hello i'm starvin in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture of the world was recognized environmentalists killed me given joins me for our conversations with great minds tonight to talk about the real threat of climate change and whether or not we're too late to address the consequences of a warmer planet and former vice president dick cheney comes clean about committing torture in his new book so as of now it's time to call up old dick and george w. in front of a jury to face war crimes charges. for

crimes conversations of great minds i'm joined by bill mckibben bill is an author environmentalist and activist in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight he wrote the end of nature in my opinion the heir to rachel carlson carson's silent spring and since then gone on to write more than a dozen notable books about the environment and our human impact on he's the co-founder and chairman of the board of the grassroots organization climate change organization three fifty dot org which is coordinated fifteen thousand rallies in one hundred eighty nine countries since two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten the boston globe called in the nation's leading environmentalist and time magazine described him as the world's best green journalist and recently he was elected a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences is latest book earth with a double a making a life. on a tough new planet is

a guide to living on our fundamentally altered time bill welcome tom good to be with you as always thank you great to have you with us first off you're in d.c. this week for a very special event or we've been the perhaps special odd way to so many ways we've we've been coordinating this week and next the largest civil disobedience demonstration in the environmental movement in a generation a series of sit ins at the white house trying to persuade the president walk this pope not running from the tar sands of northern alberta if we open those up for exploitation or at least according to jim hansen the nasa climate scientist it's essentially game over for the climate that's how he put it and hence people have come from all fifty states and are conducting this very civil disobedience very polite but very firm in front of the white house in an effort to persuade the president to do the right thing and showing the role of this or if you had

a survey you can see the demonstrations and and on your wrist here it is this these that's the first group of us that went to protest last saturday the police decided they wanted to make an example of this and the way they did it was to take us to. for three days and two nights in boats called central so walk here in the district of columbia this is the basic motors rapists and thieves kind of play it's exactly as much fun as you might expect. you know bad sort of metal slabs to lie on without sheet or mattress or pillow or going. to bologna sandwiches a day twelve hours apart three am and three pm it's quite a regiment but it didn't intimidate us and the next wave of people came in the next wave and pretty soon the police decided that they would instead just arrest and put people they put them in a paddy wagon but give them a fine of a hundred dollars and. send them on their way which is probably about the

appropriate it's still not easy for good middle class americans to go get arrested it's still a hard thing but thousand or more people will have gone through this process before these two weeks are over it's quite stirring to see of it. this is the. if you can say pinnacle or end point or anything like that would be hyperbolic and wrong but this is this is perhaps the natural progression of a lifetime of work that you've been doing around the environment around issues about the relationship of human beings to the world around us you've written about our our relationship with ecology with earth with our culture. where you go all the start for build a kit. you know it's odd that probably wasn't quite destined to be an environmentalist though i. always enjoyed the art of the worse i thought of myself as a very urban person my first job when i left college was writing the talk of the

town section for the new yorker magazine and young barclay twenty one or twenty two about the most urban jobs the yeah it's there for five years. so i knew how to spot the new yorker i quit because they fired mr shawn in the editor forever. and i moved up to the adirondack mountains the last great wilderness of the american east and fell in love with that wilderness and not long afterwards and began reading the early papers about climate science and climate change and somehow it struck me almost sort of out of the blue it that this walled place that i could fall in love with that i was deep you know. and wasn't going to be as wild this i wanted it to be. that human beings by changing the temperature of the earth will change. you know the floor on the floor on everything

about even the most remote places throw one said i can rock a half hour from my house and come to a place where no man stands from one year's end to another and there consequently politics are not for politics or put the cigar smoke over me well i mean i can walk five minutes from my house and the next night get to a place where no one had ever been i don't think and yet human beings wherever they were our habits and our economies were changing that place in fundamental ways. and so it was it was out of that that i wrote his book the end of nature which was the first book about climate change you can some idea of how relatively short a period of time we've really known about it was twenty two years ago. it was a strange book in that half of it was the sort of reporting first real reporting and kind of book length about what climate change was all about and the second half was the sort of philosophical essay more out of sadness relieved and fear we

were doing since then i've learned many more reasons for worrying about climate change some of the better i've been to bangladesh and people are having to flee their farms or road and i've watched people die and gave you were as mosquitoes spread and i've seen the effects in severe weather and drought and flooding and things put some right for me at the beginning it was that sense of loss as much as anything else that drove me started me down this path at the beginning of it was it with a couple of russ's five stages perhaps and if so and of course you know. talk about naive i mean my theory of political change then you'll recall i was twenty seven or twenty eight when i was writing this my theory of political change basically boiled down to i will write a book. everyone will read it and then they'll change right you know i mean i did

