In the endless caterwauling about Donald Trump’s attempts to stop subsidizing allegedly cheaper and better “alternative” energy, Heatmap complains that “The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees.” But if you can’t operate without free money from the government, you’re not actually winning the competition for customers’ dollars, are you? Meanwhile Canary Media laments that Trump “[s]lashing funding and staffing at the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations” will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, cripple U.S. manufacturing and generally be largely extremely not good. Its Office of what? And does U.S. manufacturing really depend on the state? It didn’t use to.

Apparently some confusion has arisen lately, in the press at least, as to how giants like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan built up the industrial might of the United States without an elaborate bureaucracy including an “Industrial Demonstrations Program” that, Canary believes, was going to be part of the creation of “nearly 300,000 jobs nationwide” according to dispassionate analysis by zealots committed to government promotion of energy systems so mindbogglingly efficient that they’ll vanish the minute the handouts do. Possibly because of some confusion lately as to whether journalists should report skeptically and show both sides of an issue or be credulous crusaders.

Especially given how keen the U.S. government was on ethanol, keen being a term here meaning how willing to hand out vast sums to grateful farmer-voters and steamroll opposition by insisting that it was good for the environment in contradiction to the facts with respect to land use, monoculture, food prices and energy wasted, isn’t anyone doubtful that its current almost identical approach to other kinds of not-oil energy is suddenly almost perfect?

Not Heatmap, which betrays characteristic confusion in warning that “Why Undoing the IRA Could Set Up a Gas-Fueled Power Price Shock” and in hollering that proposed Republican changes to the tax subsidy system for alternatives:

“would strangle new energy development so quickly that it could raise power costs by as much as 7% over the next decade, according to the Rhodium Group, an energy and policy analysis firm.”

But if these kinds of energy are cheaper, why wouldn’t people buy them without subsidies? Inquiring economists want to know. And we may find out because the Manhattan Contrarian notes that New York, like some other “blue” states, is reacting to the withdrawal of federal subsidies not by backing off their “green” plans but by doubling down on the theory that the more they spend the more they’ll save.

Likewise, in Britain, reeling from the cost of alternatives, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband snarled that if Nigel Farage of the surging Reform Party “wants to have a fight arguing for expensive, insecure fossil fuels against cheap, clean renewables creating good jobs for the country and protecting our kids and future generations – bring that fight on.” After, be it noted, Reform thumped Labour in the 2025 local elections, not least because of energy prices.

By contrast the New York Times tries to buy the opposition off with:

“A Clean Energy Boom Was Just Starting. Now, a Republican Bill Aims to End It. The party’s signature tax plan would kill most Biden-era incentives, but there’s a sticking point: G.O.P. districts have the most to lose.”

We realize that Canary is avowedly an activist outfit. But even so they might dust off their skepticism instead of telling us “If the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is shuttered, Ohio stands to lose $391 million in economic activity and 2,400 jobs, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions found” without asking how anybody would know such a thing. Or expressing the slightest doubt about matters like:

“Unlike other federal investments that are estimated to take a decade or more to pan out, IDP’s projects average a predicted completion time of 4.5 years, according to former officials at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and data from the leaked spreadsheets of projects.”

Have they never heard of government agencies feathering their own nests by predicting better results than actually occurred? If not, they almost certainly went to government schools. And thus their sources for these wobbly claims are, once again, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, along with The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. And “a former official at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations who now leads advocacy at the nonpartisan climate group Clean Tomorrow”. They don’t present counter-arguments even to demolish them. It would spoil the fun.

If they were skeptical, it would be fairly easy to come up with concerns. For instance the Manhattan Contrarian also calculates that the “green energy handouts” alone in Biden’s vaunted “Inflation Reduction Act” were around $370 billion minimum, so if they really generated $391 million in economic activity it would amount to a Return on Investment of 0.1%.

It gets worse with another of their items saying:

“Tucked into the House Republicans’ 389-page tax bill released on Monday is a poison pill for U.S. clean energy developers and manufacturers, one that energy and tax policy experts say would essentially repeal the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax credits now flowing to energy projects and solar, battery, and EV factories across the country. The provision at issue prohibits tax credits for any project associated with ‘foreign entities of concern,’ a category that includes companies and individuals linked to China as well as any ‘material assistance’ from Chinese companies, their subsidiaries, or even non-Chinese companies that happen to have executives who are Chinese citizens. Its scope is so sweeping, and China’s dominance of clean-energy supply chains so vast, that virtually all clean power projects or factories being built today could be implicated.”

So should we subsidize China and its kill switches? Because again, if these things really are cheaper, they shouldn’t need U.S. tax dollars, and if they’re not, they shouldn’t get them.

We should add that when Canary runs a piece about “Trump’s all-out war on energy efficiency” they show remarkable credulity about the government’s fabled efficiency:

“From targeting Energy Star to pausing more obscure rules, the Trump administration is derailing measures that help save money by reducing energy use.”

And no apparent awareness that it is markets that have been proven to enhance efficiency and the state that has been proven arrogantly to mangle it. Instead another Heatmap article wails:

“Can Offshore Wind Survive the Tax Credit Purge? Empire Wind has been spared – but it may be one of the last of its kind in the U.S.”

And why? Because the dang stuff just doesn’t make dollars and sense:

“The economics of building offshore wind in the U.S., at least during this nascent stage, are ‘entirely dependent’ on tax credits, Marguerite Wells, the executive director of Alliance for Clean Energy New York, told me.”

At least during this nascent stage. It’s what they all say.