Over 100 environmental advocates, union workers and community members gathered outside the steps of the Nassau County Legislature in Mineola on Tues., April 22, to protest President Donald Trump’s decision to halt wind projects off the coast of Long Island.
The crowd, which Executive Director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment Adienne Esposito said came together on short notice, included dozens of carpenters, ironworkers, painters and electricians.
The demonstrators demanded that the Trump administration lift its stoppage of the Empire Wind 1 project, which U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum halted April 16.
“The event was clearly to tell everyone that offshore wind is not a Republican issue, it’s not a Democratic issue, it’s a public health issue, and that climate change is real,” Esposito said. We need to address it. We need to advance renewables in order to do that, and we should be working together collaboratively to take on that challenge. Ignoring climate science doesn’t fix the problem. It makes it worse.”
If constructed, the Empire Wind 1 project would span 80,000 acres of water around 15 to 30 miles off the Long Island coast, and according to the project’s developer, Equinor, would power around 500,000 homes across New York City.
Burgum announced a stoppage to the offshore wind project on X, formerly known as Twitter, until further review of “information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
Earlier on the same day, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman hosted a press conference in Long Beach calling for the project’s termination and joined with other county elected officials like Town of Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino, Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Jennifer DeSena and state Assembly member Ari Brown in calling state renewable energy initiatives a land, water and money grab.
At the Mineola protest, workers from unions including Carpenters Local #290 and 32BJ SEIU spoke about the loss of their jobs due to the halting of the wind project.
Other speakers included an expert on whales, who discussed the potential for offshore wind projects to have minimal negative impacts on marine life.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that encouraged the expansion of the country’s energy infrastructure, a point that Esposito said the Empire Wind 1 project would have helped address.
“Listen, the president declared an energy emergency. Therefore, we should be using all the sources of energy that we have, including offshore wind,” Esposito said. “It’s a reliable, clean, safe source of energy that’s homegrown here in America, and it’s creating thousands of good-paying jobs for Americans.”
