“The EV bust in the U.S. is front-page business news. The domestic battery industry is following suit. The demise of the U.S. rooftop solar industry, despite subsidies, is now all about litigation to get out of long-term contracts. Add the EV school bus bust.”
A sea-change is occurring in energy policy as realism overtakes magical thinking. But you would not know it from the social media ‘denialists’ (thousands of climate-related professionals) who claim that
In a bizarre piece, “Solar Is the Cheapest Power in History, But States Are Retreating from It,” Haley Zaremba states:
Solar is now the cheapest energy source in human history, yet rollbacks are spreading from California to Virginia as officials blame high costs and a hostile Trump administration…. ‘Energy costs, vanishing federal subsidies and an administration in Washington hostile to clean energy are giving officials reasons to retreat from efforts to deal with climate change and the political cover to do so,’ [wrote] Andres Clarens, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia….
Cheap? Only according to biased analysis. No, solar (and wind power) are cost inflating and dependent on special government favor in the real world. If these intermittent power sources were cheaper, would you buy it without a utility grid to back it up? Would you want to pay less for a vehicle with a trick motor? Want to pay for another vehicle to act as a battery if the primary vehicle stopped running? I doubt it.
Back to reality. The EV bust in the U.S. is front-page business news. The domestic battery industry is following suit. The demise of the U.S. rooftop solar industry, despite subsidies, is now all about litigation to get out of long-term contracts. Add the EV school bus bust.
And with the coming (July 4, 2026) end of the ITC and PTC for projects not under construction, and the end of the same for any and all uncompleted projects effective December 31, 2027, the boom will turn to bust.
Even the legacy media, the pro-climate outlets, are reporting (intermittently) on the problems of public opinion and public policy from the salad days of Obama and Biden. Here is a sampling:
Adam Aton and Marie J. French reported in E&E News [“One casualty of Democrats’ affordability pivot: Climate goals” (March 30, 2026)]:
The Democratic Party’s embrace of affordability politics is pushing what remains of U.S. climate policy to the brink. In a bid to quickly lower electricity costs, a growing number of Democratic-governed states are pulling money away from programs to save power and boost renewable energy, often by cutting charges on utility bills or redirecting those funds toward customer rebates.
Governors across New England and the mid-Atlantic are retreating from the blue-state climate model that defined the Biden era: utility-bill charges, public subsidies and strict mandates aimed at cutting emissions and building a cheaper, cleaner grid, even if the payoff would come years later.
Claire Hao reported (“Fury at CenterPoint Grows in Indiana.” Houston Chronicle, November 21, 2025):
In response to [rate] protests, Centerpoint launched a series of “affordability actions” last month. The company cancelled $1 billion in renewable energy projects and would keep a coal-fired power plant open longer, in order to maintain rates near the rate of inflation for two years. This meant customers wouldn’t have to pay an extra $18 per month in the future, Centerpoint said.
Lamented Bill McKibben (“A Low Point” December 19, 2025):
“… I’m saddened to see how little our representatives in DC seem to really care, even the Democratic ones.”
Too many Democratic leaders are feeling comfortable waving off climate concerns, because of a feeling that it might be a political problem for them. That was exemplified this morning in the New York Times when center-right pundit Matt Yglesias issued a strident call for liberals to ‘support America’s oil and gas industry’.
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Appendix: Reality Energy/Climate Reporting
Left Progressives Cool It on Green New Deal: Progressive Policy Institute (May 13, 2026)
Is Public Stupidity Behind Climate Change Apathy? (March 23, 2026)
Democrats Retreat from Climate Activism (energy affordability, electability in play) (March 19, 2026)
Climate Alarmists Question Climate Exaggeration (November 4, 2025)
Climate Out, Affordability In (October 23, 2025)
Climate Activism Fail from the Inside (July 31, 2025)
Climate Messaging: The Alarmists are Alarmed (July 29, 2025)
When the Rockefeller heirs, the Hewlett heirs, Jeremy Grantham, Michael Bloomberg, the Ford Foundation, the John D. MacArthur Foundation stop funding propaganda derived from the evidence deficient “Catastrophic/dangerous, CO2-driven anthropogenic global warming/climate change” CONJECTURE, we’ll know this colossally expensive chapter of human folly and delusion is truly over.
When Middlebury College throws the charlatan Bill McKibben out on the street and the University of Pennsylvania does the same with Michael “Piltdown” Mann, I’ll believe the end of climate pseudoscience is nigh.
Much analysis and reporting here and other places notes the inaccuracy of cheap and better from renewable resources. I agree renewables become unreliables. It seems that a system that can handle the demand absent renewable fleet can be agnostic to some level of renewables and maybe achieve some lower costs. That’s at face and direct value mostly and not the holistic cost of subsidies and turbines. However, developing more on a system and relying on renewables only increases the costs their costs and the costs to the system. Backup power, reserves, reduced reliability, increased maintenance, etc. show up more as the unreliables are interconnected. But, even more than that, I wish the reporting would include more commentary on the real driver and problem. Some bureaucrat and crony have profited in the form of money and power. They used lies to enrich themselves regardless of the results. It’s not the fact that their analysis in cheaper is wrong. It’s that it was done deliberately to profit. That’s the bigger issue in my eyes. The love of money, and power, is the root of all evil.