HN title (currently reads "US govt pays TotalEnergies nearly $1B to stop US offshore wind projects") is editorialized and it's unclear to me whether it's accurate. The article says:
> We're partnering with TotalEnergies to unleash nearly $1 billion that was tied up in a lease deposit that was directed towards the prior administration's subsidies
What's the deal with this lease deposit and how does "freeing it up" equate to the US govt "paying" TotalEnergies that amount?
Is this a situation where TotalEnergies put down a 1B deposit to lease the seashore from the government and the government is now canceling that agreement and giving them their money back? How does it relate to "subsidies"?
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.
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.
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.
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).
They only get the money if they reinvest in oil and gas. It’s not just trying to kill wind, it’s actively trying to expand burning fossil fuels. We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
They aren't idiots, they are evil. They know what they are doing; enriching themselves and hoarding political power and resources. Claiming these folks are dumb rather than evil propagates the idea that we should give them some sort of leeway. In fact, we should have sent these clowns to prison 5 years or more ago.
> TotalEnergies has committed to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States. Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind. Under this innovative agreement driven by President Donald J. Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda, the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.
> For its part, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, on the following projects in 2026:
The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas;
The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production.
Following TotalEnergies’ $928 million in investments in affordable, reliable and secure U.S. energy projects, the United States will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company
Thanks, that's helpful. Pretty annoying the original article didn't link to its source given that it was just repeating the contents of a press release.
Anyone know what these "ideological subsidies" are that they're referring to? Were they part of the agreement that was just terminated? Or was that just a vaguely related talking point they inserted into the press release for political reasons?
"ideological subsidies" for this administration means any policy supporting non-thermal and non-battery (to a lesser extent, although their lobby has pretty successfully extracted them from previous renewable associations they relied on) generating units.
To get more specific, you could say everything rolled back from the IRA as part of the BBB.
If it's just BBB they're referring to then I would call that a political talking point since that doesn't seem directly related to this deal.
Unless the subsidies being repealed explains why TotalEnergies seems happy to get out of the lease now even though they presumably thought it was a good deal for them back when they originally agreed to it. If that's true though then I don't know why neither the article nor the press release say anything about it other than in this vague allusion.
They were stuck in a never-ending series of legal battles because the current administration is trying to block all wind power, so their money was not actually going anywhere useful. Coincidentally Trump hates wind power and is still bringing up his golf course having some offshore wind near it after years.
Unclear to me what would satisfy this complaint.. You wish La Monde speculated more on some glaring omission of motive here? You're original point is that they seemed to speculate too much!
We don't know some important specifics about the deal but (IMHO) that's on purpose and is telling, meaning you only end up obscure deal details because you have something to hide.
So I don't know what stage the project was at but by withdrawing from the deal or cancelling it, the government is going to have to pay a penalty. Is that penalty $10 million? Is it $500 million? We don't really know.
So it could be that TotalEnergies is still getting paid $1 billion but now they have to spend $600 million on some fossil fuel project. But in doing so the government has essentially paid a $400 million break penalty. You see what I mean?
I don't believe for a second that the government didn't lose money on this political cancellation. The fossil fuel project is just a way to hide that and save face (IMHO).
Not sure how it relates to subsidies, but it is what you said. The government is cancelling wind shore projects leased to TotalEnergies under the Biden admin for ~$930 million.
The Trump admin is paying them back with the understanding that TotalEnergies will reinvest the money into oil and gas operations in the US
They are taking money committed to a wind project and redirecting it towards burning fossil fuels - because what other lesson can we take from a global energy shock other than to increase our exposure to the next one? The company itself (France's Total) had already committed to the wind deal, so now the Trump admin is letting them off the hook, and using Trump's irrational refusal to issue licenses for wind power as the excuse for why the deal wasn't working out as originally planned.
Total is also committed to expanding LNG - Total [0] and Oil India [1] are collaborating on a $20 Billion LNG extraction megaproject in Mozambique which was paused due to an Islamist insurgency during which Total-and-Oil India-funded paramilitary allegedly committed massacres against civilians [2] while putting down an Islamic State insurgency in Cabo Delgado.
The US, France+India, and China have been competing over this project for decades.
These are businesses - no one cares about morals, only interests. And it is in France's interest to unlock these kinds of LNG projects.
I think you misread my comment. I'm asking why you wouldn't want other types of vehicles that can be electrified to be electrified, such that there is less demand for the diesel that yours requires.
For example I've got a tractor that burns diesel, for effectively homeowner use. I too am not going to be replacing this piece of capital equipment any time soon (even though electrical would actually be better in a lot of regards). But since trucking is reliant on diesel and quite demand-insensistive, the Epstein war recently made diesel prices jump 60%. Whereas the fewer economically-critical vehicles there are being powered by diesel (even just the short range ones), the less that price would have spiked.
This deal has zero to do with someone like you. This impacts our electrical grid. Now instead of harvesting renewable wind energy we will be burning LNG to power that portion of the grid.
I suppose there are still some diesel generators out there, so they might burn that instead. Of course, that only makes you worse off.
The guy is unhinged, hellbent on denial, just to appease his base, who are going bankrupt because of his policies. Would he pay Sun as well to stop shining over the US?
The overrated and very annoying "sun", the so-called "star" that our planet goes around has been going unquestioned for too long! Many people have been asking for a long time, perhaps even before Obama, to remove the sun from the sky and replace it with our beautiful clean coal towers!
It's even stupider than that, it's not even to appease his base, it's a personal grudge. Trump sued a wind energy company to prevent them from building an off-shore wind farm in view of his golf resort in Scotland. He lost that case badly and he has been railing against wind energy specifically ever since.
So far Trump hasn't done much to prevent solar farms from being built, it's only wind turbines that he's exacting his vengeance on like some sort of modern day Don Quixote.
If the government would like to pay me to also not build wind turbines, hit me up. I mean, I wasn't going to build any in the first place, but I think this makes me qualified to continue not building any.
> [Major Major’s father's] specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county….
Shit like this has been happening since the first colonists came to the US. On of the first thing the Massachusetts Bay Company did in the 1630s was subsidizing the Winthrop Salthouse for decades ... which never successfully produced salt. Another thing commonly done was the English government or charters would gift land and then turn right around and buy it back at market price.
Just look at it as America going back to the colonial ages and then everything that's happening makes sense. The bad news is that people were willing to put up with that for over 100 year so there's no guarantee anyone will do anything for a long time.
I'm investing in property in places that will allow me to get permanent residency without jumping through too many hoops.
You theoretically lose yield compared to the S&P average - but if you're hedging your bets against the US possibly going to shit - the S&P is unlikely to perform as well as its historic average IFF that scenario unfolds.
Seems like a better hedge than gold, but my crystal ball isn't working.
