Trump breaks the green revolution, the coming energy crisis, Musk has his hands full

There's no doubt about it: he won. After a week of orchestrated psychodrama and false suspense, Donald Trump obtained from his majority in Congress the vote on a law, the Big Beautiful Bill, which crushes every last principle of the old Republican Party by increasing the budget deficit by more than $3 trillion and inflicting the worst abuses on the American social welfare system. The Democrats, the last square of Joe Biden's supporters, had no doubt that Trump, through his astounding art of demagogy and mafia-like threats, would succeed in imposing this mixture of enormous tax cuts for the highest incomes and the destruction of Medicaid, the health insurance intended for the poorest.

But still: according to the Washington Post , Biden and his brilliant technocrats, adept at good old-fashioned political mechanics, did not imagine that Trump would attack with such violence one of the major achievements of the former administration: the hi-tech industrial stimulus plan called IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. Nearly $400 billion of public funds devoted largely to renewable energies that were supposed to create factories and jobs throughout the country while ensuring American preeminence in the technologies of the future. Why this certainty?

The Democratic White House believed it had ensured the plan's survival by prioritizing its implementation in Republican strongholds. Of the twenty states benefiting from the IRA's green tax breaks and the 120,000 jobs it would create, seventeen had overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the previous presidential elections. It doesn't matter.

Republican elected officials in these states voted fanatically for the rapid elimination of these subsidies, key to more than 400 industrial projects and thousands of jobs, because they feared the wrath of a president hell-bent on destroying his predecessor's achievements more than the electoral consequences of rising unemployment among their constituents. Some members of Congress even proposed, to demonstrate their devotion to Donald Trump, a 20% tax on the left-wing solar panel and wind turbine industries. Most of the IRA-funded projects were certainly underway. The public in these conservative regions was poorly informed by Fox News and social media about the local details of the industrial plan. The culture war matters more to these voters than their economic future. At least, for now...

The Atlantic foresees another consequence of the IRA massacre: a coming energy crisis worthy, in its severity, of the oil crisis of the 1970s. It's simple: 93% of new electricity supplies to the US grid this year will be generated by solar, wind, and battery energy storage. Abandoning these investments, while electricity prices have been rising by 13% per year since 2022, would contribute to terribly higher energy bills for households and businesses, or to cause blackouts across the country. The return to coal-fired power plants advocated by Donald Trump is as illusory as it is grotesque. As for the increased use of natural gas for electricity generation, it is running up against the shortage of turbines due to the vertiginous increase in electricity demand needed by data centers for artificial intelligence (AI). No new gas-fired power plants will be able to come online before 2030. And there will soon be no alternative.

Elon Musk is on the mat. Defeated? But no. He's been chopped into small pieces, sliced ​​into sushi, and scattered like a puzzle by his former mentor and sovereign Donald Trump for opposing the budgetary abyss of the Big Beautiful Bill. This Shakespearean disgrace has even inspired Foreign Policy magazine, usually more expert on belligerence and missiles, to now describe the genius of SpaceX and Tesla as the president's "useful idiot." Musk, known for having cut X's workforce by two-thirds without sinking the social network, believed he was saving the Universe by applying his science of downsizing to the American public service. But his savage chainsaw will have done less to reduce the state budget than to terrorize and bring the civil service into line, the famous " deep state" hated by Trump.

This dirty work did, however, bring him some advantages. The Washington Post , informed by Elon Musk's competitors, claims that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) madman, thanks to his squad of young computer scientists, had access to masses of precious and confidential data from at least seven government agencies which would allow him, for example, via state contract files, to know the technological secrets of his rivals, to examine the federal complaints of labor law violations being prepared against him, or to appropriate the tax and financial information of millions of Americans in order to launch his future online payment service on his X network. A tough myth had it that Musk was too crazy, too rich, too powerful, too interstellar and idealistic to get rich in vulgar conflicts of interest. Well, let's see...