When you promote this book, you are not promoting yourself: You are promoting the work you do. That work is a source of sustenance for millions, including me. So there's nothing to be even tempted to be ashamed of. Please keep doing it.
Looking forward to reading your book. Thank you so much!
No apologies needed at all, Bill. Thank you for the years of reporting that started feeling perhaps like a voice crying in the wilderness, and is now heard and read by so many of us seeking clarity, hope, and reasoned optimism. I’m very happy to pre-order.
Thank you climate hero! Your piece reads like a cheerleading love letter to Citizens’ Climate Lobby. We are streaming into DC by the hundreds right now to lobby congress next week on behalf of the climate. I will share your words widely.
I plan to read your book. Thanks for writing it. I feel that between denying and dooming, there is this reasonable middle ground of things we can do, should do anyway, or should be trying to do, come hell or high water. (Throw in a little less red meat and gas and at least we can say we tried.) Radical moderation. We need more of it, especially considering all the journalistic “balance” we’ve endured on the issue. And thank you for holding out against strategic fatalism. So the predictions aren’t “water tight”? It’s pretty rich for the trolls to criticize when they haven’t come up with any. Kinda hard when your trolling besties deny it, or deny anthropogenic sources. Keep calm and solar on!
Bea, I'm admittedly a "doomer" but I agree with your fine comments. I think we're in for some terribly rough sledding ahead but it's no reason to give up doing our best now for the sake of our future descendents and the rest of the beleaguered species whose environment we're wrecking. We owe fish and birds and pine trees and insects as much as we owe people, our best efforts.
There's much that can be done. In the past few weeks, the US has experienced four 1-in-a-thousand year deluges, and some 250m Americans have been under flood warnings. It doesn't seem that long ago that a similar number of Americans were subject to warnings of intense heat.
There are many countries for whom global warming has already become a grim reality and they are having to adapt in order to survive even though many are far less well able to do this than the US. Yet in the US, polls show that the majority of Americans appear not to share the view either than climate change is an existential threat to communities or that it should be the chief priority for the government. This dangerous complacency is as big a threat as the imminence of extreme weather events.
The horrific links between attacks on truth, human rights and decency that link the return of the most disgusting, brutally sadistic machiavellian mad white supremacists and everything that makes life more fun is closely linked to the ties between BigOil and Gas and Mining and the rise in ugly authoritarianism starting in 1934 when Hayek published " The Road to Serfdom." Neoliberalism's lie that we humans are all selfish, independent individuals, as articulated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the first female member of the Mont Pellerin Society, has been promoted by the well-paid employees of the 150 Atlas Foundation Network think tanks founded by Antony Fisher. Fisher was a hero in the Battle of Britain, yet he became infatuated with neoliberalism. I assume he never twigged that Hayek supported Hitler. He made his fortune by introducing brutally cruel factory chicken farming to Britain and then spent his time creating these linked think tanks that were funded by leaders in extractive polluting industries keen to deregulate environmental laws and have free range to inflict endless harm on workers, and the natural world and to hide their shenanigans and pretend that neoliberalism is an economic theory rather than a cult that favours hierarchy and elitism.
I wasn't aware that Hayek supported Hitler. I know that he argued that National Socialism was the inevitable outcome of any dirigiste form of government. I doubt he would have approved of Trump's economically ruinous tariffs policy and rejection of global markets. Perhaps that's why the Federalist Society is suing the administration, backed by a furious Charles Koch.
Thanks Dr Scully. Well, we've been affected here in the UK in a small way with the shenanigans surrounding the BBC Panorama programme that used a 'quilt quotation' to emphasise Trump's incitement of the crowd on January 6 2021 which led to the Capitol building siege. I understand that he's threatening to sue the programme (he's already extorted ignominous compensation payments from ABC News and CBS News).
