The anti-carbon, “green energy” push has suffered tremendous setbacks in the past few years. Consumers have balked at the coerced conversion to an all-electric future powered by “renewable” energy sources. Voters in the United States have thrown out the anti–fossil fuel regime in Washington, D.C. Perhaps most importantly, physics and the scientific limitations of wind and solar energy have exposed the political mandates ordered by de-carbonistas to be unfeasible.
This article is from The American Spectator’s summer 2026 print magazine. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive the magazine.
Here in the U.S., it especially feels as if a tremendous victory has been won. The “EV transition” has failed and legacy auto manufacturers are abandoning electric vehicles in favor of the gasoline-powered vehicles Americans have always preferred. Wind and solar projects are being scrapped. Petroleum production is at an all-time high, and the U.S. is now a net exporter of petroleum products. Perhaps most importantly, President Trump and his administration have aggressively dismantled the federal regulatory apparatus that was imposing the anti-carbon agenda.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our summer 2026 print magazine.
A tremendous battle has been won, but the fight is not over. The left never gives up, and its ultimate goal is not actually replacing carbon-based energy with “clean energy.” Rather, the goal is to eliminate the freedom and prosperity that come from abundant, affordable energy.
Things are messier in Europe, which committed to a green energy future with a short deadline under authoritarian zeal. The unraveling of those plans, and the pain that the net-zero agenda has inflicted on European consumers, has been enlightening for those of us on the other side of the Atlantic. In 2020, the EU set an ambitious goal of a 55 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030, increasing it to 90 percent by 2040, and to 100 percent carbon-free (net zero) by 2050.
While these mandates were never actually attainable, the massive investment in this quixotic endeavor caused electric bills to surge. But because solar cannot generate electricity when the sun doesn’t shine, and since there is no wind energy on breezeless days, the Europeans have had to maintain a parallel capability to generate electricity from natural gas and other vilified carbon sources. Despite all the efforts to go 100 percent renewable, wind and solar peaked at just 30 percent of EU electricity production, and there are times when “renewable” sources are contributing close to 0 percent. Amidst this green energy failure, Russia has remained a high-volume supplier of natural gas to Western Europe, despite being a pariah state.
Germany went even further than other European countries in its green energy push, with its Energiewende shutting down all of the country’s nuclear plants. About 25 percent of Germany’s electricity came from seventeen nuclear plants prior to 2010. They’ve all been closed, with the final three nuclear plants shut down in 2023. Only 14 percent of Germany’s electricity came from natural gas in 2010. That percentage has subsequently increased because natural gas has replaced nuclear as the reliable source of dispatchable electricity. Even worse, Germany is so strapped for electricity that it cannot produce enough domestically, so it is now forced to buy electricity from neighboring countries. Since the Energiewende was launched, Germany’s already high electricity prices have skyrocketed. The inflation-adjusted cost of electricity to consumers is up about 50 percent. The average cost per kilowatt-hour in Germany is now more than twice the average price paid in the United States. German industry is also suffering, due to the cost and scarcity of electricity.
Since his election as president in 2024, Donald Trump has been on offense against prior administrations’ mandates and regulatory impositions that sought to push green energy and punish fossil fuels. Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency, Doug Burgum at the Department of the Interior, and Chris Wright at the Department of Energy have been assertive in promoting a “drill baby drill” attitude toward petroleum, while dismantling the regulatory frameworks that previously existed.
The wind industry has specifically been kneecapped by the Trump administration. On day one of his new term, President Trump issued a memorandum directing a cessation of offshore wind projects on the outer continental shelf. He also paused all other onshore and offshore permitting, easements, leases, and so forth, pending a review of their impact on wildlife and national security. In late 2025, the administration suspended leases for five major East Coast offshore wind farms. Donald Trump is making it abundantly clear that there is no easy path to constructing offshore wind during his presidency.
Trump’s war on green energy also extends to the Tennessee Valley Authority, the giant, federally owned utility that provides electricity to seven states in Appalachia and the South. President Trump quickly fired all of the TVA board members appointed by Joe Biden, in large part due to their fairy-tale belief in the possibility that solar and wind could be the primary sources for electricity generation in the Tennessee valley.
At the EPA, Lee Zeldin terminated the Obama administration’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding.” This was a terrible ruling from Team Obama that declared that carbon dioxide is a man-made pollutant that threatens public health; therefore, any human activity that produces carbon dioxide is subject to governmental regulation. To grasp the implications of this, remember that every one of us exhales carbon dioxide with every breath we take. The Endangerment Finding served as a catalyst for the government to ramp up its commitment to “the EV transition” because of carbon dioxide in auto emissions. The Biden administration further compelled a switch to all EVs by setting emissions regulations that were virtually unattainable with gasoline-powered vehicles. Trump and Zeldin canceled those regulatory actions.
