Editor’s note: With his recent article in Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben has shown once again why he is America’s best environmental writer and the leading organizer around global warming activism. Here are three articles in response to his article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”
The first is an analysis/synopsis of the article by Tom Athanasiou, director of EcoEquity; then Moisha Blechman, chair of the Chapter’s global warming committee, comments as well; finally, McKibben reacts to the overwhelming response to the article and talks about his — and our — next move.
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It’s time for a carbon divestment movement
by Tom Athanasiou
The August 2 issue of Rolling Stone has a major essay by Bill McKibben, called Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.It’s a must read, for a number of reasons. The big one is that McKibben’s call for a “carbon disinvestment” movement – aimed at breaking the hammerlock that the fossil cartel has on our civilization – is a big step forward. It’s not the only step we need to take (more on this below) but it would make a huge difference.
First up, Terrifying New Math is a fine science-for-civilians essay on the recent “extreme weather,” which has been monumental. In fact, the summer of 2012 may well turn out to be a decisive turning point in the climate war. Not to put too fine a point on this, but the deniers have obviously peaked, at least in the US, at least for now. Not that they’ve given up – or run out of funding – but at least they’re now in the rear view. I for one doubt that they’ll be taking control of the debate again.
Anyway, there’s a lot of extreme-weather color in this essay. Who knew that this spring, when it rained in Mecca at a temperature of 109 degrees, it was the hottest recorded downpour on the books? And McKibben does a great job of quickly moving on to key numbers, and then drawing some substantive conclusions.
The numbers are key to the story. McKibben chose three:
The First Number: 2° Celsius
2°C of warming, maximum. This is the semi-official inter-governmental global temperature target (“the bottomist of bottom lines”). And it’s extremely, dangerously high. McKibben makes the case here well and briefly, and correctly notes that the ubiquity of support for the 2°C target is a sign of our desperation. 2°C of warming would very likely be a catastrophe. And the way things are going, we’re not going to come anywhere close to holding the 2°C line.
“The new data provide further evidence that the door to a two-degree trajectory is about to close,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist. In fact, he continued, “When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees.” That’s almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.
The Second Number: 565 Gigatons
The real action begins, though, with McKibben’s introduction of the global carbon budget. And I’d bet that this is the first time it’s shown its face in Rolling Stone. The discussion, again, is miraculously short, and the point is clear.
Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. (“Reasonable,” in this case, means four chances in five, or somewhat worse odds than playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.) . . .
The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all,” says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “There’s maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We’re just fine-tuning things. I don’t think much has changed over the last decade.”
In other words, we’re running out of “atmospheric space.” And, yes, we’re sure.
The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons
This larger number is the point of the story. To see this, note that it’s five times as large as the 565-gigaton
budget we met just above.
This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative. . . The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher. . .
Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically above ground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.
If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion.Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. [My emphasis] The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but the carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That’s how the story ends.
If you haven’t read the whole of McKibben’s Terrifying New Math, read it now. Here’s the link again.
Tom Athanasiou is director of EcoEquity, a project of the Earth Island Institute. To read the full text of his analysis of McKibben’s article, go to www.ecoequity.org/
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We are going to hell now
By Moisha Blechman
Around here in upstate New York, McKibben's article gave many people a real jolt. It is effective. McKibben is relentless in using his authority on the subject to get the message out to the public where almost no one else has access. He uses every opportunity. His energy is terrific. It appears to me that his aim was to find a way to dramatize the problem in a simple and focused way so that the Rolling Stone readership would take notice. While he blames the fossil fuel industry, no readers could miss the fact that they consume fossil fuels themselves, and at every turn.
In my view, his essay is a good platform on which to build. Having awakened the sleepers, someone else needs to come in with still more depth. McKibben noted that the Earth has already warmed by 0.8 degrees. This is the truly terrifying reality because it is so very clear that we are going to hell now. It's plenty upon which to build a new article.
