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Essay


IN A WORLD ON FIRE, STOP BURNING THINGS

The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to
rapidly ditch fossil fuels. 

By Bill McKibben

March 18, 2022
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Illustration by Álvaro Bernis
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On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations,
António Guterres, had, he said, “seen many scientific reports in my time, but
nothing like this.” Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document
as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate
leadership,” and added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson
of our only home.” Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare
emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the
horrors of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and declared, “Enough is
enough.” Citing Putin’s declaration of a nuclear alert, the war could, Guterres
said, turn into an atomic conflict, “with potentially disastrous implications
for us all.”

What unites these two crises is combustion. Burning fossil fuel has driven the
temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer
Arctic, bending the jet stream, and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil
fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for
sixty per cent of Russia’s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe
by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor
on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly
alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that
our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in
Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the “last best
hope” for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going “net-zero by
2050”; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the
young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as “blah, blah, blah.” Even
people trying to pay attention can’t really keep track of what should be the
most compelling battle in human history.


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So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy
tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening
the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale
combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we
might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday,
President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to
compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration
official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing
country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency
on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that
is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

We don’t know when or where humans started building fires; as with all things
primordial there are disputes. But there is no question of the moment’s
significance. Fire let us cook food, and cooked food delivers far more energy
than raw; our brains grew even as our guts, with less processing work to do,
shrank. Fire kept us warm, and human enterprise expanded to regions that were
otherwise too cold. And, as we gathered around fires, we bonded in ways that set
us on the path to forming societies. No wonder Darwin wrote that fire was “the
greatest discovery ever made by man, excepting language.”

Darwin was writing in the years following the Industrial Revolution, as we
learned how to turn coal into steam power, gas into light, and oil into
locomotion, all by way of combustion. Our species depends on combustion; it made
us human, and then it made us modern. But, having spent millennia learning to
harness fire, and three centuries using it to fashion the world we know, we must
spend the next years systematically eradicating it. Because, taken together,
those blazes—the fires beneath the hoods of 1.4 billion vehicles and in the
homes of billions more people, in giant power plants, and in the boilers of
factories and the engines of airplanes ships—are more destructive than the most
powerful volcanoes, dwarfing Krakatoa and Tambora. The smoke and smog from those
engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year, more deaths
than those caused by war and terrorism, not to mention malaria and tuberculosis,
together. (In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as
COVID-19 did.) Those flames, of course, also spew invisible and odorless carbon
dioxide at an unprecedented rate; that CO2 is already rearranging the planet’s
climate, threatening not only those of us who live on it now but all those who
will come after us.


“We looked at the price of coal over a hundred and forty years,” Doyne Farmer, a
researcher at Oxford University, said. “Prices have not come down.”Photograph by
Spencer Platt / Getty

But here’s the good news, which makes this exercise more than merely rhetorical:
rapid advances in clean-energy technology mean that all that destruction is no
longer necessary. In the place of those fires we keep lit day and night, it’s
possible for us to rely on the fact that there is a fire in the sky—a great ball
of burning gas about ninety-three million miles away, whose energy can be
collected in photovoltaic panels, and which differentially heats the Earth,
driving winds whose energy can now be harnessed with great efficiency by
turbines. The electricity they produce can warm and cool our homes, cook our
food, and power our cars and bikes and buses. The sun burns, so we don’t need
to.



Wind and solar power are not a replacement for everything, at least not yet.
Three billion people still cook over fire daily, and will at least until
sufficient electricity reaches them, and perhaps thereafter, since culture
shifts slowly. Even then, flames will still burn—for birthday-cake candles, for
barbecues, for joints (until you’ve figured out the dosing for edibles)—just as
we still use bronze, though its age has long passed. And there are a few larger
industries—intercontinental air travel, certain kinds of metallurgy such as
steel production—that may require combustion, probably of hydrogen, for some
time longer. But these are relatively small parts of the energy picture. And in
time they, too, will likely be replaced by renewable electricity. (Electric-arc
furnaces are already producing some kinds of steel, and Japanese researchers
have just announced a battery so light that it might someday power passenger
flights across oceans.) In fact, I can see only one sublime, long-term use for
large-scale planned combustion, which I will get to. Mostly, our job as a
species is clear: stop smoking.

As of 2022, this task is both possible and affordable. We have the technology
necessary to move fast, and deploying it will save us money. Those are the first
key ideas to internalize. They are new and counterintuitive, but a few people
have been working to realize them for years, and their stories make clear the
power of this moment.

