Bill McKibben

Responding To A Red Alert

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Another reason to subscribe to Bill McKibben’s newsletter:

How Not to Act in an Emergency

Forget AI–we need some human intelligence

We’re getting right to the nub now.

Yesterday the World Meteorological Organization officially certified 2023 as the hottest year in human history. Just to put on the record here what should have been the lead story in every journal and website on our home planet:

Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organisation was now “sounding the red alert to the world”.

The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45C higher last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil and gas.

Last year’s spike was so scary that NASA’s Gavin Schmidt—Jim Hansen’s heir as keeper of NASA’s climate record—wrote in Nature this week that it raised the most profound possible implications. Please read his words slowly and carefully: Continue reading →

McKibben On Responsibility & Accountability

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Vermont’s capitol city, underwater in epic July flooding that wrecked most of Montpelier’s retail district

Holding the responsible accountable is part of Bill McKibben’s objective; he also provides sunshine. Subscribe to this newsletter if you can:

You flood it, you pay for it.

States are considering ‘climate superfund’ laws to hold Big Oil accountable

One prong of the climate fight involves installing so much renewable energy that fossil fuel use actually declines dramatically—a few places are finally showing that’s possible, like sunny Germany which last week said emissions in 2023 dropped more than ten percent. Continue reading →

Victorious, For Now, Reining In LNG

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When Bill McKibben announces victory, savor it but stay vigilant:

A Massive Win, and What It Means

For Once, Big Oil Takes It on the Chin

I wrote you two days ago with provisional good news—it looked as if the long and deep fight to rein in runaway LNG export growth had scored a huge victory. Continue reading →

McKibben On The LNG Methane Problem

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Exporting LNG to China helps no one but frackers

Not as cheerful as Mr. Grouse, but this week’s newsletter is important reading in the interest of progress of this looming LNG problem (a gentle way of putting it, since it is more a PROBLEM than a problem):

Different Kinds of Winning

Helping Biden Help Himself–and the Planet–on Climate

We are, I think, edging towards a win on LNG exports, which would be a very good thing: a pause on the biggest fossil fuel expansion plan on earth. The question, I think, is if it will be the kind of win that makes it easier to boost the beleaguered presidential campaign of Joe Biden—which has got to be a central focus for anyone worried about the planet’s (and our democracy’s) future. And that is largely up to the White House. Continue reading →

Corrupted Cop & Better News

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Cylindrical battery cells undergoing tests in the UK. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

Thanks to Bill McKibben, in his newsletter–“A Corrupted COP New revelations show just how bad the oil countries really are“–for more details on this bad news but also for pointing us to better news that has implications for so much of the decarbonization opportunity set:

Battery Prices Are Falling Again as Raw Material Costs Drop

BloombergNEF breaks down the biggest annual drop in its lithium-ion battery price survey since 2018.

As the auto industry grapples with how to make affordable EVs, the task may get easier by one key metric. Battery prices are resuming a long-term trend of decline, following an unprecedented increase last year.

According to BloombergNEF’s annual lithium-ion battery price survey, average pack prices fell to $139 per kilowatt hour this year, a 14% drop from $161/kWh in 2022.1

Letters To The Secretary

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We have appreciated this newsletter since it started, and every issue since. This week it brings these handwritten letters to our attention:

…Oh, and who’s the other group of climate voters the president needs to worry about? That would be older people, like those of us at Third Act—we codgers have been organizing mass protests all year. And while we may not be TikTok savvy, we have another weapon: pen and stationery. In the last week Third Actors have unleashed thousands of letters on DOE headquarters—which may not sound quite as sexy as petitions from the Internet, but they have their own impact, since officials know that if you’re willing to do more than click you’re probably an effective and motivated adversary.

So consider [image above left]

Or [image to the right]

What I’m trying to say is, the Department of Energy has a real problem—an increasingly aware and activated posse of youngsters and oldsters. And a solution: announce CP2 is going nowhere, and that no other project will be approved, or even considered, until there’s been an exhaustive rewrite of the criteria taking into account the latest science and economics. It’s not hard. Continue reading →

Civil Disobedience & Civil Response

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A sign made by William Rixon, who has been protesting L.L. Bean’s partnership with Citibank to offer the Bean Bucks credit card. Courtesy photo

Thanks to Bill McKibben for bringing this to our attention. And kudos to L.L. Bean’s CEO for having the decency to respond to this activist’s efforts to raise awareness of the company’s climate-unfriendly banking choice. Iconic companies messaging their environmental responsibilities need to be held to the same standard as the lousiest companies.

Climate demonstrator outside L.L. Bean gets surprise visit from CEO

Bill Rixon outside the L.L. Bean retail store earlier this month. He was joined by Molly Schen, a member of Third Act Maine. Luna Soley / The Times Record

Freeport resident and retired schoolteacher William Rixon has been demonstrating outside L.L. Bean since the beginning of September. This week, he got a response.

