When I got arrested with you in 2011, I thought I had made such a difference. But now it seems like just a drop in the bucket. If there is a large scale action, I want in. I continue to tell people that until enough of us are in the streets making people's lives uncomfortable, nothing will change. Too many people are comfortable as they sit on the Titanic waiting for it to sink. Change must often be demanded. Especially when you've asked nicely so many times without result. Thank you for all you do and have done. I try to go easy on myself as an activist. As you know, that's difficult. But I'll just keep waking up every day doing the best I can.
Thank you, Bill, for your post and for your endless work on climate which is much appreciated by so many of us. I share your disgust for lawmakers, banks and pension administrators who cannot look beyond the money from fossil fuel companies.
More rain is pouring down as I write. Bristol has been spared but my daughter in Montpelier not so much. The dam 3+ miles to the north is a constant worry.
"The next really bad idea in American energy policy is the rapid buildout of LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast." This seems insane to me, not only building the terminals, but in that location which is often hurricane alley! I try not to let despair set in. We have to do better.
As a 5 time IPCC lead author, I helped identify many technological mitigation options and adopted many of them. They work but are not sufficient. We must also rapidly halt destruction and restore the forests and other ecosystems that are the planetary operational system.
Bill, as a 5 time IPCC lead author, what is your opinion on the following statement:
> I couldn’t even keep the crisis off my own damned doorstep. My beloved Vermont was one of many places that took it on the chin this week—huge flooding in Japan and India and China and Spain, but also in Montpelier and Ludlow and Barre and a dozen other places I know intimately.
WGI Section 11.5.4 concludes:
> In general, there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence because of a limited number of studies, differences in the results of these studies and large modelling uncertainties.
Judith, if it’s the case that “no science [is] needed to define climate change now,” then why are we bothering with the massive endeavor that is the IPCC, whose reports are written by hundreds if not thousands of scientists, or with climate science more generally?
The science has been written and completed by the IPCC; future reports will address mitigation efforts only as I remember. It WAS NEEDED and WAS COMPLETED in great detail. We are thankful to the IPCC for eliminating beyond a shadow of a doubt that climate change is man made, CO2 emissions the far and away chief offender but there are others like Methane, agriculture practices. Just saying for those who still deny; it must be blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention especially this summer to unprecedented heat waves that are killing residents in the SW US, and elsewhere, drought versus flooding, weather patterns not seen before, warming oceans with fish dying in masses and found on beaches, El Niño expected to be longer this year thus more frequent & severe storms, ice caps melting at both poles, etc., more but cannot elucidate further at present without my coffee! I can be a dictionary but earlier short comment was all I could muster. To be concise, we are f***** (without massive effort and cooperation on a global scale). Better?
Judith, your statement that “The science has been written and completed by the IPCC” is at odds with the excerpt I posted from WGI Section 11.5.4, which uses the expression “low confidence.” The IPCC uses “low confidence” when there are few studies (low evidence) or studies contradict each other (low agreement).
Bill, I remember your visit to my science class in the late 80's. It was a rural school of 400 students, K-12, but you made the time to spread the word. Your seminal piece on climate change had hit the book stores, and so began a life dedicated to addressing the crisis. I've tried in my own career path to educate and make a difference around anthropogenic climate change, but the work has been painfully slow. I heard recently on Bloomberg news that politicians won't address the problem, and that it will take technological innovations to mitigate the damage. We'll see. Haven't given up hope yet, but we need to see some major wins. My community in the Adirondacks has also suffered from the tropical storms that are pummeling the area, and it saddens me to know the clarion calls for action really started nearly 40 years ago with your work, 350.org, and other climate action pioneers. Please keep the faith and encourage others to do the same. Otherwise, we're all doomed.
