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Bill McKibben on Cochabamba, Congress and Eaarth
By Juan Gonzalez
and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Twenty years ago, environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, but his warnings went largely unheeded.
Now, as people are grappling with the unavoidable effects of climate change and confronting an earth that’s suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in unprecedented ways, Bill McKibben is out with a new book about what we have to do to survive this brave new world.
Today, he says, global warming is no longer simply a threat. It’s a reality. And the planet is so fundamentally different as a result, we might as well call it “Eaarth.” That’s the title of his latest book: Eaarth — Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Author, activist and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben joins us from Washington, D.C.
Bill, E-a-a-r-t-h? Why?
BILL McKIBBEN: You have to channel your inner Schwarzenegger to really pronounce it, Amy. It’s sort of “Eaarth.”
Look, the planet that we live on now is different, and in fundamental ways, from the one that we were born onto. The atmosphere holds about 5 percent more water vapor than it did 40 years ago. That’s an incredible change in one of the basic physical parameters of the planet, and it explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere.
NASA said that we’ve just come through the warmest January, February, March on record, that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever seen.
And we begin to see just about every day in the newspaper the practical effects of all this. Earlier this month, it was Rio de Janeiro with absolutely record rainfalls, causing landslides that killed hundreds. Today, in the run-up to the summit in Bolivia, in Peru an enormous chunk of glacier fell off a mountainside into a lake, set up a 75-foot-high wave that killed some people and destroyed the one water processing plant in the whole area.
These sort of things happen now someplace around the world every single day because we’ve undermined the basic physical stability of this planet.
JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of your proposals for solutions, in your book, you don’t focus so much on governmental or top-down solutions. What are some of the key ingredients of how the world’s population can reverse this trend?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, reversing the trend is hard — impossible, in fact. We’re not going to stop global warming. We can keep it from getting worse than it has to get.
For that to happen, we need things to happen at two levels. One is the governmental, national and global. We need a stiff price on carbon, one that reflects the damage it does in the atmosphere, that will reorient our economy in the direction of renewable energy instead of fossil fuel. But we’re also going to need, because we have a new planet, a new set of habits for inhabiting it successfully.
Our fundamental habit for the last couple of hundred years has been to assume that growth is going to solve every problem that we face. I think now we’ve fundamentally reached the limits to growth that people started talking about 50 years ago.
When you melt the Arctic, that’s not a good sign.
So we’re going to need, instead, to start focusing on security, on stability, on resilience, on figuring out how to allow communities to thrive, even on a tough planet. And I think that that has a lot to do with decentralization, with scaling down, with spreading out, with building food systems and energy systems that aren’t too big to fail, that are small enough and stable enough to succeed.
AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen thousand people [are expected at the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth this week in Bolivia], particularly from around Latin America, but from around the world.
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Climate justice= less overconsuming/overproducing/overpopulating
Thanks to all representatives of the World's People for speaking out loudly and clearly to the family of humanity about what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the reckless dissipation of Earth's limited resources, the relentless degradation of the planet's frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding synergistically at a breakneck pace toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world's gigantic, ever expanding global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic 'WALL' called "unsustainability" at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth's ecology is collapsed.
Many scientists have remarked eloquently on the collapse of civilizations. The global challenge we appear to face today, one that singular and unimaginable, is that the collapse of human civilization in Century XXI is not simply the end of another human civilization. What is occurring now is likely not only the collapse of a human civilization but also the human-driven destruction of the natural resource base, the ecology, and biodiversity of Earth.
Concern for the future of life as we know it and for the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the children leads me to point to the great value I attach to the open discussion of the global predicament looming before the human family. We simply must make good use of the best available science to adequately explain the population dynamics leading to the collapse of our civilization. Without such knowledge, I cannot see how necessary changes in the behavioral repertoire of humankind can be made.
Is there doubt in the mind of anyone at the World's People Summit that the future will ultimately be brighter for children everywhere if people choose now to consume and hoard less; to protect, preserve and share more; and to effectively check the unbridled increase of unsustainable large-scale production capabilities as well as to humanely regulate the propagation of the human species?
