This was originally published by The Dispatch on April 16, 2026.

Since the start of my career in energy more than 15 years ago, I’ve been hearing about—and, indeed, actively championing—the declining cost of renewable energy technologies. Between 2010 and 2023, the price of wind turbines fell by about 70 percent and the price of solar panels fell by 90 percent. Lithium-ion batteries, which can store electricity for short durations when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, have also shown impressive gains in both performance and price, dropping about 90 percent in cost through 2023.

Given these advancements, renewables are now competitive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis with incumbents like coal, nuclear, and natural gas. So why are electricity prices rising?

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A Renewables Referendum

The explanation is threefold. First, the intermittency of wind and solar means that even very affordable renewable energy relies on enabling technology and infrastructure, like natural gas plants and extensive networks of power lines, with the consumer price set by the overall system. Second, though wind turbines and solar panels are cheap, they are increasingly running up against geographic limitations. The sunniest and windiest places are not always close to cities and industrial sites, or to transmission infrastructure that can connect generation to demand.

These two factors are exacerbated by a third, which is perhaps the defining energy phenomenon of our era: U.S. electricity demand is rising for the first time in a generation. The electrification of vehicles and HVAC systems, artificial intelligence and other emerging industries, and growing use of air conditioning are combining to increase electricity demand faster than new sources of power generation are coming online. That lag time pushes prices up, and it’s just the beginning.

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Intermittency.

While many renewables advocates have come to believe it’s a form of trolling to point out that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, it is, in fact, true. And because they’re both intermittent and have no fuel costs, wind farms and solar plants largely act as fuel-savers for the nation’s natural gas and coal plants (which are “dispatchable,” meaning they can be turned on and off by their operators instead of relying on the weather like renewables do). This capability has real economic advantages, especially given renewables’ current level of penetration in the U.S. grid system. But over the long term, grids that include more and more wind and solar will inherently require substantial overbuilding of redundant capacity to smooth out lulls in sunlight or wind.

Battery storage also helps fill the gaps caused by fluctuating supply and demand, but today’s battery systems store electricity for only a few hours at a time. They cannot cover unexpected days- or weeks-long droughts in wind generation, nor store excess summertime energy for use when the solar panels are covered in snow in the winter.

Meeting current, let alone growing, year-round demand with increasing shares of wind and solar will simply require far more electric power capacity than is installed today. That helps explain why the capital costs of the U.S. electric power system are expected to grow faster if more renewables are added to the grid.

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Geography.

One reason my fellow Dispatch Energy columnist Lynne Kiesling has written frequently about long-distance transmission is because large power lines make it easier to connect sunny and windy deserts and plains to demand centers. Provided they have access to the right infrastructure, renewables have some of the shortest lead times of any electricity sources available today, so utilities and independent power producers are trying to connect them to the grid as quickly as possible. But as with the nation’s bridges, tunnels, and rail lines, the U.S. has struggled to build significant high-voltage transmission for decades.

This wait time imposes something of a hard constraint on many renewable projects, hundreds of which are languishing in the “interconnection queue.” Transmission lines have become one of the most difficult types of infrastructure to build in the United States, often taking a decade or more to clear overlapping local, state, and federal siting and permitting regulations. As one prominent analysis of the Biden administration’s energy policy found, the growth of wind and solar through 2030 could be cut by as much as half if new electric power lines are not built in a timely manner.

But it’s not just transmission. Communities across America have increasingly turned against renewable energy projects. In a prelude to the ongoing local opposition to data centers, hundreds of counties around the country have enacted siting limits on wind and solar projects. Building more clean energy may be a national priority, but it runs up against local preferences against new construction and infrastructure in people’s backyards.

And even in areas that allow renewable energy development, other geographic features may get in the way. For example, the Northeastern United States has both high population density and dark, snowy winters—not exactly a welcoming combination for land-intensive and weather-dependent renewable energy projects. Many Eastern states had hoped offshore wind projects would overcome these limitations, but due to both economic and political factors, the U.S. offshore wind industry has failed to scale.

There is still plenty of untapped solar and wind potential in the United States. But these geographic constraints are real, and we can already see evidence of them in the data on annual wind deployment, which, despite falling costs, has fluctuated substantially over the last decade. Solar, which is a much more modular technology that can be deployed at either the rooftop or megaproject scale, has grown more consistently.

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When demand outpaces supply.

The dynamics that defined the expansion of U.S. wind and solar power over the past two decades have been completely upended by more recent technological developments. A steady migration toward air conditioning-reliant states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas, together with the growing adoption of electric heat pumps and vehicles, is helping drive electricity consumption up for the first time in a generation. But the big story, of course, is AI data centers, whose power consumption could triple (or more) within a decade.

So it’s telling that, while wind and especially solar continue to grow steadily in the United States, data centers are relying overwhelmingly on natural gas to meet their immediate power needs—at least for now.

AI is also infamously driving renewed interest in nuclear power, especially smaller advanced reactors that can be installed on-site and generate reliable power. The so-called tech hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft have also invested in next-generation geothermal and natural gas with carbon capture to meet the skyrocketing electricity needs of their data centers.

In other words, while wind turbines and solar panels have become cheap, mature electric power commodities, they alone do not appear capable of meeting rising electricity demand. In renewables’ defense, no other single technology is better-positioned either. Advanced nuclear, geothermal, and carbon capture technologies remain somewhat speculative, and there’s even a shortage of natural gas turbines.

But as many energy analysts have been warning for years, even impressively declining solar and wind costs will not enable renewables to meet all or even most of the electricity demand facing modern power grids.

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Rest in piss, Paul Ehrlich.

That was the gist of so many tweets on Abundance and Progress Twitter this week, marking the death of the famed environmentalist and Population Bomb author. “Paul Ehrlich was one of the most pernicious public figures of the last 50 years,” said Institute for Progress’ co-founder Alec Stapp. “Paul Ehrlich made a lot of money and got a lot of awards (including a MacArthur ‘genius’ award),” noted science writer Matt Ridley, “out of making doomsday predictions that were wrong, and did real harm.” My impressionistic tally counted hundreds of tweets of this nature this week.

Even on the occasion of his death, Ehrlich-bashing is so universal, I think, because of how spectacularly wrong his high-stakes predictions proved, and because of the cruelty with which he spoke about babies, mothers, families, and the poor.

I come not to add nuance, but to pile on. Ehrlich’s empirics and metaphysics were badly mistaken. He advocated monstrous policies, such as tax penalties for large families, coercive sterilization campaigns, and withholding foreign aid to lower-income nations which fail to control population growth. And throughout it all, he maintained a callous attitude towards the weakest among us. “Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones,” he said in 2023, decades after inspiring China’s one-child policy, which is estimated to have resulted in 20 million “missing girls,” largely due to coerced sex-selective abortion and infanticide.

For those who think that Ehrlich’s errors are only obvious in hindsight, I would simply observe that Ehrlich himself never changed his tune as real-world events falsified his hypotheses. The same week as his death, a paper that he co-authored was published that argued the Earth can only sustain 2.5 billion people.

Ehrlich’s intellectual project was not merely proven wrong in retrospect. It was wrong throughout his life, and was always more the product of ideology than science, invulnerable to falsification. He was a proud champion of Malthusianism, which by the time of his own research had been thoroughly discredited by the likes of the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Ester Boserup. “I was pleased to find an article in a history journal that credited us ‘neo-Malthusians’ with stimulating ‘thinking of the planet as a whole and anticipating its future,’” he wrote in his memoir, even though the 20th century famines he predicted would kill hundreds of millions never came to pass.

All of which is to say that while his impact on society was significant, Ehrlich was merely one in a long lineage of eco-doomers, a tradition that carries on to this day. As my colleague Vijaya Ramachandran and I wrote for the Atlantic a few years ago, Ehrlich’s ideas can be easily found in the writings and positions of influential modern environmentalists. Naomi Oreskes, progenitor of the litigation campaign against oil and gas companies, and William Rees, one of the creators of the carbon footprint, to this day invoke population control and biophysical limits to growth.

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As Williams College’s Darel E. Paul eulogized this week for Compact:

Thirty years after The Population Bomb, environmentalist Bill McKibben published Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families. Reprising Ehrlich’s argument, Earth Policy Institute founder Lester R. Brown published Full Planet, Empty Plates in 2012. Broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough has been a reliable Malthusian scold down to the present day, referring to human beings as a “plague” and giving his valuable long-time patronage to the organization Population Matters (formerly known as Optimum Population Trust).

It is with centuries of failed prophesies in mind that we should evaluate this generation of neo-Malthusians’ warnings about the latest looming eco-apocalypse.

What most, though not all, of Ehrlich’s intellectual descendants have abandoned is the abject cruelty of his conduct. The opening pages of The Population Bomb have become infamous for the way they describe a crowd of poor Indians (witnessed on an Ehrlich family vacation) as a horde of people “screaming,” “defecating,” and “urinating.” Ehrlich never publicly reckoned with, let alone atoned for, the tens of millions of forcibly terminated pregnancies and murdered babies he left in his wake. And throughout all his doomsaying about the poor and the planet, he was a charming, charismatic, seemingly carefree celebrity intellectual. He was the consummate pop scientist of his day, flaunting his anti-humanism while glad-handing with Johnny Carson, Ted Turner, and other paragons of the wealthy Western elite.

It’s important to note the ways in which environmentalism has moved beyond this blatant anti-humanist callousness. As Ramachandran and I noted in our Atlantic piece about the modern Malthusians, the major population control organizations have eschewed, at least officially, the use of coercive contraception and sterilization practices, instead emphasizing family planning resources and women’s education. The Sierra Club, to its credit, recently went further, closing the long-standing population program that had actually published Ehrlich’s book. “Contraception and family planning are not climate mitigation measures,” the Club wrote in 2022.

But modern environmentalism does still reward cruel anti-humanism. Consider the still-celebrated climate scientist Michael Mann, who earlier this year released an “enemies list” that ostensibly included all Republicans in America, and has referred to his critics as “cockroaches.” (Mann was one of Ehrlich’s few vocal defenders this week, because of course he was.)

And even if Ehrlich’s vile dehumanizing language and policy agenda have gone out of fashion, it’s still important to recognize the inherent cruelty in enforced Malthusian scarcity that persists in too much of environmental advocacy today. The Sierra Club notwithstanding, groups like Population Connect and the Overpopulation Project are still out there pitching population control as an environmental solution. Most major environmental groups oppose development finance for modern agriculture technologies and fossil fuel, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy infrastructure in poor countries. As Ramachandran put it a few years ago, these restrictions are little more than “green colonialism.”

There is also a certain cruelty in telling children that they may not make it to adulthood because of the ecological crisis. As Jake Anbinder wrote this week, “the small but growing number of young people who cite climate change as the reason they do not want children reflects a view that, in its way, is gloomier than anything Ehrlich wrote.”

And of course all this doomsaying is predicated on the same kind of pseudoscientific biophysical boundaries that Ehrlich insisted would doom hundreds of millions of humans to starvation and death. Limits to Growth, the Earth’s supposed human population carrying capacity, the two-degree temperature target, the Planetary Boundaries, and the Ecological Footprint are not fixed biophysical constraints on human population and development, but rather arbitrary limits, dressed up in the language of science, intended to enforce a Malthusian scarcity agenda.

Remember that next time you see one of these alleged boundaries out in the wild, even if it’s discussed in less cruel language than Ehrlich took to his grave.

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This was originally published by The Dispatch on March 12, 2026.

As of this morning, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains at a virtual standstill. Since March 1, 25 commercial ships have come under fire from Iran, but the country’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Aragchi, announced today that the Strait “is open” to Iranian allies, “but closed” to its “enemies.”

The sudden and ongoing war in Iran is roiling global oil markets, raising the specter of an energy shock that recalls the oil crises of the 1970s. In that era, U.S. policymakers responded by radically restructuring American energy policy, creating the Department of Energy and making big investments in energy independence, innovation, and infrastructure. Congress should respond similarly today by pursuing bold policies that cut red tape, expand energy abundance, lower prices, and extend America’s technological frontier. But two shifts over the last five decades stand in the way. The first, ironically, is the success of the 1970s-era initiatives. The second is the deep partisan polarization that now defines energy politics in Washington.

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The house that OPEC built.

The oil crises of the 1970s exposed just how vulnerable the United States had become to global energy disruptions. The 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and later the Islamic Revolution in Iran, prompted severe and shocking spikes in oil prices. Gas lines stretched around city blocks. Policymakers suddenly confronted the reality that the country’s energy system—long built around cheap, abundant petroleum—was far less secure than previously assumed.

Congress responded with sweeping legislation.

The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for automobiles, among other agencies and initiatives. Lawmakers also created the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 1977, consolidating a sprawling set of federal programs and launching a coordinated national effort to develop new energy technologies.

And the response wasn’t limited to fuel conservation or emergency management. The new Department of Energy and its growing number of National Laboratories also funded large research and development programs in solar and wind power, geothermal energy, advanced nuclear technologies, and new drilling techniques aimed at unlocking unconventional oil and gas resources. Many of these projects looked speculative, even fantastical, at the time. Wind turbines were expensive and inefficient. Solar panels cost orders of magnitude more than today. And unconventional oil and gas deposits trapped in dense shale formations were widely considered uneconomic.

But in retrospect, many of the bets made at DOE and its National Laboratories in the 1970s and 1980s paid off.

As our research has shown, the 2000s-era boom in shale oil and gas production was the product of more than three decades of public and private experimentation. Government-funded research helped develop key technologies—from massive hydraulic fracturing to advanced mapping and drilling techniques—that made shale extraction viable. Industry innovators eventually combined those technologies with new drilling practices and persistent trial-and-error experimentation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, companies like Mitchell Energy demonstrated that shale formations could be developed commercially.

Domestic gas production skyrocketed starting around 2005. Oil production followed soon after as similar techniques were applied to shale oil deposits. By the late 2010s, the United States had become the world’s largest oil producer and a leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. The transformation was so dramatic that it upended long-standing assumptions about American energy scarcity. For decades, policymakers assumed that the country would remain permanently dependent on foreign oil. Instead, technological innovation dramatically expanded the domestic resource base.

And it wasn’t just oil and gas. Policymakers in the 1970s responded to the oil crises by crafting the original all-of-the-above energy agenda. Federal support for solar photovoltaic technology, wind turbine development, and advanced battery chemistry helped nurture industries that today are growing rapidly worldwide. Early research programs, tax incentives, and demonstration projects helped drive down costs and expand deployment over several decades.

Like shale gas, these technologies required long periods of incremental progress. But the results are now visible across the energy system. Solar panels and wind turbines are among the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in many regions, while battery technologies are rapidly expanding the possibilities for grid storage, electric vehicles, and many other applications. These revolutions, in unconventional hydrocarbons and renewables, emerged from sustained public investment, bipartisan policymaking, and a willingness to pursue multiple technological pathways simultaneously.

Ironically, the success of America’s all-of-the-above energy independence agenda may now make it harder to repeat.

The shale revolution turned the United States into an energy superpower, dramatically reducing OPEC’s leverage on global oil markets and providing a meaningful buffer between American consumers and geopolitical shocks. U.S. producers can increase oil output when global prices rise, and the country now exports large volumes of liquefied natural gas, reducing both the market and strategic power of Middle Eastern supplies.

The flipside of domestic energy independence, though, is that America is now deeply embedded in global oil markets and increasingly commoditized trade in natural gas. We can’t become a global petroleum superpower for a second time, and though America can and should produce more oil and gas, this will not have either the short-term or long-term benefits that policymakers were chasing in the 1970s. Indeed, U.S. drillers require higher prices to turn a profit than their main global competitors in Russia, South America, and the Middle East, so consumers’ desires for gasoline price relief are somewhat misaligned with the priorities of the oil and gas industry. While demand for natural gas is widely expected to grow for at least the next few decades, the world is likely on the cusp of a peak in demand for oil.

And America’s hydrocarbon resources are only as useful as we make them. In response to the oil supply shock, the International Energy Agency announced the largest-ever release of strategic oil reserves. But America’s own Strategic Petroleum Reserve was not even full when the United States and Israel launched the attacks on Iran. Likewise, our military still is not positioned to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Even unprecedented hydrocarbon abundance still exhibits vulnerable choke points.

Likewise, while wind, solar, and batteries have plummeted in price thanks largely to U.S. policy investments made decades ago, we may be approaching a period of diminishing returns in the ongoing renewables revolution. Wind deployment has slowed substantially in recent years. Solar power continues to surge in the United States, but the cost of new solar generation has actually ticked up for the first time in decades in response to inflation, interest rates, and rising electricity demand.

Oil, gas, solar, and wind all have bright futures in the U.S. But responding to the looming global oil crisis will require expanding America’s energy technology and infrastructure frontiers in much the same way policymakers pursued in the 1970s.

Unfortunately, even with a proven energy policy playbook, modern energy politics may get in the way.

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The rise of energy polarization.

The posture that policymakers adopted toward U.S. federal energy policy in the 1970s endured for decades. Lawmakers from both parties collaborated on the Energy Policy and Conservation Act in 1975, the Energy Policy Act of 1992, and the Energy Policy Act of 2005. These bills combined support for fossil fuels, nuclear power, efficiency programs, and emerging renewable technologies.

But this political consensus collapsed during the era of the climate hawk.

For Democrats, climate change became the central organizing principle of energy policy. Decarbonization targets, emissions regulations, and large-scale clean energy deployment dominated the party’s agenda. Republicans, meanwhile, grew increasingly skeptical of the clean energy agenda. Once broadly supportive of technologies like wind and solar power, many conservatives have come to view them as a stalking horse for a radical climate agenda. What were once largely technical debates have transformed into a multifront culture war. Instead of broad legislative coalitions, Congress now struggles to pass even modest reforms.

Deepening political gridlock didn’t feel like an existential risk to the American economy for most of the first two decades of the 21^st century, when domestic energy supply was expanding while demand was stagnant. But if war in the Persian Gulf triggers a global oil shock on the backs of a mounting electricity affordability crisis, the U.S. will be forced to reckon with energy system vulnerabilities that have been worsened by years of neglect.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of opportunities for meaningful policy change. At the beginning of March, key lawmakers reopened congressional negotiations over elusive federal permitting reform legislation). There are many active bills designed to expand domestic critical minerals production and refining, geothermal exploration and drilling, high-voltage electric power transmission, and beyond. Securing the fuel supply for the next generation of advanced nuclear reactors, and financing their manufacture and construction, remains imperative. Policymakers are considering increasing the use of reserves and stockpiles of critical resources, including the dynamic use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to better protect American consumers from swings in global commodity markets.

America may be sitting on the launchpad of nuclear, geothermal, and battery renaissances, a massive expansion of the power grid, and the creation of whole new domestic commodity and advanced technology industries. Our oil and gas abundance should buffer American consumers against acute supply crises while enabling big investments in advanced energy innovation. These are exactly the kinds of policy and technology opportunities that once brought America’s two political parties together.

But hyperpartisan politics have bedeviled policy progress on all of these fronts for years. The question now is whether looming energy cost crises will force a meaningful shift in those politics.

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“Kamala definitely needs to start getting involved.”

That’s what climate activist RL Miller told E&E News in August 2024, when congressional Democrats and Republicans were negotiating over major federal permitting reform legislation. “What Democrats should do is refuse to take [the permitting bill] up,” said Miller, “and wait until January to start passing more serious clean energy-only bills.”

Kamala, of course, never did get involved.

A year later, Bill McKibben made a similar argument about permitting reform on Jerusalem Demsas’s podcast. “I just don’t see that there’s a negotiation to be had now,” he told Demsas. “I think we should try to make it happen, but not with these guys.”

My concern, as 2026 began, was that this line of thinking—that permitting should be pursued, but only on a partisan basis—would prevail in the latest round of congressional permitting negotiations.

Late last year, after the House passed the SPEED Act, all eyes turned to the Senate for the Upper House’s companion legislation. Then, the Trump administration paused federal leases on five wind farms off the Eastern Seaboard. Key Senate Democrats announced they would, in turn, pause negotiations on permitting reform legislation. “The illegal attacks on fully permitted renewable energy projects must be reversed if there is to be any chance that permitting talks resume,” said Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse in a joint statement.

As I argued recently with my colleagues Marc Levitt and Elizabeth McCarthy, this was a substantive and strategic overreaction. One need not defend any portion of the Trump administration’s energy agenda to observe that walking out on permitting negotiations does as much or more damage to Democrats’ energy and climate priorities as it does to the administration’s agenda.

The Trump administration, though, has been far from a good-faith counterpart in the negotiations. While the Interior Department advanced its scorched-earth campaign against renewable energy projects, the White House has pursued a NEPA reform agenda predicated entirely on executive action. Not unlike their Democratic adversaries in Congress, the Trump administration has at times not seemed to care very much about permitting reform legislation.

Since December, courts have reversed the administration’s stop-work orders for all five of the affected wind farms, and the Trump Administration more recently quietly rebooted federal approval of solar projects on public lands. And, as of yesterday, Senators Whitehouse and Heinrich have announced their intentions to resume permitting negotiations.

