Latest Articles by Bill McKibben

Can you imagine? A warming world needs art

Bill McKibben — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:19:00 +0000

The magnitude of climate change can seem too vast for human intelligence to perceive. Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature”, calls on poets, dramatists, and novelists to open our eyes.

Here’s the paradox: if the scientists are right, we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since human civilisation emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter.

But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas? Compare it to, say, the horror of HIV/Aids in the last two decades, which has produced a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect. I mean, when people someday look back on our moment, the single most significant item will doubtless be the sudden spiking temperature. But they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what it meant to us.

Why is that? Well, some of the reasons are obvious. It’s way too big, for one. When something is happening everywhere all at once, it threatens constantly to become backdrop, context, instead of event. And in this case, since the context is the natural world that more and more of us have forgotten how to read, the changes seem small.

At my latitude, spring comes a week earlier than it did in 1970. The ice on the lake melts, and the snow in the fields; and the fields commence to drying out, which has real implications later in the season. That’s an almost inconceivably huge change in a basic physical system over a short stretch of time – but not quite big enough to be noticeable, unless you’re paying attention with, say, the vigilance of a farmer. In a society that has more prison inmates than farmers, that’s unlikely.

Conversely, when global warming does attempt to show its teeth, the immediate event is usually overdramatic, so vast that the event itself grabs all the attention, leaving none behind for the motive cause. Four hurricanes sweep across Florida in a summer, which is just the kind of result computer modelling says is becoming more likely. But who has time for computer modelling and carbon when there is Storm Surge and Blown–Over Mobile Home and Waiting in Line for Ice, all of which are a lot easier to take pictures of.

And the dramatis personae are deficient as well, being us. Too many villains can mar a plot as easily as too few, and “starring everyone with a car” is a large cast indeed. We don’t much want to be told that we’re the problem, primarily because it implies we would have to change some of our ways. In a consumer society, those habits constitute a large part of our identity, not to mention our net worth; once you’ve got your plasma screen installed in the recreation room of the 3,500–square–foot house, this is an epic you can do without.

Especially since there’s no real chance of a happy ending. We can do better, or we can certainly do much worse – but we’ve already pushed the carbon concentration past the point where the atmosphere can easily heal itself. So far we’ve increased the world’s temperature by about one degree Fahrenheit; the best guess is we’ve stoked the fires enough that another two degrees are essentially inevitable. Past that, what we do now matters deeply. But the difference between miserable and catastrophic is not a compelling dramatic device.

The two large–scale attempts to achieve mythic status for climate change thus far – the movie The Day After Tomorrow and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear – prove most of these rules. To dramatise the first story, the producers postulated a series of physically bizarre and silly events: global warming somehow leads to a kind of flash–freezing, with supercyclonic storms ripping chilled air from the stratosphere and forcing it down on midtown Manhattan. Oh, and watch out for the wolf escaped from the zoo. Crichton, meanwhile, postulates environmental–spawned tsunamis and cannibal kings in order to prove the whole thing a fable.

In the face of all this, how to proceed? If we can’t turn to creative artists, then to documentarians. Their impulse is to gather more evidence so that people will listen and do something; hence the photographers descending on Tuvalu to watch for rising waves and the writers heading north to interview the Inuit. It’s all remarkable stuff – the news that communities in the far north were hearing thunder for the first time in their histories shook me. But it’s also news about people who, almost by definition, are marginal to those of us in the developed world. The question is how to unsettle the audience.

The possibility exists, I think – in part because events get steadily more obvious. The western European heatwave that killed tens of thousands in August 2003 is a good example. Its toll was horrifying precisely because they were not Ghanaians or Bengalis, people who we have become used to blithely and guiltily reading about dying by the thousand. These were people who could easily have been us, with magazine subscriptions and cable TV and the expectation that nature was not going to do them in – that they’d progressed to a point where they were beyond nature’s real reach.

Not only that, but the deaths illustrated another crucial point. The breakdown in human community, the rise of a kind of hyper–individualism perfectly symbolised by the automobile, was both the motive and immediate cause of many of the fatalities. Old people baked to death in their apartments because the temperature got higher than it had ever gotten before (and barely cooled at night); and they baked to death in their apartments because the social structure that always protected each of us from such events had broken down. I mean, nobody was checking up on them. It’s hard to imagine more symbolic casualties, and easy to imagine the play, the novel, that should keep that fortnight near the front of our minds.

