Fear of a Hot Planet

An interview with environmentalist, educator, and author Bill McKibben

By Robert Parker • April 20, 2010 • 3 Comments

On December 24, 1968, while orbiting the moon aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft, astronaut William Anders took one of history’s most famous photographs. As the ship rounded the grey, lifeless surface of our satellite, a pale blue-and-white dot appeared against the blackness of space; Anders picked up his camera and snapped its shutter. “Earthrise,” as the photo would come to be known, was the first widely published image of our planet taken from space. Never before had humanity seen such a view of our collective habitat.

But that planet no longer exists. In the forty-two years since “Earthrise” was taken, we have done so much damage to our home that, some say, we need a new name for it. Environmentalist, educator, and author Bill McKibben suggests “Eaarth,” which is the title of his new book. In 1989, McKibben published The End of Nature, a groundbreaking work in the study of climate change. More than a dozen books have followed, each with the unifying theme of coping with change. In 2007, he started the Step It Up program, which organized 1,400 simultaneous global warming demonstrations in all fifty US states. As a result of this action, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, then in the heat of their presidential campaigns, signed on to the group’s target of an 80 percent cut in carbon emissions by the year 2050.

In the wake of this success, McKibben helped launch 350.org, “an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis.” The group is founded on the notion that any level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration above 350 parts per million is dangerous for all life on the planet. This only sounds like an obscure point of reference until you learn that the number currently stands at around 390 PPM and rising.

Eaarth is about living on this new planet that we have created for ourselves, and trying, perhaps in vain, to return to the one seen in “Earthrise.” I recently interviewed McKibben at Random House’s offices in Toronto.

What drew you to climate science?
I wrote the first book about global warming twenty-one years ago this year, The End of Nature. I was a young journalist, and I knew it was a big story that no one was covering. Now it’s going to turn out to be the biggest story there ever was… The only thing we didn’t know twenty years ago was how fast this was going to happen. People would have laughed if you had said a one-degree rise in temperature would be enough to melt the Arctic.

In The End of Nature, you wrote about how most global change is based on the geologic time span — that anything major takes a long time to happen — but not when it comes to global warming. Why?
Because we’re enacting an enormous geological change. We’re taking hundreds of millions of years worth of biology — old plankton and ferns and dinosaur [fossils] and stuff — and digging it up in the span of a few decades. All that carbon that had been sequestered down below is up here now, and it’s having astonishing effects. The atmosphere has 5 percent more moisture in it than it did when I was born. That’s a mind-blowing change.

Was it already too late to stop climate change when you published The End of Nature?
It was probably too late to prevent some change, but if we’d started work really aggressively twenty years ago, we’d be in much better shape now. We probably would have been over the hump in terms of the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy; we would have put a hell of a lot less carbon in the atmosphere. And, probably most importantly, we would have been able to point China and India on a different route to development.

Just to play devil’s advocate for a second: is there no possible way this is a natural process?
The science of what’s going on is very clear. We know that burning fossil fuel releases CO₂; we know the molecular structure of CO₂ traps heat. That’s the story. All else is commentary, as they say.

Yet denial of climate change keeps hanging on.
It’s the equivalent of 9/11 conspiracizing — sound and fury signifying nothing. Twenty years ago the science wasn’t so clear. Everybody who was talking about it then was out on a limb, but not anymore: we’re standing on the middle of the tree trunk. But the disinformation campaign never ceases. It’s skilfully run, it has all the resources it could ever want, and it will continue to cause trouble.

What motivates that way of thinking?
It’s an exaggerated form of the people who don’t wish to change, who have an ideological predilection against it, and the invidious influence of the fossil fuel industry. It’s the most profitable industry there ever was and ever will be. ExxonMobil made more money last year than any company in the history of money. That buys a lot of confusion if you want it to.

Why did you title your new book Eaarth?
I needed to get across the idea that the planet’s not the same one we were born onto — it’s already shifted. We have to come up with new habits in order to live on this new planet even modestly successfully.

One of Eaarth’s most startling statements comes from Ted Schuur of the University of Florida’s botany department: he says that even if we cut carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, we’ve already started a feedback process that would not stop.
There are parts of this system that at a certain point become autonomous. You raise the temperature enough and you start melting permafrost, and beneath the permafrost there is methane, so it goes into the atmosphere. You raise the temperature enough and you start melting ice; you get rid of white ice and there’s blue ocean underneath, and it absorbs heat instead of reflecting it. It goes on and on and on. We can act now and keep things from getting worse than they need to get, but we’re no longer at a place where we can restore the status quo ante.

