The Seussian rancor with which every layer of the Administration views clean energy would be almost funny if it weren’t so tragically shortsighted. As recently as 2009, Donald Trump joined a handful of other business leaders in signing a full-page ad in the Times urging President Obama to “strengthen” U.S. climate legislation and to “lead the world by example.” The ad insisted that “investing in a Clean Energy Economy will drive state-of-the-art technologies that will spur economic growth, create new energy jobs, and increase our energy security, all while reducing the harmful emissions that are putting our planet at risk. We have the ability and know how to lead the world in clean energy technology.” The other signatories ran the gamut from Ben and Jerry to Martha Stewart, but only Trump had the rest of his key executives sign on: Don, Jr.; Eric; and Ivanka. But that was before the sight of wind turbines on the horizon at Trump’s Scottish golf course wounded him grievously. As he wrote to Scotland’s First Minister, in 2011, as his project neared completion, “Unfortunately, instead of celebrating the start of something valuable and beautiful for Scotland, this ugly cloud is hanging over the future of the great Scottish coastline.” And it was nearly fifteen years before oil-and-gas executives spent unprecedented sums during an election cycle; nearly half the amount spent during the 2024 cycle went to Republicans, and the rest on lobbying Congress. We’re not in Kansas (the fourth-largest wind-producing state) anymore. The greatest irony of this dramatic turnaround is that in 2009 solar and wind power were still expensive; now they are the cheapest forms of energy on offer. And yet the Administration is digging in. The question is: will it be able to hold that position even as electricity prices begin to rise? (On average, they are up ten per cent so far this year.) At the moment, official policy appears to be a complete muddle. The President, on his first day in office in January, declared an “energy emergency” as a way to suspend regulations and allow both increased drilling and the creation of more generating capacity. His team argues that we need far more electricity in order to build data centers that would enable the U.S. to outpace China in the race for “A.I. dominance.” As Trump put it in his Day One declaration, “without immediate remedy,” America’s energy situation “will dramatically deteriorate in the near future due to a high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology. The United States’ ability to remain at the forefront of technological innovation depends on a reliable supply of energy and the integrity of our Nation’s electrical grid.” But then came the cascade of decisions designed to restrict the cheapest—and, just as important, fastest to construct—sources of new energy supply. Trump’s team ignored the pleas of actual data-center operators to keep Biden-era rules on renewable energy, which might have let them build what they needed right away. We are, to use a metaphor from the internal-combustion era, stamping on the gas and the brakes at the same time. Though Economics 101 would seem to indicate that cutting off the easiest source of new supply while demand is simultaneously rising would inevitably cause prices to climb, the Trump Administration has been rejecting this argument in favor of telling whoppers. Last Wednesday, the President took to Truth Social to insist that “STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS ARE KILLING NEW JERSEY. Energy prices up 28% this year, and not enough electricity to take care of state. STOP THE WINDMILLS!” In point of fact, though, the windmills planned for off the Jersey shore have been cancelled, thanks to the Administration. The entire state currently has just six wind turbines, generating nine megawatts of power, which, as the American Clean Power Association points out, is 0.03 per cent of the state’s energy production. Whatever is driving up electricity prices, it isn’t wind—in fact, the states with high levels of wind power, including the very red states of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Oklahoma, have some of the lowest electric rates in the country. The Administration’s bet seems to be that it can hold back renewable power in this country indefinitely—and perhaps it can. But even here its reach is somewhat limited: Texas, with very little in the way of public lands, continues to lead the nation in installing new clean energy. And, outside our borders, the sun rush continues unabated, which matters because Trump, in his energy-emergency directive, also called on the U. S. to export more fuel, in order to “create jobs and economic prosperity for Americans forgotten in the present economy, improve the United States’ trade balance, help our country compete with hostile foreign powers, strengthen relations with allies and partners, and support international peace and security.” That may be a tall order. We learned last month that China installed two hundred and twelve gigawatts of new solar power in the first six months of the year, compared with twelve in the U.S.; as a result, its carbon emissions have begun to fall, even as its economy keeps growing. (America’s emissions, in contrast, rose sharply over the same period.) And other nations are following China’s lead: Indonesia, the fourth most populous country, announced plans last week for a hundred gigawatts of solar over the next five years. Why? Because it’s so much cheaper than running the diesel generators that currently supply much of that country’s rural electricity. “The estimated levelized cost of electricity (L.C.O.E.) for this system is about $0.12 to $0.15/kWh over the next 25 years, compared to $0.20 to $0.40/kWh for a diesel generator,” the head of a Jakarta-based energy-transition think tank told PV magazine. Numbers like that have convinced the International Energy Agency that peak consumption of oil on this planet can’t be far off; the Trump Administration’s response has been, as in other cases, to try to play with the data. It is currently pressuring the I.E.A. (set up by that environmental radical Henry Kissinger in the nineteen-seventies in response to the OPEC oil-price shocks) to fire one of its top officials and replace her with someone who will parrot the White House line that demand for fossil fuels will keep climbing for decades. “They want to get operatives in there, whether they’re career or political, who can actually move the needle,” an unidentified lobbyist told Politico. “They’re going to get someone they trust and that person is going to fight from the inside out.” You can only get away with that kind of maneuvering for a while, however, and the Administration’s license may be running out. One fascinating indicator: the world’s hedge funds seem to be placing their bets on solar. Since Liberation Day, Bloomberg reported earlier this month, the main index of renewable funds had risen eighteen per cent, while oil-and-gas shares had fallen four per cent. “If we are going to continue to grow both in developed and emerging economies, we’re going to need a lot of energy,” one analyst explained. “A big chunk of the marginal growth in energy over the last 10 years has come from renewables and it’s hard to see why that isn’t going to continue.” Indeed, despite the Administration’s loud repeal of subsidies for electric vehicles, this month Ford announced an ambitious campaign to build a brand-new E.V. platform, designed to produce thirty-thousand-dollar pickups by 2027. The company called it a “Model T moment,” though, in fact, it’s driven less by pure innovation than by a desperate response to China’s seizure of the global automotive market with its cheap E.V.s. Three-quarters of the cars imported by countries as far-flung as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Djibouti last year were pure electrics. What’s driving that switch is not so much concern for the climate as it is concern for the bottom line. Unlike America’s trade balances, which economists view as generally favorable for consumers, there’s no doubt that the cost of importing oil weighs heavily on other nations. As the veteran energy analyst David Fickling wrote recently, “In India and Pakistan, oil and gas account for as much as a third of the total import bill,” which “makes the economy unusually vulnerable to swings in the price of crude, and ensures that money spent on transport fuel is enriching other countries, rather than being recycled through domestic supply chains where it can enhance economic growth. Switching half of India’s car fleet to electricity—still a far-off ambition, to be sure—would be sufficient to eliminate the country’s persistent current account deficit.” Other countries, that is, are making a series of rational decisions, even as we let political cash and petty grievances chart our energy future. It’s hard to imagine a more catastrophic series of economic decisions; it’s as if Teddy Roosevelt, out of love for the horses of his Rough Riders, had put the whole power of the Presidency behind resisting the rise of the automobile. (Instead, he became the first President to ride a car in public—an electric vehicle, as it happened.) Here’s how the signatories, including the then businessman Trump, put it in the 2009 letter to Obama: “Please allow us, the United States of America, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.” Those were the days. ♦