BRATTLEBORO — Bill McKibben is a very smart man, but he is also completely misguided in his attacks on "Big Oil."
Everyone needs to stop blaming corporations for their actions. Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil, or whoever, aren't responsible for society's addiction to oil. They are certainly not responsible for Bill McKibben's lavish, jetsetting lifestyle, in which he personally is responsible for burning countless tons of fossil fuels into the upper atmosphere, where it does the most damage of all, while getting paid to talk to gullible people about his nonsensical divestment crusade.
The solution to the climate crisis is clear, but almost no one really wants to take the actions that are necessary, and so almost no one will. The solution is simple: Stop burning fossil fuels. That's it. It's really that simple.
Of course, the reason why almost no one wants to do this is because it will completely and systematically destroy society as we know it, and the only way we can do it without creating mass chaos has to involve radical changes to our land tenure and taxation policies.
There isn't sufficient understanding of why this is necessary even among the vast majority of people who are advocating for change - so there is virtually zero political will to make it happen, so it won't happen. And yet, this is the only thing that offers us any measure of hope, at all.
And even if we were somehow to magically develop that understanding, that political consensus and will, it would take generations to have any appreciable effect, and we simply do not have that kind of time. The clock has already run out. Saving human civilization from drowning in its own filth is no longer a realistic possibility.
Vermonters are among the most greedy per capita consumers of fossil fuels, thanks to the state's cold and rural character, filled with dilapidated, outdated, outmoded, inefficient building stocks sprawling all over the countryside, heated mostly with oil, requiring huge outlays of transportation fuels to reach, stock, and maintain.
We have to engage in immediate, intensely rapid, radical de-growth. We have to immediately and permanently power down at least 90% of human activity in the industrialized nations in order to have any hope that human civilization will survive this century in any substantive form, at all.
We have to condense human settlement into urban forms and abandon the single-family home American Dream, abandon our addiction to privately owned and operated automobiles, abandon our sense of entitlement to the very notion of private property in Nature.
This is the only way. There is no other way. We are out of time.
This piece was submitted to The Commons.