McKibben award and announcement in Bloomberg
December 2, 2014
Post Carbon Fellow Bill McKibben’s announcement that he is to step down as chair of 350.org was reported in Bloomberg. McKibben made the announcement from Sweden where he was a recipient of a Right Livelihood Award.
From the article:
“If this sounds dramatic, it’s not,” McKibben wrote in a letter to supporters sent from Sweden, where he is receiving the Right Livelihood Award from Parliament. “I will stay on as an active member of the board, and 90 percent of my daily work will stay the same, since it’s always involved the external work of campaigning, not the internal work of budgets and flow charts.”
McKibben, 53, has led 350.org since he co-founded it in 2007. The group gets its name from a comment by climate scientist James Hansen, who has said the world needs to cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million to avoid dangerous alterations to the climate. Current levels exceed that limit.
I have great respect for Bill McKibben’s work and the organization his leadership has helped to build. This has brought heightened public awareness world wide of the crisis we face and has made some inroads toward divestment from fossil fuel industries. Unfortunately, the momentum of industrial civilization’s accelerating consumption, waste, and pollution is not being curtailed in the slightest. The power and influence of the fossil fuel industries remains entrenched and immutable. Peaceful demonstrations by multitudes of concerned citizens have proven ineffectual against the imperatives of the market, and as Naomi Klein and many others have pointed out, that is the crux of the problem. Restructuring the economy is a worthwhile goal, but again the profit motive and the power of money far outstrip the most dedicated efforts to steer governments, businesses and other institutions away from their obsolete business models. I don’t have a solution to this, other than trying to educate people to stop consuming and procreating, and that has proved fruitless as well. I wish all of you PostCarbon devotees success in your endeavors, but having studied enough of the scientific evidence, my outlook is bleak. Good luck to you all, and good luck to Bill McKibben in his new ventures.