Tim Walz Might Be a Pivotal Climate Leader

Less because of carbon than because of neighborliness

I’m writing this partly out of pure indignation at the spectacle of the Trump campaign, (with, as the invaluable Josh Marshall points out, the active help of the New York Times,) trying to swiftboat Tim Walz. The same man—Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita—who lowered our national politics a large step by smearing genuine war hero John Kerry, is now trying to do the same to veteran National Guardsman Walz. So let me say: no one who cares about democracy should take it lying down this time; fight back with all we’ve got.

But no one who cares about the climate should take it lying down, either, because I think it’s possible Walz might play a key role in the crucial years now dawning. And for a reason that might not be immediately obvious.

By now, a number of people have written useful accounts of Walz’s climate policy in Minnesota. As Zoya Teirstein points out in Grist, Walz won a narrow legislative majority in the 2022 election and quickly pushed through a law that “requires the state’s utilities to get 100 percent of their electricity from clean sources by 2040. The legislation quickly catapulted Minnesota, a blue state with purple inclinations, to the top of the state-level climate action leaderboard.”

As governor, Walz also signed bipartisan legislation to reform Minnesota’s permitting process for clean energy projects, funded a clean energy jobs training program for minority and low-income Minnesotans, approved new clean transportation standards, and enacted a law directing $240 million toward replacing the state’s lead water pipes.

This is well and good—and it helps balance out the less wonderful parts of his years in office, especially his unwillingness to stand up against the Line 3 pipeline, a boondoggle where, I suspect, his ties to organized labor trumped his otherwise good sense. Emily Atkin has an excellent account today, and Tara Houska, who organized much of the most important protest, has been both blunt and even-handed on Twitter. I was only up there for a few days, but that was long enough to see how out-of-control Minnesota authorities let things get, including allowing pipeline backers to fund local police. As Houska (whose Twitter feed has also been an unsparing source of news from Gaza even as its slipped from the headlines) put it

Do I think that Walz would be the most Indian Country-savvy person to ever sit in a top 2 seat? Yes. I believe that he has a good heart and a good mind. Do I think that it’s our job as citizens to push politicians on their record & for progress because *that’s their job*? YES.

Agreed—he should be pushed, just as we had to push Barack Obama over the KXL pipeline.

But he should also be appreciated, as the line about “a good heart and a good mind” makes clear. And it’s that heart that I want to talk about.

If we are going to both prevent the worst of the climate crisis, and cope with that which we can no longer prevent, than the most important thing we can do in this country is restore as much a sense of neighborliness as possible.

Those of you who’ve read my books know that, in my version of American history, things really began to crumble with the election of Ronald Reagan. And that, above all, was because Reagan sanctified a kind of hyper-individualism. America has always had a strong and healthy individualistic streak, but at least since FDR it had been tempered with an equally healthy respect for the idea that we were in this together. That was the streak that produced Social Security and Medicare, the Clean Air Act and civil rights law. Reagan ended that—his message was to cut taxes, empower the rich, end regulations. America as a group project came to an end, and inequality began to rise sharply, ballooning to the grotesque levels that we see now. Basically: ask what your country can do for you.

Joe Biden began to back us away from that—his presidency has been an attempt to revert to the LBJ years, with the Inflation Reduction Act as a good-faith effort to build large-scale cooperation around the necessary task of converting to clean energy. But the ongoing political combat in this country, and the ongoing fallout from covid, has meant that his efforts weren’t appreciated as they should have been. (His increasing inability to really communicate about them didn’t help).

But now, potentially, we’re in a new moment. The joy that came with Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket—the joy that Walz noted as her greatest achievement in his Philly speech on Tuesday—offers the possibility of a kind of release from the prison of the last eight years. It’s the Beyonce/Taylor energy, the hundred national zoom calls (So far I’ve helped organize Elders for Kamala, appeared on Climate Leaders for Harris and also Outdoor and Conservation Leaders; next week I get to be on both Christians and Vermonters for Harris—it’s spontaneous organizing unlike anything I remember in the past).

And adding Walz added a particular aspect to that joy, which I will call neighborliness.

He comes from rural America, from smalltown America. From a town of four hundred. I’ve spent almost my whole adult life in towns that size, in both blue and red districts—I can tell you that living in them both demands and rewards a particular kind of neighborliness, which Walz exemplifies. There’s no inherent virtue that goes with rural or small town life, but there is an inherent dependency. With few people around, you have to volunteer—I’m not a natural fireman, but I spent a number of years learning about pumps and respirators. You have to both respect people’s privacy, and come to their aid: Vermont, this weekend, is staring down the barrel of yet another round of flooding, as Debby heads our way, which means yet another round of helping neighbors muck out their basements. At its best, this breeds a kind of social trust that can make life rich.

