WEBVTT 00:00:29.525 --> 00:00:33.779 Like most people, I'm not an activist by nature. 00:00:33.779 --> 00:00:37.325 There's really not that many people whose greatest desire it to go out and fight the system. 00:00:40.061 --> 00:00:43.932 My theory of change was I'll write my book, people will read it and they'll change. 00:00:43.932 --> 00:00:47.289 But that's not how change happens. 00:00:49.739 --> 00:00:57.485 So I've been kind of forced to go against my sense of who I am most comfortable being. 00:00:58.732 --> 00:01:01.006 It seems like it's the things that's required now 00:01:01.006 --> 00:01:06.637 and I think it's probably required that an awful lot of us doing things that are a little hard for us, 00:01:06.667 --> 00:01:10.955 make a little noise, be a little uncomfortable, 00:01:10.955 --> 00:01:14.608 push other people to be a little uncomfortable. 00:01:14.608 --> 00:01:17.946 This is really the fight of our time. 00:01:17.946 --> 00:01:24.703 It's official: 2012 was the hottest year in the United States since weather scientists started keeping records. 00:01:24.703 --> 00:01:30.292 2012 was not only the warmest year on record, but also the second most extreme, 00:01:30.292 --> 00:01:34.598 featuring tornadoes, wild fires, a massive drought. 00:01:34.660 --> 00:01:37.372 Rising seas due to climate change. 00:01:37.372 --> 00:01:40.642 Heat trapping gases from burning oil, coal and gas. 00:01:40.642 --> 00:01:46.548 10.9 billion dollars in profits, people look at this and say that's a world turned upside down. 00:01:46.548 --> 00:01:53.096 Listening to your testimony makes me even more convinced that we need to act to prevent cataclysmic climate change. 00:01:53.096 --> 00:01:57.975 BP cut corner after corner and now the whole gulf coast is paying the price. 00:01:57.975 --> 00:02:00.513 How can you justify the record profits you're making? 00:02:00.513 --> 00:02:03.329 Well our business is one of very large numbers. 00:02:06.980 --> 00:02:12.693 Okay, let's bring out Bill, he's an environmentalism and president and co-founder of 350.org. 00:02:12.693 --> 00:02:16.883 And my guest Bill McKibben, our nation's leading environmentalist. 00:02:16.883 --> 00:02:19.674 We started this thing called 350.org. 00:02:19.674 --> 00:02:23.214 We're going out and building the kind of political movement that will change things. 00:02:30.796 --> 00:02:36.897 We just announced this road show out across the country to really try take it at the fossil fuel industry. 00:02:38.319 --> 00:02:42.540 People are just lining up to try and get involved in this fight. 00:03:15.648 --> 00:03:20.004 Well, thank you all, 00:03:24.219 --> 00:03:27.703 thank you all so much for being here today. 00:03:27.703 --> 00:03:35.418 It is a great pleasure for me to get to be here tonight 00:03:35.418 --> 00:03:39.170 and one of the gifts for me of these last few months was getting, 00:03:39.170 --> 00:03:42.337 tiring as it was in a sense, to travel around the country. 00:03:42.337 --> 00:03:48.045 And one of the things that was great was just being reminded was what an incredibly beautiful place this is. 00:03:48.045 --> 00:03:55.675 You know, we got to Denver and it was gorgeous but the air was full of smoke from fires still burning in December 00:03:55.675 --> 00:03:57.680 after the biggest fire season ever 00:03:57.680 --> 00:04:04.070 and we got through this gorgeous farmland, much of it still-60% of it still in a federally declared drought. 00:04:04.070 --> 00:04:09.469 But it's also worth just saying that it's a terrible thing to take a world this beautiful 00:04:09.469 --> 00:04:16.585 and, for the sake of outsized profits for a few people for a little while, lay it to waste. 00:04:16.585 --> 00:04:20.900 Tonight's the start of the last campaign I may really get to fight. 00:04:20.900 --> 00:04:25.919 Not 'cause I'm getting tired but because the planet's getting tired. 00:04:25.919 --> 00:04:30.299 In the world that we've built where our institutions aren't working the way they should, 00:04:30.299 --> 00:04:34.686 we have to do more than we should. 00:04:34.686 --> 00:04:36.515 That news doesn't depress me. 00:04:36.515 --> 00:04:40.518 In a sense it excites me, because I think we know what we need to do. 00:04:40.518 --> 00:04:42.979 I think we've peeled away the layers of the onion. 00:04:42.979 --> 00:04:44.945 We've got to the very heart of things. 00:04:44.945 --> 00:04:51.447 As of tonight, we're taking on the fossil fuel industry directly. 00:04:54.321 --> 00:04:59.524 The moment has come where we have to take a real stance, we're reaching limits. 00:04:59.950 --> 00:05:09.421 The biggest limit that we're running into may be that we're running our of atmosphere into which to put the waste products of our society, 00:05:09.421 --> 00:05:15.800 particularly the carbon dioxide that is the ubiquitous biproduct of burning fossil fuels. 00:05:15.800 --> 00:05:23.375 You burn coal or oil or gas, you get CO2 and the atmosphere is now filling up with it. 00:05:23.375 --> 00:05:27.378 We know what the solutions for dealing with this trouble are, 00:05:27.378 --> 00:05:32.200 many of the technologies we need to get off fossil fuel and onto something else. 00:05:32.200 --> 00:05:36.898 The thing that is preventing us from doing it is the enormous political power 00:05:36.898 --> 00:05:45.014 wielded by those who have made and are making vast windfall profits off of fossil fuels. 00:05:46.759 --> 00:05:52.679 Well, there have been a lot of efforts by scientists to try to estimate whether we are living sustainably 00:05:52.679 --> 00:05:58.310 in the sense of whether we're consuming planetary resources at a rate that can be continued. 00:05:58.310 --> 00:06:06.063 The threat that this combination that climate change, water shortages, food shortages and rising energy prices 00:06:06.063 --> 00:06:11.867 is enormously troubling to anyone who's aware of the data and the way these issues could play out. 00:06:11.867 --> 00:06:17.371 You can't keep increasing your economy infinitely on a finite planet. 00:06:17.371 --> 00:06:20.512 One of the things that humanity is facing is the need 00:06:20.512 --> 00:06:26.180 to dramatically reduce its carbon footprint over the next 40 years. 00:06:26.180 --> 00:06:32.177 And we're talking in the wealthy countries about 80 to 90% reductions. 00:06:32.177 --> 00:06:37.109 We're no longer at the point of trying to stop global warming. 00:06:37.109 --> 00:06:39.832 Too late for that. 00:06:39.832 --> 00:06:45.710 We're at the point of trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity. 00:06:45.710 --> 00:06:47.214 We shouldn't have to be here tonight. 00:06:47.214 --> 00:06:51.383 If the world worked in a kind of rational way, we shouldn't have to be here. 00:06:51.383 --> 00:06:57.214 25 years ago our scientists started telling us about climate change. 00:06:58.015 --> 00:07:05.065 I played my small role in that by writing the first book about all this in 1989 for a general audience, 00:07:05.065 --> 00:07:08.033 a book called The End of Nature. 00:07:09.131 --> 00:07:14.491 If the world worked as it should, our leaders would have heeded those warning, gone to work, 00:07:14.491 --> 00:07:20.880 done the sensible things that at the time would have been enough to get us a long way to where we needed to go. 00:07:20.880 --> 00:07:26.032 They didn't. And that's why we're in the fix we're in. 00:07:26.541 --> 00:07:32.987 This is the biggest emergency the human family has faced since it came out of the caves. 00:07:32.987 --> 00:07:34.571 There is nothing bigger. 00:07:34.571 --> 00:07:38.732 All these issues matter: immigration and health care and education. 00:07:38.732 --> 00:07:42.746 But this one is really about the physical change of the planet. 00:07:42.746 --> 00:07:46.417 We all have been saying we need to save the planet. 00:07:46.417 --> 00:07:52.672 But as I think about it, the planet's going to be around for some time to come. 00:07:52.672 --> 00:07:57.215 What's at stake now is civilization itself. 00:08:02.365 --> 00:08:05.016 Our most important climatologist, Jim Hansen, 00:08:05.016 --> 00:08:12.355 has his team at NASA do a study to figure out how much carbon in the atmosphere was too much. 00:08:12.355 --> 00:08:17.282 The paper they published may be the most important scientific paper of the millenium to date, 00:08:17.282 --> 00:08:20.453 said we now know enough to know how much is too much. 00:08:20.453 --> 00:08:24.994 Any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million 00:08:24.994 --> 00:08:33.920 is not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. 00:08:33.920 --> 00:08:36.927 That's pretty strong language for scientists to use. 00:08:36.927 --> 00:08:45.603 Stronger still if you know that outside today, the atmosphere is 395 parts per million CO2. 00:08:45.603 --> 00:08:48.907 And rising at about 2 parts per million per year. 00:08:50.397 --> 00:08:53.191 Everything frozen on earth is melting. 00:08:53.191 --> 00:08:57.718 The great ice sheet of the arctic is reduced by more than half, 00:08:57.718 --> 00:09:02.196 the oceans are about 30% more acidic than they were 30 years ago 00:09:02.196 --> 00:09:07.619 because the chemistry of sea water changes as it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. 00:09:07.619 --> 00:09:10.940 And because warm air holds more water vapor than cold, 00:09:10.940 --> 00:09:16.049 the atmosphere is about 5% wetter than it was 40 years ago. 00:09:16.049 --> 00:09:19.588 That's an astonishingly large change. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:22.512 --> 00:09:29.524 There's more energy coming in and being absorbed by the earth than there is heat being radiated to space, 00:09:29.524 --> 00:09:36.530 which is exactly what we expected because as we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, it traps heat. 00:09:36.530 --> 00:09:43.404 Now we can measure that and that's the basis by which we can prove that the human made impacts 00:09:43.404 --> 00:09:49.443 on atmospheric composition are the primary cause of the climate change that we're observing. 00:09:51.899 --> 00:09:53.549 So let's get to work. 00:09:53.549 --> 00:09:56.995 We're calling this Do the Math and we're gonna do some math for a moment. 00:09:56.995 --> 00:09:59.620 Just three numbers, okay? 00:09:59.620 --> 00:10:02.888 I wrote about them in a piece last summer for Rolling Stone. 00:10:02.888 --> 00:10:05.332 A piece that went oddly viral. 00:10:05.332 --> 00:10:12.164 It was the issue with Justin Bieber on the cover, 00:10:12.164 --> 00:10:14.022 but here's the strange thing: 00:10:14.022 --> 00:10:17.114 The next day I got a call from the editor saying, 00:10:17.114 --> 00:10:24.120 "Your piece has gotten ten times more likes on Facebook than Justin Bieber's." 00:10:24.120 --> 00:10:30.272 Some of that is doubtless the result of my sort of soulful stare, you know. 00:10:30.272 --> 00:10:34.669 But mostly it's because we managed to just kind of lay out this math 00:10:34.669 --> 00:10:38.842 in a very straight forward way that people needed to understand 00:10:38.842 --> 00:10:44.767 as we were going through what turned out to be the hottest year that America has ever experienced. 00:10:44.767 --> 00:10:47.914 Before we get to those three numbers, here's where we are so far: 00:10:47.914 --> 00:10:52.545 We've burned enough coal and gas and oil to raise the temperature of the earth one degree. 00:10:52.545 --> 00:10:53.272 What has that done? 00:10:53.272 --> 00:10:59.068 There was a day last September when the headline in the paper was "Half the Polar Ice Cap is missing." 00:10:59.068 --> 00:11:02.198 Literally. I mean if Neil Armstrong were up on the moon today, 00:11:02.198 --> 00:11:05.868 he'd look down and see half as much area of ice in the arctic. 00:11:05.868 --> 00:11:11.470 We've taken one of the largest physical features on earth and we have broken it. 00:11:14.884 --> 00:11:16.740 Shall we work through the numbers? 00:11:17.019 --> 00:11:19.288 There are three, and they're easy. 00:11:19.619 --> 00:11:21.328 The first one's 2 degrees. 00:11:21.328 --> 00:11:26.757 That's how much the world has said it would be safe to let the planet warm. 00:11:26.757 --> 00:11:30.713 In political terms, it's the only thing that anybody's agreed to. 00:11:30.713 --> 00:11:34.049 Some of you may remember that climate summit in Copenhagen. 