Daily Caller
Trump Moves To Reverse Biden’s Green New Deal Agenda — With A Special Focus On Wind

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By David Blackmon
Shares of big Danish offshore wind developer Orsted dropped by 17% Monday, the same day President Donald Trump took the oath of office to become the 47th president of the United States. The two events are not merely coincidental with one another.
To be sure, Orsted’s loss of market cap was caused by several factors, including both the general slowing of the offshore wind business, and Orsted’s own announcement that it will incur a $1.69 billion impairment charge related to its Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New York. Company CEO Mads Nipper attributed the charge to delays and cost increases and said the project completion date is now delayed to the second half of 2027.
But there can be little doubt that the raft of energy-related executive orders signed by Trump also contributed to the drop in Orsted’s stock price. As part of a Day 1 agenda consisting of a reported 196 executive orders, the new president took dead aim at reversing the Biden Green New Deal agenda in general, with a special focus on wind power projects on federal lands and waters.
In addition to general orders declaring a national energy emergency and pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords (for a second time), Trump signed a separate order titled, “Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects.” That long-winded title (pardon the pun) is quite descriptive of what the order is designed to accomplish.
Section 1 of this order withdraws “from disposition for wind energy leasing all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf (OCS) as defined in section 2 of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), 43 U.S.C. 1331.” Somewhat ironically, this is the same OCSLA cited in early January by former President Joe Biden when he set 625 million acres of federal offshore waters off limits to oil and gas leasing and drilling into perpetuity.
As with Biden’s LNG permitting pause, the fourth paragraph of Section 1 in Trump’s order states that “Nothing in this withdrawal affects rights under existing leases in the withdrawn areas.” However, the same paragraph goes on to subject those existing leases to review by the secretary of the Interior, who is charged with conducting “a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases, identifying any legal bases for such removal, and submit a report with recommendations to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy.”
Observant readers will know that the parameters of this order as it relates to offshore wind are essentially the same as a proposal I suggested in a previous piece here on Jan. 1. So, obviously, it receives the Blackmon Seal of Approval.
But we should also note that Trump goes even further, extending this freeze to onshore wind projects as well. While the rationale for the freeze in offshore leasing and permitting cites factors unique to the offshore like harm to marine mammals, ocean currents and the marine fishing industry, the rationale supporting the onshore freeze cites “environmental impact and cost to surrounding communities of defunct and idle windmills and deliver a report to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, with their findings and recommended authorities to require the removal of such windmills.”
This gets at concerns long held by me and many others that neither the federal government nor any state government has seen fit to require the proper, complete tear down and safe disposal of these massive wind turbines, blades, towers and foundations once they outlive their useful lives. In most jurisdictions, wind operators are free to just abandon the projects and leave the equipment to dilapidate and rot.
The dirty secret of the wind industry, whether onshore or offshore, is that it is not sustainable without consistent new injections of more and more subsidies, along with the tacit refusal by governments to properly regulate its operations. Trump and his team understand this reality and should be applauded for taking real action to address it.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Daily Caller
Biden Administration Was Secretly More Involved In Ukraine Than It Let On, Investigation Reveals

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Wallace White
The U.S was far more directly involved in aiding Ukrainian forces against Russia than previously understood, a New York Times investigation revealed Monday.
American backing of Ukraine was an instrumental piece in forces of the eastern European nation wounding or killing more than 700,000 Russian soldiers during the course of the war, according to the NYT. Methods the U.S. used to aid Ukraine included giving target information while officially obfuscating their nature, dispatching American advisers close to the frontlines and sweeping oversight over its use of missile systems granted by officials.
One European intelligence official was taken aback as to how deep U.S. involvement was, telling the NYT that American officials had become “part of the kill chain.”
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Ukrainian officials met in Wiesbaden in Spring 2022, the headquarters of the U.S. European Command, to discuss strategy with U.S. forces and the extent to which the U.S. would aid the Ukrainians.
During the meeting, U.S. European Command settled with Ukrainian officials that they would reportedly dispense target locations as “points of interest” to the Ukrainians, not officially calling them “targets” as they believed the language would be too “provocative.”
“If you ever get asked the question, ‘Did you pass a target to the Ukrainians?’ you can legitimately not be lying when you say, ‘No, I did not,’” a U.S. official told the NYT. Most artillery strikes were carried out with the M777 Howitzer system, in part provided by the U.S.
Due to diplomatic risks, the Biden administration wanted to share intel in the most plausibly deniable way possible, with a total restriction on sharing the whereabouts of Russian military figures and targets on Russian soil, one senior U.S. official told the NYT. The information shared would have to adhere to NATO guidelines of intel sharing to not provoke the Russian’s ire against other nations in the alliance.
“Imagine how that would be for us if we knew that the Russians helped some other country assassinate our chairman,” the official told the NYT. “Like, we’d go to war.”
European Command also had sweeping oversight of the Ukrainian use of the HIMARS missile system, the Americans retaining the ability to shut off the activation key cards required to fire the missiles, according to the NYT. HIMARS strikes regularly resulted in hundreds of Russian deaths weekly.
Advisers regularly made visits to the frontlines of the war, referred to as “subject matter experts” in their official capacity, according to the NYT. Their official names only changed back to “advisers” once Ukrainian leadership changed, which was also followed by a threefold increase in advisers.
Despite the deep cooperation, there was often tension between the U.S. and Ukraine, with Kiev often accusing the Americans of being overbearing, while the Americans questioned why sometimes Ukrainians did not heed their advice, according to the NYT.
Business
Biden’s Greenhouse Gas ‘Greendoggle’ Slush Fund Is Unraveling