write the book and you know in comparison to terms everybody read it it came out in twenty four languages it was a bestseller all over the place but it turns out that as i've sort of learned slowly painfully that's not quite how political change exactly happens. you you have also written about. you've you've written about human impact your book about one you've written you wrote a book about. other cultures. how. to what extent do you think that the sickness. excuse me that we're confronting is not our technology necessarily or even our politics but our culture i think that culture and our technologies as it were very closely intertwined i think the thing the most important thing but it's happening in our world was the discovery of the ability to

use fossil fuel in the early really in the seventy's eighteenth century at the beginning of the kind of industrial age. it made us a minute's lean more powerful than we'd ever been before gave us the ability to it we did essence each have thousands of slaves there were certain parts of that that were obviously very useful and there were other parts that there weren't and i don't mean just the environmental impacts though this is climate change is par for the biggest thing that humans have ever done and also mean that it allowed us in a certain sense to become. deeply deeply deeply kind of hyper individual wise in a way that humans hadn't before and i think that that to wonder why it's much of the problem that we've kind of wandered into so well we were once looking at it sort of the tip of starting a book called keep. economy i was looking at

a set of data and you asked americans how happy they were with their lives one of the big polling firms has done this every year since the underworld works. and it turns out that the percentage of americans who say i'm very happy with my life peaks in one thousand fifty six and goes downhill since a moment earlier quarter of americans will make the claim i'm very happy with my life despite the fact that our standard of living is troubled since the one nine hundred fifty s. now. if you start to think about what we've done since then so i think that the reasons become a little clearer certainly would be to some cats that what was the great american economic project of the last sixty years essentially building bigger houses for the report from each other that's what we spent most of our fortune on in the post-war years and the effect of that is not only environmentally problematic you could he was pretty houses and drive between and it's also socially problematic the fifty's

was the era of the beginning of the suburbs exactly that's that's the process that we've gone through the result is that the average american has half as many close friends as the average american and fifty years ago we've substituted an awful lot of consumption for a different set of pleasures but frankly i don't think there's enough you know i pods i don't keep up with that decline in friend that was also pretty much the peak of unionization in the united states you know chatterley been passed in forty seven which started in kneecap the process but that's community that work you know churches i mean you name name your thing. and so that's you know that's i mean completely tied to in many ways to our ability to use fossil fuel in ways that we haven't before to drive between vast places you know distances to. brass powell

says things like that we couldn't use is that if we make some of the changes we need to make in the right direction even technological changes will start seeing those things shift again give you an example. if you are one of the best trained in america right now the best number in the country i think it's this the number of farmers markets is more than doubled again then doubled again in the last fifteen years it's the fastest growing part of our food economy ok that's good for environmental reasons. because you know five mile tomato is better than a five thousand mile one it's good for colon airy reasons i mean i traveled five thousand miles in the last week i know how i feel that's how the tomato feels to you know mostly it's good for social reasons a personal religious followed shoppers a few years ago first around the supermarket then around the farmer's market you've been to the supermarket i mean you know how it works you walk in and you fall into the light fluorescent trance you visit the stations of the cross around the

supermarket. one that for all the people around the farmer's market they found that on average they were having ten times more conversations per visit sure so it's a could we begin a new back together and of course the funny part is that you know she comparisons we've decided that we've invented this great new thing the farmer's market this is so all the world shopped for food until fifty years ago and how seventy percent of the world still does you know course we like i mean we're socially of all day animals you know. that's the that's the really promising hope i think so if we it to the words if we if we take the advice. if we if we look at this crisis this climate crisis as a as in part a crisis of stupid use of fossil fuels and carbon based fuels to get to it in ways that have suppose a part and and. some would say reduce our standard of living but it's not very at

all in fact if anything it's the opposite come back together look what comes next so let's say we have a farmer's market as it were in electrons you know instead of a few huge power plants spewing carbon into the air what if we had and i think we will have in time the engineers distributed generation millions rooftops i mean i have a little journalist i was hoping all over my roof on a sunny day and they're tied to the grid so on a sunny day i'm a little utility you know i'm firing electrons down the grid my neighbor is keeping his beer cold before the red sox game with the sunshine falling on my roof. and so many ways to secure your system to the one that we have with the moment when we get there however if we get serious about making this transition happen the trouble with global warming the reason that you know i spent the weekend in jail the trouble with global warming is it's not giving us time to make an easy. hundred

year transition to something else. the physics and the chemistry of this situation are demanding that we act much more quickly than really any government or economy would like to happen here and we have to kind of force that spring as it were and that's what you know my work uniting work over the last five or six years has been a let's let's continue our conversation in just a moment on the topics of bad and the organizing and and to this information i'd like to get to you at the book that you wrote about how information travels around and it's really remarkable our conversation tonight with bill mckibben author environmentalist and activist conversations of great minds will continue in just a few moments. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to.

