CLIMATE CRUNCH TIME / PROJECT SYNDICATE

Climate Crunch Time

In the 50 years since the first Earth Day, the environmental movement has matured and developed highly sophisticated methods for driving change. But, given the unprecedented scale of the climate crisis, the question is not whether activism is effective, but whether we still have time to save ourselves.

Elmira Bayrasli, Bill McKibben

Since 1880, the average global surface temperature has risen by about 1°C, or 1.8°F. 

Much of that increase has happened in the last 50 years, and the consequences are already becoming apparent. Forest fires have become larger and more severe, the polar ice caps are melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s, and extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts are occurring with greater frequency and intensity.

As the evidence of the looming climate crisis has mounted, it has reinvigorated the environmental movement that started in the 1970s, with young people increasingly leading the way. In August 2018, a then-15-year-old Greta Thunberg staged her first climate strike in front of the Swedish parliament. 

Just over a year later, millions of young people in 150 countries joined her for a worldwide climate strike. The activists’ demands are straightforward but potent: eliminate greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, shift to renewable energy, and ensure a sustainable future. Will our leaders listen?

Bill McKibben is a long-time climate activist; a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and other publications; and a co-founder of 350.org. On July 8, he spoke with Elmira Bayrasli about climate activism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

EARTH DAY, EVERY DAY

Elmira Bayrasli: This past April, the world celebrated its 50th Earth Day. What were environmental activists fighting for back in 1970, and how have their goals changed since then?

Bill McKibben: Early environmentalism was largely a response to problems that were incredibly visible. The air was brown, and you could chew it. The rivers and streams were yellow and orange, and you could light them on fire. There had just been a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, off the California coast, and on and on. So, it wasn’t completely surprising that people were ready to rally.

The first Earth Day in the US had about 20 million people – one-tenth of the population at the time – out in the street. It may well have been the largest single day of political activity in the country’s history, and that was really important. Earth Day didn’t just get people out in the streets; they won. America soon passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other measures that made the air far more breathable and the water far more swimmable and drinkable.

The movement’s initial goals have, to a very large degree, been met, and all of us are the beneficiaries. Now, we’ve moved on to a deeper, more difficult set of environmental problems that can’t be seen quite as plainly.

EB: Yet today’s protests, which have spread even farther around the world, have yet to deliver in terms of reducing GHG emissions.

BM: Today’s targets are much more difficult, and the reason has a lot to do with the science. Take, as an example, one of the pollutants that people were most concerned about on that first Earth Day: carbon monoxide – carbon with an oxygen atom. It comes out of a tailpipe. It kills you if you breathe it. But you can take care of it pretty easily. Stick a catalytic converter on the back of the car and that small amount of carbon monoxide that was in the exhaust stream just disappears.

Today, we’re dealing with a different kind of pollutant: carbon dioxide – carbon with two oxygen atoms. Instead of being a trace gas that you can eliminate with an exhaust filter, CO2 is what happens when you burn something.

There’s no filter that can catch it. You must either stop driving a car and take a bus or a bike instead, or drive an electric car that you can run with renewable energy. 

So, it’s no wonder that this is far more difficult terrain. The fossil-fuel industry’s life is on the line, and they have fought with extraordinary amounts of money to keep change from happening.

EB: Many commentators have pointed out that environmental issues intersect with inequality. Hurricane Katrina comes to mind, because it showed there to be a strong connection between climate risk and social justice. The poorest in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, and they have long lived in the city’s most vulnerable areas. As climate change increases the frequency of Hurricane Katrina-type events, how has the growing awareness of its disproportionate impact on the world’s poorest shaped the environmental agenda?

BM: The first, most basic thing to realize about climate change is its incredible unfairness. Those who contributed the least to it suffer first and are the hardest hit by it. That’s now widely understood – enough so that the climate movement is really morphing into the climate justice movement. The people who are most at risk are also the people doing most of the leading on these questions.

