On Thursday, 2,800 Americans died from Covid-19. That is more than died on September 11, 2001 in a horrific attack that sparked a national convulsion and two wars that are still ongoing.

If an accident or attack had violently killed this many US citizens in January of this year, there would have been a reckoning, a demand that authorities bring the full might of the country to bear on finding and addressing the causes. It would have been experienced as an unbearable collective tragedy. The names of the dead would have been carved into a new national monument.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, infections started slowly and grew. There was no line crossed, no sudden trauma that shook us awake, just a creeping death toll spread out over to which we have been incrementally adjusting for nine months.

But now there’s a 9/11 happening every day, and there’s still no real national mobilization. We can’t even get everyone to wear masks. Millions of people traveled for the Thanksgiving holidays, despite expert warnings that the Covid surge is ongoing.

Because the virus crept up on us, we adjusted to it, like we’re adjusting to climate change, like we adjust to everything. It’s called “shifting baselines syndrome” and it’s the theme of a piece I first published back in July. It is, unfortunately, at relevant as ever.

For as long as I’ve followed global warming, advocates and activists have shared a certain faith: When the impacts get really bad, people will act.

Maybe it will be an especially destructive hurricane, heat wave, or flood. Maybe it will be multiple disasters at once. But at some point, the severity of the problem will become self-evident, sweeping away any remaining doubt or hesitation and prompting a wave of action.

From this perspective, the scary possibility is that the moment of reckoning will come too late. There’s a time lag in climate change — the effects being felt now trace back to gases emitted decades ago. By the time things get bad enough, many further devastating and irreversible changes will already be “baked in” by past emissions. We might not wake up in time.

That is indeed a scary possibility. But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all.

No moment of reckoning arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable, but it never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the sustained attention of any particular generation of human beings. Instead, it is treated as rising background noise.

The youth climate movement continues agitating, some of the more progressive countries are roused to (inadequate) action, and eventually, all political parties are forced to at least acknowledge the problem — all outcomes that are foreseeable on our current trajectory — but the necessary global about-face never comes. We continue to take slow, inadequate steps to address the problem and suffer immeasurably as a result.

David Wallace-Wells, author of the popular and terrifying climate change book The Uninhabitable Earth, discussed this possibility in a New York Magazine piece written during the apocalyptic fires late last year in Australia. One might have thought that fires consuming hundreds of millions of acres and killing more than a billion animals would be a wake-up call, but instead, Wallace-Wells writes, “a climate disaster of unimaginable horror has been unfolding for almost two full months, and the rest of the world is hardly paying attention.”

Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.

Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.

Concepts developed in sociology and psychology can help us understand why it happens — and why it is such a danger in an age of accelerating, interlocking crises. Tackling climate change, pandemics, or any of a range of modern global problems means keeping our attention on what’s being lost, not just over our lifetimes, but over generations.

Shifting baselines are a form of generational amnesia

In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly published a one-page article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution titled “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome in fisheries.” It contained no original experiments, no numbers or equations, but it went on to be the most cited and widely discussed thing he ever wrote.

Pauly had something particular in mind about the transition from pre-scientific (anecdotal) to scientific data, but the conceptual architecture of shifting baselines also proved to be incredibly fruitful in other contexts and went on to be “revolutionary for the field of ecology,” write Jeremy Jackson (an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and Jennifer Jacquet (an environmental studies professor at New York University). The notion was later introduced to the public by filmmaker Randy Olsen in a 2002 LA Times piece and has since become a subject of much popular discussion.

So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.

And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.

Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.

“An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare,” says Pauly in his TED talk on shifting baselines. “So you don’t lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore, they’re not perceived as a big loss.”

The same phenomenon is sometimes called “generational amnesia,” the tendency of each generation to disregard what has come before and benchmark its own experience of nature as normal.

A 2009 study from researchers at the Imperial College London examined a series of case studies, from “hunters’ perceptions of change in prey species populations in two villages in central Gabon” to “perceptions of bird population trends of 50 participants in a rural village in Yorkshire, UK.” Sure enough, they found evidence of generational amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs because younger generations are not aware of past biological conditions.”

It’s easy to see the same thing happening on a larger scale with climate change. Few people are aware, in a conscious way, of how many hot summer days were normal for their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. Recent research shows that “extremely hot summers” are 200 times more likely than they were 50 years ago. Did you know that? Do you feel it?

It’s not just intergenerationally that we forget, either. The Imperial College researchers also demonstrated the existence of another form of shifting baselines syndrome: personal amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs as individuals forget their own experience.”

Just as generations forget about ecological loss, so do individuals

It turns out that, over the course of their lives, individuals do just what generations do — periodically reset and readjust to new baselines.

“There is a tremendous amount of research showing that we tend to adapt to circumstances if they are constant over time, even if they are gradually worsening,” says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He cites the London Blitz (during World War II, when bombs were falling on London for months on end) and the intifada (the Palestinian terror campaign in Israel), during which people slowly adjusted to unthinkable circumstances.

“Fear tends to diminish over time when a risk remains constant,” he says, “You can only respond for so long. After a while, it recedes to the background, seemingly no matter how bad it is.”

He notes that big events, or “teachable moments,” can momentarily shock us into willingness to make big changes, but “a teachable moment is only a moment,” he says. “Once the fear is gone, the willingness to take measures is also gone.”

Even those big personal moments fade quickly. One of the most robust findings in modern psychology — made famous by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert — is that we have an incredibly robust “psychological immune system.”

We tend to dramatically overestimate the effect that large events, good or bad, will have on our happiness. We think the death of a family member will make us enduringly less happy, or winning the lottery will make us enduringly happier. In fact, what psychologists find again and again is that we quickly return to our personal happiness equilibrium. A soldier who loses a leg and a soldier who returns home safe to a new baby will generally, a year or two later, be roughly as happy as they were before those events. It’s called “hedonic adaptation.”

Just as we adjust emotionally, we adjust cognitively. We forget what came before; we simply don’t think about it. For the most part, only our recent experience is salient in defining our baselines, our sense of normal.

The process of forgetting, of resetting, is almost impossible to resist, even for those acutely aware of it. In 2013, author JB MacKinnon released a book called The Once and Future World, about the extinction crisis and the abundant natural world that Americans are barely aware is draining away.

