No matter where you live on the planet, you are most certainly noticing intense and changing weather patterns. There is much debate about what that means and how to interpret all of the empirical data that scientists have collected for decades.
Bill McKibben has been writing and lecturing on the topic for more than 25 years, practically introducing global warming to a new generation. More recently, he has participated in and organized acts of civil disobedience to bring attention to the global warming crisis.
Last month, a leaked draft of the United Nations upcoming report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that scientists are convinced that human activity is behind the increase in global temperatures.
McKibben is currently the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont. He volunteers for 350.org, a climate change awareness and activist group that he founded in 2007.
I first asked him about his experience many years ago, working on story about homelessness for The New Yorker, which is also how he happened to meet his wife, author Sue Halpern.
Bill McKibben: I’ve done a lot of reporting on homelessness for The New Yorker. This was back in the days when homelessness was still a phenomenon in America, at least in the way that we thought about it.
At the time, we thought about it as a crisis. It needed to be covered all the time in the media. And we thought it was like a new thing that was going to go away, that we would, as a society, quickly figure out that we didn’t want hundreds of thousands of people living outside.
I wrote some pieces about it and I spent some time living as a homeless person. I also started and ran a homeless shelter in the basement of my church that served 10 men each night.
My (now) wife had been doing a lot of fundraising for groups that were working on the homelessness crisis – that is how we met.
One of the great tragedies is that people have stopped thinking about homelessness as a crisis and have started thinking about it as something that just happens. It is just an indelible part of American life. There are those of us old enough to remember that that wasn’t always the case. That it was shocking when it first started emerging.
Sue Zalokar: What was the experience like — sleeping on the street?
B.M.: It added up to weeks I stayed outside. My editor asked me to find out what it was like (to be homeless) and in those days, at The New Yorker, there was plenty of time to do things. I’m trying to think about the various places that I lived actually. The Armory close to 158th Street. In those days, if I’m remembering this right, that place slept 5,000 people a night, if you can imagine that. It was a pretty remarkable and Dickensian operation. I spent some time at another place called Palace Hotel. Which was one of the last of the real Bowery flophouses in New York. In those days, if you had $3, you could have a cot. They were all lined up next to one another with men sleeping as though in one long bed. If you had $5, you could have a cot inside a little chicken wire cage — which for obvious reasons was preferable. I didn’t generally have $5.
One of my take aways from that experience was that being homeless was one of the hardest jobs in the world. I was never so tired.
S.Z.: You’ve said that “it’s already too late to prevent global warming. What we have to do now is learn how to deal with the reality.” What is the reality?
B.M.: Well, it is too late to prevent it altogether, but it is not too late to keep it from getting worse than it can get. We’ve raised the temperature one degree so far and that’s going to cause us untold problems.
We’re almost certainly going to raise the temperature two degrees — there is already enough momentum in this system to all but guarantee that. That will cause us more than twice as many problems.
At one degree, we have already melted the Arctic. So that should give you some idea of the stakes that we are playing with. There is no happy outcome. We’re probably still at a place where we can maintain the planet. But that only happens if we take swift action — much swifter than governments are planning – to get us off fossil fuel. If we don’t, the same science that told us about one degree now tells us with confidence that it will be four or five degrees before the century is out. I’m talking Celsius here, so that would be eight or nine degrees Fahrenheit. So, the stakes are really high. We have to prevent that change from happening even as we’re adapting to the change that we can no longer prevent.
S.Z.: 2012 was the hottest year on record since we started keeping track. What do the facts tell us about the meaning of this?
B.M.: It’s a very good year to think about. It got really hot in the U.S. and there were two very dramatic results. One is that we can no longer grow food in the most fertile land on earth. It just got too hot in the summer of 2012 to grow corn in Iowa across the grain belt. Beyond a certain temperature, it is too hot for corn to fertilize. The price of grain went through the roof and a lot of poor people around the world had a lot less to eat than they wanted to as a result.
Another dramatic thing that happened –well there were a bunch of dramatic things – was wildfire season and this season has already been worse.