My husband, who died in 2012, taught me climate change and trains (appropriate mass transportation run with recyclable steam). I had a ticket (Chicago Humanities Festival) to hear Bill McKibben (a household name, of course) the night after Trump was elected. Grief that night was as profound as when I heard Paul Krugman in NYC a month later. Now we are in the situation both understood and warned about. What we can do is start making certain that the current occupier of the White House remains there with his intelligent crew. This means getting involved NOW in helping Democrats who understand climate change get elected in states having primaries right now (Ohio) and being national politically as we have never been while keeping a close eye on local developments. The political and environmental are completely linked. At 89, I write GOTV postcards to Ohio through my Indivisible chapter. I urge readers of this newsletter to get involved politically if they have any hope of contributing to the environmental situation. Remember that officially the Republican Party in DC does not “believe in” climate change. When will their adherents get the message”? It’s up to those of US who see what Bill McKibben, Jim Hansen, Al Gore, and Jake Hubbell see and Jimmy Carter (who put solar panels on the White House, which Ronald Reagan took off; why?) see to get the climate deniers out of office. This newsletter may be the most important you will ever read. There are fires in CA again. We have to get on with the ‘24 primaries (yes, in ‘23) and encourage both our representatives in DC in whose hands we are if we are to keep democracy alive and the planet habitable.
Notice that Jimmy Carter and Al Gore were farmers. There is one farmer left in Congress: Jon Tester in Montana, no longer a hospitable state for a Democrat who farms.
That’s why those of us who know some of what you know have to work twice as hard as ever we have (thinking of McGovern days) to be certain of retaining the presidency, adding to the Senate, and getting all the conspirators out of the House.
Thanks to Bill and thank you Virginia for keeping the faith.
I have also been at it for many years: reading Rachael Carson, celebrating Earth Days, writing comments and to Congress & Senate members and sending out emails to friends (some with ironic titles like "time to sell the beach house". So, yeah....
Even though it sometimes feels like greed and ignorance reign we have to continue to make whatever efforts we can.
And to grieve the loss of each species that passes.
Thank you, TJ. I had 10 years of up close and personal climate change living on a small boat on the French canal system with a couple of times on the Rhône. It was an unforgettable lesson in climate change so that nothing we are experiencing really surprises, but only makes me sad.
Bill, the reality is that no words would have changed the outcome. You cannot tell people what they don't want to hear.
Americans don't want to suffer the slightest inconvenience to avoid global catastrophe.
Giving up cars, car-sharing, giving up or limiting red meat, installing solar panels, heat pumps, and induction ovens is way too inconvenient and expensive (meanwhile travel is at record highs, so financial concerns are clearly a fig leaf).
Unfortunately, as bad as things are (and as terrible as the near-term future promises to be), as with smoking...people will ignore the warnings until every family is impacted in some way.
Once mass suffering has reached a crescendo, the demands for change will force politicians to act, tech leaders to innovate, and a reimagining of daily life.
Activists should continue to lay the groundwork, so that the country has a running start when mass misery creates the momentum for change. Until then, people will choose to be frogs literally boiling slowly.
Thank you, of course is not nearly enough but a thank you, withheld is a form of denial. I'm grateful for your tireless labors, awed by your generosity. Namasté. And thank you.
Clearly we need lower carbon emitting energy systems. Technological carbon capture is a money sink, but unlikely to ever be an effective carbon sink. On the other hand forests reduce the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 increases from fossil fuel emissions. A recent study found that annual global forest harvests add the equivalent of 10% of fossil fuel emissions (entire Russian fossil fuel emissions) to the atmosphere.
We must protect 30-50% of the worlds ecosystem and insure their integrity according to IPCC AR6 Working Group 2 Summary for Policy Makers. In chapter 2, page 303, it states that protecting forest ecosystems is a priority.
Why don’t we address the destruction of the operational system of the planet - terrestrial ecosystems (forests and soils) and oceans.?
The problems with Carbon Capture and Sequestration are all the result of human failings:
1. The tendency to postpone action to effectively curtail emissions, leading to magnification of both the problem and the cost of remediation;
2. The desire to rely on technology exclusively intead of modifying our own behavior (speaking to the so-called advanced economies);
3. Failing to implement an effective closed loop negative feedback control system that would bring CCS into massive use while we complet the restructuring of our energy, transportation, industrial and agricultural systems into sustainable ones.
