Many Americans have come to expect that their government officials will at least give the appearance of telling the truth and basing their decisions on evidence, science and facts. Under Donald Trump, these assumptions are out the window and agency heads and their upper tier employees are expected to advance ideological goals regardless of the factual basis of their decisions.
Nowhere is this more consequential than at the Department of the Interior which oversees hundreds of millions of acres of land owned by the American people and has responsibility for implementing energy policy for 346 million Americans.
In the case of energy policy, the Department of Interior is responsible for leasing public lands for oil and gas development, wind and solar development, and for other energy sources. During the Biden years, the Interior Department was actively promoting wind and solar development on federal and private lands to the point that conservationists had to protect some sensitive places from solar arrays. Biden understood the climate crisis and he wanted the US to be competitive in the modern energy field.
Now the opposite it true with Interior Secretary Douglas Burgum doing everything possible, legal or not, to block wind and solar development on federal lands but also offshore and private lands in the US. Federal energy policy in 2026 is based on the personal beliefs of Donald Trump, no matter how poorly informed. His beliefs not only are the official policy of the federal government, but they are ideas that republican politicians must believe and repeat and campaign on.
Trump has said repeatedly that he believes that climate change is a “hoax” or a “green scam” and that our nation must fully invest in fossil fuels for the long term. He also believes that wind and solar are unreliable and “don’t work.” These ideas are common on right wing media and in the intellectual world of right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation. Trump operates within a hyper culture-war framework and with concern about loyalty to him of whoever is a player in a particular issue. Conservationists, renewable energy advocates, renewable energy businesspeople, climate scientists, energy engineers, and others focused on renewables are all disloyal because their ideas is at odds with Trump’s personal beliefs. Therefore, the full weight of the federal government must oppose those people and their efforts. Where Trump got the ideas he has about energy is an open question. He obviously didn’t consult with actual experts, and his views seem at least four decades out of date.
Oil and gas production needs little encouragement, but Trump has also done all he can administratively to revive the dying coal industry in the US. When his second term began many coal fired power plants were set to close for economic reasons but Trump has halted many closures even when it means that utility companies will lose money on their continued operation and toxic air pollution will continue to afflict communities near these plants. Coal mining impacts continue as well. The costs of running obsolete powerplants are passed on to the consumers. These moribund plants emit as much air pollution as 27 million cars according to the Associated Press.
At a time when the computer industry has built 3000 data centers and 1500 more are planned for rural areas in the US, Trump’s team is working to block renewable energy projects that could fuel these energy hungry facilities. Trump’s people feel the plants should be fueled with coal, natural gas, or oil which all pollute the air, cost more than renewable energy and all emit substantial greenhouse gasses.
Nowhere has Trump and Secretary Burgum’s anti-renewable campaign been more pronounced than in blocking offshore wind farms being built off the east coast by private companies. Trump got on a warpath against wind energy when he was developing a golf resort in Aberdeen Scotland in 2012 and new wind turbines were planned offshore. He felt they were ugly and urged the Scottish government to have them stopped. He said they would hurt tourism, meaning they would depress sales at his golf resort. Since then, there has been a substantial increase in wild energy development off Scotland and other UK countries and the wind farm off Aberdeen has some of the most powerful wind turbines anywhere.
Stung, Trump has taken his hatred of wind turbines into the federal government and employees like Douglas Burgum have been instructed to block wind farms across the US. Citing “national security” without defining the actual threat, Trump’s team blocked leases for five large wind projects off the east coast in December 2025 even after a federal judge had ruled that his blockage of wind projects was “arbitrary and capricious.” Military officials told the court that the wind farms had been studied by all branches of the military and found to be safe and positive for the United States.
Even so, Trump tried to shut down the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island when the project was 80% complete and had billions of dollars in sunk costs. The courts ruled the project could go forward.
Then in March 2026 Trump convinced the French energy company TotalEnergies to abandon two leases for wind farms off the US east coast and invest in oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico instead. One can hope that in a new administration the wind development can continue in those lease sites.
Trump has also blocked 60 wind farms slated to be built on federal land in the West. Trump has directed utilities to burn fossil fuels instead even as Secretary Burgum eases regulations on oil and coal leasing while creating new regulatory obstacles for wind farms. Trump and his right-wing Defense and Interior Secretaries have blocked wind farms on private land inside the US by saying these are national security risks and need Pentagon review. As it turns out the Pentagon doesn’t review the projects as required so the applications languish or die in Secretary Hegseth’s office, killing the projects.
Even so, the US clean power sector is booming. In 2025 alone, it attracted $79 billion in investment, supported more than 1.4 million jobs, and accounted for over 90% of all new electricity capacity added to the grid, according to the American Clean Power Association.
The Trump administration is obsessed with ideology over the wellbeing of the country or the private sector in the US. America is facing an electricity shortage as computer corporations rush to compete building data centers across the US. These data centers are massive computer facilities that use large amounts of electricity and water. They are stressing water supplies in arid states, and they are raising utility rates for Americans by hogging electricity. Many communities and states are pushing back.
Yet Trump insists that these data centers, built by his campaign donors, are a good thing but they must be powered by fossil fuels or nuclear power according to him. There is no new nuclear power, and fossil fuels pollute the air and worsen the climate crisis. Notice that ideology is more important than keeping the US functioning.
Finally, it is worth noting that the Trump administration is not “conservative” as they claim. Republicans and conservatives until the rise of MAGA were interested in deregulating business and promoting free enterprise. They were about jobs and innovation. Trump rejects those ideas. For him and his buddies, renewable energy must be blocked because it is disloyal to the Trump philosophy and him personally. Even large corporations that are not fossil fuel companies must be interfered with and frustrated and forced to lose billions of dollars for Trump to stop his hated renewable energy.
This might be a fun joke, but the climate crisis is real and other countries like China are taking the lead in solar and wind technology as those technologies are frustrated under Donald Trump in the US. Especially since the Trump Iran war started, the rest of the world is rushing toward renewable energy development while Trump digs in his heels and raises utility bills for all Americans as he insists on 1950’s energy policies.
Tom Ribe
