Bill McKibben will be remembered as one of the most important U.S. journalists of his generation because he was first, and he was right, on the biggest story of our time: global climate change. His 1989 book, The End of Nature, was the first popular book on global warming to attract a large readership and is still the place to begin for anyone new to the subject. (Get the 10th anniversary edition.)

I’ll be interviewing Bill about his life and work on stage in San Francisco next Monday night, March 24, as part of the City Arts & Lectures series. The program begins at 8 pm at the Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Avenue (minutes from Civic Center BART stop). Tickets are $19 per person; details at http://www.cityarts.net/n.mckibben.html. If you are in the Bay Area, come on by. If you have a question you’d like me to ask Bill, please send it to info@markhertsgaard.com for consideration.

I haven’t blogged in the past few months because I’ve been hibernating, writing my new book, Living Through the Storm: How We Survive the Next 50 Years of Climate Change. But check next week’s edition of The Nation for my article on peak oil, its paradoxical relationship to climate change and the best and worst of humanity’s possible responses to it. On this 5th anniversary of Bush’s war in Iraq, I also commend A Climate of War, an analysis by the NGO, Oil Change International, which shows what the $2.8+ billion spent on this war could have achieved had that money been used to fight climate change. You can find it here: http://priceofoil.org/.

Thanks for reading,

Mark Hertsgaard

As the world awaits news from the crucial climate talks in Bali, here are some books worth buying and some charities worth supporting this holiday season.

Continue reading this post…

I’m heading off on Friday to Chicago, where I’ll join Bill McKibben, E. L. Doctorow, Terry Tempest Williams, Diane Ackerman, Lawrence Weschler and dozens of other leading thinkers and scientists at the annual Chicago Humanities Festival. The Festival is a city-wide event of readings, lectures, panel discussions, performances that focus on a different theme each year. This year’s theme is global climate change, under the title, “Climate of Concern.” (Last year’s theme was the war in Iraq.) You can read all about it at the Festival’s website. And if you are in or near Chicago, I invite you to come and join the conversation. I’ll be moderating two panels, both on Saturday, Nov 3.

Continue reading this post…

Fresh from winning the Nobel peace prize for his climate change evangelism, Al Gore is apparently considering an invitation from a prominent environmental group to engage in civil disobedience against the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

Rainforest Action Network issued the invitation to the former U.S. vice president, according to RAN executive director Michael Brune. The San Francisco-based group has a twenty year history of protesting against destructive logging practices and other causes of climate change; it specializes in targeting corporations as much as governments.

“We came across a quote from Gore in an interview with [New York Times] columnist Nicholas Kristoff back in August, saying he didn’t understand, quote, ‘why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them constructing new coal-fired power plants,’” said Brune. “We thought, ‘Great idea!’ That’s the kind of activism we do at RAN. So we decided to invite Gore to join us.”

Gore’s office confirmed that the former vice president had received RAN’s invitation and was considering it, though no decision has been made.

Continue reading this post…

Now that Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, will the US Congress take the IPCC’s scientific advice on how to fight global warming? The IPCC holds that the world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 80 percent by the year 2050. Few in Congress seem prepared to go that far, however. And judging from the discussion at a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill last week, even lawmakers who personally embrace the “gold standard” of 80 percent reductions are prepared to endorse a weaker measure in the name of getting some form of climate legislation moving in Congress.

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” So goes one of the oldest sayings in politics, generally invoked by reformers who think that half a loaf of progress is better than none. Often the reformers agree privately with more ambitious colleagues who want the entire loaf, but they argue that pushing too hard and too soon may end up yielding no progress at all.

There are times when this is sound strategic advice. Is the current battle over global warming legislation one of those times?

Continue reading this post…

Van Jones is one of the most impressive political activists I have met in my entire journalistic career. The work he talks about in this video — linking the fight against climate change with the fight against poverty — is long overdue for the environmental movement and crucial if the movement wants to appeal beyond its traditional white middle class backers.

Here’s how Van described the 1 Sky initiative in my recent article for The Nation:

“1 Sky’s demand for 5 million green collar jobs is crucial to appealing beyond the traditional environmental constituency”, says Van Jones, a veteran African-American activist and 1 Sky supporter whose new group, Green For All, “aims to spread the benefits of the green energy revolution to all parts of society. Now, the implicit assumption is that green means white. When Vanity Fair does its green issues, you don’t see many people who look like me in there. Green For All is demanding a $1 billion commitment from the federal government to lift 250,000 people out of poverty and into the new economy by training them for green collar jobs.”

Continue reading this post…

Coming Sunday (Sept. 30) I’ll be presenting a striking documentary on the role of ExxonMobil in promoting denial of climate change.

Here’s the press release from LinkTV:

Continue reading this post…

A recent NYTimes piece idiotically likened Chancellor Merkel’s environmental outlook–which the reporter took to be a new, politically motivated tactic–to the US equivalent of “Ronald Reagan transforming himself into Al Gore.”

This, despite the fact that Merkel was Germany’s lead negotiator on the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and very committed to the issue, according to Tim Wirth, the US negotiator.

Adding to the foolishness of the NYT piece, the reporter later in the article even mentioned that Merkel had held this post but still insisted that her current green gestures are more spin than substance.

You know what they say about journalists who get a notion in their heads: Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!

The German-language St. Galler Tagblatt (Switzerland) has published my article Amerika wird Grün (”America Goes Green”). Included with the article is a brief interview with me.

The article can be read at the St. Galler Tagblatt website.

[Thanks to Thomas Spang for the interview and the link.]

The article As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes (NY Times; Aug 26, 2007) makes for important, if discouraging, reading–all the more so because the same basic facts and trajectory have been clear for over a decade now.

I should know.

I wrote what, I think, was the first extensive report on China’s environmental crisis by an independent western reporter back in 1997–first, in an article for The Atlantic Monthly and, in more length and detail in my 1998 book, Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future.

The NYT story reported almost nothing that I did not say in that article, “Our Real China Problem,” ten years ago; in fact, I predicted that China’s environmental actions would soon command the world’s attention as much as its economic prowess already was.

Here’s a link to that original article: http://www.markhertsgaard.com/articles/108

[Thanks to Michael Dietrick bringing the NYT article to my attention.]