Latest news with #BillMcKibben
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
EPA poised to scrap landmark finding that will limit its battle against climate change
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has taken another step toward ending its own ability to fight the climate crisis. The agency is considering scrapping a 2009 scientific 'endangerment finding' that confirmed greenhouse gases from the oil and gas industry, and other sources, endangered people's health, so there was reason to regulate them under the 1970 Clean Air Act. 'On Monday, June 30, 2025, EPA sent over its 'Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards' proposal to the Office of Management and Budget, which was originally announced on March 12, 2025,' an EPA spokesperson told The Independent, in an email Wednesday. 'The proposal will be published for public notice and comment once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the Administrator.' EPA did not respond to The Independent's questions regarding the potential impacts of a rollback. But if the 2009 finding is rescinded, it would erase EPA limits on greenhouse gas pollution across industries, adding to dozens of rollbacks in federal climate and environmental policy by the Trump administration. Over the past 15 years, the endangerment finding has helped to reduce climate pollution and protect Americans' health, bolstering limits on power plants and emissions standards for trucks and other vehicles. If rolled back, limits on tailpipe emissions would be overturned and automakers could make cars that guzzle more gas. Climate scientists and activists said tossing the 2009 ruling would throttle the U.S.'s ability to prevent the worst outcomes of climate change, and would endanger people around the world in the name of the Trump administration's push for energy dominance. "If you're busily committing a crime, it's smart to try and change the law so that it's not technically a crime any more,' author and Third Act founder Bill McKibben said, on the proposal. 'Big Oil is not content to merely wreck the future, they'd like to alter the past as well." The EPA proposal is still in draft form, sources told The New York Times , so could be changed. But if it is finalized, legal challenges would almost certainly follow although those could take a year, said Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources. 'But, if this ultimately comes to pass, the consequences will be stark: it essentially would halt all federal actions to regulate heat-trapping and climate change-causing greenhouse gases as a pollutant. That would mark a grim milestone, indeed,' Swain told The Independent. Dr. Michael E. Mann, the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, had warned of an attack on the 'endangerment finding' a year ago. 'The United States, and a small number of petrostates including Russia and Saudi Arabia, now pose a major threat to the planet. The rest of the world will need to decide what to do about that,' he told The Independent, in an email Wednesday. Earlier this year, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that the agency would reconsider the 2009 finding in what he deemed the 'most consequential day of deregulation in American history.' 'The Trump Administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas,' he said. 'We will follow the science, the law, and common sense wherever it leads, and we will do so while advancing our commitment towards helping to deliver cleaner, healthier, and safer air, land, and water.' Under Zeldin, the EPA announced it would shutter its Office of Research and Development, which provides expertise for environmental policy and regulation, and analyzes the dangers of climate change and pollution. The agency is also expected to shed thousands of employees, including chemists, biologists, and toxicologists. The U.S. has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any country in human history. Countries are failing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions at a fast enough rate, and temperatures around the world are hitting unprecedented highs. As the planet continues to heat up, extreme weather events will become more severe, the threat of famine and plague rockets, and more species face extinction.
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How Trump's megabill could slow AI progress in US
The elimination of federal renewable energy tax credits in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act has major implications for the global AI race. Ultimately, the shift means slowing down US progress on new energy production, which is key to winning the technology Cold War with China. There is no possible way tech companies can power the massive rollout of AI factories without solar, and now it will be that much more expensive. But the attempt to throw a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry could be too little, too late, as detailed in this New Yorker article by Bill McKibben. The rate of solar adoption is now about a gigawatt every 15 hours. A gigawatt is the output of a typical nuclear power plant. Solar isn't just cheaper than fossil fuels. It's also faster to deploy, which is crucial in the AI race. The expansion of AI data centers is creating new economic incentives for innovation in renewables, from geothermal to fusion to new battery chemistries, which can store all that new solar power. It's a topic I expect we'll be covering more and more here in the coming months.
