For Reality
Bill McKibben
Jan 19, 2025
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.
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.
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.
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/for-reality