The New Yorker
- Bill McKibben
Now the biggest barrier to change is the will of our politicians to take
serious climate action.
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Because its costs continue to slide with every quarter, solar
energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels almost everywhere on
the planet by the decade’s end. Photograph by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / Getty
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Author
Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign
350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He
writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.
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Earth Week has come and gone, leaving behind an ankle-deep and
green-tinted drift of reports, press releases, and earnest promises
from C.E.O.s and premiers alike that they are planning to become
part of the solution.
There were contingent signs of
real possibility—if some of the heads of state whom John Kerry
called on to make Zoom speeches appeared a little strained, at least
they appeared. (Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, the
most
carbon-emitting developed nation
per capita, struggled to make his technology work.)
But,
if you want real hope, the best place to look may be a little noted
report
from the London-based think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative.
Titled “The Sky’s the Limit,” it begins by declaring that “solar
and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can
meet global energy demand many times over.” Taken by itself,
that’s not a very bold claim: scientists have long
noted
that the sun directs more energy to the Earth in an hour than
humans use in a year. But, until very recently, it was too
expensive to capture that power. That’s what has shifted—and so
quickly and so dramatically that most of the world’s politicians
are now living on a different planet than the one we actually
inhabit.
On the actual Earth, circa 2021, the report
reads, “with current technology and in a subset of available
locations we can capture at least 6,700 PWh p.a. [petawatt-hours
per year] from solar and wind, which is more than 100 times global
energy demand.” And this will not require covering the globe with
solar arrays: “The land required for solar panels alone to provide
all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of
149 million km2. That is less than the land required for fossil
fuels today, which in the US alone is 126,000 km2, 1.3% of the
country.” These are the kinds of numbers that reshape your
understanding of the future.
We haven’t yet fully grasped this potential because it’s happened
so fast. In 2015, zero per cent of solar’s technical potential was
economically viable—the small number of solar panels that existed
at that time had to be heavily subsidized. But prices for solar
energy have collapsed so fast over the past three years that sixty
per cent of that potential is already economically viable. And,
because costs continue to slide with every quarter, solar energy
will be cheaper than fossil fuels almost everywhere on the planet
by the decade’s end. (It’s a delicious historical irony that this
evolution took place, entirely by coincidence, during the
Administration of
Donald Trump, even as he
ranted
about how solar wasn’t “strong enough” and was “very, very
expensive.”)
The Carbon Tracker report, co-written by
Kingsmill Bond, is full of fascinating points, including how
renewable energy is the biggest gift of all for some of the
poorest nations, including in Africa, where solar potential
outweighs current energy use by a factor of more than a thousand.
Only a few countries—Singapore, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and a
handful of European countries—are “stretched” in their ability to
rely on renewables, because they both use a lot of energy and have
little unoccupied land. In these terms, Germany is in the
third-worst position, and the fact that it is nonetheless one of
the world’s leaders in renewable energy should be a powerful
signal: “If the Germans can find solutions, then so can everyone
else.”
Clearly, those few nations are going to be
importing some renewable energy—a more farsighted Australian Prime
Minister would be figuring out how to send ships full of
solar-generated hydrogen to Japan, not how to continue shipping
coal to China. (And, in fact, the world’s
largest
solar farm is set to end up in the Australian outback, connected
by at least two thick undersea cables to Singapore.)
The numbers in the report are overwhelming—even if the analysts
are too optimistic by half, we’ll still be swimming in cheap solar
energy. “We have established that technical and economic barriers
have been crossed by falling costs. It follows that the main
remaining barrier to change is the ability of incumbents to
manipulate political forces to stop change,” the report reads.
Indeed. And the problem is that we need that change to happen
right now, because the curves of damage from the climate crisis
are as steep as the curves of falling solar prices.
Given three or four decades, economics will clearly
take care of the problem—the low price of solar power will keep
pushing us to replace liquid fuels with electricity generated from
the sun, and, eventually, no one will have a gas boiler in the
basement or an internal-combustion engine in the car. But, if the
transition takes three or four decades, no one will have an ice
cap in the Arctic, either, and everyone who lives near a coast
will be figuring out where on earth to go.
That conundrum was illuminated on Friday, when
word came
that Governor Gavin Newsom, of California, who has been under
pressure from an unrelenting activist campaign, agreed to ban new
fracking permits in his state and end fossil-fuel production there
altogether. This is a stunning achievement—for the planet and also
for the California communities (and you can guess what kinds of
communities they are) that currently have oil wells in their
schoolyards and next to their hospitals.
