Tag: McKIbben

“She took me half the way there…”

Bill McKibben has come up with a striking metaphor for the US stance in climate change negotiations. In a Huffington Post article he describes it as a tease – “it shows some leg, but it never ends up in your arms.”

Twice before US negotiators have persuaded the world into a watered-down agreement – the Kyoto pact and the Copenhagen accord – and in both cases the Senate didn’t come through – it didn’t ratify Kyoto, and it didn’t pass the climate legislation last summer. “All the watering down was for nought – you might as well have done the right thing.”

Now, says McKibben, we’re into Climate Tease Part III.

 

“This time the U.S. is demanding that the poor countries of the world stop thinking of themselves as poor. Before there can be any agreement on stopping deforestation, or on aid to help poor countries cope with climate change, Mr. Stern said last week, those nations have to agree to start cutting carbon more or less as if they were the U.S.”

It isn’t fair, but McKibben acknowledges that there’s a logic to it, in that the developing world’s emissions will need to be reined in like everyone’s if we’re to slow down climate change. It would make sense if the developed world sent them the aid that lets them move past coal.

“But since we’ve seen this movie twice already, we know how it ends. The rest of the world gives in, and then the Senate doesn’t come through with the money — indeed, just yesterday four GOP solons offered a preview of coming attractions. They sent a letter to Secretary of State Clinton demanding that she freeze the relatively small sum of climate aid we’d already pledged — less than $2 billion next year. They were, they said, opposed to the deal Obama struck last year which would ‘transfer billions of US taxpayer dollars to developing nations in the name of climate change’. In other words, even the small sums we’ve promised are unlikely to be forthcoming.”

Don’t be deceived, he says. Washington is “playing the world for suckers”. In conclusion he reiterates his consistent theme.  “If we actually want to stop global warming, then we have to build a movement big enough to force change. Otherwise we’re suckers too.”

McKibben is no cynic. Although he can write light heartedly and with humour he’s very much in earnest. Indeed the idealism of the 350.org movement he co-founded is about as far from cynicism as you can get.   “Our theory of change is simple: if an international grassroots movement holds our leaders accountable to the latest climate science, we can start the global transformation we so desperately need.”  Their latest effort is an exhibition of art (an Indian one pictured) large enough to be seen from space.

Another humorous look at the intransigence of US lawmakers was provided by Thomas Friedman in his New York Times column a week ago. He imagined a Chinese WikiLeaker publishing a cable from the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

“Americans just had what they call an ‘election’. Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him.”

Among the results:

“Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan.”

Friedman’s no cynic either, as is apparent from his climate change book Hot, Flat and Crowded. But like McKibben he’s exasperated by the seeming inability of the American political system, at least on the federal level, to even acknowledge the seriousness of the problem let alone address it. It’s certainly difficult to see the US leading us anywhere promising while they’re stuck with their current mix of legislators. Any meaningful agreements at Cancún, which Barry Coates’s latest blog considers possible, will still have to survive the bluster and bombast which substitute for science back home.

[The Fabs]

Anyone for 10/10/tennis?

his is a guest post by the team at 350.org Aotearoa, describing some of the events planned in New Zealand for the 350 Aotearoa Global Climate Working Bee on 10/10/10 — part of the international 10/10/10 campaign.

350 Aotearoa is part of an international campaign and aims to mobilise New Zealanders to initiate actions to address climate change. The flagship day on 10th October 2010, the Global Climate Working Bee, will see thousands of volunteers planting trees, organising bike rides and insulating homes in a bid to get to work on climate change and do something positive for the environment.

350 Aotearoa supports the goal of reducing carbon dioxide from its current level of 390 parts per million (ppm) to below 350 ppm, the safe upper limit according to the latest science. Over 5,100 events are already registered in over 170 countries for 10/10/10, including 90 in New Zealand.

Some of the inspirational actions include:

 

  • In Auckland, staff from the White Roofs Project will paint many high-visibility rooftops white to reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.
  • Cyclists are getting to work by running free bike skills workshops and fix ups in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. They are aiming to get as many bikes as possible out of storage and road-ready for summer.
  • Volunteers will be planting native species in Earthwise Valley, on the Coromandel Peninsula, throughout October to convert degraded farmland back to native rainforest.
  • 350 locally sourced natives will be planted in Carterton, Wairarapa, to regenerate wetlands and clean up the polluted Kokotau swimming spot.
  • The 10/10/10 Wellington Wander will showcase the best walking shortcuts in Wellington to encourage swapping the car for your feet.
  • An environmental awareness and education festival aims to bring all Marlborough has to offer in terms of sustainable practices together.
  • At Scarborough beach, south of Timaru, volunteers will clean rubbish from along the shoreline and plant native trees in the nearby wetland.
  • Frocks on Bikes will take a tour around Christchurch city.
  • In Christchurch, volunteers will have an afternoon of planting native plants to the soothing sounds of trance music with live DJ performances.
  • ‘Swap it’ encourages Dunedin locals to spring clean their closets in a sustainable fashion.
  • In Dunedin, locals are invited to a low-carbon picnic event with live music and face painting. The picnic will showcase seasonal and locally sourced food.

