{"id":146732,"date":"2013-09-18T15:00:30","date_gmt":"2013-09-18T19:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"\/gazette\/?p=146732"},"modified":"2019-07-26T11:51:08","modified_gmt":"2019-07-26T15:51:08","slug":"big-problems-small-solutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2013\/09\/big-problems-small-solutions\/","title":{"rendered":"Big problems, small solutions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t
\"\"

"My goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement and into a life of climate-change activism," said Bill McKibben, who delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.<\/p>

Stephanie Mitchell\/Harvard Staff Photographer<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t

\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tBig problems, small solutions\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t
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\n\t\tCorydon Ireland\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

\n\t\t\tAs global warming rises, McKibben suggests more local fixes\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\t\t

If you Google \u201cBill,\u201d the first hit you get is the phrase \u201cBill me later.\u201d It\u2019s an accidental tribute to the writer-turned-activist whom everyone calls by his first name: Bill McKibben<\/a> \u201982, who spoke at Harvard Tuesday.<\/p>\n

McKibben\u2019s message for years has been that oil-based economies shelve the issue of the environmental costs of fossil fuels. When it comes to the natural systems that support humanity \u2014 clean air, fresh water, and pristine seas \u2014 the message from developing countries has been: Bill me later.<\/p>\n

Well, the bill is due, McKibben said, and it may be too late to pay. Seas are rising, temperatures climbing, storms intensifying, and floods and droughts worsening because of fossil fuel emissions, a statement with a 95 percent chance of certainty, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>, up from 66 percent in 2001.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the moment, physics is well ahead\u201d of political action, McKibben told a crowd at Sanders Theatre, but the fight is on. There have been growing protests \u2014 many of them centered on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline \u2014 and a new movement to persuade institutions to jettison investments related to fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a strange pleasure it is,\u201d McKibben said, to be in the tiered seating, polished wood, and stained glass venue that he remembered from lectures in his undergraduate days. McKibben delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement<\/a>, an arm of the Division of Continuing Education since 1977.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement\u201d and into a life of climate-change activism, said McKibben. That shift may even mean getting sent to jail, a life event the author endured for the first time in 2011 during a protest at the White House. Since then, he has talked with eager new older activists. \u201cThis is on my bucket list,\u201d one told him. \u201cTell me how I can get arrested.\u201d<\/p>\n

Young people are leading climate change activism now, said McKibben, but it\u2019s time to see \u201celders acting like elders\u201d by putting their comfort on the line for a cause. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to be arrested, please wear a necktie or a dress,\u201d he told the audience, since those are visual signals that \u201cthere is nothing radical going on here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRadicals work at oil companies,\u201d he said, because the radical consequences of oil-slicked climate change are \u201cburning the top of the Earth, melting Arctic ice, acidifying the oceans. What could be more radical than that?\u201d<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the lecture, which was delivered in a witty and extemporaneous style, McKibben offered an apology. \u201cMy role in life is basically to be a professional bummer-outer,\u201d he said, an activist delivering stark facts, in this case on \u201cthe prettiest fall day of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he promised to get past the worst of the talk first and fast, saying that: the Earth has just come out of 10,000 years of mild climate in the Holocene epoch and into an uncertain era of climate change; storms, wildfires, droughts, and temperatures are breaking records at a rat-a-tat pace; oceans are turning acidic; 80 percent of the Arctic ice cover was gone last summer; and in a few decades \u201cwe\u2019ve taken one of the most basic features of the Earth [steady temperatures] and broken it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Earth\u2019s temperature has risen about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the last few decades, which may not sound like much, since it\u2019s about three-quarters of a watt per square meter of the Earth\u2019s surface, the equivalent of a Christmas tree bulb. But taken worldwide, said the author, that extra heat equals the output of \u201c400,000 Hiroshima-size bombs daily.\u201d<\/p>\n

He sketched one consequence: Each degree of temperature rise worldwide means a 10 percent cut in grain yields.<\/p>\n

McKibben pointed to events of the past week as signs of the changing climate: forest fires in the West, catastrophic flooding in Colorado, a typhoon ripping into Japan, and rare double storms that punched both coasts of Mexico.<\/p>\n

The signs are there for all to see, he said, even closer to Boston. \u201cThe New York City subway filled up with the Atlantic Ocean last October,\u201d he said of Hurricane Sandy. \u201cWhat more do you want? And we are only at the start \u2014 only at the start \u2014 of our global warming era,\u201d which some analysts say will make present-day civilization impossible.<\/p>\n

McKibben summed up the surprise and fear of climate change, saying, \u201cThis is by far the biggest thing human beings have ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n

After his look at the grim facts, he turned to solutions. He said that putting a price on carbon use would assure that greenhouse gases don\u2019t just \u201cpour into the atmosphere for free.\u201d<\/p>\n

More large-scale renewable energy projects would reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Germany is a success story in that respect, he said, with solar and wind power arrays that some days this summer provided half of that nation\u2019s electricity. \u201cNot many people go to Germany for their sun-splashed vacations,\u201d McKibben said, pointing to the plausibility of renewable energy even in unlikely places. \u201cThere are more solar panels in Bavaria than the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the future, he said, societies should get a boost from distributed-generation energy systems, the small-scale, decentralized power supplies that reduce vulnerability and emphasize regional resilience. (He predicted that nuclear power will play a very small part in backing away from climate change, since such plants are too slow to get on line, and too expensive for debt-crushed times.)<\/p>\n

He suggested that building a climate-change movement could lead to the large-scale civil alliances and actions that could prove a counterweight to a moribund Congress.<\/p>\n

McKibben discussed 350.org, the global movement that he and seven undergraduates started at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar. (The number refers to 350 ppm, or parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that was a scientific tipping point for climate change. That number is now over 400 ppm.) \u201cOur goal was to organize the world,\u201d he said to a patter of laughter. The group\u2019s first global action rippled across the globe, with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries.<\/p>\n

