The Department of the Interior, headed by a man who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from oil companies, just declared it will spend $1 billion of your dollars to convince a French oil company, TotalEnergies, to stop development of affordable, reliable offshore wind and instead shift to expensive, unreliable liquified methane gas.
TotalEnergies is the third-largest oil company in the world, but it also operates some solar and wind projects in various parts of the world (including solar in Texas, and a wind farm in the North Sea, pictured above).
It had owned two offshore wind leases in Carolina Long Bay and New York Bight, both awarded in 2022. It was going to develop these sites into offshore wind locations to help develop reliable, cheap power for the US.
Offshore wind is one of the cheapest forms of electricity, and also one of the lowest-impact environmentally. It doesn’t use up any land space, and doesn’t create any pollution. It’s also incredibly reliable, because wind on the ocean tends to blow consistently – especially in the areas chosen for offshore wind leases.
The republican squatting in the Department of the Interior, Doug Burgum, former governor of North Dakota and recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the oil industry, announced today that the Department will take $928,333,333 of your taxpayer dollars and give them to TotalEnergies in exchange for the renouncement of its two leases.
Both the Dept. of the Interior and TotalEnergies made Orwellian statements claiming that the decision had something to do with affordability and national security, despite that wasting $1billion of your money on bribes to a foreign company to develop less secure, more expensive energy does nothing to benefit the country in either of those ways.
Nor will it benefit your health or the fight against climate change, which ravaged the West Coast with a heat wave over the last week, with temperatures up to 30ºF higher than average for this time of year, that would be “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.
TotalEnergies continues to develop wind projects in Europe and Asia, where wind apparently is in the national interest (just as it would be in the US…).
Let’s see if the poster who likes to complain about the cost of green energy will have anything to say about this.