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solar power
Hey America, the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Trying to Tell You What to Do
It’s time for the climate movement to speak to the nation’s inner teenager and persuade it that renewable energy is the true energy of freedom.
Nov 18, 2024
Since so much that is bizarre is currently being normalized (Matt Gaetz, in an effort to get out of Congress before it could publish its report on his sex scandals, is taking a new job as… attorney general) let me just say that the strangest thing of all remains in plain view. The incoming president of the richest country on Earth believes climate change—the deepest challenge that our species has faced—is a hoax.
This obviously has endless policy implications, which we’ll spend the next four years working through—but the simple fact is what’s so amazing. Every single one of the structures we’ve built over the centuries to help us understand the world, from the National Academy of Science to the land-grant universities with their huge labs, to NASA with its satellites keeping an eye on planet Earth, have told us the same thing: Fairly simple physics means that burning fossil fuel is warming the Earth, a warming now painfully confirmed in rainfall totals, melting ice, rising sea level, and deadly heatwaves. The entire world is plunging into an inferno.
And yet the person at the putative head of that entire pyramid of reason and evidence, the person with instant access to any scientist on Earth, and the person with the power to do the most to prevent it, simply rejects it. Jaded as we are, that should stun us.
Oil companies are a scam, pushing antiquated technology to keep you hooked. They don’t care if you breathe dirty air as long as it makes them money.
It’s not news, of course. President-elect Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords last time around, and he will soon do so again. He’s busy finding allies—the first foreign leader to visit Mar-a-Lago post election was Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian beloved by far-right leaders around the world, who joined Trump in doing the YMCA dance (the picture of authoritarian leaders bouncing to a gay anthem is one of the few saving graces of the moment). Milei announced that he too thought climate change was a “socialist lie” and hinted that Argentina too would soon be leaving the Paris pact. Even the host of the current global climate talks, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev (named as “Corruption’s Person of the Year” in 2012 by a global NGO) used his opening address last week to explain that fossil fuels were “a gift from the god.” (Climate activists, an unpopular species in Azerbaijan, were prevented from chanting at the global talks, so they hummed)
Obviously the underlying motive for all of this is the wealth and power associated with fossil fuels. (The country of Fossil Fuel Lobbyists sent more representatives to the climate talks than almost any other). Trump on Friday appointed a fracking executive, Christopher Wright, as his new energy secretary, surprising absolutely no one. Wright of course rejects the idea that there is a climate crisis, that we need an energy transition, or that there is any such thing as clean energy.
But he goes further, and in a way that I think helps illuminate how the right gets away with its denial. He tweeted recently that following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the “left” needed a new “north star.”
Enter climate change. The solution to top-down control’s existential challenge came in the form of problem. The climate “problem” fit the bill perfectly. It was global and centered on the two core industries of society, energy and agriculture. It was crowned “existential” by alarmist activists, and left-of-center politicians fell in line.
And here, for me, is the key part. Wright says that the core view of the left is that
those uneducated rubes (the citizenry) surely can’t be left free to exercise their own preferences through purchasing and employment decisions.
I have no idea how Argentine politics works, and I imagine that Azerbaijani politics mainly involves staying on the right side of Mr. Corruption, but I get American politics well enough to recognize the power of Wright’s worldview. There’s always been in our character a strain of “You’re Not the Boss of Me.” (Indeed, I spent my boyhood giving tours of Lexington Green where this attitude had its first real expression). But for much of my life it was a fairly fringe part of our discourse: Long before RFK Jr, for instance, there were oddball right-wing opponents of fluoride in our water supply, or of making motorcyclists wear helmets.
But most of us aren’t motorcyclists interested in traumatic brain injury, nor conspiracy theorists eager to increase our dental bills. So things like that stayed on the fringe—the changes demanded by, say, seatbelts were so small and so obviously beneficial that we just got used to them, and there was no real cost to any industry big enough to matter.
Climate change was a different matter. Taking it seriously would require enormous change from one group of people—those who made fortunes in coal and oil and gas. (Wright’s aptly-named Liberty Energy fracks one-fifth of the onshore wells in America). So the mere fact that science has demonstrated we’re wrecking the Earth with fossil fuel couldn’t be allowed to dictate policy—something that became more likely as the alternatives became cheaper and easier.