But what emotions should the playwright play with? Fear? Guilt? Sure, but not only those. For me, a kind of wistfulness has always been at the core of my reaction to global warming, a sense that as a species we’re finally and irrevocably managing to crowd out everything else, smudge our fingerprints on every frame of the book of life. There seems to me no more telling turn in our civilisation, at least since the apple in Eden (a crisis that gave rise to more great art than anything in the western tradition).

But there also needs to be hope as well – visions of what it might feel like to live on a planet where somehow we use this moment as an opportunity to confront our consumer society, use it to begin the process of rebuilding community. They don’t have to be romantic visions, though a little romance wouldn’t hurt.

We are all actors in this drama, more of us at every moment. The great subplot of these few years involves the introduction of Indians and Chinese as principal players, a fascinating confrontation between old privilege and new assertion. It may well be that because no one stands outside the scene, no one has the distance to make art from it. But we’ve got to try. Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action.

Otherwise, the only role left to us – noble, but also enraging in its impotence – is simply to pay witness. The world is never going to be, in human time, more intact than it is at this moment. Therefore it falls to those of us alive now to watch and record its flora, its fauna, its rains, its snow, its ice, its peoples. To document the buzzing, glorious, cruel, mysterious planet we were born on to, before in our carelessness we leave it far less sweet.

Time rushes on, in ways that humans have never before contemplated. That famous picture of the earth from outer space that Apollo beamed back in the late 1960s – already that’s not the world we inhabit; its poles are melting, its oceans rising. We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?

The author: Bill McKibben is a writer and journalist. His books include The End of Nature (1989), Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2004) and Wandering Home (2005).

Warning on warming

Bill McKibben — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 17:10:00 +0000

The UN climate-change panel’s new report is an opaque, conservative and nonpolitical document. Bill McKibben sums up its stark message: quick, deep cuts in fossil-fuel emissions are needed immediately.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: “World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe,” reported an Australian newspaper. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context -- a context that makes the report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications.

Although atmospheric scientists had studied the problem for decades, global warming first emerged as a public issue in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, told the United States Senate that his research, and the work of a handful of other scientists, indicated that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels. This bold announcement set off a scientific and political furor: many physicists and chemists played down the possibility of serious harm, and many governments, though feeling pressure to react, did little to restrain the use of fossil fuel. “More research” was the mantra everyone adopted, and funding for it flowed freely from governments and foundations. Under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and governments set up a curious hybrid, the IPCC, to track and report on the progress of that research.

From roughly 1988 to 1995, the hypothesis that burning coal and gas and oil in large quantities was releasing carbon dioxide and other gases that would trap the sun’s radiation on Earth and disastrously heat the planet remained just that: a hypothesis. Scientists used every means at their disposal to reconstruct the history of the earth's climate and to track current changes. For example, they studied the concentration of greenhouse gases in ancient air trapped in glacial cores, sampled the atmosphere with weather balloons, examined the relative thickness of tree rings, and observed the frequency of volcanic eruptions. Most of all, they refined the supercomputer models of the earth’s atmosphere in an effort to predict the future of the world's weather.

By 1995, the central Herculean tasks of both research and synthesis were largely complete. The report the IPCC issued that year was able to assert that “the balance of evidence suggests” that human activity was increasing the planet’s temperature and that it would be a serious problem. This was perhaps the most significant warning our species, as a whole, has yet been given. The report declared (in the pinched language of international science) that humans had grown so large in numbers and especially in appetite for energy that they were now damaging the most basic of the earth’s systems -- the balance between incoming and outgoing solar energy. Although huge amounts of impressive scientific research have continued over the twelve years since then, their findings have essentially been complementary to the 1995 report -- a constant strengthening of the simple basic truth that humans were burning too much fossil fuel.

The 1995 consensus was convincing enough for Europe and Japan: the report’s scientific findings were the basis for the Kyoto negotiations and the treaty they produced; those same findings also led most of the developed world to produce ambitious plans for reductions in carbon emissions. But the consensus didn’t extend to Washington, and hence everyone else’s efforts were deeply compromised by the American unwillingness to increase the price of energy. Our emissions continued to soar, and the plans of many of the Kyoto countries in western Europe to reduce emissions sputtered. (At the same time, most tragically of all, China and India had just begun their rapid industrial takeoffs using precisely the technologies we then knew were wreaking havoc; they did not seek or find much aid from the western countries that could have encouraged them to take a more benign path.)

In 2001, the IPCC issued its Third Assessment Report (TAR), but it coincided with the start of the Bush administration, which refused even to consider a serious policy for climate. The IPCC’s new Fourth Assessment of this February (known as AR4) arrives at a more congenial moment, as the new Democratic Congress takes up a wide variety of legislation designed, finally, to curb emissions.