More global actions followed, and participants provided thousands of pictures from around the world. McKibben displayed some of them on a screen. Many showed what he called the most common activists in the world, who are young, poor, brown, black, and Asian. Some of the demonstrations were huge. Others were small, like one in Les Cayes, a seaport in southwestern Haiti. In the picture, seven children with signs stand ankle-deep in a flooded street.<\/p>\n

That small demonstration argued that \u201cyour actions affect me,\u201d said McKibben, reminding the audience that the poor in remote nations affected by climate change rely on the rich in developed nations to take action. \u201cThey can\u2019t get to the White House to protest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

McKibben will be in Washington, D.C., Saturday for a \u201cdraw the line\u201d action, a coast-to-coast protest against the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.<\/p>\n

That pipeline is the outward sign of an environmental disaster already underway in Canada. With only 3 percent of the tar sands oil extracted so far in Alberta, he said that the ground-stripping oil mining has already disturbed a section of boreal forest the size of Scotland and created vast pools of tailings waste held back by the biggest dams in the world.<\/p>\n

His lecture came on the official publication day of his latest book, \u201cOil and Honey<\/a>,\u201d a memoir of his transition from journalism to activism. (Its subtitle is \u201cThe Education of an Unlikely Activist.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The \u201coil\u201d of the title is the symbol of his public fight, largely through 350.org, against the coal, gas, and oil industries. The \u201choney\u201d is the book\u2019s emotional antipode, recounting McKibben\u2019s periodic visits with Kirk Webster, a Vermont neighbor who runs a small-scale, chemical-free beekeeping operation.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis life doesn\u2019t seem Luddite or retro. It seems advanced,\u201d wrote McKibben, who says that regional, self-sufficient economies can buffer the effects of climate change. He called Webster, who doesn\u2019t own a computer and writes with pencil and paper, \u201ca solid human being, attractively and somewhat dauntingly solid.\u201d<\/p>\n

McKibben is a creature of two worlds, the calm of home in Vermont, with its rhythms as natural as a beekeeper\u2019s seasons, and the rush of an activist\u2019s life, with its 400 emails a day, 24-hour news cycle, and constant world travel that he admits leaves vapor trails of spent fossil fuels behind him.<\/p>\n

The book was not the point of coming to Harvard, McKibben said, and he barely mentioned it, though his lecture bore the same title. But in response to a question, the book came up. He called his friend\u2019s honey operation a sign of the \u201cbeautiful, evolving local economies\u201d that are rebounding in an age marked by the resurgence of small farms and the popularity of farmers markets, the food sector\u2019s fasting-growing segment.<\/p>\n

