> We're partnering with TotalEnergies to unleash nearly $1 billion that was tied up in a lease deposit that was directed towards the prior administration's subsidies
What's the deal with this lease deposit and how does "freeing it up" equate to the US govt "paying" TotalEnergies that amount?
Is this a situation where TotalEnergies put down a 1B deposit to lease the seashore from the government and the government is now canceling that agreement and giving them their money back? How does it relate to "subsidies"?
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.
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...
They only get the money if they reinvest in oil and gas. It’s not just trying to kill wind, it’s actively trying to expand burning fossil fuels. We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
They aren't idiots, they are evil. They know what they are doing; enriching themselves and hoarding political power and resources. Claiming these folks are dumb rather than evil propagates the idea that we should give them some sort of leeway. In fact, we should have sent these clowns to prison 5 years or more ago.
Unfortunately it is malice and greed, not ignorance (though Trump in particular is clearly mostly just a useful idiot puppet being lead around by others). They know climate change is real and serious impacts are imminent, this is why the US has shown interest in "taking" Greenland and Canada.
Trump being the impulsive egotist he is gave the game away too early wanting to take credit for these land grabs while still alive, but there's no way there isn't some overall plan in place as the predictable results of climate change accelerate and the world has to geographically realign through mass migrations (some of it likely to result in wars) to deal with it.
A lot of what they are doing now is to profit off the opportunities of the chaos that they themselves are accelerating.
So I don't know what stage the project was at but by withdrawing from the deal or cancelling it, the government is going to have to pay a penalty. Is that penalty $10 million? Is it $500 million? We don't really know.
So it could be that TotalEnergies is still getting paid $1 billion but now they have to spend $600 million on some fossil fuel project. But in doing so the government has essentially paid a $400 million break penalty. You see what I mean?
I don't believe for a second that the government didn't lose money on this political cancellation. The fossil fuel project is just a way to hide that and save face (IMHO).
> TotalEnergies has committed to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States. Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind. Under this innovative agreement driven by President Donald J. Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda, the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.
> For its part, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, on the following projects in 2026:
The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas; The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production. Following TotalEnergies’ $928 million in investments in affordable, reliable and secure U.S. energy projects, the United States will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company
[1] https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-and-totalenergies...
Anyone know what these "ideological subsidies" are that they're referring to? Were they part of the agreement that was just terminated? Or was that just a vaguely related talking point they inserted into the press release for political reasons?
The US, France+India, and China have been competing over this project for decades.
These are businesses - no one cares about morals, only interests. And it is in France's interest to unlock these kinds of LNG projects.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mozambique-says-tota...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-india-sees-resta...
The Trump admin is paying them back with the understanding that TotalEnergies will reinvest the money into oil and gas operations in the US
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
> His specialty was containers, and he made a good thing out of not loading any. Ever since containerization came in, he was paid handsomely for every crate he did not touch. The more containers he did not load, the more money he was given, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on securing more seniority on the docks to increase the amount of cargo he did not handle. He worked without rest at not working the piers. On long evenings he lingered by the hiring hall and did not sling a single hook, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that no breakbulk cargo had somehow returned.
Enjoy.
Just look at it as America going back to the colonial ages and then everything that's happening makes sense. The bad news is that people were willing to put up with that for over 100 year so there's no guarantee anyone will do anything for a long time.
- Assume everything will be fine and America will remain a global economic superpower.
- Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
- Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
You theoretically lose yield compared to the S&P average - but if you're hedging your bets against the US possibly going to shit - the S&P is unlikely to perform as well as its historic average IFF that scenario unfolds.
Seems like a better hedge than gold, but my crystal ball isn't working.
Shorter term, we need to rotate investments out of USD.
There are two obvious problems with exiting to a more stable country: (1) we'd be putting ourselves on the business end of a large gun being held by a madman (2) when things really hit the fan, will it actually be more stable for American expats?
I saw the writing on the wall long ago. I predicted all of this happening many years ago. I left the US back in 2015.
Currently in the UK, and I hope to eventually get dual citizenship. My partner is European, so that is possible too.
Thatcher: bad Invasion of Iraq: bad Brexit: bad Human Challenge Trials: good Free Speech: bad Too many immigrants: bad Revolving cascade of PMs who can’t get anything done: bad
Listing out a few - I guess I appreciate the Covid stuff. Hmm. still on the whole, I would be in the green longterm shorting everything about the UK.
The most interesting cultural export is Bonnie Blue (sign of decline).
I mostly like the US but the years since Obama have been rough
My main concern is that it might not be far enough away.
My guess is 2/3 of the country at lease believe in that.
> - Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
Only the Top 0.1% are eligible. Probably only half of them are prepared. The other half are blind.
> - Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
That's the same cohort of the half of 0.1%. These people are not betting against the US as much as they are hedging their bets. They'll remain in the US till it's clear that the downward spiral is inevitable.
I’ll wait.
On a serious note;
I’m looking at my billion dollar neighbors and they all just are citizens everywhere now. No allegiance to anything but their own pleasure.
Also, Canada. They're likely to withstand global warming better than most of the world, and would be comparatively easy to adapt to. If I didn't own a house, I'd already be working to move there, though I have recent ancestry that makes it a relatively more appealing option.
Salaries in tech sector still give you higher overall quality of life than most of US can ever offer. Then you have - extremely beautiful nature at your doorstep, more top notch destinations like Italy and France just at the border, very low criminality compared to US, very good free healthcare, very good free education including top notch public universities, very well functioning social programs. One doesn't have to be ashamed their taxes go to killing innocent civilians half around the world (although at this point US population including folks here seems fine with that). And so on and on and on.
Also, you don't spend your whole active life getting it and (almost) burning out for that, 40h/week and then you can live your life and chase dreams and passions.
Chinahhhh.
New Zealand is really nice. So is Australia with free electricity.
Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland are all great. Iceland I want to live in.
Good friends live the simple life in Costa Rica and love it.
Canada has a much better quality of life, but it’s probably a bit close if the US melts.
There are a lot of options
Uh, anywhere that hasn't collapsed?
Investment wise they are doing well.
They often own multiple homes.
They are not “smart” if they think a civil war will go down.. that’s poorly read people imo, sentiment pushed by the group that lost elections. And sooo context unaware. Could these people name any politics outside the US? Nope. Clueless, which is why they lost the election.
Some very smart friends are making investments in SA irt building factories.
And that's exactly what the question was.
You seem to consider yourself in the "smart people" ranks, so what's your big plan for adaptability?
I'm almost 50 and mostly retired except for work I like doing (producing musical events or performing).
About the time my kiddo graduated high school, I moved to a rural area far from cities, and about 18 months ago I bought some land that had primitive shacks on it.
I spend a lot of time reading history. I assume that the US fails eventually;
not because I have any illusions about surviving that house fire, have a lack of awareness of the mass death that would cause, or fantasies about how I'd be able to function in some post-US world.
That assumption comes out of watching the capitalists strip the wiring from the walls of US soft power along side watching the fact that it's 85 degrees in March at 6500 feet here... "climate isn't weather" is true, but I'm not an idiot and we didn't have a real winter this year.
The failure of the US is terrifying, not because I and my community would mourn the loss of some glorious and benevolent order, but in the way that the death of my estranged parents was terrifying:
we are no longer doing things because we're forced by the fantasy of belonging to some larger political order, but now have to choose what to do.
Having read a lot about what the US has done in the world, I believe that a) it's unethical/racist/genocidal / exploitative in almost all its actions and b) I think the only actual hope for climate change is the end of the US as a world order. I don't know if the end of that order is sufficient to fix the ecosystem, which I feel is on the verge of some calamitous changes, but it certainly seems necessary.
Not having control over that failing system, and not having a lot of fantasies about belonging to the polis associated with that system, it's perhaps easier for me to look at its failure modes more clinically than I might have when I was 25 and saw it as an impenetrable solid face; I've moved downstream from Fisher's statement, and now it's much easier to see a possibility for the end of capitalism (or at least the uni-polar US world order) than the end of the world itself.
Not that it's the actions of a bunch of angry and over-educated leftists who would bring it about, but as has always been understood by Marxists (among whom I do not count myself), the failure leading to its dissolution are the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself.
Which makes me feel amazingly hopeful, actually. I don't have any real political power (beyond my affinity group), so it's nice to know (like Duncan instead of MacBeth) that these things could maybe take care of themselves without me doing anything I don't find ethical.
Because I believe that there is a future for humans, I spend a lot of time organizing with folks even when I think the short-term goals aren't super useful: for instance, doing ICE Watch support with local folks, shooting a lot of guns with folks who understood the wisdom of John Brown, or just being available to help out folks who have politics oriented around direct action.
I have been spending most of my time clearing the scrub oak from various parts of the land where I live to make the wildland fire interface a little less terrifying. I build a pretty sturdy solar power system here. I've spent the last couple of months getting my head into programming the esp32 and its peripherals. I got a ham license and have been working on building radio systems. Hopefully I will figure out how to get an underground cistern next month, and then act on the septic permit I got last year.
Other than that, I assume that things aren't going to change much in my life time... I just sit here in my shack playing banjo and hoping for the best.
