Environmentalist Bill McKibben, author of some of the most widely read literature on climate change and co-founder of the group 350.org, brought his message
about the dangers of global warming to lawmakers in his home state of
Vermont on Wednesday, telling members of the Statehouse assembly that
every state government (like every nation large and community small)
must do what it can to meet the challenge—the greatest one ever faced by
humanity—posed by climate change. Courtesty of the author, his full
prepared remarks follow:
It is a great and signal honor for me to be here at my
second-favorite legislative body on the planet. You are actually a match
for the Ripton Town Meeting in wisdom, civility, and earnest effort,
falling short only in the selection of baked goods. I look forward to
the first Tuesday in March for many reasons, but the most important are
probably these particular maple cream cookies that my neighbor Barry
King always bakes; since our great mutual friend Willem Jewett is now
your Majority Leader, perhaps he can bring some up some time, because
that’s really all you’re missing.
limate
change expert Bill McKibben speaks to legislators and members of the
public in the House chamber at the Statehouse in Montpelier on Wednesday
(Photo: Burlington Free Press / Glenn Russell)
I’d like to thank Speaker Smith for this invitation, and also for his
clarion call to this great assembly to make climate change a priority; I
know he will meet with a good reception, because just a quick glance
around the chamber reveals some of the country’s most devoted
environmental legislators. Tony Klein, Margaret Cheney—and from your
sister body the Senate I want to take a moment to salute Ginny Lyon for
her hard work over the years. Of course Governor Shumlin has been a
leader on this issue throughout his career, in both legislative and
executive capacities—and also as an outstanding communicator. His
straightforward declaration, from the first morning of our trauma with
Irene, that it was an effect of climate change is a model of the way we
need our leaders to talk about the world we find ourselves in.
It is that world I want to address today. I know that you all know
about climate change, but I want to take just a couple of minutes to
bring you up to date scientifically. I wrote the first book for a
general audience about what we then called the greenhouse effect, way
back in 1989. At that time, few anticipated how rapidly the crisis would
advance. So far human beings have raised the planet’s temperature about
a degree Celsius—a quarter century ago few scientists predicted the
effects of that relatively small increase. But the earth turned out to
be very finely balanced. The extra solar energy trapped by carbon in the
atmosphere—less than three quarters of a watt per square meter of the
earth’s surface—has already done very large things. This past summer,
for instance, saw the catastrophic melt of the Arctic ice sheet—there’s
now, by area, half the ice that Neil Armstrong saw when he looked down
from the moon.
We have, in other words, taken one of the largest physical features
on earth and broken it, and others are close behind. The chemistry of
the earth’s oceans, for instance, is now changing as seawater absorbs
carbon from the atmosphere—it is now 30% more acidic than it was four
decades ago, a dangerous development for the marine food chain upon
which all of us ultimately depend. For those of us who dwell on land,
however, the most conspicuous changes have to do with hydrology, the way
that water moves around the planet. If you want one physical fact to
explain this century, it’s that warm air holds more water vapor than
cold: the atmosphere is about five percent warmer than it was 40 years
ago, a staggering shift that more than anything else signals that we’ve
left behind the Holocene, the 10,000-year period of benign climate that
underwrote the rise of human civilization. That increase in atmospheric
moisture also loads the dice for both drought and flood—for the kind of
extremes we’re seeing more and more commonly on this planet. The
scientists have long linked extreme weather to our new heat, but for the
last few years they’ve been joined by the part of our economy that we
ask to analyze risk. Here’s how Munich Re, the world’s largest insurance
company, put it in its annual report for 2010, the hottest year ever
recorded. Globally globally, loss-related floods have more than tripled
since 1980, and windstorm natural catastrophes more than doubled, with
particularly heavy losses from Atlantic hurricanes. This rise cannot be
explained without global warming.
If you want one physical fact to explain this
century, it’s that warm air holds more water vapor than cold: the
atmosphere is about five percent warmer than it was 40 years ago, a
staggering shift that more than anything else signals that we’ve left
behind the Holocene, the 10,000-year period of benign climate that
underwrote the rise of human civilization.
