January 2025 |
260102 |
ENERGY CHRONICLE |
On January 12, a US federal court allowed Danish energy company Oersted to continue building its nearly completed “Revolution Wind” wind farm off the US East Coast. This stopped the US government's arbitrary decision, which in August last year had ordered all work to be stopped, citing extremely flimsy reasons of sudden “concerns related to national security interests” that first had to be resolved (250804). The US Department of the Interior was thus obviously following an instruction from President Trump, who is a notorious wind power hater. When he took office in January last year, Trump announced the immediate halt of all new wind farms, along with the US's renewed withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement (250101), which he had already ordered during his first term in office (170606).
Judge Royce Lamberth indicated that he considered the allegedly necessary security review to be a pretext. He justified his preliminary injunction to lift the construction freeze on the grounds that the concerns raised retrospectively did not justify allowing the long-approved and almost completed project to suffer irreparable damage and thus fail. Alluding to the government's planned delaying tactics to blackmail Oersted, he asked the Justice Department's lawyer the rhetorical question: “You want to shut down something that costs $1.5 million a day while you figure out what you're going to do?”
The US Department of the Interior had suspended the leases for a total of five large offshore wind power projects off the east coast until the end of 2025. It justified this with concerns for national security, which the War Department – as the US Department of Defense has been renamed by Trump since September 2025 – only recognized retrospectively: The rotor blades and reflective towers of the turbines would cause radar interference, which could make it difficult to locate and detect threats.
“The Trump administration is looking for any excuse to continue its attack on clean energy,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul. “However, there is no credible justification for this halt.” The industry association National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) emphasized that “every project under construction has already undergone review by the Department of Defense without objection.”
In addition to Oersted, the US company Dominion Energy and the Norwegian energy company Equinor were also affected by the government's arbitrary decision. However, with the temporary ban on the almost completed Oersted wind farm off the US East Coast, Trump was pursuing a very specific goal: he wanted to put pressure on the Danish state, which is the majority owner of Oersted with a 50.1 percent stake. At the same time, he reaffirmed his intention to annex the island of Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, to the US. He had already announced this before his inauguration, adding that he also wanted to annex Canada and the Panama Canal for the US (250101).
Trump is clearly serious about all this: shortly before Christmas, he even appointed the governor of the southern state of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, as “special envoy” for Greenland. Landry immediately expressed his gratitude for this honor on the now infamous portal “X” (formerly Twitter): “Thank you, Donald Trump. It is an honor to serve in this honorary position to make Greenland part of the US.”
The US president has long demonstrated how little he cares about civilized manners, treaties, laws, or international law by having the US military sink suspicious boats off the Venezuelan coast, which may or may not have belonged to drug traffickers, and simply shoot the survivors. In early January, he then ordered a military attack on the Venezuelan capital Caracas, while at the same time a special commando unit abducted dictator Maduro and his wife to the US to put him on trial there for drug trafficking under US law.
The US president's megalomania and lust for power have left NATO allies in a state of shock. Secretly, almost all of them probably consider Trump to be more or less a psychopath. At the same time, however, they still find it advisable to treat him as carefully as a severely disturbed psychiatric patient who is also heavily armed. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has gone the furthest so far, saying with regard to a possible annexation of Greenland by the US: “If the United States decides to attack another NATO country, then it's all over.”
A few days after the attack on Venezuela, Trump actually intensified his threats against Greenland. The use of military force is “obviously” a possibility if the “acquisition” of Greenland does not work out, government spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on January 6. When NATO countries Denmark, Germany, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland issued a joint statement opposing such rhetoric, Trump announced that he would impose punitive tariffs of ten percent on them starting February 1. Norway, Sweden, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Finland issued a joint statement condemning such rhetoric, Trump announced that he would impose punitive tariffs of 10 percent on them starting February 1, which would rise to 25 percent in June if no agreement on the purchase of the island had been reached by then. Apparently, he was also responding to the deployment of a handful of soldiers to Greenland by Germany and France at Denmark's invitation to refute Trump's argument that only his country could prevent the island from being annexed by Russia or China.
Another highlight of this absurd theater was that on January 15, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado passed on the Nobel Peace Prize, which had been awarded to her in December, to Trump of all people, who had loudly but unsuccessfully demanded it for himself (250901). Apparently, she wanted to win the favor of the US president after he tried to secure the new supremacy of the US by cooperating with the old ruling clique in Caracas, despite the violent abduction of the previous dictator Maduro, instead of relying on the oppressed opposition. When the Nobel Prize Committee pointed out that the prize was not transferable, the megalomaniac blamed the Norwegian government and sent a message to Norwegian Prime Minister Støre: “Dear Jonas, since your country has decided not to award me the Nobel Peace Prize for ending eight wars, I no longer feel obliged to think exclusively about peace, although it will always be at the forefront of my mind. I can now concentrate on what is good and right for the United States.”
Trump has thus made it quite clear that he intends to use armed force to get what he is denied. At the end of January, he graciously refrained from claiming Greenland after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte promised to renegotiate the agreement on the US military presence on the island, which belongs to Denmark. Trump then proudly announced that the US would thus gain unlimited and permanent access to Greenland. The World Economic Forum in Davos, which was taking place at the same time and was thought to have already gently fallen asleep, was revived by Trump with a comedic performance, during which, however, no one dared to laugh. Among other things, he repeated the nonsense about wind energy that he had already spouted in September before the UN General Assembly (250901). He also sent out invitations to establish a “peace council,” with which he apparently wants to compete with the UN. At the beginning of January, he had already ordered the US to withdraw from 31 UN and 35 other international organizations.