Sustainable energy is common sense

January 29, 2026 10:39 PM ET society

We are people. We all require food, water, and shelter from the elements. Without these, we die. The climate is changing. This is a fact. We could argue about the cause, but why? We should be committing all of our resources to doing something about climate change.

Assuming we can’t reverse climate change and we can’t stop climate change, what else can we do about it?

We could 1) do things that slow it, by reducing things that contribute to making the climate less habitable for humanity. We could 2) plan and prepare for a future where our planet’s surface is not habitable.

The second option seems like science fiction, and in some ways it is: we don’t currently know how to survive off the planet or not on the surface of the planet. That’s not a thing we can do now, it’s going to take years to build towards those.

So let’s pursue the first option: we should do everything we can to reduce things that demonstrably contribute to climate change. This is not a political commentary, but there are political arguments against it.

Let’s destroy each argument against it:

Even if the United States stopped producing greenhouse gases, it wouldn’t make other countries stop. (Nirvana fallacy)
First of all, there’s the bandwagon effect, where people will do something because others are doing it. Secondly, a non-greenhouse gas system would ultimately be more cost-effective than a greenhouse gas system (because costs will trend to zero over a longer time span than the costs of a dramatically shorter time span). Thirdly, if you create a new market, it will increase competition of that same type elsewhere (bandwagon effect, again, but this time of market forces). This argument is just an excuse to not start doing something. If literally any societal change did not overcome this first, most basic hurdle of doing something, we would still be using stone tools and have no written language.
Greenhouse gases aren’t bad. (Ignoratio elenchi)
Sure, the greenhouse effect is crucial to life on Earth, but if the balance is tilted, it becomes a threat to life on earth. Minimal research effort yields an answer here: https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/greenhouse-gases.
It’s too expensive. (Sunk costs fallacy)
Every new technology is expensive initially.

OK, sure, plenty of people don’t have any interest in learning about fallacies or rational arguments. I get it. So let’s use the tool that conservative media loves to conjure up: common sense.

Does it make sense to have clean water?
Yes. Obviously. We need water to survive. Of course we want to ensure that our water is free of contaminants that could sicken or kill us.
Does it make sense to have clean air?
Yes. Obviously. We need air to survive. Of course we want to ensure that our air is free of contaminants that could sicken or kill us.

So why would anyone oppose measures to ensure we have clean air or clean water? The Trumpy camp has attacked these in two ways: 1) a challenge to the legality or compliance of policies that were enacted to further sustainable energy (that is, energy that does not foul the air or water), 2) revoke scientific findings that deem greenhouse gases an endangerment. The logic of the latter is that if these gases are not harmful, then they should not be regulated.

This highlights that the real goal being pursued is deregulation. To put that differently: it’s too cumbersome and too expensive to have to comply with regulation that ensures environmental pollutants are within safe ranges – whether that means just safe enough or better than previously allowed. To put that difference into perspective: it’s more important for businesses to make money then it is to ensure that the air and water we need are safe enough for humanity.

Following that line of thinking, it’s more important for people to make as much money in the short-term than to be alive longer in the long-term.

There’s probably a little bit of nostalgia denial happening too, where older people (like myself) recall simpler times, where the environment was less of a concern (mostly because we had done less research on it, and understood less of what the concerns should be).

But wait, there’s more.

The Trumpy camp has attacked these budgetarily as well, with: 3) a plan to decommission the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, so that we can’t learn more about atmospheric change that affects us, and 4) proposed budget cuts to the NOAA, which would affect both research and funding of the National Weather Service.

Even if you consider that the latter is intended to help privatize weather forecasting (because free markets are sacrosanct), the net result is that we regular people would have a decreased ability to know what’s happening to our air and water, and what to expect from changing weather patterns as a result.

What would change in our weather patterns?

Knowing what is coming can help people prepare and adapt; policies that get rid of people’s ability to know what’s coming are not policies that are trying to help people. At best, this is a “la la la I can’t hear you” approach to adapting to a changing world. The party advocating for these policies is so nostalgic for the past that they would blind themselves to the present. We can pretend the world isn’t changing, but that won’t stop it from changing.

You can lie to people about all sorts of things, but the layers of lies around climate change are the most infuriating. It’s no surprise that the current administration would stop work on sustainable energy initiatives – that’s just doing what they promised. This is the latest word in a long-running narrative, and people who support it have stopped thinking critically about the narrative. They just cheer the lib-owning.

It makes no defensible sense whatsoever to reduce any effort to shift our energy consumption to more sustainable sources. Let’s consider the possible excuses:

Excuse #1: Sustainable energy “doesn’t work”
This is a decades-old belief, born of the same willfully misleading claim that sustainable energy systems don’t include storage of energy produced. These people equate something like solar (which is stored to account for when solar isn’t available) with fossil fuels (which you can consume around the clock). They are not the same, so they’re not treated the same. So, yes, if for some reason you would invest in sustainable energy without the associated storage of excess energy, then it won’t work like fossil fuels. But you wouldn’t do that, because that’d just be stupid system design.
Excuse #2: Sustainable energy “causes <undesirable something>”
This is usually “cancer” of some kind, but it’s clearly a conspiracy theory in every case. My personal favorite is that wind turbines risk poisoning our drinking water. For example, a wind turbine that leaks oil will befoul our water supply – which is laughable when you compare that small possibility and even smaller amount to the very real contamination that stems from oil spills. The idea that a leaking turbine would go unchecked and be a disaster is comical when you compare it to something like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that leaked for years.
Excuse #3: Sustainable energy is “too expensive”
This is the one that is deployed to appeal to fiscal conservatives or free-market nuts (the kind of people who believe that literally everything is better as a free market). It’s a lazy argument that asserts that renewable energy is still so new and uncommon that it’s prohibitively expensive to pursue. This may have been true decades ago, but it’s not true now.
Excuse #4: Sustainable energy is “just as bad”
This argument asserts that it costs so much to make, say, a battery, that the amount of energy consumption is ultimately the same or worse as just continuing to use fossil fuels. This is usually about either the CO2 emitted or the overall eco-footprint of mining for batteries’ raw materials, but neither is true. This argument would have you believe that creating batteries is just as damaging to the environment as drilling oil, and it leaves out the part about sustained need: you regularly put gasoline in an internal combustion engine to make it keep working; you don’t keep mining materials for a battery to make it keep working.
Excuse #5: “Climate change” is not real and/or not man-made and/or not that bad
Of course climate change isn’t only man-made. But why should we make a bad thing worse? The frog boiling in the pot doesn’t turn the heat up on itself. Anyone who has already rejected science will not be persuaded by facts or evidence; they won’t believe any of this until it’s at their doorstep. Even then, they might think the effects are isolated, but they’re not.

So put politics aside: what is most important to you right now? It’s probably not needing clean air and water. But once you don’t have clean air or water, nothing else will matter.

Climate change isn’t a hoax. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. You might want to consider why.