I worked at the Department of Energy and I’m puzzled: the climate movement has been making the wrong case for 20 years

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States can only maintain its economic primacy in the dawning age of artificial intelligence if we build new electricity generation on an unprecedented scale. That obligation to our national competitiveness and security has led to an unfamiliar political battleground — American families’ utility bills. How we satisfy these twin obligations — powering the tsunami of new data centers and holding harmless American electricity consumers from the price impact of powering AI — will define how we energize the country for generations to come. The stakes have been ratcheted up given recent geopolitical events highlighting the deep interconnection and vulnerability of a world still dependent on fossil fuel energy sources.

Thus, my surprise that the decision of the U.S. government last month to pay a French oil company nearly $1 billion of U.S. taxpayer money NOT to add offshore wind capacity to the American electricity system was met with barely a ripple of consternation in renewable energy circles. The episode raises a pointed question: what happened to the climate movement? For the first time, an effort to energize the country with clean electrons powered by domestic, inexhaustible and free sources of fuel is being stymied by a billion-dollar expenditure of our taxpayer money at the very moment that the country is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to remove a perceived geopolitical risk to the global oil trade.

Twenty years ago, the climate movement looked a lot like me — white, coastal, and well-to-do. We were shocked that compelling science and the consequences to our children and grandchildren didn’t convince everyone to take real and dramatic action. We shrugged off the prospect of higher electricity bills as a result of more costly renewable power as inconsequential. We gave off the impression that we were more concerned with the plight of the polar bear than we were with the everyday financial challenges facing Americans.

We were wrong to do so, and we were slow to learn our lesson. It turned out most Americans were more concerned with minimizing their energy costs so they could put food on their table and keep a roof over their heads. We may have lost the argument but enough incentives remained for the clean energy industry to achieve impressive cost declines that lead to real deployment of resources at scale at a lower cost than any practical fossil fuel alternative. And that cost advantage is before factoring in — in the case of fossil fuels — the direct and indirect cost of extracting, processing and shipping the fuel itself.

Today, we suddenly have a moment to take that progress and double down to create the long-term conditions for a clean power industry in America. Today it will be built on economic necessity and national security and not on achieving a political consensus that seems obvious but remains elusive. Across the country, electricity bills are going up — significantly. And they are hurting real Americans. Now, the price declines across clean energy sources over the last 15 years have made our technologies the foundation for how all Americans can air-condition their way through 100-degree days in March, heat through a polar vortex, and recover from a string of natural disasters that have gone from once a century to once a decade to once a year. All the while, doing so without requiring the American Navy, at stupendous expense and human risk, to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

We have an obligation to engage farmers, already struggling with changing weather patterns, and now beset by fertilizer scarcity and sky-high diesel prices, in opportunities to leverage the solar and wind benefits of their own land. To remind them of the water and air quality benefits and the passive income opportunities of not just being farmers, but powered landowners. We have an obligation to reach out to swing voters — from suburban moms to union members — to ensure that they fully understand how their bills will be lower and more predictable when served by cheap, reliable renewables that have domestic feedstocks, than fossil fuel infrastructure whose price relies on a painfully complicated global interdependency that can be disrupted at any point. We have an obligation to young adults, already worried about being able to buy their first home, to make clear that energy costs can be a fundamental cost of living that they shouldn’t have to worry about.

The climate movement needs to go from selling itself as a moral obligation to wrapping itself in the practical truth: we’re a better, more affordable way to live life in America in 2026 and beyond. We need to move on from being the survival solution for polar bears to being the affordability solution for American families.

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