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FOR REALITY  
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Bill McKibben
January 19, 2025
The Crucial Years [[link removed]]

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_ A few thoughts on the last day of the old world _

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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
[[link removed]] 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
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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 
[[link removed]]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
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The figure exceeds the most pessimistic predictions
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the U.K. Met Office, which says
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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
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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
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the Times,

the months leading up to the Los Angeles wildfires were among
the hottest and driest
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record in California, during the hottest year on record for
the planet
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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
[[link removed]] in
the LA Times (and his columns are now also available as podcasts
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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
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a hallmark of global warming.

Los Angeles did not burn, despite Elon Musk’s assurances
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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
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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
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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
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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
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my Third Act colleague Michael Richardson in an interesting podcast,
and here
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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
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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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL)
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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
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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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CRUCIAL YEARS, Bill McKibben's substack blog._

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