YOUR AD HERE — REACH DISCERNING READERS OF SERIOUS JOURNALISM
Rates upon inquiry. Clowns extra.
WORLD✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
The Louisiana wind industry’s plan for survival: Outlast Trump
Filed 2h ago · Via Grist · The Buffoon Desk
THIS STORY IS SCORED
Waltz of the Carnies
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: UNCTAD · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Louisiana's offshore wind supply chain, built up over a decade serving East Coast projects, is bracing to wait out the Trump administration, with state Representative Joe Orgeron summing up the strategy as watching the calendar until January 2029. The administration halted new federal leasing, froze permitting, issued stop-work orders, and ultimately paid developers roughly $4 billion to abandon 12 leases representing about 21 gigawatts of potential capacity, including a 2-gigawatt Gulf project with a secured customer in Entergy.
Gulf-based firms had captured nearly a quarter of U.S. offshore wind contracts by 2024, about $1 billion in regional investment, and local colleges built turbine-technician and engineering programs to feed the workforce. Now companies like Gulf Wind Technology are pivoting to aerospace and defense contracts while layoffs spread among engineers the industry spent years training.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
Trump's objection to wind turbines goes back to a golf course view in Scotland, and here we are two decades later with a $4 billion bill and a Gulf Coast industry parked in neutral over it. Paying companies to walk away from leases isn't shutting down an industry so much as renting its coffin for four years, which is a strange way to spend taxpayer money if the goal was ever to save any. The workers who learned turbine repair instead of oil rig maintenance are the ones stuck holding a skill nobody in Washington wants them to use right now.
