Bill McKibben is probably America’s foremost climate environmentalist. He teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and is the founder of the climate campaign 350.org. I might add, he suggested years ago that we stop supporting Russia’s fossil fuel industry, which is happening now but only because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. McKibben’s idea was to replace Russia’s fossil fuel with renewables.

The only reason I wanted to introduce McKibben to this column is to make sure you read his March 18 piece in The New Yorker. “Stay the Fire” is a wonderful summary of our dependence on combustion by burning fossil fuel. We either burn it or sell it. Our “cop” meetings have done little to change our dependence. 

As McKibben says, “Glasgow in November provided mostly vague promises about going ‘net zero’ by 2050. It was a festival of obscurantism (wow), euphemism, and grumbling, which young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as ‘blah, blah, blah.’” 

Bill McKibben gets it. I urge you all to read a well written, fact filled, up-to-date summary of the “era of large-scale combustion.” What really caught my eye was the reference to wood pellets and his argument that there is a terrible incongruity with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says and what seems to be going on. Take a few minutes to read his message.

My subject for this column is not McKibben nor pellets. It’s actually some really neat developments in the continuing development of electricity (renewable energy particularly), albeit at the cost of fossil energy. McKibben would be pleased. Some folks refer to decarbonization as “the electric revolution.” I agree that seems to be occurring. But I believe decarbonization is much broader than just replacing fossil energy with electricity. I think we need to look at solutions that incorporate hydrogen, hydro power, and nuclear energy. Yes, unlike most, I believe we need nuclear if we are really going to tackle climate change.

Most of us know that the electric revolution is changing our transportation industry. Electric vehicles (EV) have caused a shift in automobile engineering. The number of all-electric and plug-in-hybrid electric vehicles rose by nearly half last year, even as overall car sales dropped by 16%. The types of models that are adding EV technology go from Chevrolet and Ford to Mini Coopers, Porsches, and Harley-Davidsons. 

The European Union has announced that it will ban sales of passenger cars powered by gas or diesel fuel by 2035 or sooner. Volvo and Jaguar will phase out piston engines at least by then. And, Ford Motor Co. has pledged that all its car manufacturing in Europe will be EV or hybrid in five years and all electric by 2030. Electricity is taking over the automotive industry, without a doubt.

The “greening” of power in transportation is not limited to cars. There is also a transition in aviation, with not just lighter weight but different fuel sources. As Jennifer Holmgren, chief executive officer of Lanzatech, a company pioneering the development of aviation fuel from unorthodox sources, such as waste, to replace the standard kerosene jet fuel, says, “We simply have to get there. Everyone agrees airplanes simply can’t keep flying around on fossil kerosene. But there is no magic solution to the problem.” 

The industry is looking at zero-emission, battery-powered electric engines. But there are years of development in front of that alternative. Right now, the battery-pack would be heavier than the typical passenger plane and even if the plane could lift off, all the power would be expanded. Further, where and how do we recharge? So, batteries as a sole source of energy with planes is a long way off.

Using waste as an alternative to traditional aircraft fuel is a different story. And I love this because we’re using byproduct that ordinarily would be landfilled and creating methane. Lanzatech may be the most prominent of the alternative fuel manufacturers. Lanzatech takes a variety of byproduct, such as cooking oil, sugar cane stalks and other agricultural byproduct, and processes them into a much lower emitter of carbon than aviation fuel.

“The result: so-called sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. Blended with Jet A (traditional kerosene-based aviation fuel), Lanzatech’s invention powered a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 from Orlando, FL to London in 2018.” 

No question, if we’re going to reduce emissions caused by traditional aircraft fuel, we must look seriously at alternative fuel.

There is no question that wind and solar are continuing to grow. A great story that typifies this transition can be found in the April/May 2022 issue of Smithsonian. This is a really neat article about the conversion of energy, powered by diesel-burning generators to energy generators by 5, 6-megawatt turbines. The article starts:


“Block Island, 15 miles off the coast at its farthest point, has always been at the mercy of the four winds.

“Raging winter gusts have been known to rip porches off houses and knock stones off the rock walls that lattice the island’s meadows and pastures. More regularly, breezes delivered to residents the drone of enormous diesel-burning generators, the Rhode Island community’s sole source of power. No one liked it, ‘but that was just part of island life,’ a local real estate agent tells me. People got used to the noise, and those who lived near the power plant – less than half a mile from downtown – resigned themselves to frequently scrubbing soot from their windows and sills.

“But then, at precisely 5:30 a.m. on the first of May, 2017, a great silence fell upon the land.  The generators, after roaring for 89 years, shut down. And yet electrons continued to flow.

“‘Suddenly you could hear the leaves rustling, the waves breaking, and the birds – Henry DuPont, a local engineer who attended the diesel shutdown, breaks off, allowing the twitter and squawk of spring migrants to speak in his stead. Residents have been marveling at the quietude ever since.

“Since that day, Block Island has been the only community in the United States fully powered by offshore wind: in this case, five 6-megawatt turbines pounded into the seafloor just south of the island’s Mohegan Bluffs. Over the next several years the Block Island venture will be joined by many more towns and cities, as up to 2,000 new turbines begin to populate utility-scale wind farms along the Atlantic Seaboard.”


Naturally, the project had its detractors, but the results are now history, and the changes for Block Island residents have been ever so positive. Wind into turbine into electricity is here to stay, unquestionably.

Hydrogen as a source of decarbonized energy also has to be part of the solution. The question is, “how big?” I really don’t think we’re ready to answer that question because we have so much more development work to do. However, Europe is spending enormous amounts of time and money, betting that hydrogen generators will allow their industrial sector to shift from fossil fuels. This focus includes replacing natural gas. The latest EU focus is generating hydrogen from waste-to-energy (WTE), which uses non-recyclables to generate hydrogen energy. 

“The hydrogen generated from WTE plants has the unique feature of being partly renewable and partly low-carbon.” Kai Lieball, chair of ESWET (European Suppliers of Waste-To-Energy), has been working on the conversion of waste to hydrogen and says, “We strongly support waste-to-hydrogen as an interesting option for waste management to support decarbonization of the EU economy while reinforcing the circular economy.”

Do you remember Wuppertal, Germany? Not only was it the home of Jackstadt and had the first commercially successful monorail system, it also was the first city in the world to power public transport buses with hydrogen. Today, there are 20 buses powered by hydrogen, but by 2025 there will be 70. I will spend a bit more time on hydrogen as a decarbonizer in my next column.

Suffice it to say, renewable and decarbonized sources of energy are giving fossils a run for their money. Dependence on fossil energy is changing, whether for environmental or political reasons (political is a reference to Germany’s dependence on Russian gas!)

As I have written, once we make a decision to change, we move pretty quickly. Now that the UPM strike is over, maybe we can focus on change. The strike was a hiccup, I know. Climate change is not a hiccup. It is for real, and our industry needs to do its part to create change that will help decarbonization.

Another Letter from the Earth.


Calvin Frost is chairman of Channeled Resources Group, headquartered in Chicago, the parent company of Maratech International and GMC Coating. His email address is [email protected].