Regarding the third point, readers of my own Substack will be familiar with the argument that CCS is a failure because the great polluters have no monetary incentives to implement it. Tax credits and shell games like carbon credits, cap & trade, etc. are proven failures. The negative feedback mechanism needs to be a regressive carbon tax (say, $2000 per ton of CO2 emmitted) charged to the producers of CO2 (e.g., fossil fuel fired power plants) in the case of point source emitters, and to the suppliers (e.g. fossil fuen companies) in the case of distributed sources. I guarantee, that would start a stampede toward CCS at power plants, steel mills, and portland cement plants, and away from Otto- and Diesel power in the transportation sector. Moreover, it would hasten the abandonment of fossil fuels, because it would place them in an untennable economic position.
Another way to put your point 1...allowing politicians a way to both pretend to be doing something and to give even more of our taxes to the FF industry in subsidies.
I've been thinking about you, reading about the rain that's drenched your home. I read your book, "The End of Nature" a few years ago, and shortly after, wrote this. I hope you enjoy it.
Mr McKibben, your elucidation regarding the physics of climate change has empowered me to make clear and cogent arguments over the years, changing peoples' minds. It's all about waking people up, and you are one of the shining lights in this effort. It may seem like you haven't done enough, or done it fast enough, but this isn't a failure on your part; it's merely a reflection on the enormity of the problem. As the love of my life once told me (actually more than once), when it looks like we have so far to go, consider how far we've come. Persevere, my friend, and thank you.
Same! Bill's writing on devestmemt in "Oil and Honey," along with Bob Massie's "Loosing the Bonds", which is referred to in "Oil and Honey," have shown this recovering MAGA/Evangelical(unwilling) cultist what true boycotts, civil disobedience can actually do (tactics that are appropriated, unsuccessfully by the MAGA Right). The first boycotts I recall hearing about was against Levi's Jeans because they "promoted gays" in the Boy Scouts. I was under ten years old.
I share your frustration and sense that there must have been more, somehow that I could do. I don’t suppose that will pass. But let me say for the record, Bill, that you have done your share and more. Thank you.
One of the things that really irks me is the size and weight of new cars and personal trucks. Amory Lovins said some years ago that what he called hypercars--the EVs of the future--would weigh much less than then current cars. But because of the way cars are regulated, the regs are much less stringent for the big, 10,000 lb pickup trucks, which people use as personal vehicles. There should be a much lower limit to the weight on personal vehicles, and big, heavy pickups should be classed as commercial vehicles, demanding a commercial license, and having a real job. The big pickups are not only environmentally bad, they are also dangerous to other motorists, and to children, who can't be seen by drivers if they are less than about 25 feet from the front of the pickups, because the hoods are so high. Here is my nearly 20 year old article on Amory Lovins' vision of hypercars, in Environmental Health Perspectives
Amory is still at it! A couple of years ago he gave an excellent presentation at the APS spring meeting on sustainable development. His firm has implemented HVAC disttribution mods (rerouting duct work and removing unnecessary air moving equipment) resulting in over 30% reductions in overall energy consumption for clients such as the Empire State Building. This hints at how much energy demand reduction could be realized if we made sustainability a universal design priority.
But I put little faith on the idea that the MAGAs will be persuaded by the ground truth. Perversity is their watchword.
The earth’s ecosystems are in deep doo-doo my friends. The world’s people need to figure out how to keep the fossil fuel industry and other environmentally destructive corporations and organizations away from their governments. Here in the United States, next year’s elections could very well be this country’s political tipping point. We’ve run out of elections to waste, and we’ve run out of time.
We have met over the years. I just retired after 50 years as a professor teaching and writing about environment and crisis and the destruction of habitability and psychological well being. I used your books beginning with The End of Nature with my students. I also have led a non-profit for forty years, and a climate activist, etc. I share your sense of abject failure to avert what so many clearly saw coming. How could we be so right and so impotent? But, as you write, now is the time when change is possible. In my work, for example Contaminated Communities, I found that people needed to be personally touched in a visible way by disaster before they woke up to the conditions that were harming them. So we now have the wake up call so clear that the conditions exist to mobilize even the resistant. It may be too late in the game to prevent what we always feared would transpire. But , as you correctly write, we can stop it from getting worse. So this is not the time for regret. But for action!!!!
