alt Hacker NewsI mean, to some extent, you're not wrong, but if a Democrat were in office right now, we wouldn't be actively fighting the rising tide of solar power.
At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.
Last year—2025, the first year of Trump's second term—something like 90% of all new generating capacity in the US was solar. Even with his active antipathy toward it.
There no longer needs to be a massive movement willing to pay more for energy just to get it decarbonized. All we need is for the fossil fuel industry and the people in its pay to get out of the way.
> At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.
Not just more cost-effective for new power.
The operating expenses for a given coal plant are greater than the buildout cost for the equivalent solar+battery plant.
It no longer makes financial sense for coal plants to continue existing in almost all cases. This isn't some environmentalism thing, it's strictly hard math. Fossil energy is no longer viable without taxpayers keeping it on life support.