There are about a hundred and forty million homes in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family houses; the rest are apartment units or trailer homes. That’s what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from one another. The great majority of them are heated with natural gas or oil, and parked in their garages and driveways or on nearby streets are some two hundred and ninety million vehicles, an estimated ninety-nine per cent of which, as of August, run on gasoline. It took centuries to build all those homes from wood and brick and steel and concrete, but, if we’re to seriously address the climate crisis, we have only a few years to remake them.
So far, the climate debate has gone on mostly in people’s heads and hearts. It took thirty years to get elected leaders to take it seriously: first, to just get them to say that the planet was warming, and then to allow that humans were causing it. But this year Congress finally passed serious legislation—the Inflation Reduction Act—that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to the task of transforming the nation so that it burns far less fossil fuel. So now the battle moves from hearts and heads to houses. “Emissions come from physical things,” Tom Steyer, the businessman and investment-firm manager, who, after a Presidential run in 2020, is focussing on investing in climate solutions, told me. “Emissions come from buildings, from power plants, from cars, from stuff you can touch. It’s not like information technology, which is infinitely replicable. This is one object at a time.”
So the big question is: How do you move from exhortation and demonstration to execution and deployment? Engineers have provided relatively cheap and incredibly elegant technology: the most cost-effective way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. The federal government is providing the biggest infusion of clean-money capital in its history. But can it actually be done? Or is it simply too big a task, especially in the face of ongoing opposition from the fossil-fuel industry?
“So many of us are tired,” Leah Stokes, an energy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. Stokes was an architect of key parts of the I.R.A. during its tortured twenty-month trek through the Senate; at one point, she found herself drafting bill text while in a neonatal intensive-care unit, with her newborn twins. “But we’re at an inflection point in the fight against dirty energy. We can solve the climate crisis.”
“Now is the time for the doers, the implementers, the people ready to roll up their sleeves and dig,” Donnel Baird, the founder and C.E.O. of BlocPower, a heat-pump startup, said. Even before the I.R.A. passed, Baird, the son of Guyanese immigrants who once heated their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, by turning on the gas oven and leaving the door open, had raised a hundred million dollars to work on electrifying whole communities across the country. “If we can green a building, we can green a block,” he told me. “If we can green a block, we can green a neighborhood, and a city. So we should do that, and show everyone it can be done.”
“We’re in head-down, drive-deployment mode,” Billy Parish told me last month. Parish runs a company, Mosaic, that has raised half a billion dollars in financing to become one of the largest lenders to solar projects in the country; it is one of the companies, along with Airbnb and the real-estate broker Redfin, that last month joined the White House to announce plans for educating homeowners on how to access I.R.A. money. “There’s so much clean energy that wants to be built,” he said.
These people have been working on the climate crisis for years. (I first met Parish a few years after he dropped out of Yale, in 2002, to start the Energy Action Coalition, one of the first big campus climate-action groups in this country; Steyer and I have long been involved in campaigns against pipelines and investing in fossil fuels.) But, for all their enthusiasm, they are worried. “If we don’t get implementation right, then it’s catastrophic for carbon, and it also teaches politicians it’s not a winning issue,” Stokes told me. Baird advised the Department of Energy on the creation of green jobs under the Obama Administration, which also set aside money—albeit, considerably less—for renewable energy. “The part I worked on was greening buildings, and we had $6.5 billion, and that attracted another ninety billion dollars in private-sector capital,” he told me. “And, even with that, we couldn’t really pull it off. We weren’t able to invest the private capital. There’s still a ton of work to be done implementing the I.R.A., and if we don’t do it well the politicians will say, ‘We tried, this didn’t work, and we don’t know why.’ And it will be two or three times harder next time.” Parish warned, “There’s a more coördinated effort against clean energy now. It’s still very popular, but it’s becoming more polarized.”
