Bill McKibben’s Parable of the Beers
The shifting style of our best environmental journalist raises the question: How do you really change the zeitgeist, anyway?
Bill McKibben has long proven masterful in many voices: nature poet, trenchant moralist, ponderer of metaphysics; meticulously clear explaining science to non-specialists; disarmingly humble and likeable describing outdoor adventures. More recently, however, McKibben’s style has assumed an exasperated tone, marked by hyperbole and scornful accusations, as a response to climate crisis intractability. His early works like “The End of Nature” and “Wandering Home” were lucid, philosophical, down-to-earth, likeable, and well-received. Yet human emissions continued apace. Would a new style be more effective?
The title and tagline of a 2012 article for Rolling Stone speaks volumes: “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe — and make clear who the real enemy is.” Previous efforts did not produce action, so McKibben finds a villain, the fossil-fuel industry, and indeed capitalism itself.
A parable comparing the world’s carbon budget (565 gigatons) to industry assets exemplifies his new angry activism:
Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit — equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit — the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.
The fault lies not in ourselves but in conniving oil firms. Who could resist a few cold ones?
There are issues with McKibben’s numbers. According to Information is Beautiful, the reserves are not a single lump sum. Of 2755 gigatons left to release, only 710Gt are “in fossil fuel reserves of all energy companies.” 780Gt are “remaining company reserves that could be developed” and 1265Gt are “other reserves (including state-owned).” McKibben glosses over these details. Even his total differs slightly (2795 vs. 2755 gigatons). But these inaccuracies are only part of the problem.
Even the early McKibben made no claim to precision. In “Wandering Home” he expresses modesty about his skill in the outdoors, relying instead on the wisdom of friends:
This would be a good place for an interlude of real nature writing, but I am, as you have doubtless already gathered, an incompetent naturalist. Beyond the obvious — trillium, loon, monarch — names tend to slip from my memory. I love walking with good naturalists in the woods, eagerly taking in their descriptions. But each such outing is as exciting as the one before, because I’ve managed to forget most of what I learned. I’m sure I’ve been introduced to the yellow-throated whatever on a dozen occasions, but each time it’s as if we’d never met.
As he continues, however, we realize this disarming humility is a cover for genuine savvy.
If you dropped me from a helicopter here and asked me the date, I could give you a pretty good guess — not from the wildflowers out on the forest floor, but from the color of the leaves. The vibrating, nearly neon green of spring has dropped away; we’re now approaching the leathery deep green of high summer, which will steadily deepen further until — three weeks or so from now — the first maples along the swampy edges will, overnight, start to show a band of red along the leaf edge.
“Wandering Home” is McKibben at his simplest and most optimistic. Trekking back from Middlebury to the Adirondacks, he finds places where his soul is happy, and reasons outward. Decent people in tightly-knit communities are making peace with modernity. Can’t the whole world be like this?
Considering my own life in a small city in Japan — groceries from a small farmer coop, mostly organic; artisanal whole-grain bread (difficult to find in Japan); hand-crafted this and that (easy to find in Japan); an “all-electric” house with rooftop solar, heat pumps for hot water, heat and air conditioning, good insulation, double-glazed, double hung windows; an urban garden to tend — in many ways, my world has been nurtured by environmentalists like Mr. McKibben. Small progress, but perhaps there is hope.
Even this placid McKibben was a moralist. Near journey’s end, a sermon he has been holding back spills out:
… for me the answer is much more basic, having to do with what it means to be civil, a good neighbor, a part of a community. There might be a hundred of us out on this trail today (there aren’t, but there could be), and we would barely disrupt one another’s experience. … But put one Jet Ski turning doughnuts on the lake, or one four-wheeler careening along the trail, and everyone else’s blood pressure starts to rise.
Our modern ills and the climate crisis are due to a few selfish jerks — so things can surely improve.
But in Rolling Stone the accusations grow personal, and calculated:
A rapid, transformative change would require building a movement, and movements require enemies. As John F. Kennedy put it, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.” And enemies are what climate change has lacked.
Facing an enemy shortage, McKibben manufactures one: Rex Tillerson. After explaining in detail how no rational oil company could write off trillions in reserves (suggesting a systemic problem), he then fingers Tillerson as “the most reckless man in America” — for not writing off Exxon’s reserves. In the 2018 book “Falter,” McKibben swivels to target Tillerson’s brusque predecessor Lee Raymond, but the strategy is the same: identify enemies, and incite folks to join the movement.
