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Austin Sierra Club hosted a virtual conversation on May 6 with climate activist Bill McKibben on the current state of environmental affairs. McKibben has written influential books on climate change, which helped him earn the Gandhi Peace Award.
McKibben said that the global warming now occurring is precisely what scientists anticipated, when he penned his first book, “The End of Nature,” in 1989. At that time, those predictions were derided for being too extreme. Globally, we are experiencing the highest temperatures ever recorded, frequent extreme weather events, and even temperate climates like the Amazon rainforests are experiencing unprecedented drought and wildfires.
Even so, McKibben said that he somehow feels more optimistic than ever. In the past decade engineers have achieved major breakthroughs in renewable energy, making these technologies cheaper to produce than fossil fuels for the first time.
“We now live on the Earth where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a piece of glass at the sun,” McKibben said. California is deploying renewables across its entire electric grid, he added, while China mass-produces high-quality electric vehicles.
“You can tell how well (the energy transition) is going based on how scared fossil fuel corporations are,” McKibben said. He cited pending Texas Senate Bill 388, which would require Texas electric companies to produce as much “dispatchable” fossil-fuel power as they do renewable power. “It’s like DEI for fossil fuels,” McKibben joked.
Nonetheless, Texas is one of the states best equipped to make the renewables transition. It leads the country in wind energy and solar power capacity, supplemented by increasing battery storage capacity.
Renewables “are no longer an ‘alternative’ energy – not Whole Foods,” McKibben said. “Renewables are now the Costco of energy – cheap, available, and ready to go”
McKibben urged people to participate in SunDay on September 21 to promote the superiority of renewables and to lobby legislators to phase out fossil fuels. The first goal of reversing climate change is “to turn off the faucet, making sure we stop pouring out more and more (carbon) into the air,” he said.
McKibben said older people must fight alongside young climate activists like Greta Thunberg. “This is not just a younger generation’s issue, we need to provide some serious backup,” he said. Eleven percent of the population, older Americans hold 30 percent of the country’s wealth and are a major voting bloc.
Speakers from Austin Sierra Club, Public Citizen, The Third Act, and McKibben’s climate group 350.org also spoke at the event.
“I won’t guarantee that we will win this fight – we are in trouble and the cumulative damage of climate change is worse than we could have imagined,” McKibben said. “But I do know we have new tools available to us that we didn’t have before.”
