The movie that I, like a million other women, really wanted to see this weekend was Barbie. A celebration of friendship! Of girlhood! Of the color pink! But my editor had a different idea: Would I go see that movie about child sex trafficking? The one that a lot of people online are angry about?

“Uh, sure,” I replied. I am a team player.

When I arrived at the Tysons Corner AMC in McLean, Virginia, on Sunday, the lobby was filled with people wearing fuchsia body-con dresses, blond wigs, and thigh-high boots. None of these happy moviegoers, however, was heading in the same direction as me. Instead, my theater contained a few dozen somber-looking people who had elected to see a $15 Sunday-afternoon screening of one of the most disturbing films of the year.

Sound of Freedom, which came out on the Fourth of July, follows a man named Tim Ballard, who quits his job at the Department of Homeland Security to personally rescue two Honduran children from a sex-trafficking ring in Colombia. Ballard is a real person with “extreme biceps, extreme blue eyes, and extreme bleach-blond hair,” as my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in 2021. He really did start an organization that conducts sting operations to free people from traffickers. But according to one journalistic investigation by Vice, his nonprofit, Operation Underground Railroad, has exaggerated the details of some of its international rescues as well as its role in domestic law enforcement.

[Read: The great (fake) child-sex-trafficking epidemic]

Sound of Freedom was attracting controversy long before its release. Finished in early 2018, the film was bought by Fox, and then when Disney acquired Fox it immediately shelved the film. Right away, that gave the movie a kind of forbidden, subversive appeal. Eventually, the distribution rights were sold to Angel Studios, a company in Utah that produced the Christian historical drama The Chosen. Since Sound of Freedom started showing in theaters, some viewers have alleged instances of sabotage intended to prevent them from seeing the film. This week, Sound of Freedom broke $100 million in revenue. Last week, former President Donald Trump held a screening at his golf club in New Jersey, where, channeling Paris Hilton, he called it “the hottest movie anywhere in the world.” On Tuesday night, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy held a screening of the movie for members of Congress.

The film’s critics argue that the movie exaggerates the prevalence of child exploitation in a way that helps advance QAnon conspiracy theories about a satanic ruling elite that molests children and feasts on their blood. But the movie’s fans say, This is the film the Democratic elite doesn’t want you to see!

Sound of Freedom is neither of these things. It’s fine—not great but not terrible, either. It doesn’t make any reference to “deep state” bloodsucking or congressional sex cabals. It’s a straightforward, if plodding, action movie about a man on a righteous quest—with zero character development and way too many close-ups of people either crying or smoking cigars.

Although the movie doesn’t depict anything particularly graphic, the subject of child abuse is still difficult to watch dramatized on the big screen. It was upsetting. But so was talking about it afterward with other audience members, many of whom seemed convinced that some significant number of their countrymen condone child trafficking. Sound of Freedom, in other words, is just the latest flash point in an apparently endless culture war that encourages Americans to believe the absolute worst about one another.

In the movie, Ballard is played by Jim Caviezel, who also starred as Jesus in 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, and has himself dabbled in the dark whimsy of Q. In 2021, he spoke at a right-wing conference in Oklahoma, where he warned attendees about “the adrenochrome-ing of children,” an absurd theory that says global elites are using a chemical harvested from kidnapped children to keep them looking spry. At one point in the movie, asked why he was so determined to rescue the kids, Caviezel’s character pauses, and his eyes well up with tears. “God’s children aren’t for sale,” he says. My theater broke into applause and shouts of “Amen!”

[From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q]

The movie has united religious conservatives and Trump supporters, as well as a small sampling of the chronically paranoid—or at least it appeared to have done so at my showing. (I chose this particular theater because, when I looked online, a lot of people had bought tickets—probably because McLean has more right-leaning voters than many other places in the Washington, D.C., area.)

Kate Cox, a retiree from McLean wearing little flower earrings, told me before the movie that she was “a pro-life Catholic” concerned about the border. “That’s exactly what this is about,” she said. “They’re taking these people and selling them into sex slavery.” Cox and her girlfriends were also worried about the fentanyl coming in from Mexico: How hard would it be to put up a wall?

“And the homelessness!” added Peggy, a friend of Cox’s who declined to share her last name. “Cities are falling apart.” Cox nodded. “Say what you will about Trump, and 99 percent of it’s true,” she said, “but this didn’t happen under Trump.”

Unlike Barbie, with its huge marketing budget and corporate partnerships, word of mouth seems to be the main attendance-driver for Sound of Freedom: Most of the people I spoke with on Sunday had bought a ticket on a loved one’s recommendation.

“One of my friends told me to see this movie,” Nicole Gutierrez, a Swiss native who lives in D.C., told me. “This is a much bigger business than we think it is. Hollywood, politicians—they’re all involved.” She pulled out her phone to show me a text that her friend had sent a few minutes earlier. “Maybe you know what it means.” Her friend had sent the letter C, followed by an eye emoji, followed by the letter A. “I think he means the CIA,” I said. Gutierrez raised her eyebrows. “Everybody’s involved,” she said. “The White House, of course.”

In a bonus clip after the credits, Caviezel encourages viewers in a whispery voice to scan a QR code and buy a ticket for someone who can’t afford it. “We can make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st-century slavery,” he says, likening the film to the novel that helped inspire the 19th-century abolitionist movement. After that, as the lights came up, a woman in my row who introduced herself as Cheska stood up to announce that she was there to talk about her 23-year-old daughter, who had been missing for a year and a half. “I’m expecting a miracle,” she said. “She’s going to be returned soon.” Warning that the End Times were upon us, Cheska asked us to pray for her and for one another. A few people again said, “Amen,” and at least one woman gave her a hug.

