The fundamentals here are not hard to grasp: the earth is warming at an alarming rate thanks to our prodigious appetite for fossil fuels. What follows, then, is not climate denialism, but a reminder that the green transition has a class system. At its upper reaches everything is agreeably frictionless. From the edgier neighborhoods of Western chancelleries, its future can look positively convivial: solar panels on the roof, an electric car at the curb, an oat cortado in hand and a bottle of pét-nat chilling for later. Consumption becomes cleaner, the carbon footprint contracts, and modern life proceeds much as before, only with improved appliances. At Davos, the same transformation is rendered in the more desultory language of targets and taxonomies. Yet it is somewhere farther down the class pyramid that the gigawatts are actually made. There, at the bottom of the pecking order, the lower orders drill tunnels, pour concrete, mine copper, string transmission cables, drive trucks in interminable nocturnal capers, and climb inside power stations when rivers rise.

Decarbonization appears in prospectuses bedecked in green; but the labor behind it remains blue-collar. Émile Zola, whose coal mining opus Germinal (1885) ends with miners drowning underground, would have instantly recognized the arrangement. Nearly a century and a half since its publication, the fuel has changed and the carbon ledger has improved, but the laborer is still in the tunnel.

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By Pratinav Anil

In Nepal last week came a grim illustration of this new class divide. On 26 August, near the Tibetan frontier, a sizeable chunk of Himalayan ice detached itself from the mountainside, plunging with such violence that the impact seismically registered on the Richter scale. Rock, ice, water, boulders, and pulverized mountain were funneled through Nepal and Tibet, where, in scarcely half an hour, the swollen Trishuli River began consuming the valley around it. Roads disappeared, then bridges, and helicopters were obliged to perform duties ordinarily entrusted to highways. An impressive rescue operation managed to save 11,800 people, even as over a thousand perished, with a further 4,500 missing.

Farther down the valley, a rather more hopeless story was unfolding. A dozen hydropower projects were struck, and, at the time of writing, around 900 workers remain unaccounted for. Reports say that 500 of them are still in tunnels, awaiting rescue. Indian specialists have joined Nepali soldiers, while China has sent drones and DNA-testing kits. Meanwhile, some 700 megawatts of generating capacity, roughly a tenth of the national total, has been lost. Nepal has spent two decades transitioning to clean energy, in the main by turning Himalayan water into electricity. It is a bleak irony that the men building this green future have now been buried under it.

For Kathmandu, hydropower was never simply an environmental policy. The dream long pre-dated the climate transition. In 1966, the Nepali engineer Hari Man Shrestha, armed with a Moscow doctorate, calculated that the torrents tumbling off the Himalayas contained some 83,000MW of theoretical generating capacity. Later estimates reckoned roughly half of it commercially exploitable. Here was an intoxicating proposition for a poor, landlocked country with few conventional energy resources and an energy-hungry giant to its south. So it was that in 1992, the government formally opened hydropower to private and foreign capital, explicitly envisaging electricity for export. A power-trade agreement with India duly followed five years later. By the following decade, politicians and developers were talking of Nepal as the “hydropower battery of South Asia.”

As it was, for decades, the battery remained uncharged. As late as last year, Nepal’s installed capacity was roughly 3,400MW, still a fraction of the old 42,000MW dream. Now, however, the dams are going up quickly. India has agreed to buy as much as 10,000MW over a decade, while Nepali electricity already travels through the Indian grid to Bangladesh.

This was no minor achievement for a small nation, wedged between two capricious giants, chronically deficient in merchandise exports, and accustomed to its best workers emigrating to more hospitable economies. Clean energy was a ticket out of poverty and dependency. The rivers promised electricity and reindustrialization, foreign exchange and domestic jobs. Some of the more utopian Nepalese mandarins even imagined that, after sufficient megawatts, the old hierarchy of landlord and peasant would give way to the more benign modern compact of engineer and technician. In short, the green transition was industrial policy, foreign policy, and class conciliation all rolled into one.

The latter, in particular, was a big deal. Nepal has spent the past generation accomplishing political revolutions rather more efficiently than economic ones. The Maoist insurgency began in 1996 among the impoverished populations of the western hills, where feudalism was still very much a lived reality; by the time the guns fell quiet a decade later, some 17,000 people were dead. The Maoists finally entered government in 2008, abolishing the 240-year-old Shah monarchy and installing their former guerrilla commander Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known by his revolutionary sobriquet Prachanda, “the Fierce One” – as prime minister.

Republican Nepal had its achievements. Extreme poverty fell precipitously — the share of Nepalis living below the World Bank’s $3-a-day poverty line falling from 22% in 2011 to 3% in 2023. Caste discrimination was outlawed, representation widened and public services improved. Nepal also developed an Italianate — or dare one now say, British — appetite for changing governments. By 2024, there had been fourteen prime ministers in about as many years. Meanwhile, far-Left factions multiplied with a fecundity to rival Marx (father of seven). Maoists joined Marxist-Leninists; Marxist-Leninists embraced their centrist enemies of old, discovering the novel attractions of cabinet office. At one point, the country counted 25 different communist parties — all very People’s Front of Judea versus Judean People’s Front. As the Nepali political scientist Krishna Khanal observed: “Ironically, there are no communists in Nepal even with an abundance of Communist parties.” With the revolution over, the new political caste settled into the more temperate business of coalition arithmetic, familiar enough to any observer of the South Asian scene.

