Paul Krugman writes about the current administration’s animus toward renewable energy in a post entitled Real Men Burn Stuff.
Most critiques of the One Big Beautiful Bill have focused on the way it explodes the budget deficit while imposing immense hardship on lower-income Americans. Yet energy policy is also an important component of the OBBB, which basically tries to roll back the rise of solar and wind power — sources that have accounted for more than half the worldwide increase in electricity generation since 2015.
Looking just at cost, I found the following rather remarkable.
a transition to renewables, which might have seemed like pie-in-the-sky, hippy-dippy stuff a generation ago, is now not just feasible but the only sensible energy strategy. Here’s a chart showing estimates of the levelized cost of electricity generation (LCOE), adjusted for inflation, for a variety of renewable energy technologies, compared with the costs of power from fossil fuels. I’m aware that LCOE is an imperfect measure, but the results are still astonishing.
We’re talking in particular about a 90 percent decline in the real cost of power from solar panels and a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind power. This isn’t just progress, it’s a revolution.
Krugman then provides this chart.
But instead of trying to take advantage of this and to further fund its progress, the administration wants to go back to the past.
But the OBBB killed those tax credits. And the Trump administration has been taking executive action to stall renewable development, for example, by halting federal approvals for wind farms. In general, MAGA clearly wants to move us back to burning gas, oil and above all coal.
Krugman notes the influence of money from the fossil fuels industry, but he then goes in this direction.
Honestly, I think this is a case where the usual logic of money-driven policy is trumped (Trumped?) by irrational, psychological — you might even say psychosexual — issues.
We know that Trump himself has a weird thing against wind power, insisting that wind turbines massacre birds and kill whales. This appears to stem from the refusal of the Scottish government to cancel an offshore wind farm he thought ruined the view from one of his golf courses.
But it’s not just Trump. There is, it turns out, a strong link between the manosphere — the online movement promoting “masculinity,” misogyny and opposition to feminism — and anti-environmentalism. For example, in 2023 Jordan Peterson convened a high-profile conference to declare that concerns about climate change are a “conspiracy run by narcissistic poseurs.”
If you think about it, this makes sense — not intellectually but emotionally. Don’t concern about the environment and advocacy of “clean energy” sound kind of, well, feminine? Real men burn stuff and don’t worry if the process is dirty.
And manosphere-type attitudes are clearly widespread in MAGA. One of the main arguments Trump officials and supporters have made for tariffs is that they will bring back “manly” jobs in manufacturing. (They won’t, but that’s another story.) The same notion underlies the doomed attempt to revive the coal industry.
Granted, Krugman is an economist, and I am a political scientist, so maybe this foray into pop psychology at a distance is unwarranted. Although he is objectively correct about the high levels of misogyny and school-yard levels of grunting male rhetoric in the online manosphere, and even in the techbro community (after all, they are all bros, now aren’t they?).
The headline also made me think of the “rolling coal” fad of a few years ago and the fact that I have anecdotally encountered anti-electric views about power tools and trucks because the assumption is they couldn’t be powerful enough to do the job (insert Tim Allen grunting about “more power” here).
But I would add that there is a profound amount of purely reactionary thinking in the way Trump and others talk about this stuff, like using coal instead of wind. Americans didn’t have wind power back when, you know, it was great (whenever that was). Anything that smacks of progressiveness, like clean energy, is sneered at. After all, my granddaddy didn’t need no electric trucks, so I don’t either!
One of the dumb, destructive consequences of reactionary thinking is that when looking to the past, you ignore the future.
But here’s the thing: MAGA and the manosphere may hate clean energy, but they won’t be able to stop the rise of renewables. All they can do, possibly, is stop the rise of renewables in the United States. Other nations, China in particular, are making huge investments in wind and solar power, because they understand what Trump and his allies refuse to acknowledge — that this is the only way forward.
I continue to marvel (not in a good way) at the degree to which those who claim to want to make America “great” keep ignoring what made us great, has kept us great, and what might make us greater in the future.
Here’s a hint: protectionism, 19th-century power politics, and burning coal aren’t the gateways to greatness. They are nostalgia bombs being exploded by people who don’t understand the things they are nostalgic for. Or, don’t really want to admit what they want to return to (hint: what kind of people were dominant in American society in the 1950s and which kind weren’t?).
Bonus section: clips!!
Trump and windmills.
Tilting At Windmills: A delusional Trump rambles through a bizarre rant about windmills, still nursing a personal grudge since losing a battle to move them away from one of his golf clubs in Turnberry, Scotland.
“The windmills are killing our country.”pic.twitter.com/Ty8IPkaj5Q
— Really American
(@ReallyAmerican1) June 12, 2025
And on coal.
A weird confluence of coal and wind from a member of Congress.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Steven L. Taylor
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