As I left the theater, I approached another group of friends to hear what they thought. They all declined to share their last names, but were happy to tell me how powerful they’d found the movie. “Men want to protect people,” a dark-haired middle-aged man named George said, “so it’s embarrassing that there’s anyone out there that would ever do that to a child.” He brought up the new Jason Aldean song, “Try That in a Small Town,” in which the country artist promises vigilante justice. “I like that song that no one wants to talk about,” George said. Real men would beat up a child abuser.

“You realize you’re talking to some of the few conservatives in the area?” George’s bearded friend Steven asked me, with a wink. “You know what surprises me,” he went on, “is why the left hates this movie. I don’t get it.” He looked at me as though he expected an answer.

If people on the left are repelled by this movie, it’s for the same reasons people on the right feel so obligated to see it. Our political leaders, our social circles, and our chosen media have signaled in our echo chambers exactly how we should feel about it—and so much else, besides. Bud Light. Gas stoves. School libraries. The Target Pride section. Elon Musk’s Twitter. Luke Combs’s “Fast Car.” The entire Walt Disney Company. Lizzo playing James Madison’s flute.

It’s exhausting. All I wanted to do was put on a pink dress and enjoy a movie about a plastic doll.

Photographs by Morgan Hornsby

On November 10 of last year, at a place called Paradise in western Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley Authority blew up the cooling towers of a large coal-fired power plant. The three stout towers, each 435 feet high, buckled at the waist in synchrony, then crumpled like crushed soda cans. Within 10 seconds, they’d collapsed into a billowing cloud of dust.

To anyone who watched the demolition happen, or saw the footage online, the message was clear: TVA, a sprawling, federally owned utility created 90 years ago as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, is getting off coal.

Though some people in the region regret that move, it’s a win for the local environment—and for the global climate. In the past few years, as the urgency of slowing climate change has grown, something like a consensus has emerged on how to do it: Green the electrical grid while retooling as much of the economy as possible—cars, buildings, factories—to run on zero-carbon electricity. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden last August, is supporting that plan with $370 billion in subsidies. In a 2021 executive order, Biden directed the federal government to “lead by example in order to achieve a carbon pollution–free electricity sector by 2035” and a net-zero economy by 2050.

Given this strategy, electric utilities are crucial to our future—and none more so than TVA, the largest public power provider in the United States. Its territory covers nearly all of Tennessee; large chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky; and bits of three other states. In one of the most conservative regions of the country, 10 million people get electricity from a federal agency that has no shareholders to answer to and no profits to make.

“TVA is this crazy unicorn—it’s not like anything else,” Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told me. As a federal agency responsible not just for promoting the clean-energy transition but for building it, TVA is positioned to provide a national model—and TVA says it is doing just that.

But that’s not how Smith and other environmental advocates describe TVA’s behavior. They see a utility that is replacing coal plants, at Paradise and elsewhere, with gas-burning plants that will pollute the climate for decades. They see a utility betting heavily on small nuclear reactors that don’t yet exist. Above all, they say, TVA is failing to embrace proven clean-energy technologies, such as solar and wind power and energy-efficiency measures.

“TVA is a living laboratory that could be part of a phenomenal push to change to clean energy,” Smith said. Instead of an agency “on a war footing to get us to zero carbon,” he sees it becoming “an impediment in the executive branch.”

TVA has cut its carbon emissions by well over half since 2005, far more than the nationwide average for the electricity sector, while charging lower-than-average rates. It has done so by replacing coal with gas and by switching on a large new nuclear reactor. But like most American utilities, TVA has no plans to reach Biden’s goal of a net-zero grid by 2035; it’s targeting only an 80 percent carbon reduction by that date. “We aspire to net-zero by 2050, and we aspire to go farther, faster, if we can,” Jeff Lyash, TVA’s president and CEO since 2019, said at a meeting of the agency’s board of directors in November. With existing technology, though, he doesn’t think that’s possible.

What’s the right road to net-zero? The Tennessee Valley is an illuminating microcosm of a national debate, in which the imperative of addressing climate change is pitted against the enormous practical challenge of not only maintaining a reliable electric supply but dramatically expanding it to meet the needs of a decarbonizing economy. “TVA is in a unique position to lead in delivering the clean-energy future,” Lyash said in November. He and his critics agree on that much. But as for when that future will arrive, and what it will look like, they are very far apart indeed.  

T

VA was born from another global crisis. In 1933, when Roosevelt and Senator George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, persuaded Congress to establish TVA, the United States was at the nadir of the Great Depression, and the Tennessee Valley, where only a tiny percentage of the homes had electricity, was one of the country’s poorest regions. TVA transformed it. Starting with the Wilson Dam, at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a series of dams controlled flooding on the Tennessee River and its tributaries and electrified the whole Valley. Hydroelectric plants still produce about 10 percent of the region’s power, carbon-free.

Private utilities hated TVA, and complained bitterly about what they saw as unfair competition. They challenged the agency’s existence before the Supreme Court and lost, twice. As late as the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower wanted to sell off the agency, which he saw as an example of “creeping socialism.” The agency survived by becoming quasi-independent of the federal government. The president appoints and Congress confirms TVA’s board, but since 1959, TVA has mostly done without federal appropriations. It pays its own way by selling electricity—not directly to consumers (aside from a few dozen industrial and federal properties), but to the 153 municipally or cooperatively owned local power companies, or LPCs, that distribute power to the people.

Top left: Widows Creek Steam Plant, 1961. Top Right: Wilson Dam, June 1942. Bottom: TVA directors with President John F. Kennedy in 1963. (Courtesy of National Archives Catalog)

From the start, TVA’s strategy was to make electricity cheap and accessible enough that people would use it for everything. The agency succeeded so well that demand soon outstripped what even a thoroughly dammed river could supply. In the ’50s, TVA began relying on coal as its main energy source, ultimately building 12 large power plants. Over the past decade, it has closed six, but giant piles of toxic ash remain. In 2008, a dike ruptured at the coal plant in Kingston, Tennessee, spilling more than 5 million cubic yards of ash into the Emory and Clinch Rivers.

