McKibben’s Wisdom, Our Action
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Dear friends,
We are sending us all a message from one of the true prophets of our time — Bill McKibben. Please read his gentle, loving, passionate outcry for our Earth and human life. The Shalom Center yesterday called for a pre-Tisha B’Av webinar sparked by five leaders of Jewish activism on the climate crisis — that is, to describe it honestly, the broiling, roasting of our planet by heedless corporations and politicians for the sake of Greed. The webinar will itself include an action choice to take on the spot — and will encourage further action on and beyond Tisha B’Av. Please register at:
https://theshalomcenter.org/events/templeearth5783
Blessings for the sake of Earth and Humankind
— Arthur
Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?
The latest record temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world.
by Bill McKibben
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-it-hot-enough-yet-for-politicians-to-take-real-action
We’ve crushed so many temperature records recently—the hottest day ever measured by average global temperature, the hottest week, the hottest June, the highest ocean temperatures, the lowest sea-ice levels—that it would be easy to overlook a couple of additional data points from this past weekend. But they’re important, because they help illuminate not just the size of our predicament but the political weaknesses that make it so hard to confront.
Fort Good Hope, at 66.2 degrees north latitude, in Canada’s Northwest Territories (which is to say, just a few miles below the Arctic Circle), hit 99.3 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday afternoon, surpassing the old record by four degrees. The town of Norman Wells, a little to the south, topped a hundred. These are close to the high-temperature record anywhere that far north; it was hotter there over the weekend than it has ever been in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, which is twenty degrees latitude to the south. Canada was far from alone: Beijing experienced more than a week straight of temperatures higher than ninety-five degrees in a record heat wave affecting hundreds of millions of people (authorities opened air-raid shelters, some dating from the Japanese invasion in 1937, as cooling centers); temperatures were a hundred and twenty-two degrees in Kuwait and Iraq; on Thursday, Africa recorded its hottest nighttime ever, with the temperature at one site in Algeria failing to drop below 103.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Those temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world. Remember one of the essential facts of our century: warm air holds more water vapor than cold. In dry areas that leads to drought, but once that water is in the air it’s going to come down. In the past few days, we’ve seen devastating flooding and mudslides in Japan (Al Jazeera reported that the rain had brought “southwestern Japan to a halt”), China (where more than a dozen people died in seasonal mountain floods, even amid a heat wave), northern India(where bridges and buildings were washing into rivers), Spain (cars were swept away down narrow streets), and the Hudson Valley, where roads disappeared and the historic buildings at West Point are feared to have sustained damage. My neighborhood in Vermont is under a high flood-risk warning as I write this; a little to the south of us they’ve been conducting high-water rescues of stranded campers, and downtown Montpelier, the state capital, had flooded catastrophically.
So the crisis is everywhere—that’s why it’s called global warming. But the case of Canada is interesting, because it’s a liberal democracy with a strong environmental sentiment—polling earlier this year found that seventy-five per cent of Canadians were anxious about climate change; twenty-one per cent of the population was having fewer or no children as a result. And the nation has an absolute front-row seat to the crisis: the Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth. As a result of an extraordinary spring heat wave, wildfires have already burned more of the country this year than in any full year on record—so far, the fire season has consumedfourteen hundred per cent more forest than usual. The costs of this kind of change are enormous: before the fire season started, an economic analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute suggested that climate change could cut the nation’s economic growth in half by 2025. By 2050, half a million jobs would be lost, “mostly from excessive heat that lowers labor productivity and causes premature death.” As with Chicago and New York, Canadian cities have had moments this summer when their air quality was the worst in the world; an Ironman triathlon was cancelled in Montreal, because people’s lungs are not, in fact, made of steel.
