It teaches decision-makers not to trust the proponents.
“Affordability” is now the litmus test on energy for every U.S. politician. Policymakers governing in The Moment know that energy policy now lives or dies on whether people believe it will hold bills down, keep the lights on, and support economic growth.
No wonder, then, that many on the climate left are repackaging pro-climate policies as energy affordability solutions. This is not helping climate. It is reviving the Myth of an Easy Energy Transition. And the most savvy people who actually govern are not having it.
That doesn’t mean that you, the oil and gas leader, have to jump into the fray. Read on to understand how you can skillfully use this backdrop to make your civic case for abundant energy.
Both of these things are true:
- Affordability is now the political test for energy policy.
- Climate politics gets weaker when it pretends decarbonization pathways alone pass that test.
The problem here is not the climate ambition
A lot of climate rhetoric now presents clean energy build-out as the answer to affordability. You see it everywhere:
- Democratic lawmakers describe clean energy as the fastest and cheapest answer to high bills (just one example here).
- NGOs celebrate bills that would push more “cheap, clean energy” onto the grid as “real relief on energy bills now.”
- Climate-tech voices insist that smarter utilization, batteries, and flexible demand can do the work that firm generation is being asked to do.
Some of these arguments contain real insight. Most of them are well-intentioned (albeit misleading). None of them erase the painful real-world trade-offs they would require.
The problem here is not the climate ambition. The problem is pretending that the hard parts are already solved—the very definition of The Myth. Short-duration batteries can help with peak power needs. Demand response can manage power reliability at the margins. Better grid utilization is real and worth pursuing. But none of that makes questions about duration, winter reliability, build-out speed, transmission bottlenecks, local opposition, workforce limits, or seasonal variability disappear. And it certainly does not make natural gas build-out evidence of backwardness or bad faith.
If it were as easy as “gathering up a bunch of demand,” somebody would already be doing it at scale and with full accountability to their customers.
This is why this climate-masquerading-as-affordability language matters. When climate advocates deny trade-offs on cost, reliability, duration, and build-out speed, they are not strengthening the case for climate progress. They are losing credibility and weakening their political case.
Kathy Hochul and the governing reality check
New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul is no climate denier. She is an excellent avatar of a Problem Solver pushing back. In her recent opinion piece calling on New York legislators to amend the state’s inflexible climate law, she notes that “so much has radically changed since the Climate Act was enacted, necessitating common-sense adjustments that keep us on our path to a greener future in a way that is affordable for New Yorkers.”
Hochul’s piece lays out the step-wise assessment of the situation Problem Solvers everywhere are reckoning with: An ambitious climate agenda meets changing on-the-ground reality … requiring a hard look at trade-offs.
That does not mean Problem Solvers such as Hochul are rejecting climate. They’re rejecting the desperate magical thinking the climate left is putting forward.
They’re rejecting The Myth.
Jigar Shah: And then things got weird
I have a lot of long-earned respect for Jigar Shah. While I don’t agree with him across the board, I respect his data- and analytics-driven approach to energy and climate. He is not a leave-it-in-the-ground, all-or-nothing activist. He is smart, experienced, and—notably—very influential. In his recent conversation on Volts, he offered the aspirational version of this worldview: If utilities and large customers, especially data centers, are turning to natural gas for new load, that is not mainly a response to governing obligations and real system constraints. It is, in his telling, a failure of imagination and discipline.
I listen to this kind of conversation to (1) stress-test my thinking on natural gas build-out and (2) understand how climate-centric stakeholders are looking at energy and climate policy.
But things got weird in this conversation.
Referring to the rush toward behind-the-meter gas for data centers, Shah said: “The natural gas turbine phase is simply a masculine energy effort.”
Wait, did he just evoke the manosphere to explain why companies are spending billions of dollars to build out modern infrastructure as quickly as possible?
The podcast host and Shah went on gleefully for some time, to the point that I couldn’t help but imagine them sitting on yoga mats sipping chardonnay, culminating in host Roberts uttering this beauty: “Maybe it’s that masculine energy again, but something about big power plants and big transmission lines. Everybody wants to talk about those and people don’t want to talk about the distribution, but the distribution grid is where all the action is.”
What the heck is happening here?
This conversation demonstrated how quickly an intelligent argument about energy system design can devolve into culture wars. Instead of asking why companies serving customers, shareholders, and communities might choose firm generation under pressure, the move is to frame the choice as knuckle-dragging and unserious.
That is the kind of simplification that makes climate advocacy brittle.
Decision-makers for utilities, industrial users, and large power load customers (such as data centers) are not making these decisions in their cold plunge. They are responding to service obligations, regulatory timelines, financing risks, and customer accountability.
As a society, we are surely getting some of those choices wrong. (I’ve had a lot to say about that.)
But using identity politics to explain these choices is not useful, neither as analysis nor as a credibility builder for the climate left.
The real point: Climate proponents are teaching decision-makers to distrust them
Climate masquerading as affordability is not a problem because it is too ambitious. It is a problem—and bad for climate—because it is evasive. Progress on decarbonization requires truth-telling about trade-offs. It requires admitting that solving for affordability, reliability, and decarbonization at the same time is extremely difficult.
If climate advocates keep insisting that their preferred pathway is the cheap, easy, and politically painless one, they will not build durable support for climate action. They will teach governors, regulators, and other Problem Solvers to distrust them.
Seize the day
As an oil and gas leader, you can take the climate left’s mistake as an opportunity—but only if you engage it correctly. Here’s how:
- Follow the rhetoric. Watch the culture wars without jumping in. You don’t have to let “affordability” become shorthand for climate preferences with no accountability. But you won’t be the most effective messenger if you jump into the fray willy-nilly.
- Help the Problem Solvers. Observe the central line they are walking. Help them navigate energy realities with realistic decarbonization solutions. Become their thoughtful source for those solutions.
Problem Solvers are not rejecting climate. They are rejecting the fantasy that climate politics can dodge trade-offs forever. Your job is to help them with that.
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To addressing the real-world trade-offs,
Tisha
