CLIMATE CHANGE
3–2–1: What are we fighting for?
Palindrome Day deserves a new form of climate action
I first heard of Bill McKibben’s plan for a bank boycott on Palindrome Day (March 21, 2023; 3–21–23) during his enlightening, sometimes bemusing conversation with Ezra Klein. This plan — to ceremonially cut up and destroy credit cards and otherwise protest fossil fuel investments by four major banks — offered bemusement. The conversation’s supposed main topic was the new climate zeitgeist ushered in by successes with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and midterm election. But this 1960s-style protest seems to belong to a prior age.
For years, McKibben has argued that such a zeitgeist shift would come through protests against the fossil fuel industry. Like much activism since the 1960s, this emphasizes thwarting and punishing bad actors.
Ezra Klein, meanwhile, has declared himself on a mission to explore “the possibilities of a liberalism that builds,” exploring how liberalism has focused on saying no but needs to start saying yes.
These two vectors came together in their conversation following the midterm elections. The two men share a genial collegiality, but at several key junctures, their ideas failed to mesh.
Part of this may be methodological. Elsewhere, McKibben has identified the importance of a “media survival skill of turning inane questions into the answer you want to give.” But there is no evidence he considers Klein’s questions inane.
Still, over the course of 86 minutes, as Klein asks McKibben some probing questions about how things have changed recently, McKibben doesn’t always give relevant answers. Perhaps internalizing a new zeitgeist takes time, especially as you age (McKibben is two years younger than me; we’re not young).
Consensus: Degrowth is too slow
The conversation starts well, with consensus that conservation and degrowth cannot drive change fast enough. Klein suggests that McKibben has shifted from a focus on “climate austerity” — diminishing our economies and lifestyles — to an accommodation — using technology improvements to “decouple” the way we live from “setting things on fire.”
McKibben agrees: In the short term, we no longer have time for degrowth to work.
I think in 100 years, it’s unlikely human beings will be amusing themselves by consuming immense amounts of stuff. … But in seven years, I doubt it. I think, for the moment, we’re stuck with things like the suburb, where I grew up, and the physical limits that it enforces on us, which means lots of people driving cars. So we better figure out how to make electric cars work, at least for now.
Klein’s question pays homage to a trope that McKibben has recently begun to use, that the world is on fire so we should stop burning things. McKibben uses this to reframe old content that will already be familiar to readers of his past work (fossil fuels are the problem; cheap solar energy is the solution).
For McKibben, this reframing is not trivial. Later he tells Klein that movement building is just a kind of storytelling; later still that storytelling is the most crucial task in climate mitigation.
If we don’t tell that story right, we are going to go in exactly the opposite direction. So I think our job, as I say, is to tell the story of a rapid transition from setting stuff on fire here to using the fire that’s up in the sky. And that’s a powerful story …
McKibben, after all, is a writer. But this supreme faith in storytelling highlights how different his take on the new zeitgeist is from Klein’s.
What exactly is the new zeitgeist?
Klein thinks recent developments require an attitudinal reboot:
… a movement that has spent most of its life learning how to stop terrible things from happening […] needs to become something different. A movement that builds real things in the real world at a breakneck pace. A movement that doesn’t just say yes, but figures out how to make all kinds of communities and groups and cities around the country say yes. Yes and yes and yes, again and again and again, faster than we have in decades.
Klein is saying that climate advocates now have the money and legislative tools to make a difference, so they need to shift to a practical, realistic mindset. He thinks climate action is no longer hypothetical; it needs to get things done.
For McKibben, the changes have mostly happened in the external political climate, not within the movement. The “fever has broken” because other people are behaving better. Republicans have changed: They “didn’t attack the IRA in the midterm campaigns.” Voters have changed: Democrats did well in the U.S., and Lulu beat Bolsonaro in Brazil. Attitudes toward solar panels have changed: Their low price makes them broadly popular, stylish for conservatives who see them as a symbol of independence, and “groovy” for liberals.
McKibben sees no shift from campaigning to governance; he just sees some encouraging election results and some new metaphors to frame the narrative. This leaves him unprepared for some of Klein’s subsequent questions.
How to handle community protesters?
Klein wonders if the speed of rollout is hindered by protesters or by regulators who oversee permits for building electrical transmission lines. Traditional environmental protests protected natural spaces; now there is a need to build over some of them. Development can be blocked by “local homeowners or community members who show up to meetings” but
“… maybe now we have a little too much of that kind of nonrepresentative voice. Maybe we need policies and processes that allow for more speed, for more building, for more discretion on the part of political leaders.”
McKibben recognizes the problem: “Last year, the public utility commission in Vermont turned down a solar farm solely on the grounds of aesthetics, that people didn’t want to look at it.” But the most he can muster is finger-wagging, and an appeal for some new poetics:
I don’t think that that’s OK anymore. In [the] world that we live in, in the kind of emergency we face, we need to have some change in that aesthetic. If you look at a wind turbine spinning on a hill, you have to be able to think there’s something beautiful about it. That it’s the breeze made visible and that it’s a sign that you’re taking some kind of responsibility for your own energy.
English majors like me appreciate McKibben’s faith in metaphorical spin. But he doesn’t address Klein’s question. Does progress require a fundamental change to unrepresentative “democratic” processes that allow small groups to veto the development of the common good?