“PROTECT MOTHER EARTH,” William Rixon’s homemade climate banner reads. Assembled with drop cloth and PVC piping, it stands at 10 feet, dwarfing Rixon.

Since September, Rixon and a group of fellow retirees have been standing with signs outside L.L. Bean’s sprawling downtown Freeport campus as well as its corporate headquarters just down the road. Continue reading →

Climate Leadership Lacking In Too Many Places

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Once a golf course, now a solar farm supplying tens of thousands of homes in Japan

If you know a bit about Japan’s love of golf, the photo above says alot about leadership there in moving away from fossil fuels in the direction of alternative energy. But it is too little too late compared to what is happening elsewhere. Thanks as always to Bill McKibben for his newsletter:

Energy from Heaven

and not from Hell/Exxon.

Amid the torrent of hideous news last week, one item might have skipped your notice: Exxon announced the acquisition—its biggest since picking up Mobil a quarter century ago—of one of the largest fracking operators in the world. As the AP reported, “including debt, Exxon is committing about $64.5 billion to the acquisition, leaving no doubt of the Texas energy company’s commitment to fossil fuels.” In fact, it’s the declaration of conviction that they think they have enough political juice to keep us hooked on oil and gas for a few more decades, even in the face of the highest temperatures in 125,000 years. Continue reading →

Environmental Status Reports & Lurking Contradictions

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The last time we shared an advertisement here? Never. Occasionally, we promote a video like Kill the K-Cup that serves the opposite purpose. But this ad? Must see. It promotes a powerful message, and paradoxically at the same time, as Bill McKibben points out in this week’s newsletter, a whole other big mess is lurking just behind the curtain. He starts by bringing our attention to a new bill being considered in California, and then relates that bill to Apple in a way that raises questions about the accomplishments celebrated in the ad:

…#In California, SB 253 made it through the legislature, which is an incredibly big deal. Because California is the fifth largest economy on earth, and this law would force the big companies that do business there—which is everyone, really, because who is going to miss out on that economy?—to fully disclose their carbon emissions, including their “Scope 3” emissions, which are the ones that come from the supply chain. Continue reading →

Beechnut & Beaver Hope

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Nearing the end of the northern summer, one for too many of the wrong kind of record books, some notion of hope is more than welcome. This edition of his newsletter offers some:

Beavering Away

With Your Help. (An annual update!)

In the guise of my annual report on our nifty online community I’m going to show you my vacation pictures! Lucky you!

It’s possible I’m just feeling guilty because I took a couple of days off in this Summer To End All Summers. But Sunday and Monday, while Hillary was introducing southern Californians below the age of 85 to the concept of ‘tropical storm,’ I went on a wander with an old friend through the middle of the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, a splendidly remote chunk of land that I’ve lived on the edge of, off and on, for much of my life, and which I never tire of exploring. Continue reading →

Climate Optimism Part 1

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Illustration by João Fazenda

Bill McKibben acknowledges in his most recent newsletter that in spite of all his efforts over the decades, he and we all are failing on climate change mitigation. But he has not given up hope:

Big Heat and Big Oil

A rapid end to burning fossil fuel would arrest the heating that has caused extreme damage in recent weeks; and that rapid end is possible.

In the list of ill-timed corporate announcements, historians may someday give pride of place to one made by Wael Sawan, the new C.E.O. of Shell, the largest energy company in Europe. In 2021, Shell said that it would reduce oil and gas production by one to two per cent a year up to 2030—a modest gesture in the direction of an energy transition. Continue reading →

Bill McKibben On Degrowth Movements Past & Present

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Bill McKibben gives a thorough reconsideration of what, if any, growth is helpful now:

To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower?

The degrowth movement makes a comeback.

John Maynard Keynes once observed that dating from “say, to two thousand years before Christ—down to the beginning of the 18th century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change.” Continue reading →

About That Rocking Chair

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There’s been no enormous hurry in Washington to do much about the greatest threat that humans have ever faced. Photograph by Kevin Dietsch / Getty

Thanks, as always, to Bill McKibben for a perspective on otherwise difficult-to-make-sense-of events:

Looking at the White House Through Wildfire Smoke

This week, elected officials can see for themselves why they must get serious about climate change.

I’m sitting on a rocking chair just outside the White House fence on Thursday afternoon, and I can more or less make out the seat of American executive power through the haze. In the morning, the local government announced that the air-quality index for the District of Columbia had reached Code Purple (“very unhealthy”), because of the level of particulate pollution, which has never happened before. Continue reading →

What Does Positive & Progressive Permitting Look Like?

