Among the standard epithets often leveled at green energy is the one about subsidies. As the conservative myth goes, green energy is allegedly not ‘cost competitive’ with dirty energy sources like coal or natural gas. This, we are led to believe, makes green energy just another wasteful taxpayer-supported boondoggle for dominant special interests. In this version of the story, big, bad all-powerful solar, wind and insulation companies are supposedly getting government handouts to unfairly oppress the earnest mom-and-pop oil and gas industry.

As laughable as it is to portray oil, gas and coal companies — some of the wealthiest corporations in the world — as underdogs, the narrative’s Machiavellian brilliance should be obvious. For both the global fossil fuel industry and a conservative political movement underwritten by oil barons like the Koch brothers, the mythology self-servingly casts environmentally friendly alternatives as inherently ill-suited to free market economics. In the process, it convinces millions of consumers and entrepreneurs that even if they want to go green, they can’t do so in any sort of economically viable way, meaning they should just keep guzzling as much fossil fuel as ever.

But in an up-is-down political arena where being a millionaire is ‘struggling’ and where […]