As the war with Iran moves toward a possible end, one of the many takeaways of the conflict is that it’s clearly in Americans’ interest to embrace renewable energy, not just because it’s cleaner and cheaper, but also because it helps shield U.S. consumers from international turmoil.

It’s a basic idea the Trump administration doesn’t want to understand. The New York Times reported this week:

The Trump administration on Monday said it would pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon its plans to build an offshore wind farm off North Carolina.

It was the fourth such deal struck by the administration to throttle the development of offshore wind power, a source of renewable energy that President Trump has disparaged for decades.

The new agreement is regressive but straightforward: The Republican administration will reimburse Duke Energy $129 million, which is roughly what it paid for the lease under the Biden administration, and in exchange, the company will abandon the project and reinvest the money in what the Times described as “other sources of energy favored by the Trump administration.”

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. In March, the Republican administration announced it had agreed to pay a foreign company almost $1 billion in American taxpayer money to abandon two wind farm projects that would have produced enough electricity to power more than 1.3 million homes and businesses across New York, New Jersey and North Carolina.

At the administration’s insistence, the company will instead proceed with different energy projects that will cost more and pollute more. Or put another way, thanks to a model imposed by Donald Trump, many American consumers will pay for the privilege of paying more to turn on the lights, all while polluting our own air.

Then in April, it happened again, when the Republican administration announced plans to pay energy companies nearly $900 million to abandon plans for two offshore wind farms. Two months later, Team Trump spent $765 million to buy back another group of offshore wind leases.

The combined price tag for these developments is approaching $3 billion.

I’m mindful that the president has been on a personal crusade against wind power since he lost a fight a decade ago to block a project visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland. This generated such hysterical hatred for wind power that Trump, in 2019, publicly suggested that the sound generated by wind turbines “causes cancer.” (It does not.)

But that doesn’t make the latest developments any easier to defend. At a time when the U.S. would benefit from more renewable energy projects, the Trump administration is spending billions to scuttle renewable energy projects.

It’s a detail consumers should keep in mind the next time they’re writing a large check to their utility company.

After the third of the four payouts, Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on House Natural Resources Committee, said in a written statement, “Donald Trump is using your tax dollars to make America more dependent on dirty, volatile fossil fuels. … It is hard to imagine a more backwards use of taxpayer money.” The sentiment continues to resonate for a reason.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Team Trump uses tax dollars to scuttle renewable energy project (yet again) appeared first on MS NOW.

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