But then the \u201cbummer-outer\u201d McKibben came back, in discussing the alternate farm and energy sector. \u201cBy itself, it\u2019s not enough. We have to work at the global (level), and we have to work at the local.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end, McKibben pointed again to the joys of the fall day still in full splendor outside. But for him there was work yet to do. As the departing audience streamed past, McKibben stood outside Sanders, head down, reading the screen on his cellphone.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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webster\"],\"dateCreated\":\"2013-09-18T19:00:30Z\",\"datePublished\":\"2013-09-18T19:00:30Z\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-07-26T15:51:08Z\"}<\/script>","tracker_url":"https:\/\/cdn.parsely.com\/keys\/news.harvard.edu\/p.js"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/091713_mckibben_bill_605.jpg","has_blocks":true,"block_data":{"0":{"blockName":"harvard-gazette\/article-header","attrs":{"blockColorPalette":"","coloredHeading":"","creditText":"Stephanie Mitchell\/Harvard Staff Photographer","displayDetails":"","displayTitle":"","categoryId":1387,"mediaAlt":"","mediaCaption":"\"My goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement and into a life of climate-change activism,\" said Bill McKibben, who delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.","mediaId":146736,"mediaSize":"full","mediaType":"image","mediaUrl":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/091713_mckibben_bill_605.jpg","poster":"","title":"Big problems, small solutions","subheading":"As global warming rises, McKibben suggests more local fixes","centeredImage":true,"className":"is-style-full-width-text-below","mediaHeight":403,"mediaWidth":605,"backgroundFixed":false,"backgroundTone":"light","coloredBackground":false,"displayOverlay":true,"fadeInText":false,"isAmbient":false,"mediaLength":"","mediaPosition":"","posterText":"","titleAbove":false,"useUncroppedImage":false,"lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"\" height=\"403\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/091713_mckibben_bill_605.jpg\" width=\"605\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">"My goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement and into a life of climate-change activism," said Bill McKibben, who delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Stephanie Mitchell\/Harvard Staff Photographer<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","innerContent":["<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"\" height=\"403\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/091713_mckibben_bill_605.jpg\" width=\"605\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">"My goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement and into a life of climate-change activism," said Bill McKibben, who delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Stephanie Mitchell\/Harvard Staff Photographer<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n"],"rendered":"<header\n\tclass=\"wp-block-harvard-gazette-article-header alignfull article-header is-style-full-width-text-below centered-image\"\n\tstyle=\" \"\n>\n\t<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img alt=\"\" height=\"403\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/091713_mckibben_bill_605.jpg\" width=\"605\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><p class=\"wp-element-caption--caption\">"My goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement and into a life of climate-change activism," said Bill McKibben, who delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.<\/p><p class=\"wp-element-caption--credit\">Stephanie Mitchell\/Harvard Staff Photographer<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t<div class=\"article-header__content\">\n\t\t\t<a\n\t\t\tclass=\"article-header__category\"\n\t\t\thref=\"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/\"\n\t\t>\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t<h1 class=\"article-header__title wp-block-heading \">\n\t\tBig problems, small solutions\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t<div class=\"article-header__meta\">\n\t\t<div class=\"wp-block-post-author\">\n\t\t\t<address class=\"wp-block-post-author__content\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<p class=\"author wp-block-post-author__name\">\n\t\tCorydon Ireland\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t<p class=\"wp-block-post-author__byline\">\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t<time class=\"article-header__date\" datetime=\"2013-09-18\">\n\t\t\tSeptember 18, 2013\t\t<\/time>\n\n\t\t<span class=\"article-header__reading-time\">\n\t\t\t9 min read\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<h2 class=\"article-header__subheading wp-block-heading\">\n\t\t\tAs global warming rises, McKibben suggests more local fixes\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n"},"2":{"blockName":"core\/group","attrs":{"templateLock":false,"metadata":{"name":"Article content"},"align":"wide","layout":{"type":"constrained","justifyContent":"center"},"tagName":"div","lock":[],"className":"","style":[],"backgroundColor":"","textColor":"","gradient":"","fontSize":"","fontFamily":"","borderColor":"","ariaLabel":"","anchor":""},"innerBlocks":[{"blockName":"core\/freeform","attrs":{"content":"","lock":[],"metadata":[]},"innerBlocks":[],"innerHTML":"\n\t\t<p>If you Google \u201cBill,\u201d the first hit you get is the phrase \u201cBill me later.\u201d It\u2019s an accidental tribute to the writer-turned-activist whom everyone calls by his first name: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/index.html\">Bill McKibben<\/a> \u201982, who spoke at Harvard Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben\u2019s message for years has been that oil-based economies shelve the issue of the environmental costs of fossil fuels. When it comes to the natural systems that support humanity \u2014 clean air, fresh water, and pristine seas \u2014 the message from developing countries has been: Bill me later.<\/p>\n<p>Well, the bill is due, McKibben said, and it may be too late to pay. Seas are rising, temperatures climbing, storms intensifying, and floods and droughts worsening because of fossil fuel emissions, a statement with a 95 percent chance of certainty, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipcc.ch\/\">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>, up from 66 percent in 2001.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the moment, physics is well ahead\u201d of political action, McKibben told a crowd at Sanders Theatre, but the fight is on. There have been growing protests \u2014 many of them centered on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline \u2014 and a new movement to persuade institutions to jettison investments related to fossil fuels.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat a strange pleasure it is,\u201d McKibben said, to be in the tiered seating, polished wood, and stained glass venue that he remembered from lectures in his undergraduate days. McKibben delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/hilr.dce.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement<\/a>, an arm of the Division of Continuing Education since 1977.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement\u201d and into a life of climate-change activism, said McKibben. That shift may even mean getting sent to jail, a life event the author endured for the first time in 2011 during a protest at the White House. Since then, he has talked with eager new older activists. \u201cThis is on my bucket list,\u201d one told him. \u201cTell me how I can get arrested.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Young people are leading climate change activism now, said McKibben, but it\u2019s time to see \u201celders acting like elders\u201d by putting their comfort on the line for a cause. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to be arrested, please wear a necktie or a dress,\u201d he told the audience, since those are visual signals that \u201cthere is nothing radical going on here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRadicals work at oil companies,\u201d he said, because the radical consequences of oil-slicked climate change are \u201cburning the top of the Earth, melting Arctic ice, acidifying the oceans. What could be more radical than that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the beginning of the lecture, which was delivered in a witty and extemporaneous style, McKibben offered an apology. \u201cMy role in life is basically to be a professional bummer-outer,\u201d he said, an activist delivering stark facts, in this case on \u201cthe prettiest fall day of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But he promised to get past the worst of the talk first and fast, saying that: the Earth has just come out of 10,000 years of mild climate in the Holocene epoch and into an uncertain era of climate change; storms, wildfires, droughts, and temperatures are breaking records at a rat-a-tat pace; oceans are turning acidic; 80 percent of the Arctic ice cover was gone last summer; and in a few decades \u201cwe\u2019ve taken one of the most basic features of the Earth [steady temperatures] and broken it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Earth\u2019s temperature has risen about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the last few decades, which may not sound like much, since it\u2019s about three-quarters of a watt per square meter of the Earth\u2019s surface, the equivalent of a Christmas tree bulb. But taken worldwide, said the author, that extra heat equals the output of \u201c400,000 Hiroshima-size bombs daily.