We’re Hot As Hell and We’re Not Going to Take It Any More ~ Bill McKibben

The planet has just come through its warmest decade, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010. A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.

In the light of these three stark facts, “The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy,” says Bill McKibben, who has been writing on the issue of global warming for over 20 years and who founded the global organisation 350.org.

In a recent article he outlines three steps to establish a politics of global warming.

Step 1 is to actually talk about global warming and to explain the facts at every turn. “It is the heat, and also the humidity,” he writes. “Since warm air holds more water than cold, the atmosphere is about 5% moister than it was 40 years ago, which explains the freak downpours that seem to happen someplace on this continent [United States] every few days.

“It is the carbon — that’s why the seas are turning acid, a point Obama could have made with ease while standing on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s bad that it’s black out there,” he might have said, “but even if that oil had made it safely ashore and been burned in our cars, it would still be wrecking the oceans.” Energy independence is nice, but you need a planet to be energy independent on.”

Step 2 – ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. “If we’re going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don’t actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run. We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can’t still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who’s made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business.”

Step 3 is the need for a movement. “For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we’d get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.”

“Is it possible to get people out in the streets demanding action about climate change?” asks McKibben. “Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called the “largest ever co-ordinated global rally of any kind” on any issue – 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries.”

McKibben believes it is essential that environmental groups work together and that churches get involved too. “We may need to get arrested,” he says. “We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger.

“Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we’ve got. It’s not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we’re going to have to raise our voices.”

Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Earlier this year the Boston Globe called him “probably the country’s leading environmentalist” and Time described him as “the planet’s best green journalist.” He’s a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

To read Bill McKibben’s full article see – http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/04-1.