McKibben on the Physics of Climate Change

Even facing undeniably real problems—say,
discrimination against gay people—one can make the case that gradual change has
actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared,
in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have
been swift and severe.  There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving
state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately
made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations
came of age.

Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of
people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move
slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even
decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts
between people.
And that’s always been the difficulty with climate change—the
greatest problem we’ve ever faced. It’s not a fight, like education reform or
abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions.
It couldn’t be more different at a fundamental level.

We’re talking about a fight between human beings
and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics
couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal
industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon
slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less
profitable.

Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on
climate change threatens the most lucrative
business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry.
It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into
heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And
unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets.  Do nothing and you
soon have a nightmare on your hands.

We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and
the cost would be terrible—all the suffering not responded to over those 10
years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size.
With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set
by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.

Unless you understand these distinctions you don’t
understand climate change—and it’s not at all clear that President Obama
understands them.

That’s why his administration is sometimes peeved
when they don’t get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in
his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase
in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the
next decade.

It’s precisely the kind of gradual transformation
that people—and politicians—like. We should have adopted it long ago (and would
have, except that it challenged the power of Detroit and its unions, and so both
Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But here’s the terrible thing: it’s
no longer a measure that impresses physics. After all, physics isn’t kidding
around or negotiating. While we were discussing whether climate change was even
a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting
the Arctic. If we’re to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally
at a sensational rate, by something like 5 percent a year to
make a real difference.

It’s not Obama’s fault that that’s not happening.
He can’t force it to happen. Consider the moment when the great president of the
last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable
enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analog to physics we’re going to get, in that
he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German
armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn’t muster America to
get off the couch and fight.

There were even the equivalent of climate deniers
at that time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America.
 Indeed, some of them were the same institutions. The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, for instance, vociferously opposed
Lend-Lease.

So Roosevelt did all he could on his own authority,
and then when Pearl Harbor offered him his moment, he pushed as hard as he
possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant, for instance, telling
the car companies that they were out of the car business for a while and instead
in the tank and fighter-plane business.

For Obama, faced with a Congress bought
off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic approach would be to do
absolutely everything he could on his own authority—new Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) regulations, for example; and of course, he should refuse to grant the
permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar sands
pipeline, something that requires no permission from John Boehner or the rest of
Congress.

So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best
when it comes to such measures. The White House, for instance, overruled
the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last
year opened up the Arctic
for oil drilling, while selling
off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement
prices to coal miners. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change
negotiations. (It’s hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic failure than
the Copenhagen summit). And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve
the Keystone pipeline,
which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth.
Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would
save.

If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than
just the obvious and easy. He’d also be looking for that Pearl Harbor moment.
God knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest
year in the history of the continental U.S., the deepest drought of his lifetime,
and a melt of the Arctic so
severe that the federal government’s premier climate scientist declared
it a “planetary emergency.”

In fact, he didn’t even appear to notice those
phenomena, campaigning for a second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble,
even as people in the crowds greeting him were fainting en masse from
the heat. Throughout campaign 2012, he kept declaring his love for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy,
where apparently oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as sun and
wind.

Only at the very end of the campaign, when Hurricane Sandy seemed
to present a political opening, did he even hint at seizing it—his people
letting reporters know on background that climate change would now be one of his
top three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top four) for a
second term. That’s a start, I suppose, but it’s a long way from telling the car
companies they better retool to start churning out wind turbines.

And anyway, he took it
back at the first opportunity. At his post-election press conference,
he announced that climate change was “real,” thus marking his agreement with,
say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to “future generations,”
he also agreed that we should “do more.” But addressing climate change, he
added, would involve “tough political choices.” Indeed, too tough, it seems, for
here were his key lines:

“I think the American
people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our
economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to
ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody
is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”

It’s as if World War II British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill had declared, “I have nothing to offer except blood, toil,
tears, and sweat. And God knows that polls badly, so just forget about it.”

The president must be pressed to do all he can—and
more. That’s why thousands of us will descend
on Washington D.C. on President’s Day weekend, in what will be the largest
environmental demonstration in years. But there’s another possibility we need to
consider: that perhaps he’s simply not up to this task, and that we’re going to
have to do it for him, as best we can.

If he won’t take on the fossil fuel industry, we
will. That’s why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment
movements are now doing their best to highlight the fact that the
fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.

If he won’t use our position as a superpower to
drive international climate-change negotiations out of their rut, we’ll try.
That’s why young people from 190 nations are gathering in Istanbul
in June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won’t listen to
scientists—like the 20 top climatologists who told him that the
Keystone pipeline was a mistake—then top scientists are increasingly clear that
they’ll need to get arrested
to make their point.

Those of us in the growing grassroots climate
movement are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast
as physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough even this all-too-patient
president will get caught up in the draft. But we’re not waiting for him. We
can’t.

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