Leading international
climate activist Bill McKibben is a cofounder of 350.org, an
environmental organization that has coordinated thousands of climate
demonstrations worldwide. This week he’s in Houston and speaking
publicly in flagrant violation of the Houston Taboo.
The Houston Taboo is this city’s unwritten rule that we do not openly discuss the relationship between Houston’s oil-based economy and the world ecosystem. Specifically, we don’t talk about Houston’s role in generating climate change and global weirding. This verboten topic is the dinosaur in our living room. If we pretend it’s not there, maybe it will disappear.
McKibben’s appearance at Houston’s Wortham Center on Monday was sponsored by the Progressive Forum and attended by several hundred concerned citizens, including me. It’s been three days since he came to speak, and I’m still waiting for the Houston Chronicle’s write-up of the event ( … speaking of the Houston Taboo).
In my role as a citizen-blogger, I’m making an effort to educate myself on climate issues, and frankly I didn’t expect McKibben to say anything I hadn’t heard or read before. But he surprised me with several insights and shifts of emphasis that are already subtly changing my way of thinking about our current and future climate crisis.
Insight #1: The powerless suffer most. I’ve tended to think of environmentalism as a movement engaging mainly affluent whites in the United States. McKibben made the point, however, that environmental hazards often hit hardest those who are least able to fight back. Every time a refinery or petrochemical plant, an incinerator or garbage dump is located on the blue collar side of town (in our case, east and southeast Houston and its industrial suburbs), its toxic effects are typically felt most severely by the poor and powerless. McKibben cites several efforts now underway in our region to organize grassroots resistance among those most vulnerable to environmental hazards, including neighborhoods that lie along the heavily polluted Houston Ship Channel.
Insight #2: Climate action is erupting all over the world. The relationship between climate change and economic disadvantage is glaring at the global level. Those suffering the greatest pain and hardship from climate change worldwide are people living in poor and developing countries closer to the equator than we are. They have done less than anyone to create anthropogenic or human-generated climate change, consuming far less energy per capita than we do. Yet they suffer most severely from the degrading effects of global warming on health and well-being.
Climate justice is truly a worldwide, transboundary issue, and that’s s why 350.org has coordinated climate actions and supported grassroots movements in 188 countries around the world -- in South Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as in the richer countries of Europe, North America and Oceania. McKibben says that 350.org doesn’t have to create awareness of climate effects in the developing world. Rather, it finds people who are already distressed because they live with its effects every day.
Insight #3: Climate change is accelerating. McKibben observes that extreme climate-related events such as glacial melting are occurring more rapidly than scientists had previously anticipated. On our present course, we may expect more hurricanes and wildfires, more rapid acidifying of the oceans, and more glacial melt as things happen “harder and faster than we thought.”
We are now in what others have called the Great Acceleration or the Anthropocene Epoch as our species’ behavior becomes a major determinant of Earth’s future, and we are rapidly undermining the conditions necessary to maintain human civilizations. McKibben notes, for example, that grain yields are expected to decline 10% with every increase of 1 degree Celsius in Earth’s temperature. Droughts and famines will result in political destabilization, creating dangerous threats to national security and international peace. And the more carbon we dig up and burn, the more hellish the world will become.
Insight #4: There’s good news too. Enough bad news. Here are some hopeful signs. Scientists and engineers working in the fields of renewable energy and battery storage are rising to meet the climate challenge, working relentlessly on multiple fronts to find cleaner, greener methods of energy generation and storage in the race against carbon (which I’m tempted to call the “race for the carbon cure"). The costs of solar, wind and other renewable alternatives are already dropping to levels economically competitive with fossil fuels.
No single energy alternative will be the whole answer. As McKibben has said, we can’t expect a silver bullet to save us, but we can hope for silver buckshot.
The scientific debate over anthropogenic climate change has been over for some time, though it lingers in the public mind. The scientific jury is in. Greenhouse effects in the past two centuries are real and caused primarily by human activity, as reported in numerous studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and other major scientific journals.