“Even though I spent several years writing a book about things disappearing from the natural world,” MacKinnon says, “I can’t hold it in my head. I have to go back and reread it in order to refresh my eyes so that when I go out into the natural world, I think, ‘there are things missing here’. Otherwise, I’m just gonna go, ‘What a beautiful day’.”

“I mean, who remembers what the price of coffee was 10 years ago?” he asks.

Humans view the world through the lens of recent experience

UC-Davis environmental economist Frances Moore thought of a clever way to test this phenomenon of short-term salience in the context of weather.

How many times must unusual temperatures be repeated before they cease to be experienced by individuals as unusual? How fast do unusual temperatures become unremarkable? To find out, Moore and colleagues turned to Twitter. In a study published last year, they analyzed Twitter’s massive US database to correlate unusual heat or cold events with chatter about the weather. In this way, they tried to track the “remarkability” of temperature anomalies.

“Something crazy happens, and then the same crazy thing happens the next year, and people are able to realize, ‘Oh, it’s two crazy things’,” Moore says. “Then it starts happening again, and people start to think, ‘I guess this isn’t so notable anymore.” Accordingly, tweets about the weather decline.

How quickly does the effect take hold? “The reference point for normal conditions appears to be based on weather experienced between 2 and 8 years ago,” the study concluded.

“It’s a powerful phenomenon, this normalization or reference-dependent utility,” Moore says. “It’s not super-rational behavior.”

The study’s conclusion about what this portends for climate change is unsettling: “This rapidly shifting normal baseline means warming noticed by the general public may not be clearly distinguishable from zero over the 21st century.”

Let that sink in. Even though atmospheric temperatures are, on a geological time scale, changing at a headlong pace, on a human time scale, they are still changing too slowly to be perceptually or emotionally salient. Put more bluntly: The public may never notice that it’s getting warmer.

Research based on social media in a single country has obvious limitations, and Moore is reticent to speculate about how long the window of salience might be for other kinds of weather, or in other places.

But it stands to reason that something like the same window applies to other natural or even social phenomena. It may be just as likely that the public never notices the increasing intensity of storms or frequency of flooding or regularity of crop failures. However rapidly those phenomena might change, they rarely change fast enough to be dramatically different from conditions two to eight years ago.

The window of experience that humans find emotionally and cognitively salient is simply too narrow to take in long-term changes in ecological systems. What was unthinkable to previous generations — say, regular nuisance flooding in southern Florida — is normal now. What seems unthinkable to us now — say, stay-at-home orders in large swathes of the US Southwest for several weeks a year due to dangerous heat — will be, by the time it rolls around, not that much worse than what came just before it.

We adjust; we can’t help it. If we wait for ecological change to thrust itself into the consciousness of ordinary Americans, we may be waiting forever.

Shifting baselines apply to several other social problems

Once you start thinking in terms of shifting baselines, you start seeing them everywhere, not just in ecology.

What is the unending debate over the “normalization” of Trump but a debate over shifting baselines? President Trump has degraded and discarded longstanding norms of presidential behavior with astonishing speed and recklessness, but it has proven incredibly difficult for the press and the public to assess his record based on pre-Trump baselines. This is why people are always asking, “What if Obama did this?” They are trying to ask, “Why have we shifted our moral and political baselines so quickly?”

Similarly, the US is busy normalizing the grim reality that college graduates will enter a world of high debt, expensive housing, and parlous job prospects. The post-war expectation of a middle-class life with a family-supporting job and a reliable pension might as well be ancient history.

Shifting baselines are evident in the steady erosion of unions, the militarization of police, and the infusion of US politics with dark money. They are even evident, as we’ll discuss in a moment, in our experience with Covid-19.

For the generation of Americans coming of age today, Trump, gridlocked politics, and a rapidly warming planet have become normal. Can the incoming Biden administration convince them that they should expect, and demand, something better?

How to fight shifting baselines and personal amnesia

The human propensity to rapidly adapt is part of our evolved cognitive and emotional machinery. But our ability to heed and remember the past is also shaped by culture.

“I looked at Native Hawaiian culture,” MacKinnon says. “They had individuals within communities who were assigned to have a social relationship with species that were never even given names in English.” North America’s indigenous cultures still carry an enormous amount of accumulated knowledge that can help reveal what’s been lost.

That kind of historical consciousness — a day-to-day awareness of the obligations that come with being a good ancestor — has faded. And modern consumer capitalism might as well be designed to erase it, to lock everyone into an eternal present wherein satisfying the next material desire is the only horizon.

One answer is for journalism and the arts to pull the lens back and try to recenter a richer historical perspective. One ambitious effort to do that is journalist John Sutter’s Baseline 2020 project. He and his team have picked four locations around the world that are particularly vulnerable to climate change — Alaska, Utah, Puerto Rico, and the Marshall Islands — and will visit them every five years until 2050, documenting the changes facing the people who live there. (It is modeled on director Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries, which check in on the same group of Brits every seven years.)

“Change is invisible in any one moment,” Sutter says. He notes that scientists often do studies that last for years or decades, but “that longitudinal approach just doesn’t happen in journalism.” Taking the long view is one way to make changing conditions salient and emotionally impactful.

In a similar spirit, artist Jonathon Keats has designed a special camera to take a 1,000-year exposure of Lake Tahoe. He calls it a “sort of cognitive prosthesis, a mechanism for us to be able to see ourselves from that far-future perspective.” The Long Now Foundation, established by Stewart Brand in 1996, has been hosting seminars to spur long-term thinking for decades.

“Culture will hang on to knowledge of things that are changing or gone longer,” MacKinnon says, “if those things are the kinds of things that they pay attention to.”

It’s not just about documenting decline, either. There have been long-term victories, too — reductions in poverty, increases in the number of educated young girls, declines in air pollution, and so forth. These also happen incrementally, often beneath our notice. We adjust our baselines upward and do not register what, over time, can be substantial victories. Making those victories more visible can help show that decline is not inevitable.

There is no substitute for leadership and responsive governance

It can not ultimately fall to ordinary people to hold baselines stable. On these matters, as on much else, they take their cues from their leaders. Studying and understanding the long arc of history, considering the experience of previous generations and the welfare of coming generations, making decisions with the long view — those are things leaders are supposed to do.