This is encouraging. But we’re not out of the woods yet. Both political and policy disputes stand between resumed talks and final legislation. And those of us who have been pushing permitting reform for years remember well that partisanship has repeatedly stymied permitting legislation, from the handshake deal after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 to the Energy Permitting Reform Act (EPRA) in 2024.

It’s vitally important that Congress follows through this time. Abundance, artificial intelligence, stewardship of public lands, and other key national priorities are being held back by laws Congress passed half a century ago and that Congress now needs to fix. And the Trump administration’s lackluster attitude on the legislative front only goes to show what happens when one party gains the consolidated political control that Democrats like Miller and McKibben are clamoring for: temporary executive actions that worsen energy policy polarization.

Permitting reform should be one of the only remaining policy issues for which bipartisanship can prevail. If our legislature can’t do this, what can it do?

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The Permitting Proceduralist Arms Race

Meaningful permitting reform legislation has become a significant priority among certain congressional Democrats and Republicans in recent years. There are multiple bills in both houses of Congress, including major reforms to NEPA that passed the House on a bipartisan basis last fall, as well as several bills that advance the “permitting certainty” Democrats have prioritized. And the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda, if anything, strengthens the case for reforming NEPA and other laws that enable weaponized regulatory obstructionism, and strengthens the case for durable, bipartisan congressional action.

Democrats’ reticence on this issue is frustrating because, in one sense, they’re the party that started it. By canceling the Keystone XL pipeline permit, and attempting to cancel approved oil and gas drilling leases, the Biden White House opened the Pandora’s Box of weaponized permitting procedure. The Biden administration was also infamously meek in its support of permitting legislation.

Democrats’ general frustrations with the current administration are understandable. President Trump kicked his second term off with DOGE, and continued to pursue legally dubious RIFs, reversals, repeals, cancelations, and firings. The Departments of Energy and Interior have gone scorched-earth on many of Democrats’ signature climate and energy achievements, including specific renewable projects, but also clean energy innovation hubs and scientific funding. It has not always been immediately obvious that President Trump would sign permitting legislation that Democrats would support, nor that his agencies would implement any new laws in the ways Democrats would prefer.

But while President Trump may exert uniquely forceful executive preferences, it is not unusual for a minority party to be confounded by the executive’s agenda. And while Trump won’t be president in a few years time, the nation’s infrastructure woes will endure. Waiting for the perfect opportunity of consolidated political power would be worse than chasing a phantasm; it’s the very impulse that created the permitting proceduralism arms race in the first place.

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From Energy Policy Acts to Energy Policy Polarization

Energy politics and policy have polarized substantially over the last couple decades. The parties today not only diverge on the types of policies they favor—with Republicans generally preferring regulatory relief, and Democrats preferring new spending programs—but, more and more, on the types of technologies they’re willing to support.

Though the clean-versus-fossil dispute has long divided the parties, there was traditionally a middle ground. Republicans controlled both Houses when Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed the 30% investment tax credit for solar panels into law in 2005. Democrats voted across the aisle to end America’s oil exports embargo in 2015. The two parties regularly came together to write omnibus energy policy bills in 1975, 1978, 1992, 2005, 2007, and even in 2020, in the last piece of legislation signed during President Trump’s first term.

Then things changed in 2022, when a narrow Democratic majority took much of the policy errata established under these prior Acts and jammed reforms through the budget reconciliation process, to the tune of hundreds of billions in new federal outlays. In passing the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats took bipartisan national energy policy and turned it into hyperpartisan climate policy. And of course the law was merely the signature piece of the Biden administration’s “whole of government” climate agenda which included a regulatory crackdown on fossil fuel production. Almost regardless of what the IRA would go on to accomplish, the Biden years represented an unequivocal escalation in the energy tribalism wars.

Republicans, at the first chance they got, responded in kind. In Our Big Beautiful Bill, Republicans went after the IRA, gutting incentives for solar, wind, and electric vehicles. And, like clockwork, Democrats have already drafted legislation to revive the IRA.

This is no way to manage national energy policy.

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Beyond Secret Congress

Again, it wasn’t always like this. Energy regulations and technology subsidies were historically passed via so-called “secret Congress” and more staid bipartisan negotiations. These vectors for legislative deliberation are still available, but the opportunities to utilize them for meaningful purposes are waning.

Consider the ADVANCE Act that passed in President Biden’s last year in office. ADVANCE was a package of nuclear regulatory reforms designed to streamline the commercialization and deployment of advanced reactor technologies in the United States. Though the legislation was introduced well into the era of energy policy hyperpartisanship, it secured overwhelming bipartisan support in both Houses. There was no great public fanfare or controversy, either from the public or from civil society. It was in this sense a classic success story for Secret Congress.

Even right now, Secret Congress is hard at work on quiet, abundance-oriented legislation. As of this writing, the Senate is considering the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that would streamline regulations on housing development, open up new financing for affordable housing projects, and even make narrow reforms to NEPA.

Not all bipartisanship can be accomplished in secret, though. And that brings us back to permitting reform.

Major, cross-sectoral reforms to NEPA and transmission planning are neither the kind of policies that generate tons of front-page headlines, nor the type of under-the-radar progress that can be expeditiously achieved by Secret Congress. Laws like NEPA benefit from large and well-funded special interest issue advocates on all sides, and the reforms themselves are often quite meaningful to businesses and the public alike. Reconciliation is not an option, as much as both parties have tried to shoehorn statutory reforms through budgetary gimmicks. And while US infrastructure policy may not be as politically perilous as immigration or welfare reform, it has become swept up in a variety of culture wars, making ambitious bipartisan legislation a difficult proposition.

But that’s the job.

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Permitting Reform or Die

The good news is that the coalitional dynamics behind environmental regulatory reform really have shifted in recent years. Streamlining NEPA and other environmental statutes makes sense whether one’s frame of reference is abundance, energy dominance, conservative populism, climate pragmatism, or national security.

The bad news is that permitting reform keeps falling short anyway. As much as members of both parties are working across the aisle to craft intelligent and practicable reform proposals, the parties at large still don’t feel the overwhelming imperative to get bipartisan legislation across the finish line. Public choice theory explains much of what’s going on here. The public doesn’t connect transmission cost allocation policy and NEPA to anything that readily improves their lives, and no President has utilized the bully pulpit to convincingly connect the dots for them. Permitting reform faces opposition from the large and well-endowed environmental movement, as well as a vocal cohort of ideologically anti-renewables influencers. The divergent electric power transmission planning priorities of liberalized versus vertically integrated utilities also complicates the negotiations. Optimizing for all operant stakeholder priorities is genuinely difficult.

But I’d argue it’s political culture, more than lobbying and logrolling, that most explains Congress’s failure to pass meaningful reform legislation. America’s two main political parties face vanishingly few incentives to legislate, or to work with each other. Raising money, advancing to higher office, and attracting media attention can all be accomplished by doing precisely the opposite—by cultivating an aura of fierce partisanship. The stubborn permitting reform deadlock may simply be the depressing inevitability that occurs when the unstoppable force of Energy Dominance meets the immovable object of the Climate Emergency.

Indeed, my lingering fear amid the pause in negotiations has not been so much that Democrats struck out a poorly considered negotiating position, but rather that they will stand their ground on a thoroughly considered political gamble. The midterms are mere months away, and the generic ballot shows Democrats as the favorites. Most analysts expect Democrats to regain a majority in the House, and taking back control of the Senate is a plausible, though unlikely, prospect as well. Democrats may yet take the advice offered by Miller, McKibben, and other progressives: to kick the can down the road until they’ve once again consolidated political power.

This would be a grave substantive and tactical error if the goal is a pragmatic, durable energy policy. Democrats who fail to work across the aisle on meaningful permitting legislation in the 119th Congress are unlikely to find willing Republican counterparts for a new round of negotiations in the 120th. The irony that the legislative obstruction on display here perfectly mirrors the delayed investment in American energy infrastructure would be bemusing if it were not legitimately tragic.

And the tragedy only deepens if Democrats are banking on total control of the federal government in 2029. Waiting until your preferred party has a political trifecta to advance energy policy reforms not only risks worsening the decay of American infrastructure, it threatens the further disintegration of America’s political and civic institutions. Congress has proven itself fully incapable of even broaching bipartisan talks on issues like immigration, education, and abortion. Until fairly recently, energy policy was a bright exception to the structural and strategic party polarization that has come to define American politics.

Our legislators need to take that seriously. To do so would compel Democrats and Republicans not only to work together to reform environmental review and judicial oversight of NEPA this year, but to work continuously, session after session, on meaningful reforms to the nation’s gauntlet of regulatory barriers to technology and infrastructure investment. The Trump administration is showing us what it feels like for one party to go it alone on permitting policy. Does this feel sustainable to anyone?

As I wrote in my most recent Dispatch column, “The fate of permitting legislation is a test, both of the “all-of-the-above” energy abundance agenda and of a civil, bipartisan politics that has come under threat in recent decades.” Failing to pass meaningful permitting reform this year would signal a harrowing rubicon in our political culture, beyond which it will become unclear whether our federal legislative branch serves much productive purpose at all.

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Every year or so, for as long as either of us can remember, there is a great Twitter/X pile-on from a segment of the clean tech and climate movement attacking the Breakthrough Institute for having been insufficiently bullish about solar energy and renewables. Our long-standing take on solar and renewables—that they are an important and growing part of the global energy mix, deserving of appropriate policy support, but nowhere close to a complete replacement of fossil fuels—is far from the most controversial stance we have taken over the years. But the intensity of these attacks often takes friends of ours in the broader abundance, progress, and techno-optimist communities by surprise because they often come from figures who are not the usual green, degrowth, or left-wing suspects.

When Noah Smith tweets that “The Breakthrough Institute will be a recurring minor comic villain in the eventual history of the energy revolution” or futurist Ramez Naam accuses us of generating “terrible solar projections” and deliberately attempting “to cast doubt on renewables,” it is jarring because on most subjects, there just isn’t some radical divergence in worldview between us. We’re all champions of abundance and progress. We are all pro-growth and pro-technology and have little use for degrowth. Neither Smith nor Naam is a technological decel like most of our anti-nuclear, anti-biotech critics. So what gives?

On the one hand, Smith’s and Naam’s problem with Breakthrough stems from a simple unwillingness to acknowledge our actual views on solar, nuclear, and energy transitions. We have, for the record, never argued that “nuclear – and only nuclear – must be the energy source of the future,” a position that Smith erroneously ascribed to us. Nor have we ever produced our own solar projections, as Naam repeatedly claimed.

A decade or more ago, we cited mainstream forecasts, from the International Energy Agency, the US Energy Information Agency, BP, and other analysts, which projected that global adoption of wind and solar energy would be much lower than ended up being the case. Notably, most of these projections were made as the enormous scale of Chinese clean tech industrial policy, mercantilism, and/or overproduction depending upon one’s perspective, was only beginning to become apparent. Typically, we noted that we thought real-world deployment would be higher than these projections. And in general, we cited those projections both to make the case for continued policy support for wind and solar, including subsidies and deployment mandates, and to push back against the idea that these sources of variable renewable energy could do most, if not all, of the heavy lifting when it came to decarbonizing the global economy.

On the other hand, the misrepresentation of our position and history on these questions by Smith, Naam, and others is not merely one of misunderstanding. Rather, it is another illustrative manifestation of the solarmaxxers’ hubris. Smith’s truculence in particular is testament to the widespread teleological faith that falling photovoltaic costs will beget permanent dominance of energy systems by solar, which has led many advocates to dismiss or even obstruct progress in other energy technologies. This has always been the basis of Breakthrough’s critiques of renewable energy maximalism. The most prominent champions of solar power—figures like Amory Lovins, Mark Jacobson, Bill McKibben, and many more—have leveraged the vision of a solar utopia to advance openly anti-nuclear policies, as well as other policies that make energy affordability, abundance, and decarbonization harder, not easier.

Making the case for nuclear energy in particular, and for all-of-the-above energy innovation in general, has required pushing back on the Lovinsian solar maximalism in which Smith and Naam are trafficking, whether wittingly or unwittingly. And in one sense, we’re happy to take one side in this dispute. Time and tide will tell whether the future is mostly solar-powered or mostly nuclear-powered or, indeed, a healthy mix of the two technologies.

What’s more pernicious about the solarmaxxers is not that they represent the other side of an open, even-odds game of technological advocacy, but that they charge their opponents as the more tribalist of the two camps, when the truth is more often precisely the opposite. Despite having consistently promoted a growing and substantial role for wind and solar energy in the global economy and supported policies to accelerate that growth for over two decades, we are branded as being against wind and solar by these critics because in their eyes, anything much short of promoting 100% renewables as being desirable, feasible, and inevitable is deemed to be “anti-renewables.”

Breakthrough has long been a special source of anger to this crowd because we played such a major role in creating the investment-centered paradigm that has accounted for much of the progress that wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles have made over the last 15 years, and yet refuse to sign on to the maximalist gospel that most proponents preach. In the land of solar maximalism, supporting a diverse portfolio of energy technologies and being open to a diverse range of possible energy futures makes one an enemy.

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Twenty Years of Solar Optimism

To understand our dispute with the solarmaxxers, you have to go back to the beginning. Long before either Smith or Naam was prognosticating on energy, the Breakthrough Institute was a fairly lonely voice making a quixotic case for massive state investments in expensive but promising renewable energy technology.

Across most of the aughts, the overwhelming focus of the environmental community on climate change was to regulate emissions. Insofar as there was any debate within the community, it was between proponents of traditional command and control regulatory policies and market-based trading schemes. Environmental philanthropy went all-in on the $100 million “Design to Win” effort to pass a cap-and-trade program. During this period, Breakthrough was arguably the most prominent public critic of this strategy, arguing that pricing carbon wouldn’t ultimately achieve much decarbonization so long as solar, wind, batteries, nuclear, and other low-carbon technologies remained significantly more expensive than incumbent fossil fuels.

This has largely become conventional wisdom even among mainstream greens today. But it was controversial at the time. Joe Romm wrote in response that “pollution limits are far, far more important than R&D for what really matters.” David Roberts argued that “a price on carbon would do more to stimulate productive energy research than targeted grants for specific research programs.” And Brad Plumer, then a young blogger at the New Republic, described Breakthrough’s preference for “subsidizing clean-energy sources” as “weird.”

Weird or not, our investment-centered clean tech optimism was based on an understanding of the history of energy innovation that would become central talking points for a growing chorus of solar champions. In a 2008 essay for the Harvard Law and Policy Review titled “Fast, Clean, & Cheap.” we proposed a massive public buydown of the cost of solar energy, arguing that “solar has special potential, and merits special attention. Solar panels, like microchips, have their own kind of ‘Moore’s Law’: the price of solar comes down roughly 20% every time production capacity is doubled.” Not long after, we released an influential report called “Where Good Technologies Come From,” arguing that public investment in R&D, demonstration, and deployment had played a critical role in the commercialization of most transformative technologies throughout American history and that similar policies would be necessary to achieve a clean energy transition. Naam, by contrast, wouldn’t write his first post about a Moore’s Law for solar until 2011. Smith wouldn’t publish anything about solar until 2012.

With our partners at Third Way, ITIF, and elsewhere, we made the public case for investments to drive down the price of solar, wind, and other clean technologies. Breakthrough’s renewables advocacy helped lead to tens of billions of investments in the 2009 Recovery Act. Our research was cited in congressional hearings and called out multiple times in President Obama’s State of the Union addresses.

But over time, as we gained a better understanding of energy systems and technologies, a couple of things became clear to us. The first was that electrifying most end uses of energy, dramatically increasing the global demand for energy, and then running that system overwhelmingly on intermittent renewables was a fantasy, and that what would become known as “clean firm” technologies, especially nuclear, would be essential to energy abundance and decarbonization. The second was that the fiercest champions of renewables were almost always fierce opponents of nuclear power.

This was circa 2010, in the years immediately before and after Fukushima and in the midst of America’s faltering “nuclear renaissance.” It was also in the midst of flatlining demand for electricity in the wake of the Great Recession, with cheap shale gas and subsidized renewables further depressing the wholesale electricity costs that baseload nuclear plants depended on for their operations. Environmental groups and so-called ratepayer advocates were in open war against nuclear plants like Diablo Canyon and Indian Point. There were no notable next-generation nuclear startups compared to the dozens that exist today. There was no civil society pro-nuclear movement, because the Breakthrough Institute hadn’t yet launched it.

The climate movement, led by figures like Bill McKibben and Robert Kennedy Jr., insisted that declining renewable energy costs heralded not just the end of fossil fuels but of nuclear power too. These claims were not new. They had been around since long before anyone had ever heard of climate change, dating to the mid-1970’s, when Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins invented the original solarmaxxing imaginary, the “soft energy path,” not as a solution to climate change or even a replacement for fossil fuels (Lovins, in the 70’s, actually advocated for decentralized mini-coal generators for residential use) but as an alternative to nuclear energy.

Lovins famously claimed in the early 1980s that solar was already cheaper than both fossil fuels and nuclear and forecast that solar would account for a third of US energy generation by the year 2000, a forecast that solarmaxxers conspicuously ignore when pointing the finger at erroneous solar predictions. By the early 1990s, the soft energy path had become the basis for virtually all environmental advocacy in the United States and globally.

The renewable energy avatar for a new generation of green activists is a former atmospheric scientist named Mark Jacobson, who since 2009 has produced modeling that purports to show that the world’s energy consumption could easily and quickly be met by 100% wind, water, and solar. Jacobson’s modeling was always transparent first-order nonsense. Even many energy modelers who have long been extremely bullish on renewable energy growth have stated publicly and privately that his analyses simply don’t add up, and even violate basic biophysical principles.

When not spinning out preposterous renewable energy models and suing other researchers, Jacobson makes the remarkable claim that nuclear energy is carbon-intensive, based on life-cycle analysis that among other analytical sleights of hand, assumes that the existence of nuclear energy results in nuclear warfare and hence includes the carbon content of the resulting mushroom clouds. Nevertheless, Jacobson has been celebrated as a visionary researcher by the National Academies and the American Meteorological Society, is regularly quoted authoritatively by outlets like the New York Times, and showered with philanthropic dollars by Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and other benefactors.

Over the last 15 years, Jacobson and a handful of other academics and advocates have produced hundreds of technical-seeming analyses purporting to demonstrate that a hypothetical future powered entirely by existing renewable energy technologies is close at hand. With these promises of solar inevitability in hand, environmental groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Riverkeeper waged campaigns against new and existing nuclear power plants, leading to the premature closure of Duane Arnold, Three Mile Island, Indian Point, among many other plants. Over the course of the 2010s, about 8.5 gigawatts of US nuclear capacity was shuttered, about enough to power the state of New Jersey or Virginia.

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Finland Succeeds. Energiewende Chickens Come Home to Roost

One notable target of anti-nuclear solarmaxxers was Olkiluoto 3, a nuclear plant that began construction in Finland in 2005 and by 2013 was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Olkiluoto became a symbol of nuclear energy’s decadence. This was in contrast to Germany’s “energiewende,” a nationwide mission to replace fossil fuels and nuclear with wind and solar.

In 2013 we compared Finland’s investment in Olkiluoto with Germany’s enormous subsidies for solar generation, demonstrating that Olkiluoto would provide electricity at approximately a quarter of the cost per unit as solar would under energiewende subsidies. This became Exhibit A in the solarmaxxers’ case against Breakthrough. In a 2015 blog post titled “Nuclear will die. Solar will live,” Smith alluded to this analysis, claiming that Breakthrough typified “the anti-solar antipathy of the pro-nuclear crowd.”

Notably, we don’t hear so much about that analysis today. Olkiluoto 3 opened in 2023 and generates a quarter of Finland’s total electricity. At the time that we completed our analysis, Finland’s electricity system, which already had a lot of nuclear and hydro generation, was about half as carbon intensive as Germany’s. Today, it is 8 times lower. And Finland’s average industrial electricity prices are now about two-thirds lower than Germany’s.

Germany, meanwhile, mortgaged its energy future to Russia and its claims to climate leadership to domestic coal and lignite, both of which were necessary to keep the lights on and its solar dreams alive. Especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, high energy costs and shortages have devastated Germany’s industrial base. Today, its political leaders acknowledge the huge economic cost of those decisions.

Neither this particular comparison nor Germany’s particularly zealous energy policies should suggest that solar power isn’t an important energy technology. We believed in solar back in 2013 and we still believe in it now. Notice that we never wrote that “solar will die and nuclear will live.”

But it is also important to note that even with the massive delays and cost overruns that solarmaxxers endlessly emphasize, nuclear power plants generate clean, affordable, and reliable electricity, with a tiny land footprint and secure supply chains, and will do so for 60 to 80 years or perhaps longer. Places like Finland that manage to build new reactors—even when they take longer than planned and cost more than anticipated—will benefit from cheap, clean electricity for the rest of this century.

That said, we have never been sanguine about the megaproject approach to nuclear power expansion. Even in Finland, a small country with a vertically integrated electric power system, it took many years and many more billions of dollars than originally envisioned to complete construction of Olkiluoto 3. A similar story played out with the Vogtle nuclear project, which also went considerably over deadline and over budget, even in Georgia’s vertically integrated market that allowed Southern Company to ratebase the plant’s construction.

