Bill McKibben at Carleton University

On February 2^nd renowned climate scientist and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben was hosted by the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Council of Ottawa at Carleton University’s Richcraft Hall. The journalist and author sought to paint a picture of the grim climate change challenges that humanity must overcome, “the greatest challenge that humanity has ever faced”, while highlighting the achievements of climate change activism to date.

After noting the irony of his presence during the same Ottawa winter that was too warm to allow for skating, McKibben said that the two great inventions of the last century are the solar panel and non-violent social movements. He gave special praise to the non-violence advocates Mahatma Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, noting the difference of their physical statures and that “bigness comes in all sizes.”

McKibben observed that in 2023 the physical unraveling of earth became more apparent than ever. Ocean temperatures spiked last year and reached their highest ever record in June, and then there were the major wildfires in Canadian boreal forests. He said that the summer solstice temperatures went “off the walls of the charts”. He argues that there is consolation, however, that the enormous cloud of smoke went down to Washington and made those in powerful places feel some discomfort in the worst air quality ever recorded.

He then emphasized that last year saw the hottest days in 125,000 years. According to climatologists, no recognizable human society has ever lived in this kind of “climatic regime”. As warm air holds more water vapour than colder air does, “what is going up is increasingly coming back down” in terms of extreme precipitation to come.

Later, McKibben noted that all of Africa has been responsible for only 3% of global historical carbon dioxide emissions, and that no other region will ever catch up to North America on historical emissions. But ironically, those who are the least responsible for climate change suffer the most from it. Existing refugee outflows from climate incidents have unfortunately been enough to “discombobulate our [American] politics” with xenophobia.

McKibben further argued that most political debates on the same subjects occur repeatedly with mild gradual progress, but that the fight against climate change cannot be like that. The Paris Accord targets require that emissions be cut in half by 2030, which is a short time to achieve “the most important task in human history.” In short, he says, humanity needs to stop burning coal, gas, and oil.

Fortunately, there has been a 90% drop in the price of renewable energy over the last 3 or 4 years. It is cheaper now in India to construct a solar panel than to buy coal for a coal-fired plant. McKibben says it is now possible to imagine “a rapid end to combustion”. This would be desirable since even North America gets hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma each year from fossil fuel combustion, and people who control the few places with fossil fuels get way more political control. He reminded the audience of how Vladimir Putin funds the Russian invasion of Ukraine via scarce energy resources.

Nobody has a plan for re-freezing the Arctic, says McKibben, so we need policies to force this transition as fast as possible. Oil companies’ lies about climate change may be the most consequential lies in history because of the time for action that they cost us. We have won the argument about climate change science but we are still losing the climate fight, because this fight is about “money and power.” That is why McKibben started 350.org almost 20 years ago with 7 college students: to prove that the small and the many could stand up to the mighty and the few.

In 2009, McKibben led 350.org's organization of 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries, “the most widespread day of action in history.” Since then, $40 trillion in endowments and portfolios have been successfully divested from fossil fuels. He believes that the young people in his movement, as exemplified by Greta Thunberg, have paved the way for the kind of economy proposed by the Green New Deal.

Unfortunately, McKibben says that young people lack structural power to force the kind of change that older people can. Yet the time urgency of climate change does not allow for us to wait for young people to age. He noted with some humour, “if you have hair growing out of your ears, you probably have structural power… There is no known way to prevent old people from voting.”

McKibben further showed slides of some of the demonstrations that the climate activist movements have successfully organized. He expressed pride that even a climate conference run by an oil executive became the first one to proclaim a commitment to phase-out of fossil fuels, like having a cancer conference finally acknowledging the relevance of smoking to cancer. U.S. President Joe Biden subsequently pledged to pause all new government permits for LNG plants.

Before taking questions from the audience of roughly two hundred persons, McKibben considered Martin Luther King’s optimistic saying that the “arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice”. McKibben sought to make the urgency of our current circumstances clear, as the “arc of the physical universe is short and bends towards heat.”

You can watch a recording of Bill McKibben’s speech in this YouTube link.

Stefan Klietsch sits on PERC’s board as Treasurer. He is finishing studies in Political Science for his Master of Arts program at Carleton University.