The other truly dramatic event was Hurricane Sandy. It was the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded North of Cape Hatteras. It was the largest wind field we’ve ever measured in a hurricane.
If anybody ever had any doubt before that whether climate change was a serious threat to a highly developed technological civilization, watching the New York City subway system fill with seawater should have answered that question once and for all.
S.Z.: What effect does climate change have on poor people?
B.M.: For poor people everywhere, it is particularly hard. A study came out in January from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. It said that we’ve already reached the point where it is hot and humid enough that people’s ability to labor and be outdoors is cut about 10 percent from what it was. And that that number will be 30 percent by mid-century. That’s pretty profound, if you think about it.
That’s pretty much the most basic measure of what humans need to do, have to do, want to do. For somebody who can just escape into an air-conditioned office and sit in front of a computer, it’s not as immediate. But for people who are on the streets or who are in a Bengali field, Liberian market garden, or on a plantation at work, it’s harder than it used to be.
S.Z.: In your April 2013 piece in the Rolling Stone, “The Fossil Fuel Resistance” you referenced a study from the University of Delaware from December that showed that by 2030 “we could affordably power the nation 99.9 percent of the time on renewable energy.” Why doesn’t every home and business in America utilize solar and wind power?
B.M.: Because the system that we have makes it difficult to make this transition. The thing that makes sure that system never changes is the enormous fossil fuel industry. Their political power and their ability to force the status quo into a kind of stalemate are profound. That’s why we fight hard against the fossil fuel industry in an effort to break that stalemate.
S.Z.: Germany set a fantastic example recently.
B.M.: Yeah Germany, having been responsible for more than its share of 20th century woes, is doing it’s best to step up and solve some of this century’s biggest problem.
It really is impressive to go there. There are, by last count, more solar panels in Bavaria than there are in the United States. This in a country that really isn’t well known for its sun. Very few people set out for their sun soaked vacation on the shores of Ulrich, Germany.
S.Z.: For which geographic locations is it too late in terms of climate change?
B.M.: I’m uncomfortable announcing doom for everybody because everybody everywhere (in the world) is trying really hard and nobody wants to think of themselves as a victim.
Our friends that we work with a lot on the islands of the Pacific Nation of the Indian Ocean are adamant. They did a great day of action this spring across the Pacific Island. Warriors, traditional warriors from every country, had the slogan “We’re not drowning, we’re fighting.” You should Google it because the videos of these guys are amazing.
They’re in as tough a situation as it gets. They’re in poor countries to begin with, a couple of meters above sea level.
They understand that they have to reach out. They can’t do it by themselves so that’s why they’re involved in big global network like 350.org.
S.Z.: You founded 350.org. Tell me about the organization.
B.M.: It was designed by necessity to fit with the world in which we now live. It’s dispersed. We run these big days of action where we’ll have 5,000 demonstrations in 5,000 places around the globe. We leverage those to make them more than the sum of their parts. We’ve been quite successful in the educational bent. I think we’ve had about 20,000 demonstrations.
In the last couple of years, we’ve tried hard to also take that education and make it really tell, make it really turn into some kind of power. So we’ve fought very hard on this fight over the Keystone Pipeline.
S.Z.: What’s the significance of the number 350?
B.M.: 350 is probably the most important number in the world, but nobody knew it until about 2008.
That’s when our premier climate scientist Jim Hansen and his team at NASA published a paper saying we now know how much carbon in the atmosphere is too much. Any value for the CO2 greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible to the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. Yikes!
We took that number (as our name) because we wanted to dramatize how serious the problem was.
We are already past 350. We are past 400 this year. That’s why the Arctic (glacier) is melting. But we also needed a name that would work around the globe and Arabic numerals do that.
People around the globe now understand that we’re too high. We have too much carbon in the atmosphere.
S.Z.: Not only that, but as I understand it, the resources that governments have that they are planning to use far exceed anything viable.
