> In its greed Exxon helped — more than any other institution — to kill our planet.
This is an excellent article right up to the last sentence, which is the sort of unfortunate hyperbole that often trips up McKibben in particular and many climate activists in general. It's frustrating, in a discussion about how Exxon misled the public, to see hyperbole in the other direction.
Climate change is not killing the planet. It is altering the environment in a way that will interfere with human society, and will shift the balance for some species.
Just to be clear: the planet is indeed being killed, in that a mass extinction is taking place right now. But climate change is only a small factor in that. Most species decimations have come from 3 other human sources:
1) Habitat destruction: converting wild areas (characterized by high biodiversity) into farmland, towns, or cities (characterized by very low biodiversity). This is the biggest impact on plant biodiversity.
2) Hunting and fish for food: taking breeding-age adults out of animal populations faster than they can be replaced. This is the biggest impact on ocean macrofauna, for instance.
3) Toxic pollution: point-source and non-point-source pollutants that depress biodiversity by either directly harming plants and animals, or by altering the local environment to make it less habitable (for example, when fertilizer runoff feeds algal blooms that reduce free oxygen in the water).
Until now, species losses have been due to factors 1,2,3. But climate change does threaten to greatly accelerate the rate of species collapse, perhaps unstoppably so, in the coming decades and centuries.
So you're giving Exxon (and the fossil fuel industry generally) a hell of a break, simply because thus far, we've barely been able to see the effects of climate change.
> But climate change does threaten to greatly accelerate the rate of species collapse, perhaps unstoppably so, in the coming decades and centuries.
What is the evidence for this? For example I'm not aware of any correlation between the historical records of warming periods and historical records of mass extinctions.
There is no reason that warmer temperatures or higher levels of CO2 should be bad for life in general. As cold areas shrink, populations of species adapted to cold habitats will suffer, but warm habitat species populations would expand.
I'm not trying to take away from the reality or seriousness of anthropogenic global warming, or give Exxon a pass. Just because something is real and is bad in certain ways, that does not mean it threatens all of life on Earth, which is how I interpret the concept of "unstoppable" species collapse.
This is an excellent article right up to the last sentence, which is the sort of unfortunate hyperbole that often trips up McKibben in particular and many climate activists in general. It's frustrating, in a discussion about how Exxon misled the public, to see hyperbole in the other direction.
Climate change is not killing the planet. It is altering the environment in a way that will interfere with human society, and will shift the balance for some species.
Just to be clear: the planet is indeed being killed, in that a mass extinction is taking place right now. But climate change is only a small factor in that. Most species decimations have come from 3 other human sources:
1) Habitat destruction: converting wild areas (characterized by high biodiversity) into farmland, towns, or cities (characterized by very low biodiversity). This is the biggest impact on plant biodiversity.
2) Hunting and fish for food: taking breeding-age adults out of animal populations faster than they can be replaced. This is the biggest impact on ocean macrofauna, for instance.
3) Toxic pollution: point-source and non-point-source pollutants that depress biodiversity by either directly harming plants and animals, or by altering the local environment to make it less habitable (for example, when fertilizer runoff feeds algal blooms that reduce free oxygen in the water).