The knives are out for wind energy in America. President Donald Trump has said he wants a future in which “no windmills are being built.” Hours after taking his oath of office, he signed an executive order pausing leases for any new wind projects on federal land and in U.S. waters. Opponents of wind power — many of them tied to the fossil fuel industry — have taken note and are furiously lobbying the government to block projects already under construction, as well.
One man could steer this conversation back toward reason: Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The former North Dakota governor, who in his confirmation hearing professed support for an “all of the above” energy policy, should bypass the extreme path that anti-wind activists are laying down.
The president’s executive order has already hurt the offshore wind industry. Several projects proposed for the East Coast, with a combined estimated capacity of more than 30 gigawatts of energy — enough to power more than 12 million homes — have been halted. New Jersey’s state utility board was forced to put its plans for new offshore wind developments on ice as investors pulled out.
Should Trump’s moratorium remain in place, the United States, blessed as it is with long coastlines ripe for wind farming, would abandon an abundant source of clean energy, just when it’s needed most. And it would do so as other countries surpass America in the burgeoning industry. 
China’s capacity for wind power is already three times that of the United States. Denmark derives about 60 percent of its total energy from wind.
Obstructing clean energy projects despite growing demand is bad enough. But the administration has signaled that it might go further by stopping ones that already have won approval.
Trump’s executive order instructs the Interior Department to conduct “a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases, identifying any legal bases for such removal.”
Anti-wind organizations are also pressuring Burgum to act. A group of them recently sent a letter urging him to order four wind projects to cease construction.
Their argument is one of Trump’s favorites: that offshore wind turbines are killing endangered North Atlantic right whales. No evidence supports this assertion, however. The species began to decline around 2010, before offshore wind projects in the United States were operational, and since 2020 the population seems to have stabilized — despite the installation of turbines.
Scientists insist the more likely culprits for recent die-offs are the right whales’ collisions with boats and entanglements with fishing nets.
To revoke the wind farm approvals, Burgum would have to overrule the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who reviewed the projects’ effects on whale populations.
These scientists acknowledged that installing turbines had the potential to harm whales, but they determined that this danger was not great enough to justify blocking the projects. Rescinding their decisions could chill investment in future energy projects.
Why take the risk, after all, if the government would be ignoring its own science agencies and adding a new layer of uncertainty?
And stopping the projects wouldn’t be free. Residents would still need to cover the costs of the construction that has been done in the form of higher utility bills — while receiving no additional electricity in return. Would Burgum, whose state doubled its wind energy generation while he was governor, really want to get in the way of other states’ strategies?
An irony here is that Republicans in Washington have long bemoaned the onerous regulatory hurdles that have made energy projects near-impossible to get off the ground.
