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Comment by while_true_ | Hacker News Reader

NY Times phrases it as a reimbursement to TotalEnergies for relinquishing wind leases that they paid for. The US made the reimbursement contingent on them investing in fossil fuel projects. "The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels."

Total waste of $1 Bil of taxpayer dollars. If the oil and gas industry want to shut down wind projects let them pay for it.

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Why would they do that when they already paid for a corrupt new regime to do it for them?

Slight tangent:

The US is a net oil exporter. If fossil fuel companies were so influential, wouldn't we expect them to be in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?

Instead the what seems to be influential is the average Joe who's complaining about the price at the pump.

US fossil fuel companies also make money from projects outside US. They explore, build the infrastructure, and operate oil fields for other countries.

Maybe. But it's not obvious that they would benefit from cheap petrol.

In that case, we should definitely reserve judgement on the weird payment stipulations then. The oil industry probably hates that the government is doing this, and we shouldn't cast aspersions on them.

Not maybe, they do. And noone wants their product so expensive that people starts looking for alternatives.

At a guess, they're probably happy to encourage continued reliance on petroleum, whilst the rest of the world is switching over to renewable energy.

Indeed.

All the blather about Canadian "trade surplus" is actually oil.

US companies owning that infra sell that oil under market price, to their US corp divisions. The CEO, upper execs are usually American, and so their large salaries, and all corporate profits all flow to the US parent corp.

Canada of course sees some taxes per barrel of oil, and local employment, but when you remove all this, Canada has a massive trade deficit with the US

Of course for this US calls Canada trade unfair.

It's all smoke and mirrors.

> in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?

Another slight tangent: the street of Hormuz being closed has them covered nicely there currently.

Yes, that _would_ be evidence in favour of oil interests having influence in the government.

But that's also an unusual situation; and the US administration is also lifting sanctions on Russian oil at the same time.

So TotalEnergies agreed to invest 1 billion is offshore wind during thr last Administration. The current Administration doesn't want any investment in renewables so they attempted to block it. A judge said the attempted block was unlawful. So then immediately the admin said something new and that instead there were "national security concerns" with building wind plants - (Which doesn't pass the smell test to me at all) and the project would be held up while untangling those.

My assumption is the company started getting upset at being toyed around and having their 1 billion investment completely stalled for so long. So the admin said we'll kill the wind if you do our fossil fuels instead. So shift your investment away from wind (we kill it and pay you back for what you investws) if you instead do fossil fuels. And that's what's being done.

So previously the company was spending 1billion on wind and getting some subsidies. Now they spend 2 billion, and get paid 1 billion from the tax payer. For them it's at best a wash, though likely a loss since I haven't heard they get subsidies with the fossil fules. And the tax payer instead of paying for tax credits or low interest loans or other subsidies that were part of wind power portion of the Inflation Reduction Act instead pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company.

> The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.

1. https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...

This seems plausible. Though I find "pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company" to be a very confusing way to frame this if this just returning a deposit the company put down in the first place. Would be more accurate to say the company spent 1 billion, canceled that and were refunded the 1 billion, then spent that billion on a different U.S. project instead.

Though it's still a significant impact to the tax payer if the new thing they're spending 1B on is private industry and not a government-owned lease.

GOP capitalism at its worst: take public money and give it to private interests, without any thoughts of what makes sense.

"Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won."

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/foss...

Cough Cough Big Bank bailout..... this is corpocracy with two branding every few year interval.

You should probably look up when the TARP bailiut program was passed and initiated, because it wasn't when Obama was president. The Great Financial Crisis brewed and exploded under Bush.

Obama pushed for the 2010 Dodd Frank reforms to rein in big banks after that.

Corporate bailouts, huge deficit spending, mega tax cuts for the mega rich, and bottomless pit defense spending have been Republican policy for the last 50 years.

Left (foot), right (foot).

... while all the time blaming Democrats for everything they do themselves, at a much larger scale.

Hypocrisy works, if you have an electorate that can't think critically and are addicted to "news" sources that confirm their biases.

The companies don't give a rats ass what kind of energy project it is as long as it is profitable. Wind energy, gas, cow farts, it's all the same to them. Your framing makes no sense.

The majority of tax payers voted for this to happen

Plurality, not majority. (Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates).

With Trump getting a little bit less than half the vote and a 65% turnout, "did not vote" was the plurality.

Which is functionally a vote for the status quo. Someone who can't bother to vote isn't going to bother e.g. protesting or otherwise affirming their rights.

Or defeatism. Discouragement campaigns go a long way: “both sides are bad so don’t vote!”

So, in this case, "plurality" means "third place".

Not voting is a choice and the same as voting for the winner

> Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates

Sounds like both candidates were terrible enough that quite a few didn't bother?

1.They weren't equally bad.

2. Not voting still results in one being elected. This isn't the same as being offered two foods you don't like and declining to eat either.

3. The judgment on the quality of the candidates is likely mostly based on misinformation and manipulation by others.

"Both sides"

Both candidates weren't equally bad. That is always the situation and you must choose the least worse or best candidate.

Many taxpayers are non-citizens or convicted felons and cannot vote. Turnout of citizens who were eligible to vote last election was 65%. Of those, 49.8% voted for Trump. Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.

>Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.

Their fault. The Republican party has been quite open about being a against environmentalism and related policies.

I didn't see this particular policy on the ballot. I hope you use this logic uniformly when deciding if it is valid to care about a particular policy.

And the majority of tax payers voted for the previous admin too, which started this offshore wind project in the first place.

Ok? And?

The majority voted to move in one direction then the majority wanted to reverse it.

Voted for what? More pollution, more expensive gas, more expensive electricity??

Well, yes. The GOP's disdain for renewables is well-known and not recent.

> Voted for what? More pollution, more expensive gas, more expensive electricity??

Yes, but the hope is that the downside happens to the people you don't like, and you somehow only get the upside.

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