A Pace College student in a gas mask “smells” a
magnolia blossom in City Hall Park on Earth Day in 1970 in New York. (AP Photo)
‘Twenty
million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970 – 10%
percent of America’s population at the time, perhaps the single greatest day of
political protest in the country’s history.’ Photograph: AP
This Earth Day, we must stop the fossil fuel
money pipeline
Bill
McKibben
Taking down the fossil fuel industry requires taking
on the institutions that finance it. Even during a pandemic, this movement is
gaining steam
@billmckibben
Wed 22 Apr
2020 11.30 BSTLast modified on Wed 22 Apr 2020 12.31 BST
1970 was a
simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think
outside the pandemic bubble.)
Simpler
because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our
cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was
nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert
Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I
wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical
examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink
lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve probably heard of
Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how the former New York
governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “One great
septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for
swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.”
Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now
was said of America’s cities then.
It’s no
wonder that people mobilized: 20 million Americans took to the streets for the
first Earth Day in 1970 – 10% of America’s population at the time, perhaps the
single greatest day of political protest in the country’s history. And it
worked. Worked politically because Congress quickly passed the Clean Air Act
and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired
effect. In essence, they stuck enough filters on smokestacks, car exhausts and
factory effluent pipes that, before long, the air and water were unmistakably
cleaner. The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of
photos that showed just how filthy things were. Even for those of us who were
alive then, it’s hard to imagine that we tolerated this.
But we
should believe it, because now we face even greater challenges that we’re doing
next to nothing about. And one reason is you can’t see them.
The carbon
dioxide molecule is invisible; at today’s levels you can’t see it or smell it,
and it doesn’t do anything to you. Carbon with one oxygen molecule? That’s what
kills you in a closed garage if you leave the car running. But two oxygen
molecules? All that does is trap heat in the atmosphere. Melt ice caps. Raise
seas. Change weather patterns. But slowly enough that most of the time, we
don’t quite see it.
And it’s a
more complex moment for another reason. You can filter carbon monoxide easily.
It’s a trace gas, a tiny percentage of what comes from a power plant. But
carbon dioxide is the exact opposite. It’s most of what comes pouring out when
you burn coal or gas or oil. There’s no catalytic converter for CO2, which
means you have to take down the fossil fuel industry.
That in
turn means you have to take on not just the oil companies but also the banks,
asset managers and insurance companies that invest in them (and may even own
them, in the wake of the current economic crash). You have to take on, that is,
the heart of global capital.
And so we
are. Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental and climate justice
groups running from the small and specialized to the Sierra Club and
Greenpeace, formed last fall to try to tackle the biggest money on earth. Banks
like Chase – the planet’s largest by market capitalization – which has funneled
a quarter-trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris
agreement of 2015. Insurers like Liberty Mutual, still insuring tar sands
projects even as pipeline builders endanger Native communities by trying to
build the Keystone XL during a pandemic.
This
campaign sounds quixotic, but it seemed to be getting traction until the
coronavirus pandemic hit. In January, BlackRock announced that it was going to
put climate at the heart of its investment analyses. Liberty Mutual, under
similar pressure from activists, began to edge away from coal. And Chase –
well, Earth Day would have seen activists engaging in civil disobedience in
several thousand bank lobbies across America, sort of like the protest in
January that helped launch the campaign (and sent me, among others, off in
handcuffs). But we called that off; there’s no way we were going to risk
carrying the microbe into jails, where the people already locked inside have
little chance of social distancing.
Still, the
pandemic may be causing as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as our
campaign hoped to. With the demand for oil cratering, it’s clear that these
companies have no future. The divestment campaign that, over a decade, has
enlisted $14tn in endowments and portfolios in the climate fight has a new head
of steam.
Our job – a
more complex one than faced our Earth Day predecessors 50 years ago – is to
force the spring. We need to speed the transition to the solar panels and wind
turbines that engineers have worked so mightily to improve and are now the
cheapest way to generate power. The only thing standing in the way is the
political power of the fossil fuel companies, on clear display as Donald Trump
does everything in his power to preserve their dominance. That’s hard to
overcome. Hard but simple. Just as in 1970, it demands unrelenting pressure
from citizens. That pressure is coming. Indigenous nations, frontline
communities, faith groups, climate scientists and savvy investors are joining
together, and their voices are getting louder. Seven million of us were in the
streets last September. That’s not 20 million, but it’s on the way.
We can’t be
on the streets right now. So we’ll do what we can on the boulevards of the
Internet. Join us for Earth Day Live, three days of digital activism beginning
22 April. We’re in a race, and we’re gaining fast.
Bill
McKibben is an author and Schumann distinguished scholar in environmental
studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. His most recent book is Falter: Has the
Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
This story
originally appeared in The Nation and is republished here as part of Covering
Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening
coverage of the climate story
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'This is
Bill McKibben at his glorious best. Wise and warning, with everything on the
line. Do not miss it' Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The
Shock Doctrine
Thirty
years ago, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book that alerted
us to the dangers of climate change. Falter is a new call to arms, to save not
only our planet but our very souls as well.
Over tens
of thousands of years, through the harnessing of nature, the development of
civilization, and the application of new technologies, human beings have
created the world we live in. But as McKibben points out in this provocative
and sobering look at the world today, we are fast approaching a tipping point,
putting into question the viability of humanity itself.
McKibben
argues that we have failed to recognize how individual actions often operated
against our collective interest, and as a result we now face three daunting
challenges - to adjust to a new life on a broken planet, to fight the
hyper-individualism that now animates government and business; and to reverse
the ways that technology is bleaching out the variety of human existence. He
asks if we still retain the tools and social capital to fight these larger
forces - and if we are willing to make the effort.
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