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Bill McKibben: How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Democrats?

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

 

At 72, climate scientist James Hansen is retiring as head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies to work even more actively on climate-change issues. Keep in mind that, in congressional testimony in 1988, he first put climate change on the national map.  "It is time to stop waffling so much," he told the congressional committee members, "and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."  He then went on to suggest a future "probability of extreme events like summer heat waves... and the likelihood of heat wave drought situations in the Southwest and Midwest."  (Any of that sound faintly familiar a quarter-century later?)  It was, at the time, a startling statement.  Recently, in an email to the members of 350.org, the environmental organization he helped to found, former New Yorker reporter Bill McKibben wrote: "If 350.org has a patron saint, it's Jim [Hansen]. It was his 2008 paper that gave us our name, identifying 350 parts per million CO2 as the safe upper limit for carbon in the atmosphere."

That's no small praise from the writer who, only a year after Hansen spoke up, first put global warming on the map in a popular book, The End of Nature.  He was at least a decade or more ahead of the rest of us, and more recently he's led the popular charge on climate change and especially, in the last year, on trying to block the building of Keystone XL.  That's the pipeline slated to bring tar sands, a particularly "dirty" (and in carbon terms, dirty to produce) form of crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast.  Just the other day, as if to provide a little exclamation point on his energetic campaign, during which Hansen has been arrested twice in acts of civil disobedience, a pipeline through which Exxon was already running Canadian "heavy crude" (reputedly a particularly corrosive form of oil) burst in an Arkansas town.  The neighborhood affected, according to NPR's "Morning Edition," was left "looking like a scene out of the Walking Dead."

As a scientist and an activist, Hansen has proven a remarkable figure.  (He will soon be awarded the prestigeous Ridenhour Courage Prize.)  After a February arrest protesting the Keystone pipeline, he told the Washington Post, "We have reached a fork in the road," adding that politicians have to understand that they can "go down this road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have -- tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic -- but the science tells us we can't do that without creating a situation... our children and grandchildren will have no control over, which is the climate system."

Recently, there was a striking New York Times portrait of him by Justin Gillis headlined "Climate Maverick to Retire From NASA."  That word "maverick," while by no means wrong, might be a little deceptive in 2013, since a maverick is a loner, an outlier, and in climate-change terms these days, there is nothing terribly mavericky about Hansen's suggestions that climate change is likely to radically transform this planet unless we begin to get our greenhouse gas output under control soon.  These days, in fact, he's surrounded by a worried mass of scientists. 

In Gillis's piece there was a passage that, despite everything I've read, managed to shock me, and I thought it worth citing here before you read TomDispatch regular McKibben's latest post.  Writing about how early Hansen highlighted the dangers of global warming, and how he was doubted at the time, Gillis added, "Yet subsequent events bore him out. Since the day he spoke, not a single month's temperatures have fallen below the 20th-century average for that month. Half the world's population is now too young to have lived through the last colder-than-average month, February 1985. In worldwide temperature records going back to 1880, the 19 hottest years have all occurred since his testimony."

Think about that for a moment and imagine where we're still going as greenhouse gases continue to pour into the atmosphere at record rates. Tom

Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the "Stonewall" of the Climate Movement?
And If So, Is That Terrible News?
By Bill McKibben

A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast the "Selma and Stonewall" of the climate movement.

Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we're aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the "environmental review" the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline.  And there's good reason to put pressure on.  After all, it's the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired "experts" who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline's builder.

Still, let's put things in perspective: Stonewall took place in 1969, and as of last week the Supreme Court was still trying to decide if gay people should be allowed to marry each other. If the climate movement takes that long, we'll be rallying in scuba masks. (I'm not kidding. The section of the Washington Mall where we rallied against the pipeline this winter already has a big construction project underway: a flood barrier to keep the rising Potomac River out of downtown DC.)

It was certainly joyful to see marriage equality being considered by our top judicial body.  In some ways, however, the most depressing spectacle of the week was watching Democratic leaders decide that, in 2013, it was finally safe to proclaim gay people actual human beings. In one weekend, Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia figured out that they had "evolved" on the issue. And Bill Clinton, the greatest weathervane who ever lived, finally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act he had signed into law, boasted about in ads on Christian radio, and urged candidate John Kerry to defend as constitutional in 2004, was, you know, wrong. He, too, had "evolved," once the polls made it clear that such an evolution was a safe bet.

Why recite all this history? Because for me, the hardest part of the Keystone pipeline fight has been figuring out what in the world to do about the Democrats.

Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Let's begin by stipulating that, taken as a whole, they're better than the Republicans. About a year ago, in his initial campaign ad of the general election, Mitt Romney declared that his first act in office would be to approve Keystone and that, if necessary, he would "build it myself." (A charming image, it must be said). Every Republican in the Senate voted on a nonbinding resolution to approve the pipeline -- every single one. In other words, their unity in subservience to the fossil fuel industry is complete, and almost compelling. At the least, you know exactly what you're getting from them.

With the Democrats, not so much. Seventeen of their Senate caucus -- about a third -- joined the GOP in voting to approve Keystone XL. As the Washington insider website Politico proclaimed in a headline the next day, "Obama's Achilles Heel on Climate: Senate Democrats."

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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