If you listen to any Democrat office-holder or candidate right now, with the 2026 midterms on the horizon, one of their key messages right now seems to be "affordability." Here's the problem with that: If you follow the Democratic model, making something "affordable" means "subsidizing it by draining every remaining drop of blood from taxpaying Americans." Just look at the campaign rhetoric so far, with the traditional Labor Day start of the campaign season still some way off, and that's what you'll see. They want the rich to pay their fair share, you see, and they make impassioned statements to that effect with annoying regularity.
The problem here is that most of their constituency, the people who hear this and agree with it, consider the "rich" to be anyone who has a dime more than they do.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when you combine the panic-mongering of the climate scolds with the whining of the socialists, both of whom loudly proclaim the "affordability" of green energy sources, mostly solar and wind power. But the facts simply don't support their claims. Master Resource's Robert Bradley Jr. has details:
A sea-change is occurring in energy policy as realism overtakes magical thinking. But you would not know it from the social media ‘denialists’ (thousands of climate-related professionals) who claim that
- Wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels (some highly dubious studies say so, but government is required for on-grid additions)
- Recent social/wind/battery additions are high (government play: continuing IRA-PTC-ITC subsidies in the U.S.; UK/EU subsidies; central planning edicts)
- Wind and solar are inevitable (no, the fossil fuel era is still young with a global boom under way)
Exactly so. And all of those claims that Mr. Bradley describes are pure horse squeeze.
He continues:
Back to reality. The EV bust in the U.S. is front-page business news. The domestic battery industry is following suit. The demise of the U.S. rooftop solar industry, despite subsidies, is now all about litigation to get out of long-term contracts. Add the EV school bus bust.
And with the coming (July 4, 2026) end of the ITC and PTC for projects not under construction, and the end of the same for any and all uncompleted projects effective December 31, 2027, the boom will turn to bust.
Even the legacy media, the pro-climate outlets, are reporting (intermittently) on the problems of public opinion and public policy from the salad days of Obama and Biden.
That's because their claims, like their predictions of a climate apocalypse, are just wrong. In most cases, that's because, when estimating the costs of a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity, they don't know how to compare apples to apples - in other words, to count all the costs.
Read More: The Future of Clean Energy Is Small, Modular, and Nuclear
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But this is also a political problem. The Democrats are seeing their climate scold claims and their green energy claims evaporate around them. Why? There are several aspects.
First: As we've documented here many times, the political left in the United States and Europe has been hammering the electorate with apocalyptic climate claims for several decades. What's more, the direction of those claims keeps changing; some of us aging Boomers can remember when the panic-mongering was all about a new, imminent ice age. Then it was global warming. Then, later, when neither of those claims proved prescient, they switched to the rather nebulous claim of climate change. Well, the American people are figuring it out; the climate, that vast, chaotic, wholly ungrokkable thing, has always and will always change, but we humans are a small part of it - and people aren't willing to sacrifice their cars, trucks, air conditioning, and cellular phones for it.
Second: The affordability argument is falling flat. For one thing, the various green energy schemes, like solar and wind power, are only economically viable when subsidized. The same goes for their offshoots, like electric vehicles. Facts have a funny way of finding their way out, no matter how much the left would like to preclude them, and the facts of these schemes remain: They are practical in some niche applications, but not on the grid scale. They are intermittent, unreliable, expensive, and have a low energy density. And worse, because they are intermittent, they must be backed up by traditional generation: Natural gas, coal, nuclear power. And those traditional sources? Constant, reliable, high-density.
It's a trifle aggravating that this has to be hammered home every so often, but where the left is concerned, as my grandfather was fond of saying, "you can teach 'em, but you can't learn 'em."
The left has decided to make "affordability" a campaign issue. But in so doing, they have collided head-on with another part of their agenda: Green energy. That won't end well for them, because the one claim they have left is that, if we just tax everyone enough, it will all somehow work out. And if there ever was, in all of human history, a country that ever taxed its way into prosperity, I'm not aware of it.