breakthrough. who can you trust no one. is in view with a global mission that would see where we had a state controlled capitalism this court session so when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. safe. place. to go into the. box among policy. mausam drugs. the moment efficiency.

comes for. months the moment maneuverability most in aviation takes it to the marks moscow's world famous here show on technology update here on r.g.p. we've got the future covered. welcome back to conversations with great minds tonight i'm joined by environmentalist activist and author bill mckibben who was also the founder of the grassroots climate campaign three fifty dot org and the shoeman distinguished scholar at middlebury college in vermont bill welcome back just you know we've been talking about some of the actions that you've been taking with regard to how you got to use this whole issue of climate change and the books that you've written about what is you know just a static picture here we are it's two thousand and eleven ever so little right what is the nature of nature so here's the here's the deal when i wrote the end of

nature in one thousand nine hundred nine i mean we basically knew most of what we needed to know you burn coal and gas and oil you put carbon in the atmosphere the molecular structure of carbon traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space the planet warms the only thing we didn't know how fast and how hard will this pinch the story of the last twenty years unfortunately is that it's pushing harder and faster than we thought and to understand just look at the last year ok twenty two and was the warmest year for which we have records on this planet nineteen nations set new all time temperature records and so for the record by a large margin some of them are unbelievable i was on the phone one day with our three fifty dot org organizing crew in pakistan and one of them said very hot here that i was surprised to hear him say it it's always hot in pakistan in the summer why would you say that he said no it's really hot. new all time asia temperature record today at one hundred twenty nine degrees. ok that's hot that's really.

when when that happens when you get heat like that all kinds of things you know the literal i mean pretty much literally yes all hell breaks loose i mean it may not be hell but it's roughly the same temperature. the arctic is melting in a sauna. great if you go look at those pictures from apollo eight or whatever it was that came back to our beautiful earth there is out of date as my high school yearbook picture i mean there's like forty percent less sites up there in the summer if you want. you look at the atmosphere itself since warmer air pools more water vapor than cold basic physical fact. it's about four percent wetter than it was forty years ago which is a huge change in the basic physical parameter that loads the dice for trout because you're getting more of apparation and then flooded the lucian down with those nice loaded you know place after place is throwing snake eyes so last year for instance

it was pakistan it's an area up in the khyber pass that gets three feet of rain in a normal year we've got twelve feet of rain in a week last summer and that meant that eventually is that worked its way down the in this river a quarter of the country was under water right there's still millions of people without homes in pakistan as a result. we think of you know in life and skilling as the biggest thing that happened in pakistan in the last year but that's not what the pakistanis think you know it was the fact that they were all forced out of their homes. now we've seen the same kind of flooding. this year in our own country more water came down the mississippi and the missouri than it ever come down before i mean it was epic meanwhile you know move a few hundred miles west and texas and oklahoma are walking in a deeper drought then the dust bowl. all the way that rick perry is asking people

to pray for rick perry is asking everyone to pray for rain and i gotta say since i'm a methodist sunday school teacher i'm completely right there with where you know it's a good idea but most theologians would hold that it would work better if you wore to the same time doing every damn thing you can think of to pour more carbon into the atmosphere you know rick perry. it is doing one thing in church and another on the job and it may be. at any rate. the earth has moved out of. this period of ten thousand years that underwrote the rise of human civilization the temperature is now about a degree warmer than it was during that period the question is how far how much farther we're going to go we can't stop global warming some of it's already happened there's probably about another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already admitted. the trouble is unless we get our act together very soon. the

momentum of our fossil fuel use is going to carry us deep deep deep into whatever comes after the hollywood scene. the climate scientists say unless we get off fossil fuel far faster than any government is planning to at the moment we're looking at four or five degrees before the century is out. there's no one who studies this stuff. carefully who thinks that civilization can deal with that kind of rocks the agronomist are telling us that from this point in every degree rise we see in temperature is likely to reduce grain yields ten percent or something like that try to imagine a world a crowded world with a lot of guns and ten or twenty or thirty percent less calories. developments not a possibility he still isn't a possibility. the ocean is already thirty percent more acid than it was forty years ago as the sea water trade absorbs all of its power been out of the air you

