Sept 8, 2011 San Francisco

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, spoke before an enthusiastic crowd at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club. The event, “Blessed 350”, focused on issues of climate change and systemic transformation .

Selected Excerpts

“So we’ve got to adapt to that which we can no longer prevent, but even more importantly probably, is to prevent that which there is just no way for us to adapt to.” ~ Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben 0:00 “The fact that we’re in a period of economic trauma probably is a good sign that we need to start thinking much more systemically about what we’re going to do differently. My guess is that the economy that we’re moving towards looks less to growth than to durability and resilience and security. And it’s probably going to be far more – the trajectory will be more in the direction of local instead of the ever expanding outward globalism that’s relying on an endless supply of cheap fossil energy to make it possible.. I think we’re in one of the really interesting moments that has a lot of promise and the only real worry is that climate change is happening so fast that it may knock the props out from under the whole thing before we can get where we need to go. ”

“Just to give you the easiest example: the place you can see this new economy emerging is in food. And it’s been wonderful to watch, as the local food movement has grown and the number of farmers markets have doubled and then doubled. That’s the fastest growing part of our food economy. Fast enough that last year the USDA said that there are actually more farms in America instead of fewer for the first time in a hundred and fifty years which is great. ”

“I live in Vermont, which is one of the headquarters along with the bay area of this sort of local food movement. When we had hurricane Irene dump more rain on Vermont than ever has fallen there – and direct consequence of the fact that the warm air holds more water vapor than cold – when that happened at the end of August it wiped out every farmer in the state. There’s nothing growing there now. I mean everything was flooded and submerged. Our best local farms underwater. We’ve got to take on these environmental challenges to have any hope of being able to do the kind of really interesting transformative economic work that’s possible now.”

“What we need from Obama is conviction, and spine and a clear vision of the future…. And no Congress can stop him from being a human being. And no Congress can stop him from being a father to two beautiful children and saying I am going to do everything I can to insure that my daughters have a livable world. Nothing stops him from doing that.” ~ Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken 2:13 “But what do we really need to change? What we need to change is the system, and the system cannot change until there is a manifest crisis that is shared and the pain is shared. That’s just the way human beings are; I’m not wishing it upon us. Whether it’s a climatic crisis like two force five hurricanes climbing up the coast in the same year that really makes an impression, or whether it’s economic or whether it’s both because they’re not unrelated, I don’t know what it will be. But in the meantime, what I see happening, and why I wrote Blessed [Unrest], and why I see Bill doing 350.org, is that it’s extraordinarily important for people to build and create the basis for a future; it’s more than resiliency, it’s what’s going to succeed in an ecological sense the system that’s in place now. It may look marginal, the small farm or NGO may look inconsequential. But as I said, there’s no such thing as inconsequential action – there’s only inconsequential non-action.”

Bill McKibben 4:44 “I think that we’ve got two tasks now to save society. The interesting and powerful fun one takes all our creativity, is to figure out how to build these beautiful resilient interesting local and regional economies that can roll with the punches. That’s really where I wish I could spend all my time, that’s what I mostly write about, and Vermont where I live is a place like California which is a leader in it, and nothing I’d rather due. I was home 50 days last year I think, because the second part of this task, the emergency part, is making sure that we don’t push so hard that that can’t happen. So far we’ve raised the temperature of the planet one degree, but the climatologists are quite robust in their consensus that that will be four degrees by centuries end unless we get our act together very very fast.”

Bill McKibben 5:37 “You can’t adapt to change at that level. So we’ve got to adapt to that which we can no longer prevent, but even more importantly probably, is to prevent that which there is just no way for us to adapt to. We’re already pushing the outer limits. We’ve moved out the Holocene, the ten thousand years of benign climatic stability that underwrote the rise of the human civilization and we’re into something else. And the question is how deep into that something else are we gonna go? And if you think it’s hard for us to adapt to those things in California that has plenty of money, I mean, one of the pleasures of helping start 350.org is that we work in every country in the world except North Korea. So I’ve been everywhere, and you know, this is already a matter of life and death, and all too often death for people in place after place after place around the world. And of course the horrible ethical irony of that is that the places that are hit hardest are the places that have done the least to cause the damage. We don’t just have a practical onus on us to do something, we have a profound moral one too.”

