It is hard, watching the richest men on earth grovel before the new king, not to feel a little fear. I have some early morning bouts myself—perhaps I’ve caused enough trouble over the years for the fossil fuel industry that they will come for me. Those fears are tiny next to those of the millions of immigrant families who must be trembling tonight, knowing that some of their families will soon be cruelly singled out for separation.
My other fear, though, is for what I’m going to call ‘reality.’ As I wrote right after the election, I think the era that began with FDR is ending now—an era marked, imperfectly, by the search for justice. President Carter, buried last week, was at the midpoint of that journey, when it had already begun to falter. President Biden, born under Roosevelt, tried (imperfectly but sincerely) to revive that streak.
Now we will, at least for a time, replace justice with power as our guiding light. Power has always been a contender, of course, and always warped our reality, but now it has much fuller sway. And power, as Orwell perhaps understood best, often works by insisting that up is down. In the case of the climate crisis, which is the deepest problem our civilization confronts, that consists of claiming that global warming is a hoax, and that its main solution—clean energy—is expensive and ineffective. All this has been on display in Washington in recent days, as the grandees of the fossil fuel industry gather to celebrate Trump’s win, and as the president-elect’s cabinet nominees told the Senate that, even if turned out to be real, climate change was no great threat, and that they were intent on reviving even the coal industry with government aid.
So, against all that, let’s just take stock of where we actually stand as this new era begins.
The first key reality is that the climate crisis just keeps growing. The most important news of last week, though you would have had to search hard to find it, was that the carbon dioxide monitoring station at Mauna Loa recorded the biggest single-year growth in co2 in its 66-year-history, rising 3.58 parts per million. For the first few decades after Charles Keeling erected earth’s most important scientific instrument in 1958, atmospheric concentrations of co2 grew at roughly two parts per million per year; that has steepened in recent years, and 2024 was the worst yet. As Yale E360 reported
The figure exceeds the most pessimistic predictions of the U.K. Met Office, which says that even record-high emissions from fossil fuels cannot fully explain the surge in carbon dioxide.
U.K. scientists note that increasingly severe heat and drought mean that trees and grasses are drawing down less carbon dioxide than in the past, while desiccated soils are also releasing more carbon back into the atmosphere. Conditions were particularly poor last year owing to a very warm El Niño — when warm waters pool in the eastern Pacific Ocean — which fueled hotter, drier weather across much of the tropics.
With El Niño over, that increase should be smaller next year, though who knows—this system is clearly bending in pwerful ways. And the effects are of course ever more hideous. Though the new Energy Secretary told Senators that he “stood by” his remarks that “the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify” climate action, the news from California was truly grim. As the former firefighter Jordan Thomas wrote in the Times,
the months leading up to the Los Angeles wildfires were among the hottest and driest on record in California, during the hottest year on record for the planet. Heat without precipitation turns vegetation into kindling and primes it to burn violently.
Sammy Roth expanded on the point in a desperately beautiful and angry column in the LA Times (and his columns are now also available as podcasts!)
After two wet winters fueled the growth of grasses and brush — ideal kindling for fires — across SoCal mountains and hillsides, the last few months saw an abrupt shift to record-dry conditions. This kind of weather whiplash is a hallmark of global warming.
Los Angeles did not burn, despite Elon Musk’s assurances, because of DEI policies in the city’s fire department or because the governor of California was a “subtard.” It did not burn, despite Mr. Trump’s assurances, because of concern for a smelt in the Sacramento watershed. It burned because we weren’t—to use the vernacular—woke to the challenge of climate change.
And now we will pay. Accuweather estimated last week that total damages may top $250 billion, which would put the pricetag higher than Hurricane Helene last year, and even Katrina way back in 2005; in fact, at those levels only the gruesome Japanese eathquake and tsunami of 2011 would be in the same league. Longtime journalist Robert Kuttner explained how this can spill over into the insurance system, citing “exact parallels” to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
Against this backdrop, the London-based Institute and Faculty of Actuaries estimated last week that climate change could cut global GDP in half by 2070, when someone born this past year (my grandson, say) will be in their mid-40s. As the author of the report told the Guardian
If these risks were taken into account the world faced an increasing risk of “planetary insolvency”, where the Earth’s systems were so degraded that humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services they relied on to support societies and economies.
“You can’t have an economy without a society, and a society needs somewhere to live.”
I will add, as the least of the fire’s impacts, that the home where I lived as a boy in Altadena apparently burned down. I haven’t been there in six decades, but to have the place of one’s first memories vanish is oddly troubling. A much more recent migrant, climate scientist Peter Kalmus, moved his family from Altadena just a couple of years ago because of fears fire would soon overtake it. His remembrances are moving
I’ve been watching this week’s tragedy unfold from afar, piecing the story together through local news reports and texts and videos from friends, some of whom have lost homes, trying to figure out what has burned and what hasn’t. Our dog’s pet hospital, gone. The church where our boys’ string recitals took place, gone. The weird Bunny Museum I’d wonder about on my bicycle, waiting for the light to change; the friendly hardware store I went to a hundred times; the coffee shop where I’d meet friends and climate activists; all gone.
My former neighbor texted me Thursday to say that our little cul-de-sac burned, his house and ours and all our neighbors’ homes except for one. The beautiful house we raised our children in, gone; and my tears finally came.
It’s good to see people trying to use the fires to change policy—here’s my Third Act colleague Michael Richardson in an interesting podcast, and here’s the good folk at Public Citizen organizing survivors of the inferno to call for holding Big Oil responsible. Hopefully the horror will give new impetus to calls for Sacramento to follow Albany and Montpelier in passing a “climate superfund” bill to make the shareholders of the oil companies pay for the damage. As the Times reported,
Patrick Parenteau, senior fellow for climate policy at the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said the Los Angeles wildfires could eventually result in juries that are sympathetic to climate lawsuits in California. “Just imagine a jury in Los Angeles hearing a case like this,” he said, referring to allegations that oil companies had covered up what they knew about climate change. “That’s what the companies are terrified about.”
But it’s almost as important for those of us who won’t ever serve on such a jury to just hold these basic truths in our minds and hearts, guarded against the firehose of nonsense that is coming in the years ahead.
The other piece of reality to keep close as it comes under assault: clean energy from the sun and wind is ready to go. I’ll be focusing on that in the months ahead, because I think economics is more likely than science to undercut Trump’s energy plans. But as a last hurrah from the Biden Department of Energy, which has probably been the single most useful part of his administration, consider this study released last week.
A new study reveals that federally managed reservoirs have the potential to generate enough energy to supply power to around 100 million U.S. homes annually.
Federal reservoirs have significant potential to support the nation’s solar energy needs, according to a new study published in Solar Energy.
Researchers Evan Rosenlieb and Marie Rivers, geospatial scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), along with Aaron Levine, a senior legal and regulatory analyst at NREL, conducted the first detailed assessment of how much energy could be produced by installing floating solar panel systems on federally owned or regulated reservoirs. Developers can access specific information about each reservoir on the AquaPV website.
The findings reveal a remarkable opportunity: these reservoirs could accommodate enough floating solar panels to generate up to 1,476 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—enough to power roughly 100 million homes each year.
“That’s a technical potential,” Rosenlieb said, meaning the maximum amount of energy that could be generated if each reservoir held as many floating solar panels as possible. “We know we’re not going to be able to develop all of this. But even if you could develop 10% of what we identified, that would go a long way.”
William Ernest McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org.
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