Recent weather events have prodded media outlets to insert climate change into their coverage, so I thought it might be a good time to revisit an exchange about “the green transition” that clarified for me, at least, much of what I find troubling about those who champion it as a path forward.
It started with Bill McKibben’s review for the New York Review of Books in January of The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything (2025), a book documenting the role carbon dioxide has played in shaping the history of the planet and the lives of its inhabitants. The book ends, as one might expect, on a somber note. After telling us about the disastrous impacts that high CO2 levels have had at various moments in the lifespan of the earth, the author, Peter Brannen, turns to consider the likely effects of the even greater volume of the gas we now spew into the atmosphere. Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, it turns out, put to shame everything all the volcanoes that ever erupted could manage in the way of destructive power. Brannen is not hopeful about our ability to change course.
McKibben does what he always does when he encounters this kind of despair. He concludes his review with a breathless recitation of “the possibility of a quick and remarkable solar revolution.” He notes the declining costs of solar panels, the success with which China is installing them at home and selling them abroad, and the potential for grassroots activism to overcome the opposition of those who have mobilized to head off the revolution.
A month later, the NYRB published a letter from Mark Roller, who took issue with McKibben’s sunny rendering of the green transition, followed by McKibben’s response. In 2023, Roller, a San Francisco-based artist, had published a detailed critique of the idea in the Brooklyn Rail titled “Hope”. His letter to the NYRB contains a condensed version of that discussion; the points he makes will be familiar to anyone who has looked into this issue.
Solar and wind only appear cheap, Roller argues, if you ignore the way they are integrated into the existing fossil-fuel grid. They are intermittent energy sources that must be backstopped, and even if one could end dependency on that grid, the number of batteries required would be staggering – and costly to produce. He reminds us that electricity accounts for roughly a fifth of total energy usage and that the 4/5 remaining is dependent upon the non-stop burning of fossil fuels. Improving that proportion, even if it were technically feasible, would require building whole new industries pretty much from the ground up. Finally, it is misleading, he argues, to call solar and wind “renewable.” The sun and the wind are eternal, but solar panels and wind turbines are machines with a shelf life. Making, transporting, and installing them, replacing them when they wear out – these are necessary phases of a highly industrialized process fully dependent upon fossil fuels. The ecological costs attending the development of a “green” economy – e.g., mining, pollution, toxic wastes – may well exceed those of a fossil fuel economy.
More generally, Roller objects to the way that green transition advocates frame the current crisis. For him, rising CO2 levels are just “one symptom of a larger man-made crisis of ecological overshoot.” By focusing so narrowly on global warming, we miss the main point: the modern industrial way of life itself is to blame and it imperils “not just the atmosphere but the entire biosphere.” The “techno-optimism” articulated by McKibben, he concludes, is little more than a “fairy tale” told to boost hopes for a quick fix to an existential predicament.
McKibben, in his reply, dismisses Roller’s argument as “just silly.” His strategy for countering it proceeds along two tracks. First, he offers a point-by-point refutation of Roller’s critique, marshaling as evidence a parade of technological innovations that, in his view, nullifies all dire predictions for the future. After citing a few examples and a few experts, he switches to the second track: solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels, an argument McKibben seems to believe has the most potential for swaying those slow to join the solar revolution. He addresses Roller’s larger argument – and the “fairy tale” charge – by rehearsing his bona fides as an environmental writer and activist. Roller’s rhetoric, he concludes, “is as damaging in its own way” as Trump’s flat dismissals of “green scams.”
I have read nearly every book McKibben has written. He is always thoughtful and well-informed and writes in a manner I find appealing. I have learned a great deal from him over the years. But I found his response to Roller to be unconvincing and, to be honest, a bit annoying. Roller is sounding an alarm about issues that should be of primary importance to people who are trying to imagine a way out of the fix we are in. There are many weak spots in “green transition” advocacy that make objections to it worthy of serious consideration. These reservations are neither “silly” nor “archaic,” and they are not the same ones voiced by those in the climate change denial camp.
McKibben’s optimistic projections nearly always come hedged with adverbs and adverbial phrases that obscure their shaky foundations. This or that new technology is “increasingly” or “more and more” being used for processes that skeptics like Roller think are unlikely to work as planned or scale up as necessary. I did a Google dive into the recycling of solar panels, which McKibben suggests we will soon be able to do on a massive scale, and found the usual mix of high-tech ingenuity and old-school hucksterism. I did not come away from my investigation with much hope that we would be doing much of this any time soon. Most of the people on the cutting edge of the field seemed considerably less optimistic than McKibben about gleaning for future use the complete carcass of a dead solar panel. No one denies that nearly all the panels aging out right now are headed for the landfill or that fossil fuels will supply nearly all the energy needed to manufacture the next generation.
None of McKibben’s claims stand up well under this kind of scrutiny. The cold fact that most inclines me towards Roller’s position, however, is the steady rise in carbon emissions, and global temperatures, as more solar panels and wind turbines come on line. Fossil fuel use is booming alongside the solar revolution. Renewables are not so much replacing as supplementing non-renewables, with rates for both still determined by the demand for energy. This would explain why greenhouse gas emissions have only declined when there was a sudden drop in demand – the fall of the USSR in 1991, the financial crisis in 2008, the COVID pandemic. It seems that only a wholesale collapse of the global economy can accomplish what the green transition advocates believe can be achieved by pell-mell electrification.
That is a sobering conclusion. But if it is true, surely it needs to be faced. When observers like Roller lament the narrowness of vision of those, like McKibben, who only want to talk about global warming and energy options. I imagine that is what he has in mind. If all the inspired thinking and creative activism currently flowing in “green transition” channels is misguided – if they are not likely to bring about the desired result – then there can be no honor in smugly dismissing those bold enough to call this to our attention.
