On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects.

Sounds wasteful. A state actually paying people so they won't deliver electricity to other people.

As for why - I mostly agree, it's about campaign finance. He's been paid off by fossil fuel lobbyists. The price of helping him into the White House was a duty to fight windmills, so that's what he does.

Meanwhile every sensible person, company and society looks for alternatives. Dependence on petrostates is bad in so many ways.

Feels like a category error to say that Trump is necessarily against renewable energy rather than just against specific types of renewable energy.

A lot of greenies are against hydroelectric because even though it provides base load power for decades or even centuries, the building of reservoir and the damning of a river typically has major environmental impacts that they feel override the benefits.

If there's concern about offshore wind because of the potential -- the actualized potential by the way in a limited number of cases -- then that would explain why there would be the pushback against offshore wind.

The problem with water is that unlike land which tends to be fairly localized, just a little bit of pollution can affect an absurd amount of water. That's why they tell people not to dump their motor oil in the ground, because one drop of motor oil can pollute thousands of gallons of water.

I tend to be less interested in solar because empirically speaking it seems to drive up electricity costs for actual consumers regardless of the cost of a specific kilowatt hour of electricity at peak production, and less interested in wind because sometimes it is bright or cold and the wind doesn't blow, the Germans already have a word for this because it is relatively common.

That being said, there's no reason to be against good technology that actually does what it's supposed to do, and that can mean hydroelectric, it can mean well regulated nuclear, it can mean geothermal, but just because something is marketed as green doesn't mean that it is actually good for the environment. Everything at an industrial scale is a out trade-offs. Different people will look at things through different lenses and find different trade-offs more example and other trade-offs less acceptable.