The fear is not that nothing will get done; it’s that not enough will get done, because meeting the climate challenge means, essentially, changing everything. And in America that includes changing a hundred and forty million homes. Essentially, that means replacing furnaces, gas burners, and internal-combustion engines with heat pumps, induction cooktops, and electric cars. “We estimate that there are a billion machines in American homes that have to be switched out,” Ari Matusiak, the C.E.O. of Rewiring America, a nonprofit that is educating communities about electrification funds that are available to them through the I.R.A., told me. Success depends on making sure that those machines are clean. “The market won’t do it on its own, because the market of goods and labor—the market of machines—is a fossil-fuel market,” Matusiak said. “My house has gas pipes in it. If my furnace goes out, or my water heater goes out, the contractor is not going to sell me a heat pump, even though it’s better. They’re going to sell me a replacement for what I already have.”
The scale of the task somehow looks more enormous the closer you get to the ground. Consider Boston, the home town of Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, whose push for the Green New Deal was instrumental in getting the I.R.A. passed, and the city whose mayor, Michelle Wu, has been as outspoken an advocate of environmental politics as any civic leader in the country. And, as of next month, the governor of Massachusetts will be Maura Healey, who made her name, in part, as the state’s attorney general, by suing the fossil-fuel industry for having misled the public about climate change. In 2020, Massachusetts voted for Biden by better than two to one; Boston did by nearly five to one. But Boston has almost three hundred thousand housing units, and Massachusetts, in all, has three million. And even getting new construction to go electric is a trial—as attorney general, Healey had no choice but to rule that state law prohibited town ordinances from banning gas hookups in new buildings. And getting homeowners (and landlords) to switch out gas-powered appliances is just part of the problem. You also have to come up with a stream of clean electricity—solar panels and wind turbines and batteries—to power the new electric ones.
A renewable-energy engineer based in Massachusetts pointed out to me that his state needs close to ten gigawatts’ worth of electrical power to meet current demand. Construction on the state’s first big offshore wind farm, Vineyard Wind, is just now beginning, after a decade of bureaucratic battles, and when it’s done it will supply less than half a gigawatt of power. “Can Massachusetts really build the needed twenty-five offshore wind farms in a decade?” he asked. At least Massachusetts has something. Sam Evans-Brown, who heads Clean Energy New Hampshire, says that his state has just five per cent of the installed solar capacity that Massachusetts has. “Renewables are cheap, and everyone wants them, but there are big gaps in our ability to get it done,” he told me.
Some of those gaps are of the kind that come with any big new industry challenge. For instance, Rewiring America estimates that the country needs a million new electricians just to do the new wiring that will be needed. According to Evans-Brown, the largest solar company in New Hampshire has “taken their entire marketing team and said, ‘Stop selling solar panels, they’re selling themselves.’ Instead, the whole marketing team is now devoted to recruiting electricians.” That shouldn’t be an impossible task. Evans-Brown said that, the previous weekend, he and his wife, Aubrey Nelson, had been in the northern part of the state, where she spoke “with a bunch of kids from a technical high school, working on a house being renovated. They were doing blower-door tests, pulling out the thermal cameras to see where the house was leaking. And the teacher was saying, ‘These dudes are going to be able to make six figures working construction.’ That’s a success story, but it’s not getting out there enough.” Eugene Kirpichov, who runs a new nonprofit called Work on Climate, points out the scale of the challenge. “Compare this to a mainstream industry like software,” he said. “Every school teaches it, everybody knows who the main employers are, and sees it as cool. There are thousands of bootcamps, tens of thousands of recruiting agencies.” At the moment, he says, “There are tens of thousands people in our climate-jobs community, while we need millions.”
There are, of course, other obstacles to working on this scale. Some thirty-five per cent of American homes are rental units, and they usually come with what economists call “split incentives.” As the veteran energy analyst Hal Harvey and the former Times climate reporter Justin Gillis explain in “The Big Fix,” an important book published earlier this year, “The people who design and build buildings almost never occupy them, which means they are not going to pay the utility bills,” something that applies to homes as well as to apartments. “If the architect can save time by not thinking through solar heat loads or overhang angles, she will. If the developer can save money by skipping insulation, which is invisible to potential buyers, he may do just that. And if the builder is not fastidious about insulating the heating ducts, buried deep in the walls, who is to know?”