For all these Communists, however, the lower orders remained obstinately lower. Nepal had abolished its king, survived a civil war, and installed former revolutionaries in the Singha Durbar, Kathmandu’s neoclassical seat of power. But what failed to materialize was sufficient productive work for the working classes in whose name all this had taken place. Capitalism here appeared with peculiarly Nepali characteristics: the country’s most dependable export is its own proletariat. After a decade-long People’s War, the people are still obliged to go look further afield for work: at the 2021 census, 2.2 million Nepalis were living abroad, representing around 7.5% of the population. Remittances — money that foreign-based workers send back home — still supply around a quarter of GDP and reach well over half of households. Youth unemployment has hovered above 20%; many find work in the black market. The IMF calls the resulting dispensation a “low-trust, low-investment equilibrium.” Put less decorously, Nepal cannot employ enough of its people, so they leave at a rate of roughly 1,700 per day to earn poverty wages building stadiums in the Gulf and operating factories in Malaysia, which they then send home to their pensionless families. Hydropower was meant to break this cycle. If the Maoists had failed to emancipate Nepal’s proletariat, perhaps the megawatt would.

This is not an appealing social contract and something eventually had to give. It did so last September, when Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli — of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) — decided to ban 26 social-media platforms. Nepal’s Gen Z had spent years unemployed or watching friends depart, while the offspring of Communist grandees displayed designer handbags and holiday snaps. On 8 September, security forces opened fire on protestors marching on parliament, killing nineteen in the first crackdown. The people of Kathmandu answered the following day with riots and attacks on politicians’ homes. By the time the upheaval subsided, at least 76 people were dead, and some 2,300 injured. Oli duly resigned. Having successively tried kings and communists, Nepal plumped for a rapper. Balendra “Balen” Shah — engineer, hip-hop artist, independent mayor of Kathmandu, scourge of illegal buildings, and habitual wearer of dark glasses — had spent his musical career rapping about corruption and unemployment. He cannily declined the interim premiership, waited for elections and, in March, demolished the septuagenarian Oli in his Jhapa-5 constituency. His Rastriya Swatantra Party duly swept parliament.

Six months later, the rapper-ruler has inherited a disaster, and, with it, an uncomfortable lesson in political economy. Contrary to liberal assumptions, decarbonization does not abolish class relations merely by altering the fuel. To be sure, a dam may emit less carbon than a coal-fired power station; yet it still has owners, creditors, contractors, engineers, and laborers, and they do not share its attendant dangers equally. It is Nepal’s hydropower proletariat who drill and blast through unstable Himalayan rock, working underground among explosives and sleeping beside the river systems being harnessed for Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese electricity.

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Shah has responded vigorously enough, mobilizing the army and hospitals while accepting Sino-Indian assistance. His government has also, understandably, reached for the language of climate justice, seeking compensation from the richer, heavier-emitting powers for the costs of a catastrophe Nepal did vanishingly little to cause. Yet the workers entombed in Nepal’s hydropower tunnels expose a less convenient injustice: the fault line runs through Nepalese society as well as between Nepal and the carbon-rich West.

The green transition promises to transcend carbon. But, as Nepal shows, it cannot quite transcend class. As trillions are poured into dams, grids, batteries, mines, and transmission lines, the old question of who profits, and who is placed in harm’s way, merely acquires new terrains.

The independent producers who now generate roughly two-thirds of Nepal’s hydroelectricity are the toast of the Kathmandu financial press. Their workers understandably occupy the less photogenic end of the boom. At the Tanahun project, a 2025 study found barely two-thirds observing adequate safety practices, amid reports of electric shocks, musculoskeletal disorders, and skin disease. Meanwhile, at Upper Tamakoshi, injuries were significantly more common among men working inside the tunnels than among those above ground. None of this, of course, caused last week’s glacial collapse. Yet once a warming and geologically unstable mountain range becomes a workplace, natural hazard acquires a class dimension: someone must be sent underground; some regulation decides what protections follow him there; and some state authority must possess the machinery to retrieve him when the mountain moves.

Marx, whose ideas have enjoyed a rather eventful afterlife in the Himalayas, would have found 21st century Nepal a familiar place. His account of commodity fetishism turned on the way relations between people come to assume the appearance of relations between things. It followed that the finished commodity confronts us as an object complete in itself, while the social relations, not to mention the labor that produced it, recede from view. Something similar afflicts the modern imagination when it comes to clean energy. We see the turbine, the solar panel, the electric car. Less visible, however, are the Congolese cobalt miner, Chilean copper worker, Chinese solar-factory hand, and Nepali tunneler beneath the Trishuli — until, that is, disaster strikes, making the class relations concealed inside the innocent abstraction of the “green transition” suddenly impossible to miss.

The takeover in Venezuela brings under US control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Under Trump, Washington saw Venezuelan energy bolstering hostile countries, especially oil-import-dependent China. For now, the Venezuela coup deprives the Middle Kingdom of upwards of 800,000 daily barrels, while taking away a valuable customer as well as an intelligence asset for the Russians and their Islamist allies.

This naked neo-imperialism could prove beneficial, not least for the hard-pressed Venezuelans. American supermajors like Chevron are also natural beneficiaries, with huge resources being placed to modernize the country’s shambolic energy industry and thus to restore its once proud relative prosperity.

