Bill McKibben on Earth Day at 50: We Must Stop Subsidizing Fossil Fuel Industry Wrecking the Planet

This is a critically important interview. Bill McKibben has been a vital visionary voice for decades. Thirty years ago was when Bill first warned us about the coming climate crisis. But no one listened and the deadly campaign of doubt was launched. Ten years ago I read Bill's book Eaarth and began to first educate myself in earnest about our warming climate and its devastating impact and the looming catastrophic crisis facing all life on this planet. Now here we are at the precipice. There is no longer any time left to wait to dramatically change ourselves, our nation, and the world. NO TIME LEFT for the status quo, for silence, and for active or passive collusion with the forces which are killing life on Earth and destroying the planet. — Molly

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, when more than 20 million Americans joined in actions to protect the environment — 10% of the U.S. population at the time. Half a century later, in the middle of a pandemic, protests planned around the world have moved online, and the Trump administration has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency — established not long after Earth Day — rolled back fuel economy standards and eased the enforcement of pollution regulations. “The countries that flattened the coronavirus curve early on are doing far better than those like ours, which delayed,” says Bill McKibben, author, educator, environmentalist and co-founder of 350.org. “That’s a pretty perfect analog to the 30 years that we’ve wasted in the climate crisis.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we mark this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, started have a century ago. Ten percent of the U.S. population participated in events.

We are joined by Bill McKibben, who is the founder of 350.org, author, educator, environmentalist. His latest book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? His recent piece in The New Yorker, “How We Can Build a Hardier World After the Coronavirus.” And in The Nation, he wrote a piece, “This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipeline.”

Bill, we’re going to try this again, from your home in Vermont, hope we have a better connection. Talk about the significance of this Earth Day 50 years later, and what needs to happen now in the midst of this pandemic.

BILL McKIBBEN: Sure. And thanks for bearing with me in the midst of all the rearrangements we’re all making in our lives.

Look, 50 years ago, as you say, was probably the biggest day of political action in American history, and it came out of the fury over the dirty air and the dirty water that marked our country. People were wearing surgical masks 50 years ago today, too, but they were doing it to protest the almost unbreathable air in many of our cities, the kind of air we now see in places like Beijing and Delhi. Those early warriors, we owe a great debt of thanks to, because they changed the zeitgeist, and in the wake of that massive show of protest, President Nixon, conservative Republican, signed the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, everything else — all the acts that Donald Trump is systematically trying to gut. That was a remarkable accomplishment, and our air and water are cleaner, but we didn’t make the kind of systemic, fundamental changes that we would have needed to head off the much deeper environmental perils that face us now.

I mean, in the last 50 years, Amy, the temperature has obviously gone sharply up. We’ve lost half the sea ice in the summer Arctic. The chemistry of the oceans has changed, and changed dramatically. We’ve lost some of the biggest living things on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef, large parts of our rainforests. Half the wild animals in the world are dead now compared to 40 years ago.

Those are remarkable changes that need to be met with remarkable upsurge again in protest and action. And we’re seeing some of that. And we’ll see some of it today, albeit online, at this 72 hours of Earth Day online live. It begins at 9:00 on Earth Day morning. It’s a struggle, a deeper struggle than we’ve ever seen before. And the salience of that struggle is highlighted as we deal with the pandemic.

What are the messages that come out of this strange moment in human history? One, that reality is real, that you can’t hector or fight with or force to negotiate or compromise chemistry or physics or biology. Both the COVID microbe and the carbon dioxide molecule are immune to political persuasion, no matter how much our president yells at them. If they say, “Stand six feet apart,” we stand six feet apart. If they say, “It’s time to stop burning coal and gas and oil,” then that’s what we need to do.

Similarly, we’re learning lessons about delay and timing here that are crucial. As you know, the countries that flattened the coronavirus curve early on are doing far better than those like ours, which delayed. That’s a pretty perfect analog to the 30 years that we’ve wasted in the climate crisis.

And I think, third, maybe most powerfully, the lesson that we’re learning is social solidarity is almost everything. You know, Amy, this era in our political life began, in a sense, with Ronald Reagan announcing that the nine scariest words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But those aren’t the scariest words in the English language. The scariest words are “We’ve run out of ventilators,” “The hillside behind your house has caught on fire.” And those kind of things, we can only face together. So, maybe, maybe we’ll see the beginning of the end of this doctrine of every man for himself, as we come through this linked —

This transcript, and the video, can be continued here: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/22/bill_mckibben_earth_day_2020