The Trump Train chugs at full speed, and radical green initiatives pay the price.
This week, the news has focused on several yuge announcements from the Trump administration, plus a lot of leftist media speculation they seem to have made up out of thin air. Case in point: Elon Musk isn’t going anywhere, despite the rumors to the contrary. Trump also announced “Liberation Day” on Thursday, which sucked all the oxygen out of the room when he announced his reciprocal tariff plan on overseas imports. That caused a rather volatile day in the stock markets and in the media. Of course, that stirred pot is exactly where Trump lives, so he seems to be thriving on the attention.
While those media events have taken all the attention, a lot of stuff happened in the environmental space that escaped notice. We have much to cover in this week’s column that you may have missed. A spectacular wind turbine failure puts a punctuation mark on the end of Biden’s Green New Deal insanity and other stories about failing green energy; the Gotion EV battery plant in Michigan continues to unravel; a scientific study shows just how much a volcanic eruption a few years ago affected the climate, dwarfing human contributions; a tragic EV explosion that claimed the lives of two firefighters; the children who sued the government over the climate and lost now want to change their state constitution; and Al Gore is still wrong about everything.
In our Good News segment, the far-left government of British Columbia has abandoned its heralded carbon tax; Trump has started rolling back tailpipe emissions rules; and EPA Chief Lee Zeldin has closed the EPA Museum (yes, it really existed).
Let’s get to it.
This Week in Failing Green Energy
This week we have a grab bag of “green energy” failures. None captures the zeitgeist of the moment better than the images from Fox News of a Nantucket, Massachusetts offshore wind turbine that committed seppuku recently:
A major part of a first-of-its-kind green energy project, which the Biden administration bragged about, is now lying in ruins and polluting some of America’s beautiful ocean and seashore in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Exclusive images obtained by Fox News Digital show the shattered remains of what is left of an ocean wind turbine constructed by Vineyard Wind in a green energy project touted by the Biden administration.
The turbine was recently struck by lightning and destroyed just months after one of its blades dangerously fell into the Atlantic Ocean, dropping non-biodegradable fiberglass shards into the water, some of which washed ashore, forcing six Nantucket beaches to close.
Image via Fox News
Environmental groups have used “sue and settle” tactics — wherein plaintiffs sue an aligned administration to kill a disfavored project, which the aligned administration effectively does via settlement — for decades to impede infrastructure projects they oppose. Now, Nantucket is suing the Trump administration and alleging that key procedural laws were not followed in Biden-era approvals for the massive SouthCoast wind farm off the island’s coast, teeing up a potential “sue and settle” situation that could derail a major project supported by the green left.
Nantucket’s lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) as defendants, even though the Trump administration was not in power when the government approved SouthCoast Wind’s paperwork.
At this rate, offshore wind will cease to exist before the end of Trump’s term in office.
Gotion Plant in Michigan Falling Apart
Restoration News has reported extensively over the past couple of years on the crony deal between Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and a Chinese EV battery manufacturer to build a plant in rural Green Charter Township, over the objections of the townsfolk. The project appears to have ground to a halt:
According to a local report, the CEO of Gotion’s American company announced the permitting application “is now on hold.” Perhaps this portends the end of the project?
Studies Show Volcano Cooled Earth Significantly
Climate cultists and catastrophists who perpetually proclaim a pending climate cataclysm routinely fail to account for natural sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Chief among those sources: Volcanoes, which spew potentially gargantuan clouds of all sorts of gases into our atmosphere without any human intervention required. Some throughout geological history have been of such a scale as to dwarf the contributions of human activity.
We had a modern example just a couple of years ago that humans could study for clues as to the sources of additional greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Now, a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal has attempted to quantify the amount of an often-overlooked greenhouse gas from volcanic sources: water vapor, which can have a significant cooling effect on surface air temperatures.
The paper, published in Nature on March 27, is titled, “The January 2022 Hunga eruption cooled the southern hemisphere in 2022 and 2023.”