When Mark Jacobson was growing up in northern California in the
nineteen-seventies, he showed a gift for science, and also for tennis. He
travelled for tournaments to Los Angeles and San Diego, where, he told me
recently, he was shocked by how dirty the air was: “You’d get scratchy eyes,
your throat would start hurting. You couldn’t see very far. I thought, Why
should people live like this?” He eventually wound up at Stanford, first as an
undergraduate and then, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, as a professor of civil
and environmental engineering, by which time it was clear that visible air
pollution was only part of the problem. It was understood that the unseen gas
produced by combustion—carbon dioxide—posed an even more comprehensive threat.



To get at both problems, Jacobson analyzed data to see if an early-model wind
turbine sold by General Electric could compete with coal. He worked out its
capacity by calculating its efficiency at average wind speeds; a paper he wrote,
published in the journal Science in 2001, showed that you “could get rid of
sixty per cent of coal in the U.S. with a modest number of turbines.” It was, he
said, “the shortest paper I’ve ever written—three-quarters of a page in the
journal—and it got the most feedback, almost all from haters.” He ignored them;
soon he had a graduate student mapping wind speeds around the world, and then he
expanded his work to other sources of renewable energy. In 2009, he and Mark
Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California, published a
paper suggesting that hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy could conceivably
supply enough power to meet all the world’s energy needs. The conventional
wisdom at the time was that renewables were unreliable, because the sun insists
on setting each night and the wind can turn fickle. In 2015, Jacobson wrote a
paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing that, on
the contrary, wind and solar energy could keep the electric grid running. That
paper won a prestigious prize from the editors of the journal, but it didn’t
prevent more pushback—a team of twenty academics from around the country
published a rebuttal, stating that “policy makers should treat with caution any
visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems
that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.”

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David Attenborough on Spiders with Personalities



Time, however, is proving Jacobson correct: a few nations—including Iceland,
Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway—are already producing more than ninety per cent
of their electricity from clean sources. When Jacobson began his work, wind
turbines were small fans atop California ridgelines, whirligigs that looked more
like toys than power sources. Now G.E. routinely erects windmills about three
times as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and, in August, a Chinese firm announced
a new model, whose blades will sweep an area the size of six soccer fields, with
each turbine generating enough power for twenty thousand homes. (An added
benefit: bigger turbines kill fewer birds than smaller ones, though, in any
event, tall buildings, power lines, and cats are responsible for far more avian
deaths.) In December, Jacobson’s Stanford team published an updated analysis,
stating that we have ninety-five per cent of the technology required to produce
a hundred per cent of America’s power needs from renewable energy by 2035, while
keeping the electric grid secure and reliable.




Making clean technology affordable is the other half of the challenge, and here
the news is similarly upbeat. In September, after almost fifteen years of work,
a team of researchers at Oxford University released a paper that is currently
under peer review but which, fifty years from now, people may look back on as a
landmark step in addressing the climate crisis. The lead author of the report is
Oxford’s Rupert Way; the research team was led by an American named Doyne
(pronounced “dough-en”) Farmer.

Farmer grew up in New Mexico, a precocious physicist and mathematician. His
first venture, formed while he was a graduate student at U.C. Santa Cruz, was
called Eudaemonic Enterprises, after Aristotle’s term for the condition of human
flourishing. The goal was to beat roulette wheels. Farmer wore a shoe (now
housed in a German museum) with a computer in its sole, and watched as a
croupier tossed a ball into a wheel; noting the ball’s initial position and
velocity, he tapped his toe to send the information to the computer, which
performed quick calculations, giving him a chance to make a considered bet in
the few seconds the casino allowed. This achievement led him to building
algorithms to beat the stock market—a statistical-arbitrage technique that
underpinned an enterprise he co-founded called the Prediction Company, which was
eventually sold to the Swiss banking giant UBS. Happily, Farmer eventually
turned his talents to something of greater social worth: developing a way to
forecast rates of technological progress. The basis for this work was research
published in 1936, when Theodore Wright, an executive at the Curtiss Aeroplane
Company, had noted that every time the production of airplanes doubled, the cost
of building them fell by twenty per cent. Farmer and his colleagues were
intrigued by this “learning curve” (and its semiconductor-era variant, Moore’s
Law); if you could figure out which technologies fit on the curve, and which
didn’t, you’d be able to forecast the future.

