Australia used to have a government that loved fossil fuels. But, they lost the election, and their country is now going all in on wind and solar (and the Australian desert definitely has no shortage of sunlight).
It will be similar here. In the long run, Trump will be no more successful in stopping renewable energy than progressives were in trying to stop oil drilling.
A Breakthrough-esque rewrite of the OBBB energy provisions would be better than the current version, but it would still leave Americans with most of the energy cost increases (as downward pressure on prices mostly comes from lots of deployment of established solar and wind, and continuation of existing nuclear, rather than from important but small scale early deployment of more novel techs). And likewise it would slash most of the medium-term reductions in greenhouse and noxious emissions.
Not great! Better than total scorched earth, but actually its own form of scorched earth.
At some point I have to teach myself to stop worrying by reading predictions about the future because ultimately the majority of the population by virtue of scarcity lives in a constant state of near-term thinking and our politics is unable to react to anticipated future threats whether it is global warming, the national debt, AI job losses etc etc.
Our path for the next 10-20 years is now clear. We will warm the planet to well beyond 1.5 degrees and probably trigger one or two climate tipping points, we will hit Social Security and Medicare insolvency, we will do nothing as AI drives structural unemployment higher while unleashing flying drone armies to keep the peasants in check. What happens on the other side of these events is anyones guess.
This is just another reminder reminder that we have the worst possible people running our country at the worst possible time. What a profoundly depressing situation.
I dispute a bit that it's the worst possible time. Most of the problems we're facing are self made, the result of electing sociopathic morons. The biggest structural problems we face, climate change and fiscal challenges, would be addressable except for said morons.
I think AI is a structural issue that is harder to properly face than climate change or fiscal challenges - on those two, we basically know what to do and are gradually groping in that direction. But on AI, we still don’t have a clear sense (though there’s much more possibility of accidentally getting a great outcome).
Keeping expensive coal power plants that raise prices for consumers and also kill people is the perfect encapsulation of current Republican policymaking.
Oo, a little bit of polite shade from Paul Krugman this morning.
"If you’re a pundit who thinks that this is over the top, you’re part of the problem (and you have been wrong every step of the way.) If you’re a Democrat who wants to ignore the ongoing assault on democracy so we can talk about Medicaid — important as it is — you’re hiding your head in the sand."
The BBB may be terrible, but you have made significant mistaken assumptions about energy and economics which undercut your analysis of it.
Corn subsidies make corn cheaper. Then, a bill trying to remove them makes corn more expensive for Americans! Possibly a lot! Just looking at the benefits of a bill without the costs makes any subsidy look good. In fact, subsidies on any specific area encourage overproduction in that area and in the absence of positive externalities generally make everyone worse off. Someone has to pay for that extra corn! Now, here, the subsidies are not just electricity in general, but specific kinds of generation. So its not even the most economical way to reduce electricity prices. In short- you'd expect that in the medium term these subsides make Americans poorer overall.
OK, but maybe we need to invest in renewables/storage for technological reasons? Does it pass the basic classical liberal merit test? I know you're not a classical liberal, but we should at least try to justify government intervention in a way which doesn't apply to everything else in which we don't want more interference (like NIMBYism). If it's a good technology investment, why won't it get private funding? If it's essential to produce energy due to a shortage of gas turbines, won't normal market forces drive the construction just fine? It can't both be necessary in the short term economically and require a subsidy to get a budding technology off the ground!
OK, so we could still argue that research has positive externalities which we should be willing to fund as a public good (in the economic sense of the word). However, most of the funding you've described isn't of that form- its to private companies for specific things owned by them. Even the geothermal company owns their technology- why do they get a subsidy? If their technology has enough promise, they should expect private investment at the correct level. By contrast, this reasoning would justify research into carbon capture (at the source), alternative battery technologies, geoengineering etc.
What makes the government better suited to pick winners in this industry than any other?