00:11:34.049 --> 00:11:40.094 There was only one number in the final two page voluntary accord that people signed. 00:11:40.094 --> 00:11:44.112 Only one number in it: 2 degrees. 00:11:45.267 --> 00:11:49.631 Every signatory pledged to make sure the temperature wouldn't rise about that. 00:11:49.631 --> 00:11:55.293 The EU, Japan, Russia, China, countries that make their money selling oil like the United Arab Emirates, 00:11:55.293 --> 00:11:58.880 the most conservative, recalcitrant, reluctant countries on earth. 00:11:58.880 --> 00:12:00.243 Even the United States. 00:12:01.366 --> 00:12:07.223 If the world officially believes anything about climate changes it's that 2 degrees is too much. 00:12:09.835 --> 00:12:14.353 Second number that scientists have calculated is 00:12:14.353 --> 00:12:20.612 how much carbon we can pour into the atmosphere and have a reasonable chance of staying below two degrees. 00:12:20.612 --> 00:12:24.558 They say about 565 more gigatons. 00:12:24.558 --> 00:12:26.894 A gigaton is a billion tons. 00:12:26.894 --> 00:12:32.203 That's not a perfect chance, that's worse odds than Russian roulette, you know. 00:12:33.983 --> 00:12:38.837 Sounds like is should - it is a lot, 565 billions tons of CO2. 00:12:38.837 --> 00:12:43.704 The problem is we pour 30 billion tons a year now and it goes up 3% a year. 00:12:43.704 --> 00:12:47.755 Do the math and it's about 15 years before go past that threshold. 00:12:47.755 --> 00:12:50.139 So that's sobering news. 00:12:51.375 --> 00:12:54.840 But the scary number is the third number. 00:12:54.840 --> 00:12:57.442 The third number was the important one and the new one 00:12:57.442 --> 00:13:01.900 and it came from a team of financial analysts in the United Kingdom. 00:13:01.900 --> 00:13:07.811 And what they did was sit down with all the annual reports and SEC filings and things 00:13:07.823 --> 00:13:15.546 to figure out how much carbon the world's fossil fuel industry, how much they had already in their reserves 00:13:15.546 --> 00:13:22.315 and that number turned out to be 2795 gigatons worth of carbon. 00:13:22.315 --> 00:13:29.125 Five times as much as the most conservative governments on earth think would be safe to pour into the atmosphere. 00:13:31.249 --> 00:13:32.100 It's not even close. 00:13:32.100 --> 00:13:35.418 I mean, it's five times more. 00:13:35.418 --> 00:13:42.038 Once you know that number, then you understand the essence of this problem. 00:13:48.389 --> 00:13:54.981 What the fossil fuel industry is doing is locking us into a future that we can't survive, that humanity cannot survive. 00:13:54.981 --> 00:13:58.373 And we know this because just at the end of 2012 00:13:58.373 --> 00:14:02.712 we heard this from three different conservative sources simultaneously: 00:14:02.712 --> 00:14:08.704 The World Bank, The International Energy Agency, Price Waterhouse Cooper, hardly a hippy outfit. 00:14:08.704 --> 00:14:14.598 All told us that if we do nothing but more of the same, if we dig up those reserves, 00:14:14.598 --> 00:14:18.988 we are headed toward 4-6 degrees warming celsius. 00:14:20.157 --> 00:14:28.390 These numbers show, and I want to be absolutely clear here, these companies are a rogue force, they're outlaws. 00:14:28.390 --> 00:14:34.146 They're not outlaws against the laws of the state. They get to write those for the most part. 00:14:34.146 --> 00:14:36.899 But they're outlaw against the laws of physics. 00:14:36.899 --> 00:14:41.313 If they carry out their business plan, the planet tanks. 00:14:43.236 --> 00:14:46.630 We have all the engineers and entrepreneurs we need. 00:14:46.630 --> 00:14:55.557 The thing that's hold us back above all else is the simple fact that the fossil fuel industry cheats. 00:14:55.557 --> 00:15:00.775 Alone among industries, they're allowed to pour out their waste for free. 00:15:00.775 --> 00:15:04.413 Nobody should be able to pollute for free. 00:15:04.413 --> 00:15:10.663 You can't, I can't. We can't walk out of here and go litter for free. If you do, you get a fine. 00:15:10.663 --> 00:15:13.994 If you run a small business, you can't just dump the garbage in the road, 00:15:13.994 --> 00:15:16.868 you've got to pay to have it hauled away or you get a fine. 00:15:16.868 --> 00:15:25.079 The only people who can pollute for free are these megapolluters when it comes to carbon: big oil, big coal. 00:15:25.079 --> 00:15:30.091 If you get a $25 fine for littering, you're going to pay $25 more 00:15:30.091 --> 00:15:37.731 than all of the industrial polluters have ever paid in 150 years for the carbon they've been dumping. 00:15:37.731 --> 00:15:40.137 That's how whack this whole thing is. 00:15:40.137 --> 00:15:42.718 It's almost how we define civilization. 00:15:42.718 --> 00:15:46.607 You pick up after yourself unless you're the fossil fuel industry. 00:15:46.607 --> 00:15:50.154 Then you pour that carbon into the atmosphere for free 00:15:50.154 --> 00:15:56.659 and that is the advantage that keeps us from getting renewable energy at the pace that we need. 00:15:56.659 --> 00:15:59.884 We should internalize that externality. 00:15:59.884 --> 00:16:07.167 The only reason we haven't is because it would impair somewhat the record profitability of the fossil fuel industry 00:16:07.167 --> 00:16:11.034 and so they have battled at every turn to keep it from happening. 00:16:11.034 --> 00:16:13.632 These are rogue companies now. 00:16:13.632 --> 00:16:17.469 Once upon a time, they performed a useful social function. 00:16:17.684 --> 00:16:25.155 For a long time, the US's engine was fossil fuels like oil and coal to power trains, to power cars, to power industry. 00:16:25.155 --> 00:16:28.102 In the mid 1900's we realized there were consequences. 00:16:28.102 --> 00:16:32.171 If you look at industries like coal now, we just did a report with Harvard Medical School 00:16:32.171 --> 00:16:35.531 that showed that if they actually paid for what they're doing to us, 00:16:35.531 --> 00:16:42.705 what we're paying indirectly for that electricity, coal would cost anywhere from 3 to far more times their current cost. 00:16:42.705 --> 00:16:48.633 They would be out of business and that is just, financially and morally, bankrupt. 