Time's Up

Do yourselves a favor, read Eaarth: Making A Life On A Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben ( Times, 2010), who has written about climate change since they days it was called the "greenhouse effect". Living in Vermont, McKibben tries to outline how Americans may adapt to times of pitiless shortages and environmental catastrophes. It would be nice to call this book a jeremiad but unfortunately it's merely realistic reporting on how we have altered the global environment and virtually wrecked the conditions that sustained human civilization for 10,000 years. We are literally living on a different planet than all the generations who came before us. Now that planet has become harsh and life will become extremely hard.

As McKibben makes clear it is very likely I will live to see the day Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam dries up completely and California and Southwestern America cease to have water. The first part of the book documents in sometimes excruciating detail what scientists are discovering around the world--the melting glaciers, the disappearing ice caps, the rapid acidizing of the oceans and the disappearance of oil supplies. He does a wonderful job in explaining how all these traumas to our ecosystem inter-relate and what their real-life consequences are.

McKibben reports on scientific meetings where papers are presented that argue that we have already passed the thresholds of carbon dioxide, where climate change is now irreversible. In fact, scientists are so alarmed because it no longer is gradual but changing at quantum levels every few years. In one poignant scene of a scientist presenting a paper in England demonstrating that the carbon emissions levels are actually twice what was projected, the scientist begs his audience to prove him wrong. They remained silent and stunned by his findings.To me what was surprising was McKibben description of how our impact on the environment has now created the natural conditions by which the earth itself is polluting with methane at a rate as fast as humans.

McKibben revisits the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, which came out in the 1970s and reviews their different scenarios for economic growth. This was the first computer-driven analysis of a multi-variable model of economic growth ever produced. For that reason, it attracted the attention of wonks. As McKibben finds out, we actually chose--deliberately--the worst economic model for the past generation. A model that ramped up consumption, waste and indebtedness. He called it the 4 hour erection that Viagra ads warn men about. And if it's too big to fail, it already failed.

What surprised me was that in the 1970s, polls indicated that a plurality of Americans favored limiting economic growth. McKibben works through how economic growth became the mantra of both political parties even though we had already passed the year of peak American oil production and were running into peak global oil production last year.

McKibben points out that we have to embrace alternative energy sources out of necessity. He also soberly points out that nuclear energy is not an option because we have run out of money. We have to understand that our economy is old and that we are now in the stage where we have to conserve and preserve. He analyzes this component as central to Obama's stimulus package--the repair of our infrastructure, which we neglected for twenty-five years. And while he salutes the new President's commitment to alternative energy, he points out how the political will simply does not exist anywhere in our political system to do anything to ameliorate the effects of climate change and envirommental degradation.

McKibben points out how the Defense Department is already studying the implications of climate change for national security. It is thought that we will see 700 million people become climate refugees and that we will return to an era of real resource wars around the world. He also indicates that some of the Defense plans deal with the mass removal of Americans from areas of natural disaster, especially the anticipated massive flooding of the East Coast.

McKibben does a wonderful job of integrating the science of climate change with the economic impact on the planet. He also explains how the mundane insurance industry has been battered by the frequency of hurricanes, flooding and weather-related claims and how the industry admits that their models ,which have been reliable for the last century at projecting such damage, are now inadequate. The consequence is that governments now have to assume the insurance liabilities once assumed by the private sector.

McKibben is unusually good at analysing the wreckage in China, where they have adopted an American idea of progress and are reaping a world of total environmental and health disasters. He claims that the worst Bush failure, among the several, was not interferring to persuade China not to engage in their full-court press to rachet up their coal-burning power plants. This policy means that China will be emitting more carbon into the air than the rest of the planet combined. For those who argue that China will emerge as the dominant power, McKibben has the best answer to that I've read. Instead, he argues with data that China will suffer immense food shortages and grave periods of drought and health epidemics that will imperil their existence as a country.

McKibben spends the last third of the book depicting positive developments in the United States on how Americans can and do adapt to the sudden lack of mobility and the re-creation of communities. In a way, he reminds me of James Kuntsler, the dystopian who envisions a de-developed America resorting to pre-industrial modes of production. McKibben warns us that large parts of the United States will exist in a state resembling developing countries. The change we'll need to adopt will be very hard for millions of people and also for the psychology of Americans, who need the great National Project.

Whatever one's political point of view, McKibben's portrait of our global reality is hard to refute. Unfortunately, the implications of what he describes have not been digested by anyone in our political culture. He makes Al Gore look positively pollyannish.