Let's examine what is happening at 0.8 degrees Celsius:
• massive burning of the forests of north America,
• forests of Australia already incinerated,
• forests decimated or threatened everywhere by insects or unsustainably dry conditions,
• loss of the coral reefs on which 40% of the oceanic species depend,
• massive losses of oxygen generating phytoplankton,
• unsustainable thermal conditions for most species,
• escalating crop failures of the basic grains,
• the combination of drought and heat that is already a huge stress even in this part of the country where one or the other would not be a problem,
• the loss of species to extinction already underway, and so on, everywhere we look.
But the real kicker is that all the feedback mechanisms have been activated. People need to know that the ice is key. They need to know that it is essential to restore the permafrost to its frozen state in order to plug methane and CO2 release on a scale so massive we will not survive it. People need to know that the planet as we know it will not survive the loss of even 0.8 degrees of its Holocene cold.
My criticism would be how coy McKibben is with the two-degree Celsius increase as a viable goal. It could confuse the average reader. The thoughtful and careful reader will see that he does not ever endorse it himself, and he does mention the point of view of scientists. But he has used the accepted wisdom of the majority of nations, repeated endlessly by the commercial media, to structure and dramatize his point. Is it worth almost appearing to endorse a goal that is certain death in order to bring people on board? Maybe it is a clever strategy.
I disagree in blaming Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP and so on for their avarice. We need to start talking about the real problem—the corporate charter that promotes, in fact requires, their ruthless behavior. Capitalism itself is the evil. I think it is becoming more and more evident. McKibben must know this. Could he have hinted at this in the article?
Actually, oil, coal, and the various natural gases are nature's waste dump buried on purpose. Nature had to dispose of the excess carbon constantly created through photosynthesis. Carbon is the wild card. Burial is one way. Another is recycling it in ever more life. My guess is that recycled carbon is what accounted for the monumental abundance when life emerged on Earth.
Our motto should not be “beyond coal” or “beyond fossil fuels.” Rather, it should be, Beyond Burning.
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What’s next: A road show to spark the movement
By Bill McKibben
I confess to being somewhat blown away by the reaction to the piece I wrote for Rolling Stone recently. Despite the fact that it was 6,000 words long and pretty technical, it has been shared almost 100,000 times —which is more than 10x as many as the interview they did with President Obama the month before. Clearly the piece struck a nerve—probably because its timing coincided with the heat and drought and fire that have so unnerved the nation this summer.
I was told by the folks at Rolling Stone that it's been viewed 450,000 times, which is just remarkable. (If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, here's the place to go: act.350.org/signup/reckoning)
With the crazy weather putting climate change at the top of more people’s agenda, it is clear that we’re at one of those breakthrough moments that movements occasionally get, and we don’t want to waste it. If you’ve read the piece, you know that it makes clear that the fossil fuel industry already has 5 times more coal and gas and oil on hand than even our most timid governments think would be safe to burn—left to their own devices, they’ll usher us right past the brink.
So—even as we continue to fight pipelines and coal mines and oil wells, we need to take on that industry as a whole. We need to change the rules. Until the election we're going to do that by pushing folks running for office to take a stand against fossil fuel subsidies. But we also have to start preparing for what happens after Nov. 6th.
I've been working on something I wanted to let you know a bit about, and hopefully have your help in seeing through.
Starting the day after the election, I’d like to go after the fossil fuel industry even more directly, trying—as the Rolling Stone piece suggests—to spark a movement like the ones that overturned the great immoral institutions of the past century, such as apartheid in South Africa.
On November 7th, 350.org board member Naomi Klein and I are planning to launch a road show that will cover 20 cities in just over 20 nights (we’re going to break for Thanksgiving) to bring the message I laid out in Rolling Stone to thousands of people across America.
We'll have a revolving cast of musicians and great speakers, to make it an inspirational and exciting event. We're in the process of confirming venues now — but we're going to need your help to promote these events in your community, and help turn these ideas into a powerful campaign. If you can help us book a large venue, know of great musicians that might want to participate, or can lend a hand with the creative work that this will surely require, click here to let us know how you'd like to help out: act.350.org/survey/tour-help/.
Look, the Rolling Stone piece was pretty grim. But the response to it shows that people understood that our backs are to the wall and that means it’s time to fight. I don’t know if we can win; but I’m certain that without each of you we’ve got no chance. So thanks in advance for jumping in.