We Already Have the Solutions. So Why Aren't We Using Them?

Bill McKibben taught a seminar at her college on the IPCC assessment report then current. Its abstract already described tens of millions of people in Bangladesh who would have to relocate because of flooding. It described food shortages from drought. What was known then is arriving now. She lives in Maine, where wells are running dry. Forest fire is a new worry. Tick populations explode because no winter kills them back. Three years ago she sat on her porch watching video of the flooding in Vermont. Vermont was supposed to be one of the safe places. You can see something coming for decades and cannot stop it. The feeling, she says, is a particular kind of fury and heartbreak.

She comes to the room from the Planetary Guardians briefing on their annual Planetary Health Check. The check synthesizes the planetary boundaries science with experts from around the world and points at the interventions that make the most difference. The briefing's news is that the Earth system is at or near several tipping points. The Amazon is moving from a net sink of carbon toward a source of emissions. An El Niño is arriving that is projected to be worse than anything in the record. She recommends everyone read the check.

Climate TRACE is the coalition Al Gore helped found. It uses AI on satellite imagery to locate the largest sources of fossil fuel emissions. It finds the dirtiest power plants in the world. Countries make commitments at the UN, but many cannot afford to track their own major sources. So they cannot aim their limited resources at the right places. Those are the places where a clean energy investment would cut the most emissions and deliver the fastest health benefits. She names it as one of the few AI projects she is a fan of.

Her book's section on money opens with one figure. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the 65 largest banks have put more than eight trillion dollars into fossil fuel companies. The top four American banks alone provided more than 1.6 trillion of it, by her count. Those are JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. The money went to expand extraction. We talk about individual footprints without talking about where our money is, she says. A bank account or a retirement fund is often the biggest part of it. That money is lent out to drill. Moving it takes one day of administrative annoyance. She wants it made cool, the way she wants extremely cool vegans on television.

The tech-bro line is that fusion is coming, or that nuclear is the answer. So the things at hand can wait. Her reply is that there is no single answer, there is an array. Every one of those claims is another reason not to do what we could do now. Nuclear takes a long time to build and costs a lot, even as the price falls. Meanwhile high-speed trains are invented and could go in more places. Buildings can be greened, transit improved and electrified, homes electrified. The food system is an entrenched global industry. It drives deforestation, land-use change, pesticides and fossil fuel use. It is the inconvenient truth about our diets, and it gets the least airtime.

We mostly think of the ocean as a thing being damaged or a source of risk. We do not think of it as a place to look for solutions. Coastal ecosystems absorb more carbon per hectare than forests. The decline of mangroves is starting to reverse. People want it complicated, she says. It is close to this: you bulldozed them, that was bad, plant them back. The same wetlands are nursery habitat for fish, lobster and other crustaceans. They buffer storms physically and blunt sea level rise. She calls it a win, win, win. Protecting and restoring nature, she says, keeps getting pushed down the priority list.

Her Instagram mentions are a mess. She posted that if you drive a car it should be an electric one. The replies asked why she was promoting single-occupancy vehicles. Electric public transit is the priority, she says. But it does not make sense everywhere yet in a large country with a bad train system. Keeping a gas car running forever is not the lower-emission choice under life-cycle analysis. It is less so as the grid cleans up. Batteries and solar panels require mined metals with real labor abuses in the supply chain. Mining fossil fuels is far worse for people and the planet. Kate Marvel wishes scientists did more to help people weigh costs against benefits. Doing nothing, Johnson adds, is also a choice, and often a dangerous one.

E.O. Wilson proposed protecting half the planet. The fights that erupted were about indigenous land rights and whether people would be evicted. She would rather the concept were embraced and the details argued out together. How close can we get in a way that is feasible? Is land back part of it? Strongly held opinions not supported by data are the problem, she says, more than black-and-white thinking. Mezzatesta names the same thing in politics, purity tests. They agree on doing the imperfect things, because they beat doing nothing.

Asked whether capitalism is in the way, she asks for more precision. Concentration of wealth is the problem: roughly a hundred people have the money. They have a very different idea of the society they want to live in. She does not think billionaires should exist, since tens of millions is enough for a ridiculous lifestyle. Tax evasion starves government of what implementation costs. The Republican Party is captive to the fossil fuel industry, she says. That is how the Inflation Reduction Act's home electrification credits got rolled back. The credits were working well at a reasonable cost. The money went to wars instead. Wars are terrible for the climate on top of everything else.

Mezzatesta's show argues capitalism has to be dismantled to solve climate change. Her answer is that both have to happen at once, and that which-comes-first is a false binary. Shift the economy while doing the clean energy transition, fixing agriculture and restoring ecosystems. It gives agency, and it gives a push. Most implementation happens in cities, towns and farms rather than Washington. That is where people can have a large influence. Governors have state budgets. City councils decide on composting and bike lanes. Public utility commissioners set how fast a utility goes clean. She wants pro-social policy without socialism becoming another purity test.

