I’ve written admiringly of Bill McKibben, one of our leading environmental philosophers and journalists. He reviewed Lord Stern’s The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity in a recent issue of the “NY Review of Books.” The review covered a lot of good ground but it strayed in some instances from what readers needed to know. (The review is not available for free online. Try your friendly neighborhood library, on-line through library services, or buy the piece for $3.) In any event, here are my thoughts on the review, as I submitted them to the editors.
***********
Bill McKibben is an astute climate warrior and has been for a fair number of years. I am, for that reason, all the more perplexed then by a few observations he has made in his recent review of Lord Stern’s The Global Deal. The conservative movement in America has certainly not “…been able to block every proposal to do anything serious about global warming.” The 2007 federal Energy Independence and Security Act, passed by the then-new Democratic Congress – and signed grudgingly into law by President Bush – was a signal achievement for energy efficiency and renewable energy. President Obama’s economic stimulus package devotes scores of billions of dollars for clean tech. The President’s recent initiative to further boost the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards is another important step. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast US and Western Climate Initiative, greenhouse gas-limiting compacts between a number of states and Canadian provinces, are well underway. 29 states have renewable energy standards requiring a certain percentage of renewable power from utilities and the US Environmental Protection Agency has issued an “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act that well may lead, in the not-so-distant future, to mandated reductions of greenhouse gases.
Certainly, we could have much greater buy-in on averting a climate catastrophe – much worse than the one we’re already experiencing – by our Republican brethren in Congress, among others, but the political situation is not as dire as McKibben indicates.
And yes, the politics, science, and economics of climate change, energy and sustainability are “eye-glazing” in their complexity, but that doesn’t justify oversimplifying some important aspects of the problem. McKibben maintains we need only really concern ourselves with carbon dioxide and that Lord Stern’s use of the term “CO2 equivalent” is an unnecessary complication. This is pretty far off the mark. Greenhouse gases regulated under the Kyoto Protocol also include methane, nitrous oxide and the class of “F-gases.” There’s a reason for that. Measured by CO2eq, a greenhouse gas’s global warming potential, methane accounted for 14.3% of global emissions in 2004, nitrous oxide 7.9% and the F-gases 1.1%. These are not inconsiderable amounts. Black carbon, not regulated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been directly linked by a number of scientists, including those led by James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to the rapidly increasing melting of Arctic ice and the Himalayan glaciers that supply water for at least three quarters of a billion Asians. McKibben makes a further curious statement regarding these other GHGs: “…other gases offset their effect…” I am at a loss to understand this assertion.
I wholly agree with Mr. McKibben that we are in a serious situation and that prolonged, focused, committed global attention needs to be paid to restoring earth’s climate and other natural systems. He has been in the vanguard in the effort to create that focus. It needs to be wholly understood, however, that although there is much yet that needs to be done, we have made massive strides and that cutting corners on difficult issues will not get us where we need to be any faster.
