THE U.S. MUST RETURN TO ITS ROOTS AS A NATION OF DOERS / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

The US must return to its roots as a nation of doers

America’s choice is to either build its future on renewables, or stay stuck in the fossil fuel economy

Tom Steyer

© Ann Kiernan

Adam Smith saw it coming. 

In The Wealth of Nations, capitalism’s grandfather reserved his sharpest criticism not for merchants or manufacturers, but for landlords — those who, in his words, “love to reap where they never sowed”. 

To Smith, they were value extractors, not creators — havers, not doers.

With the recent passage of Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill”, the distinction between creating wealth and extracting has never mattered more — especially in energy.

Over the past two decades, the US has tilted towards innovation: solar panels, battery storage, electric vehicles — industries built from scratch that now employ hundreds of thousands. 

But this bill threatens to reverse that shift by gutting clean energy investments and undermining solar, wind and battery industries just as they gain global momentum. 

Meanwhile, fossil fuel subsidies remain untouched, even as global demand plateaus and the world moves beyond combustion.

It’s not a strategy for the future. 

It’s a payout to the past. 

And the most frustrating part? 

The US doesn’t have to choose.

When it comes to energy, there’s a very useful, albeit slightly reductive, framework to think about a country’s options. 

Indeed, countries generally fall into one of three categories. 

First, there are those like Russia and Venezuela, whose economies depend heavily on reserves of oil and natural gas that they did not create and cannot replace. 

Call them “havers”. 

Their power comes not from what they produce, but from their position — where they are and what they happen to have underground. 

They don’t have to work very hard to make a fortune.

Next come the “doers” — nations such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. 

They have no fossil fuel reserves to speak of, yet they’ve built world-class energy systems through sheer ingenuity — investing in clean tech, grid resilience and domestic power generation.

And then there’s the US, which has both: vast reserves of coal and oil but also a deep bench of engineering talent, liquid capital markets and efficient innovation ecosystems. 

In other words, we have a choice — we can build our future on advanced batteries and renewables, or stay stuck in an outdated fossil fuel economy. 

The “big beautiful bill” chooses the latter. In doing so, it cedes ground to rising powers, including our greatest rival.

China fuelled its rise with coal and remains the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels. 

But now it also dominates the clean tech supply chain — from solar to EVs. 

BYD is selling $10,000 self-driving electric cars. 

And China is electrifying its economy by 10 percentage points each decade.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, once wholly reliant on oil, are repositioning themselves as doers. 

Through initiatives like Saudi Vision 2030 and the UAE’s massive sovereign wealth investments, they are pumping fossil wealth into manufacturing and logistics hubs, new forms of value creation.

America, for its part, is now following a model that looks less like Silicon Valley and more like Siberia in the 1990s, when oligarchs scrambled to seize Soviet oilfields. 

And how has that worked out for Russia?

If America wants to lead, it must return to its roots as a nation of doers.

Given our current political situation, that will be a multiyear project. 

Democrats will have to lead the way, but first they need to prove they are the party that can actually build more of what Americans need — the party of real abundance. 

Liberals can no longer afford to just talk about creating equity — we have to make it real. 

The path to equity runs through execution.

This means ending tax breaks for fossil fuel companies drilling unprofitable wells, streamlining authorisation for clean energy infrastructure and modernising the grid. 

It means scaling up renewable energy deployment — potentially adding about 70 gigawatts per year and expanding heat pump installations to 8mn units annually. 

It means building tens of thousands of new housing units powered by clean energy. 

Ultimately, it means positioning the US to lead on electrification and creating thousands of durable, high-quality jobs in the process.

That’s what a truly big and beautiful bill would deliver.

America has every advantage: capital, talent, innovation and a culture of solving hard problems. 

But we can’t win the future by sitting on our past. 

It’s time to stop managing our own decline and instead start scaling what works. 

That means focusing less on what we have and more on what we can make.

The future belongs to doers. 

So, let’s choose to be one.

The writer is co-founder of investment firm Galvanize and a former hedge fund manager