I bid you farewell, and what’s next
There are many extraordinary people who are going to continue to lead the fight to protect our climate in the coming years. While I will remain involved in this work, it’s time for me to close Power Up for Climate Solutions. It became clear to me some months ago that the world, physically, biologically, socially, culturally, technologically and politically has changed so much in the last few years that the part I was endeavoring to play in promoting climate action had become outdated. The US election results provided the final confirmation that it’s time for a new direction. I thank you for joining me in my efforts to share ideas, tools and inspiration to take action on climate. Going forward, I invite you to follow my new blog at wiseonearth.com to see what I’m getting up to.
I will leave you with a few thoughts. I claim no special grasp of our predicament except that afforded by time and experience. I’ve been worried about climate change for at least 35 years. For the past 20 years, climate writing and advocacy have dominated my work life. In this time, our situation has changed in profound ways, opening up both extraordinary opportunities and extraordinary threats. Although no one can see the future, I can tell you what I see, and how I plan to respond going forward.
In 2013, when I got involved with climate advocacy, there was only one grassroots organization active where I live focused on climate. Journalists were still being taken in by fossil-fuel funded disinformation efforts, and climate scientists were being harassed, maligned, and attacked for simply for trying to do good science. A very sizable chunk of the American population, never a terribly scientifically literate people, were confused, disengaged, uninformed, or fully deceived about the facts. Clean energy technologies were so expensive that they were not a viable alternative to fossil fuels in most situations. No global climate agreement had been ratified by the world’s nations, and no major climate laws had been enacted in the U.S.
Today, all these things have changed. We now have more public acknowledgement of the threat, better and cheaper technology, and some real climate policy wins. There’s also been a huge blossoming of organizations and individuals doing great climate work. The niche I was trying to help fill providing ways to take simple climate actions is now quite crowded, in the best possible sense. I think it’s fair to say that the clean energy transition has begun.
However, climate scientists are more and more convinced that we are entering an era of worsening climate-change fueled disasters and increasingly deadly harms. The party taking power in the US is communicating it’s intent to reverse progress on climate. We are missing the window we had to contain greenhouse gas concentrations to levels consistent with a stable climate, successful agriculture, and stable ocean, wind, and ice patterns. The US election results will likely slow progress on a clean energy transition both nationally and internationally.
So, although the future is unknowable, here is how our situation appears to me: I don’t see a pathway for avoiding devastating climate harms in the coming decades. Greenhouse gas levels are still rising. We have started transitioning toward clean energy, but in the US and globally, it appears that progress will slow instead of speed up in the next few years.
Therefore, going forward, I’ll be shifting my efforts to focus on strengthening local systems to better weather the coming storms. I’m beginning to look for ways to help build and strengthen resilience in Corvallis and the Willamette Valley. In his new novel Sun House, David James Duncan refers to this as lifeboat work, and I am drawn to the image of community lifeboats to help us weather an uncertain and destabilizing future. This includes continuing to shift toward clean energy, re-localization efforts, community building, reducing consumption and waste, and emergency preparedness. I will also be looking for opportunities to support climate solutions at the local and state level, and to counter hate, xenophobia, and fascism.
Thank you again for your support, interest, and participation in the Power Up for Climate Solutions experiment. I am deeply grateful to you for joining me in this effort. If you’d like to follow my writing going forward, I will be blogging at wiseonearth.com, where I plan to share what I learn as I dive into lifeboat work. And if you have thoughts, ideas, or questions about resilience work, I’d love to hear from you!
What’s next for Power Up for Climate Solutions
In 2022, Power Up for Climate Solutions will be providing resources for decarbonizing at home and in your community, and building resilience in the face of growing climate instability. We will be placing less emphasis on national and international climate policy action. The reasons for this shift are explained below, and we hope you will find our new direction useful in this time of growing accessibility of clean energy techologies and increasingly catastrophic and frequent climate disasters.
The world has changed dramatically in the last few years. Three truths about the moment we live in inspire our new focus on direct decarbonization and building resilience.
