Bill McKibben writes:

A couple of weeks ago, I said that the first principle of fighting the climate crisis was simple: stop lighting coal, oil, gas, and trees on fire, as soon as possible. Today, I offer a second ground rule, corollary to the first: definitely don’t build anything new that connects to a flame.

It’s obvious, of course, that we’re not going to stop burning fossil fuel tomorrow: there are, for instance, 1.42 billion cars on the planet’s roads, and, at the end of 2019, less than one half of one per cent of them were fully electric. You can’t simply force conventional vehicles off the road, any more than you can instantly turn off every gas-fired power plant. That’s why global warming is such a wickedly difficult problem: two hundred years of constant development with fossil fuels at the center of our economy has left all of us deeply entangled.

On the other hand, we do have to stop burning fossil fuel. Climate scientists have told us that, if we don’t cut emissions in half by 2030, we’re not going to meet the targets set in the Paris climate accord. Renewable energy has gotten so cheap so fast that the economics of such an endeavor are no longer insane. It would require an all-hands effort, grander in scale but similar in kind to the green-infrastructure program that President Biden has promised to propose, and one conducted around the world. But we have no chance if we simultaneously keep building new infrastructure for fossil fuels. If you’re already in a hole that would take a decade to climb out of, why would you dig yourself another decade’s worth of pit? [Continue reading…]