The "mass mobilization" called for by Bill McKibben better include dramatic cuts in energy consumption. Anyone who thinks we can get carbon emissions down in a substantial and timely manner without doing so is delusional. I find it most troubling that McKibben isn't demanding a major scale down of energy use (have I missed something?). It will give me no great pleasure to tell him, a decade or so from now, "I told you so."
He's been calling for that forever. Unfortunately, he cannot control that. He can only advise people. I got arrested with him in 2011 to slow the mining and distribution of tar sands oil in Canada. And we successfully stopped the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Please direct me to McKibben's specific statements or articles where he calls for major cuts in energy consumption by our society. Calls to stop oil and gas production are not the same as calls to scale down energy use.
Thanks, Bill, I read your article, "To save the planet, should we really be moving slower?" I found it to be helpful but a rather timid endorsement of degrowth. I sincerely hope you will become a much stronger voice and full participant in the degrowth movement. I'll read your book "Deep Economy" but, considering some of the reviews, it sounds similar in tone to your New Yorker piece. Like may environmental leaders today, I am afraid that you're entrapped in a culture of extreme anthropocentrism that provides almost no margin of error with its environmental "solutions." You characterize ecological harm from the green energy boom as "local", notwithstanding its regional and global cumulative impacts on life, especially more than human life. The world is not just about us, a single species among some 10 million.
When I got arrested with you in 2011, I thought I had made such a difference. But now it seems like just a drop in the bucket. If there is a large scale action, I want in. I continue to tell people that until enough of us are in the streets making people's lives uncomfortable, nothing will change. Too many people are comfortable as they sit on the Titanic waiting for it to sink. Change must often be demanded. Especially when you've asked nicely so many times without result. Thank you for all you do and have done. I try to go easy on myself as an activist. As you know, that's difficult. But I'll just keep waking up every day doing the best I can.
it's very good to have a big broad movement so we can lean on each other
Thank you, Bill, for your post and for your endless work on climate which is much appreciated by so many of us. I share your disgust for lawmakers, banks and pension administrators who cannot look beyond the money from fossil fuel companies.
More rain is pouring down as I write. Bristol has been spared but my daughter in Montpelier not so much. The dam 3+ miles to the north is a constant worry.
"The next really bad idea in American energy policy is the rapid buildout of LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast." This seems insane to me, not only building the terminals, but in that location which is often hurricane alley! I try not to let despair set in. We have to do better.
thank you friend, on we go
As a 5 time IPCC lead author, I helped identify many technological mitigation options and adopted many of them. They work but are not sufficient. We must also rapidly halt destruction and restore the forests and other ecosystems that are the planetary operational system.
thank you for leadership in all of this
Bill, as a 5 time IPCC lead author, what is your opinion on the following statement:
> I couldn’t even keep the crisis off my own damned doorstep. My beloved Vermont was one of many places that took it on the chin this week—huge flooding in Japan and India and China and Spain, but also in Montpelier and Ludlow and Barre and a dozen other places I know intimately.
WGI Section 11.5.4 concludes:
> In general, there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence because of a limited number of studies, differences in the results of these studies and large modelling uncertainties.
How can I reconcile these two statements?
Look outside your door. No science needed to define climate change now. It is essentially everywhere.
Judith, if it’s the case that “no science [is] needed to define climate change now,” then why are we bothering with the massive endeavor that is the IPCC, whose reports are written by hundreds if not thousands of scientists, or with climate science more generally?