00:16:48.633 --> 00:16:55.807 When a utility burns coal, it is the cheapest source of fuel, but they're not paying the full price. 00:16:55.807 --> 00:17:02.379 The externalities, the additional costs to society, to human health, to the environment, 00:17:02.379 --> 00:17:06.645 are not factored in as a cost of doing business. 00:17:06.645 --> 00:17:10.731 We subsidize the fossil fuel industries. 00:17:10.855 --> 00:17:14.795 We are paying them to continue to keep polluting and this means all kinds of things: 00:17:14.795 --> 00:17:23.077 it's tax breaks, it's loans, it's the fact that armies protect their pipelines and protect their trade routes. 00:17:23.077 --> 00:17:31.385 You're helping them stay on top and preventing their competitors like renewable fuels from competing. 00:17:31.385 --> 00:17:33.562 What we need is a level playing field. 00:17:33.562 --> 00:17:39.865 We could be using that public money, tax-payer money, to make the shift to green energy. 00:17:41.177 --> 00:17:44.581 Occasionally they will pretend to be seeing the light. 00:17:44.581 --> 00:17:53.356 Ten years ago, BP announced that their initials now stand for Beyond Petroleum and they got a new logo 00:17:53.356 --> 00:18:02.582 and put some solar panels on some gas stations and they invested a tiny bit of money, a pittance in solar and wind research. 00:18:02.582 --> 00:18:06.789 Even that proved too much, three years ago they sold off those divisions 00:18:06.789 --> 00:18:11.252 and said that from now on they were going to concentrate on their core business. 00:18:11.252 --> 00:18:15.134 Which turned out to be basically wrecking the Gulf of Mexico. 00:18:16.255 --> 00:18:19.841 Why are they so fixated on hydrocarbons? 00:18:19.841 --> 00:18:23.678 Because these are the most profitable enterprises in human history. 00:18:23.678 --> 00:18:29.645 The top five oil companies last year made 137 billion dollars. 00:18:29.645 --> 00:18:33.872 That's 375 million dollars every day. 00:18:33.872 --> 00:18:37.136 That's a lot of money. 00:18:37.136 --> 00:18:42.117 They got 6.6 million dollars in federal tax breaks daily. 00:18:42.117 --> 00:18:46.916 They spent $440,000 a day lobbying congress. 00:18:46.916 --> 00:18:51.959 Rex Tillerson, the head of Exxon, made $100,000 a day. 00:18:52.706 --> 00:18:56.338 Which, by the way, one of my favorite talking points 00:18:56.338 --> 00:19:02.928 is that climate scientists make up their findings because they're in it for the grant money, okay. 00:19:07.697 --> 00:19:11.187 The only problem that these companies have now 00:19:11.187 --> 00:19:17.066 is that the scientists are watching in real time while they pull off this heist and it's getting harder to deny. 00:19:17.066 --> 00:19:20.527 In fact, they're being to kind of admit what's going on. 00:19:20.527 --> 00:19:27.410 Last summer, for the very first time, the CEO of Exxon, Mr. Tillerson gave a speech in which he said, yes, it's true. 00:19:27.410 --> 00:19:28.953 Global warming exists. 00:19:28.953 --> 00:19:36.749 Clearly there's gonna be an impact so I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions is going to have an impact. 00:19:36.749 --> 00:19:38.506 It'll have a warming impact. 00:19:38.506 --> 00:19:42.303 But since the only way to stop that would be to take a hit to the company's profitability, 00:19:42.303 --> 00:19:44.849 he immediately tried to change the subject. 00:19:44.849 --> 00:19:48.097 It's an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions. 00:19:48.097 --> 00:19:51.267 Really? What kind of engineering solutions were you thinking? 00:19:51.267 --> 00:19:56.020 Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around, we'll adapt to that. 00:19:56.020 --> 00:19:59.583 Look, I mean all respect, but that's crazy talk. 00:19:59.583 --> 00:20:03.653 We can't move crop production areas around, okay. 00:20:03.653 --> 00:20:08.284 Crop production areas are what people in Vermont refer to as farms, okay. 00:20:08.468 --> 00:20:13.286 We already have farms every where that there is decent soil on earth. 00:20:13.286 --> 00:20:17.003 It is true that Exxon has done all it can to melt the tundra, 00:20:17.003 --> 00:20:22.174 but that does not mean that you can just move Iowa up there and start over again. 00:20:22.174 --> 00:20:24.092 There is no soil. 00:20:24.757 --> 00:20:28.975 If fossil fuel companies want to change, here's how we'd know they're serious: 00:20:28.975 --> 00:20:33.684 One, they'd need to stop lobbying in Washington. 00:20:33.684 --> 00:20:38.814 Two, they'd need to stop exploring for new hydrocarbons. 00:20:38.814 --> 00:20:44.069 The first rule of holes is that when you are in one, stop digging, okay. 00:20:44.069 --> 00:20:48.118 And the third thing they'd need to do is go to work with the rest of us 00:20:48.118 --> 00:20:55.582 to figure out the plan where they turn themselves into energy companies, not fossil fuel companies 00:20:55.582 --> 00:21:00.753 and figure out with the rest of us how to keep 80% of those reserves underground. 00:21:02.536 --> 00:21:06.469 The thing that really does make this almost pathological 00:21:06.469 --> 00:21:12.064 is the fact that when we already have almost five times as much carbon as we can possibly burn, 00:21:12.064 --> 00:21:17.937 I mean Exxon alone: 100 million dollars a day exploring for new hydrocarbons. 00:21:17.937 --> 00:21:23.799 By this point we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. I mean we're in tar sands, we're doing shale oil, 00:21:23.829 --> 00:21:28.863 we're doing fracking, we're doing mountain top removal, we're doing deep sea drilling, 00:21:28.863 --> 00:21:34.114 we're taking apart the earth to look for the last bits of gas and oil and coal. 00:21:49.633 --> 00:21:56.848 I find that when I get depressed, the best antidote by far is action and I think that that's true for most people. 