Absurdity
Republican Think Tank Discovers Renewable Energy Works, Declares It Un-American
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. The Hargrove Institute for American Prosperity, a conservative policy organization funded in part by the energy sector and a man named Dale, released a landmark study Thursday confirming that renewable energy is cost-effective, reliable, scalable, and poses no meaningful technical barrier to full national adoption.
The institute immediately called for its prohibition.
"We went in expecting the data to vindicate us," said Dr. Preston Wakefield, the institute's director of energy policy and a man who has not visibly enjoyed anything since 2009. "Instead the data vindicated them. We considered not publishing it, but our donors felt that releasing it and then yelling about it was the stronger play."
The report, titled 'The Green Threat: A Comprehensive Assessment of Why Something That Works This Well Should Make You Nervous,' found that solar energy in particular had achieved price parity with coal in thirty-eight states, generated zero emissions, and did not require blowing the top off a mountain, which the report noted "admittedly sounds fine until you realize the mountain was American."
The institute convened an emergency board session Wednesday night to determine how to frame findings that, in the words of board chair Loretta Munsch, "made us look like we'd been wrong for twenty years, which we categorically refuse to accept as a conclusion."
The board resolved the problem in four hours, producing a one-page addendum arguing that the effectiveness of renewable energy was itself the problem.
"If it works this well without any help from us, what does that say about dependency?" Munsch told reporters. "Americans depend on their energy companies. That relationship is sacred. Wind doesn't need a CEO. Wind doesn't need a lobbying arm. Wind just blows, and frankly that kind of self-sufficiency is exactly what happens right before a country loses its values."
The full report, running to two hundred and twelve pages, dedicates forty-seven of them to a theoretical framework the institute calls "Competence Anxiety," defined as the condition in which a technology performs so capably that it destabilizes the psychological infrastructure of industries that perform worse.
A separate appendix lists the solar panels installed on the Hargrove Institute's own roof in 2021 as "evidence of prior infiltration."
Senator Roy Dillman of Oklahoma, who received a copy of the report along with a fruit basket the institute declined to itemize, praised the findings as "the intellectual courage to look at something working perfectly and ask whether that's really what we want."
"The American energy story is one of struggle," Dillman said in a floor statement Thursday afternoon. "Pipelines, refineries, the whole beautiful struggle of it. You put a solar panel on a roof and a guy just goes to work. No flaring, no spill response, no heroism. I'm not sure that's the country I recognize."
The institute has forwarded the report to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce with a formal recommendation that renewable energy be designated a "Category One Economic Comfort Threat," a classification the institute invented the previous evening and defines as "anything that functions adequately without causing anyone sufficient pain to feel earned."
Dr. Wakefield said the institute plans to begin a follow-up study examining whether the effectiveness of renewable energy can be partially reversed through strategic permitting delays, a finding he described as "early stage but spiritually promising."
The institute's original study cost four point two million dollars and took twenty-six months to complete.
The addendum cost eleven hundred dollars and took the length of a dinner at which, sources confirm, nobody ordered dessert.
The solar panels on the Hargrove Institute's roof have continued to generate electricity throughout the controversy, producing an average of eighteen kilowatt-hours per day and, according to facilities staff, zero comment.
This is satire. The events and quotes are invented and none of it is real news.
Satire & Commentary BSN publishes satirical commentary on real events alongside entirely fictional stories. Content may include invented quotes, fictional scenarios, and exaggeration for humor and should not be read as strictly factual reporting.