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All right, all right. Listen up. listen up.

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Very few people can ever say that they are in the single most important place they could possibly be

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doing the single most important thing they could possibly be doing.

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That’s you, here, now.

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You are the movement that we need if we are going to win in the few years that we have.

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You have the skills now. You are making the connections. And there is no one else. It is you.

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That is a great honor and that is a terrible burden. There is no one else.

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The science is the easy part in this, grim, but easy. 2010 was the warmest year on record. And it was warm.

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We were on the phone one day with our 350 crew in Pakistan and one of them said, “It’s hot out here today,”

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and I was surprised to hear him say it because it’s usually hot in Pakistan during the summer.

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He said, no it’s really hot . We just set the new, all time Asia temperature record, 129 degrees [53.9 °C].

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That kind of heat melts the arctic. That kind of heat causes drought so deep across Russia that the Kremlin stops all grain exports.

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That kind of heat causes the flooding that still has 4 million people across Pakistan homeless tonight.

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It’s tough, it’s grim, but the good news at least is that it’s clear, the science.

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We have a number: 350 parts per million. 350, the most important number on earth.

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As the NASA team put it in January 2008, “any value in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million

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is not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and which life on earth is adapted.”

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Getting back to 350 pars per million will be very very tough, the toughest thing human beings have ever done,

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but there is no use complaining about it, it’s just physics and chemistry.

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That’s what we have to do.

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But if the scientific method has worked splendidly to outline our dilemma,

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that’s how badly the political method has worked to solve it.

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Think about our own country, historically the biggest source of carbon emissions.

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Last summer, the Senate refused to even take a vote on the tepid, moderate, tame climate bill that was before it.

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Last week, the House voted 248 to 174 to pass a resolution saying global warming wasn’t real.

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It was one of the most embarrassing votes that Congress has ever taken.

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They believe that because they can amend the tax laws they can amend the laws of nature too, but they can’t.

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I’m awful glad a few of you went up to the visitors gallery to talk some sense to them last week.

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Even the White House. Two weeks ago, the interior secretary, who spoke here two years ago, Ken Salazar,

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signed a piece of paper opening 750 million tonnes of coal under federal land in Wyoming to mining.

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That’s like opening 300 new coal fired power plants and running them for a year. That’s a disgrace.

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But you know what. We understand the physics and chemistry of political power.

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In this case, it’s not carbon dioxide that rules the day: it’s money.

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Many of you are in the District of Columbia for the first time and it looks clean and it looks sparkling.

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No, this city is as polluted as Beijing. But instead of coal smoke it’s polluted by money.

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Money warps our political life, it obscures our vision, but just like with physics in chemistry there is no use whining.

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We know now what we need to do and the first thing we need to do is build a movement.

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We will never have as much money as the oil companies so we need a different currency to work in,

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we need bodies, we need creativity, we need spirit.

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350.org has been like a beta-test for that movement. It began with youth here at Power Shift four years ago.

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It’s now spread around the planet. In the last two years, there have been 15,000 demonstrations in 189 nations.

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CNN called it the most widespread political activity in the planet’s history. But it needs to get bigger still.

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On the first Earth Day in 1970 there where 20 million Americans in the street, one in ten Americans.

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That’s the kind of size we need.

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And so, on September 24 we need your help. September 24 is the next big day of action.

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We’re calling it Moving Planet and in those 189 nations, people will be in motion.

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Much of it will be on bicycles, because the bicycles is one of the few tools that rich and poor both use.

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Who here knows how to ride a bike?

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All right, September 24, I cannot wait to see the pictures.

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We are not going to wait for the politicians to move, we’re going to create the future that we need ourselves.

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But that movement doesn’t just need to be bigger, it needs to be sharper too, more aggressive.

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You know what, at Copenhagen we got 117 nations to sign on to that 350 target.

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That was good, but they were the wrong 117 nations. They were the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

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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.

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That work, to deal with that money pollution, that work starts Monday at ten o’clock in Lafayette Square,

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across from the White House and next to a place called the US Chamber of Commerce.

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The Koch Brothers are high peaks of corruption, but the US Chamber of Commerce is the Everest of dirty money.

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It boasts on its web page that it is the biggest lobby in Washington.

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In fact, it spends more money lobbying than the next five lobbies combined.

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It spent more money on politics last year than the Republican National Committee and

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the Democratic National Committee combined and 94% of that went to climate deniers.

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We cannot stop their money, but we can strip them of their credibility. They claim to represent all American business,

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but they don’t. 55% of their funding came from 16 companies.

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They don’t have to say who those companies are, but it’s easy to tell when you watch what they do.

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They spend their time lobbying to make sure the planet heats up as fast it possibly can.

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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,

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humans could alter their behavior and their physiology to deal with the problem.

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I don’t even really know what that means, alter your physiology. Grow gills? I don’t know.

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But I can tell you this. I am too old to change my physiology and you all are too good looking.

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But I will adapt my behavior. Every day now I will roll out of bed and go to work fighting them.

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Hell, I will go to bed at night and try to dream up new ways to fight.

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We’re going to adapt our behavior all right. We’re going to adapt our behavior now to fight on every front.

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I’m sorry if that sounds aggressive, but there we are.

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Twenty-two years ago, I wrote the first book about climate change and I’ve gotten to watch it all,

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and I know that simply persuasion will not do.

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We need to fight. Now, we need to fight non-violently and with civil disobedience.

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You will hear from my friend Tim DeChristopher in a moment and more to come,

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but if you’re going to go that route, one thing you need to make sure that you manage to get across

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in your witness is that you are not the radicals in this fight.

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The radicals are the people who are fundamentally altering the composition of the atmosphere.

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That is the most radical thing people have ever done.

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We need to fight with art and with music, too. Not just the side with our brain that likes bar graphs and

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pie graphs, but with all our heart and all our soul.

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Tomorrow or tonight, you need to go down behind Hall B downstairs and help them build the art work for Monday morning.

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We need to fight with unity. We need to have a coherent voice.

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That’s why, last week we joined with our friends at 1Sky to build this bigger, stronger 350.org.

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We need to speak with one loud voice, because we are fighting for your future.

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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.

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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.

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And if we do that, then the world that we leave behind will be a ruined world.

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We fight not just for ourselves, we fight for the beauty of this place.

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For cool trout streams and deep spruce woods. For chilly fog rising off the Pacific and deep snow blanketing the mountains.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That’s truly admirable and it puts a real moral burden on us.

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Never let anyone tell you, that environmentalism is something that rich, white people do.

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Most of the people that we work with around the world are poor and black and brown and Asian and young,

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because that’s what most of the world is made up of, and they care about the future as anyone else.

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We have to fight, finally, without any guarantee that we are going to win.

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We have waited late to get started and our adversaries are strong and we do not know how this is going to come out.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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some of whom may be dead from climate change before this century is out.

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No guarantee that we will win, but from them a complete guarantee that we will fight with everything we have.

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It is always an honor for me to be in those rooms. It is the greatest honor for me to be with you tonight.

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No guarantee that we will win, but we will fight side by side, as long as we’ve got. Thank you all so much.