At the congressional level, the most important action was the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The act codified sweeping changes to roll back federal coercion tied to the left’s green agenda. This included:
• Revocation of tax credits for future wind and solar projects that weren’t scheduled to go online until the 2030s.
• Revocation of tax credits for most existing wind and solar projects that won’t finish by 2027.
• Termination of clean energy tax credits that benefit or subsidize “Foreign Entities of Concern,” which really means China. This squeezed the supply chain, especially for solar, and drove up the cost of green projects.
• The effective elimination of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for automakers by eliminating all fines and punishments for not complying with EPA standards.
The governmental pushback against green energy has been happening at the state level too. State treasurers and attorneys general have been retaliating against woke banks and investment houses that had been using their corporate clout to impose an anti-carbon agenda. Riley Moore as treasurer of West Virginia started this movement by yanking deposits and state contracts from firms such as BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase. What started in West Virginia has now taken hold in red states throughout the country, with the energy powerhouse of Texas now taking the lead. The CEOs of BlackRock and JPMorgan, among others, are now trying to walk back their previous embrace of anti-carbon environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with the attorneys general from ten other states, sued Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street for using investor funds to push a left-wing political agenda on the companies whose stock it purchased. Vanguard was the first to capitulate. Its settlement includes the following: a $29 million fine for harming the energy industry; a commitment not to impose further ESG goals; an agreement not to threaten to withhold investments if companies don’t push ESG; and a commitment not to nominate directors or push shareholder proposals.
Beyond politics, the general public is turning against green energy, since what was once promised as being clean and virtuous reveals itself to be expensive, wasteful, and environmentally destructive. Eagles and whales were once prominent icons of the environmental movement, but the ugly reality of green energy has brought the realization that raptors and whales are being killed in significant numbers by wind farms. It has effectively become a religious test of the environmental left that they must now embrace the sacrificial killing of eagles and whales as a sacrament of their green faith. A growing number of environmentalists are balking, choosing instead to side with conservatives in stopping green energy projects.
It’s estimated that perhaps a million birds per year are killed in the U.S. alone due to wind turbines. This includes several hundred golden eagles. Wind is especially effective at disorienting bats, whose kill rate may be even higher than birds. Those bats also play an important role in managing insect populations, something they obviously can’t do if they are lying dead on the ground under a spinning blade. Under Doug Burgum, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has stepped up enforcement by issuing fines and civil penalties for killing eagles, refusing to issue new permits to kill eagles, and also threatening criminal penalties for those wind operators who do so.
Offshore wind farm developers had previously been issued “incidental take” permits, allowing them to kill whales, including the endangered right whale. Killing one of these majestic creatures would land an ordinary person in jail, but somehow it has been embraced by the left that it’s a good thing when wind farms are killing whales. As more and more dead whales started to show up on East Coast beaches near wind development, public resistance — and revulsion — have grown.
Adding to the resistance to offshore wind farms was the ecological disaster that resulted from the collapse of just one blade from one wind turbine in a wind farm off of Nantucket in 2024. Thousands of fiberglass pieces littered the water and beaches, along with foam and other materials. Beaches were closed, and even after reopening, visitors were advised to wear footwear on the beach due to all the glass-like shards embedded in the sand. The promise of “clean energy” turned out to be a false promise.
The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility is a massive solar farm in the Mojave Desert that was just decommissioned. It cost $2.6 billion, most of which was funded by U.S. taxpayers. It opened in 2014 with an expected lifespan of twenty-five years. It never came close to meeting its anticipated electricity production targets or cost-benefit projections, but it was devastatingly effective at killing birds. It lasted barely twelve years before becoming unviable. In addition, all those solar panels must now be disposed of.
Texas aggressively embraced an “all of the above” energy policy, which left it dangerously dependent on unreliable energy sources during the great freeze of 2021. Homeowners shivered in near-zero temperatures without electricity, as solar and wind were absent when the need for electricity was a life-or-death matter. “All of the above” is now understood to be reckless and life-threatening.
The net zero/anti-fossil fuel push has had major setbacks, but the green energy promoters are merely down, not defeated. Where they retain power, the left will continue to try to outlaw fossil fuels.
We have won a battle but not the war, which is why every incentive, subsidy, and mandate must be permanently eliminated and prohibited by law to the maximum extent possible.
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