by Nick Pope
The Daily Caller
The town of Nantucket, Massachusetts looks set to use one of the green left’s go-to legal strategies against a massive offshore wind farm supported by liberal environmentalists.
Environmental groups have used “sue and settle” tactics — wherein plaintiffs sue an aligned administration to kill a disfavored project, which the aligned administration effectively does via settlement — for decades to impede infrastructure projects they oppose. Now, Nantucket is suing the Trump administration and alleging that key procedural laws were not followed in Biden-era approvals for the massive SouthCoast wind farm off the island’s coast, teeing up a potential “sue and settle” situation that could derail a major project supported by the green left…
The small island community argues that the Biden administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act on its way to greenlighting the development. Contrary to the Biden administration, the Trump administration is no friend of the offshore wind industry: President Donald Trump railed against offshore wind on the campaign trail, and some of his first acts upon taking office in January included temporarily withdrawing offshore wind lease areas and initiating a review of federal permitting for offshore wind.
“In a perfect world, of course there would be no ‘sue and settle.’ But we don’t live in a perfect world,” Steve Milloy, a senior policy fellow with the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Unfortunately, the left has put us in this war-like situation where extreme, extra-Constitutional means need to be used. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I think it’s excellent.”