Previously, McKibben says, scientists naively thought that if you explained what’s happening to people, they’d naturally act to save themselves and their descendents. Scientists didn’t count on the resistant power of denial, procrastination and the inertia of habit, nor did they anticipate the massive funding of disinformation and political investment by the carbon industry – what McKibben describes as “the richest industry in the history of money” – to block, suppress, and channel public consciousness on the issue of excess CO2 pollution. The environmental movement may never be able to match big carbon's money, but McKibben suggests that it can meet big money with passion, spirit, creativity, and the power of the Internet and social media to organize resistance and to promote alternatives. Fortunately for us, there’s still a remnant of democracy left in a nation that has otherwise become a plutocracy with democratic frosting.
People power still has a fighting chance against the power of carbon money. Small-d democratic resistance efforts are proliferating, such as the Cowboy and Indian Alliance (CIA) that’s riding on horseback through Washington, D.C. this week to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline, designed to bring rivers of tar oil down from western Canada to the Houston area for refining and potential worldwide distribution.
Houston's Responsibility
Progressive Forum president Randall Morton, who referred to Houston earlier this evening as the “carbon capital of the world,” now opens the floor to questions of our speaker. This is our chance to ask about Houston’s role in the carbon industry's efficient production of climate change.
McKibben begins the Q and A on a light note, saying that “I doubt that Houston will divest anytime soon.” He comments, not entirely in jest, that Houston “needs the best cancer treatment facilities in the world” for good reason.
Then he turns even more serious. Oil companies, many of them based in Houston, have access to oil reserves that are “five times as much as we can conceivably burn.” In a famous Rolling Stone article, McKibben contends that carbon companies, as profit-driven enterprises, are powerfully incentivized to burn as many of these carbon reserves as they can get away with, creating short-term profits for their owners even as they inflict tragic long-term consequences on future generations around the world. At what point, I wonder, does this plunder for profit go beyond business-as-usual to become something far more gruesome?
Many of us who depend directly or indirectly on the carbon economy (i.e., nearly all of us) often fear to speak out. But McKibben sees two groups in particular that can rise up – the young and the old. The young, because their idealism is not yet dead and their futures are more in flux, can organize on university campuses and elsewhere to challenge the long-term sustainability of a carbon economy, which menaces their own futures and the futures of their future children.
Older folks, such as boomer retirees like myself, are discovering newfound freedom to speak out and to act. We can even choose, if we feel called to do so, to stand in front of coal trains (McKibben shows an image of such an event) in acts of civil disobedience. My mind goes immediately to the iconic picture of the lone protester in Tiananmen Square, standing before the oncoming tank.
“Past a certain age,” McKibbon quips, “what can they do” to stop you? Some of the bravest protesters he’s met were born when Roosevelt and Truman were President, and some remember World War II all too well. They know that sometimes the future hangs in the balance and depends on how we choose to respond in history-defining moments like this one.
The climate challenge, McKibben says, is comparable to the fight against fascism, against segregation and apartheid. Every time in history has its fight. This is our time, he says. This is our fight.
Asked how Houston should respond to the current crisis, McKibben may surprise some with his answer. He doesn’t recommend what I call “carbon guilt.” He says “there’s no shame in having built a city on oil and gas. Until 20 years we didn’t know” just how dangerous greenhouse gasses really are. The shame is in continuing on this tragic course.
His advice to Houston: “Let’s collect our winnings from this casino, walk out, and put our money on something else.” Houston is filled with talented people, including plenty of smart scientists, engineers, and managers. Why not invest big in cleaner industries such as renewable energy, and put these good minds to work on them. Then Houston might truly become the Energy City it claims to be, and not just the carbon city it is.
McKibben’s career advice to young people: The problems are so big that no matter what you’re good at, you will have a role to play – in science, engineering, art and the many other ways of contributing to civilization. Meanwhile, “what you do after hours in your job is way more important than what you do for a living.”
And remember this: “It can be enormous fun to be engaged in some useful struggle. You’ve got to do the thing that’s in your time. This is just as real and beautiful as the civil rights movement.”
Bill McKinnon’s unwelcome address to the Houston community has gone unreported by the Houston Chronicle as of this writing, in keeping with the strictures of the Houston Taboo. Most of our citizens will remain unaware of McKibbin’s message, and of the world movement he leads.
Meanwhile, our next hurricane season is approaching.
