“Why is the U.S. giving welfare to wealthy wind developers when gas power plants don’t need taxpayer dollars?
By The Editorial Board Of WSJ Today
Bannon-Trump-Musk…
The rift within the MAGA movement is indeed deepening. The clash between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon has highlighted significant ideological differences. Musk, who supports easing restrictions on H-1B visas to bring in skilled foreign workers, has faced fierce opposition from Bannon and other traditional MAGA supporters who view these visas as a threat to American jobs2.
Bannon has gone as far as to publicly declare war on Musk, vowing to remove him from Trump’s inner circle before the inauguration. This conflict underscores the broader struggle within the movement between the tech-savvy, libertarian faction and the more nativist, populist wing.
The Washington Post today, Opinion by Eugene Robinson
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Trump Speaks Truth to Wind Power…
“He says wind farms only work because of subsidies. He’s right.
By The Editorial Board Of WSJ Today
The Great MAGA Schism of 2025 is only getting uglier
War of words between Musk and Bannon shows gap between rhetoric and reality
The Washington Post today, Opinion by Eugene Robinson
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Andrés Gluski, President and CEO of AES, articulated this perspective during the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2023, stating, “I am confident we will need natural gas for the next 20 years.” He further emphasized, “We can start blending it with green hydrogen today.”
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“He says wind farms only work because of subsidies. He’s right.
It’s certainly true that government support plays a big role in the growth of wind farms. Incentives like subsidies, tax credits, and grants help offset the high upfront costs of developing and installing wind turbines, making them more attractive to investors and energy companies. Additionally, government policies and regulations that mandate or encourage the use of renewable energy sources can create a favorable market for wind energy.
However, it’s also worth noting that technological advancements and economies of scale have significantly reduced the cost of wind power over the years. In many places, wind energy has become competitive with, or even cheaper than, traditional fossil fuels. So, while government support has been crucial, the industry’s ability to innovate and reduce costs has also played a major role.
The debate about the extent of government involvement in renewable energy is complex and multi-faceted. Do you think the environmental benefits of wind energy justify the government support it receives?
By The Editorial Board Of WSJ Today
Every once in a while Donald Trump says something that shocks Washington with its blunt truth. So it was during last week’s discursive press conference when he observed that wind power isn’t economic without subsidies.
Wind farms “only work if you get a subsidy,” Mr. Trump mused. “The only people that want them are the people that are getting rich off windmills, getting massive subsidies from the U.S. government. And it’s the most expensive energy there is. It’s many, many times more expensive than clean natural gas. . . . You don’t want energy that needs subsidy.”
The media’s fact-checkers pounced and proclaimed that wind energy is among the cheapest and fastest-growing power sources. But that’s only because of rich subsidies, which were sweetened by the Inflation Reduction Act. Federal tax credits can cover 50% of the cost of building an offshore wind farm and more than 80% of the cost onshore.
Even the Biden Energy Department, in a 2023 report, estimates that power from new onshore wind farms costs more than from gas-fired plants on a per-megawatt-hour basis if you exclude subsidies. Wind with tax credits is about 25% less expensive. On the other hand, offshore wind costs two to three times more than gas power even with subsidies.
These estimates notably don’t account for the cost of backing up wind generation. Power from so-called peaker plants and batteries costs three to four times more than from baseload generators. It’s far cheaper to run gas, coal and nuclear plants around the clock than to use wind (and solar) some of the time and have to back them up with other forms of energy.
In any case, rising interest rates and inflation have rendered offshore wind uneconomic even with fat subsidies, which is why developers are canceling projects and begging for more largesse. Orsted in 2023 announced $4 billion in write-downs after walking away from two projects off the New Jersey coast.
The reality is that most wind projects wouldn’t be built without federal subsidies and state renewable mandates. The wind production tax credit was established in 1992 to boost an “infant” industry, but Republicans from wind states like Iowa, Kansas and Wyoming have joined Democrats to extend it every time it comes close to lapsing.
Democrats used a budget reconciliation trick to ensure that the wind and solar tax credits never expire by sunsetting them when U.S. emissions decline by 75% from 2022 levels. But that won’t happen before 2050 under the Energy Department forecast—if ever. Perhaps Republicans should use the same nebulous sunset when they extend the 2017 tax cuts.
It’s encouraging that Mr. Trump says he wants to end the renewable subsidies, which would reduce power-market distortions that are driving up electric rates. Perhaps he can persuade Republicans from wind states that, after 33 years of subsidies, wind power should be able to stand on its own as an adult.
Why is the U.S. giving welfare to wealthy wind developers when gas power plants don’t need taxpayer dollars?
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The Great MAGA Schism of 2025 is only getting uglier
War of words between Musk and Bannon shows gap between rhetoric and reality
The Washington Post today, Opinion by Eugene Robinson
Donald Trump hasn’t been inaugurated yet, and already two bellicose titans of the MAGA universe are waging total war — against each other.
Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s rumpled onetime chief strategist, vowed last week in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Serra that he will “get Elon Musk kicked out” of Trump’s inner circle by the time Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” Bannon said of Musk.
And that was one of the nicer things Bannon said about the world’s richest man, who spends so much time at Trump’s side that he might be mistaken for a member of the Secret Service detail, minus the earpiece and the muscle tone.
“He should go back to South Africa,” Bannon said of the immigrant tycoon. “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, White South Africans … making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?” Bannon added that Musk “has the maturity of a child,” which indeed might be provable in a court of law.
Is Bannon’s rage simply over the fact that Musk has replaced him at the Mar-a-Lago dinner table? I wouldn’t discount jealousy as a motive, but there is also a substantive issue involved. Bannon, whose credentials as a MAGA warrior are genuine — he served four months in federal prison for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee — has long been a hard-liner against immigration. Musk is an equally fierce defender of the H-1B visa program that allows tech firms to bring skilled foreign workers into the country.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk declared on X last month, responding to a post critical of the program. “Take a big step back and F— YOURSELF in the face. … I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Bannon responded on his podcast with a playground taunt of his own, telling Musk that longtime MAGA true believers will “rip your face off” if he continues to back a program that Bannon claims takes good, high-paying jobs away from American citizens.
“They’re recent converts,” Bannon said of Musk and the other tech moguls who supported Trump in the November election. “We love converts. But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.” Musk and the others, he said, should not “come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be.”
This war of words between two insufferable blowhards reveals a consequential schism in the MAGA world — and the yawning gap between MAGA rhetoric and objective reality.
It is an article of faith among some of Trump’s most loyal and avid supporters that immigration is a bad thing, period. In this view, the H-1B program is nothing more than a way for tech companies to hire foreign workers who can be paid less than American citizens and who cannot complain or quit because of their immigration status. Bannon speaks for this group when he calls for “a 100 percent moratorium on all immigration until we get this thing sorted.”
Musk and other tech leaders see the program as a way to maintain U.S. technological primacy by attracting the most creative and talented engineers from around the world. Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s partner in the advisory “Department of Government Efficiency,” goes much further.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and probably longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” Ramaswamy wrote on X last month. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Trump, typically, is trying to have it both ways. He sounded like Bannon during his first campaign in 2016, vowing to “end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first.” Then he sounded like Musk last month, telling the New York Post that “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas.” And then, with a straight face, he claimed that “I didn’t change my mind.”
Meanwhile, the Musk and Bannon factions — call them “New MAGA” and “MAGA Classic” — definitely are not changing their minds. This is ugly, and it promises to get uglier.