The larger point is that successful economies either have fossil fuels or need easy access to them. Gas reserves, and the revenues they generate, grant places the Persian Gulf monarchies far more influence than populous Arab states like Egypt, which lack oil and gas. Russia has been able to underwrite its invasion of eastern Ukraine and withstand severe Western sanctions thanks to its hydrocarbon reserves. China and India look to secure imports of the same wherever they can, especially at bargain prices. Core European powers like Britain, France, and Germany, meanwhile, could punch far above their weight if they would but tap their own plentiful supplies of shale gas, but their governments refuse to do so owing to irrational green phobias about hydraulic fracturing.

Beyond Europe, however, the recognition of fossil fuels as a key element of geopolitics puts a stopper on decades of green campaigns designed to instill fear of emissions and promote wishful thinking about how to reduce them. In academia and the media, dissenters from the narrative, even academics who accepted anthropogenic climate change, are hounded if they fail to submit to the green papacy’s encyclicals.

But the green doomerism has failed to meet the reality test. We now know that predictions of climate crises, some of which date back to the 1970s, have turned out to be exaggerated or even plain wrong. For example, both ABC and NBC boldly predicted in 2008 that New York would be under water by 2015; last time I visited my familial home town, however, it seemed very much on dry land. Extinction rates, often blamed on climate change, have slowed, with even the polar bears continuing to thrive in somewhat warmed temperatures.

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By Joel Kotkin

A 2021 paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers David Rode and Paul Fishbeck tracked apocalyptic predictions dating from the first Earth Day in 1970. Across half a century, 61% of the forecasts of planetary collapse have come and gone (and the planet is still here, chugging along). Even the committed climate sirens at Nature journal have been forced to retract a study that claimed the world economy would contract due to climate change.

The collapse of the worst-case scenario goes hand-in-hand with the continued strength of fossil fuels, which remain the dominant source of energy; even coal is ascendant. Despite billions spent by Western taxpayers to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use is 30 times bigger than wind and solar combined, as the energy analyst Robert Bryce notes; in the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar, but 13,000 from fossil fuels.     

Fossil-fuel energy remains “the blood” that wins economic battles, including the drive to build data centers for artificial intelligence. For a while, China was catching all the upside from the fossil-fuel resurgence by going on a coal-plant building spree (this, even as the People’s Republic invested heavily in green technologies). Meanwhile, the West, including the United States under President Joe Biden, hamstrung itself.

Americans and Europeans suffered. Living standards in the de-industrializing West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe, especially, has endured a decade of stagnation. Americans laboring under the joint rule of green capital and green government likewise suffered.

In my adopted home state of California, electricity rates have surged a staggering 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. Once a major oil producer, the Golden State now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign sources in South America and Saudi Arabia.

High energy prices most hurt those in California’s less temperate, heavily Latino interior. The crisis has driven an erosion of industrial jobs; since 1990, one-third of California’s manufacturing jobs — 1.3 million of them — have disappeared. The disparate class impacts have been confirmed recently in a study by the California Air Resources Board, which projects that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

If they stick to the climate agenda, the only way places like Europe and California can get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China put off for at least another decade — is by squelching future growth. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes that such policies would have  catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West. But China’s leaders won’t sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost.

But America under President Trump is pulling in another, better direction. And even some Democrats are going along in recognition of geopolitical reality. In the United States, Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have all but abandoned use of the Green New Deal, even amid their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump. “Today,” notes longtime Democratic policy expert Will Marshall, “the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality.” Among Democrats in Congress, mentions of the once-hyped program have fallen to a bare handful, down from more than 1,000 citations in 2020.

Only 6% of Americans rank climate as a top concern, a sliver of those who see inflation as their major problem. As these concerns have faded, even ultra-green California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been begging refiners to stay in the state.   

The prospects for greens are even worse in the developing world. In Africa — the only continent whose population is growing strongly; also now home to five of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies — governments generally recoil from adopting net-zero ideologies. Leaders choose to ignore the scolding of Greta Thunberg and the green nonprofits. Instead, they prioritize bringing electricity to the roughly 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa who do not have it now.  

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Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, for example, has warned that the climate policies favored by Western nonprofits and aid agencies could precipitate a continent-wide energy crisis. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, launched a scathing attack on European climate policies in November 2022, declaring it “morally bankrupt” for Europe to use African fossil fuels while denying Africa the same right. Museveni accused Western nations of imposing “one rule for them and another rule for us”, while expecting Africa to sacrifice development for climate goals Europe has failed to meet.

“The climate-industrial complex,” as Bjorn Lonborg has put it, is, well, running out of energy. Even before the return of Trump, many green companies, despite subsidies, were failing, the product of high costs and poor delivery. 

Yet it is far too early to proclaim the permanent demise of the climatistas. They remain deeply entrenched in the universities and the mainstream media and are busy grifting in the massive nonprofit sector. A generation of children who have already been schooled in climate-change science, however exaggerated, may help them resurge. Also, those who have invested in “renewables” will be interested in recouping their losses under Trump.

