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Bill McKibben is an author and activist who has been speaking out about climate change since before his first book, The End of Nature, brought him a national audience in 1989. He’s also a Vermonter.
Since 2001, McKibben has lived in Ripton, a small town in the Green Mountains about ten miles from Middlebury College, where he serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar. Middlebury is also where McKibben and a group of students founded 350.org, the environmental organization helping to organize this week’s Global Climate Strike, in 2007.
Thirty years after The End of Nature, which is widely credited as the first book about climate change written for a general audience, McKibben revisited some of the most unsettling questions about the climate crisis with his new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
While developing nations have not significantly reduced carbon emissions since his seminal book came out in 1989, McKibben contends that there are reasons to keep fighting for solutions.
“At a certain point, I had to decide not to spend a lot of time worrying about whether I was optimistic or pessimistic,” McKibben said in an interview with VTDigger last week, “and just making sure I got up in the morning and did as much work as I could to try and change the odds in this wager. Because the stakes are so high that even changing the odds a little bit seems well worth it.”
McKibben discussed the origins of his advocacy work, his hopes for this week’s global action, and the political barriers to passing environmental protections both nationally and in Vermont. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: You mentioned in the introduction to your book Falter, which came out this year, that you wrote a book 30 years ago called The End of Nature. What’s changed, and what hasn’t changed, in those decades between those two books?
Bill McKibben: The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about what we then called the greenhouse effect. Back then, we knew enough about it to know that trouble was coming. We knew that when you burn coal and gas and oil, you produce a lot of carbon dioxide. And we knew that the molecular structure of CO2 trapped heat that would otherwise radiate back out into space.
So we knew enough to be very scared, but not precisely how fast or how hard it was going to pinch. And the story of the intervening 30 years is that it pinched harder and faster than we thought. It turned out both that scientists are conservative by nature. They underestimate. And at the end, it was more finely balanced than we thought. So the things that we thought would be happening in 2080 or 2140 or something are already well underway. The Arctic is melting at a rapid pace. The Antarctic is beginning to collapse. We’re seeing the decimation of coral reefs. The hydrological cycle, the way that water moves around the planet, is completely helter skelter.
What was then a series of warnings is now a series of bulletins from the front lines of what feels more and more like a kind of war.
Something that it seems to me has changed during that time period would be, I think, awareness of climate change and the climate movement has become a bit more mainstream. But we still haven’t seen meaningful action on climate change. Does that match with your understanding? And how do we translate that momentum into action?
So this definitely, for the first 15 years or so, until 2005 or so, there really was no climate movement. I think we were all convinced that we were in an argument, and that as soon as the powers that be realized what the science was, and the argument was settled, action would begin.
But by 2005 or so, it was clear that we’d long since won the argument. The science was robust. The consensus was strong. And that made me conclude we weren’t having an argument at all. We were having a fight. And the fight was about what fights are always about: money and power.
In 2006, some of us put together this march up the west side of Vermont from Ripton here, where I live, up to Burlington. It took five days going up Route 7. We slept in farm fields at night. By the time we got to Burlington, there were 1,000 people marching, which is, in Vermont, a goodly number of people.
But the story in the Free Press the next day said that that thousand people may have been the largest demonstration about climate change that had yet taken place in the United States. And when I read that, I really began to understand why we were losing. We had the superstructure, we had the policy, we had Al Gore, we had scientists. The only thing we lacked for a movement was the movement part. And so we set out to build that.
The beginning was, truthfully, in Addison County, where we put together 350.org with myself and seven undergraduates at Middlebury. And it quickly grew into the first sort of global-scale climate action movement. We’ve organized about 20,000 demonstrations in 181 countries. And now there are lots and lots of other players in this movement. It’s reached a kind of critical mass where I think it’s beginning to have a serious effect on our political debate.
Climate change, for Democrats in this year’s primary, is either the number one or number two issue, depending on what polls you turn to. And among young Americans of all political parties, it’s by a huge margin the most important issue. So we’re going to see political action. The question is, will it be enough? Because having waited as long as we have waited to do anything, we’re now a mile behind the eight ball.
Climate change isn’t like other issues. It’s a timed test. And so the longer you delay action, the more dramatic that action has to be just to meet the math of climate change.
Right. And part of the reason we’re doing this series now is because of the Global Climate Strike that’s happening in advance of the UN Climate Action Summit. I’m wondering, what do you think we can expect out of that summit?
Well, I think that the strike will be the biggest day of climate action in the planet’s history. But I think there will have to be more like it, and bigger yet, in the year or two ahead.
I think that the UN assembly will focus attention, but I think it’ll be more rhetorical than anything else at this point. That’s alright. That rhetoric needs to be focused. People need to be on board.
The biggest challenge for a movement is to change the zeitgeist, to change people’s sense of what’s normal and natural and obvious. That’s in the process of happening. People are understanding that we need to move quickly and dramatically. Hopefully we’ll see that play out in our presidential election. Hopefully we’ll see that play out in other elections around the world.
Governments are one big power center. The other is the financial world. And we’re beginning to see action there too. The fossil fuel divestment movement is the biggest campaign of its kind in history. Now, yesterday, we passed the $11 trillion mark in endowments and portfolios that have divested. Not, I must say, the Vermont Pension Fund, which remains a source of sadness for me — but huge funds from all around the world. And that’s begun to put real pressure on industry. Shell Oil described it as a material risk to its business. So there’s pressure coming from many directions. We’ll see where that pressure really breaks through in a big way.
When we talked last spring, you expressed some skepticism about how warranted Vermont’s “green” reputation was. What more do you think Vermont could be doing on the climate front? And why hasn’t our state done more, considering that there are a lot of people here who are in office who are concerned about climate change?
