Loretto Earth Network News Step Into Action Winter 2013
Vol. 21, No. 1
A Civil Rights Movement for Mother Earth By Maureen Fiedler SL
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n Sunday November 18, I went to hear Bill McKibben, the president and co-founder of 350.org. That organization is active in 191 countries around the world, making McKibben a global leader of the movement to deal with climate change. He spoke to a packed house at the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC, as part of his nationwide “Do the Math” tour. McKibben laid out the stark and rapidly changing climate reality in numbers that should scare any thinking person. His bottom line is this: An increase of 2º Celsius in the earth’s atmosphere is a crisis point beyond which we cannot go if we have any hope of saving Planet Earth as we know it. That is the consensus of scientists worldwide. We are nearing that edge even now. The earth’s temperature has already gone up 1º Celsius. These effects are evident in a melting polar ice cap, in more acidic oceans, in drought in the Midwest, and in erratic storms like Hurricane Sandy that hit New York and New Jersey recently. Therefore to stay below McKibben’s 2 °, we can burn NO MORE than 565 gigatons of carbon-based fuel throughout the world. If we continue to burn fossil fuels at the rate we are using them today, we will blow through that 2º mark in 14-15 years! Worse yet, there are five times that many gigatons (2,795 to be exact) in reserve, waiting to be burned.
And the fossil fuel industry (oil, coal, natural gas) is looking for more (under the sea, in shale formations in the earth … anywhere), and they intend to burn it all. McKibben says simply: We have to stop them.
(colleges, universities, pension funds, religious orders, etc.) to withdraw their investments from fossil fuel industries.
As he put it, they are now a rogue industry. “So we want to put them in the public mind in the same place where big tobacco is right now.” In other words ... make them a pariah industry.
But McKibben also offered a sign of hope. In Germany and the Scandinavian countries, there have been serious efforts to convert to solar and other forms of renewable energy for decades thanks to government policy. Germany (not exactly a “solar” tropical paradise) is reporting now that it has exceeded its goals for renewable energy conversion. In fact, renewable energy in Germany has increased from 6.3 percent nationally in 2000 to about 25 percent in 2012, and the German government expects to exceed its goals for 2020. Indeed, Germany has been called “the world’s first major renewable energy economy.” McKibben says: If Germany can do it, so can we, and China, and all the other nations gobbling up fossil fuels.
Many people have told McKibben that this is a “David vs. Goliath” kind of struggle. “But,” says McKibben, “I am a Methodist Sunday school teacher, and I know how that story ends!” David, against all odds, beats Goliath with a slingshot.
McKibben believes that cutting fossil fuel production has many dimensions, among them, ending oil drilling in the Arctic, stopping the Keystone XL pipeline, opposing mountaintop removal and ending the practice of fracking.
But how? What is McKibben’s slingshot?
In addition to divestment, look for a new campaign of demonstrations and nonviolent civil disobedience this spring and summer. McKibben and others have already demonstrated and spent time in jail for their efforts to stop the Keystone Pipeline. There is more to come – much more. Think of this as the “Civil Rights Movement” for Mother Earth.
One answer: A divestment campaign. Using the successful divestment campaign against apartheid in South Africa as a model, 350.org plans a major push to get as many institutions as possible