Donald Trump’s bitter dislike of renewable energy first erupted publicly 14 years ago in a seemingly trivial spat over wind turbines visible from his Scottish golf course. As Trump returns to Scotland this week, though, he is using the US presidency to squash clean power, with major ramifications for the climate crisis and America’s place in the world.
Trump will visit his Turnberry and Aberdeenshire golf courses during the Scottish trip, the latter venue being the stage of a lengthy battle by the president to halt 11 nearby offshore wind turbines. From 2011, Trump, then a reality TV star and property mogul, argued the “ugly” turbines visible from the Menie golf course were “monstrosities” that would help sink Scotland’s tourism industry.
Although Trump failed in his legal attempt to halt the Scottish wind farm, an enduring scorn towards renewables appears to have been seeded that now has global consequences.
As president, Trump has declared wind and solar projects unwelcome in the US, barring them from federal lands and signing a vast spending bill that demolishes support for a nascent industry that held the promise of revamping the American economy while cutting dangerous planet-heating pollution.
“I don’t want windmills destroying our place,” Trump said shortly before signing the “big, beautiful” bill that is set to severely curtail new clean energy projects. “I don’t want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up half a mountain and they’re ugly as hell.”
Ahead of his latest visit to Scotland, where he will meet with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, Trump called for the UK, too, to ramp up oil drilling and to ditch wind. “They should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil,” Trump said. “The windmills are really detrimental to the beauty of Scotland and every other place they go up.”
The cost of one, albeit very powerful, man’s hostility will be steep. With the acquiescence of Republicans in Congress, hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investment in clean energy and electric car facilities is set to be lost, with one union calling the legislation “the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country”.
Americans’ household power bills are expected to surge as the supply of cheap renewable energy falters, prompting utilities to turn to gas and coal that will emit an extra 7bn tonnes of carbon pollution by 2030. Scientists warn the world must rapidly eliminate emissions to avoid catastrophic climate impacts via heatwaves, flooding, drought and other unfolding maladies.
This culmination of Trump’s animus towards renewables has stunned those in Scotland who tangled with him over the wind farm before he burst into politics. “At the time a lot of us thought the climate denial movement was on its deathbed,” said Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Greens. “Whether Donald Trump believes his lies or not, and I’m prepared to believe he’s stupid or he’s dishonest, he has damaged climate action around the world, including the US.
“Green tech is a huge part of the future of the economy and the scale of investment by China in this is extraordinary,” Harvie added. “People will look back at this point as when the US gave up on the dominant energy technologies of the future and declined as a major power. Those in the US should recognize the incredible harm done to their national interest. For golf, of all things.”
In 2012, Trump appeared at a Scottish parliamentary committee and sparred with Harvie, who he later accused of blasphemy. The hearing featured rhetoric from Trump that has now become familiar – that wind turbines are made in China, that they kill birds, are inefficient and are “so ugly, so noisy and so dangerous” that they will “lead to the almost total destruction of Scotland’s tourism industry” and cause the country to “go broke”.
When pressed as to what evidence he had for such claims, Trump provided an answer that seemed to draw deep from his core psychology. “I am the evidence,” he said. “I am considered a world-class expert in tourism. When you ask, ‘Where is the expert and where is the evidence?’ I say: ‘I am the evidence.’”
Today, more than half of all Scotland’s electricity comes from wind, nearly 2 million more tourists visit the country than in 2011 and the country has not gone broke. Renewable energy in the US isn’t quite as dominant but has also grown quickly as costs have plummeted, with more than 90% of all capacity added to American grids last year coming from wind, solar and batteries rather than fossil fuels.
Despite this, Trump has only escalated his incendiary invective toward renewables, claiming offshore wind turbines are “driving the whales crazy” – there is little evidence for this – and stating shortly after his inauguration in January that “we don’t want windmills in this country”.
Federal approvals for wind and solar projects have seized up and, earlier this month, Republicans in Congress pushed through a reconciliation spending bill that effectively gutted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Joe Biden’s signature legislation that provided tax credits to boost renewable energy, battery and electric vehicle manufacturing and deployment in the US.
About three-quarters of the hundreds of billions of dollars in new clean energy investment has flowed to Republican-held districts since the IRA. Two dozen concerned GOP lawmakers across the House of Representatives and US Senate wrote to colleagues pleading for the retention of the tax credits to avoid “sparking an energy crisis” that would kill off jobs and hike electricity bills.
