++"The arc of the physical universe is short and bends toward heat." Bill McKibben
++Bill McKibben finished his stint as guest editor at Andrew Sullivan's The Dish by leaving his family recipe for granola for the readers. He had extravagant praise for the staff and left an appreciation of the work he takes to generate copy at time limits spaced throughout the day.
++One of the things I didn't know or have long forgotten was that McKibben wrote for the New Yorkers' Talk of the Town section. He also helped create the homeless shelter at the Riverside Church in Manhattan.
++Do yourself a favor and watch McKibben's sermon at Riverside Church entitled "God's Taunt"at the church's website or the Daily Kos, where he urges the congregation to continue to mobilize for climate change awareness.
++McKibben points out the difference between this movement and the civil rights movement. Bayard Rustin made the remarkable claim that the thing he remembered about Freedom Summer was that it was fun. Police dogs and fire hoses and beatings? Fun? Yes,Bayard said,"The cause was just and we knew we were going to win." The difference McKibben says about the climate change movement that there is no guarantee it will win but at least people are called to "witness."
++In his sermon, McKibben starts with Job as the first serious writing on nature and points to a cranky Old Testament God asserting his mastery over the earth and dictating when the waves should stop. McKibben says we have gotten to the point where humanity's actions are challenging that position because we have caused the seas to rise and the polar caps to melt and drought to plague the land.
++McKibben makes the case that climate change is the justice issue of our time and not the province of white rich liberals. He points to his five-year old 350.org, which has organized thousands of demonstrations around the world and that it is predominantly poor,black, brown, and young like today's global demographic. We can absorb the slight increase in Cornflakes caused by drought but the peasant who depends on cornmeal and tacos in the developing world can not.
++After writing on climate change for 25 years and being jailed countless times for his activism,McKibben has helped organized the People's Climate March in New York City on September 21.
++In his piece at The Daily Dish,McKibben answers the questions readers had about such an endeavor. Yes, they will be using fossil fuels to get there. Yes,it would be better if there was a carbon tax. Yes, it would be better still to move to alternative fuels. He points to the uphill struggle against companies who have made more money than any companies in the history of the world.
++Against all odds,McKibben has been the mover on the divestment movement by colleges,universities and cities to dump fossil fuel stocks. Encouraged by Desmond Tutu, one of his advisers,this movement will not dent the profit margins of the oil and coal industry but is aimed to make a statement that it is not moral to turn the sky into a sewer.
++Bill McKibben is an exemplar of those who create activist organizations and carry on a grand American tradition. Long may he carry on.
Showing posts with label Bill McKibben. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill McKibben. Show all posts
Monday, September 1, 2014
Friday, July 11, 2014
BFD
++Bill McKibben of 350.org is right that the announcement by the World Council of Churches about divesting from oil, gas and coal is a big thing. For all the talk about the NSA being used to crack down of domestic dissidents,my candidate for most endangered person is Bill and environmentalist groups. If Fusion Centers were used against Occupy Wall Street,the same will happen against groups that protest the XL Keystone Pipeline and the fossil fuel industry.
++The statement by the WCC, which represents 345 Christian denominations,covers 590 million people worldwide.
++Its action has been supplemented by Pope Francis speaking for the Catholic Church and issuing a statement on the Sustainability of the Planet.
++In the United States, smaller actions have been taken by Union Theological Seminary in New York and the United Church of Christ,the first denomination to divest from the fossil fuel industry.
++The Unitarian/Universalist Association's National Assembly also voted to divest.
++Otherall the momentum to divest from fossil fuels has gained speed.
++The statement by the WCC, which represents 345 Christian denominations,covers 590 million people worldwide.
++Its action has been supplemented by Pope Francis speaking for the Catholic Church and issuing a statement on the Sustainability of the Planet.
++In the United States, smaller actions have been taken by Union Theological Seminary in New York and the United Church of Christ,the first denomination to divest from the fossil fuel industry.
++The Unitarian/Universalist Association's National Assembly also voted to divest.
