Team Trump uses taxpayer money to scuttle yet another renewable energy project
There’s no shortage of lessons to be learned from the U.S. war with Iran, but high on the list is that it’s in Americans’ interest to embrace renewable energy — not just because it’s cleaner and cheaper, but also because it helps shield consumers from international turmoil in an increasingly volatile sector.
It’s a basic idea the Trump administration doesn’t want to understand. The New York Times reported this week:
The Trump administration will pay the German energy firm RWE $1.22 billion to abandon plans to build wind farms off the coasts of New York, California and Louisiana, the company announced on Thursday. […]
Under the agreement, RWE will voluntarily surrender three leases it owned for wind farms in federal waters.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. In March, the Republican administration announced that it had agreed to pay a foreign company almost $1 billion in American taxpayer money to abandon two wind farm projects that would have produced enough electricity to power more than 1.3 million homes and businesses across New York, New Jersey and North Carolina.
At the administration’s insistence, the company will instead proceed with different energy projects that will cost more and pollute more. Put another way, thanks to a model imposed by President Donald Trump, many American consumers will pay for the privilege of paying more to turn on the lights, all while polluting our own air.
Then in April, it happened again, when the Republican administration announced plans to pay energy companies almost $900 million to abandon plans for two offshore wind farms. Two months later, Team Trump spent $765 million to buy back another group of offshore wind leases.
In late June, a fourth example emerged, when the administration announced plans to pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon an offshore wind project off the coast of North Carolina.
With a fifth instance this week, the combined price tag for the developments is approaching $4 billion.
I remain mindful that the president has been on a personal crusade against wind power since he lost a fight a decade ago to block a project visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. This generated such fanatical hatred for wind power that Trump, in 2019, publicly suggested that the sound generated by wind turbines “causes cancer.” (It does not.)
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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