know. we're it's a it's a it's a finite planet there are a number of you know finite number of huge physical features so we're melting arctic sea ice that's one of the biggest we're destroying at a very rapid rate the planet's coral reefs that's you know the great barrier reef the biggest the biggest pile. future you can see from space you know and it's disappearing were drying out amazon it's temperatures rise around at the parts we're not cutting down we thought of that cough in a serious way because we're moving into really dangerous territory how how do we do the only thing the only way to do it is to get off fossil fuel and that's easy to say hard to do doesn't it is much mean getting on to alternatives to the scenes getting some of each but the problem is i mean this will be hard enough to do in any event don't mean it's fossil fuels the center of the economy and it would be

a rapid transition more rapid than our economies can easily deal with like what we did at the beginning of world war two to europe for that matter hard enough to do what harder to do in our political era because the power of the fossil fuel industry is so large that it blocks even small obvious sensible changes so if you look at the last election the biggest election players were people like the u.s. chamber of commerce and the koch brothers they were the ones channeling money into the selection. of the chamber of commerce was the biggest donor and they gave ninety four percent of their money to climate deniers to people who have some alternative physics and chemistry but the paper rock that shared not science is just by radio walks you know a kind of lysenkoism that's sort of creeping through our political culture.

so you know i suppose that's one reason we're you know out there a lying down in front of the white house you know we have to figure out some other currency to work in because we're never going off the money for the moment that currency is our priorities our books our spirit our creativity all that we can muster in the four or five minutes we have left. i'd like to get into the kind of how we got here i i think that your book the age of missing information is is in many ways metal all of this underlies it and over wraps that and talk to us this was a very odd book. i found the largest cable t.v. system in the world at the time with the early ninety's this was fairfax virginia it one hundred channels which now so you know a mere bagatelle but then. i got people in fairfax to tape for me on the old fashioned video tape everything that came across them for twenty four hours so i had twenty four hundred hours worth of videotape i took it back with me to the

country and i went to sears and bought a recliner and settled in and spent a year watching television trying to figure out i think what the world would look like if this was your main window onto it and of course the books filled with a thousand different ideas about history and. if you pull it all down if you you know boil off the sap the way we do in new england in the spring and come down to nice sugar. the basic message that that. t.v. and indeed before consumer society gives you hour after hour day after day is you're the most important thing in the world you're the center of the universe. that's a dangerous message and stranger is in terms of our own happiness as we talked about earlier it's dangerous i suppose theologically you know. it's clearly become a great danger just practically that kind of high consumption.

self-centered life that we've been living is producing a planet that can't continue to support us and so we're going to have to figure out some other ways and doesn't is it almost become fractal it's you know the i mean the main message of all advertising is you're the most important person in the world but then. your family is the most important family the world your communities your country all the way yeah absolutely and all of it makes it or the good news i will say is that in the last few years of trying to build these global organizations these three fifty dot org which has become the biggest. climate change certainly the biggest environmental campaign ever you know we work in hundred we work in every country on earth except north korea we've got to say we're only seven demonstrations were that you know it's it's it's crazy but we found people all over the world desperate to go to work to do these things in take great

joy in being in partnership and communication one of the few dollars purse that we have and it's a good wild card i am large is the rise of the internet remember we talked about farmer's market in food and electronics or we've got a farmer's market in ideas now to people can bring their ideas take ideas away it's not a few centralized points telling us things we're mixing it up and we've used that technology at three fifty go to work pretty well to try and make make a movement whether we can make a movement big enough and strong enough and fast enough to do the fossil fuel companies. i'm not a i'm out of the prediction business it's it's it's a tough wages if you were a betting man you might well bet that we were going to lose but you're not allowed to make that the only moral course of action is to get up in the morning and figure out how to change the odds are that wagers and we're doing that or there will

change and i know if i couldn't tell you what good change you are. in the thirty seconds we have left literally bill your message to work. you know what it's it's it's time it really is time. inertia is a big force in human affairs it's hard to overcome it's hard for any of us to break out of our conventional ways of doing things but the moments come and it's the biggest moment human beings have ever faced if we can't figure out how to change we're not we're at a walk if we do well you know we'll see you could be quite remarkable remarkable bill mckibben thanks so much thank you voice of great awakening and great hope honored to have you. to watch this conversation again as well as our other conversations with great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com.