Yep, the only thing that's sure is that children of said smart people will suffer their whole life so these smart people could give a bit more money to the fossil barons.
Pay may be numerically less in the eu, but rather than me trying to convince you, try on youtube: 'why I left the USA for europe'.
There are very many.!
Even if the insanity stopped right this second, it's likely that the EU will be actively working to step out of the US's economic and military shadow in the next couple decades. For anyone not in tech, most of the EU is already better than most of the US. The same is also true for many people in tech (most outside NYC/SF/Seattle).
Also, Canada. They're likely to withstand global warming better than most of the world, and would be comparatively easy to adapt to. If I didn't own a house, I'd already be working to move there, though I have recent ancestry that makes it a relatively more appealing option.
Lol thats trivial if you actually know history and politics a tiny bit - Switzerland. 800 years of most free citizens in the world (lost that armed part but still valid for whole Europe with maybe Finland having similar numbers).
Salaries in tech sector still give you higher overall quality of life than most of US can ever offer. Then you have - extremely beautiful nature at your doorstep, more top notch destinations like Italy and France just at the border, very low criminality compared to US, very good free healthcare, very good free education including top notch public universities, very well functioning social programs. One doesn't have to be ashamed their taxes go to killing innocent civilians half around the world (although at this point US population including folks here seems fine with that). And so on and on and on.
Also, you don't spend your whole active life getting it and (almost) burning out for that, 40h/week and then you can live your life and chase dreams and passions.
Swiss people are quite rude and unaccepting of foreigners, even foreigners who grow up there. I don't think they have room for Americans wishing to leave.
Americans have a twisted outlook because despite muh racism USA has allowed more foreigners in than any other country, a quite sizeable chunk of them via overstay or illegal immigration, so we think we could do the same thing and just as an average person up and move somewhere else because we see that it can be done and most of the time it is at least possible to get away with it unless you have bad luck or do something stupid.
Argentina and Brazil are about the only other countries where you can almost get away with this and legalize your existence (Argentina in particular has constitution that says essentially if you survive 2 years, you are basically citizen) , although most of Africa wouldn't bother to enforce it (South Africa in particular has almost as much illegal immigration per capita as USA although with a wide band of possible error in estimates, and they can't meaningfully enforce it).
Otherwise you need investments (usually 50k+), permanent pension, top-tier education, a professional job offer, cultural/family ties, or connections with the political apparatus. Switzerland in particular is on extreme hard mode for a non-EU citizen to get citizenship.
Quite a few swiss residents would be happy to have this (or at least some more cost control).
There's mandatory health insurance with preexisting condition coverage, but it's not free (tho it's partially tax supported, depending on location and income).
Do I have it right that the two projects that this deal kills off haven't seen any construction work yet? These aren't among the projects that the stop work orders were issued against in December, right?
My quick skim, I think you are right. This is getting them to halt new development, by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled.
>by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled
no, the billion that is being "paid" is a refund of what Total paid in for the leases. Total paid that into the US govt in anticipation of receiving returns on that investment in the form of "clean energy subsidies".
it is not clear from what is in the news story whether Total is being compensated for the would-have-been future subsidies, or whether Total simply expects to make decent profits from fossil fuels.
if one's interest is in the "clean energy" angle, then this is a "defeat". if one's interest is in reducing govt subsidies, this could be "a win", but it's not exactly clear.
These ones no construction had been started yet AFAIK.
If AI summery is to be trusted, a few other windparks got stopped that where almost done, but got completed anyway after a legal battle. Vineyard Wind 1, Coastal Virginia (CVOW), Empire Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind.
Again, got it from AI, make of that what you want.
The symbolism, and the stupidity, was there though. As time has gone on it has been more clear every year how intelligent Carter's administration was and how terrible the following administration was. Investing in/promoting solar was just one of many smart moves by Carter that were attacked purely to gain political points that only harmed us in the long run.
Carter: “This energy crisis shows us how vulnerable we are to foreign autocrats. We should work toward energy independence via renewable energy and waste reduction, to lead the world away from this risky and unsustainable fossil fuel market and secure ourselves a brighter future.”
To be fair, he was essentially wrong about the efficiency angle because of the Jevons paradox and the "make your dryer not actually dry your clothes" kind of thing was pretty stupid.
A lot of the methods of subsidizing things were also quite incompetent, e.g. Solyndra. If you want to subsidize something like this you do it on the consumer side, e.g. 75% tax credit for every US-made solar panel you install, which drives demand for US-made solar panels without opening you up to scandals like that or the usual corruption where the money goes to the administration's buddies.
I really want to see the legal verbiage guaranteeing this right. Like, how many mutations can covid virus get before it legally could be sprayed on patriotic Americans?
This will not be a learned more robustly in the US until one or both of the only two (edit: major) gas turbine manufacturers in the world (GE Vernova, Siemens Energy) suffer a tail risk event causing their failure. Backlog for new gas turbines is ~7 years, as of this comment. Continued production capacity is a function of how fragile those two companies are.
Yes, but their production volume is limited (imho) compared to the two companies I mentioned. Good callout regardless. I'll have a post put together to share here enumerating and comparing.
(i track global fossil generation production capacity as a component of tracking the overall rate of global energy transition to clean energy and electrification, but some of my resources are simply an excel spreadsheet)
People laugh at this, but anthracite genuinely is cleaner than other coal in every regard save CO2 emissions. People just think it's a joke because they've come to believe that CO2 is the only coal emission worth caring about, which definitely isn't true.
The oxymoronic term "clean coal" refers to carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology [0], touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and continue employing coal workers.
Thus far, it is incredibly expensive, at a time when solar and wind generation is cost-competitive with fossil-fuel plants which don't employ CCS. It is simply a dead end. You can generate more renewable energy, and store it, for far less than it takes to equip and operate CCS in conjunction with a fossil-fuel-fired plant. Only direct government subsidy makes it viable for a vanishingly small amount of GHG emissions.
"Clean coal" is like saying "a fast snail". Sure it can be faster than other snails, but even if it's twice as fast as the second fastest snail, it's still a snail and I'll still laugh when an ant runs circles around it.
No, the criticism isn't because people get caught up about CO2 -- it's because "cleaner than other coal" is a very low bar to meet to be calling something "clean" full stop.
Also "clean coal" is not a type of coal being burnt (although that does matter too) but pollution control systems added to coal plants.
Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven. If your neighbor told you he was going to install a new furnace and offered you the choice of it burning wood pellets or anthracite, from a smell standpoint you should absolutely choose the anthracite.
Anthracite, in these regards, is very different from bituminous coal.
Undoubtedly. Doesn't change the fact that one kind of coal burns smokeless with a clean blue flame while the other will cover everything for miles in a film of soot and tar.