The most reliable way to stop baselines from shifting is to encode the public’s values and aspirations into law and practice, through politics. They can’t be held steady through acts of collective will. They have to be hardwired into social infrastructure.

Unfortunately, US politics has become almost completely unresponsive, which reinforces rather than ameliorates our slipping baselines. One crucial part of registering a crisis as a crisis is a sense of agency, and Americans increasingly feel that they have no ability to shape national policy.

Negative changes “are normalized more quickly if you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Moore. “That might be what’s going on with the coronavirus — people don’t feel like they have agency on a collective level, because the government is not doing anything, so their response is to say, ‘well, I gotta live my life’.”

On top of that, it’s just tiring to feel anxious for so long. “The combination of adaptation and fatigue is absolutely deadly in terms of our ability to respond to the virus at this point,” says Loewenstein.

What if Americans simply accommodate themselves to thousands of coronavirus deaths a day? As writer Charlie Warzel noted in a recent column, it’s not that different from the numbness they now feel in the face of gun violence. “Unsure how — or perhaps unable — to process tragedy at scale,” he writes, “we get used to it.”

Biodiversity loss, deforestation, and climate change may make pandemics more common. It is not difficult to imagine Americans forgetting a time when mingling freely was taken for granted. When being in public did not mean constant low-level exposure anxiety. When there weren’t regular waves of infection and death.

“If we keep getting zoonotic disease pandemics, then we’ll just say, ‘well, here comes the winter one, catch you on Zoom until June’,” says MacKinnon. “Our baseline could shift to the point that we don’t remember there was a time when people went most of their lives without hearing the word pandemic.”

Our extraordinary ability to adapt, to get on with it, to not dwell in the past, was enormously useful in our evolutionary history. But it is making it difficult for us to keep our attention focused on how much is being lost — and thus difficult for us to rally around efforts to stem those losses.

And so, little by little, a hotter, more chaotic, and more dangerous world is becoming normal to us, as we sleepwalk toward more tragedies.

The heat stored in the Earth’s crust, known as geothermal energy, is carbon-free and effectively inexhaustible. There’s enough of it to run all of civilization for generations, if it could be cost-effectively tapped.

Tapping it turns out to be no small feat, but efforts have ramped up recently due to new urgency by the climate crisis and the search for low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels.

The cutting edge technological developments in the field (including, yes, lasers) are devoted to drilling deeper and deeper, into hotter and hotter rock. Heat anywhere from 302°F (150°C) up to 703°F (373°C), where water enters its “supercritical” phase and above, can be used to profitably generate electricity.

But electricity is only half of the geothermal story. Well before humans generated electricity with it, they used geothermal heat directly, to bathe, cook, and heat buildings, among other things. Geothermal direct heat is still used today in industry, agriculture, and for buildings, but only a tiny fraction of its potential has been unlocked.

When it comes to direct use of heat, geothermal resources don’t need to be quite so hot. It doesn’t require 300°F to heat the air in your home to 68°F. Just about anything 50°F or above (which is available just 10 feet down or so) can be used for something, whether drying grain, running a greenhouse, melting ice on airport runways, or heating commercial buildings.

Geothermal heat is accessible almost everywhere and useful in a wide range of applications. The US Department of Energy has a research program devoted to these “low-temperature and co-produced resources.”

But the most important application, in my mind, is the use of low-temperature geothermal resources for large-scale heating and cooling of buildings.

Heating and cooling buildings isn’t as sexy as electricity in the energy world these days, but it is important, representing just over 12 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions and a larger proportion of emissions in cities, many of which have aggressive decarbonization goals. To achieve those goals, they need to figure out carbon-free heating, and geothermal is one of the best (out of very few) options.

In this post, we’ll dive into the other half of geothermal: heat. First we’ll take a look at the market and the need for low-carbon heat. Then we’ll look at the technologies and companies involved, and wrap up by considering how government might help accelerate the development of geothermal solutions.

It’s hot, or at least warm, stuff!

Decarbonization means an improved competitive landscape for geothermal heat

Cities across the world are setting aggressive decarbonization goals, pledging to zero out their direct carbon emissions by 2050. The first three challenges facing a decarbonizing city are electricity supply, transportation, and heating and cooling of buildings. The pathways to decarbonization of electricity and transportation, while extremely challenging, are at least fairly well understood: renewable energy, electric vehicles, and good urban design that minimizes the need for cars.

For most cities, though, heat is a big unanswered question.

Oil and natural gas furnaces will need to be phased out, which means cities will need an extraordinary amount of low-carbon heat to compensate. And low-carbon options are much more limited in heat than in electricity.

Some furnaces can run on biomethane, other biofuels, hydrogen, or hydrogen-derived fuels, but in a mostly electrified world, low-carbon liquid fuels are likely to be used for high-value applications in industry and transportation — not heating your living room.

That leaves geothermal district heating or, at an individual building level, electrical options like electric resistance heating or heat pumps. In heat pumps, it’s either air-source (exchanging heat with the outside air) or ground-source (exchanging heat with the earth). The latter is far more efficient. And geothermal district heating is the most efficient of all.

In a decarbonizing world, it is these — the other low-carbon heating options — that will eventually comprise the competitors in the heating and cooling space. It’s a competition some decarbonizing cities, like Boston, are already grappling with. Boston will have trouble building lots of new electrical infrastructure to heat buildings with electricity, so it is leaning toward geothermal.

So what exactly are the technologies that can provide heat from the Earth? There are two basic categories. Let’s start by looking at the smaller side.

Ground-source heat pumps are the most efficient source of individual building heat

It’s a bit of a fudge to include ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) here, because technically they do not make use of geothermal energy. They make use of stored solar energy, from sunlight striking the Earth’s surface. It’s only when you get much deeper, or in active volcanic areas, where you get into heat from the planet’s core. If you want to be precise, GSHPs harvest solar heat stored in the shallow earth.

I don’t think this terminological issue matters all that much though — it’s heat in the earth!

Anywhere from 10 to 1,000 feet beneath the surface, the temperature is a steady 54°F, year-round, everywhere in the country. GSHPs take advantage of that fact to heat and cool buildings. When the air is colder than 54°F, they draw heat from the earth; when it’s hotter than 54°F, they dump heat into the earth.