00:21:56.848 --> 00:22:01.227 The problem with climate change is that it seems too big for any of us ourselves to take on. 00:22:01.227 --> 00:22:02.977 And ideed it is. 00:22:02.977 --> 00:22:09.278 It's only when we're working with other people, as many other people as possible, that we have any hope. 00:22:09.278 --> 00:22:14.383 So that's why I spend my time trying to build movements. I think it's the only chance we've got. 00:22:14.383 --> 00:22:22.355 Anybody can get involved. There's always stuff to be done and more of it all the time. That's what movements look like. 00:22:23.167 --> 00:22:30.967 We started 350.org in 2008 and when I say we I mean me and seven undergraduates at Middlebury College. 00:22:30.967 --> 00:22:35.851 We had the deep desire to try and do some global organizing 00:22:35.851 --> 00:22:40.237 about the first really global problem this planet's ever faced. 00:22:40.237 --> 00:22:42.481 And we spread out around the planet 00:22:42.481 --> 00:22:48.069 and for the next year or so we found people all over this earth who wanted to work with us. 00:22:48.069 --> 00:22:54.657 We asked them all to take one day and this was our first big day of action was in the fall of 2009. 00:22:54.657 --> 00:22:57.370 We said, Will you all join us for one day? 00:22:57.370 --> 00:23:01.094 Will you do something on that day to take this most important number, 350, 00:23:01.094 --> 00:23:05.129 and drive it into the information bloodstream of the planet? 00:23:05.129 --> 00:23:10.672 For the next 48 hours, pictures just poured in many a minute. 00:23:10.672 --> 00:23:16.074 Before it was over, there'd been 5200 demonstrations in 181 countries. 00:23:16.074 --> 00:23:20.853 CNN called it the most widespread day of political activity in the planet's history. 00:23:20.853 --> 00:23:24.481 Cities across the globe have gathered today to rally for solutions to climate change. 00:23:27.496 --> 00:23:29.944 Locations around the globe. 00:23:29.944 --> 00:23:34.336 Hundreds of environment campaigners gathered in Edinborgh today. 00:23:38.701 --> 00:23:42.209 So we've gone on since then to do more of these big days of action. 00:23:42.209 --> 00:23:44.808 We work in every country but North Korea. 00:23:44.808 --> 00:23:47.891 We have had about 20,000 rallies or so. 00:23:47.891 --> 00:23:50.141 And we've gone on to do more direct things: 00:23:50.141 --> 00:23:53.010 spearhead the fight against the Keystone Pipeline, 00:23:53.010 --> 00:23:56.887 organize the largest civil disobedience action in thirty years. 00:23:56.887 --> 00:23:59.967 Now the high stakes battle over whether the Obama administration 00:23:59.967 --> 00:24:03.813 should approve a major oil pipeline bisecting the US. 00:24:03.813 --> 00:24:08.324 It would transfer tar sands from Alberta, Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico. 00:24:08.324 --> 00:24:11.776 The type of oil the pipeline would carry is far more toxic. 00:24:11.776 --> 00:24:14.446 Among the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. 00:24:14.446 --> 00:24:17.618 This pipeline has proven to be very controversial. 00:24:17.618 --> 00:24:23.249 To the federal government to decide whether or not to give Keystone XL the green light. 00:24:23.496 --> 00:24:32.178 Tar sands is destructive in and of itself but it's also symbolic of a way of developing, 00:24:32.178 --> 00:24:35.966 a way of growing our economy that just can't be sustained. 00:24:36.647 --> 00:24:42.059 Right now a company called TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline 00:24:42.059 --> 00:24:48.425 to speed more oil from Cushing to state-of-the-art refineries down in the Gulf Coast 00:24:48.425 --> 00:24:52.444 and today I'm directing my administration to cut through the red tape, 00:24:52.444 --> 00:24:56.758 break through the bureaucratic hurdles and make this project a priority. 00:25:01.957 --> 00:25:07.668 August was the beginning of the people's veto of this whole proposal. 00:25:07.668 --> 00:25:15.776 We will never give up until the very idea of Keystone XL is dead and buried. 00:25:16.329 --> 00:25:20.178 Tar sands are the turning point in our fossil fuel addiction. 00:25:20.178 --> 00:25:28.245 The fundamental fact is that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, they will continue to be used. 00:25:28.245 --> 00:25:33.691 The solution is to begin to put a price on carbon emissions. 00:25:33.691 --> 00:25:40.448 We the American people should not have to sacrifice our land and water to meet TransCanada's bottom line. 00:25:40.448 --> 00:25:46.871 We stand here right now because we are at our lunch counter moment for the twenty-first century. 00:25:46.871 --> 00:25:50.001 President Obama, do the right thing. 00:25:50.001 --> 00:25:55.895 We are at a tipping point in America's history for this environmental movement. 00:25:55.895 --> 00:26:01.376 If you are going to be risking arrest, you're going to be lining up on this sidewalk. 00:26:01.842 --> 00:26:06.014 When I saw the acts of civil disobedience in front of the White House, 00:26:06.014 --> 00:26:10.411 people saying I will not let this Keystone pipeline be built, 00:26:10.411 --> 00:26:15.747 I won't let us be committed to an energy plan based on fossil fuels. 00:26:15.747 --> 00:26:18.662 You know the people who got arrested in front of the White House, 00:26:18.662 --> 00:26:22.577 those were not all people who were all self-identified as environmentalists. 00:26:22.577 --> 00:26:28.748 Those were farmers and ranchers, those were people from indigenous communities, those were business leaders, 00:26:28.748 --> 00:26:31.624 those were grandparents and moms and dads. 00:26:31.624 --> 00:26:36.547 We're really starting to see an expansion of the group of people that are fighting this fight, 00:26:36.547 --> 00:26:39.725 but we have a lot further to go on that. 00:26:40.508 --> 00:26:43.898 I've been forced to do things I didn't imagine I'd ever do: 00:26:43.898 --> 00:26:48.268 stand up on a stage in front of thousand of people, go to jail. 00:26:48.268 --> 00:26:54.644 We're probably not going to be able to stop them all one pipeline, one mine at a time. 00:26:54.644 --> 00:26:58.354 We're also going to have to play, you know, offense. 00:27:00.027 --> 00:27:05.333 We think one thing the fossil fuel industry cares about is money so that's what we're going to go after. 00:27:05.333 --> 00:27:09.829 You want to take away our planet and our future? We're going to try and take away your money. 00:27:09.829 --> 00:27:12.794 We're going to try and tarnish your brand. 