Prognostication should be illegal and all, but I suspect that Trump will probably kick off in 6 months from a stroke, the Dems will elect Newsom, and then they won't do a damn thing to change anything, and we will be fighting the facists under worse conditions when they finally find a pretty face to solidify them.
So I look forward to dying of Super Ebola-fluenza at age 65 in the middle of a mid-June snow-hurricane near Bluff, UT while supporting a bunch of anarchist 30 year-olds in a drone-powered trench line while they fight the "Western Slope Fascist Front". But I bet I'll still be driving my Tacoma to that battle...
Leaving aside the fact that offshore wind power is already a mature technology, at the current stage of human development we should be promoting this kind of clean energy as much as possible. I remember a scientist once said that resources like oil are non-renewable, and simply burning them is actually a waste. We should try to use them for other purposes whenever possible, since there are so many renewable energy sources available.
Of course, the lifespan of a country is shorter than that of oil, and the lifespan of a politician is even shorter than that of a country. That, too, is one of the tragedies of human society.
* Once a person gets elected, (USofA) democracy effectively ends.
* Many of their policies may be harmful to the country, and their promises may not be fulfilled, but there is no punishment mechanism (in the USofA).
All democratic systems are not the USofA .. the USofA hasn't progressed much since inception.
2. Should someone be held responsible for Germany’s energy problems?
3. Sanae Takaichi is the prime minister of Japan with the highest vote share in recent years. Because of her poor foreign policy, Japan’s relations with South Korea, Russia, and China have all worsened, and her approval rating is now continuously declining.Should she be held responsible for these things? Or is it enough that she can simply be voted out next time?
4. Mongolia has the second-highest proportion of prostitutes in the world(#1 is Philippines, which has a simpilar system compare to USA) . Among the countries near Mongolia, it is considered by the media to be the most free and democratic. Why is Mongolia’s system unable to solve this problem? Or is this problem something that does not need to be solved? Does nobody need to be responsible for it?
That's an intentional feature of representative democracy, not a bug. Letting voters micromanage every individual decision would be direct democracy.
> there is no punishment mechanism
In the next election voters can and will exact a punishment if they don't like the direction things are going. Politicians live in constant fear of this.
It is true that term limits reduce the effect of this threat somewhat, but in a system with shared governance not everyone gets term limited at the same time so there's still a strong collective effect. The issue in this case is just that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of one term limited person; the executive branch was not designed to wield this much unilateral power over domestic policy.
We still need these large scale deployments to make meaningful progress in decarbonizing.
no, the billion that is being "paid" is a refund of what Total paid in for the leases. Total paid that into the US govt in anticipation of receiving returns on that investment in the form of "clean energy subsidies".
it is not clear from what is in the news story whether Total is being compensated for the would-have-been future subsidies, or whether Total simply expects to make decent profits from fossil fuels.
if one's interest is in the "clean energy" angle, then this is a "defeat". if one's interest is in reducing govt subsidies, this could be "a win", but it's not exactly clear.
Truly, the deals this administration crafts are nonpareil!
If AI summery is to be trusted, a few other windparks got stopped that where almost done, but got completed anyway after a legal battle. Vineyard Wind 1, Coastal Virginia (CVOW), Empire Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind.
Again, got it from AI, make of that what you want.
CVOW is supposed to flow first power this month, but won't be done for ~a year, Empire Wind is also end of '26/early '27, Sunrise later in 2027.
Vineyard was completed this month, and Revolution is delivering power and targets completion over the next few months.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
And I say that not as some rabid renewables person. Just the insane binary thinking, regardless of the dollars and cronyism at work. There's zero room for nuance, which I guess is my biggest complaint about the world at large.
Aside: people who think climate change will be the death of us all, and sooner than later, I get it, and I fully appreciate you pushing for a cleaner and more livable world. At this point I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope you, and China, figure it out and then it spreads quickly to the rest of the world, which I think at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion barring a nuclear war (will refrain from commenting about how the likelihood of that has ticked up the past couple of weeks in an area teeming with (sarcastically shocked this time!) fossil fuels).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...
Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term.
Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot.
Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there.
Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it.
This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
and the noise causes cancer
An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?
So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.
I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.
> I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be,
The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.
Perhaps they try to please the US government. A previous total CEO "maintained complicated relations with the United States". He died in a plane crash accident. Was it an accident or a murder, perhaps the current Total CEO prefers to be safe than dead.
https://www.france24.com/fr/20160714-margerie-deces-enquete-...
They've funded massacres in 2021 [0] in order to unlock the $20 Billion Cabo Delgado LNG deal [1] in Mozambique. Greenwashing is the least of their worries.