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
‘This is a fight for life': climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield
Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. But scientists have also identified at least 16 'tipping points' – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed. Dr Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist, is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which was described by Bill McKibben as 'a gift to the world'. In the run-up to the Global Tipping Points conference in July, Guenther talks to the Guardian about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis. The climate crisis is pushing globally important ecosystems – ice sheets, coral reefs, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest – towards the point of no return. Why is it important to talk about tipping points? We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation. How have attitudes changed towards these dangers? There was a constructive wave of global climate alarm in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 1.5C in 2018. That was the first time scientists made it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C would be catastrophic for millions of people and that in order to halt global heating at a relatively safe level, we would need to start zeroing out our emissions almost immediately. Until then, I don't think policymakers realised the timeline was that short. This prompted a flurry of activism – Greta Thunberg and Indigenous and youth activists – and a surge of media attention. All of this converged to make almost everybody feel that climate change was a terrifying and pressing problem. This prompted new pledges, new corporate sustainability targets, and new policies being passed by government. This led to a backlash by those in the climate movement who prefer to cultivate optimism. Their preferred solution was to drive capitalist investment into renewable technologies so fossil fuels could be beaten out of the marketplace. This group believed climate fear might drive away investors, so they started to argue it was counterproductive to talk about worst-case scenarios. Some commentators even argued we had averted the direst predictions and were now on a more reassuring trajectory of global warming of a little under 3C by 2100. But it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests. If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we're still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don't realise the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance. In your book, you write that it's appropriate to be scared and the more you know, the more likely you are to be worried, as is evident from the statements of scientists and the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. Why? Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn't going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels. [It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it'll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening. A recent Yale study found that a degree of climate anxiety was not necessarily bad because it could stir people to collective action. Do you agree? It depends. I talk about three different kinds of doomerism. One is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we're absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. That is not true. Second, there's a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. I have disdain for that position. Finally, there's the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down. And that to me is the most reasonable kind of doomerism. To address that kind of doomerism, you need to say: 'Yes, this is scary as hell. But we must have courage and turn our fear into action by talking about climate change with others, by calling our elected officials on a regular basis, by demanding our workplaces put their money where their mouth is.' You need to acknowledge people's feelings, meet them where they are and show how they can assuage their fear by cultivating their bravery and collective action. The most eye-opening part of your book was about the assumptions of the Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus that we'll probably only face a very low percentage of GDP loss by the end of the century. This surely depends on ignoring tipping points? The only way Nordhaus can get the result that he does is if he fails to price the risk of catastrophe and leaves out a goodly chunk of the costs of global heating. In his models, he does not account for climate damages to labour productivity, buildings, infrastructure, transportation, non-coastal real estate, insurance, communication, government services and other sectors. But the most shocking thing he leaves out of his models is the risk that global heating could set off catastrophes, whether they are physical tipping points or wars from societal responses. That is why the percentage of global damages that he estimates is so ridiculously lowballed. The idea that climate change will just take off only a small margin of economic growth is not founded on anything empirical. It's just a kind of quasi-religious faith in the power of capitalism to decouple itself from the planet on which it exists. That's absurd and it's unscientific. Some economists suggest wealth can provide almost unlimited protection from catastrophe because it is better to be in a steel and concrete building in a storm than it is to be in a wooden shack. How true is that? There's no evidence that these protections are unlimited, though there are economists who suggest we can always substitute technologies or human-made products for ecosystems or even other planets like Mars for Earth