-- originally posted in Danagram
For more on the Houston Taboo, see "The Dinosaur in Houston's Living Room"
The Houston Taboo is this city’s unwritten rule that we do not openly discuss the relationship between Houston’s oil-based economy and the world ecosystem. Specifically, we don’t talk about Houston’s role in generating climate change and global weirding. This verboten topic is the dinosaur in our living room. If we pretend it’s not there, maybe it will disappear.
McKibben’s appearance at Houston’s Wortham Center on Monday was sponsored by the Progressive Forum and attended by several hundred concerned citizens, including me. It’s been three days since he came to speak, and I’m still waiting for the Houston Chronicle’s write-up of the event ( … speaking of the Houston Taboo).
In my role as a citizen-blogger, I’m making an effort to educate myself on climate issues, and frankly I didn’t expect McKibben to say anything I hadn’t heard or read before. But he surprised me with several insights and shifts of emphasis that are already subtly changing my way of thinking about our current and future climate crisis.
Insight #1: The powerless suffer most. I’ve tended to think of environmentalism as a movement engaging mainly affluent whites in the United States. McKibben made the point, however, that environmental hazards often hit hardest those who are least able to fight back. Every time a refinery or petrochemical plant, an incinerator or garbage dump is located on the blue collar side of town (in our case, east and southeast Houston and its industrial suburbs), its toxic effects are typically felt most severely by the poor and powerless. McKibben cites several efforts now underway in our region to organize grassroots resistance among those most vulnerable to environmental hazards, including neighborhoods that lie along the heavily polluted Houston Ship Channel.
Insight #2: Climate action is erupting all over the world. The relationship between climate change and economic disadvantage is glaring at the global level. Those suffering the greatest pain and hardship from climate change worldwide are people living in poor and developing countries closer to the equator than we are. They have done less than anyone to create anthropogenic or human-generated climate change, consuming far less energy per capita than we do. Yet they suffer most severely from the degrading effects of global warming on health and well-being.
Climate justice is truly a worldwide, transboundary issue, and that’s s why 350.org has coordinated climate actions and supported grassroots movements in 188 countries around the world -- in South Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as in the richer countries of Europe, North America and Oceania. McKibben says that 350.org doesn’t have to create awareness of climate effects in the developing world. Rather, it finds people who are already distressed because they live with its effects every day.
Insight #3: Climate change is accelerating. McKibben observes that extreme climate-related events such as glacial melting are occurring more rapidly than scientists had previously anticipated. On our present course, we may expect more hurricanes and wildfires, more rapid acidifying of the oceans, and more glacial melt as things happen “harder and faster than we thought.”
We are now in what others have called the Great Acceleration or the Anthropocene Epoch as our species’ behavior becomes a major determinant of Earth’s future, and we are rapidly undermining the conditions necessary to maintain human civilizations. McKibben notes, for example, that grain yields are expected to decline 10% with every increase of 1 degree Celsius in Earth’s temperature. Droughts and famines will result in political destabilization, creating dangerous threats to national security and international peace. And the more carbon we dig up and burn, the more hellish the world will become.
Insight #4: There’s good news too. Enough bad news. Here are some hopeful signs. Scientists and engineers working in the fields of renewable energy and battery storage are rising to meet the climate challenge, working relentlessly on multiple fronts to find cleaner, greener methods of energy generation and storage in the race against carbon (which I’m tempted to call the “race for the carbon cure"). The costs of solar, wind and other renewable alternatives are already dropping to levels economically competitive with fossil fuels.
No single energy alternative will be the whole answer. As McKibben has said, we can’t expect a silver bullet to save us, but we can hope for silver buckshot.
The scientific debate over anthropogenic climate change has been over for some time, though it lingers in the public mind. The scientific jury is in. Greenhouse effects in the past two centuries are real and caused primarily by human activity, as reported in numerous studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and other major scientific journals.
