My boozy neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were playing in the same key for a change. We agreed that the world has come a long way since the 2015 Paris Agreement.

A long way down, that is. We sat on his wobbly front porch with my laptop and tried to process the most recent bad-news story about the environment:

The Trump administration announced it will pay nearly $1 billion to French energy giant TotalEnergies in exchange for the company abandoning plans to build offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean and instead pursue fossil fuel projects in the U.S.

“It don’t make no sense,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I know the hog monster don’t like wind farms but why spend all that taxpayer money to kill something that would power a million homes?”

Forget about making sense, I told him. We’re talking about a delusional sociopath who’s forever seeking revenge on those who cross him. Check out his response to the death of Robert Mueller: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

The mad king issues decrees, knowing that Congress and the courts are too weak or corrupt to overrule him. He turned a billion dollars meant for renewable energy into a gift for the fossil fuel industry in order to strike back at Joe Biden, who defeated him in 2020 and helped close the wind farms deal with TotalEnergies.

Last year the king — dictator, actually — tried to shut down a bunch of offshore wind farms that were already being built. And now he’s paying to kill wind farms before they get started. He’s still trying to get even with the people who, more than a decade ago, refused to block construction of an offshore wind farm that he thought would spoil the view from a golf course he was building in Scotland.

“This guy neutered the EPA,” I said. “He started a billion-dollar-a-day pointless war with Iran that’s ruining the economy. He refuses to see that boosting renewable energy alternatives is the best way to avoid wars fought over fossil fuels. Should it surprise us that he’s using taxpayer money to poison the planet?

“I ain’t surprised, I’m scared,” Swamp Rabbit said. “That’s why I’m going to that No Kings protest on Saturday. It’ll feel good to be around peeps who ain’t MAGA.”

Footnote: Trump is a special case, but there’s nothing new about rightwing opposition to renewable energy. Ronald Reagan took down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter put on the White House. George H.W. Bush said he differed with Reagan and hired the pro-environment William Reilly to head the EPA, but Reilly was blocked by Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, an arrogant reactionary bully — Trump with brains — who was pro-oil all the way. Most of this is explained well in The White House Effect, a documentary now on Netflix.