Photo: Offshore wind turbines in the Irish Sea, by Andy Dingley, via Wikimedia Commons.
The plan was to sink more than a billion dollars into the ocean off Rhode Island to build Revolution Wind. The 705mw, $1.5bn offshore wind farm had been 15 years in the making. The first environmental assessments started in 2011 and the first turbine was installed in September 2023. As planned, the turbines would power 350,000 homes and operate across two states. Its developer, Ørsted, might be Danish but in its corporate communications it sought to emphasize how the work would be all-American. The manufacturing chain the project depended on spanned 40 U.S. states and employed hundreds of unionized workers. By August 2025, Revolution Wind was four-fifths complete, with 45 out of 65 wind turbines installed. Then Donald Trump tried to kill it.
So far, the Canadian province of Ontario has been the only jurisdiction in the world to rip out wind turbines once built, but the U.S. looks like it is about to join them. Revolution Wind was not the only offshore wind farm to have its approvals yanked by the Trump administration in an effort to plunge its value as an asset into the sea. On his first day in office Trump signed an executive order that “temporarily” halted all federal wind permits. The passing of the federal government’s finance bill ended tax credits for wind and solar projects unless construction started within a year of the bill’s passage. The Trump administration pulled approvals for the Lava Ridge Wind project in Idaho in July as the President stood in front of a bank of television cameras to rail against “windmills” he described as a “con job” and “ugly”. The result was an effort to encircle the U.S. renewable industry: the “temporary” block on approvals meant no new construction could begin before tax credits were phased out even as the Trump administration repeatedly demonstrated that, going forward, it might pull approvals that had already been given at any time.
The attacks went even further, including efforts to undermine the very foundations of climate science itself. Over the last few months the Trump administration has sought to attack data collection, proposing to allow satellites relied upon by farmers and climate scientists alike to burn up in the earth’s atmosphere, and shutting down the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. In a cruel irony for the “America First” Presidency, that facility is itself a monument to American scientific excellence. The atmospheric CO2 readings the lab has been collecting since 1958 provided the evidence for establishing that climate change is occurring, and underpin the Keeling Curve, which describes how concentrations are increasing in the atmosphere. Not content with shaping the direction of policy into the future, the administration has reached back into the past to rewrite existing climate reports – an act it described as an “update”. In the process, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, replaced the 721 volunteer scientists who had previously worked assessing the latest climate science from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Science with just five hand-picked climate deniers with scientific credentials. Meanwhile, the administration has appointed climate deniers to key decision-making roles within the administration. One of them, Lee Zeldin, now heads the Environmental Protection Agency where he is pushing to overturn the crucial 2009 endangerment finding that first listed CO2 as a pollutant, allowing it to be regulated.
With the administration hostile to large-scale renewable energy, anti-wind groups have even been emboldened to attack those who have been monitoring and reporting on their activities. On August 11th, an anti-wind group in Rhode Island issued a legal threat demanding a Brown University lab retract three published papers analyzing its links to the fossil fuel industry. This research includes network analysis of the activity of the lawyers representing the group, who issued the demand.
The result is an unstable and deeply uncertain operating environment that makes investment in new renewable energy projects impossible and threatens to render existing assets worthless. To those on the outside this might seem like madness, but Brown University Professor Mark Blyth says there is a method to what is taking place. The political economist, who had no involvement in the research into anti-wind groups, says the Trump administration is engaging in what he calls a “strategy of carbon dominance”.
“Carbon dominance is basically when you turn stranding assets into a political strategy, and that is essentially what's going on right now,” Blyth says.
For a deep-dive on “carbon dominance” with Blyth, check out today’s podcast episode!
What the world is watching unfold within the US, Blyth says, is an “existential struggle” between carbon-heavy Republican states and largely Democratic ones that have embraced green tech. The clash between these political blocs with their respective constituencies has long been foreshadowed, including in an academic paper published in 2021 that described how an “existential politics of climate change” would emerge as “holders of both climate-forcing and ‘climate-vulnerable’ assets stand to lose some or even all of their assets’ value over time, and with them, the basis of their political power” as the transition away from fossil fuels takes hold.
“This dynamic contest between opposing interests is likely to intensify in many sites of political contestation, from the subnational to transnational levels,” it said. “As it does so, climate politics will become increasingly existential, potentially reshaping political alignments within and across countries.”