The science has been written and completed by the IPCC; future reports will address mitigation efforts only as I remember. It WAS NEEDED and WAS COMPLETED in great detail. We are thankful to the IPCC for eliminating beyond a shadow of a doubt that climate change is man made, CO2 emissions the far and away chief offender but there are others like Methane, agriculture practices. Just saying for those who still deny; it must be blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention especially this summer to unprecedented heat waves that are killing residents in the SW US, and elsewhere, drought versus flooding, weather patterns not seen before, warming oceans with fish dying in masses and found on beaches, El Niño expected to be longer this year thus more frequent & severe storms, ice caps melting at both poles, etc., more but cannot elucidate further at present without my coffee! I can be a dictionary but earlier short comment was all I could muster. To be concise, we are f***** (without massive effort and cooperation on a global scale). Better?
Judith, your statement that “The science has been written and completed by the IPCC” is at odds with the excerpt I posted from WGI Section 11.5.4, which uses the expression “low confidence.” The IPCC uses “low confidence” when there are few studies (low evidence) or studies contradict each other (low agreement).
Bill, I remember your visit to my science class in the late 80's. It was a rural school of 400 students, K-12, but you made the time to spread the word. Your seminal piece on climate change had hit the book stores, and so began a life dedicated to addressing the crisis. I've tried in my own career path to educate and make a difference around anthropogenic climate change, but the work has been painfully slow. I heard recently on Bloomberg news that politicians won't address the problem, and that it will take technological innovations to mitigate the damage. We'll see. Haven't given up hope yet, but we need to see some major wins. My community in the Adirondacks has also suffered from the tropical storms that are pummeling the area, and it saddens me to know the clarion calls for action really started nearly 40 years ago with your work, 350.org, and other climate action pioneers. Please keep the faith and encourage others to do the same. Otherwise, we're all doomed.
you said it
Always grateful for you Bill McKibben, doing what you can and stretching to do more.
My husband, who died in 2012, taught me climate change and trains (appropriate mass transportation run with recyclable steam). I had a ticket (Chicago Humanities Festival) to hear Bill McKibben (a household name, of course) the night after Trump was elected. Grief that night was as profound as when I heard Paul Krugman in NYC a month later. Now we are in the situation both understood and warned about. What we can do is start making certain that the current occupier of the White House remains there with his intelligent crew. This means getting involved NOW in helping Democrats who understand climate change get elected in states having primaries right now (Ohio) and being national politically as we have never been while keeping a close eye on local developments. The political and environmental are completely linked. At 89, I write GOTV postcards to Ohio through my Indivisible chapter. I urge readers of this newsletter to get involved politically if they have any hope of contributing to the environmental situation. Remember that officially the Republican Party in DC does not “believe in” climate change. When will their adherents get the message”? It’s up to those of US who see what Bill McKibben, Jim Hansen, Al Gore, and Jake Hubbell see and Jimmy Carter (who put solar panels on the White House, which Ronald Reagan took off; why?) see to get the climate deniers out of office. This newsletter may be the most important you will ever read. There are fires in CA again. We have to get on with the ‘24 primaries (yes, in ‘23) and encourage both our representatives in DC in whose hands we are if we are to keep democracy alive and the planet habitable.
Notice that Jimmy Carter and Al Gore were farmers. There is one farmer left in Congress: Jon Tester in Montana, no longer a hospitable state for a Democrat who farms.
yeah, the next election is going be, yet again, the 'most important ever.'
That’s why those of us who know some of what you know have to work twice as hard as ever we have (thinking of McGovern days) to be certain of retaining the presidency, adding to the Senate, and getting all the conspirators out of the House.
Thank You Virginia! I just finished notifying friends about a Swing Left Rhode Island letter writing event for OHIO!
Thank you, Rich! The more the better chance of success.
Thanks to Bill and thank you Virginia for keeping the faith.
I have also been at it for many years: reading Rachael Carson, celebrating Earth Days, writing comments and to Congress & Senate members and sending out emails to friends (some with ironic titles like "time to sell the beach house". So, yeah....
Even though it sometimes feels like greed and ignorance reign we have to continue to make whatever efforts we can.
And to grieve the loss of each species that passes.
Thank you, TJ. I had 10 years of up close and personal climate change living on a small boat on the French canal system with a couple of times on the Rhône. It was an unforgettable lesson in climate change so that nothing we are experiencing really surprises, but only makes me sad.