So let’s think about Vermont for a minute. Even before Irene it was
clear that things were very different here. Choose your gauge: ice out
dates, lilac bloom, start of sugaring season. Most obvious was the more
than 85% increase in severe rainstorms, the gullywashers that do farmers
no good and cause a world of trouble for road crews. I’ve always found
the easiest public officials to talk about global warming with work in
municipal DPWs—they’ve spent the last decade trading out small culverts
for bigger ones, because the old book no longer works. As one Australian
mayor said on Monday, after the second great flood of his tenure,
“these storms are supposed to be one in a hundred year events, not one
in two year events.” For us, though, Irene was a defining moment. It saw
the greatest rainfall in the state’s history, 11.23 inches recorded in
Mendon. If anyplace should be able to cope, you would have thought it
would be Vermont—the remarkable recovery of forest cover in our state
should have meant less flooding than from the great storms of the 20s
and 30s when most of those slopes were bare. But this was just too much
water—it wasn’t just off the charts, it was off the wall the charts were
tacked to. From now on we need to know that Irene is what nature is
capable of producing for us. You know better than anyone else in the
state the true cost—in lives and in hopes, yes, but also in deferred
plans, busted budgets, foregone opportunities. God forbid the next one
comes before we finish paying off this one.
But the next one will come, and much else with it. We’ve increased
the temperature one degree so far, as I’ve said, but we’ve burned enough
coal and oil and gas to guarantee almost another degree of temperature
increase in the decades ahead. That is to say, even if we do everything
right we are going to come right up to the 2 degree red line that the
world’s governments have declared is the absolute and final red line for
climate chaos. We shouldn’t go there, obviously—if one degree melts the
Arctic, we’re fools to find out what two degrees will do. But we will
go there—and if we don’t do everything right the most recent reports of
radical organizations like the World Bank make clear that we’re headed
for a global temperature increase of 4-6 degrees, which would create a
planet straight out of science fiction. Among other things, the
agronomists estimate that from this point on each degree increase in
global temperature will cut grain yields ten percent. Try to imagine our
earth with 40% fewer calories. This is the biggest challenge by far
that humans have ever faced, and we must do absolutely everything we can
to stop it.
That means getting off hydrocarbons as soon as possible. The fossil
fuel industry, we now know, has 2795 gigatons of carbon in its proven
reserves, the coal and oil and gas they’re planning to burn. The
scientists, sadly, tell us that to have any hope of staying below two
degrees we can only burn 565 more gigatons. That is, the fossil fuel
industry has five times the amount of inventory on hand that we can
safely use. To put it another way, we have to figure out some mix of
technology, legislation, economics, and personal and societal change
that can somehow keep 80% of current reserves in the ground. You—this
legislature--played a small but noble role in that job last session by
banning fracking—all we need is new hydrocarbons. But the only way to
accomplish what needs accomplishing in the very short window of time
that physics affords is an all-out effort, here and everywhere else. You
can’t control ‘everywhere else,’ but you can try to provide some
leadership—indeed Vermont has already played an outsized role. 350.org,
which began five years ago in Addison County with the march up Rte 7
that some of you joined, has become the largest climate campaign on the
planet, having organized 20,000 rallies in 191 countries, what CNN
described as the ‘most widespread political activity in the planet’s
history.’ That kind of advocacy produces results—look at a country like
China, which followed our development path too closely with its
coal-fired power plants, but now also leads the world in sun and
windpower. I can tell you that when I’m in China, I invariably find
mayors and provincial chiefs who have met alumni of Efficiency Vermont
as they spread out around the planet with their wisdom. In fact, many
Chinese officials I’ve met know about two American states, California
and Vermont, and they are under the impression they’re roughly equal in
size and importance. I never let on. But that’s a powerful example of
what we can do as Vermonters.
You can’t control ‘everywhere else,’ but you
can try to provide some leadership—indeed Vermont has already played an
outsized role.
So let’s talk about next steps.
Clearly, building on the Efficiency Vermont model is key. This
session you’ll have the chance to build an equally robust program aimed
at ‘thermal efficiency.’ Which is an awkward name—another way of saying
it is, it’s high time Vermont stopped heating the outdoors. Putting in
insulation will create jobs, and it will save low and middle-income
Vermonters serious money. It’s straightforward and obvious good policy
even absent the climate crisis, and I hope you’ll make it a priority,
pay for it in a logical way, and keep pushing it hard till every
building in the state is up to snuff. Because—given the climate
crisis—one of the things we most need to do is reduce our use of energy.