The smell of wood might be nice for flavor, but that's beyond the point of anthracite being clean. That particulate pollution from wood burning is severe compared to the smoke you'll get off anthracite, which is virtually nonexistent.
Regardless of how good it might be at being the cleanest dirty thing, it's not what the US trope of "clean coal" refers to anyway. Anthracite is not used in the US to generate power because it is too expensive.
> The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.
Oh boy can't wait for the reenactment of third reich intervening peacefully in czechoslovakia, for their own safety and wellbeing of course, and not at all for the resources they're hoarding, the filthy hoarders.
It's awesome the US hasn't destabilized one of those neighbors and alienated the other one by declaring it the prospective 51st state. Soft power really is America's super power.
tbh I’m kind of surprised the admin hasn’t enacted export tariffs on oil and gas already to take the pressure off car owners.
Wouldn’t do anything to the prices of imported products since the entire intl supply chain would be subject to even higher prices, but would reduce pressure at the pump
Sure, if we build out refining capacity for the next ten years. Then we're golden until we run out of the finite well of combustible dead algae. So if you think we can revitalize American manufacturing and resource processing starting now, and you're okay with those investments being worthless in a few decades, and you don't give a shit about rendering the planet significantly less habitable to human life, then yeah, we're totally self-sufficient with fossil fuels.
Or we could, you know, pull energy out of the air and sun, a strategy which will be viable until our star dies.
Alberta tar sands have hundreds of years worth of reserves. They're also expensive and incredibly dirty to extract and emit significantly more CO2 during processing than a light oil well will. (The tar is usually melted by heating with natural gas).
I'm quite confident cheap renewable alternatives will make the tar sands inviable far before they run out.
Some good news though, with the war in Iran the spiking oil price means that Albertan executives can ramp up operations and stay quite profitable! Push the price to 200/barrel and we'll just strip mine the entire province after airlifting out Calgary and Edmonton.
This assumes that there isn't profound demand destruction caused by the stratospheric energy prices.
Fossil fuels were already an inferior energy source when oil was $60/barrel. Electrification has been moving fast and accelerating, even at the pre-energy crisis prices.
Now? Current events are likely to take fossil fuels out back and give 'em the Old Yeller treatment with surprising speed.
I absolutely agree, _in market driven economies_, fossil fuels are slowly pricing themselves out of relevancy. The issue is that for some reason the US specifically subsidizes their usage keeping them artificially lowly priced.
So, how many billions of newly printed debt is Trump willing to throw at the problem to keep those subsidies up so that he can be sheltered from the scary windmills?
I do find the slow Sovietization of America funny, both mentally and economically. The year is 2050, autarky on energy has been established, the markets cut off, politics in the hands of erratic and geriatric leaders. Americans proudly drive 30 year old Fords the way people used to drive Ladas, while China exports green energy, cars and infrastructure to the world.
The US is unable to implement export controls so consuming less than it creates doesnt mean theres enough since producers will export if international prices are better
I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, but I'm still shocked to see things like this. And I'm fully aware of Trump's Scotland experience and how that contributed or directly led to this, but, still, shocked. And then I'm also shocked because I know that at least half, if not a good bit more, of US citizens are in agreement with this strategy. Not sure how I can still be shocked but here I am.
And I say that not as some rabid renewables person. Just the insane binary thinking, regardless of the dollars and cronyism at work. There's zero room for nuance, which I guess is my biggest complaint about the world at large.
Aside: people who think climate change will be the death of us all, and sooner than later, I get it, and I fully appreciate you pushing for a cleaner and more livable world. At this point I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope you, and China, figure it out and then it spreads quickly to the rest of the world, which I think at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion barring a nuclear war (will refrain from commenting about how the likelihood of that has ticked up the past couple of weeks in an area teeming with (sarcastically shocked this time!) fossil fuels).
I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"
Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.
As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.
So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.
> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on
I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.
It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.
In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.
Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.
I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.
I've just grown to really respect older people who manage to stay excited and optimistic. It's so much easier to become a cynic, and I think it required effort on their end to try and be a positive person.
Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency
Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.
The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.
> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.
I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.
> I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be,
Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like.
The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.
I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.
Perhaps they try to please the US government. A previous total CEO "maintained complicated relations with the United States". He died in a plane crash accident. Was it an accident or a murder, perhaps the current Total CEO prefers to be safe than dead.
They've funded massacres in 2021 [0] in order to unlock the $20 Billion Cabo Delgado LNG deal [1] in Mozambique. Greenwashing is the least of their worries.
I've found French business culture to be extremely refreshing compared to their DACH peers - French business norms tend to be much more pragmatic, and will try to maintain strategic autonomy by hook or by crook.
> "TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was 'not the most affordable way to produce electricity' in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants. [...] So it was a win-win dialog," he said."
Pouyanné is only 62 years old. If, as I hope, there are criminal trials in the future for those responsible for recklessly endangering life on this planet, then I hope that he is still alive and that statements like this form part of the prosecution. Unfortunately Trump will almost certainly be long dead by then.
Trump wrecks the global energy economy and his next move is to increase our dependence on it? They don't make enough dimensions for the type of chess this brainiac is playing.
Kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation to put them on show trial and plotting to steal the country's natural resources. Blockading and strangling an island country to the point of economic collapse. Opining out loud about annexing their northern neighbours. The list goes on and on..
None of the institutions function, or do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist. You're welcome to describe my view with whatever pejorative you prefer.
> do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist
Something misfunctioning doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here. Pretending that doesn’t exist because it doesn’t work the way we like is an expression of exasperation, not a description of reality.
>A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here
Those things are exactly what destroyed the nation. The military industrial complex and the billionaires who removed the teeth from institutions that used to prevent the accumulation of power (see also: antitrust litigation against Standard Oil). Those entities are now in complete control and democracy is nothing but a sham, a clown show between two faces of the same coin.
The US as a country didn't fail with Trump. It failed when Microsoft got away scot-free. This was the biggest sign that the country was no longer a serious entity, because a serious entity would try to preserve its own power, while the United States of Burgers is something to be sold to the highest bidder.
This level of doomerism is absurd. Of course the US will survive this administration. I blame the news for making every breathe by whichever opposition seem like the next WWIII.
The land will be there. (most of) people will be there. What parent probably meant is losing everything good and positive United States of America represented in past 80+ years, internally and globally.
That is gone my friend, with the wind like a sulfuric fart, for good. US is becoming a global terrorist and enemy #2 of free world and certainly whole Europe (right after its biggest and only 'friend', russia which coincidentally keeps trying to make you a thing of the past). This comes from somebody who strongly believed in your role in global hegemony despite your numerous well documented fuckups in the past. All on the whims of one visibly mentally sick man, with absolutely nobody standing up to him despite nobody really believing in any of that bullshit. No principles, just plain greed and firm fuck-the-rest approach. Right now, if Europe needs a strong big ally it will be #1 China, and then... nothing.