The finding of the new report that attracted the most attention in the press was that scientists were now more confident than ever that the warming we’ve seen so far (about one degree Fahrenheit in the average global temperature) was caused by human beings. Instead of being merely “likely”, the conclusion was now “very likely”, which in the IPCC’s lexicon means better than a 90% chance. But it’s been years since any reputable scientist specialising in climate research doubted that conclusion. More important findings were ignored in accounts of the report and in some cases were obscured by the document’s very poor prose, which is much more opaque than its predecessors. Those findings include:

* The amount of carbon in the atmosphere is now increasing at a faster rate even than before.

* Temperature increases would be considerably higher than they have been so far were it not for the blanket of soot and other pollution that is temporarily helping to cool the planet.

* Alternative explanations for some of the warming (for example, sunspot activity and the “urban heat island effect”, the raising of temperatures in cities caused by high building densities and the use of heat-retaining materials such as concrete and asphalt) are now known to be relatively negligible.

* Almost everything frozen on earth is melting. Heavy rainfalls are becoming more common since the air is warmer and therefore holds more water than cold air, and “cold days, cold nights and frost have become less frequent, while hot days, hot nights, and heat waves have become more frequent.”

These facts serve as the prelude to the most important part of the new document, its predictions for what is to come. Here, too, the news essentially confirms the previous report, and indeed most of the predictions about climate change dating back to the start of research: if we don’t take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil-fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of -- at the best estimate -- roughly five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. Technically speaking, that’s enormous, enough to produce what James Hansen has called a “totally different planet”, one much warmer than that known by any of our human ancestors.

The process by which the IPCC conducts its deliberations -- scientists and national government representatives quibbling at enormous length over wording and interpretation -- is Byzantine at best, and makes the group’s achievements all the more impressive. But it sacrifices up-to-the-minute assessment of data in favor of lowest-common-denominator conclusions that are essentially beyond argument. That’s a reasonable method, but one result is that the “shocking” conclusions of the new report in fact lag behind the most recent findings of climate science by several years.

That’s most obvious here in the discussion of the rise in sea level. Researchers know that sea levels will rise fairly quickly this century, in part because of the melting of mountain glaciers and in part because warm water takes up more space than cold. The new assessment refines the calculations of the rise in sea level and puts the best estimate at a foot or two, which is actually slightly less than the last assessment in 2001. Though it doesn’t sound like much, a couple of feet is actually a large amount -- enough to inundate many low-lying areas and drown much of Earth’s coastal marshes and wetlands. Still, it might be more or less manageable.

During the last eighteen months, however, new research has indicated that a far more rapid rise in sea level may be possible, because the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic appear to have begun moving more quickly toward the sea. Some of this research appeared in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, and James Hansen has written in The New York Review about this new information; it is responsible for much of the recent increase in the level of alarm. But it is not included in the IPCC report, except as a caveat: “larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.”

In short, the new report is a remarkably conservative document. That it is still frightening in its predictions simply indicates the huge magnitude of the changes we’re now causing, changes far larger than most people fully understand. Even using its conservative projections, the panel states unequivocally that typhoons and hurricanes will likely become more intense; that sea ice will shrink and perhaps disappear in the summertime Arctic; that snow cover will contract. Later this year, a second working group will outline the effects of these changes on humans, translating inches of sea-level rise into numbers of refugees, showing the effects of increases in temperature and humidity on malaria-carrying mosquitoes as well as the impact of heat waves on crop losses. The language will still be bloodless, but the findings obviously won’t.

The IPCC has always avoided taking political positions -- it doesn’t recommend specific policies -- and it continues this tradition with its new report. In its discussions of the momentum of climate change, however, it does introduce one particularly disturbing statistic. Because of the time lag between carbon emissions and their effect on air temperature, even if we halted the increase in coal-, oil- and gas-burning right now, temperatures would continue to rise about two-tenths of a degree Celsius per decade. But, the report writes, “if all radiative forcing agents [i.e., greenhouse gases] are held constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming trend would occur in the next two decades at a rate of about 0.1ºC per decade.”

Translated, this means, to put it simply, that if world leaders had heeded the early warnings of the first IPCC report, and by 2000 had done the very hard work to keep greenhouse-gas emissions from growing any higher, the expected temperature increase would be half as much as is expected now. In the words of the experts at realclimate.org, where the most useful analyses of the new assessment can be found, climate change is a problem with a very high “procrastination penalty”: a penalty that just grows and grows with each passing year of inaction.

