Letter from America

By Bill McKibben, author, educator, environmentalist, co-founder of 350.org 

I’m sure that many readers are staring across the Atlantic at America and wondering what the hell is going on. It is a very good question, and most of the answers are unhappy. 

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration — comprised largely of people who spent their lives ‘extracting resources’ or lobbying to make that extraction easier — have managed to undo a great deal of the hard work of generations of environmentalists. They have undone the rule which protects existing roadless areas on the national forests, and they have mandated steep increases in tree-cutting on those vast lands; the newly passed budget bill will double the timber harvest over the next nine years, taking us back to 1990 levels. They’ve gone to work rescinding habitat protection for endangered species, and they’ve opened up millions of acres in Alaska to drilling and mining. 

On every front a fast-moving ideologically committed administration is moving to loot the fifty states in the guise of an ‘energy emergency’ and a ‘timber emergency’. The ability of the administration to function in emergency mode — to ignore or suspend time-honoured practices of consultation and comment — has left the environmental community squarely on the back foot, clinging to practices that may have no real purchase in this new world. That’s especially true since it is the Supreme Court which has systematically empowered the executive branch over the last few years and show no sign of stopping. 

Even worse, in some ways, has been their concerted effort to shut down all the satellites, monitors and computer systems currently used to keep track of the rapidly heating climate. This vandalism is clearly in service of their announced intention to slow or reverse the transition off dirty energy: wind farms have been blocked, solar subsidies cancelled, and coal, gas and oil shown every possible favour. As a result, the country where global warming was really discovered, and where the solar cell was invented, is taking itself out of the climate game. 

Or at least it’s trying to, from the top. The question is how much we can fight back. We have, in this fight, one crucial advantage: for the first time in the global warming era, the laws of economic gravity are helping, not hurting; the economic wind is in our sails, as it were. That’s of course because of the precipitous fall in the price of clean energy, including in the last two years the rapid expansion of batteries big enough to make sun and wind a round-the-clock proposition. In California, for instance, enough solar panels and wind turbines have gone up in the last few years that the world’s fourth largest economy now generates more than 100% of its power from renewable sources for long hours almost every day. And enough batteries have been installed on the grid that when the sun goes down they are running much of the Golden State off stored sunshine all evening. As a result, California is using 44% less natural gas to generate electricity this year than it did in 2023. That’s a big number, big enough to matter in how hot the planet eventually gets. 

In this battle we need constantly to get ahead of the propaganda from Big Oil. That’s why some of us are coming together across the environmental movement on 21st September, the fall equinox, for what we’re calling SunDay (Sunday.earth). It’s a celebration of the possibilities for clean energy, with the goal of making it clear to people this is no longer ‘alternative energy’, but instead the obvious, common-sense, and beautiful way forward. Imagine a planet where we cease combustion and instead rely on that large ball of burning gas hanging a convenient 93 million miles away. It could transform, among other things, our ruinous politics: an energy source that can’t be hoarded, and which you can’t fight wars over, would change the nature of both power and power, if you see what I mean. 

I offer no guarantees of success; obviously we’ve already lost much to an overheating climate, and we will lose more still. But I do think it’s clear that for the first time in the 40 years I’ve been at work on this question we actually have a valuable card to play. We look to places like Scotland for leadership, as it learns how to exploit its winds; and increasingly we look to China as well, with mixed emotions but with admiration for their disciplined ability to change big systems at speed. That’s what we need. 

Environmentalism, in some ways, was another American invention (with that Scotsman John Muir playing a large role). But it is now abdicating its leadership, and so those of us who continue the fight are counting on the rest of the world to show the path forward. 

Bill McKibben on Renewable Energy, "Sun Day" & the "Last Chance" for Climate