Rather than ruin the basis of our prosperity and hopes for the developing world, humanity needs to adapt, much as our species has done during previous, and often more dramatic, climactic changes. In the coming years, the world must muddle through reducing emissions through practical steps like adopting natural gas over coal and restoring nuclear power.  Trump’s successors may not fully embrace these realities. But for the immediate future, at least, fossil fuels are back, for better or worse, shaping history much as they have for the past century.  

Ten years on, Donald Trump has waved aside decades of climate science as a “con job”, recently joining Saudi Arabia in sinking a landmark deal that would cut global shipping emissions. Meanwhile, Europe, bound by the knots of its own climate bureaucracy struggles to execute an ambitious industrial strategy. At COP30, Brussels will speak the language of leadership — but with diluted goals and waning momentum. Washington, turning inward as a newly unapologetic petrostate, may arrive only to heckle from the wings. The climate consensus is fracturing.

China will arrive in Belém with confidence — and control.Over the past decade it has built the world’s most complete clean-energy manufacturing base: it now produces well over 80% of global solar modules, leads the battery supply chain from raw materials to final assembly, and dominates the rare-earth mining and processing vital for EVs, wind turbines and electronics. Clean-energy projects around the world depend on components that pass through its industrial ecosystem. Put simply, Beijing controls the infrastructure of decarbonization.

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By Elizabeth Lindley

As the principal architect of the low-carbon era, China can build what others only promise — but at a price. For some, Beijing remains an indispensable partner in decarbonization, able to mobilize capital, equipment and contractors faster and cheaper than Western institutions. But others are more cynical, regarding China’s strategy as a new form of green colonialism. China’s ascent as the world’s system-builder inspires as much admiration as unease.

With its grip on global supply chains, China has de facto control over certification regimes, pricing structures, and emergent standards for green finance, all of which increasingly govern market access. The electric-vehicle sector offers a glimpse of what is to come: Chinese batteries and EVs may have higher life-cycle emissions than Japanese or Korean rivals, yet cost and scale have allowed Beijing to dictate the terms of competition. Falling emissions are reinforcing China’s claim that state direction delivers results.

But Beijing’s path to decarbonization is riddled with contradictions. China is both the world’s dirtiest industrial behemoth and its leading green architect. In 2024, China broke records for wind and solar installation even as it approved more coal plants than at any point over the last decade. Critics interpret this as “green-washing” or bad faith, but for Beijing, it’s “sequencing” — the belief that industrial might in strategic sectors must come before emission cuts.

It is a transition philosophy without precedent. “The path, method, pace and intensity… must be determined by ourselves,” Xi Jinping has insisted. What has followed is a multi-trillion-dollar experiment: China is attempting to reach its dual carbon goals — peaking CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 — without dismantling the largest industrial base on Earth.

For Beijing, industrial strength is the foundation of geopolitical power. Commanding roughly 35% of global manufacturing, with projections of 45% by 2030, manufacturing is not something China is willing to trade for climate credibility. On the contrary: it believes the world’s low-carbon future can only be built by those who still know how to make it.

In Beijing’s view, whoever builds the clean-energy economy will write the rules of the next world order — just as the United States once did through oil, arms and the dollar. Decarbonization, by this logic, is statecraft, not climate stewardship. Domestically, it doubles as an insurance policy,  securing water, food, and energy on China’s terms before scarcity and climate shocks arrive. This strategy grants Beijing the mandate to plan decades ahead and mobilize entire sectors.

China can also pursue policies that would be unthinkable in pure market economies. While Western governments set climate targets and leave delivery to the market, Beijing intervenes directly. Strategy is directed from the top, and capital is treated not as a market outcome, but as an instrument of national power. Policy banks funnel cheap finance into strategic sectors often years before they are commercially viable. State-owned firms absorb early risk, allowing new technologies such as carbon-neutral steel and advanced battery chemistries to be trialed without needing to turn a profit. Once a technology shows promise, the state withdraws protection and unleashes a brutal survival-of-the-fittest competition: the strongest are rapidly scaled up, the rest are abandoned.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL) is a product of this system. A decade ago, China granted subsidies to dozens of battery startups before ruthlessly pruning the sector. Graveyards of failed EV startups now ring the outskirts of Hangzhou and Nanjing. CATL survived the cull, and was quickly scaled up into a “national champion”. Today, its dominance in battery technology anchors China’s lead in the global EV supply chain.

It is not tidy or efficient, but waste and failure are built into the system. Duplication builds capacity; missteps refine technology. Beijing doesn’t care about short-term profitability, instead incubating firms that will dominate the industries of the future.

Foreign expertise has also helped to accelerate industrial innovation. Tesla’s experience in China is a case in point. Lured into Shanghai with tax breaks, land grants and regulatory exemptions, it was welcomed not just as an investor but as a benchmark against which domestic firms would be forced to compete. Silicon Valley might have interpreted this move as market openness for Beijing, though, it was a controlled experiment in technological transfer. Within a year, nearly 90% of Tesla’s Shanghai-made components were sourced locally. The company thrived, but so did the rivals it helped train. Elon Musk laughed off BYD as a joke in 2011; by 2023, it was outselling him. China hosted the world’s most celebrated innovator to train its own, and then scaled beyond his reach.

This dual system — ruthless competition steered by state direction — has already delivered China’s overwhelming manufacturing dominance in solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Now Beijing is applying it to the dirtier, harder-to-abate sectors.

