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Briefing|Why Doesn’t Trump Like Wind Farms?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/briefing/why-doesnt-trump-like-wind-farms.html
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Without evidence
President Trump doesn’t like wind farms. Never has. He thinks they’re ugly. He calls them inefficient and expensive. Years ago, he failed to stop the construction of one that’s visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. He was apoplectic about it. He told a Scottish politician on Twitter in 2014 that “the windmill hovering over hole 14 is disgusting & inappropriate.”
On his first day in office this year, Trump stopped new wind projects on public lands and waters. A judge called that order “arbitrary” and said it violated federal law. Still, Trump persevered. Yesterday his administration said it would halt leases for five wind farms under construction off the East Coast, virtually gutting the offshore wind industry in the United States. The projects were “expected to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses,” my colleagues Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman report.
Perhaps in order not to appear arbitrary, Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, said that the decision “addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our East Coast population centers.”
Based on what evidence? The Pentagon has produced classified reports, Burgum said, and the Energy Department has found that wind farms could interfere with radar systems.
Is this true? Military studies have indeed shown that offshore wind turbines could disrupt radar, Lisa told me. But they concluded that the risk could be offset with planning. A spokesman for one of the wind farms said it had worked “in close coordination with the military.” He pointed out that his project’s two pilot turbines had been operating for five years with no impact on national security.
It is not the first time the administration has justified a new policy — one it wanted to impose quickly without fretting over legal and regulatory procedures — with a broad claim. It just asserts there’s a problem.
