Trump Pays a French Company a Billion Dollars to Increase Your Electric Bill
Say what you will about Donald Trump, he’s a man who tends to fixate on simple ideas. One reported reason for his biliously hostile anti-immigrant policy back in 2016, for instance, was that his aides used “build the wall” as a mnemonic device. Even in 2014, Trump tended to ramble incoherently while delivering a speech, so this served as a way to focus his attention and get him to repeat it a billion times.
Another Trump fixation is “wind farms bad.” From what I can tell, this one is pure personal pique dating back to the time that the British government built an offshore wind farm visible from his golf course in Scotland. Trump has the typical wealthy NIMBY attitude toward anything that changes the view from his various properties, and also bears a huge grudge when he is unable to obtain whatever he wants through the legal system.
Thus, as president, Trump has mounted a full-scale assault on offshore wind—repealing Biden’s renewable-power subsidies, adding a whole bunch more regulatory red tape to renewable investment, and attempting to illegally cancel several huge projects that were already near completion. So far, Trump has lost every subsequent court case, but of late his administration has come up with an innovative new strategy: bribery. Rather than harassing the French developer TotalEnergies to drop two planned wind farm projects, the administration offered it nearly a billion dollars to not build them.
This, alas, worked great, at least when the bribe covered the company’s costs. The Danish company Ørsted naturally fought Trump’s attempted cancellation of the Sunrise Wind project, which was nearly complete, because it would have led to billions in losses. But TotalEnergies was happy to take Trump’s proposed buyout of the leases it bought under the Biden administration, in exchange for some incentives to invest in oil and gas, particularly a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Texas. The projects were not started yet, and the company has historically worked in fossil fuels anyway. It was a “pragmatic” decision, according to TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné.
The two projects were to be located off the coasts of New York and North Carolina; they would have generated enough electricity to power roughly one million and 300,000 homes, respectively.
The gratuitous stupidity of this is almost impossible to exaggerate. Federal taxpayers lose $928 million. Utilities in New York and North Carolina lose power generation projects that they were counting on and will likely have to turn to natural gas to make up the difference. The price of that gas in turn is shooting up, while the price of wind has been in structural decline for decades, and so power bills in those states will increase markedly relative to where they would have been. Emissions go up, hurting the climate. And Texas probably gets some more investment in oil and gas, meaning yet more higher prices and emissions.
By my count, this makes it a lose-lose-lose-lose-lose policy, and that’s not counting increased pollution. That’s President Deals in a nutshell.
The only arguable winner is TotalEnergies, which, again, is French. It’s not even necessary to give the company any incentives to invest more in oil and gas at this moment, thanks to the aforementioned high prices that are locked in for months if not years at this point. The “America First!” president is giving a foreign company a large windfall profit for no reason.
And even here, Trump is arguably harming TotalEnergies’ long-term interests. The company will get a quick profit thanks to Trump forcing America to double down on filthy, dangerous, expensive, and outdated energy sources, but the rest of the world either is or soon will be sprinting as fast as possible in the other direction. Chances are good America will turn back toward renewables in the future as well. Despite his efforts, Trump has only slowed, not stopped, the transition to renewable energy. Offshore wind projects are not easy to build, and TotalEnergies is missing out on a great opportunity to build some expertise and a track record of success.
The fact that all this is happening while Trump is waging a comprehensively deranged war on Iran really puts it into the highest plane of idiocy. On the one hand, this war—a clear purpose of which Trump has still not articulated, probably because he doesn’t have one—has choked off maybe a fifth of the global supply of oil and gas production, blown a huge and rapidly growing hole in global energy supplies, and hence caused the price of oil and gas to skyrocket. As I was drafting this article, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is likely to send 3,000 82nd Airborne troops into Iran to do … something?
On the other hand, Trump is spending a billion taxpayer dollars to prevent the development of domestic energy sources that aren’t exposed to the global commodities markets, instead subsidizing the construction of more gas export infrastructure so the American consumer can be even more exposed to global price shocks caused by his drunken-maniac foreign policy.
Pollsters tell us that voter anger at President Biden over high prices was a key factor in Trump winning the 2024 election. Despite that, it is hard to imagine more ways in which Trump could be making prices go up faster.
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