Liam Denning, Columnist

Trump’s Energy Emergency Is Self-Fulfilling

March 18, 2026 at 5:55 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Out of favor.
Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images North America

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President Donald Trump’s vendetta against offshore wind power is characterized chiefly by its oddities. These range from the president’s pet theories about the technology’s supposed hazards to his attempts to shut down nearly built projects. Now, he appears to be escalating to the truly bizarre, with a reported offer to pay an offshore wind developer almost $1 billion in order to simply walk away.

This latest threat to offshore wind, coming amid a war in waters thousands of miles away that’s spiked oil prices, confirms a bigger conclusion: Just over a year after Trump declared a “national energy emergency,” he himself now constitutes that emergency.