“Falter” offers angry denunciations of a villainous cast including the Koch brothers, billionaire Tom Perkins, economist James Buchanan, Rick Perry, Margaret Thatcher, and others, mostly rich, poisoned by Ayn Rand, conspiring with “chums” and “pals.” We hear about Arizona regulators whose elections were financed by the Koch brothers and utilities, and who bring Solar City’s rooftop installation business to a “shuddering halt” with net metering fees.
But — during the years mentioned, Arizona continued to rank among the top five states in residential solar installations. “Distributed Solar Electric Generation in Arizona” steadily increased by 25% (+/- 10%) per year between 2014 and 2018, when “Falter” was published. Distributed solar increased 2.5-fold, from 511.7 MW to 1262.9 MW. Solar City’s business came to a “shuddering halt,” arguably, because its leasing model left it overleveraged. These are not isolated quibbles. When McKibben goes on a polemical tear, you can poke anywhere and find inaccuracies. It’s hard to envision policy solutions when problem assessments rely on shaky information and emotion.
McKibben freely admits that policies are an afterthought. The system is rigged, he reasons, so the answer is a mass movement to “change the zeitgeist, and hence the course of history.” Activism becomes the end, not a means:
We [the founders of 350.org] didn’t concentrate on policy, but instead on mobilization, figuring that without a movement pressing change, it was pointless to worry about precisely what change should look like.
If a certain superficiality creeps into his action plans, that’s OK. It’s all about hitting the streets.
Discussing zeitgeist change on the Solvable podcast, McKibben argued that gay marriage liberalization came about because “organizers did a fantastic job” centering the issue. But did placard-waving really effect this change? In a recent Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell suggested the shift owed less to anger over bakeries and wedding cakes, and more to America’s shared experience of watching “Will and Grace” on network TV. Building positive feelings, perhaps, contributed more than exposing prejudice.
Herein lies a weakness of the beer parable: it focuses on blaming the bartender. McKibben advocates — what, exactly? Eliminating the fossil fuel industry? But suppose Exxon and others were outlawed tomorrow (for good measure, put Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson on a sidewalk selling pencils). Without infrastructure improvements (charging stations, transmission, storage) and other preparations, the likely outcome is expensive energy, in short supply, and no plastic syringes for our vaccines either, much less carbon-free steel or concrete. McKibben provides no constructive plan. In a recent blog, the best he could offer was simplistic sloganeering:
… if you’re a solar engineer working to drop the price of power ten percent a year, don’t you dare leave the lab — the rest of us will chip in to get you pizza and caffeine so you can keep on working. But if you’re not a solar engineer, then see you in the streets.
In the parable, only the bartender has agency. He serves beer. We obediently drink. But I actually might resist the temptation to drink 3 more 12-packs of beer after finishing a 6-pack, even if the proprietor offered discounts or flashed slick marketing materials. To the extent we lower consumption, we undermine the business case for developing the 710Gt of remaining reserves, the 780Gt that “could be developed,” and the 1265Gt “other reserves (including state-owned)” — these “beers” don’t get opened.
Mr. McKibben piously assures us that “Of course individual action won’t add up to change.” But this is like saying “My one vote doesn’t matter.” If we vote with our purchases, companies will need to respond. (Granted, government actions like carbon taxes or technology support would make our choices easier.)
Protest movements have played a prominent civic role the past 60 years, blocking injustices — lunch counters, bus segregation, and war in Indochina. But as a tool, protest works better at thwarting action than building solutions. And activism cuts both ways. Vermont had 12 wind power projects planned in 2012. None has been implemented. The NIMBYs who blocked these wind farms, plus solar and transmission projects elsewhere all followed activist playbooks.
Adam Gopnik recently observed: “Though democracy is practiced when people march on Washington and assemble in parks — when they feel that they have found a common voice — politics is practiced when the shouting turns to swapping.” Political successes like passage of the IRA show consensus and coalition-building can still pay off.
McKibben himself seems to sense this, at least sometimes. Toward the end of “Falter,” he switches gears, making a case for maturity and balance (his antidote for capitalism’s endless drive for growth). As McKibben argues “the human game is a team sport,” his style drops the sneer and snarl that dot the preceding pages, recovering the likeability of “Wandering Home.” Even in a crisis, patience and tolerance can produce results. The early McKibben changed my world; maybe he can revive this winning approach.
For a longer discussion, see my essay Two Bills and “Reconciliation.”
