Bill McKibben writes:

Past sins are past no more: an overdue historical recalibration is under way, with monuments being pulled down, dorms renamed, restitution offered. People did things, bad things; even across the span of centuries, they’re being held to account, and there’s something noble about that. The Reverend Robert W. Lee IV, for instance, recently backed the removal of his famous ancestor’s statue from Richmond, Virginia. The memorial, he wrote, “is a hollow reminder of a painful ideology and acts of oppression against black people. Taking it down will provide new opportunities for conversations, relationships and policy change.” Such a response raises an uncomfortable question: What are we doing now that our descendants will need to apologize for? Might we be able to get ahead of the sin this time?

The most urgent practical question currently facing the species is almost certainly whether we can rapidly transform our energy systems and stop pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Chief executives of oil companies keep the conflagration going, but the industry doesn’t work alone. Last year—before the final fully intact ice shelf in Canada collapsed into the Arctic Ocean; before record fires killed or displaced nearly three billion animals across Australia; before the world measured its first reliable hundred-and-thirty-degree-Fahrenheit temperature, in Death Valley, California; before that state faced the largest fires in its history; before at least five tropical cyclones spun at once through the Atlantic—I wrote about the role that banks, asset managers, and insurance companies have played in supplying the capital required to keep the fossil-fuel industry humming. In the months since, those industries, pressed hard by activists, have begun to shift; giants such as BlackRock have announced sweeping new policies, even if they’re still far from matching their rhetoric with action.

Now I want to focus on another industry that buttresses the status quo: the advertising, lobbying, and public-relations firms that help provide the rationalizations and the justifications that slow the pace of change. Although these agencies are less significant monetarily than the banks, they are more so intellectually; if money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns, then P.R. campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling. [Continue reading…]