Bill McKibben: The Planet’s Future Depends On Distributed Systems
To environmental activist Bill McKibben, it’s all about math. The planet has warmed 1 degree Celsius over the past few decades and is on track to rise another 4 to 5 before the end of the century. An increase of this magnitude is simply too much for the ecosystems we depend on to adapt to that quickly.
Much of the observed warming is due to the fossil hydrocarbons humans burn for energy and industry. McKibben predicts, whether by foresight or necessity, new sustainable energy and agricultural systems will emerge that will drastically reduce the greenhouse impact our modern lifestyle is having on the planet. These will be revolutionary not just for their “greenness”, but also because they will be distributed — disrupting the monolithic control of the current large energy and food producers:
In the late 80’s when I wrote the first book about all of this, we knew trouble was coming. The basic science is not that difficult: with its molecular structure, more CO2 is gong to trap heet that would otherwise radiate back out to space. What we didn’t know was how fast that trouble was coming or really on what scale.
Unfortunately, in the quarter century since, what we’ve learned is that this is happening harder and faster than we would of thought. 25 years ago, no scientist would have thought that at this point we would have melted most of the summer sea ice in the Arctic — they would have said that’s still 50 or 75 years off. No one would have even bothered to really measuring the PH of the oceans, because we didn’t think we could substantially alter something that vast. Certainly, no one would have worried that, as we learned about a year ago, the West Larsen Antarctic ice sheet seems now to be fundamentally destabilized and beginning its slide into the southern ocean. And I think no one would of guessed the degree to which we’ve seen perturbations of the hydrological cycle, the way that water moves around the planet.
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