Meditations in an Emergency

09/16/2025

Two things are striking about the Trump Adminstration’s tying itself to fossil fuel and particularly to affirmative action for coal, welfare for coal, bailouts for coal. One is that it’s a losing game in the long run, because renewable energy is just better in every way–profoundly cheaper, profoundly cleaner, more universally available, far quicker to install. More universally available means you can hook up your own house as people from Australia to Pakistan have done, and make your own power to run your home; you can achieve the kind of energy independence talked about as a national goal or make it a personal goal, even run your electric car off your roof.

Propping up fossil fuel is like propping up white supremacy: the future of the USA is a nonwhite majority, and the future of the human race is renewable energy. You can batter it and badge it and try to roll time itself backward, but you can’t in the long term stop the renewable revolution. You can just make things worse in the short term, so that some planet-destroyers can grab a few more dollars. Bill McKibben spoke about all this on tour for his exhilarating new book Here Comes the Sun, a glorious compendium of solar facts and possibilities, a big-picture overview of where we’re at and where we could go.

The solar revolution means that power can be decentralized, democratized, distributed far more justly. So it makes perfect and hideous sense, given the nostalgia of authoritarians for their version of a golden age (of exclusion, exploitation, and inequality ), to tie themselves to the past, with the heavy anchor of all fossil fuel’s problems. Because the other reason team Trump loves fossil fuel is because it’s so inherently anti-democratic (and deeply tied to authoritarian regimes from Russia to Saudi Arabia and some autocratic left regimes, such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela).

We use the same word for both political/social power and the power that runs our machines. One source of the power that runs our machines is fossil fuel, an unequally distributed resource; it occurs in a limited number of places worldwide, it’s easy for tyrants and corporations to grab and monopolize and exploit to make political power even more unevenly distributed. About 80% of human beings live in net fossil-fuel importing countries, meaning that they are caught up–as are we all–in the ugly anti-democratic politics of fossil fuel, the stuff that’s making a lot of us poorer and all of us on a planet hurtling toward terrible thresholds of destructive climate change. Those importer countries are spending a lot on what exporter countries are selling, funding fossil fuel’s literal and political poisons–so they have economic and political, as well as ecological, motives to make the transition. And a lot of them are making it.

Just as fossil fuel is tied to inequality and autocracy, so renewables can be democratic. In a world where every country and almost every region and even locality can generate its own energy, the corrosive geopolitics of fossil fuel will come to an end and with it the corrosive political power of the fossil fuel industry. (In places where solar is less viable as a year-round source, hydro geothermal, and wind power can do a lot.)

I believe climate is the most important of all issues, because it’s about all life on earth, everywhere, for the next ten thousand years or more; it’s a human rights issue, a justice issue, an agricultural issue, an ecological issue, an extinction issue, an issue so profound that it’s reshaping the globe with sea level rise and melting ice and migrating species, making some places unliveable and bringing an onslaught of disasters–flood, fire, drought, famine, extreme heat–both fiercer and more frequent than in the placid holocene in which our species evolved.