Dec 5, 2015 Paris.

Bill McKibben of 350.org appeared along with Mark Jacobson, James Balog, Neil Leary, Jacob Scherr, and John Adams at a youth climate activist event called Climate Action – Engaging the Next Generation.

Partial Transcript
“You know, we planned last weekend to have an enormous march in Paris. We though it would be as big as the one in New York last September, and my colleagues all of them young had worked for six or eight months had moved over here to France, we had people from hundreds of different groups, everybody lined up but of course that went by the board.”

“The beautiful thing that happened immediately was that we sent out word all around the planet saying, look, we can’t march in Paris, we need people marching everywhere else. There were 2200 marches and things around the world last weekend and they were astonishing to see..”

“… they were amazing, big marches, thousands of people in just the most unlikely places, in Malawi, in Ghana, and huge turnout down under… Across Europe of course, but also happily very big in Asia, in many places that we’ve really been working hard, all of us, all the different groups to kind of establish a foothold - places like Nepal, places like India.”

“In fact there was a very moving picture of people in Chennai demonstrating, and in the six days since, Chennai has had the biggest rainfall ever measured in that part of the world. There’s now hundreds of dead people there, the city’s been cut off. A city of eight million basically cut off, an island.”

“The point I’m trying to make is that now there’s the big movement out there, and what it’s been engaged by are a series of fights. That’s how people have become… – the trouble with climate change always is it seems so big and we seem so small against it. What could we do, what could matter, what could happen?”

“And the trick of building this movement over the last five or six years has been to convince people that there’s enough of us that when we concentrate our power on particular things, we can make a difference.”
“So in the states, you know, the key fight, oddly, has been this fight over this pipelines down out of the tar sands of Canada that somehow turned into an emblematic battle that rallied people as things hadn’t before. And as a result, you know, pleasantly for the moment, we’ve beaten that pipeline. More to the point, as the leader of the American Natural Gas Association said to his colleagues in a speech a few weeks ago, he said, we somehow have to stop the keystonization of projects…”
“Everyplace people are, people are fighting – there’s people are going to jail today in Boston fighting pipelines there. In place after place, all over the world. We think we’ve beaten plans for the biggest coal mine in the world in Australia. France here has banned fracking, which is I think in many way a direct outgrowth of the work that [?] and so many others did in New York State to take this issue and make it absolutely central.”

Report by James George