Clean energy’s winning argument is the one it refuses to make

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