Environmentalists have long had reason to distrust TVA. In the ’70s, when the newly created Environmental Protection Agency began regulating air pollution, TVA resisted. Accustomed to making its own engineering decisions, it argued that investing in scrubbers for its coal stacks made no sense—after all, it was about to replace most of them with nuclear reactors. But the agency completed only seven of a planned 17 reactors—demand for electricity grew slower than forecast—and today, unfinished reactor hulks lie scattered around the Valley. The fiasco left TVA constrained by debt, which still totals nearly $20 billion.

[From the April 1962 issue: Harry Caudill on TVA and the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains]

Nevertheless, TVA is proud of its nuclear fleet. Although Georgia Power is expected to bring a new reactor online soon, TVA has been the only U.S. utility to have managed that in the past three decades. It began construction on the two reactors at its Watts Bar plant, in Tennessee, in 1973; mothballed them for years; then completed them in 1996 and 2016. In the first half of 2023, they and the agency’s other reactors helped it generate nearly 60 percent of its kilowatt-hours without emitting carbon—significantly higher than the national average. But it has “fumbled, failed, and flopped” into that enviable position, Stephen Smith told me. The climate crisis demands transformative change, Smith said, and TVA has abandoned its historic mission to provide precisely that.

TVA’s Colbert gas plant, which is under construction, in Florence, Alabama, July 7, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

In downtown Chattanooga, the people directly responsible for delivering electricity to the Valley’s 10 million residents sit in TVA’s system-operations center. It’s a large, hushed, dimly lit room, in which curving rows of workstations face a wall filled with an illuminated schematic of TVA’s sprawling transmission grid. The first rows of operators track the physical condition and voltage of the transmission lines. The operators behind them “dispatch” power as needed from hundreds of generators around the grid, matching supply to demand minute by minute. That complex job is simplified by having lots of “dispatchable” power, which is what coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro plants provide, at least in principle: power that’s available any time of the day or year.

In a conference room overlooking the control room, I met Greg Henrich and Aaron Melda, TVA’s vice president and senior vice president for transmission and power supply. Melda had helped formulate the agency’s decarbonization strategy, and he grabbed a marker to sketch out the numbers on a flip chart. The strategy’s central element is the closure of TVA’s last five coal plants, all more than 50 years old, by 2035. “Over the same period, we will add 10,000 megawatts of solar,” Melda said. To store energy for when the sun isn’t shining, TVA will also add 1,000 megawatts of battery capacity.

Over the next decade, though, the agency’s main carbon-reduction strategy is to build more gas plants—7,000 megawatts’ worth, roughly the capacity of the current coal fleet. When I visited the system-ops center last fall, TVA was finalizing plans for the latest addition: a 1,450-megawatt gas plant in Cumberland City, Tennessee, at the site of its biggest coal plant, whose two generating units are scheduled to retire in 2026 and 2028. Environmentalists strenuously opposed the gas plant—even the EPA questioned it—arguing that it would commit TVA to emitting carbon long past 2035 or even 2050. In the near term, though, the switch from coal will substantially reduce emissions of carbon and other pollutants. “You replace coal with gas, you’ve now taken every one of those megawatts down 50 percent in its carbon intensity,” Melda said.

Why not just build more batteries and more solar, and take the intensity down to zero? It would cost a lot more, Melda said, and batteries discharge within several hours. A few rainy days could leave you unable to meet demand. Nor is solar a big help on dark winter mornings, which are the moments that TVA worries about most. The majority of homes in the Valley have electric heat. A spokesperson for TVA, Scott Fiedler, later said that gas is “the only mature technology that allows us to quickly add renewable energy and maintain the low cost and reliability” needed.

I visited the system-ops center on a chilly November day a week before Thanksgiving. Early that morning, as people cranked up their thermostat, TVA had seen a fairly typical winter peak in the load on its grid. Warmer weather was coming that would drive down demand, Henrich said, but it would rise again on Thanksgiving morning, as people roasted turkeys. That afternoon, the load would plummet. “Everybody’s asleep on the couch,” Henrich said. “It’s awesome to watch—it’s truly societal behavior driving your load.”

He opened the blinds on the conference-room windows so we could see into the control room itself. It looked pretty quiet, with a lot of the workstations empty. “When does it ever get exciting?” I asked. A month later, my question was answered.

Aaron Melda (left) and Greg Henrich, TVA’s vice president and senior vice president for transmission and power supply, at TVA’s main headquarters, in Chattanooga, July 6, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

On December 23, people in the Tennessee Valley awoke to temperatures that had plunged 40 degrees or more overnight. Worse, both units of the Cumberland coal plant had shut down, because thick ice from a big storm had encased instruments on the exposed boilers. In the morning, the Bull Run coal plant wouldn’t start, and some natural-gas plants failed too. As demand soared to an all-time winter record of 33,427 megawatts, the operators in Chattanooga found themselves about 8,000 megawatts short. Neighboring utilities couldn’t help; the storm had affected half the country.

For two hours that morning, TVA had to instruct its 153 local power companies to cut demand by 5 percent. On Christmas Eve, it asked for a 10 percent cut for more than five hours. To comply, the LPCs shut off power neighborhood by neighborhood for 15 minutes or more at a time. The rolling blackouts were the first in TVA’s 90-year history. At Christmas dinner, Fiedler told me, his mother required him to explain why his storied organization had cut her power on the holiday. “She wore me out,” he said.

TVA likes to boast of its reliability, and environmental advocates seized on the Christmas failure. “The emperor has no clothes,” Amanda Garcia, the director of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Tennessee office, told me. “The winter storm to me provided a perfect example of why TVA needs to change”—by showing that fossil fuels are no guarantee of reliability and that it should be transitioning to renewables faster. The Sierra Club ranks TVA among the very worst American utilities for its energy transition. The Center for Biological Diversity calls it a “climate laggard.” Both want the agency to replace all its coal plants as soon as possible with renewable energy, not gas.

