Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  The month before the tour started was, in truth, a tour of its own. I crisscrossed the country—from Marin County to the University of Texas, from Syracuse to Columbia, Missouri, from Austin to Boston—and then spent a week in Canada, where a huge movement had grown up to oppose the tar sands pipelines aimed at the Pacific Coast. Five thousand British Columbians gathered on the lawn of their provincial parliament to risk arrest; a few nights later, as I waited to talk to a giant crowd in the coastal town of Nanaimo, Chief Doug White of the Snuneymuxw First Nation welcomed us with a speech in his native tongue. “If any of you didn’t follow that,” he said at the end, “it translates roughly as ‘There’s no goddamned way they’re building that pipeline out here.’” I made it back to Ottawa the next night, where hundreds of youth climate activists were holding a conference—and where I got to meet Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’s baby, Toma, for the first time. He was gorgeous, alert, and full of smiles.

  At every stop along the way, though, I was checking the Internet. About a week earlier, a storm had begun to form in the far Atlantic. At first most of the computer models had predicted it would be sucked to the east, harmlessly out to sea. But there was a small chance it would take an unlikely curve west instead, following a track close to Irene’s the year before. Two powerful North Atlantic hurricanes in two years seemed statistically unlikely, especially since this was late October, past the season for the strongest storms—but then, normal no longer works as a way to measure things. When we left the Holocene, we left the predictable: this was already looking to be the hottest year in American history, we’d seen the deepest drought in living memory, and the full-on melt of the Arctic had shocked even the most pessimistic of climate scientists.

  And this new storm—now named Sandy—seemed intent on visiting the Atlantic Seaboard, where the water temperature was again five degrees above normal. In Vermont we’d only begun to rebuild. I got to Boston the day before the storm was due to hit, but it was so vast—the largest storm ever measured, with tropical force winds stretching 1,040 miles out from the center—that the outer bands of rain and wind were already whipping the Hub. I talked to a church full of religious environmental activists and then went to City Hall Plaza, where a few dozen stalwarts had been camped for a week, demanding that the Massachusetts senatorial candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown, at least mention climate change in their upcoming debate on the following Tuesday, a week before the election. The rain was coming down sideways as I talked through a bullhorn, and then two young volunteers drove me home to Vermont, to help make sure the hatches were battened down; I’d scrubbed a few talks and changed my schedule so I could get home just in case.

  Watching from a distance as Vermont drowned the fall before had been hard—the rivers I knew and loved had suddenly turned swollen and snarling, eating away their banks and swallowing houses and farms. It was worse than anything any Vermonter could remember—but it wasn’t, somehow, weird. It was at the upper end of the horror scale, but the scale was marked in comprehensible increments.

  Watching Sandy flood New York, though, was different. It felt scarier by far, like a glimpse into the way the world ends. More people died on the Jersey Shore, on Staten Island, and on Long Island (and in Haiti, where Sandy had overwhelmed refugee camps and sparked a full-on outbreak of cholera), but New York is our national city, and really our global one, too. If you haven’t been to Manhattan, you’ve ridden its subways in a thousand movies and TV shows. Now those subway tunnels were filling with salt water, millions of gallons of cold Atlantic surging down the steps of the IRT and the BMT and the IND. The Lower East Side—stuck in the national imagination since the days of Jacob Riis—was suddenly a branch of the East River, whitecaps breaking across its intersections. Sitting in front of my computer, staring at the images accumulating on Instagram, I wrote a short piece for the Guardian, just because I couldn’t think of anything else to do:

  New York is the city I love best, and I’m trying to imagine it from a distance tonight. The lurid, flash-lit Instagram images of floating cars in Alphabet City or water pouring out of the East River into Dumbo, the reports of bridges to Howard Beach submerging and facades falling off apartment houses—it all stings. It’s as horrible in its very different way as watching 9/11.

  But it’s the subways I keep coming back to, trying to see in my mind’s eye what must be a dark, scary struggle to keep them from filling with water. The tide at the Battery has surged feet beyond the old record; water must be pouring into every entrance and vent—I hope some brave reporter is chronicling this fight, and will someday name its heroes.

