>> and so i believe it came -- fairly before or right after. and so right after this week i'm still going to japan. and i will be giving a lecture, yes. at the international house of japan.

>> this is the book "kamikaze diaries." who is this on the cover? >> this is a man who is a graduate of university of tokyo. and this is the photo the day before his death. and his brother, who is a professor, gave me -- >> his brother is still living. >> yes. we correspond. >> and was his kamikaze mission successful? >> no, no. none of them are. other than the first atck, kamikaze missions were all failures militarily. >> thank you for sharing a few minutes with us. >> thank you, thank you. >> in his book "earth, making a

life on a tough new planet," bill mckibben asks americans to make due with less. politics and prose bookstore is the host of this event. it's about an hour. >> i'm barbara mead. i'm one of the owners here at politics and prose. and this evening i want to welcome bill mckibben. [applause] >> bill is a scholar in residence at middle bury college. and he's cofounder of the online community 350.org. in case you don't know the number -- the name of the organization, 350 comes from the

fact that leading scientists have said that only 35 parts per million in the atmosphere is the most that any climate can tolerate. and if it goes over that, things are getting very unsafe. more than 20 years ago, in his book "the end of nature," bill mckibben warned about the impact of the destructive practices that could and have led to global warming. through 12 books in the past 20 years, he's continued his witness to the earth's declining health and its atmosphere's swelling pollution. and now bill mckibben's book, his new book "earth" and he'll speak why it has an ideocratic spelling is a passionate indictment of our wasteful activity along with a practical

vision of maintaining what resources we have left. and then you'll find right across the front of the book a wonderful statement from barbara who's been here many times. she said read it please. straight through the end. whatever else you are planning to do next, nothing could be more important. so here's bill mcmckibben here to tell us about his book. [applause] >> well, thank you so much for being here. it's a great pleasure to always be here. i'm just in the first couple days of wandering around the country talking about this book, and so i've -- the main problem that i've been facing over and over again doing tv and radio and things is the question, how do you pronounce this odd idiosyncratic may have been a polite world.

eaarth, is you have to kind of channel your inner schwarzenegger to make it work. if you say earth it more or less gets across the both the attitude and the idea. the conceit of the title is pretty simple. 20 years ago when i wrote "the end of nature," the first book about climate change it was full of warnings about if we didn't make changes very fast, and we didn't make changes very fast at all and very quickly than we thought 20 years ago. the impact of all that carbon that we've been pouring into the atmosphere has become clear. the earth that we live is no longer much like the one we are born into. it's had significant change already.

as the temperature has begun to rise and we've pushed it up about a degree, that's begun to kick off really large scale changes, larger than we would have guessed 20 years ago. the atmosphere holds about 5% more moisture than it did. that's an enormous change in one of the basic parameters of the planet. and it explains why we're seeing around the world one record rainfall or snowfall after another. y'all here got a slight taste of that believe winter when you had snow like you'd never seen before. but that's what happens place after place. this week it was rio de janeiro where they had the greatest rains they'd ever experienced. and hundreds of people died in the resulting mudslides. on and on and on. that world needs to be described.

because our inability really to imagine that we're capable of changing things on that scale is one of the reasons that we are so bad at taking any real action about it. it seems somehow emotionally impossible to us that we could have grown large enough to really be changing the world. but we have. i'm not going to burden you really with too much from the first chapter or so of believe book because it is dark and hard and interesting. it's interesting to see what we've managed to make of believe world. but much of the book is devoted to the question on a new planet, how do we live? what new habits are appropriate to this planet that we've created. and the answer to that, i think, are kind of interesting, too. and kind of -- kind of dramatic.

above all else, i think, the habit that's been most thoroughly ingrained in us in our political lives and in many ways in our individual lives in a consumer society. if we have a tough choice we can avoid it by figuring out how to grow our way out of it as an economy. that, i'm afraid, is not the option that will be possible in the future. when in 1970 when that team at mit published the book "the limits to growth" that caused so much growth and so much pushback. their prediction was that sometime in the next 100 years we would reach the point where continued growth of the sort that we were used to wouldn't be possible. they weren't able to say exactly when it would happen.