A modeling study released in March by the Center for Biological Diversity and by GridLab, a nonprofit consulting group, concluded that TVA could indeed stop burning both coal and gas by 2035. To do that, it would need to build the equivalent of about 145 large solar farms, with a total capacity of 35 gigawatts, in its territory, along with the transmission lines needed to import about 12 gigawatts of wind power from the Midwest. (The Valley isn’t windy enough to produce cost-effective wind power.) Then, by 2050, it would have to nearly triple that expansion again in order to electrify and decarbonize the Valley’s economy. The goals are ambitious, given the delays that now plague many renewable and transmission projects—but the benefits to society would dwarf the costs, the study found. Consumers would save more than $250 billion, mostly from switching to cars that run on TVA’s electricity rather than gasoline. Carbon emissions would drop by hundreds of millions of tons.

The first step toward a clean-energy future, advocates agree, would be to reduce energy waste in the Valley. About a quarter of homes there rely on resistance heating—the method employed in electric furnaces and space heaters. Many heat pumps also fall back on it at freezing temperatures, Huntsville Utilities’ president and CEO, Wes Kelley, told me. “That is basically the equivalent of turning on a bunch of big hair dryers to heat your house,” Kelley said.

According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates, efficiency measures, including more and better heat pumps, could save roughly as much electricity as the Cumberland gas plant will generate. “If you reduce that resistance heating, you’re helping the system as a whole”—by reducing the peak load—“as well as the customer,” Maggie Shober, the research director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), told me. Because people in the Valley use so much electricity, monthly bills are high even though rates are low, creating an especially heavy burden on the poor.

Utilities generally have little incentive to invest in energy-saving measures, which only reduce their revenue. But TVA should be different: It doesn’t need to make a profit. Since 2018, it has run an admirable program, called Home Uplift, that provides heat pumps, weatherization, and other measures to low-income homeowners, all for free—but so far, only to 5,000 of the hundreds of thousands of Valley residents who might be eligible. TVA could do much more, SACE and other critics say, especially now that the Inflation Reduction Act is subsidizing energy-efficiency programs. For its part, TVA says it’s planning more of these types of investments, including rebates to replace older and less efficient heat pumps. Fiedler, the TVA spokesperson, said the agency will lower energy costs in underserved communities by $200 million over the next five years through Home Uplift and other programs.

TVA’s Wilson Dam, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, July 7, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

The environmental advocates I talked with were all suspicious of TVA’s clean-energy intentions. SACE’s Stephen Smith, a close observer of the agency for more than three decades, thinks TVA is building gas plants now and planning nuclear for the future because large power plants are what it is comfortable building, and it has a monopoly on building them in the Valley. The future of the industry should lie in “shifting from central stations to a more distributed model that opens up a whole new powerful toolbox for fixing the climate crisis,” Smith said. “But TVA is not going there.”

He and other advocates see a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future,” to quote the most recent United Nations climate report, and in that stark light, TVA’s current fleet of renewables looks inadequate, especially if you set aside the hydroelectric dams and focus on what it has achieved lately. It buys about 1,200 megawatts of wind from the Midwest; it has installed about 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity in the Valley. That’s far less solar power, Amanda Garcia pointed out, than deployed by utilities in the Carolinas or Georgia. Though she acknowledged TVA’s plans to expand solar over the coming decade, “actions speak louder than words,” she said.

But TVA is actually making a big effort these days, Gil Hough, the executive director of TenneSEIA, the state solar-industry association, told me. Hough worked for SACE from 2000 to 2010, promoting solar with Smith. Now he helps deliver it to TVA.

In the mid-2010s, he told me, the agency did indeed walk away from solar because it was focused on paying down its nuclear debt. Under Lyash, though, TVA has changed, Hough said. It may have only 1,000 megawatts of solar online—but it has more than 2,200 under construction or contracted. “TVA wants every megawatt we can provide them right now,” Hough said. “It’s us who’s holding them back.” Supply-chain disruptions have slowed solar projects and raised prices. But Lyash announced in May that TVA would award contracts this year for 6,000 megawatts of solar power, to be brought online between 2026 and 2029. “We are building as much solar as we can get panels for,” he said.

What got TVA’s attention was the demand from large corporations, says Reagan Farr, the CEO of the Nashville-based Silicon Ranch, which owns and operates solar farms for TVA and other utilities. Farr told me that companies like Google and Meta, by insisting on renewable energy, convinced TVA that it could no longer fulfill its mission of economic development without expanding its solar capacity. “The power of these large companies—their procurement decisions drive actions,” Farr said.

Local resistance to solar farms is a growing problem, both TVA and the industry say. At the November TVA board meeting, Chief Operating Officer Don Moul announced a $216 million plan to build a 100-megawatt solar plant on top of the coal-ash pile at the Shawnee power plant, in Kentucky. If it works, Moul said, as much as 1,000 megawatts of solar might one day rise from ash piles around the region—poetic justice, and a way to “alleviate some of the land challenges that we’ve heard about from so many of our stakeholders,” Moul said.

One of TVA’s key constituencies are the local power companies that distribute its electricity. Their perspective is often very different from that of environmental advocates. At a listening session before a February 2023 board meeting in Muscle Shoals, a dozen of their representatives got up to speak—not about renewables or climate change, but about the blackouts. They were a “black eye for all of us in the Valley,” said Brian Solsbee, the executive director of the Tennessee Municipal Electric Power Association and a former TVA employee. “How does TVA ensure it never happens again?” It needs new generation capacity, Huntsville Utilities’ Wes Kelley told me.

When it was Lyash’s turn to speak, he said what he has said repeatedly: that TVA plans to use all available technologies to decarbonize. He promised a renewed focus on energy efficiency and an aggressive expansion of solar—but also of gas and, in the long run, nuclear. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he said. Renewables, in his view, are one basket.

TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, in Rhea County, Tennessee, June 30, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

The Tennessee Valley is going through a period of economic expansion that would make Roosevelt proud, and TVA, with its reputation for cheap and reliable power, is partly responsible. The Valley’s new growth includes electric-vehicle, battery, and solar-panel manufacturers—the industries that will drive the electrification of America. When I first met Lyash in Chattanooga, where he had just presented TVA’s Engineer of the Year award, he rattled off some of the names. “Ford, GM, Toyota, Mazda, Volkswagen, LG, SK—those industries are going to decarbonize transportation,” he said. “So we have to provide them the energy now.” Demand is growing already, and Lyash expects it potentially to double by 2050. A study last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which mapped how the grid might be decarbonized by 2035, in line with Biden’s goal, assumed that demand might even double by then.

The decision to build a new gas plant at Cumberland comes in that context as well as that of climate urgency. In TVA’s view, even if it could build enough additional renewables and transmission lines to replace the Cumberland coal unit it plans to retire by 2026, which it says it can’t, solar and wind wouldn’t offer “firm, dispatchable power”—power that’s available regardless of weather or time of day. The basic problem, as the NREL report explains, is “seasonal mismatch”: There’s not enough sunlight to meet peak demand on cold winter mornings and not enough wind on hot summer afternoons; both can be minimal for days.

Given this reality, is it reasonable to build a new gas plant today, even though it will emit some carbon for years to come? I put the question to Paul Denholm, a senior research fellow at NREL and the lead author of the recent study. “That is a fantastic question, and it’s something everybody is trying to figure out,” he said.

All visions of a decarbonized grid and of an electrified, net-zero society require huge expansions of wind and solar power. But the NREL study foresees that a net-zero grid will also need some kind of gas to meet peak demand. In three of its four net-zero scenarios, turbines are still burning substantial amounts of natural gas in 2035, and the carbon is being captured rather than released into the atmosphere. In all scenarios, many gas turbines are retrofitted to burn zero-carbon hydrogen.

TVA’s vision of the future, as Lyash and Aaron Melda explained it to me, aligns broadly with the NREL study. Any gas plants that TVA builds now, they said, will one day either burn “green hydrogen” or involve carbon capture—neither is in wide use yet, and TVA is investing in both. The reason TVA won’t promise a net-zero grid by 2035, Lyash said, is because “it’s going to take deploying technologies that are not currently available at a price people can afford and a scale that can be implemented.” The NREL study assumes that those technologies will be developed in time to reach net zero by 2035; TVA doesn’t want to count on that.

It’s no surprise, Denholm said, that utilities are struggling to figure out how to cut the last 10 to 20 percent of their carbon emissions. NREL researchers haven’t figured it out either. “The fact that you have conservative utilities saying they know how to [cut] 80 percent—that is a really remarkable shift,” he told me. “I think we need to recognize that and applaud it.”

Another influential report, Princeton’s 2021 “Net-Zero America” study, included a scenario in which only renewable energy was allowed: By 2050, wind turbines were visible from about one-eighth of the area of the Lower 48 states, solar farms covered an area the size of West Virginia, and long-distance transmission lines mushroomed to five times their existing capacity. Even when such facilities share land with other uses—Silicon Ranch, for instance, allows sheep to graze or pollinator gardens to bloom among the solar panels—they are a significant industrial intrusion on the landscape.

In some regions, people may prefer less of those—and more of the compact central power stations that TVA knows how to build. The NREL and Princeton studies both include net-zero scenarios in which the expansion of renewable facilities and transmission lines is constrained, perhaps by “challenges with siting and land use,” as NREL puts it. Both scenarios rely, as does TVA, on nuclear plants. “I can’t make the numbers work without new nuclear,” Lyash told me.

Like many nuclear engineers these days, he thinks the future lies in small modular reactors, or SMRs. At a site on the Clinch River, TVA is planning the first of what it hopes will be a fleet of 20 or so identical SMRs, using a relatively conventional design. “Our goal is not just to build a plant, but to build a plant that sets the model for the U.S. industry,” Greg Boerschig, one of the engineers running the TVA effort, told me.

The way environmentalists focus on TVA’s renewable capacity or lack thereof frustrates Lyash. “The point is,” he said, “what are your carbon emissions, and what’s your price, and what’s your reliability?” Different regions with different starting points—Arizona has a lot of sunshine, Oklahoma has wind, TVA has a legacy of nuclear and hydro—might reach their clean-energy goals in different ways.

Toward the end of our last conversation, Lyash opened an app on his phone that shows real-time carbon emissions from electricity generation. “One of the countries that gets held up as having deployed huge amounts of solar, and it’s a big percentage of their capacity, is Germany,” he said. “Germany’s carbon emissions right now are 426 grams per unit of electricity. And today, right now, TVA’s is 247 … And our price is less than a third of theirs.”

That happened to be a bad day for Germany’s numbers and a good one for TVA’s—but long-term data confirm Lyash’s point: Germany gets a far higher percentage of its electricity from renewables than TVA, but emits substantially more carbon per kilowatt-hour. Germany has made different choices. It closed its last nuclear reactor in April.

TVA’s Norris Dam, in Andersonville, Tennessee, June 30, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

Environmentalists are right to be wary of TVA. In the past it has performed badly on a variety of environmental issues. It built an unnecessary dam, the Tellico, that drowned important Cherokee cultural sites and hundreds of farms and notoriously threatened to extinguish a little fish, the snail darter. (The darter has since recovered.) It stepped back from solar and energy-efficiency efforts when it could have led the way. It was slow to reduce air pollution from its coal plants—which are still lethal polluters—and allowed the major coal-ash disaster in Kingston to happen. This May, even as Lyash was promising 6,000 megawatts of new renewable energy, TVA doubled down on its Cumberland decision: It released a draft environmental-impact statement saying that it also wanted to replace the Kingston plant with gas power by the end of 2027. That will lock in higher emissions for longer, environmentalists say.

