Energy Policy Decoded: The Real Numbers Behind the Headlines

Ultimize. According to reporting by Thomas Edsel in the New York Times, Trump's energy policies have already cost the average American household $1,508 since he took office. That number comes from Professor Leah Stokes at UC Santa Barbara, not a political operative but an academic who did the math. $1,500, not because of market forces, not because of global supply chains, because Donald Trump lost a court case in Scotland over a wind farm he could see from his golf course and decided the entire United States of America should pay for his hurt feelings. Donald Trump has a 1970s mental map of who counts as a real American worker. In his mind, there are only two respectable men in this economy. Number one, A billionaire in a suit closing deals at Goldman Sachs. Number 2, a coal miner covered in soot. That's the complete list. There is no solar installer in Ohio, no wind technician in Iowa, no battery engineer in Michigan. The 39,000 people who lost clean energy jobs in 2025 alone do not exist in Trump's imagination. And we're all paying the price for a president whose entire economic Worldview fits on a bumper sticker from a car that runs on leaded gasoline. Thomas Edsel writes a political column for the New York Times from Washington, D.C., and today he published a piece calling— called Trump is fighting the world's stupidest culture war. I urge you to read it. I want to walk you through what this means and what it's costing to you in specific terms and where the whole insane situation actually started. Because the origin story of American energy policy in 2026 begins not in Washington, not in an oil field in Texas. It begins on a golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland, way back in 2006. Trump was building a luxury resort. It was gonna be spectacular, naturally. And then someone told him there was gonna be an offshore wind farm about a mile from the course. Trump went ballistic. He actually traveled to the Scottish Parliament in April 2012 and testified on record. He said, and I'm quoting directly here, "Windmills are so unattractive, so ugly, so noisy, and so dangerous that if Scotland does this, I think there will be serious trouble." Well, Scotland didn't listen. In February 2014, a Scottish civil court judge named Lord priority, ruled against Trump. The turbines went up. They can be seen from his golf course to this day. And Donald Trump, a man who's never once in his life processed a loss and moved on, never got over it. That's the emotional origin story of the United States energy policy in 2026. A golf course, a view, a grudge. January 20th, 2025, his first day in the White House, Trump issued a wave of executive orders targeting clean energy. He ordered all offshore areas withdrawn from wind energy leasing. He pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. He rescinded 12 Biden executive orders supporting renewables. He killed the electric vehicle mandate. He eliminated California's ability to set its own emission standards. All of it, day one. And then on July 4th, happy Independence Day, he signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which terminated 7 clean energy tax credits, phased out support for wind and solar, and eliminated the tax credit for electric vehicles entirely. Now let's talk about what that actually cost a real family. Professor Leah Stokes at UC Santa Barbara calculated that energy cost are up $1,508 per household since Trump took office. That breaks down to roughly $94 per month, $22 per week, $3.13 per day, just from his domestic energy policies. But that's only part of the bill. Professor Jeff Colgan at Brown University runs something called the Iran War Energy Cost Tracker. Trump's military confrontation with Iran has added $37 billion in extra gasoline and diesel costs to American consumers. This is an additional $285 per household. Put those two numbers together and the average American family is paying somewhere between $3.50 and $4 every single day in extra energy cost directly, directly attributable to Trump's decisions. Roughly $4 a day. That's a gallon of milk. Gone. Every day. Not because of anything the market did. Because of choices one man made to reward the fossil fuel industry that bankrolled his campaign and to punish an energy source that ruined his golf course view. Think about a family earning $60,000 a year in Michigan or Ohio or Pennsylvania. These are Trump's voters. These are the people that just rallies. They're spending an extra $100 a month on energy they did not have to spend. That's their internet bill. That's 2 weeks of school lunches. That's a tank of gas. And where is that money going? Some of it is going directly to the Campbell Coal Plant in Michigan, a plant that was scheduled to close. that Trump ordered kept alive using emergency presidential grid powers that cost $615,000 per day to operate. $308 million has already been spent keeping uneconomical coal plants running across the country. Indiana plants forced to stay open are costing utilities $200,000 a day. In Colorado, the Craig Plant was already broken when the order came through. Grid Strategies estimates it will cost $85 million per year to keep running. Trump has issued a government mandate to prop up dying plants that the free market— remember that— the free market already rejected them, and then he mailed the bill to you. Now here's where this gets philosophically interesting, because this isn't just bad energy policy. This is a window into how Trump's mind actually works. He sees the world through a very specific lens of masculinity and economic legitimacy. In his framework, certain kinds of work are real and certain kinds are not. Coal mining is real work. It's physical, it's dirty, it's old, and it fits his nostalgic idea of American toughness. Fossil fuel executives, they're real. They wear suits, they do deals. They have private jets. Trump understands them because he wants to be them and