In Los Angeles, where I live, the rites of autumn can feel alien. Endless blue skies and afternoon highs near 90 degrees linger long after Griffith Park opens its Haunted Hayride. When the highs dip toward more seasonably appropriate numbers, they’ll be accompanied by one of California’s unfortunate traditions: wasted clean energy.

During the fall and spring, cloudless afternoons produce a spike in solar power at a time when milder temperatures necessitate less air-conditioning. When that happens, the state’s solar farms make more energy than the state can use, and some panels are simply turned off. This maddening problem—a result of what energy wonks call the “duck curve”—has been getting worse as the amount of available solar power outpaces the state’s ability to move that power around. In early 2017, just more than 3 percent of the state’s solar was wasted this way. The total reached 6 percent by 2022, according to California’s grid operator, and 15 percent in the early afternoons of March 2021. Wind power also can be wasted if the weather is especially breezy, and California’s combined curtailment of wind and solar set a new record this April.

Now the state has punted this dilemma to its residents. In December, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to slash the amount of money homeowners with new solar panels can make from “net metering,” the practice of selling your own extra solar back to the power company. Because the math for buying new panels is less favorable, fewer Californians are installing them, according to the Los Angeles Times. Many sunny rooftops that could generate clean energy simply won’t.

California is outpacing the rest of the country in the energy transition, but its misadventures in solar are going national. Moving away from fossil fuels requires a huge expansion of renewable energy in America. One government report estimated that meeting Joe Biden’s goal of supplying half of the country’s energy with solar would mean doubling America’s capacity annually until 2025—and then quadrupling it annually through 2030. But without better ways to transport that solar power or store it for later, California and several other states are already turning off perfectly good solar panels and clawing back incentives that entice Americans to install their own. Far more of America’s sunny potential is about to go to waste.

A little clean-energy wastage is inevitable, Carey King, the assistant director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, told me. Such is the very imperfect nature of integrating unpredictable renewables onto a power grid built for the predictability of fossil fuels. Compared with an inflexible coal or gas plant, solar panels are easier to turn off and on, so they are first to be cut during times of energy surplus. Ideally, we could stash away sun power and use it to light up the skyline at night, but that would require a build-out of big batteries that is still in early stages. Excess solar can be moved to less sun-soaked places to help them burn fewer fossil fuels, but electricity doesn’t just teleport from sunny Palm Springs to drizzly Portland. Moving it across long distances requires heavy-duty power lines and navigating the bureaucracies of various agencies that operate them.

Take Texas: The state’s famously independent power grid has relatively few interconnections with neighboring systems to send spare renewable energy elsewhere. When Texas started making a big push toward renewables in the 2000s, King said, the state began turning off solar panels and wind turbines, and slowing the construction of new ones because it lacked enough so-called transmission lines capable of zipping renewable energy from windy West Texas to the big cities in the east. A state-mandated power-line expansion solved the problem then. Now, as Texas’s total wind-energy capacity leapt from 10 gigawatts in 2010 to 40 gigawatts by 2022, those new wires have reached their limit. In 2022, Texas wasted 5 percent of the wind and 9 percent of the solar energy it could have created. Without another big fix to the grid, those numbers could jump to 13 percent of wind and 19 percent of solar by 2035.

Across the country, clean energy is similarly hemmed in by the limits of transmission lines. Existing plants can’t get all their electricity where it needs to go, because there aren’t enough power lines for them to thrive, says Timothy Hade, the co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions, which builds clean-energy systems for homes and businesses. The Biden administration has pledged billions to modernize the grid and expand high-voltage transmission lines, but actually building them is very, very, very hard. As Robinson Meyer wrote in The Atlantic last year, “If you want to build new transmission, then you need to win the approval of every state, county, city, and in some cases, landowner along the proposed route.”

[Read: Unfortunately, I care about power lines now]

The Herculean task of building new transmission lines wasn’t such a pressing issue before the rise of renewable energy. But now solar power is so pervasive that parts of the country have no choice but to turn down the supply. Although that could take the form of fewer industrial-size wind and solar plants coming to fruition, the other option is giving a cold shoulder to people who have their own solar panels and sell it back to the power company through net metering. After all, net metering can create lots of power: California gets more than 15 percent of its energy from big solar farms and roughly 10 percent from residential rooftop panels, according to the EIA.

