It's no secret that Donald Trump hates wind turbines, especially offshore ones. He has tried (and largely failed so far) to cancel a bunch of wind farms off the eastern seaboard that were already in progress.
Now, though, he is setting his sights on cancelling offshore wind farms that are permitted but not yet begun. And this time, there's a twist.
Trump wants to cancel two large wind farms permitted by the Biden administration to the French oil/energy company TotalEnergies SE, one off the coast of New York, and one off North Carolina. His ploy now - or at least that of the Interior and Justice Departments, which just seem to follow Trump's every whim, no matter how random, foolish or financially imprudent - is to basically bribe the developers.
The New York Times has seen contracts drawn up with TotalEnergies that would see the company abandon the two wind farms (which would, between them, have powered over a million homes and businesses) and commit unspecified sums of money to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas instead. To make TotalEnergies happy with this intervention and their loss of income, the Justice Department would pay them $795 million to abandon the New York project and a further $133 million for the North Carolina development. And this, remember, in a so-called "energy emergency" that Trump himself declared last year.
So, that's nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money that Trump is making the government shell out just because ... well, we're not really sure why. There are no actual national security reasons or economic imperatives, whatever Trump may bluster. He has just decided that he doesn't like wind power, and his feckless administration humours him in it.
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