On climate policy McKibben and Parenti sadly, but not surprisingly, end up in the same place: clean energy technology is the way to deal with climate change. Deus es Machina, as it were.
Parenti's main thrust is that McKibben is trying to weaken the oil companies by attacking their balance sheets when they are only vulnerable, if at all, through their income statements. The venacular phrase "the bottom line" is used to talk about profits (or losses) which show up as the bottom line on the Income Statement, not the Balance Sheet. Parenti obscures his own point with a confused and confusing discussion of this.
Divesting shares in order to lower their value on the stock market is an attack on the balance sheet. Parenti doesn't use accounting terminology, though it would have clarified what he was trying to say. He does stray when, relying on Henwood's book, he goes from the general to the particular, i.e. that the oil companies do not raise money in the market. The smaller companies surely do, particularly the ones creating the current boom in shale gas and oil. Those companies have borrowed heavily and sold shares to raise money. Parenti's point, nevertheless, is broadly correct.
But that's not as interesting as McKibben's important strategic errors.
I went to McKibben's Berkeley event, one of the early stops on the 21 city tour of the "Do the Math" campaign It was a very well done event, well paced, moving, and motivating. Naomi Klein, appearing via TV, was much more populist than McKibben himself. The other speakers were uniformly good and McKibben was impressive. If you look at the event as an exercise in consciousness raising, and think of the campus campaigns for divestment as raising the consciousness of the campaigners, it is all to the good. The student-campaigners might learn more about the morality of the college trustees than anything else.
McKibben's goal is to weaken the oil companies so that they no longer can block "putting a price on carbon". Congress, freed by that oil company weakness, will then raise the price of emitting CO2 so as to create a market niche where clean technologies can thrive -- in other words, a Cap on emissions and clean technology. Business As Usual with clean energy. I simply assert that there is on that path no hope of succeeding in sufficiently reducing green house gas emissions. Technology, needed as it is, cannot deal with the problem. Social change is required.
McKibben is a successful organizer. He can turn out large crowds and motivate them. If he would adopt a course correction so that college students were organized to fight for social change rather than a technological paradise, exciting times could lie ahead. College students at elite universities united with Occupy Wall Street! Think of that!
Gene Coyle