WORLDFIRE: A Climate Journey from the Depths of Despair to a Haven of Hope is Tom Weis’ powerful new book he’s publishing in serial form on his Coming Home to Gaia web site. It’s a novel format, and more so because he’s providing it gratis or through a subscription service on substack.com.
Weis is a superb writer and has a knack for telling anecdotes. Most of which he pulls from his “rocket trike” journey through America’s heartland in 2010. (You can find Weis’ Ride for Renewables on YouTube.) That cross-country trip revealed a shared dream that many Americans have of renewing the country with a new industrial revolution built on renewable energy. Despite what we read in the press or hear from politicians in the Republican Party, Americans of all stripes want renewable energy and want the jobs and economic opportunity it brings.
I knew Weis when he was close to the leadership of the American Wind Energy Association. (That was back in the day when it was a wind association. It’s not that now.) Weis shared my frustration with the wind industry’s lack of vision and its timidity in seeking a role for itself in the energy marketplace. They wanted their subsidies of course, but they didn’t demand or push for a bigger piece of the energy pie.

When Weis launched his climate ride “the ten-year goal of 100% renewable electricity for the U.S. was considered the wishful thinking of just a few,” he writes. That’s telling. I was saying the same thing at the time in relation to Al Gore’s target of 100% within a decade of 2008. I did some back-of-the-envelope-math and concluded that indeed we could do it. We had enough manufacturing capacity to do it if we had wanted to. By my calculations, we’d miss his target by a few years, but in principle we could do it. The catch is, as now, if we want to do it.
Weis, like me, was destined for continued frustration on wasted opportunities. It’s 2024 and we still haven’t done it.
It’s here where Weis makes his most important contribution. We can grow bitter with disappointment after disappointment, or throw our hands up in the air and say “to hell with it all.” Weis doesn’t do that. He stays positive and provides that “haven of hope” that we need.
I share Weis’ dream, and believe all should. As he argues, “It is time now for our generation to dream anew.” He calls on us to demand a green revolution, to seek a goal as powerful as the nation’s plan to put men on the moon in 1960s, a goal of 100% renewable energy. We just haven’t had the will to do it, in part due to the nay-saying, FUD-spewing fossil-fuel industry and their political allies. Weis says we can beat those holding us back, and in his experience most Americans are on our side.
I also agree with Weis’ take on the Public Utility Regulatory system in the US. He calls it as “outdated and unreliable as our electrical grid.” Indeed. The state PUCs have long been captured by the business they supposedly regulate. They are the “dinosaurs obstructing progress” says Weis.
His passage on the reason for his ride across America was striking to me so soon after reading a similar passage in David Toke’s Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy. “The primary theme of the ride,” writes Weis “is Americans “taking back our power” by demanding a green industrial revolution that will put unemployed Americans back to work, reestablish our role as world economic leader, and help ensure future generations a livable planet.”
“We are still not moving anywhere near fast enough,” Weis observes. He takes extensive aim at various forms of climate denial. Of course, he takes on the Republican Party and its infamous embrace of fossil fuels, but he also has plenty of opprobrium for the Democratic Party as well. In this he illustrates how the Democrats, especially leading figures such as Barack Obama, are so clueless. He cites Obama bragging how he was responsible for the Paris Climate accords and at the same time record breaking oil and gas production in the USA—all in the same breath. “That was me!” Obama brags. Geesh, with friends like this, who needs enemies? Talk about cognitive dissonance. It’s not only a Republican Party problem.

The level of denialism plunged to then unimaginable depths with the Trump presidency. Exxon’s Rex Tillerson to the State Department, Ryan Zinke to Interior, and Texas’ Rick Perry to Energy, and Scott Pruitt to EPA was selecting the four horsemen of the apocalypse to direct American energy and environmental policy. Yikes.
He draws a parallel with our current climate plight and the flight of Apollo 13. We, collectively, brought them home from disaster. Will we do the same with the planet the astronauts wanted to return to?
Weis is a good story teller and knows how to spin a yarn. He meets a Harley-riding, guitar-picking, truck driver at a campsite in eastern Colorado, who to his surprise endorsed his solo journey to revitalize a nation, and to save it from itself.
His expedition pedaling across America reminded me of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways: a Journey into America.
Weis’ writing is not just a joy to read, his exploits seeing America, and engaging with Americans is inspirational. At each stop, he called on people to sign his petition demanding 100 percent renewable energy. We all owe Weis a debt a gratitude both for his physical endurance, but also for his vision giving us hope.
WORLDFIRE: A Climate Journey from the Depths of Despair to a Haven of Hope by Tom Weis, ClimateCrisisSolutions.com, ComingHomeToGaia.Substack.com. You can subscribe for $50 per year or subscribe to the weekly installments for free.