EffektTV: Bill McKibbens budskap till Sverige

More on Bill McKibben and the all important number 350

Max Jerneck and Tom R. Burns

Bill McKibben is one of the leaders, thinkers, and doers behind what may turn out to be one of the largest political manifestations in history. On October 24, his brainchild 350.org will launch a multitude of events worldwide to raise awareness about climate change. The goal is to imprint in the minds of everyone the number 350, which is the atmospheric CO2 concentration (parts per million) that many scientists consider a limit or likely ”tipping point” for survival. 350.org is a platform, a global network connecting people in every corner of the planet. The network consists of over 200 organizations around the world and every continent is well represented. Bill McKibben is, in addition to being a well-known writer, activist, and co-founder of 350.org, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in the USA. He is the author of The End of Nature, which was the first book for a general audience on climate change. We interviewed him at a recent international conference in Oslo, Norway — the Oslo Sustainability Summit (August 31st – September 1st) — where he explained why 350 is the most important number in the world:

”During the 10 000 years during which civilization developed, the average rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 270 parts per million. With the industrial revolution, that number started going up, and we are now around 390. Scientists now believe that 350 is the highest number that is safe. In a paper published by NASA scientist Jim Hansen, he writes that above 350, we cannot have a planet on which life adapted. Those are very strong words for a scientific paper. We used to think that numbers like 450 would be safe, but that changed in the summer of 2007, when the ice in the Arctic suddenly started melting at a rate no-one had imagined. The ice was melting 50 to 60 years ahead of when the computer models said that it would. There was 25 percent less ice in the Arctic than there had ever been, at least for millions of years; photos of the Earth from space looked very different.

Now, if one degree temperature rise melts the arctic, we don’t want to see what two degrees will do, much less three or four. There are scary and insidious feedback loops. The permafrost is melting and releasing methane gas, and once that gets out of hand we’ll never get back. Some scientists say that it is already too late to stop global warming, that we’ve waited too long.”

”Glaciers are also melting. The glaciers on the Himalayan plateau provide water to rivers like the Ganges, the Yellow, the Brahmaputra, etcetera. One in three people on Earth live downstream from these rivers. The glacier above the Ganges will be gone by 2035 at the rate it is going. And let me tell you a little about Bangladesh, a country with more than a 120 million people. These people are basically screwed. Their rivers are flooding because of melting glaciers, and the Bay of Bengal is rising. Salt water is leaking into their soils and, when I was there, there was an outbreak of what is called dengue fever, which is increasing due to rising temperatures. The people are suffering because of global warming, and the thing is that none of them have done a damn thing to make it happen. Bangladesh’s emissions are not even measurable on the scale, they’re within the margin of error. The U.S., with four percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. I was at a hospital where people were dying of dengue fever and I thought to myself that one out of every four of those hospital beds are our fault. There are around 300 000 people dying every year from global warming, a number that is going to go up exponentially.”

McKibben and others behind the 350.org movement want to make 350 the most well known number in the world. They have been building a mass movement around the world, as strong in the North as in the South. On October 24, this global network intends to stage the biggest and most geographically spread manifestation there has ever been. Among the 115 countries involved, there will be mountain climbers unfolding banners with the number 350 on mountain tops, there will be people playing planetary scrabble, forming a 3 in India, a 5 in South Africa and a 0 in Florida. The intent is to have the media pay attention and show some very powerful images in the weeks before the UN Climate Change meetings in Copenhagen in December. 350.org has so far about 1500 actions registered to take place on October 24.

Their major goal is to insert that number into the minds of as many people as possible. McKibben stresses, ”People need to get involved politically, it isn’t enough for people to just change their own individual behavior, it’s too late for that.”

We also asked Bill McKibben how is the planet earth can get back to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when it is already close to 390.
”We’ll have to stop burning coal by 2030. We’ll probably use all the easily accessible oil, I mean it’s too valuable to be left alone. We can make the math work anyway, but we can’t do things like exploit the tar sands. We’ll have to put a strong cap on carbon, change the economics in order to shift to renewable energy. We could use natural gas (which is much cleaner) as a bridging fuel.”

At the same time, there are powerful vested interests in the fossil fuel economy, and McKibben is not sure that they can be overcome.
”They may be too powerful, and we may lose. But they grow weaker everyday, as people become aware of the problem.”

Finally, we asked Bill McKibben if he is an optimist or a pessimist regarding our chances of saving the planet. He answered directly:
”Look, I’ve stopped being an optimist or a pessimist. I just get up in the morning and do what I can. Clearly, the outcome is uncertain; all I can do is shift the odds. Right now we may have a 15 percent chance of succeeding; maybe if we in 350.org do all we can, we might make it 20 percent. Given the stakes, I think it’s worth it”