Editor’s note: This commentary is by Bill McKibben, co-founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which helped launch the fight against the Keystone Pipeline and the global fossil fuel divestment effort.
[I]’m writing this on the Amtrak headed out of Vermont, and this time with even more regret than usual If there’s one Montpelier gathering I’m sorry to miss, it’s Saturday’s big demonstration against the fracked gas pipeline through Chittenden and Addison counties.
That protest (11 a.m. on the Statehouse lawn, and right now the weather forecast is for a fine fair day) ramps up the remarkable three-year-old fight against the plans by Vermont Gas to build the new pipeline south from Burlington. The battle — one of literally dozens around the country — is part of a new wave of opposition to fossil fuel plans, what one gas executive earlier this year called ‘the Keystone-ization’ of virtually every new fossil fuel infrastructure project.
All those fights draw some of their power from local concerns — the people whose land will be taken, the neighbors fearing safety concerns, worries over constantly escalating costs — but they also are part of the rapidly emerging battle over climate change, perhaps the most crucial fight in human history.
Viewed through this lens, a pipeline like the one proposed by Vermont Gas has two principal problems. First, though gas is sometimes sold as a cleaner fuel, fracking to get at new supplies releases large quantities of methane into the atmosphere, and that methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Cutting edge studies, especially from nearby Cornell University, make it clear that between carbon and methane emissions, fracked gas is currently the equivalent of burning coal if not worse.
Second, building an expensive pipeline (and expensive is an understatement, as the price of this one keeps mounting) locks us in to using fossil fuels for decades to come — that’s how long it will take to amortize the capital costs of this giant straw. But long before the pipe is paid off, the world will be ready to switch to renewable energy. Indeed, it appears to be ready now. Consider, for instance, what the European firm Enel—earth’s biggest utility—announced on Thursday. Half its investment going forward will be in sun and wind, and most of the rest on rebuilding the grid to take advantage of renewables. “There is a huge tide flowing and you can decide in which direction you want to swim,” its CEO told reporters. “The tide is not in our control – it is the evolution of technology.”
What’s ironic is that Vermont Gas executives need look no further than their affiliated peers at Green Mountain Power to see that future. As I detailed in the New Yorker this summer, they’re doing cutting edge work to make Vermont efficient and green.
It is worth noting that for that work to succeed, Vermont will need to capture the wind and sun that washes across this state. Powering ourselves is not impossible—and it’s ethically imperative in a world where literally millions are now dying from the various effects of climate change, effects that we Vermonters have been contributing to in large quantities over our last century of fossil-fuel burning.
We can’t magically take that century of carbon out of the atmosphere. But we can keep from pouring more in than we have to. Which is why I’ll be watching my twitter feed on Saturday, hoping to see images of lots of Vermonters out celebrating the end of the fossil fuel era and spurring the move towards a working future for the entire planet.