  For me, the subways are New York, or at least they’re the most crucial element of that magnificent ecosystem. When I was a young Talk of the Town reporter at the New Yorker, I spent five years exploring the city, always by subway. This was in the 1980s, at the city’s nadir—the graffiti-covered trains would pause for half an hour in mid-flight; the tinny speakers would reduce the explanation of the trouble to gibberish.

  It was how I traveled, though—I didn’t even know how to hail a cab. For a dollar, you could go anywhere. And my boast was that I’d gotten out at every station in the system for some story or another. It may not have been quite true: the Bronx is a big and forgotten place, and Queens stretches out forever—but it was my aspiration.

  The subways were kind of dangerous, but also deeply democratic. Writing about homelessness, I slept with hundreds of other men on the endless A train to the Rockaways. I convinced motormen to let me ride as they turned trains around through the City Hall station abandoned decades earlier. I hung out in the control room under Grand Central with its Hollywood array of levers and lights.

  Imagining all that filled with cold salt water is too much.

  I’m an environmentalist: New York is as beautiful and diverse and glorious as an old-growth forest. It’s as grand, in its unplanned tumble, as anything ever devised by man or nature. And now, I fear, its roots are being severed.

  And then, for the next four or five days, I just kept writing. Vermont was basically unharmed—our power flickered and went off briefly, but the backup batteries from the solar panel kept the Internet working, which was mostly what I cared about, because this storm clearly had the chance to change the way we understood the way the planet worked. I couldn’t get to New York to help—New Hampshire and New York closed down the highways. But I could raise money for relief, as 350.org quickly partnered with Occupy Wall Street and others for an improvised effort that brought aid to regions the Red Cross and FEMA seemed unable to reach. And I could help explain what was going on: that this was an unprecedented tempest, with the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras.

  But unprecedented, I emphasized, didn’t mean unexpected: this was what happened when you changed the planet’s ground rules, and scientists had been warning for years to expect a cataclysm of this kind, right down to predicting how deeply it would flood the subway tunnels. I wrote for the Daily News (recommending that hurricanes henceforth be named for oil companies, not girls) and the New York Review of Books and pretty much everyone in between. But even if I hadn’t written a word it wouldn’t have mattered—the pictures did the work, unlocking in people’s unconscious a cascade of images derived from Revelations or Hollywood or some nightmare mash-up. We’d seen worse storms in every corner of the planet—hell, in Pakistan in 2010 the rain and flooding were so intense they chased twenty million people from their homes. But if God’s aim was to wake folks up, His aim was improving. As meteorologist Jeff Masters put it in his wrap-up of the storm, New York, the media and financial capital of our home planet, had not “experienced a storm this strong since its founding in 1624.” By Thursday, Bloomberg Businessweek had splashed these words in huge black letters across its cover: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” That afternoon a shaken Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a political independent, endorsed President Obama in the election then just five days away, citing climate change as the reason. The clim
ate silence, meticulously maintained by the candidates all year long, had been broken by Mother Nature.

  Air travel resumed along the East Coast by week’s end, and I flew to North Carolina to give a speech to six thousand scientists gathered at the annual convention of the Geological Society of America. They gave me their annual President’s Medal, less I think for my work than for the fact that they needed somehow to publicly recognize what their members were able to sense more easily than most: this earth had left behind one epoch, the Holocene, and was now careening into something else. They were watching in real time one of those transition boundaries that only carbon dating and sediment samples had revealed from the deepest past. Viewed that way, our fight to slow it down seemed almost nearly pointless—but not quite. The earth was shifting, but perhaps we could still determine how fast and how far.