but i think they would be -- i think that they would be unsurprised at some level to see the arctic melting to see the deluge occurring in place after place after place. to see the very ocean our metaphor for vastness on this planet turned acidic. 30% more acidic simply by the effort of the ocean to draw that carbon out of the atmosphere. if we're not -- and you'll just have to take this as the argument for the moment, if we're not going to grow our way out of our trouble, then we're going to have to think about other possibilities. and i thought i might read just for a minute from the beginning of the third chapter here where i kind of make to me the beginning of the argument about where i think where we need to ahead instead.

and the ideas where we will get in our head if we ever get back into the business of transitioning into something else. we lack the vocabulary and the metaphors we need for life on a different scale. we're so used to growth that we can't imagine alternatives. the best we embrace the squishy sustainable with its implied claim that we can keep on as before. so here are my candidates for words that may help us think usefully about the future. durable, sturdy, stable, hearty, robust, they are stout words. they no longer grow by leaps and bounds where we hunker down and dig in. they're words that we associate with youth with steadiness and flash. they aren't exciting but they are comfortable. think husband not boyfriend. [laughter] >> here's a better metaphor the economy that's defined our western world is like a racehorse, fleet and showy.

it's bred for speed with narrowed tapered leg as it accelerates down the back stretch but don't put it on the track where things put on muddy. a small bump in the path will break its stride and break its thin and speedy leg. the thoroughbred has been optimized for one thing only. pure burning swiftness. even while we're in the saddle is transform our racehorse into a workhorse into something dependent, tempered, won't go fast and will go on. won't win the laurel. will carry the day. our times have been marked by ever increasing speed. paddle wheeler to locomotive to airplane rocket to formula one. can you imagine slower? our time has been marked by great ups and downs, booms with the occasional bust. can you imagine steadiness. can you make it work in your mind. most of all, of course, our time has been the time of bigness.

the amazing ever steepening upward curve where things grew and grew and then gruesome more. economies and road networks and houses inflating until there were entire subdivisions filled with starter castles for entry level monarchs. stomachs, stomachs and breasts and lips, cars and debts, portions and bonuses. can we imagine smaller? this is the test of our time with practical and psychological. how can we adjust to the fact that we're not going to get bigger. that the wind has begun to blow harder and hence we need to lower our wind resistance that the oil has worn out and everything is larger than it should be. it's not easy to make the imaginative leap. the pain of recession a word that after all literally means getting smaller. our economy is geared to work only with growth by definition. the only way to escape recession is to grow larger again.

on the other hand, in certain ways our economic trouble give us real insight into scale. makes it easier to start thinking subversive thoughts. if there is a phrase that sticks in the mind and in the craw from the last few years, it is too big to fail. giants like aig or citi bank have swelled too a size if they collapsed they could bring down the entire financial system. loosely translated meant the government must bail us out. that's the part we debated on the tv and the op-ed columns should we prop them up. but simpler meaning of the phrase it was too big. anything to big to fail is by definition too big. we thought we'd spun a kind of magic that would suspend the laws of gravity. ever since reagan the libertarian economist would insisted that self-interest alone was enough to hold at bay the possibility of collapse, that's why the amount of retail space per person in the u.s. doubled from 19 to 38 square

feet between 1990 and 2005. it didn't make rational sense but it made sense as long as the minimal held. the spell broke in the summer of 2008. and after that there was only poor alan greenspan looking less like the master magician and more like the tired tiny wizard behind his curtain. his belief system turned out to be flawed he testified in congress. i made a mistake in presumes that the self-interest of organizations that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and equity. and you almost felt sorry for him. i mean, we'd lost our money but he lost an entire belief system. as he put it, the whole intellectual edifice collapse in the summer of the last year because the data inputted in the risk management models generally covered the last two decades of the period of euphoria. that's a quote worth re-reading. on a larger scale our whole civilization stands on the incidental of collapse because the data inputted into our risk

management models comes from the last couple of hundred years. a giddy time high on oil. it's not just the banks that have gotten too big to fail but all the arrangements of modern life. our time on every front has been marked by the dizzying alice on her first pill explosion in the size of the human enterprise. for almost all of human history, our society was small and nature was large. in a few brief decades that key racial has reversed. most of the time it happened a little too slowly for us to it. the first announce was oppenheimer. he quoted from the gida we'll become gods destroyers of worlds. that particular kind of explosion is easy enough for us to imagine. especially after hiroshima and nagasaki. hence we have done so much what we can to hold it at bay. it is far harder for us to

