[ExI] The war on wind continues

[John Clark]

The following is by Nobel prize winning economist* Paul Krugman*:
==============
*The war on wind continues *

*The burn, baby, burn compulsion persists amid a fossil fuel crisis*

*Paul Krugman March 25 2026*

[image: A graph of a number of columns AI-generated content may be
incorrect.]
<https://substack.com/redirect/22927a31-0d6b-4011-9f50-fd56626b4c83?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>

*Electricity generation in Texas. Source: Energy Information Agency*

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
<https://substack.com/redirect/00f2eec1-ef73-4ca1-af8a-35e392d7804a?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>
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
<https://substack.com/redirect/d883da37-911c-45a1-8845-9876630b0873?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.
But the administration is continuing to block development of onshore wind
and solar power by freezing the issuance of federal permits
<https://substack.com/redirect/9a664c64-d858-45fe-bba4-d2fc614cb8a8?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>
.

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
<https://substack.com/redirect/a0ba1c66-632d-4f15-904c-8fd187001af3?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>
 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:
[image: A blue rectangle with black text AI-generated content may be
incorrect.]
<https://substack.com/redirect/ffaf43d8-7f17-4d1b-8e00-d2123a2c0465?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>

You almost have to admire the administration’s persistence, its
determination to turn back the clock on energy even though renewables are
big business, its tenacity in trying to block new, secure energy sources
even in the face of a global energy crisis. But what’s this all about?

The administration has argued that offshore wind farms are a threat to
national security
<https://substack.com/redirect/1a454d8b-0aa6-47e3-b8e4-e17977250b20?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,
supposedly interfering with radar. But that doesn’t explain the efforts to
block onshore wind and solar, and the courts have remained unconvinced. In
announcing the buyoff of TotalEnergies, the Interior Secretary claimed that
wind power is expensive and unreliable; but in that case why is it
necessary to pay private companies not to develop it?

Campaign finance is part of the story. At this point, political
contributions from fossil fuel companies go almost entirely to the GOP,
while alternative energy favors Democrats
<https://substack.com/redirect/0bfaf9fd-2911-4fa5-8ee9-5c80f97b06ad?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>
.

Beyond campaign finance, fossil fuel interests, especially but not
only the Koch
brothers
<https://substack.com/redirect/3ef83df1-13cd-40f8-a5e3-c3d5f7a83dd2?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,
have spent many decades promoting hostility to renewable energy and any
effort to mitigate climate change. They have done so by every means
possible, including faux environmentalism. When Donald Trump makes bizarre
claims about how wind power is massacring birds and “driving whales crazy
<https://substack.com/redirect/d4fcf36f-ffb0-4eff-89c4-387acf89e627?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,”
he’s getting his fantasies, whether he knows it or not, from the
fossil-fuel propaganda machine.

Now, this long-term project has had limited success at moving the broader
public, which remains favorably disposed toward renewable energy. In fact,
as late as 2020 large majorities of rank-and-file Republicans held favorable
views
<https://substack.com/redirect/80132d5c-3894-478d-8958-3fcd73c4581d?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>
of
both solar and wind power. Those views have shifted against renewables in
Trump’s second term, but even now they aren’t nearly as extreme as the
views of the Trump administration. And according to Pew
<https://substack.com/redirect/3ef83df1-13cd-40f8-a5e3-c3d5f7a83dd2?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,
a substantial majority of Americans still believes that promoting wind and
solar is “a more important priority” than promoting fossil fuel production.

But the right-wing elite is completely anti-renewable.

In large part this reflects long-term indoctrination by fossil-fuel backed
think tanks and media. In addition, however, to make sense of the
right-wing elite’s intense hostility to renewable energy one needs to think
about psychology (psychology that the fossil fuel cabal exploits.)

Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely
condemned as “woke
<https://substack.com/redirect/788b0076-8cfd-4cf2-bb88-2688f2960bc2?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.”
Real men burn stuff.

What this reflects, I believe, is a common factor underlying many
right-wing obsessions. Why cling to fossil fuels in the face of a
technological revolution in energy? Why valorize “warrior ethos” and
bulging biceps in an age of drone warfare? Why build economic policy around
a doomed attempt to bring back “manly
<https://substack.com/redirect/2f417f31-71f8-4a26-a792-c54131fcf3a9?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>”
jobs? At a deep level, I’d argue, it’s about nostalgia for an imagined past
in which brawn mattered more than brains, combined with, yes, a hefty dose
of insecure masculinity.

The world keeps declining to cooperate with these macho dreams. Tariffs
aren’t bringing back blue-collar jobs
<https://substack.com/redirect/5ffd559d-f119-444f-a64a-1b7ff384331d?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.
Setting out to “destroy the enemy as viciously as possible” — as Pete
Hegseth said Tuesday
<https://substack.com/redirect/46cee97a-014e-44d8-bd44-a9eb0ade8cf9?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>
—
isn’t winning an easy victory over Iran. And turning our back on the energy
revolution, even paying the private sector to reject new technology, means
both making America less secure and ceding the future to other countries
that aren’t ruled by MAGA’s obsessions.

But that appears to be a price both fossil fuel interests and the Trump
administration are willing to pay.
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