  And so, on to Seattle, and on to the fight against the fossil fuel industry. I got there a night early, so I could watch the election returns with Sam and Lisa Verhovek, two of my oldest and dearest friends. Sam had spent his newspaper career with the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times before quitting to write books, so he’d covered many an election; he knew how to read the numbers starting to pour out of Ohio and Florida, and long before the networks called the race he was saying Obama had it won. I cheered—I’d organized the largest protest of his first term, but I knew exactly what Karl Rove and other Republican strategists had in mind for the planet. But ten minutes after NBC flashed “President Obama Re-Elected” on the screen, we pushed the button to send out an e-mail to four hundred thousand people announcing the first protest of his new term, ten days hence, in D.C. We needed to show the president that we hadn’t forgotten about the Keystone pipeline. The conventional wisdom said it was certain now to be approved. But not without a fight.

  Before we got to that, though, we had another, bigger fight to pick, this one with the fossil fuel industry itself. Our tour would start the next day, and so I headed off to bed.

  * * *

  The minute I walked into Seattle’s vast Benaroya Hall, the venue for the first night’s show, I was unsettled. I knew we’d sold all 2,500 tickets, but I hadn’t really quite figured out how many seats that would turn out to be. I’ve spoken to larger crowds but always at some convention or festival or rally—these folks in Seattle were coming to see me, and suddenly it felt as if I might not have quite enough to say. Jon and Duncan, who were running the visuals, were about a football field away, in a booth two balconies up. We ran through our rehearsal as best we could, and then I went backstage to pace.

  The mayor, Mike McGinn, welcomed the crowd—and then he announced that he’d spent the afternoon huddled with the city treasurer, starting to figure out if it was possible to divest the city’s own money from fossil fuel stocks. The crowd roared, and then they roared at the four-minute video that started the show. Filled with images from five years of 350.org, it was narrated by Van Jones, who had spent the night before as an election-night commentator on CNN. He’d been Obama’s first green jobs czar, but the conservative talk show host Glenn Beck had chased him out of D.C.; now Beck had disappeared in a puff of noxious smoke, and Van was back in the limelight. It seemed a good omen.

  I walked out on stage and started to talk—and within seconds a heckler jumped up and started shouting that global warming was a hoax. So much for omens. I was a little stunned; a couple of people surrounded him and started trying to talk him down, and I did my best to make a joke about “even in Seattle,” but I was rattled. He was apparently a follower of Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a marginal but tenacious political cult that for some reason had fixed on me, a “Middlebury College Nazi” and “savage Malthusian” who “demands the takedown of man-created infrastructure on Earth.” (I’m in good company, since LaRouche is also convinced that the queen of England is a drug dealer.) The heckler finally strode out the endless aisle, still bellowing, and the evening settled down. We worked our way through the math, and the videos from Naomi Klein and Desmond Tutu, and a few apt songs from a young Native American musician named Nahko. The crowd roared at all the right spots, but I can’t recall many moments—just hugs from friends at the end, and then we were aboard the bus.

  And the bus was pretty great. Your average fifty-one-year-old book author with a receding hairline doesn’t get that many opportunities to feel cool. But this was definitely one of those moments. Our driver used to drive for Johnny Cash; by power of association that’s as good as it gets.

  We sped south on I-5 out of Seattle, under Mount Rainier, headed for the Oregon border. There were eight of us aboard, which was good since that’s how many bunks there were—and better yet there were four WiFi hotspots, so all the hot and cold running Internet you could ever want. Which was also good since we needed it to find biodiesel stations en route. I got the late great Dobie Gray (“Out on the Floor”) cranked on Spotify and settled in to write blog posts.

  The problem with fighting climate change is that it never feels like we’re getting anywhere. Right at that moment, though, we were getting to the outskirts of Portland. And maybe the outskirts of doing some damage to the ExxonMobil mystique, the Chevron reputation, the Shell brand. I had my 350.org baseball cap on, my earphones pulled down tight, and now my northern soul playlist has turned over to the too-soon-forgotten Prince Philip Mitchell and his not-quite-a-hit “I’m So Happy.” Don’t know if we’re going to win, but we were rolling.

