A short report
on my ego, and your good work
Every year at this newsletter I offer a few updates on our work together, though I fear that they may come as boasting. Hell, this one definitely is boasting. Here’s what Heatmap News reported about six weeks ago:
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, American environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben pitched an idea to sap Russia’s power by drying up the market for its oil and gas. Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom, he named the proposal, which called on President Biden to use his wartime emergency powers to ramp up manufacturing of electric heating appliances so that households could replace their fossil fuel-based furnaces.
Remarkably, Biden obliged. Just a few months later, he authorized the use of the Defense Production Act to expand American manufacturing of electric heat pumps, deeming them essential to national security. Now, a year and a half later, money is finally going out the door. On Friday, the Department of Energy announced $169 million in grants for nine companies that will invest in projects to boost domestic production of heat pumps.
Now, the reporter gave me the credit for this, and I guess I get some of it. But mostly it was on you guys. Readers of this newsletter (and the elder hence astute activists at Third Act) flooded the White House with letters and emails boosting the plan. We worked together, and as a result we beat $200 million worth of swords into…not plowshares but heatpumps.
Citizen journalism can combine with activism to accomplish remarkable things; I think there’s a chance, for instance, that 2024 will see a big win on LNG exports from the Gulf, and if it happens most of the credit will be due to the local activists who have been kicking up a ruckus for years. But you can’t win national battles in one state; again, you folks have helped come to the rescue this fall.
None of this means, of course, that we’re winning the climate fight; 2023 was the hottest year in human history, until next year. It’s a sprawling conflict, spread out over every continent, and over every discipline: politics, economics, sociology, technology, even theology.
If I still have a role to play as a journalist after all these years (next year marks the 35th anniversary of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about what we then called the greenhouse effect), it’s to find the places where the seams overlap—the seams between politics and technology, and economics and sociology. When we find places with leverage, we can make a difference fast. And fast is what matters; our chance at limiting the rise of the planet’s temperature depends on how fast we move for the rest of this decade, the crucial years.
This newsletter is free to everyone, and it will stay that way. But if it wouldn’t cause undue financial hardship to you to pay the modest and voluntary subscription fee, that would be a huge help to our work. Thank you, and on we go.