Governor Murphy, Tilting to Trump on the Jersey Shore, Ends Quixotic Push for Windmills

The winds of change may be blowing across America, but they’ll never spin the turbines that many Democrats envisioned dotting New Jersey’s coastline. Governor Murphy is bowing to President Trump and local opponents who say that dreams of wind technology are just hot air.Shell abandoned the Atlantic Shores wind venture on Friday after investing close to $1 billion. The project, touted as able to power a third of New Jersey’s households, fizzled in the face of lawsuits, technical problems, local resistance, and a Republican majority in Washington.Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Inauguration Day ending offshore turbines. “Windmills are an economic and environmental disaster,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Most expensive energy — only work with massive government subsidies, which we will no longer pay.”On Monday, Mr. Murphy, citing “significant challenges,” announced that New Jersey will stop funding offshore wind projects. “Now is the time for patience and prudence,” he said. A look at the failure of his signature suggests that he embraced those qualities years too late.Aiming to lead the Democratic push for a petroleum-free future, Mr. Murphy charged into office like a Boston-born Don Quixote: Chasing windmills. Quixote, in Miguel de Cervantes’s novel, imagined that windmills were giants while his squire, Sancho Panza, saw reality and tried to get his boss to see it, too.With an executive order days after his 2017 inauguration, Mr. Murphy set a “goal of 3,500 megawatts of offshore wind energy generation by the year 2030.” He’ll leave office in January without even a single turbine built, having spent eight years ignoring the Panzas who challenged his vision. Other Democratic governors pushed plans like Mr. Murphy’s that looked good on paper, forgetting that citizens don’t live on printed pages. They live at places like Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where Save LBI sued to protect their beaches and marine life from the farms.Save LBI’s president, Robert Stern, Ph.D, called the Atlantic Shores cancellation “a major victory for shore values, communities, others, and common sense” on the group’s website. He also urged vigilance “to ensure that this project, or a similar one, never reappears.”In testimony to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in March of 2023, Mr. Stern, an environmental engineer and lawyer, said he “managed the office” at America’s Department of Energy that “reviewed and recommended approval of … environmental impact statements.” While “not opposed to all offshore wind energy,” Mr. Stern said his group is “concerned with what we see as ill-informed, biased decision-making, and specific projects in locations that will cause way more harm than good.” He cited seeing more whales beaching themselves and attributed it to turbine construction.“All politics is local” is an old adage popularized by Mr. Murphy’s fellow Democrat, Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. As I wrote in the Sun last month, the wind farm debacle has helped New Jersey Republicans erode the Democratic lead in registered voters from one million four years ago to under 900,000 today.Mr. Murphy was reelected by just 84,000 votes, or 3.22 percent, in 2021. He is said to have presidential ambitions, but pushing his state closer to Mr. Trump’s energy vision will be no selling point to Democratic primary voters fretting about greenhouse gases. “If your primary concern is carbon dioxide emissions,” Mr. Stern told NJ.com in November, “the realistic alternative is nuclear.” He noted that a single coal plant built by Communist China means “everything we do to reduce carbon emissions is out the window.” According to Global Energy Monitor, Communist China built new coal-burning plants almost 20 times as fast as the rest of the world last year. In 2022, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that Beijing was issuing permits for two new coal plants a week. Congressman Jeff Van Drew, whose district encompasses the southern coast of New Jersey, switched to the Republicans from the Democrats in Mr. Trump’s first term. He called the end of Atlantic Shores “a big win for New Jersey’s coastline and our local economy.”Mr. Van Drew urged his state to pursue “more reliable and sustainable sources like nuclear and solar energy … instead of subsidizing failed wind turbines.” He was tasked by Mr. Trump with writing the executive order that ended the wind farms — something Republicans can point to at election time.

Governor Murphy, Tilting to Trump on the Jersey Shore, Ends Quixotic Push for Windmills

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