EB: In the US and elsewhere around the world, there has been a reckoning this summer over police violence and other forms of racial injustice. Like the environmental movement, today’s demonstrations emanated from the grassroots. How complimentary are the two movements, and what kind of collaboration can we expect to see between them?

BM: You’re seeing a lot of collaboration, which is terrific, because in the end, all of these questions are about justice. We can’t just take an unjust world that runs on coal and replace it with an unjust world that runs on solar. We should take this opportunity to make the world a better place – and racial and economic equality are a huge part of that.

The phrase of the summer – owing, sadly, to the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer – is “I can’t breathe.” People can’t breathe for all kinds of reasons: because a policeman is kneeling on their neck; because there’s a coal-fired power plant in their neighborhood; because the temperature has just become too hot; because wildfires are burning nearby.

The people paying the price for racial, economic, and climate injustices are predominantly the same people who have borne the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. The poorest and most vulnerable people – disproportionately people of color – are at the forefront of all these fights.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

EB: The environmental movement has passed many milestones over the last 50 years, but only in the last few years has public opinion really shifted in favor of climate action. The science hasn’t really changed, so why did it take so long to get here?

BM: We know the answer to that question now, and we know it from really great investigative reporting. I wrote the first book about climate change – The End of Nature, which came out in 1989. It turns out that while I was working on it, the fossil-fuel companies were doing their own work and coming to understand exactly how dangerous global warming was.

The record is very, very clear. Companies like Exxon put good scientists on this, those scientists gave highly accurate forecasts of what was coming, and those forecasts were believed. Exxon started building all its drilling rigs to compensate for the rise in sea levels, because they knew what was coming. What they did not do was tell the rest of us.

Instead, Exxon and its peers invested billions of dollars in a massive disinformation campaign that kept us locked in a completely phony debate about whether or not climate change was real. Both sides in this debate knew the answers from the beginning. But one of them was willing to lie in order to protect its business model. It may turn out to be the most consequential lie in human history, because it cost us 30 years that we could have been at work on this existential problem.

Now, finally, thanks to enormous efforts by activists to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry in a thousand ways – through divestment campaigns, stopping pipelines, going after their financing – the oil companies’ position has been weakened enough that they can no longer completely block rational action on climate change. Their ability to dominate public sentiment has evaporated. People see forest fire after forest fire, heat wave after heat wave. In the end, who are you going to believe: Exxon advertisements or your own lying eyes?

EB: I want to focus on the financial angle. In a column for the New Yorker last year, you suggested that a powerful way to dramatically alter the landscape for companies like Exxon is take away their credit card by divesting from fossil fuels, especially in the domains of banking, asset management, and insurance. What progress is being made on this front?

BM: Yes, we’ve mounted this huge divestment campaign to get institutions to sell their shares in the fossil-fuel industry. Over the last decade, that’s become by far the biggest financial campaign of its kind in history. I think, as of today, we’re at $14 trillion divested – universities and pension funds and churches have sold their fossil-fuel stock. Within the last few months, both the Pope and the Queen have joined in this effort. I don’t even know who’s left. I guess we still need Beyoncé – but beyond that, it’s gone well.

This has had a real effect. It’s weakened the fossil-fuel industry in big ways, which they’ve admitted. Shell, in its annual report last year, said divestment is becoming a material risk to its business. Thank heavens, because Shell’s business poses material risks to the planet.

But the next step is, as you say, an attack on the people who supply the money to the fossil-fuel industry – the cash pipeline that keeps them going. A broad coalition of groups have formed an effort called StopTheMoneyPipeline.com, which has been in operation for about eight months and has had much success. 

JPMorgan Chase got rid of its lead director because of his ties to the oil industry. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, announced that it will make climate change a central part of every investment decision.

This is happening because it’s clear that the fossil-fuel industry’s finances are not good. They’re being challenged every day by sun and wind, which are now the cheapest ways to supply the same product – energy – that oil and gas companies produce.