This is why the most important news about climate at the moment may come not from the IPCC but from Washington. After twenty years of inactivity -- a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing -- the first few weeks of the new Congress have witnessed a flurry of activity. A series of bills have been introduced by people including California Representative Henry Waxman, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Arizona’s John McCain which would call for more or less aggressive carbon-reduction targets. Some of the bills would set in place a “cap-and-trade” system that would set overall limits on emissions of carbon dioxide but would allow companies to freely buy and sell credits permitting them to emit certain amounts of it; this would produce a market for carbon-cutting measures.

The IPCC report doesn’t call for particular reduction figures. It does, however, make clear that reduction in emissions must be quick and deep. There is no more optimistic alternative. Even if we do everything right, we’re still going to see serious increases in temperature, and all of the physical changes (to one extent or another) predicted in the report. However, there’s reason to hope that if the US acts extremely aggressively and quickly we might be able to avoid an increase of two degrees Celsius, the rough threshold at which runaway polar melting might be stopped. This means that any useful legislation will have to feature both a very rapid start to reductions and a long and uncompromising mandate to continue them.

Sanders’s bill, also endorsed by California’s Barbara Boxer, who heads the relevant committee, comes closest to that standard. It calls for an eventual 80% cut in emissions by 2050. McCain’s bill, co-sponsored by one of his challengers for the presidency, Barack Obama of Illinois, is somewhat weaker in its eventual targets. But the bargaining has barely begun, and in any event quick initial implementation of any cuts will be almost as important as the final numbers.

No one expects president George W Bush to sign such a bill. In fact, it was widely considered a minor miracle that he uttered the words “climate change” in this year’s State of the Union address. (His limp proposal, centering on alternative fuels for some vehicles, was equally widely considered a dud.) What’s happening now has much to do with positioning for the next presidential election in 2008, and the legislation that will eventually be passed and signed in 2009. What the IPCC report makes clear by implication is that that legislation will be our last meaningful chance: anything less than an all-out assault on carbon in our economy will be rendered meaningless by the increasing momentum of global warming. And of course by now our economy is only part of the problem. Though we use more energy per capita than any other country, the Chinese may pass us in total carbon emissions by decade’s end. Even if we start to get our own house in order, we’ll need to figure out how, with desperate speed, to lead an equally sweeping international response.

The only really encouraging development is the groundswell of public concern that has built over the last year, beginning with the reaction to Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore’s movie. In January 2007, a few of us launched an initiative called stepitup07.org. It calls for Americans to organise rallies in their own communities on April 14 asking for congressional action. In the first few weeks the website was open, more than six-hundred groups in forty-six states registered to hold demonstrations -- this will clearly be the largest organised response to global warming yet in the United States. The groups range from environmental outfits to evangelical churches to college sororities, united only by the visceral sense (fueled in part by this winter’s bizarre weather) that the planet has been knocked out of whack. The IPCC assessment offers a modest account of just how far out of whack it is -- and just how hard we’re going to have to work to have even a chance at limiting the damage.

Bill McKibben is a frequent contributor to The New York Review and is scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

This article appears in the March 15, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books

Thanks also to Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com

Homepage photo by Twm™

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Obama’s big climate challenge

Bill McKibben — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:59:00 +0000

As he assumes the US presidency, Barack Obama must make climate-change legislation and investment in green energy his top priorities. He must be ready to take bold -- and politically unpopular -- action, writes Bill McKibben.

And so the United States' eight-year interlude from reality draws to a close, and the job of cleaning up begins. The trouble is, we’re not just cleaning up after a failed presidency. We’re cleaning up after a two-century binge.

Barack Obama won a historic victory last week, and with it the right to take office under the most difficult circumstances since Franklin D Roosevelt was president. Maybe more difficult, because while both Roosevelt and Obama had financial meltdowns to deal with, Obama also faces the meltdown meltdown — the rapid disintegration of the planet's climate system that threatens to challenge the very foundations of our civilisation.

Do you think that sounds melodramatic? Let me give it to you from the abstract of a scientific paper written earlier this year by one of the people who now work for Obama, NASA scientist James Hansen. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm." In other words, if we keep increasing carbon any longer, the planet itself will make our efforts moot.

Hansen's calculation is a scientifically grounded way of saying everything must change at once. To meet his target, before enough feedback loops kick in to irrevocably warm the planet, Hansen says that fossil-fuel combustion, particularly coal, must cease around the world by about 2030, and that it must happen sooner in the industrialised nations. As a climate observer, and tireless blogger, Joe Romm observed when Hansen's paper was published, it means that "we need to go straight to the government-led WWII-style effort for the whole planet that is sustained for decades." (Well, back to Roosevelt, what do you know!)

