WORLDFIRE - Chapter 2, Part II
Gut Check
Something that gave me hope that America might finally start getting serious about the climate crisis was Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, but I still could not shake a growing inner sense of foreboding. That fall, I was out riding my bike on a cool, crisp day when I witnessed something I will never forget. Pausing to catch my breath at a wooden bridge overlooking beautiful Boulder Creek, something in the icy water below caught my eye. It was a rock jutting out of the water, covered with a solid layer of ice that bore a remarkable resemblance to a globe. I did a double take, then realizing I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, watched the sun beat down on the icy orb, knowing it was slowly melting. It felt like a sign. The message I received was: “Speed it up,” as in speed up my planetary protection work. Something told me the transparent layer of ice would be gone by the time I came back down the trail. Less than 30 minutes later, I rolled back across the bridge and peered down to see if the frozen globe was still there. It was gone.
That was all the motivation I needed to finish a commentary I had been working on for Boulder-based elephant journal challenging the U.S. wind industry to abandon its comfort zone and step up and lead a climate crusade. Here are excerpts from that piece:
With wind power plants now cost-competitive with fossil fuel plants, the wind industry is uniquely positioned to assert itself as the vanguard of the emerging green energy economy... With great opportunity also comes great responsibility, meaning modest and comfortable industry growth levels are no longer acceptable measuring sticks for success. I believe the leaders of the wind industry have a moral imperative to do everything in their power to spark this generational crusade by becoming corporate crusaders for a green industrial revolution… Our time here on earth is short. Let us mark it by making a stand on behalf of this glorious planet–our home–not just for this and future generations, but for all life on earth.
My second public challenge to wind industry leaders appeared the following spring in WINDPOWER MONTHLY, the world’s top wind industry magazine. Here are excerpts from that piece:
The American Wind Energy Association’s goal of 20% wind power by 2030, while a good start, is clearly too little, too late, to effectively address the global climate crisis... The urgency of the situation demands more of the titans of this vital industry. They can begin by raising the bar to 40% wind power by 2020 and demanding federal policies to facilitate this goal… The course of human history is littered with golden opportunities either squandered or seized. The US wind industry faces such a defining moment now. Will we be content with simply growing our businesses and playing a marginal role in the world’s energy future, or will we lead a generational mission by mustering our moral and industrial force to address this planetary emergency? It is time to decide.
If you are wondering why the wind industry would be so loath to seize market share from the fossil fuel industry when it was obviously in their financial self-interest to do so, you are not alone. As best I could discern from my perch inside the industry, the main reasons were stockholder syndrome (valuing next quarter’s profits over long term market dominance); corporate think (aversion to risk); a vision deficit (inability to think outside the box); political calculation (protecting access to the corridors of power by not rocking the boat); conflict of interest (some wind companies are subsidiaries of large fossil fuel companies); and–this one may surprise you–a lack of confidence by some industry leaders that wind power could play anything more than a token role in meeting America’s electricity needs. In short, the industry viewed winning such a fight as politically inconceivable.
Most troubling to me, however, was the missing conversation by too many wind leaders of their industry’s ethical imperative to address the global climate threat. I am not talking about the wind industry’s rank and file. I have a great many friends in the industry who feel the urgency of the climate crisis and want to see their industry realize its true potential. I was hardly alone in my frustration with AWEA acting like we had all the time in the world to act. Many of my colleagues were drawn to the wind industry for the same reason I was and are working tirelessly to fulfill the industry’s unrealized potential. Like them, I was proud to be part of the wind industry. So I had hope in 2009, when Jim Walker used his board president speech at AWEA’s annual convention to challenge the industry to embrace its “moral imperative” to ramp up in the face of the worsening climate emergency.
