Following these moves, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to vow that the administration \u201cwill not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!\u201d<\/p>\n
What Trump and the Interior Department are doing, experts say, is using environmentalists\u2019 legal playbook against them to throttle renewable energy. Laws meant to protect and safeguard wildlife and public lands from mining, drilling, and habitat degradation \u2014 such as the Federal Land Policy and Management Act\u2019s prohibition against \u201cunnecessary or undue degradation\u201d \u2014 are instead being wielded as a cudgel against wind and solar.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are effectively trying to co-opt arguments that we have used for years to push back on fossil fuels,\u201d said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director at the Western Environmental Law Center, a public interest firm.\u201cBut I think it should go without saying that they are abusing those laws.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Schlenker-Goodrich pointed to the DOI\u2019s recent capacity density order as a particularly troubling example. Secretarial orders are meant to function as internal guidance to agencies. \u201cThey are not intended to put in place substantive rules that dictate outcomes,\u201d he said, in this case \u201ca de facto prohibition against the siting and permitting of renewables on federal public lands.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Solar and wind farms will never technically be able to produce as much energy per acre as an oil and gas facility \u2014 but that is also not the best measure of impact. Wind turbines are only a handful of feet wide at the base \u2014 the land or water that surrounds them remains unaffected and can easily be used for farming or agriculture. Solar panels can be placed on brownfields or integrated on agricultural land. When a wind or solar farm is decommissioned, the equipment is removed, the ground is decompacted, and vegetation is replanted. Within a year or two, you can barely tell anything was there, and the land can immediately be reused \u2014 the possibilities are limited only by zoning laws.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In contrast, when a refinery or a fossil fuel plant shuts down, the ground is poisoned. Cancer-causing chemicals like benzene saturate the soil and remediation can take years, assuming it happens at all. And that doesn\u2019t even account for the massive amount of energy spent producing and transporting fossil fuels to power plants.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe DOI is fixating on this one metric, capacity density, to the exclusion of a holistic understanding of costs and benefits of a particular energy technology,\u201d said Schlenker-Goodrich.<\/p>\n
Refineries, gas plants, and nuclear plants also aren\u2019t typically built on public land, nor are they likely to be. Private industry has little interest in dealing with even more federal regulations, according to Josh Axelrod, senior policy advocate at the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe [DOI is] trying to come up with the facade of a rational reason to stop doing anything related to renewables, but this one especially is really mind-boggling,\u201d said Axelrod. \u201cEverything it compares wind and solar to \u2014 none of those types of facilities are built on federal land \u2026 There\u2019s no comparison.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Interior Department\u2019s order<\/a> that all wind and solar projects on federal land undergo \u201celevated review\u201d is another misuse of environmental law, experts said. Routine procedures that would have previously been handled by a DOI bureaucrat will now need the secretary\u2019s personal sign-off. And the restrictions will impact projects on private land just as much as on public land. A recent analysis<\/a> from The American Clean Power Association found that 27 of the new procedures requiring Bergum\u2019s sign-off \u2014 such as needing consultations around harm to wildlife and endangered species \u2014 will allow the DOI to effectively end development of renewable energy projects nationwide. The goal, it seems, is to create an impossible backlog that bleeds projects of funding before they can get off the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n All of this is in service of propping up dying industries, such as coal, said Alex Klass, an environmental law professor at the University of Michigan. \u201c[The administration] can talk about energy dominance and talk about the need for new energy,\u201d he said, \u201cbut before there was always an argument [that] you shouldn\u2019t try to prop up an industry that can\u2019t make it on its own. That\u2019s basically what they\u2019re doing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n And it is being done with little concern for the environmental consequences.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bergum cited<\/a> concerns about migratory bird populations when he moved to cancel offshore areas for wind energy development. But on Tuesday, the DOI announced<\/a> that it plans to hold 30 oil and gas lease auctions over the next 15 years \u2014 also offshore. Although the administration has declared an \u201cenergy emergency,\u201d it\u2019s clear that actual energy development is being approached from a position of political theater, rather than practicality.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump has claimed that offshore wind turbines \u201care causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,\u201d but there is no evidence<\/a> of that. Upon taking office, the administration almost immediately moved<\/a> to fire scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration whose research centered around ensuring offshore wind was safe for whales. Offshore drilling, on the other hand, is proven to be enormously harmful to marine environments. Seismic blasting can result in hearing loss \u2014 affecting whales\u2019 ability to breed and communicate \u2014 and animals are often killed by vessel strikes. When something goes wrong on a drill rig, it\u2019s apocalyptic for the nearby environment. The Deepwater Horizon spill remains<\/a> the worst environmental disaster in United States history.<\/p>\n Interior officials have also worked<\/a> to roll back environmental regulations around mining, eliminate<\/a> Biden-era regulations that provided protection for public lands, and fast-track mining despite<\/a> local concerns of water scarcity. Given the administration\u2019s aggressive antipathy for environmental regulations, experts say it\u2019s impossible to believe that the Interior Department\u2019s sudden conservationist concerns around solar and wind impacts are being made in good faith.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like the Biden administration stopped permitting oil and gas development. There\u2019s lots of oil and gas development,\u201d said Klass. \u201cThey just also tried to prioritize wind and solar. Here they\u2019re saying, \u2018Not only are we not going to prioritize [wind and solar], we\u2019re going to try to shut it down entirely.’\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Department of the Interior, or DOI, has such a wide-ranging set of duties that it\u2019s sometimes referred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-99588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Wind](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/wind-turbines-in-farmland.jpeg\")
A farmer harvests a wheat field with a combine harvester, next to wind turbines.
\n Photo by JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n