itself. This goes back to an economic growth theorist named Robert Solow, who claims technological innovation can increase human productivity indefinitely. He stressed that it was just a theory, but the economists advising Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s took this as gospel and argued it was possible to ignore environmental externalities – the costs of our economic system, including our greenhouse gas pollution – because you could protect yourself as long as you kept increasing your wealth. Except when it comes to the climate crisis? Yes, the whole spectacle of our planet heating up this quickly should call all of those economic assumptions into question. But because climate change is affecting the poor first and worst, this is used as evidence that poverty is the problem. This is a misrepresentation of reality because the poor are not the only ones who are affected by the climate crisis. This is a slow-moving but accelerating crisis that will root and spread. And it could change for the worst quite dramatically as we hit tipping points. The difference between gradual warming and tipping points is similar to the difference between chronic, manageable ailments and acute, life-threatening diseases, isn't it? Yes. When people downplay the effects of climate change, they often represent the problem as a case of planetary diabetes – as if it were a kind of illness that you can bumble along with, but still have a relatively good quality of life as long as you use your technologies, your insulin, whatever, to sustain your health. But this is not how climate scientists represent climate change. Dr Joelle Gergis, one of the lead authors on the latest IPCC report, prefers to represent climate change as a cancer – a disease that takes hold and grows and metastasises until the day when it is no longer curable and becomes terminal. You could also think of that as a tipping point. This is a fight for life. And like all fights, you need a tremendous amount of bravery to take it on. Before I started working on climate change, I didn't think of myself as a fighter, but I became one because I felt I have a responsibility to preserve the world for my son and children everywhere. That kind of fierce protectiveness is part of the way that I love. We can draw on that to have more strength than our enemies because I don't think they're motivated by love. I believe love is an infinite resource and the power of it is greater than that of greed or hate. If it weren't, we wouldn't be here. Tipping points – in the Amazon, Antarctic, coral reefs and more – could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with devastating effects. In this series, we ask the experts about the latest science – and how it makes them feel. Tomorrow, David Obura talks about the collapse of coral reefs Read more
National Observer
19-05-2025
- General
- National Observer
What a Zen master, a grieving elder, and a carbon bomb taught me about climate journalism
Have you ever stood on the edge of a tailings pond by an oil refinery? If you have, you've heard the boom of propane cannons as they explode to scare off wildlife. You've seen the more adventurous wildlife coated in toxins as they die. The first time I witnessed this was at something called "The Healing Walk," organized to bring people to the oil sands to experience them viscerally. This is when my consciousness about climate as a journalist truly awakened. I was trying to make sense of so many things at once. A white-haired Indigenous elder was breaking away from our group of 400, walking toward the edge of the tailings ponds. The scenery under a blue sky might have been beautiful – spacious, brushy pines, boreal forest cut to the ground. It's what Edward Burtynsky calls "A terrible beauty" – massive industrial complex rising out of glorious lands. The air smelled acrid. The back of my throat hurt. Between the cannon explosions, I heard a deep cry. I looked over and saw the elder raise her hands to the sky, sobbing. Her white hair caught the light as she wept. There was no comfort here. For me, something that had only been theoretical became visceral – her voice, the injured wildlife, the nearby Suncor plant belching fumes. I stood there stricken, listening and watching, and feeling my own heart break. Later at the Healing Walk, Bill McKibben told me as we stood by the Suncor Plant, "The oil sands are ground zero of climate change. A carbon bomb." I didn't quote Bill McKibben in my story. But that interview would become central to a powerful film I made with Bill Weaver for a crowdfunding campaign, "The Tar Sands Reporting Project," that raised $50,000 for us to do more reporting from Ft. McMurray. Myself, I had only just started thinking seriously about climate change. Bill's words have stayed with me through the years. That night, I wrote up the story in my hotel room and published it. My story never mentioned climate change. It showed the impacts of tar mining on people and animals. The story went viral. In a few weeks, I would drive to the Tsleil-Waututh lands in North Vancouver to speak with her — Amy George, the woman who had broken away from our group and wept at the edge of the tailings pond. We sat under the trees and talked for hours. She told me about her experience at residential school, the pain of that memory still raw beneath the surface of what we had witnessed together. She spoke about how learning about the Holocaust helped her begin to heal — how she saw parallels between her own suffering and what Jewish people had endured, and how that recognition gave her strength. It was a wonderful afternoon. I wrote a follow-up story about her life — her strength, her grief, her spiritual leadership as a residential school survivor, her pride as