Here’s how wind-energy projects aren’t built in America. This particular story took place a decade ago but could easily have unfolded last year or last month. In 2013, a Texas-based company put forward a proposal to build two windmill farms in northeastern Alabama. The company said that the farms would generate enough power for more than 24,000 homes, eagerly projecting that it would break ground by the end of 2013. But local opposition swiftly defeated the project. Opponents also won stringent regulations that made future wind farms in the area extremely unlikely.

“I think this is a great example of ordinary people with determination and a certain amount of political cooperation successfully standing up to defend their community,” one critic of the project told a local reporter. “It was literally a David versus Goliath thing,” another said.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Tress? Not in my backyard]

Americans have generally understood the transition to a clean-energy economy as a technological or an economic problem: Can renewables be reliable? Can they compete with cheap fossil fuels? Recent advances have answered these questions with a resounding yes. But climate change is also a democratic problem: Can our political institutions quickly and equitably facilitate 91,000 miles of transmission lines? The problem is not just that entrenched oil-and-gas interests reject the need to end reliance on fossil fuels; it’s also that the environmental playbook was written to stop rather than create change.

In the typical cultural script, a polluting corporation tries to crush the little guy; a pipeline threatens a defenseless fox; a faceless bureaucrat charts the course of a highway through a thriving neighborhood. Accordingly, American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without.

Five landowners filed a lawsuit against the wind developers in Alabama; two of them were well-connected local politicians. They alleged the following concerns: noise from the turning of the windmills; an “overwhelming” negative aesthetic impact; hypothetical harms to tourism, recreation, and home construction (again due to noise); the “flashing of the blades when the sun strikes at a particular angle”; harm to wildlife (unspecified); harm to nearby lakes and ponds; and “significant danger” that could occur from broken blades, lightning strikes, or collapsing towers. In sum, the property owners claimed that the two farms, containing eight wind turbines, would hurt property values as well as destroy “the way of life of the surrounding land owners.”

Another 32 property owners in the adjacent county had already filed a suit opposing the development on similar grounds. But neither lawsuit was ultimately necessary, because the state legislature granted broad authority to the two county governments at issue to oversee future wind permitting. The legislature also created stringent requirements for wind projects that make them legal in name only. So died a project meant to provide millions of dollars of local tax revenue and play a small part in the clean-energy transition.  

[Jerusalem Demsas: The great defenders of the status quo]

This case was not unusual. The UC Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes recently led a study looking into wind-energy opposition in North America from 2000 to 2016. She estimated that in the U.S., 17 percent of wind projects faced opposition, usually by a small number of people. (The median figure was 23.) As in Alabama, opposition was most likely to take the form of litigation and legislation, not mass protest.

Stokes’s research likely undersells how rampant opposition actually is. She relied on media coverage to measure it, which means that her data set doesn’t include nonpublic actions such as making calls to legislators or local elected officials, or lawsuits not covered by local newspapers. Nor can her research capture the cascading effects of opposition on renewable-energy development. Whether it kills a project or merely delays one, opposition has broad ramifications beyond the enterprise in question, because it raises the costs of development. Moreover, broad ordinances such as the ones in Alabama don’t just stop current projects; they prevent future projects as well.

Community opposition holds back the broader green-energy economy well beyond onshore wind projects. The Stanford researcher Michael Bennon studied 355 major transportation and energy-infrastructure projects from 2010 to 2018, and found that nearly two-thirds of proposed solar-energy projects were litigated. Fourteen percent of these projects were canceled, and fewer than half of them were in operation by the time the study was published this month. Transmission lines necessary to connect renewable-energy sources to the grid also face intense local opposition. And carbon-dioxide pipelines that seek to ferry the substance away to underground storage locations rather than releasing it into the atmosphere are also blocked by local opposition.

Rejecting clean power in your own backyard means accepting pollution in someone else’s. And the costs of that bargain are unevenly felt: Environmental-justice advocates have long pointed out that politically marginalized communities—those with less power usually due to their class or race—face the brunt of climate change’s negative effects, and they have successfully pushed legacy green organizations to recognize that pollution has disparate impacts.

Stokes brings a new phrase into the lexicon: energy privilege. It refers to her finding that in the U.S., whiter census tracts were more likely to oppose wind-energy projects. Opposition was also more intense in whiter tracts. This finding adds to a growing literature in political science showing that race, age, class, and homeownership status predict involvement in local government. The people who show up to land-use hearings, the people who vote in local elections, and thus the people aware of and equipped to fight changes in their community, are not reflective of the broader population. Relatedly, opposition tends to require access to lawyers, connections to local elected officials, and practice with lobbying.

I spoke with environmental-justice advocates about energy privilege and the broader issue of opposition privilege. At the center of my conversations was this question: Isn’t there a tension between pushing for a fast transition to a green economy and giving local objectors so much power to block renewable-energy projects? They all told me that I was focusing on the wrong problem: Instead of removing veto points from the clean-energy process, we should instead invest more in community input to ensure that projects get the necessary buy-in early.

Johanna Bozuwa, the executive director of the Climate and Community Project, wants to focus on integrating input early in the community process, to avoid easy pitfalls. Catherine Coleman Flowers, the vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, made a similar point. “I’m sure things would look very, very different if there was stakeholder engagement from the very beginning,” she told me, pointing to a finding in Stokes’s paper that opposition to wind-energy projects was less likely if those projects were community owned.

[Read: Floating wind farms are about to transform the oceans]

Flowers is right about this finding, but when I pressed Stokes about it, she ran the numbers and found that community-owned projects in her sample had a median of just two wind turbines, whereas non-community-owned projects had a median of 44. Giving local communities significant control over these projects may alleviate opposition, but at a significant cost.

Marion Gee, an executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, sees a problem with scale. She believes that instead of reforming our processes to speed up the development of large new projects, we should question whether we need them at all. “You’re probably setting up for conflict when you have such big projects,” she told me, recommending a focus on distributed energy rather than on “huge, concentrated wind farms or huge, concentrated energy installations near any community.” Gee thinks that the path forward looks like rooftop solar, energy-efficiency investments, and reduced demand for energy.

These are empirical questions: Can we do without big energy projects and large transmission lines? Is distributed generation enough? The answer is no. According to a 2016 assessment by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, even if the U.S. put rooftop solar on every single building where it was technically feasible, that would generate only 1,432 terawatt hours of energy annually. In 2022, the U.S. used more than 4,000 TWh of electricity. And our electricity needs will skyrocket as people switch over to electric cars, buildings switch to heat pumps, and industrial production switches away from fossil fuels. To reach net-zero emissions in 2050, the U.S. will need to generate nearly 11,000 TWh of electricity a year, according to one model. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, the best approach is to do it all. Yes to rooftop solar; yes to utility-scale solar; yes to wind; yes to carbon-capture technologies.

Flowers, Bozuwa, and Gee are united in their belief that local objections are inherently legitimate. There are good reasons to oppose a development, of course, even a renewable-energy one—if it blocks public access to a national park, for instance. But opposing a wind turbine because you think it might be ugly is not reasonable. Delaying a solar project because you have a vague notion that it might affect tourism is not reasonable. And the reality is that our legal and political systems are incapable of differentiating reasonable from unreasonable objections.

Let’s return to the Alabama wind-energy example. Many of the detractors’ objections were patently unreasonable. Wind farms simply aren’t particularly noisy, for instance. (Listen for yourself.) Nor do they really hurt property values. And even the top bird-conservation organization says that outdoor cats are a greater threat to birds than windmills are. But this is how the system works: Local opposition, even if it is unreasonable or narrowly held, can derail projects and slow the green-energy transition without ever proving any of its claims.

Highways that cut through downtowns were bad, because they destroyed vibrant neighborhoods, entrenched car dependency, targeted poor and minority communities, and locked in climate-unfriendly infrastructure. The problem with bad projects isn’t the local opposition; the problem is that they are bad. Local opposition can be a sign of that, but it can also just be a sign that people fear change. The green-energy transition rests on our ability to distinguish between the two. Right now, we can’t.