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We have seen the Center for Biological Diversity mentioned in his newsletters before, but this week Bill McKibben links to this recently released document. The Center offers a positive and progressive consideration of priorities we should give to permitting renewable energy, contrasting efforts to gut regulatory protections related to fossil fuel permitting highlighted in his current newsletter:

Introduction

It is indisputable that the climate emergency requires the United States to rapidly transform its majority fossil energy system to 100% clean and renewable energy.

Distributed solar on rooftops alone can generate a significant portion of our energy demands while also bringing key benefits like resilience, local job generation, and avoided wildlife impacts. Once distributed energy is maximized, building renewables on top of parking lots and canals as additional built surfaces can fill the remaining gap in our current energy demand. Prioritizing these sites for renewable energy can avoid the community impacts and bottlenecks associated large-scale transmission construction.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent sixth synthesis report makes absolutely clear that an unprecedented bold transition to renewable energy with an equally aggressive effort to halt new fossil fuel development and phase out existing fossil fuel usage is absolutely vital to avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of climate change (1). This necessary transformation presents a tremendous opportunity to pursue a far more just path forward—one that ends the status quo entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry; empowers federal agencies to use their authorities to accelerate the transitions to a justly sourced, justly implemented, resilient, and equitable power system; actualizes the principles of environmental justice; and preserves our core environmental laws. Continue reading →

Lie-Liable Fossil Fuel Companies

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Following record rains in April of 2014, a section of Baltimore street simply collapsed. Now there’s some chance of holding the culprits accountable.

Thanks to Bill McKibben for this legal news following plenty of precursor stories on the same topic:

High court lets cities and states sue Exxon et al

…But something else happened yesterday too, with a price tag that may eventually dwarf that settlement, and with even larger potential implications for the future of the planet. The Supreme Court, also tersely, declined to grant cert in a case brought by oil companies desperately trying to hold off state court trials for their climate crimes. Continue reading →

McKibben Embraces Green Building Boom

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Grace J. Kim

We link to one person more than anyone else, for good reason:

ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING

Yes in Our Backyards
It’s time progressives like me learned to love the green building boom.

The United States is on the brink of its most consequential transformation since the New Deal. Read more about what it takes to decarbonize the economy, and what stands in the way, here. 

I’m an environmentalist, which means I’ve got some practice in saying no. It’s what we do: John Muir saying no to the destruction of Yosemite helped kick off environmentalism; Rachel Carson said no to DDT; the Sierra Club said no to the damming of the Grand Canyon. Continue reading →

Fusion Hoopla

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A reason that the breakthrough is causing such hoopla is that it implicitly promises that we could use fusion to run the world in almost its current form. Photograph courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Without the expertise to fully appreciate the science, the hoopla can be overlooked too easily. McKibben’s comment helps clarify:

The Fusion Breakthrough Suggests That Maybe Someday We’ll Have a Second Sun

In the meantime, we need to use the sun we’ve already got.

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy: according to early reports, scientists at the government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant. Continue reading →

McKibben From COP 27 & A Rare Smile

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You can read the daily news from COP27 on the official website, and it is useful information but not fully contextualized; for that we have our most reliable scribe who today is giving us one of his rare smiles:

Has the fever broken just a bit?

The view from Egypt: Trumpism, Putinism, Bolsonaroism finally on the defensive

Those of us who have been faithful in bringing the world bad news are perhaps excused if we seize occasionally on the the promising straws in the wind (though always aware that ill winds continue blowing, and not just in Florida where a rare November hurricane made landfall today). I’m thinking globally this afternoon, because I’m at the climate summit in Sharm al Sheikh in Egypt, where dozens of countries have pavilions (it’s the Epcot of carbon mitigation.) And the planet looks just a little better than it did a month ago. Continue reading →

Choose Your Hope Vector Carefully

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We all need an occasional dose of hope, especially when it comes to climate change. Choosing the right kind makes a huge difference, so give McKibben’s newsletter a thorough reading this week:

Magical Hope vs Actual Hope

Left or right, physics doesn’t much care about your wishful thinking

I spent the weekend in Reno, Nevada with, among other people, my old friend Rebecca Solnit. We were there to rally voters and knock on doors in one of the nastiest elections in the country—and at such times Solnit’s powerful reflections on hope are a balm and a spur. Continue reading →

Memo From Mr. Gates

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We have only rarely linked to stories featuring or mentioning Mr. Gates.

This is not because we do not value his opinions; we think he is the smart money on multiple fronts. Climate change is one of them.

Even if we consider McKibben the more reliable scribe, and even if we give Malmo his due, this is still smart money territory:

The state of the energy transition

My annual memo about the journey to zero emissions.

When I first started learning about climate change 15 years ago, I came to three conclusions. First, avoiding a climate disaster would be the hardest challenge people had ever faced. Second, the only way to do it was to invest aggressively in clean-energy innovation and deployment. And third, we needed to get going. Continue reading →