The Interior Department, which recently used $1 billion in taxpayer funds to bribe a foreign oil company into stopping development of cheap offshore wind in the US, had already decided on the deal before it had fabricated a legal justification for it, according to emails obtained by Congress.
TotalEnergies, formerly Total, is one of the largest oil companies in the world, considered one of the six “supermajors” of Big Oil. But it also operates and constructs wind farms in various parts of the world.
Two of those wind farms were going to be built in Carolina Long Bay and New York Bight, until the $1 billion payoff was announced in March.
In its press release after that payoff, TotalEnergies issued an Orwellian statement suggesting that wind power was not in the “national interest” of the US… despite it still operating wind farms in its native France, meaning this justification for the deal seemed puzzling. Why is it good for one country and supposedly not for another?
The deal attracted interest for other reasons, given recent moves by republicans to try to stop cheap wind power and advance dirty unreliable fossil fuels making energy more expensive and less available for Americans, and due to Doug Burgum’s history of connections to the oil industry, having received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from it. Burgum himself tried to pass rules making it nearly impossible to build new wind and solar, but a court reversed those rules.
