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Yes, even during his election campaign in 2020, Donald Trump was already muttering about how windmills "kill all the birds." ("You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill someday. You'll see more birds than you've ever seen in your life.") And whales, too (though there isn't the slightest evidence that coastal wind turbines are doing so). Worse yet, as he argued at that time and again in the 2024 election campaign, windmills are made in China! No surprise, then, that on taking power this January, his administration promptly cancelled a major project to build Empire Wind 1, the first of a series of massive wind-power projects off the coast of Long Island, New York. It was slated "to create over 1,500 jobs and ultimately power 500,000 homes by building 54 wind turbines." And the Norwegian company constructing it had obtained all the necessary permits for the project after a four-year federal environmental review and was already preparing the ocean floor for those future wind turbines.
Of course, who could possibly be shocked that the man who ran a "drill, baby, drill" presidential campaign and whose administration is indeed planning to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil and natural gas drilling would have decided to close down a major wind-power project? No shock there, right? The shock actually came a month later when, after negotiations with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Trump agreed to let the project continue. And from the president who once called climate change a "Chinese hoax" and claimed that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive," that was no small thing.
In fact, it should be a reminder to all of us that, as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of that classic book on an imperial planet To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, points out today, a new clean energy industrial revolution is now occurring on this planet and, whatever Donald Trump and crew might want, it's likely to prove all too literally unstoppable. (If anything, oil production is faltering in the early months of the second Trump administration.) Yes, the president can indeed ensure that yet more fossil fuels pour into the atmosphere for some years to come, but he will undoubtedly prove thoroughly incapable of stopping what McCoy calls this country's "new industrial revolution." Tom
America's New Industrial Revolution
On the Cusp of the Fourth Great Transformation
By Alfred McCoy
He lived over 1,000 years ago, but King Canute's life still has some important lessons for our own time. After conquering England, Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden, he forged a vast North Sea empire that made him, by the year 1030, the greatest of all the Viking kings. At that peak of power, he ordered his courtiers to place a throne on the seashore. There, according to a contemporaneous account, he shouted at the rising tide: "Thou, too, are subject to my command, as the land on which I am seated is mine and no one has ever resisted my commands with impunity. I command you then not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet the feet and the robe of your Lord."
But the tide, of course, kept rising and waves soon washed over the legs of his royal person. Stunned and chastened, Canute leapt backwards, saying, "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings."
In our time, specifically on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump, who had vanquished his rivals, took office with full control of Congress, making him an exceptionally powerful president. On that day, he ordered his courtiers to set up an executive desk at the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, D.C. There, before waves of cheers from MAGA-capped supporters, he commanded that the U.S. quit the Paris climate accord, announcing: "We are going to save over a trillion dollars by withdrawing from that treaty."
Retiring to the Oval Office, he then signed another executive order eliminating "the electric vehicle (EV) mandate" by ending "unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs over other technologies." More broadly, that decree also removed any barrier to the development of "domestic energy resources -- with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower" and nuclear energy resources."
Like King Canute before him, President Trump was attempting to do nothing less than command the tides to recede. Not the ocean tides, of course, but the no less powerful tides of economic and technological change. For the United States, and indeed the world, is at the cusp of a new industrial revolution in the way we live and work that will, within the coming decades, do nothing less than save humanity from the rising threat of global warming.
America's Energy Transitions
To grasp the full import and unstoppable power of this impending change, let's take a moment to place our current era in its historical energy context. Over the past 500 years, as I argued in my book To Govern the Globe, human life has been transformed by three great revolutions in the basic energy infrastructure that drove the global economy and shaped all human life on this planet.
Starting in the sixteenth century, European nations forged the world's first maritime empires through technologies that maximized the power of nature's raw energy. In the era's first technological advance, Portugal's agile sailing ship, the caravel, used multiple sails to master the winds and thereby conquer sea lanes from the South Atlantic to the South China Sea. Somewhat later, the Dutch district at Zaan (near Amsterdam) became the world's first dedicated industrial zone, where 150 powerful windmills cut logs into low-cost lumber for shipyards that would build the world's largest merchant fleet with 4,000 ships on the high seas. Starting in the fifteenth century, Portugal combined water mills with massed teams of enslaved laborers on the island of SÃ à ? ï ? ? ï ? ?o Tome' off the coast of Africa to create a new form of agribusiness, the fazenda or sugar plantation, whose phenomenal profitability -- achieved by using cruel coercion to push the energy output of the human body beyond its natural limits -- soon led to the spread of slavery to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American colonies.
During the nineteenth century, Britain's coal-fired industrial revolution brought an energy transition that would move the world quickly beyond the wind and muscle power of the previous four centuries. Steam engines started powering factories in 1786, riverboats in 1810, railways in 1829, trans-Atlantic steamships by the 1830s, and the British Royal Navy's warships by the 1840s. Meanwhile, Britain's coal production soared from just nine million tons in 1800 to a peak of 292 million tons in 1913. By the 1850s, an armada of steam engines was transforming the nature of work worldwide -- powering factories, driving sawmills, threshing grains, husking rice, pulling gang plows, and crushing sugarcane. Coal-powered construction equipment sculpted the Earth's surface, as steam shovels (patented in 1839) moved mountains, steam dredges (1844) cut canals, and steamrollers (1867) flattened roadways. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of steam engines in the United States tripled from 56,000 to 156,000, accounting for 77% of all the power that drove this country's first industrial revolution.
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