McKibben to Clinton: Now It’s Really Time to Get Serious About Climate Change

Dear Secretary Clinton —

In your husband’s years in office, the greenhouse effect was still fairly novel science; even eight years ago, when you were first running for president, climate change was not yet really a top-tier issue.  In a sense, then, this summer marks the first chance most Americans have to really find out what and how you think about global warming — the challenge that more than any other will color the economic and foreign policy landscape for the years ahead.  In hopes you might seize the moment, I offer a few suggestions.
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Five reasons environmentalists distrust you:

1. Climate change has not been your issue.
2. You were terrible on Keystone.
3. You took the Obama administration’s affection for fracking and ran with it.
4. You presided over the monumental failure that was the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009.
5. All that endless money.

Seven ways you could win some green stripes:

1. Stop hiding behind “process” and say what you think about Keystone.
2. Make it clear that you get that this is a problem of supply as well as one of demand.
   If the federal government goes ahead and approves new leases for coal mining on public land in the Powder River Basin, that will release three times as much carbon as Obama’s coal regulations save.
3. Fall out of love with fracking.
4. Make sure you’re doing something to back up your Copenhagen pledge of $100 billion in annual global financing for moving developing countries straight to renewables.
5. Do your part in pushing back against tired attacks that solving climate change is going to cost jobs or hurt our economy or hurt workers in coal plants.
6. It’s time to signal your support for divestment from fossil fuels.

And now let’s say that you didn’t simply want to win the support of environmentalists in a general election.  Let’s say you wanted to change the world.  What would you do?  We’re stuck in a business-as-usual framework, where the leaders of the G7 said last week that they’d phase out fossil fuel use by the end of the century; that’s far more time than the physics actually allows.  How could you be truly transformative?

More than anything, I think, you’d take notice of the opportunity you’ve been given.  Every other president of the global warming age has been forced by stark science to face choices among difficult, expensive alternatives.  If you’re elected, that won’t be your problem.  The price of a solar panel has fallen 75 percent in the years since Barack Obama was elected. That means you would come to power as the first American president really poised to change the way the country and the world looks.

To be specific:  You could use your political capital to overturn America’s energy paradigm — not slowly, around the margins, but quickly and at the core. ... 

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I’m not hugely hopeful you’ll do these things.  The Clinton brand has always been small-bore, play-it-safe, incremental.  I’d guess you’ll play your campaign, and your presidency, the same way that Obama has played his:  to move the ball forward, to make some progress so that your successors can make some more.  Normally that’s smart policy, but this is an unusual question.  The underlying physics makes clear that either we make massive progress very soon, or our window disappears.  Winning a little is the same as losing.  We need you to think bigger. 

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