hello i'm starving in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture of the world well it's recognized environmentalists killed mckibben 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 committee was torture in his new book so is it now it's time to call up old dick and george w. in front of a jury to face war crimes charges. for

thise 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 science his latest book. earth the

double a making a life on a tough new planet as a guide to living are fundamentally altered. bill welcome 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 no perhaps special hardware to so many of these 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 pipeline 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 right 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 the sort of behind us or 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 us and the way they did it was to take us to. for three days and two nights imports called central so walk here and it's district of columbia this is the basic motors rapists and thieves going to play it's exactly as much fun as you might expect. no. no bad sort of metal slabs to lie on without sheet or mattress or pillow we're going to get 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 book people they put them in a paddy wagon pay. 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 a good middle class americans to go get arrested it's still hard but thousand or more people will have gone through this process before these two weeks are over it's quite a story to see every day. this is the. it you can say pinnacle or end point or anything like that would be hyperbolic and well 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 relationship with ecology with planet earth with our culture. where you go all the start for a building. you know it's a hard i probably wasn't quite destined to be an environmentalist though i. always enjoyed the outdoors i thought of myself as

a very urban person my first job when i left college was writing the talk of the talent section for the new yorker magazine in the dark of twenty one or twenty two it's about the most urban joggers yeah i think that for five years when sign your house bought the new yorker i quit there because it fired mr shawn in the editor forever. and i moved up to the adirondack mountains the last great wilderness to be american east and fell in love with that wilderness and not long afterwards began reading the early papers about climate science climate change and somehow it struck me almost sort of out of the loop. that this walled place that i had in the love with that i was you know. wasn't going to be as well this i wanted it to be. that if you. beings by changing the temperature of the

earth changing you know the floor and the font and everything about even the most remote places throwing said i can walk a half hour from my house and come to a place where no man stands for a million years and do 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 enter an x. and i 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 this book the end of nature which was the first book about climate change and gives you some idea of how relatively short of 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 sort of philosophical essay more out of sadness really than fear what 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 watched people having to flee their farms or road and i've watched people die there and gave fevers miss you know spread and i've seen the effects in severe weather and drought flooding and things put some way for me at the beginning it was that sense of was as much as anything else that drove me started me down this path the beginning of elizabeth kubler ross is five stages perhaps maybe so and of course you know. talk about naive i mean my theory of political change and then a new recall i was twenty seven or twenty eight when i was writing this my theory of political changed. basically boiled down to i will write

a book everyone will read it and then they'll change it up and you know i mean i did write the book you know in comparative terms i really read it it came out in twenty four languages it was a bestseller all over the place but it turns out that's as i've sort of learned slowly 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. and sees 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 with being the most important thing that's happened in our world was the discovery of the ability to

use fossil fuel in the early really you know sort of seventy's eighteenth century at the beginning of the kind of industrial age. it made us a men's league more powerful than we'd ever been before gave us the ability to lead in essence each have thousands of slaves there were certain parts of that that were obviously very useful and there were other parts that. weren't and i don't mean just the environmental impacts though this is climate change is by far the biggest thing that humans have ever done and would also mean that it allowed us in a certain sense to become. deeply deeply deeply kind of hyper individualized you know 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 working. it is

sort of. starting a book called people come to me and i was looking at a set of data and asked americans how happy they were with their lives one of the big polling firm has done this every year since the end of world war two and it turns out that the percentage of americans who say i'm very happy with my life peaks in one thousand and fifty six and goes downhill since at the moment barely americans will make the claim i'm very happy with my life despite the fact that our standard of living has trouble since the one nine hundred fifty s. now. if you start to think about what we've done since then some think that the reasons become a little clearer certainly the data suggests that it 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 go to

restrict houses and drive between a. it's also socially problematic to be a fifty's was the era of the beginning of 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 on earth to keep up with that decline in france that was also pretty much the peak of unionization in the united states you know it's had hardly been passed in forty seven which started in kneecap a process but that's community work you know churches i mean you name name your thing. and so that's you know that's in the completely tied to in many ways to our ability to use fossil fuel in ways that we hadn't before to drive between vast places to you know distances to these vast power with these

things like that i couldn't use is that if we made some of the changes we need to make in the right direction even technological changes we'll start seeing those things shift again give me an example. if you have one from the best trained in america right now the best number in the country i think it's this the number of farmers markets is doubled and doubled again then doubled again in the last fifteen years it's the fastest growing part of our food economy it's good for environmental reasons. because you know five mile tomatoes better than a five thousand mile one it's good for coal unary reasons i mean i travel five thousand miles in the last week i know how i feel about it so that tomato feels to you know it mostly it's good for social reasons appear sociologist fellow 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 you fall into the

light. fluorescent transceivers at the stations of the cross around the supermarket . when they followed people around the farmers' market they found that on average they were having ten times more conversations per visit sure so it's a bit different it's like beginning a new back together and of course the funny part is that you know she can vary and we decide that we've invented this great new thing the farmer's market this is how 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 the animals you know. that's the that's the really promising. 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 of carbon based fuels to get to it in

