Bill McKibben

Vermont renewable energy festival looks to the future

News today that a quake has caused a fire at a nuke plant in Japan follows revelations of operator error that could have caused an accident at the 1,316 MW Krummel reactor in Germany, owned by Vattenfall Europe. When a fire broke out at that plant in late June, operators panicked and put the reactor on emergency shutdown, against their guidelines, and put the reactor at risk. Then Vattenfall tried to cover up what happened.

I learned of this at SolarFest this weekend in central Vermont, where thousands converged to learn and share ideas toward a safer and more sustainable energy future. Fellow vendors said that it was the best crowd for this perennial event they'd seen -- was it merely the "year of the climate" effect? Perhaps, but there was a real sense of determination shared by all the folks I spoke with about my organization's renewable energy plans. As Bill McKibben said so well from the main stage on Saturday, this event used to be about good things we should do. Now it's about all the things we must do.

Convincing evidence for the central role of protest and a troubling cost-benefit analysis

The most important and relevant research for U.S. environmentalists is being conducted by Jon Agnone, a sociologist at the University of Washington. Agnone studies sources of environmentalist power -- the first social scientist to undertake a systematic analysis. His comprehensive findings are summarized in "Amplifying Public Opinion: The Policy Impact of the U.S. Environmental Movement" (PDF), appearing in the June 2007 issue of Social Forces.

Agnone compared the relative impact of public opinion, institutional advocacy, and protest on passage of federal environmental legislation between 1960-1998, using a sophisticated analytical model and data drawn from The New York Times.

Three key findings in this first-ever quantification of environmentalist power upend conventional political wisdom:

1. Protest is significantly more important than public opinion or institutional advocacy in influencing federal environmental law. Agnone found that each protest event increases the likelihood of pro-environmental legislation being passed by 1.2 percent, and moderate protest increases the annual rate of adoption by an astonishing 9.5 percent.
2. Public opinion on its own influences federal action (though less than protest), but is vastly strengthened by protest, which "amplifies" public support and, in Agnone's words, "raises the salience of public opinion for legislators." Protest and public opinion are synergistic, with a joint impact on federal policy far more dramatic than either factor alone.
3. Institutional advocacy has limited impact on federal environmental policy.

Agnone's findings demonstrate that protest is neither a historical phase of the environmental movement nor a peripheral tactic: it is the central basis of environmentalists' power. As Agnone notes, "these results lead to an important conclusion: when both protest and public opinion are at high levels, they jointly influence policy makers in ways that would be impossible if each existed without the other."

When we stopped protesting, in other words, and began to rely on advocacy and mobilizing pubic opinion alone, we threw away our single most important lever of influence. The accompanying chart shows the correspondence between declining trend lines of environmental protest and passage of federal environmental law:

No more canaries in coal mines, please

While on a book tour recently, Bill McKibben made an interesting point in an appearance in Santa Barbara. McKibben -- a former New Yorker writer who wrote his first book on climate change back in 1989 -- told the crowd that to expect the Sierra Club and traditional conservationists to take on global warming with "the grammar of wildness" that John Muir drew from his life in the Yosemite Valley back in the 1860s was impractical and unfair.

He suggested that "we're all looking for the next metaphor" for global warming.

Yesterday Southwestern reporter John Fleck posted a good example of why: a list of stories published in recent months employing the "canary in a coal mine" metaphor. Many of these stories were terrific, including the very first one, from Corie Brown at the L.A. Times.

But it's clear: the canary metaphor is exhausted, perhaps dead. We need a new one. Suggestions, anyone?

On a new McKibben editorial

If this were the daily sunset you had gotten used to growing up, you would understand the hesitancy of even Bill McKibben, a renowned environmentalist, to okay wind turbines on the horizon, interfering with bird migration in order to generate electricity.

However, in an opinion article in which McKibben confesses his sentiment, entitled "One world, one problem," he ultimately resolves:

In this world, the threat to that landscape, and to those birds, comes far more from rapid shifts in temperature than from a few dozen towers.

McKibben goes on to write a testament to the gravity of climate change and its meaning for the environmental movement, which the existential call for action is uniting. No matter your top concern -- clean water, dolphin populations, crop survival, energy consumption -- there is a link to climate change and a bigger picture to keep in mind.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Photos and voices from Step It Up 2007 rallies across the U.S.

On April 14, 2007, gaggles of enthusiastic Americans gathered at more than 1,400 spots around the U.S. to demand action against climate change, part of a coordinated Step It Up campaign launched by author Bill McKibben. At all the rallies, marches, parties, and other hullabaloos, the message was the same: Step it up, Congress! Enact […]

Bill McKibben questions thinking as usual when it comes to climate.

The old thinking, as author and thinker Bill McKibben explains in today's LA Times, goes like this: bigger is always better, growth is good no matter what, and a booming stock market is the ultimate measure of our success.

McKibben illustrates the kind of lopsided priorities that naturally flow when we're ruled by the bottom line, pointing to a scarcely-reported White House report that said the U.S. would be pumping out almost 20 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than we did in 2000, our contribution to climate change going steadily up -- against all warnings to the contrary.

That's a pretty stunning piece of information -- a hundred times more important than, say, the jittery Dow Jones industrial average that garnered a hundred times the attention. How is it even possible? How, faced with the largest crisis humans have yet created for themselves, have we simply continued with business as usual?

New thinking, by contrast, might go something like this: measure what matters.

A new essay from the man

Tom Engelhardt of the indispensable Tom’s Dispatch received permission from the editors of the New York Review of Books to reprint an essay by Bill McKibben that appears in the current issue. He passed that permission along to me. Thanks to Tom, the editors at NYRB, and of course Bill for his tireless advocacy. —– […]

Lines that are bright, how we love them

Bill McKibben’s Step It Up 2007 campaign (read his dispatches) is trying to rally a bunch of simultaneous protests pushing a single goal: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80% by 2050. This approach — picking a goal rather than supporting specific legislation — is known as bright lining, and it’s something you’re going to hear a […]

Newer and cheekier!

With sincere respect to my colleagues across the Atlantic (this is all a matter of opinion, after all), I'm dismayed by some of the choices on their list of most important environmental books. Hoary tomes like The Lorax, an analysis of the impact of pesticides on the environment that's nearly a half-century old (I shake in my boots to criticize La Carson thus) ... if the list were of books that had a big impact in their time, or books that will bolster the sentiments of the already-sympathetic, then it would be enough.

But the "small is beautiful," "earth as organism," "pursue simplicity" approach to eco-reform reflected in most of these choices has not proven a big winner in Western mass culture. Right or wrong, converting Western mass culture is the task at hand today, if we're going to solve the problems addressed by these authors over the decades.

What are the books that speak to more recent science, contemporary events, and our evolving understanding of the intersections of environment with economy, culture, and human rights?

Here are some titles I'd consider: