Trump’s Interior Department is turning environmentalists’ legal playbook against them todayheadline

The Department of the Interior, or DOI, has such a wide-ranging set of duties that it’s sometimes referred to in Washington, D.C., as “the department of everything else” — public lands, natural resources, wildlife regulations, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs all fall under its auspices. It is now also the tip of the spear in the Trump administration’s war on renewables. 

On July 17, the DOI announced that all wind and solar projects would have to undergo “elevated review” from department Secretary Doug Burgum’s office. On July 29, Burgum ordered an end to “preferential treatment” for “unreliable, foreign controlled energy sources,” specifically wind and solar. The next day, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which sits within the DOI, rescinded all designated Wind Energy Areas along the continental shelf. Two days later, on August 1, the DOI released a secretarial order that mandates all energy projects based on federal land be evaluated on their “capacity density,” or how much energy they are able to produce per square acre. The following week, the agency ordered the cancellation of the already-approved Lava Ridge Wind Project, a proposed wind farm in Idaho, arguing that it would “harm rural communities, livelihoods and the land.” And on August 4, Bergum called for the use of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to request numbers of eagle deaths from wind developers.

Following these moves, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to vow that the administration “will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”

What Trump and the Interior Department are doing, experts say, is using environmentalists’ legal playbook against them to throttle renewable energy. Laws meant to protect and safeguard wildlife and public lands from mining, drilling, and habitat degradation — such as the Federal Land Policy and Management Act’s prohibition against “unnecessary or undue degradation” — are instead being wielded as a cudgel against wind and solar. 

“They are effectively trying to co-opt arguments that we have used for years to push back on fossil fuels,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director at the Western Environmental Law Center, a public interest firm.“But I think it should go without saying that they are abusing those laws.” 

Schlenker-Goodrich pointed to the DOI’s recent capacity density order as a particularly troubling example. Secretarial orders are meant to function as internal guidance to agencies. “They are not intended to put in place substantive rules that dictate outcomes,” he said, in this case “a de facto prohibition against the siting and permitting of renewables on federal public lands.” 

Solar and wind farms will never technically be able to produce as much energy per acre as an oil and gas facility — but that is also not the best measure of impact. Wind turbines are only a handful of feet wide at the base — the land or water that surrounds them remains unaffected and can easily be used for farming or agriculture. Solar panels can be placed on brownfields or integrated on agricultural land. When a wind or solar farm is decommissioned, the equipment is removed, the ground is decompacted, and vegetation is replanted. Within a year or two, you can barely tell anything was there, and the land can immediately be reused — the possibilities are limited only by zoning laws. 

In contrast, when a refinery or a fossil fuel plant shuts down, the ground is poisoned. Cancer-causing chemicals like benzene saturate the soil and remediation can take years, assuming it happens at all. And that doesn’t even account for the massive amount of energy spent producing and transporting fossil fuels to power plants.

“The DOI is fixating on this one metric, capacity density, to the exclusion of a holistic understanding of costs and benefits of a particular energy technology,” said Schlenker-Goodrich.

Refineries, gas plants, and nuclear plants also aren’t typically built on public land, nor are they likely to be. Private industry has little interest in dealing with even more federal regulations, according to Josh Axelrod, senior policy advocate at the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit.

“The [DOI is] trying to come up with the facade of a rational reason to stop doing anything related to renewables, but this one especially is really mind-boggling,” said Axelrod. “Everything it compares wind and solar to — none of those types of facilities are built on federal land … There’s no comparison.” 

The Interior Department’s order that all wind and solar projects on federal land undergo “elevated review” is another misuse of environmental law, experts said. Routine procedures that would have previously been handled by a DOI bureaucrat will now need the secretary’s personal sign-off. And the restrictions will impact projects on private land just as much as on public land. A recent analysis from The American Clean Power Association found that 27 of the new procedures requiring Bergum’s sign-off — such as needing consultations around harm to wildlife and endangered species — will allow the DOI to effectively end development of renewable energy projects nationwide. The goal, it seems, is to create an impossible backlog that bleeds projects of funding before they can get off the ground. 

All of this is in service of propping up dying industries, such as coal, said Alex Klass, an environmental law professor at the University of Michigan. “[The administration] can talk about energy dominance and talk about the need for new energy,” he said, “but before there was always an argument [that] you shouldn’t try to prop up an industry that can’t make it on its own. That’s basically what they’re doing.” 

And it is being done with little concern for the environmental consequences. 

Bergum cited concerns about migratory bird populations when he moved to cancel offshore areas for wind energy development. But on Tuesday, the DOI announced that it plans to hold 30 oil and gas lease auctions over the next 15 years — also offshore. Although the administration has declared an “energy emergency,” it’s clear that actual energy development is being approached from a position of political theater, rather than practicality. 

Trump has claimed that offshore wind turbines “are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,” but there is no evidence of that. Upon taking office, the administration almost immediately moved to fire scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration whose research centered around ensuring offshore wind was safe for whales. Offshore drilling, on the other hand, is proven to be enormously harmful to marine environments. Seismic blasting can result in hearing loss — affecting whales’ ability to breed and communicate — and animals are often killed by vessel strikes. When something goes wrong on a drill rig, it’s apocalyptic for the nearby environment. The Deepwater Horizon spill remains the worst environmental disaster in United States history.

Interior officials have also worked to roll back environmental regulations around mining, eliminate Biden-era regulations that provided protection for public lands, and fast-track mining despite local concerns of water scarcity. Given the administration’s aggressive antipathy for environmental regulations, experts say it’s impossible to believe that the Interior Department’s sudden conservationist concerns around solar and wind impacts are being made in good faith. 

“It’s not like the Biden administration stopped permitting oil and gas development. There’s lots of oil and gas development,” said Klass. “They just also tried to prioritize wind and solar. Here they’re saying, ‘Not only are we not going to prioritize [wind and solar], we’re going to try to shut it down entirely.’”