Garcia and Smith think TVA lacks public accountability. They point out that it has no independent public-service commission to regulate it, only a board that, like corporate boards, has no staff of its own and thus depends on management. They would like to loosen TVA’s monopoly and free local power companies to buy power elsewhere, bridling the “unicorn” with market discipline.

But that would risk undermining the very thing that makes the agency such a precious unicorn: the public-power model. TVA has retained political support, at least in its sphere, for an active government role in improving people’s lives. And in a region where environmental causes are hardly unifying, TVA has said, publicly and repeatedly, that it wants to stop emitting carbon as fast as it can. How it does that should be debated—but in many conversations with TVA and its critics, I never heard a solid reason to doubt its good faith.

As I traveled the Tennessee Valley, I visited monuments from TVA’s golden age, including Wilson Dam, in northwestern Alabama, with its lofty, sunlit turbine hall and arches like a Roman aqueduct’s, and Norris Dam, in northeastern Tennessee, which closes off the narrow Clinch River with a tall, sculptural curve. TVA engineers and the people of this region built these marvels “for generations yet unborn,” as Senator George Norris liked to say,  with no notion of how valuable they would become in an age of climate change.

Now it’s time to build more.

This article is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

For most Americans, voting for a member of Congress is one of their simplest civic duties. Every two years, they pick the candidate they like best—usually the same one they chose last time—and whoever gets the most votes will represent them and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors in the House of Representatives. In nearly every case, the winner is a Republican or Democrat, and whichever party captures the most seats secures a governing majority.

That basic process has defined congressional elections for much of the past century. But according to a growing number of political-reform advocates, it has outlasted its effectiveness and could prove ruinous for American democracy if left in place. They blame the current winner-take-all system for driving U.S. politics toward dangerous levels of polarization. Without radical change, they say, the damage could be irreversible. “Our democracy is on a pretty troubling trajectory right now over the next decade or two,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the left-leaning New America Foundation, “and all of the problems that we’re experiencing are only going to get more intense.”

Drutman is a co-founder of Fix Our House, a group that envisions a new configuration for the lower chamber of Congress in which districts would elect several representatives, not just one. Most states would have fewer but larger districts, and unlike America’s current system, a district wouldn’t simply be won by the party with the most votes; instead, its multiple seats would be parceled out according to the percentage of the vote that each party gets. This means that previously niche parties would suddenly have a shot at winning seats. The system is known as proportional representation. If implemented, its backers believe it could help transform America into a multiparty democracy.

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Advocates for proportional representation acknowledge that such a radical change is a long shot, at least in the immediate future. Multimember House districts actually have an extensive history in the U.S., but it’s not one remembered fondly. Congress outlawed their use at the federal level during the civil-rights era, after southern states exploited the rules to disenfranchise Black voters. Proponents say they’d ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again, and they’ve won the support of some civil-rights activists who believe that under the right legal parameters, multimember districts could significantly expand Black representation. Another challenge for the movement is that Israel, a frequently cited example of a multiparty system that uses proportional representation, has recently experienced no less political instability than the U.S.

That such an idea has gained a following is a reflection of just how frustrated election experts have grown with the fractured state of American politics, and how worried some of them are for the future. They believe—or at least hope—that a new season of reform in the U.S. will make possible proposals that were once deemed unachievable.

Supporters of proportional representation—which is used in advanced democracies such as Australia, Israel, and countries throughout Europe—view the system as a prerequisite for breaking the two parties’ stranglehold on American politics. It would foster coalitional, cross-partisan governance, while larger, multimember districts would all but eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “Your enemies are never permanent. And your friends today might be your opponents tomorrow, and maybe your friends the day after,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, explained to me. “So there’s something structural about a multiparty [system] that depresses polarization, depresses the risk of political violence—that depresses extremism.”

Take a medium-size state like Wisconsin as an example. Wisconsin has eight districts that are gerrymandered in such a way that Republicans reliably win six. Under proportional representation, the state would have fewer districts—perhaps only two, say, composed of five and three members. Less reliance on geographic boundaries would make the state harder to gerrymander, and when combined with proportional representation, its elections would likely be far more competitive. The results, therefore, would be more reflective of Wisconsin’s closely divided population.

Larger, ideologically diverse states such as California and New York might elect representatives from the Working Families Party or the Green Party; Texas could send Libertarian members to Washington. In 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” In a multiparty democracy, they wouldn’t have to be.

Voters across the country have shown a willingness in recent years to experiment with new ways of electing their leaders. California and Washington State have scrapped partisan primaries. Maine has adopted ranked-choice voting for federal elections—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—as have New York City, San Francisco, and many other municipalities for local offices. Alaska uses a combination of nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting, and Nevada has taken the first step toward approving a similar system.

[Read: The political-reform movement scores its biggest victory yet]

The changes that Fix Our House has in mind for Congress are far more dramatic. They’re also much harder to carry out. Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”

Election reformers are a polite bunch. When I asked them about ideas other than their own, they were hesitant to be too harsh. That’s partly out of necessity. When your goal is reducing partisanship and polarization in politics, slinging insults doesn’t exactly help the cause. So they applaud almost any proposal as long as it represents an improvement over the status quo, which to them is pretty much anything.

Yet this public bonhomie masks a vigorous competition of ideas—and a jostling for resources—over the best way to create a more representative government. Perhaps the biggest rival to proportional representation is final-four voting, the system that Alaska adopted through a statewide referendum in 2020. Instead of separate party primaries, all candidates run in a first round of balloting. The top four advance to the general election, which is decided through ranked-choice voting. Developers of final-four voting celebrated when, under the new process last year, far-right candidates lost two key races. Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski staved off a challenge from the right, and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin, the right-wing former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a race for the House. Peltola became the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years.

