By Paul Bean
On Sunday, I attended a “Climate Action” Talk and Q&A hosted at American Flatbread in Vermont’s beautiful Mad River Valley. The guest in honor was Environmentalist Bill McKibben. McKibben is well known for his organization 350.org and as an outspoken anti-fossil fuel environmentalist.
McKibben has written multiple environmental books and is currently a contributing writer for the New Yorker. In 2022 he wrote an article titled Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It, an article where he dances with the idea of Geoengineering as a potential solution to climate change while at the same time condemning the it. If you were viewing this from a political perspective you would say that he is speaking out of both sides of his mouth and when I asked him about his stance at the event you would say his response was similar (more on that later).
McKibben and I have an on-going back in forth on the social media site X where he’s amassed an impressive 397.4K followers.
Occasionally I say something just annoying enough to get a response out of Bill, something I quite enjoy, and it seems he sort of does too. He genuinely does have a sense of humor.
The most recent case is when I accused him of being secretly funded by the Rockefellers- that “old oil money”, which is of course true.
However he snarked back “it’s not even money. they just give me barrels of oil, and I refine it in my backyard and sell it to my neighbors.” An expert deflection if you ask me. Humorous, clever and absurd.
Jokes aside, if McKibben is really funded by “that old oil money” it would at the very least be concerning to his supporters and ultimately the agenda that he supports. Which is of course the green new deal, solar technology, wind technology, getting rid of the fossil fuels, going all electric, etc. If you want to find out how McKibben is funded by the Rockerfellers and 350.org is just a giant front for Wall Street and greenwashing than read this article by OGA researcher Rob Williams.
Nonetheless, after attending and speaking at my third Geoegnineering Resistance Gathering hosted in Colchester by the Facebook group VT SKY, I made my way down to American Flatbread at Lareau Farm in Waitsfield to attend Mckibben’s talk on Climate Change.
This was a picturesque Vermont fall evening. Early October peak foliage, big rolls of hay bails in the field, at little chill that was cold enough to wear a flannel but not so cold you need a full on jacket— just the best. (Minus the Geoegnineering activity overhead)
When I arrived, there was a teen speaking. She read a poem about climate change and her fear of climate inaction. She shared her frustrations with older generations and their missteps.
Unfortunately I didn’t record her so I can’t give exact quotes, but you can imagine the kind of language and frustration she was sharing. Her emotion was like that of a mini-Greta Thunberg. It was full on climate hysteria with the crowd emotionally struck and sucked right in.
Just after the emotional priming, McKibben took the stage and began his full on sales pitch for the renewable energy industry:
“I think we still think of this stuff, sun and wind, as alternative energy. I think that those of us who even care about this look at this as sort of the ‘Whole Foods’ of energy. Ok? But it’s not, it is the Costco of energy. This is the stuff that is available cheap, in bulk, off the shelf, and now if we want to use it. If we’re willing to make that change.”
Ironically enough I just made my first trip to a Whole Foods down in Destin, Florida and below was one of the suggestions for payment
An option to literally pay with Amazon biometrics at Whole Foods (owned by Amazon), which sums up McKibben entire analogy with Costco/ Whole Foods.
His sales pitch continued.
“In some ways what’s happening in the developing word is even more dramatic. Earlier this year authorities and government officials in Pakistan began talking about that there’s been a 10% drop in demand on their countries national electric grid. They couldn’t figure out what is going on because that’s a big drop, unless there was a recession or something like covid…they couldn’t figure out what was happening, but people began to solve the issue by looking at images of google earth you could see… a very rapid spread of solar panels on poles roofs, on stores, on factories there were so many cheap Chinese solar panels flooding into the country that people were buying them, hooking them up, and not telling the government, not doing anything. That’s amazing. In the last 6 month, Pakistanis working on their own have installed 30% of their countries electric grid.”
I don’t really think it’s so bad that Pakistanis are independently pursuing means of power production. Good for them. More power to ‘em.
The problem is the use of unregulated coal power plants in China used to create these solar panels and Mckibbin’s failure to acknowledge that unless of course we are assuming he did not already know this.
“Anthropologists even think that standing around the campfire for millions of nights taught us some of the kind of social bonds that mark our species, it was the kind of ‘proto-zoom,’” said McKibben with some laughter from the crowd. “And we learned to control the combustion of coal and gas and oil, and we call that the industrial revolution and it brought us modernity, everything that we know around us. But the price is too high now. Not only the destruction of the planets climate systems, which is the biggest thing we have done, but 9 million people a year? 1 death in 5 people on this planet come from people breathing particulates that happen when you burn coal and gas? So its good news on many fronts that we don’t need to do that anymore…”
Accept that we do, to make to make and the solar panels, not to mention the making, moving, and mining of the other resources necessary to render them useful.