The
environmentalists
who banded together in the Last Chance Alliance should be
incredibly proud; Newsom (who is now facing a recall election)
deserves credit, as well, because this is precisely the step that
his famously green predecessor, Jerry Brown, did not take. The
fracking ban, though, only affects a small percentage of
California’s oil production, and won’t take effect until 2024. The
ban on oil production would not happen until 2045, which in
climate terms is the very distant future—a decade past the date
when California will ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, which
are the main use of oil in the state.
It’s clear why
Newsom is slow-walking the changes. An executive secretary of a
building-trades council immediately responded, “We will work to
oppose this effort for our membership, their families, our
schools, and our future. I have one question for Gavin Newsom: Are
our jobs too dirty for you?”
Change is hard. The job of politicians is to make it easier for
those affected, so that what must happen can happen—and within the
time we’ve been allotted by physics. But that hard job is
infinitely easier now that renewable energy is suddenly so cheap.
The falling price puts the wind at our backs, as it were. It’s the
greatest gift we could have been given as a civilization, and we
dare not waste it.
Passing the Mic
Audrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written for
this magazine, and also for
Harper’s, the
Times, and
The Nation. She is the editor of the book “
The World We Need: Stories and Lessons from America’s Unsung
Environmental Movement,” which the New Press will publish next week. For the book, she
surveyed America, finding the people who are powering the
environmental movement now. (Our conversation has been edited for
length.)
Bill McKibben: People may have an image in their mind of what an
environmentalist looks like—but what does an environmentalist
actually look like in 2021?
Audrea Lim: They don’t look any one way! Far from the
“white college-educated hippie” stereotype, environmentalists are
Black and brown youth transforming an abandoned jail into a
community farm; a former coal miner turned blogger and
environmental advocate; Asian, Latinx, and indigenous people
creating healthier and more equitable neighborhoods for their
kids.
“Environmentalist” just describes any people defending the quality
of their surroundings. This work can be local (protecting air or
water from toxic emissions or lead paint in the walls) or global
(protecting the glaciers and oceans that regulate local climates,
from Brooklyn’s streets to the Alaskan coast). The health, safety,
and well-being of their communities hang in the balance, but many
activists understand that these goals also require bigger changes,
from better access to parks, recreation, and community spaces to
more localized food systems and good, clean jobs.
I
think that’s why many environmentalists don’t even call themselves
“environmentalists.” They are culture-makers, or community,
housing, labor, and immigration activists who understand that
environmental issues are ingrained in every part of society, and
have simply made them a core element of their work.
Bill McKibben: What are the most important insights that came as, say, the
climate movement morphed into the climate-justice
movement?
Audrea Lim: That climate change will touch every
community, demographic, and region, but is also on track to
devastate poor and
BIPOC communities the
most. Many of these communities already struggle to meet basic
needs—food, housing, education, physical and mental health—making
them more vulnerable to sudden shocks, as we’ve seen through
the pandemic.
Many of these communities also live near polluting
developments (factories, refineries, waste incinerators) or on
eroded and contaminated lands (mines, Superfund sites), or lack
proper water and sewage infrastructure. These are added risks when
the fires and floods arrive.
This uneven burden is part of America’s legacy of environmental
racism: a history of hazardous, polluting fossil-fuel developments
being concentrated in communities of color—sometimes by design and
often through neglect. It’s the conjoined twin of residential
segregation. But, in addressing this reality head on, the
climate-justice movement also has another important insight to
offer: everyone benefits when we empower these communities to
build more equitable, resilient local economies, and transition
away from the dirty industries long looming over them.
Bill McKibben: If you could pick one story that would really stick in
people’s minds and hearts, what would it be?
Audrea Lim: Eric Enos grew up on the Waianae Coast of
Oahu, with little knowledge of his Native Hawaiian culture,
including the central importance of taro, a root vegetable.
(Native culture was suppressed under U.S. colonialism.) After
graduating from college, in the seventies, he began teaching art
to Native youth-gang members, taking them to dive in the ocean,
protest the conversion of local fishing grounds into a resort, and
hike in the back of the desiccated Waianae Valley. Here they found
abandoned walls and terraces in the ground. These were clearly
cultural sites, but what were they?
Archeologists at the Bishop Museum found that the entire area was
once under taro cultivation, as well as other traditional Hawaiian
plants. The water had long ago been diverted toward colonial sugar
plantations, but, with guidance from a state senator and local
agencies, Enos, the youth, and community members built a new
irrigation system. A group of multi-ethnic taro farmers, whom they
had earlier helped defend against eviction from their lands,
helped prepare the terraces for cultivation. And, with seeds
donated from the Lyon Arboretum, they began growing native plants,
learning about the land, their own culture, and taro in the
process.
These were the beginnings of
Ka‘ala Farm, a cultural learning center that connects troubled youth to the
land. The story underscores how different institutions and people
from different communities can collaborate toward a more equitable
and resilient future.