A conscientious landlord can overcome some of that conundrum. Evans-Brown and Nelson own a small rental unit in Concord, the state capitol, and they just took over their tenants’ energy bills, which means that the incentive to make the energy supply cleaner and more efficient is now theirs alone. But, when they went to install a heat pump, they immediately ran into another problem: big bottlenecks in the clean-energy supply chain. He told me, “We looked to install a whole-house heat pump, which was partly about saving carbon, and partly about me not wanting to lug the window A.C. units up every summer.” (Heat pumps, despite their name, also cool homes.) They had hoped to install it by June, but no condenser units were available, so it didn’t happen until October. Tight supplies and labor force and heightened demand all mean that “I believe that we’re in a period of ‘greenflation,’ when contractors can charge more than they should,” Evans-Brown said. “Right now, they can quote thirty per cent above what they should, because they only have to land one job in five to fill their book, and I worry about that, too. There are going to be some consumer horror stories that get shared.”
Such problems mostly get filed under “growing pains,” and financial incentive eventually overcomes them: if there’s enough demand for electricians, community colleges will start producing them; and if there’s enough demand for condensers, factories will start producing them. When economists talk about the I.R.A. “priming the pump,” this is what they mean.
But, beyond inertia, vested interest also presents a challenge. According to an analysis of World Bank data conducted earlier this year, the oil industry has averaged the equivalent of $3.2 billion, adjusting for inflation, in profits a day for the past fifty years. That’s both a prize worth fighting for and a war chest ample enough to make the fight prolonged and bitter. And we don’t have much time—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the United States must cut emissions in half by 2030 in order to keep on track to meet the targets set in the 2016 Paris climate accords. “We’re in a knockdown, drag-out fight,” Stokes told me. “Because our opponents, every day they delay us, they make money.”
So the battle will be fought at the global level. At last month’s COP27 climate talks, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, there were six hundred and thirty-six official fossil-fuel lobbyists in attendance, and the largest national delegation—more than a thousand people—came from the United Arab Emirates, which produces more oil per capita than all other countries except for Kuwait and Qatar, and which will host next year’s climate summit. Saudi Arabia and China tried to block any mention of phasing out fossil fuels in the final text of this year’s agreement; a recent analysis of academic research databases revealed that Saudi Aramco, the state-owned petroleum company, had financed “almost 500 studies over the past five years, including research aimed at keeping gasoline cars competitive or casting doubt on electric vehicles.”
And the battle will be fought at the national level. In this country, even before the G.O.P. won back control of the House in the midterms, Eric Lipton reported in the Times, fossil-fuel lobbyists were boasting that they could undercut much of the I.R.A. funding for energy transitions. The head lobbyist of the American Gas Association told an industry conference in Minneapolis that Republicans are “champing at the bit to do some oversight to try to change the law where they can.” They aim, for example, to gut a $4.5-billion section of the bill that would give rebates worth as much as fourteen thousand dollars to low- and moderate-income households that install heat pumps, induction stoves, or other appliances that use electricity instead of gas. Lipton notes that “there is almost glee” in the lobbyists’ voices “when they discuss the possibility of helping draft questions for Biden Administration officials, such as Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.” According to Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil-industry trade association, Haaland “has managed to dodge questions when she’s before a Democrat committee chair. I don’t think she’ll get that same treatment when the Republicans are in charge.”
The most damaging campaigns, however, are aimed at the local level—at the places where those millions of houses sit, or where those arrays of solar panels will have to be built. BlocPower’s Baird told me, “I just spent a week with state energy officers in a hotel in Florida for a conference. There’s energy and excitement about the I.R.A. money, but there’s more confusion and concern. And more than that, risk aversion.”
If you want to see this fight playing out in all its hard particulars, you can pick almost any state. North Carolina, for example, is a purplish state that’s home to a powerful utility, Duke Energy, but also to a lot of sunshine, and a vibrant small-scale-solar legacy. Tyler H. Norris, who grew up in the mountains twenty miles southeast of Asheville, earned a degree in public policy at Stanford and, when he was twenty-three, started working for the Obama Administration, advising on clean-energy investments initiated by the recovery plan for the 2008 financial crisis. In 2017, Norris returned to North Carolina, to help run a division of Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar-development company.