++Otherall the momentum to divest from fossil fuels has gained speed.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Give it up for Bill McKibben
++Don't be surprised in twenty years when Bill McKibben receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is a special American, who has contributed to our understanding of the environment with scores of books and is now a nonpareil organizer on a global scale against climate change.
++He is the founder of 350.org, which is the first global environmental group which organizes at a grass-roots level against climate change. You might have seen his work with the protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline wrapping around the White House.
++His latest book Oil and Honey,The education of an Unlikely Activist,is a semi-memoir of how he went from being an author in upstate Vermont to a world-class organizer, even if he didn't know it at the time. The oil in the title is obvious, the honey is a story that is woven through the text about the life and times of Kirk Webster, who has bee yards in Vermont and has established a lifestyle of no debt,little consumption and production on an old-fashioned scale.
++I have always found McKibben's writing accessible, humane and encouraging. I have always argued that organization will beat money. But,that attitude is more an attitude than real. McKibben's account of organizing 350.org is worthwhile for anyone interested in advocating for an issue. He doesn't hide the slips, pitfalls and other disasters that await the organizer around each bend.
++Unfortunately,the struggle to fight climate change does demand going after the juggernaut of the fossil fuel industry. McKibben is painfully aware that members of Congress have been bought and sold by the fossile fuel industry. McKibben cites that John Boehner has received nearly $1 million in campaign contributions from that industry. McKibben neglects to mention Boehner's PAC received $237million from the industry at the end of the 2012 campaign.
++But McKibben and his merry band have marched on--creating the divestment movement around 250 colleges. From the small Unity College in Maine, McKibben has moved on to bigger pastures in the divestment struggle. The divestment movement takes its lead from the struggle against apartheid and the pressure brought against colleges to divest from companies that did business with the apartheid regime.
++I admire the lifestyle of Kirk Webster and would love to live the same but I am too plugged into our consumer-information system. I suspend my pessimism on the ultimate result of 350.org. and greet it with the same support I had for Occupy Wall Street. Whatever the verdict on Occupy, it did make the issue of income inequality central to our national debate. Hopefully, for all our sakes,McKibben's crusade will have even more positive results.
++And if you have tuned out on the issue, it is still a good read.
++He is the founder of 350.org, which is the first global environmental group which organizes at a grass-roots level against climate change. You might have seen his work with the protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline wrapping around the White House.
++His latest book Oil and Honey,The education of an Unlikely Activist,is a semi-memoir of how he went from being an author in upstate Vermont to a world-class organizer, even if he didn't know it at the time. The oil in the title is obvious, the honey is a story that is woven through the text about the life and times of Kirk Webster, who has bee yards in Vermont and has established a lifestyle of no debt,little consumption and production on an old-fashioned scale.
++I have always found McKibben's writing accessible, humane and encouraging. I have always argued that organization will beat money. But,that attitude is more an attitude than real. McKibben's account of organizing 350.org is worthwhile for anyone interested in advocating for an issue. He doesn't hide the slips, pitfalls and other disasters that await the organizer around each bend.
++Unfortunately,the struggle to fight climate change does demand going after the juggernaut of the fossil fuel industry. McKibben is painfully aware that members of Congress have been bought and sold by the fossile fuel industry. McKibben cites that John Boehner has received nearly $1 million in campaign contributions from that industry. McKibben neglects to mention Boehner's PAC received $237million from the industry at the end of the 2012 campaign.
++But McKibben and his merry band have marched on--creating the divestment movement around 250 colleges. From the small Unity College in Maine, McKibben has moved on to bigger pastures in the divestment struggle. The divestment movement takes its lead from the struggle against apartheid and the pressure brought against colleges to divest from companies that did business with the apartheid regime.
++I admire the lifestyle of Kirk Webster and would love to live the same but I am too plugged into our consumer-information system. I suspend my pessimism on the ultimate result of 350.org. and greet it with the same support I had for Occupy Wall Street. Whatever the verdict on Occupy, it did make the issue of income inequality central to our national debate. Hopefully, for all our sakes,McKibben's crusade will have even more positive results.
++And if you have tuned out on the issue, it is still a good read.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
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.
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.
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