The Sierra Club Vision for Texas Energy

 

Matthew Johnson is the deputy director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.  Last week on Valentine's Day, the Austin American-Statesman published in its opinion section Mr. Johnson's thoughts about the state of the Texas energy situation.  If his piece was a valentine to the state's energy interests, it was one that had a lot more thorns than roses.

 

As the disastrous power-grid failure during the February 2021 freeze demonstrated, all was not well with the Texas energy infrastructure, and Mr. Johnson notes that in 2023, Texas voters approved spending $5 billion on grid improvements.  But in his view, the trusting voters of Texas, who simply wanted more reliable electricity at lower costs, were betrayed by "greedy industrial corporations," who directed the money into "risky, polluting, and unnecessary gas-fired power plants."  According to Mr. Johnson, this was a betrayal of public trust.  Instead, during the current session the legislature is once more considering funding both fossil-fuel and nuclear plants.  Mr. Johnson thinks nuclear plants are a bad idea, because they have suffered delays and severe cost overruns in the past.

 

What should have been done, and what he hopes the legislature will do instead, is to put our money into energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy such as more wind and solar power.  He favors a regulation that would require electric utilities, "while they don't generate electricity," to "produce energy efficiency savings that offset 1% of the energy they sell."  And he mentions practical consumer measures such as improved insulation, smart thermostats, and retrofitted water heaters.  He concludes with this rhetorical flourish: "Together we have the power to forge a sustainable path forward that benefits all Texans—not just a select few."

 

I agree with Mr. Johnson on some of his points.  Energy conservation is a good thing.  In fact, without any special regulatory incentives such as the one he promotes, the energy consumption per capita in Texas actually went down by more than 6% from 2019 to 2022.  This is part of a long-term national trend that results from a number of factors, including more efficient industrial processes, the changing nature of energy-intensive industries, and replacement of old housing units by newer and better-insulated ones.  Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson's hopes that even more energy savings will occur, the fastest way to make people and corporations save energy is to make it cost more.  And that directly conflicts with one of Mr. Johnson's other hopes:  that energy would cost less.

 

If Mr. Johnson wants our Texas grid to be more reliable, let's consider the one thing that those desperate power dispatchers wished they had on that cold February night in 2021:  rapidly dispatchable emergency generators, robustly insulated for cold weather.  The type of generator that starts up the fastest—in a matter of minutes—is exactly the kind that Mr. Johnson deplores:  gas-fired turbine plants.  Why Mr. Johnson calls them "risky," I'm not sure.  While any process involving flammable gas can go awry, I'm not aware of any special hazards associated with them.  The only significant pollution they produce is carbon dioxide, but they make less CO₂ per kilowatt than coal or oil-fired plants. In fact, a big reason that CO₂ emissions are not higher than they are is the replacement of coal and oil by natural gas. 

 

Reading between the lines, I think Mr. Johnson's vision for our energy future would be as close to a 100% renewable grid as we can get, and the shuttering of all fossil-fuel plants, and no new nuclear plants.  If we could wave a magic wand and turn his vision into reality today, I would currently be typing in the dark until my laptop battery ran down.  It is nighttime in Texas, and the wind is not blowing much, at least in San Marcos.  While for brief moments, the abundant wind generation capacity of Texas has supplied a third or more of total Texas electricity consumption, the average is much less, and the same is true of solar power.  An all-renewable grid would require storage of power that could keep us running for days with little or no wind and long, cold nights. 

 

A surprising amount of battery-based energy storage has already been connected to the Texas grid.  As of 2024, there was almost 10 GW of storage available.  That's nice, until you realize that Texas' electricity consumption has peaked historically in the range of 80 GW.  And those batteries could supply 10 GW for only a short time—a few hours, perhaps.  So even if we had enough renewables to theoretically supply all our needs, we would need about an equal amount of battery storage to keep us going, at an expense that would lead to a lot of energy conservation, no doubt—but there goes Mr. Johnson's hopes of low electric bills again. 

 

And that's the fault of those "greedy industrial corporations," no doubt.  But by its nature, a modern energy grid is a large-scale industrial project, and the best institution we have found so far for organizing and developing such things is the corporation.  As for "greedy," I doubt that energy companies, or solar-power and wind-turbine companies, for that matter, are any greedier than other industrial sectors.  They have to make a profit of some kind to stay in business.  And while I'm sure that the details of how the Texas legislature interacts with energy companies might not bear public scrutiny too well, in my view spending $5 billion on gas-fired turbine generators was about the best way it could be spent.

