Coal miners driving Teslas, and cylinders showing the rise of oceans: Bill McKibben's newsletter is a real treasure-trove for greens

We are obviously fans of newsletters (see our Alternative Weekly) as a filter and framing for the torrent of stories and information that barrel towards us each day, from establishment and alternative media.

One of our favourites for a while - and which we’d encourage you to sign up to - is The Climate Crisis from veteran environment writer Bill McKibben, associated with The New Yorker magazine.

It’s comprehensive, practical and maintains a sense of fun and creativity every week (from an American perspective).

This week’s newsletter stuck out as especially entertaining - but also to the point. For example see this embed below:

It’s from an Australian YouTube series titled "Coal Miners Driving Teslas”, where rufty-tufty Oz fellows deeply committed to their petrocarbons exult in the acceleration and power of a electric-powered Tesla (more on it here). As McKibben notes:

Many of the changes needed to get us on the right climate path are going to meet with resistance, but it’s beginning to look as if getting people to accept electric vehicles may not be one of them. Elon Musk has done pioneering work, but the Tesla has mainly been a niche product—the niche being early adopters of cool things who live along the coasts…

Things got very real, though, with last month’s announcement of an electric version of the Ford F-150 pickup, America’s best-selling vehicle every year since the Reagan Administration, and the most popular motor vehicle of all time. Within seven days, the company had reported seventy thousand preorders—and the stock had jumped eight per cent.

Having spent most of my life in rural America, where the F-150 is ubiquitous, I can tell you why this is going to succeed. It’s not the acceleration; it’s the plugs. The electric version will basically be a battery on wheels. The “power frunk” (where the engine used to be) has several outlets, useful for all the power tools you might need if you’re not near another electrical source—if you’re building a home, say—and replacing the noisy, smelly, dangerous gas generators that no one likes.

You say that most pickup drivers are not, in fact, home builders? It’s true—most Americans have no need of a pickup at all. But watch any truck commercial and see who it stars. Once blue-collar America endorses the electric approach, suburbia will follow. We need far more than electric cars, of course: buses and bikes, not to mention paths for those bikes, are crucial. But since, right now, public transit accounts for about one per cent of passenger miles travelled, the new pickup paradigm seems critical.

McKibben is also sensitive to culture’s role in all this. The video at the top, On The Horizon, is a teaser for an artwork by Ana Teresa Fernandez, who McKibben profiles below:

Ana Teresa Fernández, an artist born in Mexico and now based in San Francisco, specializes in what she calls “social sculpture.” I was struck by her recent project “On the Horizon”: clear tubes, erected on the beach and filled with saltwater, which attempt to show passersby what the six feet of sea-level rise that scientists are projecting would actually look like. But all her work is mesmerizing, and I was grateful that she agreed to answer a few questions.

Explain these remarkable tubes that you’ve installed on the beach. Where did the thought come from, and what has the reaction been like?

In 2017, I was invited to speak at the Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art, where I first came across this piece of information: “The sea levels will rise 6 feet in the next 50 years.” This news first pounded on my gut, then kept reverberating within me. I know we hear numbers, but we often don’t feel what that means.

This is where I had an idea to try and suspend six feet of water in an attempt to create a visceral experience. First of all, how does one suspend that much water? Secondly, how do you make it rise from the shoreline? And how do you create it in a way that lures people to want to know more? This is how “On the Horizon” was born.

Once I had the first design of the ten-inch-wide and six-foot-tall Plexi tube made, I partnered with Doniece Sandoval, the founder of LavaMae, to raise the funds to create an interactive experience by fabricating sixteen of these tubes. “On the Horizon” would be mobile and brought to different shores and endangered coastlines.

While honing in on the design, we tested just one tube on different beaches. Each time, people were immediately drawn to it. When we tested it at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, a group of five little girls swirled, danced, and played around it for an hour, showering us with questions.

When we explained this was how high our future coastline would be, their mouths gaped wide. When their parents approached us, the girls were the ones responding to their inquiries about the piece. This is when we knew this piece was intergenerational.

Are there other ways you’ve tried to tackle climate change through your art? What are the challenges of taking something from the future and putting it in the now?

My work deals with migration, especially within bodies and borders, which are outcomes of climate and political changes. I use my own body as a vehicle to explore places and situations which I photograph or film and then turn into large-scale paintings. I want to draw people in—first, visually, and hopefully afterward empathetically. Bodies are being displaced; now bodies of water are also being displaced.

We use literary and metaphoric time machines all the time to learn from the past (one would hope). We create simulators to learn to fly, to train bodies for situations. Aren’t these methods created for us to acquire knowledge, futuristic muscle memory? In psychology, there are practices where you travel back to your younger self and give advice.

Why not speak to future horizons like a person, an aging body? Make endangered coastlines more relatable? This is why I want to have these tubes be bodies of water that people can touch, hug, speak with, walk amid. Create an immersive seascape that we can listen to and connect with.

Climate refugees are headed north now from places such as Honduras. Maybe some of them will see the section of the pre-Trump border wall that you painted blue. What would you like them to see in it?

“Borrando la Frontera” (“Erasing the Border”), done in 2011, was and still is a futuristic piece. I was trying to pull the sky down again as an act of resistance and optimism. I was painting a future, a path forward, and opposition to the borders imposed on us. I hope that migrants that keep journeying to this border can see it and be emboldened to rekindle hope, to find a way beyond the border.

There are many more juicy items in this week’s newsletter (you can sign up here). Bill McKibben’s site is here.