I was away camping this weekend–no e-mail or phone access for 3 whole days. Amazing. But judging by my inbox and the 350.org blog, it looks like my team has been busy. It seems that Bill McKibben was in Colorado stumping for 350, and managed to convince one of the world’s most influential journalists that a global climate movement is actually a pretty good idea.
Check out Nicholas Kristof’s blog post below, cross-posted from his blog on the NewYorkTimes.com
When I arrived at college in the fall of 1978, I figured I was a good writer and would shine in the mandatory expository writing class. So I was mildly traumatized to discover that I was the second best writer in the class of a dozen students; the best was a gangly dynamo with an interest in the environment, a kid named Bill McKibben.
Fast forward three decades, and I’m here at the Mountain Film Festival in Telluride, Colorado. I just saw Bill give an excellent presentation on climate change and the organization he has started to build political pressure for change, www.350.org. Bill was one of the first to warn the general public about climate change, but he realized a few years ago that what was missing was a social movement for change — so he set out to create one. That’s 350.org, after the presumably safe level of carbon dioxide in the environment (350 parts per million). We’ve already exceeded that, and we’re on a trajectory that may take us past 500 ppm.
I took my kids to hear Bill talk, because this may be one of the great issues in their future. There are huge uncertainties, and it’s possible that new technologies will help, that geo-engineering will save us, or that the threat won’t turn out to be as serious as we believe. Or it’s also possible that it’ll be worse — that the melting will accelerate, that the West Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets will disappear, that sea levels will rise 10 feet, and that we’ll have pretty much destroyed civilization. Given the scale of the risks, we need to act far more aggressively, and I think Bill is right that a grassroots social movement is the only way to get the necessary policies in place.