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He sketched one consequence: Each degree of temperature rise worldwide means a 10 percent cut in grain yields.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben pointed to events of the past week as signs of the changing climate: forest fires in the West, catastrophic flooding in Colorado, a typhoon ripping into Japan, and rare double storms that punched both coasts of Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>The signs are there for all to see, he said, even closer to Boston. \u201cThe New York City subway filled up with the Atlantic Ocean last October,\u201d he said of Hurricane Sandy. \u201cWhat more do you want? And we are only at the start \u2014 only at the start \u2014 of our global warming era,\u201d which some analysts say will make present-day civilization impossible.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben summed up the surprise and fear of climate change, saying, \u201cThis is by far the biggest thing human beings have ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After his look at the grim facts, he turned to solutions. He said that putting a price on carbon use would assure that greenhouse gases don\u2019t just \u201cpour into the atmosphere for free.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More large-scale renewable energy projects would reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Germany is a success story in that respect, he said, with solar and wind power arrays that some days this summer provided half of that nation\u2019s electricity. \u201cNot many people go to Germany for their sun-splashed vacations,\u201d McKibben said, pointing to the plausibility of renewable energy even in unlikely places. \u201cThere are more solar panels in Bavaria than the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the future, he said, societies should get a boost from distributed-generation energy systems, the small-scale, decentralized power supplies that reduce vulnerability and emphasize regional resilience. (He predicted that nuclear power will play a very small part in backing away from climate change, since such plants are too slow to get on line, and too expensive for debt-crushed times.)<\/p>\n<p>He suggested that building a climate-change movement could lead to the large-scale civil alliances and actions that could prove a counterweight to a moribund Congress.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben discussed 350.org, the global movement that he and seven undergraduates started at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar. (The number refers to 350 ppm, or parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that was a scientific tipping point for climate change. That number is now over 400 ppm.) \u201cOur goal was to organize the world,\u201d he said to a patter of laughter. The group\u2019s first global action rippled across the globe, with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries.<\/p>\n<p>More global actions followed, and participants provided thousands of pictures from around the world. McKibben displayed some of them on a screen. Many showed what he called the most common activists in the world, who are young, poor, brown, black, and Asian. Some of the demonstrations were huge. Others were small, like one in Les Cayes, a seaport in southwestern Haiti. In the picture, seven children with signs stand ankle-deep in a flooded street.<\/p>\n<p>That small demonstration argued that \u201cyour actions affect me,\u201d said McKibben, reminding the audience that the poor in remote nations affected by climate change rely on the rich in developed nations to take action. \u201cThey can\u2019t get to the White House to protest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben will be in Washington, D.C., Saturday for a \u201cdraw the line\u201d action, a coast-to-coast protest against the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.<\/p>\n<p>That pipeline is the outward sign of an environmental disaster already underway in Canada. With only 3 percent of the tar sands oil extracted so far in Alberta, he said that the ground-stripping oil mining has already disturbed a section of boreal forest the size of Scotland and created vast pools of tailings waste held back by the biggest dams in the world.<\/p>\n<p>His lecture came on the official publication day of his latest book, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/oilandhoney.html\">Oil and Honey<\/a>,\u201d a memoir of his transition from journalism to activism. (Its subtitle is \u201cThe Education of an Unlikely Activist.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>The \u201coil\u201d of the title is the symbol of his public fight, largely through 350.org, against the coal, gas, and oil industries. The \u201choney\u201d is the book\u2019s emotional antipode, recounting McKibben\u2019s periodic visits with Kirk Webster, a Vermont neighbor who runs a small-scale, chemical-free beekeeping operation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHis life doesn\u2019t seem Luddite or retro. It seems advanced,\u201d wrote McKibben, who says that regional, self-sufficient economies can buffer the effects of climate change. He called Webster, who doesn\u2019t own a computer and writes with pencil and paper, \u201ca solid human being, attractively and somewhat dauntingly solid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>McKibben is a creature of two worlds, the calm of home in Vermont, with its rhythms as natural as a beekeeper\u2019s seasons, and the rush of an activist\u2019s life, with its 400 emails a day, 24-hour news cycle, and constant world travel that he admits leaves vapor trails of spent fossil fuels behind him.<\/p>\n<p>The book was not the point of coming to Harvard, McKibben said, and he barely mentioned it, though his lecture bore the same title. But in response to a question, the book came up. He called his friend\u2019s honey operation a sign of the \u201cbeautiful, evolving local economies\u201d that are rebounding in an age marked by the resurgence of small farms and the popularity of farmers markets, the food sector\u2019s fasting-growing segment.<\/p>\n<p>But then the \u201cbummer-outer\u201d McKibben came back, in discussing the alternate farm and energy sector. \u201cBy itself, it\u2019s not enough. We have to work at the global (level), and we have to work at the local.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the end, McKibben pointed again to the joys of the fall day still in full splendor outside. But for him there was work yet to do. As the departing audience streamed past, McKibben stood outside Sanders, head down, reading the screen on his cellphone.<\/p>\n","innerContent":["\n\t\t<p>If you Google \u201cBill,\u201d the first hit you get is the phrase \u201cBill me later.\u201d It\u2019s an accidental tribute to the writer-turned-activist whom everyone calls by his first name: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/index.html\">Bill McKibben<\/a> \u201982, who spoke at Harvard Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben\u2019s message for years has been that oil-based economies shelve the issue of the environmental costs of fossil fuels. When it comes to the natural systems that support humanity \u2014 clean air, fresh water, and pristine seas \u2014 the message from developing countries has been: Bill me later.<\/p>\n<p>Well, the bill is due, McKibben said, and it may be too late to pay. Seas are rising, temperatures climbing, storms intensifying, and floods and droughts worsening because of fossil fuel emissions, a statement with a 95 percent chance of certainty, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipcc.ch\/\">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>, up from 66 percent in 2001.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the moment, physics is well ahead\u201d of political action, McKibben told a crowd at Sanders Theatre, but the fight is on. There have been growing protests \u2014 many of them centered on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline \u2014 and a new movement to persuade institutions to jettison investments related to fossil fuels.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat a strange pleasure it is,\u201d McKibben said, to be in the tiered seating, polished wood, and stained glass venue that he remembered from lectures in his undergraduate days. McKibben delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/hilr.dce.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement<\/a>, an arm of the Division of Continuing Education since 1977.