When fact is stranger than fiction

Don Quixote de la Mancha lost his mind and attacked windmills.

Donald Trump of Mar-a-Lago did the same.

Don Quixote thought they were ferocious giants.

Donald Trump thought they killed whales, increased the price of bacon and spoilt the view from his golf course in Scotland.

Don Quixote is an antihero because of his ignorance, cowardice and incompetence.

The parallels are uncanny.

Right off the starting blocks, Trump has been taking from renewable energy with one hand and giving to fossil fuels with the other. He who pays the piper calls the tune, after all. (According to Climate Power, “big oil” spent $445m throughout the last election cycle to influence Trump and Congress.)

The executive orders Trump signed in his first days in office eliminated more than 70 of the Biden administration’s climate and energy initiatives. The move to interrupt wind project permits is just one example of Trump’s prejudice against efforts to reduce energy-related carbon emissions, which the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects will increase 1.2% this year.

The most laughable illustration of Trump’s relationship with reality must be his suggestion that because rain did not completely ruin his birthday parade on June 14 – as day-ahead weather forecasters had warned it might – then scientists cannot be trusted to predict climate change in the coming decades.

Windmills led to Don Quixote’s downfall; literally, when one of their sails knocked him from his horse. Who knows what it will take to knock Donald Trump off his throne. In the meantime, we have Miguel de Cervantes to thank for the idiom “tilting at windmills” to describe attacking imaginary enemies. In Trump’s head, wind power is one of them.

It is true Trump cannot take all the credit for the demise of offshore wind in the US. For example, in 2023 Ørsted cancelled its Ocean Wind I & II project offshore New Jersey and in 2024 it withdrew from developing the Skipjack I & II off Maryland. It is also true intermittent wind power alone cannot meet the future demand of gigascale artificial intelligence data centres.

But even Trump cannot be blind to the fact eight of the top 10 states for clean power additions in the first quarter of this year voted Republican in the 2024 presidential election. According to the American Clean Power Association, oil and gas producer Texas ironically leads the nation in clean power, with a portfolio reaching 80-plus gigawatt (GW) – a 20% increase from the first quarter of 2024 – and ranks first in utility-scale solar (28 GW) and land-based wind (43 GW) capacity.

Curiously, the Trump administration’s agreement for a further stay in litigation brought by conservative groups the Committee for a Constructive Future and the Heartland Institute against Dominion Energy’s nation-leading 2.6 GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind array in construction “indicates its willingness to allow advanced projects to continue despite his vow to crush the industry”, analysts told the publication Recharge.

It is no surprise, however, a gas deal helped save Equinor’s $5bn New York wind farm. Trump reportedly reversed his opposition to the project in exchange for state regulators reversing their opposition to the Constitution pipeline – a $1bn project to carry gas from fields in Pennsylvania to New York and New England.

Under the Biden administration, US emissions fell 1.4% in 2023 compared with 2022, according to the European Commission’s emissions database for global atmospheric research. Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science warn that under Trump’s policies the US could see its emissions rise by as much as 36% in 2035. This “severe setback for US mitigation efforts”, the researchers say, also leads to a greater reliance on fossil fuels, pushing the country’s need for imported oil up as much as 31% by the same year. And that means higher household energy bills, not to mention less energy security.

Act of self-harm

Trump’s signature second-term domestic legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is as obviously self-defeating as injecting oneself with bleach to kill Covid.

Data centre developers are noticeably quiet on the implications of the bill because no one in the corporate world wants to make an enemy of Trump. Several re/insurers in Insurance Day’s upcoming special report on energy risks, however, have described the implications of Trump’s aversion to renewable energy, both for the US and globally.

The insurance sector nevertheless remains optimistic. In a recent article, Zurich describes the “unstoppable momentum” of renewables. It points out the International Energy Agency expects clean sources like solar, wind and hydropower to meet around 46% of the world’s electricity demand in 2030, up from about 32% in 2024.

Meanwhile, Trump’s bill will roll back most of the tax credits provided via Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and impose a 50% tax on wind projects and a 30% tax on solar projects completed after December 2027.

According to The Atlantic, getting rid of tax credits for clean energy will not simply set back the fight against climate change, but also set the US up for the worst energy affordability crisis since the 1970s.

From 2000 to 2022, US electricity prices rose by an average of about 2.8% a year; since 2022, they have risen 13% annually. But the spike in demand – for data centres, electric cars and air-conditioning units – thankfully coincided with a boom in renewable energy. According to the EIA, 93% of the electricity capacity added to the grid this year will come from a combination of wind, solar and battery storage.

Trump’s bill means, however, all wind and solar projects that do not begin construction within a year of its passage or become fully operational by 2028 get no credits. They will cost about 50% more than projects that received them, according to analysis by the Princeton ZERO Lab. The US is effectively raising taxes on the country’s main sources of new power at a time when electricity prices are already rising.

Trump chose to proceed with the symbolism he wanted, by signing the bill into law on Independence Day. That is poor taste, even for him, considering the day before deadly flash floods hit Texas. These floods had followed powerful thunderstorms that unleashed torrential rainfall across the region. As MetDesk wrote in The Guardian, the storms were supercharged by moisture from the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry and instability in the atmosphere facilitated by a low-level jet stream. Global warming is expected to increase the likelihood of these events, MetDesk adds, as warmer air can hold more moisture. At the time of writing, the death toll of the Texas floods exceeded 100 people, including many children.

From shame to shameless, Politico reported that Trump secured votes for his bill from conservatives by promising a crackdown on renewable energy credits. “We believe the administration is aligned with us on terminating those Green New Scam subsidies. We believe we’re going to get 90%-plus of all future projects terminated,” Representative Chip Roy (R-Texas) said.

Amid such ignominy, the chief science officer at Gallagher Re, Steve Bowen, nobly suggested via LinkedIn that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cannot do its job as well as it could before it received the Department of Government Efficiency treatment. “NOAA needs to be fully funded/staffed; it [provides] a crucial public service,” he wrote.

Critics of the Trump administration have sought to link the disaster to thousands of job cuts at NOAA, but White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, rejected attempts to blame the president. “That was an act of God,” she told a daily press briefing on July 7. Some in Maga may take issue with that assertion, seeing as, to them, Felon 47 is God.

Donald Trump famously likes “winners”, but history will record that treating climate change as a work of fiction secured his place as the world’s biggest loser.