Five years later, the state’s Democratic governor managed to pass what Norris called “the first ambitious decarbonization mandate in the Southeast.” Under the legislation, statewide emissions are supposed to drop seventy per cent by 2030, and to net zero by 2050. “It kicked off a new wave of development, and you’d think the I.R.A. and its money would be gasoline on that spark,” Norris said. But the law also gives “big amounts of discretion” to the state’s Utilities Commission, and their plan remains unclear. Duke Energy “has been pretty oppositional to accelerating the pace of solar deployment,” Norris said, and they’ve “proposed a hard, fixed cap on the amount of renewables that can be added in any given year.” According to Norris, under those rules, the state can’t add more solar capacity than it did in the twenty-tens until 2028.
Duke, for its part, is reportedly hoping to incorporate small modular nuclear reactors in time to meet much of North Carolina’s decarbonization goal. In fact, Norris told me, “We work a lot with the environmentalists here—with the Sierra Club, and the Southern Environmental Law Center and so on—and there’s generally an openness to investing in nuclear research and technology.” He added, however, that “the attitude is ‘Let’s see how far it gets’ ” and, if “it comes down the cost curve and it’s available, then let’s take that into serious consideration. But we have no idea if it’s going to be available, and at what cost. It’s incredibly speculative.”
Also at issue, Norris says, is slow-walking the number of “interconnects”—upgrades to transmission lines to accommodate new power generation—that utility companies are offering to solar developers. In essence, utilities have to provide a path for the new electrons to flow—until they do, the solar panels are just pricy sheets of black glass. As Norris and Gillis put it in a Times Op-Ed earlier this month, “Huge backlogs of renewable energy projects have built up around the world as developers are refused permission to pump their power into the grid.”
Battles over transmission upgrades will be a major sticking point in the years ahead in many places—and even from opposing sides. Sometimes, the issue involves building new corridors for electric power lines, and local environmentalists have often moved to block such projects. Jigar Shah, who is the director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, pointed to a referendum in Maine last year, backed by local green groups, that killed a major new transmission corridor in that state. “These advocates are not really serious about giving people access to modern energy,” he told me. But, as Gillis points out, more often it’s the almost invisible local upgrades to transmission lines that become a bottleneck. “You want to develop a solar project somewhere, and you get control of the site—you sign a lease option with a farmer, say. And then you put your project in what’s called the ‘interconnect queue’ with the local utility. And then, depending on the state, you wait years to see whether you can build the thing or not. Nationwide, there are nearly enough solar and wind projects already in the interconnection queue to meet Biden’s goal”—of reducing emissions forty per cent by 2035—“but they’re not going to get built, because people can’t get answers. The power companies are still resisting upgrading the lines.”
And now the industry and its allies are going after projects before local authorities grant them permits, enlisting putative concern for the environment and ginning up NIMBY battles. Offshore wind, for instance, will have to be a large part of the energy mix, and in some ways it’s easier to site projects out at sea, especially now that new technology allows turbines to be built in deeper water, farther from the coasts and their vista-loving homeowners. But, as Emily Atkin and Michael Thomas recently reported in the newsletter Heated, groups such as the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation have gone to court to block all offshore-wind development, not just in the Gulf of Mexico, on the ground that it could harm marine mammals—particularly the three hundred and fifty right whales that remain in the North Atlantic. It’s clearly possible to take protective measures to safeguard whales, such as by limiting underwater construction noise, and timing the work to avoid collisions between vessels and migrating whales; the Natural Resources Defense Council signed off on one such plan in June. And it’s just as clear that the T.P.P.F.—whose largest donors have included Koch Industries and the Koch family foundations—is not acting in good faith. Among other things, it has previously attacked environmental groups for trying to block oil drilling that endangered lizards in the Permian Basin. The group also supplied a series of officials for jobs in the Trump Administration who, in the words of one trade journal, “overwhelmingly reject climate science” and “promote more fossil fuel consumption.”
