The Democrats’ Green Delusion: Using the Iran War to Double Down on Renewables

The radicals are pushing back on energy pragmatism – and winning

As the American Democratic establishment is being convulsed by an insurgent Democratic Socialists of America’s success in New York City with its outright communist messaging, the last several months have also seen a faction of moderate Democrats quietly distancing itself from the more apocalyptic Al Gore-type climate advocacy. “Liberals should support America’s oil and gas industry,” wrote Matt Yglesias in a radical opinion for the New York Times last December. Earlier this month, also at the New York Times, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer reported that many party moderates are backing away from dire climate messaging to focus solely on affordability, pointing to election losses among climate hawks and several blue states failing to meet their climate goals.

Confronted with gasoline prices hovering around $4.55 per gallon — up from $2.98 before the Trump administration launched its military campaign against Iran in late February 2026 — and inflation at a three-year high of 3.8%, various moderate or centrist Democrats could support “a less ambitious climate agenda if the party returns to power in Washington” according to Friedman and Plumer in the NYT. As empirical reality bites, even New York Governor Kathy Hochul – for long a climate hawk and partly responsible for the city’s energy woes – now supports some gas pipelines and significantly scaled back the state’s climate law last month.

The climate faithful will have none of It

A recent piece in the American Prospect by its Senior Editor, Ryan Cooper, is having none of this turn to moderation. The American Prospect is a Left-progressive outlet on the US political spectrum “devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective” and calls itself “an independent voice for liberal thought”. It was founded in 1990 by Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich and Paul Starr explicitly as a response to the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, with the goal of revitalising American liberalism and progressivism.

The article characterises the retreat by centrists and moderates from climate policy not as a belated recognition of economic reality but as ideological cowardice. The lesson of the Hormuz crisis, Cooper insists, is not that Western economies are dangerously exposed to fossil fuel supply disruptions, but that governments should redouble their commitment to renewable energy. The crisis is not a warning but an opportunity.