00:27:12.794 --> 00:27:20.213 This industry has behaved so recklessly that they should lose their social license, their veneer of respectability. 00:27:23.735 --> 00:27:28.599 We need these guys to be understood as those outlaws against the laws of physics. 00:27:28.599 --> 00:27:33.935 We need to take away some of their power and there's a lot of ways we're going to do it. 00:27:33.935 --> 00:27:37.682 One tool, the first tool, is divestment. 00:27:37.682 --> 00:27:45.324 We're going to ask or demand that institutions like colleges or churches sell their stock in these companies. 00:27:45.324 --> 00:27:47.329 The logic could not be simpler: 00:27:47.329 --> 00:27:52.867 If it's wrong to wreck the climate, it's wrong to profit from that wreckage. 00:27:52.867 --> 00:27:57.668 That argument has worked in a big way exactly once in US history. 00:27:57.668 --> 00:28:01.505 There has been scattered violent incidence in the Athlone mixed race neighborhood. 00:28:01.505 --> 00:28:04.364 Authorities returned fire without warning. 00:28:04.364 --> 00:28:11.139 Organized, vocal and committed students urge the university to divest itself of all investments in South Africa. 00:28:11.139 --> 00:28:15.228 That's what happened during the fight against South African Apartheid. 00:28:15.228 --> 00:28:23.194 At 155 colleges and universities, people convinced their boards of trustees to sell their stock. 00:28:23.194 --> 00:28:27.849 And when Nelson Mandela got out of prison, one of his first trips was to the US 00:28:27.849 --> 00:28:34.599 and he didn't go first to the White House, he went to Berkley to say thank you to the University of California students 00:28:34.599 --> 00:28:42.240 who had forced the sale of 3 billion dollars worth of Apartheid tainted stock. 00:28:44.750 --> 00:28:45.799 Here's what we demand: 00:28:45.799 --> 00:28:49.471 One, no new investments in fossil fuel companies. 00:28:49.471 --> 00:28:57.673 Two, a firm pledge over the next five years that they will wind down their current positions. 00:28:57.750 --> 00:29:03.443 It's not unreasonable. It's hard but it's not unreasonable. 00:29:03.443 --> 00:29:05.319 I'll give you a piece of news: 00:29:05.319 --> 00:29:11.126 The first college in the country to divest all its stock from fossil fuel companies 00:29:11.126 --> 00:29:16.751 was a college in Maine called Unity College with a 13 million dollar endowment. 00:29:16.751 --> 00:29:22.230 And none of that 13 million dollars at this point is in fossil fuels any place. 00:29:24.797 --> 00:29:28.216 Divestment really in one sense was a no brainer for us. 00:29:28.216 --> 00:29:34.225 When you look at other institutions and their struggle with whether or not to divest, 00:29:34.225 --> 00:29:38.855 it really boils down to one simple thing: willingness. 00:29:38.855 --> 00:29:43.609 The mayor in Seattle, he said, I spent the afternoon with my treasurer 00:29:43.609 --> 00:29:48.801 and we're figuring out how we're going to get the city's funds out of fossil fuel companies. 00:29:51.831 --> 00:29:55.205 Welcome everyone to our event tonight: Divesting from Fossil Fuels, 00:29:55.205 --> 00:30:00.552 a conversation with students from Barnard, Columbia, the New School, NYU and Hunter College. 00:30:00.552 --> 00:30:02.960 Students are asking for divestment. 00:30:02.960 --> 00:30:08.343 The fact that we have over 250 movements on different campusus around the country 00:30:08.343 --> 00:30:13.433 means that we have severely challenged that veneer of social respectability. 00:30:14.063 --> 00:30:19.146 They understand, like the religious denominations and cities that are also doing this, 00:30:19.146 --> 00:30:23.317 they understand what those numbers mean. 00:30:23.317 --> 00:30:26.987 It's inconsistent with the reason these institutions exist 00:30:26.987 --> 00:30:33.368 for them to continue to invest in something that is dedicated to the destruction of civilization. 00:30:33.368 --> 00:30:39.990 We're asking the administration at NYU to divest the university endowment from the fossil fuel industry. 00:30:39.990 --> 00:30:46.539 We can re-invest in our antiquated infrastructure and make our buildings more energy efficient. 00:30:46.539 --> 00:30:50.393 People are always looking for this silver bullet, instead its the silver buckshot. 00:30:50.393 --> 00:30:53.305 How this campaign fits into the greater scheme of things 00:30:53.305 --> 00:30:58.697 is that this is just one of those ways in which we can take action. 00:30:58.697 --> 00:31:02.096 These are the kind of solutions that the university should be leading on 00:31:02.096 --> 00:31:06.476 and they should be saying, we're going to take the money that's piled up in our endowment 00:31:06.476 --> 00:31:08.964 that right now is either doing nothing or doing harm 00:31:08.964 --> 00:31:13.881 and we're going to take that money away from the problem makers and give it to the problem solvers. 00:31:13.881 --> 00:31:17.538 Once you know what's evil, now if you're ignorant you get a pass, 00:31:17.538 --> 00:31:24.628 but once you know what's evil, you have a moral responsibility to withdraw your energy from it. 00:31:24.628 --> 00:31:28.924 We are participating in the destruction of our own world even if we don't want to 00:31:28.924 --> 00:31:37.506 because the fossil fuel industry is so intertwined in so many aspects in American life. 00:31:37.506 --> 00:31:41.844 They rely on our cooperation to continue what they're doing. But what if we said no? 00:31:41.844 --> 00:31:47.528 The divestment work is a piece of that and what it does is it has the ambition 00:31:47.528 --> 00:31:54.950 of transforming hundreds, thousands of institutions in the US to be allies rather than adversaries. 00:31:54.950 --> 00:31:58.319 We, as everyday people, have so much power. 00:31:58.319 --> 00:32:05.131 If you are a member of a church, you have the ability to work with your fellow congregants 00:32:05.131 --> 00:32:09.037 to make sure your church is not investing in fossil fuel companies. 