New York state has announced a lawsuit against the Interior Department’s illegal $1 billion payment to an oil company to stop development of a wind farm off the New York Coast.
The project would have saved New Yorkers $10 billion and created 1,700 jobs, which would have conflicted with the Department of the Interior’s goals of raising your energy costs.
Wind is one of the cheaper forms of energy we have available to us, and also has the benefit of not causing pollution. Pollution from fossil fuels harms human health, causing millions of deaths and childhood asthma cases and costing trillions of dollars per year globally.
Offshore wind is a little more expensive than onshore wind, but has the benefit of having zero land use and more consistent winds. This is especially true in the North Atlantic, where wind resources are plentiful.
However, the Department of the Interior, the government agency responsible for usage of public lands, including oceans, is currently occupied by Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel advocate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the fossil fuel industry.
And given that he is bought by the fossil fuel industry, he doesn’t want you to have cheap and clean energy, he wants to keep you with the dirty and expensive stuff that far too much of your power is currently generated with.
So Burgum has been working overtime to increase your energy costs. Interior has cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new power generation projects and halt existing constructions, and tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking expensive, dirty projects with “concierge” service).
His party, the republican party, also recently suggested drastic new fees on wind farms that could see them spending millions of dollars a year just to get one inspector to take one helicopter flight around a bunch of turbines.
Another of Interior’s recent actions was to give $1 billion in taxpayer money to a foreign oil company to stop development of two wind farms, one offshore of New York and another in the Carolinas. Interior made up a fake national security reason, but of course, we know that domestic sources of power are far more secure than the kind that start intractable global conflicts. Courts have previously ruled that there are no national security concerns around wind power and Dept. of Defense has signed off on these projects.
Later investigation showed that Interior made the decision for the bribe before it had invented its fake justification for it.
But, as has been the case with many of Interior’s other actions, which have been stopped by courts for their high illegality, this most recent bribe has found its way to court, as of today.
New York Attorney General Letitia James and six other attorneys general (NJ, CT, ME, MA, RI, and VT) filed a lawsuit today over the cancellation of the New York project. This lawsuit does not cover the Carolina portion of the project (and so is only concerned with $795 million of the billion-dollar scheme), but the New York project was the larger of the two anyway. James was also involved in previous legal action against Interior which stopped their previous failed attempts to block wind power.
The lawsuit says that the project would have reduced costs for New Yorkers by $10 billion and provided a total of $25.6 billion in economic benefits to New Yorkers, including 1,716 jobs. It would have had additional benefits for other nearby states. This would harm the availability of energy for New York and other states, which are expected to have increasing electricity demand in coming years.
Further, the lawsuit says that the cancellation is a violation of the US Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which was passed to “enhance the energy security of the US” and which limits the government’s ability to cancel such leases. Interior did not hold the required hearings or show “that continuing the lease would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment, and determine that the benefits of cancellation outweigh the benefits of allowing the lease to continue.”
It additionally states that plans to use the US “Judgment Fund” to pay this oil company bribe would be illegal. This fund is set aside to pay out legal action against the US government. It recently made the news as former reality TV host Donald Trump, who cannot legally hold office in the US, used it to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to channel taxpayer money to his treasonous co-conspirators from his effort to overthrow the US government, after instructing the IRS to stop investigating his decades of tax fraud. That use of the fund is also being investigated by courts and Congress.
The lawsuit says that the fund exists to pay out legal settlements, but that no court case or settlement was made in this case, so it shouldn’t apply. James says the deal was “a contrived arrangement to satisfy [Donald Trump]’s personal opposition to wind energy,” rather than related to any legal proceedings.
The lawsuit makes a simple ask to the court: strike down the illegal agreement, vacate the lease cancellation, and further restrain Interior from taking action to implement this illegal deal. Given courts have had to stop Interior from its illegal actions to stop wind power many times before, the count doesn’t seem to be on their side so far.
Read the full lawsuit here.
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