I woke up this morning to thousands of hysterical emails from so-called climate advocates whining that the Tennessee Valley Authority—our nation’s largest public utility—has officially doubled down on coal, fossil gas, and nuclear power. In its revised energy plan, the TVA has proudly followed President Donald Trump’s directives to aggressively shy away from solar and wind in favor of combusting the earth's crust. Predictably, the peasants are revolting. But as someone who has actually read a corporate sustainability report without weeping, I must ask: what did you people expect? You wanted a transition, but you never specified a direction.
Last month, over an incredibly dry branzino at COP with several mid-level EPA administrators, I was struck by how utterly exhausted these visionaries are. They have spent a decade politely nodding while teenagers in thrifted sweaters scream at them about net-zero. The sheer administrative burden of pretending to care about a carbon footprint takes a devastating toll on a person’s summer sabbatical. The TVA’s pivot is not a betrayal of the American public; it is a long-overdue boundary being set by adults who are tired of humoring your solar-paneled fantasies. It takes immense bravery for a multibillion-dollar federal monopoly to stand up and say, "No, we will not build a windmill. We are going to set a rock on fire."
Let us look at the cold, hard facts of the energy market. Wind is erratic. Solar energy fundamentally requires the sun, which, as any serious analyst will tell you, goes away every single night. Coal, on the other hand, is dependable, heavy, and leaves a satisfying, tangible layer of soot on the windowsill that reminds us of the golden age of American industry. We have spent years demanding that these utilities manage the transition. Well, they are transitioning—backwards, to a simpler time when stranded assets were just called "assets" and executives didn't have to pretend to care about the atmospheric composition of the 2050s.
We simply looked at the data and realized that mining prehistoric carbon and setting it ablaze is the only authentic way to express our corporate values.
The truth is, the general public has fundamentally misunderstood the assignment here. You refused to rinse your recycling properly in 2014, and now the TVA has to build a sprawling new fossil gas pipeline to compensate for your moral failures. President Trump’s directive to prioritize baseline hydrocarbons and abandon renewables is, if we are being intellectually honest, the only logical response to a populace that still buys fast fashion and expects cheap next-day shipping. You cannot demand the luxuries of a late-stage empire and then complain about the smoke in the kitchen. We are out of time, but go off.
Have you ever actually looked at a wind farm? I mean really looked at one, perhaps from the window of a chartered Cessna en route to a climate symposium? They are aesthetically catastrophic. They ruin the sightlines of some of our nation's most promising undeveloped golf terrain. Gas plants, by contrast, possess a brutalist charm. They sit quietly by the river, humming with the steady, reassuring vibration of immense profit margins. The people of Memphis and Knoxville who are currently protesting the localized smog events are missing the bigger picture. A little particulate matter in the lungs is a small price to pay for knowing that the grid is being managed by men who wear tailored suits to board meetings.
There is a profound, quiet dignity in knowing exactly how the biosphere will end and actively funding its conclusion.
And let us not forget the nuclear component of this revised plan. For years, I have argued in this very column that splitting the atom is the only truly elegant way to boil water. The TVA’s renewed commitment to generating highly radioactive waste that will comfortably outlast human civilization is a beautiful, necessary testament to our species' enduring optimism. It says: we believe that someone in the year 12,000 will be smart enough to figure out where we buried this. It is a gift to the future, wrapped in lead and concrete. By expanding its nuclear fleet, the TVA is essentially creating permanent, glowing monuments to its own jurisdictional authority.
Ultimately, it is incredibly selfish of working-class utility customers to demand clean air when these executives are just trying to finalize their legacy portfolios in peace. If you are genuinely concerned about the TVA doubling down on coal and gas, the solution is not to petition the federal government or chain yourself to a cooling tower. The solution is to adapt. Buy a better air purifier. Invest in a hyperbaric chamber. The next time you find yourself choking on the exhaust of a freshly revitalized coal furnace, I suggest you look inward. Take a deep, sulfur-filled breath, and ask yourself what you could have done differently.