a mother, and grandmother. Two years later, I returned to Fort McMurray to cover Archbishop Desmond Tutu's visit to the region. I interviewed him as he stepped off a helicopter after doing a flyover of the oil sands hosted by Suncor. With the aerial perspective of the vast industrial landscape still fresh in his mind, Tutu declared with characteristic moral clarity, "The oil sands are emblematic of an era that must end." Yet even as he named them the product of "negligence and greed," he balanced his critique with compassion, emphasizing that "No one wants to see an end to industry. If you have industry that is responsible, they have to be commended and encouraged." This approach—holding both critique and invitation simultaneously—reflected the same complex conversations I'd heard about happening around family dinner tables across Canada. From Tutu, who passed away in 2021, I witnessed another powerful model of how to speak difficult truths while still creating space for dialogue. When I went home after these Fort McMurray trips, what stayed with me was the taste of chemicals, oil, and tar at the back of my throat. These visceral experiences taught me something profound about climate journalism – sometimes the most powerful stories don't need to say "climate" at all. Don't say "climate" Fast-forward to now when I have come to understand that my story's power without mentioning 'climate change' wasn't coincidental, but reflected a broader pattern in how people engage with this crisis. After witnessing how people responded to discussions about extreme weather, researchers working in Calgary told me very recently that they reached a striking conclusion: despite the fact that people they were interviewing had just suffered the impacts of extreme weather caused by global warming, victims shut down at the mention of climate. This reflects a growing trend. We've heard so many shocking things about climate change that the words "climate change" have become mundane and many people may want to shut them out. Not only many people. The U.S. government itself is leading in erasing all mention of "climate change" in official conversations. This has a chilling effect on the entire information system and will have many ripple effects. As I wrote in a recent note to readers, the U.S. government has been ordering agencies to completely erase all mention of the word "climate" from websites and communications and remove climate studies. But the climate story doesn't listen to political edicts. It continues to unfold, mercilessly, cruelly, in spite of politics. While political forces attempt to erase climate language from our discourse, the physical reality continues unabated, manifesting in increasingly devastating events. Just last week, Richard and Sue Nowell died tragically when wildfires tore through their home near Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba. The fire was described by police as having moved with "unprecedented speed" through the region. This news is wrenching, heartbreaking, but in an era where megafires devour thousands of acres, no longer shocking. And even though we now have a new group of climate deniers espousing that even the phrase "climate change" is "radical", weather doesn't care and will go on disrupting our lives until we get a handle on it. Call Me By My True Names This conflict — needing to communicate about a crisis while navigating resistance to its very name, needing to name something that powerful forces demand to remain unnamed — evokes a great deal of reflection in me. How do we navigate this in 2025? I'm reminded of Thich Nhat Hanh's insight into identity and naming in his poem Call Me By My True Names. In that powerful work, he offers a profound truth about interconnection: that we must recognize ourselves in all people and situations — even the uncomfortable ones. He was writing about his experiences during the Vietnam War, urging us to see that we are not separate from the suffering of others — even those we might view as adversaries. His words were born from a specific conflict, but in my opinion, they apply to all of them. That spirit — of seeing beyond sides, of listening deeply — stayed with me when I went to the oil sands region after the Healing Walk several more times to report on one of the most polarizing issues in Canada. As a journalist, I've always tried to understand as many perspectives as possible. I've made a practice of putting myself in other people's shoes. In the climate story, that's meant being just as interested in the perspective of an oil company executive as in that of an activist. Unfortunately, the oil executives have never been willing to speak with me. I still wish they would. When I was interviewing people in the oil sands region around 2013, many were eager to talk — and what they most often talked about was family. They told me about dinner tables where siblings faced each other across a divide — one working in the oil sands to support aging parents, the other an environmental activist fighting to stop fossil fuel expansion. And yet, the conversations didn't devolve into shouting or slogans. There was a deep recognition of each other's humanity, motivations, and the validity of their concerns. The oil worker understood the activist's fears for the future. The activist understood the worker's need for economic security. In some cases, they both wished the industry could rapidly shift to renewables — that clean energy like wind and sun could replace the paycheques that held families together. They faced each other across a divide — and then asked one another to pass the ketchup, laughed, and felt close again. I met a man who worked in the oil sands to make enough money to build his home in B.C. and fit it out with