Feb. 28 – According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), major energy lobbying groups, including the American Petroleum Institute (API), recently urged the Trump administration to halt its offensive against offshore wind. Since taking office, Trump has maintained a hard line on offshore wind and halted major projects from Massachusetts to Virginia. In a meeting with oil industry executives on the on the last month, Trump said, “My goal is to make sure not a single wind turbine gets built,” adding, “Wind is the worst form of energy and the most expensive form of energy.”
The problem is the Democrats’ countermove. As the Trump administration deliberately withered wind projects, a form of renewable energy, Senate Democrats responded by flatly refusing to negotiate the “Energy Reform Act,” which the oil and gas industry has desperately wanted.
In the United States today, laying a single oil pipeline can take years due to environmental regulations and lawsuits. The oil industry has pushed for legislation to streamline permitting to pull out these regulatory nails, but Trump’s attacks on wind have provoked Democrats, throwing the legislation itself into a maze.
Toby Rice, CEO of EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the United States, lamented, “Infrastructure bottlenecks mean that even if we pull out gas, there is no way to get it to market.” In the end, from the oil industry’s perspective, it has found itself in a peculiar strategic symbiosis in which it must tolerate building wind farms to push through pipelines.
Experts say this stalemate will also hamper the United States’ ability to meet surging power demand driven by the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers and manufacturing reshoring. One energy lobbyist said in private, expressing bewilderment, “The president’s aversion to wind is not strategically understandable.”
※ This article has been translated by AI.
Brazil Energy Insight 
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