DOI: Alaskan Oil Good, Wind Power Bad

By Dave Levitan | July 31, 2025 | 9:20am

Photo via US Department of the Interior/Wikimedia Commons

Climate Wind Power

It is the juxtaposition in both space and time that rankles most — a press release from Doug Burgum’s Department of the Interior on July 29, announcing the end of “special treatment for unreliable energy sources, such as wind,” right at the bottom of which can be found the immediate previous press release from exactly one day earlier on policies aiming to “fully develop” Alaska’s oil and gas resources. There is an abandonment of pretense there, a sort of brazen maintenance of eye contact while administering a wedgie and stealing lunch money. “We know this is absurd and we don’t care.”

Donald Trump’s hatred of wind power is well-traveled road at this point, but it remains remarkably grim to watch Burgum — pictured above visiting Alcatraz/inside the prison of his own tattered logic — and others work to breathe life into such a meandering corpse. “Leveling the playing field in permitting supports energy development that’s reliable, affordable, and built to last,” Burgum said of the policy moves that literally tilt the playing field against what is actually a very reliable form of energy that does not have the potential to decimate an ecosystem. The specific maneuvers, the DOI said, include “evaluating whether to stop onshore wind development on some federal lands and halting future offshore wind lease sales.” The agency will also study the impacts of turbines on migratory birds, more well-trod ground from the president’s decades-long case of brain rot, never mind that we already know full well that cats, windows, and yes, fossil fuel-generated energy kill far more of them.

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The ongoing assault on wind power continues to lay bare the lie beneath Trump’s “energy emergency,” declared via executive order on day one of his presidency as if the nation’s lights had been blinking on and off uncontrollably. The very-next-sentence sort of pivot to “more oil, all the time” encases the lie in granite.

The Alaska moves involve rescinding three previous documents and reports regarding protection and potential development inside the National Petroleum Reserve on the state’s North Slope. A day before more or less admitting they want to stop all wind power development, Burgum sniped at “anti-development ideologues” that he says are holding the oil industry back. There is no guarantee that the Alaska push will really lead to much more drilling, as the North Slope is remote and difficult to access, and it is the underlying economics and not absurdist DOI press releases that will drive the industry forward.

Still, it is at least an attempt at a direct giveaway to Big Oil, never mind that Alaskans themselves have heavily supported increasing oil taxes on the companies that operate there. There have long been divisions inside the state regarding drilling and the potential economic benefits it can bring versus the potential environmental damage, including among Native Alaskans and North Slope residents. More broadly, Americans don’t have much appetite for this sort of thing — fully 70 percent of poll respondents in 2017 were against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, just for example.

The administration doesn’t care, of course. Without batting an eye they will perform this Hypocrisy Two-Step, touting the emergency one day and maiming an industry the next. When there’s no one to stop you, why wait.