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A new reality for living on 'eaarth'
Bill McKibben
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TEXT OF INTERVIEW
Kai Ryssdal: Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham say they'll unveil their new climate change bill by next week sometime. But between health care and financial reform and a Supreme Court nomination, it could get kind of lost in the shuffle.
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben says it's already too late to prevent global warming. What we have to do now is find a way to cope with our new reality. His new book is called "Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet." Bill, it's good to talk to you.
Bill McKibben: As always, Kai.
Ryssdal: This book, for those who can't see it out there, the title is "Eaarth" with the unconventional spelling of e-a-a-r-t-h. Help me out there.
McKibben: The conceit is that we really have built a new planet. Substantially different enough from the one that we were born onto to warrant a new name. This earth that we live on now has 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere than the one 50 years ago. Its oceans are turning steadily acid. We're seeing dramatic increases both in drought and in deluge, enough so that we've really begun to alter not only the ecological fabric of the planet but the economic fabric as well.
Ryssdal: It kind of feels on a day-to-day basis like the same old place.
McKibben: It does until something happens. I recount the story of our small town, and the fact that summer before last we had the two biggest rainstorms ever recorded there. That kind of storm is now happening in some place around the world every single day. This is a different world. It so far doesn't feel entirely different. It just feels a little different.
Ryssdal: So how do we recalibrate? Do we just get used to living smaller and less complicated and closer to home?
McKibben: Well, that's certainly part of it. We need to do two things. One, put a price on carbon so that we really begin to ween ourselves aggressively from fossil fuel. Even when we do that we'd be very wise to re-examine our economic life. Stop thinking constantly about expansion, and start thinking more about security. That implies getting away from too-big-to-fail, not just in banking, but in energy, in agriculture, and in almost everything we do.
Ryssdal: Take me through one of those big fixed investments that you spend some time on in the book: agriculture. How do we deconstruct that so that it becomes sustainable?
McKibben: Right now soil has become a kind of matrix for holding your corn upright while you apply fossil fuel. We need to get back to a very different kind of agriculture. One that's much more diverse and is much more localized. And that's beginning to happen, Kai. The fastest growing part of the food economy for the last decade has been local farmers' markets.
Ryssdal: I don't want to get all macroeconomic on you here, Bill. But just to go back to basic economics and Adam Smith, the opening lines of "Wealth of Nations," the book that he wrote, was consumption is the soul and purpose of all production. I mean that's why you have economies is to grow and get bigger.
McKibben: He didn't say that it's to grow forever getting bigger. In fact, he was pretty clear that there was a place at which that no longer made sense. What economists have failed to realize from the beginning, the economy is a subset of something else, and that something else is the natural world. There comes a point in which infinite growth no longer works. This is the moment finally when those limits are at hand.
Ryssdal: You're probably the last guy I need to tell this to. But there are fundamentally two responses to a book like this. One is to put your fingers in your ears, and say, la, la, la, because it's really just so depressing that you can't even comprehend. Or, as you say in the book, you go down into the basement, and you start oiling your guns because the apocalypse is nigh. What are you supposed to do about those responses?
McKibben: You know I've spent the last two or three years of my life organizing the largest scale global environmental movement we've seen. At the same time, I've been doing all kinds of work in the place where I live, in my town in Vermont. We need to work at that local scale and at that global. It's true that we've taken the sweet earth on which we were born and degraded it in pretty powerful ways. There's already damage. There will be more. So we better figure out how to live on the planet we have left.
Ryssdal: Bill McKibben's latest offering is a book called "Eaarth," that's e, double a, r, t, h. Bill, thanks a lot.
McKibben: Thank you, Kai, so much.
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As usual, this is all begging the question. It's actually true that "it's already too late to prevent global warming," but that's because *human activity had next to nothing to do with global warming in the first place* and *global warming has stopped already.* The planet is constantly changing; some changes are due to human activity, and some--probably most--aren't. The first question to ask about any given change is *is it beneficial?* And we need to ask the same question about any political alleged solution someone proposes. The political proposals advocated in this column are the sort of tyranny against which both common sense and patriotism revolt. We've been warned for years that liberals would put a tax on breathing if they thought they could get away with it; now, calling it a "carbon tax," you're actually advocating it as a serious proposal. No thank you!
Bill McKibben is either misinformed or is himself misinforming.
The idea that the rainstorms that hit his home town have anything to do with climate change is wrong, plain and simple. There has been no increase in severe weather in the United States over the last fifty years. None.
The idea that the oceans are getting "more acidic" is also wrong. The oceans are alkaline. There is speculations that the pH has dropped slightly over the last one hundred years, by about 0.15 (8.15 to 8.0 or thereabouts.) But pH varies by time of year and time of day by a far greater number.
Kai Ryssdal noted that everything in nature seemed to be about the same. Touché Mr. Ryssdal. It is, and will continue to be, with the usual variations.
Maybe it is time for Marketplace to interview Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Richard Lindzen, or Willis Eschenbach. Some common sense is much needed.
So Mr Bill thinks we are going to die from global warming! If he was dying from cancer do you think he or you would still be so cockee as thinking we could kill the earth!!!!!!!!!!!!! And for the rest of you why is it higher education can never live within there means, higher taxes and bond over rides means more prodution to pay for higher taxes I. E.higher carbon footprint just once I would like someone to say no to college sports becacause it leaves to big of carbon footprint for flying all of those football teams around. But it will never happen because it is all about money! If you belive in Global warming then help stop Global warming kill yourself
I am an engineer by training who understands and accepts the scientific fact of global warming. Yet this author during his interview diluted the case for global warming by applying faulty anecdotal logic. The heavy rains in his home town are not evidence for climate change, nor is snow falling in Texas (as cited by Sean Hannity) evidence against climate change.
This story reminds me of the ABC special Earth 2100 aired in june 2009 and Jaryed Diamond's Book Collapse. The prevailing theme of these 2 efforts as in this story are to bring sharp attention to the fact , that, we live on a small and rapidly shrinking planet where, we as a species no longer have the luxury of unfettered capital exploitation of the planet or its precious human resources.
Mr. McKibben makes a fine point about the false assumption of many economists and students of social systems. The economy does not need to grow in order to maintain a quality standard of living for those involved. Under that model, it is only by ever growing the size of the pyramid of exploitation of people and natural resources that the volume of those living at a higher standard of living increases. As the author points out, this model must eventually collapse. Unfortunately, based on my observations of human behavior as individuals and groups, I fear that it will take tremendous repercussions to human lifestyle to bring this about. I would contend that it will do so only once the pyramid grows so large and our net exploitation causes a series of catastrophic collapses in the global ecosystem which will be followed by amazing human efforts to compensate for the demolition of the "natural life support functions" of the planet. Only then might we truly start to manage the overflowing populations of poorer nations forced to scour the earth and sea to subsist, as well as the impact of so many people climbing out of relative material poverty to consume like we do in the West. We in developed nations can all decide to be noble and stop consuming all together, but we would quickly be replaced by billions more that have not yet begun to grow weary of consumption and develop a guilty conscious about their impact on the planet. Global population control is needed today, or all our best efforts at sustainability and environmental safeguarding are for not.
Not only is your guest talking of the dangers of climate change; but, he also hit another topic I've been thinking about for some time now.
Why must we always think our economy has to grow? Why must a company continue to make more and more money year after year? It must come at someone else's expense. In a world of limited resources, this is insane!
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