David Stevenson is a 75-year-old grandfather with a gruff voice and an easy grin. He drives a hybrid and has rooftop solar. He also helped launch a national movement that, when I first met him in early 2023, was working on the GOP fringes to thwart the construction of wind farms off the US coast.
I had pitched a profile to my editor at The Post and Courier, the South Carolina newspaper where I was then working, but at the time, Stevenson seemed like little more than a gadfly to the multibillion-dollar offshore wind industry that was taking off under the Biden administration. I put my piece on the back burner, though we stayed in touch.
Today, President Donald Trump’s war on offshore wind has become a scorched-earth campaign. Stevenson, until recently a policy director with the Caesar Rodney Institute, a GOP think tank, had long predicted this moment. In fact, he says, he’s dreamed of it.
Under Trump, the high-flying offshore wind industry has been grounded. In the past few months alone, the administration halted a nearly finished wind farm, clawed back $679 million in grants, and moved to cancel permits for three other huge projects. Multiple fully permitted wind farms were shelved. New development in US waters now seems impossible.
“I feel incredible,” Stevenson told me when we reconnected in February.
There is perhaps nobody more responsible—save Trump himself—for the ongoing conservative assault on offshore wind. Stevenson operated largely in the background, like the anti-vaxxer Del Bigtree and anti-DEI crusader Christopher Rufo, obsessives who slowly incubated their movements against vaccines and higher education. But in Trumpworld, all of these fringe ideas have blossomed into policies.
I went back and finished my story for Canary Media—the first in-depth profile of Stevenson—which I invite you to read. It’s funny, as someone who claims he’s concerned about climate change, Stevenson is an unlikely player in all of this. Yet he’s also a clear example of a growing trend: the replacement of outright climate change denial with concerted attacks on potential solutions.
—Clare Fieseler
