The headline is hyperbolic; do what you want. But after my conversation with Bill McKibben last week, I’ve realized I’m not a big fan of the oft-repeated talking point: “The renewable energy revolution is inevitable/unstoppable.”
The phrase has been everywhere since Trump’s re-election. It’s headlined news articles, press releases, and academic papers. Last month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres delivered an address alongside a new report on the growth of clean energy, focusing on the theme. “The clean energy future is no longer a promise. It’s a fact,” he said. “No government. No industry. No special interest can stop it.”
There’s a good reason for the statement’s growing popularity: It’s technically true! Renewables—solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy and geothermal—have become astonishingly cheap in the last few years, and batteries to store renewable energy are getting amazing. Today, solar is 41 percent cheaper than fossil fuels, and offshore wind is 53 percent cheaper. That’s despite fossil fuels getting nine times as much government consumption subsidies as renewables. (Global fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $620 billion in 2023, compared to $70 billion for renewables, according to the United Nations.).
But the statement is also incomplete, so much so that it almost dips into paltering. Because while it’s true that special interests cannot stop the world’s shift toward renewable energy, they can significantly slow it. In fact, special interests in the United States are currently slowing the renewable energy transition to such a degree that, by time the world has largely weaned itself off fossil fuels, unthinkable and irreversible climate catastrophes will have already occurred. It’s as Bill McKibben said in our conversation last week:
Forty years from now, we're going to run the whole world on sun and wind ... But if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, forget it. The world that we run on sun and wind is going to be broken.
The clean energy revolution is inevitable. But the clean energy revolution that will significantly slow climate change is not. When we proliferate the former statement without clarifying the latter, we risk lulling climate-concerned people into a false sense of security. I don’t know about you, but when I hear that an outcome I desire is inevitable/unstoppable/rolling-along-just-fine-despite-Trump, that doesn’t inspire me to act. Actually, it makes me feel like I don’t need to act at all.
This is the opposite of what we need to preserve a livable planet. The clean energy revolution that will significantly slow climate change will not happen without action—specifically, a mass organizing movement to loosen red tape around solar and wind development in the United States. As Bill explained to me last week, a lot of this organizing can happen at the state and local level, away from Trump land. That’s good news.
