By Alex Trembath
“The technofix is in,” wrote the environmental ethicist Clive Hamilton ten years ago, in response to the publication of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” Hamilton saw in ecomodernism a crude, baseless faith in technology. “The roadblock to climate mitigation has never been technological,” he wrote. “Nor has it been economic. It has been political.”
We ecomodernists at Breakthrough have been parrying attacks of this nature from environmentalists since our founding. So it was with no small measure of amusement that I read in The New Republic that a new book by Bill McKibben, the nation’s chief environmentalist, “makes the case for going big on solar power—and abandons climate angst for ecomodernist optimism.”
McKibben even seems to have anticipated this reaction, writing in the introduction to the book that his solar enthusiasm “is not, I think, a ‘technofix,’ but something far more fundamental.”
And like McKibben, I was not surprised that other environmentalists have bumped against the solarmaxxing vision in his book. The title, Here Comes the Sun, certainly evinces its own kind of crude faith in technology. While other leading environmentalist figures have voiced sharp skepticism of ecomodernism and the new abundance consensus, McKibben has been more strategic, earning a place in at least Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s vision of abundance. This week, McKibben launched “Sun Day,” a successor to Earth Day celebrating “the cheapest forms of power on the planet, lowering costs, creating new jobs, and strengthening our communities.” As my colleague Ted Nordhaus wrote in his own review of Here Comes the Sun, “McKibben has attempted to refashion himself as something of an abundance advocate.”
McKibben’s strategic ambiguity on abundance is a long time in the making. McKibben was an important interlocutor when Nordhaus and Shellenberger released their essay “The Death of Environmentalism” in 2004. That essay argued for a new environmental coalition “whose interests in economic development can be aligned with strong action on global warming.” And McKibben was substantially more thoughtful about the eulogy than many of his peers. “There's something almost exhilarating in knowing how bad a situation really is,” he wrote of the essay. “Spared the false hope that maybe things will get better on their own, at least you have permission to think expansively about what to do differently.”
Since then, in an apparent effort to reconcile his long-standing techno-pessimism with a more “convivial environmentalism” as he put it, McKibben took on a pair of dueling personalities. In his longer-form writing, he remained the growth-skeptical public intellectual, while his more visible public persona took on the form of the solarmaxxing climate activist. In books like Deep Economy, Eaarth, and Falter, he argued that “growth simply isn’t enriching most of us.” In front of adoring crowds, on the other hand, McKibben has long demurred on these degrowth commitments, preferring to celebrate the abundance and job-creating potential of renewable energy technologies.
So when Ezra Klein asked McKibben on his podcast a few years ago whether decoupling or degrowth was more likely to deliver climate salvation, McKibben hedged. “I think in 100 years, it’s unlikely human beings will be amusing themselves by consuming immense amounts of stuff. I think we’re likely to have moved beyond that. But in seven years, I doubt it,” he told Klein. “So we better figure out how to make electric cars work, at least for now. And we better do it very quickly.”
In other words: decouple now, degrow later.
How is such a hedging—a fusing of ideological opposites—possible? The answer is the modern solar panel.
Solar irradiation is simultaneously one of the most abundant sources of useful energy available to humans, and a central talisman of the ecological degrowth left. It is simultaneously a diffuse ecological flow of energy, imposing a putative natural limit on economic growth, and a simply massive volume of energy, capable of providing substantial useful electricity and heat if captured. As my colleague Seaver Wang wrote in a recent piece on solarmaxxing, “Solar’s modularity is genuinely revolutionary, delivering scale at both the Jeffersonian level of the rural homeowner and the Hamiltonian level of the gigawatt-scale ‘solar farm.’”
These cultural contradictions were simply not a factor during the launch of the modern environmental movement, when solar energy was much more expensive. Solar energy’s high cost was arguably a feature, not a bug, for environmentalists. Indeed the state of photovoltaic technology in the 1960s and 1970s made it possible for Amory Lovins to advocate for solar energy while simultaneously declaring that “it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.” (NB: McKibben approvingly quoted Lovins in his newsletter this month.)
But then solar energy got cheap, scrambling clean energy politics. And it’s via these newer cultural contradictions of solar energy that environmentalists like McKibben flirt their way into the abundance camp, even as they oppose other abundance causes like permitting reform, nuclear energy, industrial agriculture, artificial intelligence, and, indeed, economic growth. And in this way, solar energy becomes perhaps the biggest “technofix” of them all. To the solarmaxxers, photovoltaic panels have not only the power to provide abundant energy and solve climate change; they have the power to obviate the most fundamental political disputes, such as those between authoritarianism and liberalism, or between degrowth and abundance.
And while solar’s newfound affordability and modularity are genuinely impressive technological advancements, McKibben has little time for solar energy’s downsides. You’ll find nary a mention in his writing, for instance, of Uyghur slavery in Chinese solar manufacturing. Other challenges to solar maximalism are handwaved away with a nod to Lovins, or McKibben’s favorite disgraced energy analyst, Mark Jacobson. For each obstacle encountered in solarmaxxing, there is a technical and immediate solution. It’s techno-fixes all the way down.
All technologies, of course, have their impacts and tradeoffs. The test of a good-faith technology advocate is whether he acknowledges those tradeoffs, or papers over them with an activist's zeal. Likewise, the test of a good-faith abundance advocate might be whether he supports the abundance agenda outside his own narrow interests. And the test of a good-faith energy analyst is in whether he expresses any humility at all in forecasting the final destiny of the global energy system. Arguing that humanity is on the cusp of becoming “sun worshippers” once again, as McKibben does in his new book, bespeaks something other than humility.
In these ways, to solarmaxx is to abundance-wash old-school environmentalism. Now, our friends in the YIMBY movement have done an admirable job developing antibodies to similar forms of abundance-washing, for instance by calling out elected officials who try to pass off defense of status-quo zoning rules as a housing affordability agenda. Energy abundance advocates would do well to develop some antibodies of their own.
McKibben has referred to solar panels as “magical.” And to be clear, in the view of this author, he’s right. Photovoltaics are cheap, commoditized, and highly modular, capable of transforming diffuse photons into highly useful electric current. They will contribute substantially to the energy abundance agenda and, in that way, are “indistinguishable from magic” in the Clarkeian sense.
But there’s a difference between magical technologies and magical thinking.
The paragraph near the end about the good-faith tests should be underlined twice and inscribed in stone somewhere useful. Well said.