The same institutions are also under incredible pressure from activists. If you’re a bank, you can make some money lending to oil companies. But it’s not the core of your business. It’s maybe 5-6% of your business, and if it becomes more trouble than it’s worth, you might back away.

EB: In getting more organizations to divest from fossil fuels, how important are new greener accounting standards, financial disclosures, and other elements of sustainable finance?

BM: Those things are really important, because what we measure is what we do. 

However, there’s a tendency for green accounting standards and this sort of thing to turn into a “greenwash,” or to slow everything down. We don’t have time for that. At this point, it’s really important for institutions just to break ties with the fossil-fuel industry: to say, “You are an industry of the past that is trying to wreck the future, and we want nothing to do with you.”

As for other industries, it makes sense to be looking hard at how we make these activities – all of the things we need to do every day to keep the world moving, to grow food, and so forth – as green as possible. Standards are a huge part of that. As I say, what we measure tends to be what we do.

EB: Climate activists also have been using Bloomberg Terminals to monitor the activities of specific firms and industries. Where did that idea come from?

BM: That was the wonderful people at the Rainforest Action Network. About a decade ago, they bought a Bloomberg box so they could keep track of the financial world. Everybody else uses these to watch what banks are doing, who’s lending the most to whom, and so forth. 

Of course, RAN was interested for the opposite reason. They were tracking the worst banks in the world, the ones who were financing our destruction. That led to a series of annual “fossil fuel finance reports,” Banking on Climate Change, which revealed that JPMorgan Chase has provided a quarter-trillion dollars of financing to the fossil-fuel industry just in the years since the 2015 Paris climate accords.

We’re talking about climate denial on the largest and most expensive possible scale. But the people at RAN and at groups like Carbon Tracker are doing a good job of keeping people well apprised of who’s spending what. The intelligence capabilities of the environmental movement are much better than they used to be.

DIRTY HANDS

EB: Of course, government also has a big role to play in climate solutions. So, what about politicians’ often-cozy relationships with the fossil-fuel industry? How do we change that?

BM: That’s the key question. If you look at the US, the fossil-fuel industry basically purchased one of our two main political parties about 15 years ago, and left the other one terrified. That’s why there’s been no real climate action from Congress. 

The only solution is to try making it more painful for politicians to take money from the industry. None of these politicians are in bed with the oil industry because they love the oil industry. They’re there because the oil industry is powerful and can deliver goodies to them. If we make the industry less powerful and more politically toxic, that will shift the dynamic.

EB: That means the climate movement needs to focus not only on the science, but also on the lobbying and the corporate influence that these companies have in Washington, DC.

BM: Absolutely. People are working on all of those things. There’s an inside game and an outside game in everything, and there are a lot of good lobbyists. The environmental movement has volunteers trying to counter the power of the corporate lobbies, but to succeed, they need a big movement behind them. You can’t dispense with people in the streets.

EB: This November, the US will have one of the most consequential elections, arguably, in modern history. If Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump, what should his first 100 days of climate policymaking look like?

BM: I think he’s got a lot of good people beginning to work on this. What it should look like is something like the Green New Deal. There are things he can do on day one without congressional authorization, and he’s already said he’ll do some of them – for example, ending new permits for drilling and mining on public lands in the US. 

That’s important, because US public lands are the fourth- or fifth-biggest source of the country’s carbon emissions. He can do that by himself.

But then he’ll need to work with Congress to achieve the long list of things we should have been doing for the last three decades. That means figuring out how to carry out massive retrofitting of buildings, how to overhaul transportation systems, and how to work with farmers to reduce the carbon impact from agriculture. 

There’s a pretty good programmatic agenda now emerging. The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis – which was set up after the Sunrise Movement and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez camped out in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand action – has just produced a powerful 500-page document that contains a lot of these ideas.

BUILDING BACK GREEN

EB: Then there is the rest of the world. China and many European countries are taking advantage of large-scale stimulus spending in response to the COVID-19 crisis by investing in clean-energy technologies. And many governments are attaching climate-related conditions to industry bailouts. What are your hopes for a green recovery at the global level?