First, technological and economic barriers to a clean energy transition have lowered dramatically for Americans in middle and higher income brackets. The speed of technological and economic changes in clean energy has outpaced even optimistic predictions, and as a result, decarbonizing home energy and transportation is feasible at a personal and local scale for many of us. The impacts of climate change fall most heavily on those least responsible, harming the most vulnerable among us. We will be encouraging those who have some privilege to begin decarbonizing or to help others afford to do so.
Renewable resources generated only 19 percent of US electricity in 2020, but climate experts and modelers increasingly contend that a 100 percent renewable energy grid by 2050 is “not only feasible but can be done without any blackouts and at a lower cost than the existing grid” (Nikita Amir, “The US could reliably run on clean energy by 2050”). We will be providing tools for you to contribute to this transition.
Second, the climate crisis is here now. The speed of warming and the magnitude of climate-fueled disasters has touched everyone I know in recent years. In 2021 alone, the US experienced twenty major weather disasters as defined by NOAA. These included the February winter storms causing the power grid in Texas to fail; a severe and widespread drought in the West; the Bootleg and Dixie fires in California, so bad they generated their own weather; Hurricane Ida; the historic and deadly heat dome centered over Oregon, Washington, and Canada; and the Midwest derecho and tornado outbreak in December with more than fifty tornados. The imperative to strengthen our resilience in our homes, our food systems, and our communities to deal with climate instability is urgent.
Third, our political system has failed to head off a worsening climate crisis that threatens everything we need to survive and thrive. As Ezra Klein succinctly observed, “Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on emissions, or even investments.” National politics in the US are more toxic and our culture is more divided than at any other time in my lifetime; the odds of major climate policy being enacted by Congress in 2022 appear minuscule. I believe the biggest opportunities for climate progress right now are in other arenas.
The resources we will be sharing will offer ways to contribute to the clean energy transition and guidance for building resilience at home and in your community. Examples may include individual, community, and business clean energy programs; regenerative agriculture; clean electrification resources; electric vehicle information; information on divestment from fossil fuel companies; and climate resilience resources. I hope that the resources and ideas we share will provide support and allow you to find ways to contribute to a clean energy transition, become more resilient in your home and your community, and help create a safer, more peaceful, more equitable world.
Most fossil fuel energy is wasted–New analysis shows how to fix this!
With catastrophic fires again raging in California and hurricane Laura devastating the Gulf Coast, the urgency of the climate crisis is painfully clear. You may wonder if it’s too late to do anything meaningful to avert climate chaos. A recent analysis finds we can still eliminate 70-80% of US carbon emissions by 2035 with existing technologies and tools, getting this country on a 1.5° C pathway while creating millions of jobs and lowering energy costs. And this isn’t some fly-by-night study: it was done by MacArthur Genius grant recipient Saul Griffith and colleagues, after analyzing all the available data on how energy is used in the US.
This report, published by “Rewiring America,” shows how the US can quickly and fully decarbonize our economy with proven technologies and existing resources. David Roberts, writing about the report in Vox, describes it’s findings as “oddly optimistic.” Here are the major bombshells, as summarized by Roberts:
“In a nutshell, (the analysis shows) that it’s possible to eliminate 70 percent to 80 percent of US carbon emissions by 2035 through rapid deployment of existing electrification technologies, with little-to-no carbon capture and sequestration. Doing so would slash US energy demand by about half, save consumers money, and keep the country on a 1.5° pathway without requiring particular behavior changes. Everyone could still have their same cars and houses–they would just need to be electric.”
How is this possible? First, burning fossil fuels for energy is incredibly wasteful. Electric motors are much more efficient at converting energy into useful work. So much more efficient, in fact, that electrifying everything would cut US energy demand in half, according to Rewiring America’s report. Second, our clean energy technologies have advanced to the point where we can use them to get most of the way to full decarbonization. The five key existing and well-proven technologies we need, according to Griffith’s work, are wind and solar power plants, rooftop solar, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and batteries.