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement\u201d and into a life of climate-change activism, said McKibben. That shift may even mean getting sent to jail, a life event the author endured for the first time in 2011 during a protest at the White House. Since then, he has talked with eager new older activists. \u201cThis is on my bucket list,\u201d one told him. \u201cTell me how I can get arrested.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Young people are leading climate change activism now, said McKibben, but it\u2019s time to see \u201celders acting like elders\u201d by putting their comfort on the line for a cause. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to be arrested, please wear a necktie or a dress,\u201d he told the audience, since those are visual signals that \u201cthere is nothing radical going on here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRadicals work at oil companies,\u201d he said, because the radical consequences of oil-slicked climate change are \u201cburning the top of the Earth, melting Arctic ice, acidifying the oceans. What could be more radical than that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the beginning of the lecture, which was delivered in a witty and extemporaneous style, McKibben offered an apology. \u201cMy role in life is basically to be a professional bummer-outer,\u201d he said, an activist delivering stark facts, in this case on \u201cthe prettiest fall day of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But he promised to get past the worst of the talk first and fast, saying that: the Earth has just come out of 10,000 years of mild climate in the Holocene epoch and into an uncertain era of climate change; storms, wildfires, droughts, and temperatures are breaking records at a rat-a-tat pace; oceans are turning acidic; 80 percent of the Arctic ice cover was gone last summer; and in a few decades \u201cwe\u2019ve taken one of the most basic features of the Earth [steady temperatures] and broken it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Earth\u2019s temperature has risen about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the last few decades, which may not sound like much, since it\u2019s about three-quarters of a watt per square meter of the Earth\u2019s surface, the equivalent of a Christmas tree bulb. But taken worldwide, said the author, that extra heat equals the output of \u201c400,000 Hiroshima-size bombs daily.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He sketched one consequence: Each degree of temperature rise worldwide means a 10 percent cut in grain yields.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben pointed to events of the past week as signs of the changing climate: forest fires in the West, catastrophic flooding in Colorado, a typhoon ripping into Japan, and rare double storms that punched both coasts of Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>The signs are there for all to see, he said, even closer to Boston. \u201cThe New York City subway filled up with the Atlantic Ocean last October,\u201d he said of Hurricane Sandy. \u201cWhat more do you want? And we are only at the start \u2014 only at the start \u2014 of our global warming era,\u201d which some analysts say will make present-day civilization impossible.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben summed up the surprise and fear of climate change, saying, \u201cThis is by far the biggest thing human beings have ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After his look at the grim facts, he turned to solutions. He said that putting a price on carbon use would assure that greenhouse gases don\u2019t just \u201cpour into the atmosphere for free.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More large-scale renewable energy projects would reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Germany is a success story in that respect, he said, with solar and wind power arrays that some days this summer provided half of that nation\u2019s electricity. \u201cNot many people go to Germany for their sun-splashed vacations,\u201d McKibben said, pointing to the plausibility of renewable energy even in unlikely places. \u201cThere are more solar panels in Bavaria than the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the future, he said, societies should get a boost from distributed-generation energy systems, the small-scale, decentralized power supplies that reduce vulnerability and emphasize regional resilience. (He predicted that nuclear power will play a very small part in backing away from climate change, since such plants are too slow to get on line, and too expensive for debt-crushed times.)<\/p>\n<p>He suggested that building a climate-change movement could lead to the large-scale civil alliances and actions that could prove a counterweight to a moribund Congress.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben discussed 350.org, the global movement that he and seven undergraduates started at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar. (The number refers to 350 ppm, or parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that was a scientific tipping point for climate change. That number is now over 400 ppm.) \u201cOur goal was to organize the world,\u201d he said to a patter of laughter. The group\u2019s first global action rippled across the globe, with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries.<\/p>\n<p>More global actions followed, and participants provided thousands of pictures from around the world. McKibben displayed some of them on a screen. Many showed what he called the most common activists in the world, who are young, poor, brown, black, and Asian. Some of the demonstrations were huge. Others were small, like one in Les Cayes, a seaport in southwestern Haiti. In the picture, seven children with signs stand ankle-deep in a flooded street.<\/p>\n<p>That small demonstration argued that \u201cyour actions affect me,\u201d said McKibben, reminding the audience that the poor in remote nations affected by climate change rely on the rich in developed nations to take action. \u201cThey can\u2019t get to the White House to protest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben will be in Washington, D.C., Saturday for a \u201cdraw the line\u201d action, a coast-to-coast protest against the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.<\/p>\n<p>That pipeline is the outward sign of an environmental disaster already underway in Canada. With only 3 percent of the tar sands oil extracted so far in Alberta, he said that the ground-stripping oil mining has already disturbed a section of boreal forest the size of Scotland and created vast pools of tailings waste held back by the biggest dams in the world.<\/p>\n<p>His lecture came on the official publication day of his latest book, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/oilandhoney.html\">Oil and Honey<\/a>,\u201d a memoir of his transition from journalism to activism. (Its subtitle is \u201cThe Education of an Unlikely Activist.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>The \u201coil\u201d of the title is the symbol of his public fight, largely through 350.org, against the coal, gas, and oil industries. The \u201choney\u201d is the book\u2019s emotional antipode, recounting McKibben\u2019s periodic visits with Kirk Webster, a Vermont neighbor who runs a small-scale, chemical-free beekeeping operation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHis life doesn\u2019t seem Luddite or retro. It seems advanced,\u201d wrote McKibben, who says that regional, self-sufficient economies can buffer the effects of climate change. He called Webster, who doesn\u2019t own a computer and writes with pencil and paper, \u201ca solid human being, attractively and somewhat dauntingly solid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>McKibben is a creature of two worlds, the calm of home in Vermont, with its rhythms as natural as a beekeeper\u2019s seasons, and the rush of an activist\u2019s life, with its 400 emails a day, 24-hour news cycle, and constant world travel that he admits leaves vapor trails of spent fossil fuels behind him.<\/p>\n<p>The book was not the point of coming to Harvard, McKibben said, and he barely mentioned it, though his lecture bore the same title. But in response to a question, the book came up. He called his friend\u2019s honey operation a sign of the \u201cbeautiful, evolving local economies\u201d that are rebounding in an age marked by the resurgence of small farms and the popularity of farmers markets, the food sector\u2019s fasting-growing segment.<\/p>\n<p>But then the \u201cbummer-outer\u201d McKibben came back, in discussing the alternate farm and energy sector. \u201cBy itself, it\u2019s not enough. We have to work at the global (level), and we have to work at the local.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the end, McKibben pointed again to the joys of the fall day still in full splendor outside. But for him there was work yet to do. As the departing audience streamed past, McKibben stood outside Sanders, head down, reading the screen on his cellphone.