It's a storm in a teacup (although what the programme did was very unprofessional) especially as Trump is now pardoning Rudy Giuliani and others involved in the plot to draw up a slate of fake electors to usurp the election. Special Counsel Jack Smith's final report on the case against Trump showed quite clearly his involvement in these machinations, whatever his role on the day of the siege.
Hayek rewrote the constitution of Chile and supported Augusto Pinochet, and defended Pinochet's murderous and sadistic assault on the people of Chile. Chile was Hayek's first opportunity to try out his neoliberal ideas. Nancy McLean is one of several authors who write about neoliberalism, a term I first heard of in 2021. I took a course led by Jeremy Lent, the author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. I was astonished to hear of the Mont Pellerin Society. My training is in academic clinical Hematology/Oncology. I worked in rural India with Tibetans in 1984, and as a result, I was aware of what are known as the social determinants of health. I was also familiar with the work of The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. I used the book "Where There Is No Doctor in India," and I also found the book "Mountains over Mountains" by Tracy Kidder helpful. It's a long story. During the pandemic, I decided to check out the IPCC reports, and I was horrified. I decided I needed to learn more and signed up for many courses, including one organized by Programs in Earth Literacy led by Jeremy Lent. I was stunned. My late husband, who was Vietnamese Canadian, and I always supported Oxfam, Amnesty International, and it was through Amnesty that we learned about the disappeared girls and women in Canada and about indigenous activists being targeted and murdered. I had noticed a change in Canada since I arrived in Toronto to train in 1985, having come from Ireland. My mother and many other neighbours were active in the women's peace movement, which seemed to be slowly progressing until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to power. Then it seemed that she had an incredible capacity to bring death and misery everywhere she looked. I had always planned to train further in London, where my uncle, aunt, and cousins lived, but Thatcher made life so miserable for anyone Irish that, on the advice of my favourite mentor, I applied to train at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. My late husband wanted to stay in Canada, and so we stayed. We really thought that it was just a matter of time and that human rights would improve life everywhere. My husband died in 2014, and he was still convinced that life was improving, as was I. When I first heard of the MPS and the 150 Atlas Network Foundations, I did not believe this could be true. Especially since, at the time, I was an active volunteer with the Liberal Party of Canada, and no one I asked had ever heard of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek, or the MPS. I asked everyone I know if no one had heard of this, and no one was interested. I did what I have done my entire life as a researcher, although not at the same level. I have looked for papers and books by others and have been reading them ever since, but I have not been enjoying what I have found at all.
I've read Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains'. You might also like 'Dark Money: how a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US' by New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer. Another well-known book on the work of these think tank/lobby groups is 'Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming' by Eric Conway and Naomi Oreskes.
Thatcher continued to defend Pinochet even after his arrest and extradition, partly because he was an ally of the Britain during its ludicrous war over the Falkland Islands but also his opposition to communism. You can still read her defiant and infamous speech to the House of Commons in 1999 on the Thatcher Foundation website.
Thanks, I will look for this. I am interested in reading about how to undo this harm and get us working to increase animate NOT artificial inteligence.
Yes, I know it’s bleak. I’m trying not to identify as a doomer, but rather, to use it as a verb, and take breaks from it when possible. I don’t think a hard-core dooming streak actually helps the person or the conversations they have with others. My daughter said, no hope, no effort; no effort, no hope.
Thank you, Bill. I intend to ask my family for your new book for my birthday. I shall read it, like I read your newsletters, with angst and fears for my grandchildren. I live in Vermont, have solar panels and power walls and one heat pump which drops cool air silently to the lower floor in my house very efficiently. We even had 2 large fold-down solar panels that could be angled to best catch the sun on our boat. Salt spray had to be wiped off every day of our long passages. Every little bit helps!
How can mafia leader, Leonard Leo, destroy ESG investing? That's the way I invest and I am not alone! Speak up, folks, do something and continue to do good trouble...