solar energy. His story embodied the very contradiction we face - using today's carbon economy to finance tomorrow's clean energy future. I was always moved by these stories of home - to me they told the story of Canada's challenge and its potential. I would have loved to have been at those tables myself and to have documented those conversations. As it was, I heard about them second-hand, but even then, I was struck by their warmth and depth and the sense of connection to people and place. These families were having the conversations our nation needed to have - holding space for complexity, for multiple truths, for the difficult tensions between present needs and future consequences. Let's return to where we began – that tailings pond in Fort McMurray. When I stood watching that elder weep, I didn't yet understand what would make my story resonate with hundreds of thousands of readers. I didn't understand how deep what I experienced that day would go, how it would become the catalytic story that led me to found CNO. Looking back, I can see all that. I also understand why it landed with so many people. It wasn't technical language about carbon emissions or climate models. It was the raw, human truth of what's happening to people on the ground – the sound of those cannons, the acrid smell that lingered in my throat for days afterward, the grief of that white-haired elder raising her hands to the sky. Dene Suline hereditary chief Francois Paulette captured this sentiment by saying at the Tutu conference, "The greatest sin that a man can do is to destroy Mother Earth." Perhaps our challenge is similar: to call this crisis by its true names – not just the scientific terminology, but the human experiences, the economic impacts, the community stories that make it real. The elder's tears, the taste of chemicals in my throat, the shattered roofs in Calgary – these too are the true names of climate change. Thich Nhat Hanh's advice to a journalist In my thirties, I lived in Paris and received an assignment from an American magazine to travel to Plum Village, the Zen retreat, to write a profile of Thich Nhat Hanh, the meditation centre's senior monk. I was privileged to spend two weeks at Plum Village and at the end to have tea with the Zen Buddhist teacher on the porch of his humble dwelling near Bordeaux. As he poured me tea, he spoke to me as a journalist about the power of stories. "Stories are like seeds," he said with his gentle smile. "When you tell a story, you plant a seed that can grow in another's heart. Plant a few good seeds." Though Thich Nhat Hanh passed away in 2022, his wisdom continues to guide my approach to storytelling. He understood that change doesn't happen all at once – it begins with a single story, a single seed, carefully tended. Perhaps that's our work today: planting seeds of understanding that can grow even in resistant soil. Finding stories and human experiences that can take root where abstract concepts cannot. By taking on the small task of planting a few good seeds, the larger task of solving massive global problems can be made manageable. Those seeds grow from experiences like that day at the tailings pond—visceral moments that connect us to the reality of our changing world into deeper reflections and concrete actions. The taste of chemicals in my throat from that day at the tailings pond has long since faded. But the lesson remains: Our most powerful stories aren't the ones that insist on their own importance, but those that allow others to truly see and feel our shared reality – stories that plant seeds that can grow into understanding. That's the work I'm committed to. Not because it is easy or because I've figured it all out, but because the people I've had the privilege to meet along the way in the years since I started my journey as a climate journalist and publisher have shown me it's possible. And in times like these, possibility is what we need to cultivate. That's going to mean planting a billion good seeds. That's going to mean saying "climate", even when the most powerful and scary forces in the world order us not to. That's going to mean remembering that the story we're working to tell is the story of ourselves, our home, our miraculous planet Earth. It's the story of our dangerous, remarkable species. Will we be dangerous or remarkable? How will our story end? It's always in the balance — we human beings, with our capacity for both brutality and brilliance, cowardice and courage. The story continues with each seed we choose to plant. We carry within us both destruction and possibility. The future depends on which we feed.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Bill McKibben says 'liberals spreading misinformation' on solar project south of Santa Fe
Bill McKibben, a noted environmentalist known for penning a pioneering book on climate change in the 1980s, has weighed in on the white-hot debate over Rancho Viejo Solar, the large renewable energy and battery storage development proposed south of Santa Fe. McKibben, who lives in Vermont but visited the City Different last fall, had an opinion piece published Sunday in The Santa Fe New Mexican outlining his support for the project and sounding off on its vocal opponents who cite concerns about fire risks and the potential effects on property values. "Imagine my surprise to hear that an outspoken minority has emerged in Santa Fe opposing plans for a large-scale solar array, one capable of supplying a large part of the town's energy needs," he wrote. "In the rest of the country, opposition to renewable energy has come largely from the fossil fuel industry. But in Santa Fe, it's actually liberals spreading misinformation and working against the interests of their neighbors." The project