Trump's $1 billion wind payoff
Support our nonprofit journalism STORIES FROM MOTHER JONES AND ITS PARTNERS Earlier this week, at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, the Interior Department and the French oil supermajor TotalEnergies unveiled a very strange settlement. The Trump administration announced that it would give Total almost $1 billion to scrap its proposed offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean, and in exchange Total would invest around $1 billion in US oil and gas projects. Many climate activists and media outlets described this settlement as the government deploying taxpayer money to get a company not to build something, and the Trump administration itself almost seemed to invite that interpretation. The truth, as my Grist colleague Rebecca McCarthy and I point out in our story this week , is a little weirder. The Interior Department has already tried to cancel five almost-complete offshore wind farms in the Atlantic, and has lost in court on all five...