Climate School
Two former Prime Ministers of Australia wrote
an insightful op-ed
about why their country, bathed in sun, continues to insist on
building more coal mines and gas wells. They note that “the main
thing holding back Australia’s climate ambition is politics: a
toxic coalition of the Murdoch press, the right wing of the
Liberal and National parties, and vested interests in the fossil
fuel sector.” Last week, the center-left Australian Labor Party,
too, said that it will not stand against building more coal mines,
and believes that the nation will be exporting the black rocks
past 2050.
A wonderful leftover from Earth Day: Tia Nelson, the daughter of
the late senator Gaylord Nelson, who launched the April day of
action, in 1970,
wrote
about how her father helped welcome
Joe Biden to
the Senate, in 1973, comforting him after his wife and infant
daughter had been killed in a car crash. Nelson said, of her
father, “It would delight him to see that something he started so
long ago, to shake the Washington establishment out of its
lethargy, still playing such an important role these many years
later. And he would be moved to see that the heartbroken young man
he helped recover from despair is carrying his legacy forward.”
It’s remarkable how long Biden has been around—one good effect is
that he’s known some superb people.
A new
study
has found that climate change will cause lakes in the Northern
Hemisphere to stratify earlier in the year and over longer
periods, and that “many of the ecosystem services that lakes
provide, ranging from the delivery of drinking water and food to
recreation, may be endangered by the projected change in
stratification phenology during the twenty-first century,
particularly in urbanized and agricultural regions where lakes are
already eutrophic.”
A sign of what’s to come: a new renewable-energy
project
in Oregon marries solar power, wind turbines, and large-capacity
battery storage. A spokesman for the local utility, Portland
General Electric, said, “We feel pretty certain that this is what
the future of renewable power looks like. It’s more diverse, and
it’s more flexible.” A little further south and looking a little
further into the future, the invaluable Sammy Roth, in his weekly
“Boiling Point” newsletter, discusses the
possibility
of covering California’s irrigation canals with solar panels, to
both generate clean energy and cut evaporation.
The Movement for Black Lives is launching a
Red Black and Green New Deal, with a virtual summit on May 11th. Its Web site states, “We are
organizing to introduce a National Black Climate Agenda that
includes federal legislation to address the climate crisis by
investing in Black communities and repairing past harms.”
A Yale team has developed a
podcast devoted
to climate policy and carbon pricing—the most recent episode is
about why conservatives might be comfortable with the tactic. As
Naomi Shimberg, a junior, explains, “Many conservatives echo the
classic economic argument: pricing harm across the economy, rather
than controlling it with direct forms of government regulation, is
the most efficient way to cut pollution.”
Scoreboard
A new
report
from the World Meteorological Organization documented just how
dismal 2020 was in climatic terms: it was one of the three warmest
years on record, with more than eighty per cent of the world’s
oceans subject to at least one “marine heat wave;” extensive
flooding in the Greater Horn of Africa helped trigger a plague of
locusts; and severe drought in South America caused three billion
dollars in crop losses in Brazil alone.
A Baylor College of Medicine pediatrician and a University of
California, Davis, environmental economist published an
assessment, in
Scientific American, of the actual health impact of
climate change. They argue that the Biden Administration should
set the “social cost” of carbon at a higher level, to reflect the
damage that it’s doing to “every organ system in the human body.”
Water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead are
expected
to drop to record lows in the coming months, and reduced snowpacks
and increased evaporation along the Colorado watershed may trigger
the first-ever official water-shortage declaration in the
area—and, hence, cuts in the water supply to Arizona and Nevada.
The student-body presidents of all the Ivy League schools signed a
joint call
for full fossil-fuel divestment last week. Meanwhile, divestment
campaigners at Harvard produced a
series of comic sketches
as part of their ongoing efforts, and Christiana Figueres, the
former head of the United Nations convention on climate change who
spearheaded the push for the
Paris accord,
criticized
the university for its investments in fossil-fuel companies,
warning that Harvard management is on the verge of “breaching its
true fiduciary responsibility.”
The
Times
obtained
a detailed summary of an upcoming United Nations scientific
report, which makes clear that, in addition to cutting carbon
emissions, controlling methane emissions is crucial in solving the
climate crisis. Along with issuing calls for plugging leaks, the
report makes the critical point, according to the
Times,
that “expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with
keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the
international Paris Agreement.”
Warming Up
Bonnie Raitt and the Indigo Girls are among the artists who cut
“
No More Pipeline Blues (On this Land Where We Belong),” to raise money and awareness for the fight against Minnesota’s
Line 3 pipeline. Listen for the voice of the first enrolled member
of a Native American tribe to be named U.S. Poet Laureate,
Joy Harjo.
Links
