Of all the culture-war flash points that could become political wedge issues, you might think “don’t waste energy” would be toward the bottom of the list, down around “a hot dog is a sandwich” and “puppies are nice,” especially during a supposed energy emergency. And yet here we are. Your electric bills should feel the effects first.
Let’s set the scene: During a heat wave, a political leader urges citizens to curb their energy use to ease the strain on the electric grid. He goes so far as to make specific suggestions, such as turning off unnecessary lights and electronics and avoiding the use of appliances such as dishwashers and coffee makers between certain hours. He even suggests people “avoid opening refrigerators or freezers unnecessarily.”
Who is this Marxist nanny-state dictator? No, it is not Zohran Mamdani.
It is Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who on a sweltering day in August 2015 joined the Electric Reliability Council of Texas in prescribing certain energy-saving measures to stop blackouts. Along with the advice about coffee makers and fridges, the council suggested homeowners set their thermostats to 78°F (25.6°C) when they were in and 85°F (29°C) when they were away.
Eleven years later, during the recent heat wave that made New York City hotter than Texas was in August 2015, Mamdani offered basically the same advice, only with far less specificity. He suggested New Yorkers set their thermostats at 78°F (no mention of 85°F), “turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can. A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved.”
Rather than doing what most normal politicians would have done in the decades before 2026, which is to recognize Mamdani’s advice as utterly unremarkable common sense and move on to other outrages (a hot dog is not a sandwich!),
Republicans clamoured to accuse Mamdani of Stalinesque communism. The backlash apparently reached the White House; soon after Mamdani’s tweet, President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy ( DOE) deleted its web pages containing the identical advice Mamdani had given. Stalin would be proud.
The DOE’s purge did not stop at thermostat settings. The agency removed nearly 7,000 pages related to energy efficiency, the Verge reported. Fortunately those have been saved by the Internet Archive, if you are curious. These include discussions of such politically neutral topics as insulation, storm windows and moisture barriers, stuff you would probably feel comfortable discussing with even the most MAGA-pilled relative or contractor.
That mass deletion hints at a deeper, more enduring motivation behind what might on the surface seem to be a bizarre, one-off backlash against energy efficiency: forcing people to burn more fossil fuels. The Mamdani critique is just window dressing.
Some of the response to his bland statement is politicians scrambling for relevance, like Seinfeld’s George Costanza shoving children and the elderly out of his path at the first hint of fire. Some of it is the Republican party seeing the rise of Mamdani and other socialist-leaning candidates as a chance to scare their base into voting in the midterms to avert an impending Red Dawn situation.
But Trump’s war on efficiency, designed to favour an industry that helped bankroll his 2024 campaign, began long before Mamdani was mayor. In May 2025, soon after Trump retook the White House, his ironically named “Environmental Protection” Agency (EPA) tried to kill the Energy Star programme that certifies the efficiency of home appliances, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, new homes and more.
Another Republican president, George H.W. Bush, had launched the programme 33 years earlier. Almost everybody loved it. It saves American consumers $350 for every $1 it spends, according to the Alliance to Save Energy, a non-profit group whose honorary board includes senators from both main parties. It has saved more than $500 billion in energy costs during its lifetime.
In fact, Energy Star is so popular that Trump’s effort to eliminate it was one of the few things to rouse a seemingly eternally slumbering Congress to resist him last year. In January, it passed a law giving the EPA $33 million for the programme, its first budget increase in at least a decade.
Trump has found many other, quieter ways to wage war on energy savings. Last week, his Energy Department proposed a new rule making it much harder for the agency to set new efficiency standards for household appliances and industrial equipment.
Higher standards available to the DOE could save the average US household $160 a year and all US businesses $15 billion a year in electricity costs between 2030 and 2050, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project (ASAP), a non-profit research and advocacy group.
Trump’s DOE wants to prevent itself from delivering those savings, an odd political choice when ‘affordability’ is a buzzword that seems to have more juice than ‘communism.’ Higher efficiency standards would also cut peak summer energy demand by 34GW by 2040 and 56GW by 2050, ASAP estimates. That would help ease the way for Trump’s stated goal of putting power-hungry data centres all over the place.
In fact, one of Trump’s first acts in his second term was ordering the EPA to toss efficiency standards for light bulbs. As my colleague Liam Denning wrote, demand for LED bulbs helped slash 50TWh in total demand for household lighting between 2015 and 2020, even as the US added 4 million households. Those LED bulbs alone not only slashed electric bills, they more than made up for the 30TWh in new data-centre use that cropped up during that time.
Catering to the industry whose products are worsening global heating and the natural disasters that come with it might score cheap political points, and expensive political donations, in the short term. In the long run, they are shaping up to be a generational error for both politics and capitalism. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change.