Outside these cost-of-service markets—which is to say, in most of the United States—it’s even harder to finance construction of a multi-billion dollar commodity-producing megaproject. If this represents the future of nuclear energy, we are not likely to get very far with it. Large, conventional reactors will continue to have a role in places with the right political and institutional arrangements. But much as solar and wind cannot be the sole energy source powering a fast-growing global economy that needs electricity that is available all the time, conventional nuclear cannot be the sole pathway to expanding the role of nuclear power.

For this reason, we have focused our research and advocacy on the commercialization and deployment of a next generation of smaller reactors with different fuels and fuel cycles that will enable modular production, right-sizing power plants to varying geographies and customers, economies of scale and multiples, and other features to lower the costs of nuclear construction. In other words, our ambition as technology advocates has been to make the nuclear industry look a bit more like the solar industry.

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Innovation vs. Forever Subsidies

One of the ironies about the intense reaction to our comparison of Finland and Germany was that despite the excessive cost of Germany’s solar subsidies, we supported them as innovation policy. The hundreds of billions of euros that Germany poured into its feed-in tariffs and other policies were both necessary to drive down solar costs and proof that it was, in fact, very expensive. The energiewende proved to be a fiscal, economic, and geopolitical disaster for Germany and demonstrated that attempting to power a modern, industrialized economy entirely with variable renewable energy is a terrible idea. But it has significantly benefitted the rest of the world.

Solarmaxxers during this period, by contrast, typically played a motte and bailey game, touting the ascendance of solar in Germany’s energy system as proof that it was cost effective and feasible at large scale and then retreating to an argument about its importance for innovation and the future of the energy system whenever anyone pointed out the extraordinary cost of the energiewende, Germany’s world leading electricity prices, or its curious dependence on coal.

Our view of Germany’s solar investments was consistent with our broader take on energy innovation. We championed solar subsidies in the US for well over a decade, in the face of critics from the Left who insisted that carbon caps and pricing had to be the central focus of climate policy and critics from the Right who argued that state support to commercialize new energy technologies amounted to “picking winners and losers,” because we believed that solar was a technology with enormous potential and that commercializing solar would require state support for a period of time.

Throughout those years, we insisted that public investments in nascent technologies were the historic norm, and that deployment subsidies to help drive down the cost of solar panels were an entirely appropriate clean energy policy. We also argued that deployment subsidies should be temporary as technologies like solar power achieved price parity with fossil fuels. As Jesse Jenkins and Tyler Norris wrote for Breakthrough in 2009, “we are proposing to use public investments in a highly specific and targeted way, at several defined points in the innovation process, in order to drive cost reductions in the unsubsidized price of clean energy technologies.”

That’s why, starting in 2020, we advocated that federal deployment tax credits for solar and onshore wind be phased down. Solar and wind had become mature, competitive industries. The point of the subsidies, we had always argued, was to achieve precisely this state of economic parity. More so than any energy technology save perhaps fracking, solar panels provided a positive proof point of the “make clean energy cheap” thesis that had made Breakthrough so controversial in the first place.

But the controversy didn’t end with solar’s success. At the onset of the Biden Administration, we advocated shifting federal clean technology supports towards less commercially mature technologies like advanced nuclear, deep-earth geothermal, and long-duration storage. The climate movement had other ideas and ultimately prevailed, passing hundreds of billions of dollars in expanded subsidies for solar and wind in the Inflation Reduction Act. In contrast to our solar optimism, solarmaxxers like Naam, despite their claims that solar is already the cheapest form of electricity in most places, continue to push for longer and larger subsidies.

It is slowly dawning on the more pragmatic quadrants of the climate movement what a mistake that was. Transforming once-bipartisan technology deployment tax credits into hyperpartisan emissions reduction subsidies polarized energy policy to an unprecedented degree, earning Democrats a bruising punishment in the form of Our Big Beautiful Bill only three years after the IRA’s passage. Spending hundreds of billions of inflation-juicing taxpayer dollars on an issue that, it turns out, the public doesn’t care very much about did not yield the political benefits climate hawks were counting on during the Biden years. As energy demand and interest rates have spiked, more and more researchers are recognizing the ways in which renewables subsidies—especially ratepayer subsidies for rooftop solar and state-level renewable energy mandates—are driving electricity prices upwards, not downwards.

And yet, even as federal subsidies sunset, solar power continues to expand impressively in the United States. Industry analysts expect annual solar deployments to decline somewhat after the expiration of the tax credits, but to remain nearly double 2020 rates each year through the end of the decade. And where solar and wind are not mandated by policy, they are associated with marginally lower power prices.

That’s because we solar optimists were right and the solarmaxxers were wrong. Solar power is an important, affordable, commercially mature technology that energy producers and consumers will now deploy for economic reasons without subsidies or mandates. What they will not do is rely on solar power for 100% of their energy system, even with the behind-the-meter and grid-scale battery storage technologies that have also come down significantly in cost.

Solar’s impressive success story is not a sign that it is “winning,” per se. The power grid has been and remains a mix of generation technologies. US natural gas generation, for instance, increased by over 300,000 MWhs from 2021 through 2024—approximately equal to total US solar generation in 2024. This is a complementary, not a competitive, relationship that we at Breakthrough have long observed.

The maturation of solar energy as a commercially viable energy technology, meanwhile, has not coincided with the death of nuclear. In fact, just the opposite: As electrification and power-hungry data centers are pushing US electricity demand up for the first time in a generation, large load customers are looking for electrons wherever they can get them. In some cases, that has meant investing in grid expansion and power purchase agreements for solar and battery storage. But there has been little appetite for behind-the-meter solar and batteries to power these loads. Rather, hyperscalers and other large load customers are betting on natural gas in the short term and clean, firm generation in the future, inclusive of new, existing, and restarted nuclear power plants, emergent geothermal, and natural gas with carbon removal technologies.

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Against Energy Technology Fanaticism

Smith and Naam will surely tell you that they support all of these technologies, especially the low-carbon ones. As Smith wrote in his first inaccurate critique of Breakthrough over a decade ago, “Our government should continue to fund research into next-generation nuclear power.” Their problem with Breakthrough, purportedly, is not so much our nuclear advocacy as our perceived “anti-solar” bias. But as this history should establish, that perception is false.

We have not only been optimistic about solar but championed sensible policies to support solar and its deployment for twenty years. Even today, we most often find ourselves reassuring deflated climate hawks that solar and batteries can stand on their own two feet without subsidies, and that the Trump Administration’s various broadsides against renewables will not be enough to stop the solar train from chugging along.

So what is contested here is not whether solar energy has gotten very cheap, or whether IEA projections for solar and wind energy in 2010 or 2014 were accurate, or whether solar and wind are likely to grab significantly larger shares of global electricity generation in the coming decades. It is whether solar and wind can plausibly power most or all of the global economy, and whether betting the future of the energy economy and decarbonization solely on variable sources of renewable energy is a good idea.

Since our founding, we have argued that solar power merited special consideration in forecasts of a clean energy future. In 2015’s “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” we called out solar and nuclear as the two technologies capable of achieving “the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.” Even so, we have also supported ongoing oil and gas production in the United States, as well as public policies to support wind, geothermal, hydrogen, carbon removal technologies, electric vehicles, and other plausible complements to a future of energy abundance.

By contrast, and in somewhat different ways, both solarmaxxers like Smith and Naam and nuclearmaxxers such as our former colleague Michael Shellenberger are promoting extremely deterministic views of the energy system and its future. We would counsel both sides in this ancient feud that technological futures unavoidably involve deep uncertainty. Energy systems are both path-dependent and emergent. They are shaped by unpredictable macroeconomic and technological forces and by policy in both intended and unintended ways. Different energy technologies can both compete with and complement one another depending upon the context.

And so, more than a decade after first suggesting this to Smith, we would remind him, Naam, and all the solarmaxxers that wisdom and humility dictate that we hedge our energy technology bets. Neither solar nor nuclear is remotely on track to meet all of the world’s future energy needs any time soon. We are far more likely to succeed in building an abundant energy future if we pursue a broad portfolio of technologies and strategies rather than insisting fanatically upon a single technological solution.

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The climate watchdogmatists are at it again.

That’s what I’ve taken to calling the Revolving Door Project, Public Citizen, Drilled Media, and other groups associated with the progressive climate movement, purportedly focused on employment ethics and media watchdogging.

The thing to understand about these groups is that their concerns are not ethical but ideological. Climate watchdogmatists ascribe to the worldview of the climate emergency—the notion that climate change is not merely important but existential, and that binding limits on carbon emissions should be proscribed in regulation, usually through non-legislative pathways like lawsuits, executive actions, and social pressure campaigns. Now, it might seem confusing why a group like the Revolving Door Project would be leveraging a government employment ethics operation to pursue climate targets. The way to resolve that confusion is to understand that the ethics agenda is fake and the climate agenda is real.

The watchdogmatists’ sleights of hand are omnipresent if you look for them. But every once in a while they escape containment, usually by inflicting collateral damage on other climate advocates.

In 2024, for instance, a cadre of climate activists went after the integrity of sociologist Holly Buck for questioning the efficacy of the activists’ “disinformation” campaigns. Suggesting Buck was advancing Big Oil propaganda, as Public Citizen’s Aaron Regunberg did, was particularly brazen. Climate hawks leapt to her defense, as well they should have.

The latest such drama concerns my former colleague Jesse Jenkins. Jeff Hauser from the Revolving Door Project (RDP) initiated a campaign against Jenkins, for the infraction of working as a part-time clean-tech advisor and CTO while running an academic research lab at Princeton, and for accepting research funding from the oil and gas industry.

Many observers asked why Hauser should care about Jenkins’s remuneration in the first place, since RDP’s mission is “to scrutinize executive branch appointees to ensure they use their office to serve the broad public interest.” None of the parties involved in this episode is an executive branch appointee, or public official of any kind, so it is indeed unclear why Jenkins’s activities caught Hauser’s attention.

At least, it’s unclear to those who don’t understand that the watchdogmatists’ ethics mission is fake.

Climate activists like Regunberg and Genevieve Guenther went after Buck not because of some obvious ethics breach, but because she “uses fossil fuel talking points,” or ideas they consider verboten. Hauser went after Jenkins not because of some new or newsworthy ethical breach, but because Jenkins posted a qualified defense of an op-ed in which Matt Yglesias argued Democrats should be friendlier to oil and gas interests.

The persistent strategy here is to launder a particular climate agenda through seemingly unrelated advocacy agenda. Watchdogmatists like RDP use purported ethical frameworks to delegitimize ideas they consider ideologically unacceptable. It’s a deliberate short-circuiting of liberal discourse and an assault on philosophical pragmatism, which holds that ideas should be evaluated on their merits, not categorically dismissed for alleged affiliative or financial concerns.

Climate watchdogmatism is not an ethics operation gone awry; it is, rather, the inevitable logic of the climate emergency.

As Guenther has argued, climate targets demand that no new fossil fuel production come online anywhere in the world ever again. As the media activist organization Covering Climate Now has argued, this “scientific realism” should override any countervailing political priorities. A climate movement that sincerely ascribes to these premises would inevitably target the careers and reputations of any influential figures who differed with their ideological views.

The challenge for those outside watchdogmatist circles is not to parse their faux-ethical accusations. It is, rather, to interrogate the logic of the climate emergency at the center of the accusations. Because while the climate emergency may manifest most bizarrely in reputational attacks on climate advocates, it is pervasive across the progressive advocacy community, and in all cases should be regarded with suspicion.

The era of the climate hawk may be over, inasmuch as climate advocates have finally internalized the public’s apathy over the issue and are pursuing more oblique pathways towards decarbonization and climate resilience. But if the erstwhile hawks aren’t careful, they may allow the watchdogmatists to crowd them out, by dismissing democratic politics entirely and enforcing the climate emergency through other means.

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Discourse vs. Reality

A huge amount of modern climate activism is downstream from the Merchants of Doubt-style corporate conspiracy theorizing advanced by academics like Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway. The core idea here is that fossil fuel industries produce propaganda to influence energy policy and to hoodwink consumers into using oil and gas. By attacking the fossil fuel industry’s “social license to operate,” and by policing “fossil fuel talking points” even when invoked by non-industry representatives, the watchdogmatists hope to neuter this propaganda and achieve a net-zero utopia.

The watchdogmatists’ discursive approach, in which reality is entirely socially constructed, is the foundational premise for the public relations and litigation campaigns against Big Oil “disinformation.” The climate problem, according to the watchdogmatists, is not that fossil fuels are chemically dense sources of useful energy, plentifully distributed in the Earth’s crust and relatively easy to dig up, store, transport, and combust. The real problem supposedly is fossil fuel industry propaganda and misinformation. Indeed, arguing that fossil fuels are abundant and useful is one of many “fossil industry talking points” identified by the climate watchdogmatists. To utter such talking points is, definitionally, to engage in a campaign of disinformation, the only purpose of which could be to “shill” for the fossil fuel industries. It’s a circular, stupid logic, but one that’s proven highly effective for climate activists over the last decade or so.

It’s been so effective that it only ever seems to attract widespread outward critique when climate experts themselves become collateral damage. Much to my frustration, no one seems to care, for instance, that the formal position of the institutional environmentalist movement is that exceeding 350 parts per million carbon in the atmosphere is unconstitutional. This is a pretty sweeping practical outcome of the climate watchdogmatists’ worldview! But since it’s the logic of the climate emergency operating conventionally, it doesn’t seem to register. Conversely, when activists aim at less conventional targets, like Buck or Jenkins, the broader climate commentariat becomes more interested in the rationale behind RDP and Public Citizen’s erratic watchdogging.

Defending Buck and Jenkins in these episodes is admirable, but it does kind of miss the point. To take seriously the accusations of ethical breaches, even in service of debunking them, is to grant the watchdogmatists far more legitimacy than they deserve. The issue is not that Jeff Hauser is mistaken about Jenkins’ conflict of interest. The issue is that Hauser has an illiberal climate emergency agenda and is using the guise of ethics watchdogging to advance it. Conceding that RDP’s activities are a worthwhile pursuit, and are merely off the mark in the case of Jenkins, not only legitimizes RDP’s purported watchdog operation, but actually legitimizes the climate emergency politics upon which the climate watchdogmatists’ discursive project is predicated.

Just consider what it looks like to defend Jenkins on the narrow technical charge that he’s a shill. UC Santa Barbara Professor Leah Stokes, for instance, backed Jenkins up on Twitter, writing that “It is possible to have a different theory of change on decarbonization, the clean energy transition, affordability, etc—and not attack people’s motives, credibility, etc.” But the moral relativism Stokes endorses here did not, conspicuously, extend to Yglesias’s originating argument, which Stokes took the time to attack herself. The actual substantive arguments here—about the usefulness of climate targets and about Democrats’ attitudes towards oil and gas—get suppressed by negotiating narrowly over the drummed-up ethics accusations. This is how the climate emergency lives to defame another day.

My former colleague Zeke Hausfather, likewise, argued that the attack on Jenkins is evidence that RDP has “clearly lost its way.” So I want to be very clear about this: RDP has not lost its way. RDP’s revealed mission, at least when it comes to energy and climate, is to oppose all-of-the-above energy politics and enforce the standard-issue keep-it-in-the-ground agenda. Attacking Buck and Jenkins is not a deviation. It is, if somewhat shameless, entirely consistent with the logic of the climate emergency.

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The Widening Gyre of Shills and Deniers

I have some direct experience with this. I’ve been accused of shilling for nuclear energy, for the oil and gas industry, for big agriculture, and beyond. It’s become rote and, in my view, deeply lazy on the part of the accusers. The charge is obviously selective, and ignorant. Breakthrough has always published our funding, 100% of which comes from charitable philanthropy, on our website. But perhaps since I have advocated for nuclear energy while also criticizing the idea of the climate emergency, these attacks on my reputation somehow rarely seem to marshall the defenses enjoyed by Buck, Jenkins, and other climate pragmatists in good standing. C’est la vie.

Multiple times over the past few years, RDP has published what it probably intends as blistering takedowns of the Abundance Movement, focused on the ideas and participants of the Abundance conference that I helped organize. In 2024, RDP’s Dylan Gyauch-Lewis wrote a kind of exposé of the Abundance Movement, charging that the organizers of Abundance 2024 had—quelle horreur—connections to wealthy philanthropies.

As others in the abundance movement have pointed out, unlike the Breakthrough Institute, the Revolving Door Project does not make its funders public. This should influence how seriously we take their general strategy of accusing their ideological opponents of opaque, nefarious connections to corporate paymasters.

Nevertheless, they persisted. RDP doubled down during our conference last summer, publishing this hilarious corkboard diagram on their website to expose the alleged conspiracy behind Abundance:

Why is RDP going after the Abundance Movement, which contains relatively few present or former executive branch appointees? The same reason RDP went after Jenkins and Buck and me and Yglesias: Because they disagree with the ideas.

Now, disagreeing about ideas is of course fine, and in fact ideal in a free pluralistic society. What’s pernicious about RDP and their allies is the way in which they use the jargon of ethics to suppress other ideas. Climate watchdogmatists’ strategy is not to defeat Abundance or all-of-the-above energy politics on the merits, but to sabotage the credibility of their ideological opponents.

It’s a fundamentally anti-liberal project. But what’s arguably worse is when those of us outside the activist groups let them get away with it, by conceding that their ersatz watchdogging is primarily an ethical pursuit instead of an ideological one. We should make these concessions no longer, and instead recognize the watchdogmatists’ arguments for what they are: a vehicle to enforce the much more pervasive, but just as illiberal, project of the climate emergency.

There are a few heuristics we can use to recognize the bad-faith argumentative sleight-of-hand employed by the fake watchdogs. For instance, when an activist accuses someone of using fossil fuel industry “talking points” or “tropes,” it’s a telltale sign that the accuser is trying to short-circuit a substantive conversation. Dismissing an argument as a “talking point” is simply a way to avoid engaging with it. Likewise, when the climate watchdogmatists allege that one party is “shilling for,” or has nefarious “ties” to, certain other parties or industries, this should generally be understood as a tactical distraction more than a meaningful intervention. As we at Breakthrough have documented, the term “climate denier” has long since stopped signifying anything meaningful about adherence to mainstream science, and is now deployed as a conspicuous all-purpose epithet for figures who deviate from the climate movement’s keep-it-in-the-ground politics.

All of these labels are the language you use when the targets are demonstrably not on a fossil fuel industry payroll or actually affiliated with any of the nefarious organizations or individuals that they are being linked to. So if any of these people ever accuses you of being a “shill” or a “denier,” you can be reasonably confident that person has turned their brain off.

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Climate Hushers vs. Watchdogmatists

Heatmap’s Insider Survey, released earlier this month, captures an important phase shift in climate politics. As Rob Meyer wrote in an incisive headline summarizing the survey, “Climate Insiders Want to Stop Talking About ‘Climate Change.’” This is a welcome development, but not one everyone is happy about. The watchdogmatists at Covering Climate Now already have a term for it—climate “husherism”—that has been amplified by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, among others.

So here we have the two opposing factions in the post-climate hawk era: the hushers who acknowledge the low priority the voting public places on climate change, and the watchdogmatists who, politics be damned, seek to jam the climate emergency down the public’s throats through any mechanism at their disposal.

And fake ethics enforcement is just one of those mechanisms.

Having abandoned straightforward legislative actions like a carbon tax, climate activists are now working to enforce climate targets through employment ethics enforcement, yes, but also through liability lawsuits, population stabilization campaigns, limits on Federal Reserve liquidity relief, Clean Air Act rules, executive emergency declarations, and beyond. So it’s not just that we should stop taking the watchdogmatists seriously. It’s that we should guard against the more widespread strategy to smuggle the climate emergency through a variety of unrelated policy instruments.

None of this is to say that ethical breaches are impossible or immaterial. Muckraking and watchdogging in general are worthwhile pursuits. But climate activists, as a group, have long since abandoned the liberal virtues of those pursuits, instead channeling the language and tactics of ethical enforcement to advance a very particular ideological agenda.

The risk of merely policing the watchdogmatists’ most outlandish attacks, or in indulging illiberal activism as long as it doesn’t implicate other climate advocates in good standing, is that doing so allows the logic of the climate emergency to persist. And make no mistake: that logic is at odds with a pluralist, durable liberal democracy. Without cultivating an alternative to the logic of the climate emergency—one in which climate change is a serious but not existential problem that must be managed through technologically and economically inclusive politics—the climate watchdogmatists will continue to rear their heads.

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This is a lightly revised version of an article originally published at The Dispatch Energy.

Energy prices are rising everywhere, particularly in blue states, and Democrats are scrambling to build new energy supply—and in doing so, are abandoning the climate politics that have defined the party’s agenda for over a decade. Perhaps no other Democratic official in the country has pursued an energy affordability agenda as aggressively as New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who has reversed her state’s position on nuclear energy and natural gas pipelines while pursuing permitting reform and new AI data centers. It could mark a new dawn for affordability-minded Democrats, if they can navigate the deepening tensions with their erstwhile allies in the climate movement.