The fact you voted him in, and he still has massive support, and there has been 0 overthrow attempts of the biggest traitor to US in its history tells me and everybody else in the world many things, but nothing positive. Even if next election, if they will happen, will have 98% win of the democracts with that ridiculous unfair and undemocratic system of yours, it won't change a permanent shift that started and keeps happening. US has no real allies, in same vein russia or China has no real allies.
Empires rise and fall, inevitably, there was never a reason to think US would be an exception.
Theses wind farms have not even started construction yet. Once Don Quixote is out of office, some future administration undoubtedly will start wind farm construction.
I'm actually less concerned about the continued non-existence of a bunch of windmills, vs the billion-dollar payout to ensure that they continue to not exist.
I've spent my entire life not building any windmills and nobody's paid me a billion dollars for it yet.
This seems like a good thing considering the “TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was "not the most affordable way to produce electricity" in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants.”
Not sure why we’re building offshore wind plants when land based gas plants provide cheaper energy. We need to be reducing the cost of living for working people and not raising it. Our goal should be to reduce people’s cost of living and we should align our actions towards those goals.
Does the offshore wind energy costs include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping, installing, maintaining and decommissioning the turbines? Does it also include bird losses and whale harms?
Does the gas turbine include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping installing, maintaining, and decommissioning oil drilling rigs? And of shipping, storing, and burning the gas? And the climate change caused by gas leaks? And the harms to humans, the fishing industry, and bird losses and whale harms by oil spills (I know you really care about those)?
Wind and solar are consistently the cheapest forms of new energy generation. Pouyanné knows that. He is being a politician here, saying what he knows will play well with the current administration. When in Rome...
HN title (currently reads "US govt pays TotalEnergies nearly $1B to stop US offshore wind projects") is editorialized and it's unclear to me whether it's accurate. The article says:
> We're partnering with TotalEnergies to unleash nearly $1 billion that was tied up in a lease deposit that was directed towards the prior administration's subsidies
What's the deal with this lease deposit and how does "freeing it up" equate to the US govt "paying" TotalEnergies that amount?
Is this a situation where TotalEnergies put down a 1B deposit to lease the seashore from the government and the government is now canceling that agreement and giving them their money back? How does it relate to "subsidies"?
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.
Why would they do that when they already paid for a corrupt new regime to do it for 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.
1. https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...
Sweden and Finland have also banned offshore wind farms for national security reasons.
It's not hard to understand why, if you think about it one further step than your nose.
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.
Could you give some sources for this? I can't seem to find anything with a cursory search, but I'd be interested in reading.
https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/11/avslag-pa...
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.
The majority of tax payers voted for this to happen
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).
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/trumps-latest-anti-w...
They only get the money if they reinvest in oil and gas. It’s not just trying to kill wind, it’s actively trying to expand burning fossil fuels. We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
> We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
They aren't idiots, they are evil. They know what they are doing; enriching themselves and hoarding political power and resources. Claiming these folks are dumb rather than evil propagates the idea that we should give them some sort of leeway. In fact, we should have sent these clowns to prison 5 years or more ago.
The only idiots are the people who voted for Trump
You could go to the source and see[1].
> TotalEnergies has committed to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States. Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind. Under this innovative agreement driven by President Donald J. Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda, the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.
> For its part, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, on the following projects in 2026:
The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas; The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production. Following TotalEnergies’ $928 million in investments in affordable, reliable and secure U.S. energy projects, the United States will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company
[1] https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-and-totalenergies...
Thanks, that's helpful. Pretty annoying the original article didn't link to its source given that it was just repeating the contents of a press release.
Anyone know what these "ideological subsidies" are that they're referring to? Were they part of the agreement that was just terminated? Or was that just a vaguely related talking point they inserted into the press release for political reasons?
"ideological subsidies" for this administration means any policy supporting non-thermal and non-battery (to a lesser extent, although their lobby has pretty successfully extracted them from previous renewable associations they relied on) generating units.
To get more specific, you could say everything rolled back from the IRA as part of the BBB.
If it's just BBB they're referring to then I would call that a political talking point since that doesn't seem directly related to this deal.
Unless the subsidies being repealed explains why TotalEnergies seems happy to get out of the lease now even though they presumably thought it was a good deal for them back when they originally agreed to it. If that's true though then I don't know why neither the article nor the press release say anything about it other than in this vague allusion.
They were stuck in a never-ending series of legal battles because the current administration is trying to block all wind power, so their money was not actually going anywhere useful. Coincidentally Trump hates wind power and is still bringing up his golf course having some offshore wind near it after years.
Unclear to me what would satisfy this complaint.. You wish La Monde speculated more on some glaring omission of motive here? You're original point is that they seemed to speculate too much!
We don't know some important specifics about the deal but (IMHO) that's on purpose and is telling, meaning you only end up obscure deal details because you have something to hide.
So I don't know what stage the project was at but by withdrawing from the deal or cancelling it, the government is going to have to pay a penalty. Is that penalty $10 million? Is it $500 million? We don't really know.
So it could be that TotalEnergies is still getting paid $1 billion but now they have to spend $600 million on some fossil fuel project. But in doing so the government has essentially paid a $400 million break penalty. You see what I mean?
I don't believe for a second that the government didn't lose money on this political cancellation. The fossil fuel project is just a way to hide that and save face (IMHO).
Not sure how it relates to subsidies, but it is what you said. The government is cancelling wind shore projects leased to TotalEnergies under the Biden admin for ~$930 million.
The Trump admin is paying them back with the understanding that TotalEnergies will reinvest the money into oil and gas operations in the US
They are taking money committed to a wind project and redirecting it towards burning fossil fuels - because what other lesson can we take from a global energy shock other than to increase our exposure to the next one? The company itself (France's Total) had already committed to the wind deal, so now the Trump admin is letting them off the hook, and using Trump's irrational refusal to issue licenses for wind power as the excuse for why the deal wasn't working out as originally planned.
Total is also committed to expanding LNG - Total [0] and Oil India [1] are collaborating on a $20 Billion LNG extraction megaproject in Mozambique which was paused due to an Islamist insurgency during which Total-and-Oil India-funded paramilitary allegedly committed massacres against civilians [2] while putting down an Islamic State insurgency in Cabo Delgado.
The US, France+India, and China have been competing over this project for decades.
These are businesses - no one cares about morals, only interests. And it is in France's interest to unlock these kinds of LNG projects.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mozambique-says-tota...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-india-sees-resta...
[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gw119ynlxo
I drive commercially.
There are no fully electric, or even hybrid, options for the type of vehicle I drive.