You mention a carbon tax, the economically most efficient way to reduce emissions. Note that not any carbon tax is an unalloyed good- too high, and the emission reductions don't offset the costs. When you replace a carbon tax with a hodgepodge of subsidies, the efficiency in terms of carbon reduction per dollar goes down- and when converted into net benefit for the world in terms of
social cost of carbon can easily go negative, though exactly when depends on your SCC estimate. This means that the correct replacement for a politically infeasible carbon tax might be nothing at all- because the inefficient replacement is worse than nothing, even with generous accounting for damage from carbon emissions (global instead of US). You'd be better off trying to pass a very small carbon tax, or a gasoline tax increase, etc. I haven't looked closely but I'd be surprised if this weren't the case for the IRA. For a particularly good example of failure from this line of thinking, look at light truck mileage regulations in the US, which have pushed trucks to become larger due to the less stringent requirements for larger vehicles, resulting in higher emissions! If you want to use less gas, tax gas- avoiding unforeseen perverse incentives like this.
Finally on the subject of GDP growth, I don't see any particular reason to trust your source's model. Overall, it doesn't pass a basic sanity check- to quote Friedman "The true tax on the American people is government spending"- which, must be paid for through taxes, inflation (printing), or borrowing. Your source cites high borrowing crowding out private investment as the damper on GDP growth, but overall the bill reduces government spending, so overall taxes (combination of all three effects) must go down. So it would be surprising if it had negative long term effects on GDP growth through just one of those levers than is offset by the other two!
Note that I'm not making any comment on if the spending reduction is good- it may be a terrible thing with severe consequences, and you could make an argument that some of those consequences might affect future growth, but that isn't the argument they are making.
Yes! It's valuable to let people who are watching at home on TV that people who are motivated to protest can care about these things too, not just Palestine!
Thanks for the tip, I haven’t checked out eggs at Target.
Fun tidbit: shortly after the inauguration, a jar of instant coffee at Target was $7. Last month the same identical brand and size was $13. And I’m talking regular instant coffee, not some fancy schmancy artisanal single-origin rainforest-friendly fair trade coffee!
TRUMP PROMISED LOWER PRICES WHERE IS MY AFFORDABLE COFFEE GODDAMMIT
The best rule of thumb for this is if someone is using some obscure and novel metric to measure something with a widely understood established metric then they are lying. The well understood metric shows that thier thing is worse and they invented the new one to exclusively focus on a benefit while ignoring the drawbacks that make thier thing worse overall.
I agree with the sentiment but I don't think that's what Matt's doing here. Using the word "electrons", which is not just silly but factually wrong, is a tick a bunch of writers have picked up lately because I guess they think it sounds good. Ezra has been using it too
Good post but I want to push back on the Nordhaus argument. The bottom line is that we pull back on "mature" renewables (solar and wind) as they achieve around 10% of the market and put the money toward new, emerging technologies, like geothermal and advanced nuclear.
But why do the tradeoffs have to be among alternatives in the IRA portfolio? I'm not convinced that just because renewables hit 8-10% of the market they'll zoom up the curve and become dominant with no need for more subsidies.* If Nordhaus (and MY) are wrong, then they could really stall out and that would be disastrous. In other words, yes, let's research the hell out of the emerging technologies *and* keep pushing the more mature ones until we have much more confidence that they're truly safe from setbacks.
We should be spending more money on this, and not green eyeshade our way to a worse future.
* I used to be able to get Impossible/Beyond Beef hamburgers at my grocery store. They're gone now. So there's a flameout.
I dream for the day when what we are protesting for is basic accountability from Republicans. Seems as long as they can claim whatever is convenient for them with nobody calling them on what turn out to seem to be flat out lies, then we are always stuck fighting against topics that they weren't serious on, anyway.
Australia used to have a government that loved fossil fuels. But, they lost the election, and their country is now going all in on wind and solar (and the Australian desert definitely has no shortage of sunlight).
It will be similar here. In the long run, Trump will be no more successful in stopping renewable energy than progressives were in trying to stop oil drilling.
Not true that there would be no policy support whatsoever for carbon capture. Still $85/ton just less accessible to startups/non profits.
A Breakthrough-esque rewrite of the OBBB energy provisions would be better than the current version, but it would still leave Americans with most of the energy cost increases (as downward pressure on prices mostly comes from lots of deployment of established solar and wind, and continuation of existing nuclear, rather than from important but small scale early deployment of more novel techs). And likewise it would slash most of the medium-term reductions in greenhouse and noxious emissions.
Not great! Better than total scorched earth, but actually its own form of scorched earth.
At some point I have to teach myself to stop worrying by reading predictions about the future because ultimately the majority of the population by virtue of scarcity lives in a constant state of near-term thinking and our politics is unable to react to anticipated future threats whether it is global warming, the national debt, AI job losses etc etc.
