Bill McKibben: The fierce urgency of now

[GliderGuider]

The fierce urgency of now
Bill McKibben

Watching the backlash against clean energy projects build in Canada has moved me to think about what Americans have learned from facing this same problem. I have been thinking and writing for several years about overcoming conflict-avoidance and the importance of standing up for "Big Truths" even at the price of criticizing fellow environmentalists.

It's not that I've developed a mean streak. It's that the environmental movement has reached an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.

By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or those kinds of things – pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced.

In the ideal world, we'd do everything slowly and carefully – but this planet is rapidly becoming the worst of all possible worlds, a place that before my daughter dies may well see temperatures exceeding anything since before the dawn of primate evolution. A planet facing hundreds of millions of environmental refugees as a result of rising seas, with heat waves like the one that killed 35,000 in Europe becoming commonplace occurrences.

The evidence gets worse by the day: already whole nations are evacuating, the Arctic is melting and we have begun to release the massive storehouse of carbon trapped under the polar ice. Scientists figure the "safe" level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 350 parts per million. This is the most important number in the world. Go beyond it for very long and we will trigger "feedbacks" that will result in runaway warming spiralling out of any human control and resulting in a largely inhospitable planet.

Even if he is a "Mr. Fix-It", I've always liked the way McKibben cuts to the chase.

[Dead_Parrot]

1. Nice article...

...shame about the comments. Makes you think the the collapse of the biosphere and the starvation of billions might not be so bad after all.
x(

[GliderGuider]

3. Man is not a rational creature

We are a rationalizing creature. We will accept any rationale for our decisions that enhances our status, sense of self-worth or our physical or psychological comfort. After you read the comments to that article, think about how the structure of our brain, our evolved psychology and our cultural narrative team up to screw us over. One could not ask for a more perfect illustration of modern man's psychological cul-de-sac.

http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Behaviour.html

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Yeah. It's amazing we got this far, to be honest.

Whenever a salesman...

tries to sell me a product and says that I have to act now, I get nervous. We are designing the transport plan for the next 20,000 years. If the sole purpose to build wheels is to reduce effort, then we need to consider a few things first. As wheels need effort to make them, it is questionable how much effort is saved....

Submitted by lad at 7:53 AM Wednesday, March 25 12,009 BC

[hunter]

5. Who needs wheels when we have feet? -- hunter

I think we should try riding around on horses. -- crazy optimist

You want to sit on food? That's perverted. -- an honest conservative.

[pscot]

2. The response in the comments

was remarkably negative. And greens were every bit as negative as the deniers. Which, I guess, proves his point. People who go around telling the truth get shot at from all sides.

[Nihil]

6. Agreed.

Only read the first page of comments as they were so depressingly
stupid (with one or two exceptions) that I just didn't want to bother.

The archtypical climate change denier: As thick as two short planks
but with a loud voice.

:-(