Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Amy and Juan interview Bill McKibben
Democracy Now: April 15, 2010
JUAN GONZALEZ: Bolivia is hosting a people's summit on climate change
that could draw up to 15,000 participants from 100 countries around the
world. The conference will focus on those most affected by global
warming-indigenous and poor communities, particularly in the Global South-
and highlight their demands for climate justice in advance of the United
Nations climate summit to be held in Mexico at the end of this year.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, the Senate is expected to unveil a
climate change bill. Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and
Joseph Lieberman will reportedly release a specific plan by Earth Day on
April 22nd. The proposed compromise legislation is expected to include caps
on some greenhouse gas emissions, but also boost domestic oil and natural
gas production and spur new nuclear power plants.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, today we're joined by someone who sounded one of the
earliest alarms about global warming. Twenty years ago, environmentalist
Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, but his warnings went largely
unheeded. Now, as people are grappling with the unavoidable effects of
climate change and confronting an earth that's suddenly melting, drying,
acidifying, flooding and burning in unprecedented ways, Bill McKibben is out
with a new book about what we have to do to survive this brave new world.
Today, he says, global warming is no longer simply a threat. It's a reality.
And the planet is so fundamentally different as a result, might as well call
it "Eaarth." Well, that's the title of his latest book:
Eaarth-E-a-a-r-t-h-Making [a] Life on a Tough New Planet. Author, activist
and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben joins us now from Washington, DC, as
he whirls around the planet.
Bill, E-a-a-r-t-h? Why?
BILL McKIBBEN: You have to channel your inner Schwarzenegger to really
pronounce it, Amy. It's sort of "Eaarth."
Look, the planet that we live on now is different, and in fundamental ways,
from the one that we were born onto. The atmospheres holds about five
percent more water vapor than it did forty years ago. That's an incredible
change in one of the basic physical parameters of the planet, and it
explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more
acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere. NASA said
yesterday that we've just come through the warmest January, February, March
on record, that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we've ever seen.
And we begin to see just in every day in the newspaper the practical effects
of all this. Last week it was Rio de Janeiro with absolutely record
rainfalls, causing landslides that killed thousands. Today, in the run-up to
the summit in Bolivia, in Peru an enormous chunk of glacier fell off a
mountainside into a lake, set up a seventy-five-foot-high wave that killed
some people and destroyed the one water processing plant in the whole area.
These sort of things happen now someplace around the world every single day,
because we've undermined the basic physical stability of this planet.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Bill, in terms of your proposals for solutions, you-in
your book, you don't focus so much on governmental or top-down solutions.
What are some of the-what are some of the key ingredients of how the world's
population can reverse this trend?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, reversing the trend is hard-impossible, in fact. We're
not going to stop global warming. We can keep it from getting worse than it
has to get. For that to happen, Juan, we need things to happen at two
levels. One is the governmental, national and global. We need a stiff price
on carbon, one that reflects the damage it does in the atmosphere, that will
reorient our economy in the direction of renewable energy instead of fossil
fuel. But we're also going to need, because we have a new planet, a new set
of habits for inhabiting it successfully.
Our fundamental habit for the last couple of hundred years has been to
assume that growth is going to solve every problem that we face. I think now
we've fundamentally reached the limits to growth that people started talking
about fifty years ago. When you melt the Arctic, that's not a good sign. So
we're going to need, instead, to start focusing on security, on stability,
on resilience, on figuring out how to allow communities to thrive, even on a
tough planet. And I think that that has a lot to do with decentralization,
with scaling down, with spreading out, with building food systems and energy
systems that aren't too big to fail, that are small enough and stable enough
to succeed.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm looking at this chart that you've put out with the book,
and it says, from 1989, when you published The End of Nature, some of
the-well, the rise of temperature accelerating at the same time that more
gas has entered the air, the British model now lists the six warmest years
on earth-this was in 1989-as 1988, '87, '83, '81, it went back. Then you say
one scientist has considered a fleet of several hundred jumbo jets to ferry
35 million pounds of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere annually to
deflect sunlight away from the earth. Now, this was twenty years ago. Since
then, of course, the warmest years have been the last years since then.
Talk about 350.org, your organization. As we lead into Bolivia, Democracy
Now! is already headed down to Cochabamba. We'll be broadcasting from there
Monday through Friday, right through Earth Day. Expected, 15,000 people,
particularly from around Latin America, but from around the world. It's not
as if this is going to change policy, as Copenhagen would have if it
succeeded, but it's about people going back a step and saying, well, then
it's going to come from grassroots movements. 350.org simply-certainly
was an emblem of that. Talk about the actions around the world that are
being taken now, Bill.
BILL McKIBBEN: Absolutely. Amy, you've got it exactly right. We're going to
have to build a movement to put political pressure on to finally get some
change out of this system. We haven't done it in the past well enough. And
that failure of Copenhagen was symbol of that.
At 350.org, we'll have a bunch of folks in Cochabamba, and they'll be
spreading the word, telling people what happened last year with 350.org,
when we pulled off the largest-what did CNN say?-the most widespread day of
political action in the planet's history: 5,200 separate actions in 181
countries on a single day in October.
