An America-sized hole in the world

Washington won't help in the climate fight, but there's still a key role for Americans

America makes up about 1.87% of the earth’s surface

Those of us of a certain age grew up believing that America was the central nation on this planet—because, in the decades after World War II, it clearly was. We also believed that the course of history would move others in our direction, and that what did or didn’t happen in Washington would determine what did or didn’t happen on planet earth. We believed, I think, that America had hit on the formula for political and economic success, that somehow our constitution had marked us out for leadership.

Most of those beliefs seem a little silly now. Clearly our political architecture—our electoral college, our filibusters, and so on—has some deep flaws. Clearly we are not magically resistant to authoritarianism—indeed we’ve now embraced a flavor of it. And clearly America is not going to play the commanding role in helping solve the climate crisis, the greatest dilemma humans have ever encountered. For the next few years the best we can hope is that Washington won’t manage to wreck the efforts of others—and that some parts of this big nation will demonstrate what’s still possible. And that many of us can join in a genuinely global citizens’ fight for rapid action.

This all seems quite clear as the world’s nations gather these next two weeks in Baku, the oil-soaked capital of Azerbaijan, for 2024’s edition of the global climate talks. America is represented by John Podesta, the stalwart representative of the Democratic political structure that came crashing down on election day. (I mean, he was chief of staff to Bill Clinton). Podesta put on a brave face at a press conference as the talks began:

“Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable,” he said. “This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet. Facts are still facts. Science is still science. The fight is bigger than one election, one political cycle in one country. This fight is bigger, still, because we are all living through a year defined by the climate crisis in every country of the world.”

More specifically, he promised that the U.S. would not “revert back to the energy system of the 1950s. No way.”

Which is true—but we also, clearly, won’t be leading the charge into this century’s clean energy transition. As the leading climate scientist Michael Mann put it in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the day after the election, “the United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests. It is now, in short, a petrostate.” (Not unlike the petrostate of Azerbaijan, whose lead climate negotiator was discovered last week to be using his role as host of the climate talks to negotiate new fossil fuel deals).

But—and here’s the interesting and good news—this fight for oil and gas and coal will be a rearguard action. That Trump lost in 2020 was, it turns out, of great importance: it gave the U.S. four years to help break renewable energy out of its “alternative energy” niche. In those years the price of solar power and wind power dropped below the price of energy from coal and gas and oil, and as a result everything has begun to change.

If you want a fact to cheer you up—and I sure do—here’s one. It took humanity 68 years from the invention of the solar cell in 1954 to reach one terawatt of installed solar capacity. We passed that mark in 2022—and then we installed the second terawatt in two years since. To meet the goals set by climate scientists we need to roughly double the pace of solar installation again through the end of the decade: so, a terrawatt a year. Is that doable? We currently have the factory capacity to produce 1.1 terrawatts a year worth of panels. It’s a matter of finance and execution.

Most of that factory capacity, of course, is in China, and it is China that will now unambiguously be in the lead. There will be other players (here’s a good account of how India is trying to build its solar capacity) but the action shifts pretty powerfully from Washington to Beijing, which has bet big on this energy transition. One imagines that its diplomats are now the unrivaled key players in climate talks like the one in Baku, though the phalanx of other big, growing nations (Brazil, South Africa, India, Indonesia and so on) will play important roles. Crucially, most of these are fossil fuel importers, and have every reason to move speedily in the direction of sun and wind; it’s possible that in terms of international negotiations things may get somewhat easier without the drag of the US on the proceedings. (Which is why, comically, Exxon is asking the Trump administration to stay in the Paris talks).

And what of the U.S.?

Well, it’s a big country, and much of it is still in rational hands. As the World Resources Institute put it

Both Republican-led and Democratic-led states are seeing the benefits of wind, solar, and battery manufacturing and deployment thanks to the billions of dollars of investments unleashed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Governors and representatives in Congress on both sides of the aisle have come to recognize that clean energy is a huge moneymaker and a job creator. President Trump will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now.

That fight over the fate of the IRA will be a huge battle, but perhaps more important globally is the fact that America—because of those decades after WWII—has most of the world’s capital. It rests, above all, in pension funds, and it could be the thing that finances that terrawatt-a-year build out. I imagine the Trump administration will cut back sharply on American contributions to the International Monetary Fund and other global financial institutions—and that may mean that as other nations gain more influence, those institutions will have more ability to use their relatively small amounts of money to “de-risk” those crucial investments. That could be critically important in helping, say, retired schoolteachers in Seattle build the solar farms that Senegal requires and that will help us all.

And America remains the world center of zeitgeist. Which means that the fact that California and Texas (the twin capitals of American dynamism, and the fifth and eight largest economies on earth) are rapidly moving toward clean energy will help. Maybe even New York—tenth largest economy on earth—might show some spunk; Governor Hochul is apparently trying to revive the congestion-pricing scheme for Manhattan that she killed eight months ago. The genie will keep trying to climb out of the bottle, even as MAGA does it best to drag it back by its heels.

