Fortieth Anniversary Kick-Off: Keynote Address

September 28, 2012

The dining commons at Greenfield Community College was humming Friday evening, September 28th [2012], as Conway alums and community members waited eagerly to hear author, educator, and tireless environmental activist Bill McKibben speak. Founder of
350.org, a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis, and author of more than a dozen books starting with The End of Nature (1989), Bill has been writing about climate change for over two decades.

Bill used the time frame of Conway’s anniversary to illustrate the earth’s precarious health:

• The volume of the Arctic ice cap is seventy-five percent less than it was forty years ago.
• The oceans are thirty percent more acidic than forty years ago.
• Because the air is one degree warmer, and warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere is five percent
  wetter than forty years ago.

These changes have led to catastrophic flooding and drought world wide, including recent floods along the Eastern seaboard, and the  largest wildfire ever recorded in the United States last summer in Colorado and New Mexico. The drought in the Midwest raised the price of corn and soybeans fifty to sixty percent, with devastating consequences for food supplies in developing countries. Every degree of increase in global temperature, Bill reported, reduces grain yields ten percent.

Of all the statistics, the numbers Bill wants us to remember are these: 2, 565 and 2795.

If we hope for the earth to survive, the global temperature cannot increase more than two degrees. If we release 565 gigatons (GT) of carbon into the atmosphere, that will cause a two degree increase. Currently, we are burning at the rate of thirty-one GT a year, Bill reports, and the amount is increasing three percent a year. At this rate, we will exceed the 565 GT threshold in sixteen years.

Financial analysts in the United Kingdom have estimated that the world’s fossil fuel producers (both companies and countries) have 2795 gigatons of fossil fuel in their inventories, ready to burn—five times the amount that would jeopardize the earth as we know it. Yet they keep exploring for more.

Bill says the fight to slow climate change must go beyond individual efforts to reduce consumption. Expecting Congress to act is unrealistic. His latest campaign is directed at colleges and universities, as well as churches and other institutions with investment portfolios. As happened in the late 1980s, when a national movement to divest in companies with investments in South Africa
eventually contributed to the end of apartheid, Bill hopes for a similar groundswell of divestment in companies with holdings in fossil fuels. It will take this, and more, to begin to slow global climate change.

Conway alums and friends filled the house to hear Bill McKibben give the kick-off address Friday night. Prior to Bill’s address, Al Rossiter, vice chair of Conway’s board of trustees, presented him with an honorary degree in sustainable landscape planning and design. It read, in
part: “For more than two decades, you have worked tirelessly to educate and motivate people around the globe to take action in the face of climate change, the central issue of our time. Not intimidated by the scope of the challenge nor the denial of others, you have used your skills as author, educator, and advocate to inspire communities to engage in the rebuilding of a resilient and humane world.”