 

By the way, some electric utilities do generate their own electricity, contrary to what Mr. Johnson says.  Some buy power from companies that only generate, some both generate and sell, and about the only part of the grid that nobody wants is the most essential one:  the transmission lines themselves.  But even that problem is being addressed with so-called "smart grid" developments, which promise to deliver some of the energy conservation that Mr. Johnson wants.

 

Opinion pages are for expressing opinions, and we are all now more enlightened than we were concerning the opinion of a Sierra Club spokesperson about the Texas energy grid.  All I can say is, I'm glad Mr. Johnson isn't in charge of it.

 

Sources:  The opinion piece "Texas needs more renewables—not fossil fuels" ran in the Friday, Feb. 14, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The statistic on Texas energy consumption is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states, and on Texas energy storage capacity I used https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states. 

 

The Permian Basin Petroleum Museum: Oily Propaganda or Necessary Corrective?

 

On a trip to the west Texas city of Midland last week, my wife and I took in the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum.  Full disclosure requires that I let you know the following family history.  My mother's father was an oil-field-equipment manufacturer's representative, and he naturally went where people were discovering oil.  In 1929 that was the Midland-Odessa-Big Spring area, and my mother was born in Big Spring in that year.  So as I owe my existence in an indirect way to the sedimentary deposits of limestone and oil known as the Permian Basin, it's hard for me to be objective.  But I know bias when I see it, and the Museum makes no secret of where its interest lies:  to convince you of the greatness and world-girdling influence of the oil business.

 

It's easy to spot the Museum from Interstate 20:  just look for the antique wooden derrick, the tapered outline of which has become a permanent symbol of oil production, just as an envelope still symbolizes email long after most communications ceased to involve paper.  After browsing among the cable-tool rigs and working pump jacks in the open-air "oil patch," the visitor can go inside, pay twelve bucks (eight for seniors), and sit down to a fifteen-minute video entitled "Mythcrackers."  

 

This slickly-produced show purports to be a quiz program, complete with a young woman emcee whose enthusiasm is equalled by most of the contestants:  an Anglo family on the left and a Hispanic family on the right.  The contestants field questions such as "Are most gas stations owned by oil companies or OPEC?"  A tentative "Yes?" from one contestant prompts a raucous buzzer, followed by the explanation that most gas in the U. S. is sold through convenience stores, and even if an oil company's name appears on the sign, most of the outlets are owned by local franchisees.  On the screen a cartoon of your Average American Franchisee Owner shows up, with an arrow pointing to him and a big sign saying "NOT OPEC" just in case you missed the point. 

 

And it goes on from there, taking on one "myth" after another:  wind and hydroelectric power could replace oil, fracking puts lots of toxic chemicals in the ground, and so on.  Offhand, I don't recall any answer the contestants got right, unless the light eventually dawned and they started giving answers more to the petroleum industry's liking.  The way they cracked the toxic-fracking-chemical one was this:  Most of what goes into the ground is water, most of what they put in is taken out again, most of what's left is innocuous stuff like guar gum and sodium carbonate (this was accompanied by a benign-looking sketch of ice cream and cakes and other familiar products that use such chemicals), and the tiny little bit of chemicals you might not want to put on your banana sundae stay in the ground, far away from any drinking-water well formations.  There now, don't you feel better?

 

In a museum privately owned and funded by people who got exceedingly rich in an industry which truly is an essential part of modern life, to expect even-handed argumentation taking both sides of an issue into account is downright unreasonable.  These people know they are anathema in some circles, and so they're going to make things look as good as they can without outright lying. 

 

But what if you take out a fiction license and construct an entire participatory exhibit around it?  Technically, all fiction is lying, but some people—especially children—are unable to distinguish between fiction and fact.  And that's what bothered me about the second major theatrical exhibit we tried out.  It's called "The Voyage of the PetroTrekker," and the museum's website describes it thus:  "As the tactical engineers of a petroleum exploration vessel, guests journey across land, through space, and under the sea to find new sources of petroleum.  This immersive theater features interactive touch screens, dramatic lighting, and special effects to place guests at the heart of the action." 

