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</div><div><div>The Opponent: How Bill McKibben Changed Environmental Politics and Took on the Oil Patch</div><div>by MATTHEW C. NISBET</div><div>For the May/June issue of Canada’s Policy Options magazine, I contributed an article adapted from my Spring 2013 Shorenstein Center paper examining the career of environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben....</div><div>
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</div><div>Having spent months studying McKibben’s books, writing and career, I hold a deep admiration for his ability to convey the urgency of climate change and to articulate a better approach to life that includes more time for family, reflection and nature. His work as an activist is equally impressive. From his start in 2006, working with a handful of college students, to his leadership today of 350. org, McKibben has helped shift the US environmental movement from an almost exclusive focus on insider lobbying, legal strategies and think-tank-style influence to focus greater resources on grassroots organizing and mobilization.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet as a public intellectual, McKibben has failed to offer pragmatic and achievable policy ideas. Instead, reflecting his intellectual roots in the deep ecology movement, McKibben’s goal has been to generate a mass consciousness in support of limiting economic growth and consumption, with the hope of shifting the United States toward localized economies, food systems and “soft” energy sources. I wonder how many of the people turning out to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, working on behalf of divestment, or following along on Twitter and Facebook are aware of McKibben’s long standing vision of societal change, detailed first in The End of Nature and most recently in Deep Economy and Eaarth.</div><div>
</div><div>In this pastoral future free of consumerism or material ambition, Americans would rarely travel and experience the world instead via the Internet; grow much of their own food; power their communities through solar and wind; and divert their wealth to developing countries. McKibben’s romantic vision of a New-England-style utopia seems to have blinded him to alternative approaches that may be not only more effective at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and providing for the material needs of large, diverse populations, but also more politically probable.</div><div>
</div><div>McKibben is perhaps at even greater fault for downplaying the need for “hard” technological approaches like nuclear energy or carbon capture and storage, and focusing instead on “soft” technologies like solar, wind and efficiency. His favoured technologies are unlikely to alter the dynamics of fossil-fuel energy use and dependency worldwide. Consider that globally, an estimated 1,200 coal power plants are scheduled for construction, three-quarters of them in China and India. Compounding the challenge, according to University of Manitoba energy analyst Vaclav Smil in his 2010 book, solar and wind energy sources are unlikely to be able to overcome the problems of intermittency, storage capacity and cost, and to be scalable in time to compete with coal power worldwide.</div><div>
</div><div>In other words, innovative technologies are needed that can not only power the mega-cities of Asia but also limit emissions from the thousands of coal plants already in place and scheduled to be built around the world. In advocating for nuclear energy, even McKibben’s long-time inspiration Hansen is blunt, saying on his Web site in 2011: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”</div><div>
</div><div>In this case, it is useful to see the contrast between McKibben and evironmentalists like Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas, who have urged their peers to adopt a new outlook on technological innovation. Sharing many of the same political aims as McKibben over the course of his career, Lynas has developed a very different perspective about technology and humans’ relation to nature. In his most recent book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, Lynas argues that “we cannot afford to foreclose powerful technological options like nuclear, synthetic biology and [genetic engineering] because of Luddite prejudice and ideological inertia.”</div><div>
</div><div>In a recent essay titled “Wicked Polarization,” Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus describe progress on climate change and similarly complex social problems as obstructed by experts and public intellectuals who have “come to frame virtually every national problem as a consequence of the irrationality, ignorance, and immorality of the political Other.” In this light, arguments for action on climate change that evoke idealized visions of small-scale, hyperefficient agrarian communities powered by wind and solar reflect the priorities and values of environmentalists like McKibben, rather than a pragmatic set of choices designed to effectively manage the problem and align a diversity of political interests in support of compromise.</div><div>
</div><div>“The problem is not that we are in a post-truth age but rather that we have not learned to adapt to it,” Shellenberger and Nordhaus write. “Perhaps a good place to begin is by recognizing our own biases, perspectives, and agendas and attempting to hold them more lightly. Bringing an end to our ideological arms race will ultimately require that we force partisans out of their comfort zone by redefining those problems in ways to which partisans do not already know the answers.”</div><div>
</div><div>As a complement to activists like McKibben — and to the powerful voice of his oil patch opponents — we urgently need to bridge these polarized narratives around climate change. In our digital, algorithmic media culture we must find ways to hear each other, to listen as well as test our assumptions. And that begins by accepting that total victory for a single point of view is unachievable. “There is no kumbaya moment,” argued New York University’s Jay Rosen in a 2012 speech outlining ways to improve media coverage of wicked problems like climate change. “You never get everyone on the same page. What’s possible is a world where different stakeholders ‘get’ that the world looks different to people who hold different stakes.” The question that the Bill McKibbens pose to us, then, is not whether our fate lies in a choice between a mythologized pastoral past and apocalyptic visions of the future. It is whether our new media culture can be a path to the understanding of others, or force us even deeper into our ideological bunkers.</div><div>
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