Jake Bittle on the Front Lines of the Green Transition

In your reporting from Kern County, California, you’ve captured a region in upheaval. What is it about Bakersfield that makes it such a revealing lens on America’s energy transition?

I like to say that Bakersfield is the dirtiest place in the greenest state. California has been one of the most ambitious governments in the world when it comes to building out renewable energy, shifting away from fossil fuels, addressing air pollution, and clamping down on excessive water usage. The state’s overall economy is dominated by white-collar industries such as tech and film, and Bakersfield is one of the only pockets where politics and society are still intertwined with extractive industries. It’s almost like training a microscope on a Petri dish to run an experiment about the political, economic, and cultural effects of green transition policies.

Your first book, The Great Displacement, looked at climate-driven migration nationally; your upcoming one, The End of the Golden Empire, is deeply rooted in one place. What does writing locally allow you to see—and say—about climate change that a national lens doesn’t?

I think the biggest advantage of a single location is that it allows me to extend and build out the chronology. In The Great Displacement, I had only so much space in each chapter to explore a given disaster and its aftermath, which made it hard to show how people and places changed over time. In this book, I’ve had the ability to tell a story that extends over more than a decade and a half. This has allowed me to build out real characters, like in a novel, showing how the principal actors evolve as people and how Bakersfield’s economic evolution has altered their lives. This kind of economic change is sometimes too slow for people to see it in front of them, but when you extend the story over this period, you can really see how dramatic the evolution has been.

As a writer documenting a community in flux, what do you feel you owe the people whose lives will live on the page?

This is something I wrestled with a lot. The main characters in the book have radically different and opposed views, and in many cases have been fighting each other for decades over the big questions I wanted to write about. In some cases, Person A would consider it suspicious and disqualifying that I was speaking to Person B, and vice versa. I know that everyone who’s featured in the book will encounter their own perspective alongside an opposing perspective that they find objectionable. I ended up trying to just give the fullest and most accurate version of each person’s worldview, representing the truth of Bakersfield’s transition as that person saw it, even if I felt like their worldview might be too narrow or skewed. I tried to do as little editorializing and “ground truthing” as possible while still remaining accurate, because I felt like I had a duty to represent each perspective faithfully.

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