Sooty coal might be able to save us from the coming cold
20th century warming was caused by an 80 year long "grand maximum" in solar activity, not by CO2. Now that the sun has entered a quiet phase, it is going to get colder. We will soon be wishing that human CO2 emissions had a significant warming effect, but they do not.
What we will actually need is dirty coal in the old-fashioned sense of sooty (not the new-fangled sense of CO2 emitting, CO2 is NOT dirty). What causes run-away cooling is the albedo effect of spreading ice and snow, reflecting progressively more of the sun's radiation back into space. Sooty coal plants dotting the great white north would be able to constantly paint the snow with a significant amount black, mitigating the deadly albedo effect. (In summer, temperate-region coal plants could switch to "clean" burning in the old fashioned sense of not-sooty.)
Alec Rawls
I don't intend to commit the ad hominum fallacy, but some evaluation of "authority" needs to be made.
Rawls seems to me to be a crackpot, and some time back, rather than trying to refute his stuff, I decided to ignore him. Most of his energy goes toward Islam bashing, and hunting for conspiratorial Islamic imagery everywhere (in the memorial for Flight 93, etc.) Right now his favorite subject seems to be to prove that Obama is conspiring with Iran on nuclear development as proved by the fact that the hydrogen atom logo of the UN organization's Nuclear Security Summit looks like the flag of Turkey. He also claims that millions of Islamic terrorists are crossing the southern border, pretending to be Mexicans I suppose.
He claims to have been an economics student at Stanford, prior to changing his major to "moral philosophy". His claim to being a "journalist" is his (reported) involvement with Stanford's conservative student newspaper The Stanford Review, but a search of their website does not turn hu his name.
He has written an as-yet unpublished book devoted to Islam bashing. Occasionally he tries his hand at climate-change bashing as well, but, as most of the virulent deniers such as Fox news, he is completely science illiterate. He just drags out the old hackneyed arguments, such as "the sun did it". His blog Error Theory, is a disturbing stroll through paranoia.
I no longer spend much time with him, since there seem to be more serious issues than what ol' Alex (not to be confused with the New Orleans musician, Alec) Rawls has to say.
It is never too late............
Everyone is going to have to speak out. In the last decade the collusion, corruption and cover-up of massive fraud in the global economy by greedy, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us as well as their willful blindness and elective mutism in the face of the rampant dissipation of natural resources, relentless pollution of the environment and reckless degradation of Earth's ecology is as unconscionable as it is unforgiveable. The fulmination of irresponsible leadership in the first decade of Century XXI gave rise to the cratering of the world's political economy and to the irreversible destabilization of the Earth's climate.
From 2000 to 2008, whatsoever was politically correct, economically expedient, socially convenient and culturally prescribed was automatically espoused loudly as "the truth". Ideological idiocy prevailed over science. Greed ruled the world. Intellectual honesty, personal accountability, moral courage and doing the right thing were eschewed. Gag rules were enforced. As a consequence, the human community was persuaded to inadvertently make a colossal mess of our planetary home, Earth. Everyone could see what was happening, but few people were willing to speak out. No one with power listened to those who did speak out about what was observed occurring around us. Millions of people were encouraged to engage in conspicuous per-capita overconsumption and scandalous individual hoarding of resources; in megabillion-dollar pyramid schemes and unsustainable large-scale industrial enterprises.
Nothing can happen until many people speak truth to the greedmongers and power-hungry.
New leadership and a new direction such as the one presented by President Barack Obama need to be freely chosen and actively sustained.
Oceans 30% more acidic - really?
I was directed to this page from a Yahoo Answers question - http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100418091211AAQIqxN - and i'm having trouble believing the claim that the oceans are 30% more acidic!!
Isn't the actual change more like an alteration from 8.2 to 8.1?
30% more acidic
The pH scale is logarithmic, so a change of just over .1 units is a 30 percent increase in acidity. Here's a more detailed explanation of how ocean acidity changes are calculated: http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2008/06/covering-ocean-acidificatio...
-The Managing Editor
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