The Clean Energy Information War

The clean energy industry has spent the past few months trying to sway public and political discussions about federal support for renewable energy with an onslaught of facts and figures — to little or no avail. 

We have been told that President Trump’s rollbacks of clean energy funding have already cost the country millions in private investment and thousands of jobs, largely in the Republican states and districts that stood to benefit most from the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tech spending. A group of Republicans in the House of Representatives sent letters to party leadership asking for restraint in expected cuts to the IRA’s renewable energy tax credits and incentives but then cravenly voted for the so-called Big Beautiful Bill (B3) that decimated this critical federal funding.

The Senate has followed suit. After a further barrage of facts and figures by clean tech trade groups, the Finance Committee on June 17 released a draft of their revisions to the bill, supposedly fixing some of the worst bits of the House version, but not by much. On the same day, a New York Times op-ed pointed out that defunding the U.S. clean energy transition would effectively abdicate American leadership in global clean tech markets, leaving the field to China’s carefully planned and well-funded domination.

At another time and place, the industry’s articulate, thoughtful and well-documented arguments might have been able to break through the political noise in D.C. The fact that they haven’t has been painful and frustrating to watch, and with B3’s passage — and its disastrous impacts on the U.S. energy transition — almost certain, it is past time to ask, why?

In an earlier post on E/lectrify, I questioned the industry’s attempts to win over lawmakers and the public with pragmatic, rational arguments grounded in facts and science, given the opposition’s irrational, unpragmatic ideology rooted primarily in fear. 

But how I view the current situation has changed. What the industry is facing is not merely ideological rhetoric, but a full-scale information war against climate science and clean energy. 

What shifted my thinking is a book, “How to Win an Information War” by Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University and an expert on contemporary propaganda. While focused primarily on Sefton Delmer, a British journalist who was instrumental in British efforts to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II, the book provides striking insights into the dynamics of contemporary propaganda campaigns.

Pomerantsev’s analysis of Russian propaganda used to build support for the war in Ukraine could easily be applied to President Donald Trump’s drive toward authoritarianism and his continuing hold on Republican lawmakers and a major portion of the public. 

“We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth,” Pomerantsev writes. 

In the face of propaganda backed by government power, “truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.”

Further, Pomerantsev says, propaganda takes away “the burden of responsibility. … [It] allow[s] you to relinquish responsibility and enjoy dominance” without carrying any moral burden.

Create fear, avoid responsibility

How have these dynamics played out in the fight over clean energy tax credits?

First, Trump quickly and successfully nullified the need for clean energy by undercutting its connection to climate change and U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Since his inauguration, he has slashed and burned any government agency or research related to climate, replacing fact- and data-driven science with fears about growing power demand from data centers, “unreliable” renewable energy and imminent blackouts.

Winning the artificial intelligence war has became the new imperative, relieving government, industry and the public from any responsibility for climate change. Clean energy leaders pivoted to Trump’s energy abundance and dominance paradigm, framing solar, wind and storage as the fastest, cheapest means of meeting growing demand.

But, as Pomerantsev says, truth — in this case, both climate science and economics — has become a subset of power.

In the context of B3, clean energy funding has been redefined and falsely pitted against the bill’s primary purpose, which is extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Renewable energy incentives are no longer a generational investment in building American manufacturing, supply chains and competitiveness in global markets but an unnecessary expense unaligned with administration priorities.

Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) was one of the House Republicans signing onto letters, in August 2024 and again in March 2025, voicing support for the economic development and jobs the IRA tax credits have created in their districts. 

But, like other House Republicans, he voted for the bill that will terminate most of that federal funding by year’s end. Speaking at a Canary Media event in D.C. on June 4, Carter said he still favors an all-of-the-above energy policy that includes renewables, but defended his vote on B3. 

Extending the 2017 tax cuts had to be the top priority, he said, because if not passed, Americans would face “the largest tax increase the world’s ever seen.”

Trumpian hyperbole aside, lumping tax cuts and clean energy tax credits into one bill allowed Carter and other Republicans to avoid responsibility for the loss of investment, jobs and innovation — and for the accelerating impacts of climate change — their votes will trigger. 

Experiment, fail, learn

Clearly, we know what’s not working; now we have to figure out what will. 

During World War II, Sefton Delmer pioneered propaganda radio broadcasts that were aimed at subtly breaking through the Nazis’ grip on Germans’ loyalty and imagination.

His goal was “to kindle the audience’s desire to think for themselves again, to fall in love with finding facts,” Pomerantsev writes.

Delmer was obsessed with details that “helped him tap into the audience’s world, and when he had slipped inside their imagination, he reconnected the logic of cause and effect.”

A delicate balance was required to encourage people to think for themselves without offending their prejudices, Pomerantsev says.

In the midst of a devastating war, one of Delmer’s core tactics was the strategic use of lies, something that, unfortunately, remains a core tactic in today’s complex and fast-moving information wars. 

The clean energy industry must maintain its insistence on science and facts, but also cultivate a deeper attention to the details of people’s lives, like rising electric bills and the environmental impacts of new natural gas plants, as well as extreme weather events. 

A recent New York Times article provided a bleak, but moving picture of people in Georgia now paying electric bills in some cases four times higher than a few years ago.

New and multiple entry points into Americans’ imagination must be found to reconnect their sense of cause and effect — energy and climate, tax credits and electric bills — and renew their love of fact-finding.

I make no claims to swift or easy answers but hope others will pick up the challenge to experiment, fail, learn and try again. Tell me your stories.