Bill McKibben: Is the Fight Against Climate Change Losing Momentum?

Essay by Eric Worrall

McKibben still doesn’t get it: Greens are entirely to blame for Net Zero momentum.

Is the Fight Against Climate Change Losing Momentum?

Some financial institutions are backing away from emission pledges.

By Bill McKibben
April 4, 2024

The morally right side doesn’t lose the crucial battles: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend toward justice. We know that lesson too well, which may be a problem, in that it gives us undue confidence. …

…

A recent report from Bloomberg lays out the calculations clearly: there is no way for the banks to keep to the pledge without surrendering some part of their business. …

…

The Bloomberg report quotes an exasperated UBS executive telling a closed-door gathering in Tokyo with representatives of “the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and public officials from around the world” that “banks are living and lending on planet Earth,” not on some planet of environmental virtue. According to the report, his “impassioned speech” met with “little pushback.”  …

…

To overcome the pull of that treasure you need the kind of push that can come only from mobilized public consciousness. We’ve seen a series of such moments in the course of the past decades, beginning, arguably, with the first Earth Day, fifty-four years ago this month, when twenty million Americans poured into the streets …

…

Public consciousness, in other words, needs another charge. It’s not evident how that can happen in a world as politically divided as this one is. …

…

Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-the-fight-against-climate-change-losing-momentum

The collapse in support has nothing to do with public consciousness or corporate greed. The core problem is renewable energy simply doesn’t work.

It wasn’t climate skeptics like WUWT which derailed the green juggernaut, it was the total failure of renewables to deliver affordable energy which has created a public backlash, which threatens the careers of green energy supporting politicians across the world.

Even Australia, arguably the world’s best site for solar energy, has utterly failed to make renewables work. Politicians boast Australia is on track to become a renewable energy superpower, boasted that renewables would slash household bills, but all those promises have fallen flat.

Even worse, despite paying more for energy, Australians face the prospect of imminent blackouts. Last September the AEMO warned that almost every state on East Coast of Australia is headed for an era of unreliable energy, thanks to gaps in our dispatchable capacity.

Think about that – sun drenched Australia, with vast and mostly empty deserts stretching from around 31 degrees south to 19 degrees south, cannot make solar energy work.

Greens have also suffered a series of body blows to their credibility recently. Trump hater Michael Moore and film maker Jeff Gibbs set out in 2020 to expose the Big Oil conspiracy which was suppressing the rise of renewables. Instead, Gibbs claimed they discovered a bunch of greedy green entrepreneurs who exaggerated the potential of their product, who were doing horrendous damage to the environment for very little gain in terms of emissions reductions.

I wonder how many of the 15 million+ viewers who were dismayed by the revelations in “Planet of the Humans”, would put their hand up for McKibben’s wave of public green consciousness, to demand more of the same? McKibben himself appeared in Planet of the Humans, in a less than flattering context.

And of course there have been lots of exposes of ineffective or downright horrible carbon offset schemes in recent years.

If greens had followed former NASA GISS Director James Hansen’s advice to wholeheartedly back nuclear energy, the world today would be well on the way to Net Zero. People would probably have accepted a few cents extra on their power bills, in return for saving the planet. Greens could have even slipped a few token windmills into the mix, and people would probably have accepted their plan.

There is zero doubt nuclear could have delivered. France switched to nuclear in just a few decades, and still gets most of its affordable zero carbon electricity from nuclear reactors. People who claim nuclear is not a viable solution to reducing emissions need to explain why France got it right, and why nobody else can do likewise. But anti-nuclear greens mostly just pretend France doesn’t exist when they diss nuclear.

Greens put squeamishness about nuclear energy ahead of their alleged mission to save the planet from global warming, and now they are paying the price for failure to deliver.

Update (EW): Added a reference to the Verra Carbon Offset Fraud.