Page 223 - Demo

311feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed%u2014by the narrowest of margins%u2014one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and kept finding more money for the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines. As those industries grew, they got more politically powerful, a virtuous cycle that reliably cleared the way for more new funding.Eventually, responding both to the changing economics and to ever more impassioned demands from young people, even Wall Street investors began to treat the fossil-fuel industry with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines%u2014and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its remaining political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.Other easy eco-friendly gains came in our homes. After a century of keeping a tank of oil or gas in the basement for heating, people quickly discovered the appeal of air-source heat pumps, which turned the heat of the outdoors (even on those rare days when the temperature still dropped below zero) into comfortable indoor air. Gas burners gave way to induction cooktops. The last incandescent bulbs were in museums, and even most of the compact fluorescents had been long since replaced by LEDs. Electricity demand was up%u2014but when people plugged in their electric vehicles at night, the ever-growing fleet increasingly acted like a vast battery, smoothing out the curves as the wind dropped or the sun clouded. Some people stopped eating meat, and lots and lots of people ate less of it%u2014a cultural transformation made easier by the fact that plant-based burgers turned out to be at least as juicy as the pucks that fast-food chains had been slinging for years. The number of cows on the world%u2019s farms started to drop, and with them the source of perhaps a fifth of emissions. More crucially, new diets reduced the pressure to cut down the remaining tropical rain forests to make way for grazing land.In other words, the low-hanging fruit was quickly plucked, and the pluckers were well paid. Perhaps the fastest-growing business on the planet involved third-party firms that would retrofit a factory or an office with energyefficient technology and simply take a cut of the savings on the monthly electric bill. Small businesses, and rural communities, began to notice the economic advantages of keeping the money paid for power relatively close to home instead of shipping it off to Houston or Riyadh. The world had wasted so much energy that much of the early work was easy, like losing weight by getting your hair cut.But the early euphoria came to an end pretty quickly. By the end of the 2020s, it became clear we would have to pay the price of delaying action for decades.For one thing, the cuts in emissions that scientists prescribed were almost impossibly deep. %u201cIf you%u2019d started in 1990 when we first warned you, the job was manageable: you could have cut carbon a percent or two a year,%u201d one eminent 15What kinds of changes does McKibben predict will happen quickly in the future world he describes? What do you find striking about these kinds of changes?225 Bill McKibbenCopyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.