A Republican official in Texas is opposing the Biden administration’s effort to bring offshore wind to the coast of the Lone Star state due in part to concerns that the technology could have negative environmental impacts.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham filed comments with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Monday expressing her opposition to the agency’s plans to hold a 410,000-acre offshore wind lease sale near Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. Buckingham expressed her worry that offshore wind, a key green technology underpinning the Biden administration’s climate agenda, will cause unnecessary ecological damage while posing other economic and logistical concerns about the plan.
“As of now, I see a number of significant concerns — economic, practical, and environmental — that must be addressed before a prospective wind lessee is permitted to cross state-owned submerged land,” Buckingham wrote in her Monday letter, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Even if a lessee were to actually see a path to eking out a profit, introducing hundreds of wind turbines across 410,060 acres of ecologically-sensitive ocean is reckless and directly contradicts the Biden administration’s recent position when leasing federal land in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas development,” Buckingham wrote, referencing the administration’s legal efforts to gum up a Gulf of Mexico oil lease by imposing protections for the Rice’s whale. (RELATED: Offshore Wind Farms Are Killing Whales ‘In Numbers Never Seen Before,’ Trump Says)
