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Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, and as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Many of us in the environmental movement have spent our lives saying no – no to exploitative developments, bad policies and bad projects.
The political landscape is littered with terrible ideas that never came to be because earnest people stood up to the government and corporate interests to protect parts of our world that matter most. I’ve spent a good part of my career saying no to such bad ideas, and have no regrets.
But we have reached a point where we must learn how to say yes.
Climate change requires us to make urgent decisions about our economy and infrastructure: what, where, and how we build. The consequences of inaction are catastrophic, first for the poor and marginalized in our neighborhoods and around the world, and then in every community on the planet.
There’s always a tradeoff when we build something. We’re conditioned to protect the things that we know and love, and it can be excruciatingly hard when that place turns into something else – even if it’s a wind farm or solar array that’s critical to meeting our clean energy needs.
Our current point in history, however, requires that we move beyond our conservation tendencies and place our decision making in a larger context — one that takes into account that inaction is a dangerous form of climate denial.
Maine is currently in the process of picking a location to build a new port that is necessary to develop new offshore wind energy in federal waters off the state’s beautiful coast.
All potential locations considered, including the two leading sites in Searsport, would require making difficult environmental and social tradeoffs.
After a multi-year review and years of stakeholder engagement, Gov. Janet Mills and the Maine Department of Transportation are recommending that the new port be built on Sears Island on an undeveloped parcel of land that was originally purchased by the state with the intent of developing a port.
Sears Island is undoubtedly a treasured place for many people, and the development of a 100-acre port would undoubtedly transform the setting — something I would ordinarily oppose. And if this were one of the past proposals for Sears Island, like a container port or LNG terminal, I’d join the picket line in protest.
But this time is different. The world is changing so fast — and nowhere faster than the oceans. Last week the New York Times ran a story with the headline, “Scientists are freaking out about ocean temperatures,” because those temperatures are setting staggering new records every week. “The North Atlantic has been record-breakingly warm for almost a year now,” one said. “It’s just astonishing. Like, it doesn’t seem real.”
But it is real, and the only way to begin to check it is to replace fossil fuel with clean energy. Offshore wind is by far the single greatest opportunity for Maine and the northeast to decarbonize while creating thousands of family-sustaining union jobs in communities that badly need them. None of that can happen without a port, and there simply are no other east coast locations that meet the physical requirements, including size, needed to build out this industry at the pace and scale the climate crisis demands.
I can’t say how the federal permitting process will ultimately weigh all of the tradeoffs of Sears Island, or whether it will greenlight the project.
But what I can say is that those of us who are serious about stopping climate change and mitigating its worst impacts must be willing to make hard decisions and to say yes to projects that are critical to reducing our carbon pollution and reinvesting in our local economies.
Communities across the United States are facing tough questions like this one about increasing housing density, which changes a neighborhood; about building transmission lines; about allowing turbines on mountain ridges; about planting solar panels in corn fields.
The consequences of our climate catastrophe are already here, and to say no — to use delay as a tactic to kill climate-positive projects like this offshore wind port — is to deny that reality and shrug off the deadly impacts.
Thanks to years of hard organizing by young people and dedicated climate and labor activists, the Biden administration signed into law an historic set of investments in clean energy, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is already spurring a clean energy building boom. This sweeping climate bill has given us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to “say yes” to more projects like the offshore wind port in Maine: critical clean energy infrastructure that gives us a fighting chance to stave off the existential crisis of climate change while creating high-quality union jobs, a winning combination. Let’s not miss our shot.
