Fox News Anchor Grills Trump’s EPA Chief About Pulling Plug On an Almost-Finished Wind Farm: ‘Why Would You Take Any Power Offline?’
A Fox News anchor grilled EPA administrator Lee Zeldin about the Trump administration halting construction on a Rhode Island wind farm which is almost completed.
In an interview Saturday on Fox News Live, Fox News correspondent Rich Edson pressed Zeldin about the decision to stop work on a $4 billion wind farm off the Rhode Island coast called Revolution Wind — despite nearly three-quarters of the turbines at the site having already been installed.
“What’s the problem with this wind farm in Rhode Island?” Edson asked Zeldin.
The EPA chief cited Trump’s previous criticism of wind.
“President Trump’s been very consistent,” Zeldin said. “He’s not a fan of wind, the economics of it. He has also been outspoken on environmental impacts, impacts to fisheries. And we saw a section 232 decision for an investigation out of commerce, which was news over the course of the last day or two, looking at windmill imports from out of the country and analyzing whether it’s a national security threat. So now you add the national security impact with that decision from commerce. The president, he’s not a fan of wind.”
Edson followed up — wanting further clarification about why Trump would stop a project that was near-completion.
“This project is, apparently, largely almost finished,” Edson said. “You’ve got AI, you’ve got the electrification of everything around us. I mean, we just need power. Why would you take any power offline?”
“Well, we certainly need a lot more baseload power,” Zeldin replied. “Intermittent sources of energy are more unreliable. And there are some states — purple-blue states — where a Democratic governor is more honest with how this conversation goes saying, ‘Yes, we need more baseload power, we need more reliable power.'”
The Fox News correspondent called out a notable red state exception to Zeldin’s argument.
“Is there room for both?” Edson asked. “I mean you look at Texas, for example. They get more than a quarter of their power from wind. And that’s not exactly a left-leaning state.”
Zeldin seemed to retreat to talking points — pivoting to bash his home state of New York for not extracting natural gas or approving pipeline applications.
“President Trump wants to unleash US energy dominance,” Zeldin said. “And at the EPA, we’re here for it. We want to help. EPA has the power to gum up the works. We also have the power to speed things up. We are here to get things done as fast as possible.”
Watch above, via Fox News.