A GSHP consists of two parts. The first is the “ground loop” pipe buried beneath the ground with water circulating through it. Via conduction, the water draws heat from (or returns heat to) the earth, so the more pipe surface area there is, the more efficient the system. That’s why there are often several loops of pipe in the overall ground loop. The rule of thumb is one loop equals one ton of capacity, which equals about 12,000 BTU per hour. An average US home will need 2 to 3 tons of capacity, thus two to three loops (or one very deep one).

The second part is the heat pump itself, which sits inside, connected to the ground loop, exchanging heat with the water via a vapor compression refrigerant cycle (not unlike the way your refrigerator exchanges heat with the surrounding air). In the winter, it takes heat out of the circulating water and puts it into the air, thus warming the building; in the summer, it takes heat out of the air and puts it into the water, thus cooling the building.

You can think of a GSHP as two linked heat transfers. Via the ground loop, the water exchanges heat with the earth; via the heat pump, the water exchanges heat with the indoor air.

Because ground temperature is basically the same 10 or 1,000 feet below the ground, somewhat counterintuitively, the depth of the ground loop doesn’t matter much. What matters is the square footage of pipe exposed to earth. Installers use either long horizontal loops or deep vertical loops depending on the project. (Most projects these days are “closed loop,” meaning no fluids are exchanged with the ground, but in the right circumstances, an “open loop” system that works directly with water heated by the earth can work.)

A GSHP is not generating heat, like an oil or gas furnace, but harvesting heat from the ground. The water does not circulate itself, of course; it requires electricity to run a GSHP. But in terms of units of heat out per units of energy in — what they call, in the business, Coefficient of Performance (COP) — it is the single most efficient way to heat a building.

An oil or gas furnace has a COP less than 1; one unit of energy input produces about 0.7 to 0.9 units of heat. Electric resistance heating (baseboard heaters, wall heaters, space heaters) have a COP of 1. Air source heat pumps (ASHPs), which draw heat from the outside air rather than the earth, vary somewhat with the temperature of the air, but generally can reach a COP of 3. GSHPs, depending on the climate, can get to 4, or as high as 6. (They work better in extreme climates, with a high temperature differential between air and earth, than in temperate climates.)

In the best circumstances, GSHPs are 600 percent efficient. Nothing else, except a district heating system serving multiple buildings, can match that efficiency.

GSHPs are an old technology — they first popped up in the US around 1940 — with well known benefits and drawbacks. On the benefits side, the system runs quietly, operating costs are low, maintenance costs are low, there are no indoor pollutant emissions or GHGs, and it lasts a long time. (Heat pumps inside can last 25 years; ground loops can last 50 years or longer.) It is a nice thing indeed to already have a GSHP installed.

Unfortunately, it has also been expensive as hell to install one. They typically run from $20,000 up to $50,000 in upfront costs (quite a bit more than your $1,000 natural gas furnace) and installing them has typically involved extensive drilling and excavation that can last for weeks (quite a bit more than the 1-2 day turnaround for a gas furnace or ASHP). These limitations have made them impractical for most homeowners.

At least at the moment, when it comes to a remodel, it’s a real question whether GSHPs are worth the additional cost over and above ASHPs, which have improved enough to work in almost any climate. If an ASHP isn’t enough for a given building, it’s generally cheaper to reduce heating needs through insulation and efficiency than it is to buy a bigger system.

For new builds, though, “geothermal is a no brainer,” says Adam Santry, the president of Allied Well Drilling. “You don’t need any [tax] credits. Rolling [a GSHP] into your mortgage, you are cash flow positive that first month.” The savings on heat are greater than the loan payment on the GSHP, right off the jump.

“Yes, there’s an upfront cost,” says Alan Skouby, a 40-year veteran of the industry now with GeoPro, Inc. “But it will pay for itself in relatively short order, and once it’s paid for, it’s a money printer.”

GSHPs face a problem that all sorts of clean-energy technologies early in their cost and development curves have encountered: Though they pay off in the long run, the substantial upfront investment often deters customers. The two key strategies for growth, then, are reducing those upfront costs and spreading them out over time through clever financing.

One new company is currently attempting to do both, focusing on the residential market.

Dandelion is trying to make ground-source heat pumps easy

The secretive X Lab at Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has been working away on clean energy problems, spinning off companies as it goes. One of them, formed in 2018, is called Dandelion, and it is directly attacking the problems that have held GSHPs back.

Dandelion’s team “didn’t grow up in this industry, they grew up in the solar industry,” says Skouby. “They’re coming to all of this with a fresh perspective.”

Typically an HVAC contractor can install a furnace or an ASHP themselves, harvesting all the profits and tax credits. For a GSHP job, they have to find a drilling subcontractor and split the profits — more hassle for less money. They also frequently have furnaces in stock that they need to move, and might need to special order a GSHP. The incentives don’t line up.

One of Dandelion’s key moves has been to vertically integrate, to pull all those links in the supply chain into one organization. The people who find customers, assess properties, drill ground loops, and install heat pumps all work for Dandelion, so they can coordinate efficiently.

Vertical integration also means Dandelion can order custom-built, high-quality equipment. “Because they’ve got a game plan to reach much bigger scale,” Skouby says, “they can leverage that and buy down cost. Nobody else has been willing to do that.”

For instance, the company designed its own heat pump. “We looked at what was taking installers a lot of time,” says Kathy Hannun, Dandelion’s founder and president, “and every time, there was an opportunity to take those things and just build them into the heat pump.” There’s less on-site assembly required and it has a smaller form factor than comparable heat pumps. It is also covered in sensors, which provide real-time information on how it performs in the field, something the industry has lacked. It’s also cheaper than its competitors.

The company has ordered purpose-built drills, smaller than typical geothermal drills and able to fit into tighter spaces. Similarly, they have optimized piping, grouting, and other components. The strategy is more like a solar startup’s: Invest big early on to drive down costs and begin scaling up; trust that scale will pay back the investment.

Drilling vertical ground loops — 4 to 6-inch holes around 500 feet deep — Dandelion has substantially cut down on the time and disruption of installation, from weeks or months to one week. The company has got the upfront, delivered cost of a system down to $18,000 from $25,000.

