NY Times phrases it as a reimbursement to TotalEnergies for relinquishing wind leases that they paid for. The US made the reimbursement contingent on them investing in fossil fuel projects. "The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels."
Total waste of $1 Bil of taxpayer dollars. If the oil and gas industry want to shut down wind projects let them pay for it.
The US is a net oil exporter. If fossil fuel companies were so influential, wouldn't we expect them to be in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?
Instead the what seems to be influential is the average Joe who's complaining about the price at the pump.
All the blather about Canadian "trade surplus" is actually oil.
US companies owning that infra sell that oil under market price, to their US corp divisions. The CEO, upper execs are usually American, and so their large salaries, and all corporate profits all flow to the US parent corp.
Canada of course sees some taxes per barrel of oil, and local employment, but when you remove all this, Canada has a massive trade deficit with the US
In that case, we should definitely reserve judgement on the weird payment stipulations then. The oil industry probably hates that the government is doing this, and we shouldn't cast aspersions on them.
So TotalEnergies agreed to invest 1 billion is offshore wind during thr last Administration. The current Administration doesn't want any investment in renewables so they attempted to block it. A judge said the attempted block was unlawful. So then immediately the admin said something new and that instead there were "national security concerns" with building wind plants - (Which doesn't pass the smell test to me at all) and the project would be held up while untangling those.
My assumption is the company started getting upset at being toyed around and having their 1 billion investment completely stalled for so long. So the admin said we'll kill the wind if you do our fossil fuels instead. So shift your investment away from wind (we kill it and pay you back for what you investws) if you instead do fossil fuels. And that's what's being done.
So previously the company was spending 1billion on wind and getting some subsidies. Now they spend 2 billion, and get paid 1 billion from the tax payer. For them it's at best a wash, though likely a loss since I haven't heard they get subsidies with the fossil fules. And the tax payer instead of paying for tax credits or low interest loans or other subsidies that were part of wind power portion of the Inflation Reduction Act instead pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company.
> The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.
This seems plausible. Though I find "pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company" to be a very confusing way to frame this if this just returning a deposit the company put down in the first place. Would be more accurate to say the company spent 1 billion, canceled that and were refunded the 1 billion, then spent that billion on a different U.S. project instead.
Though it's still a significant impact to the tax payer if the new thing they're spending 1B on is private industry and not a government-owned lease.
Sweden has been blocking offshore farms on the east side of country, where they would be fighting Russia. West side farms are fine.
USA hardly has the same problem, and the current admin are frankly a bunch of low-brow vicious thugs, who in my view wouldn't know a genuine security problem from a large hole in the ground.
The Swedish government is not blocking all offshore wind, but it is blocking a lot of it, specifically wind parks in areas of the Baltic Sea that could cause trouble for trying to detect Russian military activities.
I don't know what the situation looks like for Finland.
a) Finland needing fast & accurate RADAR tracking across their 50km gulf and restricting activity in the gulf as a result. Not just wind farms, other commercial activities are restricted in the Gulf of Finland including shipping.
b) USA restricting wind farms on it's east coast (NC and NY/NJ) where the nearest land is thousands of km away and no other commercial activities are meaningfully restricted.
(If the US can't field a RADAR for early warning off the east coast that can handle wind farms on the coast, we have other problems)
Offshore wind farms have been stopped by the Finnish and Swedish military in many parts of the Baltic sea which aren't the gulf of Finland.
If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US, then it's quite a small price to pay to block them offshore. Especially since the country is gigantic and has plenty of room inland.
Any attack on the US will be through sea or space. Both are voids and very difficult or impossible to surveil. There's a historical example in Pearl Harbor.
So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.
Atlantic ocean: thousands of miles to the nearest land from the NE coast; unrestricted commercial activity
Baltic sea: Belligerent nation on the coast (Kaliningrad Oblast) ~100 miles away; heavily patrolled and monitored commercial activity
> If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US
I’m asserting they are not because they magically weren’t 2 years ago and the airspace on the NE coast of the US has some of the largest and most aggressive ADIZ in the world since 2001. If wind farms were a problem for RADAR/early warning systems we would have heard about it in the last 25 years.