And even if there were, are you (tax payers) prepared to buy it for me, because I’m not due for an upgrade for about another 400,000 kilometres.
Can’t put wind generated watt-hours in my diesel tank.
Can’t put wishful thinking in my cars petrol tank.
> And even if there were, are you (tax payers) prepared to buy it for me, because I’m not due for an upgrade for about another 400,000 kilometres.
400,000 km is around two years for a commercial driver, isn't it?
In the EU it would be about 7 000 hours of driving so more like three years, or more.
What kind of vehicle is it though? There are battery electric vehicles available now in almost all commercial vehicle segments in Europe.
It seems like you should want the types of vehicles that can avoid using fossil fuels to do so, to keep your own prices down?
What is with this attitude of reflexively interpreting the development of alternatives as if they are mandatory ?
Whether I wanting them or not is irrelevant to the fact that they presently don’t exist, and that I’m not due for a new vehicle for years.
I did try to make that clear in the comment you replied to.
The battery technology doesn’t exist.
I think you misread my comment. I'm asking why you wouldn't want other types of vehicles that can be electrified to be electrified, such that there is less demand for the diesel that yours requires.
For example I've got a tractor that burns diesel, for effectively homeowner use. I too am not going to be replacing this piece of capital equipment any time soon (even though electrical would actually be better in a lot of regards). But since trucking is reliant on diesel and quite demand-insensistive, the Epstein war recently made diesel prices jump 60%. Whereas the fewer economically-critical vehicles there are being powered by diesel (even just the short range ones), the less that price would have spiked.
You know if demand goes down for fossil fuels because the grid is powered by renewables then the cost would decrease right?
Also “kilometers”? “petrol tank”? Thanks for holding three fingers up and letting me know you’re cosplaying as an American
This deal has zero to do with someone like you. This impacts our electrical grid. Now instead of harvesting renewable wind energy we will be burning LNG to power that portion of the grid.
I suppose there are still some diesel generators out there, so they might burn that instead. Of course, that only makes you worse off.
The guy is unhinged, hellbent on denial, just to appease his base, who are going bankrupt because of his policies. Would he pay Sun as well to stop shining over the US?
The overrated and very annoying "sun", the so-called "star" that our planet goes around has been going unquestioned for too long! Many people have been asking for a long time, perhaps even before Obama, to remove the sun from the sky and replace it with our beautiful clean coal towers!
"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun" - Charles Montgomery Burns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LbxDZRgA4
Thankyou for your attention to this matter!
Relevant power metal song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z769xf9ET5A
I had this big guy, very big guy with tears streaming down his cheeks asking me "Sir can you take down that woke star that keeps me awake"
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
> The guy is unhinged, hellbent on denial, just to appease his base, who are going bankrupt because of his policies.
In the middle of a war he started over war. No less. If his base wanted cheap gas, they are not going to get it.
To me, this deal makes it pretty clear who holds actual sway
https://fee.org/articles/the-candlemakers-petition/ This feels relevant
It's even stupider than that, it's not even to appease his base, it's a personal grudge. Trump sued a wind energy company to prevent them from building an off-shore wind farm in view of his golf resort in Scotland. He lost that case badly and he has been railing against wind energy specifically ever since.
So far Trump hasn't done much to prevent solar farms from being built, it's only wind turbines that he's exacting his vengeance on like some sort of modern day Don Quixote.
UK should confiscate his golf courses and build on shore wind on them as reparations for this Iran war he sarted
Even Burns wasn't this deranged
If the government would like to pay me to also not build wind turbines, hit me up. I mean, I wasn't going to build any in the first place, but I think this makes me qualified to continue not building any.
> [Major Major’s father's] specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county….
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Shit like this has been happening since the first colonists came to the US. On of the first thing the Massachusetts Bay Company did in the 1630s was subsidizing the Winthrop Salthouse for decades ... which never successfully produced salt. Another thing commonly done was the English government or charters would gift land and then turn right around and buy it back at market price.
Just look at it as America going back to the colonial ages and then everything that's happening makes sense. The bad news is that people were willing to put up with that for over 100 year so there's no guarantee anyone will do anything for a long time.
I think it’s in part returning money this company paid the government
Serious question, but not entirely related to the topic - how are “smart” people in the US preparing for the next 20-30 years?
- Assume everything will be fine and America will remain a global economic superpower.
- Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
- Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
I'm investing in property in places that will allow me to get permanent residency without jumping through too many hoops.
You theoretically lose yield compared to the S&P average - but if you're hedging your bets against the US possibly going to shit - the S&P is unlikely to perform as well as its historic average IFF that scenario unfolds.
Seems like a better hedge than gold, but my crystal ball isn't working.
I don't know if I qualify for "smart" but my plan has been to keep one foot in the US and one foot in Europe.
I saw the writing on the wall long ago. I predicted all of this happening many years ago. I left the US back in 2015.
Currently in the UK, and I hope to eventually get dual citizenship. My partner is European, so that is possible too.
Smart people know that you can't predict or plan for anything on anywhere close to that time horizon. The only plan is be adaptable.
> The only plan is be adaptable
And that's exactly what the question was.
You seem to consider yourself in the "smart people" ranks, so what's your big plan for adaptability?
You can build contingencies and hedge bets. You can plan. You just can't predict what will happen so it's playing the odds.
Yep, the only thing that's sure is that children of said smart people will suffer their whole life so these smart people could give a bit more money to the fossil barons.
I live in iowa - all my electric comes from wind, and I drive an ev or bike. I'm not worried
I'd leave the US if the tech jobs didn't pay so much better here.
I mostly like the US but the years since Obama have been rough
Pay may be numerically less in the eu, but rather than me trying to convince you, try on youtube: 'why I left the USA for europe'. There are very many.!
And oddly enough plenty the other way.
D) Die. I'll reach my expected lifespan by then. If possible, move to a serious, stable country before then.
I'm somewhere in the middle and bought an ocean going sailboat.
Please list the more serious and stable country if America collapses.
I’ll wait.
On a serious note;
I’m looking at my billion dollar neighbors and they all just are citizens everywhere now. No allegiance to anything but their own pleasure.
Even if the insanity stopped right this second, it's likely that the EU will be actively working to step out of the US's economic and military shadow in the next couple decades. For anyone not in tech, most of the EU is already better than most of the US. The same is also true for many people in tech (most outside NYC/SF/Seattle).
Also, Canada. They're likely to withstand global warming better than most of the world, and would be comparatively easy to adapt to. If I didn't own a house, I'd already be working to move there, though I have recent ancestry that makes it a relatively more appealing option.
Lol thats trivial if you actually know history and politics a tiny bit - Switzerland. 800 years of most free citizens in the world (lost that armed part but still valid for whole Europe with maybe Finland having similar numbers).
