Donald Trump’s Quixotic hatred of wind power is breezing up once again. On Monday, the administration said it will pay the French energy company TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion not to build wind farms, the New York Times reports.
In the “unusual” deal, announced by the Interior Department, TotalEnergies will forfeit its leases in federal waters for two wind farms off the coast off New York and North Carolina. In exchange, the Justice Department will give it a refund for the ages: $928 million, the amount it paid for the leases during the Biden administration.
In fact, the money will be redirected straight into dead dinosaurs. As part of the deal, TotalEnergies agreed to invest the money in oil and gas projects in the US, and ramp up production of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
And of course, AI figures into this somehow: it would also build more gas-burning power plants to meet the electricity demand from data centers, per the NYT.
Fishy as the arrangement may smell, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné insists that, actually, it wanted to back out of the wind farms anyway. Since winning the leases, he told the NYT, the company had since concluded that offshore wind was “not the most affordable way to produce electricity,” and that pursuing it in the US is too “expensive.”
But have no fear, green energy fans. He’s simultaneously fence-sitting on the topic until Trump is out of office.
“To be clear, we don’t renounce onshore wind,” Pouyanné added. “We continue to invest in onshore solar, onshore wind, batteries.”
The arrangement comes after the US about-faced and rejected a key scientific finding that climate change harms the environment and human health. The so-called “endangerment finding” gave agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency legal license to take action to mitigate its effects, such as by curbing CO2 emissions.
It also comes amid upheaval in oil markets after the US launched a war with Iran, which retaliated by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, an essential passageway for nearly a fifth of the world’s oil supplies.
For environmentalists, the deal is a kick in the tree nuts. Money that was going towards renewable energy is now being redirected towards fossil fuels. Generative AI, known for its outsized environmental impact, gets yet more power.
New York governor Kathy Hochul blasted the deal in a statement. “Using a pay-not-to-play scheme to pressure a company to not build offshore wind is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars,” she said, per the NYT.
Between exactly which couch cushions the administration will have to be rifling through to get the money for the deal is unclear. Energy lawyers told the NYT that it would probably come from the Justice Department’s Judgment Fund, which is typically for paying court judgments and settlements with the federal government.
More on energy: Chinese Company Launches Wind-Powered Data Center at the Bottom of the Sea
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