German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the US after reaching a $1.2bn (£892m) payout deal with President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior (DoI).
RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
“After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the US for the foreseeable future,” the company said in a statement.
RWE said it has agreed to relinquish its leases off the California and Louisiana coasts as well as in the New York Bight.
Overall, the German firm plans to invest approximately €17bn (£14.5bn; $19.6bn) in the US over the next six years “to grow its generation capacity”.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on “costly subsidies”.
“We welcome RWE’s agreement and voluntary investment in projects that strengthen our nation’s energy security,” he added.
The deal is the latest the Trump administration has reached this year as Trump, a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel industry, continues his push to halt offshore wind projects.
Trump has sought to boost government support for fossil fuels after campaigning for the presidency under the slogan “drill, baby, drill”.
Days after his return to office, he said “we’re not going to do the wind thing” and called them “big, ugly windmills” that were dangerous to wildlife.
In March 2026, the DoI reached a deal with TotalEnergies putting an end to the French company’s offshore wind projects in the US.
Instead, the firm agreed to reroute investment to build a LNG plant in Texas and to develop “upstream conventional oil” in the Gulf of Mexico.
The administration signed a similar $129m (£96m) agreement with Charlotte-based Duke Energy last month in exchange for the termination of the company’s offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area.
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The International Court of Climate Justice will be armed with improvised weapons. They will carry rusty machetes, fashioned from twisted sections of I-beam, grips wrapped in soft plastic and electrical tape. They will hold in their hands spears made from broom handles and broken glass bottles as they pass judgments from the top of cracked, crooked multi-level parking lots.
They will cut paths across a changed landscape with outdated cartography, clutching faded printouts from Google Maps that fail to reflect where water has come, where water has gone, and where it has removed roads in the course of those processes. They will stay in the lee of the terrain when storms come and stay in the shadows as much as they can when the storms go. They will eat mostly carbohydrates, made from the tenacious superstrains of wheat that cling to life in soil devoid of nutrients and bare of moisture — hardy stalks engineered to be resilient and adaptive and to mature quickly and to propagate even faster. They will pass little other plant or animal life.
They will have lists, scribbled with notes. Rumours. Tips. Vague recollections. Landmarks. The International Court of Climate Justice will hogtie octogenarian former employees of Shell and Exxon and Chevron and BHP Billiton. Executives who commissioned reports into climate trends and ignored them, kept them secret. Marketers and lobbyists who spun and misdirected and winked and smiled and put money in the right hands. Politicians who absorbed the interests of these companies into their ideologies will kneel helpless before the Court, breathing short and shallow breaths through hessian hoods that smell like rust.
They will hunt them down. From the basements of abandoned supermarkets and in storm shelters and in caves and in old missile silos converted to complexes that are somewhere between apartments and doomsday bunkers, they will drag out once millionaires and once billionaires. CEOs and spokespeople and authors and television hosts. The memory of the International Court of Climate Justice is long for denialists and those that equivocated.
There are no juries in the International Court of Climate Justice. Those who would be jurors are dead. There are no lawyers, either, in the International Court of Climate Justice. There are judges; many of them. As many as can follow them. And they are armed.
is all we have in our future.