Like California, other states are choosing the second option. Indiana phased out net metering, and in North Carolina, solar advocates are now suing the state for allowing its giant utility, Duke Energy, to force a minimum monthly bill upon its customers and adjust net metering in a way the advocates say will reduce payouts. Arizona is considering cutting payments for homemade solar, as is Madison Gas and Electric in Wisconsin, according to Energy News Network. A few other close calls show the perilous state of net metering: This year, it has so far survived in New Hampshire, barely, when utilities backed the practice at the last moment. Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice and hit home-solar users with extra fees.

That isn’t to say that the clampdown has happened everywhere. Texas, for example, has allowed Tesla to set up a “virtual power plant” so that people with Elon Musk’s solar panels and batteries can make gobs of money selling back energy whenever they have extra. And there are legitimate fears about using this method as a way to grow the country’s solar supply. Hade calls net metering a “blunt instrument”—too crude an approach for the complex energy system of the future. One major problem is that solar-panel owners tend to be far richer than the average American but don’t pay their fair share for the upkeep of the electrical grid, which is built into the price the power company charges everybody else. The more houses that have rooftop solar, the argument goes, the more that people without solar must pay to maintain all the infrastructure that everyone needs. “Net metering can’t be the end-all solution as we go forward,” King said. “It’s just going to create a little bit too much disparity.”

The growing backlash against net metering isn’t just a response to wasted solar power—it’s also about for-profit power companies wary of rooftop solar panels that don’t make them money. The idea of turning homes, apartment buildings, and businesses with solar panels into mini power plants is a potentially transformative one—and net metering is a big part of how people can afford solar panels in the first place. Solar panels can cost upwards of $10,000, and in California, the extra cash from net metering has helped residents recoup the expensive cost of panels in five to six years. Now it will take up to 15 years, according to one analysis.

In that way, America will end up squandering more potential clean energy down the line. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. homes have installed solar panels so far. The rest constitutes an enormous swath of untapped real estate—billions of square meters of sun-drenched rectangles that could be making clean energy. Incentives for solar energy still exist from states and the federal government, but the result of slowing down net metering is that residents will put on smaller solar panels that make only enough energy for their own use, Hade told me, because they can’t make much money selling their bonus juice. Or they won’t get solar at all.

The squeeze on homemade solar is a missed opportunity in the making. A retreat from net metering makes solar-panel owners less like mini power plants and more like doomsday preppers, perhaps filling the backup battery in the basement with electricity to get through a blackout but adding nothing to the country’s clean-energy supply. With a more nuanced form of net metering to allow people to sell their surplus, or with the advent of “microgrids” that tie together communities and allow them to share energy, American rooftops could contribute gigawatts toward running the country on clean energy. Such a DIY approach would be a way around our inability to build new power lines, but it is deeply at odds with the way America has operated for a century, and will seemingly operate for many more years to come: The power company sends you the power, and you use it.

As president, Donald Trump imposed an array of deeply divisive immigration restrictions on both Latinos and Muslims. And yet from 2016 to 2020, he increased his share of the vote among both groups. Even some Latino and Muslim voters who opposed Trump’s immigration agenda moved to support him anyway because of his record on other issues, particularly the economy and conservative social priorities.

Now Trump and several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are doubling down on the bet that they can target each group with harsh immigration policies without paying an electoral price.

For months, they have proposed an escalating succession of hard-line measures aimed at deterring mostly Latino undocumented migrants from crossing the southern border. And following the Hamas terror attack on Israel earlier this month, they rolled out a wave of exclusionary proposals aimed at Muslims. Trump has pledged that, if returned to the White House, he will restore his travel ban on people from a number of majority-Muslim nations, expand ideological screening of all potential immigrants to ensure that they agree with “our religion,” and deport foreign students in the United States who express hostility to Israel.