Our path for the next 10-20 years is now clear. We will warm the planet to well beyond 1.5 degrees and probably trigger one or two climate tipping points, we will hit Social Security and Medicare insolvency, we will do nothing as AI drives structural unemployment higher while unleashing flying drone armies to keep the peasants in check. What happens on the other side of these events is anyones guess.
Judging from some comments lately, immigration is the new Palestine.
This is just another reminder reminder that we have the worst possible people running our country at the worst possible time. What a profoundly depressing situation.
I dispute a bit that it's the worst possible time. Most of the problems we're facing are self made, the result of electing sociopathic morons. The biggest structural problems we face, climate change and fiscal challenges, would be addressable except for said morons.
I think AI is a structural issue that is harder to properly face than climate change or fiscal challenges - on those two, we basically know what to do and are gradually groping in that direction. But on AI, we still don’t have a clear sense (though there’s much more possibility of accidentally getting a great outcome).
kind of funny to think of rubio as a republican version of hillary
But what about Pete Hegseth’s emails?
Keeping expensive coal power plants that raise prices for consumers and also kill people is the perfect encapsulation of current Republican policymaking.
Oo, a little bit of polite shade from Paul Krugman this morning.
"If you’re a pundit who thinks that this is over the top, you’re part of the problem (and you have been wrong every step of the way.) If you’re a Democrat who wants to ignore the ongoing assault on democracy so we can talk about Medicaid — important as it is — you’re hiding your head in the sand."
The BBB may be terrible, but you have made significant mistaken assumptions about energy and economics which undercut your analysis of it.
Corn subsidies make corn cheaper. Then, a bill trying to remove them makes corn more expensive for Americans! Possibly a lot! Just looking at the benefits of a bill without the costs makes any subsidy look good. In fact, subsidies on any specific area encourage overproduction in that area and in the absence of positive externalities generally make everyone worse off. Someone has to pay for that extra corn! Now, here, the subsidies are not just electricity in general, but specific kinds of generation. So its not even the most economical way to reduce electricity prices. In short- you'd expect that in the medium term these subsides make Americans poorer overall.
OK, but maybe we need to invest in renewables/storage for technological reasons? Does it pass the basic classical liberal merit test? I know you're not a classical liberal, but we should at least try to justify government intervention in a way which doesn't apply to everything else in which we don't want more interference (like NIMBYism). If it's a good technology investment, why won't it get private funding? If it's essential to produce energy due to a shortage of gas turbines, won't normal market forces drive the construction just fine? It can't both be necessary in the short term economically and require a subsidy to get a budding technology off the ground!
OK, so we could still argue that research has positive externalities which we should be willing to fund as a public good (in the economic sense of the word). However, most of the funding you've described isn't of that form- its to private companies for specific things owned by them. Even the geothermal company owns their technology- why do they get a subsidy? If their technology has enough promise, they should expect private investment at the correct level. By contrast, this reasoning would justify research into carbon capture (at the source), alternative battery technologies, geoengineering etc.
What makes the government better suited to pick winners in this industry than any other?
You mention a carbon tax, the economically most efficient way to reduce emissions. Note that not any carbon tax is an unalloyed good- too high, and the emission reductions don't offset the costs. When you replace a carbon tax with a hodgepodge of subsidies, the efficiency in terms of carbon reduction per dollar goes down- and when converted into net benefit for the world in terms of
social cost of carbon can easily go negative, though exactly when depends on your SCC estimate. This means that the correct replacement for a politically infeasible carbon tax might be nothing at all- because the inefficient replacement is worse than nothing, even with generous accounting for damage from carbon emissions (global instead of US). You'd be better off trying to pass a very small carbon tax, or a gasoline tax increase, etc. I haven't looked closely but I'd be surprised if this weren't the case for the IRA. For a particularly good example of failure from this line of thinking, look at light truck mileage regulations in the US, which have pushed trucks to become larger due to the less stringent requirements for larger vehicles, resulting in higher emissions! If you want to use less gas, tax gas- avoiding unforeseen perverse incentives like this.
Finally on the subject of GDP growth, I don't see any particular reason to trust your source's model. Overall, it doesn't pass a basic sanity check- to quote Friedman "The true tax on the American people is government spending"- which, must be paid for through taxes, inflation (printing), or borrowing. Your source cites high borrowing crowding out private investment as the damper on GDP growth, but overall the bill reduces government spending, so overall taxes (combination of all three effects) must go down. So it would be surprising if it had negative long term effects on GDP growth through just one of those levers than is offset by the other two!