 

The "theater" is a Star-Trek-looking circular command post, with places for you to sit and touch screens when a Captain-Kirk-like guy orders the technicians or engineers to do so.  I quickly figured out that the system didn't care if I touched anything or not, so I just watched it. 

 

Somebody spent a ton of money on this thing.  After Not-Kirk explains the mission, the screen shows something like a missile-silo lid opening with the Midland skyline in the background.  But instead of an ICBM, here comes a thing that looks for all the world like a glorified tuna can:  a gussied-up cylinder with a slightly conical top that shoots into the sky and takes off for some tropical clime where oil is suspected of being.  Not-Kirk mutters about needing to get there before some vaguely Oriental-sounding rival company beats us to it, and we see scenes of verdant greenery interlaced with rivers, just before the craft hovers and shoots down a laser beam from the sky to drill an exploratory well, and then sends down microbots that look like mechanical roaches with tails to sniff out any oil and report back to the PetroTrekker. 

 

I found myself thinking, "Wait a minute.  If I'm eight years old and don't know any better, I may go away thinking this is how we actually explore for oil, not realizing that it is really a billionaire oilman's fever dream of how he wishes he could explore for oil."  And what about those people on the ground, hey?  Did you check with them before you turned on the laser? 

 

The exit doors slid open and we emerged to see the rest of what is quite a good historical collection of petroleum-business artifacts.  But whether the PetroTrekker and Mythcrackers are really encouraging the younger generation to take up the mantle of oil exploration and production, which seems to be the purpose for which they are designed—well, let's just say I have my doubts. 

 

Sources:  The Permian Basin Petroleum Museum's website is at https://petroleummuseum.org/. 

Climate Bait and Switch: Why Fossil Fuels are "Not Essential"

 

Writing in December's Scientific American, Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes has penned an essay with the title "Fossil Fuels Are Not Essential:  The industry argues that we can't live without its deadly products.  It is wrong."  How so?

 

She begins with a litany of climate bad news:  record high temperatures, floods, and Hurricane Helene.  All floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and indeed just about every adverse weather event except maybe blizzards and fog are now recruited as evidence for global warming.  Then she quotes a couple of fossil-fuel companies saying things like, "oil and natural gas remain vital" and that there is a "need for fossil fuels that will continue to play a central role in our lives."  That is the bait.  We are primed to learn how fossil fuels are in fact not essential, and we can live without its "deadly" products.

 

Then comes the switch.  Having told us that what these bad-guy corporate fossil-fuel behemoths are saying is wrong, she admits that a transition to renewables will take time, and then accuses them of working for decades to delay it.  In one sentence, the topic has changed from whether or not fossil fuels are essential (present tense) to whether fossil-fuel companies have tried to delay "the transition."  Then she spends the rest of her column summarizing the story of the gasoline additive tetraethyllead, abstracted from a new book with the heartwarming title Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History.  From the 1920s until it began to be banned for health reasons in the U. S. in the 1970s, this toxic anti-knock compound was used in making "ethyl" gasoline.  Yes, General Motors and the oil companies said in 1925 that adding tetraethyllead to gasoline was "essential" because otherwise, the automobile engines of the time could not have used as high a compression ratio without knocking, leading to poorer fuel efficiency and less power. 

 

Admittedly, their use of the word "essential" was biased by their strong economic motives to shift an externality (a low level of lead poisoning in the entire populace) to the public at large in order to prosper the automotive and oil industries.  In 1925, there were 0.17 automobiles per person in the U. S.  One could have argued that autos were not essential in 1925, but they soon came to be, fueled by that nasty ethyl gasoline.  Except for some regrettable and avoidable industrial accidents, we will never know the specifics of how the widespread levels of lead affected public health in general.  If our culture in 1925 had decided the right way according to Oreskes, refused to consider using tetraethyllead, and sent the engineers back to the drawing board, we probably would have muddled through somehow, but with unknown consequences for both public health and the growth of the automotive industry.

 

But what of the assertion that fossil fuels are not essential?  All we get at the end of her essay is this:  "Leaded gas was not essential to civilization, and neither are fossil fuels.  What is essential to civilization is that we dramatically reduce our use of coal, oil and gas—the largest contributors to the existential threat of global climate change—and thereby set our planet on a path toward a safer future."

