Cold Warrior

Bill McKibben misses winter. the 51-year-old environmental writer turned unlikely activist is marching through a frosting of snow outside his Vermont home, dodging the jabbing branches of spruce trees. McKibben has lived in and around the Adirondack and Green mountains since leaving New York City some two decades ago, and he remembers winters sunk “with a cold so deep, the trees would snap at night.” But not this year. Scientists are already predicting that this winter could be the warmest in recorded history in the Northeastern U.S. In its place–thanks in part to man-made climate change–is something different and likely more dangerous. As McKibben walks through the woods, on land originally owned by the poet Robert Frost, he recalls the damage inflicted on Vermont by Tropical Storm Irene, one of 12 record-breaking billion-dollar disasters that hit the U.S. last year. “The climate has already warmed 1 [Celsius], and if this is what 1 produces, more warming is going to be impossible to deal with,” he says. “We can’t let this happen. We won’t let this happen.”

McKibben has been writing about climate change for more than two decades, and for years he waited for the U.S. to get serious about what he calls humanity’s gravest threat. Finally, a few years ago, he grew tired of waiting and took action. With help from students at nearby Middlebury College, where he’s a scholar-in-residence, McKibben launched 350.org a digital activist group that organized climate rallies across the world, making him one of environmentalism’s most powerful voices. “Bill has helped turn this movement around,” says environmentalist Paul Hawken.

Last year, McKibben helped lead bottom-up resistance to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought carbon-heavy Canadian oil-sands crude through the upper Midwest to U.S. refineries. Most insiders considered the pipeline a done deal, but McKibben and his allies drew thousands of protesters to the White House–where McKibben himself was arrested–and helped pressure President Obama to reject the pipeline in January.

McKibben understands that his work has only just begun. One rejected pipeline won’t stop climate change. And the oil industry, along with its mostly Republican allies, is already fighting back hard, ready to make Obama pay in November. Critics say McKibben doesn’t understand politics. He responds that you can’t negotiate scientific fact. While he admits that his vision of an Internet-driven popular movement to save the planet might sound “naive,” he also says nothing else has worked thus far. And time, he insists, is running out.

The Observer Gets Involved

McKibben’s home suits the image of the quiet nature writer he was before becoming a star activist. An array of solar panels sits in his backyard–though McKibben’s house isn’t off the grid–and a 2003 Honda Civic hybrid rests in the garage. The house is heated by a wood-burning fireplace, supplemented with, as McKibben puts it, “sweaters.” By the door is gear for cross-country skiing, a pastime that has left him with an endurance athlete’s spare physique. A yellow lab dozing by the fireplace completes the tranquil scene.

Born in California and raised in Toronto and Massachusetts, McKibben followed the path of his journalist father. He was hired fresh out of Harvard by then New Yorker editor William Shawn. It was a plum job that McKibben quit out of solidarity when Shawn was fired in 1987–not the last time McKibben acted on seemingly impractical principles. He and his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, moved to a cabin in the New York Adirondacks, where he wrote his first book, 1989’s The End of Nature, about climate change. The tone was grim, but he was still optimistic. “I assumed the system would swing into gear automatically to start solving the problem,” he says.

That didn’t happen. McKibben spent years watching with amazement as science was undermined by corporate interests threatened by the prospect of carbon cuts. He now realizes it was foolish to assume that Washington could be moved by science alone. McKibben is normally subdued, but when the conversation turns to the politics of climate, his voice rises and his eyes widen behind rimless glasses. “While the scientists were talking patiently into our leaders’ ear, the fossil-fuel industry has been screaming into the other,” he says. “We’re no closer to dealing with climate change than we were in the late 1980s.”

McKibben always assumed it was “someone else’s responsibility” to translate his ideas into activism. But a reporting trip to Bangladesh several years ago changed his mind. The low-lying South Asian country is uniquely vulnerable to climate change, and while there, McKibben–stricken by dengue fever–mused on the injustice of poor Bangladeshis suffering for the wealthy world’s carbon habit. “If you try to measure the carbon footprint of Bangladesh, you’ll barely get a number,” he says. “There was this guilty part of me that said I had to do more.”