Bill McKibben 7:08 “Our problem is far and away caused by the fact that the fossil fuel industry, which is the most profitable industry on earth, has all the financial means at their disposal to keep us from taking action and clearly they are willing to us it. They are willing to keep going, the record profits they’re making for another five or ten years, even if it means the ruination of the planet. There’s nothing polite about the political fights that we’re now in… If we cannot break the power of the fossil fuel industry to delay change and action then we can’t do anything. And that’s the work that we’re about . And that’s why people are going to jail. And that’s why people are doing huge things, you know 350 we’ve had these great enormous days of action on every country on earth. It’s why people are stepping up. And that’s what the battle is, people versus very concentrated pockets of money”

Bill McKibben 9:30 “Everybody who got arrested was in coat and tie or a dress, you know. And the reason was to kind of demonstrate to the rest of the world who the radicals in this scenario are. The people who work and Chevron and Shell and Exxon are radicals. They are willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere in order to get money. That’s as radical an act as any person who ever lived has undertaken. ”

“Those of us who are trying to preserve the world in something like the form we once know it are in this sense deeply conservative. And it’s importance to get that across. To understand what the ideologies around this fight really are.”

This is already a matter of life and death, and all too often death for people in place after place after place around the world. And of course the horrible ethical irony of that is that the places that are hit hardest are the places that have done the least to cause the damage. We don’t just have a practical onus on us to do something, we have a profound moral one too.” ~ Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben 10:21 “We know the thing that we have to do. Everybody who’s ever looked at it knows that if you put a serious price on carbon to reflect the damage that it does to the environment then we would begin to move much more quickly and gracefully in the right direction. The only reason we don’t do that is because of the incredible power of the fossil fuel industry to prevent that from happening. …Look Exxon made more money last year than any company in the history of money. In our political system that gives them way more power than they deserve.”

“And they’re using that power to prevent change from happening. And they’re using that power right now to try to make sure. You now, and all those companies. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Which the bigger contributor to elections in the last cycle was the US chamber of commerce, and they put 94% of their money into the campaigns of climate deniers. They used that power to retard what scientists and economists and everyone else knows that we need to do and that’s the shameful part.”

Paul Hawken 11:31 “What we need from Obama is conviction, and spine and a clear vision of the future. And that is totally absent. And he has that bully pulpit any time he wants it. And no Congress can stop him from being a human being. No Congress can stop him from being a father to two beautiful children and saying I am going to do everything I can to insure that my daughters have a livable world. Nothing stops him from doing that. And that’s what’s missing from the Obama Administration. The dysfunctional politics, that’s another issue … a real issue and a terrible issue. But that isn’t preventing him from standing up.”

Bill McKibben 12:14 “And there are issues on which Congress doesn’t get in the way. That’s one reason why we focused so hard on the Keystone Pipeline. Congress has not a thing to do with it. The President will either sign or not sign something called a Presidential Certificate of National Interest, and if he doesn’t sign it, then they cannot build this pipeline. His call. I mean, you know, he’s a basketball guy. It’s a twenty foot open jump shot from the top of the key and he’ll either take it or pass off, you know. And we’re doing our best to help him sort of nerve up to do it. They’ve made – did a couple of good things. We’ve got better mileage than we used to and there was some money in the original stimulus bill for a green things. Not anywhere near as much money as say the Chinese put into their similar stimulus bill. They’ve done a lot of bad things on their own. Earlier this year they opened up 750 million tons of coal underneath Wyoming for mining, and it wasn’t something Congress made them do, Ken Salazar and the President decided to do it. And that’s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal fired power plants. We can’t afford to be doing this any longer. Everything we know about the science of climate change says we’ve got to keep carbon in the ground. And if you can’t do that , we really can deal with it.”

“There’s no such thing as inconsequential action – there’s only inconsequential non-action” ~ Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken 13:34 “..and I think the same thing holds true in terms of renewable energy. And I think that in some ways the progressive movement has given a hall pass to some renewable technologies that are not renewable, and solar is one of them. It’s not renewable because you’re using high intensity energy, in this case Chinese coal powered plants, to make a low intensity generator that can’t turn around and make itself, and so therefore it’s not renewable. And second, it is the most toxic form of energy per kilowatt hour on the planet besides the tar sands, save for a meltdown at Fukushima.”

Greg Dalton “That’s because the photovoltaic cells, what goes into them…”

Paul Hawken “Oh it’s a witch’s brew. You have hexaflouride gases that are 25,000 times more powerful than CO2. And they’re escaping from the sintering ovens in China. A quarter ounce escapes and you have a net effect on environment in terms of increased carbon emissions, not negative….”