". . . a world that runs on a resource that you can’t hoard or fight wars over, and that is available everywhere, could help erode the grotesque inequality that marks our world. Yes, Bill! That's the incredible opportunity the world now confronts. The end of fossil fuels is the end of fossil fuel imperialism and the wars that go with it.
I read the book (my Goodreads review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7697849361), and have assigned it (along with "Deep Economy") to my Simplicity and Sustainability class in the fall, meaning that your work will be providing the backbone to my whole class this semester! I wish you were coming back to Wichita, but maybe Boulder won't be too far to drive....
As much as there is no one less deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Trump, is there anyone more deserving than Bill McKibben for his lifetime of work. He should definitely be considered, especially right now as the crucial years are becoming less and less.
I know but that was a while ago. The Nobel is more widely known and receiving it now would send a message to the world about the importance and urgency of the issue in addition to your decades of hard persistent work.
BRAVO. There’s literally nothing more important than the preservation of our planet, Mother Earth, that which sustains us. I simply cannot understand how “conservation” has been so irrationally dismissed by “conservatives”. It’s not a political issue!
We as humans are simply part of the overall interdependence, the interconnectedness of the diverse circle of life. So what we do to this planet we inevitably do to ourselves. And if we continue to reap mass destruction of our ecosystem we do so at our own peril.
Mother Earth will continue to exist. Humans? Well that’s entirely a different question…
I’m hoping to make it to Powell’s for your talk on September 17 and excited about the timing as an energizing call for Portlanders to show up for SunDay. I preordered online at Powell’s.
Mr Mckibben, Greetings and Salutations, sir.
When you promote this book, you are not promoting yourself: You are promoting the work you do. That work is a source of sustenance for millions, including me. So there's nothing to be even tempted to be ashamed of. Please keep doing it.
Looking forward to reading your book. Thank you so much!
Cheers
No apologies needed at all, Bill. Thank you for the years of reporting that started feeling perhaps like a voice crying in the wilderness, and is now heard and read by so many of us seeking clarity, hope, and reasoned optimism. I’m very happy to pre-order.
Thank you climate hero! Your piece reads like a cheerleading love letter to Citizens’ Climate Lobby. We are streaming into DC by the hundreds right now to lobby congress next week on behalf of the climate. I will share your words widely.
I plan to read your book. Thanks for writing it. I feel that between denying and dooming, there is this reasonable middle ground of things we can do, should do anyway, or should be trying to do, come hell or high water. (Throw in a little less red meat and gas and at least we can say we tried.) Radical moderation. We need more of it, especially considering all the journalistic “balance” we’ve endured on the issue. And thank you for holding out against strategic fatalism. So the predictions aren’t “water tight”? It’s pretty rich for the trolls to criticize when they haven’t come up with any. Kinda hard when your trolling besties deny it, or deny anthropogenic sources. Keep calm and solar on!
Bea, I'm admittedly a "doomer" but I agree with your fine comments. I think we're in for some terribly rough sledding ahead but it's no reason to give up doing our best now for the sake of our future descendents and the rest of the beleaguered species whose environment we're wrecking. We owe fish and birds and pine trees and insects as much as we owe people, our best efforts.
There's much that can be done. In the past few weeks, the US has experienced four 1-in-a-thousand year deluges, and some 250m Americans have been under flood warnings. It doesn't seem that long ago that a similar number of Americans were subject to warnings of intense heat.
There are many countries for whom global warming has already become a grim reality and they are having to adapt in order to survive even though many are far less well able to do this than the US. Yet in the US, polls show that the majority of Americans appear not to share the view either than climate change is an existential threat to communities or that it should be the chief priority for the government. This dangerous complacency is as big a threat as the imminence of extreme weather events.
