Outrage builds over Trump’s billion-dollar bribe to stop wind farms

WASHINGTON—The BlueGreen Alliance of unions and environmental groups and Public Citizen slammed Donald Trump’s latest anti-green move: A $928 million payment to TotalEnergies to stop its construction and cancel its leases for wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, and its promise to never build wind farms in the U.S. again.

The alliance, founded by the Steelworkers and the Sierra Club, is working to convince decision-makers that green projects can produce well-paying union jobs and restore U.S. manufacturing might.

“Donald Trump truly can’t leave a good thing alone,” said Katie Harris, BlueGreen’s Vice President for Federal Affairs. “His never-ending vendetta against offshore wind farms shows he either doesn’t understand the affordable energy crisis or he just doesn’t care.” 

“Either way, it’s clear he’s never paid his own electricity bill, and he’s determined to raise [power] bills for working people. He’s failed at every other attempt to halt offshore wind development, so now he’s doing what he always does: squandering taxpayer funds to force his own agenda.” 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former venture capitalist and North Dakota governor, authored the latest chapter in Trump’s ongoing crusade against renewable energy sources—wind, solar, and hydropower—and Trump’s promotion of fossil fuel sources and firms. 

Those sources, primarily coal and oil, are responsible for the carbon emissions that produce and accelerate global warming. The current war on Iran is also motivated by the desire of big fossil fuel companies in the U.S. wanting to control the energy resources in the Mideast. The high oil prices resulting from the war are making the oil billionaires happy with another of their latest windfalls under Trump.

But even by Trump’s standards, this latest payment, with all the features of a massive bribe, was a doozy.  The money went to Total, the French conglomerate, which is one of the oil industry’s fabled “Seven Sisters.”

The payment to Total goes far beyond what Trump’s own 2024 platform, Project 2025, from the far-right Heritage Foundation, proposed: A 75% cut in federal clean fuel subsidies. But it said nothing about payments, essentially bribes, to companies to abandon green projects.

As a presidential candidate, Trump convened fossil fuel executives behind closed doors at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2024 and asked them for $1 billion in campaign cash. He promised total deregulation and tax cuts in return. 

Trump’s EPA gave them the deregulation. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” chipped in with the tax cuts. The Total deal shows another Trump strain, one often associated with true fascist regimes, such as Benito Mussolini’s Italy: Picking corporate winners and losers. 

Trump did it again here, Public Citizen noted, as Total’s CEO promised also to build a liquified natural gas export terminal in deep-red Texas, plus offshore and onshore oil and gas drilling platforms. 

Burgum claimed all of that would help cut U.S. gas prices, with no proof that his promises would become reality. Those prices rise and fall with the world price of oil. 

Public Citizen’s Climate Program director, David Arkush, said Trump gave Total “a $1 billion corporate bailout for fossil fuels instead of new renewable energy.” And as “fossil fuel prices soar” for consumers, Trump shows “rampant disregard” for diversifying U.S. energy sources, said Arkush.

And since Trump’s Justice Department is paying out the money to Total to have it break its energy leases, one industry analyst, who served in the Obama administration, told the Associated Press she expects other bidders will now line up at Trump’s door to receive cash for abandoning their green projects, too. 

“Since the Interior Department’s anti-renewables strategy has failed in court several times, Trump and Burgum have come up with a new strategy: Waste taxpayer money and harm Americans by paying companies not to develop cheaper, cleaner, renewable power,” said Arkush.

As a governor, Burgum touted wind farms, but as Trump’s Interior Secretary, he “transformed into a MAGA sycophant who will do everything he can to kill the offshore wind industry,” said Arkush. 

“Rather than transition the U.S. to cleaner, safer energy sources as any responsible leader would, or even lower energy costs as he promised, Trump’s policy is all about lining the pockets of fossil-fuel billionaires at the expense of American families.”

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