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Greening heavy industry is one of the toughest frontiers in climate action. Steel, cement and aluminum are responsible for a third of China’s emissions and more than half of global output. These sectors are the backbone of the modern economy — and they are almost entirely coal-dependent. Replacing that foundation is  technically daunting and financially risky;blast furnaces burning at over a thousand degrees cannot be wished away. Instead they must be carefully reengineered with new, low-carbon technologies. Those alternatives, including hydrogen-based steelmaking, carbon capture and low-carbon smelting, demand deep pools of capital and years of industrial trial and error. China’s system is built to keep funding the effort until one of them works.

Now, China has an opportunity to experiment with changes to production without disrupting growth. A prolonged slump in the property sector and population decline have lowered demand for carbon-intensive cement and steel, driving a fall in emissions. This slowdown affords Beijing breathing room to trial hydrogen and carbon capture technologies, all while embedding its own certification systems into supply chains.

The stakes are enormous: Beijing is betting that it can decarbonize the world’s largest industrial base and then export the model abroad. Success would not only yield clean factories, but would grant China the power to define what counts as “green” and thus shape the standards of global trade.

Beijing is seizing the opportunity to build a parallel economic order. Through carbon certificates, “zero-carbon” industrial parks, and an expanding taxonomy of green finance, it is embedding Chinese standards into global regulation and capital flows. These mechanisms are fast becoming the plumbing of 21st century commerce: converting carbon footprints into tradable data, and data into passports for goods and investment. In the coming decade, carbon content will likely become a default value — printed on everything from car batteries to shipping containers. Beijing wants to be the one writing the label.

The longer the United States and its allies delay a credible counteroffer, the more likely it becomes that the world’s low-carbon future will be wired, financed, and standardized in Beijing. Western policymakers increasingly recognize the scope of China’s industrial strategy — but their responses remain piecemeal and defensive: tariffs, tax credits, and talking points in place of coordinated vision. As COP30 convenes in Belém, that asymmetry is laid bare. All eyes are on China.

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. 

Once wars united people, but not in modern America. Here, the vast majority of citizens share remarkably similar opinions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: that it should be condemned outright. Our politicians, however, seem blissfully unaware of this.

In Congress last week, despite strong pro-Kyiv sentiment among the vast majority of Republicans, pro-Trump acolytes constituted the largest faction of those who voted against supplying aid to Ukraine. Yet on this issue, there is little to distinguish them from the Democratic Socialists of America, who have called for America’s exit from the “imperialist” Nato. There are even some on the far-Left who believe the West’s sympathy for Ukrainians reflects our unredeemable racism.

And yet the past fortnight has revealed something more optimistic than the intellectual adolescence of America’s politicians. The key to repelling Putin’s campaign of division in the West has also become apparent: unifying around basic economic interests.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to Russian online interference in our elections. But it is tangible realities — such as oil, food, and the ability to build things — that will determine our ability to resist external autocratic forces. And it is here that energy policy becomes crucial.

Before Biden became President, America was well on its way to energy independence, and emerged as the world’s leading gas exporter. Far more than words or military threats, the US energy revival was a blow to Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. American production was a critical factor in weakening the price of the one commodity that keeps their economies alive.

Yet this weapon is being systematically dismantled. Since taking the White House, Biden has turned the Federal Reserve and other executive departments into enforcers of “net zero” policies. From the very beginning, Biden and his green allies have busily cancelled gas pipelines, ended new leases for offshore oil, and introduced new regulations that make it harder to build new fossil fuel plants. All of this was manna for Moscow.

Biden’s energy policies, so poorly timed amid the prospect of a looming Russian invasion, has also widened a deeper, more long-lasting schism that will reverberate for years to come. Perhaps more than anything else, it seems certain to expand both class and geographic divisions.

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Green hypocrisy hurts the poorest

By Joel Kotkin

The decision by his administration to double down on green policies, while blaming Putin for their hefty cost, has exacerbated the already-wide divide between the coast-hugging financial and tech oligarchs and the oil drillers, truck drivers, factory workers and farmers labouring outside the big cities, particularly in the country’s vast heartland. America’s coastal elites may express moral outrage about the Kremlin’s behaviour, but for those living and working in energy-producing states such as Texas — whose energy boom represents a far greater threat to Putin than elaborate virtue-signalling — this is not a matter of morals, but of livelihoods.

Oddly, American progressives even seem to lack the sense of realism that their German counterparts, once models for the Left, have adopted. Despite all evidence to the contrary, our greens cling to their fantasy that renewables can magically recast the laws of physics, the length of a day or the oscillations in the wind. Meanwhile, Germany’s greens now realise that such a boneheaded energy strategy essentially turned their country into a satrap of Sino-Russian neo-Eurasianism and helped embolden Putin’s aggression.

So far, no sense of this reality informs the Left-wing Congressional squad, whose pronouncements now constitute the leading edge of Democratic thinking. They generally oppose military aid to Ukraine, and their response to the energy shortage is to propose shutting down our entire fossil fuel production. When the mid-terms come around in November, this will likely help the Republicans in the leading gas and oil producing states. Almost all are in the heartlands, Alaska or the Intermountain West; California, the last blue energy giant, has committed itself to wiping out its large local energy industry while importing oil from Saudi Arabia and, at least until recently, Russia.

