McKibben to Obama: You Still Have Time to Be a Climate Champion — but Not Much

Dear President Obama —

I feel a little awkward writing a letter to you, perhaps because I helped organize the largest demonstrations outside your house during your residence there:  It’s odd to write someone when the closest you’ve ever come to them is being chained to the fence outside their home protesting the Keystone pipeline.

But I’ve had a very long time to think about global warming — since the late 1980s, when I published the first book for a general audience on the topic of what we then called the greenhouse effect.  And so I thought I might offer a few thoughts.  It’s only in the last three or four years that climate’s political dimensions have come into clearest focus for me, beginning in some ways with those Keystone demonstrations.  As I’ve learned more about how Washington works, I’ve understood better some of the paths you took and didn’t.  With 18 months left in your administration, the summing-up mood is appropriate — but not entirely, since time remains for a series of fateful decisions that will shape your legacy, but more importantly the planet’s future atmospheric chemistry.

Credit where it’s due
There are moments, I think, when some in your administration have thought the climate movement paid too little heed to the things you have accomplished.  And so one begins there, with credit that is in fact due:

1. Significant green funding in the Recovery Act.
2. Taking advantage of the auto bailouts to dramatically improve the mileage our cars get.
3. The EPA coal regulations that have been the high point of your administration’s second-term efforts.

In fact, that list beats the combined efforts of all the presidents that came before you in the global warming era.  And that you achieved these things in the face of GOP congressional intransigence that made the obvious policy change (a price on carbon) impossible means that no one can accuse you of neglecting the issue.  It’s true that our carbon emissions have risen the last two years, but perhaps you’ve put us on a course to meet the moderate reduction targets you and the Chinese agreed on.

But it’s not nearly enough
The problem, of course, is that 20 years ago those changes would have gotten us ahead of the physics.  Now, given the hole we’re in and the pace that the world is warming, we’ve lost ground during your tenure despite those efforts.  The G7 communique talking about getting the world off fossil fuel by century’s end is way too close to business as usual.
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Here’s the checklist for your final 18 months
But earlier this year a team of scientists at Nature published a crucial paper explaining exactly which resources had to stay underground to prevent the globe from warming past the 2 degree Celsius limit you set in Copenhagen.  Their work reads like a to-do list for the last 18 months of your administration.

1. The carbon in Canada’s tar sands has to stay underground.
2. The carbon beneath the Arctic has to stay beneath the Arctic.
3. Just this spring your Interior Department yet again offered vast new leases to coal companies in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming. ... The coal sale is not quite final yet, and it must not go through.
4. Somewhat remarkably, you seem inclined to approve new offshore drilling off much of coastal America, including the Atlantic seaboard. ... These too are deposits that must remain underground to meet the climate targets you yourself set.

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Just maybe, you also could take that new vision and use it to make the climate talks in Paris more than they’ll otherwise be.  At the moment they look set to ratify a global temperature increase of 3 or 4 degrees C — that is, to lock us into a kind of slow-motion guaranteed catastrophe.  They lack a vision beyond the mediocre (and unenforceable) targets that countries are now producing.  But given the changed economics of sun and wind, the talks could be the moment when the world commits to electrifying every house on Earth with a solar panel on the roof.  That’s now not only possible, it’s a practical and a moral imperative.

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