There’s a peculiar dynamic at work in American energy policy right now, one that reveals something deeper about our political moment than mere partisanship. The facts themselves are straightforward enough. Seventeen of the twenty-two states drawing the highest share of their electricity from wind and solar now enjoy below-average retail power prices. Iowa generates nearly half its electricity from renewables and boasts some of the nation’s cheapest rates. Texas, that great symbol of fossil fuel capitalism, now leads the country in wind generation. South Dakota powers itself substantially on prairie winds.
Thirteen of these renewable-heavy, low-cost states voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
So we find ourselves in a strange situation. The states benefiting most materially from the clean energy transition are politically aligned with leaders ideologically committed to dismantling it. This is not simply hypocrisy. It’s something more interesting: a disconnect between lived economic reality and political identity.
When Markets Outpace Meaning
The market case for renewables has become overwhelming. Utility-scale solar now costs between $38 and $78 per megawatt-hour. Onshore wind runs $37 to $86. These figures undercut coal, nuclear, and increasingly natural gas, even without subsidies. The International Renewable Energy Agency reports that more than 90 percent of new renewable projects globally now cost less than fossil alternatives.
This is the kind of economic shift that should produce bipartisan celebration. Cheaper electricity. Energy independence. Cleaner air. Rural economic development through lease payments to farmers. These are conservative values delivered through market mechanisms. Yet the Republican political class, led by Trump and his energy secretary Chris Wright, continues to frame renewables as economically suspect and ideologically tainted. Why?
Part of the answer is institutional inertia. The fossil fuel industry has spent decades building political relationships, funding think tanks, and shaping the intellectual infrastructure of conservative energy policy. These networks don’t dissolve simply because the underlying economics have shifted.
But there’s something deeper at work. Political identity in America has become less about material interest and more about cultural affiliation. To embrace renewable energy wholeheartedly would require acknowledging that the coastal environmentalists were right about something important. For many conservative voters, that symbolic concession feels more costly than any monthly electricity bill.
The Dignity of Work and Place
There’s also the matter of community identity. Coal towns and oil regions have organized their sense of meaning around extraction industries for generations. When we talk about transitioning away from fossil fuels, we’re not just talking about kilowatt-hours and carbon molecules. We’re talking about the dignity of work, the coherence of place, and the continuity of tradition. Renewable energy offers different kinds of jobs in different kinds of places. Wind technicians instead of coal miners. Solar installers instead of roughnecks. These aren’t bad jobs, but they don’t carry the same cultural weight, the same mythos of rugged masculinity and industrial might.
David Hume observed that reason is the slave of the passions. We might update that: economics is often the slave of identity. People don’t simply calculate their material interests and vote accordingly. They belong to communities, inherit narratives, and seek coherence between their values and their choices.
The Pragmatists Are Already Moving
What makes this moment fascinating is watching the gap widen between political rhetoric and practical action. Texas didn’t become a wind energy leader because of environmental activism. It happened because deregulated markets, abundant land, and favorable wind patterns made it profitable. Iowa farmers didn’t install turbines to fight climate change. They did it for lease income.
These states are quietly building the clean energy economy while their political representatives wage culture war against it. Utilities are signing power purchase agreements for renewable projects because the numbers work. Corporations are demanding clean energy to meet sustainability goals and hedge against fuel price volatility. The market, in other words, has already decided. What remains unsettled is whether our political culture can catch up to economic reality.
A Failure of Leadership
This is where the real cost becomes clear. America needs substantial new electricity generation. Data centers, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence are pushing demand higher. We will build something. The question is whether we build intelligently or ideologically.
Every wind farm canceled for political reasons, every transmission line blocked by fossil fuel lobbying, represents not just lost megawatts but lost opportunity. We’re choosing expensive nostalgia over cheap abundance.
The tragedy is that this transition could be a unifying story. Rural communities hosting wind and solar projects. American manufacturing producing turbines and panels. Energy independence through domestic resources. Lower bills for working families.
These are the kinds of wins that once generated broad political coalitions. But our current political moment seems more interested in symbolic battles than material progress.
Beyond the Binary
Perhaps what we need is a different vocabulary. The climate debate has been dominated by two extremes: apocalyptic environmentalism on one side, defiant denialism on the other. Neither framework leaves much room for the pragmatic center where most Americans actually live.
What if we talked less about saving the planet and more about building prosperity? Less about sacrifice and more about abundance? The economic case for renewables doesn’t require anyone to join the environmental movement. It just requires looking at the cost curve. Markets are amoral. They don’t care about your political identity or mine. They flow toward efficiency and profit. Right now, they’re flowing decisively toward wind and solar.
The question is whether our politics can achieve the maturity to acknowledge that truth, build on it, and turn it into shared prosperity. Or whether we’ll continue fighting yesterday’s culture wars while the future gets built in spite of us. The market has moved on. One hopes, eventually, that our political imagination can too.
