Until recently, other than water stored in dams, we purchased the fuels that we used to generate electricity. Coal, natural gas, oil and uranium are extracted and sold by companies that invest billions of dollars in their operations. With the advent of renewable energy, we can now produce some of our electricity from fuels such as sunshine and wind that are free. Who wouldn’t like that? It turns out there is a large number of Americans, mostly on the right of the political spectrum, who dislike these costless fuels.

President Trump’s antipathy toward wind-generated electricity, in particular, has been well publicized. He points to the environmental impacts of windmills on marine and other animal life, and the large subsidies required to make wind energy projects economically viable. Offshore wind farms, in his view, are an unreliable and expensive eyesore.

Since his return to the White House, President Trump has taken several actions that are highly detrimental to the wind energy industry. Last month, he ordered construction work to be halted at Revolution Wind, a massive wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. The $6.2 billion project was said to be 80 percent complete, and was expected to produce enough electricity to power 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut by early next year. That stop-work order reportedly put over 1,200 jobs at risk.

On his first day in office as president, Joe Biden revoked a key permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. That forced the developer, TC Energy, to cancel the project. The pipeline was being built to transport up to 830,000 barrels per day of crude oil from Western Canada to Nebraska for eventual delivery to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast. People on the right have argued that if a Democratic president can cancel a multi-billion-dollar project with the stroke of a pen, nothing should stop a Republican president from doing the same.

Ørsted, the Danish energy company that is the developer of Revolution Wind, filed a lawsuit against President Trump’s stop-work order. A few days ago, a U.S. federal court judge issued a ruling in favor of Ørsted, saying that President Trump’s order was “arbitrary and capricious.” The Trump administration will probably appeal the ruling. But whatever happens from here on, the delays will increase project costs, while the uncertainties introduced will jeopardize many other wind energy investments.

People who work in the energy industry are quite familiar with this movie. In the last several years, left-leaning environmental groups have used all kinds of roadblocks to stop construction of natural gas pipelines. One of the biggest casualties was the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). The 600-mile pipeline would have transported natural gas from the prolific Appalachian production region in West Virginia to Virginia and North Carolina. Although it had been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and much of it had been built, the developers ultimately canceled the project. $4 billion had already been spent on it.

The most important reason cited by environmentalists and their supporters in government for their opposition to natural gas pipelines is the need to limit carbon emissions. Those groups argue that in order to attain the goal of carbon-neutrality by 2050, there should be no new investments in fossil-fuel infrastructure. Some have even called for immediate cessation of the use of fossil fuels.

Anyone who knows anything about energy is aware that those demands by the green movement were completely unrealistic. Net-zero by 2050 was never supposed to mean no more use of fossil fuels. Every projection made by energy industry experts in the last several years has shown that the world will continue to need substantial amounts of oil and natural gas well past 2050. The intermittency of wind and sun is the primary reason we need an all-of-the-above approach when it comes to fuel choices.

The good news for us here in America is that we have abundant reserves of natural gas, and we are by far the largest producer of that fuel in the world. Natural gas emits about half the amount of carbon that coal does, so this country and the world need lots of natural gas in the coming decades not only to power national economies, but also to help heal the planet. It is therefore unwise to throw away that advantage the way we seem determined to do.

It was frankly quite irresponsible for people in leadership positions who knew better but kept silent while those multi-billion-dollar pipeline projects were stymied. Throughout the time that we were tying ourselves in knots trying to shut down the fossil-fuel industry in America, the Chinese and the Indians were building hundreds of coal-fired power plants to keep their economies humming. Pollutants don’t respect borders. Whatever those two nations were emitting into the atmosphere went everywhere, including into our skies.

There used to be something called an international community that met periodically to discuss and agree on ways to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Those days appear to be long gone. No one listens to anything anyone says anymore. That doesn’t mean that those noble efforts should be abandoned. But a casual look across the geopolitical landscape today reveals that our unilateral disarmament regarding fossil-fuel use is quite suicidal. The Chinese, in particular, will do anything in their quest to become the dominant global power. There is no better way to speed up that process than to hamstring ourselves by throwing away one of our best competitive advantages.

We may be deeply divided as a nation, but it is the height of recklessness to be playing politics so blatantly with our energy policy. No economy can function properly and prosper without a sensible energy policy. There are problems with both fossil fuels and renewable energy, as their respective opponents argue. But life is about trade-offs.

It is quite apparent that the right hates green energy largely because it is championed by the blue team. People on the left, on their part, seem unwilling to listen to anything the red team says about the need to obtain at least some of our electricity from non-renewable sources. Hence our current predicament.

We should all know by now that in order for the U.S. to win the artificial intelligence (AI) race, this country needs all the electricity it can get. A senior executive at PJM, the largest grid operator in the U.S., said at a recent conference that winter peak demand in PJM territory is expected to rise from the current level of 145,000 MW to 210,000 MW in 2035, while the summer peak is estimated to increase from 165,000 MW to 220,000 MW over that decade. Those are eye-popping numbers. The PJM official cited AI demand as the main reason for those anticipated spikes in electricity demand.

No energy sources should be excluded from our power generation mix at this crucial moment. Responsible leadership is urgently required to drive a national conversation about crafting a consensus-based national energy policy. Simply put, it is not smart to have our electricity become so color-coded.

As the cases of Revolution Wind and ACP demonstrate, political partisanship is creating chaos in our energy industry. Even a nation as wealthy as America cannot afford to throw away billions of dollars in this fashion. If this trend continues, investment in all forms of energy will begin to dry up. Who would be willing to invest such large sums of money in these critically important projects when there is such a high risk of losing it all simply with a change of administration?