imagine that the explosion of a billion pistons ever minute can be doing damage on the same kind of scale but that's us. big. and that question of how we become less big in some kind of graceful way is the most interesting question that we face. the most interesting political question, the one that will define the next period of time. the one i think that washington has yet to successfully grapple with and is going to have to if we're going to have some kind of future. now, the clear beginning politically for how you make this transition start to happen, for how you begin to get the world to wise up a little bit is to finally go about the business of putting a real price on carbon. of making fossil fuel bear the cost for the damage that it exacts on the environment. and when that happens, when congress or the united nations

finally gets it together to do that in a serious way, then we may begin to see real -- real work towards this trend. we see around the edges the beginning, you know, things like the local food movement in this country. the last agricultural census showed for the first time in 150 years the number of farmers in america actually on the increase, not declining. that's good news. it's because there's a beginning of a real demand for good food grown by our neighbors, in essence. but that needs to expand dramatically and it will only happen when the economic signals that we're sending by putting a real price on fossil fuel begin to trickle down into that system. trying to figureo:/ out how to e that happen is a difficult job. and i'm going to talk for just a minute about this work we've been doing at 350.org.

when wrote the end of nature i was 27, i had a very simple theory about change. i would write a book, people would read it and that would accomplish the job, you know? people did, in fact, read it. it was in 25 languages but actually that turns out not to be how political change happens. at some point in the last few years, i became convinced that one of the reasons we were making no progress was that we had no movement demanding change. we had the super structure of movement. we had al door. -- gore. we had economists and scientists and engineers. we had policy people. they just had nothing behind them to give that movement any heft, any power on capitol hill or any place else. and so slowly and haltingly since i had no idea doing being a rioter.wq8x with the few young friends of mine we started trying to build

this kind of movement. and we started in the u.s. in 2007 we organized about 1400 simultaneous rallies across the country in april. and that was enough to convince barack obama and hillary clinton then running for president to adopt our goal of 80% cuts in carbon emissions by 2050. a number you'll still hear the president using. but six weeks after we did that arctic started to melt. and by the time that summer was over it was clear that those targets and things were out of date. we needed to work much more quickly. and, in fact, in january of 2008 we finally got the one thing we'd really been lacking. a specific number to tell us how much was too much. jim hanson and his time at nasa put out a paper that said -- i'll see if i can quote it accurately. any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350

parts per million is not compatible in which civilization has developed and on which life adapted strong language for scientists. stronger still when you realize we're well beyond here. the air is 390 parts per million c02 and that's why the oceans are acidifying. that's why moisture -- water vapor is collecting in the atmosphere, on and on and on. we decided to see if we could organize around that number. around the world. 'cause it's clear we're going to have to deal with this globally to really make a difference. it was not an intuitive choice to take a number as our kind of organizing cry because the numbers kind of abstract. it's a scientists not like i have a dream, you know, it doesn't leap off the tongue. on the other hand, for global organizing they have one great advantage.

arabic numerals translate against linguistic boundaries. and so with no money particularly or anything we set out to try to organize in the winter of 2008. there were seven 27 years old and seven was a good number. each one of them took a continent. [laughter] >> and that was -- the guy who had the antarctic got the internet 'cause it's own kind of continent. and we decided that we would make october 24th last year the sort of pinnacle of this campaign and aim everything towards that. and see if we could figure out a way to drive believe number into the middle of the debate. we didn't know how well it would work. we gathered in new york a few days beforehand to kind of watch the returns as it were. because we told everybody to upload pictures. well, what do you know? it turned out that it worked

pretty darn well. on october 24th we had 5200 different rallies and demonstrations in 181 countries. cnn said it was the most widespread day of political action in the political's history. foreign policy said it was the largest coordinated global rally on any kind on any issue ever. and it was all about this scientific data point. it was all about this point of sort of truth about the planet. it's very interesting. one of the things that was most beautiful about it was that those -- we have 25,000 pictures in the flickr account. most of the people in those pictures i was saying earlier on the radio, most of them are poor, black, brown, asian and young. some combination of those

because that's what most of the world is. and it was stunning to see that around the world. it was also stunning to see peoples intuitive understanding that politicians had gotten this wrong in many what's that our constant interpretation of this as a debate between republicans and democrats, industry and environmentalists, americans and chinese and whatever is the most superficial understanding. this is a much, much, much more important debate than that. it's a debate between human beings on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other. that's a tough debate because physics and chemistry don't bend. i'm sorry your economy is in a tough patch. let's suspend the rules are.

