Can Burning Man Pull Out of Its Climate Death Spiral?
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gear
Apr 2023
It was desperation that led Michelle into a BDSM tent at Burning Man. Not a desperate need for a spanking. Far from being a masochist, Michelle just wanted relief from the heat, and the BDSM tent had air-conditioning.
Burning Man 2022 was hot. The infamous bacchanal held in the dusty, dry lake bed of Nevada's Black Rock Desert started at a high of 98 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, August 29. By the weekend it had gotten up to 103, a record-setting temperature for a place already inhospitable to life.
That this featureless, skin-cracking-dry expanse of white dust isn't easy living has always been the point of hosting Burning Man there. But last year's conditions led to a general sense of burnout and malaise, and many of the 80,000 attendees asked the existential question of whether it was still worth it to throw a party in a desert on a warming planet.
Tickets usually sell out within seconds of going on sale, and when the tickets to the 2023 event become available on April 12, that probably won't change. Instead, the event might slowly decay after hitting a cultural high point right before the pandemic.
Reno, Nevada, is the closest big city, and it is the fastest warming city in the United States. Nevada currently averages 20 days a year with "dangerous" heat. By 2050, that's projected to be 30 days. That doesn't mean every year from here on out will have triple-digit days, but it does mean they're increasingly likely.
Michelle, 35, is an outdoorsy person who likes to camp out and hike. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and counts plenty of "Burners" among her friends and former roommates. "Self-sufficiency being one of the core principles, I was thinking this would be a really fun adventure for me," she says, alluding to Burning Man's foundational 10 Principles that festival devotees adhere to. (Michelle asked me not to use her last name because she worries that publicly identifying as a Burner would adversely affect her professional life.)
Two friends got her a last-minute ticket and set her up with a 175-person sustainability-focused camp. There would be fresh vegan meals, talks about sustainable living, and a bio-toilet, and the camp would provide composting for other camps. She packed a duffle bag with lightweight clothes, a big hat, electrolytes, sunscreen, plenty of water, two battery-powered fans, and a two-person tent. But those supplies were no match for the dust and the heat.
By 8:30 on the first morning, her tent was an oven. She scrambled for a place to hide from the heat. The few misting cool-down stations listed in the official schedule were all packed with people seeking respite. Meanwhile, dust storms swept over the playa, limiting visibility to a few feet and coating everyone with alkaline dust.
"I really felt like I was gonna die," Michelle says. She knew her two friends had air-conditioning in their shelter, but they were a 45-minute bike ride away. She finally found their yurt and crawled inside. When they showed up an hour later, Michelle was having a breakdown. "This is too much. I think I need to go home," she sobbed. She ended up staying, however, and at the end of the week she endured the nauseating task of cleaning rotten food out of her camp's freezers and throwing it away--the camp's old generators had broken down.
Festival attendees have to deal with dust storms on the playa.
Full disclosure, I spent Burning Man 2022 in a gas-guzzling, air-conditioned RV. It was my sixth year at the Burn, and I was having a crisis of conscience over my participation, which was exacerbated by sitting in a 12-hour traffic jam to get out that was so big you could see it from space.
When we made it out of this pathetic Mad Max scenario and arrived in nearby Lake Tahoe, we went hiking under a sky rendered apocalyptic orange by nearby wildfires. It all seemed completely wrong, and way too expensive; each year cost me $5,000, not including fashion. Frankly, being a Burner no longer felt like a good thing.
"You're not the only one who said this to me," says David Shearer, a clean-tech scientist and cofounder of Black Rocks Labs, which works in concert with the Burning Man Organization--the festival's governing body, often called "the Org"--on renewable energy solutions. He points to some of the Org's efforts to decarbonize the event, including deploying mobile solar generators for art projects on the playa, implementing a LEED-type rating system for camps, and testing out renewable diesel and hybrid battery-diesel generators.
But the big barrier to running Burning Man on renewables is air-conditioning, which draws an exceptional amount of power. (Even Shearer's camp ran on diesel generators.)
At least one camp in 2022 did manage to power its whole setup--including AC for 48 people--on solar power. Solar Punks constructed a 48-kilowatt microgrid, the largest on the playa, using consumer-grade equipment. It never had an outage. They didn't allow anyone to bring an RV. Instead, they did a bulk buy of Shiftpods, silver dome-shaped tents that were invented by a Burner for camping in harsh conditions. Set up of the solar microgrid took several back-breaking days in the heat. Equipment costs totaled $200,000.
"It was hard, not gonna lie. But it worked in the end," says Corey Johnson, Solar Punks cofounder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based events company Production Club. He was able to expense the microgrid to his company and has been deploying it to events and art installations around Los Angeles.
According to Black Rock Labs, about 78 percent of playa generators--all but the largest ones--could be replaced by solar microgrids, whose price will hopefully come down to more affordable levels.
