‘We Will Not Have Climate Progress Without a Functional Democracy’
By Christian Roselund / Climate Action RI
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The threat posed by these orders spoke to our fears in the
climate movement: that federal orders could be unstoppable; that all of our
work could be for nothing; that we would lose our chance to decarbonize the
East Coast for a decade or more; and that the climate crisis will spin out of
control.
There’s a real basis for these concerns. While our region’s
growing solar fleet is substantially eating into gas use in power plants in the
spring and summer, output is less in the fall and winter. Without offshore
wind, there is simply no credible near-term plan to replace or even
significantly reduce our outsized dependence on gas and petroleum in the
winter, and to get off the roller coaster of high power prices caused by this
dependence.
The impact on workers is much more immediate: thousands in
the construction industry got put out of work three days before Christmas, and
face an uncertain future.
Once the immediate fear subsides, there are the facts. All
of these offshore wind projects were fully vetted by the U.S. military during
multi-year federal review processes that were necessary for them to proceed to
construction.
And there is no legal basis for the Trump administration to
revoke leases on a whim. This was demonstrated by how quickly the courts shot
down this summer’s stop work order on Revolution Wind. The judge went so far as
to characterize the administration’s actions as “the height of arbitrary and
capricious.”
Authoritarian tactics
That BOEM’s action is highly unlikely to be supported by any
legal basis is entirely characteristic of the approach of the Trump
administration. And it points to why Trump is not just a threat to our region’s
workforce and to our ability to stabilize and reduce energy costs while
combating the climate crisis, but to our Republic.
At the most basic level, what Trump and the fossil fuel
stooges he has put in power are doing is bullying. It’s an attempt to scare off
an emerging industry that threatens the obscene profits of the oil and gas
industry, by means of extreme regulatory uncertainty.
But it is also reminiscent of so many other actions by the
Trump administration, such as his executive order attempting to overturn the
constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. Many of Trump’s actions in
the first year of his second term have fallen outside the bounds of his
administration’s legal authority and due process.
That’s the point. Trump is intentionally and routinely
overstepping these bounds to establish an entirely different kind of governance
and ultimately a different kind of American society. These are exercises of
power not because there is a legal basis or evidentiary record, but because the
strong man says so.
An essential aspect of these actions is that they are based
on premises that are transparently bogus. The classified “national security”
claim of Trump’s latest assault on offshore wind is far from the first one.
We have tariffs on Canadian imports based on the claim that
Canada is allowing fentanyl to be smuggled across the border, when in reality
the overwhelming majority of fentanyl coming into the United States crosses our
southern border. We have global tariffs imposed due to the threat that imports
of lumber, upholstered furniture, and kitchen cabinets allegedly pose to our
national security.
We have military strikes on boats in the Caribbean that no
expert thinks are smuggling drugs to the United States. We have immigrants who
have not been convicted of any crime being called the “worst of the worst,” and
so many other examples of the Trump administration giving blatantly false
rationales for its actions.
Trump is daring the system to stop him. Like his exceeding
the executive branch’s legal authority, this is a demonstration of power.
Power over reality
It’s a very specific kind of power Trump seeks: power over
reality. Authoritarian regimes need not only to control what their subjects do.
They need to control what their subjects see, think, and feel, and they do so
by controlling public narratives.
The Trump administration is working hard to replace public discourse based on
facts and evidence with one that is controlled by his dictates, and those of
his oligarchic backers in the tech industry and the oil and gas industry. This
has happened everywhere, from the scrubbing of climate information on the EPA
website to his installing executives at CBS.
A friend of mine in solar advocacy in Washington, D.C.,
revealed to me that in the Trump administration, when Trump puts something on
his Truth Social media network, the post is called a “truth.” This naming is
identical to what was used in the former Soviet Union for a main organ of state
media, Pravda (“truth”).
What is “true” in the America that Trump is trying to build
is not what is backed by fact and evidence. It’s what the boss said.
The bad news is that this is not one man, but symptomatic of
larger problems in our society. On Jan. 2, while we in the climate and labor
movement were holding a press conference and rally to protest Trump’s war on
offshore wind in Providence, he was posting social media messages with
doctored, out of date, and inaccurately captioned photos linking bird deaths to
wind turbines.
This claim is similar to the big lie propagated by local
anti-wind groups, which have routinely claimed, without a shred of evidence and
contrary to the findings of marine scientists, that offshore wind is killing
whales. At least one of these groups claims to have worked with the Trump
administration on its anti-wind orders, which should not be a surprise. As
these groups’ organizing relies on spreading conspiracy theories and a barrage
of misleading when not false claims, they can be seen as a local militia in the
Trump administration’s war on science and evidence-based decision-making.
This fight is far from over
All is not lost. As long the courts and other institutions
in the U.S. government hold up, Trump and his administration cannot get away
with their plans. And so far the courts have taken a very dim view of the
lawless actions of this administration.
Three lawsuits have already been filed by offshore wind
developers against the freeze on activities and the review of leases. If the
courts maintain their commitment to requirements of legal due process and
evidence, this pause on offshore activities could be brief.
And in the bigger scheme, we are not without power.
Authoritarian regimes, given their need to control reality, are often quite
brittle. Nationally, the Trump administration’s approval ratings are in the
toilet, given that the daily, lived reality of Americans tends to contradict
his statements, whether this is the reality of prices going up due to tariffs
or their law-abiding immigrant neighbors being terrorized.
Here in Rhode Island, we have an alliance of environmental
advocates and organized labor standing behind our offshore wind industry. The
industry is further vocally supported by the McKee administration and every
member of our Congressional delegation. We demonstrated that when we brought
more than 100 people, including everyone from members of the U.S. Congress to
union millwrights, out in the snow to protest on Jan. 2.
The remaining three years of the Trump administration are
going to be a struggle. But just like the steel monopoles in the Atlantic Ocean
that will hold wind turbines, we aren’t going anywhere. And while the
connection between our fight for good jobs, stable power prices and climate
action may at times seem distant to the struggle to resist an authoritarian
takeover of America, these are deeply connected. We will not have climate
progress without a functional democracy.
Every article in the press that is based on research and
facts instead of conspiracy theories or authoritarian dictates, every time we
stand up to say no to unlawful orders, every action taken for democracy and
rule of law erodes what Trump is trying to do. This is not going to be easy,
but in the end we will prevail.
Christian Roselund is the co-lead of Climate Action Rhode Island’s Yes to
Wind campaign. He lives in Providence.
