New Yorker - Bill McKibben
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A swarm of locusts north of Nairobi, Kenya, in January. The U.N. described an outbreak of desert locusts as a threat to food security. Photograph by Tony Karumba / AFP / Getty
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Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker.
He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker's newsletter on the environment. |
We’re
eight weeks into the new decade, and, so far, we’ve had the warmest
January ever recorded. (Indeed, researchers at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
said that
2020 is more than ninety-eight per cent likely to be one of the five
warmest years ever measured, with a nearly forty-nine-per-cent chance to
set a new annual record.) We’ve seen the
highest temperature ever measured on the Antarctic continent, and also record swarms of
locusts descending
on the Horn of Africa, a plague which scientists assure us will “become
more frequent and severe under climate change.”
I’m calling this new newsletter—and welcome aboard—The Climate Crisis because
this is what a crisis looks like. I’ve been at this beat for so long that when I first started writing for
The New Yorker
on this topic, in the nineteen-eighties, we called it the “greenhouse
effect.” “Global warming,” “climate change”—those are fine, too. But
they don’t capture where we are right now: not facing some distant or
prospective threat but licked by the flames. Thousands of people huddled
on Australian beaches this year, ready to wade into the ocean as their
only protection from the firestorms raging on the shore. This is not
only a crisis—it is the most thorough and complete crisis our species
and our civilizations have ever faced, one there is no guarantee that we
will survive intact. Does that sound extreme? Consider the conclusions
of a team of economists from the world’s largest bank, in a
report to
high-end clients which leaked to the British press, last Friday:
“Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going
to survive.”
But
the name of this newsletter is also a nod to W. E. B. Du Bois, and the
magazine that he founded a hundred and ten years ago, at the start of
the N.A.A.C.P.
The Crisis was, and is, a crucial journal in the
analysis of the race hatred that mars and shames and undermines our
collective life to this day; it linked readers to news from around the
world, so that they could examine the currents roiling their lives. I’ll
do the same in a section we’re calling Climate School—perhaps, if only
by long exposure, I have some sense of how emerging science, economics,
and politics fit into the larger picture. I mostly won’t be doing
original reporting. (Check out Emily Atkin’s excellent daily
newsletter,
Heated, for
that.) And I won’t shy away from talking about the activism and
organizing that many people—myself included—are now engaged in.
Du Bois’s
The Crisis was an organ of action, constantly
suggesting ways that its readers could move forward. “Is a toothache a
good thing?” Du Bois asked, in the
first issue.
“No. Is it therefore useless? No. It is supremely useful, for it tells
the body of decay, dyspepsia and death.” A toothache, he declared, “is
agitation,” and agitation is necessary “in order that Remedy may be
found.” Since I am an agitator as well as a journalist, I’ll include
many suggestions about where a push might help us make progress.
My sense is that we’ve reached a place where many people are eager to help. National polling
released
this month, in a study by researchers at Yale and George Mason
Universities, found that one in five Americans said that they would
“personally engage in non-violent civil disobedience” against “corporate
or government activities that make global warming worse” if a person
they liked and respected asked them to. If that’s anywhere close to
true, then it’s possible to imagine a movement big enough to make a
difference—a movement one can see already emerging with the school
climate strikers, the extinction rebels, and the Green New Dealers. I
hope to introduce you to many of these people, and to the scientists,
entrepreneurs, and policy wonks whose work undergirds their
activism—people I’ve met in my years as a journalist and a volunteer at
350.org, the global climate campaign. Most weeks, I’ll include a short interview that lets them address you directly.
I
wouldn’t bother doing any of this if I didn’t think that we could still
make a real difference in the outcome. But I can’t offer you any
guarantee that we’ll win—the short time that science gives us to make
sweeping changes is daunting. When an
iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., crashes into the Southern Ocean, or when the South is experiencing
historic winter flooding,
it’s a reminder that we’re a long way back in this race. The only
guarantee I’ve got is that the fight is under way. Thank you for being a
part of it.
Climate School
An as-yet-unpublished
study from
researchers at Brown University shows that a fourth or more of the
climate chatter on Twitter is produced by automated bots, which are more
likely to be on the side of climate denial. This is good to know: in
real life, as opposed to social-media combat, polling shows that more
and more people understand the reality of climate change.
The New Yorker has published luminous climate coverage over the years: few writers match the penetrating authority of
Elizabeth Kolbert, and younger writers such as
Carolyn Kormann are doing superb reporting. This recent
piece, by
Robin Wright, is excellent both for its evocation of the Antarctic
Peninsula (the place on Earth, I think, that most feels like another
planet) and its reminder that this is a war that we can’t afford to
lose, because the effects will last essentially forever. And Bernard
Avishai’s
account of the vanishing solar-tax credit is a reminder of just how much quiet damage the Trump Administration is doing.
