Global warming is already wreaking havoc on human civilization.
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"The Christian Paradox: How A Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong"
"The Christian Paradox: How A Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong"
Bill McKibben
This
is an invitation, an invitation to come to New York City. An
invitation to anyone who'd like to prove to themselves, and to their
children, that they give a damn about the biggest crisis our
civilization has ever faced.Bill McKibben on global warming's terrifying new math
My
guess is people will come by the tens of thousands, and it will be
the largest demonstration yet of human resolve in the face of climate
change. Sure, some of it will be exciting – who doesn't like the
chance to march and sing and carry a clever sign through the canyons
of Manhattan? But this is dead-serious business, a signal moment in
the gathering fight of human beings to do something about global
warming before it's too late to do anything but watch. You'll tell
your grandchildren, assuming we win. So circle September 20th and
21st on your calendar, and then I'll explain.
Since
Ban Ki-moon runs the United Nations, he's altogether aware that we're
making no progress as a planet on slowing climate change. He presided
over the collapse of global-climate talks at Copenhagen in 2009, and
he knows the prospects are not much better for the "next
Copenhagen" in Paris in December 2015. In order to spur those
talks along, he's invited the world's leaders to New York in late
September for a climate summit.
But
the "world's leaders" haven't been leaders on climate
change – at least not leaders enough. Like many of us, they've
attended to the easy stuff, but they haven't set the world on a
fundamentally new course. Barack Obama is the perfect example: Sure,
he's imposed new mileage standards for cars, but he's also opened
vast swaths of territory to oil drilling and coal mining, which will
take us past Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world's biggest petro
producer.
Like
other world leaders, that is, he's tried, but not nearly hard enough.
Consider what he told The
New Yorker in
an interview earlier this year: "At the end of the day, we're
part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph
right." And "I think we are fortunate at the moment that we
do not face a crisis of the scale and scope that Lincoln or FDR
faced."
Obama and climate change: the real story
We do, though; we face a crisis as great as any president has ever encountered. Here's how his paragraph looks so far: Since he took office, summer sea ice in the Arctic has mostly disappeared, and at the South Pole, scientists in May made clear that the process of massive melt is now fully under way, with 10 feet of sea-level rise in the offing. Scientists have discovered the depth of changes in ocean chemistry: that seawater is 30 percent more acidic than just four decades ago, and it's already causing trouble for creatures at the bottom of the marine food chain. America has weathered the hottest year in its history, 2012, which saw a drought so deep that the corn harvest largely failed. At the moment, one of the biggest states in Obama's union, California, is caught in a drought deeper than any time since Europeans arrived. Hell, a few blocks south of the U.N. buildings, Hurricane Sandy turned the Lower East Side of New York into a branch of the East River. And that's just the United States. The world's scientists earlier this spring issued a 32-volume report explaining exactly how much worse it's going to get, which is, to summarize, a lot worse even than they'd thought before. It's not that the scientists are alarmists – it's that the science is alarming. Here's how one Princeton scientist summarized the situation for reporters: "We're all sitting ducks."
Obama and climate change: the real story
We do, though; we face a crisis as great as any president has ever encountered. Here's how his paragraph looks so far: Since he took office, summer sea ice in the Arctic has mostly disappeared, and at the South Pole, scientists in May made clear that the process of massive melt is now fully under way, with 10 feet of sea-level rise in the offing. Scientists have discovered the depth of changes in ocean chemistry: that seawater is 30 percent more acidic than just four decades ago, and it's already causing trouble for creatures at the bottom of the marine food chain. America has weathered the hottest year in its history, 2012, which saw a drought so deep that the corn harvest largely failed. At the moment, one of the biggest states in Obama's union, California, is caught in a drought deeper than any time since Europeans arrived. Hell, a few blocks south of the U.N. buildings, Hurricane Sandy turned the Lower East Side of New York into a branch of the East River. And that's just the United States. The world's scientists earlier this spring issued a 32-volume report explaining exactly how much worse it's going to get, which is, to summarize, a lot worse even than they'd thought before. It's not that the scientists are alarmists – it's that the science is alarming. Here's how one Princeton scientist summarized the situation for reporters: "We're all sitting ducks."
The
gap between "We're all sitting ducks" and "We do not
face a crisis" is the gap between halfhearted action and the
all-out effort that might make a difference. It's the gap between
changing light bulbs and changing the system that's powering our
destruction.
In
a rational world, no one would need to march. In a rational world,
policymakers would
have heeded scientists when they first sounded the alarm 25 years ago. But in this world,
reason, having won the argument, has so far lost the fight. The fossil-fuel industry, by virtue
of being perhaps the richest enterprise in human history, has been able to delay effective
action, almost to the point where it's too late.
have heeded scientists when they first sounded the alarm 25 years ago. But in this world,
reason, having won the argument, has so far lost the fight. The fossil-fuel industry, by virtue
of being perhaps the richest enterprise in human history, has been able to delay effective
action, almost to the point where it's too late.
