Jason Schneider
ROBERT KUTTNER: Bill, so much of the debate about climate change has oscillated between denial and despair. Scientists and citizens who take the climate science seriously keep painting an ever bleaker picture, as the cumulative interaction of complex systems worsens outcomes and catastrophes are arriving ahead of schedule.
Yet you, who were among the first to issue prophetic warnings, manage to keep hope alive—hope that there is yet time to avert the worst, and hope that the planet may yet be habitable for humans and other forms of life—if we make fundamental changes and if we act in time.
What gives you hope that the fundamental changes that are needed can be done politically and can be done in time? And what urgent first steps must be taken?
BILL MCKIBBEN: At this point, we clearly can’t “stop climate change.” We’ve already warmed the planet a degree Celsius, and with huge consequences: The Arctic is in full melt mode, and California’s fire season never ends. And we’re going to warm it some more: The lag time between carbon emissions and their full heating effect means that even if we did everything right now the temperature will continue to rise.
The question is, how much—can we stop that heating short of the point where it completely cuts civilization off at the knees? (Worth remembering that the U.N. estimate for climate refugees by 2050 reaches one billion.) If we have a chance at doing that, it’s down to two things: The engineers have done their job as well as the politicians have done theirs badly, coming up with the innovations that have cut the price of solar and wind power by up to 90 percent in the last decade or so. Technology is no longer a barrier.
And perhaps we can remove the remaining barrier too—the lack of political will is now up against the remarkable burgeoning climate movement. Those of us who’ve been at this awhile are overjoyed to see the school climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion, and everyone else who is showing up to make a difference. On a feverish planet, these are the antibodies kicking in.
Of course, some patients still die, even after those antibodies appear. We don’t know for sure how the Earth is going to do, only that there is going to be a fight.
With the best possible scenario, and the election of a progressive president in 2020 with a working majority in Congress, what are the most urgent things that the new administration needs to get done in the first year?
In the best possible scenario, something that looks like the Green New Deal: an all-out commitment to change on the timescale that physics now requires, with the funding and the larger social programs to make it possible to carry out this sweeping change.
On day one, a president could, by her- or himself, shut down a lot of drilling and mining on public land, and end the easy permitting of new fossil fuel infrastructure.
What else might a new president do via executive power that doesn’t require substantial outlay by Congress, recognizing that both things are necessary?
The climate plans of the leading candidates, especially Bernie and Warren, are full of such ideas—there’s a ton of work on things like automobile emissions that can be done without Congress.
But it’s going to take real money too: It was good to see Chuck Schumer’s plan for a quick electric-car build-out, a plan that has the support of the UAW.
- Reinstate the methane pollution bill.
- Get us back in Paris (and have a full-court diplomatic press to make the Paris accord much stronger).
- Restore and raise vehicle emissions standards.
- Restore the Clean Power Plan, and understand that replacing coal with natural gas is not a viable strategy for change.
- Stop the government from procuring anything that isn’t efficient and green.
With the best-case scenario, what will the world and human civilization look like in 2040 and 2050, and what kinds of adaptations will we have to make?
The world in 2040 and 2050 is going to be, at the very least, strained. Climate change is by far the biggest thing human beings have ever done. But if we move right now with everything we’ve got, we may limit the damage sufficiently that our kids and grandkids have a fighting chance—and in the process we could reduce as well some of the inequality that plagues the planet. A side benefit of solar and wind power is that they’re everywhere—it’s much harder for people like the Kochs to corner the sun.