The more we reduce it, the easier it becomes to meet our needs with
electricity, specifically renewable electricity. That’s the only chance
we have moving forward, and it’s increasingly a good chance. A
University of Delaware study released this month demonstrated, by
running 28 billion computer simulations of different weather conditions,
that by 2030 the country could provide reliable electricity from
renewables 99.9 percent of the time at reasonable cost—but only if we
simultaneously practice efficiency, and build out our renewable network.
Governor Shumlin, skilled civil servants like Liz Miller and Deb
Markowitz, and this legislative body—you guys--have pointed us in
exactly the right direction—we need 90% or more of our power from
renewable sources, and I fear the science indicates we need it even
faster than you’ve called for. This is an emergency.
Which brings me to controversy of the moment, the call for a
three-year moratorium on windpower development in this state. It’s not
perhaps the most important issue, but it is the most contentious, so let
me address it with some care. I am glad that there are people standing
up for our mountains, and for the rest of creation that inhabits them;
it is good to see that the environmental message has sunk deep roots. I
yield to no man or woman in my affection for the high forests of this
region—I’ve explored them, written about them extensively, and done my
best to help the legion organizations dedicated to their preservation.
But I also read the science carefully, and am thoroughly convinced that
by far the greatest threat to their integrity, biology, and beauty is
the onset of rapid climate change; the scientific community is in
agreement that, as we heat the earth, we stand on the brink of
triggering earth’s 6th great extinction event, one that will decimate
species everywhere including here. The computer modeling shows a
dramatically warmer world won’t support the birch-beech-maple forest we
love, and that the hemlock will be driven north of the Canadian border.
In other words, the future of these mountains depends on our ability to
get ahead of the global warming crisis. So: Let me say that if there is
anything in my description of that crisis so far that leaves you
thinking we have three years to spare for a ‘time out,’ then I’ve done a
poor job indeed. We need to be doing all we can be doing on every
front, and with real purpose and dispatch. I completely agree with our
junior Senator Mr. Sanders who on Monday blasted the idea of a
moratorium—among other things, this state leads the nation in green jobs
per capita. What kind of signal would you be sending to the one set of
businesses really ramping up here? I find it, truly, hard to imagine
that after even the Boehner-led U.S. House of Representatives, as
backward a legislative body as we have ever seen in our nation’s
history, managed to extend incentives for wind, this forward-looking
body will go the other direction. It is important to try and choose
sites wisely, and it would be good public policy to figure out how,
perhaps using the model of Germany and Denmark, to share the financial
benefits of these installations widely among the people who live among
them. That’s simply good law-making, a challenge to which you are
entirely equal.
We do not need them, as I say, on every
ridgeline, but I continue to hope for the day when I see [windmills] on
top of Middlebury Gap, the ridgeline above my home, turning with slow
and stately beauty, the breeze made visible and the future illuminated.
But I recall, last year, when the leading opponents of “big wind” in
Vermont told 7 Days thing like, “They are making climate-change victims
out of the people who live around the projects,” and that it was akin to
“burning villages in order to save them.” Let me say that I think such
statements are incorrect. Climate change victims are, say, the 150,000
displaced from their homes on Monday in chaotic flooding in Mozambique.
Ask a hero like Sue Minter how we’d even begin to deal with 150,000
people--a quarter of Vermont—displaced; it would be beyond even her
skills. Burning villages can actually be found, in places like Tasmania
or for that matter Colorado, where record wildfires in the last year
have taken lives and wrecked communities. So I think we should plan
carefully but quickly to minimize the ecological footprint and maximize
the energy gain. That energy gain is real: every spin of that windmill
blade reduces the need, somewhere, for burning coal or gas or oil; in
New England, first of all, where we still have lots of fossil-powered
electricity being generated. But it also reduces by some small amount
the pressure on a Bangladeshi peasant farmer or a doctor fighting the
spread of dengue fever. We do not need them, as I say, on every
ridgeline, but I continue to hope for the day when I see them on top of
Middlebury Gap, the ridgeline above my home, turning with slow and
stately beauty, the breeze made visible and the future illuminated.
I do give the opponents of windpower one important point. They have
said, correctly, that it is not a silver bullet. And in that they are
absolutely right. We’ve had our magic fuel—coal and gas and oil were
good stuff, extremely useful, and it’s too bad the carbon they release
is destroying our earth. No silver bullet. Maybe, though, enough silver
buckshot, if we are diligent about picking up every piece and deploying
every tool. We have to make sure the steps we take will actually
help—the carbon numbers, say, for industrial biomass don’t look very
promising. But there are literally dozens of other things we could be
doing.
