The bill is Langworthy’s first introduction of legislation since the Republican began representing New York’s 23rd Congressional District, which includes Chautauqua County, Jan. 1. He announced it near Lake Erie, following up a morning press conference at the shore in Buffalo with an afternoon presser at Dunkirk’s Conservation Club.

Langworthy said his Lakes Before Turbines Act fulfills a campaign promise.

“I made the promise that I would aggressively fight developers from coming in, and the state from coming in, to create unnecessary eyesores to the beautiful shores here in Dunkirk and across Lake Erie, and I am delivering on that promise,” he said. “Our communities here in Western New York and the Southern Tier — we enjoy and we rely on the health of the Great Lakes. It’s a gem of our region, and the need to protect and restore it is more important than ever.”

He continued, “The so-called green energy interest in Washington and Albany, for too long, they’ve had our communities in the crosshairs with efforts to blemish our Great Lakes with intrusive wind farms. And I know that I speak for many in the district when I say that we have had enough of these attempts to jeopardize the economic and environmental health of our communities with massive intrusive wind turbine projects, that provide little actual benefit to the surrounding areas.”

Congressman Nick Langworthy, right, speaks with supporters including Zen Olow on Wednesday at the Conservation Club in Dunkirk after unveiling a bill to ban tax credits for offshore wind farms.

Langworthy said the Lakes Before Turbines Act’s stripping of tax credits to offshore wind farm developers would discourage projects from going forward. “Due to the massive capital that’s necessary to construct these turbines, if developers do not have the federal tax credit to subsidize it, it would likely prove far too costly for them to move forward with any project like this,” he said.

The congressman went on to point out that a recently released New York State Energy and Research Development Authority study did not support the placement of wind turbines in Lakes Erie and Ontario.

“I’m committed to fighting for affordable and reliable energy sources like natural gas,” he said. “It’s an untapped resource that is literally right under our feet in this congressional district. It can be tapped safely, it can be tapped cheaply, while creating thousands of good paying jobs for Western New York residents.”

Langworthy then took a direct shot at a pet project of fellow New York Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent progressive. “Democrat-led mandates to push our state and our country toward Green New Deal Utopian ideas to total electrification are leaving huge gaps in our energy supply,” he said, referring to Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to radically rework American energy consumption and production along environmentalist, “green” lines.

He said of the death toll in the recent Western New York blizzard, “you could have probably easily thrown another zero at the end” if people couldn’t have used natural gas heat or gasoline-powered vehicles.

Turning back to the Great Lakes as a whole, Langworthy called them “a gift from God. We need to do everything we can to protect the property owners and all of the taxpayers of this region to enjoy this resource for generations to come.”

He later added, “There’s a lot of things that look great on paper, and yes, we should set lofty goals and ambitions. But you’re dealing with people’s lives, you’re dealing with a real-world situation, and people are making economic decisions based on some of these lofty ambitions.”