He made similar comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast in the run-up to his re-election, asserting he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”. Rogan remarked on the “dystopian” aesthetics of a wind farm in South Texas. Whether the concern is whale psychology or landscape aesthetics, there seems to be something visceral, even vibes-based, in the Right’s disdain for renewable energy.

In his second term in office, Trump has intervened on behalf of the whales — or, at least, against renewables. While Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was uniquely generous in using tax credits to support electricity from solar and wind, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) is equally ruthless in repealing them.

What distinguishes the OBBB is its exacting focus on solar and wind energy: increasingly the object of an emerging culture war. On one side, the Right argues solar and wind are “expensive and unreliable”, to use the words of Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright. Increasing reliance upon these intermittent power sources has led, Wright insists, to grids that are “less stable”.

On the other side, many on the Left see climate change as solvable only through the vast expansion of solar and wind energy — entailing a huge increase in the supply of batteries. Several high-profile commentators, including the activist Bill McKibben and the engineer Mark Jacobson, argue that the world can solve its decarbonisation needs by focusing exclusively on solar and wind, along with hydroelectric power — with, of course, more batteries. “100% renewables!” is their rallying cry.

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Granted, the Right downplays the real value of these energy sources, which are already making huge contributions to energy capacity in places such as Texas and California. But the Left is wrong to imagine that wind and solar will be a cure-all. Decarbonisation is complex, and will rely on a wider variety of energy sources and technologies to not only clean up electricity, but also deal with harder sectors like steel, cement, aviation and shipping.

Intermittency, of course, remains a real challenge for renewable energy — particularly in regions not blessed with a robust supply of sunshine or wind. The problem is not only geographical, but temporal. To deal with the recurring phenomenon of “winter”, renewable-heavy grids would need better “long-duration” batteries than those that exist today. To its credit, the IRA actually did enact a very broad-based set of support for not just solar and wind, but also nuclear power, carbon removal and green hydrogen. 

This is not the first time that energy policy has been shaped by antagonistic cultural politics. The oil shocks in the Seventies led to a wave of anti-Arab xenophobia in the United States — leading one country singer to suggest that America should cut off food supplies to the Middle East by way of retribution. Fifty years later, energy provision remains affected by culture. Germany has a significantly more carbon-intensive grid than its neighbours because it voluntarily dismantled its nuclear power plants at the behest of a vocal and powerful anti-nuclear movement. The country has spent billions on renewable energy, but these investments have not yet broken Germany’s dependence on coal and gas. 

But Biden did not have a culture war in mind with his energy policy so much as an audacious political theory. With many of its investments targeted for red states, Biden bet the IRA would create a durable political coalition that would help ward off attacks from Republicans. It was an attempted enactment of the neo-Marxist theory that clean-energy jobs and investments would appeal to the material class interests of Republicans, thus securing political support for the Democrats. 

The theory has many flaws, one of which was the reality that most of the investments had barely broken ground prior to the 2024 election. Worse, the Democrats’ theory of material interests fell prey to the larger culture war. It’s notable that, during the negotiations of the OBBB, a vocal faction in the Republican Party rose up to attempt to save some of the IRA tax credits and investments. But they were drowned out by a wider GOP that was scornful of renewable energy. Reporting suggests that, at the eleventh hour, Trump himself entered the negotiations, assuring many in his party that the OBBB would repeal the subsidies for solar and wind specifically.

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To explain their defeat, the Left has reached for another class theory. In this telling, the passing into law of the OBBB is just another example of the power of the fossil fuel industry. Likewise, the legislation could be seen as a defeat for “green capital”. Indeed, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, Abigail Ross Harper, claimed it was time to “storm the Hill” upon reading the Senate version of the bill.

At its core, though, the energy culture war is being waged not between industries so much as between classes. For the new populist Right, whose most prominent figures include JD Vance as well as Chris Wright, the class enemy is not green capital per se, but the wider “professional class”: the liberal academics, journalists and bureaucrats who, of all Americans, are the most enthusiastic about the transition to renewable energy. Although the OBBB does the bidding of fossil fuel capital, its most significant appeal to MAGA is in its broader culture-war project of “owning the libs”. Beyond solar and wind, the repeal of electric vehicle tax credits for liberal consumers plays into this larger cultural class war.

