The wealthiest generation in history is being subsidized to burn the planet, and the generations who will inherit the ash are paying for it.
This is not a moral judgment. It is an accounting.
The Consumption
Start with the homes. Forty per cent of baby boomers live in houses of 2,000 square feet or larger, while 42 per cent of millennials live in homes half that size or less. Millennials are three times more likely to live in dwellings smaller than 500 square feet. The boomers are twice as likely to have a pool, three times as likely to have a hot tub, 60 per cent more likely to have heated floors, and 53 per cent more likely to have a wine or beer fridge. Eighty-five per cent still subscribe to cable, powering a home entertainment system that millennials replaced with a laptop.
The result is measurable. Baby boomers’ annual electricity use is double that of millennials, and their annual bills are about $500 higher. The average baby boomer living in a single-family home uses twice as much electricity as a millennial living in an apartment. On consumables alone, boomers emit 1.69 tonnes of CO₂ per year—15 per cent higher than the national average. When researchers ranked the carbon footprints of the generations, the baby boomers came first. The generation that lectures the young about avocado toast is the generation that built the pool, heated the floor, and left the lights on.
The Resistance
Now the attitudes. The technology to fix this exists. The boomers do not want it.
Ninety-two per cent of Gen Z and 83 per cent of millennials think solar is a good investment. The figure drops to 75 per cent for Gen X and 67 per cent for baby boomers. For electric vehicles, the divide is a chasm. Thirty-six per cent of adults aged 18–34 and 40 per cent of those aged 35–49 say they are “very likely” to buy an EV, compared to 18 per cent of those aged 50–64 and 4 per cent of those aged 65 and older. Forty per cent of the oldest cohort hold a somewhat or very negative view of EV technology, compared to 5 per cent of the youngest. Seventy-five per cent of younger respondents view EVs positively. The oldest cohort is the sourest on the technology by a factor of eight.
This is not a political divide. Democrats and Republicans are surprisingly aligned on EV buying intent. Age is the fault line. And the people on the wrong side of it are the people with the money. The average car buyer is around fifty. The consumers with the assets to buy an EV are the consumers least interested in buying one. The consumers who want one cannot afford the $40,000–$50,000 price tag. The interest is there. The capital is not. The capital is with the people who do not care.
The Subsidy
Here is where it becomes an indictment. The boomers are not merely choosing to consume more and adopt less. They are being paid to do it.
Global public financial support for fossil fuels exceeded USD 1.2 trillion in 2024—nearly five times the USD 254 billion that went to clean energy. Global fossil fuel subsidies alone reached USD 921 billion in 2024, and with oil prices rising again in 2026, they risk returning to the 2022 peak of USD 1.7 trillion. In the European Union, fossil fuel subsidies reached EUR 97 billion in 2024. Of that total, 52 per cent—EUR 50 billion—has no end date at all, or an end date set for after 2030. Only eight member states have expressed any intention of phasing out fossil fuel subsidies entirely. The concrete policies do not exist.
Who benefits from these subsidies? The wealthy. Consumption subsidies are untargeted and benefit the households that consume the most energy—which is to say, the households with the largest homes, the most appliances, and the highest bills. The subsidy is a transfer from the general taxpayer to the heaviest consumer. And the heaviest consumer is the boomer.
The Stack They Refuse to Build
Here is what makes the subsidy misallocation indefensible. The technology is not piecemeal. It is a stack, and the stack is greater than the sum of its parts.
A rooftop solar array. A stationary home battery. A bidirectional electric vehicle. A spot-price electricity contract. Four components, one system.
The solar array generates during the day, when prices are low. The home battery stores the surplus for evening, when prices rise. The EV sits in the driveway for 95 per cent of the day, its battery—two to three times the capacity of a stationary home battery—serving as a second, mobile storage asset. The spot contract turns the whole assembly into a trading operation: buy low, store, sell high.
The economics of the stack are documented, and they are not marginal. A Finnish study of a prosumer household with PV and bidirectional EV charging under spot-based pricing found that profit over EUR 700 was possible in 2022, with the EV serving as a property battery through vehicle-to-everything technology. The same study found that profitable V2X does not cause excess battery degradation when dispatched within a safe flexibility envelope. A separate Finnish study on vehicle-to-home found that current PV and EV battery costs still limit economic feasibility in isolation—annual savings of EUR 84 against degradation costs of EUR 500—and concluded that V2H viability requires lower battery costs, longer battery lifetimes, and supportive policy incentives.
