The relentless flood of information we receive does not necessarily equal an understanding of our situation... It doesn't matter if you hear constantly, night after night, about poor children or abused elders. It matters that you hear about them in some way both deep enough and complicated enough that you'll go out and do something useful.
-- Bill McKibben
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Book review: Here Comes the Sun, by Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is not a man known for his cheerful disposition. His books include The End of Nature, one that suggested we should rename the Earth now that we’ve ruined it, and Falter: Has the human game begun to play out? This new book bucks the trend. “Right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward,” he writes. “A path lit by the sun.”
As the book goes on to describe, a significant transformation of the energy system is well underway. The cost of renewable energy is now lower than fossil fuels, and people are filling their proverbial boots. Enough renewable energy has now been built that it is no longer additive – simply layered on top of the fossil energy system – but displacing coal, oil and gas.
Here Comes the Sun is a celebration of the energy transition, and the new world that it is creating. The spread of solar power is a democratizing force. For those who’ve been paying attention, authoritarian forces have often depended on fossil fuels, or done terrible things to ensure their ongoing supply. Renewable energy undermines that power base. It also unlocks a whole range of other benefits, such as reduced pollution and better health.
Committed naysayers will of course have their objections at the ready. There aren’t enough resources. It’s too expensive. The poorest will still need coal. Et cetera. McKibben anticipates these questions and they each get a chapter. As a journalist first and a climate campaigner second, McKibben runs the numbers and makes a clear and balanced case. We can afford it, actually. Even in the poorest countries. There are enough resources and enough land.
Another easily forgotten factor is that fossil energy is so riddled with inefficiencies that it might be easier than we think. Clean energy doesn’t need to match today’s energy consumption, because many of its key technologies are so much more efficient. A tenth of all the energy used today is in the mining, processing and transporting of fossil fuels, so we can scrap those emissions for a start. 40% of all shipping is for fossil fuels. And since we don’t have to constantly set resources on fire, a renewable energy system will require a fraction of the mining we currently do – “the sun burns so we don’t need to”.
Obstacles remain. Speed is the biggest challenge, and it was McKibben himself who wrote that “winning slowly is the same as losing” when it comes to emissions. The Trump administration is deeply committed to fossil fuels, and some state and local governments are holding back wind and solar. That won’t be able to stop the momentum, not in the long term, not when others are already reaping the gains of the energy transition. California is on track for 100% clean energy by 2035, and it’s hard to insist that it’s impossible when your neighbours have just done it. When they see the difference it makes, Republicans and Reform voters will want renewable energy too.
There’s a lot to be optimistic about in this short and pithy book, though if you’re a regular reader of this website, I would hope that you already know many of its big messages. This moment has been coming for a decade. Now that it’s here, the green movement needs to make the same pivot that McKibben has taken and get on board. “When you’re good at saying no, then yes takes some practice,” he admits – and there’s plenty to resist and say no to for the foreseeable future. “But the job now is not just to block things – it’s to build good ones.”
The moral outrage of climate change
in his book The Flag, the Cross and the Station Wagon, Bill McKibben describes an experience in Bangaldesh. There was an outbreak of Dengue fever in the capital, Dhaka. Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that benefits from the warmer and wetter conditions that climate change is creating in places like Bangladesh, and so cases of Dengue have been rising as the world warms.
McKibben, who caught Dengue himself, observed that Bangladeshis had minuscule carbon footprints and so had done nothing to contribute to the problem. The hospitals were crammed with thousands of people suffering from something caused by others elsewhere. “As I looked at those cots,” McKibben writes of those crowded hospitals, “the actual meaning of climate change became clearer to me: it was, along with a practical threat, the most immoral thing imaginable.”
Examples of climate injustice are now frequent. In the last month there have been two particularly notable ones. The heatwave in South Asia is one. Temperatures hid the mid-40s C, setting new records for the time of year. As always, those who suffer most are those who are elderly or unwell, and labourers who work outside. Scientists can now establish whether or not these sorts of events are a result of climate change, or might have happened regardless. World Weather Attribution calculate that this heatwave was made 30 times more likely by climate change.
There’s even more certainty about the recent drought in the Horn of Africa. Scientists modelled the likelihood of drought in today’s world (the upper set of curves in this diagram), and the 1.2C cooler world that we would have if there was no climate change (the lower set). The exact circumstances of the current drought are likely to recur every ten years or so in our warmer world, and “would not have led to drought at all in a 1.2°C cooler world.”
You can look up the technical detail of the study here, but the important point is that this is a climate change disaster. It has been caused by global warming. Over four million people have needed emergency aid. The misery, malnourishment and displacement are a direct result of climate change. It would not have happened if the world had heard the warning and reduced emissions when we first understood the importance of doing so.