The first six months of the Trump administration illustrate these dynamics. With the support of core Republican states whose business is “ farms, fuel, fertilizer, feed stock, plastic, petrochemicals and manufacturing”, the Trump administration has been working to inflict what many once thought was the inevitable fate of fossil fuel infrastructure on renewables.
“ Stranded assets were something that would happen to carbon assets because as the world got warmer and as governments got serious about climate change, they would tighten, if you will, the regulations and it becomes too expensive to have these things or produce these things,” Blyth says. “Companies would rationally disinvest from them and investors would disinvest from them and they would become stranded assets and therefore nobody would wanna hold them.
“But what if you flipped that on its head?”
What if, indeed. A constellation of fossil fuel advocates and think tanks associated with the Trump administration have been willing to offer up ideas, strategies and tactics for making this happen, and some of these ideas have been road-tested in traditional Republican states like Texas. Among them is self-described philosopher Alex Epstein, author of the book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future,” who demanded the administration cut support for renewable energy during negotiations on the “Big Beautiful Bill”. Another group, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) – a conservative think tank that has received funding from a who’s who of the American right, including the Koch Brothers and Exxon – has been increasingly influential within the administration. The group’s former president, Brooke Rollins, served as an economics advisor during the first Trump administration. In 2024, TPPF joined more than 100 other conservative organizations to sign on to Project 2025.
Since Trump's inauguration for his second term, TPPF has petitioned his administration to join its war on the Vineyard Wind farm – the first offshore wind project in the US, which it once sued to block – and a former TPPF economist was appointed to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the previous head was fired for reporting bad news. Relationships between these groups often overlap and self-reinforce. In one example Alex Epstein addressed a conference co-hosted by TPPF and the Heritage Foundation in 2017 with language that would come to echo Trump administration press releases.
“If we liberate fossil fuel use instead of restricting it, that is compatible with a safe climate, a clean environment, and continuous progress,” Epstein said.
Texas, a state close to the heart of both the US Republican Party and the country’s oil and gas industry, appears to have been a laboratory for testing out attack strategies, despite the state leading the country in renewables growth. Though there have always been efforts to stymie the rollout of renewable energy, the latest push finds its roots in 2019 as a faction within the Democrats began to promote the idea of a Green New Deal that would end the burning of oil, gas and coal. Sensing a threat to their traditional constituencies, a bloc of Republicans dug in to mount a defence of fossil fuels despite the general support Texas had previously offered renewables. The 2021 Texas blackout – similar to events in South Australia, Queensland and, more recently, Spain – only heightened this sense of siege as the traditional grid failed. Both the TPPF and Epstein rushed to take political advantage by falsely blaming the blackouts on renewables. Epstein’s talking points claiming renewables were “often useless when you need them most” were circulated to the Texas Governor, the oil and gas regulator, and fossil fuel industry lobbyists. In fact, the blackout was largely caused by issues with the poor maintenance of the state's barely regulated fossil-powered grid.
The power struggle has now evolved to include attempts to introduce targeted policies that work to make renewable energy less attractive as financial assets. In 2024, a small group of Texan Republicans began to propose bills that imposed a state-mandated future for legacy fossil fuel infrastructure and burdened large-scale renewables projects with strict permitting and consultation requirements that required onerous new projects to consult with anyone living within a wide area around the project. Among the more controversial proposals was a bill that would force renewable energy generators that did not have batteries or some other back-up to pay the difference in price when the price of renewable energy dropped below that produced by fossil fuel assets, effectively neutralizing the profitability of the renewable asset.
Since inauguration day, the Trump administration has been making decisions that work to achieve the same goal nationally. The goal isn’t so much to slam a handbrake on the transition so much as end it entirely by creating an environment of total uncertainty to grind investment in renewables to a halt. If it was once thought that more than a trillion dollars in oil, gas and coal infrastructure was at risk of being stranded as the world moved to phase out fossil fuels, the actions of the Trump administration makes the $96 million fossil fuel producers sunk into his presidential campaign look like a smart investment. But that's not all. The U.S. has been exporting anti-renewables rhetoric around the world for years, and now Trump's politics are spreading too.
What has been happening in Texas and the US more broadly appears to have been replicated in other jurisdictions where sympathetic center-right libertarian and conservative governments hold office, at both national and sub-national levels. Drilled has previously reported how, since coming to power in a coalition cobbled together from three smaller parties, New Zealand’s government has moved to demolish the country’s climate policies in a way that promotes gas and disadvantages renewables. Most recently the country moved to restart gas exploration after it quietly withdrew from the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) in July.