Just as importantly, it has devised a financing model to overcome the upfront cost barrier. It loans the cost of the system to customers, who pay nothing upfront. Instead, they repay the loan at a fixed monthly rate that is lower than their previous heating and cooling costs. They save money from day one.

“They’re targeting the type of customer our industry needs,” says Santry, “medium- to lower-income people that this was not available to.”

The loans are still attached to the homeowner, though. What the industry needs, says Hannun, is a model like rooftop solar’s, with “third-party ownership models where, if you’re a homeowner and you don’t plan on living in your house forever, you can put no money down — just buy solar power, essentially, instead of buying normal electricity.” This kind of “solar as a service” model could work just as well with “heat as a service.”

Dandelion is taking off in New York, where some localities like Westchester County have banned gas in new buildings, and there are millions of people heating with expensive propane and fuel oil furnaces (against which a GSHP will pay itself off in five years). “When they see that they can get renewable energy for less than they’re paying for fuel oil,” says Hannun, “it’s very compelling.” The company recently expanded to Connecticut.

“I think they’re going to be successful, because the scope they’re projecting is attracting a lot of utility types that have the financial wherewithal to help drive what they’re doing,” says Skouby, “or get behind them on an exclusivity arrangement, which they wouldn’t be willing to do with a local contractor.”

New York also has substantial incentives for low-carbon heat, which will likely be needed anywhere GSHPs must compete with natural gas. But the company is learning as it goes and sees plenty of room to bring down costs “across the board,” says Hannun. And of course, in a carbon-constrained world, natural gas will be fazed out.

So that’s the smaller geothermal heat technology. Now let’s look at the bigger stuff.

Low-temperature geothermal can heat multiple buildings for cheap

In my previous post on geothermal, I described how a traditional geothermal system works. One well, the production well, taps into hot water trapped in underground aquifers; the water comes up, the heat is extracted, and the water is cooled and returned to the earth via a second well, the injection well.

To access the high heats needed to generate electricity, such systems typically must be sited in specialized (and relatively rare) areas near volcanic activity, where there is extremely hot water trapped in porous rock underground.

But saline aquifers containing warm water — not hot enough for electricity, but plenty hot enough for direct heat — are practically ubiquitous, in the US and elsewhere.

Geothermal systems that tap into warm (sub-300°F) water can be used as a source of heat for a district heating system, i.e., a single connected system of hot water loops that heats multiple buildings.

District heating found one of its very first expressions in the US — Boise, Idaho, has used geothermal to heat buildings since 1890 and heats its downtown with it to this day — but it is far more popular and advanced in Europe, especially Iceland (though China is, in this as in all things, scaling up quickly). Paris, Munich, and Reykjavik are all known for their extensive district heating systems.

In the US, district heating has never quite caught on, but it is a frequent feature of college campuses. As part of its decarbonization goals, Princeton University is shifting from a natural gas steam system to geothermal. The Oregon Institute of Technology, Carleton College in Minnesota, and Ball State University in Indiana (among others) already heat with geothermal district heat.

Once the upfront capital costs are paid off, geothermal district heat is dirt cheap, for decades or even centuries. (The world’s oldest working geothermal district heating system, in Chaudes-Aigues, France, has been going since the 14th century.) But the upfront costs remain daunting.

There are some new technological developments in the space. The Department of Energy is studying deep direct use (DDU) geothermal systems, which go deeper to find suitably warm temperatures in almost any geography and use them as large-scale heating sources for campuses, military installations, hospital complexes, or residential developments. “Large-scale, fully integrated DDU geothermal systems have not been realized in the United States,” the DOE writes, “although efforts of this type are increasingly popular in Europe and elsewhere.”

Some of these DDU efforts are using “closed loop” systems (not unlike GSHPs) that don’t exchange fluids with the earth at all, thus eliminating any possibility of groundwater pollution. The Canadian company Eavor (covered in my previous post) is working on closed-loop systems that can, in addition to going deep for electricity-level heat, be used for lower-temperature systems that harvest heat for buildings.

Some DDU systems, if they tap high enough heat, can “co-produce” electricity and heat, thus blurring the line with geothermal power systems.

The fact is, though, when it comes to shallow saline aquifers, the oil and gas industry already knows its way around. “The low hanging fruit [for geothermal heat] is our sedimentary basins, between two and three kilometers depth,” says Marit Brommer, who runs the International Geothermal Association but started out her career as an oil and gas engineer, “and they have been mapped extensively because of our oil and gas runs. We know their temperatures extremely well — and we found more water than oil in those reservoirs, by the way.”

“We have a lot better tools now [than in previous decades] — better drilling technology, much better geophysical logging capability, better seismic reflection imaging,” says Jeff Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems and principal scientist for Cornell University’s Earth Source Heat project. “We know so much more about how to find permeability and fluids in the rock.” Drilling at that depth, avoiding pollution or seismic disruption, is something oil and gas has been working on for decades.

Geothermal district heating is a no-brainer for anyone building new housing developments, campuses, or industrial clusters. It represents low, stable heating costs (rather than the fluctuating costs of oil and gas) for generations.

Forward-thinking cities like Munich (which is seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030) have begun to think of geothermal loops as part of city infrastructure, to be installed and maintained alongside water and sewer lines, so that any new building or development can simply connect to the main line through a utility, like other basic services.

The larger such a system grows, the more its unit costs fall. And it’s a local resource that generates local jobs; it is not dependent on imports or global markets. It gives cities some measure of independence.

Again, the barrier is the upfront costs. A decent-sized geothermal district heating can run $25 million, says Brommer, and though, “on average, it takes you about a quarter of your life cycle in order to get rid of your [debt] burdens,” the capital costs are often enough to scare off developers and municipalities.

Costs will come down with scale and knowledge-sharing. “What we need is multiple companies who work in multiple countries in similar subservice settings, that understand the drilling requirements and the service needs,” Brommer says, “meaning that the lessons learned in country one can be applied to reduce costs in countries two, three, and four.”

But that kind of learning requires growth. Just as with GSHPs, the trick is finding tools to bring down upfront costs and spread them out over time.

Geothermal costs more upfront, but less overall. Government could help with that.

Accelerating the development of geothermal electricity is mostly about technology research and demonstration, but when it comes to geothermal heat — both GSHPs and larger solutions like DDU — the primary need is for the kind of public policy pull that draws demonstrated technologies into a broader market.

