Red State Freedom Is Better for the Environment Than European Green Socialism

By Drew Bond

Sunday, July 19, 2026

 

Here is a fact that should embarrass every climate activist: States with the most liberated energy markets in America are producing better environmental outcomes than the green mandators of Europe — and doing it without impoverishing their people in the process.

 

Freedom, it turns out, is a remarkably effective environmental policy.

 

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. For decades, Europe has proclaimed itself the vanguard of the environmental movement. Germany’s Energiewende — its sweeping top-down energy transition initiated in 2010 — was announced as the model every serious nation should follow. Germany shut down its nuclear plants, poured money into mandated renewables, and staked its future on wind generation in the North Sea and solar pulled from its perennially cloudy skies.

 

Germany does not stand alone. The U.K.’s Renewables Obligation scheme mandated aggressive renewable targets and layered green levies directly onto consumer bills. The Netherlands passed a legally binding Climate Act in 2019, committing to mandatory emissions reduction targets. Denmark required 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. With few exceptions, European nations liberally used the heavy hand of the state to force an energy transition and “de-carbonize” their economies.

 

The results were staggering — and painful.

 

Denmark’s mandates drove household electricity prices to among the highest in Europe. The Netherlands backed down from its emission targets after a revolt from the nation’s farmers. And Germany, formerly the beating industrial heart of the continent, is becoming a manufacturing backwater. German households already pay among the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Now, industrial giants like BASF are relocating production out of Germany, citing uncompetitive energy costs, and energy-intensive production in Germany dropped over 15 percent from February 2022 to March 2026. Across the continent, the EU lost over 850,000 manufacturing jobs in four years.

 

The net impact is not environmental progress, but environmental arbitrage. When European factories close, production does not disappear. It moves — overwhelmingly to China, which generates more than 60 percent of its electricity from coal and has emitted more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. Factory closures in Germany or Poland may cheer anti-industrial environmentalists, but only because they don’t see those factories reopen in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.

 

Thus, in return for economically immiserating their own people, Europe has not solved climate change. It has only outsourced it.

 

Americans are rightly perplexed by fatalistic Europeans who would rather endure unemployment, skyrocketing cost of living, and summers without air conditioning than accept marginally higher national emissions numbers. And Europeans can’t understand Americans who don’t take the “climate crisis” seriously.

 

In reality, Americans have always cared about the environment. We simply understand that enduring pain is not the same as being effective.

 

In America, we made incredible environmental gains with a growing economy thanks to the power of the market. As of last September, American carbon emissions dropped 20 percent since 2005. At the same time, from the mid-2000s U.S. energy consumption remained steady for nearly two decades until it surged to record highs in 2024 and 2025 largely due to AI data center investments.

 

American emissions didn’t decline because California and Massachusetts out-Europed Europe, using mandates to make up for the rest of the country’s pollution. Rather, America is improving the environment thanks to a red-state energy revolution led by natural gas — which is replacing higher-emitting coal — with a little help from wind, solar, and batteries. Natural gas is the clear driving force behind this progress, but since many climate activists don’t view natural gas as green, let’s focus on wind and solar, where red states are still beating the greens at their own game.

 

Four of the top five states for total wind, solar, and battery energy generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are Republican states. Texas alone produced almost twice as much solar and wind energy as California. More than two-thirds of America’s added solar capacity in 2025 was built in states that voted for President Donald Trump, and 85 percent of clean-energy investments under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act headed to Republican districts despite every congressional Republican opposing the legislation. Green energy is flourishing in red-state America.

 

It’s no paradox. Ask any developer, and they will tell you why: Republican jurisdictions have lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a much more welcoming business environment. Republican states have renewable energy not because regulators demanded it, but because people had the freedom to build it.

 

Call it Econ 101. In a free market, producers naturally deliver the most energy at the lowest price to win the most dollars from consumers. Where that energy comes from doesn’t matter nearly as much as how much it costs. And red states would do even more if the federal government didn’t hold them back — the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) ironically stifles renewable energy more than it does oil and gas.

 

Europe spent two decades proving that mandates impoverish people without saving the planet. At the same time, red states built wind farms, pipelines, solar arrays, and refineries by embracing the free market. The result is the most dynamic energy market on earth — and one that is getting cleaner every year.

 

This prompts a question for climate activists: Is it progress you want, or propaganda?

 

If the answer is progress, there’s never been a better time in history to embrace the power of freedom. It’s a win-win for people and the planet.