To wit: transportation policy should look towards electrification
just like other sectors. I drove here today in my new Ford C-Max plug-in
hybrid. It got the first 25 miles off its electric motor before the gas
kicked in—for many Vermonters that’s a day’s commute. Since I have
solar panels on the roof of my house, I drove it as far as Middlesex off
the sun. We need incentives to make sure the same minor miracle can
happen in many driveways and parking lots. We also need a continued,
full-on commitment to public transit—the ACTR buses plying our roads in
Addison County are a good daily reminder of the possibility, and of
course everyone on my side of the state eagerly awaits renewed passenger
train service.
But just as it makes little sense to produce clean power for leaky
houses, so it makes little sense to make Vermont more car-dependent. To
borrow a phrase from the governor, building big box stores in farm
fields is a terrible idea—in essence these places are global warming
machines, feeding precisely the sprawl that will doom our larger
efforts. They’re the classic example of short-term thinking, when any
real thought about our future sees a very different Vermont that could
be forming: one that leads the nation in local food, whose intact and
thriving towns and cities are a reminder to others of how pleasant life
could be.
All of that involves offense, which is fun: building things, helping
people. But we also need to play some defense if we’re going to hold off
the staggering rise in temperature, we have to help keep some carbon in
the ground. Vermont can play a powerful role by helping block a
proposed tarsands pipeline through the Northeast Kingdom; it should
undergo every kind of review there possibly could be. I say this as
someone who organized the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years
to block the similar Keystone pipeline; do the job now so we don’t have
to ask you to go to jail later!
But just as it makes little sense to produce
clean power for leaky houses, so it makes little sense to make Vermont
more car-dependent. To borrow a phrase from the governor, building big
box stores in farm fields is a terrible idea—in essence these places are
global warming machines, feeding precisely the sprawl that will doom
our larger efforts.
And while you’re at it, please join the growing number of colleges
and governments divesting their holdings in fossil fuel companies. These
companies are the ones spending the big lobbying bucks to make sure
change never happens in DC and other capitals—please help undermine
their legitimacy by removing the state’s pension funds, the UVM
endowment, and other holdings from their shares. As the mayor of Seattle
said last month, why would they simultaneously spend millions building
new seawalls and invest in the companies making that necessary. Why
would we pay tens of millions to try and recover from Irene and at the
same time support those corporations making the next Irene inevitable?
It’s in the shadow of Irene that I want to end. We’ve already
increased the temperature a degree, and another degree is in the offing.
There’s no going back on that—that’s where we live now. It’s not as
sweet as the world we were born into; our iconic Vermont of long winters
and glorious falls will be badly stressed. But there is no use crying
about it; we must adapt to that which we cannot prevent. And so we need
those strong local farms that offer us some guarantee of sustenance, and
we need strong local communities of the type that came together to
repair the damage of Irene. We need more of our own energy and more of
our own capital—shortening supply lines is a necessary task, and often a
beautiful one. It gives me great pride to come from a state that leads
the world in breweries per capita, to know there are some things we
won’t run short of come what may.
But just as we adapt to that which we can’t prevent, we also have to
prevent that to which we can’t adapt. Temperature increases beyond two
degrees are impossible, unthinkable—and yet they are coming, fast,
unless we help lead the charge against them. I began by reviewing
climate history, but let me end by considering the political future: the
issue on which you, and every other legislator on this planet, will be
judged 50 years hence is: how quickly and how boldly did you move to
address the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. I have confidence
that if any political body is up to the challenge, it is this one.
Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
(Photo: Kimberlyki/cc/flickr)The
stock market ended 2013 at an all-time high — giving stockholders their
biggest annual gain in almost two decades. Most Americans didn’t share
in those gains, however, because most people haven’t been able to save
enough to invest in the stock market. More than two-thirds of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck.
Robert Reich,
one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is
Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public
Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in
three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor
under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten
most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written
thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future; The Work of Nations; Locked in the Cabinet; Supercapitalism; and his newest, Beyond Outrage.
His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio
commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding
editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s
group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at
www.robertreich.org.