Recounting the youth of his generation who were “inspired by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” Jim said: “They [young people] are a reminder to the rest of us not to get too comfortable, and to keep the bigger picture in mind… Our industry needs to be operating with a sense of ‘creative panic’ that if we do not do everything in our power to make things better, they will not just not get better, but could go very badly indeed. The climate crisis is unfolding in ultraslow motion, like the ‘frog in the kettle,’ unlike Katrina, 9/11, or Pearl Harbor. This makes it an invisible threat to many… It is all too easy to say ‘Wind cannot do it all,’ ‘We are just part of a portfolio,’ or ‘It was not my department’... But by virtue of our position as the most mature renewable energy industry on the scene, we all need to push the envelope as hard as we possibly can.” It was a powerful shot across the bow, but in the end not enough wind industry leaders shared our sense of creative panic. When nothing changed after that, it forced another soul search on my part.
I was invited to speak to the San Francisco chapter of Women of Wind Energy that fall, along with Jim and another wind industry veteran. I decided to speak about the urgency of the climate emergency and the failure of the wind industry to effectively respond. Drawing parallels to the moral leadership exercised by MLK during the civil rights era, I said: “My green dream is that we will find a way to tap that higher self in each of us that has always known how to live at peace with the planet. I believe humanity still has time–but very little–to effectively respond to this crisis. But we must reject the tranquilizing drug of gradualism and act now by thinking BIG as an industry. If we are successful in helping stabilize the climate–and do it in time–we will be praised by future generations for our wisdom, our determination and our courage. If we fail… let it not be because we did not try.” I will never forget two audience members coming up to me afterwards, one with tears in her eyes, asking me how they could help. I urged them to use their power as Women of Wind Energy to urge AWEA to step up its game. Another longtime industry veteran hugged me and thanked me for reminding him why he had joined the industry in the first place. The following night at an AWWI board dinner, Jim surprised me by telling the assembled guests he used to call me his “environmental conscience,” but was now calling me his “adrenal gland.” I was honored, and the room broke up in laughter, but Jim’s point was serious. Here was the wind industry’s conscience and adrenal gland saying the industry wasn’t doing nearly enough fast enough. We both knew precious time for humanity was slipping away.
In fairness to AWEA, other national renewable energy trade associations like the Solar Energy Industries Association and the Geothermal Energy Association suffered from similarly timid mindsets. But given that my whole purpose for joining the business world was to help spark a renewable energy revolution, it was gut check time. After six years in the wind industry–five of them spent banging my head against the wall–I was done. Knowing my presence in the industry was hardly making a dent in terms of accelerating a green energy transition, and not wanting to waste any more of my precious life time trying, I began winding down my consulting work with enXco. It was time to bid adieu to what was otherwise a dream career in search of more promising ways to forestall climate calamity. I knew I had a different role to play, but just what that new role was I did not yet know.
With less work on my plate, the closing months of 2009 found me with the luxury of time to think. Time spent in deep contemplation brought some clarity on how I could best contribute to the greater good going forward. One thing that emerged for me was to keep writing and speaking out. Reaction to my Women of Wind Energy talk convinced me, with the encouragement of my friend Paul Alexander, to cash in the rest of my wind industry chips by publishing a tough love commentary challenging AWEA and the other renewable energy trade associations to step up and lead. Because the op-ed I penned for the Denver Post in early 2010 explains so much about what compelled me to embark upon the journey about which you are now reading, here is “Leading the world’s green industrial revolution” in full:
A gaping gulf exists today between America's economic collapse, our melting globe, and the lackluster response of top leaders in the U.S. wind, solar and geothermal industries. You wouldn't know it, but these three industries, along with the energy efficiency sector, hold the key to ushering in a green industrial revolution for America, and the world.
I've just spent the past five years working inside the U.S. wind industry, with access to its top leadership, and have never seen an industry so lacking in ambition. I'll begin with their anemic growth goals.
For years, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) advocated providing a paltry 6 percent of America's electricity with wind power. When some of us began pushing them to raise this to 20 percent, they resisted until President Bush opined in 2006 that the U.S. could possibly generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind power.
AWEA then embraced this as a goal, but with a laggardly 2030 timeline. Now, even though the wind industry is well ahead of schedule to meet this conservative benchmark, AWEA remains strangely wedded to it, as if frozen in time. This despite a recent study by the Nebraska Power Association showing that Nebraska and several other states can reliably and affordably obtain 40 percent of their electricity from wind energy.