Those who want to direct the conversation towards the fundamental flaws in a growth-hungry capitalist economy and the culture of consumption that sustains it travel a hard road. Their access to the public is blocked by corporate media and, should some message of this sort break through, they will be vilified by those whose access is unlimited.
McKibben once ventured down that road. In Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), he launched a multi-pronged attack on growth, consumerism, and bigness generally. Global warming figures in his discussion but as one contributing factor to a deep economic/cultural crisis. He seems most concerned to demonstrate that most of our problems stem from producing “more stuff each year” and insists that we must reduce the “scale” at which business – economic and governmental – is conducted. As an alternative, he calls for “an economics of neighborliness” where people who share a patch of land cooperate in good ol’ Vermont style to provision and govern themselves. In this book at least, McKibben is an anti-growth localist.
So what happened? Why aren’t these the ideas that he chose to promote in the public square in his subsequent career as an activist and writer? Answering this question leads us into a dimension of the green transition that has nothing to do with energy or technology. We encounter there constraints on thinking and activism that are fundamentally political. These too should be squarely faced.
McKibben seems to have decided that unless we get carbon emissions under control, nothing we might like to see happen down the road will have time to gain traction. A “game over” situation will unfold. Given the accelerating pace of lethal events, this seems a reasonable conclusion. But it begs the question – what is the best way to do that? We still don’t know why mass electrification became for him (and the green transition camp generally) a more appealing option than scaling down and localizing.
The critical difference between the doughty solar booster and the author of Deep Economy, I believe, can be found in the measure of faith the former is willing to invest in existing institutions as vehicles for change. The latter, when pausing to sketch the lineaments of a “durable future,” will ask the reader to “imagine” the proposals and plans that might bring it about. We are challenged (pp. 86 and 145, for example) to “imagine” a governmental agency willing and able to implement the measures that would produce such a future. This is an effective rhetorical strategy for writers trying to broaden readers’ sense of what might be possible (I have done it myself), but it presumes that our imaginations are the only available bridge between where we are and where we would like to go. We must imagine because it would strain credulity beyond the breaking point to argue that these measures could ever be seriously contemplated, let alone implemented, by the leaders, parties, or governing bodies currently in place.
Somewhere along the line McKibben decided that such a bridge existed and, with the right kind of effort, was traversable. The organizations he helped found, the arguments foregrounded in his current writings and interviews, are designed to pressure existing institutions to do what in Deep Economy he thought could only take shape in a flight of fancy. Once this wager was made, technological remedies were bound to eclipse alternative courses of action. If one is going to try to pressure existing political organs into taking meaningful action, then any ambitions one might once have entertained to place resources and decision-making authority in the hands of citizens at the local level could only appear impractical and thus unwise to pursue. Techno-optimism is common coin in a corporate regime. Degrowth, localization – these, when measured against reigning conceptions of progress, are utopian impulses which, if allowed to run wild, would lead to anarchy.
McKibben has not abandoned his localist convictions. They still leak out into his public pronouncements. But that’s the point – these convictions cannot find a purchase in the national arena within which he now operates. Whatever his most cherished beliefs, his vision of politics elevates technological wizardry to pride of place in his strategic thinking. To work the system you have to talk its language, and that puts strict limits on what you will be able to bring up for discussion. So we talk endlessly about solar panels, wind turbines, and battery capacity but find no words to suggest what it might take to wrench decision-making power away from the vandals who wield it now and place it in the hands of land occupants.
Pressure politics exerts its greatest force on those who adopt it as a resistance strategy. To maintain the allegiance of those you call into the streets or hit up for money to fund lobbying or organizing efforts, you have to claim some victories. Movement leaders find themselves under constant pressure to celebrate as major achievements whatever a government solidly in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry is willing to do about carbon emissions. Since this is likely to fall well short of what is needed, these leaders end up being the loudest champions of proposals designed more to hoodwink than help the people for whom they claim to be fighting. If you set the bar too low, victory and defeat become indistinguishable.
We might consider the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act as a case in point. This bill was widely hailed in environmental circles; McKibben called it a “landmark” piece of legislation. It contains subsidies for various solar and wind projects, incentives to purchase EVs, and other measures designed to address the climate emergency. Nearly all of them are high-tech solutions and, as such, will carry a huge environmental cost, not least the carbon released into the air to power the various extraction, processing, fabrication, and transportation processes required to create so much machinery and the infrastructure needed to deploy it. Its champions promise significant reductions in emissions but, given the steady increase we have witnessed during every other phase of the green transition, what grounds do we have for believing it will be different this time? The main thrust of the legislation is just what you would expect from a corporation-serving government – to keep fossil fuel burning at a profit for shareholders and moneylenders. Through tax credits for boondoggles like “carbon capture,” it enlarges the spigot through which taxpayer dollars are already flowing into the coffers of oil and gas producers.
Techno-optimism and patriotism are the evil twins of the modern world. The myth of progress and the various fables told to glorify the nation-state, arguably the most destructive of humankind’s inventions – they might as well be demon spirits. They have their own purposes, and if you admit them into your reasoning, it is those purposes you will serve. They do not bargain. They laugh in the face of the ethical and the just. They cannot be made to serve the interests of humanity or the biotic community generally.
The temptation to beseech these spirits for help is powerful. They dress well and talk a good game. But resist it we must. As Gandhi recommended long ago when fighting the colonial system in India, we can choose not to participate. We can involve ourselves instead in strengthening the organs of local sustenance and local sovereignty. We can pledge allegiance to what we can see and touch. A place that is small enough to care for and settled enough to trust. Another hard road for sure, but one that we can travel with a realistic hope of reaching a habitable homeland.