The horrific links between attacks on truth, human rights and decency that link the return of the most disgusting, brutally sadistic machiavellian mad white supremacists and everything that makes life more fun is closely linked to the ties between BigOil and Gas and Mining and the rise in ugly authoritarianism starting in 1934 when Hayek published " The Road to Serfdom." Neoliberalism's lie that we humans are all selfish, independent individuals, as articulated by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the first female member of the Mont Pellerin Society, has been promoted by the well-paid employees of the 150 Atlas Foundation Network think tanks founded by Antony Fisher. Fisher was a hero in the Battle of Britain, yet he became infatuated with neoliberalism. I assume he never twigged that Hayek supported Hitler. He made his fortune by introducing brutally cruel factory chicken farming to Britain and then spent his time creating these linked think tanks that were funded by leaders in extractive polluting industries keen to deregulate environmental laws and have free range to inflict endless harm on workers, and the natural world and to hide their shenanigans and pretend that neoliberalism is an economic theory rather than a cult that favours hierarchy and elitism.
I wasn't aware that Hayek supported Hitler. I know that he argued that National Socialism was the inevitable outcome of any dirigiste form of government. I doubt he would have approved of Trump's economically ruinous tariffs policy and rejection of global markets. Perhaps that's why the Federalist Society is suing the administration, backed by a furious Charles Koch.
Thanks, Mr. Netto. I hope you are well, and I wonder what you think of what is happening now and where you live.
Thanks Dr Scully. Well, we've been affected here in the UK in a small way with the shenanigans surrounding the BBC Panorama programme that used a 'quilt quotation' to emphasise Trump's incitement of the crowd on January 6 2021 which led to the Capitol building siege. I understand that he's threatening to sue the programme (he's already extorted ignominous compensation payments from ABC News and CBS News).
It's a storm in a teacup (although what the programme did was very unprofessional) especially as Trump is now pardoning Rudy Giuliani and others involved in the plot to draw up a slate of fake electors to usurp the election. Special Counsel Jack Smith's final report on the case against Trump showed quite clearly his involvement in these machinations, whatever his role on the day of the siege.
Hayek rewrote the constitution of Chile and supported Augusto Pinochet, and defended Pinochet's murderous and sadistic assault on the people of Chile. Chile was Hayek's first opportunity to try out his neoliberal ideas. Nancy McLean is one of several authors who write about neoliberalism, a term I first heard of in 2021. I took a course led by Jeremy Lent, the author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. I was astonished to hear of the Mont Pellerin Society. My training is in academic clinical Hematology/Oncology. I worked in rural India with Tibetans in 1984, and as a result, I was aware of what are known as the social determinants of health. I was also familiar with the work of The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. I used the book "Where There Is No Doctor in India," and I also found the book "Mountains over Mountains" by Tracy Kidder helpful. It's a long story. During the pandemic, I decided to check out the IPCC reports, and I was horrified. I decided I needed to learn more and signed up for many courses, including one organized by Programs in Earth Literacy led by Jeremy Lent. I was stunned. My late husband, who was Vietnamese Canadian, and I always supported Oxfam, Amnesty International, and it was through Amnesty that we learned about the disappeared girls and women in Canada and about indigenous activists being targeted and murdered. I had noticed a change in Canada since I arrived in Toronto to train in 1985, having come from Ireland. My mother and many other neighbours were active in the women's peace movement, which seemed to be slowly progressing until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to power. Then it seemed that she had an incredible capacity to bring death and misery everywhere she looked. I had always planned to train further in London, where my uncle, aunt, and cousins lived, but Thatcher made life so miserable for anyone Irish that, on the advice of my favourite mentor, I applied to train at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. My late husband wanted to stay in Canada, and so we stayed. We really thought that it was just a matter of time and that human rights would improve life everywhere. My husband died in 2014, and he was still convinced that life was improving, as was I. When I first heard of the MPS and the 150 Atlas Network Foundations, I did not believe this could be true. Especially since, at the time, I was an active volunteer with the Liberal Party of Canada, and no one I asked had ever heard of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek, or the MPS. I asked everyone I know if no one had heard of this, and no one was interested. I did what I have done my entire life as a researcher, although not at the same level. I have looked for papers and books by others and have been reading them ever since, but I have not been enjoying what I have found at all.
