It is profoundly exhausting to watch people learn the wrong lessons from their own triumphs. For six glorious months, the county commissioners in Pocatello, Idaho, stood as the vanguard of the modern environmental movement. By passing a sweeping, draconian ban on all commercial renewable energy projects, these brave rural conservatives accidentally achieved what thirty years of UN climate summits could not: they actually stopped humans from building something.
When I first read the news of the original ban, I wept with a rare, crystalline joy. Finally, a local government had the courage to embrace true degrowth. No sprawling solar arrays disrupting the sagebrush. No massive wind turbines requiring hundreds of tons of concrete and steel to be hauled across pristine highways in diesel trucks. Just a pure, unobstructed commitment to doing absolutely nothing at all. It was the most sustainable policy in American history.
But the green capitalist machine cannot abide a vacuum. Now, according to reports, the county is having second thoughts. Commissioner Jeff Hough recently stood before a packed courthouse and argued that banning renewables violates America’s founding ideals. He actually quoted the Declaration of Independence to defend the inalienable right to lease agricultural land for a 500-megawatt solar farm.
Once again, I find myself forced to explain the basic arithmetic of extraction to people who should know better. The environmental left is currently cheering for Hough as a hero of the transition, entirely missing the horrifying implications of his argument. He is weaponising Thomas Jefferson to justify monetising the sun. He is framing the industrialisation of the rural landscape as a patriotic duty. This is not a climate victory. This is a masterclass in corporate greenwashing, wrapped in a flag and sold to the highest bidder on the electric grid.
I was on a panel at COP28 last year, sitting across from a major oil executive who had just rebranded his entire division to focus on net-zero transition fuels. He sounded exactly like Jeff Hough. They both view the natural world as a stranded asset waiting to be deployed. The only difference is that the executive uses ESG reports to justify paving over the wilderness, while the Idaho commissioner uses the founding fathers.
The sheer exhaustion of having to point this out is taking years off my life. We are replacing a fossil-fuel extraction economy with a renewable-mineral extraction economy, and we are calling it salvation. When Pocatello banned solar and wind, they were halting the relentless march of scope-three emissions in their tracks. They were saying no to the supply chain. They were, in their own deeply confused, reactionary way, holding the line for Mother Earth.
Fortunately, there are still a few principled voices in Bannock County who understand that generating electricity is inherently a compromise with the devil, even if their reasoning is slightly different from mine.
The founders didn't cross the Delaware so some woke California tech company could lease our potato fields and harvest our God-given photons for a profit.
Wayne and I may disagree on whether climate change is a Chinese hoax, but we are absolute brothers in obstruction. He understands that the land is not there to serve the grid. I just wish my peers in the climate movement possessed half of his moral clarity.
The tragedy of this reversal is entirely predictable. The county commissioners are having second thoughts because they realised how much potential tax revenue they were leaving on the table. It is always the tax revenue. They looked at their crumbling roads and underfunded schools and realised that leasing land for wind turbines could balance the budget.
To which I say: good. Unpaved roads slow down the global supply chain. Underfunded infrastructure is nature’s way of healing. If you allow farmers to profit from renewable energy, they will simply use that money to consume more goods, thereby increasing their carbon footprint and rendering the entire exercise moot. The poverty of the rural tax base was the only thing keeping the carbon in the ground.
If Pocatello officially reverses this ban, the floodgates will open. The pristine, undeveloped emptiness of Idaho will be covered in gleaming, profitable, utterly exhausting sustainable infrastructure. The commissioners will have traded the pure, unadulterated degrowth of their original ban for the messy, complicit reality of the energy transition.
I am begging the Republicans of Idaho: please, hold the line. Do not give in to the temptation of renewable revenue. Keep your ban. Leave the wind un-turbined. It is the only honest climate policy we have left.