Bill McKibben: Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing

The technology exists to combat climate change – what will it take to get our leaders to act?

If we don't win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win.  That's the core truth about global warming.  It's what makes it different from every other problem our political systems have faced.  I wrote the first book for a general audience about climate change in 1989 – back when one had to search for examples to help people understand what the "greenhouse effect" would feel like.  We knew it was coming, but not how fast or how hard.  And because no one wanted to overestimate – because scientists by their nature are conservative – each of the changes we've observed has taken us somewhat by surprise.  The surreal keeps becoming the commonplace:  For instance, after Hurricane Harvey set a record for American rainstorms, and Hurricane Irma set a record for sustained wind speeds, and Hurricane Maria knocked Puerto Rico back a quarter-century, something even weirder happened.  Hurricane Ophelia formed much farther to the east than any hurricane on record, and proceeded to blow past Southern Europe (whipping up winds that fanned record forest fires in Portugal) before crashing into Ireland.  Along the way, it produced an artifact for our age:  The warning chart that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency issued shows Ophelia ending in a straight line at 60 degrees north latitude, because the computer program never imagined you'd see a hurricane up there.  "When you set up a grid, you define boundaries of that grid," a slightly red-faced NOAA programmer explained.  "That's a pretty unusual place to have a tropical cyclone."  The agency, he added, might have to "revisit" its mapping software.

In fact, that's the problem with climate change.  It won't stand still.  Health care is a grave problem in the U.S. right now too, one that Donald Trump seems set on making steadily worse.  If his administration manages to defund Obamacare, millions of people will suffer.  But if, in three years' time, some new administration takes over with a different resolve, it won't have become exponentially harder to deal with our health care issues.  That suffering in the interim wouldn't have changed the fundamental equation.  But with global warming, the fundamental equation is precisely what's shifting.  And the remarkable changes we've seen so far – the thawed Arctic that makes the Earth look profoundly different from outer space; the planet's seawater turning 30 percent more acidic – are just the beginning.  "We're inching ever closer to committing to the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will guarantee 20 feet of sea-level rise," says Penn State's Michael Mann, one of the planet's foremost climatologists.  "We don't know where the ice-sheet collapse tipping point is, but we are dangerously close."  The latest models show that with very rapid cuts in emissions, Antarctic ice might remain largely intact for centuries; without them, we might see 11 feet of sea-level rise by century's end, enough to wipe cities like Shanghai and Mumbai "off the map."

There are plenty of tipping points like this:  The Amazon, for instance, appears to be drying out and starting to burn as temperatures rise and drought deepens, and without a giant rainforest in South America, the world would function very differently.  In the North Atlantic, says Mann, "we're ahead of schedule with the slowdown and potential collapse" of the giant conveyor belt that circulates warm water toward the North Pole, keeping Western Europe temperate.  It's tipping points like these that make climate change such a distinct problem:  If we don't act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble.  We'll simply move into a dramatically different climate regime, and on to a planet abruptly and disastrously altered from the one that underwrote the rise of human civilization.  "Every bit of additional warming at this point is perilous," says Mann.

Another way of saying this:  By 2075 the world will be powered by solar panels and windmills – free energy is a hard business proposition to beat.  But on current trajectories, they'll light up a busted planet.  The decisions we make in 2075 won't matter; indeed, the decisions we make in 2025 will matter much less than the ones we make in the next few years.  The leverage is now. 
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And so the only real question is, how do we suddenly make it happen fast?  That's where politics comes in.  I said earlier that Trump wasn't the whole problem – in fact, it's just possible that in his know-nothing recklessness, he has upset the ever-so-patient apple cart.  You could almost see the oil companies wincing when Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement – for them, the agreement was a pathway to slow and managed change.  The promises it contained didn't keep the planet from overheating – indeed, even if everyone had kept them, the Earth would still have gotten 3.5 degrees Celsius hotter, enough to collapse every ecosystem you'd like to name.  The accords did ensure that we'd still be burning significant amounts of hydrocarbons by 2050, and that the Exxons of the world would be able to recover most of the reserves they've so carefully mapped and explored.

But now some of those bets are off.  Around the rest of the world, most nations rejected Trump's pullout with diplomatically expressed rage.  "To everyone for whom the future of our planet is important, I say let's continue going down this path," said Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.  (The exception: petro baron Vladimir Putin, whose official remarks concluded, "Don't worry, be happy.")  In this country, the polling showed that almost nothing Trump had done was less popular.  Perhaps, if Trump continues to sink, this particular piece of nonsense will sink with him.
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The best chance of forcing the future, of course, lies with movements – with people gathering in large enough numbers to concentrate the minds of CEOs and presidential candidates.  Here, too, Trump seems to be upping the ante – nearly a quarter million Americans marched on D.C. for climate action in April, the largest such demonstration in Washington's history.  That activism keeps ramping up:  At 350.org, we're rolling out a vast Fossil Free campaign across the globe this winter, joining organizations like the Sierra Club to pressure governments to sign up for 100 percent renewable energy, blocking new pipelines and frack wells as fast as the industry can propose them, and calling out the banks and hedge funds that underwrite the past.  It's working – just in the last few weeks Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, announced plans to divest from fossil fuels, and the Nebraska Public Service Commission threw yet more roadblocks in front of the Keystone pipeline.

But the question is, is it working fast enough?  Paraphrasing the great abolitionist leader Theodore Parker, Martin Luther King Jr. used to regularly end his speeches with the phrase "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."  The line was a favorite of Obama's too, and for all three men it meant the same thing:  "This may take a while, but we're going to win."  For most political fights, it is the simultaneously frustrating and inspiring truth.  But not for climate change.  The arc of the physical universe appears to be short, and it bends toward heat.  Win soon or suffer the consequences. 

Read more at Bill McKibben:  Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing