Blogger Profile: Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, including The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes regularly for Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. In April 2007, he organized the Step It Up National Day of Climate Action, one of the largest global warming protests to date. Most recently, he was co-founder of 350.org, an international grassroots campaign that aims to mobilize a global climate movement united by a common call to action. He is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
May 6th, 2012
Too Hot Not to Notice?: A Planet Connected by Wild Weather
The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
April 5th, 2012
Payola for the Most Profitable Corporations in History
Along with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.” Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry with a “Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act.” It was, in truth, nothing ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
February 7th, 2012
The Great Carbon Bubble
Crossposted from TomDispatchIf we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet -- as we shall ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
January 8th, 2012
Armed With Naïvete
Crossposted from TomDispatchMy resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve. I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
November 16th, 2011
Obama’s Positive Flip and Romney’s Negative Flop
Crossposted from TomdispatchConventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
August 25th, 2011
Arrested at the White House
Crossposted from TomdispatchI didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days. As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
July 27th, 2011
Tim DeChristopher Is Going to Jail, Now It's Our Turn
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders." --Ed Abbey "The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time." --Terry Tempest Williams There's something about the redrock canyons that seems to inspire great ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
July 14th, 2011
Will North America Be the New Middle East?
The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months. Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire. First Pakistan suffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, ...
Bill McKibben
Founder, 350.org
June 2nd, 2011
Three Strikes and You’re Hot
In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades -- those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying. But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its ...