It helped that Trump and his allies in Congress could call on some supportive evidence. One striking revelation of the political fight over energy policy was that Republicans on Capitol Hill were reportedly swayed less profoundly by energy capitalists, or even energy engineers, than by a philosopher, Alex Epstein. Epstein is the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and is one of the more powerful energy “influencers” on the Right engaging in online polemics against renewable energy. On his Substack, “Energy Talking Points”, he argues solar and wind power are “not real energy” and “unreliable parasites of reliable energy”, and if the US were to embark on a “renewables-only policy”, the consequences, “…would quickly turn America into a third-world country”.

This is a battle, then, that transcends energy sectors. It is also a battle that maps precisely onto the increasingly geographical contours of political polarization. Pro-renewable liberals live in cosmopolitan, blue cities where climate change is an overarching concern. In these areas, solar and wind power appear as an unalloyed good on spreadsheets and in newspaper charts.

In rural areas, where the vast majority of these projects are constructed, people see things differently. Wind and solar farms take up a significant amount of land. This is a boon for landowners, who receive lucrative lease payments, but it is of less obvious benefit to the broader swathe of rural residents. This concern, coupled with the aesthetic problem of landscapes covered in solar panels and wind turbines, has contributed to significant resistance to these projects in rural areas all over the country.

The culture war over renewables cannot obscure the reality that the challenge of climate change is much broader than simply swapping solar and wind power for fossil fuels. It’s a civilizational infrastructure challenge, encompassing housing, transit, agriculture and energy, and will require something akin to a new, green industrial revolution reshaping entire geographies of life and work. The Trump administration’s attack on solar and wind is as superficial and unserious as Biden’s gambit that it would be enough to use tax credits to incentivize the right investments and consumer choices. 

The irony is many climate liberals have been insisting for years that renewables have become incredibly cheap and cost-competitive with fossil fuels. If that’s the case, they shouldn’t need the subsidies. Their theory is about to be put to the test. 

Arguably, Biden delivered on Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” promise. While Trump’s 2016 election victory represented a rhetorical break from neoliberalism, Trump’s policies — most notably tax cuts and a perniciously offensive form of deregulation — are better seen as the last gasps of the neoliberal order. Only under Biden did policy actually start to adopt a “post-neoliberal” hue , characterised by a kind of America First protectionism focused on domestic manufacturing and infrastructure investment. As a recent profile by Christian Lorentzen describes the economic and geopolitical outlook of Biden’s main advisors, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken: “They would be like Trump, only progressive.”

Yet if neoliberalism is what Adolph Reed Jr defined as “capitalism without a working-class opposition”, Biden’s approach did not seek to reanimate this opposition as much as ventriloquise it to the benefit of a corporatist project meant to save the country from Trumpism. The brutal reality is that, on the heels of punishing inflation and disastrous foreign policy, working-class voters are still leaving the Democrats in droves. And crucially, come November, such an outcome might give Trump an opportunity to remould Biden’s post-neoliberal project and secure the realignment of American politics to the populist Right for decades to come.

Nowhere is this clearer than in climate policy. Many hailed Biden as America’s first “climate president” and his administration claimed to take a “whole-of-government approach” to solving the climate crisis. Admirably, Biden broke decisively from neoliberal climate policy: most notably the kind of carbon pricing solution Barack Obama tried in vain to pass through Congress.

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For economists and other professional-class proponents, putting a price on carbon — or internalising the externalities of climate pollution — was “smart policy” and offered an elegant technocratic fix. These advocates never much cared that there was no popular base for increasing the cost of energy. Even worse, the policy was easily ridiculed by the Right, whose entire argument was that climate change was a liberal plot to destroy jobs and make life more expensive. Such policies have been roundly rejected in the ballot box and in the streets. By contrast, Biden’s climate policy was not framed around a carbon price or tax but rather in terms of investment in the energy and other infrastructure required to decarbonise. Instead of making fossil fuels more expensive, the goal was to use “industrial policy” to make clean energy cheap.