00:32:09.037 --> 00:32:15.002 If you are a student on a college campus, not only do you have the opportunity, I think you have the responsibility 00:32:15.002 --> 00:32:19.756 to work with your fellow students to make sure that your institution of higher learning 00:32:19.756 --> 00:32:25.723 is not investing its endowment in the companies that are destroying your future and this planet. 00:32:25.723 --> 00:32:30.600 We have to send a message, a very clear message, to big oil, big energy 00:32:30.600 --> 00:32:38.325 that we are going to hold them liable and we are going to divest if they won't themselves being to change. 00:32:40.355 --> 00:32:45.330 There is nothing, and I mean nothing, radical in what we are talking about here. 00:32:45.330 --> 00:32:47.878 All we're asking for when we talk about climate change 00:32:47.878 --> 00:32:52.715 is a planet that works the way that it did for the last 10,000 years, 00:32:52.715 --> 00:32:55.835 a planet that works the way the one we were born onto works. 00:32:55.835 --> 00:33:01.180 That's not a radical demand. That's, if you think about it, a conservative demand. 00:33:01.180 --> 00:33:04.455 Radicals work at oil companies. 00:33:04.455 --> 00:33:07.648 If you wake up in the morning to make your $100,000 a day, 00:33:07.648 --> 00:33:11.485 you're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere, 00:33:11.485 --> 00:33:15.210 then you're engaged in a more radical act than anyone who ever came before you. 00:33:15.210 --> 00:33:20.945 And our job is to figure out how to check that radicalism, how to bring it to heel, 00:33:20.945 --> 00:33:27.744 how to keep it from overwhelming everything good on this planet. 00:33:28.263 --> 00:33:32.247 And here's the good news, since I've been giving you lots of bad news, here's the good news: 00:33:32.247 --> 00:33:34.999 There's plenty we can do. 00:33:34.999 --> 00:33:37.648 The long-term solution to climate change is very clear. 00:33:37.648 --> 00:33:41.899 We need to make the leap to renewable energy and we need to do it quickly, which will be hard. 00:33:41.899 --> 00:33:46.407 It will be the hardest thing we've done since gearing up to fight World War II or something 00:33:46.407 --> 00:33:49.940 but it's by no means impossible. 00:33:49.940 --> 00:33:53.483 When I feel a little overwhelmed with all the things we need to do, 00:33:53.483 --> 00:33:56.991 I go back and re-read the economic history of World War II. 00:33:56.991 --> 00:33:58.363 It was just a matter of months, you know, 00:33:58.363 --> 00:34:03.453 from the US automobile industry producing cars to tanks and planes and ships. 00:34:03.453 --> 00:34:08.156 It didn't take decades to restructure the US industrial economy. It didn't take years. 00:34:08.156 --> 00:34:10.492 It was done in a matter of months. 00:34:10.492 --> 00:34:11.321 And if we could do that now 00:34:11.321 --> 00:34:16.321 then certainly we can restructure the world energy economy over the next decade. 00:34:16.321 --> 00:34:18.585 And it's going to require some hard choices. 00:34:18.585 --> 00:34:24.480 It's going to require a real change in how we get our energy and how we move around. 00:34:24.480 --> 00:34:26.092 But the good news is that we have the solutions. 00:34:26.092 --> 00:34:28.156 You know, we have the ways. 00:34:28.156 --> 00:34:33.691 We know what we need to do to get to a world where we're not buring as many fossil fuels. 00:34:33.691 --> 00:34:38.446 Why would we build a thousand mile pipeline taking almost a million barrels of oil 00:34:38.446 --> 00:34:41.701 from the most carbon intensive fuel source on the planet 00:34:41.701 --> 00:34:45.193 when wind energy is a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot cleaner? 00:34:45.193 --> 00:34:50.656 Why would be drill in the arctic when we know that solar power can meet our energy needs across the country? 00:34:50.656 --> 00:34:54.319 Why would be frack our countrysides and our watersheds 00:34:54.319 --> 00:34:58.842 when we know that energy efficiency would save more energy than natural gas can provide? 00:34:58.842 --> 00:35:02.929 I think that we're coming to that point now where extreme energy sources are so bad 00:35:02.929 --> 00:35:07.600 that the questions and these challenges are going to become easier and easier. 00:35:07.600 --> 00:35:11.930 Our whole economy is going to be dependent on how we respond to this crisis. 00:35:11.930 --> 00:35:18.645 Competition between countries will be between those who will be advanced in developing the technology 00:35:18.645 --> 00:35:25.444 and who will be selling it to others or those who stay back and don't seize the opportunity. 00:35:25.444 --> 00:35:29.531 We should never underestimate our ingenuity and resolve. 00:35:29.531 --> 00:35:36.080 If those people that say we cannot do anything about this do not know who we are, do not know what we can do. 00:35:36.080 --> 00:35:40.833 I think this is the moment where we dig deep and say okay we are ready. 00:35:40.833 --> 00:35:45.922 The solutions are in front of us and no longer in good conscience can any of us, 00:35:45.922 --> 00:35:51.313 everyday citizens, elected officials, religious leaders, stand idly by. 00:35:51.313 --> 00:35:54.606 All the big problems that we have, they all have very local solutions 00:35:54.606 --> 00:35:59.610 and finding what those solutions are actually results in a whole bunch of different benefits 00:35:59.610 --> 00:36:03.273 from an environmental standpoint, economic standpoint and social aspect. 00:36:08.564 --> 00:36:14.325 We are in a situation where we're going to have an ecologically sustainable economy for everybody 00:36:14.325 --> 00:36:16.886 or ultimately we won't have one for anybody. 00:36:16.886 --> 00:36:23.292 It's just the smart thing to do to bet on the future and to being to invest in the future. 00:36:23.292 --> 00:36:30.306 The past has a lobby and it's a well-paid lobby and it comes right out of big oil and big coal. 00:36:30.306 --> 00:36:34.333 The future doesn't have a lobby until now. 00:36:35.471 --> 00:36:40.114 We have to be as sophisticated as the system we're trying to change. 00:36:40.852 --> 00:36:46.617 The legislation that Senator Boxer and I are introducing with the support of the leading environmental organizations 00:36:46.617 --> 00:36:49.535 actually addresses the crisis. 