McKibben: Earth is over

Bill McKibben, author of the just-released book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is doing a lot of interviews, and it makes for interesting reading, to say the least. One of the best interviews I saw with him appeared on Salon, “Eaarth”: Earth is over:

What is “Eaarth”?

The meaning behind the title is that we really have created a new planet. Not entirely new. It looks more or less like the one we were born into; the same physical laws operate it. But it’s substantially different. There’s 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere than there was 50 years ago, much less ice at the top of the Earth, et cetera. Calling it “Eaarth,” an admittedly weird word, is a way of calling people’s attention to the fact that the changes that have already happened are large enough that if you were visiting our planet in a spaceship, this place would look really different from the outside than it did just decades ago.

What’s the biggest observable difference?

The most visible change is what’s happening to ice around the world. But probably the most important is what’s happening to liquid water. Warm air holds a lot more water vapor than cold, so you get a lot more evaporation in dry areas, and hence more drought. Even easier to measure, and more troubling, is the fact that what goes up must come down, and what’s coming down are these intense precipitation events.

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Forty-four percent of Americans still don’t believe global warming is manmade. What’s the best way to convince them?

Most accounts terrifically underplay what’s actually going on already. But in my life as an organizer, we’ve been very successful without trying to scare people. Last fall, my organization 350.org organized 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”

And people were organizing around a pretty obscure scientific data point, a parts-per-million concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. The lesson we took is that people are capable of understanding the science. It’s not harder than understanding that if your cholesterol gets too high, you’re going to have a heart attack. If the doctor says your cholesterol is too high, your first instinct isn’t to demand a rundown of how the lipid system works. You say, “OK, what do we do?”

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Thomas Friedman and others recommend a technologically advanced “green growth” project — big windmills throughout the Midwest, solar arrays in the Arizona desert, hybrid cars — to kick our addiction to fossil fuel. Won’t that work?

We eventually run into limits to further growth on the planet. All the things Tom Friedman would like to do are good things. They just cost an immense amount of money and an immense amount of resources. We can do some of them. We’d be very smart to think less about grand, continent-spanning schemes, and wise to think more about localized and somewhat humble versions of these same things. Nuclear power plants, for example, are off-the-charts expensive, because they’re highly centralized and dangerous. They’re the engineering example of too big to fail. By contrast, if the solar panel on my roof fails, I have to fix it, but it doesn’t destroy the electric grid, or release dangerous solar particles into the atmosphere.

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So what’s the best way to proceed?

First we need to reach an agreement capping our carbon emissions, and then help finance the developing world to skip the fossil fuel step and develop in different ways. Places like South Africa and Bangladesh haven’t yet gone through the development cycle that makes them rich, and they’re being told, “That’s not on offer anymore.” At the moment, solar panels are more expensive than coal and will be for a while. Still, we’re going to have to provide these countries with a better alternative, and the resources to follow it, if we want to act in a way that could be described as moral.

As for the nuts-and-bolts engineering, over the long run, I’d recommend a combination of conservation; harnessing wind and sun, from both distant and nearby sources; and lifestyle changes. There’s no good reason the Jersey Turnpike should be crowded with cars, not in a dense area easily served by better transit. In the transition, we’ll be using a lot of natural gas to make electricity, would be my guess.

Please click through and read it all.

I have ordered the book, since the publisher failed to send me the requested review copy, and I will put all other reading on hold and get to Eaarth as soon as it arrives. I might camp out on the front lawn, so I can meet the mail man before he gets the package into the box.

Let me comment on a few things, some directly related to what McKibben is saying in interviews, some not:

• I’m completely on board with his view that we’ve fundamentally changed the world. This is exactly the idea I’ve been pushing for quite some time by saying we’re now in the Metricene, when we’re forced by our past actions to lead “measured lives on a managed planet”. The fiction that we can safely treat the planet as if it were infinite is becoming ever more obvious to be just that–fiction–and we’re slowing coming to terms with the vast and deeply unsettling implications of that mass epiphany. As we uncover yet more surprises about how the Earth System works, things like melting that happens quicker and in more places than expected, early signs that there could be large-scale methane releases ramping up from the permafrost, etc., this new world view becomes all the more alarming.
• I agree completely with his emphasis on ice and water. As I’ve said perhaps Avogadro’s Number of times on this site, water will be the primary vector for the impacts of climate change on human beings.
• I’m not as optimistic as McKibben about things like the 350.org demonstrations. What did they change? What will continued acts like that change? I’ve felt for some time that the only way to make a demonstration really accomplish anything would be to organize so many people that they could essentially gridlock Washington DC and every state capital in the US on the same day. And that would take millions, possibly tens of millions, of people.
• I have no strong opinion on the issue of the scale of solutions. I’m highly skeptical of the trend toward hyper-local approaches, as I think that’s over simplifying the matter. McKibben makes a good point about the decentralization of power generation. I’ve been talking about “our D and D” electricity future here for six years. (D and D being diversified and decentralized.) We’re also headed for a much more diversified (or less homogeneous, if you prefer) mix of technologies in transportation; solutions that work well for a car used for commuting and local errands won’t make sense for long-haul trucks, for example.
• As for what makes the most sense, as many people have said, I think the answer is to make the biggest effort can afford to deploy existing technologies as well as more creative public policies, like a feebate system for cars based on CO2 emissions or fuel consumption/mile.[2]
• I will be quite interested to see exactly how blunt McKibben is in Eaarth about the seriousness of our situation and what’s needed to save ourselves from the worst of the potential climate impacts. In one interview he did with the CBC, he mentioned the concept of exceeding the limits to growth and the work that’s been done on that front since the late 1960’s. I’ve been wondering who would pick up the torch now that there will be no 40-year update to Limits to Growth[3], and I could think of much worse alternatives than McKibben.

[1] I know “Metricene” is a clunky, hyper-scientific name for the concept, and it generally sucks. I struggled to come up with something better, consulted with friends who follow this stuff, and that’s the best I could manage. In fairness, I have to say that I really don’t like “Eaarth”, either. McKibben says you have to “channel your inner Schwartzenegger” to pronounce it properly, which tells you right there it’s a bad name. His idea of renaming the planet to make the point is high concept and a good one, I think, but the specific name he picked does nothing for me. Given McKibben’s stature in the field, I fear we’re stuck with “Eaarth” and everyone who uses it choosing between giving up entirely and pronouncing it “Earth” or doing their really bad impersonation of Schwartzenegger.

[2] For those new to the concept: Under a feebate system you pick a point, say 35 MPG, and create a schedule using that as the “pivot point”. When someone buys a new vehicle that gets less than 35 MPG, they have to pay an additional fee determined by the exact mileage. When someone buys a car that gets more than 35 MPG, they get a rebate, again determined by the vehicles exact fuel efficiency. The money from the fees pays the rebates, of course, and the goal is to provide a sizable incentive to get people to buy much more fuel efficient vehicles, as well as remain revenue neutral (and therefore more politically palatable).

[3] I was in touch with the publisher and one of the original authors recently, and was told there will be no 40-year update. The 30-year update, published in 2004(?) will be the last. I think this is a terrible loss, as that book managed to condense an astonishing amount of information into one volume, as well as explain in some detail how critical parts of our world really work.

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