Bill, the reality is that no words would have changed the outcome. You cannot tell people what they don't want to hear.
Americans don't want to suffer the slightest inconvenience to avoid global catastrophe.
Giving up cars, car-sharing, giving up or limiting red meat, installing solar panels, heat pumps, and induction ovens is way too inconvenient and expensive (meanwhile travel is at record highs, so financial concerns are clearly a fig leaf).
Unfortunately, as bad as things are (and as terrible as the near-term future promises to be), as with smoking...people will ignore the warnings until every family is impacted in some way.
Once mass suffering has reached a crescendo, the demands for change will force politicians to act, tech leaders to innovate, and a reimagining of daily life.
Activists should continue to lay the groundwork, so that the country has a running start when mass misery creates the momentum for change. Until then, people will choose to be frogs literally boiling slowly.
Thank you, of course is not nearly enough but a thank you, withheld is a form of denial. I'm grateful for your tireless labors, awed by your generosity. Namasté. And thank you.
and thank you--we're all in this together!
🙏
Clearly we need lower carbon emitting energy systems. Technological carbon capture is a money sink, but unlikely to ever be an effective carbon sink. On the other hand forests reduce the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 increases from fossil fuel emissions. A recent study found that annual global forest harvests add the equivalent of 10% of fossil fuel emissions (entire Russian fossil fuel emissions) to the atmosphere.
We must protect 30-50% of the worlds ecosystem and insure their integrity according to IPCC AR6 Working Group 2 Summary for Policy Makers. In chapter 2, page 303, it states that protecting forest ecosystems is a priority.
Why don’t we address the destruction of the operational system of the planet - terrestrial ecosystems (forests and soils) and oceans.?
The problems with Carbon Capture and Sequestration are all the result of human failings:
1. The tendency to postpone action to effectively curtail emissions, leading to magnification of both the problem and the cost of remediation;
2. The desire to rely on technology exclusively intead of modifying our own behavior (speaking to the so-called advanced economies);
3. Failing to implement an effective closed loop negative feedback control system that would bring CCS into massive use while we complet the restructuring of our energy, transportation, industrial and agricultural systems into sustainable ones.
Regarding the third point, readers of my own Substack will be familiar with the argument that CCS is a failure because the great polluters have no monetary incentives to implement it. Tax credits and shell games like carbon credits, cap & trade, etc. are proven failures. The negative feedback mechanism needs to be a regressive carbon tax (say, $2000 per ton of CO2 emmitted) charged to the producers of CO2 (e.g., fossil fuel fired power plants) in the case of point source emitters, and to the suppliers (e.g. fossil fuen companies) in the case of distributed sources. I guarantee, that would start a stampede toward CCS at power plants, steel mills, and portland cement plants, and away from Otto- and Diesel power in the transportation sector. Moreover, it would hasten the abandonment of fossil fuels, because it would place them in an untennable economic position.
Another way to put your point 1...allowing politicians a way to both pretend to be doing something and to give even more of our taxes to the FF industry in subsidies.
I've been thinking about you, reading about the rain that's drenched your home. I read your book, "The End of Nature" a few years ago, and shortly after, wrote this. I hope you enjoy it.
https://tiffanyelliott84.medium.com/thoughts-on-the-end-of-nature-c5bd3378d9e0
Mr McKibben, your elucidation regarding the physics of climate change has empowered me to make clear and cogent arguments over the years, changing peoples' minds. It's all about waking people up, and you are one of the shining lights in this effort. It may seem like you haven't done enough, or done it fast enough, but this isn't a failure on your part; it's merely a reflection on the enormity of the problem. As the love of my life once told me (actually more than once), when it looks like we have so far to go, consider how far we've come. Persevere, my friend, and thank you.
thank you much!
Same! Bill's writing on devestmemt in "Oil and Honey," along with Bob Massie's "Loosing the Bonds", which is referred to in "Oil and Honey," have shown this recovering MAGA/Evangelical(unwilling) cultist what true boycotts, civil disobedience can actually do (tactics that are appropriated, unsuccessfully by the MAGA Right). The first boycotts I recall hearing about was against Levi's Jeans because they "promoted gays" in the Boy Scouts. I was under ten years old.