The same kind of manufactured opposition is shaping up on land. For many years, surveys found that solar energy was incredibly popular across political groups—Republicans, independents, and Democrats all favored far more public support for photovoltaics. But front groups sponsored by the fossil-fuel industry have begun sponsoring efforts to spread misinformation, crisscrossing the country with slide shows claiming that wind turbines routinely catch on fire, or lower property values, and that solar farms shed toxic chemicals into the water supply. “There’s always been some run-of-the-mill NIMBYism,” Norris, the North Carolina solar developer, said. “But there’s an increasingly organized opposition effort.” One vocal opponent, Robert Bryce, was formerly a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which has taken millions of dollars from various Koch entities in the past decade. Bryce is now the custodian of the Renewable Rejection Database, which tracks defeats for clean energy across the country. A recent entry, from Seneca County, Ohio, reads, “The County Commission passed a resolution on November 23 banning large wind and solar projects.” (Bryce described the database as a “journalistic document.” He added, “I’m not an opponent of solar—I’m a critic of it.”)
“Based on the way that project approvals work, it’s going to come down to a county-by-county basis,” Norris told me. “I thought solar energy was insulated from the culture wars until relatively recently, but it’s getting worrying.” Nationally, Billy Parish said, “We used to be able to say solar polled in the low nineties for popularity. But I think that’s probably begun to trail off a bit, become a little more polarized. It’s still very popular, but there’s definitely slippage.” And that slippage could mean a thousand different fights, each one delaying change past the point where the climate crisis slips irretrievably out of control. “Thanks to the I.R.A., money is not the chief obstacle,” Gillis said. “What Congress did was change the economics of the technologies we’re talking about. But what they did not do was remove all the other barriers slowing us down. Really, economics was the tailwind for renewables already. It just got better with the I.R.A. But the other friction remains.”
Which means that the task for those who want to see quick climate progress is to help smooth that friction. Some of that work will be familiar to activists, such as testifying at public-utility commissions or running for posts on zoning boards. “We need people who are willing to actually do the legwork,” Shah said. “To go to a city-council meeting and get in people’s faces. To say, ‘I have a turn to speak here, I understand the procedure.’ And there needs to be people behind that person who can write up the talking points and prepare the slide deck.” America consists, Shah notes, of almost twenty thousand cities and towns. “Five people in each, that’s a hundred thousand people. Which is doable. But there has to be an intentionality behind it.”
But other work will seem less familiar to people whose focus has been fighting pipelines or battling for congressional legislation, in part because it’s less confrontational. To understand the new imperative, Shah, who, before he went to the Department of Energy, worked for SunEdison—which is now defunct, but in the early twenty-tens was one of the biggest renewable developers in the nation—offered a lesson on the economics of transitioning to renewables. “If you want to put solar on your roof right now, it would cost about four dollars a watt,” he told me. “That’s not because of the equipment—the equipment is only $1.20 a watt. But it’s really expensive to acquire customers. The salesman has to go to your house, like, four times.” Environmentalists have been “so focussed on stopping things that they haven’t really focussed on building things,” Shah said. “They thought the private sector would focus on that. The private sector can do the first five per cent, the first eight per cent—it can find the early adopters. But the mid mass market, the late mass market—they’re really expensive to market to. That’s why solar is still four dollars a watt. If you want it at $1.85, then people have to work together. Cities, utilities—they have to aggregate demand together.”
You can see the difference in other countries. About three per cent of single-family homes in America have solar panels installed, compared with about thirty per cent in Australia, where “soft costs,” such as acquiring customers, are much lower. Anya Schoolman has been trying to close that gap. She runs the nonprofit group Solar United Neighbors, which started in 2007, when her son Walter and his best friend, Diego, then in middle school, watched Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and decided that they wanted solar panels on their homes, in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Installing them was complicated and expensive, but Schoolman figured that bulk purchasing would make it easier and more affordable. The boys signed up forty-five neighbors in the first week, and the Mount Pleasant Solar Cooperative was born. “It took us two years, and that included a lot of politics,” Schoolman told me. With funding from foundations and donations, she organized SUN to take the work national. SUN has now helped organize three hundred and fifty group purchases across the country, and the process now generally takes about eight months to complete.
