An Inconvenient Solution (New Gore Book on Climate Change)
Tom Davos
An Inconvenient Solution
By Bill McKibben
This article appeared in the December 7, 2009 edition of The Nation.
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was one of the high points not only of
the environmental movement but also of the documentary tradition in
America. He figured out how to use a new medium, PowerPoint, to take
the unavoidably wonkish story of global warming and make it scary,
credible and manageable. It was, perhaps, as important as anything he
could have done as president, and he deserved not only the Oscar but
also the Nobel.
As almost everyone noted at the time, however, there was one problem
with the film: the section on what to actually do about the biggest
problem we've ever faced was remarkably short, both in duration and on
plausible ideas. If the world is coming to an end, changing your light
bulb doesn't seem like the obvious response. Or rather, it seems
highly obvious but highly insufficient--a gesture, not a solution.
Gore heard those criticisms and spent the next few years convening a
series of more than thirty "Solutions Summits" in Nashville and
elsewhere, where he picked the brains of virtually everyone who ever
thought professionally about climate and energy. He's taken all those
data and all those ideas, and with the help of a capable team of
researchers he's turned them into a book, Our Choice, an ambitious and
entirely successful attempt to lay out all that we know about
mainstream answers to global warming. (When I say "virtually
everyone," I mean it; the acknowledgments take up four pages of agate
type and include even me.) He's got chapters on solar electricity, on
wind energy, on biofuels, on nuclear power and even on more recondite
topics: geothermal energy, carbon sequestration.
Occasionally, truth be told, the book verges on the nerdy. There are
diagrams on topics like "how a turbine works" that could have come
from an old-fashioned encyclopedia. Gore has a weakness for
statistics: did you know that between 1984 and 1991 nine early
concentrated solar thermal power plants were built in the Mojave
Desert with a total of 2 million square meters of mirrors? Some of the
vast book is taken up with what amounts to more PowerPoint
slides--beautiful but stock images of farmers or roaring hurricanes.
(If you like gorgeous windmill porn, this is your book.)
Taken as a whole, however, this is the most comprehensive and
well-informed survey anyone has ever done of what we need to do to get
off fossil fuel. Gore is judicious and reasoned at every turn, and
gets most of the calls exactly right. Building more traditional
nuclear power plants will be too expensive to provide much help. Ditto
carbon sequestration: it's a good idea to try and take the exhaust
from coal-fired power plants and store it underground in old oil
wells, but the costs so far seem prohibitive. In fact, to many of
these dilemmas Gore applies a wise test: "Put a high price on carbon.
When the reality of the need to sharply reduce CO2 emissions is
integrated into all market calculations--including the decisions by
utilities and their investors--market forces will drive us quickly
toward the answers we need."
Gore, I think, has reasonably answered not only the one apt criticism
of An Inconvenient Truth but also the good-faith (as opposed to
talk-radio) objections of anyone wondering if the world really could
exist without fossil fuels. The answer is, not easily, but it's well
within the realm of technical possibility. If we followed his advice,
we'd make it. What's lacking, of course, is the political will to
really do it.
And if there's one weakness this time around, it's that Gore could
have devoted a little space to figuring out how we should build that
political will. If we're going to impose a price on carbon at the
Copenhagen conference, or pass a strong renewables target in Congress,
or do any of the dozen or so other things the situation desperately
demands, reasoned argument among experts alone will not carry the day.
In fact, it won't come close. We've known, more or less, what to do
for more than a decade, but any progress has been stymied, especially
in this country, by the well-funded deniers propped up by the coal and
oil industries, and by the pliant and gullible media that continue to
give them play. Simply adding a few thousand more tons of scientific
reports to the environmental side of the scale won't tip the debate,
not when Exxon can afford to buy the necessary coterie of Congress
members. The only thing that will suffice is to build a movement
strong enough in some other currency (bodies in the street, votes in
the ballot box) to provide serious counterpressure.
Of course, it is not Gore's job to provide this pressure (and, in any
event, his Alliance for Climate Protection has been a useful attempt
to build some). The guy's not responsible for coming up with
absolutely every answer to every part of this problem--and the good
news, in the past few months, is that many others are stepping into
this realm. I've been watching climate policy closely for twenty
years, and only now does the planet's immune system seem to be kicking
in: civil society has finally recognized global warming for the
overarching threat it is, and has begun to go to work.
The parts I've gotten to watch most closely have been the
international efforts. In the past eighteen months, my fellow
activists and I have built 350.org, the first real global grassroots
climate change campaign, which peaked on October 24 with a global day
of action. That day featured thousands upon thousands of events in
more than 150 countries--it may have been the most geographically
widespread day of political action the planet has ever seen. (And it
was almost certainly the only one devoted to a point of scientific
fact: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide is what scientists now tell
us is the most the earth's atmosphere can safely hold, at least if we
want a planet "similar to that on which civilization developed and to
which life on earth is adapted.") It was, truth be told, quite amazing
fun to watch the campaign come together--young people around the
world, clergy, scientists all dreaming up powerful ways to take those
three digits, arguably the most important number in the world, and
make them the most well-known.
There were underwater cabinet meetings (in the Maldives, led by
President Mohamed Nasheed, whose nation may not exist in a hundred
years) and climbers on the melting slopes of the world's highest
peaks. There were thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times
and giant actions in major cities where people formed 3s and 5s and 0s
with their bodies, a kind of planet-scale Scrabble. It began in New
Zealand and went around the world till sunset in Hawaii--and since it
was tied not to a slogan but to a specific demand, it may help move
the Copenhagen talks at least a little in the direction of the
science. But this kind of movement will need to continue and grow.
We'll need civil disobedience, of the kind that blockaded Congress's
coal-fired power plant last spring; we'll need symbolic witness, like
350.org; we'll need old-fashioned lobbying.
We also learned a lot of lessons about organizing globally, something
that wasn't really possible even a few years ago. The power of the
Internet is less in the gee-whiz stuff Gore describes (real-time
pictures of the earth so that everyone can see its fragile beauty) but
in the ability to use it, C la the Obama campaign in 2008, as a tool
to enable events in the real world. At 350.org we're running a website
with fourteen languages and using wordless animated videos; our sense
is that it's possible for the idea of a "global movement" to be
something more than pious rhetoric. On this toughest of all issues we
were able to find millions of people on both sides of the rich-poor
divide who understood that they have a great deal in common, beginning
with the shared awareness that nowhere on the planet is safe once
we're north of 350 ppm. It's moving--humbling, really--when someone
sends you pictures from their rally in Cameroon or Burundi or Quito or
Phnom Penh. Humbling because you know they did nothing to cause the
problem but have come to realize that in a world newly wired together,
they might be able to play some real role in solving it.
Gore ends his book with a lovely speech from the future, looking back
on what was accomplished after "the turning point came in 2009" with
"the inauguration of a new president in the United States." Former
opponents, impressed with the president's sincerity and moved by the
questions of their children, began to link arms in the struggle for a
clean-energy future, and soon the right incentives were unleashed, new
technology began to pour off the line, even passenger rail surged
again across the land. "Although leadership came from many countries,
once the United States finally awakened to its responsibilities, it
reestablished the moral authority the world had come to expect from
the U.S. during the 40 years after World War II."
That's a very pleasant dream, especially for someone like Gore, who
was a firsthand witness to the period of American leadership he
describes. But as he knows as well as anyone, at the moment it's
nothing more than a dream. Making it real will depend on how hard we
push the system. There's no question it's capable of responding, and
no question that left to its own devices it won't.