Climate Change Weekly # 545 — GAO Questions Biden’s Offshore Wind Effort, Vindicates Critics
By H. Sterling Burnett
Published May 30, 2025
IN THIS ISSUE:
GAO Questions Biden’s Offshore Wind Effort, Vindicates Critics
IPCC Climate Models Aren’t Useful for Forecasting
New Volcano Discoveries Upend IPCC’s Human-Caused Climate-Change Narrative
GAO Questions Biden’s Offshore Wind Effort, Vindicates Critics
An April 2025 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) affirms what critics of President Joe Biden’s wind-energy spree have long argued: offshore wind is an expensive, environmentally damaging solution in search of a problem. Offshore wind is neither necessary nor justified to fight climate change or for any other purpose other than to line the pockets of politically connected corporations and to please virtue-signaling politicians who are pushing it as part of the effort to prevent climate change.
The GAO’s report was produced against a background of changing fortunes for offshore wind. The Biden administration pushed offshore wind as part of its all-of-government effort to fight climate change, pushing to expedite more than 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind with relatively little review or concern about the broader impacts of the technology on the environment, wildlife, and the economy. I have previously written about the dangers of Biden’s offshore wind ambitions and the complications that stymied a large percentage of the offshore leases Biden issued. In fact, The Heartland Institute has joined our friends at CFACT as a party to a long-running lawsuit to block a wind project off the coast of Virginia.
Despite the political, environmental, and economic headwinds, the Biden administration pushed stubbornly along with its offshore wind initiatives. “As of January 2025, [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] had granted 39 offshore wind leases to commercial developers,” the GAO study reports.
https://heartland.org/opinion/climate-change-weekly-545-gao-questions-bidens-offshore-wind-effort-vindicates-critics/
