Topher McDougal

In 2009, just after my now 16-year-old son was born, I was a doctoral candidate at MIT when President Barack Obama visited the campus. He made a claim that has stayed with me: the nation that leads in clean energy will lead the global economy.

Sixteen years on, that prediction is starting to play out—and in ways that are not always intuitive.

Take Iowa. Obama won it handily in both 2008 and 2012. It leapt on his green energy agenda, and now (you may be surprised to know) leads the United States in renewable energy as a share of total generation (60%!), driven primarily by wind. This is not an accident: federal incentives aligned with state-level policies and transmission investments to turn geographic advantage into industrial capacity. By Obama’s logic, Iowa should be well-positioned for the energy economy of the future.

And yet politically, the story has moved in a different direction. Support for that vision has eroded. Trump won Iowa with increasing margins in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And his recent rhetoric there has shifted toward ethanol—a fuel that remains economically important to farmers, but far less transformative in terms of long-term energy systems. The result is a kind of quiet dissonance: a state that has, in practice, advanced deeply into a clean energy transition, but narrates its economic future in older terms.

That dissonance matters because energy is not just an economic variable. It is a foundation of geopolitical stability. Domestically, those states better insulated from oil and gas shocks are less exposed to the Trump administration’s disastrous geopolitical bungle. Internationally, countries so insulated are more at liberty to sit this destructive conflict out, allowing the combattants to weaken each other.

As tensions escalate between Iran and its adversaries, recent strikes on energy infrastructure underscore a familiar dynamic: even limited disruptions can ripple through global markets, driving price volatility and exposing underlying vulnerabilities. Moments like these function as stress tests. When the tide goes out, you see who is exposed.

On that measure, the contrast is increasingly clear. China has built a diversified—if still imperfect—energy system (around 18% of electricity is generated via renewables, and 1 on 10 cars are electric — both statistics that are rapidly rising) alongside a commanding position in renewable manufacturing. California has invested heavily in renewables and storage, offering partial insulation (between 42% and 53%, depending what you count as “renewable”), even if grid constraints remain. Many other U.S. states, however—particularly across the Southeast and parts of the Midwest—remain highly exposed to fossil fuel price shocks.

There is a further irony. The current surge in oil and natural gas prices is often described as a “spike,” suggesting a temporary deviation from normal. But even if the conflict were to end tomorrow, prices would not simply return to where they were. Energy infrastructure, once damaged, takes time to rebuild. Capacity has been degraded. What we are seeing is not just volatility, but the early stages of a more persistent constraint.

In that sense, the present moment has recreated—through conflict rather than policy—the very incentives that earlier clean energy initiatives sought to establish deliberately. An administration that has worked to dismantle those incentives, and to discourage investment in the green economy, now finds itself presiding over a geopolitical shock that makes such investments more urgent, not less.

The distributional effects are equally striking. States like Iowa or Oregon, with substantial renewable capacity, are partially insulated from the fallout. Others—more dependent on fossil fuels, and often more politically aligned with the administration’s energy agenda—are likely to feel the pressure most acutely. The political geography of energy, in other words, is not aligning neatly with the geography of vulnerability.

It is a familiar pattern. As George Orwell observed, we are all capable of believing things we know to be untrue, and even of twisting facts to preserve those beliefs. Intellectually, this can continue for quite some time. The only real check is when those beliefs encounter solid reality—often on a battlefield. Energy systems, it turns out, have a way of bringing that encounter forward.

Globally, the picture is just as uneven. The conflict is not “good” for China in any absolute sense. But in relative terms, it may reinforce an advantage already in place: a diversified energy strategy paired with dominance in renewable manufacturing. While Beijing has objected to the conflict, its restraint may reflect not only caution, but calculation.

Energy transitions, in other words, are not just about climate or growth. They are about exposure—and, ultimately, about the conditions for peace.

But adaptation requires a forward gaze. Movements — such as MAGA — organized around the recovery of a grand, mythic past may find themselves increasingly out of step with a world defined by transition. They can preserve, sometimes even restore — but they struggle to anticipate. And in an era of necessary energy transition, the cost of that lag is not only economic. It is geopolitical.