To the Editors:

Regarding Bill McKibben’s review of The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything [“It’s a Gas,” NYR, January 15], and with all due respect to McKibben, I believe that his characterization of the transition to a wind and solar economy as something easily within our grasp, once the political obstacles are overcome, is entirely misleading. It’s time to inject some more realistic thinking into our understanding of what will be involved in such a transition if it ever becomes politically feasible.

Just to start with the often heard claim that solar and wind energy are now the cheapest energy sources. This is true only if you disregard the fact that the major shortcoming of these energy sources, intermittency, is being backstopped by the existing, mostly fossil-fueled grid. It is providing the base load of continuous power generation, which is the prerequisite for 24/7 electricity on demand. Without the conventional grid, as would presumably be the case with a fully renewable-powered grid, the base load would depend on energy storage, in other words, millions of batteries, which would drive up the cost of renewable energy considerably. As things now stand, renewable energy accounts for only 14 percent of world energy use, and is completely dependent on integration into the already existing nuclear and fossil-fueled grid systems. If renewables are ever scaled up to replace those systems, then we will see the true cost of these alternate technologies and all the necessary infrastructure their intermittency will require.

As is usual in these discussions of the energy transition, one glaringly obvious fact is never mentioned. Solar and wind generate electricity. Electricity accounts for only 18 to 20 percent of total energy usage worldwide. A fully renewable grid will make only a small dent in our dependence on fossil fuel. Although the ideal goal is to electrify as many nonelectric processes as possible, this can only be done to a certain point. The high heat vital to processing metals is a case in point. Although many are looking into various ways of decarbonizing these high-heat processes, none of them are currently feasible, or scalable. High heat is just the tip of the iceberg of indispensable processes that are completely dependent on fossil fuels, especially petroleum. Even if carbon-free substitutes are technically possible, implementing them will require the creation of whole new industries—in a time of increasing resource scarcity and climate-caused economic disruption.

The foregoing is only the beginning of a long list of considerations that make laughable the idea that the green transition can be easy or cheap. Be that as it may, the single most unrealistic claim of those who promote the green transition as a panacea is that solar and wind are renewable. Sunlight and wind are flows, but solar panels and wind turbines are machines made of nonrenewable resources. They are the products of heavy mining and heavy industry, no different than an internal combustion engine or a coal-fired power plant. Their one advantage is that during their working lives they do not emit carbon. Every other aspect of their existence is as heavily dependent on fossil fuels as any other manufactured product. Whether that will ever change—i.e., will a solar panel ever be brought into being using only “renewable” energy—is highly controversial. Not for the foreseeable future, that is beyond doubt.

So the real question is not how cheap solar/wind energy is, or how technically easy it will be to use these technologies to decarbonize. The real question is how great will be the environmental cost of the mining, the refining of metals, the manufacturing of components, the unavoidable pollution, the toxic waste, et cetera, et cetera, to create the literally millions of solar panels and wind turbines the transition will call for. And let us not overlook another fact: that these machines wear out, and need to be replaced—in the case of solar panels, every twenty years or so. Whatever the environmental cost of the transition, it will have to be paid over and over again. Perhaps the final question is whether this is even possible, and more to the point, is it even desirable? Can an already damaged and depleted Earth bear the burden of our attempts to perpetuate the industrial civilization that has inflicted so much harm on it already?

For all of McKibben’s good intentions, I fear that his techno-optimism is a kind of fairy tale, the effect of which is to deflect us from the true profundity and complexity of this moment in the history of life. CO2 buildup in the atmosphere is just one symptom of a larger man-made crisis of ecological overshoot which is catastrophically altering not just the atmosphere but the entire biosphere, which can justifiably be called an “ecocide.” The green transition will do nothing to address this overarching crisis and will in fact make it worse.

What to do? I don’t know. I do know we need more realism in the face of an overwhelming existential crisis that involves all life on earth. Just acknowledging that “renewables” are not renewable is a good place to start.

Mark Roller
San Francisco, California

I’m grateful to Mark Roller for producing an almost pitch-perfect summary of the anti-renewable talking points that have been in circulation for decades. These would have been wrong in, say, 2016, but in 2026 they are just silly.

To proceed more or less in order, renewables are now increasingly backstopped not by fossil fuels but by batteries, which have grown cheaper at a stupendous pace. As the European think tank Ember reported in December of last year, after 40 percent falls in the cost of battery storage over the last two years, “solar is no longer just cheap daytime electricity, now it’s anytime dispatchable electricity. This is a game-changer for countries with fast-growing demand and strong solar resources.” If you want to see this in action in America, Texas is a good place to start—as one journalistic account put it in September, a combination of new solar and batteries allowed for a “record-setting grid-stabilizing summer” in the Lone Star State.

The idea that “high-heat processes” are beyond the reach of solar- and wind-powered electricity is another relic; as those radicals at the World Economic Forum reported in 2024, we can already see decreases in emissions from the so-called hard-to-abate sectors. China seems to have stopped approving new steel plants that use coal, for instance, transitioning to electric arc furnaces.

It is of course the point, not the problem, that sun and wind generate electricity—which, as the writer may not know, is endlessly more efficient for moving vehicles, say, or heating homes than the thermal energy produced by internal combustion. That’s one reason EVs are now gaining such widespread popularity—60 percent of all car sales in China, for instance, in the most recent period. The EV and the e-bike, the heat pump to replace the furnace, the induction cooktop to replace the open fire in the kitchen: these are easy and economical transitions. Taken as a whole, the most comprehensive study of our planet’s energy system, from an Oxford team, found tens of trillions of dollars in savings from a rapid transition to renewable energy. That’s because we would no longer have to pay for constant deliveries of coal and gas and oil. Instead, having financed the upfront costs of solar panels and wind turbines, we’d be able to take advantage of the free energy coming from the sun. (The study doesn’t begin to calculate the savings from not grievously warming the planet.) A small taste of this bounty will come later this year when all Australians will start getting three free hours of electricity each afternoon.

The idea that solar panels and wind turbines are “heavily dependent on fossil fuels” is a straw man; more and more, of course, their manufacture (mostly in China) relies on solar and wind energy, but in any event the payback time in carbon terms for that manufacture is increasingly measured in months. A boatload of solar panels will, over its lifetime, produce a hundred times as much energy as a boatload of coal. You can recycle these components, and increasingly we are. In fact, the manufacturing process gets so much more efficient over time that when the solar panels on my roof that date to 2000 are taken down and recycled, the materials inside one panel—the silver, say—will now suffice for five or six new panels. The obvious contrast here is with fossil fuel—once it’s burned, it’s gone, and you immediately have to go mine some more. The total mining burden on the planet for a renewable energy system will be, by most accounts, far smaller than the current burden of mining coal.

Roller believes that I am trying to distract attention from the perilous ecological moment. In fact, I’ve spent my life drawing attention to it; my book The End of Nature (1989) is sometimes regarded as the first book for a general audience about what we now call the climate crisis. In the forty years I’ve been working on this problem, the rapid rise of clean and cheap renewable energy represents the first real tool that might…not stop global warming, but shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet will get. And each tenth of a degree moves a hundred million of our brothers and sisters out of safe climate zones and into perilous ones. I think the kind of rhetoric he employs is as damaging in its way as President Donald Trump’s constant references to “green scams”; many people recognize that Trump is carrying water for the oil industry, but they might be fooled by Roller’s archaic professions of concern. Those who hope for a different kind of planet are invited to join us at SunDay.earth, as we work to change the laws and policies that slow this transition.