
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- potato3732842 1y agoDon't get too exited. This is a fight that's been happening for over 20yr now. Whoever is throwing the political football of any given wind project or who is receiving it in the end zone is just a name. They'll be gone in a few years. The institution of fighting over off shore wind farms in the Boston to NYC area was there before them and will be there after them. Regardless of the pretext of any given action the the way things generally are is that the people who have a view they want to protect, the tourism industry and the hippie/nature/biology types are on the no-wind side and the climate types, green energy people, domestic energy and big business types are on the other. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes another side wins. But nobody ever gets a win streak long enough to bring anything to fruition. The area is well suited to wind power but the area but it's also chock full of rich people and moneyed interests that can afford to fight it, likely to the long term detriment of the region, but like locusts they will be gone and cashed out by then so they don't care. That's probably when these things will finally get built. I'd love to see some wind turbines go up but I'll believe it when I see it. And even then, I bet they'll find some way to make everyone's bill go up instead of down because of it. Sincerely and with the utmost disrespect, A cape wind proponent.
- kibitzor 1y agoAlso a cape wind proponent here, I got carried away with my comment below reminiscing about the "just one more year" feeling for cape wind for the past 20 years. My wind energy professor[1] assigned everyone the task of arguing against cape wind as one of our assignments (and later, for it). Of course, we found a few valid arguments for and against, but enormous reasons for it. The professor had a despondent take on utility scale wind, even though it was environmentally + economically viable, partially from the decades of fighting against the often irrational public perception. Example homework: "Wind turbines will block our sunset" > no, dune grass will block more of the sunset for you, many turbines won't even be visible (insert math) "Wind turbines will be too loud" > no, they're so far away from shore that even your breathing is louder (insert math) "They won't make energy cheap enough to reduce costs" > no, even using conservative payback plans and limited life, it still works (insert math) "The native's sunset ritual will be ruined by the wind turbines" >no, see above, are you serious? [Yes, this was proposed- https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/environment/article/tribes-claim-wind-farm-would-destroy-sacred-ritual-857698.php https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/environment/article/tribes... ] It's less about a conspiracy against renewables, you start to feel this conspiracy for pro foreign fossil fuels in the Boston area. The iconic Citgo sign, core to Boston's image [2]-> maybe The iconic Rainbow tank for liquid natural gas[3] -> maybe maybe The fact that Boston receives tanker ships of LNG from Russia[4]-> maybe maybe maybe [1]I have a Wind Energy Certificate from my university education, but this was not my focus [2]https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/how-century-old-citgo-is-caught-in-the-middle-of-the-us-conflict-with-venezuela/ https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/how-century-old-citgo-... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Swash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Swash [4]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/why-is-lng-coming-4500-miles-to-boston-from-the-russian-arctic-when-the-us-is-the-worlds-no-1-natural-gas-producer/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/why-is-lng-coming-4500-miles-...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoMy father hates this thing because the electricity it provides is above market rate.
- free_bip 1y agoGiven that electricity demand is projected to continue climbing for some time, I don't think that's such an issue. It probably won't be above market rate for long.
- stinkbeetle 1y agoAre electricity prices projected to rise? Even with all the much cheaper renewables coming on line in future?
- hamandcheese 1y agoThat seems like a great problem for the market to sort out.
- lucb1e 1y agoThat's easy to say if you don't have to live with the consequences of cheap oil product burning, nor apparently have an idea of the current health impacts (people walking by a car don't fall over but, in aggregate, the lost number of healthy years due to this pollution is pretty upsetting)
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoIn China offshore wind is cheaper than coal. The stop-start nature of US efforts, which isn't limited to this particular illegal stop work order, don't help with costs.
- sandworm101 1y agoA youtube channel i follow made an interesting point. All these wind farms are covered by the jones act. So the associated ships to biuld them must be american (biult, crewed and flagged). It was hoped that this would revitalize US shipyards. But ship construction is so risk-adverse that no matter what a court says, everything is going to be put on hold for at least a few years. https://youtu.be/9ISZuW1JKkI https://youtu.be/9ISZuW1JKkI
- marcus_holmes 1y agoThe argument I've seen on Mastodon that seems to make sense to me, is that the US Dollar is the currency used in oil trading. That brings a lot of foreign currency to the USA, because people need to buy dollars to buy their oil. If the world moves away from oil, then the US economy will stop benefitting from this trade. Of course, if the rest of the world moves to renewables, which it is, and just the USA remains reliant on oil then that also destroys this benefit. But the USA refusing to help implement renewable energy will definitely slow it down. It's the only rational argument I can see for this policy. Of course there's the irrational to consider ("real men burn stuff" as Cory Doctorow puts it), and that may be the more important consideration.
- pm90 1y agoThere isn’t a rational argument for this policy. Trump has an irrational hatred of wind energy in particular. His minions are implementing his commands.
- sandworm101 1y agoIt isnt irrational. He golfs. He believes golf with an ocean view to be the highest and best use of land, the ultimate expression of wealth. The sight of windmills on the horizon providing power to the poors is like seeing a honda civic parked in the members-only lot. It isnt an irrational hate. It is simple nimby elitism.
- komali2 1y agoIt's irrational long term since his golf courses will eventually be underwater or turned into refugee camps.
- hollerith 1y agoThe problem with that argument is that the dollar is just as important in the international trade of other goods like solar panels and batteries as it is in the trade of oil.
- pm90 1y ago> Work on the nearly completed Revolution Wind project for Rhode Island and Connecticut has been paused since Aug. 22 when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued a stop-work order for what it said were national security concerns. The Interior Department agency did not specify those concerns at the time. Both the developer and the two states sued in federal courts. This administration is beyond stupid.
- NewJazz 1y agoThey bought their oil industry sponsors another month. This is just a district court ruling. Appellate and SC shadow docket are quite possibly going to quickly reverse the injunction.
- colechristensen 1y agoI don't think it's corruption, I think Trump is just stupid and doesn't like windmills in the same way a five year old doesn't like green beans.
- fuzztester 1y agononsense. it's the exact opposite of what you think it is. you are either not reading the news enough or are not able to understand it. "Drill, baby, drill!" https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iF17bGH65gU https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iF17bGH65gU from the description of that YouTube short: Trump to Starmer: "Drill, Baby, Drill’ in North Sea to cut energy bills; Calls Wind ‘Expensive Joke
- lucb1e 1y ago(Regarding that second sentence: attack the argument, not the person you're replying to.)
- idle_zealot 1y agoThat seems to he true of him personally, but don't let his incompetence blind you to the powerful people and organizations whispering in his ear and directing the mad king to their benefit.
- waltbosz 1y agoThe NIMBY argument is often one of aesthetics: windmills on the horizon will look ugly. I want to see a barge with one of these windmills anchored off the coast at the proposed install spot. So people can actually see what one would look like in real life. I know it's not representative of the array of windmills the projects seek to install, but it something. Also, I wonder if the same people who object to the windmills ever raise objections to the boats with giant LED advertisement screens that creep past the beach close enough to shore that you can smell their engine exhaust.
- nar001 1y agoThe issue is, people will complain even seeing the barge. But when they're installed, they basically forget about it, and get used to it. So it's just a pain either way
- softwaredoug 1y agoThere are a lot of objectively ugly things people once objected to that now just exist as part of the landscape. Like normal transmission lines or telephone polls. Or many roads. Or cell towers. Or transmission towers. The list goes on.
- wlonkly 1y agoI have a hard time relating to this because whenever I come around a curve in a highway or whatever only to see a wind farm I am always mildly awed.