Action in the community not only has the potential to minimise the effects of climate change directly, but also has the power to influence and inspire change in other sectors such as business and government.

After the events, all eyes turn to Cancun, where world leaders are meeting in December to build an international treaty to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions. The failure of world leaders to reach a binding agreement in Copenhagen last year makes the negotiations especially critical.

Interested groups are encouraged to register by visiting www.350.org.nz.

[Cream]

McKibben’s long and winding road

“We will keep fighting” vowed Bill McKibben at the end of his book Eaarth. Today in an article on Yale Environment 360 he gives a promising account of what that might involve. He writes from a road trip to Washington, D.C., towing a solar hot water heating panel from the roof of the Carter White House. Jimmy Carter put it there in 1979, declaring it would still be heating water in 2000. It wasn’t, because Ronald Reagan promptly took the panels down, an action symbolic, McKibben comments, “of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits.”

The panels were salvaged by Unity College in Maine and put up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. McKibben and his associates are headed for the White House with one of the Maine panels, and with a promise from the U.S. company Sungevity that it will supply all the brand-new panels the president could ever want – as long as he puts them up on his roof where everyone can see them.

Continue reading “McKibben’s long and winding road”

The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice

The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice

Addressing climate change will require citizens of wealthy consumer societies to sacrifice. But that’s never going to happen. We’ve all heard statements like that, indeed we’ve probably muttered them to ourselves. Michael Maniates and John Meyer place the words at the beginning of their book The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice. They and their ten fellow-contributors examine exhaustively what they describe as “the political stickiness of sacrifice-talk” to see if there are more hopeful options than the stark contradiction of that opening statement.

In fact, as several of the writers point out, there is a normalcy to sacrifice which is part of many people’s lives. It may be mingled with self-interest, but the sacrifices we make for children, for causes we care about, perhaps for our careers, are essential to making our lives meaningful and pleasurable, and for the most part are recognised and welcomed as such. That kind of sacrifice becomes ingrained in who we are and doesn’t feel like sacrifice. It is not heroic, but sacrifice needn’t be restricted to the exceptional undertaking that cannot be expected of ordinary people. The book doesn’t argue for sacrifice on a superhuman scale for the sake of the environment. Its discussions of the word are nuanced and show a preference for the normalisation of environmental sacrifice whereby it becomes part of the price we willingly pay for the welfare of future generations and the Earth they will inhabit.

Paul Wapner examines the upbeat notion that tackling climate change is a call to embrace new green opportunities rather than be concerned about sacrifice.  “Promethean” environmentalism he calls it. But he prefers to keep the sacrifice word in environmental discourse and points to writers like McKibben who see environmental sacrifice not as a matter of reduction but rather enlargement.  Environmentalism takes Others into consideration by realising that we are not the centre of the universe, and in doing so it is not a politics of less but one of inestimable more. Sacrifice is not a deprivation, but a provision – it involves feeding our moral selves. Karen Liftin in her chapter on the sacred and profane, as she argues for an affirmative politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world quotes the Indian nationalist and mystic Sri Aurobindo:

“The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world…The true essence of sacrifice is not self-immolation, it is self-giving; its object is not self-effacement, not self-fulfilment; its method not self-mortification, but a greater life.”

There are strong currents in modern affluent society which make this kind of perception difficult. Thomas Princen looks closely at the beguiling concept of consumer sovereignty. There’s a grand entitlement to consumption. The good life centres on goods, not on relations, not on service, not on citizenship.  It leads to a society supremely organised to absolve individuals of responsibility, whether as consumers, producers, investors, or rule makers.  Sacrifice is depreciated and rejected. But in fact much is sacrificed to maintain such a society, in costs and trade-offs, social and environmental problems which are rendered covert and hidden.

“… the hedonistic, growth-manic, cost-displacing consumer economy must give way to a purposeful economy, an economy premised on principles of positive sacrifice, of giving (along with receiving), of sufficiency and good work and participatory citizenship. The sovereign consumer must be dethroned; sacrifice must be elevated, restored to its proper, ‘make sacred’ pedestal.”

Sometimes the built environment makes sacrifice for the environment difficult. Peter Cannavό looks at the development of suburbia in America and the way in which its original pastoral civic republicanism has been lost, especially in the closed, often gated, communities of the post World War II outer suburban expansion. The very form of sprawling suburbia mandates unrestrained consumption, privatism, and exclusivity. The automobile becomes what Lewis Mumford called “a compulsory and inescapable condition of suburban existence”. Zoning laws decree low-density development. Shopping is removed from neighbourhood and town. People are increasingly isolated in their cars and homes. Cannavό looks at ways in which suburbia could be reconstructed to become greener, more moderate and civic and sustainable, and expresses the hope that suburbanites will be willing to sacrifice what they have now in favour of what he sees as a return to suburbia’s republican roots.

Justin Williams provides an interesting essay on the difficulties placed in the way of bicycling as a contribution to environmental sustainability. He observes that there is little meaningful freedom, in America at least, to make choices about transport modes and hence it is difficult for sacrifice to enter the rhetorical field. Structural decisions, particularly those associated with suburban development, have placed cars at the centre and turned streets from social gathering places into means of transport between two distant places, home and work. The obstacles these developments place in the way of cyclists are formidable, paramount among them the distances that need to be travelled, the dearth of facilities such as adequate routes and parking, and the threats posed to personal safety by cycling among cars. Nevertheless a combination of carrots and sticks in cities such as Portland and Chicago in the US and in a  country such as the Netherlands has made cycling a more genuine option. He argues that the promotion of cycling at automobility’s expense is democratic because automobility is not an expression of freedom but merely the structurally “obvious” choice, given the constraints placed on alternatives, and because the freedom to cycle is limited by current automobile infrastructure.  I warmed to his advocacy. I have taken to cycling myself in my later years and often observe myself reduced to pathetic gratitude for very minor provisions for cyclists in my own city.

Can academics refining the concept of environmental sacrifice dent the prevailing perception, often vehemently expressed in the hurly burly of every day politics, that it’s almost an affront to expect wealthy consumer societies to make sacrifices? Sometimes it can seem an insuperable task. But I liked the idea of doggedness to which the editors give voice in their conclusion. They quote Frances Moore Lappé: “keep asking ‘why?’”. They urge students, activists, scholars and citizens to ask, and keep asking, why sacrifice should be pushed to the margins, why narrow assumptions about the capacity and willingness of humans to sacrifice should prevail, why leaders remain reluctant to call on our ability to sacrifice on behalf of public aims. That’s the first challenge. Four others follow: developing awareness of the many rich ways in which sacrifice infuses daily life; shaping environmental politics to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice or at least to make it part of the discussion; identifying and studying illustrative examples where sacrifice is made for distant benefits; engaging in a nuanced way with the rhetorical power of sacrifice, a word perilous in public debate but not therefore to be shunned.

The book is a thoughtful and lively contribution to an issue which gathers importance and urgency as the years of climate inaction continue to accumulate. There is still hope we will choose the democratic sacrifice which the book advances. If we spurn it we are likely to have sacrifice forced on us by the passage of events.

[More at Fishpond (NZ), Amazon.com, Book Depository (UK, free shipping worldwide).]

Eaarth

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“The momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it, can’t be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage. But we will keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit that damage.”

Bill McKibben’s words occur on the final page of his newly published book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. The misspelling indicates a planet still recognisable but fundamentally changed. A planet that he first warned about over twenty years ago in his earlier book, The End of Nature.

McKibben is an activist as well as a writer. He led the 350.org campaign last year. 350 parts per million is the level James Hansen and other scientists consider the upper limit of a safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. McKibben’s team adopted that figure to spearhead their internet-based campaign which saw public actions in many parts of the world in the lead-up to the Copenhagen conference. Nothing happened at that conference to suggest that the world is about to take the necessary steps to avoid dangerous climate change. Eaarth recognises that we are heading to a world different from that in which civilisation has developed.