Hochul’s recent approval of the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline, a new natural gas pipeline, signals an important evolution in Democrats’ energy agenda, from the renewables-and-regulations approach that prevailed in the climate hawk era to a revived “all-of-the-above” affordability politics.

In the Ancient Times of, say, 2012 or so, Hochul’s decision on the pipeline wouldn’t have come as a shock. Back then, Democrats explicitly embraced all-of-the-above energy policy, pairing incentives for low-carbon technologies with support for affordable domestic oil and gas supplies. As President Barack Obama said in 2012, “We’ve got to invest in a serious, sustained, all-of-the-above energy strategy that develops every resource available for the 21st century.”

But over the course of the 2010s, climate activists turned against this consensus. “‘All of the above’ is no strategy at all,” declared 18 environmentalist organizations in a letter to Obama in 2014. These groups, and hundreds more, intensified their campaigns against oil and gas production. Tens of thousands of activists showed up to protest the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects, while green groups tried to ban oil and gas fracking at the state and federal level. This style of “keep-it-in-the-ground” anti-fossil fuel activism came to a head in 2022, when moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin struck a deal to fast-track approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline as a concession for his vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, a move climate advocates called a “dirty deal.” Environmental opposition was enough to kill the pipeline and permitting deal in 2022, though the project was ultimately approved in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 and finished construction in 2024.

All of which is to say that environmentalists’ keep-it-in-the-ground politics worked…for a while. The Biden administration revoked the Keystone XL pipeline permit, proposed a moratorium on new oil and gas drilling on federal lands, and paused export approvals of liquefied natural gas. Meanwhile, Democrats across the country pursued bans on internal combustion vehicles and natural gas hookups in new buildings, and other constraints on oil and gas.

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Environmentalists and their allies in the Democratic Party did not frame these policies as efforts to drive up the cost of energy, though of course that’s what one should expect from artificial constraints on supply. Instead, they argued that the falling price of solar and batteries means we can make a clean break from fossil fuels. This was the logic behind limits on oil and gas, alongside subsidies and mandates for renewable energy, heat pumps, battery storage, and electric vehicles. And it was always a flawed argument. Though renewable electricity technologies have indeed come down in price in recent years, most energy is consumed outside the electric power sector, in industry, transportation, agriculture, and beyond. Constraining oil and gas supply leads to higher energy prices across the economy, while generous subsidies for renewables can actually increase electricity rates even as the costs of solar panels and wind turbines have declined.

Nevertheless, this strained logic held Democrats together for a time. But then came 2025, the second Trump administration, and the mounting energy affordability crisis. This past year has seen Democrats rapidly shedding their climate bona fides, reversing prior policy commitments and letting the issue go unmentioned in political messaging. As Greg Ip headlined a column in the Wall Street Journal in December, “The Climate Crisis Clashed With Affordability, and Affordability Won.”

The climate movement has been slow to register this shift. Instead, some climate advocates have insisted that their long-standing policy agenda actually provides the solution to the rising energy costs. In a December 2025 report, the League of Conservation Voters argued that their proposals, including rules against pipelines and natural gas hookups, are “driving an equitable and affordable future with clean energy for all.” In The Atlantic this month, UC Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes argued that lowering electricity costs could be accomplished by pursuing three perennial priorities of the climate movement: incentives for renewable energy, strategic reductions in energy demand, and limits on electric power utilities’ profits.

But the Democrats’ practical energy policy agenda shows the limits of these arguments. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has backed off his state’s commitments to ban internal combustion vehicles by 2035, while also easing environmental regulations on oil production. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro struck a deal with Republicans in the state legislature to exit the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state cap-and-trade program limiting carbon emissions. Environmentalists keep selling the message that limits on fossil fuels can deliver energy affordability, but elected Democrats aren’t buying.

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And that brings us back to New York. Hochul explicitly framed her approval of the NESE natural gas pipeline as a return to the “all-of-the-above” energy policy that environmentalists rejected over a decade ago. And in this case, there’s not even an obvious climate tradeoff. As the Breakthrough Institute wrote in a co-authored letter of support to Hochul, the pipeline is expected to lower both costs and carbon emissions in the region, as increased gas supply replaces dirtier heating oil and lowers the cost of electrification.

But Hochul’s agenda goes far beyond one pipeline. This year, she has also reversed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s policy of opposition to nuclear energy, directing the New York Power Authority to build a new nuclear plant upstate. Her administration has also streamlined permitting of electric power and transmission infrastructure and established the Empire AI Consortium, a $500 million public-private partnership to advance power-hungry AI capacity in New York.

Environmentalists have taken note of Hochul’s affordability agenda, and they don’t like it. “It’s inexplicable,” environmentalist Bill McKibben told Politico. “Governor Hochul’s nuclear gamble is a reckless distraction from the clean, affordable energy New Yorkers actually need,” said Alex Beauchamp of Food & Water Watch. In a recent New York Times article, reporter Hilary Howard writes that Hochul’s “focus on affordability has shaped several policy decisions that have undermined the state’s climate goals.”

The increasingly sharp division between Hochul and her environmentalist critics is a sign that Democrats will no longer simply outsource energy policy ideation and implementation to the climate movement. The question is precisely what kind of abundance and affordability politics will fill the gap.

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Earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) eviscerated the budget of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Over 80% of USAID’s programs, some 5200 initiatives supporting tens of billions of dollars in aid, were abruptly canceled. Estimates of the effects of these cuts on human life are difficult, and varied. But for a horrifying sense of scale, a UCLA study projected that cutting USAID funding will cause 14 million additional deaths by the end of the decade.

Shortly after these cuts were announced, the Breakthrough Institute was informed we would lose a significant grant renewal from Breakthrough Energy. (Despite the common confusion, Breakthrough Energy and the Breakthrough Institute have no formal connection, save this now defunct funding relationship.) It was a large numeric hit to our overall budget, and doubly painful because the grant supported our food and agriculture work. Agriculture accounts for over 10 percent of global carbon emissions, and is overwhelmingly responsible for deforestation and land use change. Intensifying agricultural production is core to the ecomodernist vision of providing abundant affordable food while sparing more land for wild nature. Yet this work has always been harder to fundraise for than, say, our work on nuclear energy. Breakthrough Energy played a critical role in supporting these underfunded areas of research and advocacy, for us and for so many other policy organizations.

Still, it was hard for us at the Breakthrough Institute to get too bitter about it. The grant was part of a broad shutdown of Breakthrough Energy’s staffing and philanthropic giving, which seems to have been partially motivated by founder Bill Gates’s desire to backfill much of the canceled USAID funding. We have long argued that climate change is one among many challenges facing human society, not the existential threat it’s often described as. In poor countries especially, poverty and public health are by far more serious concerns, where the best defense against climate change is economic development, not emissions reductions. So the moral calculus was eminently fair, from our perspective as a loser in Gates’s transaction.

Here we had the Trump Administration canceling billions of dollars in funding for health and development for the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. Gates, uniquely in possession of his own billions of dollars and already deeply embedded in the global health and development funding network, shifted his support from long-term innovation towards more immediate life-saving programs. It’s a zero-sum calculus, and a defensible one at that.

Gates more recently articulated his updated views on climate change, an issue that has occupied much of the back half of his career. As he wrote last month in a widely covered memo, climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.”

It’s understandable that Gates’s memo caused a conniption among climate advocates. But their chief complaints, thus far, are particularly unpersuasive. Having spent the last 20 years or so convincing policymakers to prioritize climate change, they’re now insisting that doing so need not come at the expense of other issues like public health. It’s magical thinking, and easily falsified by policymakers’ real-world decisions.

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Surrounded by Straw Men

In a press briefing hosted by Covering Climate Now, the climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe pushed back on Gates’ assessment of climate risk, arguing “I have not seen a single scientific paper that ever posited that the human race would become extinct … it’s a straw man, the way he’s proposing it.” My former colleague Zeke Hausfather also called this a “straw man,” arguing at his blog that the memo “​​needlessly sets up a conflict between laudable goals: we can both mitigate emissions and alleviate poverty, disease, and hunger.”

First of all, one should always be skeptical of arguments in which tradeoffs don’t exist.

Additionally, and to be a bit pedantic about it, I’ve seen more than one scientific paper positing that the human race could become extinct due to climate change. This 2022 paper, published in the prestigious Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences, describes the possibility of “potential human extinction” due to climate change as a “dangerously underexplored topic.” The authors aren’t obscure cranks: they include Johan Rockström, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Will Steffen, and other architects of the extremely influential “Planetary Boundaries” framework that Hayhoe has elsewhere endorsed.

I asked ChatGPT for 25 more examples of scientific papers positing that the human race would become extinct due to climate risk. After thinking for one minute and forty nine seconds, it readily provided these examples.

And that’s because the idea of climate change as an existential threat to humanity is incredibly widespread, within the scientific literature and especially outside of it.

Covering Climate Now, which hosted the webinar with Hayhoe and Hausfather, describes climate change as an “existential threat” on par with nuclear war. Hayhoe herself has argued that “Humans cannot survive without the rest of the ecosystems on this planet that provide everything we use.” In 2018 Greta Thunberg famously quoted a scientist who argued that climate change would “wipe out all of humanity,” arguing elsewhere that “there are no gray areas when it comes to survival.” One of the best-selling climate books of the last decade is titled The Uninhabitable Earth. I could go on and on.

The function of this rhetoric has been to raise the salience of climate change among policymakers and the general public. After President Obama “placed energy second on the priority list, guaranteeing health care would occupy most of the year,” as Bill McKibben lamented in 2009, climate activists set about reversing this prioritization for the next incoming Democratic president. And it worked. “It is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change,” said President Joe Biden in 2023.

Now, it’s possible to argue abstractly that we can care about climate change without caring less about poverty and disease. But when we move from the abstract to the practical, these calculations become a lot more zero-sum.

And it’s not just Bill Gates. A 2023 analysis by CARE International found that “most of the public climate finance reported by wealthy countries is taken directly from development aid budgets.” The Breakthrough Institute’s Vijaya Ramachandran and her colleagues similarly found that most World Bank climate aid in poor countries goes towards mitigation, not adaptation. Tens of billions of dollars that could have gone towards infrastructure, development, and public health was instead spent on reducing emissions in the poorest parts of the world.

President Biden’s prioritization of the “existential threat” of climate change provides another illustration of the unavoidable tradeoffs involved here.

As I write this, Congressional Republicans have putatively committed to a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies as a concession for reopening the federal government, a vote few expect will succeed. Those subsidies were last extended by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. That law, of course, provided significantly more and longer-lasting funding to energy deployment and innovation subsidies. It ultimately included no federal funding for ideas like the child tax credit, which Democrats had been pushing throughout the negotiations that would lead to the IRA. Instead of their perennial priorities of health care and welfare, Democrats in 2022 chose to prioritize climate change.

One need not make any critiques whatsoever of the climate and energy provisions of the IRA in order to acknowledge the plain fact that they absolutely traded off against Democrats’ other priorities. Not only is this tradeoff very obviously not a straw man, it is the exact prioritization that climate advocates have advocated for years, framing climate change as an existential threat that supersedes other issues.

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Zero-Sum

“What world do they live in?” a frustrated Gates asked Amy Harder recently, in response to climate advocates’ criticisms of his memo. “This is a numeric game in a world with very finite resources, more finite than they should be.”

Gates is asking the right question here. It’s one thing to claim to care about climate change and global poverty in equal measure. And we’re a wealthy country, with many wealthy people, capable of funding many different things. But when it comes to real-world philanthropic giving or public investments, the marginal dollar going to climate mitigation is in fact a dollar not going to public health, and vice versa. Philanthropists have to decide how much they care about each. The next time Democrats have the opportunity they will likely have to choose: restore the IRA, or fully fund the child tax credit. These tradeoffs were less stark last decade, when inflation was low and the Trumpian assault on spending and aid had not yet begun. But, to Gates’s question, we don’t live in that world any longer. And the fact that climate hawks are failing to reckon with these newer real-world tradeoffs is a further sign of their unwillingness to acknowledge the end of their era.

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It’s a testament to the urgency of the nation’s infrastructure crisis that federal permitting reform is still even considered a possibility under this Congress.

On the one hand, momentum for meaningful permitting reform has been building for the last few years, at least since former Senator Joe Manchin insisted on a permitting deal in a handshake agreement with then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer during the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The Biden presidency ended with a nail-biting but ultimately disappointing Lame Duck debate over the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024. And despite the new Republican trifecta in 2025, many energy and permitting advocates across the political spectrum started the year feeling hopeful. Republicans, after all, have long been the party of deregulation, and these days many Democrats even agree that an abundant clean energy future requires meaningful permitting reform.

On the other hand, DOGE. And Liberation Day. And the One Big Beautiful Bill. And a slew of rescissions of federal energy grants and programs passed during the Biden Administration. And now the government shutdown. The gamut of Republican legislative and extra-legislative activities in 2025 have not exactly bolstered the necessarily bipartisan politics required for major federal permitting reform. Democrats may be in no mood to cooperate with their opponents across the aisle on major legislation.

But with energy costs rising across the country, the public pressure to address America’s infrastructure sclerosis may overcome even these political headwinds. As a number of advocates have urged, there is a “window of opportunity” to reform federal permitting procedures in the coming months.

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We would amend this slightly. While the opportunity to capitalize on the current moment is real, the goal should be to keep the window open, not just to pass something before it closes.

Make no mistake: the politics of permitting reform remain daunting. The opposition is powerful—particularly the environmentalist wing of the Democratic caucus, but also utilities skeptical of major transmission reforms and Republicans who have become skeptical of policies that benefit wind, solar, batteries. And neither Democrats nor Republicans need to pass major legislation in order to satisfy their voters in the coming midterm elections. Indeed, operatives on both sides are opportunistically blaming their opponents for rising energy prices. Reform advocates are right to identify the tenuousness of the political opportunity in front of us.

And all of those advocates would agree that even the most sweeping feasible legislative deal passed during this term will not solve America’s permitting problems. It’s likely that such a deal would touch judicial review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and federal transmission policy, and perhaps sections of the Clean Water Act (CWA). But even this real progress would leave several federal statutes and regulatory frameworks unaltered. That’s to say nothing of necessary reforms at the state level, nor the generational culture shift needed at federal agencies, Departments of Environmental Quality, and Public Utility Commissions across the country. And if the disappointing reforms passed under the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 taught us anything, it’s that even well-crafted statutory changes may find themselves in need of further amendment in the future.

So as legislative and civil society reform advocates look beyond the government shutdown, we should do so in service of building a self-sustaining permitting politics. Environmental regulatory reform should be understood as a perennial and constant imperative for legislators.

In that spirit, this morning Breakthrough published our comprehensive NEPA reform proposal, entitled “Reboot NEPA.” Our proposal recognizes that robust government oversight and public comment—the core commitments of the original law—can exist without the regulatory uncertainty, cynical lawfare, and administrative waste that have come to define the statute. Our proposal would improve public comment and streamline judicial procedure under NEPA, while equipping agencies with modern artificial intelligence tools and capabilities for smarter, faster, more efficient administration of the law.

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We offer this framework in the hopes that it will further expand, not satisfy, demands for permitting reform. Fortunately, there are many appealing permitting proposals introduced in Congress right now, some of which might very well pass under a deal in the coming months, hopefully building momentum to tackle others in subsequent negotiations. NEPA has become the locus of reform efforts over the last several years, and understandably so. But there are further analytical and legislative problems stemming from many other statutes. The work ahead, if not entirely clear, is cut out for us.

We believe an important step in that work is to reboot NEPA. The regulation has mutated far beyond what its drafters intended, becoming a vehicle for costly and overwhelmingly ineffective litigation. Comprehensive reform would place clearer bounds on the original function of NEPA—informed planning and public engagement—preventing the administrative bloat that has characterized the law since its passage. Rebooting NEPA would prevent the administrative ping-ponging that has become standard over the last two decades, as Democrats and Republican administrations each weaponize the statute for their own aims. And it will avoid the unintended consequences of some well-meaning proposals, such as environmental review page limits that merely shuffle content to report appendices, or the neutering of a regulation under a Republican president that could be easily revived on Day One of a Democratic successor.

With energy politics increasingly polarized, and as the shutdown continues, the cynics are right to doubt the prospects for permitting reform during this Congress. But our peers in the permitting advocacy community are also right to identify the window of opportunity in front of us. Permitting advocates’ legislative strategy should be to pass something through that window in the short term, holding it open for further opportunities in the long term.

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Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist and environmentalist, died last week. My colleague Elizabeth McCarthy, a permitting expert at Breakthrough, shared what I thought was a lovely reflection on her legacy:

“Jane Goodall inspired me to pursue the work I do. But I found myself sharing her ideology less and less. I doubt she’d endorse what I’m most proud of. Still, her hope made my skepticism possible.”

I’ve offered my own version of Elizabeth’s conversion story from time to time. I give a lot of credit to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” for my own environmental awakening. But over the years, in particular as I grappled with the early work of the Breakthrough Institute, I found myself sharing Gore’s ideology less and less. I realized that the kind of climate catastrophism that led Gore to claim, in 2006, that “the world will reach a point of no return,” is unscientific. And I took seriously the literature that shows that environmental doomism tends to induce anxiety and demobilization.

Still, in a way, Gore’s doomism made my ecomodernism possible.

There are several things that unite Goodall’s naturalism with Gore’s more technocratic environmentalism. But at the core of their shared ideology is something I think of as “anti-primacy”: a rejection of the idea that humans are special within Creation.

And given her field of study, I think Goodall is an interesting window into the implications of anti-primacy.

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On Human Primacy

Goodall was a primatologist, and spent a considerable portion of her life living in isolation with chimpanzees. As an influential environmentalist, she was not unique in her close study of non-human animals. William Vogt, one of the founders of modern eugenics, spent his youth studying seabirds in South America. Paul Ehrlich and E.O. Wilson were each entomologists, having primarily studied butterflies and ants, respectively. The biologist Lynn Margulis suggested that humans on Earth are no different than amoebae in a petri dish. Garrett Hardin created his “tragedy of the commons” framework by comparing human populations to cattle in a grazing paddock.

If anything, Goodall’s comparisons between human societies and her field subjects were the most defensible of all of these. The chimpanzees she studied are among the closest biological ancestors of Homo sapiens. From the Latin for “the first rank, chief, principal,” the very word primate implicitly recognizes that humans rank first in the animal kingdom.

I’ve written before about ecomodernism’s fundamental anthropocentrism, one definition of which holds that “the superiority of Homo sapiens, its capacities, the primacy of its values, [and] its position in the universe.” The modern environmental movement emerged, in many ways, to combat this idea of human exceptionalism. Embracing a more ecocentric politics, environmentalists insist that humans remain within biophysical “planetary boundaries,” rely only on flows of “ecosystem services” rather than extractive stocks of natural resources, and otherwise harmonize with the rest of the flora and fauna on Earth.

Goodall, likewise, rejected human primacy. “We’re part of the animal kingdom,” she said, “not separated from it.” This is foundational to the environmentalist view of what makes us human in the first place. Jason Hickel, the degrowther, rejects René Descartes’ notion that the “thinking mind” makes humans distinct from other animals. And if anything it seems anti-primacy is felt especially strongly among Goodall’s professional cohort—consider the recent book The Arrogant Ape by primatologist Christine Webb, who refers to human exceptionalism as a “myth.” But anti-primacy shows up all over the place in environmentalism, in the work of Vogt, Carson, Wilson, Ehrlich, Hardin, Gore, and countless others.

Now, Goodall was not exactly a dogmatist in her anti-primacy. She was an expert after all in the differences between primate species, and she argued that our language and intelligence distinguished us. But this wasn’t necessarily a compliment. The other thing that made humans special, she thought, was our wickedness. “I’ve personally decided that only humans are capable of true evil,” she said.

It’s perhaps with this sour view of her fellow humans that she came to believe that there are far, far too many of us. Goodall said in 2020 that she “would like to, without causing any pain or suffering, reduce the number of people on the planet.”

Many people I respect defended Goodall on this point, insisting that her vision for depopulation is not coercive. “Goodall wasn’t calling for action or predicting collapse,” the historian Paul Sabin assured me. And perhaps that’s fair. Goodall’s rhetoric was distinct from, say, Paul Ehrlich’s, who has yet to acknowledge let alone atone for the harms done by horrifyingly coercive depopulation campaigns he proposed.

Nor was depopulation Goodall’s primary project. And while she was clearly earnest in her philosophical anti-primacy, she was thoughtful about the similarities and differences between humans and other primates. She is rightly best known for cultivating a love of the natural world and the animal kingdom, and for her contributions to animal science.

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Population Control or Pro-Natalism?

And it’s with this complexity that I’d like to close. Because I think it’s important to acknowledge the mass public inspiration that scientists like Goodall provided, but only inasmuch as we take seriously the implications of their environmentalism. And I’d argue that it’s precisely because of its sincerely inspiring legacy that we allow environmentalism’s pernicious anti-human sentiment to permeate our culture and our ideology.