<\/p>\n"],"rendered":"\n\t\t<p>If you Google \u201cBill,\u201d the first hit you get is the phrase \u201cBill me later.\u201d It\u2019s an accidental tribute to the writer-turned-activist whom everyone calls by his first name: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/index.html\">Bill McKibben<\/a> \u201982, who spoke at Harvard Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben\u2019s message for years has been that oil-based economies shelve the issue of the environmental costs of fossil fuels. When it comes to the natural systems that support humanity \u2014 clean air, fresh water, and pristine seas \u2014 the message from developing countries has been: Bill me later.<\/p>\n<p>Well, the bill is due, McKibben said, and it may be too late to pay. Seas are rising, temperatures climbing, storms intensifying, and floods and droughts worsening because of fossil fuel emissions, a statement with a 95 percent chance of certainty, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipcc.ch\/\">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>, up from 66 percent in 2001.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the moment, physics is well ahead\u201d of political action, McKibben told a crowd at Sanders Theatre, but the fight is on. There have been growing protests \u2014 many of them centered on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline \u2014 and a new movement to persuade institutions to jettison investments related to fossil fuels.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat a strange pleasure it is,\u201d McKibben said, to be in the tiered seating, polished wood, and stained glass venue that he remembered from lectures in his undergraduate days. McKibben delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/hilr.dce.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement<\/a>, an arm of the Division of Continuing Education since 1977.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement\u201d and into a life of climate-change activism, said McKibben. That shift may even mean getting sent to jail, a life event the author endured for the first time in 2011 during a protest at the White House. Since then, he has talked with eager new older activists. \u201cThis is on my bucket list,\u201d one told him. \u201cTell me how I can get arrested.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Young people are leading climate change activism now, said McKibben, but it\u2019s time to see \u201celders acting like elders\u201d by putting their comfort on the line for a cause. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to be arrested, please wear a necktie or a dress,\u201d he told the audience, since those are visual signals that \u201cthere is nothing radical going on here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRadicals work at oil companies,\u201d he said, because the radical consequences of oil-slicked climate change are \u201cburning the top of the Earth, melting Arctic ice, acidifying the oceans. What could be more radical than that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the beginning of the lecture, which was delivered in a witty and extemporaneous style, McKibben offered an apology. \u201cMy role in life is basically to be a professional bummer-outer,\u201d he said, an activist delivering stark facts, in this case on \u201cthe prettiest fall day of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But he promised to get past the worst of the talk first and fast, saying that: the Earth has just come out of 10,000 years of mild climate in the Holocene epoch and into an uncertain era of climate change; storms, wildfires, droughts, and temperatures are breaking records at a rat-a-tat pace; oceans are turning acidic; 80 percent of the Arctic ice cover was gone last summer; and in a few decades \u201cwe\u2019ve taken one of the most basic features of the Earth [steady temperatures] and broken it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Earth\u2019s temperature has risen about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the last few decades, which may not sound like much, since it\u2019s about three-quarters of a watt per square meter of the Earth\u2019s surface, the equivalent of a Christmas tree bulb. But taken worldwide, said the author, that extra heat equals the output of \u201c400,000 Hiroshima-size bombs daily.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He sketched one consequence: Each degree of temperature rise worldwide means a 10 percent cut in grain yields.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben pointed to events of the past week as signs of the changing climate: forest fires in the West, catastrophic flooding in Colorado, a typhoon ripping into Japan, and rare double storms that punched both coasts of Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>The signs are there for all to see, he said, even closer to Boston. \u201cThe New York City subway filled up with the Atlantic Ocean last October,\u201d he said of Hurricane Sandy. \u201cWhat more do you want? And we are only at the start \u2014 only at the start \u2014 of our global warming era,\u201d which some analysts say will make present-day civilization impossible.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben summed up the surprise and fear of climate change, saying, \u201cThis is by far the biggest thing human beings have ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After his look at the grim facts, he turned to solutions. He said that putting a price on carbon use would assure that greenhouse gases don\u2019t just \u201cpour into the atmosphere for free.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More large-scale renewable energy projects would reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Germany is a success story in that respect, he said, with solar and wind power arrays that some days this summer provided half of that nation\u2019s electricity. \u201cNot many people go to Germany for their sun-splashed vacations,\u201d McKibben said, pointing to the plausibility of renewable energy even in unlikely places. \u201cThere are more solar panels in Bavaria than the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the future, he said, societies should get a boost from distributed-generation energy systems, the small-scale, decentralized power supplies that reduce vulnerability and emphasize regional resilience. (He predicted that nuclear power will play a very small part in backing away from climate change, since such plants are too slow to get on line, and too expensive for debt-crushed times.)<\/p>\n<p>He suggested that building a climate-change movement could lead to the large-scale civil alliances and actions that could prove a counterweight to a moribund Congress.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben discussed 350.org, the global movement that he and seven undergraduates started at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar. (The number refers to 350 ppm, or parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that was a scientific tipping point for climate change. That number is now over 400 ppm.) \u201cOur goal was to organize the world,\u201d he said to a patter of laughter. The group\u2019s first global action rippled across the globe, with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries.<\/p>\n<p>More global actions followed, and participants provided thousands of pictures from around the world. McKibben displayed some of them on a screen. Many showed what he called the most common activists in the world, who are young, poor, brown, black, and Asian. Some of the demonstrations were huge. Others were small, like one in Les Cayes, a seaport in southwestern Haiti. In the picture, seven children with signs stand ankle-deep in a flooded street.<\/p>\n<p>That small demonstration argued that \u201cyour actions affect me,\u201d said McKibben, reminding the audience that the poor in remote nations affected by climate change rely on the rich in developed nations to take action. \u201cThey can\u2019t get to the White House to protest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben will be in Washington, D.C., Saturday for a \u201cdraw the line\u201d action, a coast-to-coast protest against the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.<\/p>\n<p>That pipeline is the outward sign of an environmental disaster already underway in Canada. With only 3 percent of the tar sands oil extracted so far in Alberta, he said that the ground-stripping oil mining has already disturbed a section of boreal forest the size of Scotland and created vast pools of tailings waste held back by the biggest dams in the world.<\/p>\n<p>His lecture came on the official publication day of his latest book, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/oilandhoney.html\">Oil and Honey<\/a>,\u201d a memoir of his transition from journalism to activism. (Its subtitle is \u201cThe Education of an Unlikely Activist.