PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.
TotalEnergies has agreed to what’s essentially a refund of its leases for projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead, the Department of Interior announced Monday.
President Donald Trump’s administration has tried to halt offshore wind construction, but federal judges repeatedly overturned those orders.
The Interior Department hailed the “innovative agreement” with the French energy giant and said, “the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.″
Environmental groups denounced the deal as an alternate way to block wind projects, with one group calling it a “billion-dollar bribe” to kill clean energy.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me despair more than anything else. That billion dollars they’re wasting could do so much fucking good in local jurisdictions all over the country, but instead, it’s being used to lock us further into a fossil fuel energy structure. Not only is this one singular asshole (and to be fair, his golf buddies) enough to turn back the clock on renewable energy, but in my town, we’ve experienced temperature swings of 70 degrees twice in the last ten days.
To me, it seems undeniable that climate change is escalating, but none of our federal legislators experience this because they’re all massively wealthy and insulated from the consequences. Bad weather? They hop on a plane Ted Cruz style and go somewhere else, or tuck themselves away in some McMansion that is energy-independent of the grid and climate-controlled. Ergo, it’s not their problem.
And over in China, fossil fuels are being burned at a massive rate because of the Iran War, which could very well drag on for years despite Donald’s assertions (and that’s what they are, unconfirmed assertions) that he’s supposedly gotten Iran to come to the negotiating table.
I’m just glad I never procreated. I’ll have to deal with the fallout of this shit, but I’m not rolling the boulder further downhill.