Bill McKibben is not a small-name environmentalist. Hailed by Time magazine as “the world’s best green journalist,” he created and led 350.org, which spawned 5,200 simultaneous climate change demonstrations in 181 countries two years ago. Foreign Policy magazine has since included him in a list of top 100 most important global thinkers.
So when students at UBC landed him as a guest speaker last month, I went to listen. What I didn’t expect, however, was a call to action specifically aimed at British Columbians.
“British Columbia is one of the most crucial places on the planet going into the next 10 years, as we figure out how we’re going to try and staunch the flow of carbon into the atmosphere,” McKibben said. “You guys will potentially play a tremendously outsized role. You have enormous leverage to bring to bear on the most important problem that human beings have ever faced.”
Why B.C.? Why this moment? McKibben explained.
Earth “more finely balanced” than we understood
McKibben’s 1989 book, The End of Nature, was the first to explain global warming for a general audience.
“The only thing we didn’t know 20 years ago was how fast and how hard this would pinch,” he said. “The earth just turned out to be more finely balanced than we understood.”
McKibben pointed to contemporary results of an already-warming globe:
•40% less ice in the Arctic and 30% more acid in the oceans than in the late 1960s.
•nineteen nations setting new temperature records in 2010, the warmest year on record (including Pakistan at a blazing 129°F); and
•epic droughts and equally epic floods.
In McKibben’s home state of Vermont this summer, 200 years of rainfall records were washed away by 25-30%, not marginal record-nudging increments. He commented, “This rainfall was falling on a new planet.”
Peat fires in Russia in 2010 compromised their grain harvest. In response, the world’s third-largest exporter of grain ceased all exports, contributing to a 70% spike in global grain prices and swelling numbers of the hungry.
McKibben asked the students to consider two things: First, the moral and ethical elements of climate change, because many nations where people are suffering are not those responsible for the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to the use of fossil fuels. (Nor have they enjoyed many of the benefits of that fuel.)
Second, that the warming is not stopping. There is already enough carbon in the atmosphere to expect “a difficult century,” said McKibben. But without cutting our dependence on coal and gas, we will reach levels of warming with serious consequences.
“Every degree increase in global average temperature will reduce grain yields by about 10%,” said McKibben. “You can predict what it would mean for peace, justice, stability, development, progress, women’s rights, food security … if there were suddenly 20% or 30% fewer calories on this earth than there are now. We cannot let it happen.”
B.C. jumping off point for global warming
McKibben then narrowed his message to B.C., based on its location between Alberta’s tar sands – the second-largest pool of carbon on earth after the Saudi oil fields – and their potential markets.
“It was burning the oil fields of Saudi Arabia more than anything else that’s ... put the planet in trouble,” he said. “But when we started in on Saudi Arabia, no one knew about climate change. If now, knowing what we know … we come to the second Saudi Arabia and just do the same damn thing, then we’re crazy.”
McKibben, who led the efforts to stop the Keystone pipeline in the U.S., said B.C. is in “a position to punch way above your weight,” with regards to pipelines proposed to carry tar sands and other fuels through the province.
“We need you to figure out how to stop those things from happening,” he said. “There are good local reasons to do it. But there are also really, really, deep moral and ethical reasons.
“If those pipelines go through and the plans for coal ports to ship coal to Asia come through, then before very long British Columbia is going to be the jumping off point for an ungodly share of the planet’s carbon.
“You’re going to be one of the main staging grounds for global warming, a platform for heating the planet. And the effect might be to generate some money in the short term for some Canadians, but the outcome in the short, medium and long term will be disaster for people around the world.”
Canada’s burden – and honour
In the same way that Brazil must protect the Amazon, Canada, said McKibben, has a deeply special role to play.
“It is not easy to deal with not being able to get the money from the tar sands,” he acknowledged. “[But] that oil in Alberta needs to stay where it has been for the last few billion years, underground, where it can’t do any harm. It’s Canada’s role to make sure of that and to guard it. That’s a great burden and it’s a great honour.”
And for a chuckle, McKibben refuted those who would call him “radical.”
“I’d like the planet I was born onto and a job and enough money. That’s pretty conservative,” he said. “Radicals are the people who think it’s okay to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere to make some money. If you wrote a Bond movie script with that as the plot, it wouldn’t fly – it would just be too weird.”
You can watch BMcKibben’s address to UBC students at www.terry.ubc.ca. •
