The town of Nantucket, Massachusetts looks set to use one of the green left’s go-to legal strategies against a massive offshore wind farm supported by liberal environmentalists.
Environmental groups have used “sue and settle” tactics — wherein plaintiffs sue an aligned administration to kill a disfavored project, which the aligned administration effectively does via settlement — for decades to impede infrastructure projects they oppose. Now, Nantucket is suing the Trump administration and alleging that key procedural laws were not followed in Biden-era approvals for the massive SouthCoast wind farm off the island’s coast, teeing up a potential “sue and settle” situation that could derail a major project supported by the green left.
Nantucket’s lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) as defendants, even though the Trump administration was not in power when the government approved SouthCoast Wind’s paperwork. If completed, the SouthCoast project will feature up to 147 massive wind turbine generators across a 199-square mile lease area located about 20 miles south of Nantucket.
Nantucket OSW Lawsuit by Nick Pope on Scribd
The small island community argues that the Biden administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act on its way to greenlighting the development. Contrary to the Biden administration, the Trump administration is no friend of the offshore wind industry: President Donald Trump railed against offshore wind on the campaign trail, and some of his first acts upon taking office in January included temporarily withdrawing offshore wind lease areas and initiating a review of federal permitting for offshore wind.
“In a perfect world, of course there would be no ‘sue and settle.’ But we don’t live in a perfect world,” Steve Milloy, a senior policy fellow with the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Unfortunately, the left has put us in this war-like situation where extreme, extra-Constitutional means need to be used. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I think it’s excellent.”
Craig Rucker, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), told the DCNF that lawsuits like the one in Nantucket will provide the Trump administration easy opportunities t0 implement its anti-offshore wind agenda. CFACT is engaged in its own similar lawsuit against the government to try to stop the massive Dominion Energy offshore wind development off the Virginia coast.
“Clearly, it’s a real opportunity for the Trump administration to take advantage of citizen outrage over offshore wind. From our perspective, it would be welcomed if the Trump administration will settle with these people out of court and put an end to that project,” Rucker told the DCNF. “From our perspective, the Trump administration settling with these people in Massachusetts would be a good precedent, and we’d like to see the same thing happen in Virginia.”
Nantucket’s suit alleges specifically that the Biden BOEM “bypassed or shortchanged numerous required steps, shirked its responsibility to the public, and allowed corporate energy developers to dictate the terms of permitting.” Notably, Amanda Lefton — who ran BOEM for the Biden administration from February 2021 to February 2023 — went to work for a major offshore wind company several months after leaving the federal government.
Nantucket became a hotbed of anti-offshore wind activism after a turbine created by a different project in the region, Vineyard Wind, malfunctioned and shed debris into the surrounding waters. Some of that pollution later washed up on Nantucket’s beaches, forcing closures and enraging many locals.
Despite the environmental damage caused by supposedly green technology, many environmental groups subsequently defended the industry. More generally, many green groups support offshore wind as a means to fight climate change, even though many critics are concerned that offshore wind development may be responsible for the surge in whale deaths observed along the East Coast in recent years.
SouthCoast Wind did not respond to a request for comment.
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