Cornered, McKibben suggests that fossil fuel operatives are behind community protests. His suspicion is not without reason, but again Klein politely demurs. Fossil fuel operatives have played some role in fomenting anti-renewable agitation, but neighborhood associations block new housing in San Francisco without fossil-fuel help. Giving people a voice in everything naturally seems to hinder action.
McKibben wants to “make sure that the burden doesn’t fall on the people that the burden has always fallen upon in the past” and launches a speech blaming Reaganism for destroying the philosophy of public spirit; luckily, the “combination of Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden that we see reflected in things like the Inflation Reduction Act” leads back to “L.B.J.-era policy” that might “get us all connected together.”
Klein reels him in, reminding him that the IRA was “an amalgam of Joe Manchin as well” (McKibben’s confusion over how that bill passed is long-standing) — and that Manchin’s package included a measure to expedite energy project approvals, including transmission. (In a previous article, Klein’s Times colleague David Wallace-Wells quoted research saying the failure of this “side bill” potentially diminished the IRA’s emission-reducing effect by 80%.)
McKibben opposed the bill because it was bundled with a fast path for the Mountain View natural gas pipeline. He waxes poetic on the ills of natural gas as a bridge fuel but when the topic comes to transmission, he first pooh-poohs its importance (perhaps he hasn’t read Wallace-Wells) before finally admitting “I don’t have any specific ideas about that bill … I think it’s a fair critique.”
After this admission comes a defensive plea that environmentalists are “just volunteers” who shouldn’t have to “answer for everything all the time.”
Thereafter, McKibben’s answers increasingly lack confidence. Klein supplies data to challenge McKibben’s critique of natural gas carbon capture; all McKibben can manage is “my guess is that it’s a time and money suck” and resort, again, to metaphor and storytelling: “our job … is to tell the story of a rapid transition from setting stuff on fire here to using the fire up in the sky.”
Keystone and divestment: Does “saying no” work?
Klein introduces McKibben as “a key leader in the fight to block the Keystone XL pipeline.” But how does this accomplishment stack up — have emissions been reduced?
Robert Rapier argues that the cancellation has had an unmeasurably low overall effect on fossil fuel supplies. Instead of getting oil from Alberta, Gulf Coast refineries just get crude from other sources.
Another signature McKibben effort, fossil fuel financial divestment, also seeks to cut supply; it aims to choke the industry by denying it capital. However, Tom Johansmeyer has noted in Harvard Business Review that divestment’s impact is questionable.
In divestment, an owner sells; necessarily, someone else buys. The seller publicly washes their hands of the asset, but the capital available to the industry doesn’t necessarily decrease. The new owners may influence the industry to pursue development more aggressively. Campaigns have generated an eye-popping $40 trillion of divestment by various financial institutions, but the supply of capital to the industry continues to increase.
Palindrome Day
Bill McKibben sees things differently. So when Ezra Klein asks him whether environmentalists hold back technological solutions by fighting for the wrong things, he pivots to introduce his latest “political fight”:
… Third Act, this group that we founded in the last year for people over 60, like me, to get them engaged in fights to save the climate and democracy …[is] taking on the four big American banks — Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, BofA — because they’re the four biggest funders to the fossil fuel industry in the world … [The funding from these banks to the fossil fuel industry] will lock us into a fossil fuel future ….
A later newsletter adds the gimmick of using Palindrome Day for a credit-card cutting protest — possibly to recall 1960s draft card burning, for the benefit of the Third Act demographic.
Gimmickry aside, this protest rehashes divestment. It targets financial supply. But while demand persists, someone will provide financing. The protest does nothing to divert demand to cleaner energy sources; it doesn’t develop new alternative technologies. But curtailing demand is the surest path to stop financing — it disrupts the business case for fossil-fuel investment.
Green Investing: A modest proposal
Throughout the conversation, McKibben dances away from the new zeitgeist Klein envisions. To meet its aims, Klein says liberalism needs to “build houses, clean energy capacity, transmission lines, mass transit, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, child care centers ….”
Cutting credit cards and boycotting banks are negative gestures, like flinging soup to “just stop oil.” These are fine as far as they go, but … retro. They re-enact 1960s heroism.
Meanwhile, many funds that promote “Environment, Social and Governance (ESG)” investments stop at eliminating fossil fuels and tobacco. Investors can wash their hands of these social ills — but wouldn’t it be better to dirty your hands? People in the Third Act demographic generally have retirement savings; we can target some to support clean enterprise.
My retirement savings need to (hopefully) prevent my becoming a burden on my family or the state. But I am still able to tithe a portion for investments to build a better world: a real estate fund that helps family farmers transition to organic; a bank that finances renewable projects. I hope to eventually devote 20% of my retirement funds assets, but I haven’t reached that ratio yet.
My plan for March 21: research ideas for constructive investment. A recent Matter of Degrees podcast introduced some sources, including the Carbon Collective’s “Climate Index” and Marilyn Waite’s “Guide to Sustainable Banking and Investing.”
In the 1960s, just stopping the war sufficed as a goal. Placard-waving, sit-ins, learn-ins, and fill-in-the-blank-ins made sense. But today’s climate fight requires building something better. So, maybe the new zeitgeist calls for us old folks to leverage (at least some of) our retirement savings to create solutions.