But it’s not just the government seeking to wipe out the energy sector. Big Business, through its cherished ESG investment standards, is making it increasingly difficult to start or expand energy production. Following Lenin’s supposed dictum about capitalists providing the rope with which they can be hanged, our corporate elite, perhaps unwittingly, also supports China, whose economy is fuelled increasingly by Russian oil and gas, a tie that has recently been consolidated by a plan to build a new gas pipeline between the countries.

But while such divides threaten the ability of America to lead in the current crisis, the news is not all inevitably bad. Americans can be deluded and stupid but are also capable of change. For generations, many in the West have celebrated the notion of inevitable American decline, particularly in Europe. Yet the country has a history of responding to challenges, albeit sometimes taking longer to respond than ideal.

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Is this the end of progressive America?

By Joel Kotkin

One has to remember that during the run-up to the Second World War, America was distinctly divided — but by the time it came to mobilise, even fascist sympathisers such as Henry Ford pitched in massively. Likewise, today, there is growing concern among Democrats that the party’s energy positions are untenable for the working and middle class. It’s not inconceivable that the Democrats, and the coastal enclaves, are forced into action by the reality of soaring food, car and energy prices.

When this happens, the party’s priorities must lie both in pumping more oil and gas, as well as learning how to manufacture goods outside China. Some Democrats, rather than tightening the relentless squeeze on the working and middle classes, might even consider introducing a modest carbon tax, expanding remote work, and restoring our nuclear power industry, as even some greens now support.

This is also good politics. Some 80% of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favour the use of both fossil fuels and renewables, while support for the net zero Green New Deal hovers around 20%. “Climate catastrophism”, notes the liberal strategist Ruy Teixiera, is a political “loser”, particularly among working-class voters of all races.

For the Republicans, meanwhile, the war in Ukraine also poses a challenge due to the still considerable influence of Donald Trump, who views Putin as “a genius”. Although Trump’s views are out of step even with the bulk of his own supporters, Democrats see an opportunity to link the Republicans with Putinism, and make Biden the staunch defender of democracy.

Of course, moving America in one direction is a fraught enterprise in these times of extreme polarisation. But preventing a deepening civil war here is critical if the world is to stop the likes of Putin from returning us to the Middle Ages. Foreigners may find our political divides diverting, but only the US, if it can get its act somewhat together, has the resources, the human assets and military power to fend off the unrelenting assault of the autocratic powers.

Even if, as it now looks likely, Newsom is not recalled, or Trudeau wins re-election, that we’re even discussing their downfalls indicates that both the “Golden State” and Canada, a country long known as the Scandinavia of the Western Hemisphere, are no longer political exemplars for the rest of the world. Instead, their governments now represent more of the same kind of political disappointments that have characterised Western liberal democracies for the past 40 years.

In Canada, polls suggest the Conservatives and Liberals are locked in a tight race, as many voters turn to the opposition Conservative Party, whose “blue-collar” policies under leader Erin O’Toole closely resemble those of Boris Johnson’s British Tories. Meanwhile, California, long considered one of America’s most progressive Democratic states, was almost confronted with the spectacle of a Republican governor, in the form of black Right-wing libertarian radio host, Larry Elder. The very fact that the recall vote got this far indicates that the “Golden State” no longer glitters with opportunity for all.

This month’s elections in Canada and California — preceded by 18 months of rolling lockdowns, job losses and Covid-related chaos — can roughly be described as a collective “Howard Beale” moment. Echoing Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s classic satirical black comedy-drama film, voters in both places are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”.

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The West can learn from China

By Marshall Auerback

Even though vaccine mandates have been broadly accepted by the majority of Canadians and Californians, this compliance is increasingly transcended by contempt for their respective governments, which have failed to address a range of non-pandemic-related issues: from rising economic precarity (concurrent with the growth of the so-called “gig economy” and all of the attendant insecurities that come with it) to the fact that both places are being ruled by hypocritical, out-of-touch technocratic elites who are clueless about the everyday life for ordinary Californians and Canadians.

As far as Covid itself goes, despite some missteps, Canada and California have done relatively well in introducing measures to restrict the speed of the pandemic. Both have also secured relatively high rates of vaccinations; Canada now has a greater proportion of its population fully vaccinated than either the US or UK, while California ranks among the highest vaccinated among American states.

Despite their relative success stories, this month’s elections have unleashed longstanding grievances, spurred on by disgust with the perceived hypocrisy of the two administrations. In the case of California, Governor Newsom’s ill-timed visit to a Michelin-starred restaurant amid a Covid-19 surge last year sparked outrage, as did his admission that he was sending his own children to classes at a private school while most public schools remained closed.

But Newsom, despite his recall victory, has failed on a host of other issues — a number of which he shares with Trudeau. For instance, California is often heralded as a model US state in terms of decarbonising its economy. But the truth is that the governor’s push for renewables has degraded the reliability of the state’s electrical grid, resulting in multiple blackouts this year. These have occurred against a backdrop in which some of California’s Latino leaders have filed lawsuits to halt several climate-focused regulations due to their negative effect on low and middle-income Californians. Yet for many families it is too late: the ostensibly progressive state has the highest poverty rate in America and a level of income inequality that exceeds of all but five states.