proposed by energy giant AES Corp. has drawn concerns about the risks of runaway fires from lithium battery storage, particularly from residents of the Eldorado area who maintain the facility would affect their property values. Some of them decried McKibben's piece and doubled down on their concerns. Camilla Brom, a Rancho San Marcos resident who started a grassroots group called New Mexicans for Responsible Renewable Energy in opposition to AES' plans, called McKibben's opinion piece "offensive." "It seems like it's turning into a smear campaign," Brom said, adding,"I am not a liberal, and I am only working in the best interest of the community." She added, "We're in a fire-risk zone, so why put anything in this zone that would increase the chance of a fire even more — and so close to thousands of people? In my opinion, it's very irresponsible." The proposed Ranch Viejo Solar project. AES is seeking a conditional use permit from Santa Fe County to build its solar array and battery facility on 680 acres of an 800-acre parcel about three miles south of Santa Fe. Once completed, Rancho Viejo Solar could generate 96 megawatts of power and roughly 45 megawatts of battery storage — enough electricity to carry the city's residential load, AES officials have said. Proponents have said it could play a major role in the state's efforts to curb climate change and argue the project is a safe one. Supporters and representatives of AES also argue new technology dramatically reduces risks posed by such facilities. 'Deep need' McKibben said in an interview locally and regionally organized opposition to renewable energy projects is not unique to Santa Fe County — he has encountered the dynamic elsewhere, including in Vermont. "The comparative weight of risk here is enormously on the side of acting, of building out renewable energy fast," McKibben said. "I think that the risk to the entire world, but also in particular the risk to the Southwest United States, by far the deepest risk comes in rapid alterations in the planet's climate. Those are the fires that y'all are dealing with already and will get steadily worse." McKibben was the special guest at a Santa Fe Conservation Trust fundraiser in September. He also spoke to students at some local high schools, he said. He believes threats posed by climate change present an urgent call to action and stresses a "deep need to say yes in my backyard" — which also is the title of an article he published in the magazine Mother Jones in 2023. "I think that's particularly true for people like me: affluent, older, white Americans, the kind of people who are really good at stopping projects with lawsuits and whatever else," McKibben said. "I think it's really time for us to step back a little bit and say, 'There's got to be some change made here on this planet for those who come after us.'" He has written 20 books, according to his website, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from The New Yorker to Rolling Stone. 020325_GC_RanchoViejoSolar01rgb.jpg (copy) (copy) Joshua Mayer, senior development manager for AES, speaks before the Santa Fe County Planning Commission during a presentation in February about the proposed Rancho Viejo Solar project. The commission voted in favor of AES' permit request for the project. 'Dangerous facility' The Clean Energy Coalition of Santa Fe County, a group with more than 1,000 members who oppose the project, recently noted in an email to members and the community it has raised about $24,500 to fight the solar and battery storage project. Voicing staunch and spirited opposition, coalition members have packed meeting rooms for county land use hearings on the matter. The county Planning Commission signed off on the project Feb. 4. Recently, the organization said it filed an official appeal of the Planning Commission's decision, meaning the County Commission will hear the matter sometime this summer. "You don't put a potentially dangerous facility ... here in the middle of three communities three miles south of a major population center in the state of New Mexico," Lee Zlotoff, president of the Clean Energy Coalition, said in a previous interview. The project's most outspoken detractors, in deep blue Santa Fe County, maintain they support the transition to clean energy but have concerns about AES and the project, in large part due to past fires at AES facilities. One ignited at a facility in Chandler, Ariz., in spring 2022. Earlier this year, a blaze that sparked at a solar battery storage plant in Northern California ignited fresh debate in Santa Fe County over Rancho Viejo Solar. Project supporters maintain battery storage has undergone an evolution in recent years, becoming safer through intensified testing standards and technological advancements. They also argue the project proposed by AES differs in its design from the facility that burned Jan. 16 in California. McKibben's article pointed out the local project would have "fire suppression technology." Brom, however, drew a distinction between fire suppression and "fire extinguishing" technology. "This suppression system, if they don't suppress the overheating in the first cell that overheats, it overheats the other cells and then propagates a thermal runaway fire," she said. Randy Coleman, the vice president of the Clean Energy Coalition, said he feels there are alternatives to a large-scale projects like Rancho Viejo Solar. What's more, he believes Santa Fe County does not have the planning in place to deal with such a facility. "The county is just not doing its duty to look at the risks and plan," Coleman said. "If the county had a plan for renewable energy, then they would see that, from a holistic perspective, there are far better things that they could be doing."