Not only did this approach signal a break with neoliberal economists — it also split from a stale wing of the environmental NGO and activist community who saw climate politics only in terms of opposition to fossil fuels. The modus operandi of these advocates was blockading pipelines and calling for bans on fracking, fossil fuel-burning cars and boilers. But opposing energy that nearly everyone still relies on in their everyday lives is bad politics. Indeed, a large majority of Americans (69%) claim they are not “ready to phase out the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely”.

Finally, analysts are waking up to the fact that decarbonisation is much more about building entirely new infrastructure — such as electricity generation units, transmission lines and public transit — than banning fossil fuels. As such, in the suite of legislation passed between 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration centred what the Financial Times’s Rana Foroohar calls a project of “re-industrialisation” or what Ezra Klein calls a “liberalism that builds”.

This impressive approach to climate policy managed at last to partially overcome the antagonism between environmentalists and labour unions. As Foroohar put it, Biden’s industrial policy is “most beneficial for groups such as the steelworkers, electrical workers and other industrial unions”. A winning climate coalition must include the very workers we need to build a green future, and Biden’s policies encouragingly pointed in this direction.

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The Biden administration also departed significantly from the green orthodoxy that decarbonisation is simply a matter of moving to “renewables”, most notably solar and wind farms. Labour unions are highly sceptical of such an approach — not least because, in the words of one union official, solar and wind installation jobs are “a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organise”. Rather, the Biden administration took an “all of the above” strategy that included a commitment to some risky technologies such as nuclear power, carbon removal and advanced geothermal. A notable example is the creation of a “Hydrogen Hub” in Philadelphia, which will establish a foothold for labour unions in a landscape marked by deindustrialisation, poverty and decline.

However, despite all Biden’s achievements, Trump is still predicted to win the election, and on the climate front, emissions continue to increase. While Biden clearly hoped that his investment programme would help to build a popular coalition able to stave off Trumpism, the reality is most Americans have little idea it exists. According to a poll by Heatmap news, “nearly 60% of voters said they knew little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act”, and other surveys suggest the same.

Part of the problem is that Bidenomics has all the marks of BlackRock — not of Biden, as it has centred private capital over muscular public sector ownership or planning. Its approach had two pillars: first, “the plans” from Elizabeth Warren’s progressive campaign, and second, Wall Street, led by BlackRock alumnus Brian Deese, who saw the opportunity to align the state with efforts to paint finance green through “Environment, Social, Governance” (ESG) investing.

This approach mobilises what Daniela Gaborb calls the “derisking state”, aimed at using government largesse to entice investments from the private sector in the form of lucrative tax credits. This means that when these investments hit the ground — and let’s be clear, most have not — they don’t plant the flag of the Biden administration in left-behind communities. Instead, they touch down under names such as Micron, Hyundai and NextEra.

Contrast this with the New Deal Works Progress Administration or the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built massive, socially useful infrastructure projects emblazoned with Franklin Roosevelt’s visage. Or the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired millions of unemployed young people to plant trees and repair the soil. The message was clear: here was a government that would directly solve public problems. In comparison, Biden’s rebrand of the Civilian Climate Corps is hiring mere tens of thousands of people and nearly all the work has been outsourced to non-profits rather than being undertaken by a remade public sector.

That said, the progressivism of Biden’s economic policy cannot be denied, given its commitment to prevailing wage standards, incentivising investment in fossil fuel communities, and, above all, full employment. Yet this was always a top-down affair, and there is scant evidence that these policies resonate much with ordinary people. With inflation still rocking household budgets and eating into modest wage gains, progressive Biden-partisans are digging in their heels: “But look at the numbers! The economy is so good!” For America’s working-class majority, however, the economy does not feel so good — and that is all that matters in the election.

And so we encounter a situation where a betting person would predict Trump winning and perhaps the Republicans winning both houses of Congress. If this happens, many of Biden’s industrial and infrastructure investments might reach fruition in the first Trump term. Climate advocates are most worried about the likelihood of Trump reversing much of Biden’s climate progress — particularly around culture-war flashpoints such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. But perhaps the more menacing scenario is that Trump is able to take credit for the Biden agenda. Some might even say it was originally the Trump agenda: reviving manufacturing and investing in American infrastructure. Imagine Trump rallies at factories opening their doors with thousands of new industrial jobs, or Trump affixing his MAGA brand to new visible investments in roads, bridges and electric grid infrastructure, just as he printed his name on millions of Covid relief cheques in 2020.

