By Peter Gleick
Photo by Reegan Fraser on Unsplash
On Monday, December 22, the Trump Administration announced it was pausing five major offshore wind energy projects, citing “national security risks” in new classified studies from the Defense Department that suggested the projects could cause “clutter” or radar interference. It’s hard not to conclude that this claim is specious—a new excuse to try to stop wind projects that Trump personally doesn’t like—especially since these projects had all previously been reviewed and approved by the Defense Department with no objections.
Trump has long hated wind, now one of the cheapest forms of new electricity. Over the years he has claimed that it is expensive (false), causes cancer (false), ruins the environment (false), harms whales (false), and, in what is probably the real problem, affects the views at some of his private golf courses, particularly in Scotland. Stopping wind development also aligns with his long-standing support for the fossil fuel industry. After losing his battle in the UK to stop an offshore wind project near his golf course, he urged the country to “get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil.”
The timing of the new Defense Department assessment is also suspicious: Trump’s previous effort to stop offshore wind, an Executive Order blocking offshore wind projects issued in January, was struck down by a federal judge just two weeks ago. A US District Court judge for the District of Massachusetts vacated that executive order, calling it “arbitrary and capricious” and a violation of US law, thus forcing the administration to try to cobble together another excuse to stop the projects.
Moreover, if any energy projects should be cancelled because they threaten national security it should be fossil fuel plants, since the US defense and intelligence communities have issued literally dozens of reports, over decades, consistently and clearly identifying fossil-fuel use and climate change as threats to national security and to the facilities and operations of the US military.
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For more than fifty years, the US intelligence and defense communities have worked to understand the threats to national and international security from a range of environmental factors, including pollution, population, water and energy resources, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. These assessments have concluded that environmental threats from fossil fuels will both increase the potential for violence, conflict, and war, and have growing impacts on US military forces and infrastructure.
I’ve been reviewing and documenting these assessments for many years, and summaries of them can be found here. The public documents themselves have long been available on government websites, but in the past year many have been censored or deleted (though almost all been archived by different organizations). A few examples?
In December 1974, the Nixon administration issued a classified study (since declassified) asking:
“Should the U.S. initiate a major research effort to address the growing problems of fresh water supply, ecological damage, and adverse climate?”
The January 1988 National Security Strategy from the Reagan White House concluded:
“The dangerous depletion or contamination of the natural endowments of some nations-soil, forests, water, air … all create potential threats to the peace and prosperity that are in our national interest, as well as the interests of the affected nations.”
In May 1990, a report from the US Naval War College concluded:
“Naval operations in the coming half century may be drastically affected by the impact of global climate change. For the Navy to be fully prepared for operations in this future climate environment, resources of both mind and money must be committed to the problem.”
A December 2007 report from the US Joint Forces Command said:
“…Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate … widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states. Unlike most conventional security threats characterized by the activities of single entities acting in specific ways, climate change has the potential to result in multiple chronic conditions, occurring globally within the same time frame.”
Trump has long tried to hide this information. In March 2019, during the first Trump administration, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to him decrying his effort “to dispute and undermine military and intelligence judgments on the threat posed by climate change.” Part of that letter said:
“Climate change is real, it is happening now, it is driven by humans, and it is accelerating… Imposing a political test on reports issued by the science agencies, and forcing a blind spot onto the national security assessments that depend on them, will erode our national security.”
Dozens of other assessments all support the same conclusion: Climate changes driven by fossil-fuel combustion pose a clear and present danger to US national security and military operations. Not one of these earlier assessments concluded that wind, solar, or other renewable energy sources posed any national security threat.
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For Trump to try to hide this information, while simultaneously producing biased information on non-fossil fuel energy options from a captive “Department of War” makes a mockery of our defense and intelligence communities that have a responsibility to produce clear, unbiased, and independent assessments of risks to the country. Climate change is an indisputable threat to peace and security, as is a president willing to manipulate facts to push personal grievances and the interests of his powerful fossil-fuel industry supporters.
Peter Gleick is a climate and water scientist, author of the new book The Three Ages of Water (PublicAffairs / Hachette), and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
This article was published on December 22, 2025 at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.