US President-elect Donald Trump called on Friday for the United Kingdom to dismantle its wind turbines in the North Sea in response to a decision by a US oil company to leave the oil-rich region.
“The UK is making a very big mistake. Open up the North Sea. Get rid of the windmills!” Trump posted on his online platform, Truth Social.
The post included a link to Scotland’s Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce, which in early November detailed a decision taken by the Apache oil firm to exit the North Sea. Apache said the UK’s windfall tax on oil operations had made operation “uneconomic.”
During his election campaign, Trump, a staunch backer of fossil fuels, also criticized Germany for its pursuit of renewable forms of energy, predicting that if it continued to pursue these policies, it would soon be bankrupt.
The UK’s Labour government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which was elected in July, is backing wind and solar power, along with nuclear power. No new drilling licences for oil or gas are to be issued for the North Sea.
During his first term in office between 2017 and 2021, Trump lowered environmental and climate protection standards, taking the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate change accord, a deal signed by most countries in an effort to minimize the output of gases that contribute to climate change.
His successor, President Joe Biden, who leaves office this month, reversed that decision.