As Schoolman explained it, “First, we get invited into the community by local groups: environmental organizations or churches or maybe the League of Women Voters.” SUN then conducts about three months of sessions in the community, explaining “the technology, what it costs, the policies that can make it more or less affordable.” (Those policies vary widely across the country, Schoolman says; in D.C., thanks to more generous subsidies, the payback time for a solar project can be three years; in Indiana, it’s eleven.) Once people sign up, the group screens their roofs to insure that solar will work for them. “We’re about consumer protection,” she said. “If they’ve got a north-facing roof with a pine tree, we try to find an off-site community solar project for them to buy into instead.”
Once a couple of dozen households have committed, SUN sends out requests for bids from local contractors, and then members of the homeowners sort through them. Because Schoolman’s campaign finds the clients, saving contractors about three thousand dollars per customer in marketing costs, they can bid much lower for the job. “And now they can do all the work in one neighborhood at the same time. They can take the paperwork for ten rooftops to the permitting office at a time.” Before long, she said, the power is flowing, and “to close the cycle at the end, we have a big party, and we invite the media, we invite local elected officials to participate and take credit, and that gets on the wheel for the next cycle.”
The initiative for Rewiring America, which was founded two years ago, came from Saul Griffith, an Australian engineer who, at M.I.T., built the most thorough flow chart of American energy use ever assembled. (Lighting billboards requires 0.005 per cent of American power, if you were wondering, compared with flying military jets, which takes up 0.5 per cent.) He says that much environmental thinking—persuading people to buy smaller cars, or to turn down the thermostat—can’t scale quickly enough to meet the climate crisis. In his book “Electrify,” Griffith writes that a lot of Americans “won’t agree to anything if they believe it will make them uncomfortable or take away their stuff.” When Ari Matusiak, who was a special adviser to President Barack Obama before building a large nonprofit, signed on with the group, he brought in advisers including Leah Stokes and Donnel Baird.
With the passage of the I.R.A., Matusiak says, the organization is set to go to work. As he put it, “We’re launching a national consumer-awareness campaign, with the core thesis that the I.R.A. created an ‘electric bank account’ for every household in America. It’s just that people don’t know they have this bank account. It’s money that they can claim by accessing machines that are going to save them on their energy bill.” (The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the I.R.A. would cost about three hundred and seventy-nine billion dollars, but the funding is essentially uncapped for the next ten years—it will pay out for any qualifying project.)
The group is scheduled to launch a big program, called Rewiring Community, in the new year. It will partner with civic and local leaders to help people secure I.R.A. funding. Converting oil furnaces to heat pumps, and installing insulation and other efficiency measures covered under the I.R.A., Matusiak told me, would save homeowners almost two thousand dollars a year in energy bills, and the process would create thousands of new jobs in a midsize city. If a lot of people raise their hands and say, ‘I want a heat pump,’ it’s a clear signal to the contracting community: ‘We should train our people on that machine so we can get the business.’ But, to get that hand raised in the first place, you have to organize the organizers, everyone from the mayor on down.” Or, as Justin Gillis put it, “Gloomism has gotten us where we are so far. But now let’s take these carrots that Congress has created and dangle them in front of every freaking rabbit out there.”
It’s hard to handicap the outcome of this fight. You’d think that the Saudis and the oil companies would have the better of it. But electric cars are quieter, and easier and cheaper to maintain, than cars that run on gas. Heat pumps beat furnaces in cost and ease of operation. A magnetic induction range can cook food without triggering a child’s asthma. Lots of farmers are eager to build solar projects, especially now that we’re learning how to graze animals and grow specialty crops between the panels. Eventually, these advantages will win out. Eventually, though, is too far away. This is the next phase of the fight, and we have to win it fast, which means that the need for mass movements hasn’t gone away, just begun to shift in focus. ♦
An earlier version of this article incorrectly outlined the North Carolina Utilities Commission’s role in renewable capping, incorrectly named Robert Bryce’s database, and misattributed a statement about Bryce’s funding to Tyler Norris.
