Environmentalist Bill McKibben: ‘Mother Nature is a very powerful educator

Bill McKibben, 58, is an author, environmentalist and founder of 350.org, a global grass-roots climate change movement. He spearheaded the fossil fuel divestment movement and resistance to the Keystone oil pipeline. His latest book, “Falter,” will be released in April.

Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist and founder of 350.org.

What drew you to environmental issues first, and can you talk about your progression from writing to full-fledged activism?

My first job out of college was at the New Yorker. And I wrote my first long piece about where everything in my apartment came from. You know, Con Ed was getting oil from Brazil, so I went down to Brazil, and up to the Arctic [where] they were getting hydro power. Along the New York City water system, on garbage barges, in sewer systems and so on. Somehow, doing that reporting impressed on me not only the physical-ness of the planet, but the fact that these were somewhat vulnerable systems, more fragile than I had assumed. That set me reading the early science on climate change. And I wrote “The End of Nature,” the first book about this subject for a nonscientific audience.

Read the story from The Washington Post magazine by KK Ottesen - “Environmentalist Bill McKibben: ‘Mother Nature is a very powerful educator.”

How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet

Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.

The Californian wildfires are an illustration of climate change in action. 

I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.

Read the piece from Bill McKibben in The New Yorker - “How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet.”

Climate change is World War III, and we are leaderless

"World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing," writes environmental activist Bill McKibben, so when Malcolm Turnbull implied that the insurgency that demolished his government was based on climate ideology, what lessons are there for Scott Morrison?

Prime Minister, please call for a personal briefing
 by Australia's leading climate scientists.

As a child in Britain during WWII, I lived in a street of mothers and children. Every father was away fighting. Each house and garden was surrounded by a metal palisade fence.

Read the ABC News story by David Shearman - “Climate change is World War III, and we are leaderless.”

Climate change is World War III, and we are leaderless

"World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing," writes environmental activist Bill McKibben, so when Malcolm Turnbull implied that the insurgency that demolished his government was based on climate ideology, what lessons are there for Scott Morrison?

Like the US, Australia is failing to save the lives of
its citizens by prolonging the life of polluting coal-fired power.

As a child in Britain during WWII, I lived in a street of mothers and children. Every father was away fighting. Each house and garden was surrounded by a metal palisade fence.

One morning the fences were gone, mother was delighted. Then a horse and cart came and took away every metal cooking pot and pan, some treasured, but mother smiled at her sacrifice. It was difficult for me to understand.

Read the story by David Shearman from ABC News - “Climate change is World War III, and we are leaderless.”

How Climate Change Is Ruining Our Indoor Air

Considering our future.

That’s the most important number in the world? Bill McKibben thinks it’s 350. The environmental activist co-founded 350.org, a climate advocacy group, as a way to popularize the finding of a 2008 paper: CO2 in the atmosphere will need to be reduced to at most 350 parts per million “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed…” We were at around 280 ppm before we began to burn coal, oil, and gas en masse. This April, we reached 410 ppm.

Yet it is a little appreciated fact that many of us at home, school, and work breathe air containing CO2 concentrations of 1,000 ppm every day. It’s because the air we exhale holds around a hundred times more CO2 — about 40,000 ppm — than the air we inhale. Badly ventilated classrooms and overcrowded conference rooms can reach 2,000 ppm, well above the point when air starts to feel “stuffy,” at 600 ppm. Concentrations above that can cause classic symptoms of CO2 poisoning: labored breathing, headaches, rapid pulse rate, hearing loss, hyperventilation, sweating, and fatigue.

Read the Medium story by Brian Gallagher - “How Climate Change Is Ruining Our Indoor Air.”

Climate activist Bill McKibben still fighting 'The End of Nature’

It's fitting I meet US climate change campaigner Bill McKibben for our lunch shortly after filing on Sydney smashing its April temperature records, part of the city's hottest autumn in almost 160 years of records.

Bill McKibben, a leading American environmentalist, sits
 down for a lunchtime chat in Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden.

McKibben was on his Accelerate Climate Action tour around Australia, arranged by the local arm of the 350.org activist group he founded in 2008.

He arrives for our chat in the sun-soaked Sydney Botanic Gardens Restaurant after a brief side trip to the bleaching-battered Great Barrier Reef, and has his own grim tales to tell.

Read the story from The Age -  by Peter Hannam -“Climate activist Bill McKibben still fighting 'The End of Nature’.”

The Billionaire on a Mission to Save the Planet From Trump

Tom Steyer.

TOM STEYER ISN’T your average California tree hugger. The former hedge fund manager—number 1,121 on Forbes’ wealthiest people list, with $1.61 billion—was once best known for turning $15 million into $30 billion in about two decades.