For the past year, I have pushed for a stepped-up goal of 40 percent U.S. wind power by 2020. Others believe we can do even more. This industry is uniquely poised - by virtue of its cost competitiveness and maturity as a technology - to lead America's economic renaissance, but it won't happen without bold leadership.
Instead, AWEA supports climate legislation (H.R. 2454) that is more likely to perpetuate a fossil fuel future than a green energy future and that even they acknowledge would not accelerate wind energy development. On the federal research and development front, wind timidly settles for crumbs, while coal and nuclear rake in billions. Then instead of doing the job themselves, AWEA waits for another Texas oilman, T. Boone Pickens, to spend $58 million of his own money on television advertising to popularize wind power in America.
Let's look at the solar industry. A recent report by the Solar Energy Industries Association says that solar power technologies could generate 15 percent of America's power in ten years. Enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the world's energy needs for a full year. Granted, the right policies must be put in place to enable its proper deployment, but why only 15 percent for the U.S. by 2020?
The Geothermal Energy Association predicts that in 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy will officially recognize a near-term potential of at least 5 percent of U.S. power needs, with longer-term possibilities of over five times that amount. At least this industry can envision significant future growth, but why are they taking their cue from the federal government, and why only 5 percent in the near term?
It's gut check time. The national renewable energy trade associations are promoting incrementalism when the times demand revolutionary change. Championing a weak U.S. renewable electricity standard of 20 percent by 2020 is not leadership. Leadership is rallying the nation around an Apollo-like goal of putting America back to work creating a 100 percent renewable electricity grid by 2020.
Whether you are motivated by millions of new jobs; energy independence; better health; accountability for polluting corporations; a strengthened economy; cleaner air; protection against volatile fossil fuel costs; increased national security; renewed economic competitiveness; food security; a reduced trade deficit; water security; revitalized rural communities; energy grid security; protection of biodiversity; or the need to address the climate crisis, replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is central to achieving it.
The U.S. has an undeniable economic self-interest, and moral imperative, to lead a worldwide green industrial revolution, but if these renewable industry captains won't do it for America, or their children and grandchildren, how about for their bottom lines? The next ten years are pivotal. How we look coming out the other side hinges in large part on whether America's green energy leaders can find it within themselves to answer the call of history. Fortunately, vision, like political will, is a renewable resource.
Shortly before writing that Denver Post op-ed, I changed the name of my consulting firm from Wind Power Solutions to Climate Crisis Solutions. Just because I left the wind industry does not mean I have given up on the industry, but nearly two decades have come and gone since I first joined them and we are still waiting on renewable industry leaders to answer the call of history. The world needs bold leadership from these industry captains now more than ever. So you can imagine my dismay when instead of blazing a trail as a climate leader, AWEA would later merge with the fossil fuel-friendly American Clean Power Association.
It doesn’t take a climate scientist to see that the weather is weirding. Climate conditions are no longer normal, and they haven’t been for a long time. The seasons are shifting. Regardless of where you live, I am sure you have your own stories about how things are changing. I certainly have mine. After almost three decades of living in Boulder, I had never seen such weird weather as what I saw during the summer and fall of 2012 and 2013, respectively. Some call what I witnessed “global weirding.” I call what global weirding is doing to our weather weather weirding.
One summer evening in 2012, standing on the front lawn of a friend’s east Boulder home, I watched pine trees in the green forests framing Boulder’s majestic Flatirons ignite like giant matchsticks. A severe drought that year had sparked a spate of wildfires, this one caused by lightning. I was no stranger to fires, having spent part of a summer fighting them as a Wilderness Ranger in Colorado’s backcountry, but seeing one from the front yard was unnerving. Slurry bombers extinguished the Flagstaff Fire (saving Boulder’s postcard perfect mountain backdrop), but not before the National Center for Atmospheric Research–nestled on a bluff below the advancing flames–had to be evacuated. Think about the irony of the world’s leading climate research facility being evacuated because of a climate-fueled wildfire.