That means incentives like grants, tax credits, or feed-in tariffs (heating tariffs, in this case) to bring down the upfront costs. At the city or county level, it means regulatory reform to reduce the costs of permitting, siting, and constructing systems. But perhaps most importantly, it involves financing mechanisms.

Remember, a geothermal district heating system or a GSHP is already a better value than their competitors over the lifetime of the system. They just face the awkward problem that almost all of the costs are stacked upfront, while the benefits accrue over time. It is the timing of the costs and benefits that poses the challenge.

That is the kind of problem financing mechanisms, which move costs and benefits around in time, can solve. The 30-year fixed rate mortgage was invented in the 1930s to spread the large upfront costs of a house out over decades, thus opening home ownership to millions of Americans. Dandelion’s fledgling financing model, which requires no upfront money from the customer, could do the same thing for GSHPs if it can be scaled (and attached to the property rather than the owner).

The government can help by offering low-interest, long-term loans for low-carbon heating systems, or backing such loans if banks or other private institutions offer them. Those loans can help soften the substantial front-end risks of exploring for new resources.

“Iceland addressed this risk in the 1960s with the establishment of a National Energy Fund, which offers loans to fund the initial cost of drilling and exploration,” says Tester. “If the initial drilling stage is unsuccessful, the loan defaults to the state; if the drilling is successful, the loan will be paid as planned.” It is the single most powerful policy tool for expanding geothermal in Iceland, he says.

Along with financing, new models of ownership and service delivery are needed. “The challenge for the energy transition is that oil and gas companies are unlikely to be operating heat,” says Brommer. “There is a need for smaller intermediary operating companies that understand what it takes to mine heat and can sell it as a service to utility companies. That’s the way forward.” Such intermediaries could even be owned by local communities, along the lines of the popular “community solar” model.

There is plenty of room for innovation around geothermal heat — in technology, but especially in policy and financing. But the US will need to get serious about the investments, policies, and regulations necessary to scale it up to the necessary size.

A large investment of time, money, and policy attention in geothermal heat could help create jobs in almost every US zip code. The DOE’s comprehensive 2019 Geovisions study found that “technology improvements could enable more than 17,500 geothermal district-heating installations nationwide, and 28 million U.S. households could realize cost-effective heating and cooling solutions through the use of geothermal heat pumps.” That number of geothermal systems would require over 50 times the number of wells dug by the entire US oil and gas industry — a bonanza of skilled trade jobs.

Geothermal heat could help towns and cities achieve a measure of energy independence, giving them a reliable source of heating and cooling that never changes price and requires no imports. It could help put retired, laid-off, or just bored oil and gas engineers to work; Dandelion recently hired Jeremy Smith, a 20-year oil and gas veteran, as their new VP of drilling.

But most of all, it could help solve the riddle of how to rapidly decarbonize the heating and cooling of buildings, a problem that has not gotten nearly enough attention and is not exactly awash in solutions. Geothermal is such a solution, right beneath our feet. We just need to get digging.

This piece was originally published August 27, and has been lightly updated.

During the final presidential debate, both candidates were asked how they would combat climate change and support job growth. President Donald Trump offered few specifics, merely saying that that, “We have the Trillion Trees program. We have so many different programs. I do love the environment.”

But let’s be clear: If Trump is reelected president, the likely result will be irreversible changes to the climate that will degrade the quality of life of every subsequent generation of human beings, with millions of lives harmed or foreshortened. That’s in addition to the hundreds of thousands of lives at present that will be hurt or prematurely end.

This sounds like exaggeration, some of the “alarmism” green types are always accused of. But it is not particularly controversial among those who have followed Trump’s record on energy and climate change.

“As bad as it seems right now,” says Josh Freed of Third Way, a center-left think tank, “the climate and energy scenario in Trump II would be much, much worse.”

The damage has not primarily been done, and won’t primarily be done, by Congress, except through inaction (which is no small thing). Under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Senate has effectively abdicated its duty as a legislative body; it now mostly exists to approve far-right judges to the federal bench.

In what follows, I’ll assume that if Trump wins, Republicans keep the Senate — and that the situation remains as is, with Congress divided and gridlocked, unable to pass major legislation or effectively restrain Trump. (It is possible that Trump wins and Democrats take both houses of Congress, but thinking about that breaks my brain.)

I’m going to do a quick review of Trump’s record so far on climate and energy. By necessity, it is not comprehensive. The amount of damage done, not only on high-profile issues but through unceasing daily efforts to weaken and degrade the federal bureaucracy, could fill volumes. I’ll just look at the highlights, with a focus on what Trump wants to do and is more likely to get away with in a second term.

First, though, let’s talk about the main thing, which is that a Trump victory would make any reasonable definition of “success” on climate change impossible.

(Note: I asked lots of people for their thoughts on a second Trump term, and for the most part, they did not want to speak on record or in specifics, for fear of giving Trump ideas. The sense of dread is palpable.)

More Trump will ensure the continued escalation of global temperatures

We know from the latest IPCC report that the climate target agreed to by nations — no more than a 2° Celsius rise in global average temperatures — is not a “safe” threshold at all. Going from 1.5° to 2° means many more heat waves, wildfires, crop failures, migrations, and premature deaths. We know that every fraction of a degree beyond 2° means more still, along with the increasing risk of tipping points that make further warming unstoppable.

Hitting the 1.5° target would require the world to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. Doing so would require industrial mobilization beginning immediately. Even hitting 2° would be desperately difficult at this point. There is no longer any time for delay; this is the last decade in which it is still possible.

We know that the US doing its part to reach net zero by 2050 would not be enough, in itself, to limit global temperature rise. By the same token, we know it is wildly unlikely that the rest of the world will be able to organize to meet that goal without US leadership. And in the face of active US undermining and opposition, it will be all but impossible.

Climate policy is complicated, but in the end, it comes down to replacing everything powered by fossil fuels with zero-carbon alternatives, and we know beyond any doubt that the Trump administration is devoted to the interests of its allies in the fossil fuel industry. Everything the administration has done since taking office reflects a single-minded zeal to release fossil fuel industries from regulatory restraints and to subsidize them through public policy.