Note that I'm not making any comment on if the spending reduction is good- it may be a terrible thing with severe consequences, and you could make an argument that some of those consequences might affect future growth, but that isn't the argument they are making.
I assume some number of people here are going to No Kings protests this Saturday. Let’s use this thread to brainstorm some useful protest signs.
Stop Trump from Killing Solar and Nuclear
Save Medicaid!
Let Me Have My Vaccines!
...
If I ran a business I would never let a moderate near my marketing department.
This sounds like the centrist version of a leftist showing up to every protest with a palestinian flag
Yes! It's valuable to let people who are watching at home on TV that people who are motivated to protest can care about these things too, not just Palestine!
Evan Bear's suggestion of "Also the Medicaid Cuts Are Bad" mixes the message with a bit of humor.
Cancer Research is Good, Actually
Eggs Are Up to $5
Average Social Security Hold Time Since DOGE: 90+ Minutes
"Eggs Are Up to $5"
/laughs-cries in California, where Albertsons sells eggs for $8/dozen on a good day
Target is $4.49 for me. Sprouts also runs cheaper. Have you tried those? Safeway is $8 still somehow. Huge variance
Thanks for the tip, I haven’t checked out eggs at Target.
Fun tidbit: shortly after the inauguration, a jar of instant coffee at Target was $7. Last month the same identical brand and size was $13. And I’m talking regular instant coffee, not some fancy schmancy artisanal single-origin rainforest-friendly fair trade coffee!
TRUMP PROMISED LOWER PRICES WHERE IS MY AFFORDABLE COFFEE GODDAMMIT
Aldi's and Trader Joe's are the only way to go. Eggs were $11.99 at Ralph's last week!
I worry about the impact of Trump's "big beautiful bill" on our energy future, and so yes, I have written my congressman about this very issue.
However, I also live in Oklahoma, a deep red, fossil-fuel friendly state where 45% of the state's energy production comes from renewable sources. Here, the key to expanding renewable energy is just about convincing rural Oklahomans that wind and solar is in the best interests of their communities. See, e.g., https://www.kosu.org/show/stateimpact-oklahoma/2025-06-12/hurdles-on-the-horizon-as-wind-industry-eyes-eastern-oklahoma-expansion.
"cost per electron" ugh. how many electrons does it take to transfer one joule per second? because *that is how electricity is measured not electrons*
The best rule of thumb for this is if someone is using some obscure and novel metric to measure something with a widely understood established metric then they are lying. The well understood metric shows that thier thing is worse and they invented the new one to exclusively focus on a benefit while ignoring the drawbacks that make thier thing worse overall.
I agree with the sentiment but I don't think that's what Matt's doing here. Using the word "electrons", which is not just silly but factually wrong, is a tick a bunch of writers have picked up lately because I guess they think it sounds good. Ezra has been using it too
I hate how often people use the word “electrons” this way. Just use “watts” - it’s a familiar word, and correct!
Good post but I want to push back on the Nordhaus argument. The bottom line is that we pull back on "mature" renewables (solar and wind) as they achieve around 10% of the market and put the money toward new, emerging technologies, like geothermal and advanced nuclear.
But why do the tradeoffs have to be among alternatives in the IRA portfolio? I'm not convinced that just because renewables hit 8-10% of the market they'll zoom up the curve and become dominant with no need for more subsidies.* If Nordhaus (and MY) are wrong, then they could really stall out and that would be disastrous. In other words, yes, let's research the hell out of the emerging technologies *and* keep pushing the more mature ones until we have much more confidence that they're truly safe from setbacks.
We should be spending more money on this, and not green eyeshade our way to a worse future.
* I used to be able to get Impossible/Beyond Beef hamburgers at my grocery store. They're gone now. So there's a flameout.
My favorite part of all this is the stock market humming along while Trump tries his very best to tank it.
At some point he's going to succeed. I can't fathom what people expect to go well.
I dream for the day when what we are protesting for is basic accountability from Republicans. Seems as long as they can claim whatever is convenient for them with nobody calling them on what turn out to seem to be flat out lies, then we are always stuck fighting against topics that they weren't serious on, anyway.