And it means that there’s lots of work for the rest of us, as we try to build a global movement behind speeding up this energy transition. That will be the chief work of this newsletter in the months and years ahead. There’s real global momentum, and we can, and will, figure out ways to add to it.

America, after all, is where the solar cell was born. It was mostly in America’s labs that we came to understand the science of climate change. And, crucially, it was America that really gave birth to the environmental movement. We—American people, if not our national government—still have a key role to play.

In other energy and climate news:

+2024 will clearly be the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023—and by pretty much every measure we’re now past the 1.5 degree Celsius benchmark that the world’s nations set in Paris. Here’s the chart from Scientific American just to put it in perspective

+Global leaders at the COP in Baku urged the Biden administration to cement its halt to permitting new LNG export facilities in its remaining days, hoping that this would at least slow down the new administration.

“The EU has already initiated its gas phase out,” said Linda Kalcher, Executive Director of Strategic Perspectives. “European governments and companies are massively scaling up renewables-based solutions as it’s the best economic and energy security choice. New LNG investments will be a white elephant US investors will live to regret.”

The U.S. is already exceeding its LNG commitments to Europe while reports show current export capacity is more than sufficient to meet allied needs. In Azerbaijan, where this year’s COP is being held, recent data shows that gas supply from the country will double by 2027, through the Southern Gas Corridor pipeline. Meanwhile, environmental justice communities along the Gulf Coast continue bearing the burden of export infrastructure.

+Sadly, not everyone involved in the clean energy transition is…clean. An excellent investigation by the San Antonio Express News is a cautionary reminder:

An explosion in sales of rooftop solar systems across Texas opened the door wide to deceptive sales practices, overblown promises, expensive loans and shoddy workmanship, a San Antonio Express-News investigation found.

The result in many cases is rooftop arrays that operate poorly or not at all. Homeowners who thought their solar panels would make them energy self-sufficient wound up with the worst of both worlds: long-term debt and monthly loan payments on top of their utility bills. In the bargain, some suffered damage to their roofs because of inept design or installation.

Making matters worse, many of the companies peddling the systems folded and vanished, leaving customers grasping at phantoms as they tried to pursue refunds or repairs.

The victims often were the elderly, ill and disabled — and people with little or no command of English.

+Climate breakdown will cut global economic growth by at least a third according to a new risk assessment by central banks—but even that number is optimistic

Sandy Trust, an actuary who works on sustainability and the climate crisis, said the small print in the report by the network of central banks revealed they had failed to take in to account the impact of climate tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration and conflict as a result of global heating, human health impacts or biodiversity loss. Climate tipping points, for example the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the deforestation of the Amazon, are critical thresholds that, if crossed, will lead to huge, accelerating and sometimes irreversible changes in the climate system.

Trust said: “This is a massive one-third hit from physical damage on GDP. It has increased more than five times, from about 6% to 33%.

“But while this is a much more severe damage risk, it is by no means comprehensive. The analogy I would use is a model of the Titanic where you can see the iceberg, but the modelling fails to recognise that there are not enough lifeboats on board, or that the cold water is a threat to human life. So this report is still systemically underestimating the risk.”

+A big Chinese solar factory opened in Texas last month—and then got sold to an American firm a week later, apparently to make sure its products would qualify for tax credits under the IRA. This fits into the main thesis of this newsletter somehow, but my brain is too tired to make the necessary leaps.

+If you have any lingering doubts about the ugly role that social media plays in the climate battle, a new report from a coalition of groups outlines how much damage is being done.

For what it’s worth, the climate world seems to have migrated from Twitter to Bluesky—there’s lots of useful content from scientists and policy people, and not much tolerance for rancor.

+Could a deal with Warren Buffet revitalize both renewable energy and rail transportation? The good folks at Solutionary Rail have a proposal for how he could electrify America’s railways and make some money in the process. Worth a read!

+Movement veteran Daniel Hunter has a list of ten things for activists to do now that Trump has triumphed. Number four is “Release that which you cannot change.”

Growing up my mom had a copy of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” Notably, that prayer comes from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as he was watching the rise of Nazis in Germany.

Over the last few months I’ve been testing out a terribly challenging tool. It’s a journaling exercise that invites you to reflect on which issues you’ll spend energy on. It asks: what are issues you’ll throw down on, do a lot for, a little for, or — despite caring about it — do nothing at all for? That last question can feel like a kind of torture for many activists, even while we’re intellectually aware that we cannot stop it all.

Unaddressed, this desire to act on everything leads to bad strategy.

+Fascinating project in the Swiss Alps, where floating pontoons of solar panels are being installed on reservoirs fed by fast-melting glaciers.