Cheers to the federal judge who, earlier this week, temporarily overturned Donald Trump’s hasty order to shut down the northeast’s nearly complete offshore wind farm.

The project, dubbed Revolution Wind, works toward a 704MW capacity wind farm under assembly in New London, Connecticut. It was 80% finished when work was abruptly halted on August 22nd.

While Mr. Trump claimed animal welfare and, bizarrely, national security concerns among his reasons for shuttering the farm, the real reason shouldn’t be kept secret: he and his administration favor fossil fuels and domestic oil production—“drill, baby, drill.”

It’s insane to shutter any 80% complete project. But it’s especially unreasonable to cite animal welfare concerns when the presented alternative is fossil fuels.

Mere days after Trump’s order, his administration released their oil and gas offshore lease plan. His message is that since offshore wind farms are concerning, we must instead opt for offshore drilling.

And yes, offshore wind farms can pose serious concerns to marine wildlife; but it’s still an essential tool in the fight against climate change—the number one cause of species loss—as highlighted by FoA in 2023.

Whereas nuclear power plants can take a decade to build, a 2GW offshore wind farm can be completed in two years—and provide the same amount of energy. So, it’s a rapid response to climate change, which is currently paramount.

And many biologists, including Aspen Ellis a seabird biologist at UC Santa Cruz, have readily challenged the claim that wind power is more damaging to wildlife than fossil fuel extraction.

Climate change is the greatest threat to most life on earth, and offshore drilling flagrantly accelerates it—for starters. Wind energy has the opposite effect, helping avoid 329 million metro tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. In fact, it’s estimated that the health and climate benefits of wind—from public health to climate and value provided to the grid—far exceed the levelized costs of wind.

Offshore drilling produces noise which can be distressing to marine life, especially whales. Wind farms also generate noise, but experts say it’s more contained and short-lived than the noise produced by offshore drilling, which largely comes from seismic surveys using airguns towed behind ships and blast compressed air at very low frequencies, so that the noise travels further. Such sound is so widespread and pervasive that whale researchers have quipped that it’s a constant background noise to most whale noise they hear.

Noise produced by offshore drilling also renders whales essentially blind, since they rely on clicks and a biological sonar system to perceive their environment and communicate. This sends whales into a panic, causing them to avoid entire areas altogether and even sometimes beach themselves.

This all goes without mentioning the inherent risk of catastrophic disasters that accompany offshore drilling projects. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon’s disastrous effects on wildlife are still palpable today. It was found that even a decade after the spill, seven of the eight different whale and dolphin species researched experienced stark population declines.

So why then was it logical for Mr. Trump to halt Revolution Wind under the guise of “animal welfare?” Clearly, the courts didn’t think it was.