Ultimately, however, only one of these letter signatories, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voted against the “big, beautiful” bill. The Guardian contacted all of these lawmakers to ask why they voted for the legislation but only Andrew Garbarino, a New York representative, replied. “We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we got what we needed to make progress,” said Garbarino, who pointed out that the tax credits were in danger of ending immediately, rather than a phase-out that will see them mostly disappear by 2027.
Trump had intervened in congressional negotiations to push for a swifter scrapping of the tax credits and secured more aid for fossil fuels in the form of a subsidy for steel-making coal. “The president was a big factor, he was talking to the leadership in the House and Senate on making changes,” said someone familiar with the discussions. “He’s been consistent on wind and now he’s bringing solar into the mix, which we didn’t see in his first term.”
The fossil fuel industry made record donations to Trump during his election campaign and the president has torn down pollution rules and opened up new areas to drilling since returning to the White House. Renewable projects, however, will face a blizzard of new paperwork for approvals under a new Trump edict.
“The president was clear about ending what he called the green new scam,” said Tom Pyle, president of the free market American Energy Alliance. “There is a place for wind and solar but they don’t need all of this lavishness foisted upon them.”
This approach is “utterly insane and destructive”, according to Elon Musk, formerly Trump’s adviser and favorite billionaire. “It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.” Trump previously criticized electric cars, too, but announced he was purchasing a Tesla after allying with Musk and held a promotional event for the car brand at the White House before a rift developed between the two.
For Democrats who bet that spreading the benefits of the energy transition to rural, Republican areas would secure broad political support for renewables, the setback has been sobering. “It’s really bizarre, it’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in politics,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Biden’s top climate adviser, on the Republicans voting for the clean energy rollback.
“A lot of this is pure and simply what Trump wanted to do and it breaks my heart to see people who have done great work in the administration have to kowtow to someone like this president. Trump has been acting like a dictator since he came into office because Republicans allowed him that luxury.”
The loss of new clean electricity capacity, at a time when demand for power in the US is increasing due to advances in artificial intelligence, is set to be significant. By 2035, the amount power added to the grid will be about 600GW less than it would have been without the bill, according to an estimate by Rhodium, which is equivalent to nearly half of all current installed electricity capacity in the US today.
The contrast to China, the world’s largest emitter but already building more wind and solar capacity than all other countries combined, is dizzying. By 2035, China is expected to add 4660GW of solar and 860GW of wind power, according to the International Energy Agency – about 15 times more than what the US is now forecast to install over this period. Last year, China hit its goal for half of new car sales to be electric, a decade earlier than planned.
The divergent paths of the world’s two superpowers on energy is now stark – in May, China installed solar panels at a rate of 100 every second. “China is running rings around us, it’s clear they will be the beneficiaries of all of this,” said McCarthy.
A 15-year head start China had in the clean energy race will now extend out further, to the point that few senior Chinese officials now view the US as a competitor, according to Li Shuo, an expert in China’s climate policies at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“I don’t think US companies will ever be able to compete with Chinese counterparts in wind, solar, batteries, EVs – all the components of decarbonization,” said Li. “That dynamic is now here to stay. The last chance for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has left the station.”
As he arrives in Scotland, it’s unlikely Trump will be troubled by this, nor any of the protests that usually greet him when he visits a country that he lauds for being the birthplace of his mother, Mary, a Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis.
Asked about Trump’s dislike of renewables, a White House spokesman said the president and those who voted for him “are not interested in advancing scam energy industries that embolden our adversaries, stifle domestic energy production, and raise prices for countless Americans”.
The reconciliation bill is “a complete overhaul of the Biden administration’s slush fund for the green new deal lobby and will further unleash the might of America’s energy dominance while continuing to lower costs for millions of families”, he added.
Harvie said it was hard to know exactly why Trump has maintained his dislike of clean energy because of his “irrational” demeanor but that his stance was opposed by most people in Scotland.
“A large majority of people here have a very negative attitude towards him, because of climate change, his racism, his economic policies or just his grotesque personal manner,” he said. “I mean the list of reasons to have distaste for Donald Trump is far too long to complete.
“I’m not sure he’s emotionally capable of admitting he’s wrong on anything but people in Scotland recognize he’s wrong. I hope a great many more people in the US come to recognize that, too.”
