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US Offshore Wind Rights Auction Generates Record Bids 

The use of wind to generate electricity for the United States has been thrust forward with the largest-ever offering by the federal government of offshore development rights.

Three days of bidding, which ended Friday, for the 197,000 hectares of the New York Bight — an area of shallow waters between the coasts of Long Island (in New York state) and the state of New Jersey — attracted record-setting prices, according to the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. 

“This week’s offshore wind sale makes one thing clear: the enthusiasm for the clean energy economy is undeniable and it’s here to stay,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a statement after the auction concluded.

Europe is much further along than North America in developing lease areas for offshore wind farms. 

There are two small offshore wind facilities in the United States off the coasts of the states of Rhode Island and Virginia. Two more commercial-scale projects were recently approved for development.

“We’re really just at the beginning of a process here. We hope to apply the lessons learned from Europe and take advantage of the cost savings achieved in Europe,” said Fred Zalcman, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, speaking with VOA. 

Officials say turbines erected in the set of six leases that went up for bidding Wednesday could eventually provide power for nearly 2 million residences.  It was the first auction conducted during the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden.

Friday’s top provisional final bids totaled nearly $4.4 billion. The largest single lease area offered – totaling nearly 51,000 hectares and located about 50 kilometers off the New Jersey coast — attracted a record-busting $1.1 billion bid.

The previous auction was held in 2018 during the administration of former President Donald Trump. It was considered a success, with three leases off the coast of the state of Massachusetts bringing in a collective record-breaking $405 million for rights to develop 158,000 hectares south of Martha’s Vineyard, with a potential generating capacity of more than 4.1 gigawatts, enough to supply power to about 1.5 million homes. 

Trump, a Republican, repeatedly expressed, at best, skepticism toward wind as a viable renewable source to supply America’s energy needs. He derided “windmills,” saying he had been told the noise from their blades “causes cancer” and “it’s like a graveyard for birds.” 

Biden, a Democrat, has veered in a different direction, embracing wind as part of his clean energy ambitions and setting a goal of 30 gigawatts of capacity in the United States by the year 2030. 

In his first week in office in 2021, Biden signed an executive order to expand opportunities for the offshore wind industry, predicting, according to the White House, the projects “will create good-paying union jobs” and “spawn new supply chains that stretch into America’s heartland.”

The area included in the ongoing auction, which began with 25 qualified bidders, was cut back by about one-fourth from what was initially proposed last year due to concerns about the potential impact on commercial fishing and military interests. 

State and federal officials, according to Zalcman, have been addressing concerns of other ocean users, including recreational and commercial fishers, navigators and the shipping industry, and taking into consideration visual impacts to coastal communities, and concerns of environmental groups about migratory species, such as the North Atlantic Right Whale. 

A group of residents of the New Jersey summer colony of Long Beach last month sued BOEM over the New York Bight leasing plans, contending the massive wind farm would permanently mar their beautiful view from the beach, hurt the area’s tourism economy and harm property values.  

Bob Stern, the president of Save Long Beach Island, told VOA on Wednesday that the organization “is not opposed to offshore wind energy but believes that the federal government’s process of selecting ocean areas for turbine placement is flawed.”

Stern explained that the group’s lawsuit challenges the federal government agency’s selection of “wind energy areas” for offshore wind turbines which “should have been preceded and supported by a structured regional environmental impact statement process with full disclosure of impacts and public input.”

The Sierra Club is calling the New York Bight auction a historic major stride forward for clean energy. 

“This lease sale is the first to include stipulations setting out responsibilities for project developers to report on their engagement with stakeholders to minimize conflicting uses, negotiation of project labor agreements, and the development of offshore wind-related manufacturing and supply chain services,” said Allison Considine, a senior campaign representative of the national environmental organization. 

A preeminent concern is ensuring that these projects are done responsibly, said Zalcman of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, of which the Sierra Club is a member. 

How developers configure the wind farms will be subject to another rigorous round of environmental review before they are able to erect the huge structures.

The federal government plans as many as seven additional lease sales by 2025, including offshore the Carolinas and California later this year, to be followed by lease sales for the Central Atlantic, Gulf of Maine, the Gulf of Mexico, and offshore Oregon.
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Experts Skeptical of GOP Claim that a Second Trump Term Would Have Prevented Ukraine Invasion

In the days since it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin was about to order a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Republican politicians in the United States have taken the opportunity to suggest that if Donald Trump were still president, Putin would not have taken such a cataclysmic step. 