So
in this case taking to the streets is very much necessary. It's not
all that's necessary – a sprawling fossil-fuel resistance works on
a hundred fronts around the world, from putting up solar panels to
forcing colleges to divest their oil stocks to electioneering for
truly green candidates. And it's true that marching doesn't always
work: At the onset of the war in Iraq, millions marched, to no
immediate avail. But there are moments when it's been essential. This
is how the Vietnam War was ended, and segregation too – or consider
the nuclear-freeze campaign of the early 1980s, when half a million
people gathered in New York's Central Park. The rally, and all the
campaigning that led to it, set the mood for a planet – even,
amazingly, in the Reagan era. By mid-decade, the conservative icon
was proposing to Mikhail Gorbachev that they abolish nuclear weapons
altogether.
The
point is, sometimes you can grab the zeitgeist by the scruff of the
neck and shake it a little. At the moment, the overwhelming sense
around the world is nothing will happen in time. That's on the verge
of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – indeed, as I've written in
these pages, it's very clear that the fossil-fuel industry has five
times as much carbon in its reserves as it would take to break the
planet. On current trajectories, the industry will burn it, and
governments will make only small whimpering noises about changing the
speed at which it happens. A loud movement – one that gives our
"leaders" permission to actually lead, and then scares them
into doing so – is the only hope of upending that prophecy.
A
loud movement is, of necessity, a big movement – and this
fossil-fuel resistance draws from every corner of our society. It
finds powerful leadership from the environmental-justice community,
the poor people, often in communities of color, who have suffered
most directly under the reign of fossil fuel. In this country they're
survivors of Sandy and Katrina and the BP spill; they're the people
whose kids troop off to kindergarten clutching asthma inhalers
because they live next to oil refineries, and the people whose
reservations become resource colonies. Overseas, they're the ones
whose countries are simply disappearing.
Sometimes
in the past, trade unionists have fought against environmentalists –
but unions in health care, mass transit, higher education, domestic
work and building services are all beginning to organize for
September, fully aware that there are no jobs on a dead planet.
Energy-sector unions see the jobs potential in massive solar
installation and a "just transition" off fossil fuels.
Here's a banner I know you'll see in the streets of New York:
CLIMATE/JOBS. TWO CRISES, ONE SOLUTION.
There
will be clergy and laypeople from synagogues and churches and
mosques, now rising in record numbers to say, "If the Bible
means anything, it means that we need to care for the world God gave
us." And there will, of course, be scientists, saying, "What
exactly don't you understand about what we've been telling you for a
quarter-century?"
And
students will arrive from around the country, because who knows
better how to cope with long bus rides and sleeping on floors – and
who knows better that their very futures are at stake? They're near
the front of this battle right now, getting arrested at Harvard and
at Washington University as they fight for fossil-fuel divestment,
and shaking up the establishment enough that Stanford, with its $18.7
billion endowment, just agreed to get rid of its coal stocks. Don't
worry about "kids today." Kids today know how to organize
at least as well as kids in the Sixties.
And
then there will be those of us plain old middle-class Americans who
may still benefit from our lives of cheap fossil fuel, but who just
can't stand to watch the world drift into chaos. We look around and
see that the price of solar panels has fallen 90 percent in a few
decades; we understand that it won't be easy to shift our economy off
coal and gas and oil, but we know that it will be easier than coping
with temperatures that no human has ever seen. We may have different
proposed solutions – carbon taxes! tidal power! – but we know
that none of them will happen unless we open up some space. That's
our job: opening up space for change on the scale that physics
requires. No more fine words, no more nifty websites. Hard deeds.
Now.
You
can watch the endgame of the fossil-fuel era with a certain amount of
hope. The
pieces are in place for real, swift, sudden change, not just slow and grinding linear shifts: If
Germany on a sunny day can generate half its power from solar panels, and Texas makes a
third of its electricity from wind, then you know technology isn't an impossible obstacle
anymore. The pieces are in place, but the pieces won't move themselves. That's where
movements come in. They're not subtle; they can't manage all the details of this transition.
But they can build up pressure on the system, enough, with luck, to blow out those bags of
money that are blocking progress with the force of Typhoon Haiyan on a Filipino hut.
Because if our resistance fails, there will be ever-stronger typhoons. The moment to salvage
something of the Holocene is passing fast. But it hasn't passed yet, which is why September
is so important.
pieces are in place for real, swift, sudden change, not just slow and grinding linear shifts: If
Germany on a sunny day can generate half its power from solar panels, and Texas makes a
third of its electricity from wind, then you know technology isn't an impossible obstacle
anymore. The pieces are in place, but the pieces won't move themselves. That's where
movements come in. They're not subtle; they can't manage all the details of this transition.
But they can build up pressure on the system, enough, with luck, to blow out those bags of
money that are blocking progress with the force of Typhoon Haiyan on a Filipino hut.
Because if our resistance fails, there will be ever-stronger typhoons. The moment to salvage
something of the Holocene is passing fast. But it hasn't passed yet, which is why September
is so important.
Day
to day this resistance is rightly scattered, local and focused on the
more mundane: installing a new zoning code, putting in a solar farm,
persuading the church board to sell its BP stock. But sometimes it
needs to come together and show the world how big it's gotten. That
next great moment is late September in New York. See you there.
This
story is from the June 5th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.
From
The Archives Issue 1210: June 5, 2014
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