As you report, according to Climate Interactive, even if every international agreement on climate change was acted upon — we know that many of them are not — we’d still see carbon dioxide concentration of 725 parts per million by 2100. What would the world look like at that level?
Not good. Much, much more difficult to grow food; oceans rising steadily and fast enough to cause real damage. The loss of seasons for the most part at these latitudes; the loss of winter as we know it. Things like that.

How can we prevent that from happening?
We need to do two things. One is, very locally, we need to build all the resilient systems we can: good local food systems, local energy systems. But even with the best, most resilient, local organic garden, it still has to rain sometime. So we’ve also got to do the global work of reining things in.

Is individual action more important than government or corporate action?
The most important actions that individuals can take are political. If we can’t get governments to set a price on carbon, we’re not going to make significant progress… That’s the whole point of Copenhagen, to incentivise business and personal decisions by raising the price of carbon. When the price of gasoline spiked in the summer of 2008, SUVs sort of disappeared from the equation. We need a lot of changes like that one.

Environmentally speaking, could running out of oil be a good thing?
Well, it might be. But the real problem we face with carbon is coal — it’s twice as dirty as oil, and there’s plenty of it. And as we run out of oil, the temptation will be to substitute coal for it — to put our cars on electricity and then [charge] them on coal-fired grids. That would increase the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere.

Where do you think we are with respect to peak oil?
If we haven’t already passed it, we’re somewhere near it, for normal oil [production]. That’s why the price has started to go up, and will probably continue to do so for a very long time to come… If you talk about taking everything out of the tar sands in Athabasca and elsewhere around the world, then we’ve got more oil, but the price of burning it is ecological catastrophe — to the climate first and foremost, but also, as we’re seeing in Alberta, the complete destruction of the landscape too.

When oil does run out, or becomes prohibitively expensive, do you have faith that we can find a replacement?
Oil is pretty sui generis; fossil fuel in general is pretty sui generis. It’s what explains modernity; it’s how we’ve built our economy. I don’t think there’s an easy substitute at all.

That’s rather scary.
Yes. The substitutes that we’re going to use — solar and wind and things — are different. They’re very diffuse and spread out, so we need to think about them in less centralized ways. Power will be more like the internet, where there’s a million different nodes feeding in and taking out, not a few big centralized stations.

The second half of Eaarth is about ways of dealing with the changed planet that we live on and will live on. You specify the five adjectives that you think need to define our future: durable, sturdy, stable, hardy, and robust. Why those words?
Because I want to get away from the focus on growth that’s always been our mantra. I think we’re ready for a focus on hunkering down instead of ever expanding.

But as population expands, don’t economies have to grow to accommodate it?
Perhaps, but population [growth] is slowing down enormously. We used to think population was going to double and double and double again. Thirty years ago, the average woman had six children; now it’s about 2.7 and falling fast. Most of the growth that’s occurring is happening in places that use so few resources that it’s not a huge problem. The problem for climate is consumption. Endless, increasing consumption.

Which will be curbed by?
One hopes it will be curbed by our own decision making.

And not a cataclysmic event.
Those strike me as the two choices.

What are the greatest obstacles to immediate, collective action on climate change?
Vested interest and inertia.

What incentive will finally drive us to alter our habits and economy?
When we set the price right on carbon, it will help all these things. If fossil fuels paid the price they should for the damage they do to the environment, it would quickly become apparent how uneconomic our current industrial-[agricultural] system is, and, by contrast, how economically sensible local food production is. We’re masking that signal right now.

What’s the most important thing that I can go home and do tonight to help stop global warming — or, more to the point, prepare for the coming onslaught?
Assuming you’ve already done the obvious things around your home — put in decent light bulbs and whatever — by far the most important thing you can do is get politically engaged. We’ve got to build a movement that’s powerful enough to actually take on this [economic and political] system. That’s what we’re trying to do at 350.org.

That’s what the best response has to be, one becoming many?
I’m afraid so. It’s too big to do one light bulb at a time.

(Author photo by Nancie Battaglia; jacket photo courtesy Knopf Canada)

350.org is planning an international day of action on October 10, 2010. Click here to learn how you can get involved.

Tags • Bill McKibben, climate change, Eaarth, environment, interview, non-fiction
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I saw an astonishing series about climate warming with todays knowledge. Astonishing figures too about temperature: it is said that it may take one hundred thousand years to come back to normal temperatures after an increase (without human intervening that is). Amazing!
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