BM: It will depend on the degree to which we do those things you mention. This is the last great opportunity we’re going to get, I think. The world will have to spend a ton of money to pull itself out of the current economic hole, and that money might as well be spent in ways that would also prevent the worst of the even bigger crisis that’s coming at us.

Countries that have realized this are beginning to take smart steps. You can see it at the national level in budgets, and you can even see it at the city level, where municipal leaders are saying, “You know what, we’re going to put a lot of bike lanes out there because we want our city to be different coming out of this.” Maybe we’ll see that in the US after November.

EB: One notable consequence of the pandemic is falling energy prices. And a number of major pipeline projects have been stymied both by protests and by deteriorating economic conditions. To what extent will the pandemic and its economic fallout force oil and gas companies to set aside new projects as well?

BM: The pandemic is putting pressure on the oil industry, and I think the trend is speeding up to the point where we will go past “peak oil.” In fact, it’s possible we already have. The financial future for the oil industry is bad.

Of course, we need to move quickly now. We can’t have a 40-year process of oil and gas companies dragging out their demise. It’s got to be much swifter than that to catch up with the physics of climate change. The pandemic did reduce emissions for a while when we locked down the economy, and that was a good reminder that individual habits play a role in all of this. We should be mindful of the fact that we were able to make big changes pretty quickly.

But the drop may not have been as sharp as some people expected. It was maybe a 15% reduction at its peak, which is a reminder of how much our emissions are hardwired into the system. We’ll have to go into the guts of that system, pull out the oil and gas, and replace it with sun and wind and a lot of insulation. Between that and some changes in habits, we can make the math work if we really, really go after it.

EB: That’s the big question, then. How likely is it that the world will pass the “timed test” that is climate change?

BM: Well, we’re not going to prevent climate change, because it’s already too late for that. 

The question now is whether we can stop it short of the point at which it cuts civilizations off at their knees. That really is, as you say, a timed test, and that’s the thing that makes it hard.

We have only about ten years of real leverage left. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in October of 2018 that if we haven’t fundamentally transformed our energy system by 2030 – by which they meant cutting emissions in half – the chances of meeting the Paris climate targets would be nil.

And the Paris targets aren’t even that great. Even short of those targets, the temperature increases we’ve seen already are wreaking havoc around the planet.

We won’t escape undamaged and untraumatized. The question at this point is how bad it will be; the answer depends mostly on how fast we work. In the last ten years, engineers have done a spectacular job at bringing down the cost of solar and wind power. Renewables are now the cheapest form of power on Earth, which means that if we wanted to move fast, we could.

EB: That makes me wonder whether we should be so dependent on national governments in the first place. When the Trump administration announced that it would withdraw from the Paris agreement, many US cities said they would still adhere to it. Should we be approaching climate activism on a much more local level?

BM: I’m afraid we need to do it on every possible level – they don’t call it global warming for nothing. It would be easiest to do it at the international level, but the Paris accords were the closest we ever came to that. The task is so large that you have to have national governments involved.

But, yes, cities and towns and suburbs are where the actual changes are going to play out. Those are places to apply pressure, because the oil industry is less likely to have control over your local city council than over your member of Congress.

EB: Let’s conclude by reflecting on your 30 years fighting the fossil-fuel industry, the politicians who defend it, and the bankers who fund it. What lessons do you think the environmental movement’s future leaders should take to heart?

BM: Oh, I don’t know if they need any advice from me. The young people who are coming up in this work are doing an amazing job. It took us too long to realize that it wasn’t an argument about data and reason. It’s about money and power. And that’s what we’ve been engaged in this last decade or so.

It’s starting to bear fruit, but we’re going to have to keep it up. The fossil-fuel industry is enormously powerful, and now it’s cornered and desperate. In some ways, it’s probably more dangerous than ever.

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in environmental sciences at Middlebury College and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a co-founder of 350.org.