Trump and other GOP 2024 candidates such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have unveiled these proposals even as many Democratic-leaning activists warn that support for President Joe Biden is suffering in Latino and Muslim communities. Polls have consistently shown widespread discontent among Latinos over inflation and the economy. And many Muslim Americans are angry at Biden for his strong support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he pursues his military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza. “There is a level of disgust and disbelief and disappointment at the administration’s handling of the crisis so far,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told me.

The movement of some of these voters away from Biden produces a powerful incentive for Republicans to escalate their rhetorical and policy offensive against immigrant communities. It means that Trump could achieve the best of both worlds politically: offering a harsh anti-immigrant agenda that energizes the most xenophobic white voters in his coalition while still maintaining, or even growing, his support among immigrant communities drawn to him (or repelled by Democrats) on other issues.

That process already seems well under way in the agenda that Trump and other Republicans are advancing about the southern border. The fact that Trump’s vote among Hispanics improved in 2020, even after he implemented such aggressive policies as starting the border wall and separating migrant children from their parents, has undoubtedly encouraged him to go even further with his new proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants in the U.S. and military action against Mexico (both of which DeSantis has also endorsed).

Likewise, if Trump wins the 2024 election and more Muslim Americans vote for him than in 2020, despite his threats to target Muslim immigrants, he will undoubtedly feel emboldened in a second term to impose more exclusionary policies on that community. Stephen Miller, the hard-line architect of much of Trump’s immigration agenda as president, offered a preview of the deportation agenda that might be ahead when he posted a video of a recent pro-Palestinian demonstration and wrote that ICE agents “will be busy in 2025.”

Over his four years in office, Trump instituted policies more resistant to immigration than any president had since the 1920s, and repeatedly disparaged immigrants with openly racist language (including calling Mexicans “rapists” and decrying immigration from mostly Black “shithole countries”). He is now pushing beyond even that agenda. “What comes next will be … spectacular,” Miller posted recently.

As just a first step, Trump has proposed to reinstate all of the key policies he implemented that raised nearly insurmountable hurdles for those who sought to claim asylum in the U.S., including the “remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to stay in that country, typically in crowded and dangerous makeshift camps, while their cases were adjudicated. He’s promised to finish his border wall. And during his CNN town hall last spring, Trump refused to rule out reinstating the separation of migrant children from their parents, his most controversial policy. The Biden administration has reversed all of these policies, and it recently settled a lawsuit in which the federal government agreed not to restore the child-separation policy. Still, experts say that a reelected Trump would almost certainly seek to void or evade that agreement.

After the Hamas attack in Israel, Trump also pledged to bring back his travel ban. A bitterly divided Supreme Court upheld the rule in a 5–4 vote in 2018; if reelected, Trump could unilaterally restore the policy through executive action. “The legal framework,” Mitchell from the Council on American-Islamic Relations told me, “is still there just waiting to be used.”

But Trump has new ideas too. These include ending birthright citizenship (though his legal authority to do so is highly questionable) and launching military actions against Mexican drug cartels. In a speech to a conservative group earlier this year, he promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

He is also calling for requiring prospective immigrants from any country to pass intensified ideological screenings: “If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you’re disqualified; if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you’re disqualified; and if you’re a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified,” he said earlier this month in Iowa. Monday in New Hampshire, Trump raised the ante when he said he would bar entry for those who “don’t like our religion,” without explaining how he defined “our religion.” He’s pledged to deport students and other immigrants who express what he called “jihadist sympathies.”

David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says Trump’s record as president shows that it would be a mistake to dismiss even the most extreme of these proposals as simply campaign rhetoric designed to stir his crowds. “Every word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth ought to be taken seriously,” Leopold told me. If Trump returns to power, he said, we will see a version of his first term’s “anti-immigrant policy on steroids.”

While Trump was president, and his agenda was in the spotlight, most of his core immigration policies provoked majority opposition in polls. In a compilation of results from its annual American Values Survey polls late in Trump’s presidency, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that just over half of Americans opposed his Muslim travel ban, about three-fifths opposed his border wall, and fully three-fourths opposed the child-separation policy.

