-
All right, all right. Listen up. listen up.
-
Very few people can ever say that they are in the single most important place they could possibly be
-
doing the single most important thing they could possibly be doing.
-
That’s you, here, now.
-
You are the movement that we need if we are going to win in the few years that we have.
-
You have the skills now. You are making the connections. And there is no one else. It is you.
-
That is a great honor and that is a terrible burden. There is no one else.
-
The science is the easy part in this, grim, but easy. 2010 was the warmest year on record. And it was warm.
-
We were on the phone one day with our 350 crew in Pakistan and one of them said, “It’s hot out here today,”
-
and I was surprised to hear him say it because it’s usually hot in Pakistan during the summer.
-
He said, no it’s really hot . We just set the new, all time Asia temperature record, 129 degrees [53.9 °C].
-
That kind of heat melts the arctic. That kind of heat causes drought so deep across Russia that the Kremlin stops all grain exports.
-
That kind of heat causes the flooding that still has 4 million people across Pakistan homeless tonight.
-
It’s tough, it’s grim, but the good news at least is that it’s clear, the science.
-
We have a number: 350 parts per million. 350, the most important number on earth.
-
As the NASA team put it in January 2008, “any value in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million
-
is not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and which life on earth is adapted.”
-
Getting back to 350 pars per million will be very very tough, the toughest thing human beings have ever done,
-
but there is no use complaining about it, it’s just physics and chemistry.
-
That’s what we have to do.
-
But if the scientific method has worked splendidly to outline our dilemma,
-
that’s how badly the political method has worked to solve it.
-
Think about our own country, historically the biggest source of carbon emissions.
-
Last summer, the Senate refused to even take a vote on the tepid, moderate, tame climate bill that was before it.
-
Last week, the House voted 248 to 174 to pass a resolution saying global warming wasn’t real.
-
It was one of the most embarrassing votes that Congress has ever taken.
-
They believe that because they can amend the tax laws they can amend the laws of nature too, but they can’t.
-
I’m awful glad a few of you went up to the visitors gallery to talk some sense to them last week.
-
Even the White House. Two weeks ago, the interior secretary, who spoke here two years ago, Ken Salazar,
-
signed a piece of paper opening 750 million tonnes of coal under federal land in Wyoming to mining.
-
That’s like opening 300 new coal fired power plants and running them for a year. That’s a disgrace.
-
But you know what. We understand the physics and chemistry of political power.
-
In this case, it’s not carbon dioxide that rules the day: it’s money.
-
Many of you are in the District of Columbia for the first time and it looks clean and it looks sparkling.
-
No, this city is as polluted as Beijing. But instead of coal smoke it’s polluted by money.
-
Money warps our political life, it obscures our vision, but just like with physics in chemistry there is no use whining.
-
We know now what we need to do and the first thing we need to do is build a movement.
-
We will never have as much money as the oil companies so we need a different currency to work in,
-
we need bodies, we need creativity, we need spirit.
-
350.org has been like a beta-test for that movement. It began with youth here at Power Shift four years ago.
-
It’s now spread around the planet. In the last two years, there have been 15,000 demonstrations in 189 nations.
-
CNN called it the most widespread political activity in the planet’s history. But it needs to get bigger still.
-
On the first Earth Day in 1970 there where 20 million Americans in the street, one in ten Americans.
-
That’s the kind of size we need.
-
And so, on September 24 we need your help. September 24 is the next big day of action.
-
We’re calling it Moving Planet and in those 189 nations, people will be in motion.
-
Much of it will be on bicycles, because the bicycles is one of the few tools that rich and poor both use.
-
Who here knows how to ride a bike?
-
All right, September 24, I cannot wait to see the pictures.
-
We are not going to wait for the politicians to move, we’re going to create the future that we need ourselves.
-
But that movement doesn’t just need to be bigger, it needs to be sharper too, more aggressive.
-
You know what, at Copenhagen we got 117 nations to sign on to that 350 target.
-
That was good, but they were the wrong 117 nations. They were the poorest and most vulnerable nations.
-
The most addicted nations, led by our own, weren’t yet willing to bite the bullet, so that’s where we’ve got to go to work.
-
That work, to deal with that money pollution, that work starts Monday at ten o’clock in Lafayette Square,
-
across from the White House and next to a place called the US Chamber of Commerce.