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Michael Chamberlain
We warned you: this gas didn’t smell right from the beginning.
The Greendoggle has made the big time! Not every shady government giveaway to special interests gets its own Wall Street Journal editorial.
But how often does the new EPA administrator announce that his staff has discovered that $20 billion that had been appropriated for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF or “Greendoggle”) had been “parked” in a bank by the Biden EPA until it could be ladled out as grants to climate industry cronies? That’s what Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in February, referencing a Biden appointee who was infamously caught on tape explaining that the agency was “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” – trying to get the unspent money out of the reach of the Trump administration. Zeldin’s “clawing back” that money, and the lawsuit by “public-private investment fund” Climate United to get the $7 billion it was awarded, has got the media paying attention. Finally.
Administrator Zeldin’s announcement that EPA is taking back the $2 billion awarded to an organization tied to prominent political figures marks another auspicious turn in the GGRF saga, which Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has followed and warned about since the beginning. Passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (Mr. Orwell, please call your office …), the GGRF was a massive spending program that would provide funds to environmentalist groups to finance green technology projects. The sheer amount of money Congress shoveled at the EPA was unprecedented. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with commensurate oversight resources – Mr. Zeldin says this was by design. The result was the Greendoggle, an environmentalist slush fund administered by insiders for insiders.
According to emails PPT obtained via FOIA request, the EPA invited a group of green activist organizations and thinktanks to a highly irregular November 2022 meeting to “provide early feedback on the RFI and ask clarifying questions.” And, as PPT foresaw, several groups with ties to EPA officials are on the invitation list. EPA’s “revolving door” with radical environmental groups spun fast in the Biden years.
PPT dug in and researched the green banks, finding multiple insider connections to the Biden administration. “With $27 billion dollars sloshing around, the American public should be on high alert for waste, fraud and abuse,” we warned in October 2023.
The next month, when the “short list” of coalitions vying to become GGRF distributors was announced, the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Nick Pope, whose reporting on the GGRF since early on has been essential in exposing the Greendoggle, revealed it featured “several organizations with considerable connections to the Biden administration, as well as the Democratic Party and its allies.” To put it mildly.
As the Greendoggle came together, the legacy media remained incurious, but for anyone paying attention, it smelled bad. There seemed to be no accountability, and given the Biden EPA’s ethical track record, that was concerning, to say the least.
One of the eight entities eventually chosen was the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), a green bank whose mission is to “accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology throughout the US while maintaining a targeted focus on underserved markets.” CGC board member David Hayes left the organization for nearly two years to join the Biden White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president. He then went back to the CGC board. As PPT put it in a complaint it filed in June 2024 with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the EPA’s inspector general (and which the Zeldin EPA cited in its legal defense of the clawback), while at the White House Hayes “presumably worked at the highest level on the very GGRF program from which CGC sought funding upon his return. This timing is suspect considering CGC itself publicly announced his return to its board as part of its effort to obtain GGRF funding.” Not very subtle, but it worked. CGC got a $5 billion windfall out of the Greendoggle.
It just so happened that, while Mr. Hayes was in the administration, so was another CGC veteran, Jahi Wise. Like Hayes, Wise was a special climate assistant to the president, until he joined the EPA in December 2022 as … founding director of GGRF. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be among the skill sets CGC looks for in its people. Wise at least didn’t return to CGC after that. He joined a George Soros foundation.
The GGRF should become a metaphor for congressional shortsightedness, bureaucratic arrogance and the venality of special interests at the government trough. The “green” industry is an industry like any other, green special interests are special interests and the color of a taxpayer dollar doesn’t change because it’s being wasted in a nominally noble cause.
The Greendoggle stank, gas and all.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
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