I share your frustration and sense that there must have been more, somehow that I could do. I don’t suppose that will pass. But let me say for the record, Bill, that you have done your share and more. Thank you.
thank you too!
One of the things that really irks me is the size and weight of new cars and personal trucks. Amory Lovins said some years ago that what he called hypercars--the EVs of the future--would weigh much less than then current cars. But because of the way cars are regulated, the regs are much less stringent for the big, 10,000 lb pickup trucks, which people use as personal vehicles. There should be a much lower limit to the weight on personal vehicles, and big, heavy pickups should be classed as commercial vehicles, demanding a commercial license, and having a real job. The big pickups are not only environmentally bad, they are also dangerous to other motorists, and to children, who can't be seen by drivers if they are less than about 25 feet from the front of the pickups, because the hoods are so high. Here is my nearly 20 year old article on Amory Lovins' vision of hypercars, in Environmental Health Perspectives
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.113-a250
Amory is still at it! A couple of years ago he gave an excellent presentation at the APS spring meeting on sustainable development. His firm has implemented HVAC disttribution mods (rerouting duct work and removing unnecessary air moving equipment) resulting in over 30% reductions in overall energy consumption for clients such as the Empire State Building. This hints at how much energy demand reduction could be realized if we made sustainability a universal design priority.
But I put little faith on the idea that the MAGAs will be persuaded by the ground truth. Perversity is their watchword.
The earth’s ecosystems are in deep doo-doo my friends. The world’s people need to figure out how to keep the fossil fuel industry and other environmentally destructive corporations and organizations away from their governments. Here in the United States, next year’s elections could very well be this country’s political tipping point. We’ve run out of elections to waste, and we’ve run out of time.
Hi Bill,
We have met over the years. I just retired after 50 years as a professor teaching and writing about environment and crisis and the destruction of habitability and psychological well being. I used your books beginning with The End of Nature with my students. I also have led a non-profit for forty years, and a climate activist, etc. I share your sense of abject failure to avert what so many clearly saw coming. How could we be so right and so impotent? But, as you write, now is the time when change is possible. In my work, for example Contaminated Communities, I found that people needed to be personally touched in a visible way by disaster before they woke up to the conditions that were harming them. So we now have the wake up call so clear that the conditions exist to mobilize even the resistant. It may be too late in the game to prevent what we always feared would transpire. But , as you correctly write, we can stop it from getting worse. So this is not the time for regret. But for action!!!!
The "mass mobilization" called for by Bill McKibben better include dramatic cuts in energy consumption. Anyone who thinks we can get carbon emissions down in a substantial and timely manner without doing so is delusional. I find it most troubling that McKibben isn't demanding a major scale down of energy use (have I missed something?). It will give me no great pleasure to tell him, a decade or so from now, "I told you so."
He's been calling for that forever. Unfortunately, he cannot control that. He can only advise people. I got arrested with him in 2011 to slow the mining and distribution of tar sands oil in Canada. And we successfully stopped the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Please direct me to McKibben's specific statements or articles where he calls for major cuts in energy consumption by our society. Calls to stop oil and gas production are not the same as calls to scale down energy use.
If you google my name and 'degrowth' you'll find a long recent piece in the new Yorker I think
Thanks, Bill, I read your article, "To save the planet, should we really be moving slower?" I found it to be helpful but a rather timid endorsement of degrowth. I sincerely hope you will become a much stronger voice and full participant in the degrowth movement. I'll read your book "Deep Economy" but, considering some of the reviews, it sounds similar in tone to your New Yorker piece. Like may environmental leaders today, I am afraid that you're entrapped in a culture of extreme anthropocentrism that provides almost no margin of error with its environmental "solutions." You characterize ecological harm from the green energy boom as "local", notwithstanding its regional and global cumulative impacts on life, especially more than human life. The world is not just about us, a single species among some 10 million.