“It was about fifteen years ago,” Farmer told me, in December. “I was at the
Santa Fe Institute, and the head of the National Renewable Energy Lab came down.
He said, ‘You guys are complex-systems people. Help us think outside the
box—what are we missing?’ I had a Transylvanian postdoctoral fellow at the time,
and he started putting together a database—he had high-school kids working on
it, kids from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, anyone. And, as we looked at it,
we saw this point about the improvement trends being persistent over time.” The
first practical application of solar electricity was on the Vanguard I
satellite, in 1958—practical if you had the budget of the space program. Yet the
cost had been falling steadily, as people improved each generation of the
technology—not because of one particular breakthrough or a single visionary
entrepreneur but because of constant incremental improvement. Every time the
number of solar panels manufactured doubles, the price drops another thirty per
cent, which means that it’s currently falling about ten per cent every year.

But—and here’s the key—not all technologies follow this curve. “We looked at the
price of coal over a hundred and forty years,” Farmer said. “Mines are much more
sophisticated, the technology for locating new deposits is much better. But
prices have not come down.” A likely explanation is that we got to all the easy
stuff first: oil once bubbled up out of the ground; now we have to drill deep
beneath the ocean for it. Whatever the reason, by 2013, the cost of a
kilowatt-hour of solar energy had fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent since
it was first used on the Vanguard I. Meanwhile, the price of coal has remained
about the same. It was cheap to start, but it hasn’t gotten cheaper.

The more data sets that Farmer’s team members included, the more robust numbers
they got, and by the autumn of 2021 they were ready to publish their findings.
They found that the price trajectories of fossil fuels and renewables are
already crossing. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming
more so. So a “decisive transition” to renewable energy, they reported, would
save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming
decades.

This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has
long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking: if we had to
transition to avoid calamity (and obviously we did), we should go as slowly as
possible. Bill Gates, just last year, wrote a book, arguing that consumers would
need to pay a “green premium” for clean energy because it would be more
expensive. But Emily Grubert, a Georgia Tech engineer who now works for the
Department of Energy, has recently shown that it could cost less to replace
every coal plant in the country with renewables than to simply maintain the
existing coal plants. You could call it a “green discount.”



The constant price drops mean, Farmer said, that we might still be able to move
quickly enough to meet the target set in the 2016 Paris climate agreement of
trying to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “One point five is
going to suck,” he said. “But it sure beats three. We just need to put our money
down and do it. So many people are pessimistic and despairing, and we need to
turn that around.”




Numbers like Farmer’s make people who’ve been working in this field for years
absolutely giddy. At COP26, I retreated one day from Glasgow’s giant convention
center to the relative quiet of the city’s university district for a pizza with
a man named Kingsmill Bond. Bond is an Englishman and a former investment
professional, and he looks the part: lean, in a bespoke suit, with a good
haircut. His daughter, he said, was that day sitting her exams for Cambridge,
the university he’d attended before a career at Citi and Deutsche Bank that had
taken him to Hong Kong and Moscow. He’d quit some years ago, taking a cut in pay
that he’s too modest to disclose. He’d worked first for the Carbon Tracker
Initiative, in London, and now the Rocky Mountain Institute, based in Colorado,
two groups working on energy transition.

He drew on a napkin excitedly, expounding on the numbers in the Oxford report.
We would have to build out the electric grid to carry all the new power, and
install millions of E.V. chargers, and so on, down a long list—amounting to
maybe a trillion dollars in extra capital expenditure a year over the next two
or three decades. But, in return, Bond said, we get an economic gift: “We save
about two trillion dollars a year on fossil-fuel rents. Forever.” Fossil-fuel
rent is what economists call the money that goes from consumers to those who
control the hydrocarbon supply. Saudi Arabia can pull oil out of the ground for
less than ten dollars a barrel and sell it at fifty or seventy-five dollars a
barrel (or, during the emergency caused by Putin’s war, more than a hundred
dollars); the difference is the rent they command. Bond insists that higher
projections for the cost of the energy transition—a recent analysis from the
consulting firm McKinsey predicted that it would cost trillions more than
Farmer’s team did—ignore these rents, and also assume that, before long,
renewable energy will veer from the steeply falling cost curve. Even if you’re
pessimistic about how much it will cost to make the change, though, it’s clear
that it would be far less expensive than not moving fast—that’s measured in
hundreds of trillions of dollars but also in millions of lives and whatever
value we place on maintaining an orderly civilization.

The new numbers turn the economic logic we’re used to upside down. A few years
ago, at a petroleum-industry conference in Texas, the Canadian Prime Minister,
Justin Trudeau, said something both terrible and true: that “no country would
find a hundred and seventy-three billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave
them there.” He was referring to Alberta’s tar sands, where a third of Canada’s
natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it
to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil
would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually
burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a
third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one
half of one per cent of the world’s population.)


