Trump to issue six-month moratorium on offshore wind projects

In the perpetual tug-o-war between outgoing president Joe Biden and president-elect Donald Trump and with it the tussle between green energy and fossil fuels, Trump is setting up a heavy blow for all of offshore wind in the US.

The president-elect, whose inauguration is set for January 20, already stated that the US will have a policy “where no windmills are being built” during his presidency. He called installing wind turbines “like dropping garbage in a field” and the turbines themselves “rusting, rotting, closed, and falling down.”

But it appears that Trump had enough words and is already setting up actions against offshore wind. Republican representative Jeff Van Drew told NJ Spotlight News in an interview that the president-elect asked him to draft an executive order to freeze offshore wind activities for six months.

The completed draft was passed to officials within the Trump transition team including Doug Burgum who is the pick for the Interior Department secretary which will hold the reigns of offshore wind. This according to Van Drew would give enough time to the federal government to review the industry.

The executive order, Van Drew told NJ Spotlight News, would create a “six-month moratorium, let the Interior Department, along with other departments, review the environmental issues, review the ratepayer issues, review the national-security issues, review the fishing issues.”

It could be said that Trump definitely found the right person to draft the executive order. Van Drew has been at odds with the Biden administration over offshore wind for several years. He also held several public hearings on the topic, the last of which was last summer.

With his braggadocious claims and the “drill, baby, drill” fossil fuels policy paired with slashing environmental regulations, it might look like Donald Trump is winning this tug-o-war in a landslide.

However, Biden was able to block all future oil and gas drilling in more than 2.5m sq km of federal waters earlier this month.

With this decision, federal oil and gas leasing was banned across large parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Northern Bering Sea. In total, the ban closed off an area equal to around a quarter of the total land mass of the United States.