Trump wants to bribe energy companies to kill wind energy
Burn, baby, burn.
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Donald Trump hates clean energy.
Obviously, the president hates lots of things: Immigrants, the media, NATO, and sound monetary policy, to name just a few.
But of all Trump’s many grievances, none is quite so petty and pathological as his loathing of wind energy.
The attacks on solar panels and electric cars can be chalked up to his belief in the holy gospel of hydrocarbons. But the windmill thing is personal.
Independent journalist Philip Bump traces it back to 2011, when Trump tried and failed to kill an offshore wind farm he thought would ruin the view from the Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. A film documenting his battle with the club’s neighbors made Trump a national figure of scorn 15 years ago — and the Scots haven’t warmed to him since.
Trump’s rage against the wind machines hasn’t lessened either. He claims that they cause cancer, make whales crazy, and kill so many birds “they make hunters look like nice people!”
Back in the White House, he tried to block wind farms wherever he can. And now, finding himself thwarted by the courts, he’s hit on a new plan to exact his revenge.
As reported by the New York Times, Trump hopes to bribe energy companies not to erect wind turbines. During a self-inflicted energy crisis, when gas prices are soaring, he wants to take hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money and use it to set back the wind energy industry for a decade.
It’s an “emergency”
On his first day back in office, Trump declared a national energy emergency.
“We need a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy to drive our Nation’s manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and defense industries, and to sustain the basics of modern life and military preparedness,” he wrote.
And yet, the very same day, he signed a memorandum withdrawing the entire Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing and directing the Interior Department to conduct a review to determine whether existing wind farm leases could be terminated. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who signed legislation creating a Clean Sustainable Energy Fund when he was North Dakota’s governor, immediately declared a moratorium on “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.”
Last July, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) de-designated 3.5 million acres of federally-controlled waters which had been pre-approved for offshore wind development. Throughout 2025, BOEM tried to stop or claw back permits to develop offshore wind projects in Rhode Island, New York, and Maryland. And then in December, Burgum issued a 60-day stop-work order for five previously-approved offshore wind projects which were already under construction, citing vague “national security concerns.”
None of this has been particularly successful.
Judge Patty Saris in Massachusetts enjoined the moratorium on wind power permits. And Judge Royce Lamberth in DC blocked the stop work order BOEM declared in August to allow it time to “review” the $6.2 billion Revolution Wind development in Rhode Island. At the time, that project was 80 percent complete, and Judge Lamberth called the halt “the height of arbitrary and capricious action.” When BOEM tried to stop the project again based on “new national security information provided by the Department of War,” he blocked that, too, finding that the government’s “failure to explain or apply that reasoning suggests the stated national security reason may have been pre-textual.”
That “pre-textual” justification undergirded the “pause” Burgum announced in December for the Revolution Wind project, as well as Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind off the coast of New York, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. Each of them had undergone years of exhaustive environmental, national defense, and safety reviews. Relying on the US government’s representations, companies invested billions of dollars into projects which would supply energy to millions of American homes. Construction was well underway, with the Massachusetts project 95 percent complete.
And yet Secretary Burgum insisted that brand new, classified reports identified wind turbines as a radar interference risk — their massive blades and reflective towers creating “clutter” that could obscure military targets.
This convenient discovery was somewhat undercut by Trump’s constant screeching about wind turbines being an eyesore that cost too much and makes whales beach themselves in disgust. And Burgum’s declaration that the projects were being halted for “national security” was hailed by White House spokesman Taylor Rogers, who crowed that “President Trump has been clear: wind energy is the scam of the century. For years, Americans have been forced to pay billions more for the least reliable sources of energy” — which kind of gives the game away.
Each of the companies sued to enjoin the ban. Empire Wind, whose New York project was more than 60 percent complete with $4 billion already invested, argued that the order violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and the Due Process Clause. Dominion Energy, whose Coastal Virginia project was designed to power 660,000 homes, called the order “the latest in a series of irrational agency actions attacking offshore wind and then doubling down when those actions are found unlawful.”
And in every case, the courts agreed. The administration went 0-5, with both Republican and Democratic appointees ruling against them. As Judge Lamberth put it, “Purportedly new classified information does not constitute a sufficient explanation for the bureau’s decision to entirely stop work on the Revolution Wind project.”
Creative killing
Having failed to kill offshore wind through executive fiat and stymied by the courts, the Trump administration seems to have settled on a new strategy: paying companies to quit producing clean energy.
According to reporting by the New York Times’ Maxine Joselow, the Interior Department proposes to pay French oil company TotalEnergies $928 million to surrender its leases for two offshore wind projects off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, known respectively as Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay.
The Attentive Energy project would be a huge loss for New York, where it was expected to power over 700,000 New York homes and bring in tens of billions of dollars of direct and indirect investment. But unlike the other offshore wind projects Burgum canceled for “national security” reasons, TotalEnergies has not yet begun construction. After Trump’s election, the company’s CEO Patrick Pouyanné put them on pause and announced he was going to wait Trump out.
“I said to my team, the project in New York, we’ll see that in four years,” he said. “But the advantage is it’s only for four years.”
This proposal aims to neutralize that advantage by disappearing both the permits and the preparations the company took in reliance on them. Trump’s loathing for wind turbines is so all-encompassing that he hopes to buy TotalEnergy off with taxpayer dollars and ensure that, even if a Democrat succeeds him, the projects will have to start from scratch.
The plan is for the Justice Department to cut a check, after which TotalEnergies will abandon the permits it won in a competitive auction back in 2022. As an extra troll, the company would agree to “accelerated investments” in natural gas infrastructure in Texas — effectively dancing on the grave of clean energy with additional fossil fuel promotion. The bet here seems to be that the companies will take the money rather than have Burgum simply declare the leases null and void and force them to undertake expensive litigation to protect their claims. (Notably, this deal was cooked up by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, a MAGAland lawyer who represented everyone from Kash Patel to Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs to Trump’s co-defendant in the stolen documents case, Walt Nauta.)
While Rome burns …
Leave aside for the moment the fact that we are already suffering the effects of climate change and have blown through every redline which scientists warned would mark the point of no return. The United States government, in the middle of an energy “emergency” Trump declared and an energy price spike he precipitated by invading Iran, is proposing to spend nearly a billion dollars in public funds to ensure that less energy gets produced.
Not because the energy is bad. Not because the projects failed. Not because there is any credible evidence that offshore wind turbines pose a genuine threat to national security or marine health. The federal government buying back its own permits because the current occupant of the White House lost a lawsuit in Scotland twenty years ago and never got over it.
And the TotalEnergies settlement is reportedly not the only one in the works. The administration has been quietly negotiating with other developers to kill wind farms as it becomes clear that the courts will not allow them to plunge the knife in themselves. The bill for Trump’s windmill vendetta is still running.
That’s one expensive game of golf. And it’s one American taxpayers will be paying for many years to come.
That’s it for today
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If only he had as much animosity towards pedophiles as he does the wind turbines…
What a freaking dumbass loser.
Thanks, Liz and PN!
My mother, who grew up on the plains in the midst of the Dust Bowl, often commented on the energy of the wind. It was a windmill that pumped the water from their well before they had electricity at the farm. I remember her saying more than once, “We should use that energy.” I’ve been thinking about her words as I watch the gas prices tick up.