Gasoline averaged more than $4 a gallon in early April, and the politics around climate and energy shifted with it. What once looked like a clean, inevitable march toward electric vehicles now looks far more fragile.
That reversal has left climate advocates quieter than they were a year ago, with Earth Day arriving in a mood shaped less by celebration than by the energy crisis. The Biden administration spent heavily to push consumers toward EVs, offering $7,500 tax credits and backing state mandates like California’s rule that 100% of new cars and light trucks sold must be zero-emission by 2035. The strategy was sold as a transition, but the public response has been more skeptical than the policy class expected.
Gavin Newsom helped define the earlier mood. Last July, the California governor said his state’s economic growth comes not in spite of clean energy but because of it. He later folded his administration’s role to responsibly increase oil production into a press release, a reminder that even the most committed believers have been forced to hedge when prices rise and supply gets tight. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality has only widened since then.
Debbie Stabenow once made the same kind of confident case from another angle. In June 2022, the Michigan senator said it didn’t matter how high gas cost because she drove an EV. But in 2024, the Big Three automakers in her home state lost a combined $52 billion on EVs. Ford stopped production of the F-150 Lightning last year and said the American consumer is speaking clearly. That line tells you more than any campaign speech about where the market sits now.
Rahm Emanuel’s warning that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste has echoed through climate politics for years, and the energy shock did exactly that. It gave regulators, governors and automakers cover to move faster than consumers were ready to follow. A story described mostly empty and losing money EV plants across the Rust Belt as part of America’s messy breakup with electric vehicles, and the image fits the moment: factories built for a future that has not arrived on schedule.
The pressure is not only domestic. Cuba relies on oil and gas for more than 90% of its electricity and gets just 2% from renewables. In January, its lights had literally gone out after the loss of cheap Venezuelan oil, deepening a humanitarian crisis on the island. President Donald Trump also allowed a Russian oil tanker to reach Havana, another sign that energy politics now reaches well beyond the fight over emissions.
The climate movement is not disappearing, but it is losing the easy moral certainty that powered its rise. The next phase will be defined less by slogans about the future than by whether governments can keep the lights on, the cars moving and the public with them.