they told us what the bottom line is. 350 parts mer million. we had a great day and we went off to copenhagen. and copenhagen in certain ways -- this big climate conference was pretty grand. we had a church service in the middle of it great cathedral and desmond tutu spoke at it. and 3,000 churches across europe did the same thing that afternoon. it was all remarkable. and 117 of the world's nations signed onto this 350 target which made us quite happy. but they were the wrong 117 nations, okay? they were the most vulnerable nations not the most addicted ones. and the most addicted ones pretty much led by our own have been unable to come to terms yet with the real size of this problem. and to propose things commensurate with that scale. and so this fight continues.

and i hope that some of you will help us at 350.org this october. october 10th, 10/10/10 we're having not a global political retail but a global work party. all across the world in thousands of places people will be putting up solar panels, digging community gardens and creating bike paths. we are not going to solve this one at a time but we will not have anything until we price serious legislation that puts a price on carbon. our hope is to make a very pointed political comment on that day in october. which is if we can get to work, it's time for our punitive leaders to get to work. if i can climb up on the roof of the school about a hammer in my hand and put in a solar panel, then you can climb up on the floor of the senate and hammer out some legislation.

20 years in this country of a perfect partisan record of accomplishing nothing on climate is enough. it's time to actually get to work and hopefully we can get that message across. it's too late as this book makes clear to solve the problem of global warming. to stop global warming from happening. that's no longer on the list of options. we've raised the temperature of the planet 1 degree we've got another degree in the pipeline. and there's going to be a heck a lot of damage done even if we do everything right. but everything is relatively. and we can keep it from getting more out of control than it has to get if we act somewhat nimbly, somewhat quickly. we're going to have to live on a new planet. we're going to have to adapt to that new planet but we're also going to have to do what we can to make that adaptation possible

to slow things down enough that we have some kind of chance in the world that we're building. that's the thesis of the book anyway. and that's what my life's work is about. so i'm extraordinarily grateful for y'all for coming out tonight. i see people around this room whom i know who have helped us in the past and i hope a lot of you will join in the future in this kind of work. so thank you all very, very much. [applause] >> it seems to me that we're not really addicted to oil in the sense that people often say. like we want to drive around. i think it's a military project. that the way we use oil, you know, besides direct use by the military is we subsidize

products like food and then dump them on markets around the world and disrupt the economies of other countries. and so to put a price on carbon you're actually saying what we need to do is change a military strategy that we've been using for decades. have you got some way to deal with it? i mean, basically we need to stop trying to dominate the world militarily if we're going to do what you say. i think people need to realize that's actually what's stopping it? >> yeah. you could look at that actually from all kinds of different directions, okay? among other things, it's becoming clear that the greatest threat to what the military is provided for us has shifted to be precisely the kind of things that i describe in the book in and there's a lot in there.

and about just how chaotic and unsettled the world we're creating as we begin to change the one thing we can always take for granted, the physical stability of the planet. but i think you're right the change in the price of carbon will have incredibly deep effects on almost every realm of our life. that included. it's not an overstatement to see that the thing that's underwritten modernity is cheap fossil fuel. that explains our society look the way we do. who we are. the fact that we've had at our disposal several hundreds years. and you can get a sense of just how dominant an effect that is just by doing some kind of easy comparisons. go to western europe. i'm sure most of you have. and understand that one -- maybe the biggest reason that it looks

and feels so much different from our part of the world, our country, is that they put a hefty tax on the price of oil at the end of world war ii. so they never sprawled out in the suburbs and the car-dependent society and a much stronger sense of community and connection than we have. i mean, our biggest economic project for the last 50 or 60 years has been building bigger houses farther apart from each other and the erosion and the life and connection of community is very easy to measure and seems to be the biggest explanation for why americans self-express satisfaction with their quality of life has gone steadily downhill over those 50 years even as our theoretical standard of living has trebled. >> thank you for your work with 350. and i sort of appreciated what you were going to say about how

