Bill McKibben | Substack

Source: Bill McKibben | Substack

It is hard, watching the richest men on earth grovel before the new king, not to feel a little fear. I have some early morning bouts myself—perhaps I’ve caused enough trouble over the years for the fossil fuel industry that they will come for me. Those fears are tiny next to those of the millions of immigrant families who must be trembling tonight, knowing that some of their families will soon be cruelly singled out for separation.

My other fear, though, is for what I’m going to call ‘reality.’ As I wrote right after the election, I think the era that began with FDR is ending now—an era marked, imperfectly, by the search for justice. President Carter, buried last week, was at the midpoint of that journey, when it had already begun to falter. President Biden, born under Roosevelt, tried (imperfectly but sincerely) to revive that streak.

Now we will, at least for a time, replace justice with power as our guiding light. Power has always been a contender, of course, and always warped our reality, but now it has much fuller sway. And power, as Orwell perhaps understood best, often works by insisting that up is down. In the case of the climate crisis, which is the deepest problem our civilization confronts, that consists of claiming that global warming is a hoax, and that its main solution—clean energy—is expensive and ineffective. All this has been on display in Washington in recent days, as the grandees of the fossil fuel industry gather to celebrate Trump’s win, and as the president-elect’s cabinet nominees told the Senate that, even if turned out to be real, climate change was no great threat, and that they were intent on reviving even the coal industry with government aid.