Next door, Australia has so far avoided a similar fate at the national level during its recent federal election, but state-level conservative governments appear to be following the example of their counterparts in Texas. Since coming to power in October 2024, the conservative Liberal-National Party imposed a new regulatory regime on renewable energy projects in Queensland, a major gas producing and export state, that imposes more onerous consultation requirements with those living around new wind and solar projects. The similarity extends to the rhetoric used to sell these proposals to the public. In Texas, Republican Jared Patterson said his push to remove tax credits for renewables would “level the playing field” with fossil fuel producers; in Queensland the state government said its push to make it harder for large-scale renewables projects to get environmental approvals would similarly “level the playing field”. Neither have ministers been shy about their goals. In April Queensland’s Minister for Natural Resources and Mines, Dale Last, told parliament he had been working to encourage new gas expansion.
“I have been saying to the gas companies in this state, ‘I’ll sign. You’ll drill.’ That is the message we are sending across Queensland, because developing our gas reserves and bringing them online means prosperity and jobs for Queensland,” Last said.
A month later the state government cancelled the conditional approval of a billion-dollar wind farm.
Next door in the Northern Territory, the conservative Country Liberal Party (CLP) has followed a similar tack in their efforts to create a major gas production and export industry. Territory governments, with a population about 250,000, have always courted the gas industry as a theoretical source of quick cash, but since coming to power in August 2024, the CLP has slashed funding to environment and climate organizations and sought to juice new gas extraction by loosening regulations.
Where governments in other jurisdictions have been unwilling to follow suit, Blyth says the Trump administration has attempted to use tariffs to bully and cajole to derail global decarbonization. In a recent example, the US sought to use negotiations over tariffs to lock the EU into long-term contracts to buy American gas at the expense of climate policy. Whether or not Trump will succeed remains to be seen, Blyth says, given the China factor. As western countries spent the last decade talking big about climate change but delivering little, China has rapidly moved to dominate the renewable energy supply chain. Thanks to its massive manufacturing capacity and the Chinese government’s race to get off oil and gas as soon as possible over concerns about geopolitical tensions, solar is the cheapest form of energy. In June, China alone installed a Poland’s worth of solar power alone, with current forecasts suggesting the country’s oil demand will peak in 2027. China’s logic is shared by other countries in the region. India would also prefer not to be reliant on foreign-owned oil, gas or coal and countries like Indonesia – a massive market for Australian coal—have announced their own self-sufficiency plans targeting 100GW of new solar. If Southeast Asia was once considered a demand-sink to soak up Western gas, there are signs many countries may leap-frog the development of costly, complex fossil fuel infrastructure. As Drilled previously reported, Japan—a foundational buyer in the global gas market that has traditionally soaked up two fifths of the world’s gas—has been buying more gas than it needs from countries like Australia and re-selling it while it is still on the water. Pakistan, similarly, has asked Qatar to defer gas shipments over the next five years due to falling demand.
Against these dynamics, Trump’s plan to “drill, baby, drill” and flood the world with American oil and gas looks like a bad gamble, Blyth says. With new supply coming online from Qatar, global gas prices are already expected to fall. Meanwhile, within the US, tariffs are expected to drive up the cost of steel, equipment and labor needed to produce.
“This is where the story [for Trump] falls apart, because at the end of the day, the problem is we have too much carbon. We have too many carbon assets,” Blyth says. ”What's the point in opening up another fracking field in Oklahoma? At the end of the day, the world price is 20 bucks because everything's so saturated. So in a sense, it's sort of double-edged. You want the cheapness that keeps you in the game, but if it gets too cheap, you knock out your own producers.”
With Trump’s Republicans holding the Presidency, House of Representatives and the Senate, and the Democrats largely in retreat, Blyth says the existential politics of the moment make what happens next an open question. The damage from a one-term Trump administration is immense; a two-term Republican administration would have broad scope to rewire the American economy in a way that is dirtier, more expensive and more carbon-dependent – and the confidence to dictate terms to the rest of the world.
“The basic idea is whoever controls the energy infrastructure of the 21st century runs the world, and the Americans are very scared that it's not gonna be oil and gas, and they're doing everything they can to make sure that it is,” Blyth says.
