And what becomes of the billions incinerated along the way? Who is summoned to answer for the squandered capital, the idle depots, the systemic fraud of the transition?
No one. Accountability is an antique virtue in an administrative state governed by moral theater.
Hundreds of battery-electric transit buses were procured at exorbitant premiums—a reckless capital bet that extended far beyond the rolling stock itself to include dedicated high-voltage charging infrastructure, overhauled maintenance facilities, and strained municipal grids. Now, quietly and without fanfare, transit authorities are forced into a humiliating retreat toward the one solution that has always been operationally coherent, technologically mature, economically sound, and impeccably clean: compressed natural gas.
For heavy-duty municipal transport, natural gas remains the unrivaled workhorse. Its logistical arteries are proven, its engineering is refined over decades, and its emissions profile is genuinely benign.
As a long-standing advocate of gas-powered mobility, I ought to welcome this quiet vindication. I find myself entirely uncheered.
Compressed natural gas does not return in triumph, recognized at last for the pragmatic marvel it has always been. It is brought back as an unsung custodian—the silent, unacknowledged concierge summoned in the dark to clean up the operational vomit left behind by ideological evangelists. It is forced to stabilize broken municipal networks, denied both political gratitude and long-term security, while the architects of the catastrophe prepare their next retreat forward.
For the apparatus of moral posturing never truly pauses to take inventory. Even as the battery experiments collapse under the weight of fleet-wide unreliability and crushing maintenance costs, the vanguard is already peddling its next chimera: hydrogen. An energy vector exponentially more expensive, thermodynamically inefficient, and hazardous than the batteries it seeks to replace. The bureaucratic class cannot permit reality to settle the ledger, because confession would be fatal to its budget.
When Albany quietly steps in to rescue New York City from the humiliation of stranded fleets and broken schedules, it does not do so out of sudden intellectual conversion. It acts solely to contain a metastasizing public relations catastrophe before the sovereign voter notices the scale of the rot.
Yet reality operates with the cold, unhurried certainty of continental drift. It does not solicit consensus. It cares nothing for institutional vanity, political timelines, or editorial sanctimony. Idiocy is inherently self-liquidating; its premises invariably collapse under their own internal friction. The tragedy is never that ideological fantasies fail—they must fail. The tragedy is the catastrophic collateral damage left in their wake, paid for by populations who never asked to finance the delusion.