So McKibben turned to organizing. With his close-cropped hair, he looks more like a monk than a leader. But he also has a talent for inspiration. “People just gravitate toward him because of his sense of storytelling and narrative,” says Jamie Henn, a 350.org staffer. In the summer of 2006, McKibben led hundreds of people in a five-day walk across Vermont to demand carbon cuts, in what may have been the nation’s biggest climate demonstration to date. He also began working with some Middlebury students who were using the Internet to rally grassroots climate action.

Soon after, McKibben learned from NASA climatologist James Hansen about new research indicating that the world needed to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (p.p.m.) to avoid dangerous climate change. (We’re already at 392 p.p.m. and counting.) Atmospheric carbon concentration hardly makes for catchy protest slogans, but McKibben saw the number 350 as a clarion call, comprehensible to a global audience without translation. His Internet-savvy friends helped him take the idea worldwide. In October 2009, 350.org organized more than 15,000 rallies in 180 countries. It was likely the biggest mass rally in history.

The success of 350.org changed McKibben’s life, making him an activist first and a writer second. He now updates more than 30,000 Twitter followers and travels constantly to give lectures and attend protests. He’s still figuring out life as a public figure. He answers all his e-mail, and 350.org only recently hired an assistant to book his travel. And he doesn’t always relish it. He asks that TIME not photograph the exterior of the house because of death threats. “People seem to think you’re going to take their freedom away,” he says.

McKibben’s fame intensified last year as he shifted his focus from the global picture to a specific project in America’s backyard. When it came to the Keystone XL pipeline, he wasn’t going to rely on thoughtful op-eds. “We need to be more confrontational,” he says. “And that’s where the tar sands come in.”

Mr. McKibben Goes to Washington

The tar sands–also called the oil sands–are an unconventional oil reserve in northern Alberta. They may hold nearly 200 billion barrels of recoverable oil, making it the world’s biggest deposit outside Saudi Arabia. This would seem to be an energy-security godsend, allowing the U.S. to replace crude from the unstable Middle East with oil from its friendly neighbor. But tapping the oil sands comes with an environmental cost. The mining scars landscapes and can threaten water supplies. Because it takes extra energy to process the oil sands, a barrel of oil-sands crude produces more carbon than conventional crude does. Hansen calculated that if the entire oil-sands reserve were mined and burned, the carbon output would mean “game over” for the climate.

Though Canada is already mining and selling oil-sands crude, McKibben saw the proposed Keystone XL pipeline–set to deliver up to 830,000 barrels a day to the U.S.–as a crucial accelerator. More practically, because the cross-border pipeline required State Department approval, he saw an opportunity to confront Obama, who dropped an early climate-change agenda in the face of stiff resistance. In late August, McKibben, along with major environmental groups, helped organize days of protest around the White House. Over 12,000 people showed up, and hundreds were arrested. In November, Obama said he would delay a decision until 2013. But Republicans tacked a provision onto a payroll-tax-cut bill mandating that the White House decide on the pipeline within 60 days. In response, Obama decided in January to reject Keystone XL altogether. “You have to give Bill a lot of credit for pushing the pipeline issue to the forefront,” says Gus Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, who was also arrested in the protests.

Still, others question McKibben’s priorities. Yes, the Alberta oil sands contain massive amounts of carbon. But its own contribution to warming is unlikely to be decisive. And if that crude is simply exported and burned in, say, China–as Canadian officials have pledged–the climate will be no cleaner. “It’s unfair to focus just on oil sands,” says Andrew Leach, a business professor at the University of Alberta.

Stopping the pipeline may also be a temporary victory. TransCanada, Keystone’s builder, has already said it will reapply using a different route. Still, McKibben believes he can slow the development of the oil sands in time to change climate policy in the U.S. “We can build off the momentum of stopping this,” he says.

But at what political cost? Republicans cite Keystone as evidence that Obama would rather “appease left-wing environmental activists in San Francisco,” in Newt Gingrich’s words, than create jobs. (TransCanada claims Keystone would have created 20,000 jobs. The State Department’s estimate is more like 5,000.) “I don’t see where the protests go from here,” says Michael Levi, senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I’d worry it leads to a dead end.”

McKibben is done with waiting, however. “This isn’t the life I thought I was setting out to have,” he says as he walks back through Frost’s woods. “But the only way to win is to spend our bodies on this, and we’ll do that.” And he won’t mind if you call him naive, so long as you’re paying attention.