A second Trump term, unlike the first, might actually credibly enact the post-neoliberal Trumpist agenda — all thanks to Biden, who lacked a political strategy to assure it for the Democratic Party. Given that we are likely in a period of political “realignment”, with echoes of the Seventies’ swing towards the Republicans, the risk is that such an outcome could keep Right-wing populists in power for decades to come.

Of course, Trump can still lose. If he does, Democrats should remember that progressive policy alone cannot automatically generate the mass working-class politics needed to create a lasting majority in the 21st century. Rather than giving Wall Street or Donald Trump all the credit for radical Democratic infrastructure projects, Kamala Harris might be wise to plaster her face all over them.

The Conservatives have interpreted their win in Uxbridge as a response to Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez), effectively a tax on those who drive cars judged to be over-polluting; Rishi Sunak instantly followed up this victory with the announcement of 100 new oil drilling licences in the North Sea. Last week, sensing the popular backlash building, he went further, pledging to reverse many of the UK’s net-zero policies.

Sunak’s exploitation of the net-zero backlash was typical of an emerging strategy on the Right. Climate-minded policymakers float or implement a policy that, rightly or wrongly, is perceived as harming the economy and working people. The policy then allows Right-wing forces to mobilise mass anger against what is construed as an elite conspiracy to make ordinary life more difficult and costly — and the Right reaps the electoral gains.

This conservative mobilisation of class inequality has held for even longer in America. In 1993, the newly elected Clinton Administration rallied around a policy that was all the rage in the environmental think-tank circuit — green taxes. Their language then still had an edge of neoliberal novelty: policymakers could solve the “market failure” by “internalising” the costs of pollution and “nudging” the market toward clean solutions.

Predictably, the policy failed to garner the necessary support in Congress and there was an outcry on the Right. One letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle captured the rage in a way the van-drivers of Uxbridge might now understand: “You will pay this tax every time you turn on your stove, run your refrigerator, iron your clothes, drive your car, water your lawn or flush your toilet. There is nothing that you do or any part of your life that will not ‘pay’ this tax.” Unsurprisingly, the Republicans rode a historic “red wave” in the 1994 midterm elections and gained control of Congress for the first time in 42 years.

Fifteen years later, President Barack Obama rode into office with a Democratic supermajority, a massive economic crisis, and radical calls for a “Green New Deal”. Instead, drawing from the same free-market environmentalism, he unveiled a complicated emissions trading programme called “cap and trade” (immediately labelled “Cap and Tax” by the Right), and helped spark the 2009-2010 Tea Party rebellion and his own party’s defeat in the 2010 midterms. By 2016, Right-wing opponents of climate action were actively claiming to be on the side of the working class. Billionaire oil tycoon Charles Koch declared himself to be “very concerned [about climate policies] because the poorest Americans use three times the energy as the percentage of their income as the average American does. This is going to disproportionately hurt the poor.” Charles Koch, man of the people.

A similar backlash is taking place across the world today: in France, Emmanuel Macron’s 2018 fuel tax incited mass revolt with the Yellow Vest movement, who contrasted liberal concern with the “end of the world” with their own struggle to pay their bills at the “end of the month”. This year, the German Green Party has suggested forcing households to purchase expensive heat pumps, only to see their popularity plummet and the rise of the AfD. Heavily Democratic states such as New York and California have floated banning gas stoves or internal combustion engines, encouraging a tide of populist ridicule.

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Why do these climate policy technocrats repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot? Because, at the heart of their thinking, there is a deeper moralism that won’t let political reality get in the way of their historic mission. Ultimately, such approaches might be dubbed “techno-behaviouralism” — insisting that the main challenge of climate change is to reform the immoral carbon practices of dispersed consumers throughout the upper, middle and working classes. Rather than tackling the problem of who owns and controls fossil-fuel based production (a relative minority of society), carbon behaviouralism aims its sights on the “irresponsible” choices of millions of consumers of all classes. It hopes to use policy tools to get them to drive less (or drive more efficient cars), insulate their homes, eat less meat, fly less. One notorious study in 2017 even went as far as to advise individuals to not have children.

