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. In five separate instances this year, the Republican administration has used public funds to scuttle renewable energy projects. The combined price tag for the misguided policy is approaching $4 billion.
As Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a recent statement, “Donald Trump is using your tax dollars to make America more dependent on dirty, volatile fossil fuels. … It is hard to imagine a more backwards use of taxpayer money.”
That does not mean, however, that the story can’t get worse.
In the most recent example of the regressive policy, the American president’s team agreed to pay a German energy firm $1.22 billion to abandon plans to build wind farms off the coasts of New York, California and Louisiana. This was already a tough decision to defend, and this week, it started to look even worse.
The Washington Post reported that the agreement won’t just gut renewable energy projects, it also helps one of Trump’s megadonors. From the article:
Behind the windfall is a settlement stipulating that German energy giant RWE will receive $1.2 billion from a federal fund on the condition that it gives up its offshore wind leases in New York, California and Louisiana and invests in unspecified oil, gas or nuclear “conventional energy” projects.
Most of the payout — $900 million — will be spent by RWE to buy a stake in a massive Louisiana liquefied natural gas project, according to statements from RWE and Woodside Energy, the majority owner of the gas project.
That stake, in turn, is being purchased from a private equity fund run by a man named Michael Dorrell, a billionaire Trump donor who, the Post’s report added, “owns a mansion on a private island near Mar-a-Lago.”
The White House insisted the administration wasn’t involved in this aspect of the agreement, so there are no conflict-of-interest concerns. But the circumstances didn’t make the broader policy any easier to defend.
“These fake ‘settlements’ were already an insane waste of taxpayer funds and a ridiculous charade that seems to be blatantly illegal,” Huffman told the Post. “This now adds the stench of corruption.”
The California Democrat is already leading an investigation into the policy, and he now intends to expand the inquiry to include this additional angle. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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