easy it is to translate and how difficult it is to make into a political slogan. i've been thinking along similar lines at least in america i took inspiration from perhaps the only campaign slogan that i remember from history class. and i've been -- i've been pitching it to everyone who can hear it. what do you think we ought to clean it up by 80 -- or we ought to clean it up double ott, or 2080. >> that's not bad. we find nus in a lot of ways are useful. one -- that's pretty good. one of the things people told us when we were first starting with this 350 thing that it was too complicated. and people wouldn't be able to get it or understand it, you know? and it turns out that's not true in part because we all have easy analogies close to hand. for instance, if you go to the doctor and the doctor says, your cholesterol is higher than it

should be, it's in that zone where people have heart attacks, you know, it gets your attention. you don't immediately, you know, say to the doctor, could you give me a long lecture now on how the lipid system works and, you know, so on and so forth. you say okay, what do i do? i mean, this makes sense to me. what pill do i take and what food don't i eat anymore. where do i buy my running shoes. you know, all of that. that same sort of thing happens when we put a concrete definition when we say global warming. it makes abundant clear of the thing that's so difficult about dealing with this problem which is that this kind of gross inequity of wealth in our world which has always been a sin is a great impediment to practical action.

because if you're in china, you know, or india, you have a nation with hundreds and hundreds of millions of poor peasants whose easiest way to burn cheap goal just the way we have. -- coal. it rankles you to look at that number and understand that the west already filled up the sky. and that there's no marginal left for you to do the obvious easy thing. and that's one of the reasons that negotiations at copenhagen break down. that it's very difficult to make -- you know, to grasp on both ends of this the fact that we're going to have to transfer some resources north to south. and they're going to have to -- the reality dictates they're going to have to find a different path. but in many ways, the chinese are doing a better job of grappling with that reality at the moment than we are.

they've clearly decided they ever going to invest a lot of money in green energy and green technology. they're going to make the best of a bad situation and try to own that industry as it emerges. that's a smarter response than the kind of stick your head in the sand, let's see if we can get another election cycle out of coal, you know, before we have to deal with it. and i'm afraid that's we pretty much where we're at right now. >> i already finished your book. by any measure it's the best material i ever read on. really illuminating the actual impacts on the climate change on the world that we live right now and how it's really affecting our lives even though we may not be aware of the causes of it. i hope that it's going to be really widely read. i don't know if you're going to send a cope to sarah palin or ms. mcconnell. i don't know if it would do any good. i had just a quick question. something that's always puzzled

me on one aspect of the fuel consumption. i've never seen a figure for how much fuel is burned up by nascar races. i would guess that it would be in the zillions of gallons. has anyone ever compiled that figure. it's the number one spectator sport in our country right now. and all the rest of us are trying to get a hybrid car. >> unless i'm wrong, i think that all those nascar guys are running on ethanol. or some alcohol of some kind. i don't think they're pumping unleaded in. but, of course, it illustrates the point. where's the real money -- i mean, the real fuel -- it's the, you know, 200,000 people who are showing up in rvs to watch every weekend or whatever. that's the problem with this -- that's the problem with this problem.

there's no easy way to get at it because it's so deeply ingrained in all of our actions and all of our lives. think of the way in which we nonchalantly get on board yet airplane to go someplace when we want to without -- by now just seeming sort of normal. well, it's not normal. i mean, the amount of energy that that takes is so astonishing, one trip on a jet is more than most people in the world -- more energy than they use in the course of a year. maybe a decade. so those mundane things, not the exceptional ones are the ones that drive the damage in a sense. there's enough room in the atmosphere if all we did was have nascar guys going around a track and everybody sat at home and watched on tv or whatever, we'd probably be okay. [laughter]

