Solar is super punk.
The solar panel is scrappy, strong, independent, and is the nightmare of petro-authoritarians. That makes it an actionable piece of resistance in dark times.
To understand why, you’ll have to understand a concept called “fossil feudalism.”
Solar threatens the feudalist model
Fossil fuel companies have spent over a century making billions off of a captive customer base.
Conventionally, consumers purchase fossil fuels to cook, heat their homes, and get around. Thanks largely to the lobbying money and campaign donations Big Oil has dished out, we’ve had no choice but to buy more fossil fuels from them.
We may fancy ourselves homeowners, but when it comes to energy, we’ve been renters. We’ve had no choice but to pay them every single month; they’ve trapped us in a type of modern-day feudalism.
Then something remarkable happened.
Around the mid-2010s, the price of solar panels — which hadn’t yet seriously threatened the fossil fuel industry — began to drop so precipitously that average homeowners could now afford to power everything with them.
Better yet, solar power could replace most fossil fuel use cases. We can cook with induction stoves, heat with heat pumps, and even charge our EVs, all with the light of the sun.
The fossil fuel industry is backed into a corner
In the face of affordable renewables, the fossil fuel industry had three options:
Option 1: Try to make fossil fuels cost-competitive. Impossible; most of the cost-cutting innovations happened years ago, and prices continue to be volatile. Fossil fuels will always require expensive extraction, processing, and transportation, whereas solar panels are simple and easy to scale.
Option 2: Pivot and start selling solar. Not likely; the solar business model favors us (the consumer) too heavily. Once we buy the panels, we never owe the seller a penny again. The feedstock — sunlight — falls from the sky for free, which kills the landlord-renter model that fossil feudalism relies on.
Option 3: Launch a disinformation campaign against solar. We have a winner! The industry simply needed to sow doubt, cynicism, and mistrust, exploiting people’s fears and ideologies. They’ve already mastered this technique (they did invent climate denialism, after all). (extra sources)
From misinformation to fascism
The fossil fuel industry maintains market dominance using three forces:
- Captive customer bases (i.e. fossil feudalism)
- Disinformation
But it is the third force that’s the most powerful:
- Political spending
In the last decade alone, the US fossil fuel industry has spent $1.3 billion in political donations, buying influence that extends deep into the government.
Spending has bought loyalty from politicians across the political spectrum, though it has mostly favored the right:
Source: Statistica 2026
When an industry under threat is willing to use any means necessary to preserve itself, it naturally gravitates towards candidates of the same mindset. In May of 2024, paving the way for his successful reelection, Donald Trump convened oil executives at Mar-a-Lago and requested $1 billion in campaign donations in return for a promised $110 billion in tax breaks.
The rest is history: anti-renewable vitriol and executive orders, the shredding of renewable investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, the conquest of Venezuela, and massive tax breaks for wealthy executives.
The marriage of fossil fuels and political leaders is the status quo in autocracies like Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others. In this way, solar panels are a real act of resistance — punk rockers flaunting independence in the face of authoritarian rule.
Ask: why are they fighting solar so viciously?
Politicians and influence groups don’t waste time or money campaigning against things that don’t threaten them. Solar panels represent a new type of superthreat to Big Oil: they are cheap, readily available, and liberate customers from a monopoly.
The idea of homeowners paying off their solar system in a decade or so, then enjoying two more decades of free energy, is frightening enough to trigger drastic measures. And when something scares Big Oil that much, you know it’s got to be good for everyday people.