Saturday, June 21, 2025
The administration of President Trump is making an unbridled push to block renewable-energy projects — including, last month, halting the placement of 54 wind turbines in the ocean south of Long Island — and is pushing fossil fuels, among them coal. The burning of fossil fuels is the leading cause of climate change. Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.”
Meanwhile, Long Island’s own Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is canceling environmental regulations, discharging EPA employees and stopping the collection of greenhouse gas emission data.
Further, also last month, Trump issued an executive order directing the U.S. attorney general to identify “illegal” state and local climate, energy and environmental justice laws that “impede” domestic energy production, and to “take all appropriate action to stop” their enforcement.
Reacting, “New York State leaders say environmental protections and policies will remain on track” despite Trump’s order “attempting to undo state climate laws,” began a Newsday piece headlined: “NY Won’t Alter Renewable Energy Policy.”
Also last month, Trump issued an order “to allow some older coal-fired power plants set for retirement to keep producing electricity” and to “lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands,” the Associated Press reported. It quoted Trump at the signing ceremony at the White House saying, “I call it beautiful, clean coal. I told my people, never use the word coal unless you put beautiful, clean before it.” Zeldin was present as Trump signed the order.
After the administration halted the building of the Empire Wind project in the Atlantic, 15 to 30 south of the Nassau-Suffolk line, The New York Times noted that Empire Wind had “received all of the permits it needed to get underway.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would “fight this decision every step of the way.”
On his first day in office, Trump had issued an executive order removing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement. As for wind turbines, he has insisted that noise from them causes cancer, despite the American Cancer Society saying that is untrue.
Zeldin, of Shirley, speaking last month at a Long Island Association event in Westbury, said, “The president has made it crystal clear … he is not approving new wind permits.” Zeldin boosted, instead, new gas pipelines, including, for New York state, one carrying fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania to a hub in Albany. He noted that there is a ban in New York on fracking, but pointed to Pennsylvania, where “all parties work together and they tap into the extraction of natural gas.”
For years there was a push to allow fracking in New York, to draw from the same Marcellus Shale formation that extends from Pennsylvania. Adding to the challenge to fracking were journalistic investigations, most prominently an HBO documentary, “Gasland,” by Josh Fox. It found that fracking regularly leads to gas and oil migrating into water. In “Gasland” there are many scenes of people turning on water faucets, holding a lighter to what’s coming out, and flames erupting because of fracking. In New York, fracking was banned in 2014.
The burning of coal produces the worst emissions of carbon, followed by the combustion of oil and gas — including fracked gas, which is high in methane.
ProPublica, the nonprofit news platform, last month disclosed that the EPA “is planning to eliminate longstanding requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee” — Zeldin — “would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country.”
ProPublica quoted Professor Edward Maibach, of George Mason University, saying it was “like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill.”
In January, The Guardian newspaper cited an analysis by the group Climate Power as key to Trump pro-fossil fuel policies. It reported: “Big oil spent a stunning $445 million through the last election cycle to influence Donald Trump and Congress, a new analysis has found,” adding that the “investments” are “likely to pay dividends.”
Karl Grossman is an author, a TV program host and a professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.