In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as COVID-19
did.Photograph by Artur Widak / NurPhoto / Getty

Even on purely economic terms, such logic makes less sense with each passing
quarter. That’s especially true for the eighty per cent of people in the world
who live in countries that must import fossil fuels—for them it’s all cost and
no gain. Even for petrostates, however, the spreadsheet is increasingly
difficult to rationalize. Bond supplied some numbers: Canada has fossil-fuel
reserves totalling a hundred and sixty-seven petawatt hours, which is a lot. (A
petawatt is a quadrillion watts.) But, he said, it has potential renewable
energy from wind and solar power alone of seventy-one petawatt hours a year. A
reasonable question to ask Trudeau would be: What kind of country finds a
windfall like that and simply leaves it in the sky?

Making the energy transition won’t be easy, of course. Because we’ve been
burning fuel to power our economies for more than two hundred years, we have in
place long and robust supply chains and deep technical expertise geared to a
combustion economy. “We’ve tried to think about possible infrastructure walls
that might get in the way,” Farmer said. That’s a virtue of this kind of
learning-curve analysis: if renewable energy has overcome obstacles in the past
to keep dropping in price, it will probably be able to do so again. A few years
ago, for instance, a number of reports said that the windmill business might
crash because it was running short of the balsa wood used in turbine blades.
But, within a year of the shortages emerging, many of the big windmill makers
had started substituting a synthetic foam.

Now the focus is on minerals, such as cobalt, that are used in solar panels and
batteries. Late last year, the Times published a long investigation of the
success that China has had in cornering the world’s supply of the metal, which
is found most abundantly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Brian Menell,
the C.E.O. of TechMet, a supplier of cobalt and other specialty metals, told me,
“We run the risk that in five years, the factories for E.V.s will be sitting
half idle, because those companies—the Fords and General Motors and Teslas and
VWs—will not be able to secure the feedstock to maintain the capacity they’re
building now.” But the fact that the Fords and G.M.s are in the hunt means that
the political weight for what Menell calls a “massive and coördinated effort by
government and end users” is likely to develop. Humans are good at solving the
kind of dilemmas represented by scarcity. A Ford spokesman told the Times that
the company is learning to recycle cobalt and to develop substitutes, adding,
“We do not see cobalt as a constraining issue.”

Harder to solve may be the human-rights challenges that come with new mining
efforts, such as the use of so-called “artisanal” cobalt mining, in which
impoverished workers pry the metal from the ground with spades, or the plan to
build a lithium mine on a site in Nevada that is sacred to Indigenous peoples.
But, as we work to tackle those problems, it’s worth remembering that a
transition to renewable energy would, by some estimates, reduce the total global
mining burden by as much as eighty per cent, because so much of what we dig up
today is burned (and then we have to go dig up some more). You dig up lithium
once, and put it to use for decades in a solar panel or battery. In fact, a
switch to renewable energy will reduce the load on all kinds of systems. At the
moment, roughly forty per cent of the cargo carried by ocean-going ships is
coal, gas, oil, and wood pellets—a never-ending stream of vessels crammed full
of stuff to burn. You need a ship to carry a wind turbine blade, too, if it’s
coming from across the sea, but you only need it once. A solar panel or a
windmill, once erected, stands for a quarter of a century or longer. The U.S.
military is the world’s largest single consumer of fossil fuels, but seventy per
cent of its logistical “lift capacity” is devoted solely to transporting the
fossil fuels used to keep the military machine running.

Raw materials aren’t the only possible pinch point. We’re also short of some
kinds of expertise. Saul Griffith is perhaps the world’s leading apostle of
electrification. (His 2021 book is called “Electrify.”) An Australian by birth,
he has spent recent years in Silicon Valley, rallying entrepreneurs to the
project of installing E.V. chargers, air-source heat pumps, induction cooktops,
and the like. He can show that they save homeowners, landlords, and businesses
money; he’s also worked out the numbers to show that banks can prosper by
extending, in essence, mortgages for these improvements. But he told me that, to
stay within the 1.5 degree Celsius range, “America is going to need a million
more electricians this decade.” That’s not impossible. Working as an electrician
is a good job, and community colleges and apprenticeship programs could train
many more people to become one. But, as with the rest of the transition, it’s
going to take leadership and coördination to make it happen.




Change on this scale would be difficult even if everyone was working in good
faith, and not everyone is. So far, for instance, the climate provisions of the
Build Back Better Act, which would help provide, among many other things,
training for renewable-energy installers, have been blocked not just by the
oil-dominated G.O.P. but by Joe Manchin, the Democrat who received more
fossil-fuel donations in the past election cycle than anyone else in the Senate.
The thirty-year history of the global-warming fight is largely a story of the
efforts by the fossil-fuel industry to deny the need for change, or, more
recently, to insist that it must come slowly.



