Guest column by Charlton Allen

For years, Americans were lectured that the “green transition” was inevitable—an article of faith for the elite and a moral commandment for the planet. Wind and solar, they claimed, would replace fossil fuels and deliver us from climate doom.

It became the creed of the coastal clerisy and their bureaucratic disciples.

And they didn’t just preach it—they spent a trillion dollars to prove it—delivering blackouts, soaring prices, and virtually no climate impact.

And when their prophecy failed? The zealots of this green theology didn’t repent—they proselytized harder. They pushed the apocalypse further down the road, made the forecasts more dire, and demanded even greater sacrifice.

The only thing missing from their utopian gospel? Reality.

Yet, the Biden administration didn’t just believe this crisis theology—it tried to govern by it.

What followed was a slow-motion collapse: a trillion-dollar funnel into failure that drove up prices, destabilized the grid, and handed strategic leverage to our enemies.

It was all funded by record-breaking federal spending—with almost nothing to show for it, unless one counts wealth transfers to progressive-aligned environmental oligarchs as “progress.”

That era is over. President Trump is now doing what his predecessor refused to do: admit that true energy sovereignty depends on reliability, affordability, and domestic control. None of those virtues were delivered—or even seriously considered—by the green schemers and utopian dreamers who spent four years selling fantasy as a strategy.

The Green Mirage Shattered

The Biden years proved a simple truth: intermittent energy cannot sustain a modern nation in the 21st century. Why?

• Wind and solar remain inherently unreliable. They cannot provide baseload power, fluctuate with the weather, and collapse when demand peaks. In other words, they generate power when nature cooperates, not when the nation needs it.
• Battery storage at scale remains a science fiction concept. Even green energy advocates quietly admit it’s a decade or more away—if it’s achievable at all. In the meantime, we are told to gamble our grid on a future that doesn’t exist.
• “Clean” energy isn’t clean. Most solar panels and wind turbines are built with rare earths and heavy metals extracted through environmentally abusive practices—often with slave labor—under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
• The grid cannot handle full electrification. Even liberal-run California, the flagship for progressive energy policies, is rationing power during heat waves. And that’s before factoring in the surging demand from AI expansion, EV mandates, and an exploding demand from hyperscale data centers.

Wind and solar are insufficient to meet current needs—let alone the additional demands of a complete electric transition.

The so-called “green transition” was neither green nor a transition. It was a policy mirage built on coercive mandates, lavish tax subsidies, and magical thinking—a political agenda masquerading as planetary salvation.

And when confronted with its egregious failures, the high priests of green energy offer no course correction—only deeper dogma. They cling to their climate catechism with apocalyptic fervor—never solutions—casting dissenters as heretical deniers.

Biden Spent Trillions and We Got Fragility

During his term, Biden committed trillions to green energy subsidies, tax credits, and regulatory schemes. The return? Higher prices, unstable supply, and increased reliance on adversarial regimes.

Biden didn’t just overspend—he destabilized America’s strategic energy balance.

Taxpayer dollars were funneled into distorting energy markets, subsidizing unreliable sources while punishing proven ones.

The result? Traditional baseload generation declined. Grid vulnerability increased.

Blackouts surged. Prices soared. And working Americans paid the price for elite vanity projects.

Yet, with trillions spent and headlines trumpeting “historic investments,” where’s the proof? Was energy security strengthened? Were prices lowered for struggling families? Or did the Biden agenda simply finance failure—while America fell behind?

The answer is as damning as it is simple: the administration didn’t just fail to deliver—those goals were never the point.

One of the most glaring absurdities of the Biden energy doctrine was its total disregard for scalability. Wind and solar require vast amounts of land to generate modest amounts of power—often hundreds of times more acreage than traditional baseload sources.

Powering a single metropolitan region at scale with so-called “renewables” demands land footprints that are economically and environmentally prohibitive.

Yet the climate cult never addresses this spatial absurdity. They chant “transition” but never explain how—or at what cost.

Meanwhile, EV mandates have distorted the auto market, driving average new vehicle prices to nearly $50,000, while EVs now exceed $59,000—well beyond the reach of most families. Their costly batteries rely on rare earths, which are controlled by China and the Congo, deepening our economic and strategic vulnerability.

This isn’t a transition to sustainability. It’s a forced transfer—of wealth, power, and pain. And it is both economically and morally unsustainable.

Green Power, Fragile Grid

Our growing reliance on wind and solar energy has reduced grid flexibility and resilience, increasing the likelihood of large-scale power outages during peak demand or adverse weather conditions.

When intermittent power replaces baseload generation without equivalent backup, failure becomes a design feature—not an accident. Under Biden, we didn’t just spend trillions—we made blackouts more likely.

President Trump recognizes that a secure grid requires dependable, dispatchable power—produced by natural gas, coal, and nuclear—not policies that gamble the nation’s infrastructure on cloud cover and wind forecasts.

Biden’s Green Delusion Was a Strategic Gift to Our Enemies

While President Biden blocked pipelines, froze LNG exports, and choked off federal leasing, America’s adversaries seized the moment to expand their global energy dominance.

• Russia financed its brutal war in Ukraine with energy revenues—while Europe, desperate for gas, was denied new American LNG supplies thanks to Biden’s export freeze.
• China ramped up coal production even as it exported solar panels manufactured with slave labor and subsidized by Western climate guilt.
• Iran cashed in on inflated oil prices, funneling profits into terror networks and regional destabilization across the Middle East.

What Biden sold as climate leadership was, in fact, strategic surrender. His climate-first agenda empowered our enemies, impoverished American families, and jeopardized both our economic strength and national security.

The Trump Restoration: Real Energy, Real Power

President Trump returned to office in 2025 with a mandate and a mission: restore American energy dominance, dismantle the green delusion, and unleash the full potential of U.S. industrial strength.

Within days, he lifted the LNG export freeze, reauthorized stalled permits, and began reversing the regulatory overreach that devastated the domestic energy sector. But his agenda reaches deeper—targeting the very architecture of climate statism that held the nation hostage.

• Dismantling the trillion-dollar regulatory drag throttling American energy and industrial investment.
• Challenging the EPA’s Endangerment Finding—the legal linchpin of Biden’s climate regime and the basis for sweeping regulatory abuse.
• Ending subsidies for unreliable renewables that destabilize the grid and mask market failure.
• Reasserting nuclear, coal, and gas as the indispensable backbone of American power—economically, industrially, and geopolitically.

Trump’s doctrine is rooted in a truth the Biden administration never grasped:

You cannot lead the free world while rationing energy at home.

Energy Is Power—and America Is Taking It Back

The left insists the future belongs to wind, solar, and sacrifice.

They’re wrong.

The future belongs to nations that can fuel themselves—and their allies.

To countries that are self-sufficient, not tethered to transoceanic supply chains controlled by adversaries.

To leaders who understand that solar panels from Xinjiang and wind farms that fail are not strategic assets.

America cannot run on radical energy orthodoxy that produces less power and more power failures.

Under President Trump, it doesn’t have to—and it won’t.

Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC

This article first appeared in American Thinker and is reprinted here by permission.

Featured image by OpenAI’ Dall-e.