The first phase of this policy outlook was to use the disciplining force of the market — particularly the price mechanism — to “nudge” consumers toward low-carbon choices. But now the severity of the climate crisis is forcing these technocrats to ratchet up their strategy to outright coercion: banning fossil-fuel boilers, gas stoves, internal combustion engines, or forcing farmers to rapidly implement costly practices. Rather than winning them over to an attractive political project, the masses must be reformed into more virtuous low-carbon practices. And even when the climate technocrats focus on society’s rampant class inequality, they only morally reprimand the lifestyles of the rich — their private jets, for example. They hardly ever consider how the rich make rather than spend their money: organising investment and for-profit production with likely far greater effects on the climate.

This has much less to do with the climate than with the ruling ideologies of a dying era — neoliberalism and technocracy. But environmentalism was not always morally fixated on the consumption of the masses. In the Sixties, the modern environmental movement emerged with a strong argument that our problems were rooted in forms of industrial production. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring railed against the chemical industry producing what she called “elixirs of death”. Tony Mazzocchi, a union leader and an organiser of the first Earth Day in 1970, saw that his fellow workers were the ones first exposed to harmful toxic pollution before it went into the community air and water. He also recognised that workers and unions had strategic leverage to force owners to reform these sites of production: “When you start to interfere with the forces of production, you’re going to the heart of the beast, right?”

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At this stage, it was pretty straightforward that environmentalism meant a form of “industrial policy”: implementing regulations that would force capitalist industry to install or replace polluting equipment in favour of cleaner alternatives. As such, policies such as the Clean Air and Water Acts had great success. But two political developments nipped this burgeoning movement in the bud. First, free-market reformers targeted both the regulatory and welfare state with the twin processes of fiscal austerity and regulatory reform. An emergent form of free-market environmentalism argued that even if industrial pollution control was successful, it was unduly burdensome, hindered global competitiveness, and, above all, was not “cost-effective”. Cap and trade, green taxes and green consumption all emerged as cheaper alternatives to the top-down environmental regulatory state. Why dictate what industry must do, when you can allow markets and prices to do the work indirectly?

Second, a new and inhuman form of environmentalism supplanted the earlier one. Certain thinkers of the post-war era — most prominently William Vogt and Paul Ehrlich — were comfortable asserting straightforward Malthusian explanations of environmental crisis. Ehrlich famously argued that a “population bomb” in the largely poor, developing world imperilled humanity. It soon became clear, however, that this crude Malthusianism focused too much on the poor, and ignored the outsized contribution of specific populations in the rich counties. Early in the Seventies, “affluence” was discovered as the key driver of environmental breakdown (famously alongside population and technology in the IPAT equation). A follow up to his bestselling book The Population Bomb was Paul Ehrlich’s The End of Affluence, blaming unsustainability on consumer societies — and, at least partially, on the consumption of the ordinary working person.

By the Eighties and Nineties, ecological thinkers such as William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel devised a whole mode of analysis — ecological “footprints” — which traced all environmental impacts to the consumption of resources by consumers (this prompted British Petroleum to invent the concept of a “carbon footprint”, which they happily promoted as part of their ill-fated “Beyond Petroleum” campaign in 2004). While focusing on “consumers” makes sense for natural ecosystems, the capitalist economy disaggregates consumption from owners who control and profit from production. The latter not only enable consumption, but have much more power over societal resources and thus more environmental impact. Footprint analysis erased these capitalists profiteers from environmental responsibility.

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The result of this footprint ideology was a shift to what John Bellamy Foster and coauthors have called “economic Malthusianism”. Like Malthus’s original arguments, it disregards the power of capital in favour of a moralistic focus on policing imprudent behaviour. But, whether focusing on consumption or demographics, it leads to similar calls for radical population reductions. In fact, William Rees published a paper just this year claiming humanity is heading toward a “population correction” and suggested that “informed estimates put the long-term carrying capacity [of the Earth] at as few as 100 million to as many as three billion people”. In other words, between 98.75% to 62.5% of the current human population needs to die off. This is how our modern climate discourse — top-down, moralising, apocalyptic — emerged.