McKibben is right. Climate change is “the most immoral thing imaginable.”
I don’t know how you feel about that. I did a talk on climate justice last week in a leafy rural town an hour’s drive from me. It was the same talk I usually give, but it got more push-back than any other audience I’ve spoken to. Several people took against my arguments – respectfully, but forcefully – and the most hostile were all white, all men, and all in their 60s and 70s. You can’t expect people to give up things they like, they told me. You can’t win people over by telling them to make sacrifices. People are attached to their way of life.
But is it a way of life? It looks more like a way of death to me. It’s just that the deaths will happen out of sight and out of mind, to other people who are not like us.
What do we do about it? We tell the truth, for a start. We call it the moral offense that it is. Then we work to reduce emissions, in ways that benefit the poor first. And we pay for loss and damage, starting with those causing the most harm.
Do the math
Last night I watched the new documentary from 350.org on the train home. Do the Math draws from Bill McKibben’s recent speaking tour, which in turn draws from the Carbon Bubble reports to put a new angle on climate change. The math in the title refers to the vast carbon content of the world’s oil reserves, which is five times more than the maximum amount of carbon we can emit if we wish to remain within 2 degrees of warming. As McKibben puts it, this makes the fossil fuel companies highly dangerous: “if they carry out their business plan, the planet tanks”.
In response, the video serves as a launchpad for a new campaign approach – going after the fossil fuel companies directly. If the government won’t act to price carbon into the cost of fossil fuels, maybe pressure on the oil companies themselves will help instead. And that means going after the money.
Inspired by the divestment campaign that helped to isolate apartheid South Africa, the Fossil Free campaign is encouraging institutions to shed their investments in fossil fuels. They’ve had some successes already, as the film shows, pushing the message that “if it’s wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.” There’s a long way to go before the fossil fuel companies start to pay attention, but it’s a start.
“We know what the solutions are,” says McKibben, “the technologies that we need to get off fossil fuels and onto something else. The thing that’s preventing us from doing it is the enormous political power wielded by those who have made and are making vast windfall profits from fossil fuels.”
Third Act and later life activism
The climate movement is often described as youthful. Media coverage certainly talks about it that way, and I regularly hear people talk about how children and teenagers are more environmentally aware. A lot of the high profile figures are young people, and school strikes have been some of the most iconic actions of recent years.
At the same time, every time I go to a climate march or event, it’s full of people older than I am. I noticed it again at Extinction Rebellion’s gathering at the weekend. Research shows little difference in concern about climate change across the generations.
Are we underestimating the contribution of older activists? I suspect so.
One organisation that’s redressing the balance is Third Act, which specifically works with people over sixty. They argue that there’s a whole demographic in America that has “life experience, skills and resources” in abundance, and they should throw their weight behind social movements.
This isn’t just a matter of opportunity, but of necessity. Many countries in the global North have aging populations, and the over-60s is the fastest-growing demographic in America. The biggest social problems will not be solved without their participation.
In mobilising older generations, Third Act are wary of taking control, and they explicitly want to play a supporting role. “We understand that our generations, taken as a whole, have helped create some of the troubles we now face,” they acknowledge. “We think we have important roles to play in dealing with those troubles—but we also know that one of our big and joyful jobs is to support younger people leading movements for environmental and social justice. They often ask for support, not direction, and that’s what we should provide.”
Third Act is only a couple of years old, and so far it has focused on voting rights and on climate change. This is no surprise, as the organisation was founded by Bill McKibben, so often described as a ‘veteran’ environmentalist himself, and a founder of the influential 350.org. (More from McKibben next week, as I’m reading his latest book)
Third Act aren’t alone in this. Among the many community groups running pickets or stands at the current XR protest are the ‘grandparents and elders group‘. Lancashire’s Nanas Against Fracking were instrumental in quashing the Conservatives’ big plans for fracked gas. The US and Canada have something similar in the group Raging Grannies. There’s the Grey and Green Manifesto, and a number of local and national Grandparents for the Future chapters. None of these organisations have the reach of some of the climate movement’s youth-let organisations, but it would be a mistake to think that the climate challenge is being ignored by senior citizens.
In fact, older activists may have something particularly important to bring to the table. While research shows similar rates of concern over climate change, and willingness to act or make sacrifices, there is one notable area of difference: optimism.
