The United States can strike a balance between protecting the environment and economic growth, but failed renewable projects under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden wasted taxpayer dollars while driving up energy costs, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told Newsmax on Sunday.
“When Democrats had one-party rule in Washington, you saw them appropriating tens of billions of dollars to go through their well-connected left-wing environmentalist NGO friends, former Biden and Obama officials, and Democratic donors,” Zeldin said on Newsmax’s “Sunday Report,” referring to nongovernmental organizations.
He added that President Donald Trump often talks about ending the Democrats’ Green New Deal “scam” and that the administration has been dismantling it all year long, saying it has been “abusing the wallets of Americans.”
Zeldin said voters made clear last November that they wanted a new direction, sending Trump back to the White House. He argued that the final years of the Biden administration were marked by regulatory decisions aimed at “suffocating out of existence entire sectors of our economy.”
Looking ahead, he said the Trump team is focused on unleashing U.S. energy dominance, lowering costs, and fostering innovation. “We need to make America the AI capital of the world,” he said. “We need to be able to better afford energy costs to ramp up energy production.”
The Trump administration last week announced it was canceling nearly $680 million in federal funding for 12 offshore wind projects, including the first terminal on the Pacific coast. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office criticized the cuts as an attack on clean energy and jobs.
Zeldin countered that private investors are eager to build new energy projects without taxpayer money, but offshore wind only survives with massive subsidies.
“We need to be massively ramping up baseload power in this country,” he said. “People and companies want to invest. They’re not asking for money to get them to build these projects. They’re looking for the government to just get out of the way.”
He added that offshore wind economics don’t add up.
“These projects would not exist without government subsidy,” Zeldin said. “On the one hand, we can massively, efficiently ramp up baseload power without having to subsidize it with federal dollars,” he said. “On the other hand, we could be pursuing these other energy sources, really lying to ourselves and the country as if it is a substitute for baseload power … The president is looking at the economics, and it’s a no-brainer for him.”
Zeldin also pointed to earlier federally backed projects that faltered, including California’s Ivanpah solar facility, which will close in 2026 after receiving more than $1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees during the Obama administration.
“You’re talking about a project into the billions, not millions,” he said. Farmers and landowners across the country, he added, don’t want to see vast amounts of land taken up by solar panels that wear out prematurely. “And then what? Now you have all of these solar panels just sitting around. You might have these wind projects just sitting around.”
He said the debate over renewables also ignores the cost of battery storage needed to back up intermittent sources like wind and solar.
“Those battery storage sites cost a whole lot of money, and they then catch on fire,” Zeldin said. “Local municipalities, fire departments, they’re not prepared for those massive fires … That should be part of the discussion as well. And unfortunately, it hasn’t been.”
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