Black Rock Labs helped provide a 30-kilowatt mobile solar solution called Dragon Wings to the famous Foam Home camp, colloquially known as the Dr. Bronner's camp, where Burners line up to take a communal soapy shower. The turnkey, double-stacked shipping container has solar panel "wings" that unfold in five minutes, providing shade beneath a 40-foot wingspan. Black Rock Labs also did an energy assessment of Foam Home's needs so the camp could run no more diesel generators than were necessary. This cut their power draw by half. Shearer says he's hoping to make his camp energy calculator public before the 2023 Burn in August.
The festival's ephemeral nature makes it particularly resistant to greening. Black Rock City--the name given to the community that forms on the playa once a year--is what you would get if Davos and a refugee camp had a baby. Thousands of famous high-net-worth people fly in, some into Burning Man's ad hoc private airport, to party and network and talk about ideas. The city's infrastructure is temporary and remarkably shoddy, and every single item and person has to be shipped in.
"It's meant to be built and destroyed," says Matteo Cantiello, an astrophysicist who in 2022 partially powered the camp he founded with solar. "It doesn't scale out in society. It's more like research and development for society and for technological solutions."
Ninety-one percent of Black Rock City's emissions are from travel by plane, RV, and cars to the desolate spot three hours outside of Reno. That also includes miles logged by heavy trucks and machinery that bring all the infrastructure needed to build a temporary city in the desert. Electric trucks are coming, but likely not in time to meet Burning Man's stated goal of being carbon negative by 2030. And on which grid would they charge back up after the three-hour drive?
All this raises questions about how an event founded on the idea of "radical inclusivity" (principle numero uno) can still live up to that ideal when it increasingly requires access to AC. RV rentals have already doubled in price for next year, and try bringing a Shiftpod and swamp cooler on the Burner Bus from Reno. Throughout my conversations, I was whiplashed between optimism--mostly from the people with money who come in RVs--and dejection from my broke-ass creative friends who aren't going this year after such a brutal 2022.
"I wish that there was an easier, better way to be net-zero at Burning Man," says Joel Wish, a climate tech investor and entrepreneur, and founder of a membership organization, Climate Draft, that connects the climate-curious with investment opportunities and jobs. Wish's camp ran on diesel generators, and he does not feel bad about it. "At the end of the day, it's such a small drop in the bucket compared to the emissions that are coming from people's normal daily life."
An individual Burner's footprint is about two-thirds of a ton for the week, twice that of an average American. But Burners aren't average, and they're becoming less average every year. The median personal income of attendees went from $51,100 in 2013 to $71,500 in 2019.
Burners are famously good at leaving little to no trash on the playa (principle number eight: "Leave no trace"), but that's cracking under the stress too. This year, the team that sweeps the playa to ensure it's truly clean before inspection by the Bureau of Land Management was shocked by the amount of trash it found, attributing the mess partly to punishing winds and dust storms, but also excessive heat and fatigue. It's telling that the thing they found the most of was tent stakes. Tent campers were just done.
You might be wondering why we should care about an 80,000-person totally optional festival and its first-world problems, when the ancestral homes of millions of people are fast becoming unlivable due to climate change. People without access to air-conditioning die every year in Pakistan, but there was only one death at Burning Man in 2022-a middle-aged man had a heart attack. But if a collection of some of the most capitalized, connected, and tech-forward people on the planet can't figure this out, what hope is there for the rest of us?
In August 2021, Nikki Caravelli, a climate adaptation planner from Sacramento, coauthored a memo with the Org that predicted the difficulties Burners faced last year, including heat, wind, dust, and a torn-up playa surface from the unsanctioned Renegade Burn that revelers held on the site in 2021.
I ask if she expected her predictions to come true so quickly. "I'm not surprised," she says. Caravelli didn't go to Burning Man in 2022, because she and her partner didn't have enough time or money to get themselves a shelter with AC. The pair had a rough 2019 Burn, wandering in the heat until a friend allowed them to crash in their air-conditioned horse trailer.
Caravelli says she respects the efforts Burning Man has made to address its emissions. But on the adaptation side--addressing health dangers that arrive with an overheated Black Rock Desert, especially for the elderly, pregnant women, low-income folks, or others vulnerable to extreme heat--very little has been done beyond inviting Caravelli into the discussion.
"This could prove to be an issue if it's not really addressed intentionally," she says.
I did talk to several Burners who insisted that it's still possible to attend and enjoy Burning Man in a tent, though when things get hairy, they just crash in a friend's RV. One Burner who always goes in a tent, Shreenath Regunathan, sent me a voice note saying, "This is probably a fucked up thing to say, but a lot of people over-exaggerate how insanely crazy it is and how difficult it is." I pointed out that, as someone who grew up in a blazing-hot part of India, he's probably more adapted to Burning Man's climate than, say, someone who lives in Vancouver. (Regunathan also doesn't turn on the AC in his New York apartment.) He then backtracked: "Did not mean to diminish someone else's experience!"