Salaries in tech sector still give you higher overall quality of life than most of US can ever offer. Then you have - extremely beautiful nature at your doorstep, more top notch destinations like Italy and France just at the border, very low criminality compared to US, very good free healthcare, very good free education including top notch public universities, very well functioning social programs. One doesn't have to be ashamed their taxes go to killing innocent civilians half around the world (although at this point US population including folks here seems fine with that). And so on and on and on.
Also, you don't spend your whole active life getting it and (almost) burning out for that, 40h/week and then you can live your life and chase dreams and passions.
Swiss people are quite rude and unaccepting of foreigners, even foreigners who grow up there. I don't think they have room for Americans wishing to leave.
Americans have a twisted outlook because despite muh racism USA has allowed more foreigners in than any other country, a quite sizeable chunk of them via overstay or illegal immigration, so we think we could do the same thing and just as an average person up and move somewhere else because we see that it can be done and most of the time it is at least possible to get away with it unless you have bad luck or do something stupid.
Argentina and Brazil are about the only other countries where you can almost get away with this and legalize your existence (Argentina in particular has constitution that says essentially if you survive 2 years, you are basically citizen) , although most of Africa wouldn't bother to enforce it (South Africa in particular has almost as much illegal immigration per capita as USA although with a wide band of possible error in estimates, and they can't meaningfully enforce it).
Otherwise you need investments (usually 50k+), permanent pension, top-tier education, a professional job offer, cultural/family ties, or connections with the political apparatus. Switzerland in particular is on extreme hard mode for a non-EU citizen to get citizenship.
> very good free healthcare
Quite a few swiss residents would be happy to have this (or at least some more cost control).
There's mandatory health insurance with preexisting condition coverage, but it's not free (tho it's partially tax supported, depending on location and income).
Switzerland would likely be one of the first to collapse financial institutions due to a US fallout.
It’s amazing how poorly you understand their financial situation. They are possible the most privately leveraged entity on the planet by ratio
Their banking systems against their gdp is at 600%.
You couldn’t pick a worse place
Switzerland?
Please list the more serious and stable country if America collapses.
Uh, anywhere that hasn't collapsed?
> Please list the more serious and stable country if America collapses.
Chinahhhh.
Do I have it right that the two projects that this deal kills off haven't seen any construction work yet? These aren't among the projects that the stop work orders were issued against in December, right?
My quick skim, I think you are right. This is getting them to halt new development, by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled.
>by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled
no, the billion that is being "paid" is a refund of what Total paid in for the leases. Total paid that into the US govt in anticipation of receiving returns on that investment in the form of "clean energy subsidies".
it is not clear from what is in the news story whether Total is being compensated for the would-have-been future subsidies, or whether Total simply expects to make decent profits from fossil fuels.
if one's interest is in the "clean energy" angle, then this is a "defeat". if one's interest is in reducing govt subsidies, this could be "a win", but it's not exactly clear.
What an amazing deal. We get nothing and the contractors we negotiated with get money for it!
Truly, the deals this administration crafts are nonpareil!
These ones no construction had been started yet AFAIK.
If AI summery is to be trusted, a few other windparks got stopped that where almost done, but got completed anyway after a legal battle. Vineyard Wind 1, Coastal Virginia (CVOW), Empire Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind.
Again, got it from AI, make of that what you want.
The feds have dropped their attempts to stop those from ongoing construction for now, but only one of those projects is complete.
CVOW is supposed to flow first power this month, but won't be done for ~a year, Empire Wind is also end of '26/early '27, Sunrise later in 2027.
Vineyard was completed this month, and Revolution is delivering power and targets completion over the next few months.
I'm reminded of Reagan taking down the White House solar panels.
Here is a summery and where the panels ended up.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
IIRC those were solar hot water heaters. More of a curiosity than something legitimately powering the white house.
The symbolism, and the stupidity, was there though. As time has gone on it has been more clear every year how intelligent Carter's administration was and how terrible the following administration was. Investing in/promoting solar was just one of many smart moves by Carter that were attacked purely to gain political points that only harmed us in the long run.
Carter: “This energy crisis shows us how vulnerable we are to foreign autocrats. We should work toward energy independence via renewable energy and waste reduction, to lead the world away from this risky and unsustainable fossil fuel market and secure ourselves a brighter future.”
America: throws a decades-long, ongoing tantrum
It’s fairly reductive… but still kinda true.
To be fair, he was essentially wrong about the efficiency angle because of the Jevons paradox and the "make your dryer not actually dry your clothes" kind of thing was pretty stupid.
A lot of the methods of subsidizing things were also quite incompetent, e.g. Solyndra. If you want to subsidize something like this you do it on the consumer side, e.g. 75% tax credit for every US-made solar panel you install, which drives demand for US-made solar panels without opening you up to scandals like that or the usual corruption where the money goes to the administration's buddies.
I feel like Total could have pushed for more, much more.
It's very important that Windmills and 5G antennas do not spray Covid19 on proud patriotic americans
I really want to see the legal verbiage guaranteeing this right. Like, how many mutations can covid virus get before it legally could be sprayed on patriotic Americans?
Depends on the mutation, but it could be as little as 1. A single mutation could turn the virus inert, therefore making it legal.
We truly live in the bad place
Fortunately, fossil fuels are a stable and geopolitically risk-free source of energy.
They're a relatively stable and risk-free source of money for a certain kind of politician.
The energy part is incidental.
Is this the biggest Woosh of the year?
Is this comment on purpose? The whooshes are getting hard to track!
They are also organic, all-natural, and fat-free! And renewable on geological timescales.
Contrary to windmills, which slows down the rotation of the earth.
Doesn't that depend whether you point them east or west?
Point them north and you'll increase Earth's axial tilt.
I think you just solved both leap seconds and daylight savings time.
I personally would like more hours in the day.
No problem: Just build a subterranean boat and launch a few nukes close to the core to restart rotation.
Won't someone think of the ~children~ birds?!
This will not be a learned more robustly in the US until one or both of the only two (edit: major) gas turbine manufacturers in the world (GE Vernova, Siemens Energy) suffer a tail risk event causing their failure. Backlog for new gas turbines is ~7 years, as of this comment. Continued production capacity is a function of how fragile those two companies are.
The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025
Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025
AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-gas-turb... | https://archive.today/b8bhn - October 1st, 2025
(think in systems)
Both of those are big wind tubine manufactres as well.
Luckily, the wind futures market is pretty bullish for the foreseeable future
Isn't there Ansaldo Energia too?
Yes, but their production volume is limited (imho) compared to the two companies I mentioned. Good callout regardless. I'll have a post put together to share here enumerating and comparing.