The fossil-fuel industry wants to be able to keep burning something. That way,
it can keep both its infrastructure and its business model usefully employed.
It’s like an industry of rational pyromania. A decade or so ago, the thing it
wanted to burn next was natural gas. Since it produces less carbon dioxide than
coal does, it was billed as the “bridge fuel” that would get us to renewables.
The logic seemed sound. But researchers, led by Bob Howarth, at Cornell
University, found that producing large quantities of natural gas released large
quantities of methane into the atmosphere. And methane (CH4) is, like CO2, a
potent heat-trapping gas, so it’s become clear that natural gas is a bridge fuel
to nowhere—clear, that is, to everyone but the industry. The head of a big gas
firm told a conference in Texas last week that he thought the domestic gas
industry could be producing for the next hundred years.

Other parts of the industry want to go further back in time and burn wood; the
European Union and the United States officially class “biomass burning” as
carbon neutral. The city of Burlington, in my home state of Vermont, claims to
source all its energy from renewables, but much of its electricity comes from a
plant that burns trees. Again, the logic originally seemed sound: if you cut a
tree, another grows in its place, and it will eventually soak up the carbon
dioxide emitted from that burning the first tree. But, again, “eventually” is
the problem. Burning wood is highly inefficient, and so it releases a huge pulse
of carbon right now, when the world’s climate system is most vulnerable. Trees
that grow back in a few generations’ time will come too late to save the ice
caps. The world’s largest wood-burning plant is in England, run by a company
called Drax; the plant used to burn coal, and it does scarcely less damage now
than it did then. In January, news came that Enviva, a company based in Maryland
that is the largest producer of wood pellets in the world, plans to double its
output.

Or consider the huge sums of money in the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed
last year, which will support another technology called carbon capture. This
involves fitting power plants with enough filters and pipes so that they can go
on burning coal or gas, but capture the CO2 that pours out of the smokestacks
and pipe it safely away—into an old salt mine, perhaps. (Or, ironically, into a
depleted oil well, where it may be used to push more crude to the surface.) So
far, these carbon-capture schemes don’t really work—but, even if they did, why
spend the money to outfit systems with pipes and filters when solar power is
already cheaper than coal power? We will have to remove some of the carbon in
the atmosphere, and new generations of direct-air-capture machines may someday
play a role, if their cost drops quickly. (They use chemicals to filter carbon
straight from the ambient air; think of them as artificial trees.) But using
this technology to lengthen the lifespan of coal-fired power plants is just one
more gift to a politically connected industry.

Increasingly, the fossil-fuel industry is turning toward hydrogen as an out.
Hydrogen does burn cleanly, without contributing to global warming, but the
industry likes hydrogen because one way to produce it is by burning natural gas.
And, as Howarth and Jacobson demonstrated in a recent paper, even if you combine
burning that gas with expensive carbon capture, the methane that leaks from the
frack wells is enough to render the whole process ruinous environmentally, and
it makes no sense economically without huge subsidies.

There is another way to produce hydrogen, and, in time, it will almost certainly
fuel the last big artificial fires on our planet. Through electrolysis, hydrogen
can be separated from oxygen in water. And if the electricity used in the
process is renewably produced then this “green hydrogen” would allow countries
such as Japan, Singapore, and Korea, which may struggle to find enough space in
their landscapes for renewable-energy generation, to power their grids. The
Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest, the founder of the Fortescue Metals
Group, is proposing to use solar power to produce green hydrogen that he can
then ship to those countries. In January, Mukesh Ambani, the head of Reliance
Industries and the richest man in India, announced plans to spend seventy-five
billion dollars on the technology. Airbus recently predicted that green hydrogen
could fuel its long-haul planes by 2035. And the good news—though Doyne Farmer
cautions that the data sets are still pretty scanty—is that the electrolyzers
which use solar energy to produce hydrogen seem to be on the same downward cost
curve as solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries.




The fossil-fuel industry can be relied on to fight these shifts. Last autumn, a
utility company in Oklahoma announced that it would charge fourteen hundred
dollars to disconnect residential gas lines and move home stoves and furnaces to
electricity. Within days, other utilities followed suit. That’s why the climate
movement is increasingly taking on the banks that make loans for the expansion
of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Last year, the International Energy Agency said
that such expansion needed to end immediately if we are to meet the Paris
targets, yet the world’s biggest banks, while making noises about “net zero by
2050,” continue to lend to new pipelines and wells. The issue came to the fore
earlier this year, when Joe Biden nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to the position
of vice-chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve. “There is opportunity in
pre-emptive, early and bold actions by federal economic policy makers looking to
avoid catastrophe,” Raskin wrote in 2020. And it’s why certain lawmakers
mobilized to stop her nomination. Senator Patrick Toomey, of Pennsylvania, who
was the Senate’s sixth-biggest recipient of oil-and-gas contributions during his
last campaign, in 2016 (he is not running for reëlection this year), said that
Raskin “has specifically called for the Fed to pressure banks to choke off
credit to traditional energy companies.” She’s tried, in other words, to
extinguish the flames a little—and on Monday, for her pains, Manchin effectively
derailed her nomination, saying that he would vote against her, because she
“failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of
financing an all-of-the-above energy policy.” On Tuesday, she withdrew her
nomination.