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>The \u201coil\u201d of the title is the symbol of his public fight, largely through 350.org, against the coal, gas, and oil industries. The \u201choney\u201d is the book\u2019s emotional antipode, recounting McKibben\u2019s periodic visits with Kirk Webster, a Vermont neighbor who runs a small-scale, chemical-free beekeeping operation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHis life doesn\u2019t seem Luddite or retro. It seems advanced,\u201d wrote McKibben, who says that regional, self-sufficient economies can buffer the effects of climate change. He called Webster, who doesn\u2019t own a computer and writes with pencil and paper, \u201ca solid human being, attractively and somewhat dauntingly solid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>McKibben is a creature of two worlds, the calm of home in Vermont, with its rhythms as natural as a beekeeper\u2019s seasons, and the rush of an activist\u2019s life, with its 400 emails a day, 24-hour news cycle, and constant world travel that he admits leaves vapor trails of spent fossil fuels behind him.<\/p>\n<p>The book was not the point of coming to Harvard, McKibben said, and he barely mentioned it, though his lecture bore the same title. But in response to a question, the book came up. He called his friend\u2019s honey operation a sign of the \u201cbeautiful, evolving local economies\u201d that are rebounding in an age marked by the resurgence of small farms and the popularity of farmers markets, the food sector\u2019s fasting-growing segment.<\/p>\n<p>But then the \u201cbummer-outer\u201d McKibben came back, in discussing the alternate farm and energy sector. \u201cBy itself, it\u2019s not enough. We have to work at the global (level), and we have to work at the local.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the end, McKibben pointed again to the joys of the fall day still in full splendor outside. But for him there was work yet to do. As the departing audience streamed past, McKibben stood outside Sanders, head down, reading the screen on his cellphone.<\/p>\n"}],"innerHTML":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n","innerContent":["\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide\">\n\n","\n\n<\/div>\n"],"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group alignwide has-global-padding is-content-justification-center is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n\n\n\t\t<p>If you Google \u201cBill,\u201d the first hit you get is the phrase \u201cBill me later.\u201d It\u2019s an accidental tribute to the writer-turned-activist whom everyone calls by his first name: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/index.html\">Bill McKibben<\/a> \u201982, who spoke at Harvard Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben\u2019s message for years has been that oil-based economies shelve the issue of the environmental costs of fossil fuels. When it comes to the natural systems that support humanity \u2014 clean air, fresh water, and pristine seas \u2014 the message from developing countries has been: Bill me later.<\/p>\n<p>Well, the bill is due, McKibben said, and it may be too late to pay. Seas are rising, temperatures climbing, storms intensifying, and floods and droughts worsening because of fossil fuel emissions, a statement with a 95 percent chance of certainty, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipcc.ch\/\">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a>, up from 66 percent in 2001.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the moment, physics is well ahead\u201d of political action, McKibben told a crowd at Sanders Theatre, but the fight is on. There have been growing protests \u2014 many of them centered on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline \u2014 and a new movement to persuade institutions to jettison investments related to fossil fuels.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat a strange pleasure it is,\u201d McKibben said, to be in the tiered seating, polished wood, and stained glass venue that he remembered from lectures in his undergraduate days. McKibben delivered the annual Robert C. Cobb Sr. Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/hilr.dce.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement<\/a>, an arm of the Division of Continuing Education since 1977.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy goal is to bring at least some of you out of retirement\u201d and into a life of climate-change activism, said McKibben. That shift may even mean getting sent to jail, a life event the author endured for the first time in 2011 during a protest at the White House. Since then, he has talked with eager new older activists. \u201cThis is on my bucket list,\u201d one told him. \u201cTell me how I can get arrested.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Young people are leading climate change activism now, said McKibben, but it\u2019s time to see \u201celders acting like elders\u201d by putting their comfort on the line for a cause. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to be arrested, please wear a necktie or a dress,\u201d he told the audience, since those are visual signals that \u201cthere is nothing radical going on here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRadicals work at oil companies,\u201d he said, because the radical consequences of oil-slicked climate change are \u201cburning the top of the Earth, melting Arctic ice, acidifying the oceans. What could be more radical than that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the beginning of the lecture, which was delivered in a witty and extemporaneous style, McKibben offered an apology. \u201cMy role in life is basically to be a professional bummer-outer,\u201d he said, an activist delivering stark facts, in this case on \u201cthe prettiest fall day of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But he promised to get past the worst of the talk first and fast, saying that: the Earth has just come out of 10,000 years of mild climate in the Holocene epoch and into an uncertain era of climate change; storms, wildfires, droughts, and temperatures are breaking records at a rat-a-tat pace; oceans are turning acidic; 80 percent of the Arctic ice cover was gone last summer; and in a few decades \u201cwe\u2019ve taken one of the most basic features of the Earth [steady temperatures] and broken it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Earth\u2019s temperature has risen about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the last few decades, which may not sound like much, since it\u2019s about three-quarters of a watt per square meter of the Earth\u2019s surface, the equivalent of a Christmas tree bulb. But taken worldwide, said the author, that extra heat equals the output of \u201c400,000 Hiroshima-size bombs daily.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He sketched one consequence: Each degree of temperature rise worldwide means a 10 percent cut in grain yields.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben pointed to events of the past week as signs of the changing climate: forest fires in the West, catastrophic flooding in Colorado, a typhoon ripping into Japan, and rare double storms that punched both coasts of Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>The signs are there for all to see, he said, even closer to Boston. \u201cThe New York City subway filled up with the Atlantic Ocean last October,\u201d he said of Hurricane Sandy. \u201cWhat more do you want? And we are only at the start \u2014 only at the start \u2014 of our global warming era,\u201d which some analysts say will make present-day civilization impossible.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben summed up the surprise and fear of climate change, saying, \u201cThis is by far the biggest thing human beings have ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After his look at the grim facts, he turned to solutions. He said that putting a price on carbon use would assure that greenhouse gases don\u2019t just \u201cpour into the atmosphere for free.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More large-scale renewable energy projects would reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Germany is a success story in that respect, he said, with solar and wind power arrays that some days this summer provided half of that nation\u2019s electricity. \u201cNot many people go to Germany for their sun-splashed vacations,\u201d McKibben said, pointing to the plausibility of renewable energy even in unlikely places. \u201cThere are more solar panels in Bavaria than the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the future, he said, societies should get a boost from distributed-generation energy systems, the small-scale, decentralized power supplies that reduce vulnerability and emphasize regional resilience. (He predicted that nuclear power will play a very small part in backing away from climate change, since such plants are too slow to get on line, and too expensive for debt-crushed times.)<\/p>\n<p>He suggested that building a climate-change movement could lead to the large-scale civil alliances and actions that could prove a counterweight to a moribund Congress.