At first, my wife and I couldn’t see the eclipse. But we heard it coming. A chorus of cheers traveled over the rooftops and reached our ears. It emanated from 800 children – our girls among them – at the nearby elementary school. We raced outside, and sure enough, a clearing in the overcast sky passed over, just long enough to reveal through our eclipse glasses a spectacular orange crescent hanging above Houston’s “Space City.”
It was warm that day in Space City, but not as warm as August last year, when we recorded temperatures as high as 109 degrees Fahrenheit. That was our city’s hottest temperature during our hottest summer on record.
“Here is a problem that transcends our particular generation,” the famous astronomer Carl Sagan once testified to Congress. “If we don’t do the right thing now, our children and grandchildren will face serious problems.”
That was in 1985. Later that year, I was born.
Since then, I admit I have not done my part to “do the right thing now.” I have burned fossil fuels. I spent part of my career enabling fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have improved the quality of life for my family and many other families, even as they have slowly, invisibly mortgaged the future quality of life of all our grandchildren.
But what I will not admit – and what none of us should ever admit – is defeat because we have not failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The truth is, until recently, we never really tried. As John Paul Jones is supposed to have said during the American Revolution, “I have not yet begun to fight!”
For this reason, despite the enormous challenge, we should be undaunted. We should be eager to throw ourselves to the task. There is another American revolution afoot: a low-carbon revolution.
History teaches that America can overcome anything, from overthrowing monarchy to winning the space race, helping to feed the world, saving the ozone layer, and reversing acid rain. In each of those cases, the investment, gumption, and grit that America put into the cause returned a benefit many times over. We did not go bankrupt winning the space race. We did not stop living to save the ozone layer. We did not make energy unaffordable by cutting sulfur and smog.
On the contrary, each of those undertakings made the next generation of Americans freer, more prosperous, and healthier than the one before.
Today, Texas produces more wind energy than any other state. “Texas turbines” are encroaching on “Texas tea,” spreading across corn belt states as far as South Dakota, which have abundant natural wind. In Iowa, dairy farmers capture the methane emissions from their manure. In Minnesota, GPS tracks seeds within fractions of an inch to reduce chemicals, improve soil health, and cut greenhouse gas footprint. It may surprise some that the number of acres used to plant corn in the U.S. has not changed significantly for 100 years. Yet we produce far more corn today than a century ago, enough to feed ourselves and much of the world, as a result of yield improvements: use less, make more.
Properly incentivized, growth and innovation in renewable power, biogas, carbon capture, and climate-smart agriculture in America’s heartland will help win the low-carbon revolution. It will spur growth in rural communities and make energy cleaner and more affordable over time. The global fossil fuels industry invests approximately $1 trillion every year in its growth and has been building and optimizing its supply chain for over a century. Global clean energy investment per year has now surpassed fossil fuels investment, and no one can predict the limits of clean energy in the next century if we simply maintain this effort, or how many jobs it will bring. But we know the direction we must go, and that we have only just begun to try.
The future of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions looms over us as plainly as an eclipse or a thermometer. Yet if we listen, we can hear the sound of cheering children: the billions on our planet today and every generation to come, carried to us on the winds of a different future.
Eric Frey is Vice President of Finance and Strategy at Gevo, Inc., a company dedicated to commercializing the next generation of low-carbon fuels and materials.