The war in Iran and its broader effects have caused shocks and chaos across the energy industry, offering a timely reminder that it’s in Americans’ interest to embrace renewables as quickly and as robustly as possible, not only because they’re cleaner and cheaper, but also to help shield U.S. consumers from international turmoil.
It’s a basic idea the Trump administration doesn’t want to understand.
Last month, the Republican administration announced it had agreed to pay a foreign company nearly $1 billion in American taxpayer money to abandon two wind farm projects that would’ve 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 — or put another way, thanks to a Trump-imposed model, American consumers will pay for the privilege of paying more to turn on the lights, all while polluting our own air during an energy crisis.
This month, it happened again. The New York Times reported:
The Trump administration will pay energy companies hundreds of millions of dollars to abandon their plans to build two wind farms off the U.S. coast, the Interior Department said Monday, in a repeat of a tactic the government used to cancel other offshore wind leases last month.
The firms will forfeit their leases in federal waters for the two wind farms. … In exchange, the companies have pledged to invest that money in oil and gas projects.
A related report from The Associated Press puts the price of the shift in total at nearly $900 million.
I’m 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 Scotland golf courses. This generated such hysterical hatred for wind power that Trump, in 2019, publicly suggested that the sound generated by wind turbines “causes cancer.”
But that doesn’t make the latest developments any easier to defend. At a time when the U.S. would benefit from more renewable energy projects, the Trump administration is using roughly $2 billion in taxpayer money to scuttle renewable energy projects.
It’s a detail consumers should keep in mind the next time they’re writing a large check to their utility company.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Amid energy crisis, Trump admin. uses tax dollars to scuttle renewable energy projects appeared first on MS NOW.