Of course, in order to get on this 1.5° C pathway, we have to commit, and mobilize on a scale we haven’t done since World War II. Such a mobilization would ramp up clean energy and electrification as fast as possible. Within 3 to 5 years, we need to increase our electricity grid three to four fold, our EV production four fold, our wind turbines 12 fold, and our solar modules 12 fold. Then, after this initial period of mobilization, every time a diesel or gas car gets replaced, it has to be with an EV. Every time an oil or gas furnace goes out, it is replaced with a heat pump, and so on. Talk about a green recovery jobs program!
Two other gems I want to mention from this report: First, the benefits of following this plan are extraordinary even without the potential to protect a climate compatible with human societies thriving. Clean air, good jobs, cheaper energy, quieter roads and cities, and on and on. Second, this analysis doesn’t rely on, or even consider, the carbon emissions that are possible with traditional efficiency measures such as insulating buildings, double-glazing windows, driving less, or downsizing homes. Adding any of these would only increase our chances of decarbonizing in time to do our part to get on a 1.5° C pathway and protect a livable climate.
If you want to dig deeper into this, Saul Griffith has updated and expanded his findings and published Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for our Clean Energy Future. What this compelling work shows is that it’s still within our capabilities to tackle the climate crisis while creating a green jobs boom and a safer healthier future. If you needed any more motivation to help elect climate champions this November, maybe this will be it.
What the coming together of the left on climate looks like
In just six weeks, we’ve seen three major climate proposals indicating that the factions of the Democratic Party are aligning on climate policy after a decade of disarray and disagreement. This policy platform on climate shows how much interest groups and politicians agree on and lays critical groundwork for enacting a transformative green recovery and a just transition to a clean energy future. It illuminates a path to finally passing big, bold climate policy solutions at the national level.
If you aren’t someone who spends time in the weeds of climate change news, you may have no idea what I’m talking about. With the pandemic raging, the economy destabilizing, and a rational racial justice/policing crisis, unification of the left on climate policy hardly made headlines. Yet if you are hoping that after the next election we will enact a green recovery and a just transition to a clean energy future, take a moment to celebrate, because such action just got a lot more likely.
Here’s a quick summary: On June 30th, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis issued its report . This included a detailed Climate Crisis Action Plan put together by House Democrats. On July 8, the Biden-Sanders unity task force on climate (chaired by John Kerry and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) issued its policy recommendations. Finally, on July 14, Joe Biden released his Build Back Better proposal on climate, a $2 trillion proposal for clean energy investments, economic stimulus, and a transition to net-zero emissions by 2050.
Here’s how journalist David Roberts summarized this in Vox: “For the first time in memory, there’s a broad alignment forming around a climate policy platform that is both ambitious enough to address the problem and politically potent enough to unite all the left’s various interest groups.”
These plans have a lot in common: they all set standards for net-zero emissions by 2050 (or sooner), they all focus on climate justice, and they all include large-scale public investment.
- Setting standards: Two-thirds of US emissions come from sectors where clean alternatives are already available–cars, electricity, and buildings. Details vary, but the plans agree on a common core of strong performance standards and incentives for these big three emitters to make rapid progress on emissions in the next ten years. Doing so can get us a long way toward meeting the 2030 emissions reduction goals the IPCC says are critical to prevent the worst, most catastrophic climate change impacts.
- Climate justice: Unions, fossil fuel workers, and frontline communities helped develop these plans. They include polices such as coal worker transition programs, equity mapping to identify vulnerable communities and send public investment there first, and incentives that favor union workers for clean energy jobs.
- Large public investment: Support for green industries, manufacturing, research, and job creation is in these proposals, as are a number of ideas for combining recovery from the COVID-10 economic crisis with transformative climate solutions.
Pre-pandemic, when I used to give in-person talks about climate solutions, I sometimes ended with this quote attributed to Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it is done.” This summer, the left’s new unity on climate policy makes transformative climate progress seep a little less impossible.
If you are interested in more details about these plans, see links below.
Carlie Clarcq, “Biden’s clean energy plan proposes economic recovery through green investments,” Climate Change, July 23, 2020.
David Roberts, “At last, a climate policy platform that can unite the left,” Vox, July 9, 2020.