For reality

A few thoughts on the last day of the old world

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.”

In other energy and climate news:

+President Biden’s farewell address last week may have been the most eloquent speech of his term. (Read Jim Fallow’s fine appreciation here). What little attention it received was due mainly to his Ike-like indictment of the “tech-industrial complex” (words that will grow in power over the years, I fear). But he also had some pointed words about the climate:

Right now, the existential threat of climate change has never been clearer. Just look across the country, from California to North Carolina. That’s why I signed the most significant climate and clean energy law ever, ever in the history of the world.

And the rest of the world is trying to model it now. It’s working, creating jobs and industries of the future. Now we have proven we don’t have to choose between protecting the environment and growing the economy. We’re doing both. But powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit. We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future, the future of our children and our grandchildren. We must keep pushing forward, and push faster. There is no time to waste.

+As the NFL post-season continues, Bill Kitchen takes issue with the KC Chiefs star Patrick Mahomes and coach Andy Reid for continuing to shill for State Farm.

In one commercial Reid acts goofy as he repeatedly says “Bundle-rooski” to describe Star Farm’s plan for bundling home and auto insurance. State Farm does some other bundling that hasn’t gotten the media attention it deserves, especially given the devastation in Los Angeles that the whole country has been watching on TV.

This other bundling couples State Farm’s refusal to insure tens of thousands of homes in fire prone areas with State Farm’s doubling down on investing in the fossil fuel industry. Not insuring properties that seem guaranteed to cost the company lots of money seems like good business sense. But it becomes shameful if coupled with also propping up the fossil fuel industry.

+College students: register here for the next “Ground Up” advocacy bootcamp on how to make your campus more sustainable.

+LNG giant Venture Global, newly liberated by Trump’s win and expecting a day one lifting of the Biden pause on new export terminals, is going for the big money—a new IPO will apparently value it at $110 billion

"Venture Global's IPO couldn't have been better timed. Investors are eagerly looking for companies that will benefit from Donald Trump's policies and Venture Global ticks the right boxes," said Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell.

The company has five LNG projects in various stages of development near the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana, and expects to have total peak production capacity of 143.8 million tonnes a year.

Two of America’s greatest environmental justice advocates are doing their best to say no. Roishetta Ozane, who’s been leading the opposition to Venture Global’s CP2 terminal, wrote in the Louisiana Illuminator that

As a Black mother and an environmental justice leader living in Sulphur, a frontline community, I witness the harsh truth every day: the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports puts my family at risk while prioritizing corporate profits over our health and safety. My story emulates the struggles faced by communities overburdened by industrial pollution and environmental degradation. Two-thirds of the operating facilities in the region are within a 30-mile radius of my home. Local water is undrinkable, wetlands are disappearing, and the pollution often exceeds legal limits, poisoning our community’s air.

My family’s experiences paint a bleak picture of these impacts. As a mother of six, three of my children have asthma, one has a severe skin condition, and my son has epilepsy —issues I believe are attributed directly to the pollution from nearby industrial facilities, including LNG terminals like Cameron LNG and Calcasieu Pass LNG. In conjunction with the expansion of these facilities collapsing in on our community, these health factors added to the daily pressures of our lives. Our communities can no longer bear the burden of living with the impacts of fossil fuel racism any longer.

And in the Houston Chronicle, Dr Robert Bullard, in many ways the father of the EJ movement, called for Biden to do more in his last hours in office.

+Great reporting by a consortium of journalistic institutions laid out the insane facts about $1.5 trillion in so-called “sustainability linked loans” from big banks since 2018, which have gone to things that are manifestly unsustainable. Cutting down trees for electricity, for instance.

In some cases, the loans have financed companies that were actively expanding polluting operations, the investigation found.

“They do not lead to measurable change,” said Richard Brooks, climate finance director for the environmental nonprofit Stand.Earth. “And they’re really meant to greenwash your finances mostly for expansion activities.”

Shortly after receiving an SLL, Canada-based Enbridge expanded a pipeline carrying tar sands oil from Alberta to the United States, a project estimated to increase carbon emissions by the equivalent of 50 new coal-fired power plants.

U.K.-based Drax has gotten a series of SLLs linked to producing cleaner energy as it shifts from burning fossil fuels to burning wood pellets — even though researchers say such a switch is worse for the climate. Drax is making plans to expand its wood biomass operations across the U.S.

+From the veteran reporter Tim Mak, more on how Ukrainians are cobbling together renewable energy to survive Russian shelling—and preparing for far more in thier future.

During the full-scale invasion, energy has become not only a target for Russian attacks but also a bargaining chip for the West. With all thermal power plants and almost all hydroelectric capacity in Ukraine destroyed by Russia, renewable energy sources offer a promising solution for a theoretical post-war reconstruction period. They could make Ukraine greener and more energy-secure – and a model for the entire world.

+And finally, to try and end on a good note—or at least with a reminder that we don’t know precisely how things will play out and we cannot give up—some news from Hawaii where the Supreme Court has refused to block the state’s lawsuit trying to hold Big Oil accountable for climate damages

The ruling keeps Honolulu and other communities across the U.S. on track to put Big Oil companies on trial for lying to the public about their role in the climate crisis.

This marks the fourth time since 2023 that the justices declined to consider an appeal from Big Oil companies in the growing number of state and local climate deception lawsuits they face. The U.S. Justice Department had urged the justices to deny Big Oil’s request to consider the Honolulu case.

Oh, and if you want something to do that doesn’t involve watching the inauguration tomorrow, you can join Rebecca Solnit, Akaya Windwood, Liz Ogbu, me, and some other friends for a livestream at the same time. Remember, tomorrow is more than the inaugural, it’s also the celebration of the life of Dr. King, who would have turned 95 last week. For the moment his life’s work seems in question, but surely his call to love will ultimately prevail over Trump’s appeal to hate. We must, at least, try to make it so.