But public tolerance for some of these ideas may be growing amid dissatisfaction with Biden’s record in managing the border and immigration. Less than a third of adults overall—and only about one-fourth of independents—said they approved of Biden’s handling of those issues in the latest annual American Values Survey, released yesterday. A recent national Marquette University Law School Poll found that Americans preferred Trump over Biden on controlling the border by nearly two to one.

A recent Quinnipiac University national poll found that a majority of Americans support building a border wall for the first time since the pollsters initially asked about the idea, in 2016. “With frustration building” over Biden’s record on immigration, “it looks to me that some of these more extreme ideas are gaining traction in the country,” Robert P. Jones, the president of PRRI, told me.

Even many in the communities that Trump’s immigration plans would most directly affect appear more focused on other issues. Every major data source on voting behavior agreed that Trump grew his vote among Latino voters from about three in 10 to nearly four in 10 from 2016 to 2020, largely around economic issues, but also because of gains among cultural conservatives. Though the GOP advance among Latinos stalled between the 2020 and 2022 elections, polls continue to record widespread dissatisfaction among them about inflation, which could further erode support for Democrats in 2024.

The Muslim American community is much smaller—Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the total U.S. population—so reliable information on its voting behavior is less available. Youssef Chouhoud, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, told me that Trump’s vote among Muslim Americans nationwide improved from about one in six in 2016 to roughly one in three in 2020. Key to those 2020 gains, he said, was sympathy to conservative GOP arguments on issues such as LGBTQ rights and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

Now, Chouhoud and others note, those Republican gains are being reinforced by the backlash among many Muslim activists against Biden’s expansive support for Israel in the conflict with Hamas. Waleed Shahid, a Muslim American Democratic strategist who has worked for several liberal groups and candidates, says that leading Democrats are underestimating the visceral anger over Biden’s words and actions. “I think, unfortunately, Democratic leadership has their heads in the sand about this,” he told me.

Both Chouhoud and Shahid told me they believed that Trump’s return to anti-Muslim rhetoric reduces the odds that any significant number of voters from that community will abandon Biden to vote for the former president. But they both said they considered it likely that some Muslim American voters disillusioned with Biden might stay home or drift to third-party candidates. “The fact that this chorus” in the Muslim community “is so loud” in criticizing Biden, “even given the full knowledge” of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, “is telling you that there is a groundswell of real animosity toward the policies that the Biden administration is enacting right now,” said Chouhoud, who is also a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan group that studies issues concerning Muslim Americans. This discontent could matter most in the swing state of Michigan, where Muslims are a sizable constituency: A mobile billboard drove through the Detroit area this week displaying a message proclaiming that “Israel Bombs Children” and “Biden Pays For It.”

Shahid says he fears that the 2024 election won’t look like 2020’s—when Democrats of all stripes unified behind the common mission of ousting Trump from the White House. Instead, he thinks, the next election will more closely resemble that of 2016, when a decisive sliver of Democratic-leaning voters, particularly younger ones, backed the third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein rather than Hillary Clinton.

“The Democratic base did not turn out for Hillary in 2016, even though Trump was a right-wing extremist,” Shahid told me. “People somehow have collective amnesia about this. But Biden is historically unpopular with the Democratic base.”

Of course Biden may regain Muslim voters’ trust if he can jump-start renewed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians after the fighting concludes. Similarly, very few Latinos may now be aware of Trump’s proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants and military action against Mexico; if he’s the nominee, that would likely change—and prompt substantial resistance, especially among Mexican Americans.

Still, these tensions reveal a larger dynamic underpinning the potential 2024 rematch between the two men. On almost every front, Trump has formulated a 2024 agenda even more confrontational to Democratic constituencies and liberal priorities than he pursued during his four years in the White House. Yet disenchantment with Biden’s performance could be eroding the will to resist that agenda among key components of the party’s coalition, particularly young people and voters of color.

The pressure that the Middle East crisis is placing on Muslim American support for Biden, even as Trump directly threatens that community, shows how hard it may be for Democrats to maintain a united front—even against an opponent whom they consider an existential threat to all that they value.