It’s been a while since a “point of no return” in the news has been positive, but a recent Washington Post report concerning the global clean energy transition bucked that trend.
As the paper noted, it’s nigh on impossible to contextualize the rapid adoption of affordable, renewable energy in 2025 without acknowledging an elephant in the room: the United States’ abrupt and comprehensive policy reversals on a host of lucrative clean energy initiatives.
Although this upheaval didn’t come as a surprise, its effects have nevertheless halted American economic momentum in incalculable ways.
Projects in progress were frozen or canceled, auto manufacturers such as General Motors were forced to eat billion-dollar losses after a long-standing federal electric vehicle incentive was rescinded with little notice, and farmers were left in the lurch when solar grants were suddenly revoked.
Perplexingly, many reversals involved already-funded or fiscally beneficial initiatives, such as solar infrastructure, further compounding the financial harms inflicted upon American industry.
On Nov. 6, the New York Times reported that the U.S. mounted “a pressure campaign” that foreign delegates “called extraordinary,” citing “nine diplomats on its receiving end” who alleged American delegates browbeat them to defeat an effort to curb maritime pollution.
While that effort was successfully undermined, the Washington Post cited a recent International Energy Agency assessment that found American policy shifts had scant impact on the world’s relentless adoption of clean energy.
“Even as U.S. political forces are working against the energy transition, economics are propelling it forward globally,” the paper observed. Consequently, renewable energy is on track to fully overtake coal as the world’s largest source of electricity no later than 2026.
According to a recent United Nations energy transition report, experts believed “solar, wind, and EVs have irreversibly crossed a positive tipping point and entered a virtuous cycle of cost decline and widespread adoption,” with “plummeting costs” as the driving force.
International Renewable Energy Agency director-general Francesco La Camera vociferously concurred.
“No one can stop the energy transition — no one. No country, no person,” he maintained.
As the U.S. drew back federally, states such as California scrambled to prevent state-level economies from suffering the consequences of falling behind amid the clean energy transition, while superpowers such as China made staggering gains.
With energy prices skyrocketing nationwide — and as other nations reap the environmental and economic benefits of solar and other renewables — the Post posed a rhetorical question: “Can the U.S. afford to sit this out?”
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