Abstract
The 2022 Hunga volcanic eruption injected a significant quantity of water vapor into the stratosphere while releasing only limited sulfur dioxide. It has been proposed that this excess water vapor could have contributed to global warming, potentially pushing temperatures beyond the 1.5 °C threshold of the Paris Climate Accord. However, given the cooling effects of sulfate aerosols and the contrasting impacts of ozone loss (cooling) versus gain (warming), assessing the eruption’s net radiative effect is essential. Here, we quantify the Hunga-induced perturbations in stratospheric water vapor, sulfate aerosols, and ozone using satellite observations and radiative transfer simulations. Our analysis shows that these components induce clear-sky instantaneous net radiative energy losses at both the top of the atmosphere and near the tropopause. In 2022, the Southern Hemisphere experienced a radiative forcing of −0.55 ± 0.05 W m⁻² at the top of the atmosphere and −0.52 ± 0.05 W m⁻² near the tropopause. By 2023, these values decreased to −0.26 ± 0.04 W m⁻² and −0.25 ± 0.04 W m⁻², respectively. Employing a two-layer energy balance model, we estimate that these losses resulted in cooling of about −0.10 ± 0.02 K in the Southern Hemisphere by the end of 2022 and 2023. Thus, we conclude that the Hunga eruption cooled rather than warmed the Southern Hemisphere during this period.
What does this prove? It does not prove that human emissions have no effect. It does indicate that the picture is far more complicated than what the true believers in global warming might tell you. And this singular event had more of an instantaneous effect than decades of human activity.
This Week in Exploding EVs—This Time, Two Firefighters Died
An EV fire took a tragic turn this week in Spain. Two firefighters lost their lives while attempting to extinguish the blaze:
Two firefighters were killed in fighting this terrible fire, which was exacerbated by the nature of battery fires. They dispense chemicals that are killers in enclosed spaces, which is why parking garages routinely exclude them. The difficulty in extinguishing the fires adds to the problem, of course.
The biggest problem, though, is the denial that it’s happening, which is reflected in the lack of coverage in the mainstream press. It’s further revealed in the fact some politically correct governments and fire departments are apparently now avoiding recording whether cars involved in fires are EVs or not to keep the public from knowing just how dangerous these particular fires really are. It’s not that they occur more often, but that they are incredibly hazardous.
If We Don’t Have That Right, We’ll Invent It
The kids who sued the government for “failing to secure a stable climate” for their future lost at the Supreme Court last month. So they’ve pivoted:
Oregon’s youth climate change lawsuit may be dead, but some legislators, residents and a statewide coalition of nonprofits aren’t giving up.
Angered by the chaos of President Trump’s first months in office, they said they want to enshrine the right to a clean, safe and healthy environment in Oregon’s Bill of Rights and are calling on lawmakers to refer a proposed constitutional amendment to Oregon voters.
Al Gore Is Still Wrong About Everything
This week’s column includes this note just because of the glorious headline:
Al Gore Is Still Wrong About Everything
Remember in 2006 when Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth and made lots of frightening claims about climate change, none of which came true?
He said the global ice caps would be gone and that all of us would be underwater by now.
Here’s another one that is still spectacularly wrong –
The whole article is worth a read just for the litany of things Gore has always gotten wrong.
Now for some Good News.
British Columbia Kills Carbon Tax
The province of British Columbia, Canada, has put itself on the forefront of the climate battle for decades, so it comes as a pretty healthy shock to see them give up on the fight:
British Columbia’s 17 years of having a consumer carbon tax ended on Tuesday, not with a bang, but with an air of resignation.
“I support the policy. I thought it was a good policy. I fought for the policy,” said Premier David Eby at a news conference on Monday afternoon, where he talked about the imminent demise of the policy at the hands of his own government.
“Without a doubt, the policy became absolutely toxic with British Columbians.”
As it turns out, you can’t tax your citizens into oblivion with no results to show for it and still garner their support. Who could have seen that coming?
Zeldin Closes EPA Museum
Say, did you know the United States federal government has an entire museum dedicated to the Environmental Protection Agency? Yeah, neither did we, until EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he would shut it down. According to Breitbart:
The little known museum dedicated to the environmental regulatory agency cost $4 million to build according to Smithsonian and costs more than $600,000 annually operate.
The museum could not compete with the popular Smithsonian, National Museum of History, and other Washington, DC, landmarks. Between May 2024 and February 2025, the museum, despite being free to visit, only received 2,000 external visitors. This makes the cost per external visitor roughly $315 per person.
Annual costs of the EPA museum include:
- Over $123,000 in cleaning and landscaping
- Roughly $38,000 in routine maintenance and repair of museum audio/visual equipment
- Approximately $54,000 in the purchase, delivery, assembly, and installation of museum-grade storage systems for archival collections and materials
- About $123,000 in utilities
- Roughly $207,000 in two security guards while the museum is open Tuesday through Friday
This article originally appeared at Restoration News