The easiest way to marshal opposition was to lean on this tired trope: Someone who thought you were a ‘rube’ was trying to tell you what to do. Trump, of course, goes on repeated diatribes about people being forced to use windpower and then being unable to watch tv because the breeze has dropped, or forced to buy an electric car that only runs when the sun has shining. Though no one has ever proposed banning gas stoves, the mere fact that scientists were pointing out its dangers to the lungs of children was enough to turn on the machine. The Texas representative Ronny Jackson tweeted, with his usual restraint:
I'll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!
and his Senate colleague Ted Cruz chimed in
The Biden administration is waging a multifaceted attack on popular appliances.
This kind of ‘thinking’ was supercharged by Covid-19—instead of appreciating the difficulties posed by a novel virus (or remembering the piles of dead bodies in the early months), lots of Americans pouted. Someone was telling them not to do something (eat in a crowded restaurant) or to do something (cover their mouths). So they rebelled; absent that anger, I doubt a January 6 could have happened.
I think this strain in our national character is wrongheaded—the danger of authoritarianism in America has always come from the right, not the left, and never more so than now. I devoutly wish that affection for one’s neighbors and a love of the generations that will come after us would persuade us to make the not-very-hard changes required of us. But I don’t think those reasons will be sufficient—they’re not strong enough to override the constant chatter about “mandates” pressed by the fossil fuel industry and its media and political harem.
So we have to broaden the appeal of the things that could save us. In the next few years the main task of the environmental movement in America (because so many other options are foreclosed) is going to involve pushing for a rapid transition to clean and renewable energy. We’re going to have to persuade people that solar and wind energy, and the devices that go with it, are what we want. And it won’t do sufficient good to argue on environmental grounds—“you’re not the boss of me” is a teenager’s argument, and teenagers are focused on themselves. So we better be too.
Here’s some of the arguments, then, that we can spend more time on. (And this is not theoretical—we’ll be rolling out the plans to make these arguments scale, as movements adjust to the new political reality).
Solar power is cheaper. (and those who oppose it know so, and are conspiring to make sure you keep paying them for energy when the sun provides it for free)
It’s more reliable. (and you can plug your EV to your house after a hurricane and run everything for a week).
It’s the ultimate liberty to have your own powerplant on your roof.
It’s far better to have a wind farm in your county than to rely on Saudi Arabia (or Chris Wright).
An electric car goes zero to 60 far faster than your antiquated gas model, and it costs half as much to run. (Rich guys in their Teslas are laughing at you)
Because it has fewer moving parts, you don’t have to visit your mechanic nearly as often. You can drive right by the gas station.
Oil companies are a scam, pushing antiquated technology to keep you hooked. They don’t care if you breathe dirty air as long as it makes them money.
Their shareholders are getting rich while you pay for repairing roads and bridges everytime there’s a new climate disaster.
We’ve already reached the percentage of the population that cares deeply about carbon emissions, and we obviously need more. We need to understand the darker sides of the American brain as well as the lighter ones, and we need to play to them.
So remember: If you have some solar panels and a heat pump and an EV, you’re the boss of you. Pass it on.
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As Trump Forfeits US Climate Leadership, We the People Still Have a Role to Play
Many of us can join in a genuinely global citizens’ fight for rapid action.
Nov 13, 2024
Those of us of a certain age grew up believing that America was the central nation on this planet—because, in the decades after World War II, it clearly was. We also believed that the course of history would move others in our direction, and that what did or didn’t happen in Washington would determine what did or didn’t happen on planet Earth. We believed, I think, that America had hit on the formula for political and economic success, that somehow our constitution had marked us out for leadership.
Most of those beliefs seem a little silly now. Clearly our political architecture—our Electoral College, our filibusters, and so on—has some deep flaws. Clearly we are not magically resistant to authoritarianism—indeed we’ve now embraced a flavor of it. And clearly America is not going to play the commanding role in helping solve the climate crisis, the greatest dilemma humans have ever encountered. For the next few years the best we can hope is that Washington won’t manage to wreck the efforts of others—and that some parts of this big nation will demonstrate what’s still possible. And that many of us can join in a genuinely global citizens’ fight for rapid action.
That Donald Trump lost in 2020 was, it turns out, of great importance: it gave the U.S. four years to help break renewable energy out of its “alternative energy” niche.
