'Dumbest people in history': Trump official astonishes critics with eye-popping claim

Critics over the weekend heaped scorn on the US Department of Energy after it made demonstrably false claims about renewable energy.

In a post on X late last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) argued that "wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing," even though batteries allow the storage of energy from both sources that can be used long after their initial generation.

The post drew immediate ridicule from social media users who expressed astonishment that the people running America's energy policy seem to be woefully ignorant about renewable energy storage.

"We are governed by some of the dumbest people in the history of this country, proudly, unashamedly, openly moronic and ignorant, and I am genuinely not sure how the US ever recovers from this," commentedZeteo editor-in-chief Medhi Hassan. "These people make George W. Bush and Sarah Palin look like savants."

The press office for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) sarcastically tried to educate the president's team about how energy storage works.

"We're excited for the Trump administration to learn about BATTERIES (we have them here in California, and they've helped the Golden State shift to green, clean energy AND keep the lights on)," they wrote.

Alex Stapp, the cofounder of the Institute for Progress, also touted California's embrace of renewable energy, and he pointed out that batteries on a given day provide more than a quarter of all energy in the state at peak hours.

Fossil fuel industry watchdog Oil PAC Tracker argued that this kind of ignorant rhetoric about renewable energy was part of a pattern from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who is the former CEO of onshore oilfield services company Liberty Energy.

"Secretary Wright should be fired for lying to American people," they wrote. "He profits off this kind of misinformation because he is a fossil fuel executive. Killing clean energy deployment also hurts our economy, makes electricity expensive and increases our power sector emissions."

Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci also leveled the administration for pushing misinformation about renewable energy.

"The fact that such an obviously false and, frankly, asinine tweet was just issued by a federal government account is an insult to the American people," he argued. "Renewables could make up the majority of our energy in a multi-layered system with better energy storage if we actually tried."

The DOE's post came at a time when the Trump administration is shutting down wind and solar power projects across the country, and when Americans' energy bills are rising due in part to increased demands being placed on the electric grid by artificial intelligence data centers.

A report released earlier this month by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis declared that Trump's energy agenda "will fail... unless the White House stops issuing stop-work orders for offshore wind."

The report further added that "renewable energy and dispatchable storage are the only option for adding significant amounts of new generation capacity to the US grid for at least the next five years," while also detailing that there are simply no short-term alternatives for rapidly building up capacity.

Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst, similarly took aim late last month at the administration's order to stop work on the Revolution Wind project off the coast of New England, which she argued would have provided fast relief to people in the region struggling to pay their utility bills.

"This stop-work order from the Trump administration is a lose-lose for pretty much everyone except fossil gas corporations," she said. "Stopping the project could not only cost thousands of jobs and ratepayers real money but have life or death consequences if we lose power in the middle of a cold snap. New England needs homegrown offshore wind energy to keep the lights on and our electricity affordable."