Bill McKibben Sees COP30 as a ‘Real Opening for Quicker Progress’

The thirtieth Climate Change Conference (COP30) has begun in Belém, Brazil, while greenhouse gases continue to rise to record levels. According to The Guardian, more than 5,000 lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry have attended the COP meetings over the past four years, and this year at least 1600 are in attendance in  Belém as the fossil fuel industry continues to expand. More than 3,500 fossil fuel infrastructure sites are either proposed, in development, or under construction globally putting the health of ever more people and their livelihoods at risk. Expectations are low among climate advocates that the talks in Belém this year will make a difference. But there is also hope, says U.S. climate activist Bill McKibben, who is not known for sugarcoating reality.

McKibben is an icon among environmentalists. He is best known for writing one of the first books about climate change for a general audience in 1989, complete with the grim title: The End of Nature. Only one year earlier, climate scientist James Hansen had given his famous assessment of the reality of climate change to the U.S. Senate. Since then, McKibben has continued his environmental advocacy. 

McKibben’s 2012 Rolling Stone article “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math,” which details how the use of fossil fuels had become a “rogue industry” intent on burning the planet for coal, gas, and oil profits, found a wide audience on social media. He has written numerous books on the climate crisis, such as Falter in 2019, and teaches environmental science at Middlebury College in his home state of Vermont. He also has a substantial history of activist work, having  helped initiate 350.org, one of the world’s largest climate movements, and later co-founded Third Act, an organization designed to mobilize people over the age of sixty to take action on climate change and justice.

I have interviewed McKibben three times before. During our first interview in 2011, he described the threats posed by an enormous oil extraction site in Canada known as the tar sands, as well as the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been subject to more than a decade of political limbo since former President Barack Obama was pushed by environmentalists to reject it before the 2015 climate summit in Paris. A year later, I met McKibben at Middlebury College in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where we talked about civil disobedience, the power of the fossil fuel industry, and the powerlessness of international climate conferences. “Copenhagen, Durban, all of those demonstrate that until we can break the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry on national governments, there isn’t really that much to be done internationally,” he told me at the time. 

Then, at the COP21 in Paris in 2015, amid the jubilation over the Paris Agreement, McKibben told me: “They’re doing exactly what they said they were going to do, they give us a pathway to a world that’s 3.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the one we were born into. They are tapping on the brake, they’re not stamping on the brake, which is what we need.”

McKibben has a realistic understanding about what climate conferences can achieve. He believes that climate diplomacy is only as strong and effective as the willingness of powerful industrialized countries to change course. During the early 1990s, which saw both the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the first Conference of the Parties (COP1) in 1995 in Berlin, Germany, there was some hope that the international community was ready to take action to address the climate crisis. After the 1997 COP3 conference in Kyoto, Japan, industrialized countries agreed for the first—and only—time to binding reduction targets to cut greenhouse gases by around 5 percent. But the targets were far too low, and developed countries did not assist developing countriesin switching to renewable energy sources. In 2001, the United States withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol and global emissions have continued to increase.

More than ten years later, the 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, sparked new hope for climate activists across the world, who flocked to the Danish capital, looking to the new U.S. President, Barack Obama, hoping that he would put ambitious climate targets on the table and accept a fair and just climate deal, as demanded by the Global South. But Washington boycotted the drafting of an acceptable agreement. The U.S. delegation offered only a 3 to 4 percent reduction in emissions by 2020 (as calculated from 1990 levels), pushed proposals that industrialized countries should no longer be subject to binding reduction targets based on the principle of responsibility, and blackmailed developing countries into accepting the reframing of the U.N. convention without burden-sharing and differentiated obligations, as diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks reveal. The talks crashed and skepticism and depression followed. 

Six years later, leaders at COP21 in Paris, France, established the Paris Climate Accords. The agreement was celebrated by the assembled delegates at the conference, and lauded by many media outlets in the United States and Europe. While it is true that the agreement set a long-term goal to keep the rise of global surface temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius and aimed for 1.5 degrees, the national reduction targets—the crucial mechanism for mitigating the human impact on the atmosphere and curbing global heating—told a different story. A year after the climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021, which softened the guidance around coal usage from a “phase out” to a “phase down,”  U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres rightly said that we are on a “highway to climate hell.”

COP30 is taking take place from November 10 to 21. Despite decades of climate diplomacy and many promises, annual greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise by more than 60 percent as the climate crisis worsens. The goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius is already unattainable, as more than 60 of the world’s leading climate scientists have warned. Last year the world already reached 1.36 degrees Celcius above pre-industrial levels. Since the beginning of climate diplomacy in the 1990s, many instruments for keeping the climate crisis in check have been watered down—there are no longer any binding reduction targets at climate conferences, only non-binding, nationally determined ones. Other tools have been added, such as climate financing for developing countries. But while many promises are still being made, not enough aid funding is available, and as a result, emissions in the Global South including in emerging countries are still going up. 

Ten years after our meeting in Paris at that climate summit, I wanted to hear from McKibben about where we stand in the global climate crisis and whether we can still be saved. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why do you think previous COP summits have failed, and what do you expect from COP31?

Bill McKibben: Look, climate change is a tough problem. It’s caused by the same thing—fossil fuel—that undergirds the economy, and the fossil fuel industry is strong enough politically in many countries to make change hard (see the United States). But, as of the last few years, the price of solar and wind energy has fallen far enough that we have a real opening for quicker progress. I think that will start to be reflected in various national strategies.

Q: U.S. President Donald Trump has reversed the steps toward an energy transition initiated under the Biden Administration, attacked almost all environmental protections, withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, and issued more than 300 new oil and gas drilling permits. That’s the bad news. Is there any good news?

McKibben: At the state level, progress continues. Texas is the biggest clean energy player now. But it’s not enough to offset the federal headwinds, so we’re all fighting back as hard as we can. 

Q: How do you assess the climate movement worldwide? What are the strategies that we should focus on now?

McKibben: I think the greatest possibility probably lies in the popularity and affordability of clean energy. It’s easier to get politicians to say yes to clean energy than no to dirty energy (though both require hard work). 

Q: You talk about a “silent revolution” in terms of the global energy transition. What is driving it?

McKibben: The cost of sun and wind power, and of batteries. These are supplying a third more power to the world this autumn than last. It took us seventy years to get the first terawatt of solar power, two years to get the second, and the third is now coming even faster.

Q: You have been fighting for climate protection for decades. What gives you the hope and strength to continue?

McKibben: Hey, lots of people are suffering badly, mostly in places that did nothing to cause climate change. If they can keep fighting, I guess I can too!