The shift away from combustion is large and novel enough that it bumps up
against everyone’s prior assumptions—environmentalists’, too. The fight against
nuclear power, for example, was an early mainstay of the green movement, because
it was easy to see that if something went wrong it could go badly wrong. I
applauded, more than a decade ago, when the Vermont legislature voted to close
the state’s old nuclear plant at the end of its working life, but I wouldn’t
today. Indeed, for some years I’ve argued that existing nuclear reactors that
can still be run with any margin of safety probably should be, as we’re making
the transition—the spent fuel they produce is an evil inheritance for our
descendants, but it’s not as dangerous as an overheated Earth, even if the
scenes of Russian troops shelling nuclear plants added to the sense of horror
enveloping the planet these past weeks. Yet the rapidly falling cost of
renewables also indicates why new nuclear plants will have a hard time finding
backers; it’s evaporating nuclear power’s one big advantage—that it’s always on.
Farmer’s Oxford team ran the numbers. “If the cost of coal is flat, and the cost
of solar is plummeting, nuclear is the rare technology whose cost is going up,”
he said. Advocates will argue that this is because safety fears have driven up
the cost of construction. “But the only place on Earth where you can find the
cost of nuclear coming down is Korea,” Farmer said. “Even there, the rate of
decline is one per cent a year. Compared to ten per cent for renewables, that’s
not enough to matter.”

Accepting nuclear power for a while longer is not the only place
environmentalists will need to bend. A reason I supported shutting down
Vermont’s nuclear plant was because campaigners had promised that its output
would be replaced with renewable energy. In the years that followed, though,
advocates of scenery, wildlife, and forests managed to put the state’s
mountaintops off limits to wind turbines. More recently, the state’s
public-utility commission blocked construction of an eight-acre solar farm on
aesthetic grounds. Those of us who live in and love rural areas have to accept
that some of that landscape will be needed to produce energy. Not all of it, or
even most of it—Jacobson’s latest numbers show that renewable power actually
uses less land than fossil fuels, which require drilling fifty thousand new
holes every year in North America alone. But we do need to see our landscape
differently—as Ezra Klein wrote this week in the Times, “to conserve anything
close to the climate we’ve had, we need to build as we’ve never built before.”

Corn fields, for instance, are a classic American sight, but they’re also just
solar-energy collectors of another sort. (And ones requiring annual applications
of nitrogen, which eventually washes into lakes and rivers, causing big algae
blooms.) More than half the corn grown in Iowa actually ends up as ethanol in
the tanks of cars and trucks—in other words, those fields are already growing
fuel, just inefficiently. Because solar panels are far more efficient than
photosynthesis, and because E.V.s are far more efficient than cars with gas
engines, Jacobson’s data show that, by switching from ethanol to solar, you
could produce eighty times the amount of automobile mileage using an equivalent
area of land. And the transition could bring some advantages: the market for
electrons is predictable, so solar panels can provide a fairly stable income for
farmers, some of whom are learning to grow shade-tolerant crops or to graze
animals around and beneath them.



Another concession will strike many environmentalists more deeply even than
accepting a degraded landscape, and that’s the notion that reckoning with the
climate crisis would force wholesale changes in the way that people live their
lives. Remember, the long-held assumption was that renewable energy was going to
be expensive and limited in supply. So, it was thought, this would move us in
the direction of simpler, less energy-intensive ways of life, something that
many of us welcomed, in part because there are deep environmental challenges
that go beyond carbon and climate. Cheap new energy technologies may let us
evade some of those more profound changes. Whenever I write about the rise of
E.V.s, Twitter responds that we’d be better off riding bikes and electric buses.
In many ways we would be, and some cities are thankfully starting to build
extensive bike paths and rapid-transit lanes for electric buses. But, as of
2017, just two per cent of passenger miles in this country come from public
transportation. Bike commuting has doubled in the past two decades—to about one
per cent of the total. We could (and should) quintuple the number of people
riding bikes and buses, and even then we’d still need to replace tens of
millions of cars with E.V.s to meet the targets in the time the scientists have
set to meet them. That time is the crucial variable. As hard as it will be to
rewire the planet’s energy system by decade’s end, I think it would be
harder—impossible, in fact—to sufficiently rewire social expectations, consumer
preferences, and settlement patterns in that short stretch.

