Hardly a day goes by without luminaries of the left like Vermont's Independent Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders pumping half-truths, undocumented claims, and outright lies about the evils of fossil fuels versus the saintly characteristics of renewables like solar and wind power.
Here's a typical example of the routine sort of cant Sanders deals on energy issues: "At a time when solar and wind are the cheapest forms of new energy in the world, Trump wants to open a BILLION acres of US water to oil drilling. Why? To line the pockets of his fossil fuel billionaire friends. The rest of the world moves forward, we get left behind."
Thanks to the sharp-eyed researchers working for James Agresti's Just Facts (based in Conroe, Texas), exposing the fallacies and fables in Sanders' energy claims is no more difficult than a mouse click and a few minutes of illuminating reading. Apparently it's not easy enough for editors and reporters at major mainstream media outlets to check out claims like those peddled by Sanders before publishing them as reliable.
Consider these 14 points from a Just Facts evaluation of the Sanders tweet quoted above:
- The assertion that solar and wind are “cheap” is based on a metric called “levelized costs,” which fails to account for the fact that wind and solar don’t produce energy when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Thus, they must be backed up by expensive energy storage systems or technologies that generate electricity on demand, like natural gas.
- Due to the unreliability of solar and wind, the U.S. Energy Information Administration warns that its levelized costs for solar and wind “are not directly comparable to those for other technologies,” a vital fact that proponents of wind and solar often ignore.
- After 40+ years of the U.S. government aggressively subsidizing solar and wind while discouraging the use of fossil fuels through taxes and regulations, solar and wind provided only 6.6% of all U.S. energy in 2024.
- In addition to the federal government, some states have subsidized solar and wind so heavily that the New York Times reported in 2024 that “thousands” of “renewable energy” companies “are reeling” from a reduction in only one California solar subsidy, causing a “sharp decline” in rooftop solar installations.
- Per a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency, “Although renewable energy technologies are becoming more cost-competitive,” “roughly 87% of global renewable utility-scale capacity growth in 2023–2028 is expected to be stimulated by policy schemes” in which “government policy is the primary driver for the investment decision.”
- Despite claims from politicians like Gavin Newsom that solar is the “cheapest form of energy,” his state of California — which gets more of its electricity from solar than any other state — has the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S., or more than twice the national average. This elevated rate doesn’t even account for all of the government spending on solar that is borne by taxpayers instead of consumers.
- In Germany, which is a “global leader in sustainable energy production,” the average price of household electricity is 3.5 times that of the United States.
- A diverse array of scholarly publications document that affordable energy is “essential for public health and economic prosperity,” while high energy prices drive up hunger, drive down wages, stoke unemployment, and harm people in a wide variety of other ways.
- While admitting that “past economic growth and poverty reduction have been associated with high GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions,” a 2024 World Bank report calls for “trade-offs” because “ending poverty for the 3 billion people who struggle on less than $6.85 a day would come at a high cost to the environment.”
- Contrary to claims that green energy subsidies create “good paying” jobs, they actually enrich selected investors while neglecting workers. As explained in scholarly publications like the encyclopedia Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, the financial benefits of renewable energy subsidies “largely accrue to the owners of capital” because “energy development” is “capital-intensive,” and growth in “the green jobs sector does not necessarily imply net job creation” since it reduces the jobs “that would have been produced from fossil fuels,” and thus, “net job creation may be zero (or negative).”
- Western Europe’s abandonment of fossil fuel production and nuclear energy has left it heavily dependent on Russia for energy.
- A shell company in Bermuda with deep ties to Vladimir Putin and Russian oil companies has donated tens of millions of dollars to the Sierra Club and other environmental groups that oppose fracking.
- A 2021 Bloomberg report documents that Communist China dominates global supply chains for key components of the solar industry, including 78% of the world’s supply of solar cells.
- A 2025 report by the International Energy Agency states that the “battery supply chain” for electric vehicles has become “increasingly geographically concentrated” in China, which was “responsible for 80% of global battery cell production in 2024.” The report also states that “China has also established a near monopoly on battery components production.”