>> coming at the problem in another -- in another aspect in october 31st, 2006, i was in london. and the stern report was released. many economists and scientists agreed that if we continued down our present course the economic effect would be comparable to disaster, comparable to the great depression. and so it made front page headlines in all the london papers and the next day i flew back to washington and it had fallen past. "the washington post", you know, panhandle 3. -- page three. and i was, you know, sort of flattened by it. i couldn't believe it. and i'm wondering if this -- you had the same reaction of this. were you aware of this? >> no, the stern report was very important. and thinking through the economics of this is extremely important. our assumption has been -- and

i'm afraid this is one of the tougher parts of this book. our assumption has been all along that we're just going to eventually some day just make the decision and go to something called green energy and just switch out what we're doing now for something else. it's going to be -- we may have passed the point where that easy substitution is possible. there's a lot of economic friction and drag coming with this new planet that we're creating. the notion that we live on a flat earth if it was true 10 years ago is no longer true. we live on an uphill planet because the kind of costs associated with the deteriorating areas is strong. and getting insurance a coastal areas is kind of a break on economic development certainly if parts of the world where they need that kind of economic

development. if you think we have problems with infrastructure at the moment in this country, and we do, think what happens when as is becoming more and more common the 100-year storm that planters plan for occurs every five or six years, you know? those sort of costs mount up in huge ways. we need -- economists are never very good at subtracting, you know, and we need to figure out just how dangerous and expensive it's going to be to not take action so that we can gear ourselves up to take the that is correct we must. >> that refuted the argument that it's too expensive to do anything about -- >> it refuted the argument. it's going to be very expensive to do anything about it. the only thing that is more expensive is not to do anything about it. >> i think we've got four people in line there. and so the fourth person is going to be the last questioner.

is it four or five? five. the man -- the man in the blue shirt is the last in line. >> bill, i've been running an energy conversation for the last four years. funded by the defense department. and we got it going because energy was -- the defense department is the single largest buyer of fuel in the world, right? and the whole idea was to get them to start paying attention to this. i started reading a book today called "cornered" which is all about monopolies. and so what worries me is this whole question of values and how do you start shifting the values because if all this merger and acquisition and getting everything together creates a super structure that we can't really fight -- what's interesting about this book is there's a lot of talk about

wal-martut ithe beginning wal-mart seemed like they were one of the leaders in addressing green issues. >> this is why, i think, it's so important to start trying to put -- i mean, that's why we write books so that we can get new -- the thing that we've been searching for for a very long time, i think, in the environmental world is not the next great engine or, you know, whatever. it's the next great metaphor to allow us to understand how we might live lives of the kind that we want to live. that don't require the destruction of the planet along the way. you know, i limp towards that in here. the world that we're going to, need to build, is a world that looks different than the one we're used to now. and it looks different because the fuel source for the one that we have now dictates -- fossil fuel is concentrated in its sources. it's easy to transport.

and it's highly rich in btus. so it made sense to centralize a lot of functions. huge coal fired power plants, you know? solar energy or wind energy or most of the other things we're going to need are almost exactly like the opposite. they're omnipresent. they are diffused. we'll have things like network transition. it looks like like the internet. everybody putting in and everybody taking out. i have solar panels all over my roof in vermont. on a sunny day i'm a utility. i'm firing electrons down the grid. and that's good in all kinds of ways. i mean, it gets around that endemic too big to fail problem. even in the most extreme case, say a terrorist wants to go after my utility, well, he can't. he can climb up on the roof with a hammer and break my solar panel, but if he does it doesn't

matter to anybody else it doesn't cripple the grid. it doesn't spew deadly particles out in the atmosphere, you know? we've gotten around some of these set of problems. that's where we got to go. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> hi. i've got a question for -- speaking of numbers, just a little clarification. when you talk about it being 1 degree warmer than it has been, are you talking in centigrade or fahrenheit because in this country that's one of the big stumbling blocks. for me and i try to read about this and i work on this all the time. and i'm just a layperson is i'm constantly confused. i don't relate to centigrade. >> and this is a bigger problem than you would think. the technical answer to your question is, .8 degrees celsius about 1.3 fahrenheit, okay? so the debate at copenhagen and before in the run-up to it was