“I am a Methodist Sunday school teacher sometimes if you will, and we live on a planet where the good Lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles away and we now know how to make full use of it”
While I do appreciate Mckibben’s passion and creative style for how he presents his beliefs and ideas, I cannot help but to notice many flaws in the things he says. Putting it into the context of religion you can really see just how deeply rooted his beliefs are in what he is selling.
At the end of his talk of about 25 minutes, he opened it up for Q&A.
“would you please comment on your thoughts on lithium and the mining of minerals and the life span of solar panels?” a member of the crowd asked.
“There’s no free lunch here. We are going to have to mine some stuff and we should strive to do it as senable as we can with as little human rights damaged as we can. Mining is always a kind of traumatic thing. The good news is the amount of mining that we have to do make this happen seems to be far far less than the amount of mining were doing now to support the fossil fuel industry…the amount of stuff that we will have to mine in order to build all of the batteries and panels that we will need by 2050 and the volume stuff that we will need to be mined, is smaller the volume of coal we mined last year on this planet…
I was thankful to have been picked second because he only allowed for three questions so I asked:
“I’ve seen you write a little bit about geoengineering as a potential solution, climate and weather modification for people who don’t know about that. What do you make of that? Ive seen you write a little about it. Do you really think that’s a viable solution to the problem?”
“I think it’s a.. I think its a very terrible and scary idea. Basically the one big way we know how to do this is to pour sulfur into the atmosphere in order to block incoming sunlight and cool the planet,” Said McKibben.
(Gee Bill…blocking the sun?! Doesn’t seem great for solar panels!)
“I think it’s a terrible idea, and I think we’re gonna do it, or something like it if were not able very quickly to get the temperature on this earth under control. I think we have that same narrow window for about 5 years- to build out as much renewable energy as we possibly can and than see where we are. We may well decide that it might also be worthwhile to do something like that because the planet is just getting unlivable otherwise. But the more renewable energy we build and the faster, the less screwing around with our planet we will have to do. This is one of the reasons why I think its so important we make use of the very straight forward technological opportunities we now have. The idea that we could counteract the carbon dioxide being poured into the atmosphere by pouring in some sulfur is a really disgusting commentary as our ability as a species, it’s also really dangerous because we really have no idea how it could play out. The computer models indicates that it may well move the monsoons off the subcontinent and change weather patterns enough to do that, and there’s a couple billion people who depend on the operation of the monsoons to provide their sustenance every year so we don’t want to do this if we can possibly avoid it.”
There are so many ways I could take his reply I do not even know where to start. While he acknowledges that this is a “terrible idea” he maintains that it is something that we will do even though he “hopes” we do not have to.
When he’s talking about making the switch to renewnebales, it feels like he’s saying will need to do this… or else!
The storms will continue until everyone switches to EVs!
He even acknowledges the potential for geoengineering to effect the monsoons at a mass scale, so he at least does realize the potential magnitude of geoengineering.
I phrased my question the way I did because I wanted to give him an opportunity to reply. We all know that geoengineering currently is, and has been going on for decades. However that was not the point.
After reading Bill’s article about geoengineering and hearing him talk on Sunday, it is genuinely sort of difficult to decipher how much he really knows about the subject of geoengineering, or how aware he is of what is actually going on with our climate and on-going geoengineering.
I get the sense that he is a guy who means well, has a good sense of humor, he’s very intelligent, and charismatic, however something seems off.
I believe that to sell a lie, a better salesman not only has to believe in what he is selling but also to be emotionally invested in what he is selling. I believe in the case of Bill McKibben, as well as nearly all of the other current mainstream environmentalists, he is absolutely invested and a real believer. To adopt this mindset means to mindlessly adopt and accept a certain reality that you are a victim to- this grim reality that humans are bad and that we are destroying everything because that is inherently our true nature really no matter what we do—Which is of course a lie!
But it is very depressing reality if it is one you choose to accept. It becomes an even more disturbing reality if it is the one you choose to make your paycheck on and most of the time that is what it comes down to for a lot of people.
Ultimately that is what I believe about Bill. I believe that a certain level he kinda sorta knows that something is not quite right… But what’s the point of questioning that, we’re going to destroy the planet in 5 years anyway…
Right?
As always,
Eyes on our skies!
The author is a Vermonter, a writer, editor, social media director for VDC as well as a writer for the Vermont based anti-geoengineering organization Our Geoengneering Age. This article was originally published on the OGA Substack page