Yet none of this has been enough to really change the political dynamic, which remains dominated by the fossil-fuel industry. Justin Trudeau’s government had been making noises about a plan to dramatically cut emissions—perhaps by forty-five per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, in line with what climate scientists have set as the necessary targets. But the government quickly began to back down after a meeting in June with officials in the oil-rich province of Alberta, when the Minister of Natural Resources, Jonathan Wilkinson, explained that “we have committed to a cap on oil and gas emissions. But there are lots of different ways to do that. There are flexibilities and how you design it.” The targets may shrink, the timetables may fade, and, incredibly, Canada may decide to count increased exports of fossil gas as a method of cutting carbon. (The country is in the process of building its first liquefied-natural-gas, or L.N.G., export terminal, along the British Columbia coast.) The argument is that Canadian natural gas will displace coal being burnt somewhere else, but, in fact, natural gas is at least as likely to displace renewable energy, and the methane that leaks from the whole process makes it as much a climate threat as coal. The task for the government is to make it appear that as much progress as possible is being made (to appease the fifth of Canadians too worried to have children) while causing as few political problems as possible with the industry. (Every few hours, a Twitter bot updates a list of lobbying meetings between the oil industry and officials in Ottawa.) For example, when challenged about concessions to the industry, Wilkinson said, “Anybody who thinks there will be no continuing role for hydrocarbons better think about what they put on their bike chains.” I don’t know how much bike-chain oil the world uses, but mine comes in a three-ounce container and lasts a long time; I’d guess that forty-five minutes of production from the vast Alberta tar sands would grease every chain from now until the sun blows up. In any event, this kind of glibness greases our slide into climate chaos.
But it’s not fair to just pick on Canada. In the United States, President Biden has laid claim to a powerful environmental legacy by passing the Inflation Reduction Act, but his Administration also approved both a giant oil and a giant L.N.G. project, in Alaska; the Mountain Valley Pipeline, in the Virginias; and lots of offshore leasing—and it may back big L.N.G. terminals on the Gulf Coast. In Great Britain, the leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, was quoted in the Times of London on Sunday as saying that he “hates tree-huggers,” probably because they keep pushing for more action than his party wants to commit to. China is building huge amounts of renewable energy, but also more coal-fired power, because the government’s legitimacy depends on keeping economic growth hot at all times. And so on: politicians want to be seen doing a lot about climate change, but not so much that it lands them in any kind of real trouble with the industry. Their argument, invariably, is that the green infrastructure they’re building will eventually reduce emissions more than the fossil fuel they’re continuing to permit.
Eventually, that will be true: solar and wind power are cheap, and, given time, economics will do its job, but time is what we don’t have, as this month’s temperatures make clear. And each time a new pipeline is built, or a new oil field is drilled, the transition is prolonged. One approach, chaired by the Canadian activist Tzeporah Berman, might be a fossil-fuel nonproliferation treaty; but so far it has the backing of just a number of Pacific island nations, including Vanuatu and Tuvalu, which have a combined population of some three hundred and forty thousand. Activists have been trying to use the negotiating process at the United Nations Climate Change conferences to win some sort of fossil-fuel phaseout, but this year’s session, cop28—set for November, in Dubai—will be led by the C.E.O. of the state oil company, which wants to dramatically increase its production. Greenwashing has become a corporate art.
So public campaigns will need to continue, but at the moment they aren’t producing enough pressure to change the calculations that Presidents and C.E.O.s are making. In part, that’s because the progress that politicians do make—the Inflation Reduction Act, say—serves to relieve the urgency for them to do more: Biden can accurately say that he’s done more than any other President on climate change (and, of course, his most likely opponent has called it all a hoax). There’s a rally planned for mid-September in New York City, when the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called a Climate Ambition Summit, to make a case that Biden, who may address the General Assembly, should meet Guterres’s demands to end fossil-fuel expansion, particularly because this country still leads the world in oil and gas production. But this moment feels as if it calls for something larger—comparable to the Earth Day demonstrations of a half century ago, which brought ten per cent of the American population into the streets. It’s eruptions on that scale that change the political reality. And those eruptions are usually rooted not just in fear and anger but also in love and resolve.
The massive Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, which was caused by a rig six miles off the California coast, was one of the sparks for the first Earth Day, in April, 1970. People were raging over the sight of dead seabirds soaked in oil, but they were also fighting for things that they loved: the ocean, the beach, the chance to sit peacefully on the sand. The incredible warming of these current weeks should strike fear, but it should also remind us how valuable a breeze is, how remarkable a deep-blue winter day, or how precious the cool that comes when night falls. The crazily raging river a quarter mile from my door scares me, but it also makes me think how stunning it is in its usual form. This planet remains stirringly beautiful, and that beauty must be one of the things that moves us to act. And so must the beauty that people can produce: we can take the deadly power of the sun and, with a panel, convert it into the electrons that help cool our homes in a heat wave. If all of that sounds overblown, scientists say that this past week broke records for the hottest days in about a hundred and twenty-five thousand years, which takes us back to the bare edge of the human story. We’re at a hinge point in that story if ever there was one.