It is striking to me, for instance, that it has become acceptable in progressive circles to assert, as Goodall did, that there should be fewer humans on the planet, or to allege that the worst thing you can do for the climate is to have children. In stark contrast, most progressives I talk to find the recent “pro-natalist” push in favor of having kids to be “creepy.”

And to be clear, I sympathize. I also want to construct a pro-natalism that liberates women and families, instead of restoring the gender expectations of yesteryear. I would just emphasize that existing social mores make it fashionable to talk about depopulation, while making it “creepy” to talk about having kids as a positive social or environmental good.

Like Goodall did, I have one son. And partially because of people like her, I’ve dedicated my career to protecting the beauty of the Earth so that he and his children and many billions of future humans can enjoy, protect, and nurture it. In a way, her environmentalism made my pro-natalism possible.

Rest in Primacy, Jane Goodall.

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“The technofix is in,” wrote the environmental ethicist Clive Hamilton ten years ago, in response to the publication of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” Hamilton saw in ecomodernism a crude, baseless faith in technology. “The roadblock to climate mitigation has never been technological,” he wrote. “Nor has it been economic. It has been political.”

We ecomodernists at Breakthrough have been parrying attacks of this nature from environmentalists since our founding. So it was with no small measure of amusement that I read in The New Republic that a new book by Bill McKibben, the nation’s chief environmentalist, “makes the case for going big on solar power—and abandons climate angst for ecomodernist optimism.”

McKibben even seems to have anticipated this reaction, writing in the introduction to the book that his solar enthusiasm “is not, I think, a ‘technofix,’ but something far more fundamental.”

And like McKibben, I was not surprised that other environmentalists have bumped against the solarmaxxing vision in his book. The title, Here Comes the Sun, certainly evinces its own kind of crude faith in technology. While other leading environmentalist figures have voiced sharp skepticism of ecomodernism and the new abundance consensus, McKibben has been more strategic, earning a place in at least Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s vision of abundance. This week, McKibben launched “Sun Day,” a successor to Earth Day celebrating “the cheapest forms of power on the planet, lowering costs, creating new jobs, and strengthening our communities.” As my colleague Ted Nordhaus wrote in his own review of Here Comes the Sun, “McKibben has attempted to refashion himself as something of an abundance advocate.”

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McKibben’s strategic ambiguity on abundance is a long time in the making. McKibben was an important interlocutor when Nordhaus and Shellenberger released their essay “The Death of Environmentalism” in 2004. That essay argued for a new environmental coalition “whose interests in economic development can be aligned with strong action on global warming.” And McKibben was substantially more thoughtful about the eulogy than many of his peers. “There's something almost exhilarating in knowing how bad a situation really is,” he wrote of the essay. “Spared the false hope that maybe things will get better on their own, at least you have permission to think expansively about what to do differently.”

Since then, in an apparent effort to reconcile his long-standing techno-pessimism with a more “convivial environmentalism” as he put it, McKibben took on a pair of dueling personalities. In his longer-form writing, he remained the growth-skeptical public intellectual, while his more visible public persona took on the form of the solarmaxxing climate activist. In books like Deep Economy, Eaarth, and Falter, he argued that “growth simply isn’t enriching most of us.” In front of adoring crowds, on the other hand, McKibben has long demurred on these degrowth commitments, preferring to celebrate the abundance and job-creating potential of renewable energy technologies.

So when Ezra Klein asked McKibben on his podcast a few years ago whether decoupling or degrowth was more likely to deliver climate salvation, McKibben hedged. “I think in 100 years, it’s unlikely human beings will be amusing themselves by consuming immense amounts of stuff. I think we’re likely to have moved beyond that. But in seven years, I doubt it,” he told Klein. “So we better figure out how to make electric cars work, at least for now. And we better do it very quickly.”

In other words: decouple now, degrow later.

How is such a hedging—a fusing of ideological opposites—possible? The answer is the modern solar panel.

Solar irradiation is simultaneously one of the most abundant sources of useful energy available to humans, and a central talisman of the ecological degrowth left. It is simultaneously a diffuse ecological flow of energy, imposing a putative natural limit on economic growth, and a simply massive volume of energy, capable of providing substantial useful electricity and heat if captured. As my colleague Seaver Wang wrote in a recent piece on solarmaxxing, “Solar’s modularity is genuinely revolutionary, delivering scale at both the Jeffersonian level of the rural homeowner and the Hamiltonian level of the gigawatt-scale ‘solar farm.’”

These cultural contradictions were simply not a factor during the launch of the modern environmental movement, when solar energy was much more expensive. Solar energy’s high cost was arguably a feature, not a bug, for environmentalists. Indeed the state of photovoltaic technology in the 1960s and 1970s made it possible for Amory Lovins to advocate for solar energy while simultaneously declaring that “it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.” (NB: McKibben approvingly quoted Lovins in his newsletter this month.)

But then solar energy got cheap, scrambling clean energy politics. And it’s via these newer cultural contradictions of solar energy that environmentalists like McKibben flirt their way into the abundance camp, even as they oppose other abundance causes like permitting reform, nuclear energy, industrial agriculture, artificial intelligence, and, indeed, economic growth. And in this way, solar energy becomes perhaps the biggest “technofix” of them all. To the solarmaxxers, photovoltaic panels have not only the power to provide abundant energy and solve climate change; they have the power to obviate the most fundamental political disputes, such as those between authoritarianism and liberalism, or between degrowth and abundance.

And while solar’s newfound affordability and modularity are genuinely impressive technological advancements, McKibben has little time for solar energy’s downsides. You’ll find nary a mention in his writing, for instance, of Uyghur slavery in Chinese solar manufacturing. Other challenges to solar maximalism are handwaved away with a nod to Lovins, or McKibben’s favorite disgraced energy analyst, Mark Jacobson. For each obstacle encountered in solarmaxxing, there is a technical and immediate solution. It’s techno-fixes all the way down.

All technologies, of course, have their impacts and tradeoffs. The test of a good-faith technology advocate is whether he acknowledges those tradeoffs, or papers over them with an activist's zeal. Likewise, the test of a good-faith abundance advocate might be whether he supports the abundance agenda outside his own narrow interests. And the test of a good-faith energy analyst is in whether he expresses any humility at all in forecasting the final destiny of the global energy system. Arguing that humanity is on the cusp of becoming “sun worshippers” once again, as McKibben does in his new book, bespeaks something other than humility.

In these ways, to solarmaxx is to abundance-wash old-school environmentalism. Now, our friends in the YIMBY movement have done an admirable job developing antibodies to similar forms of abundance-washing, for instance by calling out elected officials who try to pass off defense of status-quo zoning rules as a housing affordability agenda. Energy abundance advocates would do well to develop some antibodies of their own.

McKibben has referred to solar panels as “magical.” And to be clear, in the view of this author, he’s right. Photovoltaics are cheap, commoditized, and highly modular, capable of transforming diffuse photons into highly useful electric current. They will contribute substantially to the energy abundance agenda and, in that way, are “indistinguishable from magic” in the Clarkeian sense.

But there’s a difference between magical technologies and magical thinking.

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Last week, fifteen cohosts, nine sponsoring organizations, and over 600 people convened for Abundance 2025 in Washington, DC. This was the second annual Abundance conference, and I had the privilege to help organize each. Below I’m publishing a slightly edited version of the short remarks I gave on stage, in which I pushed back on utterly rejected the accusation that abundance is an “astroturfed” movement. As I said, “Abundance is bottom-up. We were not herded and orchestrated: we found each other.”

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It’s been a pleasure getting to know my esteemed colleagues in the abundance coalition over the last few years. I think it was around three years ago at this point that a bunch of us started talking about what it would look like, and the work it would do in the world, to convene this nascent, tenuous thing called the abundance movement. I was happy to help launch this event last year and am genuinely stunned to look out tonight at what this conference, and this coalition, have so quickly grown into.

Because I know many of us among the cohosts and sponsors of the conference—and I’m sure many of you in housing, energy, governance, tech, and other spaces—feel like we’ve been doing abundance since long before there was a movement or an agenda or a book. Breakthrough was founded almost twenty years ago to create an environmentalism that builds. The Federation of American Scientists, one of our cohosts, was founded 80 years ago and obviously represents a critical undercurrent of abundance, which is the liberatory power of science and technology. What we now think of as state capacity has been building momentum for years, drawing on ideas from dynamism and civic-tech reform. And I know my YIMBY friends have been doing housing abundance for over a decade at this point, and have really set the high-water mark for what mass-appeal, boots-on-the-ground abundance activism can look like.

I like to say that the different abundance factions use different nouns but similar verbs: build, densify, unleash, expand. But what I think brings us all together is not just a generic vocabulary or even just a broadly shared agenda.

We face an entirely new set of challenges in American politics and culture. It was one thing to build a more abundant society at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, or during the New Deal or the postwar era. Today, abundance faces novel headwinds, and it’s not just NIMBYs and degrowthers. Incumbency dynamics, regulatory bloat from decades of administrative inertia, technological stagnation, and what economists call cost-disease effects have made it difficult to deploy effective state capacity, to afford essential but labor-intensive goods and services like education and childcare, and to imagine let alone build a future more technologically advanced and, well, abundant than our own.

I think that’s why we’re all here. Exceptional circumstances brought us together.

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And so I feel the need to take a moment to address a certain report published by the Revolving Door Project. Because even accounting for my pro-abundance bias, I’m left a bit nonplussed by much of the criticism levied at abundance. The American Prospect described this coalition—literally, many of the cohosts of Abundance 2025—in pretty conspiratorial terms, writing suggestively that our groups “have connections to corporate interests” with “financial ties to crypto, AI, Big Tech, and oil.” A writer in the New International accused the abundance coalition of employing an “astroturf” strategy. Revolving Door Project released a whole report “on the people and orgs behind this movement, hopefully shedding some light on this mysterious bunch.” The implication of all this criticism is clear: abundance is not a legitimate movement.

And if I leave you with one takeaway, I hope it’s this: that accusation is totally, categorically false. Abundance is not this astroturfed conspiracy. In fact just the opposite: abundance is emergent. Abundance is bottom-up. We were not herded and orchestrated: we found each other.

The people and ideas in this ballroom pull on strands from multiple fields—think tanks, activists, organizers, elected officials, journalists, philanthropists, technologists and entrepreneurs and investors—and multiple ideological traditions—liberalism (classical and otherwise), urbanism, supply-side progressivism, state capacity libertarianism, industrial conservative populism, ecomodernism, humanism, effective altruism, and beyond. There are, as we learned this morning, many Varieties of Abundance. We’re all here not because we agree on everything that our corporate overlords tell us to believe, but to do the messy work of figuring out what unites us across differences, how we can collaborate to solve real material problems in the world, and whether this audacious thing called Abundance can meaningfully change American politics and culture.

We each have our own story of how we got to this room. And the reason you know it’s not some astroturfed conspiracy is because I don’t think any of us knows exactly where it’s going from here. Last week I had to pause Marshall Kosloff’s podcast because he said something I found so inspiring, he said because abundance “is so unsettled, people can actually contribute.” To me that’s what’s most exciting, and vital, about abundance, and about this crowd.

My contribution is that I’ve dedicated my career to modernizing environmental politics for the 21st century. Your contribution may be quite different from mine. But if anything could bring together nuclear and solar advocates, housing activists, scientists, AI researchers, state capacity reformers, Congressional representatives and comptrollers, and beyond, it would have to be an idea as capacious and compelling as abundance.

My remarks are available to be viewed here:

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Recently, I was pleased to participate in a retreat hosted by the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), one of Breakthrough’s environment-focused partners in the abundance coalition whose mission is to “build the conservative environmental movement.” I was invited to give a short talk on ecomodernism and energy abundance. I really enjoyed the conversations both related and unrelated to my talk.

But I think the ACC team won’t mind me saying that the truly memorable aspect of the weekend was the snowmobiling.

For a few hours on an idyllic snowy day in early February, the fantastic guides at Wasatch Adventures toured our group around the trails and woods on the Wasatch Mountain. And as ACC President Chris Barnard put it when we stopped to soak in the scenery, “It may not feel like it, but this is conservation.”

When people think of conservation and nature preserves they probably picture people hiking and camping, but as Chris was getting at, snowmobiling, jet-skiing, ATVing, hunting, and fishing are also all significant sources of revenue for maintaining protected areas like the Wasatch Mountain. What’s more, these activities enable a different kind of exploration and communing with the natural world than is often possible without special gear like our Skidoo Grand Touring 600 ACE 4-stroke snowmobiles. My jam is more trail running and road biking, so I had never been snowmobiling before. It was just incredibly fun and, at times, breathtaking.

Eventually we got off our Skidoos and returned to the cabin to fire up my Powerpoint presentation. Back to reality. But several months after the retreat, I still find myself dwelling on our experience in the snow. Not because Chris’s ideas were novel to me—the “North American model of conservation” is well understood to those of us who study these things—but because, at work-related events, I have pretty rarely been invited to pause and simply marvel at the beauty and bounty of the natural world. I work in environmental policy, and it took a bunch of Republicans on 500-pound, gasoline-fueled machines to encourage me to slow down, feel the snow land gently on my face, and listen to the silence of the trees growing all around us.

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I thought regularly of the retreat as I worked on an op-ed with ACC’s Isaiah Menning, which the Boston Globe ran over the weekend. In the op-ed, Menning and I argue that the abundance agenda “can be great for humans and wildlife alike—dense cities, more efficient agriculture, and streamlining regulations can make more space for wildlands.”

I was reminded again as I read Steve Teles’s excellent new essay “Varieties of Abundance,” in which he categorizes the abundance coalition along a spectrum from “Red Plenty Abundance” on the Left to “Dark Abundance” on the Right. As I read the essay, I wondered precisely where to place “Big-Ass Truck Abundance”—the term that Matt Yglesias, inspired by Senator Ruben Gallego, gave to the version of abundance in which all Americans can afford, well, a big-ass truck.

Big-Ass Truck Abundance is quite different from mainline Abundance, which tends to index for the interests of coastal urban transit-riding knowledge professionals. As Jennifer Hernandez wrote for The Ecomodernist earlier this year, abundance “only seems to apply to those of us who live in cities, can afford renewable electricity and electric vehicles, or are content to get around by bike or bus.” Big-Ass Truck Abundance would be less concerned about fossil fuel consumption and a car-centric life in the suburbs than “Cascadian” or even Liberal Abundance would be.

Obviously we ecomodernists have our own views on abundance. As Teles puts its, “The Breakthrough Institute’s ‘Ecomodernism’ is unquestionably part of Abundance, but it appears through its influence at almost every place along the Abundance spectrum, from Cascadian industrial policy advocates to Dark Abundance supporters of energy super-abundance.” And just as Big-Ass Truck Abundance probably fits most comfortably within Teles’s “Moderate-Abundance Synthesis,” it occurred to me that within ecomodernism we might find something like “Snowmobile Abundance.”

Snowmobile Abundance would offer a distinct, Promethean way of understanding humanity’s use of abundant technology to manage, protect, enjoy, and transform nature. I think it’s a useful idea because even Liberal and Cascadian Abundance, in Teles’s framework, have little to say about nature, outside of climate mitigation. Klein and Thompson are admirably clear that the abundance agenda offers a better path to decarbonization than degrowth does, but they don’t say as much about other environmental issues, in which the many conflicts between abundance and conventional environmentalism become more pronounced.

And one only needs to take environmentalists seriously to find examples of these conflicts. “The concept of abundance being advanced is too constrained and is predicated on a weakening of bedrock environmental laws,” wrote Defenders of Wildlife CEO Andrew Bowman after Abundance was published. The environmental scientist Dustin Mulvaney went as far as to call abundance “anti-environmental” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, as I dug into in July. And in a report published last week by the Revolving Door Project and the Open Markets Institute, the authors explain “why there is already substantial skepticism towards the Abundance agenda among environmentalists.”

These attitudes stem from some fundamental environmentalist commitments: that nature is singular, pristine, and fragile and must be wholly preserved or risk total collapse; that humans are fallen and must repent through ascetic reconciliation; and that technology and consumerism tempt us away from nature and degrade our spirits.

Snowmobile Abundance would provide a different way of thinking about the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. There is no singular environment, but many environments, which humans steward, protect, manage, consume, and transform in a variety of ways. We have not fallen from nature, but risen from it, having evolved into the most intelligent and capable lifeform in the history of the Earth. Technology liberates humanity, and mediates our relationship with the rest of nature; it can destroy environments, or protect them, or allow us to enjoy them.

Snowmobile Abundance, like Big-Ass Truck Abundance, might also speak to a slice of American society not necessarily drawn to the types of outdoors enjoyment one might stereotypically associate with coastal abundance advocates. And to be clear, I say that as a coastal abundance advocate. I for one am much more accustomed to weekends spent trail running and wine tasting than ATVing or hunting. Indeed, environmentalists are more likely to try to ban these latter activities than to consider them just another way of communing with the natural world. But it’s not obvious to me why protected areas with dirt trails and agro-tourism on low-productivity farms are inherently more legitimate ways to consume nature than snowmobiling.

This is ACC’s whole thing in many ways: to advance the Rooseveltian North American model of conservation and recruit a movement of hunters, anglers, and public land ranchers, to counter the conventional environmental movement. And ACC’s environmentalism, what Menning calls “an environmentalism of dominion,” is quite compatible with ecomodernism, which advocates the decoupling of human dependence upon, but not use or management of, the natural world. An ecomodernist, mostly urban, agriculturally productive, energy abundant future is a future in which humanity needs far less land and natural resources for our well-being. What future societies choose to do with that spared land is up to them.

And it’s not just how we recreate. Snowmobile Abundance would be much more open to forms of geoengineering and ecological intervention than environmentalism’s imaginary of a pristine, fragile nature would accommodate. Snowmobile Abundance is where to go to find de-extinction, weather modification, solar radiation management, genetic engineering, novel ecosystems, and other advanced human methods for altering, and protecting, the natural environments we care about.

I suspect opinions will continue to differ on the depth of the conflict between environmentalism and abundance. Teles’s Cascadian Abundance, for instance, “combines deep environmental commitments, especially around the need for rapid decarbonization, a commitment to urbanism, and a faith in technological solutions to environmental problems.” Bill McKibben, for his part, insists that his narrow solar boosterism is the real abundance agenda (while he’s opposing nuclear energy and permitting reform and high-productivity agriculture and genetic engineering…). But if you’re looking for an environmental framework “to build and invent more of what we need,” you need to spend some time considering an environmentalism of dominion, ecomodernism, and Snowmobile Abundance.

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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recently announced plans to rescind the agency’s so-called “endangerment finding,” a 2009 order that obligated the regulation of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, under the Clean Air Act. “The proposal would, if finalized,” said Zeldin, “amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

“It’s possible that he’s right,” responded the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert.

Everyone is doing a little too much here. Zeldin’s EPA is trolling climate advocates by not merely curtailing emissions regulations, as they did during the first Trump Administration, but rescinding them entirely. And climate advocates, true to form, are feeding the trolls. “When the history of this era is written,” tweeted US Representative Sean Casten of the rescission, “Donald Trump will have been responsible for more deaths than Stalin, Mao and Hitler combined.”

This enthusiastic backlash to Zeldin’s announcement is consistent with the kind of fortress mentality that has characterized the climate research and advocacy community for a long time. But despite the banality of the endangerment finding itself—climate change really does pose risks to humanity—it’s not at all clear the order has had a significant practical effect on policy or emissions. Emissions regulations were not the driving force behind shifts in the US transportation sector over the past twenty years, and had nothing to do with the even larger shifts in the electric power sector.

Climate and clean energy advocates should take a beat, and use the rescission as an opportunity to come up with a regulatory framework for greenhouse emissions that actually makes sense. Because despite various court decisions and statutes conflating them, greenhouse gas emissions and conventional pollutants are actually different along multiple dimensions, and efforts to regulate both of them under the Clean Air Act—a law drafted to cover air pollutants, not emissions—were never going to be particularly successful.

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Straightforward or Symbolic?

Climate researchers, as a group, were displeased with Zeldin’s decision. “There is no evidence that has emerged or been published in the scientific literature in the past 16 years that would in any way challenge the scientific basis of the 2009 endangerment finding,” said Stripe climate scientist and Breakthrough senior fellow Zeke Hausfather. In the New York Times, climate researchers Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang wrote that the rescission “runs counter to both basic logic and a growing mountain of science documenting direct harms from greenhouse gas emissions via climate change.”

And in a straightforward way, Zeldin’s critics are correct. The endangerment finding is remarkably easy to defend on literalist merits. Specifically, the order finds that “the elevated concentrations of the six greenhouse gases in the atmosphere…endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.” That’s it.

But many of Zeldin’s critics make claims about the endangerment finding that get way ahead of the evidence. Burke and Hsiang, for instance, write that regulations based on the endangerment finding “have begun to make a dent in America’s contribution to climate change and the hazards it creates.” Climate scientist Michael Mann said the endangerment finding has “been the primary tool that we have had to actually regulate carbon emissions and meet our obligations under various global agreements to address the climate crisis.”

And while there may be some important symbolism in the regulations, those statements are just pretty hard to defend on the empirics.

When the endangerment finding was established, during Barack Obama’s first term in office, the authority to regulate emissions was relatively new, having been granted by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts vs. EPA (2007). Much more recently, the Inflation Reduction Act amended the Clean Air Act to statutorily define greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants, in addition to the traditional criteria pollutants including lead, sulfur- and nitrogen-oxides, ozone, particulates, and carbon monoxide.

The most concrete way this authority took effect was in the Obama Administration’s introduction of new greenhouse gas standards for the vehicle fleet. These regulations were integrated with long-standing CAFE standards, and continued to drive improvements in fleet-wide fuel economy. The problem, from an emissions standpoint, is that fuel economy improvements have been largely eaten up by gains in engine horsepower and vehicle size and weight, which helps explain why transportation-sector emissions have flatlined for 25 years despite efficiency gains. The best that could be said is that the emissions standards pushed vehicle emissions lower than they might otherwise have been. But CAFE standards already existed for this purpose, so it’s not clear how big this effect was. One now wonders if the CAFE standards on their own would have proved more durable without the endangerment finding.

Separately, Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden all proposed their own greenhouse emissions rules for the electric power sector: Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, and Biden’s CPP 2.0. None of these plans went into effect, let alone “made a dent in America’s contribution to climate change.”

As I’ve written before, that’s no accident of history. In addition to the typical swings in presidential power and ideology over the past decade, there are structural reasons for the Clean Air Act’s underperformance on emissions.

Yes, Trump threw out Obama’s rule, and then Biden threw out Trump’s. But even in between the political ping-ponging, the Judiciary picked each rule apart. The Supreme Court actually stayed the original CPP shortly after its announcement in 2016, and the DC Circuit court remanded Trump’s ACE rule in 2019. Then in 2022, the Supreme Court found that Biden’s Clean Power Plan exceeded its statutory authority by mandating “generation shifting” across power plants instead of limiting emissions reduction to those “within the fenceline” of the individual plants themselves.

In theory, the IRA’s statutory revision of the Clean Air Act should bolster the EPA’s ability to regulate emissions under the law. But the revision does not resolve the fenceline issues, nor how the agency should manage issues of jurisdiction and standing, or evaluate compliance costs of so-called “best systems for emissions control.” The Biden EPA seemed prepared to test these issues with the courts, making some ambitious assumptions about the best system for emissions control within both the power and transportation sectors in a seeming effort to tighten the stringency of the emissions standards. Of course now those standards are moot.

But even if these many legal issues were resolved (a rather large “if”), there remains the practical difficulties of regulating gases emitted at the gigaton-scale, that are non-toxic at any normal concentration, and, indeed, that are essential to all life on earth. Unlike with lead or mercury, it is legitimately difficult, on a scientific level, to identify the discrete harm of a gram or a ton of carbon emissions to a human body, ecosystem, or community. Greenhouse gases by and large are not incidental to the industrial process that emits them: they are, literally, elemental to them. The benefits are immediate and obvious while the costs are diffuse and distant.

Climate economists have attempted to resolve these practical difficulties by integrating centuries of estimated climate damages into a discounted marginal “social cost of carbon” (SCC) for input into regulatory decision-making. Again, this estimation has been subject to political ping-pong, and to crude gamesmanship on the part of activist academics. And as Columbia’s Noah Kaufman, a climate economist who served on President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, recently wrote, “the SCC was always a fragile foundation for policy…[spitting] out virtually any number by replacing one reasonable assumption with another.” Relying on inherently arbitrary SCC estimates, especially those produced for transparently ideological ends, to justify compliance costs of regulatory implementation of a law the judiciary plainly distrusts, seems likely to end, at best, in years or decades of fruitless litigation, not meaningful emissions reduction.

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Move On

The last time Democrats regained political control after the Trump Administration, they rapidly set about restoring the ex-ante climate policy apparatus. The next time Democrats regain control, the risk is that they’ll run the same playbook over again. They would be wise not to. As Kaufman sagely advises, “It may be advantageous to do so without attempting to reestablish a federal government SCC estimate.” The same holds for the Clean Air Act.

It’s understandable that climate advocates are angered at the Trump Administration’s various assaults on their policy accomplishments. But an unreflective defense of the status quo ante is an unproductive path forward. Of course it’s easier said than done to call upon Congress to backfill the Clean Air Act emissions authority with a more tractable policy instrument, whether sector-specific technology standards, emissions fees, or something else. But the alternative is another round of ambitious Democratic rhetoric on climate action in defense of overwhelmingly symbolic regulatory action.

In his latest for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney compares the Trump Administration’s environmental policies to the abundance movement’s critique of procedural sclerosis. Both, he suggests, are “anti-environmental.”

Mulvaney argues that environmental policymaking under Trump recalls the “Wise Use” movement, a tradition from the Reagan era that “viewed the natural world as a resource to be dominated.” But Mulvaney is not just concerned about Trump. He draws a direct connection from the President to “the self-proclaimed abundance movement popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.”

“The discourse of abundance adds fuel to DOGE’s fire,” he writes, “by putting the blame on government regulation and public lands restrictions.”

What are the specific anti-environmental things Mulvaney is worried about? The list is long and includes oil and gas drilling, terrestrial and seabed mining, timber clearing and other forestry projects, de-extinction, public lands sales, and renewable energy development.

To describe all these things as “blatantly anti-environmental” is to conflate quite a bit, a telltale sign that someone is excoriating, not explaining.

So allow me to explain.

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On the Difference Between “Anti-Environmental” and “Anti-Environmentalism”

Mulvaney traces the idea of “wise use” of the environment back to Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt. But the idea that Americans might want to produce commodities from nature as well as protect it dates back at least to the arguments between Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, and the “conservation vs. preservation” debates of the early 20th century.

Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, argued for the wholesale preservation of natural areas like the California Sierras, while Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), argued that “It is the duty of the Forest Service to see to it that the timber, water-powers, mines, and every other resource of the forests is used for the benefit of the people.” Their most famous dispute was over the flooding and damming of Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite’s sister valley, to provide municipal water for the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course, the Interior Department would go on to oversee the construction of the dam at Hetch Hetchy, while Yosemite was and remains protected from major development, suggesting that we can “conserve” some parts of the environment while “preserving” others.

Mulvaney ignores this long-standing divide within environmental policymaking, choosing instead to describe really all kinds of production as inherently “anti-environmental.”

I would offer a small but crucial correction. The activities Mulvaney describes are not "anti-environmental," but rather anti-environmentalist. “Environmental” is a neutral term broadly describing non-human nature. “Environmentalism” is an ideological movement.

And environmentalism is, indeed, just one of many philosophies for understanding the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. Mulvaney even admits this, at one point referring to “Wise Use” as “neo-environmental,” suggesting the existence of a plurality of environmental frameworks. A century ago the argument was between preservationists and conservationists. Today, at least according to Mulvaney, the argument is between environmentalism and abundance.

This is a distinction that I know many abundance advocates would rather elide. But I would encourage my allies in the abundance coalition to notice when folks like Mulvaney keep insisting that abundance and environmentalism are opposites. Because there really is a difference between simply caring about the environment and being an environmentalist.

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Lithium Mines and Solar Panels and Dire Wolves, Oh My

Just consider all the things Mulvaney describes as “anti-environmental.”

He warns about the ecological and environmental justice dangers of mining lithium, uranium, and other geologic commodities, echoing longstanding environmentalist anxieties over mining. But mines occupy less than 1% of the Earth’s ice-free land, and the minerals they produce are only more and more important in the era of clean energy development and climate action. Would it be anti-environmental to use a trivial portion of the Earth’s landscapes to produce an abundance of clean energy? Not obviously so.

And what about that clean energy? Mulvaney takes a dig at the solar industry for “rebranding itself” under the moniker of energy dominance since Trump’s re-election, writing that “solar projects on public lands in the West tend to cause more environmental degradation and ecosystem impact than projects sited elsewhere.” Not in Mulvaney’s Back Yard, I guess.

Of course the mounting land-use disputes over solar and wind development are legion, and somewhat inevitable for technologies with such an inherently large land footprint. But it’s curious that in an article otherwise exercised over the environmental sins of the Trump Administration, Mulvaney actually takes Trump’s side here. Trump, after all, continues to push his Treasury and Interior Departments to erect as many bureaucratic obstacles as possible to solar and wind development. Does that make Trump pro-environmental, in Mulvaney’s understanding? He doesn’t exactly say.

Or consider the forests. Mulvaney warns about the Trump Administration’s orders to limit environmental review of timber harvesting, and for the USFS itself to increase timber production by 25 percent. Environmentalists have long cast timber producers as villains, neglecting the fact that agriculture, not logging, is the chief driver of deforestation. Indeed, timber is actually a case study of the absolute decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts—absolute global wood consumption peaked in the early 1990s, even as global populations have risen by over three billion people. More to the point, Mulvaney ignores that foresters now understand mechanical thinning of forests as essential to mitigating the megafire risk that has accumulated over a century of fire suppression. Today, the biggest opponents of responsible forest management come from the institutional environmental movement, who use laws like NEPA to obstruct forest management projects until wildfires burn down the forest anyway.

The list goes on. Mulvaney decries the recent de-extinction of the dire wolf, something I for one consider to be a remarkable victory for conservationists. He says that harvesting seafloor nodules could be an “environmental disaster,” while research suggests that seafloors are less biotically sensitive ecosystems than those on the land.

What counts as pro-environmentally friendly in all of these cases is deeply contested, and depends on which environments we’re talking about, and what the benefits are to the local and global commons. While Muir wanted to protect Hetch Hetchy Valley, Pinchot wanted to consolidate reservoir construction in one geography while minimizing it elsewhere. While environmentalists like Mulvaney describe all technological development in conspiratorial terms, we ecomodernists and abundance advocates understand that technological innovation and decoupling can actually strengthen the protection of the natural world.

So if you want to see more solar energy, critical minerals production, responsible forest management, and de-extinct species, you might not be anti-environmental, but you may be anti-environmentalist. And that’s not a bad thing.

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The Senate Finance Committee recently released draft text of a budget reconciliation proposal that undertakes major redesigns of federal clean energy, clean vehicle, and advanced manufacturing incentive programs articulated in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This draft text significantly modifies the House “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) reconciliation proposal, passed on May 22nd.

Designing national energy policy through budget reconciliation is inherently problematic, and there remains significant room for improvement of the bill even within the bounds of Republicans’s political imperatives in this Congress. But the Finance Committee’s proposal represents a major improvement over the House’s OBBB text. The Senate version would extend policy support to nascent energy technologies that would be phased out under the House proposal—including nuclear, geothermal, and power plants with carbon capture—while rationalizing so-called foreign entity of concern (FEOC) provisions to make federal infrastructure and innovation policy more workable.

We at Breakthrough have long argued that federal energy technology subsidies should prioritize innovation and emerging industries. Though crudely, the Senate Finance legislation moves policy in that direction, by phasing out subsidies for the most mature low-carbon industries: solar, wind, and electric vehicles. If passed, the bill could set the stage for further necessary reforms to the nation’s energy and infrastructure policy, including demonstration and commercialization support for nascent industries, an overhaul of environmental siting and permitting regulations, and streamlining of the transmission planning and investment process.

Below, we walk through our analysis of the Senate Finance Committee’s bill text, and offer recommendations for final legislative improvements as the OBBB framework nears the finish line.

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Subsidizing Innovation, Not Emissions Reduction

Like the House bill, the Senate bill eliminates the IRA provision under which the technology-neutral electricity tax credits phase out at some point in the far future after power-sector carbon emissions fall below a threshold of 25% of 2022 levels. Instead, the legislation phases out tax credits on a technology-by-technology basis.

By implementing an earlier phaseout of clean electricity credits for solar, onshore wind, and offshore wind, the Senate Finance Proposal achieves an additional $130 billion in fiscal savings over the 2025-2035 period relative to the House version. Only new facilities beginning construction this year will be able to qualify for the full credits, with steeply declining partial credits available for projects commencing construction in 2026 and 2027. Over a ten-year timeframe, the Senate proposal may achieve approximately $639 billion in savings relative to current IRA policies, while the House proposal may represent savings of $509 billion.

Figure 1: Comparison of estimates of 10-year spending projections Senate Finance Committee Draft Bill, House Reconciliation Bill, Breakthrough Institute IRA reform proposal, and current IRA policy. Senate proposal estimates do not account for significant changes to 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit and 45Q Carbon Oxide Sequestration Credit and assume identical spend as the House proposal for these credits.

Despite an even more austere early cutoff to federal subsidies for wind and solar, the Senate Finance draft improves upon the House bill by maintaining greater investment in emerging clean energy technologies like advanced nuclear, advanced geothermal, energy storage, and carbon capture.

While renewable advocates balk at the earlier phaseout to wind and solar credits, the Senate draft offers some silver lining for the renewables sector compared to the House version. The Senate’s approach preserves the investment tax credits for energy storage facilities that increasingly accompany solar and wind projects in practice—a smart policy strategy that will continue to help increase renewables’ electricity market value proposition while bolstering U.S. grid reliability. A growing fraction of solar projects in particular now use on-site battery storage systems, with over 26% of projects in recent years leveraging battery systems. The energy storage investment tax credit is technology-neutral, and thus also plays a key role in accelerating the commercialization of novel battery, thermal, and other energy storage technologies. The Senate’s draft also makes much-needed improvements to convoluted provisions barring credit eligibility for foreign entities of concern (FEOC) that might have posed extreme bureaucratic compliance difficulties even for taxpayers with negligible links to FEOC.

Ultimately, trading off preserved credit eligibility for emerging energy technologies like advanced nuclear, geothermal, and carbon capture that have yet to achieve commercial scale in exchange for accelerated phaseout of solar and wind tax credits represents a positive revision. The House bill favors a longer off-ramp for solar and wind tax credits but applies the same timing of credit phaseout for clean firm electricity technologies like geothermal and hydropower. Additionally, the House bill requires energy projects to have commenced operation by the applicable year to earn credit eligibility, a burdensome restriction that disproportionately penalizes clean firm technologies with longer construction lead times. As such, the Senate text arguably prioritizes innovative early deployment of clean firm energy sources far better than the House proposal.

Crucially, the Senate version also proposes much-improved FEOC restrictions. The draft text increases limits on individual ownership, total ownership, and debt held by FEOCs, avoiding the risk of unnecessarily excluding companies with nominally low shares of FEOC ownership. This change also mitigates the risk that FEOC entities could disquality U.S. taxpayers from incentives simply by purchasing minimal amounts of stock or debt.

The Senate draft also articulates more sensible restrictions that target the ability of FEOCs to exercise “effective control” over electricity generation or transmission, or the manufacturing of critical minerals and components. In principle this represents a superior approach to the House bill, which sought to crudely bar projects and manufacturers from utilizing even negligible intellectual property or quantities of imported material obtained from FEOC countries. However, these “effective control” provisions still leave considerable room for improvement.

Overall, the Senate proposal turns a set of draconian restrictions widely critiqued by industry and policy stakeholders as “unworkable” into a more reasonable and responsible set of guardrails to control future eligibility for selected tax credits. Still, legal experts have pointed out a number of remaining issues: the difficulty of assessing broad ownership of municipal bonds issued by public utilities, unclear definitions for “manufactured products” and coverage of sourced components used to calculate metrics of FEOC influence, and burdensome obligations for taxpayers to collect information on suppliers’ ownership, debt holdings, and counterparties. Overall, policymakers should prioritize clear and easy-to-follow FEOC rules that avoid adding additional burdensome red tape to energy infrastructure construction. It would be a mistake to obsess over taxpayers’ peripheral FEOC exposure to the point of imposing significant bureaucratic delays on the development of new U.S. energy projects.

If revised further to resolve such issues surrounding definitions and information constraints, the Senate’s more pragmatic approach to FEOC restrictions can better unlock the full long-term value of the clean electricity credits for technologies like nuclear and geothermal, while similarly benefiting domestic manufacturing supported through the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit, such as new U.S. critical mineral projects and battery gigafactories.

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Our Recommendations

We would recommend several substantial reforms to the OBBB proposals that, we recognize, are unlikely to materialize in the limited political window before final bill passage. While the Senate Finance draft appropriately rebalances clean electricity subsidies to prioritize innovation, in other sectors it does the opposite, extending subsidies for commercially mature and environmentally harmful biofuels while phasing them out for nascent clean hydrogen technologies. We would recommend the opposite. Likewise, while both the House and Senate versions phase out consumer subsidies for electric vehicles, we would emphasize the strong national interest in strengthening America’s battery and critical minerals supply chains. While the long-term future of American-made EVs was unstable long before OBBB negotiations began, the long-term strategic value of battery manufacturing and critical minerals production—for hybrids and EVs, yes, but also for drones, artificial intelligence, grid-scale storage, and more—remains obvious.

But recognizing the clear political constraints and shrinking negotiation space for reforming IRA policies in the context of a broader budget reconciliation showdown, we offer the following high-leverage legislative changes that come at low cost, zero cost, or even positive savings while producing beneficial impacts for U.S. energy policy and energy innovation.

Allow regulated utilities to opt-out of normalization tax rules

This no-cost proposal would allow regulated state utilities to opt out of normalizing capital costs over the entire period of asset depreciation and instead take the full capital cost upfront, benefiting from the clean electricity investment tax credit immediately at the start of project construction. By reducing the initial capital expenditures and financing costs for capital-intensive baseload energy technologies like advanced nuclear, geothermal, hydropower, and carbon capture, this tax normalization change adds significant market value to the investment tax credit at no additional fiscal costs. Currently, utilities are not able to do this.

We recommend incorporating this tax normalization opt-out option into the reconciliation package. Text for this provision is currently already drafted in the Accelerating Reliable Capacity Act of 2024.

Incorporate simpler and clearer revisions to FEOC restrictions

Congress faces a tradeoff between rigorous prohibitions that ensure that little if any benefits from tax credits flow to FEOC entities, and simpler safeguards that reduce the time and cost burdens of compliance for taxpayers. Policymakers should recognize that onerous restrictions that heavily limit or delay new domestic investments into energy and manufacturing projects will do far more to hurt American strategic competitiveness long-term. A number of improvements can reduce bureaucratic regulatory burdens while maintaining sensible guardrails that restrict FEOC eligibility for tax credits:

• An exemption that excludes publicly-issued municipal bonds from the calculation of the share of debt in the aggregate held by FEOC entities. This resolves the infeasibility of tracking ownership of publicly-traded bonds—a challenge that would otherwise hinder public utilities from securing federal incentives.

• Specific lists and definitions of manufactured products and components included in the cost ratio calculation for assessing the potential degree of “material assistance” sourced from FEOC entities. Considering the types of energy and manufacturing projects that these “material assistance” provisions apply to, Congress should formulate specific and clear lists of which components constitute a priority for avoiding FEOC sourcing. For example, for batteries the cost ratio calculation could be limited to the total costs attributable to contained critical minerals, electrode active materials, and battery cells, with sourcing assessed on a direct supplier basis.

• Limit the scope of the “material assistance” restrictions to Specified Foreign Entities and Foreign-Controlled Entities. This meaningfully reduces the daunting information burden on taxpayers to obtain exhaustive information about the ownership, debt holders, and counterparties of all third-party suppliers in their upstream supply chains.

• Restore more reasonable limits on the statute of limitations and accuracy-related penalty thresholds for errors in determining material assistance from prohibited foreign entities. Additionally or alternatively to the preceding point, we note that the dramatic changes to the statute of limitations and penalty thresholds for taxpayer errors in assessing material assistance impose significant unnecessary risks upon taxpayers seeking to claim electricity production or investment credits or manufacturing credits, and risk discouraging private sector investment in these sectors. Particularly given the significant ambiguity of the material assistance provisions and dependence on subsequent guidance, such added penalization of any errors may severely limit the usefulness of these incentives for industries like geothermal, nuclear, and critical minerals.

Restore stringency on pollution and land consumption safeguards for clean fuel production tax credits and biomass-fired electricity

We would advocate for getting rid of federal subsidies for biofuels and biomass-fired electricity entirely. These subsidies support clearly commercialized technologies and possess no innovation policy basis.

Barring full repeal of these provisions, we recommend striking Section 70512(e), which modifies 45Y and 48E. This provision would require the Treasury Secretary to draw from specific scientific literature that would skew the process of identifying certain combustion technologies as zero-emission, thereby qualifying additional technologies for subsidies without rigorous scientific basis. Doing so would end-run the robust process underway at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to make those determinations based on sound evidence-based assessments. We think Congress should respect the NREL process, which will yield more research-based and durable conclusions.

Concerning 45Z for clean transportation fuels, we recommend against proceeding with the changes reflected in Section 70521(b)-(c). These provisions make changes to lifecycle emissions calculations that would undermine land consumption safeguards embedded in the U.S. government’s historic approach to biofuels. The provisions would likely accelerate deforestation and increase agricultural land use, undermining key benefits of the credit. Also, the elimination of negative emissions rates would compromise the technology neutrality of 45Z. These changes would likely preserve incumbent, established biofuel feedstocks and production pathways at the expense of any innovation that 45Z might drive. We believe other provisions in this section should suffice to protect domestic interests without foregoing essential environmental protections.