all about this question of people kept talking about the target of the mainstream environmental groups set long ago and now acknowledged to be much too high and generous. we try to hold temperature increases in the planet to 2 degrees. 2 degrees centigrade. we don't speak centigrade. whenever it was translated in this country it said -- you know, the newspaper article always says 3.6 degrees fahrenheit or whatever it is. a completely meaningless and arbitrary figure that means nothing. that's one of the reasons we were so insistent on saying 350 parts per million. it's a better measurement anyway. it tells you what you need to have in the atmosphere but it also means the same thing everywhere around the world. that's not a trivial problem. that problem of -- and it's one of the things that makes it possible for people to just sort of shrug their soldiers and look

the other way and getting past all those kind of barriers is really important. now, we were able to do it for a day with this 350 thing. for a day. for 36 hours we owned google news. it was the most written story on the world. and look at them on the website because every one of them those 5200 demonstrations they all managed to get that 350 in some somehow. and just push it into people's faces. and that's good. that's what we need. >> so when you say 1 degree, i'm just thinking of your book tour. can you say both numbers. 1 degree centigrade we've already warmed almost 4 degrees fahrenheit. with another 4 degrees in the pipeline. i think -- >> it's not that -- the difference is not that big. it's not .8 degrees fahrenheit. they're not that far apart.

>> okay. okay. and my second question speaking of numbers is going from 390 you said we're at now back to 350, obviously working really hard on this so at some level you must believe we can do something. but i think you probably also think you don't have a choice. i'd just like to know what your state of mind how optimistic, pessimistic. i'm sorry it's a hard question. >> it's a very good question and a very fair question. and i'll tell you the god's honest truth at some point in the last 20 years i gave up thinking whether he was optimistic or pessimistic at all. i get up in the morning and do what i can to sort of change the odds. scientifically the picture is very dark right now. the science has gotten very bad very fast. and politically we haven't done much. on the other hand for the last year, i've woken up every day for, you know, with dozens of emails from mostly young people around the world out there organizing their hearts out to make things happen.

and that to me is incredibly counseloring. -- encouraging. the first picture that came out in october came in two days early. two sisters in ethiopia 18 and 19 whom we trained a little bit at this training camp we ran in south africa and sent them back to ethiopia. and somehow without -- they'd managed to get 15,000 people out in the street talking about it, in the poorest capital in the world almost. and to me that -- to see those first pictures come across. and they were followed 10 minutes later by a picture from afghanistan of u.s. troops who had made a big 350 with sandbags and sent us a little note saying we're parking our humvees for the weekend. [laughter] >> the problem is not that it's impossible. the problem is we haven't faced it yet. we haven't built the kind of movement that we need to make it

happen. i don't know whether we can in time. we'll do our best. some very true level it depends on how many people help. >> i heard one of the callers on the radio earlier today mention something about the sun burnt tomatoes and using sunscreen on tomatoes somewhere. and it reminded me of some of the things that i think about, the absurdities that i see, oh, goodness -- the moment with the benjamin braddock, you know, "the graduate" with plastics and i was going to include the bottled water as one of the things. one of the things i see advertised in this country now it's just beyond absurd is outdoor gas patio warmers.

so that when you're out there, you know, if it's not warm enough and you just refuse to put on a sweater, you know, you're going to gum up the environment more to be out on your patio barbecuing or whatever. and i noticed people -- what drives me up a wall, i guess, is people idling for air conditioning, for heat. and i just to join me in the only trend -- when i'm refusing a plastic bag, if i haven't brought my bag or i decide to juggle my way out, say no petroleum bag please rather than plastic and people -- it's really young people are just astonished that there's a connection, some of them. so what i'm most worried about even though i agree that legislation is the top priority, i'm most concerned about the complete cluelessness of people i work with and everywhere not people here.

>> this is a very good point. and it's why in a sense one of the things we have to do is political action, okay? we do not have time -- there just isn't time for the -- to get -- for the kind of cultural change necessary to make everybody in the world ecologically conscious in doing the right thing, okay? again enough generation or two we can do that. but that's not the time limit the planet is giving us. we have to work more quickly. so the few percent of us who are very worried about this are enough to effect political change. to put that price on carbon. and when that happens, people's behavior will shaping quickly. look at what happened in the summer of 2008 when the price of gasoline went to $4 a gallon for six weeks. all of a sudden it was as if scales fell from the -- people suddenly -- i don't actually need a military vehicle to go to

the grocery store. [laughter] >> it was a kind of -- it was as if a sort of bolt had come down from heaven. but it wasn't a bolt from heaven. it was the price spinning on the pump. we need to leverage political action to get economic, structural change that sends a message that will result in behavioral change. i think that's a set of levers that we have to pull at this point. >> listen, thank you very much for whatever -- all that you do; and it does kind of -- there have been certainly -- i remember when the hummers first came out, i had to really hold in my kids not to get out and give these people the finger and i thought i would know them from work and i never did that and it would not have helped and i know that also.

