• Bill McKibben delivers alarming and encouraging news on climate change.
• Quakers do want to get involved and make a difference.
• "Signs of Hope" at Quaker Ecology Action Network meeting.
• Hollister Knowlton becomes new QEW Steering Committee clerk,
  is now devoting her life to spreading Earthcare.
• UN adopts Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples!
• QEW elders Howenstines receive 2007 Peace and Justice Award.
• 2007 QEW Annual Meeting officers practical tools, shared visioning.
• What the Bible tells us about the human relationship with the earth.
• "Sadie" and "John" on the road, spreading Woolman's message for the 21st century.
• New climate clearinghouse welcomes your ideas.
• Two books to creatively inspire the climate change movement
• QEW: Energy conservation, Si! Nuclear power subsidies, No!
• QEW mini-grants now available to Meetings.
• New QEW pamphlet on Human-induced Climate Change

Bill McKibben delivers alarming and encouraging news about global warming to QEW supporters

by Louis Cox

Vermont author and global warming activist Bill McKibben is both alarmed and encouraged by recent climate news. In a keynote address to 80 Friends at the 2007 QEW Annual Meeting & Gathering in Burlington, Vt., in October, he led off with the bad news:

It's later than we think. The Great Warming tsunami is cascading at us faster than scientists anticipated even five years ago. One of countless signs: By September 2007, the Arctic Sea ice pack had shrunk by more than a million square kilometers, beating by 27 percent the record for summer sea ice melting set in 2005. Open sea absorbs more heat, so there is likely to be less refreezing next year....

Global warming is the greatest moral challenge in human history. Climatologists' sense of what's going to happen in coming decades is growing more dire. NASA's Dr. James Hansen, a leading spokesperson for world scientific consensus, says there is now a plausible chance of 20-foot rise in sea levels in this century. That would flood hundreds of coastal cities and millions of acres productive land around the worlda human and environmental tragedy of incredible proportions. According to Hansen and others, we now have no more than 10 years to turn this planetary emergency around.

Our leadership is AWOL. Climate politics hasn't changed over the nearly 20 years since McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first work on global warming aimed at the general public. While at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992, U.S. President George H.W. Bush gave lip service to halting global warming, but he added that "the American way of life is not open to negotiation." Meanwhile, the current White House occupant has been a complete disaster on this by actually promoting a policy of increased energy consumption. Over the past two decades, the U.S. also squandered a crucial opportunity to nudge China into a different trajectory of industrial development. If instead we had helped put China on a "soft energy" path, we might be seeing a Chinese coal-fired generating plant coming on line every month instead of at the current rate of one per week.

We are facing grim choices. Because of the delayed effect of greenhouse gases already released into the atmosphere, we're not going to stop global warming. At this point we can only think in terms of avoiding its worst effects. The choice is now between a pretty tough century ahead and a catastrophic one.

Our inaction seems be due to some kind of spiritual malady. Cheap fossil fuels have made us rich, but they have also robbed our lives of meaning. We are the first people in human history who, because of access to credit-card solutions to nearly everything, no longer have any need of our neighbors. In 1966 most people reported they were "very happy" with their lives. Since then our material standard of living has almost tripled, but our personal-satisfaction index has plummeted. Something about an affluence level above $10,000 per capita creates dissatisfaction. Over the last half century, the biggest part of the U.S. economy has been funneled into suburbia. Now people run into each other less. Families are eating meals together less than half as often, and people have less than half as many friends as they did 50 years ago.

And now for some good news:

The country is starting to wake up. McKibben said public response to the 49-mile Climate Action Walk that he led on Labor Day weekend in 2006 gave him more hope than at any time since he had begun working on global warming. The walk culminated in a rally attended by more than 1,000 Vermonters, including a number of Republican and Democratic office candidates who signed on to a pledge to reduce CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050.

This success inspired him and others to organize a nationwide "Step it Up" climate-awareness campaign in early 2007. Hoping to inspire perhaps 100 events around the country, planners were amazed to learn they had ignited more than 1,400 climate action demonstrations and stunts, generating much more publicity than if the same number of people had held a rally in Washington, D.C.

Answers to the global warming threat are becoming clearer. For example, Solar panels and wind turbines tied to the grid can cut CO2 emissions significantly. The point is, we already have the technology to do this. The scientists and economists have done their job well. It has now come down to politics and our responsibility as members of the body politic. Countries like Japan and Germany are showing they have the political will to begin recovery from their addiction to fossil fuels. They are making great strides in both reducing energy consumption and putting alternative technologies into place.

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