This year, on October 10th, we're organizing what we're calling a global
work party. There will be thousands upon thousands of communities around the
world where people will be putting of solar panels or digging community
gardens, not because we think that we're going to solve this problem one
project at a time-we are not-but because we want to send a message finally
to our leaders: get to work. If we can do it, if we can climb up on the roof
of the school and hammer in a solar panel, you can climb up on the floor of
the Senate and hammer out some real legislation, not the kind of
watered-down stuff that we're likely to see next week that is-I'm afraid,
falls deeply into the category of "too little, too late."
AMY GOODMAN: And when you say next week, you mean Earth Day around the
world?
BILL McKIBBEN: Kerry and Graham and Lieberman are supposed to introduce a
bill in the US Senate this coming week. And from-though we haven't seen it
yet, and it's too early to definitively describe it, it looks like an
incredible accumulation of gifts to all the energy industries, in the hopes
that they won't provide too much opposition to what's a very weak greenhouse
gas pact.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Bill, I'd like to ask you to talk a little about the impact
of climate change, especially on the developing world, and specifically in
terms of the massive migrations of peoples. Obviously, throughout Latin
America and Africa, more and more people are leaving the land, huge
metropolises building up that then those populations have to be fed from the
countryside. The impact of the drying up of some lands and forcing these
mass migrations? Northern Mexico for instance, increasingly arid, and more
and more the peasants of northern Mexico are leaving and moving and trying
to get into the United States.
BILL McKIBBEN: Yep. Look, the world looks the way it looks because we've had
10,000 years of climatic stability. That's why we built our cities where we
did, and so on and so forth. As that changes, there are going to be enormous
consequences, and we're already seeing them. And they're painful in every
corner of the world. The Indians are building a 2,000-mile-long wall around
the border with Bangladesh, because they know what kind of flood of people
will be coming from that direction.
And the horrible part is, of course, that the countries hit hardest and
first are the ones that have done the least to cause this problem and the
countries that are most unfairly going to have to change their economic
development plans the most over the next decades. The easiest way for India
or China or almost anybody else to pull people out of poverty would be to
burn more of the cheap coal that they have at hand. But they can't do it,
because the West has filled up the atmosphere already.
The global inequity, that's always been a sin, has become a great practical
impediment to action on this. And if we can't somehow square that circle, if
we can't figure out how to transfer some serious resources north to south in
the form of technology to allow countries to develop without going through
the fossil fuel age, then we have little to no chance of preventing the
absolute worst outcomes.
AMY GOODMAN: And Bill McKibben, the question in this country is always, we
are in a recession ourselves, why would you be sending money south?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, we're going to have to-I mean, the trouble is that what
we're dealing with, Amy, is not a debate between China and the US or between
Republicans and Democrats, fundamentally; it's a debate between human beings
and physics and chemistry. And physics and chemistry don't suspend their
operations just because we're in an economic rough patch. We've got to get
our carbon emissions down, and fast, and we've got to help the rest of the
world do the same thing. If we can't, then we're in far greater trouble than
any recession we're experiencing now.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the direction of the Obama administration, saying
that as part of the clean energy solution, the United States must begin
building nuclear plants once again, and then presumably other countries in
the world should do, as well?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, first of all, let's give credit where it's due. The
Obama administration has done more in its year and a half in office on
climate change than all the other presidents of the global warming era
combined. On the other hand, you know, I've drunk more beer than my
twelve-year-old niece. The bar was set pretty low. And the actions that
we've seen so far have been around the edges.
Now that we're beginning to get-head toward some serious negotiation in the
Senate, the Obama administration is giving away an awful lot: offshore
drilling, lots of support for nuclear power. Nuclear power doesn't give off
much carbon. That's the best thing you can say about it. The worst thing you
can say about it, at least aside from nuclear waste and plutonium and
terrorism, the worst thing you can say about it is it wastes an incredible
amount of money. It will only happen with massive, massive government
subsidy. And if we're going to subsidize something, there are a lot of
technologies that offer a lot more kilowatt hours for the buck than trying
to build giant nuclear power stations.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, we're in the wake now of this terrible mine
disaster, the worst in, what, forty years, twenty-nine miners dead. All
through the Democratic convention, as we were in Denver, we saw those signs
for clean coal. What about coal as an answer?
BILL McKIBBEN: Coal is the most dangerous substance on the planet, in almost
every way-I mean, for the people who have to mine it and for the landscapes
where it exists, like across southern Appalachia, for the people who have to
breathe the smoke around power plants, mostly in our inner cities, but most
fundamentally for the climate. Coal produces more carbon per BTU than
anything else you can burn. And as a result, more than anything, it's what's
driving our climate problem.
We're not going to have, in the time that we require it, anything that
really resembles clean coal. What we need to do is make that transition away
from coal, and make it as fast as we can. Job one is putting a really
significant price on carbon, so that coal begins to pay for some of the
incredible damage that it does to the environment.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, your organization, 350.org, explain it one more
time.
BILL McKIBBEN: Three-fifty is the most important number in the world. NASA
scientists have said that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater
than 350 parts per million is not compatible with the planet on which
civilization developed and to which life on earth has adapted. That's strong
language, and it's stronger still, because we're past it already. We're at
390 parts per million or so today and rising about two parts per million a
year. That's why the Arctic is melting. It's why the oceans are acidifying.
And it's why we need a movement around the world to force political action
sooner rather than later. We're running out of time.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, we thank you for being with us, co-founder and
director of 350.org. His new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New
Planet. And thank you for giving us our headline for the day: "I drink more
beer than my twelve-year-old niece." At least there's hope, at least for
her. Thank, Bill.
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