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Wouldn’t you love to hear a politician base their campaign on clean energy affordability? Could the following speech be at the heart of an electoral awakening?
The cost of living continues to rise for US residents. It’s time for a new campaign, a new mindset. One that puts clean energy front-and-center.
Yes, clean energy is good for the natural world. For pollution. And for our lungs.
But it’s so much more.
Clean energy has a very appealing element that the current administration in the White House has avoided. But we’re not going to avoid it. We’re not going to hide behind the false, decades-old allure of fossil fuels.
Instead, a campaign for clean energy is based on one simple truth.
Clean energy is affordable. It’s very affordable. It has saved millions of people from exorbitant energy costs already, and there are many more savings to come.
If you’re concerned about affordability, then you should listen. And listen closely. Because clean energy is for you: it’s the cheapest way to generate electricity ever created.
Think about it: wind and sun are free for the taking. We can easily build more instruments to capture and store the power from the wind and sun.
When we say these energy sources are clean, we mean they don’t pollute your community or the planet. Fossil fuels — boo!– pollute at every stage: from getting them out of the ground, to transporting them, to burning them.
A campaign that sets the US on an all-out trajectory to clean energy sources means every person in the US can save money. And I don’t mean a little bit of money. I mean a lot of money. Here’s why, with a little help from people in-the-know.
Your quality of life is much better with clean energy. And don’t you deserve it? Household income, jobs, health, energy security, fairness, and environmental conditions: these are the key indicators of a good life. And each of those indicators of quality of life improves when a variety of climate action strategies are enacted.
Why does clean energy make such a difference in life?
Climate activist Bill McKibben offers us a list of reasons.
He reminds us that, with clean energy, you no longer have to pay for fuel. Clean energy creates jobs. In fact, clean energy projects that were underway under the previous federal administration would have supplied at least half a million good jobs. Political attacks on EVs mean that more US residents pay more at the gas pump, year after year. Higher standards available to the DOE with clean energy as the norm could save the average US household at least $160 per year. Cleaner air means less pollution and fewer healthcare costs.
The list of ways that clean energy is affordable goes on and one.
Private investors, McKibben says, have shifted most of their money to clean energy over fossil fuels, fearing that fossil fuel investments will become stranded assets.
Some communities already are moving forward with clean energy solutions.
Take Boulder, Colorado. Boulder has announced a new pilot program to provide nonprofits with grants up to $50,000 to fund battery and solar-plus-storage backup power systems. The backup power systems will maximize resilience under emergency conditions. Each grant requires eligible products to support a number of priorities — like providing shelter, supporting medical equipment, and maintaining communication access.
Most people want their leaders to adopt clean energy solutions. Survey after survey shows that most everyone on earth takes climate change seriously and wants to see action on it.
Sure, a minority of people question the validity of climate change. Nostalgia — that prevalent longing for the past — is common, and so is comfort with familiarity. Fossil fuel conveniences are widely shared and durable, and it’s difficult for some audiences to move beyond those mindsets.
Yet the connections between extreme weather events and climate change are so stark, so in-your-face, that even former climate deniers are accepting the need for a campaign for clean-energy-for-all.
Extreme weather caused by climate change has sparked more than 800 wildfires in Canada and at least a dozen in northern Minnesota. Smoke from the fires is exposing US residents from the Midwest to the Northeast to hazardous levels of air pollution. Rain in the Texas Hill Country is causing deadly floods. Extreme weather including heat will get worse, threatening a grid already strained under the pressure of massive new demand growth — oh, yeah. That growth has been largely driven by data centers. Boo!
Since the beginning of the Trump Administration, NOAA has kept its monthly climate change data under-reported, if not well-hidden. Multiple and concurrent disasters are disrupting daily life and putting people’s health at risk. Climate change makes compound events more likely.
Rebecca Solnit writes this week about how climate consequences have been all-too-often hidden by politicians. She describes how making the energy transition is cost-effective in the long run.
“Those who view it as expensive tend to look at the costs of the energy transition as if everything will be fine if we just continue with the fossil-fuel status quo, rather than looking at the costs of worst-case-scenario climate chaos in the future and what climate chaos already costs us in lives as well as money in the present.”
Clean energy addresses a whole lot of the climate consequences. In March, the US generated more of its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind than it did from natural gas — aka methane. Across the US, from California to Texas to the Midwest, the clean energy industry is breaking records. It proves that solar, wind, and storage are no longer emerging technologies.
Essential to the US energy system, these fast-growing resources are ready to meet US soaring demand for electricity.
Let’s move beyond war for oil. Are you sick and tired of the awful geopolitics of fossil fuels? Well, the US — and most other countries, for that matter — can become largely independent with clean energy. Clean energy means no country or region has exclusive power over fuel.
Right now, war in the Middle East spirals out of control, with the cost of over $1 billion per day.
But clean energy sources are decentralized from big utilities. That means they’re difficult to target in war.
Robert Reich explains how ending the war on Iran is immediately connected to clean energy. “We’ll bring down energy prices by ending the war,” he outlines, “and then reduce energy prices by shifting to renewable sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels.”
We can create a campaign for clean-energy-for-all. Contact your legislators and let them know you care about clean energy. And vote in every election so your voice is heard!
References
“A million warnings and one huge invitation: Climate 2026.” Rebecca Solnit. Meditations in an Emergency. July 14, 2026.
“A 10-point plan to make America affordable: Every candidate should pledge their support.” Robert Reich. Substack. July 16, 2026.
“Democracy in an age of powermaxxing. The billionaire backlash has finally arrived. But is it too late?” Paul Krugman. Substack. July 16, 2026.
“Disasters are combining to deliver even more severe impacts.” Todd Woody, Zahra Hirji, Eric Roston, and Emma Court. Bloomberg. July 17, 2026.
“July 17, 2026.”Heather Cox Richardson. Substack.
“Setting money on fire: (Also the planet).” Bill McKibben. The Crucial Years. July 15, 2026.
“The real message of Trump’s address to the nation. We are facing the biggest test of our democracy since the Civil War.” Robert Reich. Substack. Jul 16, 2026.
“The undervalued quality-of-life benefits of demand-side energy and climate strategies.” Grubler A. et al. Communications Sustainability. 2026.
“Top science panel backs research linking extreme weather to climate change.” Raymond Zhong. New York Times. July 16, 2026.
“Trump administration proposes weakening pollution rules for the chemical plastics ‘recycling’ industry.” Ari Phillips. Oil & Gas Watch. July 16, 2026.
“Trump can’t get no respect. His biggest lie wasn’t about elections.” Paul Krugman. Substack. July 17, 2026.
“Trustees remove over 100,000 pounds of marine debris across the Gulf.” Gulf Spill Restoration by NOAA. July 16, 2026.
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