But this also mirrored shifts throughout the larger political economy. Just as deindustrialisation attacked industrial workers and unions and celebrated the educated knowledge worker, a new form of environmentalism downplayed production and glorified the agency of the environmentally conscious middle-class consumer — the people who staff the state agencies and non-profits that deploy carrots and sticks to herd the masses toward environmental enlightenment. Anyone who looks seriously at the problem should realise solving it will require not lifestyle modification but political and social change. New infrastructures for energy, housing, transport built not by the middle class but blue-collar industrial workers. And abandoned industrial regions could find obvious self-interest in a public-jobs programme aimed at constructing this new economy.

It is telling that, rather than gathering around such a programme on the Left, “green” industrial workers — such as those in the Danish wind industry — are rejecting environmentalism and voting for the Right. After all, the environmental movement still remains populated by middle-class activists brimming with moral certitude that their political project must include corralling the consumptive behaviour of ordinary people. That we could both save the planet and make life significantly better for the majority simply does not cross their mind. And as long as the Left simply renews the climate politics of the last 30 years, workers will continue to reject a platform that has nothing to offer them.

Amid this collective myopia, we have not noticed that an economy powered by renewable energy does not guarantee a fairer or more equal society, or one that favours workers over the interests of capital. When you take a look at the dynamics of existing renewable energy production (particularly in the United States) you find that it intensifies and exacerbates all the worst aspects of our highly unequal neoliberal political economy.

To understand these dynamics, we need to look to the Seventies and the rise of neoliberalism. During this crisis decade, power and influence was shifted toward capital and an associated free market ideology. Though often portrayed as anti-government, neoliberals in fact promoted quite an active state, creating the institutional conditions for markets, the extension of private power, and above all the insulation of states from democratic control. One of their greatest influences, Friedrich Hayek, had argued against “central planning” in favour of a different kind of system: “Competition…means decentralised planning by many separate persons.” The expanded Keynesian redistributive state was their prime target, but this critique extended to all kinds of large-scale bureaucratic institutions: unions, universities, and even massive monopolistic corporations of the time, such as General Motors or IBM.

In other words, neoliberals set their sights on the very institutions at the heart of the post-war boom. Their vision of a new competitive market order aimed to demolish these large, rigid institutions in favour of smaller, more flexible production guided by a decentralised price mechanism. It was an ideology that seized the electricity sector at precisely this historical moment. For most of the 20th century, electricity had been provisioned by massive investor-owned and vertically integrated utilities — each given a “natural monopoly” service territory where they controlled the entire grid. State-run public commissions oversaw these utilities to ensure consumer prices and investor returns alike were “fair and reasonable”. Because electricity is in fact a complex infrastructure where supply and demand must always remain in balance to preserve grid stability, utilities centrally planned the grid by necessity.

In the context of the Seventies energy crisis, electric utilities epitomised the kind of inflexible and corrupt institutions targeted for demolition. And, interestingly, an associated environmentalist ideology conformed to this neoliberal critique of “big” and “centralised” utilities. Most prominently, Amory Lovins proposed a “soft energy path” based on small-scale and decentralised energy production and efficiency. Although Lovins promoted any kind of decentralised energy production — including many small-scale forms of coal generation — soon it became clear that renewable energy production from solar panels and wind turbines were the most attractive to environmentalists.

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Advocates imagined a shift to renewable energy aligned with a “small is beautiful” approach, scattered about pastoral rural landscapes, and inspiring ideas of local or community ownership. Against a complex and centrally-planned system, “grassroots” local communities aspired to get off the grid entirely. In short, if most of the 20th century was about large-scale social integration of complex industrial societies, the neoliberal turn represents an anti-social reaction against society itself. For parts of the Right, there was “no such thing” as society, only individuals. But the environmental Left made a comparable turn: large-scale complex industrial society was rejected in favour of a small-scale communitarian localism. In this framework, “communities” could opt out of society and usher in democratic control over energy, food, and life. As the icon of the German Green Party Rudolf Bahro said in the Eighties, “we must build up areas liberated from the industrial system…a new social formation and a new civilisation”.