It’s an argument that some experts on Russia policy agree with – just not for the reasons being put forward by critics of President Joe Biden, a Democrat. 

 The dominant narrative among many in the GOP was articulated Wednesday by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said on Fox News, “If Donald Trump were president, none of this crap would be going on, because you’ve got to be strong. When you’re weak is when everything falls apart. And Biden is weak, and Trump was strong.” 

In a similar vein, as news flashed that Russia had launched its assault on Ukraine, Northeastern University political scientist and international security lecturer Max Abrahms tweeted, “Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans spent four years saying that Trump invited Russian predation and that we needed Joe Biden to restore Russian deterrence.” 

But Michael O’Hanlon, director of research at the Brookings Institution and the author of the book, “Beyond NATO: A New Security Architecture for Eastern Europe,” disagreed with the idea that Putin was somehow cowed by Trump.  

“The only reason that Putin might not have wanted to do this, were Trump in office, wouldn’t have been out of fear of Trump,” O’Hanlon told VOA. “It would have been affection for Trump, and not wanting to do this on the watch of his fellow strongman.” 

While noting that Putin bears “100% of the moral responsibility” for the conflict in Ukraine, O’Hanlon said that the roots of Putin’s security concerns about Russia’s neighbor and NATO’s eastward expansion run very deep. They extend through the administrations of multiple U.S. presidents, during which time the alliance grew significantly and absorbed multiple states of the former Soviet Union.  

Trying to reduce Putin’s reasons for action to a change in U.S. administrations, he suggested, was at best an oversimplification. 

  American is back 

“American policymakers have had lots of indication, for a very long time, that Ukraine was a red line for Moscow,” said Joshua Shifrinson, a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center and an associate professor of International Relations at Boston University.  

A number of events that exacerbated Russia’s concern about the country took place while Trump, not Biden, was president.  

In 2019, Ukraine amended its constitution to commit the country to ultimately becoming a member of NATO. When current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office that year, he laid out a plan meant to expedite the country’s efforts to join the alliance. 

Shifrinson said that it is just as possible to argue that Putin felt driven to act – not by weakness on Biden’s part – but rather by his strong embrace of America’s NATO allies, a group that Trump tended to keep at arm’s length, and by signals early in his presidency that he was receptive to Ukraine’s desire to join the alliance. 

“By proclaiming that ‘America is back’ and signaling that maybe NATO membership was on the table, or could be on the table one day, it may have given Putin a sense that this has to be addressed sooner than later,” Shifrinson said. However, he added, “I want to be very clear that this is not to say that Biden caused Russian activities. This invasion is entirely Russia’s choice, and immoral and illegal.” 

Afghanistan as driver 

Another narrative coming from many Republicans draws a straight line from the United States’ withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan last year to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine this week. 

In a news conference in his home state of Kentucky Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “I think the precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August was a signal to Putin – and maybe to Chinese President Xi as well – that America was in retreat, that America could not be depended upon, and was an invitation to the autocrats in the world that maybe this was a good time to make a move.” 

“I definitely don’t think it has anything to do with Afghanistan,” said Jeffrey Edmonds, a research scientist with CNA, a national security think tank in Northern Virginia. “The vast majority of the drivers, to my mind, happened over the course of the last two years.” 

This included a lack of progress on talks related to Russia’s ongoing occupation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, its support of breakaway enclaves in eastern Ukraine, and U.S. and NATO security assistance to Ukraine.  

“Things of that nature suddenly culminated to the point where [Putin] also decided to throw in all the other grievances he’s had for decades, and to go big on this thing at some point during the last year,” Edmonds told VOA. 

Trump joins discussion 

Expert assessments aside, Trump himself has not missed the opportunity to agree that the invasion of Ukraine would not have taken place if he were president and to tie it to his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.  

On Wednesday night, after praising Putin’s decision to enter Ukraine as “genius” during remarks at his Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago, Trump appeared on Fox News with the Russian assault underway.  

Trump was asked by host Laura Ingraham if he believed that a perception of “weakness” in Washington was the cause of the attack. 

“I think you are exactly right,” Trump responded. Speaking of Putin, he said. “He was going to be satisfied with peace, and now he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration, and as an American, I’m angry about it, and I’m saddened by it. And it all happened because of a rigged election. This would have never happened.” 

 
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