Bill McKibben

Over 150 activists send letter asking Kennedy to reconsider position

Cape Wind Associates' plan to build a big wind-power farm off the coast of Cape Cod has been dividing enviros for years, but the disagreement got a lot more heated last month when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran a high-profile op-ed railing against the project in The New York Times.

An excerpt:

These turbines are less than six miles from shore and would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Hundreds of flashing lights to warn airplanes away from the turbines will steal the stars and nighttime views. The noise of the turbines will be audible onshore. A transformer substation rising 100 feet above the sound would house giant helicopter pads and 40,000 gallons of potentially hazardous oil. According to the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the project will damage the views from 16 historic sites and lighthouses on the cape and nearby islands. The Humane Society estimates the whirling turbines could every year kill thousands of migrating songbirds and sea ducks.

That didn't sit so well with many enviros who see climate change as the big environmental issue and therefore think renewable-energy projects should be welcomed in all our backyards. More than 150 green leaders and activists this week sent a letter to Kennedy asking him to reconsider. Word is Kennedy said he'll meet with them to discuss. We'll keep you posted.

Meantime, here's the letter:

McKibben in NYRB

I don't have a new intro, so I'll just steal my last one:

"Every column Bill McKibben writes on climate change becomes more dread-laden and portentous, but I never stop enjoying them."

The latest is "The Coming Meltdown," in the New York Review of Books. There's not a lot of new info in it (unless you're interested in the two books reviewed), but as always, it's engagingly written and contains some juicy quotes. How about this, from Harvard's James McCarthy:

Scientists are by training and nature conservative and ... have probably underestimated our impact. Fifty years from now -- I hope I'm wrong -- I think you may be living in a world where you don't go outside between one and four in the afternoon.

Whee!

And some classic McKibben:

It is hard not to approach this year's oncoming winter in an elegiac mood .... We are forced to face the fact that a century's carelessness is now melting away the world's storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It's as if we were stripping the spectrum of a color, or eradicating one note from every octave. There are almost no words for such a change: it's no wonder that scientists have to struggle to get across the enormity of what is happening.

McKibben and Sierra Magazine

Every column Bill McKibben writes on climate change becomes more dread-laden and portentous, but I never stop enjoying them. His latest is "Year One" in Sierra Magazine. The money clip:

We will soon learn, for example, that what we've been calling "global warming" is better thought of as excess energy trapped in the atmosphere, which will express itself in every possible way. Like the Bush administration's energy bill, these manifestations will also be about "more": more evaporation in arid lands and then more flooding when it eventually rains; more wind as air pressure rises from warmer areas; more extreme heat waves like the one that killed tens of thousands of Europeans in 2003 or the one that cut North American grain yields by a third in 1988; more ecological disruption as summers lengthen, winters shorten, and sea levels rise; more disease as mosquitoes spread to once-cool climes; and even more nonlinear surprises like the possible shutdown of the Gulf Stream.

Katrina revealed deep helplessness among our rulers. Part of it stemmed from cronyism and incompetence, part from the sheer overwhelming force of the blow. We will slowly recover, but even the United States has only so many hundreds of billions to spare. New Orleans will be rebuilt -- this time. But what if hurricanes like Katrina go from being once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms? How many times will we rebuild?

The same issue of Sierra has a Decoder on the edits made by Philip Cooney to federal climate-change reports. Quite incisive and entertaining.

Then there's a set of Sebastiao Salgado photos from Galapagos (the photos aren't online, though), and a fascinating interview with Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, about his BRT (bus rapid transit) system.

Is Sierra always this good?

Why the Montreal climate summit was too painful to watch

I’ve been to climate meetings in locales that stretch from Kyoto to The Hague, Mexico City to the Maldives. It would have been awfully easy to get in the old hybrid and drive two hours north to Montreal for the big climate-change confab that wrapped up this weekend — if nothing else, it’s a city […]

Could TV and film be the key to the renewable energy revolution?

On several occasions I have written about television shows and movies. In doing so, I've tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to start a discussion about the impact they have on audiences when they address environmental issues and/or feature eco-friendly products (hybrids, windmills, etc).

