{"id":400506,"date":"2025-09-06T11:08:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T10:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=400506"},"modified":"2025-12-31T21:55:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T20:55:06","slug":"weepy-bill-mckibben-strives-for-relevance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=400506","title":{"rendered":"Weepy Bill McKibben Strives for Relevance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Watts Up With That?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Charles Rotter<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill McKibben has always been the climate movement\u2019s most reliable prophet of doom, though never a particularly cheerful one. From his 1989 bestseller The End of Nature<\/em> to his endless speeches about looming catastrophe, he has made a career out of telling Americans to stop enjoying themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s some backstory on Weepy Bill<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Title<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Now, in 2025, the New York Times<\/em> has generously profiled him again, portraying him not as the triumphant leader of a mass uprising, but as a weary relic of a fading movement, sipping tea on his porch in Vermont and gesturing toward solar panels like holy relics of a religion whose congregation has stopped showing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article begins with a pastoral scene that would make Thoreau blush:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cAt the end of a long dirt road through Vermont\u2019s Green Mountains, Bill McKibben sat on his screened-in porch, surrounded by birdsong and the drone of buzzing insects. The July sun beat through a canopy of trees. McKibben sipped a cup of green tea and pointed outside, to the ground just past the edge of the house, where an array of solar panels tilted toward the late-morning sky. The roof, too, was loaded with panels of different vintages. \u2018I\u2019ve been putting them up at intervals for a quarter century,\u2019 he said.\u201d

https:\/\/archive.is\/o8FaK<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It reads less like the description of a serious policy thinker and more like the diary entry of a man who believes his household gadgets are a model for saving civilization. That might be fine if the story didn\u2019t pivot immediately into a tale of despair: a broken climate movement, collapsing strategies, and activists admitting their decades of work have amounted to almost nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Few activists have been around longer than McKibben. As the Times recalls:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cIn 1989, at age 27, he published The End of Nature<\/em>, often described as the first book on global warming for lay readers, which became an international best seller. Then he turned to activism, eventually shifting his focus from combating the \u2018greenhouse effect\u2019 to organizing pipeline protests and fossil fuel divestment campaigns. Over the decades, he has evolved from a concerned observer to an elder statesman of the climate movement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And yet this elder statesman is reduced now to spearheading what can only be described as a nostalgia festival. On September 21, he will launch \u201cSun Day,\u201d a national day of action featuring \u201celectric-car shows, open houses at all-electric solar homes and solar installation tours\u201d. The idea is to recreate the spirit of the first Earth Day in 1970, with McKibben describing it in terms better suited to a church potluck than a revolutionary movement:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201c\u2018Like Earth Day, Sun Day is meant to be a giant potluck supper for activists around the country: We\u2019ve set the date and the theme, and everyone\u2019s bringing their own dish to the floor.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Apparently the climate apocalypse has been postponed long enough for activists to whip up a casserole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The absurdity becomes even clearer when we consider the shifting rhetoric. For years, McKibben told Americans that only radical sacrifice \u2014 shutting down pipelines, grounding airplanes, giving up \u201clifestyle options\u201d \u2014 could avert planetary doom. Now he insists renewables are not \u201cthe Whole Foods of energy\u201d but \u201cthe Costco\u201d, as if branding solar panels as cheap bulk goods will suddenly inspire a mass movement. This is less activism than late-night infomercial salesmanship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem, as even his allies admit, is that none of this is working. Public opinion surveys show climate consistently ranks at the bottom of issues that influence votes. As one veteran of the first Earth Day, Denis Hayes, bluntly admitted:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201c\u2018You can make a pretty decent case that everything that I\u2019ve worked on in my entire professional life has gone down the toilet in the last six months.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement, once hailed as the rising star of youth activism, has also lost faith:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201c\u2018I think that window has closed, and perhaps it never really existed.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When your own movement leaders confess the entire project was futile, you know the game is up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McKibben, however, plows forward with a kind of comic determination. He explains that Sun Day was originally going to be called \u201cSky Day,\u201d but the marketing team couldn\u2019t make it work:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201c\u2018It just became clear to me that you can\u2019t really draw a picture of the sky.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is what passes for strategic insight at the highest level of climate activism \u2014 an awareness that drawing the sky is difficult. He adds, with his usual apocalyptic flair, \u201cWe\u2019ve managed to screw up our relationship with the sun\u201d, as though civilization were in therapy with a celestial object 93 million miles away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the sympathetic observers quoted by the Times sound exasperated. Dana R. Fisher, a sociologist who studies activism, warns that Sun Day is \u201ctone deaf, and maybe a little na\u00efve\u201d and predicts it could \u201cbackfire, because some people are going to celebrate these little individual actions that have no real effect \u2026 and everybody else is going to just laugh at these attempts to shine light on these small glimmers of hope in despair\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute goes further, calling Sun Day \u201ca nostalgia for the old environmental politics that\u2019s just dead\u201d. In other words, McKibben is stuck trying to resuscitate a corpse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Times reporter, perhaps unintentionally, captures the pitiful image perfectly. At one point, McKibben reflects on the loss of cold Vermont winters while staring sadly at a puddle of melted ice cream on his pants:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cHe looked down at his lap, where a chocolaty puddle was forming on his pants.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If you wanted a single metaphor for climate activism in 2025, you could hardly do better: melted ice cream, sticky pants, and no solution in sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the wider movement has fractured. Younger activists have turned their attention to wars and social-justice causes, abandoning weekly climate strikes. Others push ever more radical demands, from global wealth redistribution to \u201cMake Polluters Pay\u201d lawsuits. The only common thread is despair. McKibben himself admits he\u2019s \u201calways happy to be called na\u00efve\u201d, which may be the truest statement he\u2019s ever made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times tries to cast all this as a noble struggle, but the reality is that McKibben\u2019s relevance is evaporating. His potluck activism and half-baked rebranding exercises are unlikely to inspire anyone beyond the aging choir of professional protesters. The world has moved on. Energy markets, consumer choices, and political priorities have changed, and no amount of ukulele strumming at Sun Day is going to reverse that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What remains is McKibben himself \u2014 a man who has spent his life warning of imminent catastrophe, only to end up hawking a nostalgia festival and muttering about maple trees. The Times inadvertently reveals the truth: the climate movement is not on the verge of triumph but collapse. Its strategies have failed, its leaders are disillusioned, and its most famous prophet is left to organize solar-powered block parties while the world shrugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, \u201cWeepy Bill\u201d is less a revolutionary than a relic. His Sun Day will come and go, leaving behind a few doodles of yellow circles, some speeches no one remembers, and the faint sound of melting ice cream dripping onto his khakis. If this is the best climate activism has to offer in 2025, then the obituary has already been written. The only question left is how long McKibben will keep pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are welcome to comment on this article, but WUWT is still in the middle of an upgrade. When that completes in a few days the comments will be lost. This post may or may not survive.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

See this post<\/a> for more information.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bill McKibben has always been the climate movement\u2019s most reliable prophet of doom, though never a particularly cheerful one. From his 1989 bestseller\u00a0The End of Nature\u00a0to his endless speeches about looming catastrophe, he has made a career out of telling Americans to stop enjoying themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":400511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691821050,691823924,691819668,691820439,691837775,691818412,691837776],"class_list":{"0":"post-400506","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-bill-mckibben","9":"tag-climate-apocalypse","10":"tag-climate-movement","11":"tag-new-york-times","12":"tag-radical-sacrifice","13":"tag-solar-panels","14":"tag-varshini-prakash","16":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/0AQMYKvS6QGMeXp6cTuEouPDD-DKlq64e0_xdIu-DX-qTw0onLxyKAVehxoZU-NcxvdxkffXJbdBbWQthBF2eADXrJBdBnzmwBFng2dO9YybuM9HIvLPD44DNV9OGDPja5yM4i1r5r5Xw7JUFyOFMv1ihjOYrOQ-1.jpeg?fit=1280%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1GbM","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":267218,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=267218","url_meta":{"origin":400506,"position":0},"title":"Bill McKibben: Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"13\/07\/2023","format":false,"excerpt":"The test of McKibben\u2019s claim that green energy is economically viable will be whether green energy installations survive the coming withdrawal of government support.","rel":"","context":"In \"Bill McKibben\"","block_context":{"text":"Bill McKibben","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=bill-mckibben"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/image-390.png?fit=1200%2C750&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/image-390.png?fit=1200%2C750&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/image-390.png?fit=1200%2C750&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/image-390.png?fit=1200%2C750&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/image-390.png?fit=1200%2C750&ssl=1&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":381234,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=381234","url_meta":{"origin":400506,"position":1},"title":"McKibben\u2019s Math Misstep: Exposing Alarmism\u2019s Historic Innumeracy in Rolling Stone","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"03\/06\/2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Climate activism has a long history of innumeracy and gaps in baseline scientific knowledge (ask an activist how much warming is projected from now to 2100 in a moderate IPCC scenario \u2013 the flagship warming phenomenon). Some years ago, I came upon something so stupid that it paralyzed me. 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