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben discussed 350.org, the global movement that he and seven undergraduates started at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar. (The number refers to 350 ppm, or parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that was a scientific tipping point for climate change. That number is now over 400 ppm.) \u201cOur goal was to organize the world,\u201d he said to a patter of laughter. The group\u2019s first global action rippled across the globe, with 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries.<\/p>\n<p>More global actions followed, and participants provided thousands of pictures from around the world. McKibben displayed some of them on a screen. Many showed what he called the most common activists in the world, who are young, poor, brown, black, and Asian. Some of the demonstrations were huge. Others were small, like one in Les Cayes, a seaport in southwestern Haiti. In the picture, seven children with signs stand ankle-deep in a flooded street.<\/p>\n<p>That small demonstration argued that \u201cyour actions affect me,\u201d said McKibben, reminding the audience that the poor in remote nations affected by climate change rely on the rich in developed nations to take action. \u201cThey can\u2019t get to the White House to protest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>McKibben will be in Washington, D.C., Saturday for a \u201cdraw the line\u201d action, a coast-to-coast protest against the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.<\/p>\n<p>That pipeline is the outward sign of an environmental disaster already underway in Canada. With only 3 percent of the tar sands oil extracted so far in Alberta, he said that the ground-stripping oil mining has already disturbed a section of boreal forest the size of Scotland and created vast pools of tailings waste held back by the biggest dams in the world.<\/p>\n<p>His lecture came on the official publication day of his latest book, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.billmckibben.com\/oilandhoney.html\">Oil and Honey<\/a>,\u201d a memoir of his transition from journalism to activism. (Its subtitle is \u201cThe Education of an Unlikely Activist.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>The \u201coil\u201d of the title is the symbol of his public fight, largely through 350.org, against the coal, gas, and oil industries. The \u201choney\u201d is the book\u2019s emotional antipode, recounting McKibben\u2019s periodic visits with Kirk Webster, a Vermont neighbor who runs a small-scale, chemical-free beekeeping operation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHis life doesn\u2019t seem Luddite or retro. It seems advanced,\u201d wrote McKibben, who says that regional, self-sufficient economies can buffer the effects of climate change. He called Webster, who doesn\u2019t own a computer and writes with pencil and paper, \u201ca solid human being, attractively and somewhat dauntingly solid.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>McKibben is a creature of two worlds, the calm of home in Vermont, with its rhythms as natural as a beekeeper\u2019s seasons, and the rush of an activist\u2019s life, with its 400 emails a day, 24-hour news cycle, and constant world travel that he admits leaves vapor trails of spent fossil fuels behind him.<\/p>\n<p>The book was not the point of coming to Harvard, McKibben said, and he barely mentioned it, though his lecture bore the same title. But in response to a question, the book came up. He called his friend\u2019s honey operation a sign of the \u201cbeautiful, evolving local economies\u201d that are rebounding in an age marked by the resurgence of small farms and the popularity of farmers markets, the food sector\u2019s fasting-growing segment.<\/p>\n<p>But then the \u201cbummer-outer\u201d McKibben came back, in discussing the alternate farm and energy sector. \u201cBy itself, it\u2019s not enough. We have to work at the global (level), and we have to work at the local.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the end, McKibben pointed again to the joys of the fall day still in full splendor outside. But for him there was work yet to do. As the departing audience streamed past, McKibben stood outside Sanders, head down, reading the screen on his cellphone.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n"}},"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":27454,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2009\/10\/mckibben-brings-350-home\/","url_meta":{"origin":146732,"position":0},"title":"McKibben’s movement: 350.org","author":"harvardgazette","date":"October 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Activist and author Bill McKibben \u201982 takes to the pulpit in a plea for climate change action.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/101809_mckibben_bill_001.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/101809_mckibben_bill_001.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/101809_mckibben_bill_001.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":40056,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2010\/03\/reality-check\/","url_meta":{"origin":146732,"position":1},"title":"Reality check","author":"harvardgazette","date":"March 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Author-turned-activist Bill McKibben says the fight to arrest global warming requires an international movement to force political change.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/030810_mckibbon_057.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/030810_mckibbon_057.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/030810_mckibbon_057.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":118803,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2012\/10\/silent-spring-50-years-on\/","url_meta":{"origin":146732,"position":2},"title":"\u2018Silent Spring,\u2019 50 years on","author":"harvardgazette","date":"October 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Environmentalists and faculty members gathered at Sanders Theatre to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson\u2019s \u201cSilent Spring,\u201d which catalyzed the environmental movement in its impassioned presentation of the impact of chemicals on nature.","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/092812_silent_605_main.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/092812_silent_605_main.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/092812_silent_605_main.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":57120,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2000\/11\/protecting-nature-religiously\/","url_meta":{"origin":146732,"position":3},"title":"Protecting nature religiously","author":"harvardgazette","date":"November 9, 2000","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Our religious institutions are the only institutions that are not completely implicated in the culture of materialism and growth,\" said Bill McKibben, an environmental activist and a fellow at Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. \"The church can posit some other reason for human\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":380276,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2024\/03\/a-playbook-for-policy-change\/","url_meta":{"origin":146732,"position":4},"title":"A playbook for policy change","author":"Elizabeth Zonarich","date":"March 5, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"Leah Stokes turns a love for the wilderness into a commitment to help mitigate climate change","rel":"","context":"In "Science & Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Science & Tech","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/science-technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Stokes_Lou-Jones_03-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Stokes_Lou-Jones_03-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Stokes_Lou-Jones_03-1.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Stokes_Lou-Jones_03-1.jpg?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":66405,"url":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2000\/11\/protecting-nature-religiously-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":146732,"position":5},"title":"Protecting nature religiously","author":"gazetteimport","date":"November 9, 2000","format":false,"excerpt":"The Environmental Protection Agency even has a global warming Web site. Today's debate isn't over whether the globe will warm, it's over how much and what in God's name we can do about it. At Harvard Divinity School, some people are trying to find out. A number of theologians and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campus & Community"","block_context":{"text":"Campus & Community","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/section\/campus-community\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105622744"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146732"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282316,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146732\/revisions\/282316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146732"},{"taxonomy":"format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gazette-formats?post=146732"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=146732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}