I've found French business culture to be extremely refreshing compared to their DACH peers - French business norms tend to be much more pragmatic, and will try to maintain strategic autonomy by hook or by crook.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gw119ynlxo
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mozambique-says-tota...
It's very important that Windmills and 5G antennas do not spray Covid19 on proud patriotic americans
The energy part is incidental.
The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025
Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025
AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-gas-turb... | https://archive.today/b8bhn - October 1st, 2025
(think in systems)
If they can burn down the EU in that ongoing crisis, they don't care.
That's likely the strategy the administration is running.
Oh boy can't wait for the reenactment of third reich intervening peacefully in czechoslovakia, for their own safety and wellbeing of course, and not at all for the resources they're hoarding, the filthy hoarders.
Or we could, you know, pull energy out of the air and sun, a strategy which will be viable until our star dies.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/fossil-fuels-fall-be...
Renewables are cheaper to build out, and we're facing a massive energy shortage. We need to be building renewable production as quickly as possible just to keep up with demand.
Insisting that we use obsolete, expensive and dirty technologies while the rest of the planet modernizes is just dumb.
Wind bad? Solar good?
https://oilprice.com/Company-News/TotalEnergies-and-Holcim-L...
Pouyanné is only 62 years old. If, as I hope, there are criminal trials in the future for those responsible for recklessly endangering life on this planet, then I hope that he is still alive and that statements like this form part of the prosecution. Unfortunately Trump will almost certainly be long dead by then.
> redirect those funds towards fossil fuel production [...] > US interior secretary [says] the deal was worth "nearly $1 billion
The rest of the comments here... yep.
Well hopefully when Trump is gone NY remembers this and tells Pouyanné to screw when they put out bids to restart the project.
This level of doomerism is absurd. Of course the US will survive this administration. I blame the news for making every breathe by whichever opposition seem like the next WWIII.
That is gone my friend, with the wind like a sulfuric fart, for good. US is becoming a global terrorist and enemy #2 of free world and certainly whole Europe (right after its biggest and only 'friend', russia which coincidentally keeps trying to make you a thing of the past). This comes from somebody who strongly believed in your role in global hegemony despite your numerous well documented fuckups in the past. All on the whims of one visibly mentally sick man, with absolutely nobody standing up to him despite nobody really believing in any of that bullshit. No principles, just plain greed and firm fuck-the-rest approach. Right now, if Europe needs a strong big ally it will be #1 China, and then... nothing.
The fact you voted him in, and he still has massive support, and there has been 0 overthrow attempts of the biggest traitor to US in its history tells me and everybody else in the world many things, but nothing positive. Even if next election, if they will happen, will have 98% win of the democracts with that ridiculous unfair and undemocratic system of yours, it won't change a permanent shift that started and keeps happening. US has no real allies, in same vein russia or China has no real allies.
Empires rise and fall, inevitably, there was never a reason to think US would be an exception.
In the middle of a war he started over war. No less. If his base wanted cheap gas, they are not going to get it.
So far Trump hasn't done much to prevent solar farms from being built, it's only wind turbines that he's exacting his vengeance on like some sort of modern day Don Quixote.
The $1B were a refund. Net exchange ~$0.
Building out fossile fuel production shifts oil revenue from various dictatorships around the world to the US in this case. That's a good thing. I wish we in Europe produced more gas ourselves instead of being highly dependent on other countries.
This does not mean higher gas demand, which is what matters for CO2 reduction.
It’s already questionable to build fossil fuel capacity at today’s prices. In 10 years it won’t make any financial sense. In 20 you’d be laughed out of the room.
Why waste money on a dying technology? It’d be like mining bitcoin
There is of course also an argument about national security, not being at the whim of some Iranian dictator. So some form of government investment would be justified, but not necessary IMO.
Also USA us doing nothing relevant to reduce gas demand like CO2 cap and trade or CO2 based tariffs.
At this rate buy Chinese will be a more moral choice than buy American by next decade.
In Europe you only have the same parties/"uniparty" in power all the time. Many people never had a representative they voted for.
I understand the nuance about the US voting system. But when I look at the outcomes, the US seems way more democratic than Europe.
Re gas demand: Renewables are cheaper than fossile fuels. They will obviously win out in a free market. No subsidies needed.
Theses wind farms have not even started construction yet. Once Don Quixote is out of office, some future administration undoubtedly will start wind farm construction.
I've spent my entire life not building any windmills and nobody's paid me a billion dollars for it yet.
Not sure why we’re building offshore wind plants when land based gas plants provide cheaper energy. We need to be reducing the cost of living for working people and not raising it. Our goal should be to reduce people’s cost of living and we should align our actions towards those goals.
Most people are cost sensitive!