Anyway, here are some of the pieces of what Obama must push for:

* Massive government investment in green energy. For this to have any hope of being politically viable, it will need to be seen as the single huge stimulus effort that might lift us out of our financial swamp. (That's almost certainly true, by the way — name another emergent technology capable of re-floating the economy for the long run.) We have at least some of the technologies we'd need — wind, the newly promising desert solar arrays and the ever-useful insulation (the installation of which would at least create a lot of jobs; you're not going to send your house to China for a layer of fibreglass). You might also push for nuclear, but it takes a long time and it's probably too expensive to make a rational list. Still, no holds barred.

* A stiff cap on carbon, which will help drive the process. Again, to have any chance of passing politically, it will need to come with the feature proposed in recent years by Peter Barnes, and that Obama has semi-endorsed: a "cap-and-share" approach that would return the revenue raised directly to consumers. That is, Exxon would pay for the permit to pour carbon into the atmosphere, a cost that would rise steadily as the cap was lowered. But instead of the money going into government coffers, every American would get a cheque each year for their share of the proceeds. They'd be made whole against the rising cost of energy, while the shock that the price signal would send would be preserved. Current versions of cap-and-trade are too weak and too riddled with loopholes. Getting a clean, tough bill through Congress needs to be a preoccupation of Obama.

* Once the president has done all that tough stuff at home, he'll need to do it all over again, globally. The world is meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 to come up with a successor to the Kyoto treaty, the modest first international effort that George W Bush walked away from weeks after taking office. If Hansen and others are even close to right, this will represent the last legitimate shot the world has at putting itself on a new carbon regime in time to make any difference.

It will be incredibly difficult, mostly because we begin from such unequal places. China has lots of coal and it would like to burn it, because it's the cheapest way to pull rural Chinese out of dire poverty (something the country's leaders would quite like to do because otherwise they won't be the country's leaders much longer). If we want them to use, say, windmills instead, we're going to need to “share some wealth,” north to south, to make it happen. The Chinese opened the bidding last week, with a suggestion that 1% of the US annual GDP would be a good amount to send their way. That's going to be quite a political ask; it means that Americans would be working roughly one hour every two weeks just to help the global south build up their clean alternatives. What we're talking about is a carbon version of the Marshall Plan, and it would mean Obama needs to be not just Roosevelt but Harry S Truman and Dwight D Eisenhower as well.

What it all boils down to is: the bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years ago, when we started worrying about global warming, we thought we'd have a generation to pay off those bills. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we'd realised. The melting Arctic is the call from the repossession agent.

Any hope of succeeding will require Obama to grasp, deep in his guts, the fact that climate, energy, food and the economy now are hopelessly intertwined, and that trying to solve any one of these problems without taking on the others simply makes all of them worse. More, he needs to understand, again viscerally, the single stark fact of our time: no matter how many votes, no matter how much lobbying, no matter how much pressure you apply, you can't amend the laws of physics and chemistry. They aren't like the laws that politicians are used to dealing with. They will be obeyed, like it or not: 350 is now the most important number on the planet, the red line that defines reality.

It doesn't define political reality, however. The political reality goes like this: George W Bush was so terrible on this issue that the bar has been set incredibly low. Obama will get all the political points he needs with fairly minimal effort. Doing what actually needs to be done will be politically… "unpopular" isn't even the word. It might well wreck his political future, because it would involve — directly or indirectly — raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now.

My guess, from the outside, is that all Obama's instincts are centrist. Certainly in energy policy he's offered nothing all that bold or interesting, though his sophistication and engagement have grown during the campaign, which is a good sign.

A better sign is simply that, by every testimony, he's one of the smartest men ever to assume high political office in the United States. Not just smarter than Bush. Really smart. Smart enough, if he sits down to really understand the scale of the problem he faces, that he might decide to take the gambles that the situation requires. He said, not long ago, "under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" — which is a sign of someone who is aware there may be a reality to come to grips with.

First signs to watch for: does he go to Poland next month for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and in so doing electrify the international talks over carbon? Are people like green-jobs advocate Van Jones on the short list of those he's listening to on energy policy? Can he see clear to making this — after dealing with the short-term financial emergency — his first legislative priority, even before health care?

Obama, and the rest of us, have a lot more to fear than fear itself. We've got carbon, and right now that's the most frightening stuff on earth.

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

This article is reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360.

Homepage photo by zyrcster.