For most of America, having neighbors has been more or less optional for the last 75 years. At the moment, if you have a credit card, you can get all that you need to survive delivered to your front door. But the next 75 years are going to be harder: as the climate crisis breaks over us, we’re going to have to relearn the skills, and the joys, of neighborliness. It is entirely clear, from the testimony of his former students and of everyone else in his town, that Walz has those skills. He is a good neighbor.

Those skills help not just in time of crisis. They also, potentially, help as we work to build out the renewable energy we desperately need. In too many places a NIMBY approach has taken hold, when what we need is a Yes In Our Neighborhood willingness to build the local energy economies we require.

There’s a downside to all of this. We need to continue opposing fossil fuel development at every turn—physics leaves us no choice there. And a genial attempt to make everyone a friend can turn into an all-of-the-above energy policy that has bedeviled us. But Walz seems to have some steel too—a kind of populism that one hopes will keep him from embracing Big Oil’s endless schemes (carbon capture, hydrogen production, and son on) to keep the day of climate reckoning at a distance. He has talked about “compromising without compromising values”—this will be the test.

Here’s what I find most interesting. Walz is the first Democrat on a ticket since Jimmy Carter who didn’t attend law school. Nothing against lawyers, but the adversarial take they are taught to bring to things makes cooperation hard. And cooperation—building a society that can take on joint tasks—is what we need. Walz offers an escape from some of the cynicism and crude divisiveness that Trump, and to a lesser extent many other contemporary political figures, have embodied. Walz talks about it a little, but he’s clearly lived it a lot. And that could be…crucial.

In other energy and climate news:

+Fascinating piece from Bloomberg about something that’s keeping oil prices from rising: as China’s economy switches from building more buildings to providing consumers stuff they want, the amount of diesel fuel used for bulldozers and the like has fallen very sharply. How’s this for a factoid?

China’s millions of diesel engines consume just under 4% of the the world’s oil. As a result, they account for a bit more than 1% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, a similar climate footprint to France and Scandinavia put together.

+Astute readers of this newsletter will note how often I quote Sammy Roth of the LA Times, who has emerged as one of the finest climate reporters and writers in the country. It’s fun to watch his crusading streak emerge—in this case, in relation to his beloved Dodgers, who sadly have longstanding sponsorship ties to big oil via Phillips 66

When I first wrote about the problematic nature of the Dodgers’ continued partnership with Phillips 66, the team didn’t respond to my request for comment. When I followed up with a column criticizing the team’s official charity for taking money from Phillips 66 and Marathon Petroleum to fund health and education programs for kids — a column that spurred activist Zan Dubin to write the open letter to Walter and start soliciting signatures — the team’s ownership group again declined to weigh in.

The open letter he refers to is here, and you can sign. I’m happy to sit in the bleachers, but I’m not eager to be literally bleached.

+Cory Doctorow, on one of this newsletter’s favorite topics, the inexorable rise of batteries

I have some very good news: battery tech is taking off. Some of that takes the form of wild and cool new approaches. In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power – that's the daily energy budget for the entire planet. What's more, every mine shaft has a beefy connection to the power grid, because you can't run a mine without a lot of power.

Gravity batteries are great for utility-scale storage, but we also need a lot of batteries for things that we can't keep plugged into the wall, like vehicles, personal electronics, etc. There's great news on that score, too! "The Battery Mineral Loop" is a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that describes the path to "circular battery self-sufficiency"

• The chemistry of batteries is rapidly improving: over the past decade, we've reduced per-using demand for lithium, nickle and cobalt by 60-140%, and most lithium batteries are being recycled, not landfilled.

• Within a decade, we'll hit peak mineral demand for batteries. By the mid-2030s, the amount of new "virgin minerals" needed to meet our battery demand will stop growing and start declining.

• By 2050, we could attain net zero mineral demand for batteries: that is, we could meet all our energy storage needs without digging up any more minerals.

• We are on a path to a "one-off" extraction effort. We can already build batteries that work for 10-15 years and whose materials can be recycled with 90-94% efficiency.

+A serious victory for organizers who have been pressing insurers to stop underwriting big LNG projects, as Chubb pulls out of the Rio Grande LNG terminal

This is the latest setback for the not-yet-built project that would harm the coastal landscape of the Rio Grande Valley as one of the last pristine areas of the Texas coastline—a haven for wildlife, fishing, tourism, and recreation and home to Latine and Indigenous communities—into an industrial methane export hub. Years of campaigning was a likely factor in the insurer backing away. Five banks – SMBC, Société Générale, Credit Suisse and privately, two additional banks – committed to not financing the project after pressure from community leaders.