Oh, there were plenty of losers. The most famous was Solyndra, a solar manufacturer that became Republicanese for “green boondoggle” after it defaulted on a half-billion-dollar stimulus loan. The massive stimulus-funded concentrated solar project Ivanpah was a bust, too. So was this battery startup, several biofuels ventures, and a bunch of “clean coal” projects. But the green stimulus helped jump-start America’s photovoltaic solar industry and start driving down the price of silicon panels, which is why Solyndra’s and Ivanpah’s more expensive approaches to solar faltered in the marketplace. The stimulus also created a domestic electric-vehicle battery industry, while helping wind power and LED lighting reach critical mass. And even though none of its biofuels or clean-coal projects panned out, learning which technologies don’t work is almost as important as learning which ones do.
It’s also important for governments to act on what they learn, rather than continuing to invest in the flowers that fail to bloom. The classic example of throwing good money after bad in the energy space is farm-grown fuels; there’s still bipartisan support for giving the farm lobby the biofuels mandates and tax credits it wants even though they increase food and fuel prices, accelerate global hunger, turbocharge deforestation, and destabilize the climate. Biden was a vocal cheerleader for corn ethanol, and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, while obliterating tax credits for truly clean energy, expanded Biden’s tax credits for biofuels. It is not easy to stop Washington from trying to make this kind of fetch happen.
The Biden administration’s first $3 billion climate-smart agriculture initiative did follow the let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom investment model, and even though I didn’t love its focus on scientifically dubious efforts to sequester carbon in farm soils, it did seed an innovative approach to reducing methane emissions from rice fields that is already producing big climate benefits. Unfortunately, the Trump administration killed the initiative before it could produce much more information about what works and what doesn’t, so even if Washington rediscovers the climate, it will have to start almost from scratch on food and farming solutions.
All is not lost
Like I said, it can get frustrating and depressing.
To meet those 2050 Paris climate targets, the world will need dramatic reductions in farm emissions and meat consumption, which are both soaring, along with dramatic increases in farm yields, which are threatened by climate-driven droughts, floods, and heat waves. The politics are especially dismal. The Biden team focused on providing incentives for green energy as well as green agriculture rather than cracking down on pollution from dirty energy and agriculture, under the theory that carrots are more popular and politically resilient than sticks, but Republicans killed most of those positive incentives anyway, and even many Democrats now believe the climate is a losing issue no matter how it’s framed.
So yes, change will be extremely hard. But energy’s biggest political lesson for food is that change is possible. Two decades ago, wind and solar power were global rounding errors, a documentary called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” eulogized an apparently dead technology, and crop-based biofuels looked like the only viable alternative to fossil fuels. It’s amazing how quickly the unfathomable can become almost inevitable. Technologies can get better and cheaper. Politics can be unpredictable. Conventional wisdom can be spectacularly wrong.
One confounding example: all the confident pronouncements about carrots and sticks. Yes, Obama stimulus goodies helped jump-start the energy transition, while taxes and other restrictions on agricultural pollution in Europe inspired farmers to blockade highways with tractors and dump manure on government buildings. (One American pollster told me meat taxes were the least popular government policy idea he’s ever surveyed, “up there with veterans benefits for ISIS.”) But the carrots in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act did not turn out to be resilient to Trump’s political vandalism, while cap-and-trade sticks that many pundits assumed would be politically toxic have thrived in California and the European Union.
Solar panels were invented in the 1950s, but didn’t become cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels until the 2010s. We don’t have 60 years to get food solutions to scale.
Of course, the development of solar has also been held back by backlash politics; Ronald Reagan removed the panels Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof, and Trump is trying to crush clean energy while preaching energy dominance. Like I said, progress will be really hard. But it’s also really important. And while perfect probably isn’t on the menu, better is better than worse.
This may be the most important lesson of the energy transition: Climate change is not a pass-fail test. We almost surely won’t meet the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but 1.6 would be much better than 1.7. Everything won’t be fine if we meet the goal of cutting emissions 43% by 2030, and it won’t be game over for the climate if we only cut 42%. There’s no such thing as game over for the climate, only degrees of better and worse. The apocalyptic language of failure is weirdly both too pessimistic — “business as usual” projections for 2100 have moderated from an insanely horrific 5 degrees to a still-terrible but more manageable 3 degrees — and too optimistic. Paradise, California, already had its climate apocalypse when a wildfire destroyed it, and more apocalypses are coming. Better policies, technologies, and behaviors will mean fewer apocalypses.
That’s not an inspiring bumper-sticker slogan, but politics is about the slow boring of hard boards. The global economy is not decarbonizing quickly enough, but it’s getting a little bit less dependent on fossil fuels every day, and food can follow a similar trajectory that can help us eat less of the earth.
It isn’t happening yet. Agriculture is still expanding. Forests are still falling. But the Chinese proverb that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is today, is literally true for our land and climate problems. We’re not close to fixing them, or even making them better, but we ought to at least try to slow down the rate at which they’re getting worse — and now is the time to start.