Similar charges of sanctimony have had increasing resonance in Canada, home to a Liberal government that has consistently trumpeted its desire to move to net zero carbon emissions. Yet recently, this same administration has also taken the extraordinary step of promoting oil sands exports to global markets after it nationalised the Trans Mountain pipeline for CAD$4.5-billion — even though its former owner had cancelled the pipeline expansion because of fierce opposition from environmentalists, indigenous groups and the provincial British Columbian government.

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Why the Canadian Left is burning down churches

By Meghan Murphy

By the same token, Justin Trudeau, a leader who has long trumpeted his progressive credentials, has steadily seen that image erode, notably in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal which provoked the resignation of two female cabinet ministers. Both ministers accused the Prime Minister of inappropriately interfering in a prosecution effort against the engineering company, which had been charged with fraud in connection with a series of Libyan business dealings. That one of the resigning ministers, Jody Wilson-Raybould, served as Canada’s first indigenous justice minister was a particular blow to the Prime Minister’s diversity agenda.

Yet Trudeau may have had plausible grounds for his actions: in the case of the controversial pipeline, Canada is still a heavily resource-based economy, and the fossil fuel industry continues to be a source of high-paying skilled jobs for the working and middle classes, especially in western Canada. And as far as SNC-Lavalin goes, it is a large, Quebec-based company employing thousands of Canadians in a province that is a key stronghold for the Liberals.

But while Trudeau at least has plausible grounds to explain his perceived hypocrisy, the same cannot be said for Newsom. The California governor may have survived his recall vote — but now there is no hiding from the very serious structural problems that have long afflicted his state. Indeed, as author Michael Shellenberger has persuasively argued, Newsom’s policies have actually made them worse: “Rather than put forest management on war-time footing, Newsom in 2019 actually cut the budget for forest fire prevention, which resulted in a full halving of the forest area treated for fire in 2020, all while accusing his political opponents of climate denial, and suggesting that the deployment of weather-dependent renewable energy will somehow address the state’s high-intensity forest fires.” Extensive fires have also played a significant role in the state’s rolling blackouts.

Likewise, California’s housing affordability ranks last among the 50 states with the result — as Shellenberger notes — that the number of homeless people in the Golden State “rose 31% over the last 10 years even as the number of homeless in the rest of the U.S. declined 18 percent. Where New York City shelters 95% of its homeless, California cities shelter one-third.” Meanwhile, Newsom acts like a helpless bystander, even though he has a Democratic super-majority in the State Assembly. Remarkably, new housing construction actually fell 10% last year, with just 100,550 new building permits issued, one-fifth of what Newsom promised when he was elected back in 2018.

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Conservatives need multiculturalism

By Blake Smith

That might explain why a solidly blue state started to contemplate a radical alternative to the incumbent governor. Larry Elder, a Black radio talk-show host in the state, a is pro-life cultural conservative who has explicitly opposed any minimum wage (let alone increase it). He has also come out against vaccine mandates, and has railed against critical race theory and transgender politics.

In Canada, however, conservative politics north of the border are somewhat more prosaic. The Conservative Party’s capable new leader, Erin O’Toole, has run a smart campaign and given voters a positive reason to vote Tory (in contrast to his hapless predecessor, Andrew Scheer). Evoking Boris Johnson’s successful 2019 election strategy, its manifesto features a new kind of pro-worker conservatism, at a time when most centre-left parties have increasingly abandoned working class interests in favour of launching progressive campaigns. Among its notable features are benefits for gig workers (who are largely exempt from adequate social coverage in the US), German-style worker representation on corporate boards and protections for pensions from corporate bankruptcy.

These are policies far more likely to engender support among middle and working-class Canadians than, say, proposals to support an LGBTQ agenda or linguistic “reforms” to abolish gendered pronouns. All of which has helped O’Toole’s Tories make headway in the election. While the most recent polls show an incremental movement back to the Liberals, they still point to a hung Parliament.

And so both Newsom and Trudeau have, in recent weeks, cast their political futures in increasingly melodramatic “life and death” terms. But such rhetoric — even if they win, as Newsom has — fails to address the central issue: namely, the shredding of a once sacrosanct social contract between the elites and the rest of us. No matter who wins these elections, the corresponding anger and social fallout that has resulted is unlikely to dissipate. From Canada to California, the people are “mad as hell” — and neither Trudeau nor Newsom seem capable of remedying that.

The “soaring environmental rhetoric of the state’s affluent, largely white technocratic leadership”, she concludes, is “deepening the state’s shameful legacy of racial injustice”. Certainly, the impact is stark. California now suffers the nation’s worst cost-adjusted poverty rate; and according to the United Way of California, more than 30% of California residents lack sufficient income to meet basic costs of living, even after accounting for public assistance programmes. Those struggling families include half of Latino and 40% of black residents.

There are two main factors driving this “new Green Jim Crow era”. The first, and most obvious, is California’s energy policy, which has made the state’s electricity and gas prices the highest on the mainland, with electricity prices 50% above the national average and gasoline costs that exceed even import-reliant Hawaii in the centre of the Pacific Ocean.

This surge in prices derives from the state’s obsession — shared by the ruling tech oligarchs — with renewable energy and the elimination of fossil fuels. Yet as a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report has shown, over-reliance on renewables is costly, because it requires the production of massive (and environmentally unfriendly) battery-storage capacity — the price of which is invariably passed on to the taxpayer.

