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3095 Bill McKibben2055: How Earth Survived Bill McKibben Pascal Perich/Contour/Getty Images Author of more than a dozen books about the environment, Bill McKibben (b. 1960) grew up in Massachusetts and attended Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper. After college he joined the New Yorker , where he was a staff writer until 1987. His first book, The End of Nature , was published in 1989 and is regarded as the first book about climate change for a general audience. Time magazine has called McKibben %u201cthe planet%u2019s best green journalist,%u201d and the Boston Globe has said that he is %u201cprobably the country%u2019s most important environmentalist.%u201d KEY CONTEXT %u201c2050: How Earth Survived%u201d was the cover story for a Time magazine special issue on climate change in September 2019. The subtitle was %u201cHello from the Year 2050: We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change %u2014 But Everything Is Different.%u201d In 2024 McKibben drafted an updated version of his article for this textbook, taking into account new developments that arose after the original article%u2019s release. McKibben writes as if looking back from the year 2055, so while his descriptions of the years up to and including 2023 are based on real events, his references to later policy and lifestyle changes are speculative. KEY CONTEXT %u201c2050: How Earth Survived%u201d was the cover story for a Let%u2019s imagine for a moment that we%u2019ve reached the middle of the century. It%u2019s 2055, and we have a moment to reflect %u2014 the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice. There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things. One, we weren%u2019t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. And then came 2023. As the year began, scientists noted that ocean temperatures were at an all-time high; by June, a buoy off the coast of Florida recorded the hottest seawater of all time, 101 degrees or about where you%u2019d set a hot tub. Within a few weeks that heat had moved onshore, all over the world. As the solstice approached, researchers agreed that we were seeing the hottest weather on planet Earth in at least 125,000 years. The hottest weather humans had ever experienced. Two, we also realized there were actually some solutions. In that same summer of 2023, we reached a point when humans were installing a gigawatt of solar power every day %u2014 that is, the equivalent of a nuclear power plant every day in solar panels. That was possible because the engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much %u2014 you could store its rays to use later. And what%u2019s more, Congress had finally passed legislation to spur the development of clean energy, the first serious action it had ever taken in thirty-five years of being warned about climate change %u2014 among the many provisions of Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.