00:36:49.535 --> 00:36:53.739 A major focus is a price on carbon and methane emissions. 00:36:53.739 --> 00:37:00.329 I think a lot of people wondered, maybe still wonder, whether our political system is up to this task. 00:37:02.498 --> 00:37:05.679 In the largest sense, I don't know if we can win this fight. 00:37:05.679 --> 00:37:08.470 There are scientists who think we've waited too long to get started. 00:37:08.470 --> 00:37:11.305 Clearly the power on the other side is enormous. 00:37:11.305 --> 00:37:13.425 Everyone once in awhile I get discouraged. 00:37:13.425 --> 00:37:16.181 There was TV reporter who was sort of grilling me who said, 00:37:16.181 --> 00:37:20.017 Well this just seems impossible. You're up against the richest industry on earth. 00:37:20.017 --> 00:37:23.812 This just seems like one of these David and Goliath stories. What chance do you have? 00:37:23.812 --> 00:37:25.605 And I was thinking, oh, you're right, this is terrible. 00:37:25.605 --> 00:37:30.818 But then I thought, and since we're in church, maybe this is apropos, you know, 00:37:30.818 --> 00:37:37.555 I thought, I know how that David and Goliath story comes out. David wins against the odds, okay. 00:37:37.555 --> 00:37:42.254 I don't know if we're going to win, but we have a real chance. 00:37:43.063 --> 00:37:46.210 We know that civil disobedience has helped to achieve great things. 00:37:46.210 --> 00:37:49.295 It's helped secure for women the right to vote. 00:37:49.295 --> 00:37:51.047 It's helped to end segregation. 00:37:51.047 --> 00:37:54.599 And so we know that we can't win on climate change if we continue to dither, 00:37:54.599 --> 00:37:57.145 if we continue to talk about it but not do anything. 00:37:57.145 --> 00:38:00.132 We have a moral catastrophe on our hands. 00:38:02.016 --> 00:38:07.523 We have to do this because our democracy has been subverted, our laws have been subverted. 00:38:07.523 --> 00:38:10.745 I say it's criminal. I say that not lightly. 00:38:10.745 --> 00:38:14.424 When you have no recourse in our democracy, legally or democratically, 00:38:14.424 --> 00:38:20.709 we not only have the right but we have the duty to break the law to show our discontent. 00:38:20.709 --> 00:38:29.668 As a nation, we can come together. This is not about Republican or Democrat, it's about humanity. 00:38:29.668 --> 00:38:37.560 We're connected to each other and that organizing has got to be the basis for this kind of larger fight. 00:38:39.652 --> 00:38:45.868 We're very glad to be here, some of us are especially glad to be here because we're glad to be out of jail 00:38:45.868 --> 00:38:51.357 where we spent much of yesterday in this demonstration about the Keystone pipeline 00:38:51.357 --> 00:38:56.947 and that's, of course, of the reasons Americans are descending on this city this week. 00:38:56.947 --> 00:38:58.789 Thousands of people marched past the White House 00:38:58.789 --> 00:39:03.669 and urged President Obama to take strong measures to combat climate change. 00:39:03.669 --> 00:39:09.877 In the second high profile event organized in a week by groups including the Sierra Club and 350.org. 00:39:10.077 --> 00:39:17.716 I'm here because I have an obligation to my children, my ancestors, our future generations. 00:39:17.716 --> 00:39:24.286 If this pipeline goes through, it will be at the cost of human life. 00:39:24.286 --> 00:39:29.812 When disaster strikes, it's not going to know race, color or creed. 00:39:29.812 --> 00:39:38.437 The fossil fuel barons, their lawyers, their spindoctors are losing their grip on our countries psyche. 00:39:38.697 --> 00:39:43.078 We're not going to create the clean energy economy when one side beats the other, 00:39:43.078 --> 00:39:48.120 we're going to win when we all come together for solutions that work for all of us. 00:39:48.290 --> 00:39:53.544 And the good news is that in this country, when we finally decided that we're going to take action 00:39:53.544 --> 00:40:00.768 on a moral question at the question of who we are we tend to respond, when we respond, explosively. 00:40:03.889 --> 00:40:08.096 That is the epic struggle of this century and we're going to meet it. 00:40:08.096 --> 00:40:10.178 If we don't we won't have a twenty-second century. 00:40:10.178 --> 00:40:14.690 Whenever a great generation stands up, it stands up based on idealism. 00:40:14.690 --> 00:40:17.693 It stands up based on moral courage and that's what's happening now. 00:40:17.693 --> 00:40:28.079 This is the last minute of the last quarter of the biggest most important game humanity have ever played. 00:40:28.079 --> 00:40:34.709 The reality of our movement is this: if we fail, the consequences are dire. 00:40:34.709 --> 00:40:38.436 None of you could be in a more important place than you are right now. 00:40:38.436 --> 00:40:42.385 Part of this battle against the very deepest problems we've ever faced, 00:40:42.385 --> 00:40:45.512 very few people on earth ever get to say, 00:40:45.512 --> 00:40:50.642 "I'm doing the most important thing I can be doing any place on the planet at this moment in time" 00:40:50.642 --> 00:40:56.388 but you guys get to say that because you are on the front lines of this all-important battle. 00:40:57.566 --> 00:41:00.569 I think we can win this fight. 00:41:00.569 --> 00:41:07.253 I think we can win it if we act as a community, if we do not do anything that would injure that community 00:41:07.253 --> 00:41:14.454 but instead build and knit that community together in a way that allows it to take powerful action. 00:41:18.427 --> 00:41:20.889 We know the end of the story. 00:41:20.889 --> 00:41:26.602 Unless we rewrite the script, it's very clear how it ends with a planet that just heats out of control. 00:41:27.227 --> 00:41:30.874 So that's our job: to rewrite the story. 00:41:31.200 --> 00:41:40.089 All I ever wanted to see was a movement of people to stop climate change and now I've seen it. 00:41:42.247 --> 00:41:49.842 Today at the biggest climate rally by far, by far, by far in US history, 00:41:49.842 --> 00:41:54.267 today I know we're going to fight the battle, 00:41:54.267 --> 00:42:01.971 the most faithful battle in human history is finally joined and we will fight it together.