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Something historic happened in May: For the first time in American history, more electricity was generated in the United States with solar power than with coal.
While natural gas remains our largest electricity source, the crossing of the lines between solar and coal — one representing the future and one the past — is something we may look back on as one of the key moments in the planet’s transition to green energy.
We don’t know whether someone told Donald Trump about this milestone, but if they did, he wouldn’t have been happy. Since taking office, he has waged an all-out war against renewable energy, not just making it more difficult to create and use clean power, but pouring taxpayer money into fossil fuels.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that though Trump has done significant damage to America’s green energy industry — and given us more pollution, higher costs, and more insecurity in the bargain — that industry continues to grow.
There is a global energy revolution underway, and Trump’s efforts to slow it down are destined to fall short.
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What happened to “all of the above”?
After years of Republicans arguing that they favored an “all of the above” energy strategy, they’ve essentially dropped the facade and made clear their vision for the future is one in which we get all of our energy from fossil fuels.
Trump’s rhetoric is almost comically anti-renewable — “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” — and the policy has followed.
Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was a climate horror, rescinding loans for the development of green energy and rolling back tax credits for energy audits, heat pumps, and more. Perhaps the most visible element was the repeal of subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles, which were helping to drive interest in EVs that for the moment are usually more expensive than internal combustion vehicles.
The result has been the near-destruction of the American EV industry. Without the subsidies, demand leveled off, and the car companies that had made huge investments on the presumption of future growth found themselves holding the bag. So GM, Ford, Stellantis and now Honda pulled back on their EV manufacturing plans for the US and Canada, costing thousands of jobs and forcing Americans who want EVs to buy imports (unless you’d like to support the white supremacist trillionaire on a mission to wreck the world by buying a Tesla, which most of us don’t want to do).