Public trust in the MSM is in the barely breathing category with the 2025 Gallup Poll showing only 28% of respondents trusting what they read and hear from major national media outlets. So I have a suggestion for something that any publisher or editor who wants to do something concrete to re-establish their outlet’s public credibility can do:
1) Comprehensiveness: It is very easy to distort reality by selecting facts that align with certain views while ignoring others. Just Facts rejects such reporting and seeks to present the whole truth — because half the truth can amount to a total lie.
2) Primary Sources: Just Facts makes extraordinary efforts to identify and use highly credible primary sources instead of secondary ones. This is because secondary sources often reflect someone’s interpretation of the facts instead of the actual facts. Moreover, such sources sometimes fail to mention important caveats revealed by the original sources.
3) Rigorous Documentation: Just Facts documents the facts we publish far more thoroughly than academic standards require. In addition to footnoting every fact with creditable sources, our core research also provides exact quotations or data from these sources. This allows readers to quickly verify that we accurately represent them. Simply put, we provide complete and convenient transparency for every fact.
4) Raw Data: Within reasonable constraints of time, Just Facts strives to present data in its rawest comprehensible form. This serves as a safeguard against data that has been corrupted by errors, mischaracterizations, or statistical manipulation. By providing straightforward data, Just Facts curbs and unmasks the methodological trickery that plagues policy debates.
5) Verification: Just Facts regularly uses different sources, methodologies, and calculations to double-check our work. This limits the types of human errors that led NASA to lose a Mars Climate Orbiter because they mixed up metric and English units when coding the software for the mission. Where we find small discrepancies, Just Facts gives preference to figures that are contrary to our viewpoints and uses the most cautious plausible interpretations of the data.
6) Clarity: Just Facts uses language that is precise and unambiguous in order to minimize the potential for misinterpretation. In George Orwell’s famed essay, “Politics and the English Language,” he criticized people who use words “in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” Just Facts pledges to never do this and to expose those who do.
7) Balance: Our goal is comprehensive accuracy, not the illusion of balance. This distinguishes us from publications that present brief quotes from people on opposing sides of an issue. That practice can be highly misleading because:
2) Primary Sources: Just Facts makes extraordinary efforts to identify and use highly credible primary sources instead of secondary ones. This is because secondary sources often reflect someone’s interpretation of the facts instead of the actual facts. Moreover, such sources sometimes fail to mention important caveats revealed by the original sources.
3) Rigorous Documentation: Just Facts documents the facts we publish far more thoroughly than academic standards require. In addition to footnoting every fact with creditable sources, our core research also provides exact quotations or data from these sources. This allows readers to quickly verify that we accurately represent them. Simply put, we provide complete and convenient transparency for every fact.
4) Raw Data: Within reasonable constraints of time, Just Facts strives to present data in its rawest comprehensible form. This serves as a safeguard against data that has been corrupted by errors, mischaracterizations, or statistical manipulation. By providing straightforward data, Just Facts curbs and unmasks the methodological trickery that plagues policy debates.
5) Verification: Just Facts regularly uses different sources, methodologies, and calculations to double-check our work. This limits the types of human errors that led NASA to lose a Mars Climate Orbiter because they mixed up metric and English units when coding the software for the mission. Where we find small discrepancies, Just Facts gives preference to figures that are contrary to our viewpoints and uses the most cautious plausible interpretations of the data.
6) Clarity: Just Facts uses language that is precise and unambiguous in order to minimize the potential for misinterpretation. In George Orwell’s famed essay, “Politics and the English Language,” he criticized people who use words “in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” Just Facts pledges to never do this and to expose those who do.
7) Balance: Our goal is comprehensive accuracy, not the illusion of balance. This distinguishes us from publications that present brief quotes from people on opposing sides of an issue. That practice can be highly misleading because:
- such sound bites are frequently loaded with rhetoric and misinformation.
- the space given to these snippets is generally too small to present anything of substance.
- the brevity of these quotations allows people to easily twist them.
Being an old-school journalist, I can recall a time in the newsroom when reporters were expected as a matter of course to adhere to such standards.