The following fall, I witnessed a deadly display of how our overheated atmosphere–we know that hotter air holds more moisture–is transforming storms and floods into superstorms and superfloods. Standing in that same friend’s east Boulder front yard that night, I saw something I never thought I would see: a river of water flowing down a suburban street fast enough to carry away a small child. In no more than an hour, a street with only the gutters flowing with water had transmogrified into floodwaters knee-deep, swift like a river, a liquid street lapping at the lawn.
Earlier that day, I had struck out on foot to see for myself what almost ten inches of rain falling in 24 hours looked like in an ecosystem that receives about 20 inches of precipitation annually. Gullies and ditches had morphed into creeks. Gentle Boulder Creek was now raging Boulder River, a deadly torrent of muddy debris and frothy whitewater rising above its tree-lined shores. Ignoring a warning that a giant wall of mud and debris might be headed into the heart of Boulder and spending more time videotaping near the river than was safe, I eventually hoofed it to higher ground only to find that even on The Hill, one of Boulder’s highest neighborhoods, water was running like rivers down streets and into homes. Driveways had become streambeds. Front steps had become waterfalls. Stumbling upon a group of neighbors building a barricade to divert the rushing water, I stopped filming and picked up a shovel. As we desperately worked to reinforce the makeshift sandbag wall on our side of the street–ever wary of the danger of parked cars upstream washing down into our path–we watched a sand wall on the street’s other side wash away. When I left, our stopgap levee was still holding. This is only what I saw with my own eyes. Elsewhere, precious lives were tragically lost, with others dramatically saved. The Denver Post reported on two nearby towns being evacuated by the National Guard: “Within hours, both towns were islands. A deluge even the National Weather Service described as bearing biblical proportions had swallowed highways and roads into Jamestown and Lyons, isolating the communities.”
The weather is weirding everywhere. In 2005, Category 5 Hurricane Katrina drowned much of New Orleans, claiming well over a thousand lives and racking up $161 billion in damages. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on the East Coast–even flooding the World Trade Center Memorial site–costing more precious lives and $71 billion in damages. In 2015, it felt like much of the West was on fire. In 2016, temperatures in Kuwait and Iraq shattered records by hitting 129°F.
Record flooding in Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas in 2019–the wettest year for the contiguous United States on record–prompted Nebraska’s governor to declare more than half the state’s counties disaster areas and four tribal nations in Nebraska to declare states of emergency. Tropical Cyclone Idai flooded large swaths of Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe that same year, killing more than 1,000 people. A summer hailstorm in Guadalajara, Mexico buried cars up to six feet deep. A “tornado cluster” of more than 500 tornadoes struck the U.S. in a span of 30 days. And seemingly all of Australia was on fire.
2020 brought even more extreme weather: a record 30 named tropical hurricanes and storms and record wildfires in the Arctic, and in California, where more than four million acres burned. The U.S. set a new wildfire record that year with more than 10 million acres burning. Death Valley sizzled at 129.9 degrees. Even Siberia roasted at 100 degrees. In Colorado, more than half a million acres burned, with the three largest fires each bigger than any in the state’s history. I saw ashes from one of those fires float down out of the summer sky like snow. I choked on that smoke.
In 2021, a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, claiming hundreds of lives. The Arctic Circle sizzled with ground temperatures as high as 118ºF. A wildfire consumed the Canadian village of Lytton the day after temperatures soared to 121ºF. Greenville, California later went up in flames. Climate-fueled conflagrations raged in Greece and Turkey. Germany and neighboring nations suffered apocalyptic floods. Smoke from California’s wildfires shrouded Boulder’s Flatirons for weeks on end, endangering the health of anyone who dared to venture outside. Hurricane Ida killed 82 people after making landfall in Louisiana. Dozens of deadly tornadoes struck the U.S. that year, including one monster twister that stayed on the ground for more than 200 miles, flattening swaths of eight states in a single night and killing 90 people. Then on the second to last day of 2021, Colorado’s Marshall Fire claimed 2 lives and incinerated nearly 1,100 homes, including the one where I lived for 5 ½ years and where my friend Sue Lion raised her family and lived for 45 years.