 

For a historian, Oreskes shows a remarkable lack of consciousness regarding the element of time, which is of course the only reason the discipline of history exists.  She clearly wants us to carry away the message that because the fossil-fuel industry and its allies exaggerated/lied about the essential nature of tetraethyllead in 1925, they are also exaggerating/lying about the essential nature of fossil fuels today.  She also wants us to believe that the two cases are parallel enough to validate her rhetorical point. 

 

Tetraethyllead did not make the automotive industry possible, it only improved its efficiency.  The world could have done without it.  Can the world do without fossil fuels today?  Can it do without them in five years, or ten years, or fifty years?  I call to the stand Vaclav Smil, an engineer and thinker who has studied the problem extensively and is well-versed in facts on the ground.

 

In How the World Really Works and essays derived from it, Smil agrees that global warming is real, bad things will happen if we do nothing to decrease it, and we ought to start doing something now.  So far he is at one with Oreskes.  But in contrast to Oreskes, who I suspect would simply ban or put a prohibitive tax on nearly all fossil fuels tomorrow, Smil's advice as to what we should do right now sounds a little odd.  The two most significant things we could do to abate global warming, he thinks, are to change building codes in cold-weather countries so that more insulation is required, and shift the automotive market away from SUVs toward smaller cars.  That's it.

 

Modern civilization, by which Smil means living in comfortable houses, buying your food instead of killing it, and having a good chance of living to see your grandchildren, is based on four material pillars:  cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia (the essential ingredient of fertilizer).  There is currently no practical way to make any of these materials at scale without using lots of fossil fuels and emitting carbon thereby.  Getting rid of fossil fuels right now means getting rid of cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. If we quit producing all these things tomorrow, we'd have a disaster, all right:  a global depression that would make the one in the 1930s look like a blip.

 

Consequently, he believes that a realistic path to actually doing something about climate change involves small things like building codes and SUV discouragement now, moving toward renewables as they become economically feasible without punitive government intervention, and mitigating such harm as global warming causes in the future. 

 

Maybe some day modern civilization will do without significant amounts of fossil fuels, just as it was hard for the GM engineers in 1925 to imagine making good cars that didn't need ethyl gas. But the facts on the ground are that if we let Oreskes become global energy czar, we would be consigning billions of people to continued poverty rather than allowing them to benefit from the blessings of energy use that people in Cambridge, Massachusetts enjoy every day.  That alone is a reason to favor a more nuanced path than the one that Oreskes tries to get us to believe in by ignoring the passage of time that we will need to get there—which is an odd thing for a historian to do.   

 

Sources:  Naomi Oreskes' article appeared on pp. 84-85 of the December 2024 Scientific American.  Vaclav Smil's article "Beyond Magical Thinking:  Time to Get Real on Climate Change" appeared at https://e360.yale.edu/features/beyond-magical-thinking-time-to-get-real-about-climate-change in May of 2022.  The statistic on 1925 car ownership is from https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-the-USA-population-had-an-automobile-in-1925-What-is-that-number-now.  The book Building the Worlds That Kill Us:  Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz was just published by Columbia University Press.  Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works was published by Viking in 2022.

Electrifying New York — Again

 

Thomas Edison famously electrified New York City in 1882 when the first commercial central power plant in the world went online at 255-257 Pearl Street.  It took most of the next three decades to spread the blessings of electric power through the rest of the city, but it got done without much help from any government.  Electric lights were cheaper, safer, and just better than gaslight or kerosene lamps, and little government intervention was required to persuade millions of New Yorkers that going electric was the thing to do.

 

New York City now faces a new kind of electrification:  the electric car.  As an article in the New York Times recently described, the futuristic vision of having only all-electric vehicles inside the confines of the five boroughs that make up New York is being realized slowly, if at all. 

 

One significant drawback is the lack of public charging stations.  Even after setting a modest goal of installing 120 new charging stations, the city ended up as #93 in a recent survey that rated 100 cities in terms of how electric-car-friendly they were.

 

New York City's commissioner of transportation Hank Gutman is determined to change the situation.  His commission issued a report calling for 1,000 curbside chargers by 2025 and 10,000 by 2030.  Every municipal parking lot will have one-fifth of its slots equipped with chargers, if the plans in the report are carried out.

 

One might ask if those slots will be reserved for electric cars only, of which there are presently only 20,000 registered in all of New York City.  If only electric cars can park in those slots, all this means for the old-fashioned gas-guzzler driver is that the municipal parking lots will effectively shrink by 20%.

