TRUMP IS BEHIND us now—four years of constant provocation and useless cruelty are over, which means ... we have about nine years left for the most important task any civilization has ever taken on. I want to lay out the basic math of our situation, because if we are at all serious about taking care of the earth God gave us (and we should be, since that was literally our first instruction), that math rules the day.
1) We are currently on a path to raise the temperature of the planet 3 degrees Celsius or more by century’s end. If we do that, we can’t have civilizations like the ones we’re used to—already, at barely more than 1 degree, wildfires and hurricanes have begun to strain our ability to respond.
2) In 2015, the world’s governments pledged in Paris to try and hold the rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The United States, shamefully, exited that agreement for a time, but now we’re back in.
3) To meet that target, scientists say we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 and then go on cutting until, by 2050, we’ve stopped burning fossil fuel altogether. But the crucial year is not 2050. It’s 2030—if we haven’t made huge cuts by then, we’ll miss the chance to stop short of utter catastrophe.
4) Those cuts are entirely possible. Using the brains God gave them, engineers have made incredible progress: Solar power and wind power are now the cheapest ways to generate electricity on this planet. You can buy, for a reasonable price, an electric car if you must have a car. We could actually do this.
5) But—and here the math turns more directly toward moral issues—it means we’d have to not do some things. For instance, we’d have to stop letting our banks and investment managers try to make money off global warming—currently they’re lending and investing huge sums in the fossil fuel industry.
6) And we’d have to face up to the underlying math: While it’s true that humans are heating the planet, not all humans. The top 10 percent of us, those who make more than $38,000 a year, are responsible for more than half the world’s carbon emissions. We need to change our lives, but more importantly we need to change the systems we’ve set up: Instead of trying to maximize our own wealth, we need desperately to try sharing it, so that people in the poorest parts of the world can have solar panels too—so they don’t have to choose between development and a disaster that will hit them hardest.
That’s it. Climate change is a math problem. A hard one, and one that requires that we examine our societies and our souls. But no matter what we do, the math won’t change, and the most important of all the numbers is that part about nine years ... about 450 weeks—450 Sunday sermons. Really, that’s it.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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