I've read Nancy MacLean's 'Democracy in Chains'. You might also like 'Dark Money: how a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US' by New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer. Another well-known book on the work of these think tank/lobby groups is 'Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming' by Eric Conway and Naomi Oreskes.
Thatcher continued to defend Pinochet even after his arrest and extradition, partly because he was an ally of the Britain during its ludicrous war over the Falkland Islands but also his opposition to communism. You can still read her defiant and infamous speech to the House of Commons in 1999 on the Thatcher Foundation website.
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108382
Thanks, I will look for this. I am interested in reading about how to undo this harm and get us working to increase animate NOT artificial inteligence.
..
Yes, I know it’s bleak. I’m trying not to identify as a doomer, but rather, to use it as a verb, and take breaks from it when possible. I don’t think a hard-core dooming streak actually helps the person or the conversations they have with others. My daughter said, no hope, no effort; no effort, no hope.
Indeed the complacency is galling, frightening, lacking in empathy and seemingly indifferent to dooming, at least until the flames are at the door.
Thank you, Bill. I intend to ask my family for your new book for my birthday. I shall read it, like I read your newsletters, with angst and fears for my grandchildren. I live in Vermont, have solar panels and power walls and one heat pump which drops cool air silently to the lower floor in my house very efficiently. We even had 2 large fold-down solar panels that could be angled to best catch the sun on our boat. Salt spray had to be wiped off every day of our long passages. Every little bit helps!
How can mafia leader, Leonard Leo, destroy ESG investing? That's the way I invest and I am not alone! Speak up, folks, do something and continue to do good trouble...
". . . a world that runs on a resource that you can’t hoard or fight wars over, and that is available everywhere, could help erode the grotesque inequality that marks our world. Yes, Bill! That's the incredible opportunity the world now confronts. The end of fossil fuels is the end of fossil fuel imperialism and the wars that go with it.
Can't afford to go paid but CAN afford to preorder Here Comes the Sun. Hats off for Bill McKibben, the indefatigable!
that's kind of you to say!
I read the book (my Goodreads review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7697849361), and have assigned it (along with "Deep Economy") to my Simplicity and Sustainability class in the fall, meaning that your work will be providing the backbone to my whole class this semester! I wish you were coming back to Wichita, but maybe Boulder won't be too far to drive....
it makes me happy to imagine your class reading it!
Unable to make your book tour so I’m reordering from Powell’s. Thanks for your unwavering climate advocacy.
thank you!
Excellent as always.
As much as there is no one less deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Trump, is there anyone more deserving than Bill McKibben for his lifetime of work. He should definitely be considered, especially right now as the crucial years are becoming less and less.
that's kind friend, but i already got my prize in the swedish parliament https://www.middlebury.edu/announcements/2014/09/bill-mckibben-wins-alternative-nobel-award
(and henry kissinger never won this one!)
I know but that was a while ago. The Nobel is more widely known and receiving it now would send a message to the world about the importance and urgency of the issue in addition to your decades of hard persistent work.
BRAVO. There’s literally nothing more important than the preservation of our planet, Mother Earth, that which sustains us. I simply cannot understand how “conservation” has been so irrationally dismissed by “conservatives”. It’s not a political issue!
We as humans are simply part of the overall interdependence, the interconnectedness of the diverse circle of life. So what we do to this planet we inevitably do to ourselves. And if we continue to reap mass destruction of our ecosystem we do so at our own peril.
Mother Earth will continue to exist. Humans? Well that’s entirely a different question…
I’m hoping to make it to Powell’s for your talk on September 17 and excited about the timing as an energizing call for Portlanders to show up for SunDay. I preordered online at Powell’s.
A sublime bookstore!
I've had the book on pre-order since June 8th! Looking forward to reading it.
Loved "The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon".
Congratulations!
I'm looking forward to reading the new book!