(i track global fossil generation production capacity as a component of tracking the overall rate of global energy transition to clean energy and electrification, but some of my resources are simply an excel spreadsheet)
Hah, that's super interesting. How are we looking? What under served areas are you seeing? Do you post anywhere your numbers?
And clean. Really, really clean. Just look at coal. A no-brainer. Go for it.
You mean "clean coal", right? Of course it's clean, it's right in the name.
People laugh at this, but anthracite genuinely is cleaner than other coal in every regard save CO2 emissions. People just think it's a joke because they've come to believe that CO2 is the only coal emission worth caring about, which definitely isn't true.
The oxymoronic term "clean coal" refers to carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology [0], touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and continue employing coal workers.
Thus far, it is incredibly expensive, at a time when solar and wind generation is cost-competitive with fossil-fuel plants which don't employ CCS. It is simply a dead end. You can generate more renewable energy, and store it, for far less than it takes to equip and operate CCS in conjunction with a fossil-fuel-fired plant. Only direct government subsidy makes it viable for a vanishingly small amount of GHG emissions.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
"Clean coal" is like saying "a fast snail". Sure it can be faster than other snails, but even if it's twice as fast as the second fastest snail, it's still a snail and I'll still laugh when an ant runs circles around it.
No, the criticism isn't because people get caught up about CO2 -- it's because "cleaner than other coal" is a very low bar to meet to be calling something "clean" full stop.
Also "clean coal" is not a type of coal being burnt (although that does matter too) but pollution control systems added to coal plants.
Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven. If your neighbor told you he was going to install a new furnace and offered you the choice of it burning wood pellets or anthracite, from a smell standpoint you should absolutely choose the anthracite.
Anthracite, in these regards, is very different from bituminous coal.
And both are very different from not burning anything.
Undoubtedly. Doesn't change the fact that one kind of coal burns smokeless with a clean blue flame while the other will cover everything for miles in a film of soot and tar.
>Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven.
Yeah, so does wood, which is horribly polluting.
The smell of wood might be nice for flavor, but that's beyond the point of anthracite being clean. That particulate pollution from wood burning is severe compared to the smoke you'll get off anthracite, which is virtually nonexistent.
Regardless of how good it might be at being the cleanest dirty thing, it's not what the US trope of "clean coal" refers to anyway. Anthracite is not used in the US to generate power because it is too expensive.
The doesn't cause acid rain version is called "clean" and that seems pretty fair to me when the other version causes acid rain.
It is still dirtier than all of the alternatives we have.
The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.
Unfortunately, we share the planet and the atmosphere with it.
If the US taunts someone into a nuclear war, the rest of us get to live but should be investing more in cancer research.
> The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.
Oh boy can't wait for the reenactment of third reich intervening peacefully in czechoslovakia, for their own safety and wellbeing of course, and not at all for the resources they're hoarding, the filthy hoarders.
It's awesome the US hasn't destabilized one of those neighbors and alienated the other one by declaring it the prospective 51st state. Soft power really is America's super power.
I’d wager the US is self sufficient also in terms of renewable energies.
But it gets traded globally. That means if the price goes up in Asia, it also goes up in NA.
It doesn't have to be traded globally. The US could ban oil and gas exports, and that would decouple local prices from the global market.
tbh I’m kind of surprised the admin hasn’t enacted export tariffs on oil and gas already to take the pressure off car owners.
Wouldn’t do anything to the prices of imported products since the entire intl supply chain would be subject to even higher prices, but would reduce pressure at the pump
It didn't look like that at the gas pump today.
Sure, if we build out refining capacity for the next ten years. Then we're golden until we run out of the finite well of combustible dead algae. So if you think we can revitalize American manufacturing and resource processing starting now, and you're okay with those investments being worthless in a few decades, and you don't give a shit about rendering the planet significantly less habitable to human life, then yeah, we're totally self-sufficient with fossil fuels.
Or we could, you know, pull energy out of the air and sun, a strategy which will be viable until our star dies.
Alberta tar sands have hundreds of years worth of reserves. They're also expensive and incredibly dirty to extract and emit significantly more CO2 during processing than a light oil well will. (The tar is usually melted by heating with natural gas).
I'm quite confident cheap renewable alternatives will make the tar sands inviable far before they run out.
Some good news though, with the war in Iran the spiking oil price means that Albertan executives can ramp up operations and stay quite profitable! Push the price to 200/barrel and we'll just strip mine the entire province after airlifting out Calgary and Edmonton.
This assumes that there isn't profound demand destruction caused by the stratospheric energy prices.
Fossil fuels were already an inferior energy source when oil was $60/barrel. Electrification has been moving fast and accelerating, even at the pre-energy crisis prices.
Now? Current events are likely to take fossil fuels out back and give 'em the Old Yeller treatment with surprising speed.
I absolutely agree, _in market driven economies_, fossil fuels are slowly pricing themselves out of relevancy. The issue is that for some reason the US specifically subsidizes their usage keeping them artificially lowly priced.
So, how many billions of newly printed debt is Trump willing to throw at the problem to keep those subsidies up so that he can be sheltered from the scary windmills?
another option is not to shit on all countires who do have resources driving the prices up for everyone.
This is an article about paying private industry to not build wind capacity.
I do find the slow Sovietization of America funny, both mentally and economically. The year is 2050, autarky on energy has been established, the markets cut off, politics in the hands of erratic and geriatric leaders. Americans proudly drive 30 year old Fords the way people used to drive Ladas, while China exports green energy, cars and infrastructure to the world.
Ireland during the famine was self sufficient with food production but that didn't stop people from sending food to the highest bidders abroad.
The US is unable to implement export controls so consuming less than it creates doesnt mean theres enough since producers will export if international prices are better
I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, but I'm still shocked to see things like this. And I'm fully aware of Trump's Scotland experience and how that contributed or directly led to this, but, still, shocked. And then I'm also shocked because I know that at least half, if not a good bit more, of US citizens are in agreement with this strategy. Not sure how I can still be shocked but here I am.
And I say that not as some rabid renewables person. Just the insane binary thinking, regardless of the dollars and cronyism at work. There's zero room for nuance, which I guess is my biggest complaint about the world at large.
Aside: people who think climate change will be the death of us all, and sooner than later, I get it, and I fully appreciate you pushing for a cleaner and more livable world. At this point I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope you, and China, figure it out and then it spreads quickly to the rest of the world, which I think at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion barring a nuclear war (will refrain from commenting about how the likelihood of that has ticked up the past couple of weeks in an area teeming with (sarcastically shocked this time!) fossil fuels).
Don't underestimate the power of money spend by the U.S. oil,gas,coal industry. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...
I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"
Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
True Bird Lovers only care about bird fatalities from windmills. Oil spills, buildings, and cats don't register.
Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-...
and the noise causes cancer
Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.
As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.
So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.
> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on
I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.