But then he went hiking. Steyer and environmental activist and author Bill McKibben spent a day trudging through the Adirondacks. Not long after, Steyer parted ways with the leadership of his company and his oil and gas investments, began to fight the Keystone XL pipeline, and then reinvented himself as a one-man superfund for climate causes. His organization, NextGen Climate, has spent $170 million over the past four years advocating for policies and politicians that help the environment and advance renewable energy.

Read Nick Stockton’s story on Wired - “The Billionaire on a Mission to Save the Planet From Trump.”

Watch Bill McKibben Talk Climate Change Battle on 'Real Time’

Bill McKibben - 'a bad day
 for earth's wellbeing'.

On a particularly bad day for Earth's wellbeing – the EPA revealed massive budgetary cuts while the Trump administration waffled on the Paris Agreement on climate change – environmentalist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher to discuss the dire situation and how the American people can fight back.

"The level of complete corruption from the fossil fuel industry that marks this administration is like nothing we've ever seen," McKibben said, adding that new EPA chief Scott Pruitt frequently sued the EPA on behalf of energy companies while Attorney General of Oklahoma.

Read the Rolling Stone story - “Watch Bill McKibben Talk Climate Change Battle on 'Real Time’.”

Australia joining US in openly trashing global climate efforts

Bill McKibben warns Australia risks
 missing out on the new jobs and
 investment opportunities offered by
 renewable energy industries.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Here we are – Donald Trump is about to become the 45th president of the United States and we have to prepare for the onslaught.

It beggars belief that in 2016 an outright climate change denier could rise to the highest office in the US, dragging with him a Republican controlled Congress hungry to revive the old glory days of coal, gas and oil, not to mention a Secretary of State that until last month ran the biggest oil company on earth.

Yet while Australians may groan and worry at the destruction that Trump will bring, take a look at your own Trump-like administration.

Washington DC may be awash with fossil fuel operatives, but Australia is no stranger to fossil fuel barons holding political sway either – indeed, you elected one to Parliament a few years ago in the form of Clive Palmer. And as Trump thrusts the US firmly into a position as international climate pariah, we are sadly joining Australia as two rogue developed nations openly trashing global climate efforts.

Bill McKibben writes for The Sydney Morning Herald - “Australia joining US in openly trashing global climate efforts.”

President Trump: climate policy and the environment with Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben on Radio National.

What exactly is Donald Trump's stance on climate change?

Before the 2016 election, the president-elect described man-made climate change as a 'hoax'.

His position appears to have softened, but with a cabinet full of climate change-doubters, environmentalist Bill McKibben is concerned that efforts to combat climate change could be about to take a big step back.

Listen to today’s Radio National interview with Bill McKibben by Hamish Macdonald - “President Trump: climate policy and the environment with Bill McKibben.”

Australia leads way in fossil fuel divestment

Bill McKibben - Australia leads the
way in the divestment process.

It looks as though 2016 will go down as the year that Western democracies were torn open to reveal the growing disconnect between citizens and governments. A year when many felt trust in government had fallen so low that it was better to try to burn it all down than continue on our current course.

Next month, Donald Trump will become the president of my country. Britain is destined to leave the European Union. In Australia, the political malaise is so strong that no prime minister has made it through a full term in almost 10 years. But even as the major parties scramble to find a popular face to put on their unpopular policies, many voters are abandoning them for the empty promises and scapegoating of far-right populism.

Read Bill McKibben’s story in The Saturday Paper - “Australia leads way in fossil fuel divestment.”

We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution

This year is on track to become the hottest ever recorded, and a growing number

Shoes representing protesters at the climate
talks summit in Paris last year.

of environmentalists are using a particular type of language in response. Some are calling for a huge “mobilization” to “combat” climate change. In an article in the New Republic in August, Bill McKibben, the unofficial spokesperson of the climate movement in the United States, insisted in very literal terms that, we are at war with climate change.
In the United States, we are familiar with war metaphors; and they are often politically useful. We have been through wars on poverty, drugs, cancer and even Christmas. In these cases, metaphors are understood as metaphors, but when McKibben points to territory ceded, space invaded, cultural loss and human suffering, he intends to be taken at face value: “It’s not that global warming is like a world war,” he writes. “It is a world war.”

War rhetoric serves a valuable function. It stresses the seriousness of the harm, its structural nature and the need to struggle against it. Wars require people to sacrifice and to share responsibility for a joint effort larger than individual preferences and comforts. They can also motivate solidarity: The goal of defeating the enemy orients all activity, and whatever may divide or distract us from achieving that goal must be put aside. In the rhetoric-bag of political discourse, “war” is a forceful weapon.

Read The New York Times story - “We Don’t Need a ‘War’ on Climate Change, We Need a Revolution.”

We're under attack from climate change and our only hope is to mobilize as we did in WWII

In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region’s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards.

Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre. The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The Zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of newborn babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of refugees are fleeing the horrors of war, their numbers swelling daily as they’re forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.

World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing.

Bill McKibben says: “We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.”

Tasmania will only get hotter and drier: Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben.

In his first visit to Tasmania, world renowned US environmentalist Bill McKibben has given a stark warning to the Tasmanian Government.

The state is in the midst of an unprecedented energy crisis due to falling hydro-electric dam levels and a broken Basslink cable, which means power cannot be imported from the mainland.

The former is being blamed on a dry summer, but climate change activist Mr McKibben warns the weather will only get hotter.

"Unfortunately, it's not going to be the new norm, the new norm is going to be worse and more dramatic with each passing few years," he said.

Read the ABC story - “Bill McKibben: US environmentalist sounds warning on Tasmanian energy crisis.”

Bill McKibben plea: "Keep it in the ground!"

When I was a kid, I was creepily fascinated by the wrongheaded idea, current in my grade school, that your hair and your fingernails kept growing after you died. The lesson seemed to be that it was hard to kill something off—if it wanted to keep going.

Something similar is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry. Even as the global warming crisis makes it clear that coal, natural gas and oil are yesterday’s energy, the momentum of two centuries of fossil fuel development means new projects keep emerging in a zombie-like fashion.

Read the EcoWatch story - “Bill McKibben: How to Stop the Fossil Fuel Industry From Wrecking Our World.”

Mohamed Nasheed had the dream, and now he is in gaol

Mohamed Nasheed - he should be in Paris talking
 about the Maldives becoming carbon neutral,
 but deposed by a military coup, he is now in gaol,
 while dictators who replaced him have invited
the oil industry to drill on his island nation.

One of the world’s leading climate campaigners is missing from the UN climate summit in Paris, because he is sitting in a prison cell after being deposed in a military coup. Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed was a key voice at the 2009 UN climate summit for island nations threatened by rising sea levels.

“Nasheed promised to take his whole country carbon neutral by 2020. Instead, the dictators running it now are inviting the oil industry in to drill,” says Democracy NOW!‘s guest Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. “If you want to think about irony, it doesn’t get much better than that.”

Read the EcoWatch story - “Bill McKibben: ‘Paris Summit is Missing One of the Great World Leaders on Climate’ Because He’s in Prison.”

Writing six generations into the future about climate change

T

Bill McKibben.

his letter to the future by Bill McKibben is part of the Letters to the Future campaign, a national effort to encourage people from all walks of life to write six generations into the future about climate change.
The campaign puts a spotlight on the importance of world leaders agreeing to a global climate treaty at COP21 in Paris.

Read more on EcoWatch - “Bill McKibben’s Letter to the Future.”

Climate change 'the biggest thing going on every day' - Bill McKibben

B

ill McKibben the author and climate activist and the man behind 350.org says:

"In reality, climate change is actually the biggest

thing that's going on every single day."

We have 'front row seats' and will be a part of 'the moment'

T

his is our moment, but it is also “the moment” for the next thousands of decades.

Author, activist: Bill McKibben.

Author and climate change activist, Bill McKibben, writes on the Huffington Post blog about the need for action saying, “The next 10 years will be decisive when it comes to the planet's future -- what we do (or don't) will play out over geologic time.”

“It could, if we set our minds to it, be the decade when the planet's use of fossil fuels peaks and then rapidly declines,” McKibben writes.

Hi story - “The Next Decade Will Decide What the World Looks Like for Thousands of Decades to Come” – ends with him saying, “So it's not too much to say that the next decade will decide what the world looks like for thousands of decades to come. We all get front row seats -- but we can all be actors too, if only we'll join the growing movement to do something about it.”

The dilemma of making your point about climate change

Those concerned about climate change and who understand the causes of trapped in a strange dilemma.

They know the burning of fossil fuels worsens the situation and yet they also know that those concerns can be best demonstrated through gathering in a central place; a gathering whose success is almost wholly dependent upon fossil fuels.

Writing in Rolling Stone in a story headed: “A call to arms: an invitation to demand action on climate change” activist, Bill McKibben has invited people to visit New York City.

In encouraging people to join him, Mr McKibben said it was “An invitation to anyone who’d like to prove to themselves, and their children, that the give a damn about the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced”.

“My guess is people will come by the tens of thousands, and it will be the largest demonstration yet of human resolve in the face of climate change.

“Sure, some of it will be exciting – who doesn't like the chance to march and sing and carry a clever sign through the canyons of Manhattan? But this is dead-serious business, a signal moment in the gathering fight of human beings to do something about global warming before it's too late to do anything but watch. You'll tell your grandchildren, assuming we win”.

Mr McKibben urged people to note the dates September 20 and 21 on their.