In November, Nevadans voted to approve a similar system that will go into effect if another statewide referendum passes in 2024. The initiatives in Alaska and Nevada emerged from an idea developed by Katherine Gehl, a Wisconsin businesswoman who has donated millions to centrist causes and helped bankroll the ballot campaigns in both states. Gehl is adamant that combining nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting is a better reform than proportional representation, both on the merits and for the simple reason that her idea has already shown results. “We’re getting as good a grade as we could possibly get at this point,” she told me.

Gehl and Drutman basically agree on the core problem. Because of gerrymandering and the natural clustering of like-minded people, about 90 percent of House elections are noncompetitive come November, according to an analysis by Fix Our House, having already been decided in low-turnout primaries dominated by the parties’ most ideological voters. Very few Americans, then, have a real say in who represents them in the House. Once elected, politicians tend to be more concerned about losing their next primary than losing their next general election. As a result, they legislate according to the wishes of the small sliver of the electorate that put them in office rather than the much broader pool of constituents who make up their district. This reduces the motivation to compromise and deepens polarization.

Gehl argues that to fix the system, a reform needs to both increase the number of people who cast meaningful votes for their representatives and motivate those legislators to deliver results on issues that matter to most people. Proportional representation, she told me, achieves the first goal but not the second. In a multiparty system, Gehl said, many lawmakers would feel just as beholden to a tiny portion of their constituents as do today’s primary-obsessed legislators. “If you just get better representation but you don’t look at why we’re not getting results, people will feel better represented as the Titanic sinks,” she said.

Advocates for Gehl’s system also point out that proportional representation would do nothing to alter incentives to legislate in the U.S. Senate, where hyperpartisanship and filibustering have stymied action on a range of issues. And they question Drutman’s push for more parties at a time when more and more Americans are identifying as political independents. “It’s actually a fanciful and incorrect assessment of American politics to believe that there’s a huge demand for more parties,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who, along with his business partner, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has invested in Gehl’s reform efforts. Her vision, Mehlhorn told me, “is not quite a magic bullet,” but it has more promise than the other reforms.

Drutman doesn’t see it that way. The final-four system might work well for Alaska, he said, but Alaska, with its relatively depolarized politics and unusually large number of independent voters, is not a representative state. Nor is it clear, he noted, that the new system made a decisive difference in Murkowski’s and Peltola’s victories last year. “I think those reforms are pushing up against the limits of what they can achieve,” Drutman said. “Nonpartisan primaries have not really changed anything at all.”

Beyond the friendly rivalry with other reform proposals, advocates for proportional representation must confront the much peskier problem of getting it enacted. In interviews, champions of the idea were excited to inform me that all it takes to allow states to experiment anew with multimember House districts is an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment—as if approving a major election reform will be a piece of cake for a legislature that regularly struggles to keep the government open.

[Nick Troiano: Party primaries must go]

States have been required to elect only one representative per district since 1967, when Congress banned multimember districts to stop southern states from using a version of the system to ensure that white candidates won House seats. Fix Our House wants Congress to amend the law in a way that allows states to adopt multimember districts without returning to the racist practices of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s allies in the civil-rights community argue that if properly designed, multimember districts would increase representation for communities of color, including in places where they have struggled to win elections because they are dispersed throughout the population rather than concentrated in neighboring areas.

For the moment, the idea has gained little momentum on Capitol Hill. Republican leaders have become reflexively opposed to reform efforts aimed at reducing polarization, seeing them as Trojan horses designed to topple conservatives. Democrats in recent years have prioritized other election-related proposals focused on expanding access to the ballot, tightening campaign-finance rules, and banning partisan gerrymandering.

The closest legislative proposal to what Fix Our House has in mind is the Fair Representation Act, a bill that Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia has introduced several times to combine multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. But Beyer has struggled to win more than a handful of co-sponsors even within his own party.

Most election-reform victories have come through citizen-driven ballot initiatives, which exist only on the state and local levels, as opposed to national legislation that would require support from leaders of the major parties. An idea like proportional representation, Beyer told me, is more popular with whichever party is out of power. “It appeals to Republicans in Massachusetts who’ve never gotten elected, and Democrats in Oklahoma,” he said. “So the appeal is to people on the outside, not the people who are making the laws.”

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”

Advocates for proportional representation also disagree on whether it needs to be paired with a perhaps equally ambitious reform: significantly increasing the number of seats in the House. (Drutman has advocated for adding House seats to account for substantial population increases since the number was set at 435 nearly a century ago, but Fix Our House believes that proportional representation would be beneficial even at its current size.)

Despite scant support among politicians, proportional representation has been gaining momentum within the reform community. The groups Protect Democracy and Unite America recently published a report examining the idea, and another advocacy group, FairVote, has begun to reemphasize proportional representation after years of focusing mostly on ranked-choice voting. Last year, voters in Portland, Oregon, approved the use of multimember districts (and ranked-choice voting) for the city council. Multimember districts have also generated discussion among Republican state legislators in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states, although the idea has yet to move forward there.

Reformers tend to downplay the long odds of their campaigns, but the leaders of Fix Our House are surprisingly candid about their near-term chances of success, or lack thereof. “It’s clear that there’s no path to major structural reform in Congress right now,” a co-founder of the group, Eli Zupnick, told me. He said that Fix Our House wants to “lay the groundwork for this policy to move when the moment is right.” That means promoting the idea to other advocates, lawmakers, and opinion makers so that if there’s, say, a presidential or congressional commission to study different ideas, proportional representation makes it into the conversation.

One of the group’s models is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began as an idea that Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard professor, promoted for years before Democrats included it during their package of banking reforms following the 2008 financial crisis. “It’s funny how things can go from off the wall to on the shelf,” Drutman said.

