Common Sense Ain’t Common: Will Rogers tips his hat to Bill Bivin’s NetZero City
Will Rogers once said he never met a man he didn’t like. I gave him a run for his money when I was writing my novel When Heat Comes. He wasn’t crazy about the way I put him in there — he told me I made him sound too much like a preacher and not enough like a cowboy. But we’ve made up recently. The peace offering was Bill Bivins’ new book, NetZero City: Act Locally for Global Impact.
Will liked it. My Oklahoma friend looked it over and said, “Well, I’ve seen a heap of manuals in my time, but most of ’em never left the glove box. This one sounds like it might actually fix the truck.”
And that’s about right. Bivins has been working in renewable energy for nearly twenty years. He’s a Navy-trained engineer turned clean-energy entrepreneur who built waste-to-energy systems, partnered with NASA, and spent the better part of two decades thinking about how to fix our brittle grid and our throwaway economy. His book is less a manifesto than a playbook.
Jim: It starts with urgency — the record heat waves, the brittle transformers, the landfills leaking methane. And then he shifts to solutions: distributed energy, integrated biorefineries, regenerative cities.
Will Rogers: “That’s the trouble with most of these climate books — they tell you the barn’s on fire but don’t hand you a bucket. If this fellow’s passing out buckets, I’m all ears.”
Jim: He’s clear-eyed about the electrify-everything movement. Bivins says we’re plugging EVs, heat pumps, induction stoves, even AI data centers into wires that were strung up for a world half a century gone.
Will Rogers: “That’s like hitching four horses to a wagon with two wheels. You’re gonna move, all right — straight into the ditch.”
Jim: Exactly. And that’s where the book stands apart. Instead of assuming that electrification equals decarbonization, Bivins warns that unless we rebuild the system itself, we’re just trading one crisis for another.
Will Rogers: “Well, a coal-powered electric car is still a coal-powered car. Call it what you want, it still runs on the stuff you dug out of the ground.”
Jim: For the bioeconomy, that means something important. Bivins doesn’t just talk about solar panels and wind farms. He talks about waste streams — agricultural residues, municipal waste, things we already pay to haul off — and how they can be turned into energy, fuels, and feedstocks. That’s not only clean, it’s local.
Will Rogers: “Or to put it plain: quit burying your dinner scraps when they could be supper for the hogs. Waste not, want not.”
Jim: And he believes cities, not Washington, are the real frontline. Because cities control the zoning, the waste streams, the building codes. They’re where the decisions get made about whether your power stays on in a heat wave, or your water comes out clean after a flood.
Will Rogers: “That tracks. Folks in Washington can pass a law about gravity tomorrow, but your apples are still gonna fall out of the tree. Better figure out how to catch ’em in your own orchard.”
Jim: That’s the theme of NetZero City: act locally for global impact. Not wait-and-see, not Washington-might, but you can start now. For bioeconomy readers, it’s a strong reminder that our field isn’t a side project — it’s central to building resilient communities.
Will Rogers: “Sounds like common sense dressed up in coveralls. Which, far as I can tell, is the only way work ever gets done.”
Jim: Now, Will tells me you could just go read the book and save yourself listening to us jaw about it. And he’s right — you can get a copy here. But if you’re not quite convinced yet that clicking that link might be the biggest favor you do for yourself all week, well, I suppose I’d better sic Will Rogers on you one more time.
Will Rogers: “Dang it, Jim, quit jawin’. Let ’em read the book. I wrangled myself a piece of it that just rings in my ears. Reminds me of something I used to say: even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. This fellow Bivins? He ain’t sittin’.”
Jim: Fair enough. Let’s give him the floor. Here’s an excerpt from NetZero City.
From NetZero City
The technologies we think will save us are driving demand through the roof.
In June 2023, a record-breaking heatwave scorched Texas for nearly two weeks. Its power grid struggled to keep up. However, this time, it wasn’t just air conditioners that drove electricity demand to an all-time high—it was artificial intelligence.
New technologies that are supposed to help us solve the climate crisis are, paradoxically, accelerating it. Data centers powering AI engines and cryptocurrency operations now consume more electricity than some nations. Electric vehicles, essential to phasing out gas-powered transportation, have increased residential electricity consumption in households that adopt them. Home heat pumps, induction stoves, water heaters, and rooftop solar all plug into a grid that was never built for this kind of load.
This is the electrify-everything dilemma: we are shifting energy demand from combustion engines and gas lines to electrical wires and aging transformers—but we’re doing it without updating the system that must now carry that burden.
From 2020 to 2022, global electricity demand grew by 6%—the sharpest increase in decades. Data centers in the U.S. consumed roughly 2% of the country’s total electricity use. Bitcoin mining alone used an estimated 110 terawatt-hours globally—more than the entire country of Argentina. Meanwhile, the number of EVs on U.S. roads jumped to over 3 million, and that number is expected to more than triple by 2030.
This kind of exponential growth—AI systems doubling every few months, crypto mining spikes, and heat pump mandates—may reduce fossil fuel use on the front end, but it’s overloading the grid on the back end.
…We’ve confused electrification with decarbonization. And they are not the same. A coal-powered electric vehicle is still a coal-powered vehicle. An electrified building hooked up to a gas-fired power plant still runs on fossil fuel. Yet we keep adding demand without rethinking the supply.
The result? A brittle grid, rising bills, and growing inequality. Already, energy burdens fall hardest on low-income communities—many of whom can’t access rooftop solar or new energy-efficient appliances. The very people most vulnerable to climate extremes are being left behind in the electric revolution.
This isn’t to argue against EVs or heat pumps. It’s a call for realism. If we want an electrified future, we must invest in a distributed, decarbonized energy system that can handle it. Otherwise, we’re just swapping one crisis for another
The Bottom Line: What we Saw and Liked
1. Local-first framing — cities as the frontline.
Most climate books aim at national or global scale policy. Bivins insists that cities (and even neighborhoods) are both the problem and the solution, since they consume 78% of global energy and produce 70% of CO₂. His strategy is explicitly municipal, not federal — which makes the book feel far more tactical and grounded.
2. Waste-to-energy and integrated biorefineries as core climate tools.
Many climate titles focus on solar, wind, or carbon removal. Bivins elevates municipal waste streams, agricultural residues, and circular biorefineries to center stage — arguing they are both abundant and politically local (citizens see the landfill and the trash trucks every day). He treats waste as a stored energy resource, not just a problem to manage.
3. Infrastructure honesty — the brittle grid.
Where many electrification evangelists lean on optimism, Bivins spends entire chapters on the fragility of the U.S. grid, the age of transformers, and the reality that electrification ≠ decarbonization. That grounded systems-engineer realism sets the book apart from aspirational manifestos.
4. Playbook tone — a “how-to” manual more than a polemic.
Rather than offering sweeping visions alone, NetZero City includes concrete tools: distributed generation models, case studies (Ithaca, Copenhagen, Curitiba), and even “playbooks” in later chapters for cities to replicate. The book feels written to be used by planners, councils, and entrepreneurs, not just read for inspiration.
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