President Donald Trump’s visit to the United Kingdom featured him publicly disparaging one of that country’s big priorities, reported the Daily Record: to reduce its dependence on oil.
This comes at a moment when the importance for Europe of transitioning from fossil fuels is doubly important, not just for climate change but for ending Russian leverage over the continent’s foreign policy as that nation pursues its aggressive war of conquest in Ukraine.
“North Sea Oil is a treasure chest for the United Kingdom. The taxes are so high, however, that it makes no sense,” said Trump. “They have essentially told drillers and oil companies that, ‘we don’t want you’. Incentivise the drillers, fast. A vast fortune to be made for the UK, and far lower energy costs for the people.”
Trump then went on to attack Scotland’s investment in wind turbines, or “windmills” as he insists on calling them; the president has had a vendetta against wind power ever since a wind farm was planned near one of his Scottish golf courses, and he routinely pushes misleading claims about turbines posing a threat to birds or even baseless claims they cause cancer.
“Wind is the most expensive form of energy and it destroys the beauty of your plains and your fields and your waterways,” said Trump. “Look out there, there’s no windmills but if you look in another direction you see windmills, when we go to Aberdeen you’ll see some of the ugliest windmills you’ve ever seen. They’re the height of a 50-storey building. And you can take 1,000 times more energy out of a hole in the ground this big, this big, it’s called oil and gas.”
British observers slammed Trump for his comments, with Tessa Khan, who runs the green-energy advocacy group Uplift, saying, “Donald Trump’s knowledge of the North Sea is clearly limited to his view from his golf course. His demand for more drilling is pure fantasy – it will do nothing to provide us with an affordable supply of energy. New drilling won’t cut bills and, after 50 years of extraction, the basin is fast running out of gas – that’s geology not a political choice.”
All of this comes shortly after Trump signed legislation to sharply scale back federal green energy tax credits in the United States — where even market forces at this point are driving a transition as wind and solar power have become dramatically cheaper than they used to be.