More extreme weather in 2022 put one-third of Pakistan underwater. Months long, record-breaking monsoons in the extremely climate-vulnerable nation, one that contributes less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, displaced 33 million people, killed nearly 1,500 people, and destroyed 1.7 million homes. In the U.S., 18 separate climate-related weather disasters, each causing more than $1 billion in damages, cost the U.S. economy a total of more than $165 billion in 2022.
2023 set more records still. June of that year was the hottest June on record, until July became not just the hottest July on record but the hottest month in Earth’s recorded history. Baking under that summer’s fossil-fueled heat dome, Canada experienced more than 1,000 wildfires that summer, with nearly 40 million acres burning. In 2023, a climate-fueled wildfire obliterated the Maui community of Lahaina. Words fail to describe the horror visited upon this special historic town I had twice visited and explored. The deadliest U.S. wildfire in more a century, the Maui fire claimed nearly 100 lives. Freakish flooding also swamped the capital of Vermont that summer, claiming two lives. Ocean temperatures in South Florida soared to levels you would feel sitting in a hot tub. A tropical storm even hit southern California, the first in nearly a century. It is now the rule, rather than the exception, that every year can be expected to bring horrific, lethal climate disasters. I trust you get the picture. We are now living in the dreaded age of climate consequences.
Numbers don’t lie. 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history, with the ten hottest years on record all occurring in the last decade (the chances of this happening randomly are about the same as you winning the lottery). 2010–the year I launched my ride–was the 11th hottest. All of this is from only about 2°F of global heating. Scientists are now projecting record-shattering heat waves being up to seven times more probable between now and 2050 and up to 21 times more probable from 2051 to 2080. Unless we get our act together, decades from now we will look back at the summer of 2023 as cool.
None of this is normal, nor is it a big mystery why it is happening more and more often. It is our extreme behavior as a species that is causing this extreme weather. If you haven’t been personally affected by climate disasters yourself, you probably know someone who has. But we are not passive victims to all this weather weirding. We are doing this to the climate. We are doing this to ourselves. This means we can stop doing this to the climate. We can stop doing this to ourselves.
All bets are off as far as knowing how violent the weather will get from here on in. All of that carbon dioxide pollution we have already released into the atmosphere doesn’t just dissipate. It stays there for centuries, if not millennia. But here’s some good news: once we zero out emissions, we could see the rise in global heating level off within about a decade. Drawing down carbon by going beyond zero emissions will help even more. According to the latest scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Deliberate removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere could reverse… some aspects of climate change. However, this will only happen… if deliberate removals are larger than emissions. Some climate change trends, such as the increase in global surface temperature, would start to reverse within a few years. Other aspects of climate change would take decades (e.g., permafrost thawing) or centuries (e.g., acidification of the deep ocean) to reverse, and some, such as sea level rise, would take centuries to millennia to change direction.” So the quicker we get to zero emissions and beyond, the quicker we can begin reversing climate breakdown. But first we have to stop feeding the beast.
It’s gut check time for the human species. Because we have waited so long to act, we are in for a rough ride in the decades and centuries to come. There is no getting around this fact, but if we move swiftly, there may yet be time to avert the most cataclysmic scenarios. If we act boldly, there may still be time to lead humanity away from the edge of the climate cliff. The climate crisis requires committing ourselves–each of us–to the urgent task at hand. It also requires guarding against what climate blogger David Roberts calls “shifting baselines syndrome” where we keep adjusting to the “new normal” and forget what things were like in the recent past. Climate scientist Michael Mann calls it the “new abnormal,” since there is nothing normal about conditions that just keep getting worse. Finding our way back to safety requires that we not forget that there once was such a place. We must exercise the capacity of our big human brains to remember. Then we must boldly act.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.