-
The Koch Brothers are high peaks of corruption, but the US Chamber of Commerce is the Everest of dirty money.
-
It boasts on its web page that it is the biggest lobby in Washington.
-
In fact, it spends more money lobbying than the next five lobbies combined.
-
It spent more money on politics last year than the Republican National Committee and
-
the Democratic National Committee combined and 94% of that went to climate deniers.
-
We cannot stop their money, but we can strip them of their credibility. They claim to represent all American business,
-
but they don’t. 55% of their funding came from 16 companies.
-
They don’t have to say who those companies are, but it’s easy to tell when you watch what they do.
-
They spend their time lobbying to make sure the planet heats up as fast it possibly can.
-
They sent a legal brief to the EPA last year, saying that they should take no action on climate change, because if the planet warmed,
-
humans could alter their behavior and their physiology to deal with the problem.
-
I don’t even really know what that means, alter your physiology. Grow gills? I don’t know.
-
But I can tell you this. I am too old to change my physiology and you all are too good looking.
-
But I will adapt my behavior. Every day now I will roll out of bed and go to work fighting them.
-
Hell, I will go to bed at night and try to dream up new ways to fight.
-
We’re going to adapt our behavior all right. We’re going to adapt our behavior now to fight on every front.
-
I’m sorry if that sounds aggressive, but there we are.
-
Twenty-two years ago, I wrote the first book about climate change and I’ve gotten to watch it all,
-
and I know that simply persuasion will not do.
-
We need to fight. Now, we need to fight non-violently and with civil disobedience.
-
You will hear from my friend Tim DeChristopher in a moment and more to come,
-
but if you’re going to go that route, one thing you need to make sure that you manage to get across
-
in your witness is that you are not the radicals in this fight.
-
The radicals are the people who are fundamentally altering the composition of the atmosphere.
-
That is the most radical thing people have ever done.
-
We need to fight with art and with music, too. Not just the side with our brain that likes bar graphs and
-
pie graphs, but with all our heart and all our soul.
-
Tomorrow or tonight, you need to go down behind Hall B downstairs and help them build the art work for Monday morning.
-
We need to fight with unity. We need to have a coherent voice.
-
That’s why, last week we joined with our friends at 1Sky to build this bigger, stronger 350.org.
-
We need to speak with one loud voice, because we are fighting for your future.
-
So far, we’ve raised the temperature of the planet one degree and that’s done all that I’ve described, it’s melted the arctic, it’s changed the oceans.
-
The climatologists tell us that unless we act with great speed and courage that one degree will be five degrees before this century is out.
-
And if we do that, then the world that we leave behind will be a ruined world.
-
We fight not just for ourselves, we fight for the beauty of this place.
-
For cool trout streams and deep spruce woods. For chilly fog rising off the Pacific and deep snow blanketing the mountains.
-
We fight for all the creation that shares this planet with us. We don’t know half the species on Earth we’re wiping out.
-
And of course, we fight alongside our brothers and sisters around the world. You’ve seen the pictures as I talk: these are our comrades.
-
Most of these people, as you see, come from places that have not caused this problem, and yet they’re willing to be in deep solidarity with us.
-
That’s truly admirable and it puts a real moral burden on us.
-
Never let anyone tell you, that environmentalism is something that rich, white people do.
-
Most of the people that we work with around the world are poor and black and brown and Asian and young,
-
because that’s what most of the world is made up of, and they care about the future as anyone else.
-
We have to fight, finally, without any guarantee that we are going to win.
-
We have waited late to get started and our adversaries are strong and we do not know how this is going to come out.
-
If you were a betting person, you might bet we were going to lose because so far that’s what happened, but that’s not a bet you’re allowed to make.
-
The only thing that a morally awake person can do when the worst thing that’s ever happened is happening is try to change those odds.
-
I have spent most of my last few years in rooms around the world with great people, many of whom will be refugees before this century is out,
-
some of whom may be dead from climate change before this century is out.
-
No guarantee that we will win, but from them a complete guarantee that we will fight with everything we have.
-
It is always an honor for me to be in those rooms. It is the greatest honor for me to be with you tonight.
-
No guarantee that we will win, but we will fight side by side, as long as we’ve got. Thank you all so much.