Environment & Energy

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 model imposed by Donald Trump, 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 almost $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 golf courses in Scotland. 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.