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October 29, 2013

Bill’s speech at the Sophie Prize award ceremony

Here at 350.org, we were honored that the Sophie Prize Award chose our founder, Bill McKibben, as their 2013 award recipient. The Sophie Prize is one of the most prestigious environmental awards in the world. A big congratulations to Silje Lundberg, the elected leader of Norway’s largest environmental organization for youth, Nature and Youth, and Alec Loorz, founder of Kids vs. Climate Change, who both received this years Sophie Legacy Prize. We've pasted Bill's speech from the awards ceremony below.

Bill McKibben's Speech at the Sophie Prize Awards Ceremony, Oslo, Norway

I am so grateful for this prize.

It means a great deal to me for many reasons. One, of course, is the source: Jostein Gaarder and his wonderful book about Sophie Amundsen provided great reading pleasure, and to know of his remarkable generosity makes the conclusions of the book that much more powerful.

And it doesn’t hurt that I have a daughter named Sophie. In fact, she is slightly Norwegian herself, having spent two years at the UWC Red Cross campus at Flekkefjord, and in the process acquired a Norwegian boyfriend and a pretty good command of the language. I wish she were here to translate for me; alas, she’s grown up now and in college. But it is very good to be joined by her friend Henrik’s parents, Mona and Arne Gundersen.

For myself, Norway has always been the country I love the most beyond my own. Partly that’s because my great vice has been Nordic skiing, one of this nation’s gifts to the planet. I’ve gotten to ski the Oslomarka and race the Birkebeiner, and cheer on my athletic heroes from Ulvang to Daehlie to Bjornedaelen to Northug, though always with a particular soft spot for the incomparable Marit Bjoergen. It’s a thrill to be in Oslo as the winter begins.

That said, I recognize that this honor is not really for me; it’s for the many thousands of people who have come together in recent years to form the climate movement. Let me say at the beginning that this movement should be unnecessary. A quarter century ago scientists explained that climate change was real and constituted the greatest threat that our species had yet faced. It was in those years that I wrote the first account of global warming for a general audience. If our systems of governance worked the way they should, then those calls would have been heeded, and we would have gone straight to work on the monumental but do-able task of transitioning off of fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. We wouldn’t be finished the job yet, but we’d be well begun, on the way to a sounder future.

June 6, 2013

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“To My Foreigner’s Eye”

I've seen Bill McKibben speak quite a few times, but today was something special. Speaking at the National Press Club, in Canberra, Australia, Bill delivered what a friend who was also listening called a "flawless" speech. It was something special that is for sure. Here it is in full. Tomorrow we are off to Melbourne and to another packed out theatre of 800+ people. You can follow our progress on Twitter: @350Australia #DotheMaths and on Facebook here.

Speech to the National Press Club, Canberra, Author and co-founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben

To my foreigner’s eye, there is a profound and interesting disconnection between the way that Australians view their fossil fuel resources, and the way that physics views those same deposits. This disconnection spells bad news for the planet, and perhaps also for the Australian economy, as it seems likely to lead to a series of bets that go disastrously wrong. My hope is that Australia might gain a more clear-eyed view of the future, seeing it more through the eyes of physics as it were, in hopes of charting a sounder course. A course that would, inevitably, require keeping most identified coal, gas and oil deposits safely underground.

Australia has vast fossil fuel deposits, some of the largest known on the planet; the most important are probably the coal beds. To Australians, and especially to the very wealthy men and women who own those holdings, these are the source of future wealth—enough wealth to allow you to build a whole fleet of replica Titanics, say. And so the plans are on for the rapid expansion of mine, rail, and port necessary to dig that coal and send it abroad to be burned.

April 24, 2013

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San Francisco Board of Supervisors Unanimously Pass Resolution Urging Fossil Fuel Divestment!

Exciting news! The San Francisco Board of Supervisors just voted unanimously to support fossil fuel divestment. Here's a press release we just put out:

San Francisco Board of Supervisors Unanimously Pass Resolution Urging Fossil Fuel Divestment

Resolution urges the city’s retirement system to divest over $583 million from the fossil fuel industry

SAN FRANCISCO -- The San Francisco Board of Supervisors (SFERS) passed a unanimous resolution this afternoon calling on the San Francisco Employee Retirement System to divest over $583 million invested in the 200 corporations that hold the majority of the world’s fossil fuel reserves.

The resolution makes San Francisco the third city in the nation after Ithaca and Seattle to push for fossil fuel divestment. If the SFERS Board agrees to the Supervisors’ request, it will become the largest pension fund in the country to divest from the fossil fuel industry.

“Divestment is an important part of our city response to climate change,” said Supervisor John Avalos, who introduced the resolution.

The San Francisco Employee’s Retirement System (SFERS) is a roughly $16 billion pension fund that serves more than 52,000 active and retired employees of the City and County of San Francisco and their survivors. According to SFERS Executive Director Jay Huish, the fund currently owns $583.7 million of public holdings in 91 of top 200 fossil fuel companies. Some of SFERS’ largest fossil fuel holdings include $112 million in ExxonMobil, $60 million in Chevron, $26 million in Shell Oil, $17 million in Occidental Petroleum, and $11 million in the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. (1)

The push for fossil fuel divestment is part of a new national campaign, Go Fossil Free, that is modeled on the 1980s movement to divest from apartheid South Africa. The movement has spread to over 100 cities and 300 colleges and universities across the country. Four colleges, Unity, Hampshire, Sterling, and College of the Atlantic, have committed to divestment. There are also active campaigns on every University of California campus. Earlier this spring, UC Berkeley’s student government voted to divest their $2 million budget from fossil fuels. (2)

In San Francisco, the divestment campaign was led by 350 Bay Area and the national 350.org campaign and supported by groups including SEIU 1021, SF Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, Center for Biological Diverstiy, and more.

“San Francisco’s commitment is a big victory for the burgeoning fossil fuel divestment movement,” said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, one of the organizations helping lead Go Fossil Free campaign. “The Bay Area will spend billions adapting to climate change--it makes no sense at all to simultaneously invest in the corporations making that work necessary.”