In my last article, I discussed how the Trump administration is paying a French energy company, TotalEnergies, a billion dollars to not build two wind farms off the coasts of North Carolina and New York. It’s stupidity on a truly grand scale.

But I’ve since been looking into the deal in more detail, and unbelievably, it is even dumber and more dishonest than it first appears. Let me explain.

In the typically bombastic press release announcing the decision, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum boasted: “We welcome TotalEnergies’ commitment to developing projects that produce dependable, affordable power to lower Americans’ monthly bills while providing secure U.S. baseload power today—and in the future.”

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TotalEnergies chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanné was more specific: “We will reinvest the refunded lease fees to finance the construction of the 29 Mt Rio Grande LNG plant and the development of our oil and gas activities, allows us to support the development of U.S. gas production and export.”

Except it turns out TotalEnergies has already been investing heavily in the South Texas Rio Grande LNG plant for years, because it made perfect business sense. The core of an LNG operation is the liquefaction plant, called a “train” in the business, and the Rio Grande facility has five of them under construction, with production estimated to start in 2027, and three additional trains in the permitting process. TotalEnergies owns 17.1 percent of the parent company of the Rio Grande LNG terminal, NextDecade, and invested an additional $1.1 billion in the first three trains way back in 2023. It put a further roughly $300 million in the fourth train in 2025.

It did decline to invest in the fifth train, citing high prices, but there is nothing in the Trump administration’s agreement that spells out investment requirements. It sure looks like North Carolina and New York lost out on decades of cheap, zero-carbon power in return for nothing. “This is a deliberate choice to make electricity more expensive and give an oil company a billion dollars,” said Lukas Shankar-Ross, a deputy director at Friends of the Earth.

A second issue has to do with price hedging. Pouyanné’s claim that Trump’s billion-dollar check “allows us to support the development of U.S. gas production” as well as “provide gas for U.S. data center development” is arguably misleading.

TotalEnergies has once again already invested quite heavily in American natural gas producers—not for data centers, but rather as a vertical integration move to hedge against price risk. In a pure LNG business, you buy from domestic producers, liquify the gas, pump it onto ships, and sell it to buyers overseas, which exposes you to price risk should the price of domestic gas shoot up. This is why TotalEnergies bought up a large chunk of gas-producing assets in the Eagle Ford shale gas play in Texas in 2024, and then almost half of Continental Resources’ gas assets in the Anadarko Basin in Oklahoma in 2025.

In short, you can’t get ripped off by fracking companies if you are the fracking company. To quote Pouyanné himself in a 2025 presentation to investors: These investments “reduce the exposure to the Henry Hub [price of natural gas] by integrating upstream gas value chain as well, in order to, in case of hike in the Henry Hub, because a lot of oil LNG exports will be protected from this risk. That’s an important piece of our future free cash flow.”

Dollars are fungible, and TotalEnergies could argue that it is taking its refund and spending it on further gas investment. But it’s undeniable that the company has already carried out much of the investment it promised, and has all the incentive in the world to keep it up regardless of how much money Trump gives it.

Again, this is all happening at a time in which Trump’s war on Iran has blown a huge hole in the global supply of natural gas, with tons of production bottled up in the Persian Gulf and Qatar’s gigantic Ras Laffan LNG facility that was destroyed by Iranian strikes, meaning major upward pressure on LNG prices until 2028 at least. TotalEnergies doesn’t need a billion-dollar incentive to invest in gas; they’d be fools not to.

TotalEnergies did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump Pays a French Company a Billion Dollars to Increase Your Electric Bill

Now, I would not blame TotalEnergies too much for all this. Back in early 2022, when the company bought the leases for their offshore wind projects, the Biden administration was riding high, and the transition to renewable energy was only gathering steam. A few months later, Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which set up ten years of large subsidies for renewable power.

At the time, offshore wind looked like a near guaranteed bet—while it’s a lot more expensive than onshore wind, it’s also much more reliable, and coastal states on the Eastern Seaboard were laying out elaborate plans for how such projects would be a key part of their electricity production for the foreseeable future. (That is still true in most of the world, and almost certainly will be in America, too, sooner or later.)

Fast-forward four years, and the American people put Donald Trump back in the White House, Republicans repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, and oil and gas are back in a big way. If the most corrupt president in history wants to pay an oil company a billion dollars to do things it was going to do anyway, it’s not exactly shocking that it would take the money, and that its CEO would present a somewhat massaged explanation as to why.

If we want energy companies to stop torching the climate and invest in 21st-century power sources, the first step is to turf Republicans out of office.

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Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs.