Rebecca Solnit: New Energies for Peace

On the other side of the world, first in California and the southwestern United States and then across the continent, an unprecedented heat wave caused extraordinary temperatures for mid-March, with dramatic implications for agriculture, wildfires, snow accumulation and the water cycle. The two events are connected: the climate is in crisis because we have burned too many fossil fuels for too long.

According to the Associated Press, “the war in Iran is laying bare global dependence on vulnerable hydrocarbon routes, making calls to accelerate the transition to renewable energy more urgent. The conflict has effectively blocked oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the planet’s oil and liquefied gas (LNG) passes. The disruption has shaken energy markets, sending prices soaring and putting import-dependent economies in difficulty. Asia, where much of it was headed of oil blocked by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has been hit hardest, but the repercussions are also being felt in Europe, where governments are looking for ways to reduce energy demand, and in Africa, which is preparing for rising fuel costs and inflation. Unlike in previous oil crises, renewable energy is now competitive with fossil fuels in many countries, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, in 2024 more than 90 percent of new energy projects will be renewable. worldwide had lower costs than fossil fuel-based alternatives.”

The war and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz are pushing more and more people to understand that the use of fossil fuels is harmful from a political as well as an environmental point of view. Donald Trump never seems to think about the consequences and the next moves (sometimes he seems convinced that there won’t be any, perhaps because he believes that his power is the only one that counts). But the long-term effects of this war could be the opposite of what its supporters in the fossil fuel industry hope for: an acceleration of the energy transition.

Of course, Trump is also fighting an internal war against renewable energy, cutting funding, canceling permits and even bribing (with taxpayers’ money) the French company TotalEnergies to block the construction of wind farms off the US coast. Let’s remember that in the summer of 2024 Trump promised oil company executives that if they donated a billion dollars to his election campaign he would give them everything they wanted in return. They gave, and now they’re cashing in.

As the Associated Press article points out, most energy projects around the world today are based on renewables because they are the best way to power anything that runs on electricity, and a related transition is electrifying everything from home systems to construction and industrial machinery. In 2025 Bill McKibben wrote in the New Yorker that around the world “solar panels capable of producing one gigawatt are installed every fifteen hours, the equivalent of a coal-fired power plant.”

Renewable energy is also decentralized energy, which cannot be monopolized by cartels and multinationals because the sun, wind, geothermal heat and waterways are distributed across the entire earth’s surface. Years ago Mark Z. Jacobson, a climate engineer at Stanford University, developed a series of transition plans for all fifty American states and for almost all countries in the world, demonstrating that each has different combinations of energy sources, but everyone has enough of them.

Renewable energy is local energy and it is also free, because once the infrastructure such as wind turbines and solar panels and the distribution system are built, the “fuel” is the sun or the wind, which cost nothing and never run out. Today in Australia photovoltaic energy is so abundant that electricity is free during the three hours of the day when solar radiation is at its maximum. California takes advantage of solar peaking with the largest battery farm outside China, which stores excess electricity and then feeds it into the grid at other times. I like to say that from now on the Sun also shines at night. Because one of the most annoying things we often hear from detractors of renewables is that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Sure, but with storage the combination works.

However, I would like to return to Australia for a moment. One of the reasons that pushed me to found the Meditations in an Emergency site in 2024 was my editors’ reaction to a possible article that I was looking forward to writing but that they didn’t seem to understand. This definitely convinced me that I needed my own space of expression.

My proposal was about a film, so they didn’t consider it a political comment. But it was a film about the violent struggle over fossil fuels. It was the last chapter of the dystopian science fiction saga that began with Mad Max. I had written to my editors: “Last night I saw it Furious. It’s a mess, but the interesting thing is that it refers to what I once heard called ‘yesterday’s tomorrows’.

The film is mired in an ’80s vision of the future, but the obsession with petrol felt like a blast from the past. There they were under the endless sun of the Australian desert fighting for petrol, blowing up internal combustion vehicles, fighting for a fortified refinery called Gas town, and so on. I mean, you can put enough solar panels in the Australian outback to cover the entire world’s needs several times over. The smaller and less sunny United Kingdom recently estimated that 1 percent of its land area would be enough to meet its 2050 renewables targets.

The amazing thing about renewable energy and an electrified world is that it would simply be better in so many ways, starting with the fact that almost all energy would be local, that there would be enough for everyone because the sun and wind are inexhaustible, that it would be clean and non-toxic, and that cars would be silent. Instead Furious it’s full of roaring engines. Because we see these technologies primarily as a solution to climate change, most people don’t understand that they would eliminate a lot of other problems, and that would be the case even if the climate crisis didn’t exist.

The American critic Frederic Jameson said that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Apparently, at least for director George Miller, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the fossil fuel era. In the real world, meanwhile, some of us are trying to accelerate the end of this era to prevent what may not be the end of the world, but still the destruction of a good part of it.

An amazing thing about Furious and the previous film in the saga, Mad Max fury roadis that somewhere, in this depressing imagined future, there is a feminist oasis where people have found a way to live seemingly in peace and equality in a kind of garden. That’s where Furiosa’s character comes from and that’s where she’s trying to get back to. Yet Miller seems to have no idea how to make a film about the subtle and complex problems encountered in paradise. So it focuses on an internally (and externally) burning ultraviolent misogynistic hell.

All this makes me think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The literary theory of the shopping bagaccording to which the first human tool was not a weapon but a container, because gathering was a more important source of food than hunting. Le Guin, however, points out that the story of how men killed the mammoths is more dramatic than that of the women who harvested wild oats, a more obvious story, the kind we hear all too often.

“I said it was difficult to craft a compelling tale of how we stripped the wild oats from their husks, but I didn’t say it was impossible,” writes Le Guin. The renewables revolution is a bit like the story of wild oats: it’s difficult to get people to focus on its magnificent (but technically complex and gradual) implications, while in every war the drama and violence of the mammoth hunt abounds.

Perhaps we are in the current mess in the United States – and are dragging the rest of the world into it – because too many people have failed to listen to the female candidate’s (Kamala Harris) pragmatic oat-harvesting stories and have been enthralled by the old man’s fantasies of further mammoth slaughter. Or, to extend the metaphor, we haven’t realized that our diet is made up mostly of those oats, not chunks of mammoth meat. That is, that our well-being depends on things like economic policy and environmental protection and not, for example, on the brutal violence of ICE agents against our neighbors.

The thing that the saga of Mad Max (which began only six years after the 1973 oil crisis) rightly captures is that fossil fuels, with their extremely uneven distribution, always seem scarce and are always the subject of violent struggle. The climate movement, however, is a peaceful movement, for two reasons. First of all, it is a commitment to reduce the different types of social and political violence, committed by humans against other humans, generated by fossil fuels. Wars are fought to control them, and at every stage, from extraction to refinement to transportation and use, they are environmentally devastating. Poor, indigenous and non-white communities are hardest hit. Second, we can view the climate crisis as a war we are fighting against nature (a violence of humans against the ecosystem), and the environmental movement as an attempt to realign ourselves with what the planet can handle. A movement to somehow make peace with nature.

Climate change is due to many human activities, and there are also many solutions: changing the way we design houses, cities, transport systems, agriculture, land management and consumption habits, including food. But the most important thing is to overcome our dependence on fossil fuels. The climate crisis is violence, as demonstrated by fires, floods, heat waves, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and other catastrophes that kill humans and destroy the natural world. In 2011 environmental historian Rob Nixon published Slow violencein which he states that we should consider as violence all forces that poison, contaminate, compromise and force flight. It is violence caused by powerful minorities who have sabotaged decades of efforts to do what the climate needs.

Fossil fuels are historically linked to political violence and the geopolitical iniquities necessary to acquire them. For example, the oil company BP began in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, a British-controlled company that extracted oil in Iran. With the British government and shareholders raking in huge profits, the Iranian parliament decided in 1951 to nationalize the country’s assets. The United Kingdom made plans to invade Iran, but the United States supported a coup against the country’s left-wing prime minister, the monarchy was re-established, profits began to flow to the West again, and the Anglo-Persian Company morphed into BP. The 1979 revolution overthrew the Shah and established the system of government that the United States is attacking today. Iran has also waged a war on fossil fuels, with attacks on oil infrastructure and blockades of oil tankers. In the short term this should generate huge profits for some companies in the sector, but in the long term it could accelerate the transition to other energy sources.

Spain has harshly criticized the attack on Iran, perhaps because its prime minister is a leftist, but perhaps also because it gets most of its electricity from renewable sources and is therefore much less dependent on fossil fuel imports than many other European countries. Meanwhile, several states, from Ukraine to Cuba and Pakistan, are accelerating the energy transition to free themselves from the unstable and often violent fossil fuel economy. Trump is trying to strangle Cuba, whose electricity grid has collapsed, cutting off the supply of Venezuelan oil on which the island depended; China is providing solar panels to speed up the transition. In the United States, the conflict with Iran is increasing interest in electric vehicles.

Here’s to world peace, to all kinds of peace, with nature and between humans, and to the end of the hydrocarbon era, a fundamental step on the path to peace. ◆ as

Rebecca Solnit is an American writer and journalist. His latest book published in Italy is The mother of all questions (Ponte alle Grazie 2026).