Notes 📍

It seems like every day when I open my social media it’s one article after another about how renewable energy is ruining our communities. How solar is ruining perfectly good farm land, how wind is incompatible with the rural landscape. How climate change is fake, something we should doubt. it comes to the energy powering our homes and barns, common sense has been thrown right out the window. Big Oil and corporate gas interests have spent decades pulling the wool over our eyes, turning a simple conversation about clean air and locally generated, clean power into a knockdown, drag-out political culture war. 

For years, these massive energy conglomerates have been running a slick operation. They realized that if folks started putting up solar panels on their roofs or wind turbines in their pastures, the big utilities would stop getting those fat monthly checks. So, what did they do? They went to Washington, teamed up with Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and turned clean energy into a political boogeyman. 

Suddenly, we started hearing wild tales from the top. We had Trump out there claiming wind turbines destroy property values or just flat out don’t work when the wind stops blowing. It became a regular talking point to say that caring about the environment was just an “elitist” agenda designed to kill jobs. But let’s look at the facts. It wasn’t about protecting our jobs at all; it was about protecting their bottom line. They took a technical piece of machinery—a wind turbine or a solar panel—and turned it into a political loyalty test. If you liked clean power, they wanted you to feel like you weren’t part of the club. 

While they were busy feeding folks those lines on TV, they were doing the real dirty work behind closed doors. The Trump administration pushed hard for “energy dominance,” which is just a fancy way of saying they fast-tracked oil leases and pipeline permits while putting the brakes on renewables. They slapped heavy tariffs on imported solar parts, making it more expensive for a regular guy to get a setup running on his land. 

It gets worse when you look at the local level. Right now, Big Oil is lobbying state politicians to kill Renewable Portfolio Standards—those are the goals that force power companies to clean up their act. Even down on the farm, if you try to hook up rooftop solar to the grid, conservative lawmakers in plenty of states have pushed through massive “grid access” fees. They are literally penalizing you for making your own power. Then they turn around and tell you that natural gas is a necessary “bridge fuel,” just so they can build more pipelines and lock us into their system for another fifty years. All the while, they keep pocketing trillions in government subsidies. 

The truth is simple: we are being conned. Independent power from the sun and the wind should be a country boy’s dream. It means self-reliance, lower bills, and not being beholden to some massive utility company or foreign oil market. But as long as big carbon interests and their political allies can keep us divided and arguing over culture wars, they get to keep the game rigged. It’s time to stop listening to the noise, see the hustle for what it is, and build an energy system that actually serves the people doing the heavy lifting.