Here’s how Bill McKibben, 350.org’s founder, described our situation when he visited Missoula on September 28. Exxon’s scientists got it right five decades ago: Pollution from burning fossil fuels would accumulate in our stratosphere, intensify the Earth’s temperatures, and present an existential hazard for human civilization.
This oil company research took place in the 1980s at the same time Bill McKibben was writing his seminal climate change best-seller, The End of Nature, which launched a movement to stop global warming and has been translated into 12 languages.
Exxon, on the other hand, has done everything it can in the past 50 years to cover up, deny, and obfuscate the findings of its own research, to the point where the company is a big part of a $1 billion scheme to elect a president who calls climate change a hoax.
While in Missoula, Bill McKibben managed to get in a hike on Saturday afternoon. The rest of the time, he was all bustling to three entirely distinct speaking venues and sitting down for an hour with 350 Montana’s leadership team.
“You guys have the hardest row to hoe in the country,” he told us. “You have the only utility in the country expanding its coal-burning. Our biggest job is not stopping climate change. It’s too late of that. The job is to stop the worst of the change, and it has to happen soon, by 2030.”
In other words, the world has already reached the danger zone of 1.5 Celsius, and, without massive reductions in greenhouse gases, is on a trajectory to increase temperatures by 3 C.
“At 3 C, we won’t have this level of civilization,” McKibben said.
But there are hopeful signs. Solar and wind are 10 times cheaper than they were a decade ago. Clean energy is so reliable utilities can no longer convince their ratepayers to pay for dirty energy. Texas has stabilized its grid with massive investments in renewable energy. California, the sixth largest economy in the world, now runs most of the time on wind and solar power backed by batteries, and renewables have cut the use of natural gas by 30 percent in last year. Countries like Pakistan, which suffered a massive flood that covered one-third of its land, has built back its energy system using distributed solar energy.
“Every solar panel installed cuts into the fossil fuel industry incrementally,” he told us. “Don’t let Montana fall behind. When things change in this country, they change fast.”