In the Trump administration’s latest move to kill the environment and ignore a mounting climate crisis, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that solar panels and wind turbines will no longer have a home on U.S. farmland.
President Donald Trump’s loyal lackey announced on Monday that the administration is slashing tax-funded green energy projects that are placed on “productive farmland” or use solar panels manufactured by “foreign adversaries.”
“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” she said during a press conference in Tennessee.
Rollins was actually referring to solar panels subsidized by 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. While the Green New Deal is a dependable “woke” bogeyman for the GOP, the plan to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey in 2019 as a resolution and has never been voted on or ratified.
Like similar actions by Rollins’ colleagues, this move is another step away from mitigating climate change during a very present climate crisis—with a side of xenophobia.
Concern that Chinese-produced solar panels in the U.S. could pose a national security risk has gained national attention. Trump’s underlings have screamed about China’s grip on farmland for quite some time, and this isn’t the first ban directed at the communist country that affects American farms.
Rogue communication devices were found in Chinese-owned panels in May, with experts fearing the possibility of China’s government using the technology to attack the U.S. remotely. The U.S. government did not publicly acknowledge these findings.
China has maintained that these concerns aren’t valid. But as Republican leaders point fingers at other powerful countries, they’re also undermining green technology overall.
Since taking office, Trump—along with Cabinet members Lee Zeldin, Doug Burgum, and others who have their hands in the energy cookie jar—have been ripping green energy up at the root.
In April, Interior Secretary Burgum took aim at a Trump-founded wind turbine project still in the works in the name of dismantling green energy.
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Given that Trump’s campaign was funded by gas and oil giants, though, the math is adding up.
And since Trump vowed “Promises made, promises kept” to his biggest donors, more oil leases have been signed to ramp up production in the U.S., despite questions of whether domestic refineries have the capability to handle North American crude.
Additionally, Burgum and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer have teamed up to open more coal mines across the country while the Department of Labor pushes Americans to pursue the dangerous career.
Then again, if you ask Rollins, backbreaking, labor-intensive jobs are just what she had in mind when it comes to making vulnerable Americans eligible for Medicaid.
The administration’s dirty energy goals have been made easier as well with the EPA Secretary Zeldin’s helpful removal of pesky regulations, all while pushing the message that greenhouse gases are, in fact, not so bad.
In other words, Rollins’ efforts to remove solar panels and wind turbines are right in step with the rest of her colleagues.
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