Recently, I issued a call asking (and paraphrasing Bill McKibben): "Where are the movies? The TV shows? The comics? The bleeping video games?"

I believe exposure to such content will help introduce enviro concepts to consumers of pop culture, create awareness (you mean windmills aren't only a Dutch thing?), educate (hey, I didn't realize you could fit two dead bodies in the back of a Toyota Prius!), and start a conversation (do you think Julia Roberts drinks organic soy milk in real life?).

That said, I direct you to a recent piece (based on a true story) by our friend Joel Makower. Our story begins:

(Fade in: two small children running around in a playground. Pan right: A hybrid car slowly drives by while the blades of huge windmills rotate in the background. Narrator's voice begins ... )

If you could pay an extra five or ten bucks a month to help reduce global warming, childhood asthma, rolling brownouts, the national debt, and the threats of Al-Qaeda, would you bother? I'm guessing you'd think that a no-brainer.

So, why aren't you buying clean energy?

The question has been befuddling everyone from environmental activists to utility executives. Nearly every American, it seems, understands that generating electricity from the sun, the wind, the earth's heat, or gases generated by rotting waste is good news for everyone -- the planet, people's health, national security, and the economy.

So, what's the problem? They just don't think clean energy works.

What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art

Here’s the paradox: If the scientists are right, we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though […]

Mother Jones runs a package on global warming

Don't miss the current issue of Mother Jones, with a feature package called "As the World Burns" about, as you might surmise, global warming. Here's a chunk of the Editor's Note (which is worth reading in its entirety):

In his article "Some Like It Hot" (page 36), Chris Mooney pinpoints a critical distinction in the battle over global warming. The think tanks, crank scientists, and pseudo-journalists who dispute climate change with the aid of millions of corporate dollars are not just arguing the economics of the problem, as they sometimes pretend. That activity, engaging in a thoughtful discussion of politics and priorities, the wisdom of one or another course of action, could be considered honorable regardless of which side one argued from. Rather, the mouthpieces are ignobly contesting the very science itself, using any tactic, any slipshod fiction, that might throw doubt into the public mind and so deflect the dictates of hard fact. In other words, given a public policy debate, conservatives have decided to forgo real debate entirely -- to adopt instead a radical course: denying reality itself.

Mooney's article and its companion pieces on the global warming wars, by Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, appear under the banner "Climate of Denial."

I haven't read all this stuff yet. I'll probably have more to say when I do. But check it out your own self.

The Soviet Union’s collapse led to a revolution in Cuba’s farming system

Speaking of the latest issue of Harper's, it also contains a great piece by frequent Grist contributor Bill McKibben called "The Cuba Diet." (It's reprinted in full on this blog.) Dang, the dude can write.

The piece begins as a sort of anthropological meander through Cuba's agricultural system. Turns out, when the Soviet Union fell, Cuba's heavily-subsidized, mechanized, chemical-soaked farm system collapsed. It was a huge and sudden economic change probably without precedent in the modern world. Since Castro wouldn't/couldn't open up trade, the whole country basically had to shift to a small-scale, localized, de facto organic farming system, almost overnight. Now they've got their crop load more or less where it was, with almost no use of petroleum-heavy pesticides or huge farm machinery. Pretty interesting.

McKibben pivots very subtly from this story to a meditation on our current agricultural system. It's worth reading the whole thing. Here's a tasty bit:

Hot wind

Frequent Grist contributor Bill McKibben has a column in today's NYT saying that environmentalists should get behind wind energy. He is sympathetic to some enviros' objections and rather gentle toward them.

I fully agree with McKibben, but I can't say I share his sympathy.

Oil and gas exploration is ravaging the American West. The nuclear industry is resurgent. And oh yeah, the globe is frying.

If environmentalists take global warming seriously, and expect others to take it seriously, maybe they shouldn't become bitchy provincialists the minute you want to build a wind turbine that impedes the scenic view off the back porches of their vacation homes.

So Ted Kennedy? Shut up.

(Speaking of wind, there's breaking news on the hotly contested Cape Cod wind farm. Looks like the NIMBYs may win after all.)