Pirate's Cove

I have an idea, been saying it for 21 years. Can you guess what it is?

The Old Climate-Activism Playbook No Longer Works. What Else Can?

At the end of a long dirt road through Vermont’s Green Mountains, Bill McKibben sat on his screened-in porch, surrounded by birdsong and the drone of buzzing insects. The July sun beat through a canopy of trees. McKibben sipped a cup of green tea and pointed outside, to the ground just past the edge of the house, where an array of solar panels tilted toward the late-morning sky. The roof, too, was loaded with panels of different vintages. “I’ve been putting them up at intervals for a quarter century,” he said.

Few climate activists have participated in more eras of the environmental movement than McKibben. In 1989, at age 27, he published “The End of Nature,” often described as the first book on global warming for lay readers, which became an international best seller. Then he turned to activism, eventually shifting his focus from combating the “greenhouse effect” to organizing pipeline protests and fossil fuel divestment campaigns. Over the decades, he has evolved from a concerned observer to an elder statesman of the climate movement.

Nature is still here

I met McKibben at a uniquely bleak time for that movement. Republicans in Congress had shredded the Inflation Reduction Act, a Biden administration law meant in part to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and President Trump was making every effort to thwart progress on renewables while boosting the oil-and-gas industry. The president had also pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a climate accord that advocacy groups had helped catalyze. “In certain ways, it’s the darkest moment,” McKibben said.

He’d been coping by throwing himself into a new project. On Sept. 21, McKibben will spearhead a national “day of action” called Sun Day, for which activists across the country are organizing local events to hype up solar power and energy-efficient innovations. There will be electric-car shows, open houses at all-electric solar homes and solar installation tours. In August, McKibben also published a book on solar and wind power called “Here Comes the Sun.” He wants to convince Americans that renewable energy is not a pricey, boutique alternative, but the accessible, abundant, cost-effective future of electrified life — no longer the Whole Foods of energy, as he put it, but the Costco.

And most will show up in fossil fueled vehicles. This is starting to sound like the old playbook

But Sun Day also feels like a tactical swerve for McKibben. Climate activism over the past decade has been defined by global protests against fossil fuels, by Greta Thunberg’s student strikes, by the emergence of the Sunrise Movement. McKibben has been among the strongest exponents of that era’s climate-activism strategy — confrontational, morally stark, bent on shutting down economic activity that endangered humanity in the long-term even if it meant reducing corporate profits and curtailing Americans’ lifestyle options in the short term.

Now McKibben is taking a different tack, one that seems to share a message with a more moderate, adaptationist wing of the climate world while also harking back to the innocence and idealism of Earth Day. “This is clearly the thing that we can work on at the moment that stands a chance of making a difference,” he told me. His own shift in strategy comes as many activists are asking themselves some difficult questions: What has climate activism really given us? And where should it go from here?

Hah, it’s the same thing in a different package. They still want Government to ban fossil fuels and replace them with expensive, unreliable “renewables”. One day they will be ready for prime time.

American public opinion on climate has arrived at a complicated juncture. In a Gallup poll this year, a record 48 percent of respondents said that global warming will pose a “serious threat” to them or their way of life. People can feel the hotter summers, the snowless winters, the hurricanes raging harder. Some surveys have found evidence among Republicans, too, of a willingness to link extreme weather to climate change. Yet when asked to rank the issues that affect their votes, Americans regularly place climate near the bottom of the list.

Popular in theory, not in practice. Hence why so many Warmists use fossil fueled vehicles.

Positioning Sun Day politically was a challenge, too. Jamie Henn — a climate activist who co-founded 350.org with McKibben and has been working on Sun Day — said in a recent interview with the podcast Volts that, when they began organizing Sun Day, he thought, “One of the things that the clean-energy movement needs is a really good villain.” But then they tested some language along the lines of “Big Oil is standing in the way of solar. Trump doesn’t want you to have it.” The response, Henn said, was more or less: “I don’t want to hear this stuff — like, I’m already depressed.”

Really, throughout this incredibly long article (might be nice if the Times spent this much time showing what Obama admin officials, Jim Comey, etc, did to manufacture the Russia Russia Russia conspiracy) there really isn’t any sort of new playbook. Government, demonize, depress, by hypocrites. It will be humorous when they have the Sun Day and leave a lot of trash at the protest sites, eh?