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Restore a longer timeline for critical mineral Advanced Manufacturing Production Credits

The Senate text commits a major strategic mistake by phasing out production tax credits for domestically-produced critical minerals between 2031-2033. Previously, the 45X production tax credit contained no phaseout provision for critical minerals production. The critical minerals sector faces uniquely long lead times that require a longer credit eligibility period in order for production tax credits to generate adequate market investment and project development.

Even a highly-ambitious effort to establish new domestic critical mineral projects would likely only see an initial wave of projects commencing production in the early 2030s, by which time they would only be eligible for a handful of years’ of partial tax credit eligibility for critical materials produced. This does not constitute a market incentive sufficient to drive growth in a domestic minerals sector at a level remotely commensurate with U.S. strategic needs. We would recommend that credit phaseout for domestic critical minerals production commence after the year 2039.

Where to Go From Technology Favoritism

In its departure from a crude blanket phaseout of tax credits starting several years from now, the Senate is, in a sense, returning to the “picking winners and losers” approach that skeptics of federal energy subsidies have long criticized. Those criticisms were not without merit; indeed, wind and solar’s success arguably came at the expense of industries like nuclear energy, which for decades shared neither the federal deployment subsidies, state-level mandates, or favorable market design conditions that renewables enjoyed. But the “technology-neutral” approach adopted under the IRA also misaligned federal subsidies with the discrete needs of respective technology industries.

Solar and wind energy both now enjoy established commercial markets nationwide and will continue to be built in larger quantities should these technologies achieve additional cost improvements over time. More important than subsidies for wind and solar today are energy storage and permitting and interconnection reform, while subsidies and other commercialization supports remain important for the nuclear and geothermal sectors. By phasing out subsidies for mature intermittent technologies like wind and solar, while extending them for less mature “clean firm” technologies like enhanced geothermal and advanced nuclear, the Senate’s OBBB proposal takes a more strategic (and less expensive) approach to subsidizing energy technology innovation. For other technologies like hydropower and large light-water nuclear reactors, federal policy can intervene to end a long period of stagnant development and policy-imposed penalties, and rejuvenate these industries for powerful new growth in the 21st century.

Energy systems, as a general rule, rely on a diverse portfolio of assets to optimize for lower costs and high reliability of service. As such, refocusing federal energy subsidies on clean, firm technologies and energy storage will actually benefit all energy technologies collectively. Synchronous generators provide the stability and flexibility that in turn enable greater development of variable renewable generation. Meanwhile, firm baseload generation can catalyze both old and new energy-intensive, high-utilization industrial infrastructure, from data centers to electric arc furnaces to semiconductor-grade polysilicon fabs. The policy rationale is clear: clean, firm energy is an excellent target for public sector support.

But just as firm energy technologies languished for years without federal support while wind and solar received generous tax credits, policymakers should keep in mind that technology favoritism is ultimately an imperfect proxy for innovation policy that has no hard and fast rules. Variable renewable technologies can still be highly innovative, and if future breakthroughs in highly-efficient perovskite solar cells or floating offshore wind offer opportunities that could strengthen America’s energy landscape then a future Congress should absolutely target energy spending accordingly. For now however, if Congress must pick, clean, firm energy is the sensible choice.

The recently released text of the Republicans’ proposed reconciliation legislation would significantly curtail the major tax incentives passed under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” would likely, if enacted, cripple nascent energy industries including the advanced nuclear, enhanced geothermal, hydrogen, energy storage, and carbon capture sectors. The legislative text also introduces strict restrictions meant to block tax credit eligibility for Chinese, Russian, and other foreign entities of concern (FEOC) that would make it nearly impossible for U.S. businesses to claim key credits. These cuts would have knock-on effects in heavy industry, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, liquefied natural gas, and other sectors critical to American economic competitiveness which, at least up to this point, are driving the fastest growth of electricity consumption the nation has seen in decades.

This sledgehammer approach to IRA reform would be a significant overcorrection by Republicans. According to Breakthrough’s analysis, more strategic cuts to the tax credits, targeting only the most mature energy industries subsidized under the IRA, could achieve the bulk of the budgetary savings the Big Beautiful Bill would, without kneecapping emerging industries like nuclear, geothermal, and critical minerals. Our updated calculations reaffirm that our proposal would yield on the order of $449 billion in fiscal savings, compared to the JCT’s new estimate of $496B in savings from the Big Beautiful Bill (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Comparison of estimates of 10-year spending projections for the Breakthrough Institute’s updated proposal for energy technology tax credit restructuring, the new Big Beautiful Bill reconciliation proposal, and the existing Inflation Reduction Act, grouped by major tax credit categories.

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Last month, we proposed stricter limits on federal tax credits for electric vehicles, and region-based phaseouts for technology-neutral clean electricity tax credits—the production tax credit (PTC) and the investment tax credit (ITC)—once a given technology begins contributing 5% or more of a region’s annual electricity generation. Our updated Breakthrough Institute proposal maintains the same policy recommendations as our previous analysis, but incorporates 1) updated estimates of Current Policy spending based on the JCT scoring of additional savings/expenditures associated with the Big Beautiful Bill, 2) inclusion of continuing legacy expenditures from already-built facilities qualifying for older variants of the PTC, and 3) incorporating technologies eligible for the PTC and ITC other than onshore wind and solar photovoltaic.

The vast share of fiscal savings associated with our proposal originate from our regional generation-based threshold for credit phaseout, based on North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) regions. Such a regional threshold approach would quickly make solar photovoltaics and onshore wind, two industries that have benefitted from these subsidies for decades, ineligible for federal electricity subsidies in most of the country.

This would hardly be a death knell for renewables. According to recent analysis published by John Bistline and Asa Watten, as much as 72% of the power-sector investments projected to occur under the IRA—overwhelmingly solar and onshore wind—could move forward with or without the subsidies. This makes sense. Solar and wind are more mature, global industries with affordable modular components, deep supply chains, and growing experienced workforces behind them. Solar and wind deployment will likely continue at market scale, especially if Congress enacts meaningful reforms to federal permitting and interconnection procedures, which have become perhaps the chief constraints on renewable energy investment. Our restructured credit design thus phases out subsidies for wind in solar in regions where they are already successful, while refocusing remaining federal support on regions where investment has lagged.

While subsidies are no longer essential for supporting solar and onshore wind technologies in the United States, the same cannot be said for advanced nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal power plants, green hydrogen, or natural gas plants with integrated carbon capture. Many of these more nascent technologies only recently became eligible for federal technology subsidies with the enactment of the IRA, and still face daunting regulatory obstacles to demonstration and deployment. First-of-a-kind and other early-stage projects in these sectors rely critically on financing enabled through tax equity markets. An earlier phaseout of clean electricity credits starting in 2029 is far too rapid to properly incentivize development and commercialization of advanced geothermal, advanced nuclear, or carbon capture technologies. Proposed language that limits credit eligibility to plants that commence operation in the applicable year also cripples the credits’ effectiveness as a market incentive, for example by effectively excluding any advanced nuclear projects—none of which are anticipated to enter service by [2029]—from qualifying for the credits.

The scale of these proposed changes to the IRA would likely have a chilling effect on investment that is difficult to predict with confidence. But while the legislation’s impact on mature renewables industries is uncertain, the effect on nuclear, geothermal, and other nascent industries is much more certain devastation. This is a precise misallocation of public support, further advantaging mature energy technologies at the expense of less mature ones. Solar, wind, and electric vehicles are not only long-time beneficiaries of federal deployment subsidies, but of a gauntlet of state and local incentives including renewable portfolio standards and state-level tax credits for EV purchases and leases. Taking a “technology-neutral” approach to clean energy subsidization, and to its repeal, is naive—different technologies require different levels and kinds of public support. Less mature sectors, like the constellation of advanced reactor startups and intricate geothermal exploration operations, need time and resources to demonstrate and deploy technology, achieve technological learning, develop workforces and supply chains, and activate capital markets.

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Other proposed tax credit changes exhibit this same flawed understanding by prematurely phasing out the consistent support needed to establish promising emerging technologies. The total and immediate phaseout of the 45V Credit for Production of Clean Hydrogen would place U.S. industry at a severe disadvantage in global efforts to unlock low-cost hydrogen fuel production from water, agricultural wastes, and hydrocarbons. Similarly, phasing out the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit for critical minerals after 2031 would constitute a major strategic error given the long lead times needed to develop new domestic critical mineral mining and processing operations. A significantly longer 45X tax credit timeframe for critical minerals is required to meaningfully sustain and attract new capital investment in critical minerals. The proposed 45X credit phaseout at the end of 2027 for domestic production of wind energy components also risks unnecessary damage to major U.S. shipbuilders and manufacturers producing wind turbine installation vessels and wind turbine parts, foundations, and moorings, while yielding minimal fiscal savings.

Finally, the proposed reconciliation package introduces onerously restrictive “foreign entity of concern” (FEOC) limitations that may practically prevent even fully U.S.-based businesses from claiming the clean electricity (45Y, 48E) and advanced manufacturing (45X) tax credits in any form whatsoever. Draft language stipulates that receipt of any “material assistance” from a FEOC—with material assistance defined as any component, subcomponent, critical mineral, assembly part made by, or patent or copyright held by a FEOC entity—makes a taxpayer ineligible to claim clean electricity or advanced manufacturing tax credits. These “material assistance” provisions are vaguely defined and contain no de minimis threshold, suggesting that a new geothermal power plant would risk credit ineligibility simply for using aluminum wire trays sourced from a Chinese supplier, or that a new aluminum refinery risks credit ineligibility for installing Chinese instrument panel parts. Given the globalization of supply chains for not only minor but major components of mineral, metal, and electricity generation facilities and equipment, compliance with these FEOC restrictions will prove practically impossible, as will effective enforcement of such minute criteria.

Other FEOC rules pose similarly worrying obstacles. “Material assistance” also includes “any design of such property which is based on any copyright or patent held by a prohibited foreign entity or any know-how or trade secret provided by a prohibited foreign entity.” Overall, this provision would bar beneficial intellectual property transfer to the United States, mistakenly identifying IP transfer as a threat rather than focusing more strategically on foreign ownership or control. The basic language exhibits major flaws, failing to define terms like “know-how” or “trade secret”. Meanwhile, this copyright and patent restriction sets an absurdly high bar for credit eligibility, suggesting that even if a Chinese military scientist defected to the United States and gifted trade secrets to a U.S. rare earth permanent magnet producer, that producer would become ineligible for advanced manufacturing tax credits because some Chinese company would technically still hold the patents for said technology.

Due to prohibitive difficulties involved in both private sector compliance and federal guidance and enforcement, we suggest that the U.S. would benefit from eliminating “material assistance” FEOC restrictions in any revised reconciliation proposal. We would propose that any FEOC provisions added to IRA tax credits simply adopt the FEOC criteria used in the CHIPS Act, which deems businesses to be FEOCs if 25% or more of their “board seats, voting rights, or equity interest” are cumulatively held by a covered nation’s national government, subnational governments, or key senior political figures. We also suggest that a more reasonable phase-in period of two years post-enactment would provide beneficial flexibility for relevant industries to adapt to new FEOC rules. These common-sense improvements eliminate the danger that overly restrictive FEOC criteria will inadvertently render all advanced manufacturing projects and power generation facilities credit-ineligible.

A few other proposed tax credit changes run the risk of misallocating federal support away from critical energy sector priorities and towards largely wasteful and ineffective spending categories. Starting in 2028, the new reconciliation proposal phases out the 45U tax credit meant to correct market imbalances and support existing nuclear power plants at risk of near-term closure. Such a change risks prematurely shutting down some of the nation’s most powerful, reliable, and already-built electricity generation facilities at a time when national electricity demand confronts significant future growth. Meanwhile, the draft proposal seeks to not only maintain but extend the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit, which predominantly supports already well-developed biofuels like corn ethanol that produce few environmental benefits and impose higher corn, soy, meat, and dairy prices upon American households. Treasury and JCT estimates project that the 45U credit and 45Z credit would cost a comparable amount—on the order of $20-$30 billion over the budget window. Yet the 45U Zero-Emission Nuclear Power Production Credit clearly aligns far better with America’s near-term strategic and economic priorities.

Reliable and flexible “clean firm” electricity technologies, like advanced nuclear and geothermal, are certainly poised to benefit from the Democrats’ signature climate legislation passed during the Biden Administration. But they are also the subject of significant recent bipartisan legislation, including the ADVANCE Act and the Infrastructure Innovation and Jobs Act. Prematurely gutting federal support for these critical emerging industries would undo much of the bipartisan energy innovation progress achieved in recent years, instead sustaining the zero-sum partisan energy politics that have persisted since the IRA’s passage.

In turning to energy tax credits for opportunities to realize fiscal savings, Republican members of Congress must navigate a difficult balance between realizing budgetary priorities and restructuring incentives that hold the potential to supercharge U.S. energy technology competitiveness for the next two decades. As intensifying global competition in strategic sectors like artificial intelligence and critical metals has made abundantly clear in recent months, the world power that masters a future industrial and economic landscape built upon affordable, abundant energy stands to reap rich rewards. This new budget reconciliation proposal risks hindering American efforts to achieve future energy system mastery, without delivering substantively more fiscal savings than alternative proposals that strategically concentrate federal policy efforts on the innovative technologies and sectors that will benefit the most from support.

Federal financial support is the rule, not the exception, in energy technology innovation. Combined cycle gas turbines, shale fracking technologies, and conventional nuclear reactors, lithium-ion batteries, solar photovoltaics, and wind turbines all relied substantially on various forms of federal support in their nascency, including temporary tax credits for commercial deployment. Policymakers would likewise do well to recognize that their counterparts overseas are hardly holding back in prioritizing the commercialization of revolutionary new energy technologies. China currently has over 30 large and small nuclear reactors under construction simultaneously. But the United States can reshape federal policies and rise to meet this challenge—just as it has before.

The recently released legislative text represents the beginning, not the end, of reconciliation negotiations. Already Republicans in the Senate have signalled a desire to revise the reforms to the IRA proposed by their colleagues in the House. As negotiations continue, Republicans should rebalance reforms to prioritize innovation in critical emerging energy industries. Doing so would give both parties some skin in the game of federal energy innovation policy, and establish a bipartisan baseline from which to pursue the financing, permitting, regulatory, and other energy policy reforms that must follow any reconciliation package passed during this Congress.

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By Alex Trembath

Colossal Biosciences recently announced the birth (creation?) of three de-extincted dire wolves, a canid species that disappeared 10,000 years ago due to pressure from a changing climate, extirpation by ancient humans, and competition from grey wolves. Colossal produced the pups by editing just 14 genes in grey wolf cells to express phenotypes typical of dire wolves, including white fur, a more muscular jaw, and larger size. Chris Mason, a professor of genomics and advisor to Colossal, hailed the effort as a victory for “both science and for conservation as well as preservation of life, and a wonderful example of the power of biotechnology to protect species, both extant and extinct.”

The rest of the scientific community was, shall we say, more mixed on the accomplishment.

“They’re an abomination,” declared Popular Mechanics. “No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction,” read a headline in The New Scientist.

“A grey wolf with 20 edits to 14 genes, even if these are key differences, is still very much a grey wolf,” paleontologist Nic Lawrence told Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova. “The three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves. Nor are they proxies of the dire wolf,” declared the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which evaluates such things.

But those evaluations are far from uncontested. "I think that the best definition of a species is if it looks like that species, if it is acting like that species, if it's filling the role of that species then you've done it," argued Colossal’s Beth Shapiro. “Those 14 alleles were truly extinct,” tweeted de-extinction advocate Stewart Brand, “and they have been brought back to functional life in a living canid…which could function in the wild as the large apex predator dire wolves used to be.”

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I find these technical disputes fascinating, and they are certainly worthy of scientific deliberation. But I have to admit I can’t help but resent the scientists so obsessed with technicality that they seem unable to appreciate the magic in front of them: we created modern dire wolves! Worse than that, I can’t help but notice that environmental scientists readily cling to scientific technicality only when it suits their political project, while stretching the bounds of technicality when it doesn’t.

Just compare and contrast the wolves to the snail darter, a tiny fish infamous in environmental circles for temporarily obstructing the construction of a dam in the 1970s. Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum, and his colleagues recently argued that the snail darter, actually, never really existed, and is in fact genetically identical to the stargazing darter, which is not threatened. The two subpopulations of fish were originally classified as distinct species based on morphological differences, but subsequent analysis found even these differences to be exaggerated. As the New York Times reported in January, Near “contends that early researchers ‘squinted their eyes a bit’ when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam.”

Near’s critics actually conceded this charge, accusing him of “lumping” the subpopulations together. “Whether he intends it or not, lumping is a great way to cut back on the Endangered Species Act,” Boston College’s Zygmunt Plater told the Times. Plater by implication prefers the “splitting” school of classification, or what other scientists have called “taxonomic inflation.” Splitting has been leveraged to protect subpopulations of killer whales and owls among other things, and its function is something of an open secret in the conservation community. As one scientist put it to National Geographic in 2021, “The potential positive conservation impact of splitting forest and savanna elephants into separate species cannot be overstated.”

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Certainly if morphological traits were enough to “split” the two fish pictured above, then the much larger morphological differences between grey wolves and the de-extincted dire wolves merit separate species classifications. So obviously there is something more than strict adherence to taxonomic classification going on here. As Stephen Jay Gould put it in 1985, “splitting is often more a record of our inability to comprehend variation than a depiction of evolutionary reality.”

Instead of consistently applying scientific principles, environmental scientists selectively apply genetic frameworks to arrive at a preferred result. Scientists lump grey wolves and dire wolves together to oppose hubristic commercial de-extinction efforts, while splitting snail darters and stargazing darters apart to oppose construction of a dam. In each case, genetic diversity—the putative scientific purpose of species conservation—is an afterthought; shrugged off as insignificant in the case of the wolves and as immaterial in the case of the fish.

“This isn’t de-extinction or conservation, but invention,” wrote Vox’s Bolotnikova of the wolves. It’s not obvious to me how one would draw an unambiguous distinction between these things. But it is clear to me that if scientists “invented” the modern dire wolf, they also “invented” the snail darter.

It’s entirely legitimate for scientists to simply prefer wolves and fish the way they are. But they should just be honest about that, instead of expecting science to tell us what to do with them. As Dan Sarewitz wrote in the aptly-titled paper “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse,” our values and goals “must be fully articulated and adjudicated through political means before science can play an effective role in resolving environmental problems.” Instead, the dire wolf doubters and snail darter conservers selectively deploy frameworks like the Endangered Species Act and the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission, calling upon science to settle questions of values.

Conversely, as Ted Nordhaus wrote a few years ago, we could steward nature because we want to, not because “the science says” we have to. (Science, after all, is not a mystical deity that “says” anything.) In reviewing Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky, Ted considered the many ways in which humans engineer and intervene in nature, and the ways in which science fails to resolve the conflicts created in the intervening. As Ted wrote, we don’t protect species and landscapes because science tells us how. We do so “because we think they are beautiful, or at least because we think the idea of them is beautiful. Also, because we can.”

We can preserve existing grey wolves, or we can de-extinct their vanquished dire wolf cousins—or, indeed, we can do both. We can protect stargazing darters, or we can build a dam that wipes out those fish that swim in its way. These are all choices for humans to make. To the extent science can help decide between these choices, it is because science, too, is a human invention. As the American Conservation Coalition’s Isaiah Menning tweeted regarding the wolves, “This is dominion.”

Humans have been genetically engineering wolves for our purposes for tens of thousands of years. They’re called dogs. Just as modern, hyper-productive corn bears little resemblance to its ancient grain ancestors, and just as we still call it the Mississippi River even after humans altered nearly every inch of its shores, the classification of nature is informed, but not decided, by science. Humans named the ancient dire wolves, and we will name the modern ones.

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Congressional Republicans will likely seek to repeal significant portions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) under reconciliation procedures this term, to offset the budgetary cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act and other fiscal measures. Climate and clean energy advocates have raised the alarm over the threat posed by this repeal to clean energy sectors, however, targeted reforms could substantially reduce the cost of the IRA while continuing to support energy innovation.

The bulk of estimated federal expenditures under the IRA are projected to go to the most mature low-carbon technologies: solar photovoltaics, onshore wind, and electric vehicles. These categories account for up to 60% to 80% of anticipated spending over the 2025-2034 period. By contrast, incentives for less mature technologies, like green hydrogen, carbon removal, and advanced nuclear reactors, are projected to cost much less over the next ten years. Repealing public incentives for promising but less mature sectors would greatly imperil technological progress and U.S. competitiveness without saving much in the way of federal expenditures.

This question of technological maturity should guide policymakers’ decision-making as they consider whether and how to reform the IRA. Many early discussions and proposals for scaling back energy-related tax credits simply weigh repealing provisions entirely versus maintaining them as written, or consider phasing out existing incentives nationwide within the next few years. Such efforts may benefit from a more strategic, targeted redesign that can achieve comparable fiscal savings while refocusing public spending towards technologies and projects with high innovation value.

