words by bill mckibben
artwork by lulu lin
It’s always difficult to tell what trajectory the world is on—whether the events filling our days signal something genuinely new being born, or old forces straining to hold their ground. That confusion is especially acute in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. His default governing style is manic action: He says and does more in a day (almost all of it ugly and wrong) than former presidents would say and do in a month. He appears to set the agenda by force alone, invading Venezuela, say, and demanding its oil, tearing at its institutions as if novelty itself were power.
Step back, though, and the picture looks different. Despite the daily churn, what’s become clear over the last 12 months is that two forces are reshaping this world in ways far more consequential than Trump’s aggression—and they are both profoundly new. These forces may, in fact, be the action, and Trump the reaction.
The first is the ever-mounting impact of a hotter planet. Climate change is, for the moment, not an urgent political issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there, exerting pressure that grows year by year. Some of its effects are unmistakable: the burning of Los Angeles, say. Others are quieter, but just as important, like the insurance industry rapidly losing its ability to price risk in a world increasingly governed by new physics. Without that backstop, capitalism starts to seize up, leaving homeowners stranded and lenders reluctant to finance projects in places where the next disaster could wipe out a balance sheet. This is what climate change looks like in the economy. It doesn’t need to win elections to matter; it can afford to wait, steadily gathering force.
The second force is the relentless fall in the price of energy from the sun and wind. This is an economic fact as stubborn as gravity. For the past four or five years, we’ve lived on an Earth where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. Last year, roughly 95% of new power generation globally came from renewables.
“Trumpism is not some new force reshaping the world. It’s an old, familiar, often ugly reaction to genuinely new realities.”
In a rational world, the confluence of these two forces would push our societies in the right direction. We face a planetary crisis, and we possess a solution that also saves money. And in some ways, that alignment has begun, albeit too slowly. Global conferences convened to confront the climate crisis eventually produced the Paris agreement. Meanwhile, the falling price of solar and wind is driving a surge in deployment, and speeding the spread of technologies like electric vehicles and heat pumps that can make full use of this new bounty. It comes too late to fully fend off global warming, but not too late to shave tenths of a degree from how hot the planet ultimately becomes—and each tenth can mean the difference between hundreds of millions of people living in relative safety or escalating risk. It might not be salvation, but clean, cheap energy remains a powerful tool.
That tool is also a weapon aimed directly at the fossil fuel industry’s dominance. A world that runs on sun and wind is a world in which Big Oil eventually shrinks—perhaps one day to the point of becoming small oil. But industries that can see their future narrowing rarely go quietly. That reality helps explain the events of the past year in the United States: an almost unbelievable assault on reason in all its forms.
The Trump administration has moved to shut down the agencies and instruments that measure what’s happening to the Earth. It has threatened to turn off foundational climate instruments, including the Mauna Loa Observatory, whose measurements first revealed the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere. Trump’s actions aren’t because the climate crisis is slowing down. On the contrary, they read as a defensive reaction to a worsening emergency and to the political pressure that comes with acknowledging it.
The same logic applies to energy policy. By denying climate change, the administration has also rejected basic energy economics. Offshore wind farms along the Atlantic seaboard have been halted. Solar development in the southwest desert has been constrained. Federal lands have been closed to renewables even as new subsidies are being offered to coal miners to keep working jobs the market has already left behind. Meanwhile, utilities have been pressured to keep operating coal-fired power plants long after they ceased to make economic sense.
“One year into Trump’s return, the state of the union is increasingly defined by misalignment between what science—and now economic markets—make unavoidable and what federal power is still trying to suppress.”
I’m not trying to be sanguine. The damage wrought by the Trump administration this past year is deep and dangerous. And given the short time we have to deal with the climate crisis, its recklessness may well be fatal. If we melt the Arctic, we don’t have a way to refreeze it. And if the Atlantic currents falter, the consequences will dwarf anything politics can contain.
Still, I think it’s important to understand how these forces work. Trumpism is not some new force reshaping the world. It’s an old, familiar, often ugly reaction to genuinely new realities. Our task, then, is to recognize it for what it is and do what can be done, given the present distribution of power, to bring reality steadily to the foreground.
Climate change increasingly does that on its own. When Los Angeles burns, people understand, at least intuitively, why. Disaster makes the reality hard to deny. It may be even more important, in the short run, to help people understand the new truths about solar and wind. We’ve called them “alternative energy” for so long that the phrase still implies marginality. In fact, they are now the default, and the only bottleneck is the politics and infrastructure still lagging behind.
One year into Trump’s return, the state of the union is increasingly defined by misalignment between what science—and now economic markets—make unavoidable and what federal power is still trying to suppress. Climate disruption is still reshaping daily life, clean energy is still remaking the economy, and yet federal policy continues to slow recognition to the point of self-sabotage. This gap between physics, economics, and us is the central political fact of the moment. And it will continue to shape the next three years, but also the country Americans will have to live in long after.
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A Year On, Bill McKibben’s (Green) State Of The Union
