SXSW recap: Bill McKibben on climate change and online activism.
Environmental journalist Bill McKibben gave a talk at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference about climate change, and about his new online aimed to combat it, 350.org.
The choice of “350″ requires some explaining, which McKibben did in his plainspoken lecture. The number refers to 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, which many climate scientists view as a safe upper limit to stave off climate-driven human disasters. The bad news is that the atmosphere currently has 385 ppm of CO2 in it.
McKibben and his 350.org colleagues want to promote awareness of the number 350 so that citizens around the world will influence their governments to support 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 as an official target in their policies.
In his talk, McKibben explained that, since he first wrote about global warming in The End of Nature 20 years ago, there have been three major periods in terms of our understanding of climate change:
- In 1988, global warming was “in the nature of a hypothesis” — so from about 1988 to 1995, scientists went to work on climate questions with great vigor. This led the IPCC to determine that global warming was a big, bad problem that needed to be addressed right away. At that time, climate scientists targeted 550 ppm as a safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2. They chose this number because it was double the pre-industrial number of 275 ppm.*
- The period from about 1995 to 2005 was a period not of hypothesis, but of proof. The planet seemed to validate all the direst hypotheses about climate change. These were the ten warmest years on record, the average temperature went up globally, and climate-related changes happened much faster than previously expected. As McKibben explained it, these phenomena revealed that the earth’s climate system was much more finely balanced than we had previously understood. During this period, many scientists came to regard 450 ppm as a better, safer target number for the leveling-off of atmospheric CO2.
- McKibben characterized the past couple of years as a time not of hypothesis or proof, but of fear. It has become clear during this period that earlier hypotheses about the severity of climate change seriously underestimated the changes underway in the earth’s climate system. Scientists have radically recalculated what’s going on in the climate, for example to get their heads around the record-breaking melt of Arctic ice last fall. Based on both current and paleoclimatic observations, the emerging scientific understanding says that the earth’s climate system is under real and sustained threat. Because of this, a number of prominent climatologists now point to 350 ppm of CO2 as a safe standard.
In his talk, McKibben emphasized that we’re not talking about a future problem, but one that is already upon us. He compared it to a dangerously high cholesterol number in a blood test: it doesn’t mean you keel over and die right right-this-instant, but it does imply some rigorous choices about the best moves to make going forward. As McKibben put it, instead of saying “no more cheese” as a doctor treating cholesterol would, the climate doctors are saying “no more coal.”
McKibben is well aware of the reasons we haven’t moved quickly yet to address concerns about climate change — especially in the United States. According to him, the key reason for a lack of action is the huge resistance from the corporations that have a lot to lose if we change the fossil-fuel-centered status quo. These companies — coal miners, petroleum-based businesses, electric utilities, and so on — pursue their interests much more intensively than the general population acts to oppose them. Meanwhile, U.S. politicians realize that, so far at least, the U.S. polity has not want to be led on this issue by its political representatives.
All of this is compounded, in other parts of the world, by the pressure for rapid economic development; in places like China and India, the simplest route to such development relies on heavy use of cheap and abundant deposits of coal.
McKibben believes that there will be not great shift in these behaviors until we give markets some sort of price signal for carbon, which will allow market forces to regulate CO2 levels automatically. To make this happen, he says, we need some kind of coordinated political movement.
And that’s where McKibben’s own recent environmental activism comes in. A year-and-a-half ago, as a “somewhat clueless amateur,” McKibben helped to organize a march across his home state of Vermont that called for the state’s political leaders to sign a pledge committing to reduce Vermont’s carbon footprint 80% by 2050. The sight of 1,000 people marching across the state was enough to get legislators on both sides of the aisle to stop calling for “more research” and start taking action.
To follow up on the success of the Vermont march, McKibben and his friends organized StepItUp07. They started simply by sending e-mails to people they knew, asking them to organize local events to call attention to climate change on April 14, 2007. Ultimately, there were 1,400 StepItUp rallies spread across all 50 states of the U.S. In fact, McKibben said that it was the biggest day of environmental action since the original Earth Day in 1970.
McKibben particularly cited the inspiring displays of creativity that addressed climate change as it would affect particular localities. For example, Key West activists had an underwater demonstration calling attention to the damage that climate change could do to marine ecosystems. Up the road in Jacksonville, other Floridians hoisted a yacht 20 feet into the air with a crane to show where the future sea level might be.