ways that would 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 put is next so let's say we have a farmer's market as it were you know 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 with the engineers distributed generation millions of rooftop i mean i have all the drill journals i have so pedals all over my roof on a sunny day and they're tied into the grid so on a sunny day i'm a little utility you know i'm throttling electrons down the grid my neighbor is keeping his beer cold before the red sox game with the sunshine falling on my roof . that's in so many ways 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 a. not giving us time to make an easy one 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 a commie would like the current and we have to kind of force that spring as it were and that's what you know my we're going aizen work over the last five or six years has been a let's let's continue our conversation just a moment on the topics of bad and the organizing and and to the information i'd like to get to the book that you wrote about how information travels in oregon it's really remarkable our conversation tonight with bill mckibben author environmentalist and activist our conversations with great minds will continue in just a few moments. drives the world of fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to didn't break

through a bit for it to be made who can you trust no one who is in view with it global machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism it's called sad when nobody dares to ask we do our t.v. question more. face. to face. with a. similar city. maximum thrust. marks

a moment efficiency. marks among comfort. maneuverability most maybe you shouldn't use it to denmark's moscow someone famous here show one 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 is 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 get this whole issue of climate change in the books that you've written about it but it is you know just a static picture here where you are it's two thousand and eleven never said what

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 pinching harder and faster than we thought and to understand that just look at the last year ok twenty two and was the longest year for which we have records on this one thousand nine hundred nations set new all time temperature records and so for the record by a large margin some of them were 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 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 we just hit the new all time asia

temperature record today at one hundred twenty nine degrees. ok that's that's really. when when that happens when you keep like that all kinds of things you know literal i mean pretty much a literally yes all hell breaks loose i mean it may not be hell but it's roughly the same temperature. the arctic is melting understand. great if you go look at those pictures from apollo eight or whatever it was that came back of our beautiful earth there is out of date as my high school yearbook picture i mean there's like forty percent less ice up there in the summer if you. eat if you look at the atmosphere itself since warm air holds more water vapor than cold basic physical fact. it's about four percent of 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 evaporation and then flooded the lucian down with those dice

loaded you know place after place is throwing snake eyes so last year for instance it was pakistan an area up in the khyber pass that gets three feet of rain in a normal year you get 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 still millions of people without homes in pakistan as a result. we think of you know good wife 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. and that rick perry is asking people to pray

for rain 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 prayer you know it's a good idea but most theologians would uphold that it would work better if you wanted the same time doing every damn thing you can think of for poor 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 a problem at any rate. the earth has moved out of. this period of ten thousand years that underwrote the rise of human civilization it temperatures 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 or listen. to climate scientists say unless we get our 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 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 peace isn't a possibility. the ocean is already thirty percent more assets than it was forty

years ago as the sea water trade absorbs all this carbon out of the air. we're our it's a it's a finite planet there are a number of you know finite number of huge physical features 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. feature you can see from space you know and it's disappearing drying out amazon as temperatures rise around the parts we're not cutting down we thought of that off in a serious way because we're moving into really dangerous territory. how do we do you only the only way to do it is to get off fossil fuel and that's easy to say but hard to do because there is much mean getting on to alternatives are the scenes getting some of each but the problem is i mean this will be hard enough to do in any event i mean it's fossil fuels the center of the problem mean it would be

a rapid transition more rapid than our economies can easily deal with the right what we did at the beginning of world war two take europe for that matter hard enough to do with 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 this election. the chamber of commerce was the biggest donor and they gave ninety four percent of their money to climate deniers to people who had some alternative physics and chemistry. that they have a rock shared not a science or is just by it iraq's you know a kind of lysenko wisdom that sort of creeping through our political culture.

so you know i suppose that's one reason we're you know out there we're going 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 to enough money for the moment that currencies our bodies our books our spirit our creativity 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 and i think that the your book the age of missing information is is in many ways medical all of this underlies it and over wraps that and talk to us this was a very odd book that 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 a 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 writing if you will 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. t.v. and indeed the whole 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 dangerous message it's dangerous in terms of our own happiness as we talked about earlier it's dangerous i suppose theologically you know. it's clearly the cone 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 of the ways and doesn't does it almost become fractal it's you know the i mean the main message of all advertising is you are 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 it 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 always in the demonstration we're that we're going it's it's it's crazy but we found people all over the world. to go to work to do these things and take great

joy in being in partnership in communication one of the few wildcards that we have and it's a good wild card by and large is the rise of the internet remember we talked about farmers' market in food in electronics or we've got a farmer's market in ideas now to people to bring their ideas and 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 more that we can make a movement big enough and strong enough and fast enough to outdo the fossil fuel companies. i'm not of out of the prediction business it's it's it's a talk 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 bet 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 weather will change i'm going off i couldn't tell you what good change you are. in the thirty seconds we have literally bill your message to work. you know what it's it's it's time it really is. 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 on 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 it could be quite remarkable quite remarkable bill mckibben thanks so much thank you voice of great awakening and creative thinking on it i have. to watch this conversation again as well as our other conversations with a great minds go to our website.