Climate anxiety among the flood-affected communities across the South Asian nation has failed to make headlines.

Coca-Cola hopes to cut its carbon footprint with fossil-free plastic trial at Swansea University.

A decade and change ago, as the world woke up to the catastrophe of climate change, campus activists were looking for ways to heal the environment at scale. They landed on an unusual one: the free market. Climate change is the world’s biggest unpriced externality, in that neither the producers nor the consumers of fossil fuels pay for the damage they cause to the environment. Gas is too cheap; ultimately, every living thing on the planet bears the cost. Perhaps activists could get the market to price that externality in by nudging investors to divest.

Students at dozens of universities, galvanized by the nonprofit 350.org, began protesting at academic-leadership and investment offices, asking for endowments to quit holding shares in fossil-fuel companies. The students picketed. They marched. They conducted sit-ins. They held votes. “You do not want your institution to be on the wrong side of this issue,” Stephen Mulkey, the president of Maine’s Unity College, the first to divest using 350.org’s guidelines, told Inside Climate News in 2012. “We realized that investing in fossil fuels was an unethical position.”

Still, the demands sounded symbolic at best, the movement brimming with idealism and energy but to what end? Companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil are profitable because of the world’s unslakable demand for gas; folks dumping their stocks would not change that. Such firms would “find other willing buyers” for the shares, Drew Faust, Harvard’s then-president, argued in response to students’ divestment campaign in 2013. And Harvard, she noted, used no small amount of light sweet crude itself.

But divestment had worked in other contexts: helping to end apartheid in South Africa, for instance. And the financial argument was, in theory, sound. Divestment can reduce a company’s value: Some folks sell their stock, others refuse to buy, the share price falls if there aren’t enough other, interested investors to step in. More important, it makes corporate growth more expensive. Exploration, mining, extraction, shipping—these are all extremely costly for energy firms. If such firms have less cash on hand and a harder time raising it, projects might not pencil out, energy prices might go up, and their profit margins might fall.

[Read: A major new index fund should unnerve climate-skeptical CEOs]

By 2018, less than a decade since the climate divestment movement picked up in the United States, more than 1,000 institutional investors with $6.2 trillion in assets under management had committed to divestment, the firm Arabella Advisors has estimated; some of today’s tallies are several times higher. The list of entities quitting fossil-fuel investment now includes several large pension funds, the country of Ireland, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and dozens of private colleges and universities. In 2021, Harvard (under new management) divested. In July, Seattle University did too. Last month, New York University, despite its deep ties with Wall Street, agreed to do so as well.  

Has it worked? On the margin perhaps. Some analyses find that the movement is still too small to have any effect. But one broad analysis of lending to oil-and-gas firms in 33 countries from 2000 to 2015 found that divestment was “associated with lower capital flows,” an effect “enhanced in more stringent environmental policy regimes and diminished in countries which heavily subsidize fossil fuels.”

But the single most important effect of divestment isn’t about the money at all, but something stranger and more diffuse: It takes away the “social license” of the fossil-fuel industry, as the movement’s leader, Bill McKibben, puts it. It makes extractive companies seem socially irresponsible and unworthy of public investment. It makes people think twice about working for such firms. It pushes all companies to acknowledge the environment, and to understand that being a major emitter is a bad business practice. It helps pressure corporate financiers to take climate seriously, something that really will keep the planet livable.

To be clear: A single person selling their Exxon stock is not going to change the trajectory of the climate crisis. A few families committing their 401(k) money to green funds is not going to hasten the world’s transition to renewable energy.

But McKibben is right. Symbolism matters. And if you are worried enough about the climate to want to take personal action, moving your money to green funds is one of the easiest ways to do it—one that takes perhaps five minutes, one time, plus a bit of emailing once a year. Contrast that with quitting meat, giving up your car, or stopping air travel.

If you like to pick your own stocks, the choice is simple: Either divest, or invest with intention. Just don’t buy stocks from major emitters, including coal, oil, and gas companies. Or buy the stocks of brown companies that really are trying to go green, rather than their less-green rivals. Tell these companies at shareholder meetings that you want them to commit to environmental standards. The economists Alex Edmans, of London Business School; Doron Levit, of the University of Washington; and Jan Schneemeier, of Indiana University, call this strategy “tilting.” “Divestment is most effective at starving a company of capital and hindering expansion, but tilting is more powerful” at getting a company to lower its emissions, the economists have found.   

[Read: Never acquire clothes the same way again]

Jacquelyn Pless, of MIT, has studied which kinds of corrective actions are meaningful in a corporate context—so you can know that the firms you’re investing in really are committed to saving the planet, or at least to not destroying it. She has found that companies that set long-term emissions targets, have a neutral party oversee their emissions data, tie executive compensation to environmental performance, support government climate-change bills, and set an internal carbon price do best in terms of lowered emissions.

If you like to invest in actively or passively managed funds rather than picking your own stocks, things get even easier. All of the major asset managers offer green mutual funds and index funds, meaning funds that do not put money into extractive industries and that hold companies in their portfolio to certain environmental standards. You can put or switch your money into them with nothing more than a few clicks. And let your fund manager or investment adviser know that you demand green funds: These companies manage gigantic pools of money and large shareholder voting blocs that are powerful influences on the companies whose stocks they hold.

There isn’t much downside to doing this. Green funds tend to do about as well as their conventional counterparts, at least for now. Perhaps the bigger issue is that there’s some evidence that companies in ESG funds do not actually have better environmental practices: There’s a lot of greenwashing going on. The answer for the individual is to do some due diligence, perhaps interviewing your fund manager and making sure that you are comfortable with where your money is going.

But don’t worry about it too much. The symbolism of green investment is more important than the dollars-and-cents effect. As many people as possible need to act like we are in a world worth saving. Becoming part of the divestment movement and greening your 401(k) is a quick and underappreciated way to do that.

Study shows quality and quantity of hops - a crucial ingredient - are falling with hotter weather.

Climate change is bringing about more devastation, forcing more Afghans to flee.

The opening pages of C Pam Zhang’s second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, imagine a planet facing crisis after crisis—an extension of our own. Climate change has devastated the land: the Earth is covered in smog; crops have withered; countries are caving to famine. Zhang joins a number of other writers who have recently used their work to ask how to live in a dying world. But her curiosity is more pointed: She seems to be asking how we might still find pleasure amid collapse—and whether it’s moral to do so when so many are just trying to survive.

The novel’s narrator is an unnamed 29-year-old American chef working in England who finds herself trapped when the U.S. closes its borders as smog spreads and geopolitical tensions rise. On the same day that she receives notice that her late mother’s apartment in Los Angeles has burned down in a riot, her boss cuts pesto from the restaurant’s menu because there’s no more basil, “not even the powdered kind.” Zhang splices the two events together in the same breath, suggesting that for the chef, they are equally significant. She pays lip service to the famine’s severity in Southeast Asia and the Americas, and debates over which superpower is most to blame. But what she really seems to mourn is the disappearance of peridot grapes and buttery mangoes and “the bitter green of endive.”

Even catastrophe, we’re reminded, is bookended by the needs of the present, interrupted by the cravings of one’s palate. Throughout, Zhang, who wrote the novel after her first transformative post-pandemic meal at a restaurant, employs food as a stand-in for gratification (at one point, her central character refers to strawberries “as yielding as a woman’s inner thigh”).

[Read: ‘I’ve seen several giants die on my land’]

Finally, after being asked to cook with gritty, gray mung-protein flour, the narrator quits: “In the dimness of that refrigerated room I could no longer see a future for the halibut dish without pesto.” Because she can no longer take her beloved ingredients or sunlight or clean air for granted, she decides to allow herself to want “recklessly, immorally” by taking a job as a private chef in a gated European mountaintop community of the ultra-wealthy. Her new employer and his enigmatic daughter, Aida, a scientist who runs the community’s biodiversity labs, are trying to preserve the richness of the Earth for the stomachs of the few, resurrecting Berkshire pigs and engineering tender heirloom grains. When she arrives at the Italian-French border, the narrator learns that the place is called Terra di latte e miele—“the land of milk and honey”—and that her role is to prepare elaborate meals for investors.

By imagining the planet stretched to near destruction, Zhang poses complex questions about self-interest. She asks the reader to consider how meaningful individual behavior actually is when the environment continues to decay, regardless of whether one tries to do the right thing. The chef, after becoming unmoored by the loss of her mother’s home, accepts the twisted, transactional arrangement of her job on the mountain, as well as the comfort and bounty it affords her; life’s difficulties have already begun to erode her appetite for morality. She prepares trial runs of elaborate meals, discarding pounds of pommes dauphine and pouring out gallons of steaming Armagnac, even as she thinks about starving children. When her employer asks her to pretend to be his missing wife at the dinners he hosts to fund the mountain, she agrees—in exchange for more money. As she thinks at one point, “What … is fairness in a world that fears there is never enough, in which one need always scrapes against another?”

And so the chef decides to embrace the privileges of her life on the mountain, falling in love with Aida in the process. Even as she becomes more and more powerless—her employer demands that she maintain her body-mass index within a certain range and remain silent at dinners—she realizes that all she can secure is her own sensual pleasure. As the chef and Aida become romantically intertwined and begin to spend each night together, she decides to say yes: “to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee, to that join at the legs where she softened, dimpled, begged me to bite.”

In these depictions, Zhang’s writing skates between prose and poetry, balancing the haziness of emotion with the grounding of detail. In some instances, the heaviness of her sentences can tip a passage out of balance or make the story harder to follow. But it is deeply refreshing to see plot intentionally cast in a supporting role, accentuating the primacy of feeling:

Three years, can you imagine, gray days and gray nights, no lovers no family no feasts no flights no fruit no meat and suddenly this largesse of freckles down her torso, this churning, spilling free … Against a still-dark sky, this emergent landscape of her body. Lunar dunes, slick valleys, her throat a shifting topography.

In allowing her narrator to abandon herself to desire, Zhang seems to be arguing that pleasure is an essential part of life—and of survival. Our desire is what makes us human; we don’t cease wanting just because it is selfish or futile. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the chef’s relationship with Aida. As the two become entangled, the chef grows less concerned about the hypocrisies she witnesses on the mountaintop.

When depicting these tensions, the novel can feel preachy, distracting from Zhang’s otherwise mesmerizing prose. Aida, for instance, hosts a hunting party during which the investors kill off a species of chimp that she has decided is not worth preserving. The chef berates Aida; she is shocked by this cruel display, given how protective Aida is of the animals in her labs. In response, Aida spits back, “Please. As if you never ate tuna, or used plastics, or flew on planes when gas was artificially cheap. Every person on this planet had a hand in killing the chimps.”

But despite some of the novel’s unsubtle moments, it is impossible, in most instances, to decipher the narrator’s moral stance—and, more important, how the reader should feel about her. Toward the end of the book, she decides to give up her spot on the mountain after Aida hits a child with her car while they’re driving back from Milan. When Aida’s father pays off the child’s family, Aida’s limp complacency breaks something in the chef’s mind: “I wanted her guts to twist, her stomach to revolt.”

[Read: The lie at the heart of the Western]

The chef’s decision to leave and renounce her relationship with Aida, however, stands in contrast with how fondly she remembers her time on the mountain in the final pages of the book. Here, Zhang resists devolving into an overwrought critique of climate disaster and individual greed—a restraint that feels in line with her previous work. How Much of These Hills Is Gold, her debut novel, similarly features a female narrator who prioritizes her own interests—in her case, financial stability, beaded white shoes, a beautiful home. The power of Zhang’s work is that she cares more about her characters’ motivations and yearnings than about evaluating their actions as right or wrong. The ethical ambiguities of the book are paralleled by the narrator’s murky recollection of Aida’s face: “plastered up again and again till it became smooth and strange, a cipher without any meaning.”

Zhang’s second novel is a bold encouragement to dwell within our desires, even if we ultimately decide that the consequences do not justify the pursuit. Her message is an addendum to the two stark words—“she wants”—that ended her first novel. Now she seems to be saying: She wants so that she may live.

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