It won’t be a better world. We can expect a planet “with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.” McKibben considers the process well under way. He says we may, if we’re very lucky and very committed, eventually get atmospheric carbon dioxide back down to 350 parts per million, but great damage will have been done along the way, on land and in the sea. There’s no longer any escaping that. He’s unrelenting as he lists why. Disparate data points such as the higher susceptibility of Chinook salmon to parasites, or the advancing ocean at a beach in North Carolina, or the more flourishing growth of ragweed, are part of the picture. So are the numerous stories of poor people who are grappling with new uncertainties in the seasons and rains that can no longer be counted on. But the rapid changes in huge physical features are the most telling. They are completely unprecedented in the ten thousand years of human civilisation. Here he includes the melting Arctic ice cap, the loss of Greenland ice, the acidifying and rising oceans, the more powerful hurricanes, the melting inland glaciers of the Andes and the Himalayas, the drying rainforest of the Amazon, the dying boreal forests of North America. They are big trends; once they get rolling we can’t stop them.

The growth paradigm won’t help, sympathetic though McKibben is to green growth advocates like Friedman and Gore. He realises this is “a dark thing to say, and un-American” but proceeds to make his case. Infrastructure, already neglected, is imposing steadily rising costs. Recovery from flooding is enormously expensive. Insurance costs are climbing. Endless expansion spells all kinds of trouble, including wars over climate change-affected resources. He looks back to the book Limits to Growth commissioned in 1972 by the small group of European industrialists and scientists known as the Club of Rome. The book was translated into 30 languages and sold 30 million copies. But it was before its time. He quotes from a 2002 ad from Exxon Mobil: “In 1972, the Club of Rome published ‘Limits to Growth,’ questioning the sustainability of economic and population growth….The Club of Rome was wrong.” Not wrong, McKibben rejoins, just ahead of the curve. “You can ignore environmental problems for a long time, but when they catch up to you, they catch up fast.” Basically, he says, the book was right. “You grow too large, and then you run out of oil and the Arctic melts.”

Scientists have not exaggerated our environmental woes; they’re more likely to have understated them. We are in deep trouble. The question is how to survive what is coming at us. McKibben proposes words to help us think usefully about the future. Durable, sturdy, stable, hardy, robust. “Squat, solid, stout words.” The racehorse, fleet and showy, has to become the workhorse, dependable and long-lasting. In place of expansion and growth we need maintenance and repair. The transition from a system that demands growth to one that can live without it. In this context he speaks of dispersing resources, of tilting back from heavy centralisation towards lower levels of government and smaller societies. On a tougher planet community needs to come back into its own. “We are going to need to split up, at least a little, if we’re going to avoid being subdued by the forces we’ve unleashed.”

He pursues this theme into the essentials of our future: food, energy, and the internet. Industrially farmed monocultures may produce impressive results to begin with, but their success is outweighed by the productivity of small farms. He disagrees with those who claim that only industrial farming can provide the food the growing population will need. Even World Bank economists now accept that redistribution of land to small farmers would lead to greater overall productivity. The US Department of Agriculture reports that according to its latest census smaller farms produce more food per acre, whether measured in tons, calories or dollars. New information, new science and new technologies are further assisting this productivity. He instances a large organic farm in upstate New York: “…we substitute observation, management, planning, and education for purchased inputs.” Resilience is the word McKibben uses to describe smaller scale farming, such as the resilience “which comes with three dozen different crops in one field, not a vast ocean of corn or soybeans”. He is, of course, an advocate of the consumption of locally produced food wherever possible.

He’s also an advocate of the local and dispersed when it comes to energy production. Energy conservation is the first. step. After that, he considers that the potential of locally produced energy via wind turbines and solar panels and biomass is underestimated. He quotes one study which showed that half of all American states could meet their energy needs entirely within their borders, and most could meet a significant percentage.

The internet looks the odd man out in this localising process. In some respects it is. It ensures that we are never stifled by the local or out of touch with the major information sources we need. But it is decentralised, and also it can be used for local purposes, for which use he offers several examples. It was crucial in the 350.org campaign which mobilised the localised demonstrations last year.

McKibben writes with great verve. His book is packed with real life stories and illustrations. There is nothing stolid about his presentation. Indeed the vigour and aptness of his prose can sometimes have the reader temporarily forgetting the utter seriousness of the situation he confronts. But he means it when he says: “The Holocene is staggered, the only world that humans have known is suddenly reeling.” The hunkering down process he urges is presented not as a preference but as a necessity if we are to avoid the threat of total collapse in the hard times ahead.

There is urgency in McKibben’s writing, but he doesn’t clobber the reader. His book is reasonable and engaging, an invitation to discussion and consideration. It merits both, as a serious contribution to the most fundamental issue of our time.