What Does Bad Bunny Have to Do with Making Polluters Pay?
On the biggest night in American sports, Bad Bunny dimmed the lights.
Midway through his Super Bowl performance, the global superstar launched into “El Apagón,” Spanish for the blackout. It’s a song that, on its surface, sounds like a party anthem. But Puerto Ricans know El Apagón is both a protest song and a lived reality. It’s about power outages that stretch on for months, hospitals running on generators, families cooking by flashlight. It’s about an island still paying the price for a disaster it didn’t cause and a system that refuses to fix what’s broken.
For millions of viewers, watching Bad Bunny dance atop a sparking telephone pole may have registered as merely an artistic flourish. For Puerto Rico, it was a reminder that the lights never really came back on after the longest blackout in United States history.
A blackout that never ended
Puerto Rico’s energy grid was fragile long before Hurricane Maria made landfall in 2017. Decades of neglect, privatization, and colonial governance left the island with aging infrastructure and little political power to demand better. When Maria hit, it induced a total system collapse.
Nearly the entire island lost power, with Puerto Ricans losing an estimated 3.9 billion hours of access to electricity in the six months after Maria. Some communities waited almost a year for electricity to return. Thousands died in the aftermath from heat, medical equipment failures, and the cascading effects of prolonged outages.
And yet, years later, blackouts remain routine. Puerto Ricans pay higher average electricity prices than residents of all but three U.S. states, often for power that isn’t reliable at all. Extreme heat knocks out power, heavy rain overwhelms transmission lines, and a crumbling grid keeps failing Puerto Ricans. Each outage is dismissed as an unfortunate inconvenience, rather than recognized as a systemic policy failure. Sound familiar?
It’s not just Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is often described as an exception — a uniquely fragile grid, a uniquely devastating storm. But the pattern is not unique.
Across the country, climate-fueled disasters are becoming more frequent and more expensive. In Texas and Oklahoma, winter freezes have knocked gas infrastructure offline, sending energy prices soaring and leaving customers paying off emergency fuel costs for years. In California, longer wildfire seasons, driven by hotter, drier conditions, have forced utilities to harden or bury power lines, with the costs passed on to ratepayers. Along the Gulf Coast and in flood-prone regions, substations built for a different climate are repeatedly damaged and rebuilt.
The same fuels that drive much of the grid are also driving the warming that intensifies storms, floods, heatwaves, and freezes. The system absorbs the damage, utilities rebuild, and customers pay.
Disaster without accountability
What stays the same is who pays.
Families absorb higher insurance premiums or lose coverage altogether. Local governments drain budgets meant for schools, housing, and public services. Federal aid arrives late, tangled in bureaucracy, or never fully covers the damage. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel companies most responsible for the climate crisis, which knowingly fueled it for decades, continue to post record profits.
The U.S. response to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria exposed this imbalance in stark terms. Although the storm caused an estimated $115 billion in damage, Puerto Rico has been awarded just $23.4 billion in FEMA Public Assistance. Nearly half of that funding still requires FEMA authorization before it can be spent, and with Trump proposing to cut FEMA’s workforce in half, those approvals are unlikely to come quickly.
A stalled energy future
In the years since, accountability has been further stalled by bureaucratic infighting over the future of the island’s power grid. Puerto Rico still relies heavily on oil, natural gas, and coal, with renewable energy making up only a small share of generation. After Maria, the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau approved a plan requiring 40% of the island’s power to come from renewables by 2025, with the goal of modernizing the grid and reducing outage risk. Yet disputes between regulators and utilities — particularly pushes to expand natural gas — have slowed progress and prevented federal reconstruction dollars from being spent. The result is unspent funds, delayed upgrades, and continued outages.
For places like Puerto Rico, funding from a climate superfund bill could mean the difference between permanent crisis and real recovery. It could mean power systems designed to withstand extreme heat and hurricanes, and hospitals and schools that don’t go dark when the weather turns.
And it wouldn’t fall on working people already stretched thin.
Making polluters pay on the big stage
There’s a persistent myth that holding polluters accountable is fringe or unrealistic. But when El Apagón plays during the Super Bowl, an event designed to reach as many people as humanly possible, that myth falls apart.
The Super Bowl isn’t just sweaty dudes bumping heads and countless AI ads. It’s a mirror of what the country is paying attention to and a tool for communicators to understand pop culture and what kinds of messages resonate.
So if millions of people just watched Bad Bunny up on a telephone pole singing a song about Puerto Rico’s persistent struggles with extreme weather, why can’t we be the ones to sell the solution?
You can be part of the solution too! If you’re talking to a friend or colleague about the show, here’s one way to spread the MPP message:
“Hey, did you watch the Super Bowl last weekend?”
“I did! Bad Bunny was incredible, and I loved the set design”
“Me too! I especially enjoyed when he performed ‘El Apagon’ up on those telephone poles. Did you know it’s a song about the blackouts Puerto Ricans faced after Hurricane Maria? He actually made a 20-minute documentary to go along with the music video about the island’s energy crisis and failing infrastructure.”
“Woah, I had no idea! I’ll have to watch it.”
“It’s not just Puerto Rico facing these struggles either. All across the country, countless communities are suffering from a climate crisis they didn’t cause, while the fossil fuel companies who made this mess walk away scot-free. There’s almost a dozen states pursuing climate superfund bills that would hold polluters accountable and make them pay for the kinds of climate infrastructure upgrades Bad Bunny talks about in El Apagon. You can learn more about the movement to make Big Oil pay at makepolluterspay.net”
On Super Bowl Sunday, Bad Bunny reminded millions of people what a blackout really means. The question now is whether we’re willing to act before the lights go out again.
What profits is it and for whom to poison the world?