It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.
In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.
Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.
I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.
I've just grown to really respect older people who manage to stay excited and optimistic. It's so much easier to become a cynic, and I think it required effort on their end to try and be a positive person.
Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency
Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.
The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.
> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.
I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.
63.45% voted last time. Thats not a minority.
The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.
People voted in repeatedly a visibly primitive person (plus quite a few other things but lets not go there now), then they get primitive behavior.
An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?
I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.
If this is accurate the US is making itself look unreliable for major energy investment
The US is making itself look unreliable in every aspect
Total doesn’t greenwash anymore.
Perhaps they try to please the US government. A previous total CEO "maintained complicated relations with the United States". He died in a plane crash accident. Was it an accident or a murder, perhaps the current Total CEO prefers to be safe than dead.
https://www.france24.com/fr/20160714-margerie-deces-enquete-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unijet_Flight_074P
Total doesn't care.
They've funded massacres in 2021 [0] in order to unlock the $20 Billion Cabo Delgado LNG deal [1] in Mozambique. Greenwashing is the least of their worries.
I've found French business culture to be extremely refreshing compared to their DACH peers - French business norms tend to be much more pragmatic, and will try to maintain strategic autonomy by hook or by crook.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gw119ynlxo
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mozambique-says-tota...
Simply insane.
How about Equinor? They are suing the US govt for stopping the wind projects.
The president - in his personal capacity - hates windmills. That is probably the entire reason this happened, in addition to hurting blue states.
At least it doesn't seem like a direct payoff. So in that sense the title is clickbait.
> redirect those funds towards fossil fuel production [...] > US interior secretary [says] the deal was worth "nearly $1 billion
The rest of the comments here... yep.
Idiocracy
> "TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was 'not the most affordable way to produce electricity' in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants. [...] So it was a win-win dialog," he said."
Pouyanné is only 62 years old. If, as I hope, there are criminal trials in the future for those responsible for recklessly endangering life on this planet, then I hope that he is still alive and that statements like this form part of the prosecution. Unfortunately Trump will almost certainly be long dead by then.
If we all lived on a space station these are the kind of people that would buy Oxygen futures and veto fixing the leaks in the hull.
Trump wrecks the global energy economy and his next move is to increase our dependence on it? They don't make enough dimensions for the type of chess this brainiac is playing.
Sorry, I do not know how else to say this:
Well hopefully when Trump is gone NY remembers this and tells Pouyanné to screw when they put out bids to restart the project.
x
Kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation to put them on show trial and plotting to steal the country's natural resources. Blockading and strangling an island country to the point of economic collapse. Opining out loud about annexing their northern neighbours. The list goes on and on..
We didn't even get the show trial!
Save the date! https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/maduros-next-us-court-d...
The United States has already been destroyed. It is no longer in question, or in the future tense.
This is comfortable doomerism. But it isn’t accurate. Moreover, it’s dangerous since the numpties who tend to believe it then politically disengage.
None of the institutions function, or do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist. You're welcome to describe my view with whatever pejorative you prefer.
> do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist
Something misfunctioning doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here. Pretending that doesn’t exist because it doesn’t work the way we like is an expression of exasperation, not a description of reality.
>A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here
Those things are exactly what destroyed the nation. The military industrial complex and the billionaires who removed the teeth from institutions that used to prevent the accumulation of power (see also: antitrust litigation against Standard Oil). Those entities are now in complete control and democracy is nothing but a sham, a clown show between two faces of the same coin.
The US as a country didn't fail with Trump. It failed when Microsoft got away scot-free. This was the biggest sign that the country was no longer a serious entity, because a serious entity would try to preserve its own power, while the United States of Burgers is something to be sold to the highest bidder.
>The US, should it survive this administration
This level of doomerism is absurd. Of course the US will survive this administration. I blame the news for making every breathe by whichever opposition seem like the next WWIII.
Pax Americana is doomed. What the USA looks like post-hegemony is TBD.
The Pax Americana was already over when Russia siezed Crimea.
The land will be there. (most of) people will be there. What parent probably meant is losing everything good and positive United States of America represented in past 80+ years, internally and globally.
That is gone my friend, with the wind like a sulfuric fart, for good. US is becoming a global terrorist and enemy #2 of free world and certainly whole Europe (right after its biggest and only 'friend', russia which coincidentally keeps trying to make you a thing of the past). This comes from somebody who strongly believed in your role in global hegemony despite your numerous well documented fuckups in the past. All on the whims of one visibly mentally sick man, with absolutely nobody standing up to him despite nobody really believing in any of that bullshit. No principles, just plain greed and firm fuck-the-rest approach. Right now, if Europe needs a strong big ally it will be #1 China, and then... nothing.
The fact you voted him in, and he still has massive support, and there has been 0 overthrow attempts of the biggest traitor to US in its history tells me and everybody else in the world many things, but nothing positive. Even if next election, if they will happen, will have 98% win of the democracts with that ridiculous unfair and undemocratic system of yours, it won't change a permanent shift that started and keeps happening. US has no real allies, in same vein russia or China has no real allies.
Empires rise and fall, inevitably, there was never a reason to think US would be an exception.
The US is dead; it is now a Trumpian shithole.
x
It’s not as big of a deal as it sounds.
Theses wind farms have not even started construction yet. Once Don Quixote is out of office, some future administration undoubtedly will start wind farm construction.
I'm actually less concerned about the continued non-existence of a bunch of windmills, vs the billion-dollar payout to ensure that they continue to not exist.
I've spent my entire life not building any windmills and nobody's paid me a billion dollars for it yet.
It’s a refund for buying the lease, not a payout.
This seems like a good thing considering the “TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was "not the most affordable way to produce electricity" in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants.”
Not sure why we’re building offshore wind plants when land based gas plants provide cheaper energy. We need to be reducing the cost of living for working people and not raising it. Our goal should be to reduce people’s cost of living and we should align our actions towards those goals.
Most people are cost sensitive!
the dollar cost he's talking about does not include the large dollar cost the externalities burning gas creates
Does the offshore wind energy costs include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping, installing, maintaining and decommissioning the turbines? Does it also include bird losses and whale harms?
Does the gas turbine include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping installing, maintaining, and decommissioning oil drilling rigs? And of shipping, storing, and burning the gas? And the climate change caused by gas leaks? And the harms to humans, the fishing industry, and bird losses and whale harms by oil spills (I know you really care about those)?
The project life cycle cost: yes. The birds and whales: no. But neither do the fossil power plants.
Yes.
Wind and solar are consistently the cheapest forms of new energy generation. Pouyanné knows that. He is being a politician here, saying what he knows will play well with the current administration. When in Rome...
Uhm, I dunno if you just time travelled here from the 60s but there's this thing called global warming.