 

The electric car is perhaps one of the few major mass-market items whose main selling point is ideological.  From a purely pragmatic individual point of view—whether you are looking at personal safety, saving money, or convenience—there is really nothing an all-electric car can offer that a gasoline model can't also offer.

 

The ideological reason to buy an all-electric car is that it is one small step for a car buyer, but multiply that by a billion or so and it will be a giant leap toward a fossil-fuel-less future in which global warming is defeated.  And this reason cannot be discounted, because I think it is one of the main reasons people currently buy electric vehicles.

 

Whether it makes sense for someone to spend an extra ten to thirty thousand dollars on a car that requires careful logistical planning to make it between charging stations and may not in fact reduce carbon emissions at all if the local electric utility burns coal, is a decision that individuals are free to make.  But so far, despite the growing sales figures of upstarts such as Tesla, the prospect of gasoline vehicles going the way of kerosene lamps by 1910 actually looks pretty reasonable, if you give it another three or four decades.

 

In 1910, there were still lots of people who used kerosene lamps, and it would be another twenty or thirty years before such things were found only in extremely rural areas.  And it would take government intervention, in the form of the Rural Electrification Administration, to bring electricity to the remaining rural areas without electric power.  Still, nobody was forced to put away their kerosene lamps and get connected.  People in rural areas had to wait longer because it cost more to install the lines than in urban areas, but they still wanted electricity as much as their city cousins did.

 

Until all-electric vehicles are cheaper and easier to buy and operate than gasoline-powered ones, it will be like pushing on a string to get most people to buy one.  Some of the string moves when you push on it, but most of it doesn't.  There are those who feel that the chronic global-warming emergency is so urgent that fossil fuels should be effectively banned—taxed out of existence or otherwise made inaccessible to the average person.  This would represent a draconian market intervention by governments in an area where government has not exactly covered itself with glory, judging by similar historical interventions such as the price controls during the gasoline crisis of the 1970s.

 

The technological optimists among us (and on some days I count myself in that number) look to a day when some new and currently unthought-of technology improves battery storage capacity by another factor of 10 and lowers the price by the same factor.  If that happened, electric cars would simply out-perform and undercut the price of gasoline vehicles, which hold the record as being the most complicated mass-produced human-sized object in history. 

 

By contrast, the entire drive train of an electric car is a battery, some electronics, and electric motors hooked to the wheels.  The rest is software, and we all know how cheap software is.  I don't think we'll get to the point that companies will give away electric cars for free as long as you put up with the ads, but it might come close.

 

At that point, we won't need government subsidies or carbon taxes or prohibitions to make the transition from gas to electric vehicles.  People will want to do it of their own free will, and the market will be more than happy to oblige.  But it might not happen for a while yet.

 

One of the most scarce commodities these days is patience.  Even with the vastly superior performance of electric lighting, which was not cheaper than gas to begin with, it took the better part of four decades before most people were able to make the transition.  Heavy-breathing global-warming alarmists may say, "We don't have four decades! We've got to do something now!!"  We are just emerging from the results of two years of governments "doing something now" to fight COVID-19, and offhand I can think of only one of those things that had an unequivocally positive effect on the outcome:  the rapid development of vaccines.  Most other actions arguably did more harm than good, or at least mixed in a lot of harm with the good. 

 

Let's not make that mistake again.

 

Sources:  Ginia Bellafante's article "New York's Electric Car Future Faces Several Challenges" appeared in the Mar. 13, 2022 edition of the New York Times.

The Theology of Global Warming

Last Saturday, October 19, was the date of the Second Annual Global Frackdown.  In case you didn't hear, the Global Frackdown is an international day of activism on which people who believe that global warming is an oncoming train that's about to knock us silly, gather in groups and protest the oil industry's practice of fracking.  Fracking is a technology that has produced renewed yields from old oil and gas fields and promises to make the United States largely energy-independent in a few years.  But there is no question that fracking leads to the burning of more fossil fuel than otherwise, which is the reason for the Frackdown.  According to the movement's website, there were Frackdown events scheduled even in Texas, where fracking is a native industry and practiced widely.  Opponents of global warming seem to believe in their cause with an almost religious fervor, and for some it may be exactly that:  a substitute religion, complete with a theology, an ethics, and an eschatology that foretells doom for the planet unless we get with the gospel of global warming.

