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This week, the Trump administration announced that, after having lost every single court case over its attempt to halt East Coast offshore wind projects, it will now simply pay one of the companies roughly $1 billion to abandon ship. Crucially, however, it is not just paying France’s TotalEnergies to back off—the company will now invest in oil and gas development in Texas instead. 

On its face, this would appear to be a pretty bonkers plan. "The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power," The New York Times’ Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer wrote earlier this week. "It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies."

So let’s break this down into what each party gets out of it.

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It’s not hard to see why TotalEnergies decided to take the deal. Offshore wind is extremely expensive to build, and delays and uncertainty—you know, of the sort the Trump administration has cultivated by issuing random stop-work orders—can easily make it a bad investment. Joselow and Plumer quote CEO Patrick Pouyanné as saying that they’ll still invest in renewable energy—but in the United States, specifically, "offshore wind is too expensive from our point of view."

Then there’s the Trump administration. As I wrote in early February, there was always not just a risk but a high probability that the administration’s five-nil courtroom defeat on offshore wind would goad Trump and his underlings rather than discourage them. The president and MAGA followers have a particular hatred for offshore wind (even as some of the MAGA crowd start to embrace solar). So as long as offshore wind projects are being shuttered, they can conceivably claim some kind of victory. 

Of course, being seen to fork over $1 billion in taxpayer money for this victory, after failing in court, could somewhat blunt the effect, making the administration appear weak and wasteful.

But the administration has taken pains to present the deal as doing more than saving face. "[Interior Secretary Doug] Burgum also cited national security as one of the factors motivating the agreement," the Houston Chronicle’s Rachel Nostrant reported. "Wind turbines, even those offshore the U.S., are potential targets for drone strikes, Burgum said." (If this was the argument featured in the classified Defense Department report that was the basis for the Trump administration’s original pause on the projects, you can sort of see why the judges weren’t convinced.)

Then there’s the matter of what else that $1 billion is buying: not just less wind power for New York and North Carolina but more oil and gas development for Texas. The North Carolina project was relatively small, projected to be able to power "around 300,000 homes and businesses starting in the early 2030s," according to the Times. The New York one was larger, projected to power more than a million such buildings in both New York and neighboring New Jersey.

The administration seems willing to screw over some people in these states while directing money to Texas instead. And that’s not a huge surprise: As I noted last week, the administration is also softening its stance on solar projects in a way that could benefit Texas—and its crusade against offshore wind or wind turbines on federal lands doesn’t hurt Texas at all, given that Texas’s substantial wind capacity is onshore, and on private lands.

The money TotalEnergies is redirecting to Texas, from the limited details available right now, probably will benefit some people there, or at least one company. "One of the projects receiving the reallocated funds will be Rio Grande LNG," the Chronicle reported, "a Brownsville natural gas export facility owned by Houston-based NextDecade." Just last week, news broke that a project to expand Rio Grande LNG was going ahead. The money TotalEnergies is redirecting to Texas is also supposed to go to "conventional oil" development in the Gulf and shale gas.

None of this is likely to put a dent in the energy crisis triggered by Trump’s war on Iran. Rio Grande LNG’s new project—a so-called fourth "train," which lets the facility increase output—isn’t projected to be completed until 2030. Also worth mentioning: Right now, shale gas in the Permian Basin is so abundant that it frequently hits negative prices, and producers burn off the gas instead, rather than paying someone to take it—simply dumping more methane into the atmosphere. Paying someone to develop more natural gas in this region isn’t an obvious win for energy market efficiency.

While this sort of deal—attack, lose, and then bribe someone to do what you want—may seem counterintuitive, particularly for an administration that championed frugality early last year, it does seem to be in keeping with the Trump administration’s negotiating strategy of late. Bombing Iran, then being caught unprepared by its control of the Strait of Hormuz, and then handing it a $14 billion windfall in eased sanctions? There are certain similarities, these days, between the administration’s foreign and domestic policy.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

That’s the total amount spent building data centers last year, which—for the first time—makes it more than the amount spent building offices.

Climate journalist Amy Westervelt pens a thoughtful essay about the oil industry, war, and authoritarianism—but also about the assumption that oil is needed for the good life: 

A decade or so ago I was trawling through the archive of Standard Oil of California’s (now Chevron’s) shareholder magazines and was struck by how many of them during the 1970s had been dominated by anxiety and fear—not over OPEC or access to Arab oil, but over how good Americans had gotten at conservation and efficiency. How quickly people had realized they didn't actually need to drive so much or have such big cars or leave the lights on or crank the air-conditioning. They had realized that moderating a little bit even made their lives better sometimes—walking or biking instead of driving, being in community with their neighbors on the bus or train, saving money on electric bills. In the early 1980s, as production increased and the embargo lifted, oil executives were in an outright panic. Americans didn't seem to be in a rush to let their new lifestyles go, what was an oil company to do? The answer was increase production, tank the price of oil to a point where people would start over-consuming again, and take the short-term financial hit in exchange for long-term gain.

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