This all seems quite clear as the world’s nations gather these next two weeks in Baku, the oil-soaked capital of Azerbaijan, for 2024’s edition of the global climate talks. America is represented by John Podesta, the stalwart representative of the Democratic political structure that came crashing down on election day. (I mean, he was chief of staff to Bill Clinton). Podesta put on a brave face at a press conference as the talks began:
“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” he said. “This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet. Facts are still facts. Science is still science. The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country. This fight is bigger, still, because we are all living through a year defined by the climate crisis in every country of the world.”
More specifically, he promised that the U.S. would not “revert back to the energy system of the 1950s. No way.”
Which is true—but we also, clearly, won’t be leading the charge into this century’s clean energy transition. As the leading climate scientist Michael Mann put it in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the day after the election, “the United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests. It is now, in short, a petrostate.” (Not unlike the petrostate of Azerbaijan, whose lead climate negotiator was discovered last week to be using his role as host of the climate talks to negotiate new fossil fuel deals).
But—and here’s the interesting and good news—this fight for oil and gas and coal will be a rearguard action. That Donald Trump lost in 2020 was, it turns out, of great importance: it gave the U.S. four years to help break renewable energy out of its “alternative energy” niche. In those years the price of solar power and wind power dropped below the price of energy from coal and gas and oil, and as a result everything has begun to change.
If you want a fact to cheer you up—and I sure do—here’s one. It took humanity 68 years from the invention of the solar cell in 1954 to reach one terawatt of installed solar capacity. We passed that mark in 2022—and then we installed the second terawatt in two years since. To meet the goals set by climate scientists we need to roughly double the pace of solar installation again through the end of the decade: so, a terrawatt a year. Is that doable? We currently have the factory capacity to produce 1.1 terrawatts a year worth of panels. It’s a matter of finance and execution.
Most of that factory capacity, of course, is in China, and it is China that will now unambiguously be in the lead. There will be other players (here’s a good account of how India is trying to build its solar capacity) but the action shifts pretty powerfully from Washington to Beijing, which has bet big on this energy transition. One imagines that its diplomats are now the unrivaled key players in climate talks like the one in Baku, though the phalanx of other big, growing nations (Brazil, South Africa, India, Indonesia, and so on) will play important roles. Crucially, most of these are fossil fuel importers, and have every reason to move speedily in the direction of sun and wind; it’s possible that in terms of international negotiations things may get somewhat easier without the drag of the U.S. on the proceedings. (Which is why, comically, Exxon is asking the Trump administration to stay in the Paris talks).
And what of the U.S.?
Well, it’s a big country, and much of it is still in rational hands. As the World Resources Institute put it
Both Republican-led and Democratic-led states are seeing the benefits of wind, solar, and battery manufacturing and deployment thanks to the billions of dollars of investments unleashed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Governors and representatives in Congress on both sides of the aisle have come to recognize that clean energy is a huge moneymaker and a job creator. President Trump will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now.
That fight over the fate of the IRA will be a huge battle, but perhaps more important globally is the fact that America—because of those decades after WWII—has most of the world’s capital. It rests, above all, in pension funds, and it could be the thing that finances that terrawatt-a-year build out. I imagine the Trump administration will cut back sharply on American contributions to the International Monetary Fund and other global financial institutions—and that may mean that as other nations gain more influence, those institutions will have more ability to use their relatively small amounts of money to “de-risk” those crucial investments. That could be critically important in helping, say, retired schoolteachers in Seattle build the solar farms that Senegal requires and that will help us all.
And America remains the world center of zeitgeist. Which means that the fact that California and Texas (the twin capitals of American dynamism, and the fifth and eight largest economies on earth) are rapidly moving toward clean energy will help. Maybe even New York—10th largest economy on earth—might show some spunk; Gov. Kathy Hochul is apparently trying to revive the congestion-pricing scheme for Manhattan that she killed eight months ago. The genie will keep trying to climb out of the bottle, even as MAGA does it best to drag it back by its heels.
And it means that there’s lots of work for the rest of us, as we try to build a global movement behind speeding up this energy transition. That will be the chief work of this newsletter in the months and years ahead. There’s real global momentum, and we can, and will, figure out ways to add to it.
America, after all, is where the solar cell was born. It was mostly in America’s labs that we came to understand the science of climate change. And, crucially, it was America that really gave birth to the environmental movement. We—American people, if not our national government—still have a key role to play.
