{"id":795643,"date":"2026-07-11T19:51:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T19:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/795643\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T19:51:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T19:51:27","slug":"hes-forcing-higher-bills-trump-spends-billions-to-kill-clean-energy-and-keep-coal-alive-us-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/795643\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018He\u2019s forcing higher bills\u2019: Trump spends billions to kill clean energy and keep coal alive | US news"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration<\/a> has directly spent $2.7bn of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring $1.125bn into boosting coal, which critics say is pushing up Americans\u2019 bills.<\/p>\n

They say the moves are evidence that the president aims to serve fossil-fuel companies like those which donated record sums to his presidential campaign<\/a>, rather than the working-class Americans to whom he pledged to lower energy bills and other costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump is getting Americans coming and going,\u201d said Jay Inslee, the former governor of Washington state and a Trump detractor. \u201cHe\u2019s forcing higher power bills on them by blocking clean energy, then he\u2019s fattening the wallets of his cronies \u2013 all with billions of our tax dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Department of the Interior has, since March, struck four deals with energy companies, paying them to cancel a total of eight offshore wind projects and pledge to invest in fossil-fuel power. The first such agreement was announced in March<\/a> with the French energy company TotalEnergies, sparking a lawsuit from seven Democratic-controlled states<\/a> that alleged it was an illegal use of taxpayer money.<\/p>\n

The latest deal with Duke Energy was announced late last month.<\/p>\n

Area chart of federal spending to kill wind projects and boost coal<\/a><\/p>\n

The president has derided wind energy as \u201cugly\u201d and \u201cdisgusting\u201d, and called efforts to slash planet-warming pollution a \u201cscam\u201d. Previous administrations have canceled or delayed energy projects via permitting, litigation or regulatory changes, but there is no precedent for the federal government directly paying developers to relinquish legally acquired offshore wind leases, said Jenny Rowland-Shea, senior director for conservation policy at the liberal thinktank the Center for American Progress.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are trying to snuff out an entire form of energy,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s at a time when the United States needs more energy \u2026 as people\u2019s rates are going up for electricity, as we see datacenters gobbling up more energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it has worked to suppress offshore wind, which experts say should be a key part of any climate plan, the Trump administration has bolstered coal, the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel. In September, the Department of Energy announced it would spend $625m<\/a> to \u201cexpand and extend the life of\u201d coal-fired power plants, allocating $350m to \u201cmodernize\u201d coal plants, $175m to fund coal projects powering rural communities, and $50m to upgrade wastewater management systems to extend coal plants\u2019 lifespans.<\/p>\n

Last month, the agency also set aside<\/a> up to $500m from the Defense Production Act<\/a> to \u201cexpand and reinvigorate\u201d the capacity of 13 coal plants, and to help build a coal export terminal in Oakland, California. A week later, the department announced an additional $3.6m to \u201crefurbish or retrofit\u201d nine existing<\/a> coal plants.<\/p>\n

Trump at a \u2018Champion of Coal\u2019 event at the White House in February. Photograph: Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In an email, an energy department spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said the administration is \u201cproud\u201d of its efforts to boost coal.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore President Trump ended the Green New Scam, taxpayers paid the bill for trillions of dollars of so-called green energy energy subsidies,\u201d Dietderich wrote, saying this resulted in the \u201cpremature shutdown\u201d of fossil fuel plants, higher energy costs and increased blackout risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s worth noting that states with their own anti-coal and gas policies experienced the highest price increases during that time period,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There is evidence<\/a> that renewables can lower energy costs.<\/p>\n

Reached for comment, a White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said officials were \u201cnot spending taxpayer dollars on these deals\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe administration is returning the money that companies bid on offshore wind projects that are unable to be built due to national security concerns, and those companies are voluntarily redirecting those returned bid amounts to energy projects that will provide affordable, reliable, and secure energy for American families and businesses,\u201d she said. \u201cThe reality is that the Biden administration lured companies into these projects with the promise of millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to make these offshore wind projects viable.\u201d<\/p>\n

But money from energy leases on public lands and waters goes into public accounts, said Rowland-Shea.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey can use the word return, but they are paying the companies not to produce this energy or to give taxpayers what was promised,\u201d she said. The Biden administration indeed made subsidies available for offshore wind, but fossil fuels have long been subsidized by federal administrations, she noted.<\/p>\n

The Guardian has also contacted the interior department for comment.<\/p>\n

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Coal is the most carbon-dense fossil fuel, making it a major contributor to the climate crisis. It is also harmful to public health, with one 2023 study estimating<\/a> that as many as 460,000 deaths in the US from 1999 to 2020 were attributable to tiny particles of air pollution from coal plants alone.<\/p>\n

Coal plants are also more expensive to build and run<\/a> than renewable alternatives, experts warn.<\/p>\n

\u201cCoal has largely died because of economics, and so forcing it to stay afloat is not a good energy decision, and not a good economic decision for taxpayers,\u201d said Rowland-Shea.<\/p>\n

Taxpayers are likely to pay for the White House\u2019s anti-renewable and pro-coal moves twice, critics say: first through the billions in direct public spending, and then through higher electricity bills as utilities continue relying on more expensive coal generation instead of cheaper renewable energy.<\/p>\n

A 2025 analysis<\/a> from research firm Grid Strategies suggests that if all 35,000 megawatts of large fossil power plants scheduled to retire by 2028 were kept running, this would cost ratepayers at least $3.12bn by the end of 2028.<\/p>\n

In an email, Rogers, the White House spokesperson, said without subsidies, offshore wind projects \u201care not only the costliest source of power, but also the least dependable\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yet 99% of domestic coal-fired power plants cost more to run than it would cost to replace them with renewable power sources, a 2023 report<\/a> from the research organization Energy Innovation found. Generating power with coal in 2024 cost 28% more than the same amount would have cost in 2021, Energy Innovation found<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese coal plants that are being supported by the government are coal plants that were going to close down because they couldn\u2019t keep themselves open on their own,\u201d said Gabrielle Levy, spokesperson for green advocacy group Climate Action Campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we\u2019re paying as taxpayers to keep economically unviable plants open, and meanwhile those are doing immeasurable harm to the local environment, to people\u2019s health, and to the climate, which costs us more, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spending comes alongside a broader effort to tilt the nation\u2019s energy policy toward fossil fuels and away from renewable power. In October, the energy department allocated an additional $1.5bn<\/a> in public money in the form of a loan to restart and repurpose a coal gasification plant. And in February, the president signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to purchase electricity from coal plants, in another attempt to boost the United States\u2019 coal industry through federal funding.<\/p>\n

Officials have also curtailed many of the clean-energy tax credits created under the Inflation Reduction Act; frozen or slowed permitting for new wind projects; and streamlined permitting<\/a> for fossil-fuel projects while making it more difficult for renewable projects to move forward. They have also taken other steps to make coal more economical.<\/p>\n

Through a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, officials lowered royalty rates on federal coal from 12.5% to just 7%, slashing the amount of money that coal companies pay to the federal government and states to extract on public lands \u2013 a change that Wyoming alone estimates could cost it $50m per year<\/a>. In October, when the administration also held the largest US coal leasing sale in over a decade, the only bid amounted to one-tenth of a penny per ton.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though the bid was ultimately rejected, the failure of this coal sale demonstrates the Trump administration\u2019s willingness to use significant resources to subsidize a dying industry,\u201d Rowland-Shea said.<\/p>\n

Inslee said the Trump administration\u2019s actions amounted to a \u201cmugging\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe pay more, Republicans rubber-stamp it, and Trump\u2019s donors walk off with the bag,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration has directly spent $2.7bn of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-795643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}