Left unsaid is the fact that it took an economic collapse to muscle the new federal agency into law and that the CFPB remains a target for Republicans more than a decade later. Fix Our House launched about a year after January 6, 2021, when the nation’s polarization triggered a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election. Supporters of proportional representation acknowledged that the moment they are preparing for, when the country is finally ready to overhaul the way it elects its leaders, might not be a happy one. “The most obvious way you get big change,” Beyer told me, grimly, “is catastrophe.”

A few weeks ago, as the first wave of smoke from the Canadian wildfires rolled south, I was getting ready to drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, about 18 hours west to my hometown of Rogers, Arkansas, to visit family. I figured that by the time I hit the Virginia–North Carolina border, where I was planning to camp, I would have outrun the haze. But it followed me past the campsite and along I-40 in Tennessee, all the way to my corner of Arkansas, just 20 minutes away from Oklahoma. The smoke felt much like these past years of extreme weather in the South have—heavy, muddling, inescapable.

This week, more wildfire smoke washed over Charlottesville and much of the South. Meanwhile, communities wilted under a heat wave, rattled from thunder, and flooded with rain. Towns in central Arkansas hit by severe thunderstorms last weekend were facing excessive heat advisories and worse-than-normal air quality by the end of this week. Last Monday, I watched hail batter my car. Within an hour, the sun was back out and I was picking peaches in my friends’ garden, pulling off my sweatshirt because the heat had become so fierce.

Friends in Texas who were facing deadly cold earlier this year are now seeking respite from temperatures that threaten to hit 115 degrees. In some Texas cities, the heat index has surpassed 125 degrees, dangerously high for the elderly, the unhoused, and people who have conditions like asthma. Several people have died from the heat, including Tina Perritt, a woman in Louisiana who spent days without power.

Southern summers have always been hot and humid. But the swings from one extreme to the next—drought to torrential rain, record-breaking cold to sweltering heat, storm to sun—have lately begun to feel apocalyptic. Summer is our season, the South at its best. But this new reality has taken the best parts of southern summers and made them unbearable.

[Read: America is going to have a ‘Heat Belt’]

The extremities feed into one another: The heat breeds severe thunderstorms in some parts of the country, and lights forests on fire in others; homes and cars are damaged, power is knocked out, and people are stranded. Power has become a particular issue in Texas, where the grid has been stretched past its limits by cold snaps over the past several winters as well as the current heat wave; right now, the saving grace is additional solar power from the beating sun, aided by wind power. And when the lights go out or the pipes burst, families are left to deal with the continued and increasing heat with no air conditioner, perhaps no water.

Growing up in Arkansas, I came to expect power outages during specific seasons: winter ice storms, March tornado warnings. These days, the disasters—because what else can they be called?—feel more frequent, less familiar. A tornado hit my parents’ house in October a few years ago. Earlier this week, some friends and I tried to escape the heat by floating the Rivanna River, and spent three hours drifting through wildfire haze, trying not to acknowledge that in escaping one hazard we’d exposed ourselves to another.

Climate change amplifies these disasters, and economic precarity exacerbates their impacts for many, especially the unhoused, the elderly, the incarcerated. Connie Edmonson, a 78-year-old woman in rural Everton, Arkansas, recently missed an electricity payment for her mobile home because she was paying medical bills for her heart and breathing problems. The heat had put her in danger before—she’s had several heat strokes, and earlier this year, she passed out while she was mowing her lawn. A neighbor had to help her up and back inside (and finish the mowing). If it hadn’t been for Legal Aid and her doctor working together to persuade her electricity provider to turn the power back on before temperatures escalated again this week, she said, “I don’t think I would have made it.”

[Read: Nowhere should expect a cool summer]

The South is a region rutted with inequities, and every time the pendulum of climate change swings from extreme heat to extreme cold, it deepens the grooves. Laborers are especially vulnerable. The South’s agricultural economy, propped up for centuries by enslaved Black workers, now relies on farmworkers—and because of lobbying by segregationist southern lawmakers, those workers are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act. No federal regulations protect farmworkers—who are mostly noncitizen immigrants from Latin America, commonly live under the poverty line, and have few legal rights—from extreme heat. Farmworkers die from heat-related injuries at 20 times the rate of other laborers. A 2020 study estimated that the number of days farmworkers labor in extreme heat will double by mid-century. The state of Texas just rescinded rules requiring water breaks for construction workers, exposing them to greater risk of dehydration and heat stroke.   

For workers, the growing heat is impossible to ignore. Carlos Herrera Fabian is a 22-year-old who grew up in a farmworker family that moved up and down the East Coast, from Florida to Maine, picking seasonal crops. “Back then, you could say that the heat was tolerable,” he said. “Now it’s just scorching. You can feel your eyes burning from the sweat dripping down.” Fabian’s 72-year-old grandfather, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, still works in the Florida fields, and comes home looking like he’s just taken a shower, with sweat streaming down his body. Farmworkers generally wear long-sleeve shirts and pants to protect themselves from sun and pesticides, exacerbating the effects of the heat. And they don’t get paid when extreme thunderstorms keep people out of the fields, or drought ruins crops.

Federal—and state—labor laws would help protect against these conditions. So would better infrastructure: power grids, tree canopies, cooling shelters, readily available water. The inequities manifest in cities too. Low-income, redlined neighborhoods have more concrete and fewer trees—and, as a result, summer temperatures up to 20 degrees higher—than wealthier, whiter ones.  

[Read: Heat is the human-rights issue of the 21st century]

This is how it’s going to be. Things will get hotter, storms will get worse, wildfire smoke will get more common, cold snaps will persist. All the while, the ruts of inequity will be worn deeper, the same people time and time again placed on the front lines of catastrophe. Power grids will continue to fail, especially in states where the government is reticent to fund infrastructure even for the wealthy and white, let alone for the poor, the rural, the people of color. The layering haze-on-hail-on-heat sometimes weighs so heavy that it can feel hopeless, like southern summers will never be southern summers again. And they won’t. But together we will try to stymie the damage.