> So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.
Er yes... I’m sure the military groups responsible for early warning didn’t just realise that in 2025. 10 years after offshore wind farms in the area were fully operational.
Edit: I want to say that learnings from recent conflicts (especially around drones) would be a compelling argument for why we only just realised these issues, but no one has articulated that or why it’s an issue on the Atlantic coast.
If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms? These are two countries that have very strong political agendas in favour of wind power.
Maybe there are new threats that neither you or I are aware of or understand? Secrecy is how the military operates. New and emerging threats is the exact reason which has been given by the US Department of Interior.
As for drones, at least in Finland they are investigating if land based wind power mills can be equipped with drone warning systems.
I don't buy into the hacker double think, where everything is great and glorious and rational when Europeans do it, but it's the opposite if America under Trump does it.
> If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms?
Are you deliberately not trying to see the difference?
Early warning systems need all the help they can get when you only have 100km to your threats (ie. the baltic sea); when you have the entire Atlantic you don’t need that.
US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.
As other commenters have already pointed out to you, the Nordic countries do allow wind farms in:
And they don't allow wind farms where they are exposed to the open baltic.
What does those three seas you mentioned have in common? They have Nordic coastline on both sides. Meaning that nobody can hide in radar shadow, because they'll be seen from the other coast.
> US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.
Not if there is a disturbance in the way. You know how signals work. Everything behind the disturbance will be in shadow, stretching for as far as you please. The ocean is a giant dark void, and your enemy can be anywhere and go anywhere.
The Swedish defense minister has specified the threat to be cruise missiles in their decision to ban and block offshore wind farms. I wouldn't be surprised if the US has the same reason for their national security concerns. With a cruise missile you have to get close before launching, as compared to ICBMs which have no limits in range.
And just out of curiosity: Why don't they build these wind parks inland in the great plains? Too much energy loss from distance to consumers?
(This is why my stance is "bad faith" on the "national security" claim, if that wasn't clear; I know plenty on how RADARs work and it doesn't pass the sniff test)
Are you saying that because Sweden has to worry about Russia invading from the east, the US shouldn’t build any wind farms anywhere? That can’t be right. What do you really mean?
Much larger attack forces are currently cruising the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and have been doing so for decades. The oceans are international waters, giant voids where it's hard to know where your enemy is.
They can be a thousand miles away from your coast and launch cruise missiles with more fire power than that of Pearl Harbour. If there is a radar/signal disturbance on your coast which can help them, they will take advantage of it.
We're not the ones arguing the absurd position that the concerns two small countries with extreme closeness to Russia (and a history of prior invasions) more than a thousand miles away, with completely different geography, apply to a vastly different country in a completely different area of the world.
"Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won."
You should probably look up when the TARP bailiut program was passed and initiated, because it wasn't when Obama was president. The Great Financial Crisis brewed and exploded under Bush.
Obama pushed for the 2010 Dodd Frank reforms to rein in big banks after that.
Corporate bailouts, huge deficit spending, mega tax cuts for the mega rich, and bottomless pit defense spending have been Republican policy for the last 50 years.
The companies don't give a rats ass what kind of energy project it is as long as it is profitable. Wind energy, gas, cow farts, it's all the same to them. Your framing makes no sense.
Plurality, not majority. (Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates).
Which is functionally a vote for the status quo. Someone who can't bother to vote isn't going to bother e.g. protesting or otherwise affirming their rights.
> Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates
Sounds like both candidates were terrible enough that quite a few didn't bother?
Many taxpayers are non-citizens or convicted felons and cannot vote. Turnout of citizens who were eligible to vote last election was 65%. Of those, 49.8% voted for Trump. Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.
Total waste of $1 Bil of taxpayer dollars. If the oil and gas industry want to shut down wind projects let them pay for it.