(DCNF)—The Senate dealt a series of blows to solar and wind energy in the latest version of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill — taking a page out of House Republicans’ playbook to crack down on green energy tax credits enacted under former President Joe Biden.
The Senate’s new proposal would move up the deadline for solar and wind projects hoping to qualify for production and investment tax credits by requiring them to produce electricity by the end of 2027. The additional cuts to green energy tax credits follows the president’s public broadside against the upper chamber’s initial proposal, which delayed the termination of solar and wind subsidies.
“Windmills, and the rest of this ‘JUNK,’ are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy,” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social on June 21. “It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!”
The upper chamber’s revised bill would also create a new tax on wind and solar projects whose components are sourced from foreign entities of concern, such as China.
Senate Democrats referred to the creation of a new excise tax penalizing the renewable industry’s reliance on Chinese materials as “economic self-sabotage” and an “outright massacre” for the solar and wind industry.
Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee was one of several GOP senators pushing the upper chamber to aggressively crack down on solar and wind tax credits in the president’s landmark bill. The Utah Republican favors a wholesale repeal of green energy subsidies, though Congress is likely to stop short of that given opposition from moderate Republicans.
Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters Saturday that the Senate finance panel’s decision to accelerate the termination of solar and wind subsidies by the end of 2027 was “disappointing.” He also suggested that failure to maintain the green energy tax breaks would have negative economic consequences for his state.
Tillis is one of several GOP senators that has pledged to vote against the president’s landmark tax and immigration bill, citing the legislation’s reforms to Medicaid.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lead, blasted Senate Republicans for rolling back green energy subsidies within their proposal, accusing GOP senators of putting “millions of jobs” on the chopping block.
“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk, the founder of the electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla, wrote on his social media platform, X. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
Proponents of terminating green energy subsidies argued that the green energy industry’s messaging revealed its dependency on government funds in order to be profitable.
“If, as supporters of the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] are complaining, repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place,” American Energy Alliance president Tom Pyle said in a statement Saturday. “Extending green giveaways on the backs of American taxpayers is shortsighted and neglectful.”
The conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) has also urged the Senate to adopt the House-passed language that put solar and wind tax credits on a faster route to termination.
Several HFC members, including Republican Reps. Chip Roy and Ralph Norman, suggested they would not vote for the Senate’s proposal if it failed to adhere to the House language accelerating the termination of green energy subsidies.
“That’s got to go,” Norman told the DCNF in an interview Thursday. “The President wants it to go. He wants to abolish all of them. We agree with that.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.