A new
study in the journal
Nature implies that the total methane emissions—the most significant global-warming gas after CO
2—from
man-made fossil sources (coal, natural gas, and oil) are higher than
previous estimates. That means that they underestimated how much comes
from oil, gas, and coal—which, in a twisted way, is kind of good news.
Because, if we wanted to, we could turn off that source—say, by
replacing gas with solar and wind power. The invaluable Hiroko Tabuchi
provided a particularly good
account in the
Times,
under the always-useful headline “Oil and Gas May Be a Far Bigger
Climate Threat Than We Knew”; a key point for understanding our current
energy debate is that natural gas is a bridge fuel to a dramatically
hotter planet.
Passing the Mic
Without
Christiana Figueres, there would have been no Paris climate accord—the
Costa Rican-born former executive secretary of the U.N.’s climate-change
convention worked tirelessly to create an opening where the Kyoto and
Copenhagen processes had run aground. Her new book, co-written with Tom
Rivett-Carnac, is called “
The Future We Choose.”
Your
book paints two remarkable pictures of where we will go if we don’t act
on the climate, and where we can go if we do. Can you give the gist of
those two worlds, in a few sentences?
The decade we have
just started is the most consequential decade humanity has ever faced.
If we are not able to cut our current global greenhouse-gas emissions by
fifty per cent over the next ten years, we will be poised to enter into
a world of constant destruction of infrastructure, congested and
polluted cities, rampant diseases, increasing burning and flooding, mass
migrations due to extensive droughts, heat or land loss leading to the
abandonment of uninhabitable areas, and political turmoil as people
fight for food, water, and land. At the current level of emissions, that
is the world that we are heading for. If, on the other hand, we set our
minds and determination to the necessary transformation, reducing our
global greenhouse gases [by] half over the next ten years, we would have
actually co-created a path toward a very different world: a reforested
planet with regenerated agriculture, clean and efficient transport,
enjoyable cities, clean air, and ubiquitous cheap energy for everyone.
Your
endless optimism and hard work midwifed the Paris climate accords.
Describe what it felt like the day you heard President Trump withdraw
the U.S. from the agreement.
I
remember I was travelling. I sat in front of the TV in my hotel with a
sheet of paper and a pen in my hand, ready to write down every sentence
that was correct. The speech finished and my paper was untouched. Not
one sentence had been correct. The whole speech was based on incorrect
information and a thorough misunderstanding of the Paris agreement. I
was aghast.
You’ve worked especially hard to get governments onboard, but what’s your message for, say, bankers right now?
The
financial industry has moved slowly but is picking up speed. The
divestment movement has grown to over twelve trillion dollars of capital
that is moving from high-carbon to low- or no-carbon assets. The
recently launched Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, a group of large
institutional investors holding a portfolio [valued at nearly four]
trillion dollars, is already shifting investment portfolios to net-zero
emissions by 2050. Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, which manages
[more than] seven trillion dollars in assets, in his latest annual
letter announced he is getting out of [thermal] coal and warns all asset
managers about the risk of climate-exposed portfolios. We are beginning
to see serious engagement of the financial sector. But more needs to
happen in order to accelerate the transformation.
Scoreboard
Some major wins to report this week in the battle to keep fossil fuels in the ground:
-
The Teck company pulled its application for a vast new tar-sands mine in Alberta, after sustained campaigning led by, among others, some of Canada’s indigenous groups.
-
The Equinor company announced that it would not proceed
with plans for offshore drilling in the Great Australian Bight, after
sustained campaigning led by, among others, indigenous groups.
-
Chase Bank announced that it would no longer fund efforts
to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, after sustained
campaigning led by, among others, the Gwich’in tribe in northern Alaska
and Canada.
-
In Brazil, a campaign led by indigenous communities
convinced courts to end plans for what would have been Latin America’s
largest open-pit coal mine.
(Perhaps you see a theme emerging.)
- Oh, and the University of Michigan, pressured by students, announced
that it would freeze all new investments in fossil fuels while it
decides whether to join others in purging its portfolio of fossil-fuel
stocks. As Mark Bernstein, a member of the university’s Board of
Regents, put it, “We have a responsibility to do everything we can to
disrupt the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. This requires disrupting
the flow of money to the fossil-fuel industry.”
On the very sad side of the ledger, researchers announced that
the bushfires in Australia had burned more than twenty per cent of the continent’s forests, up from less than two per cent in a normal year.
Warming Up
There
are mornings when I have a hard time joining the fight, and so
sometimes I listen to the bell-clear voice of Kelly Hogan, singing “
Sleeper Awake.”
Send me your list of motivators—and anything else you think I should
know about—at
TNYinbox@newyorker.com. I’m glad we’re doing this
together.
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