A renewable energy corridor is rising in eastern Kern County, California—where the Mojave Desert meets the Sierra Nevada mountains. Among the wind turbines, solar panels and Joshua Trees are giant batteries that look like shipping containers. Tesla workers tinker with the ones at the Eland solar and storage project, developed by Arevon Energy. They wear sun hats and boots and warn your correspondent to watch out for rattlesnakes.

“IT’LL BE somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer,” was how Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, described the emerging Republican approach to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Joe Biden’s signature climate law. Pressure from companies and congressmen with clean-energy projects benefiting from its subsidies in their districts (most are found in Republican counties) suggested surgical precision would prevail. But relentless pressure to abolish the IRA from the president, who is a fan of drilling, baby, drilling and denounced the law as the “Green New Scam,” pointed instead to brute force. The president reinforced this by dropping in on a private party caucus on May 20th to strong-arm waverers and threaten dissenters with a MAGA primary challenge. “They won’t be Republicans much longer…they’d be knocked out so fast,” he declared.

Accept, for a moment, Joe Biden’s contention that he is as mentally as sharp as ever. Then try to explain some revelations of the books beginning to appear about his presidency: that he never held a formal meeting to discuss whether to run for a second term; that he never heard directly from his own pollsters about his dismal public standing, or anything else; that by 2024 most of his own cabinet secretaries had no contact with him; that, when he was in Washington, he would often eat dinner at 4.30pm and vanish into his private quarters by 5.15; that when he travelled, he often skipped briefings while keeping a morning appointment with a makeup artist to cover his wrinkles and liver spots. You might think that Mr Biden—that anyone—would welcome as a rationale that he had lost a step or two. It is a kinder explanation than the alternatives: vanity, hubris, incompetence.