  * * *

  I had to leave the bus temporarily in Portland and fly ahead to San Francisco because it was going to be a long day. Wheels down by nine, and into town to be interviewed by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm and former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom for their news shows, then on to the city’s famed Commonwealth Club to meet another former—the ex-CEO of Shell, a fellow named John Hofmeister, whom I was scheduled to debate. Some combination of weariness and cockiness turned me a little more savage than usual—every time he tried to explain that energy was a complicated problem that needed endless compromise and study to solve, I reminded him that he’d been the one applying for the permits for Shell to drill in the Arctic once it became clear that global warming had melted the ice, and that he’d been a big backer of the Chamber of Commerce as it poured campaign money at climate deniers. Brokering some kind of compromise between Big Oil and environmentalists wasn’t the point—the negotiation was between human beings and physics, and physics wasn’t going to bend. It was a rout, and I left both cockier still and even more exhausted, just able to keep my eyes open for what was actually the day’s most important session, a meeting with twenty of the pioneers of social media in a conference room at Twitter. These folks were young and bright, and I’m guessing the average net worth in the room was eight figures—they wanted me to brief them on climate change for an hour, and then to leave so they could break down into small groups and figure out how they were going to solve it via some viral outbreak of interweb platforming wizardness.

  The next day started at the Green Festival in San Francisco with a brunch for bloggers and then a talk at one end of the cavernous hall; thousands of people sat on the floor and stairs and hung over the railings. It was a trip to finish with the crowd on its feet and then sprint fifty yards to the bus, which was clearly visible through the plateglass window, and hop on board as it pulled away for the trip to Palo Alto, where I entertained the crowd with the story of my rejection from Stanford as a high school senior. As we drove all night down I-5, I was lulled to sleep by the vibration of the engine. We got to Los Angeles in time for me to put on decent clothes and head up Mandeville Canyon to what may be the single most beautiful house I’ve ever seen, the hilltop property of Norman and Lyn Lear, who were hosting a session for fifty or sixty screenwriters in hopes they’d insert story lines about climate change into their films and TV shows. I told them that the moment for screwing in new lightbulbs had passed and that now we needed real activism, and Jim Hansen chimed in via Skype. After questions, I left those heigh
ts and descended back down into the city itself, where a packed house was waiting at UCLA for the evening’s show. Good fun.

  And the next day was our day off—we flew from LAX to the Atlantic, leaving behind our bus, which had developed mechanical troubles. (“It’s eating oil,” the driver explained.) We’d need to pick up a new one back east. Five nights down, sixteen to go.

  * * *

  I love the West Coast, but I’m at home in the East. It felt right to pull into the Holiday Inn in Portland, Maine, and stumble out, jetlagged, into a cold, foggy evening. We slept soundly, and then got ready for the next night’s show, at the truly lovely State Theatre. We’d sold it out weeks before, but I knew it was going to be electric for another reason. Tiny Unity College, in the tiny town of Unity, Maine, is one of the country’s greenest colleges. For years its dining halls owed their hot water to the solar panels a professor salvaged from the White House roof, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s early, prescient installation. But its current president, Stephen Mulkey, had taken things a considerable step further—at my urging, he’d asked his board of trustees if they’d divest. And a day before our show they’d voted, unanimously, to do just that: the first college in the country to join our effort. When I introduced Mulkey and he got up to tell the story, the theater just exploded—it was proof that what we were asking for wasn’t impossible. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more likely the whole scheme seemed. There were crowds of students from Bates and Bowdoin and Colby and a dozen other colleges in the hall that night—each of those schools had Web pages boasting at great length about its sustainability efforts and its commitment to greening its campus. All those bike paths and energy efficient buildings were great in themselves—and a logical argument for greening the portfolio. How could you pay for them with ExxonMobile money?

  There was beer every night—a skit where we illustrated the climate math with me opening a single bottle of some good local brew, and then volunteers illustrating how much the oil companies had in their reserves by carrying up bottle after bottle till our makeshift bar was covered. The metaphor worked pretty well (“Drink this much and you’d be ripped, wasted, polluted, smashed, totaled, wrecked—now think about the planet, and how long that hangover will last”), but it was also a chance every night for the audience to relax a little amid all the tough news. And it was a chance for me to have a swallow of beer. That night, with the Unity news ringing in the air, it tasted even sweeter than usual.