It should be no surprise that Lovins’s soft energy path ideas gained the ear of proto-neoliberal and deregulator-in-chief, President Jimmy Carter, who invited him to the White House in October 1977. Carter personified this new decentralised energy ideology, wearing cardigan sweaters in his prime time addresses and decorating the White House with solar panels. But while environmentalists often lament the path not taken with Carter’s conservationist ethic, his approach to the energy crisis (among other things) was a political disaster. Ronald Reagan crushed Carter by nine points in 1980 and Carter only carried six out of 50 states. For a country that had just endured a cost-of-living inflationary crisis of its own, Reagan’s message of “Make America Great Again” and solving the energy crisis through increased production resonated much more strongly than Carter’s moralism and calls for sacrifice.

But what is crucial is how this vision of a decentralised renewable-powered utopia actually accompanied a broader project of electricity deregulation started under Carter himself. About a year after meeting with Lovins, Carter signed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies of Act of 1978. Deregulation eventually opened up the field of electricity generation to competition against utilities. The process was slow but by the Nineties it unleashed a totally new frontier of investment in electricity production for capitalists untethered from the utility system: so called “independent power producers” or “merchant generators”. The main beneficiaries of this process were smaller-scale natural gas producers, but it also included a new class of capitalists building renewable energy projects such as solar or wind farms. These producers need not care about the grid as a shared social system, and can focus instead exclusively on their private profits and efforts to outcompete other sellers in wholesale electricity markets.

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Profit could also come from the state itself. As research by Sarah Knuth shows, by the Obama years, renewable energy capitalists were showered with lucrative tax credits to incentivise production. The credits allow renewable energy developers to partner with an exclusive class of “tax equity investors”: a special kind of wealthy person whose “tax burden” is so high they use renewable projects to shelter their wealth from public coffers. These tax equity investors represent some of the most powerful and wealthy actors imaginable, such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. Warren Buffett — whose company Berkshire-Hathaway is one of the biggest investors in renewables — famously said, “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them.” Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is simply a continuation of this policy of attempting to achieve climate goals through the tax code (albeit with a “direct pay” provision that will allow some public power entities to take advantage).

This shift away from utilities and toward decentralised merchant generation explicitly undermined the labour unions who had built up their power under the older, established utility system. As James Harrison, the director of renewable energy for the Utility Workers Union of America, told the New York Times, “The clean tech industry is incredibly anti-union… It’s a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organize.” It was, therefore, no surprise that labour unions were on the frontlines fighting deregulation from the beginning in the Nineties. It is much easier to organise workers in centralised power plants than scattered solar and wind farms whose, after all, only provide temporary construction jobs.

Once these installations are built, the jobs disappear and the only plausible economic benefits besides rents flowing to private landowners are marginal increases in local tax revenues. Not only are renewable energy jobs temporary, they are also often simply bad jobs. Labour journalist Lauren Kaori Gurley’s profile of the solar industry has revealed dystopian labour conditions: temp agencies send subcontracted workers from site to site, separated from their family for weeks, and exposed to occupational hazards such as extreme heat, alligators, and snakes.

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Neoliberal electricity restructuring is benefiting Wall Street above all, as well as Big Tech, who see it as a more efficient means to partner with renewable generators and claim green credentials for operations powered by “100% renewable energy” (these accounting fictions are provided by tradeable Renewable Energy Certificates while firms still rely on the fossil- and nuclear-powered grid for their actual electricity). Google has emerged as a fierce proponent of deregulation in the American South fundamentally so it can avoid utilities and partner with more scattered renewable capitalists. Naive environmentalists (who propose an extremely difficult vision of a grid powered by 100% renewable energy) have become unwitting allies of the Googles and Berkshire Hathaways of the world — and fail to recognise their renewable advocacy often enables the further neoliberalisation of electricity.

Seduced by climate rhetoric, the Left has become the unwitting ally of this programme. But the electricity grid is a shared social infrastructure that should be managed by a single entity. In other words, while private investor-owned utilities are often corrupt and negligent, the Left needs to defend and reclaim the general idea of electricity as a utility, or an essential service critical to the public good. A revived electric public utility system could indeed integrate some renewables in sunny and windy regions (on land and offshore), but grid planners will acknowledge some level of “firm” low carbon generation like hydroelectric and nuclear power will be required. But this vision of public energy development won’t come about unless we confront the power of renewable capital, their Wall Street backers and the general neoliberal political economic model that underpins the industry today. Sloganeering around renewable energy as if it’s a good in-and-of-itself may have drawn attention to the climate crisis — but it is no good at creating the politics we need to solve it.