Market forces are stronger than MAGA.
While natural gas remains our largest electricity source,
the crossing of the lines between solar and coal — one representing the future
and one the past — is something we may look back on as one of the key moments
in the planet’s transition to green energy.
We don’t know whether someone told Donald Trump about this
milestone, but if they did, he wouldn’t have been happy. Since taking office,
he has waged an all-out war against renewable energy, not just making it more
difficult to create and use clean power, but pouring taxpayer money into fossil
fuels.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that though Trump has
done significant damage to America’s green energy industry — and given us more
pollution, higher costs, and more insecurity in the bargain — that industry
continues to grow.
There is a global energy revolution underway, and Trump’s
efforts to slow it down are destined to fall short.
What happened to “all of the above”?
After years of Republicans arguing that they favored an “all
of the above” energy strategy, they’ve essentially dropped the facade and made
clear their vision for the future is one in which we get all of
our energy from fossil fuels.
Trump’s rhetoric is
almost comically anti-renewable — “We will not approve wind or farmer
destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” — and the
policy has followed.
Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was a
climate horror, rescinding loans for the development of green energy and
rolling back tax credits for energy audits, heat pumps, and more. Perhaps the
most visible element was the repeal of subsidies for the purchase of electric
vehicles, which were helping to drive interest in EVs that for the moment are
usually more expensive than internal combustion vehicles.
The result has been the near-destruction of the American EV industry. Without the subsidies, demand leveled off, and the car companies that had made huge investments on the presumption of future growth found themselves holding the bag. So GM, Ford, Stellantis and now Honda pulled back on their EV manufacturing plans for the US and Canada, costing thousands of jobs and forcing Americans who want EVs to buy imports (unless you’d like to support the white supremacist trillionaire on a mission to wreck the world by buying a Tesla, which most of us don’t want to do).
Then there’s wind. Because many years ago Trump got
in a fight with Scottish authorities over whether offshore wind
turbines would mar the view from one of his golf courses, he developed an
almost deranged
loathing of wind power, and his administration has made it all but
impossible to get permits for new wind farms, especially offshore. They
are paying
companies with new wind projects in the planning stages to abandon
them, and even
claim that wind power is a national security risk, supposedly because
sneaky enemies could launch drones through a wind farm without being detected
by radar.
Administration officials, even ones like Interior Secretary
Doug Burgum who in their former lives were sensible people — Burgum proudly
touted North Dakota’s wind power sector when he was governor — are
forced to go
out in public and cry that renewable energy doesn’t work when the sun
goes down or the wind lessens, as though batteries don’t exist.
In some ways, this holy war against renewables has
succeeded; investment in new clean energy projects has been throttled. As
Grist reports,
according to a recent analysis from a clean energy think tank, “for every
dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or
downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion
in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in
cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.”
What was that about “so much winning you’ll get tired of winning”?
At the same time, Trump is trying to save coal, a decrepit
industry on a relentless decline.
During the first week of June, Trump invoked the
Defense Production Act to direct $700 million in taxpayer funds to coal plants,
just the latest in a series of moves the administration has made to put money
in the pockets of coal companies. In its desperation to force Americans to keep
burning coal, the administration has used its authority to order
utilities against their will to keep open coal plants slated to shut
down — even though doing so will likely cost customers billions of dollars. And
Trump still promises voters in Appalachia that he’ll bring back all the lost
coal jobs — a
lie he’s been telling them for a decade, but one they seem to still
want to believe.
The green revolution can’t be stopped
The other side of this story is that the entire world is
undergoing a green energy revolution.
Solar is now the cheapest type of
energy available, which is why more and more countries are looking to
it as the foundation of their energy future.
In the last few years, Pakistan, the world’s fifth-largest
country, underwent a stunning boom in the spread of rooftop solar; solar now
generates a third of the country’s electricity. According to the
Yale School of the Environment, India is “on the verge of becoming the first
major country to power its industrialization predominantly with solar energy.”
Among its new projects is the Khavda
Renewable Energy Park in Gujarat, a gigantic facility of solar and
wind intended to produce 30 gigawatts of electricity (one gigawatt is roughly
enough to power a mid-size city).
Even though it continues to burn huge quantities of fossil
fuels, China is at the center of the green energy boom, with huge projects like
the Talatan
Solar Park, which produces 17 gigawatts of power and growing. It has become
far and away the leading manufacturer of renewable energy equipment. According
to the Climate
Action Tracker, “China is the powerhouse of the global energy transition’s
supply chain, manufacturing over 80 percent of solar panels, 60 percent of wind
turbines, and 75 percent of electric vehicles (EVs) and their batteries
worldwide.”
We are also in the midst of a worldwide battery boom, with new technologies enabling grid-scale storage that drives more wind and solar development. And yes, China is leading the way there too, in both production and deployment. All told, the country invested $625 billion in renewable energy in 2024; the renewable energy sector made up 11.4 percent of its GDP in 2025.
The weakness of the American EV market isn’t slowing
development around the world. Despite the pullback from American EV makers,
there are now 70
different EV models available to buy in the US, dramatically more than
there were a few years ago — which doesn’t include any from the Chinese
manufacturers that are coming to dominate the market. While demand may be
rising slowly here at home, it’s ballooning around the world: In 2025, 10
percent of new car sales in the US were EVs, compared to 27
percent in the European Union and 53 percent in China. Overall, global EV
sales grew by
20 percent percent in 2025 from the year before, with over 20 million new EVs
sold.
Americans are pushing ahead with green energy wherever they
can whether MAGA likes it or not. In Georgia, the largest solar cell factory in
America — one that will make every part of the solar panel — just
began operating. Almost all the new generation capacity being added to the
grid comes
from renewables. Half the states have either passed or are considering
bills to allow “balcony
solar,” small modular kits that allow people to get the benefit of solar
power without the complication and expense of a rooftop system — and even
renters can use them.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts, investments are being made that will bear fruit in the future. Consider the story of EV charging stations.
The Biden administration poured billions of dollars into a
long-term plan to spread charging stations across the country, since “range
anxiety” is one of the main reasons people hesitate to buy EVs. That funding
required a lengthy process of approvals, with the money routed through states
and localities. So the early stages of the rollout were slow, and when Trump
came into office, he tried to simply withhold the money that had already been
appropriated.
Twenty states and a collection of organizations sued over
one $5 billion program, and earlier this year they
won their case, meaning the money will continue to flow. The administration
is still trying every
bureaucratic trick it can think of to slow the installation of
charging stations, but meanwhile, states and counties are creating their own
charging station programs, and private companies are installing charging
stations in their parking lots.
You may have noticed it yourself. Stores like Walmart,
Sheetz, 7-Eleven, Kroger, and Costco all feature charging stations in some of
their parking lots and have plans to significantly expand the number — not
because the government told them they had to, but because it’s good business.
Today there are over
253,000 charging ports at over 82,000 publicly available locations,
with more being added every day.
None of that is to minimize the damage that this
administration has done and will continue to do for the next two and a half
years. But Trump can’t bring back coal, which is destined to wind up as a niche
energy source limited to certain industrial applications. He can’t make EVs
illegal or stop people from buying them as the cars get more appealing and
affordable. He can’t stop the explosion of solar power, both here and around
the world.
The transition to green energy is happening too slowly, but
it is happening. And it will outlive Trump.
