The most recent Ontario Auditor-General’s report should shock the most hard-bitten cynic. It certainly made me glum. With respect action on climate breakdown, the A-G concluded that the Ford government “has not reported on progress since 2021.”
Hardly surprising, since there has been none.
No surprise, then, that climate activists are feeling gloomy. My most recent SCAN! blog piece discussed Rebecca Solnit’s tonic for despair in No Straight Road Takes You There. Bill McKibben, another writer-activist of a certain age, has just published a book – Here comes the sun: A last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization – on climate action solutions. It’s a sort-of-hopeful book laden with compelling stories and reams of data.
McKibben remains ambivalent, writing that “I have little doubt we will run the world on sun and wind 40 years from now. But if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, then it will be a broken planet; our energy sources will hardly matter.”
Certainly a grim conclusion. But the former New Yorker writer’s recipe for avoiding gloom has for twenty years been simple enough. Take action. Do so now. McKibben co-founded 350.org in 2008 and more recently American seniors climate action group Third Act.
McKibben’s most recent book, the title credited to George Harrison’s most famous song, reminds us of what we’re up against. The fossil fuel industry is committed to making sure that we keep burning the stuff it controls. And making sure that any switch to solar and wind power is painfully slow and ineffective. McKibben writes compellingly: “We have to bring burning to a halt,” he warns, “or we will burn.” He adds that “The sun burns so we don’t need to.”
Plain language, little elaboration required. Which does not prevent the author from marshalling minutely detailed arguments in favour of the desirable — and indeed inevitable – conversion of the planetary energy system to solar and other renewables. Solar is getting steadily cheaper even as activists do everything possible to raise the cost of capital to the fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile Big Oil (see the Pathways Alliance here in Canada) keeps up its efforts to continue its campaign of what McKibben calls “deception and denial.”
If Canada has an equivalent book on climate breakdown (alas McKibben sticks with “crisis”), it is John Vaillant’s Fire Weather. The Canadian’s thorough-going takedown of corporate status quo shenanigans makes precisely the same point that McKibben emphasizes. Just like the vested interests of Big Tobacco lobby that kept peddling its death-dealing products when it knew full well the way it was ravaging people, Big Oil has long known it has been frying the planet.
McKibben is what you might call a conscious romantic. Romantic to the extent that his writing is informed by clear-eyed idealism. He is convinced that we have one last chance. Not to stop global climate breakdown (“too late for that”) but to restart civilization “on saner ground once we’ve extinguished the fires that now both power and threaten it.” To do so we will have to look skyward, to the sun.
Yet Here Comes the Sun is leavened by the pragmatism that its author has embraced during his decades of activism. His argument that the world needs immediate, fast climate action at all levels includes a recognition of two stubborn forces. The selfish vested interests of powerful corporations. And the gnawing inertia inherent in human affairs. “Between them they are entirely capable of slowing (the) energy transition sufficiently to allow the collapse of the planet’s climate system.”
Which gets McKibben around to an old tension that has long plagued the Left. The politics of opposition versus the politics of proposition; both necessary, neither sufficient. Climate activists, he insists, needs a shift in focus.
“When you’re good at saying no, then yes takes some practice – it’s a different muscle.”
There can be no giving up on “no” in a world where massive corporations and their client governments continue to do dangerous things. (consider the Ford government’s embrace of Enbridge and fossil gas). “The job now is not just to block bad things – it’s to build good ones.”
Hence McKibben’s list of optimistic stories of huge solar arrays in the global North. And the collapse of the 2024 diesel generator market in Pakistan; bridal dowries routinely include 3-kilowatt inverters paired with a handful of solar panels. African mini-grids bring light to isolated villages where doctors can suddenly refrigerate vaccines and midwives deliver babies at night without flashlights clenched in their teeth.
McKibben has a way with juxtaposition. Compare a number that climate campaigners from the Global South put on the cost of building renewable power at speed around the planet. A trillion dollars annually. “That’s three Elon Musks, and in return you get a much cooler, much fairer planet.”
And with metaphor. There’s a “great global machine undergirding our civilization…and it runs on hydrocarbons…. Our task is to rip the guts out of that machine and replace them with sun and wind and batteries.”
The climate breakdown emergency requires fast action now. Forget about how the machine got us here. “Emergency room doctors don’t waste a lot of time worrying about their patients’ poor lifestyle choices. They do what they must to save their lives, perhaps with the hope that given a second chance their patients will choose more wisely.”
In the end, Here Comes the Sun offers rays of hope for those worried about a world that is becoming hotter, scarier and angrier.
“Nobody goes to the ER expecting euphoria. What we hope for is a chance.”
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Kingston writer Jamie Swift is a member of the SCAN! Ontario Project.