October/November 2006

Water Markets /Water Wars And a small island called Arcata, California
Jim Tobin

Taking to the Streets to Raise Awareness of Global Warming
Bill McKibben

Interview with Bill McKibben
Meteor Blades

My Low-Carbon Diet
Seth Zuckerman

A Conversation with David Ward
Jody Woodruff

In Tune With the Sacred
Raina Hassan Sanderson

Democracy and the Middle Class
Thom Hartmann

The Great Turning From Empire to Earth Community
David Korten

The McKenzie River Gathering Foundation Turns 30
Richard Moeschl

Transformation Through Film
Marla Estes

Mixed Media Reviews
Debi Weiss

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

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Interview with Bill McKibben

Meteor Blades

Meteor Blades: Why Vermont? Wouldn’t a walk and talk along the route from Baltimore to DC have more impact?

McKibben: Well, the short answer is that Vermont is where I live, and so, where I can organize. But the great hope is precisely that if we can make some noise up here the idea will spread quickly to other spots. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s yet to be a real large-scale protest movement that gets spread virally in the Internet age (although the Seattle WTO protests owed part of their potency to the fact that this then-little-understood medium helped organizers assemble a crowd under the noses of the media). In fact, even in the last few weeks I’ve had emails from around the country asking for advice. Anyway, though I suspect our [Vermont] legislators would mostly vote the right way anyway on global warming, we want them to understand that their constituents need them to be champions on this issue.

I know you were an early adopter of hybrid car technology. And I suspect your house is heavily insulated and the refrigerator filled with locally grown food. But one attitude I’ve encountered time and again is that solving global warming is such a huge issue that nothing individuals can do will make a difference, so why bother? Any advice on how to break through the stubbornness?

It’s hard to break through that idea because, frankly, there’s a deep mathematical logic to it. Individual action is a kind of calisthenics before the big event, which must be political. Only the kind of massive change that can be brought about through national (and, even harder, international) policy will really suffice to reduce the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. So the key is summoning political will—and the very act of coming together in a march, say, to demand that kind of action will help us to start feeling politically powerful again.

I wrote the very first general book about global warming, way back in 1989, and I’ve been working on it ever since. The science has grown grimmer in the past few years as we understand just how fast we’re unhinging the Earth’s system. There remains time to do something about global warming (not avert it, but keep it from getting any worse than it has to be), but we need very quickly to seize that moment. And I think that right now—because of Katrina, because of Al Gore’s movie, because of our hot summer—is the best opening we’ve had in two decades.

If you rubbed a compact fluorescent bulb and the Eco-Genie popped out to offer you one wish—passage of a single piece of narrowly focused global warming legislation—what would you ask for?

I think the rapid phase-in of a 40 mpg average for new cars. Because the technology is there to do it easily, because it would demonstrate to us that the change in our sacred lifestyles will be very small at first—and because it will give everyone the added benefit of saving some money on gas. Unless you drive a hybrid, you can’t believe the number of people who sidle up to you at a gas station and ask some longing questions about exactly how far it goes on a tank of gas.

And after that I’d work my way down Energize America 2020’s* list of policies. I just wrote an overview article for Sierra magazine on our energy situation, and described that joint effort as the single most impressive package of energy policy anyone has yet concocted.

Some people, including long-time environmental critics, are saying that nuclear power can, at the very least, provide a transition that will buy us time to come up with other technologies to reduce or eliminate human-made greenhouse gases. Do you agree?

Here’s what I think: nuclear power is a potential safety threat, if something goes wrong. Coal-fired power is guaranteed destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it’s supposed to. I don’t mean to minimize the danger of a reactor; I do mean to use that danger to highlight the awesome peril posed by our conventional means of generating electricity. (And there are 150 new coal plants on the books in some stage or another).

That said, nuclear power is not where I’d turn first, or second, or even third. The reason is economics—without massive government subsidy it doesn’t work because it’s an inherently expensive technology, rather like burning twenty-dollar bills to generate electricity. All the econometric modeling not paid for by the nuclear industry itself makes clear that if you spent a billion dollars on a nuclear plant and a billion dollars on some conservation program, you’d get three or four or five times the carbon bang for your buck. So, before nuclear power, efficient appliances, heavy-duty insulation, real attention to mass transit, and also an all-out commitment to renewables, especially wind, which are much closer to cost-competitive. And no one ever spent the night worrying that a terrorist was about to smash their wind tower, spreading dangerous wind particles in every direction.

What kind of useful advice does a small-town/rural family like yours have for us urban dwellers?

City dwellers, depending on how they live, are already the greenest Americans. New York City, because it’s the least car-dependent city in the country, is our environmental champion in many ways. I think the biggest changes are needed where the majority of Americans live—i.e., the suburbs, a landscape that only sprung up because of cheap energy, and which will take real work to transform. The kind of semi-intact small towns and local economies that Vermont and some other rural places still possess are useful models—at least, that’s one of the theses of my next book.

But the real lesson, and the one I hope this march will highlight, is that the technology we need above all is the technology of community. Vermont still has town meeting government—we’re reasonably good at talking with each other. It’s one reason lots of experiments have come out of this state: the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, for instance, or for that matter, the Dean campaign. It’s not that we’re so liberal (we have a conservative governor; we’ve lost more people per capita in Iraq than any other state). But I think we’re still pretty good at community, which is the underlying necessity for a more efficient and happier country. At root, dealing with global warming will mean sanding the edges off of some of America’s hyperindividualism—and perhaps that will be just a little easier out in the country.

* Energize America (www.ea2020.org) is a comprehensive 20-point plan developed by informed citizen activists to wean the US from its fossil fuel addiction and provide the US with Energy Security by 2020, Energy Freedom by 2040. By 2020, Energize America will enable the US to 1) Reduce both oil imports and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50% and 2) Generate 25% of our electricity from renewable sources, and create 2 million new energy-related American jobs and save 1 million “at-risk” auto jobs.

This interview originally appeared at www.dailykos.com where Meteor Blades’ words often appear. Read his blog, The Next Hurrah, at www.thenexthurrah.typepad.com.