Bill McKibben




Bill McKibben is a climate writer, educator and activist who teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont (Bill's website).  I have only 3 of his 17 published books.  I have his latest, Falter, 2021, and I really need to get and read his first environmental book, The End of Nature, 1989, published a year after Dr. James Hansen testified on global warming before a U. S. Senate committee.  Besides his books he has written notable articles published in many magazines, including, of all places, Rolling Stone Magazine.

As far as I know, McKibben is a science journalist specializing in climate change, not a scientist.  This is similar to Elizabeth Kolbert, Naomi Klein, David Wallace-Wells .

And as I said, he is also an activist, founder and long-time leader of 350.org, which he founded in 2008 with Middlebury College Students.  Interesting fact: in 2008, the parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere was already 385.83 according to Mauna Loa data, so, already way past the 350 parts-per-million that the group was shooting for, the level considered "safe" at the time; it was 350 back in 1987.  In 2021 it reached 416.  Hard to keep motivated with things going against you for so long.

Since I don't have his oldest environmental book, I will discuss his two Rolling Stone articles and his latest book.

McKibben published Global Warming's Terrifying New Math in the July 19, 2012 edition of Rolling Stone Magazine.  That was in the last year of Obama's first term; now we are approaching the 10th anniversary of that article.  First McKibben laid out the math at the time: how we had a "carbon budget" of 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide, i.e. an absolute amount that could be released into the atmosphere to stay below 2 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial times, the amount considered "safe" at the time (he also discusses the choice of that number); and how the fossil fuel companies already had 2,795 gigatons of CO2-producing fossil fuels in known reserves in the ground, about 5 times the budget.  So they had to keep most of what they had in the ground, something they were (and are) very uninclined to do, to say the least.

McKibben got his numbers from the Carbon Tracker Initiative.  They still track CO2 emissions and carbon budgets.  Their numbers have changed a bit in the ten years.  They now track three budgets: one for 1.5 degrees C, one for 1.7 degrees C, and one for 2.0 degress C.  1.5 degrees C is now considered the maximum "safe", or tolerable, global temperature increase amount.  Carbon tracker gives its budget as 360 gigatons and gives the world 9 years until we blow past it.

After explaining the math, McKibben goes on at length to give one of the clearest summaries of the dynamics of the various interest groups involved in climate change.  He identifies the enemy as the oil companies and their freedom to sell a product for which they do not have to clean up the mess; the strategy against them as being widespread divestment campaigns (similar to the successful movement against South African apartheid), but at the end admits it may already be too late.  And this was 10 years ago.  Not difficult reading at all, very enlightening.

For some reason the Rolling Stone website let me through to read the previous article, but when I try to go to the second one, Winning Slowly is the Same as Losing, from December of 2017, I get blocked by their paywall [note: now I get blocked for both of them].  Hmmm.  I don't really want to subscribe to Rolling Stone for this one [these two] article[s].  They should really post it for free as a public service.  And basically the title says it all: if the world doesn't speed up its conversion to non-fossil-fuel sources of energy, we will fail, i.e. we will reach a point where the damage done to the world will prevent us from doing anything effective to fix the problem.  I read it a long time ago, I forget the details of his discussion.  I don't know if he specifies what he means by "losing."  I take it to be an uninhabitable planet, the collapse of civilization, perhaps not the extinction of the human species since some small remnants may find little niches they can survive in at stone-age levels of existence for some generations.  Or maybe  extinction.  There are those who say we deserve extinction for allowing so many of the worlds' species to go extinct, as we are doing.

Anyway, McKibben's analysis matches that of the IPCC AR6, that delay will be fatal.

TODO: Falter

TODO: The recent New Yorker article about the difficulties of locating electric vehicle chargers so he could drive to visit his mother for Mothers' Day.

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