She has donated to the Environmental Voter Project and volunteered with it for about a decade. The project found 11.2 million registered voters whose number one issue is the environment and who did not vote in 2024. That is up from about eight million in 2020. Both hard parts are done for those people: they are registered and they prioritize climate. She hosts weekly phone banks to call them. The calls are not to debate candidates. They ask whether people know their polling place and thank them for being good voters. Whether you voted is public record; who you voted for is private. The behavioral science says people want to be seen as good voters. Some of the people she calls insist they vote every election. She is looking at three missed ones.

She started in the EPA's policy office and took her first job after graduate school at NOAA. She has a large respect for government bureaucrats. They are very smart people doing thankless work for less than the private sector pays. They do it for a bigger impact and, until now, some job security. Her example of what an election buys is Louise Yeung, New York City's chief climate officer. Yeung was Zohran Mamdani's policy director through the campaign. Before that she was chief climate officer in Brad Lander's comptroller's office. There she worked on divesting the city's pension funds. She also worked on whether the city's infrastructure spending accounts for climate projections. It is close to an accounting function, she says. Lander was smart to use the office that way.

A consultant's memo told candidates not to talk about climate and to focus on affordability. She calls it climate hushing and says the data goes the other way. UC Santa Barbara polling finds talking about climate does not hurt and may help. Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project shows it works as a wedge. It is one of the biggest differentiators between the parties, and a majority of Americans are concerned. Something like two percent of politicians' press releases mention it. That is for the largest threat to humanity. In 2020 the Democratic primary field competed over climate platforms. The Sunrise Movement held them to it. That groundswell is missing now. She would take an energy-security framing if it brought the tax credits back. Mamdani did not talk about climate in his campaign. She wants him to be the spokesperson connecting inequality, affordability and climate.

The corporate broadcast networks aired less than thirteen hours of climate coverage in all of 2024. That is under one percent of programming, and down from a few years before. If you are not already interested, you can blink and miss it. Even the extreme weather reporting rarely names climate. Attribution science can now say a storm was thirty percent wetter because of it. She sees an uninformed public shaped by a bad education system, consolidated media and algorithms serving what they think we want. Politicians answer that public. A progressive politics with climate at the center is imaginable to her. Someone has to connect it to the other things people care about. She has not seen enough of it yet.

Mezzatesta asks whether the urgency opens political opportunity. Her read is that the Trump administration is losing its own base on nature. Whoever you vote for, you want to take your family to a national park. That is what taxes are for. People do not want the Endangered Species Act dismantled. They do not want roads bulldozed through wilderness, or oil and gas on public lands. They do not want unregulated data centers putting poison in the air. They will go hard for their park rangers. Add reckless spending on wars and ballrooms while the country has real problems. The frustration reads as fiscal irresponsibility even through a conservative lens.

Mezzatesta worries about eco-fascism, a hard right that weaves climate into raising the drawbridge, as in Germany. She has been thinking instead about homegrown energy gaining ground on the right. She points to Thomas Massie. Conservatives are treating solar panels and batteries as a preparedness mentality. A super PAC of clean energy executives is intervening in Republican primaries. It aims to unseat members who killed the Inflation Reduction Act. By her count it is five for five. Texas and Iowa have the most wind and solar of any states. They benefited most from the act. That is part of the reason they resisted the clawback. The other side is in the polling. Yale and George Mason polling over twenty years shows concern rising in every group except white Americans. That holds especially for white men. There, denial has grown with the political influence of MAGA.

Instead of save the world or die, she thinks about how right we get it. Incrementalism is not fast enough. Increments still matter when they are degrees of warming and inches of sea level. They matter when they are the number of people facing famine or displaced by floods. Ten, twenty or fifty percent better is a large deal. It will not be a perfect world. Species are gone and ecosystems will not recover in our lifetimes. The spectrum of possible futures is still wide. Her own scale is the small town she lives in. How does it adapt its roads and water? How many small farms are there? Does she know the neighbors? She told new ones last week that she has a generator and a battery. If the power goes out, come over.

Her objection to the AI race is that it is anti-community and anti-humanity before it is a climate problem. The climate problem is worse than thought. The planned buildout alone would raise electricity-sector emissions twenty to thirty percent. Tech companies are rolling back their climate commitments. The same companies sell their best models to oil and gas firms. Those firms use them to extract more than would otherwise be possible. Emily Atkin's HEATED newsletter has covered the arithmetic. The total is three to thirteen times the data centers' own emissions. She has never asked ChatGPT a question. She read the 140-page UN climate report herself. She wrote up what she took from it, and her takeaways differed from the newspapers'. Processing information with her own brain and other humans is not something she wants to outsource.

Samantha Montano is the emergency management scholar she interviewed for her book. Montano says the best way to prepare for a disaster is to bring your neighbor a basket of muffins. Then, when things go wrong, look out for each other. Start with elderly people without air conditioning. Their bodies give weaker heat-stress signals, and heat is the number one climate killer. Second: vote, and do not stop at voting. Volunteer, knock on doors, get everyone you know to the polls. Patagonia announces a large get-out-the-vote effort the next day. She wants more corporations pressured into the same. Third is her own project. Make environmentalists seem cool, and welcome people in instead of testing them. May the best climate candidate win.