We propose a different approach to reforms to the energy provisions of the IRA, as articulated in the table below. The major changes proposed here focus on the Section 30D New Clean Vehicle Tax Credit for consumers and the Section 45Y and Section 48E “technology-neutral” tax credits for clean electricity production and investment. In total, these revised tax credit structures can realize significant fiscal savings of nearly $421 billion dollars while continuing to prioritize U.S. energy technology leadership and critical minerals supply chain security.

Table 1: Table of Inflation Reduction Act provisions discussed and proposed policy modifications to reduce spending on mature, widely-commercialized technologies.

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45Y Clean Electricity Production Credit and 48E Clean Electricity Investment Credit

45Y and 48E currently phase out nationwide when the Secretary of Energy determines annual power-sector carbon emissions have declined below 25% of 2022 levels, or phase out in the year 2032, whichever is later. This is a perverse incentive structure, threatening the energy system with two important economic distortions: excessive spending on subsidies for commercially mature technologies, and, the subsidization of technologies to the point of imposing price volatility and reliability impacts upon the grid.

The first distortion is already evident. Solar PV and onshore wind comprise the majority of new growth in both U.S. electricity generation and installed capacity, as well as the bulk of projects in the interconnection queues of all major U.S. grid regions. Solar panels and wind turbines are affordable, modular technologies with sophisticated and globalized supply chains and healthy commercial interest across the country.

The second distortion is less acute but becoming more concerning in some grid regions. As intermittent solar and wind grid penetration increases, their marginal value to the grid decreases. Given this widely understood problem of value deflation, federal tax credits pegged to deep emissions targets, as opposed to some measure of commercial maturity or grid penetration, run the risk of subsidizing increasingly uneconomic wind and solar projects. Pushing these sectors to develop well beyond their equilibrium in competitive electricity markets results in electricity grids where a large fraction of generation becomes highly correlated based on spatial and temporal weather patterns. Meanwhile, baseload generation like hydropower, nuclear, and geothermal in such regions risks distorted revenue losses, while accompanying flexible generation from gas bears increasing sensitivity to infrastructure vulnerabilities, gas price volatility, and supply chain constraints such as long lead times for gas turbines. Promising growth in grid battery storage can forestall such challenges but cannot eliminate them entirely without cost-inefficient levels of deployment. Such dynamics pose risks to the reliability of regional electricity systems which could even backfire upon the wind and solar sector.

Pegging subsidization to grid penetration, by contrast, would prevent hundreds of billions of dollars from being spent on mature technologies and avoid market dynamics that push wind and solar beyond value deflation constraints. Rather, federal spending would rightly rebalance support towards technology deployment in less saturated markets, as well as deployment of promising but less mature technologies.

We propose phasing out Section 45Y and 48E credits for individual generation technologies when a given technology exceeds 5% of utility-scale generation within a given North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) region. We estimate that such suggested changes to 45Y and 48E would reduce total federal spending on these credits to $60 billion, a decrease of roughly $361 billion, relative to the Treasury estimate of $421 billion of clean electricity credit spending over the 2025-2034 period and corresponding to an 86% reduction.

Figure 1: Estimated Inflation Reduction Act 45Y clean electricity production tax credit (PTC) and 48E investment tax credit (ITC) spending over a 10-year period under a revised credit structure where credits phase out in each NERC grid region once a given technology exceeds a threshold of 5% or 10% of total annual regional electricity generation, versus 2024 Treasury estimates of 10-year 45Y and 48E spending under the existing IRA.

After the year in which a technology first exceeds this threshold and triggers credit phase-out, the credit would phase out over the next three years as currently articulated in the IRA for the production and investment credits: 100% credit eligibility in the first following year, 75% of the credit in the second year, 50% of the credit in the third year, and nothing thereafter. Small-scale projects under 1 MW in installed capacity and large projects over 1 MW using the same generation technology would both count towards this same 5% threshold for a regional phaseout of the credits.

As Figure 2 below illustrates, this would make both solar and wind eligible for continued subsidies in some regions and ineligible in others. The same 5% cap would apply to other, less-mature low-carbon technologies, including geothermal, offshore wind, and new commercial nuclear reactors, though it is unlikely many of these technologies would exceed the cap within the next decade.

Figure 2: Summary of percentage-based and absolute wind and solar grid penetration by NERC region and for the entire United States in the year 2023.

We argue that Congress should not apply a regional threshold-based phaseout for credits in the Hawaii and Alaska NERC regions as well as in U.S. territories but rather phase out these credits after 2032. Hawaii, Alaska, and U.S. territories will account for a relatively negligible share of program-related spending, and these states and territories represent strategically vital U.S. regions that face greater energy system resource adequacy and reliability challenges than the U.S. mainland.

We disagree with proposals to retain the production tax credit while eliminating the investment tax credit, as suggested in some proposed IRA reform approaches. The ITC possesses far greater importance for nascent, emerging, but promising clean energy technologies like advanced nuclear and advanced geothermal power, by supporting crucial early deployment of higher-cost initial commercial projects. The ITC also naturally scales downwards in magnitude as deployed technologies become more affordable. If anything, policymakers should direct greater scrutiny towards the PTC, which provides a flat subsidy per unit of generated electricity regardless of technology maturity and directly affects the dynamics of electricity market economic dispatch.

Importantly, we would maintain the 48E investment tax credit for energy storage technologies. Storage technologies do not currently confront the same risks of decreasing marginal value on the grid, and in fact help mitigate value deflation problems facing wind and solar in some regions. Storage plays useful general market roles in banking grid electricity when it is abundant and releasing it to consumers when electricity is in higher demand as well as in provision of supporting ancillary grid services key to grid reliability. Many emerging energy storage technologies like thermal, iron-air, molten salt, or compressed air energy storage are also not yet technologically mature, with investment tax credits playing an important role in early commercialization and demonstration.

45U Zero-Emission Nuclear Power Production Credit

The Section 45U tax credit for operating nuclear power plants would be maintained at its current level. The 45U credit applies only to nuclear power plants in merchant markets under threat of premature closure from other policy or economic pressures.

30D Clean Vehicle Credit and 45W Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit

The Clean Vehicle Credit and Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit subsidize two already widely commercialized technologies—electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid vehicles. These credits also apply in principle to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, a less mature category of low-emissions vehicles that has struggled to achieve widespread adoption, and would also apply to innovative emerging vehicle concepts such as extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs). The 45W Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit also provides tax incentives for the purchase of heavier electric vehicles such as freight trucks, school buses, and mine trucks. Estimates of the spending associated with these EV tax credits over the next 10 years range from $96.6 billion to $286.7 billion.

These clean vehicle credits do support important national interests by creating demand for U.S. critical mineral projects and advanced vehicle component manufacturing, helping strengthen U.S. technical expertise and investment in key technological capabilities like direct lithium extraction, battery chemical production, and high-quality metallurgical castings. The domestic critical minerals and domestic component assembly provisions of the 30D Clean Vehicle Credit create a direct business incentive for U.S. automakers to source raw materials and parts from American firms. These domestic sourcing provisions have played a direct, demonstrable role in capitalizing strategically-valuable projects like the Talon Metals nickel mine in Minnesota and the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada.

These credits can be significantly narrowed and improved to focus exclusively on promoting American critical mineral supply chain and manufacturing investments, dramatically reducing the majority of total spending while maximizing economic, security, and competitiveness benefits to the American people. Our proposals are as follows:

• Close the 45W leasing loophole. The Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit currently allows for leased electric vehicles to qualify, allowing leased passenger electric cars to circumvent the domestic critical minerals and domestic component assembly requirements that apply to the 30D Clean Vehicle Credit. This contradicts Congress’s original vision for the clean vehicle credits, which were meant to focus incentives on electric vehicles that utilize U.S. manufacturing and mineral supply chains. Some major U.S. electric vehicle manufacturers currently lease as many as 40% of the EVs that they currently supply to the U.S. market. Closing the leasing loophole represents a considerable reduction in subsidy spending while dramatically refocusing the subsidy on spurring U.S. critical mineral and component assembly projects as originally intended by Congress. The Ways and Means committee estimated the leasing loophole closure to be worth $50 billion in 10-year savings.

• Limit domestic component assembly credit eligibility requirement to U.S. based assembly only. This removes the current allowance for free trade partner eligibility. Treasury should issue guidance to establish a new de minimis threshold for overseas imported components to reduce cases where vehicles fail to meet eligibility due to import of very minor components comprising a negligible fraction of the vehicle’s market value.

• Require clean vehicles seeking the credit to meet both the domestic critical minerals and domestic component assembly criteria to qualify for the credit. This entirely eliminates the current option for partial clean vehicle credit eligibility.

• No change to domestic critical minerals credit eligibility requirements.

By eliminating the 45W leasing loophole and more importantly substantially tightening the stringency with which domestic component assembly and domestic critical mineral criteria are applied to determine credit eligibility, we anticipate these reforms will shrink IRA clean vehicle credit spending by at least $60 billion compared to Treasury’s projected future spending under the law as it exists today ($105.7 billion over the 2025-2034 period). At the same time, this refocusing of vehicle tax credits will maximize national strategic benefits by devoting remaining spending to explicit support of domestic manufacturing, critical mineral supply chains, and related economic activities.

45Q Credit for Carbon Oxide Sequestration and 45V Credit for Production of Clean Hydrogen

Our proposal would also maintain the Section 45Q Carbon Sequestration credit. Unique among IRA tax credits, 45Q actually offers an incentive pegged to marginal, not absolute, emissions reduction. If Congress maintains that reducing emissions is worth $60-180 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (depending on the form of sequestration), then this credit should stand in perpetuity. Carbon dioxide sequestration technologies have not yet achieved widespread commercialization and deployment. Incentives that promote the development and deployment of such technologies position the U.S. for leadership in an increasingly important sector poised to grow as society places increasing value on reliable, verifiable, long-term carbon sequestration. Most government and third-party federal budget estimates also gauge future spending associated with the 45Q credit to be small relative to clean electricity and clean vehicle incentives.

Our suggested reform framework would also maintain the 45V clean hydrogen production tax credit. Like 45Q, the 45V clean hydrogen credit supports technology-neutral development of innovative approaches for hydrogen fuel production from electrolysis, carbon capture, refining of biogas and biomass feedstocks, and from natural geologic resources. These technologies similarly have yet to reach full commercial viability but offer valuable strategic technology leadership opportunities while bolstering future U.S. energy resource abundance. Stringent guidance on 45V credit eligibility and slower-than-anticipated cost improvements in hydrogen electrolyzer systems mean that this credit probably represents a less significant spending factor than originally estimated. As with 45Q, the magnitude of 45V-related spending is also far smaller than the level of spending associated with clean electricity and electric vehicle credits (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Comparison of Congressional Budget Office, Treasury Office of Tax Analysis, and third-party estimates of 10-year spending projections associated with major provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, grouped by tax credit category.

45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit

EPA’s recent Triennial Report to Congress on biofuels finds that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has likely had negative environmental impacts, increased corn and soy prices, and thereby slightly increased meat and dairy prices. Congress should repeal subsidies for first generation crop-based biofuels such as corn ethanol that have received tens of billions of dollars in federal support over decades and are now well-developed technologies. Conservative estimates expect repeal of the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit would save $12.78 billion over 2025-2034. These funds should instead be reallocated to support farmers to grow food and livestock feed more efficiently and expand international markets.

Section 21001 Additional Agricultural Conservation Investments

The Inflation Reduction Act provided $19.5 billion to support climate-smart practices through NRCS conservation programs, like EQIP and CSP. This funding is available through 2027. Whether via new Farm Bill legislation or in a reconciliation bill, Congress should remove the climate guardrails attached to the remaining unobligated funds, given that the previously obligated funding has gone toward practices that reduce yields and offer little in terms of permanent climate mitigation, and add the funding to the baseline of the Farm Bill’s conservation programs. Congress should allocate remaining funds to practices under these programs that improve productivity.

Neutrality is a Technology Policy Tool, not a Tenet

In total, our proposed reforms likely save on the order of $421 billion in federal spending.

The IRA’s expansive technology incentives are a feature, not a bug, of the law. Separate, targeted credits for vehicles, electrolyzers, carbon sequestration, low-carbon fuels, and existing nuclear power plants make sense. And the technology-neutral 45Y and 48E credits are an improvement upon the pre-existing PTC and ITC as well as state-level renewable portfolio policies, which for too long excluded technologies like advanced nuclear reactors.

Technology-neutral policies and regulations offer many advantages. The technological future remains difficult to predict, and policymakers do not know a priori whether competing approaches for producing low-emissions hydrogen from electrolysis or from methane with integrated carbon capture will achieve technological and market advances faster. In regulatory policy, technology-neutral rules that focus on quantifiable performance metrics like public health benefits or structural resilience often yield better and more efficient regulatory systems than efforts to meticulously craft separate sets of rules for a spectrum of technologies constantly entering the market or becoming obsolete, as our work on U.S. nuclear regulatory policy consistently emphasizes.

But technology policy cannot remain neutral to the point of inefficiency. Subsidies as a tool for technology policy are most valuable when leveraged to maximize innovation, and the innovation policy needs of microreactors and enhanced geothermal power plants are simply a world apart from the needs of the now mature, large-scale solar photovoltaic and onshore wind sectors. To the extent that these diverse technology sectors benefit from the same federal subsidy, policymakers’ goal should be to prioritize bootstrapping nascent industries into commercially mature sectors of the American energy economy. Such a strategy requires a targeted and regularly evolving mix of technology-inclusive and technology-specific subsidies, not functionally perpetual technology-neutral spending.

By Alex Trembath

In May 2022, Ted Nordhaus and I participated in a workshop on “supply-side progressivism” organized by Ezra Klein and Steve Teles at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. As Klein and his coauthor Derek Thompson note in the acknowledgements to Abundance, that workshop took place early on the pair's journey towards the eventual publication of their important new book. Below, I’m publishing a short essay we contributed to that gathering.

Much has changed in the intervening three years. During the workshop, some participants still held out hope that the 117th Congress would pass the Build Back Better Act, which of course would go on to die in the Senate and was only fractionally resuscitated in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Speaking of, inflation at the time was mounting but not yet the sharp focus of the public’s political attention, let alone the decisive issue in national elections. Some Democrats still talked about Joe Biden like a modern-day LBJ instead of a modern-day King Lear, and some Republicans still believed their party would nominate someone—anyone—other than Donald Trump in 2024.

Throughout it all, the “Abundance Movement” advanced. Essays were written, organizations were founded, conferences were launched, upzoning and nuclear licensing laws were passed, and divisions were cleaved. The movement has now hit a local maximum with the publication of Abundance. And while many overstate how “left-coded” abundance is, Klein and Thompson are clear that, at least for their purposes, abundance is a project for liberals.

Liberals could certainly use a project. In the wake of a nominally narrow but undeniably devastating defeat for progressives in November 2024, abundance is the watchword of the moment. To its adherents, abundance rises to the occasion of America’s broken institutions, and answers voters’ anxieties about the cost of living and governmental dysfunction. To its skeptics, abundance is little more than conspicuous consumption for the professional managerial class. These arguments are all for the better, in my view. Abundance is still in its natal crucible, where it belongs. Worse than controversy at this point would be consensus. We’ve seen in social-intellectual movements in general, and the climate movement in particular, just how much wasted time, effort, money, and anxiety can come from conformity and certainty. Now is the perfect time to contest, not to crystallize, the meaning and mission of abundance.

All that said, I think Ted and my 2022 warnings to supply-side progressives still hold. Despite the final humiliations of the Biden presidency, many of its graduates continue to insist that Bidenism was the abundance agenda, especially in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. But the Biden team's fecklessness on regulatory reform, and their insistence on weaving climate justice and emissions targets into their “new green industrial policy,” neutered it in precisely the ways Ted and I anticipated. As we wrote three years ago,

Supply-side progressivism is, in this way, an agenda in search of an organized constituency and political institutions capable of realizing it. Without creating those institutions and directly and unapologetically challenging the institutional power of the environmental and public interest movements within the Democratic Party, supply-side progressivism will be stillborn.

Now, clearly, something remains alive and well in supply-side progressivism. Klein and Thompson, for their part, have mounted their own challenge, arguing, among other things, that abundance’s opposite is degrowth. But if that is the case—and it is—then the Bidenistas and other abundance progressives still need to more fully reckon with environmentalism’s foundational commitments to degrowth and limits-based policymaking. There are decades of evidence illustrating these commitments, but one need look no further than the last few years, in the avowed degrowth advocacy from Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, or the opposition to permitting and other regulatory reform by the institutional environmental movement.

How supply-side progressives ultimately untangle the cultural contradictions of abundance is, of course, yet to be seen. Ted and my writing is far from the last word on the subject (we promise). But if the environmentalist and Neo-Brandeisian reactions to abundance are any indication, those contradictions will not be swept under the rug.

You can read our full 2022 essay below.

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Progressivism Against Itself

By Alex Trembath and Ted Nordhaus

Ezra Klein’s “supply-side progressivism” captures the dilemma faced by the contemporary center left project. It invokes, intentionally, Reagan era conservatism, which, beyond its specific and dubious claim about tax policy, speaks to questions of ends as well as means, to the benefits of growing the economic pie, not just fighting over its distribution, to producing more socially beneficial goods, be they better health care, clean energy, or high paying jobs, rather than engaging in zero sum battles over how they are provided, and to the role of the public sector in unleashing productive forces versus restraining or regulating them.

For over a decade, we at the Breakthrough Institute have taken on these questions in our own little corner of the policy world, focused on both the role of government in supporting clean energy innovation and the limits of traditional environmental policies, particularly taxes and regulation, in addressing climate change and building a clean energy economy at the scales necessary to address global warming. More recently, we have further focused on the enormous obstacles to effective climate and clean energy policies presented by foundational environmental policies put in place at the state and federal level in the 1960s and 70s.

But underlying all of these issues are more fundamental questions about the Democratic Party and the progressive project. Contemporary progressivism has been, for a generation, at war with itself, at once promoting government and its capabilities both in theory and fiscally while seeking to constrain and undermine it in practice.

From its origins, culturally and politically, in the New Left revolt against post-war liberalism to its institutionalization in the new public interest movements of the 1970’s to its capture of the Democratic Party over recent decades, contemporary progressivism has simultaneously posited government as solution and problem, arguing that most social problems facing the nation required more government intervention while condemning the institutions and agents of government, excepting fully helping sectors such as education and social welfare agencies, as captured by corporate interests.

The result undermines not only progressive goals but broader public confidence in government and democratic processes. No sooner have voters duly elected representatives to do their will in Washington, and have those representatives duly deliberated and voted to authorize all manner of public projects and appropriate tax dollars toward their fulfillment, than other public institutions set about thwarting those objectives, followed on by all manner of private interests, empowered by law to intervene and litigate, that further set about undoing what Congress and other directly elected bodies have set about to do.

Recognizing that both the institutional conflicts within government and the deputization of parties from without it have statutory bases that were democratically established, it is nonetheless problematic to both the party of government and partisans of government that contemporary progressives are often no less cynical about the capture of government by corporate interests and rentiers than are libertarians and that progressives broadly continue to defend a range of policies that consistently thwart the will of democratically elected representatives and hobble state capacities to deliver necessary and broadly popular public goods.

Our point here is that this is not a policy problem that will be solved with more or better policy wonkery but that it is a political problem that raises deeper questions about what contemporary progressivism stands for, who it represents, and which institutions and constituencies have power within the Democratic coalition.

Educational polarization and the alienation of working class voters of all races from the Democratic agenda has been well ventilated in recent years. Much of that discussion has broadly focused on the disconnect between the social and cultural commitments of progressive elites and the values of the working class constituencies that Democrats still imagine themselves to represent. But no less significant has been the disconnection of progressive elites, heavily concentrated in the knowledge economy, from the material economy and the productivism upon which it depends.

For a generation, progressives and Democrats have largely outsourced land use, energy, resource, and water policy to an institutional environmental movement that was born of the effort to exclude working, non-white, and native people from landscapes that the leisure class wished to claim for itself, came of age in the post-war years standing athwart industrial modernity and technological society, and remains entirely bankrolled and largely staffed and managed by the post-industrial bourgeoisie.

Together with a broader progressive fealty to the Naderite public interest movements, those policies have, in deed if not in word, been regressive, raising costs of energy, transportation, housing, and a range of other essential goods and services that represent an outsized share of household expenditures for those at the bottom of the income distribution while contributing to deindustrialization and the loss of high wage employment accessible to less skilled and educated workers.

The complete incorporation of modern environmentalism into contemporary progressivism could only result, under the best of circumstances, in incoherence, producing a progressivism that sees itself as entirely adversarial toward the corporations and industries that both provide the vast majority of employment for American workers and produce affordable goods and services that working class households depend upon.

Supply-side progressivism is, in this way, an agenda in search of an organized constituency and political institutions capable of realizing it. Without creating those institutions and directly and unapologetically challenging the institutional power of the environmental and public interest movements within the Democratic Party, supply-side progressivism will be stillborn.

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