So one way to look at the work that must be done with the tools we have at hand
is as triage. If we do it quickly, we will open up more possibilities for the
generations to come. Just one example: Farmer says that it’s possible to see the
cost of nuclear-fusion reactors, as opposed to the current fission reactors,
starting to come steeply down the cost curve—and to imagine that a within a
generation or two people may be taking solar panels off farm fields, because
fusion (which is essentially the physics of the sun brought to Earth) may be
providing all the power we need. If we make it through the bottleneck of the
next decade, much may be possible.


The market for electrons is predictable, meaning that solar panels installed on
farmland can provide a fairly stable income for farmers.Photograph by George
Rose / Getty

There is one ethical element of the energy transition that we can’t set aside:
the climate crisis is deeply unfair—by and large, the less you did to cause it,
the harder and faster it hits you—but in the course of trying to fix it we do
have an opportunity to also remedy some of that unfairness. For Americans, the
best part of the Build Back Better bill may be that it tries to target
significant parts of its aid to communities hardest hit by poverty and
environmental damage, a residue of the Green New Deal that is its parent. And
advocates are already pressing to insure that at least some of the new
technology is owned by local communities—by churches and local development
agencies, not by the solar-era equivalents of Koch Industries or Exxon.

Advocates are also calling for some of the first investments in green
transformations to happen in public-housing projects, on reservations, and in
public schools serving low-income students. There can be some impatience from
environmentalists who worry that such considerations might slow down the
transition. But, as Naomi Klein recently told me, “The hard truth is that
environmentalists can’t win the emission-reduction fight on our own. Winning
will take sweeping alliances beyond the self-identified green bubble—with trade
unions, housing-rights advocates, racial-justice organizers, teachers, transit
workers, nurses, artists, and more. But, to build that kind of coalition,
climate action needs to hold out the promise of making daily life better for the
people who are most neglected right away—not far off in the future. Green,
affordable homes and water that is safe to drink is something people will fight
for a hell of a lot harder than carbon pricing.”

These are principles that must apply around the world, for basic fairness and
because solving the climate crisis in just the U.S. would be the most pyrrhic of
victories. (They don’t call it “global warming” for nothing.) In Glasgow, I sat
down with Mohamed Nasheed, the former President of the Maldives and the current
speaker of the People’s Majlis, the nation’s legislative body. He has been at
the forefront of climate action for decades, because the highest land in his
country, an archipelago that stretches across the equator in the Indian Ocean,
is just a few metres above sea level. At COP26, he was representing the Climate
Vulnerable Forum, a consortium of fifty-five of the nations with the most to
lose as temperatures rise. As he noted, poor countries have gone deeply into
debt trying to deal with the effects of climate change. If they need to move an
airport or shore up seawalls, or recover from a devastating hurricane or record
rainfall, borrowing may be their only recourse. And borrowing gets harder, in
part, because the climate risks mean that lenders demand more. The climate
premium on loans may approach ten per cent, Nasheed said; some nations are
already spending twenty per cent of their budgets just paying interest. He
suggested that it might be time for a debt strike by poor nations.

The rapid fall in renewable-energy prices makes it more possible to imagine the
rest of the world chipping in. So far, though, the rich countries haven’t even
come up with the climate funds they promised the Global South more than a decade
ago, much less any compensation for the ongoing damage that they have done the
most to cause. (All of sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for less than two per
cent of the carbon emissions currently heating the earth; the United States is
responsible for twenty-five per cent.)

Tom Athanasiou’s Berkeley-based organization EcoEquity, as part of the Climate
Equity Reference Project, has done the most detailed analyses of who owes what
in the climate fight. He found that the U.S. would have to cut its emissions a
hundred and seventy-five per cent to make up for the damage it’s already
caused—a statistical impossibility. Therefore, the only way it can meet that
burden is to help the rest of the world transition to clean energy, and to help
bear the costs that global warming has already produced. As Athanasiou put it,
“The pressing work of decarbonization is only going to be embraced by the people
of the Global South if it comes as part of a package that includes adaptation
aid and disaster relief.”