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Climate Change Is Our Greatest Challenge Yet, But Humanity Was Built to Do Hard Things
With world leaders now gathering for this year’s United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, the urgency of collective action has never been greater. And it’s clear that governments can’t do it alone.
Nov 11, 2024
Recently I had the opportunity to speak with and learn from members of an Inuit community in East Greenland. One of the Indigenous leaders recounted how her mother was saved by the men and women of her community when she went into premature labor as they were crossing one of the fjords in a storm. Banding together, with only their survival skills and traditional practices, they were able to safely deliver the baby and save the mother.
Her story reveals the secret behind this Indigenous community’s success in such harsh and unforgiving conditions. Their strength lies in their deep connection to the land and sea, using age-old knowledge passed down through generations to live in harmony with nature. In a world of extreme cold and scarcity, they’ve built communities that endure, embodying resilience and resourcefulness. Watching their way of life, it’s clear: Humanity is built to do hard things.
That same potent mix of tenacity and ingenuity is now required on a global scale. With world leaders now gathering for this year’s United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan (COP29), new climate targets for 2035 are due at the start of next year. The urgency of collective action has never been greater. And it’s clear that governments can’t do it alone. It takes the entire tribe—a whole-of-society approach that includes businesses, civil society, and communities as well as governments working together—to achieve real progress.
Even without further federal support, high-ambition efforts from these groups alone could reduce U.S. emissions by 48% to 60% by 2035.
Last year’s summit saw nearly 200 countries make historic pledges to accelerate global renewable energy capacity and increase improvements in energy efficiency by 2030. They also committed to transitioning away from fossil fuels and deploying emerging technologies. Despite these commitments, we are still headed for a 2.9°C rise in global temperatures—far beyond the limits required to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change. And the window to close the gap between our ambitions and the reality of our current situation is narrowing rapidly. To stabilize our climate, we must, like the Inuit and countless other societies around the world and throughout history, commit ourselves to doing hard things.
We are making progress towards our goals. The world is currently on a path to increase renewable power capacity by about two-and-a-half times from 2022 levels by the end of the decade. Likewise, energy efficiency is improving, with current annual gains of 2%. And yet, we must go even farther and faster.
To meet our renewable energy goals under the Paris agreement, we need to triple global renewable capacity in the next decade, and double energy efficiency to over 4% by 2030. Global fossil fuel demand needs to decline by more than a quarter by the end of the decade, instead of continuing to rise. This will require a dramatic and immediate acceleration in clean energy adoption and infrastructure development, such as the replacement of fossil fuels to heat and cool our buildings, and the expansion of electric vehicle charging networks. While wind power generation recently surpassed coal for the first time in U.S. history, a remarkable achievement, we need to push harder, putting in place a comprehensive solution for phasing out coal entirely.
COP29 presents an opportunity for a reset, as governments are expected to establish more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—formal pledges under the Paris agreement outlining each nation’s plan to reduce emissions. The U.S., which is the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter, can and should lead by example, showcasing how all levels of society—federal, state, city, and business—can implement climate action at scale.
The U.S. has set a strong foundation, with its 2030 NDC including a goal for a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035 supported by historic investments from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Reaching this ambitious target also requires action by non-federal actors—state and local governments, businesses, and civil society—to close the gap. Renewable portfolio standards, state emission limits, and state electric vehicle incentives are effective tools to increase climate action. Even without further federal support, high-ambition efforts from these groups alone could reduce U.S. emissions by 48% to 60% by 2035.
Through the right policies, U.S. state and local governments can incentivize investments in local energy sources like rooftop solar panels. By reducing reliance on centralized energy production. individuals, communities, and businesses are empowered to take climate action into their own hands. Likewise, local and state-level coordination can avoid bottlenecks and streamline approvals needed to expand our clean energy infrastructure. Communities and frontline workers can identify areas of investment needed to make the transition to a low carbon future inclusive and equitable, so that no segment of society is left behind.
Nations around the world must adopt a similar whole-of-society approach if they hope to meet their climate targets and benefit all their citizens. The story of the Inuit saving one of their own in a storm is a vital reminder that survival takes teamwork. As we face the enormity of the climate crisis, let’s not forget that it’s in our bones to do hard things—and that we are strongest when we work together.
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