Solar tax credits are a carbon tax by another name

The American public has shown a strong willingness to fund solar and other renewable energy projects through tax credits, largely because voters trust directed infrastructure funding more than open-ended government revenue pools.

September 2, 2025 John Fitzgerald Weaver

Image: Unsplash / Andres Siimon / CC SA 4.0

Solar tax incentives are not incentives, at least not in the traditional sense. They are politically palatable carbon pricing. More than that, Americans increasingly view them not as subsidies but as civic responsibility and a sound investment.

For decades, fossil fuel-aligned politicians have sought to brand carbon pollution pricing as a “carbon tax,” a term carefully chosen to make a practical, market-friendly policy politically toxic.

Philosophically, Americans are against taxation. We bristle at the word “tax.” After all, “no taxation without representation” is a foundational rallying cry. The phrase “carbon tax” lands poorly because it evokes images of politicians digging a new tunnel into our collective pockets. Even among supporters of carbon legislation, there’s often discomfort with handing elected officials a blank check.

And yet, most Americans recognize that emissions are pollution, and pollution carries a cost. We’re surprisingly willing to pay a bit more for a better product (cleaner energy) and we’ll even accept added fees on electricity bills when we know those dollars are building visible infrastructure.

We have proof.

Americans don’t just say that they like solar, they back it with their wallets. Favorability polls put solar right up there with apple pie, and the numbers support it. There are more than five million U.S. solar installations online, most of them residential. The U.S. solar fleet exceeds 200 GW and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. If we’re going to pay what amounts to a carbon tax, Americans have made it clear: they want those dollars tied directly to real hardware.

A 2017 Yale University poll found that U.S. households were willing to pay up to $177 more per year on electricity bills for cleaner energy. When asked how they’d like that money spent, nearly 80% favored wind and solar development, while 77% supported infrastructure upgrades like roads and bridges.

As with the apple pie data, solar’s favorability rating, consistently above 80%, dwarfs that of even the most popular politicians: Obama, Schwarzenegger, Harris, and Sanders top out between 50% and 61%, still far behind solar.

That popularity is also why Trump, who recently called solar and wind the “scam of the year,” was never able to eliminate the tax credits. There’s precedent for this kind of political durability. In Europe, wind and solar grew under public incentive programs that rewarded early adopters, especially in the wake of repeated global energy crises.

The reason for the social acceptance is simple: the cycle works. Distributed generation brings distributed benefits—jobs, bill savings, rooftop revenue—all funded by distributed responsibility. The $177-a-year figure becomes a civic baseline.

Still, fossil-fueled media voices claim that wind and solar have “outlived” their incentives. The narrative doesn’t hold. These supports are not giveaways. They’re obligations.

Because fossil interests delayed climate action for decades, the United States forfeited its first-mover advantage and the luxury of a smooth transition under purer market principles.

America has lollygagged since the 1980s, sedated by 40 years of propaganda, even as climate science grew clearer and more urgent. The bill is now due: to meet our 2050 climate targets, we must compress 40 years of inaction into just 25 years of decisive effort. And the slope towards a stable biosphere keeps steepening.

As science raised its voice, so did its opposition. The propaganda didn’t fade, it evolved. It’s louder now, more sophisticated, and deeply embedded in the culture wars that drown out facts with outrage. Yet even in this moment, broad support for solar and storage has helped launch a genuine energy revolution.

Tax credits aren’t energy welfare. They’re the cost of delay. They’re a down payment on civic responsibility, deferred by misinformation, regulatory capture, and legislative gridlock. They’re the uncomfortable byproduct of a disrupted transition, and the price of playing catch-up in an emergency.

There’s no elegant way to undo decades of inaction, and we’re out of time for purity tests. We must embrace risk. Some things will break. Others will work. Disruption is the price of transformation. Compared to the cost of doing nothing, it’s a bargain.

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