Previously, McKibben says, scientists naively thought that if you explained what’s happening to people, they’d naturally act to save themselves and their descendents. Scientists didn’t count on the resistant power of denial, procrastination and the inertia of habit, nor did they anticipate the massive funding of disinformation and political investment by the carbon industry – what McKibben describes as “the richest industry in the history of money” – to block, suppress, and channel public consciousness on the issue of excess CO2 pollution. The environmental movement may never be able to match big carbon's money, but McKibben suggests that it can meet big money with passion, spirit, creativity, and the power of the Internet and social media to organize resistance and to promote alternatives. Fortunately for us, there’s still a remnant of democracy left in a nation that has otherwise become a plutocracy with democratic frosting.
People power still has a fighting chance against the power of carbon money. Small-d democratic resistance efforts are proliferating, such as the Cowboy and Indian Alliance (CIA) that’s riding on horseback through Washington, D.C. this week to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline, designed to bring rivers of tar oil down from western Canada to the Houston area for refining and potential worldwide distribution.
Houston's Responsibility
Progressive Forum president Randall Morton, who referred to Houston earlier this evening as the “carbon capital of the world,” now opens the floor to questions of our speaker. This is our chance to ask about Houston’s role in the carbon industry's efficient production of climate change.
McKibben begins the Q and A on a light note, saying that “I doubt that Houston will divest anytime soon.” He comments, not entirely in jest, that Houston “needs the best cancer treatment facilities in the world” for good reason.
Then he turns even more serious. Oil companies, many of them based in Houston, have access to oil reserves that are “five times as much as we can conceivably burn.” In a famous Rolling Stone article, McKibben contends that carbon companies, as profit-driven enterprises, are powerfully incentivized to burn as many of these carbon reserves as they can get away with, creating short-term profits for their owners even as they inflict tragic long-term consequences on future generations around the world. At what point, I wonder, does this plunder for profit go beyond business-as-usual to become something far more gruesome?
Many of us who depend directly or indirectly on the carbon economy (i.e., nearly all of us) often fear to speak out. But McKibben sees two groups in particular that can rise up – the young and the old. The young, because their idealism is not yet dead and their futures are more in flux, can organize on university campuses and elsewhere to challenge the long-term sustainability of a carbon economy, which menaces their own futures and the futures of their future children.
Older folks, such as boomer retirees like myself, are discovering newfound freedom to speak out and to act. We can even choose, if we feel called to do so, to stand in front of coal trains (McKibben shows an image of such an event) in acts of civil disobedience. My mind goes immediately to the iconic picture of the lone protester in Tiananmen Square, standing before the oncoming tank.
“Past a certain age,” McKibbon quips, “what can they do” to stop you? Some of the bravest protesters he’s met were born when Roosevelt and Truman were President, and some remember World War II all too well. They know that sometimes the future hangs in the balance and depends on how we choose to respond in history-defining moments like this one.
The climate challenge, McKibben says, is comparable to the fight against fascism, against segregation and apartheid. Every time in history has its fight. This is our time, he says. This is our fight.
Asked how Houston should respond to the current crisis, McKibben may surprise some with his answer. He doesn’t recommend what I call “carbon guilt.” He says “there’s no shame in having built a city on oil and gas. Until 20 years we didn’t know” just how dangerous greenhouse gasses really are. The shame is in continuing on this tragic course.
His advice to Houston: “Let’s collect our winnings from this casino, walk out, and put our money on something else.” Houston is filled with talented people, including plenty of smart scientists, engineers, and managers. Why not invest big in cleaner industries such as renewable energy, and put these good minds to work on them. Then Houston might truly become the Energy City it claims to be, and not just the carbon city it is.
McKibben’s career advice to young people: The problems are so big that no matter what you’re good at, you will have a role to play – in science, engineering, art and the many other ways of contributing to civilization. Meanwhile, “what you do after hours in your job is way more important than what you do for a living.”
And remember this: “It can be enormous fun to be engaged in some useful struggle. You’ve got to do the thing that’s in your time. This is just as real and beautiful as the civil rights movement.”
Bill McKinnon’s unwelcome address to the Houston community has gone unreported by the Houston Chronicle as of this writing, in keeping with the strictures of the Houston Taboo. Most of our citizens will remain unaware of McKibbin’s message, and of the world movement he leads.
Meanwhile, our next hurricane season is approaching.
-- originally posted in Danagram
For more on the Houston Taboo, see "The Dinosaur in Houston's Living Room"
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