The Frackdown is sponsored by an outfit called 350.org, whose guiding light is one Bill McKibben, a journalist and author of such books as Fight Global Warming Now, Enough, The End of Nature, and Eaarth.  The last title requires a little explanation.  McKibben's basic theme throughout is that humanity has transformed the globe into an artifact (thus The End of Nature).  The rather unfortunate neologism "Eaarth" is McKibben's term for Earth.2, the new thing that isn't really a natural environment anymore, but isn't completely under our control either.  Despite the world's new status as a manufactured product, the laws of physics have not been repealed, and McKibben claims there will be absolutely inevitable bad consequences that will follow if we keep acting as though we were just a slight perturbation in the thing we have historically called Nature.  (Picture a 200-pound St. Bernard who still thinks he is a cute little cuddly puppy and tries to sit in your lap.)  Chief among these perturbations is our burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, which began with the Industrial Revolution and continues to be the single most important energy source worldwide.  McKibben appears to believe as earnestly in the pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as he believes in the Bible (he is a practicing Methodist).  The focus of his most recent efforts has been to sponsor grass-roots movements to give the fossil-fuel industry a bad reputation by means of divestiture movements, Global Frackdowns, and other activist measures sponsored through 350.org.  Why 350?  That is the alleged tipping point of parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, beyond which innumerable disasters loom.  The current number (as of May 2013) is around 400 ppm, by the way.

I picked up McKibben's Eaarth expecting a uniform challenge to my blood pressure, and for the first two chapters I found what I expected:  a laundry list of terrible things that will happen, and are already happening, because of global warming, which is said to be largely if not exclusively due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the air.  Storms, droughts, loss of seacoast regions, die-offs of all kinds, you name it.  So far so bad. 

But then I got to Chapter 3, "Backing Off" and I checked the cover to see if the book was really written by only one author.  McKibben turns out to be what I would call a crypto-distributist.  Distributism, as almost nobody knows, was a short-lived political movement popular in England in the 1930s, whose most well-known exponent was the writer G. K. Chesterton.  Its slogan could have been "smaller, more local, more decentralized," and the old principles of distributism are in perfect harmony with McKibben's plans for us to survive the oncoming global-warming disaster.  For example, here's a problem:  climate change may cause entire monocultures of ag-industry genetically modified foods to disappear.  Solution:  have thousands of independent farmers supply hundreds of different varieties to farmers' markets in cities around the globe, and some of them at least will make it.  Problem:  giant fossil-fueled power grids with a few huge plants are wrecking the environment, and giant nuclear plants to replace them would cost too much.  Solution:  spread solar and other renewable energy sources everywhere so that people can be largely energy-independent down to the city block and house level. 

The biggest change McKibben calls for is not technological but cultural.  He thinks we will have to end our love affair with the super-independent lifestyle so encouraged by American culture and commerce, and live more like we used to, in interdependent communities where not only did you know your neighbors, you depended on them for essential things in your life such as services, goods, and jobs.  Only in this way will we survive the bugbear of climate disasters that await us.

Eaarth is really two books: one written by a frenzied climate-change activist, and another written by a pleasant, earnest Methodist Sunday-school teacher who wants us all to get along together and be good little distributists, but without using that word.  I see no indication that McKibben has even heard of distributism, but most of his solutions lie squarely in that tradition.  And to the extent that they do, I by and large agree with them, although my pragmatic side doubts that McKibben and his fellow activists will be able to make much headway against the powerful entrenched political and economic interests who would like things to stay the way they are now.

To the extent that McKibben gets us to have more to do with our neighbors and less to do with huge multinational corporations, I hope he succeeds.  But he seems to have reached the same desirable conclusions as the English distributists through what seems to me to be a long and unnecessary detour through the notion of global warming and its promised doomsdays, which has almost taken the place of a religion for many people.  If you believe that buying an electric car will make environmental Armageddon 0.0001% less likely, then your faith has convenient ways for you to take actions that are unquestionably righteous, and to condemn those bad actors such as fossil-fuel companies that are unquestionably evil.  But life is seldom that simple, and I hope McKibben writes another book that sets forth more substantial and eternal reasons for people to be more neighborly—and leaves out all that stuff about global warming.

Sources:  Bill McKibben's Eaarth was published in 2010 by Henry Holt & Co.  The website 350.org has links about the Global Frackdown and many other related activities.  For more information on Distributism, see my blog of Sept. 22, 2008, "What Is Distributism, and Why Should Engineers Care?"