Officially, there are no VIP sections at Burning Man. The Org has also been clamping down on so-called plug n' play camps, where the ultra wealthy show up to a completed camp with luxury amenities. But in practice, high-end camps create AC domes for their campers, and they do not advertise it.
Connor Magill, a 33-year-old tech worker based in Brooklyn thought about bringing a swamp cooler for his tent at his first Burn, but he was already over budget after buying his basic survival gear. He tried staying awake for 36 hours, then crashing for 12 at night. On the third round, he realized he wouldn't make it to sunset. A friend staying in a posh 300-person camp with a private air-conditioned nap dome let him sleep there. "This is for us," the friend told Magill. "But you're here a lot. And we like you." (Magill is making sure he has his own AC next year.)
At the beginning of this year, I emailed a proposal to Burning Man's Placement team (essentially, zoning and urban planning) advocating for sectors of the city where camps agree not to have amplified sound during the day and to provide public, well-shaded areas that are listed on the official schedule for anyone to crash in. Caravelli calls these "resilience centers."
"As you probably know, there is not truly a quiet place in Black Rock City, so even zoning would have its limitations," a Placement representative chipperly wrote back. They directed me to look at the sound zoning policy "if you make it to BRC again." In other words, no.
When you're at the end of a 10-hour acid trip (not saying I have been myself), that point where time loses all meaning as you gaze at the sci-fi horizon, it really does feel like you're totally cut off from the troubles and complexities of the real world. Many people do leave Burning Man thinking it proves out their libertarian fantasies of what life would look like with no rules and no government: fucking awesome.
But Burning Man does in fact have a government; the Org delineates its borders, provides infrastructure, and sets rules. It's more of a monarchy than a democratically elected body. When the idolized founder Larry Harvey passed away in 2018, longtime board member Marian Goodall stepped into the CEO position at the nonprofit.
In multiple conversations--some off the record for fear of reprisals from the Org--people advocating for change expressed frustration with the lack of support from Burning Man's governing body.
Henk Rogers, founder of the Tetris Company and the startup Blue Planet Energy, brings renewable power to the playa for art projects. Previously, one of his Cubes--an 8-foot container with a solar array and batteries--powered all the lights and sound for the largest art installation that year, an intricate old-timey village called the Folly.
When the Org asked Rogers to power the lights on the Man--the 75-foot-tall wooden icon that's torched at the event's climax--he suggested they swap its neon tubes for more efficient LEDs. The Org refused on artistic grounds, so Rogers sent two Cubes ahead to cover the Man's power needs. When he arrived, the Cubes were nowhere to be found, and a huge solar array that the Org called the Unicorn--and that generated twice as much power as the Man needed--was being set up in its place. Rogers was pissed.
"I'll help them as far as I can help them," Rogers says. "But they have to listen. The Org has to lead by example." Rogers claims the Cubes ended up in a camp run by someone who was part of the Org. The Org did not answer my questions about where the Cubes went and why.
Several people told me they like that the Org has been incentivizing neighboring camps to link up and share resources, to reduce the cost and number of generators on the Playa. But they would like to see it do more, such as giving out points to camps that are powered by renewables or creating a fast lane for electric vehicles to skip the famously long entry and exodus lines.
The camp I'm usually with is working on bringing a hydrogen fuel cell generator, perhaps from United Rentals, which just made it available. It's silent and can be run on green hydrogen made from water. The problem is where to safely store all that hydrogen--or renewable diesel if they went in that direction--in the camp. The Org would have to provide one or both of these fuels at the official filling station to make it happen. The Org did not answer my question about whether it is planning on doing so.
"I don't have much patience for people who don't see the emerging solution set," Shearer says. "The real question is, can we do it fast enough with these tipping points around the planet?"
Despite all the green technology being discussed, Burning Man will get dirtier before it gets cleaner--and will miss its own goal of being net negative on emissions by 2030--unless the Org makes big changes.
The Org prohibited any employees or contractors from talking to me and sent over a statement that answered only a few of my questions. "Burning Man Project does not believe it is our responsibility to decide for the individual which tools and positions they should put into practice to manage their impact on the planet," a spokesperson wrote.
Caravelli would like to see Burning Man conduct a science-backed risk assessment on the viability of hosting the Burn in Black Rock Desert, just so it can get a solid idea of what's in store and make decisions appropriately. (Burning Man did not answer my question of whether it was planning to do so.)
So there's that one final climate concept we haven't yet discussed: managed retreat. Abandon Black Rock City in favor of a location that isn't being hammered so hard by the climate crisis.
"I really, really hope that we can find a solution to this problem," says Cantiello, the astrophysicist. "I think there's a specific magic about that desert, but if it turns out that that's not the place to go anymore, so be it, you know? Don't force it."