Paul Hawken 15:14 “There’s no point in making a renewable energy generator that has a three or five to one return on energy. That energy return on energy invested is laughable. It’s close to what the tar sands have: two or three to one. We came from a hundred to one world, that’s the oil and coal world. For every unit of energy that you put into the earth, a hundred units of energy came back, and that’s what we’re accustomed to The fact is surplus energy is the feedstock of civilization, and when you do not have surplus energy, you do not have civilization, you have hard scrabble existence. So you’ve got to be thinking about renewable technologies that have a really magnificent return on the energy invested, not a paltry one. So for all these reasons all I’m saying is that incumbent solar—thank you for getting us to where we are—is not going to take us to where we want to go”

Bill McKibben 17:28 “Oh there’s gotta be sooner or later a global agreement of some kind. I mean I don’t think there’s any other – this is the first global problem that we’ve ever had. If we can’t get, and we’re not going to get America, and China, and other big problems to agree without some serious pressure from the other countries of the world. You know, everybody’s going for the next sort of international negotiations in Durban this fall. And hopefully one of the things that’s going to happen there is the entire continent of Africa, the top half of which is locked in to a devastating drought right now, will be putting serious pressure on the world. That’s one of the things we do at 350.org, is try to mobilize the whole planet, and most of the people on that planet use so little carbon that they don’t have any effective way in their own personal lives to change the outcome, but politically they can put a lot of pressure on those of us who should be changing things.”

“Copenhagen the movie did not end the way that it was supposed to end. I mean we had a hundred and seventeen nations that we managed to sign on to this 350 parts per million right. That’s good, but they were the wrong 117 nations, all the poor and vulnerable ones. And the rich and addicted ones, led by our country, undermined that meeting and have done nothing since. The State Department has been, under President Obama, a complete and utter failure at getting any kind of international momentum going towards an agreement. We’ve got to change that.”

Bill McKibben 19:10 “Eventually – and here’s the thing about climate change, eventually this is going to happen. Eventually there are going to be enough bad things that have happened that people all over the world will be saying we have no choice but to do something. Sooner or later we’ll do it. The problem is, ‘sooner or later’ is the issue, because the physics and chemistry of climate change do not give us a very long window to operate, and if we choose later instead of sooner, than we might as well really bother frankly, because the problem will have passed the point where it is any longer susceptible to our amelioration”

Paul Hawken 23:46 “You know I think it’s importance to understand that we live in a very violent culture. I mean violent every step of the way. It’s not just violence in Iraq and Afghan. It’s violence to our children the way they’re educated. It’s violence to women – women know this the world over. It’s violent the way we treat our soils in agriculture. We’re violent to our forests. Our thermo-industrial system is violent in terms of chemistry. I mean every single aspect of what we do in this culture is violent. And what we’re talking about is moving to a world and a civilization that starts to looks at nature as mentor, that basically imitates. What we see in nature is is that life creates the conditions that are conducive to life and you don’t do that with force, you don’t do it with coercion. You don’t do it with power-over strategies.”

Q: “The United States got wealthy off of fossil fuels, and is not really willing to go along with the Kyoto approach or offer any reparations for the climate damage that we’ve already done. What can we hope for in terms of an agreement, I mean if Obama goes ahead with the pipeline, and when the petroleum price was getting too high and he opened the reserves to lower it, is there any way the United States can get up to the bully pulpit and say let’s make a deal. What can we offer?”

Bill McKibben 25:14 “Look, at the moment there’s no possibility right now for a global deal just like there’s no possibility for anything happening in Congress right now. We’re clearly not there, that’s why our job is to build a political movement big enough to force our leaders to actually lead. And that’s not something that has happened around climate until recently. The reason why we started 350.org was because at a certain point after sort of having written the first book about this and gotten a watch for fifteen or twenty years while nothing happened, it dawned on me that the strategy of having scientists whisper in the ear of politicians about what the biggest problem in the world was, wasn’t working, because while they were whispering in one ear, the fossil fuel industry was bellowing in the other ear about what they were gonna do. ”

“We’re never gonna have the money that the fossil fuel industry has, so we better find an alternate currency to work in, and that currency has gotta be our bodies and our creativity and our spirit and our passion. That’s what political movements are about, that’s what we’re trying to build. When we build one, as we build one, new political possibilities open up.”

Report by James George