I confess, I don’t spend as much time as perhaps I should working on Vermont politics. I have to keep reminding myself, as much as I love my state, that it’s probably more important for me to be focused on India and China, Texas and wherever. But Vermont hasn’t moved with enormous speed. It’s balked at doing even some of the easy things. Fossil fuel divestment from the state pension fund would be by far the easiest and most significant step, but the state treasurer has refused to ever do it for reasons I don’t understand, since among other things, it would save the state money and make the pension fund healthier.
But I think that there are some good proposals out there. One of the things that really makes sense to me is to take the good work that Efficiency Vermont has done with electricity, and extend it to transportation and thermal heating, because these are such big parts of Vermont’s carbon footprint.
The last legislative session was obviously a disappointment on many, many fronts, climate change maybe the most important of them. I sure hope that the next session, people are a little more focused and productive.
As a Vermonter, how have you seen our state’s climate change?
Among the national weather stations around the country, I think Burlington’s warmed almost as much, maybe more than, almost any other city in the country on average. And you can tell that because things that used to happen all the time — Lake Champlain freezing stem to stern — now happen rarely.
We had a good winter last year, a real winter, which was for me a great happiness. I love winter. And we may have the occasional one going forward, because the peculiar effect of the Arctic is melting tends to stall the jet stream, and if you happen to end up on the cold side of it, you can have these polar vortexes. But in general, winters are getting shorter.
One of the ways you can really tell that is the dramatic spread of ticks up and down the state. We no longer have the brutal seizures of cold enough to fend them off, the kind of classic winters. And so I think I read recently that Vermont, in per capita terms, now is the center of Lyme disease in the whole world. That’s scary not only because you don’t want anyone to get Lyme disease. It’s scary because it changes the way that we think about the woods. I think there’s a lot of people who are kind of scared to have their kids walking around in the fields or the forest. And for a place like Vermont, above all that’s a real sadness.
We see what happens when we get extreme weather. Hurricane Irene was the biggest rain Vermont’s ever had. I think in places it came close to 11 inches of rain. That’s the kind of rainfall you get when you warm the air, because warm air holds more water vapor than cold. The U.S. as a whole just is getting steadily rainier. The last 12 months were the rainiest 12 months in American history. Often that comes in these kind of deluge downpours. Vermont, because of its geography — steep valleys with narrow valley floors — is, as we found out during Irene, peculiarly susceptible to a kind of violent and chaotic flooding. Let’s hope we have a few more years before the next one comes.
You’ve talked about all the progress that’s been made with this movement, but it seems like at the same time, some people have really dug their heels in on the other side. With all this evidence that you and others have laid out, how is it that people are still denying the science of climate change?
That’s, I’m afraid, an easy question to answer. We now know, from great investigative reporting by your colleagues at the wonderful website Inside Climate News, by the Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism School, that beginning in the late 1980s, the fossil fuel industry — which as it turns out, knew everything there was to know about climate change: Exxon scientists gave spot-on predictions for where the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would go and how much it would warm. The predictions that were believed by the executives who began building all the drilling rigs to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming — we know now that in the late 1980s, all the oil majors and the coal industry and the utilities began spending a lot of money to build the kind of elaborate superstructure of denial and deceit and disinformation. They hired people who had worked for the tobacco industry earlier. And they pursued the same strategy: try to instill doubt.
You can tell how well it worked. Because we went from a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, declaring that he would fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. We went — after 30 years of expensive industry propaganda — we went to a Republican president, Donald Trump, declaring that climate change was a hoax manufactured by the Chinese. It’s a pretty good illustration of what you get if you spend that much money and that much time over that many years. You can really poison the well.
The good news is the number of people who believe it is relatively small, and shrinking. But the bad news is that most of them, climate deniers, are probably never going to be convinced. The studies have all been saying the same thing forever. This is an ideological complaint.
If you were literally convinced that markets solve all problems — which has been one of the things that some brands of conservatism have fixed on — if you believe markets solve our problems, and if it’s clear markets are not solving climate change, then your reaction to the sort of syllogism in your mind might be, therefore, climate change is not a problem. It’s not a very logical supposition, but it’s emotionally comforting, you know, if you’ve spent the last 30 years deeply engaged with Rush Limbaugh or the Ethan Allen Institute. Whoever it is.
What can I tell you? That’s just a fact of life in our country right now. It’s endorsed, as I say, by our president. It holds power for the moment, but I doubt it will hold power forever. Because in the end, physics and chemistry tend to come out on top.
After writing on this for a while, at least 30 years, are you feeling more frustrated or optimistic about what lies ahead in terms of combating climate change?
At a certain point, I had to decide not to spend a lot of time worrying about whether I was optimistic or pessimistic. And just making sure I got up in the morning and did as much work as I could to try and change the odds in this wager. Because the stakes are so high that even changing the odds a little bit seems well worth it.
That said, there are obviously reasons to be depressed. The science of climate change is very dark. And we see now the examples all around us. We’re clearly not going to stop climate change short of the point where it causes huge damage. It already is.
On the other hand, the engineers have done their job powerfully. The price of a solar panel or wind power has dropped 90% over the last decade. Now storage batteries are on the same curve. So we have some of the technology to fix it that we need.
And this movement has arisen. I’m glad that some part of it came out of the western edge of Vermont, and Vermont as a whole. My colleagues at places like 350Vermont are very dear to me. I’m even happier now that it’s all over the world.
I was in New York this week to watch, talk with and be with Greta Thunberg as she arrived in the States from Sweden. It was just, for me, a wonderful shot of energy to see how many young people are stepping up.
The fact that young people are doing this does not give old people a pass. Our job is to figure out all the ways we can support those young people, beginning with this all ages climate strike on the 20th of September.
Thank you, Bill.
Thank you. Take care.
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