This is not bad news for the tech oligarchs, who have been prominent among those profiting from “clean energy” investments. But many other Californians, primarily those in the less temperate interior, find themselves falling into energy poverty or are dependent on state subsidies that raise electricity prices for businesses and the middle class. Black and Latino households are already forced to pay from 20 to 43% more of their household incomes on energy than white households. Last year, more than 4 million households in California (30% of the total) experienced energy poverty.

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Critical Race Theory ignores anti-Semitism

By Joel Kotkin

These policies have also had the secondary effect of driving out many of the blue-collar industries — manufacturing, construction, energy — that have traditionally employed ambitious, upwardly mobile minority families. While the small, insulated, post-industrial urban elite bloats up on cash and stokes its virtue, over the past decade California has lost 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs, more than twice as many as any other state.

This attrition reflects in part the torpor of the state’s industrial sector; California now sits in the bottom half of states in manufacturing-sector employment growth, ranking 44th last year, easily outpaced by competitors such as Nevada, Kentucky, Michigan and Florida. Even without adjusting for costs, no Californian city ranks in the US top ten in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs, but four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom ten.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that California’s largest economic pogrom is directed at the state’s most important energy industry: gas and oil development. Two years ago, Governor Newsom — who has been described as “California’s champion virtue signaler” — announced plans to shut the entire industry down. His latest decree, announced in April, confirmed his intention to phase out oil extraction. Perhaps it could be considered a noble campaign, if it weren’t for the fact that California chooses instead to import its oil from such enlightened states as Saudi Arabia.

And while this shift will not cause much pain in Malibu or Menlo Park, where the wealthy can continue to tool around in their BMWs, in Bakersfield, where the industry is centered, or around the coastal refineries, the impact could be catastrophic. According to a study by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, these dictates threaten over 366,000 high-paying, largely blue-collar jobs — roughly half of which are held by people of colour.   

Yet perhaps inflated housing costs constitute the cruelest blow dealt by the Greens to the state’s middle and working class. As part of its climate policy, California strives to force development into transit-dependent dense neighbourhoods, a policy that has raised prices and ire in mostly minority working-class communities. At the same time, the state and the Green lobby has worked overtime, often in alliance with well-funded green groups, to stop or curtail development along the urban fringe, where land prices and regulatory costs tend to be somewhat less extreme. Some developments, like the Tejon Ranch north of Los Angeles, have been delayed for three decades.

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The battle between the two Americas

By Joel Kotkin

These and other restrictions have slowed housing growth in the state. During 2020, when national house construction was increasing 6.1% from 2019, California’s rate was down 3.7%, according to Census Bureau data. As a result, for more than half of renters in California, housing costs exceed 30% of household income, the traditional definition of unaffordability. And nearly 70% of all state households with unaffordable housing costs are people of colour.

These conditions explain why Californians are leaving; an exodus which is particularly notable among minorities. California may have the most “enlightened” policies for people of colour, but they are still leaving the state for less “progressive” states, such as Texas. San Francisco’s African-American community has declined from one in seven in 1970 to barely one in twenty today, with most now ensconced in public housing.

Even the foreign-born — the group that has transformed California over the past few decades — are staying away. An analysis of Census data by demographer Wendell Cox shows that the foreign-born population is actually declining in Los Angeles, fading in the Bay Area while growing by as much as 30% in rival cities like Dallas.

Is there any chance that these patterns can be reversed within the state? I suspect we are about to find out. Hernandez has filed a lawsuit with 200 civil rights leaders alleging that the California Air Resources Board, the supreme architect of climate policies, adopts policies essentially discriminatory towards minorities. “CARB,” the group wrote to the agency at the end of last year, “wilfully elected to increase housing costs and make it more difficult for members of our communities to close the wealth gap”.

Of course, the plaintiffs face an uphill fight in the progressive-dominated California judiciary. Even with strong support from leading minority activists, her suit has received virtually no coverage from the state’s mainstream media, which has become largely an amplifier of green agitation.

But outside the media bubble there are clear signs of growing dissent. Roughly half of Latinos, according to the most recent polls, favour the recall of the state’s eco-Governor Gavin Newsom. Recently Latino voting rights advocates openly criticised the efforts by the Sierra Club — a leading environmental organisation — to “phase out” affordable gas-powered cars. The rules, they suggest, are designed instead to make it possible for “our rich neighbors in the next town to charge their Teslas and run their air conditioners on hot days but make it unaffordable to use ours”.

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How America turned into the EU

By Joel Kotkin

Ultimately, the Greens will have to confront such criticism. Some may seek a way out by shoving the displaced working class into permanent dependency with the introduction of a universal basic income. This could allow the state to reduce energy consumption— but comes with an eye-watering price tag. The Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transit Commission recently proposed a $205 billion statewide universal basic income program, but that only covers a $500 monthly payment to all households — a pitiable amount in a state where rents average $1500 a month .

Meanwhile, Hernandez is calling for “climate equity”, where the rich, rather than the poor, pay the biggest price. After all, wealthy neighbourhoods generate up to fifteen times more greenhouse gas emissions than average and lower-income ones.

What’s certain is that to succeed over time, in California and elsewhere, environmental policy must not sacrifice what Michael Shellenberger has described as “the goal of universal prosperity”. Environmentalists need to win over the population not by terrorising them but by showing that we can protect nature without stomping out human aspirations. If minorities are able to force the green establishment to confront the economic implications of their policies, that might be a start.