US carbon emissions have been declining, down roughly 12 percent since 2004. That’s almost entirely due to the market-driven decline of coal in the electricity sector, a trend that analysts expect to continue. The Trump administration disingenuously takes credit for it. But it won’t be enough, on its own, to reduce emissions fast enough to stay on track for net zero by 2050. Not even close.

The US needs to completely transition off electricity generated by coal and natural gas, vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel, and buildings heated by natural gas and oil — and quickly.

Everything Trump has done pushes in the opposite direction. Four more years of Trump, backed by a Republican Senate, will mean a heavy drag on global efforts to control carbon. Progress on decarbonization will slow in the US, and the example America sets will slow other nations’ progress as well, making the aforementioned 10-year mobilization all but impossible. That is a difference that will reverberate for centuries.

Now let’s look at his record.

Trump has steadily rolled back regulations on fossil fuel companies

“When I think about the horrors of a Trump term two, I think about lock-in of domestic policies,” says Sam Ricketts of Evergreen Action, “buttressed — and in places even made permanent — by his continuing to stack the courts.”

In his first term, Trump has blocked, weakened, or rolled back 100 environmental, public health, and worker safety regulations. Among them are virtually all the steps Obama took to address climate change, from the Clean Power Plan for the electricity sector to tighter fuel economy standards for transportation, emissions standards on methane for oil and gas operations, efforts to integrate a “social cost of carbon” for agency decision-making, reform of fossil fuel leasing on public land, and energy efficiency standards on light bulbs. (Trump also wants to go after toilets and showerheads.)

Every one of those decisions would have the effect of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmentalists have sued over all of them, and thus far, Trump has lost more cases than he has won. Many of the rule changes pushed through by his agencies are being rejected by courts for being rushed and shoddy.

Given another term, Trump’s agencies will have more time to fill out those arguments and resubmit those rules; almost any rule can be justified eventually. Meanwhile, the federal bench will be packed with more sympathetic Trump appointees ready to rubber-stamp those rules.

And if federal judges object, the administration can appeal the cases to the Supreme Court, where Trump will almost certainly have had the opportunity to replace a justice or two. With a solid 6-3 or 7-2 majority on the Court, virtually anything the administration wants will end up being approved. 

For example, Trump’s Department of Interior tried to rescind Obama’s 2016 rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas operations on public land; the court recently rejected the attempt, calling it “defectively promulgated” and “wholly inadequate.” Given time and a friendlier court, the rule would be doomed. (Here’s a comprehensive tracker of all the rule changes so far, and their status.)

The administration is also going after other methane rules on oil and gas operations, and in the process, trying to change the EPA’s rulemaking process to make future regulations more difficult. That brings us to a key point.

The Trump administration is stacking the deck to advantage fossil fuels

Aside from all the rules the administration has eviscerated, is eviscerating, and plans to eviscerate, it is also pushing several changes to agency procedures that will make it more difficult to regulate in the future.

Under administrator Andrew Wheeler, the EPA has proposed to alter the way it does cost-benefit analysis to exclude consideration of a rule’s “co-benefits” — reductions in other pollutants that come as a side effect of reducing targeted pollutants. (A coalition of environmental groups has opposed the change, which violates EPA precedent, statutory intent, and common sense.) If the change goes into effect — as it surely will given another term and friendlier courts — all future air quality rules will be weakened.

The EPA has also promulgated a “secret science rule” that would exclude from consideration a wide swath of studies demonstrating the danger of air pollution (including its danger in helping spread Covid-19). Without those studies to rely on, justifying public health regulations would be more difficult going forward. The EPA’s own independent board of science advisers said the change would “reduce scientific integrity” at the agency.

Speaking of independent science advisers, starting under Pruitt, the EPA began pushing out science advisers who had received grants from the agency (which includes most of them) and replacing them with fossil fuel cronies. Amusingly, even a science board packed with Trump appointees has said that three of the agency’s major recent rule changes flew in the face of established science. Still, given another term to finish the job, Wheeler could effectively eliminate independent scientific review at the agency.

The administration has also gutted the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), which requires the federal government to rigorously assess the effects of its actions on the environment and local communities, and is one of the principal avenues through which communities of color and other vulnerable communities communicate their interests to the federal government.

In July, the White House Council on Environmental Quality released a proposed rule that would dramatically limit the range of federal agency actions to which NEPA applies, limit consideration of cumulative and indirect impacts (like climate change and environmental justice), and curtail public involvement in the decision-making process and judicial review. Given another term to see the change through, the White House could shape every major federal agency decision going forward.

The administration is also trying to revoke California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act, which allows the state to set its own (typically more ambitious) emissions standards. If it succeeds, it would sabotage not only California’s standards but those of the 13 states (and Washington, DC) that have adopted them.

And it won’t be the only way a vindictive Trump could go after his perceived enemies. “Blue states will be starved of federal funding, which means massive cuts that inevitably lead to a degradation in environmental enforcement and investment in cleaner energy,” says Freed, “but also likely big reductions in mass transit funding and aid to cities that will push more people into cars and more emissions.”

Over at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Trump appointees have pushed through a Minimum Offer Price Rule (MOPR). It’s quite technical (I explain it here), but the net result is that state policies meant to support clean energy will be cancelled out in regional energy wholesale markets. It would cost consumers billions of dollars and prop up uneconomic coal power plants.

The MOPR is also under litigation from multiple groups. Again, given four more years and a compliant Supreme Court, it will probably stick. And FERC’s Republican commissioners have said they want to expand its use.

FERC also recently pushed through reforms to PURPA (the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act) that would disadvantage small-scale clean energy projects. And it has long pushed an argument for ending net-metering programs (which incentivize rooftop solar) nationwide; that and other steps against distributed energy resources will likely feature in a second term.

At least in this term, the administration chose not to go directly after the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, which classifies greenhouse gases as pollutants subject to the Clean Air Act. Rumors abound that the administration will go after it in a second term, given a friendlier Supreme Court. That would take one of the only major existing regulatory tools against greenhouse gases in the US off the table.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, an emboldened conservative majority is likely to go after the Chevron doctrine, which gives federal agencies wide latitude in interpreting congressional directives. “I don’t think it’s a matter of if Chevron would be overturned,” says Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power 2020, “just a matter of what case gets them to do it.” 

Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch have recently been making noise about radically limiting the ability of federal agencies to regulate at all, under a hyper-conservative interpretation of the “nondelegation doctrine.”

“It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of this issue,” my colleague Ian Millhiser writes. “Countless federal laws, from the Clean Air Act to the Affordable Care Act, lay out a broad federal policy and delegate to an agency the power to implement the details of that policy. Under Kavanaugh’s approach, many of these laws are unconstitutional, as are numerous existing regulations governing polluters, health providers, and employers.”

There may already be five conservative votes on the court for this radical lurch backward. If Trump gets another two SCOTUS appointments, it is all but a certainty.

Land, water, and wildlife are also getting the shaft

I’ve mostly been focusing on the EPA and energy, but Trump’s damage is omnidirectional.

Earlier this year, the administration gutted Obama’s Waters of the US (WOTUS) rule, removing pollution protections from a wide swathe of wetlands and streams.

Over at the Department of Interior, Trump’s first appointee, Ryan Zinke, went on an industry-friendly bender, weakening land and species protections, ramping up oil and gas leasing on public land, and purging senior staff and 4,000 jobs. He eventually resigned amid a hail of ethics investigations — so many the New York Times had to put together a guide — and some are ongoing.

Zinke was replaced by oil lobbyist David Bernhardt, who managed to get as far as rolling back a bunch of wildlife protections before also coming under investigation for conflicts of interest. He has held on so far, though, and has a long wish list (there’s a tracker here), with almost every proposed change devoted in one way or another to weakening wildlife protections and expanding oil and gas drilling on public land.

A second Trump term will almost certainly see a renewed push for more offshore oil and gas drilling, expanding on the recent opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A plan to open virtually all the nation’s coastal waters to drilling was put “on hold” after pushback from courts and coastal communities last year, but it will return, as will further delays for offshore wind projects.

Bernhardt also moved the headquarters of DOI’s Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colorado (a fossil fuel hub), and gave DC staff 30 days to decide whether to follow. Predictably, and by intent, the move resulted in an enormous brain drain, as about half of the experienced staff left.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue did something similar, moving the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture — research agencies investigating, among other things, lower-carbon regenerative agriculture — to Kansas City. Critics saw the move as an obvious bid to make filling positions and coordinating with other federal researchers more difficult, thus strengthening the influence of big, carbon-intensive industrial agriculture.

There is no telling how many more agencies Trump could gut given four more years. Many staff, at EPA and other agencies, have been holding on to hopes of a new president. If Trump is reelected, there’s likely to be a huge exodus of knowledge and talent from the federal government.

Trump’s foreign policy is entirely devoted to fossil fuels

Promoting fossil fuels has been one of the few consistent themes of Trump’s foreign policy.

He announced early on, amid a flurry of misinformation, that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. (That decision will go into effect on November 5, regardless of the election outcome.) Though some State Department staffers are still attending international climate meetings and participating in lower-level dialogues, top US leadership has spurned the entire process and shows no sign of reengaging.

Instead, Trump is trying to manage oil prices by making deals with cartels, bullying other countries to buy US oil, seeking to export liquid natural gas to India, and jostling with Russia and China over trade routes through the melting Arctic.

In a second term, Trump is unlikely to rejoin Paris; he’s much more likely to remove the US from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change entirely. It is an open question whether the Paris framework could survive that at all.

Four more years of Trump would leave democracy, and hope for a safe climate, in tatters

The above constitutes a highly selective list, a small portion of the damage Trump has done to climate and energy progress across federal agencies and international agreements. There are plenty of other examples to cite, including his beloved trade wars, which he will undoubtedly expand in a second term. A recent analysis found that his solar tariffs to date have cost 62,000 jobs in the solar industry and blocked 10.5 gigawatts of new solar from coming online. (If you can stomach a more comprehensive list, check out this piece from the Global Current.)

The main bulwark against Trump’s changes so far has been the courts, but that bulwark will not hold against an administration with four more years to bolster its legal cases and appoint sympathetic judges.

Under Trump and McConnell, the Senate has already appointed 200 federal judges, almost a quarter of the total number. If McConnell keeps the Senate, the next four years could see half of federal judges being Trump appointees and a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. That would likely mean a rapid return to pre-New Deal jurisprudence, radically curtailing the reach of foundational environmental laws. Trump — or, more precisely, the Federalist Society — would be utterly unrestrained.

And that’s not even accounting for the possibility that Trump could simply ignore court judgments he doesn’t like, which seems to be the logical next step for an administration that has faced so little accountability for its law-breaking.

In a second term, especially if Republicans keep the Senate, there would be few tools left to use against Trump’s march into the fossil fuel past. Big businesses and financial institutions might exert some influence. The EU might impose a border adjustment tax. But most hope would fall on direct activism.

Yet activism is only going to get more difficult, as it tends to under authoritarian states. “It’s impossible to separate the massive, vicious assault on democracy and civil rights Trump would prosecute in a second term from the actions he would take on climate and energy,” says Freed. Many states have been passing laws ramping up the scope and severity of penalties for direct activism, increasingly being redefined as “domestic terrorism.” Trump’s use of federal forces to brutalize protesters in Portland is likely a preview of a much more extensive crackdown on civil disobedience in a second term. Some environmental groups are already having serious discussions about how to prepare their members.

There’s no sugarcoating it: If Trump wins the election and Republicans keep the Senate, democracy in America might not survive. At the very least, any hope of public policy to rapidly decarbonize the US is off the table. The US will push actively in the opposite direction.

I often think about this passage from a 2016 commentary in the journal Nature (signed by 22 noted climate scientists):

Policy decisions made during [coming years] are likely to result in changes to Earth’s climate system measured in millennia rather than human lifespans, with associated socioeconomic and ecological impacts that will exacerbate the risks and damages to society and ecosystems that are projected for the twenty-first century and propagate into the future for many thousands of years.

Thousands of years.

Trump’s damage to the climate is not like his damage to the immigration system or the health care system. It can’t be undone. It can’t be repaired. Changes to the climate are, for all intents and purposes, irreversible. They will be experienced by every generation to come.

It is a cliché by now to call this the most important election of our lifetimes, but even that dramatic phrasing doesn’t capture the stakes. From the perspective of the human species as a whole, the arc of its life on this planet, it may be the most important election ever.

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