Windmills and National Security

 

Windmills and National Security

“This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last… Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.” 

 Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissent where the majority just looked the other way at Trump’s non-compliance with a court order.

“The Defense Department is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat. We’re in the business of deterring and winning wars.” 

Secretary of Defense, Major Pete Hegseth.

Trump believes that all he has to say is “emergency” or “national security,” and he can overrule courts, Congress and perhaps God Himself. Afterall, Trump is self-declared to be infallible. And repeatedly, the Supreme Court lets him ignore lower court rulings and even distort Supreme Court rulings to shade their interpretation seemingly to favor Trump. As virtually the entire rest of the world sees overreliance on fossil fuels to be a threat to their stability and a hinderance to future growth, Trump sees alternative energy as the real threat. His “drill, baby, drill” mantra, effectively killing Detroit’s EV business, has taken virtually the entire US carmaker manufacturing establishments out of the global automotive industry’s overwhelming commitment to cheaper and more efficient EVs. China now manufactures 70% of global EVs. Not much competition from the US, where unlike most of the rest of the world, EV sales have dropped 27%.

As Trump’s vendetta against alternative energy rises, there is a very real chance that he just might kill off Detroit’s automotive industry. Indeed, the Iran war and the concomitant rise in the price of gasoline just might accelerate Detroit’s demise. As reported by Kyle Stock and Lili Pike in the May 4th Bloomberg, “consumers in France, Germany and the U.K. drove off in 206,200 EVs, a 44% increase over the year-earlier period. In South Korea, electric car transactions more than doubled. In Italy, where the path to electrification has been slow, 16,000 battery-powered vehicles left dealerships in March, a 67% increase…

“Where EV sales are bubbling up, analysts point to a cocktail of two ingredients: elevated gas prices and affordable new models from Chinese automakers. Indeed, Chinese exports of EVs and hybrids reached a record in March, increasing 140% from the previous year, according to the China Passenger Car Assn.” EV sales were skyrocketing worldwide, except in the US, even before the Iran war.

If you look at some vocabulary machinations, you just might understand that Trump’s vicious antipathy towards climate change has absolutely nothing to do with national security. The US military has, for years, expanded their reliance on alternative energy, freeing military bases from complex supply lines and logistics based on hard shipping of oil and gas to military bases. The new word in military-speak is “resiliency.” As reported by Patrick Sisson in the May 1st FastCompany.com, “Given the rhetoric coming from today’s military leaders, you’d be right to think climate change and sustainability has been tossed aside. The nation’s 2025 National Security Strategy labeled climate change a ‘disastrous’ ideology… And yet, there is still progress on sustainability being made; only now, it’s been rebranded as resiliency. At an Army base at Fort Polk in Louisiana, a renovation promises a cleaner, less carbon-intensive future, as well as a better living situation for servicemembers and their families.

“Completed in early March, the base represents a first-of-its-kind, $30 million investment in modernizing traditionally outdated and poorly maintained housing. It includes the installation of a large-scale geothermal energy system, all using U.S.-made equipment. It’s the first such geothermal installation at a U.S. military base, and an investment in reducing the installation’s carbon footprint… The upgrades are projected to reduce the Fort Polk family housing portfolio’s annual electrical consumption and deliver more than $2.6 million in annual utility and operational cost savings. Beyond delivering long-term savings to the installation, the initiative fostered local economic growth by investing in the community and supporting the local workforce.”

Trump’s war with the fact of climate change may harken back to his lost battle in Scotland that first erupted publicly 15 years ago in a seemingly trivial spat over wind turbines visible from his Scottish golf course. He called them “windmills,” a Chinese con-job to sell “failed” electrical power generation to suckers around the world. To this day, Trump promulgates his absurd “climate change hoax” theory, even willing to waste taxpayer dollars to shut down alternative energy projects at varying stages of development. “The Trump administration will pay energy companies hundreds of millions of dollars to abandon their plans to build two wind farms off the U.S. coast, the Interior Department said Monday [4/27], in a repeat of a tactic the government used to cancel other offshore wind leases last month.

“The firms will forfeit their leases in federal waters for the two wind farms, one of which would have been built off New York and New Jersey and the other off California. The government will reimburse the companies a combined $885 million, the amount they paid for the leases under the Biden administration…In exchange, the companies have pledged to invest that money in oil and gas projects, including liquefied natural gas facilities along the Gulf Coast… The deals are modeled after a similar agreement last month [March] with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. TotalEnergies forfeited its leases for two wind projects planned off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, while committing to a range of fossil-fuel investments.” New York Times, April 27th.

Sequentially, Trump’s foreign and domestic policies have made living in the United State increasing unaffordable, tanked the US dollar by 10% (and falling) as global prices soar by reason of Iran’s closing the Strait of Hormuz. As federal deficits and consumer costs rise, Trump’s popularity has plunged into serious negative numbers. But Trump always prefers to double-down, backing his decisions even as they have been generally perceived as major errors in judgment. After all, as the hat says, “Trump was always right about everything.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and Trump’s double-down approach, supported by a terrified GOP-controlled Congress and a “whatever Trump wants” Supreme Court, is designed for an executive order governed nation, which may continue even if MAGA’s effort to rig the 2026 and 2028 elections fails.