Professor Bobby Duffy, author of Generations, has studied attitudes to the climate across generations. He points out that fatalism about the climate is more common among the young, the feeling that it’s all too late: “Older people are actually less likely than the young to feel that it’s pointless to act in environmentally conscious ways because it won’t make a difference. Parents and grandparents care deeply about the legacy they’re leaving for their children and grandchildren – not just their house or jewellery, but the state of the planet. If we want a greener future, we need to act together, uniting the generations, rather than trying to drive an imagined wedge between them.”
The Flag, the Cross and the Station Wagon, by Bill McKibben
Over the years, Bill McKibben has become one of the most influential activists in the climate movement. His new book is “as much memoir as I’m likely to write”, looking back on changes in America over his lifetime. It’s thoughtful, curious, and as that subtitle suggests – ‘A graying American looks back at his suburban boyhood and wonders what the hell happened’ – there’s a wry sense of humour at work here too.
The book comes with three central chapters, covering the topics promised in the title. First up is the flag, reflecting on American patriotism and the country’s sense of itself. This is very much based in Lexington, where McKibben grew up, and a place that features prominently in America’s founding stories. McKibben is well versed in these local stories, having served as a guide to tourists in his youth, and sees himself as a patriot. It’s a shame to cede the flag to the right, he argues – though America needs an honest reckoning with its history.
The book probes those founding stories, sifting truth and myth, pointing out bits of the story that are usually left out. It moves forward into Lexington’s history, using it as a case study for how the country’s wealthiest areas have resisted affordable housing and maintained a privileged – and white – exclusivity. (Lexington is 1.3% black and has got less diverse over recent decades.) The founding stories of farmers standing up to empire ring a little hollow in a country that has gone on to be so unequal, he argues – but those stories should still inspire. It is something to live up to. “The affluent American suburb may be the greatest wealth accumulation engine of all time”, McKibben writes. “But you had to be able to buy a ticket at the start.”
“I’m going to try something in this chapter that I’m not sure I can pull off,” writes the typically modest McKibben at the start of chapter two, “which is to come to grips with what happened to American Christianity in my lifetime.” Again using Lexington as a starting point, he goes on to detail the decline of ‘mainline’ protestantism and the rise of evangelicalism, it’s co-opting by the Republic party, a turn from the common good towards individualism. He points out that when religion gets instutionalised, it loses its radical edge. It becomes about continuity rather than transformation, and Christianity has always operated most powerfully as part of the counterculture.
As with patriotism, McKibben writes about his disappointment with the failings of the church without giving up on it, something that resonates for me and my own faith. “Those of us raised in this tradition might consider recommitting,” he concludes, “but to a creed more radical than we once imagined, in the hope that it could help with all the other fights that face us.”
Third, the book turns to the suburbs. In the second half of the last century, suburbs came to define American life – with ever larger homes, cars and household possessions. Along the way, public goods eroded in favour of private wealth. A sense of community dwindled too, as people lived further apart and drove everywhere. “Extraordinary wealth accumulated in those places and in that generation, but it wasn’t used to build a better country.”
The other thing that accumulated was carbon emissions in the atmosphere. By 1970 Americans used a third of the world’s energy, and when the energy crisis of the 1970s offered a moment to change direction, it was buried by the Reagan administration. The genuine possibility of a solar future and a postgrowth economy were snuffed out. McKibben writes about his own despair at this missed turning point as a young journalist, and how it shaped his own choices, running to catch up as the climate changed and the American way of life grew stubbornly more destructive. “It’s been a long four decades,” he practically sighs onto the page.
After surveying the injustice and missed opportunities of all of this, what now? “We piled up an almost unimaginable carbon debt”, while failing to redress the inequalities of American society. Who should pay these debts, the book asks, before offering a concluding chapter with a simple title: ‘people of a certain age’.
I mentioned McKibben’s new(ish) charity, Third Act, last week, and the book ends with the possibility that the generation that lived through this story might want to write a different ending. “If you’re sixty”, he points out, “82 percent of the world’s fossil fuel emissions have occurred in your lifetime.” People can pretend climate change and injustice don’t exist, or work to take care of their immediate family and neighbours. Or they can “rise to the political moment” and play a role in fixing the future. Gently letting go of a destructive way of life, ushering in something new. “This kind of redemption rests not on suppressing the truth of our past, but on engaging and overcoming it.”
"They’re doing to #America what they did to #Christianity
Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent: the Maga evangelical #perversion of #Jesus’s message of radical #love to one of #hate and #aggression"
The great push is always away from individual skill and engagement -- a horse took all sorts of information and insight to handle, and a Model T a little, and a Honda Accord virtually none.
-- Bill McKibben
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The #Australian government announced that, beginning next year in much of the country and spreading to the rest by 2027, all residents will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon.
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/free-electricity-like-at-no-cost
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