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catastrophe whose contours are being mapped in the news
almost daily, with pounding hurricanes and ferocious wild-
fires, and whose scale is being charted in the grim reports of
climate scientists noting the steady rise in carbon dioxide from
our global fossil fuel addiction and the shrinking time hori-
zon in which to change course.
We should have acted with real resolve 20 years ago. We
should have done so much more. We will lose species, maybe
whole ecosystems. Millions will lose their homes and liveli-
hoods and even lives before anything like a stable climate re-
emerges. As a parent, I am acutely aware that far too much of
the full cost of this deepening crisis will be borne by my chil-
dren and grandchildren. The news is varying degrees of bad,
and it is only getting worse. It’s too easy to despair.
Yet I remain firmly an optimist, not because I am unaware of
the urgency of the problem but because I’m equally intimate
with a brighter story. It’s the story I’ve been telling in pieces
since I started searching for solutions, and my optimism has
only grown because those solutions have become faster,
cheaper, more common and more effective in the years since.
Stories I used to find on the fringe—stories about renew-
able energy and emissions-free travel and cities built to the
scale of bikes and pedestrians instead of cars—are now main-
stream stories in the daily news. The typical cost of wind
power in the United States has plummeted by two-thirds in
just the past 10 years, and the cost of solar power has gone
into giddy free fall over the same period, dropping by as much
as 88 percent in some places and making solar power by far
the world’s fastest growing source of new energy. In 2017,
China hooked up 10 times more new solar power to its grid
than existed everywhere on earth in 2005. Chinese invest-
ment in renewable energ y now exceeds $100 billion per year.
Tesla Inc., which didn’t exist in the fall of 2000 when I filed
my first story about electric vehicles, makes in excess of
5,000 of its fully electric and wildly desirable Model 3 cars
every week. (There’s even a Tesla dealer at my local mall in
Calgary.) There are also more transit and bike lanes than ever
before in my city. In British Columbia, more than half of all First
Nations are either at work on or interested in pursuing a local
renewable-energy project; Indigenous communities across the
country are similarly engaged.
This whole clean-energy push is still in its infancy, and it’s
accelerating, spreading with a quickness and resolve that even
boosters thought was much further in our future back when
I started talking to them more than a decade ago. You sometimeshear from understandably anguished activists that we spent
a generation doing nothing about climate change. That’s a
straight-up lie and an insult to the engineers and inventors
and urban planners and policy wonks who have spent the past
decade and more building, testing and refining the tools we’ll
use to overcome the climate crisis. I’ve encountered no reason
to doubt that the next decade will see a more rapid and wide-
spread deployment of more and better green technologies
than the last.
These good news stories are rarely as dramatic as raging
wildfires or as noisy as street protests. Beyond the Tesla road-
sters and carbon-free Danish oases, the green future is half-
hidden, politically messy and wonky as hell. But that doesn’t
make the work any less important or any less powerful in its
potential impact.
The tedious and sometimes bewildering day-to-day grind of
municipal governments, for example, can be a treasure trove of
climate solutions. Consider this: Last year, the municipal gov-
ernment of Berkeley, Calif., published a report on what it could
do to shrink the city’s carbon footprint by the largest amount
between now and 2030. The eye-catching stuff was in there—
renewable power and electric vehicles, for example. But by far
the largest reduction—more than four times the size promised
by encouraging electric car use—could be achieved by chang-
ing municipal regulations to encourage denser infill construc-
tion. The biggest step that the city could take would be simply
to encourage more people to live in urban environments like the
ones most city dwellers lived in before the car took over.
In broader urban-planning circles, meanwhile, a hot topic is
the elimination of mandatory parking minimums—the kind of
thing that couldn’t seem less significant at first glance. But
this simple bureaucratic step can radically change the way our
urban environments function, freeing up space for bikes,
pedestrians and transit. Montreal is the latest municipality to
adopt this strategy, joining cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis
and Buffalo. Valérie Plante, the dynamic mayor of Montreal,
added this move to a string of climate-friendly initiatives she’s
enacted since being elected in 2017, from banning traffic on
Mount Royal in a pilot project to committing the city to car-
bon neutrality by 2050.
Zoning and bylaws, parking and density—this isn’t very
many people’s idea of pulse-quickening future-tense specta-
cle. And the answers can seem ridiculously out of proportion
to the scale of the climate crisis. Energy efficiency is another
whole world of simple, unsexy climate-saving tools: Canada
could achieve a third of the emissions target it committed to
at the Paris climate summit simply by fully implementing the
efficiency measures that the provinces and territories have
already pledged to pursue. But it could be a big deal for the
planet’s bottom line. It’s already helping to draw a clear divid-
ing line between hope and despair.
I know which side of that line I’m happiest to stand on.Chris Turner has written several books on sustainability,
including The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the
Oil Sands.The good news stories are rarely
as dramatic as raging wildfires
or as noisy as street protests.
But that doesn’t make the work
any less important or any less
powerful in its potential impact.
notebook OPTIMISM