McKibben: Dream a Little Drean

Bill McKibben is the author of "The End of Nature." This article is an interview of McKibben that deals with his views of global warming:

...climate change arises from the use of fossil fuels, which are at the heart of pretty much every part of modern life. A problem of this size can be tackled only with enormous changes in technology, in the economy, in our behavior, and in our very idea of who we are. That challenge is too big for the Sierra Club to handle. Any effort to solve the problem will have to involve every aspect of human society: churches, businesses, education.

And this administration's response:

The rest of the world is far more concerned about global warming than our government is. Even the Chinese government at least purports to take the matter seriously. It’s shameful. We used to lead the world in environmental concern. We wrote the Clean Air Act, and then everyone else wrote their own Clean Air Act. We developed the catalytic converter, and then everyone else put them on cars, too. We created national parks, and everyone else followed our lead. Now we’re not even the caboose on the train of environmental progress. We’re trying to bring the whole thing skidding to a halt.
The mistake that history will hold the current Bush administration most responsible for is not the war in Iraq, which is terrible. No, the biggest mistake is that the White House made no effort to affect China’s and India’s energy policies during those countries’ industrial expansion over the last six or seven years. It would have taken a real commitment of money and resources and time to nudge them in a different direction, but if we had, it would have brought huge benefits fifty years from now. Instead we’ve just served as their enablers, and they as ours.

We are not even the caboose.

Our administration has to change. Our consumer attitude has to change.

...we're long past the point where more is doing us any good.