The success of StepItUp 2007 led McKibben to undertake his new effort, 350.org. He and his colleagues want to tattoo the number 350 into people’s brains so that public opinion can cohere around the target of 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2, which according to McKibben would represent some kind of safety net for the human species.
McKibben hopes that the 350.org endeavor will unlock a wave of open-source-style creativity and innovation. He believes that the technology of the Web might be the secret weapon that will drive consciousness of climate problems and solutions worldwide. The point, he says, is to somehow get the boulder of climate policy dislodged and rolling.
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More coverage of Bill McKibben at SXSW:
- CBS 11 News (Dallas/Fort Worth)
- Vimeo video of McKibben’s talk at Scholz’s Garten
- Austin American-Statesman interview with McKibben.
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* Scientists have determined what the pre-industrial level of atmospheric CO2 was by examining core samples from glaciers, the beds of peat bogs, and the like — natural receptacles that preserve evidence of the world’s antique atmosphere undisturbed.
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With many countries now safely using nuclear power (especially France), that seems like an obvious answer. We can use wind, solar, etc., but they are not ready to be large-scale solutions.
So many of the same people who argue against nuclear are arguing to reduce carbon footprint. It reminds me of the people who argue against oil drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) but want the U.S. to stop being so dependent on foreign oil.
Did Bill McKibben have any suggested solutions? I hear what we’re not supposed to do: use fossil fuels. What specific alternatives did he give?
You raise some good points, Mr. Paine:
–Nuclear: I was talking about this with some friends last night, and it came up more than once at an environmentally-oriented conference I attended last week. As I see it, the major barriers here are (a) logistical, but more in terms of disposal of waste than anything else; and above all (b) political, especially because of the mass negative memories associated with Three Mile Island. Eventually, nuclear is likely to be a live option in the U.S. – but it’s going to take some doing politically.
–As for ANWR: to be fair to their position, plenty of the folks who argue against ANWR drilling *and* against dependence on foreign oil would rather advocate (what they see as) better, cheaper solutions that don’t raise the sorts of environmental concerns that ANWR drilling does. These solutions include better conservation measures, more efficient automobile fleets, etc. My larger point is that it’s not inherently absurd to argue againt ANWR drilling and against dependence on foreign oil, because the two are not linked in a zero-sum way. There are many variables in this equation.
–As for solutions, McKibben seems to be focused primarily on (a) creating policy mandates for a 350 ppm CO2 target in countries throughout the world, and (b) using the political system to install price signals that markets can then factor into their calculations. Looking over my notes, I can’t recall whether he stumped specifically for a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, or whatever – but he certainly wants carbon priced into decisions.
My prediction is that, if/when such price signals come into play, we’ll see a shift away from fossil fuels automatically. If this is correct, it could explain why so many companies involved in fossil fuels oppose these kinds of actions.
[...] threat of broad-scale environmental degradation in our lifetimes; [...]
A quick note with regard to nuclear power. I know France has had enormous success with their nuclear power, proving that it is a viable energy alternative. However, in the U.S. I’ve read that building a nuclear power plant is a decade-long process. Certainly the bureaucracy is tied to a number of safety precautions (as they should be), but it is frustrating that even if Congress approved of six new nuclear plants today we wouldn’t see progress for a long while.
I know Shell’s been touting their Clean Coal program, but the question is, does it hold water? Or is it just short-term lip service to consumers?
Thanks for the comment, Ryan.
Like a lot of folks who have both environmental and commercial concerns, I’m of two minds about nuclear power. Clearly it can be used and used safely, as France’s experience demonstrates. In the U.S., as I read it, the real resistance is political and emotional, based on the history of environmental action against nuclear power here and on the series of disasters (esp. Three Mile Island) that color Americans’ views of what nuclear power is like.
For sure, there are sustained technical issues — especially in terms of waste disposal — that must be answered. But my sense is we need to go ahead deliberately, if not rapidly, on nuclear power. There are other, better, quicker ways to get where we need to be in terms of an energy mix that can sustain *both* the environment and the U.S. economy, but nuclear is a much better option than coal, from what I understand, in the long run.