A carnival float depicts U.S. President Donald Trump and the Statue of Liberty with a "MAGA" gag across her mouth, at the traditional "Rosenmontag" Rose Monday carnival parade in Mainz, Germany, February 16, 2026. REUTERS/Heiko Becker TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Paul Krugman revealed the simple and unsurprising reason for a baffling political mystery: why America has rejected renewable energy just when it's become cheaper and more profitable than ever.
In his latest Substack, the Nobel Prize-winning economist opined that it all comes down to cold, hard cash.
"What explains this extraordinary rejection of progress and embrace of energy know-nothingism? Money may not be the whole story, but it’s a lot of the story," he wrote in his piece, "Turning Our Back on Clean Energy."
Krugman noted that 2025 ranked among the warmest years on record, beaten only by 2024 and 2023, as extreme weather intensifies across the nation. But the Trump administration has waged an all-out war on climate action, going so far as to slap a "blockade" on wind and solar projects while promoting coal through a cartoon mascot called "Coalie," he noted.
Krugman traced energy know-nothingism to decades of billionaire manipulation, pointing a finger squarely at the conservative Koch brothers' controlling the Supreme Court through the Federalist Society and bankrolling right-wing politics, which was designed to keep America hooked on fossil fuels that built their fortunes.
"We now live in a time in which U.S. policy is shaped by sheer, naked corruption (enabled in part by the Koch takeover of the courts). Notably, Middle Eastern petrostates, which have a strong interest in blocking the energy transition, have played a huge role in enriching the Trump family," noted Krugman.
He added that renewable energy would actually make America richer, not poorer, as solar and wind are now cheaper than coal.
Even so, on a global scale, Trump's rejection of science and data may not matter.
"If there’s any good news here, it is that from a global point of view this malignancy may not matter very much. America is not the world. In fact, at this point we’re responsible for only a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions," he said, sharing a chart of the world's greenhouse gas emissions far outpacing America's.
Krugman concluded that the U.S. is choosing to become "backward, poorer, sicker and irrelevant" while the rest of the world races ahead on green energy.