and actually i do think just -- i've been around a lot and i've been working on this a lot on a smaller level. but i think that the movie, the gore movie, did more than -- i'm surprised there hasn't been any other fabulous, you know, exciting film. i guess it's very hard to do that. that would attract people 'cause i think that really opened up a lot of people's eyes. so the bummer question that i have, there are many different issues extinction, global warming. i feel like there are many specialists. where's the family doctor. in personally am curious. if we all work really hard maybe something will be done. but if nothing were done and things went on as they are -- i've got kids. is there anywhere any source that where sound science would give an educated guess as to what things might look like in

30 years. >> much of the first chapter of the book is devoted to that. >> oh, it is. good. [laughter] >> and most of the news isn't good because, you know -- because you know, our civilization arose in this moment of climatic stability and disrupting that turns out to be a very foolish thing. and one of the things that always makes me crazy is to have people who describe themselves as conservative oppose action on climate change. abbie hoffman on his most yippish day never thought anything half as radical as filling the -- double the carbon concentration of the atmosphere and just seeing what thats. -- what happens. if it was being done by some, you know -- the communists were doing it or something, we'd be bombing the hell out of them to

keep them from doing it. it's crazy to describe that as conservative, opposition to action on that. and it's crazy to let this become the partisan and ideological debate that it has. that's why we like working with numbers. 350 -- i mean, it just says what we have to do, you know? sometimes i'm glad i'm not in washington so i don't have to think all the time what exactly it is that goes on here. [laughter] >> thank you. >> last question. >> okay. thank you for your patience. i teach eighth grade environmental science here in washington. and we are at the moment looking at global climate change and one of the of things we like to do is show a little bit of the skeptic side. i don't know if you've seen this

dvd out called unstoppable solar cycles. it's been distributed 150,000 copies have been distributed free of charge to schools across the country. by the heartland foundation. so they present this -- the alternative side. and our kids do a pretty good job of dismantling it. we have another one called the greeting of planet earth which i think you may have seen the western fuels association. [inaudible] >> right. these films -- the recent one -- they tried a couple of scientists who we think should know a lot better supporting the skeptic side. i could maepgs number of names. -- mentioned a number of names. what might be motivating these

guys to richard linzen is one. sherwood itzo is one. in wonder if you bump into them. and if you can give me a clue that i can tell the kids. >> it's bootless to speculate on sort of motivation it seems to me of particular people. but it's not hard to figure out the kind of motivation behind, say the western fuels association deciding to distribute. think about how hard it was to get action on tobacco regulation in this country. there was something that's a trivial part of our economy, you know, employing a small number of people. where the link could not have been clearer. i mean, in this case we're talking about the most profitable enterprise human beings have ever engaged in. extracting fossil fuels and refining them and selling them.

exxonmobil made more money than any corporation in the history of money. our political system that buys an immense amount of influence. and their only goal is to delay. as we all know from watching political life delay is accomplished relatively easy. action is what's difficult. the only -- the only answer to all of this -- i mean, i wish that i had -- and maybe there's better political minds than mine, i know. you know, i don't think there's any shortcut. i don't think there's any way other than building a real political movement to demand action that accomplishes this. we have a great number of noble environmental groups in washington busy lobbying up on the hill. but every senator and congressman they go to knows that they don't have that much behind them. that there's not enough of a movement to inflict pain or give

reward to people who do the right or wrong thing. and until we build that kind of movement, you know, it's a naked bluff that our lobbyists are having to work with. we've got to build that movement. we can. and i hope that y'all will help us a little bit at 350.org. thank you. very much. [applause] >> bill mckibben is a scholar in residence in vermont. he's the founder of the environmentalist step it up and 350.org. for more information information visit billmckibben.org.