That last clause is the point. The stack works when it is subsidized. It does not work when it is not. The boomers have the roofs, the driveways, and the capital. They are choosing not to build the stack because the fossil fuel subsidy makes the alternative cheaper.
A Dutch study by Berenschot found that a home battery combined with multiple revenue strategies—self-consumption savings plus imbalance market trading—can pay for itself in as little as five years under favorable conditions, and within twelve years even under unfavorable ones. The cross-market strategy is the robust one: a battery deployed for self-consumption alone will “almost certainly” not repay its investment, but a battery deployed across multiple energy markets simultaneously achieves a payback period of three to twelve years depending on the specific combination and market conditions.
The German case is even starker. A residential V2H system using the vehicle battery to store own-generated solar power for later use becomes profitable after thirteen years for one vehicle and after six years for another, depending on battery size and usage patterns. The variance is large, but the direction is clear: the stack pays. It pays for itself, it pays the household, and it reduces emissions across its entire lifecycle.
The stack is the unit. Not the solar panel alone. Not the battery alone. Not the EV alone. The stack. And the stack is what the boomers refuse to build.
The Redirection
The arithmetic is not complicated. The EU spends EUR 97 billion annually on fossil fuel subsidies. The same amount, redirected toward household energy stacks—PV, battery, bidirectional charger—for the households that would actually use them, would finance roughly eight million installations. The Finnish case study documented a net investment of EUR 11,100 for a 13 kWh battery plus installation. The Dutch case study documented payback in five years under cross-market strategies. The German case study documented six to thirteen years for V2H. The variation is enormous, but the direction is clear: the subsidy makes the stack viable for the households that cannot afford it, and the arbitrage makes it profitable thereafter.
The boomers can keep their houses. They can keep their pools, their hot tubs, their heated floors, their wine fridges. They will pay the market price for the fossil fuels they burn, without the subsidy that currently softens the blow. The young will get the capital to build the stack the boomers refused to build, and they will capture the spot-market revenue the boomers refused to capture.
This is not expropriation. It is the removal of a transfer. The boomers are not being punished. They are being unsubsidized. The young are not being given a gift. They are being funded with the money that was already being spent on them—except now it goes to a system that reduces emissions and generates revenue instead of a system that increases emissions and generates nothing but a bill.
The Political Economy
The fossil fuel subsidy is the most entrenched entitlement in the developed world. It is defended by every incumbent industry, every legacy utility, and every homeowner who has already installed a gas boiler and does not want to pay the true cost of operating it. The beneficiaries are old, wealthy, and politically mobilized. The victims are young, dispersed, and politically weak.
This is the structural reason the transition is slow. The technology is available. The capital is concentrated. The votes are with the people who benefit from the status quo. The young have the enthusiasm—92 per cent of Gen Z think solar is a good investment—but they do not have the houses to install it on, and they do not have the votes to change the subsidy regime that keeps the incumbents comfortable. If the boomers claim that their current setup works better, perhaps they ought to demonstrate that by footing the whole bill.
Make the boomers pay.
References
Aurora Solar. (2025). Solar Snapshot 2025. Aurora Solar.
Berenschot. (2025). Home battery payback study. Berenschot.
European Commission. (2025). 2024 Report on energy subsidies in the EU. COM(2025) 17 final.
European Council. (2025). Energy subsidies in the EU-27, 2024. Council of the European Union.
Grivolt. (2026). Helsinkiläisperheen 13 kWh kotiakku + pörssisähkö – 12 kuukauden tulokset. Grivolt.
Honkapuro, S., et al. (2026). Profitability optimized bidirectional electric vehicle charging in a Nordic prosumer household. Electric Power Systems Research.
IISD. (2026). Governments spent five times more public money on fossil fuels than renewables. International Institute for Sustainable Development.
McCarthy, B., & Liu, H. (2024). It starts at home: Non-economic factors influencing consumer acceptance of battery storage in Australia. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 31(46), 57129–57145.
Saari, A., et al. (2026). The role of electric vehicle batteries in hedging electricity costs in residential homes with solar panels. Journal of Energy Storage.
ZETA. (2026). EV divide is more generational than political. Zero Emission Transportation Association.