There’s an age-old debate playing out among climate hawks today: Do you win environmental battles by fighting against something or fighting for something?

Grist’s David Roberts had a thought-provoking piece on the issue yesterday, lamenting the oppositional tactics of enviros:

And as a substantive matter, oppositionalism is a woefully insufficient approach to climate change mitigation and/or adaptation. Most of what’s needed to respond to climate change involves building sh*t — new power systems, new transportation systems, new sustainable communities, new models of finance and ownership. If it ever happens, it will be a “third industrial revolution.” You don’t get one of those by stopping things.

Roberts raises some good points. And as someone who’s tried to fall on the side of positive messaging when writing about these issues, I agree with the basic premise.

But there’s a major issue that he leaves out: Enviros and other supporters of action already tried the strategy of “let’s build shit” to solve climate change – and it hasn’t worked out terribly well politically in the U.S. (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?“)

Admittedly, that is likely a result of failed tactics, not the strategy itself.

In the few years leading up to the climate bill in Congress, the environmental community switched gears, linking up with business to tell a positive story about the economic potential for clean energy and combating climate change.

However, as Congress developed a climate bill in 2008 and 2009, there was remarkably little mention about climate – with advocates instead choosing to talk exclusively about green jobs and economic competitiveness. That worked. Until it didn’t.

Three years after the climate bill imploded, we are further away from taking action on climate change than ever. One of the reasons is that fossil fuel proponents have shifted the narrative on jobs and competitiveness due to the boom in unconventional oil and gas.

You want to build shit? Why not build a bunch of shale oil rigs, fracking wells, and tar sands pipelines?

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by Bill McKibben, via TomDispatch

It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich — after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards — but also a little pathetic.  A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

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If we’re going to tell this story — and it’s the most important story of our time — we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.

by Bill McKibben, via TomDispatch

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.  Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical — the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure — and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it.  There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day.  If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

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by Bill McKibben, via Huffington Post

The president makes a potentially interesting speech today in Cushing, Oklahoma.

It comes amidst a completely unprecedented March heat wave — 2,000 records fell last week as cities like Chicago broke records dating back to the 19th century, and that heat is expected to move towards the eastern seaboard this week; meanwhile, record levels of atmospheric moisture are expected to trigger flooding in Texas and Oklahoma. It comes on the tail of a year when America set a new record for multi-billion dollar weather disasters. And it comes on his first visit to the Sooner State since it set the all-time American record for the hottest summer by any state — the average reading for June, July and August was 86.9 degrees, breaking the old record (also Oklahoma, this time 1934) by an astonishing 1.7 degrees. In other words, if there was ever a moment for talking about global warming, this would be it.

But I’m guessing the president won’t.

My bet is he’ll talk about what’s he’s called his “all of the above” energy policy — about how America has drilled a record number of oil and gas wells during his administration, about how fracking technology has spread around the country. He’ll laud sun and wind, but as supplements to gas and oil, not replacements.

And to make it especially painful to ranchers, indigenous people, and assorted environmentalists, he may do it while standing next to pipe waiting to be laid for the southern half of the Keystone Pipeline, an enterprise he has promised to “expedite.”

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Environmental Activist and 350.org Founder Bill McKibben had a lot to be excited about when he walked onto the Colbert Report last night. After wondering publicly whether the environmental movement could accumulate 500,000 messages in 24-hours from citizens opposed to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, by last night he announced that they’d done it in less than seven.

But the battle over Keystone XL is not even close to finished. The Senate introduced an amendment in a transportation bill yesterday that would allow Congress to approve the project. Meanwhile, activist groups are hoping to raise over one million signatures against the tar sands pipeline by noon today — shattering any previous petitions from environmental organizations.

So it was fitting that faux-pundit Stephen Colbert invited McKibben “the troublemaker” onto his show just before the next Congressional showdown. Will the rally against the Keystone XL experience the infamous “Colbert Bump” after last night’s appearance? We can only hope.

“The Colbert Bump is the curious phenomenon whereby anyone who appears on The Colbert Report gets a huge boost in popularity, causing them to win elections, receive massive increases in money (making Colbert the greatest fundraiser ever), receive major awards and even get laid (The Colbert Bumpin’ Uglies).

Watch McKibben’s segment on last night’s show:

Time to Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry

by Bill McKibben, reposted from Tom Dispatch

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review.  (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.)  Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.

A few weeks later, however, Congress decided it wanted to take up the question. In the process, the issue went from out in the open to behind closed doors in money-filled rooms.  Within days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings that barely mentioned the key scientific questions or the dangers involved, the House of Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline.  Later, the House attached its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.

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A deal to sell tar sands oil in Europe would outweigh any good the UK might do with all its other climate change measures

– by Bill McKibben, first published in the UK Guardian

The EU has provisionally imposed penalties severe enough to make it difficult for Canada to sell tar sands oil in Europe, but Britain is working to undermine that stance. Photograph: Jeff Mcintosh/AP

wendyannibell via Flickr

by Van Jones and Bill McKibben in a HuffPo repost

If you wanted one word to sum up this year, it’s “noisy.” From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, people who have gotten tired of the old politics have started grabbing the microphone away from the authorities and speaking themselves. And not just speaking; chanting, drumming, singing-conjuring up a new future.

As 2011 draws to a close, diplomats from almost every country will be gathering in Durban, South Africa to talk about global warming. After the warmest year on record, and endless flood and drought, you’d think they’d be digging in for real change. But, alas, they seem likely to just go on spinning their wheels, unwilling to challenge the power of the fossil fuel industry. Leaders of the world’s major economies are privately admitting that they’re unlikely to reach a global deal until 2016 at the earliest. So here too people will need to raise their voices.

But since climate change is the first truly global problem, those people have to figure out how to raise a common message, one that crosses the boundaries of language. The best method — proven in countless social movements — may be music. Earlier this week, the global climate campaign 350.org launched “Radiowave.” It’s designed to take a single powerful song, and use it as the focus of a campaign that will sweep down Africa, one country at time, for the next few weeks, finally landing in South Africa just as the UN’s climate conference begins.

“People Power” (radio version) by 350RadioWaves. Uploaded with Gobbler

The song is written and performed by a who’s who of African musicians, from Angelique Kidjo to Maria Daulne and Ahmed Soultan. Hip Hop star Talib Kweli performs the opening verse. It’s in English and French, but also Berber, Arabic, Xhosa, Zulu, Setswana, Zolani Maholo, and Fon. But it’s not just the beat that crosses borders; the sentiment, once translated, will make sense to anyone suffering the early effects of climate change. As the South African hip hop star Jabulani Tsambo puts it:

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