The White House – Declaring a National Energy Emergency – January 20, 2025:
This active threat to the American people from high energy prices is exacerbated by our Nation’s diminished capacity to insulate itself from hostile foreign actors. Energy security is an increasingly crucial theater of global competition. In an effort to harm the American people, hostile state and non-state foreign actors have targeted our domestic energy infrastructure, weaponized our reliance on foreign energy, and abused their ability to cause dramatic swings within international commodity markets. An affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy is a fundamental requirement for the national and economic security of any nation.
The Trump administration will pay the French energy giant TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast, the Interior Department said on Monday at an energy conference in Houston.
Under the unusual deal, TotalEnergies would forfeit its leases in federal waters for two wind farms, which would have been built off New York and North Carolina. The Justice Department would then reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million, the amount it paid for the leases during the Biden administration.
In exchange, TotalEnergies would invest that money in oil and gas projects in the United States, including a facility in Texas that would export liquefied natural gas to global markets. The company would also commit to producing more oil in the Gulf of Mexico and said it was developing some additional gas-burning power plants to meet rising electricity demand from data centers.
The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power. It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies.
Continue reading “In “Energy Emergency”, Tax Money to Shut Down Wind Projects”