he wants things from them. But a wind turbine technician, a solar panel installer, a battery engineer— these don't compute for Trump. They are associated with people who went to universities that made fun of him, with a political movement he despises. With a future he did not build and can't control. So he doesn't see those workers as real, which is how you can wipe out 38,000 clean energy jobs in a single year and feel like you're protecting the American worker. Meanwhile, China is watching all of this and laughing all the way to the bank. According to the Atlas Public Policy report cited in Edsel's column, China has invested $509.7 billion in clean energy manufacturing. The United States sits at $236 billion and falling. China announced 101 new clean tech demonstration projects in March of 2025 alone. The bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission created by Congress, not some left-wing organization, found that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China, China, for solar components, battery components, and clean energy supply chains. Every canceled American renewable project is a gap that China fills. Every lost American clean energy job is a Chinese clean energy job. We're not just hurting ourselves, we're handing our competitor the future. And there is an alternative, it exists. It's not theoretical. Professor Jan Rosenau at Oxford writes in this same column about Spain this week. 25 years ago, a third of Spain's electricity came from coal. Today, coal is effectively gone there. Wind and solar now provide 45% of Spain's electricity, and Spain's wholesale electricity prices are now among the lowest Lowest in all of Europe, lower than countries still burning gas, lower than they were when coal was running the show. Because here's the thing about sunshine and wind, they don't have a fuel cost. The sun does not negotiate a higher price because of a war in the Middle East. The wind doesn't have a lobbyist. Once you build the infrastructure, the fuel is essentially free. Spain figured this out. Germany figured this out. The United Kingdom figured this out. The United States, under this president, is moving in the opposite direction, not because of economics, not because of engineering, because of a grudge that started on a golf course in Scotland years ago. Professor Jeff Colgan at Brown put the national security dimension plainly. He wrote that renewables have a national security advantage over fossil fuels because geopolitics makes fossil fuels unreliable, not more reliable. Every time there's instability in the Middle East, every time a shipping lane gets threatened, every time an adversary nation decides to play games with oil supply, Americans— that's right, Americans— pay more at the pump. Clean energy breaks that chain entirely. Trump calls fossil fuels a symbol of strength. Every economist who looked at the data calls them a vulnerability. Julie McNamara at the Union of Concerned Scientists said Trump is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the United States to lead the global clean energy transition and all the benefits that leadership can afford. Amanda Levin at the National Resources Defense Council was more blunt. She said, 'This could not have come at a worse time for American consumers.' Now I want to take a moment and speak directly to some of them. I think about a lot in terms of human psychology and personal development because I believe strongly that the way we handle setbacks define us more than how we handle successes. Every person in their life, every person experiences loss. A business deal falls through, A relationship ends. A judge rules against you. The question that determines the entire trajectory of your life is what you do next. Do you absorb the loss, extract the lesson, and move forward with greater wisdom? Or do you carry that wound with you, let it fester, let it metastasize into something that poisons every decision you make going forward? Donald Trump has been publicly nursing the Aberdeen wind farm loss for decades. He's mentioned it in speeches countless times. He's tweeted about it. He testified before a foreign parliament about it. And now he's turned that unprocessed wound into the energy policy of the most powerful nation on Earth. This is what unresolved grievance looks like at scale. This is why emotional intelligence is not soft. It's not optional. It's literally the difference between a leader who makes decisions based on data and a leader who makes decisions based on a view from a golf course that got blocked 20 years ago. The people paying $4 a day extra for energy are not paying for Trump's ideology. They're paying for his inability to let something go. Here's where we end up. The Times column, by Edsel lays out a picture that's almost impossible to believe, and yet it's completely documented. President who made a billion-dollar deal with fossil fuel executives to gut clean energy. A president keeping coal mines alive that the free market already decided to close at a cost of $600,000 a day and charging the cost to you and to other ordinary families. A president who's handed China a decisive lead in the industries that will define the next 50 years of the global economy, a president whose policy can be traced in a straight line back to Scottish civil court ruling, this ruling back in 2014 about a golf course view. 38,000 clean energy jobs gone, poof, in a year. $34.76 billion in canceled investment. $4 a day, out of every American family's pocket. A gallon of milk every day gone. Spain has cheap electricity because they chose wind and solar. We have a president who chose personal revenge, and we're all living with the bill. And hey, I'm being optimistic, not even talking about how this ill-fated, ill-thought-out Iran war could make energy prices double, triple, quadruple. Things could get worse because of the psychosis of one deranged individual. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered. Join me tomorrow. Ultimize.