I said at the start that there is one sublime exception to the rule that we
should be dousing fires, and that is the use of flame to control flame, and to
manage land—a skill developed over many millennia by the original inhabitants of
much of the world. Of all the fires burning on Earth, none are more terrifying
than the conflagrations that light the arid West, the Mediterranean, the
eucalyptus forests of Australia, and the boreal woods of Siberia and the
Canadian north. By last summer, blazes in Oregon and Washington and British
Columbia were fouling the air across the continent in New York and New England.
Smoke from fires in the Russian far north choked the sky above the North Pole.
For people in these regions, fire has become a scary psychological companion
during the hot and dry months—and those months stretch out longer each year. The
San Francisco Chronicle recently asked whether parts of California, once the
nation’s idyll, were now effectively uninhabitable. In Siberia, even last
winter’s icy cold was not enough to blot out the blazes; researchers reported
“zombie fires” smoking and smoldering beneath feet of snow. There’s no question
that the climate crisis is driving these great blazes—and also being driven by
them, since they put huge clouds of carbon into the air.

There’s also little question, at least in the West, that the fires, though
sparked by our new climate, feed on an accumulation of fuel left there by a
century of a strict policy which treated any fire as a threat to be extinguished
immediately. That policy ignored millennia of Indigenous experience using fire
as a tool, an experience now suddenly in great demand. Indigenous people around
the world have been at the forefront of the climate movement, and they have
often been skilled early adopters of renewable energy. But they have also, in
the past, been able to use fire to fight fire: to burn when the risk is low, in
an effort to manage landscapes for safety and for productivity.

Frank Lake, a descendant of the Karuk tribe indigenous to what is now northern
California, works as a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, and he is
helping to recover this old and useful technology. He described a controlled
burn in the autumn of 2015 near his house on the Klamath River. “I have legacy
acorn trees on my property,” he said—meaning the great oaks that provided food
for tribal people in ages past—but those trees were hemmed in by fast-growing
shrubs. “So we had twenty-something fire personnel there that day, and they had
their equipment, and they laid hose. And I gave the operational briefing. I
said, ‘We’re going to be burning today to reduce hazardous fuels. And also so we
can gather acorns more easily, without the undergrowth, and the pests attacking
the trees.’ My wife was there and my five-year-old son and my three-year-old
daughter. And I lit a branch from a lightning-struck sugar pine—it conveys its
medicine from the lightning—and with that I lit everyone’s drip torches, and
then they went to work burning. My son got to walk hand-in-hand down the fire
line with the burn boss.”



Lake’s work at the Forest Service involves helping tribes burn again. It’s not
always easy; some have been so decimated by the colonial experience that they’ve
lost their traditions. “Maybe they have two or three generations that haven’t
been allowed to burn,” he said. There are important pockets of residual
knowledge, often among elders, but they can be reluctant to share that knowledge
with others, Lake told me, “fearful that it will be co-opted and that they’ll be
kept out of the leadership and decision-making.” But, for half a decade, the
Indigenous Peoples Burning Network—organized by various tribes, the Nature
Conservancy, and government agencies, including the Forest Service—has slowly
been expanding across the country. There are outposts in Oregon, Minnesota, New
Mexico, and in other parts of the world. Lake has travelled to Australia to
learn from aboriginal practitioners. “It’s family-based burning. The kids get a
Bic lighter and burn a little patch of eucalyptus. The teen-agers a bigger area,
adults much bigger swaths. I just saw it all unfold.” As that knowledge and
confidence is recovered, it’s possible to imagine a world in which we’ve turned
off most of the man-made fires, and Indigenous people teach the rest of us to
use fire as the important force it was when we first discovered it.

Amy Cardinal Christianson, who works for the Canadian equivalent of the Forest
Service, is a member of the Métis Nation. Her family kept trapping lines near
Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, but left them for the city because the
development of the vast tar-sands complex overwhelmed the landscape. (That’s the
hundred and seventy-three billion barrels that Justin Trudeau says no country
would leave in the ground—a pool of carbon so vast the climate scientist James
Hansen said that pumping it from the ground would mean “game over for the
climate.”) The industrial fires it stoked have helped heat the Earth, and one
result was a truly terrifying forest fire that overtook Fort McMurray in 2016,
after a stretch of unseasonably high temperatures. The blaze forced the
evacuation of eighty-eight thousand people, and became the costliest disaster in
Canadian history.

“What we’re seeing now is bad fire,” Christianson said. “When we talk about
returning fire to the landscape, we’re talking about good fire. I heard an elder
describe it once as fire you could walk next to, fire of a low intensity.” Fire
that builds a mosaic of landscapes that, in turn, act as natural firebreaks
against devastating blazes; fire that opens meadows where wildlife can flourish.
“Fire is a kind of medicine for the land. And it lets you carry out your
culture—like, why you are in the world, basically.”







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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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