B.M.: If we did what governments have currently announced they are planning to do, that number will reach 550, 650 parts per million in our lifetime. At the moment, as a planet, we’re not planning a serious response to climate change.
S.Z.: You are one of the few employees of 350.org that is over 30 years old.
B.M.: There are only a few of us. And I’m not an employee – I’m a volunteer.
S.Z.: Why the focus on youth?
B.M.: That’s just where we started. 350 started (with) myself and 7 undergraduate students of Middlebury College in Vermont – which is where I hang out. And they now run the whole operation. Basically, they always did. They’ve just kept hiring young people, mostly because we don’t have much in the way of money. But also because our style and way of organizing is, as I said, very dispersed and young people have an almost visceral understanding of the connected world because they grew up with the Internet in a way that I didn’t. So they are aware of the possibilities. It doesn’t daunt them as it would have daunted me to have to go out and be in Vermont at the age of 22 and figure out how to organize all of East Asia by yourself — 1,000 demonstrations in the course of a year. They have a sense of the world that allows them to do that.
S.Z.: What kind of footprint do the electronic devices that we covet and use and own leave on the planet?
B.M.: More than they need to. And we can design them more efficiently. But, in general, they are pretty good substitutes. For instance, you can do a 1,000 Google searches with the amount of energy that it takes you to drive your car about half a mile. Learning to travel via mouse rather than car or plane would be a big improvement.
S.Z.: Civil disobedience. You are borrowing a page from history and the civil rights movement. Tell me a bit about some of the actions that you have been a part of.
B.M.: It’s one tool in the activist toolkit. As with all tools, you don’t want to overuse them because they become dull.
We pulled off what was the largest civil disobedience action in this country in 30 years when we did the first round of arrests around the Keystone XL Pipeline.
It was very civil, civil disobedience. Everybody was in dress or jacket and tie. One of the reasons was we wanted to show that this was a big, powerful moral issue. At the same time, we wanted to demonstrate that we were not radicals in any way. I mean, all we’re asking for is a planet that works a little bit like the one that all human beings know about – all human beings of the last 10,000 years, which is how far back our history goes. That’s really not a radical demand. It’s pretty much a conservative (demand).
Radicals work at oil companies. They’re willing to alter chemical composition of the atmosphere even though we now know it has melted the Arctic and it will do 1,000 other terrible things. No '60s radical had ambitions anywhere near that big.
S.Z.: The efforts you have led, or participated in, have been responsible for the stalling and blocking of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
B.M.: So far …
S.Z.: So far. Then there is Enbridge and the Eastern Gulf Pipeline and another Trans Canada project that was announced recently to bring a pipeline East across Canada.
B.M.: I don’t think they are going to get any of these built. I certainly don’t think they will get any of them built without huge opposition.
They’ll keep trying. There are trillions of dollars of crude up there in Alberta. So Koch Brothers, et. al., will keep trying to make their investments pay off.
But they are being fought at every turn. The Canadians have already beaten the only other pipeline that had any other real chance of being built. The so-called, Northern Gateway Pipeline. The rest are just proposals on paper someplace. And there is a huge, sprawling coalition of indigenous people that are involving all of the rest of us and making life hard (for the fossil fuel proponents) at every turn.
We can’t, however, just play defense against bad projects. We also have to fight offense against this industry.
We have a big divestment campaign, which is spread widely.
S.Z.: What does our future look like, in your opinion, 100 years from now if we do nothing?
B.M.: Hot and damp and pretty miserable. Basically, our civilization will be mostly in a kind of an emergency response mode.
S.Z.: And if we take climate change seriously?
B.M.: Hopefully what it looks like is a much more localized world – with dispersed energy instead of centralized energy. That’s a beautiful, much more democratic kind of world.
S.Z.: What can the average person do to make change on a small, but meaningful level to address climate change in his or her community?
B.M.: They can organize.
S.Z.: What about the naysayers?
B.M.: This is why we have science. We are able to study and look at what all of the thermometers tell us around the world. That’s the useful thing about science.