Check the 350.org website for an action near you today. On the flip: an excerpt from Democracy Now! & some thoughts about the day.
The Democracy Now! interview is a chilling reminder of how deep is disconnect in which we live. McKibben's first book about global warming, The End of Nature was published 20 years ago.
Here's the intro:
JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama is heading to Massachusetts today where he will urge the Senate to move forward on a climate change bill. The President's speech comes just seven weeks before the start of the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference. Next week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold three days of hearings to discuss the climate change bill proposed by Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry.
While the Obama administration has acknowledged no bill will be passed before the Copenhagen talks, pressure is growing from grassroots organizations to take action. On Saturday the group 350.org is organizing an International Climate Action Day. More than 4,500 events are scheduled to take place in 170 nations.
350.org is named after what scientists have identified as a sustainable target for carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere: 350 parts per million. We are currently at 387 parts per million.
While most climate scientists say the effects of global warming are happening far sooner than initially projected, many Americans appear to be dismissing the threat of climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: A poll released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that just 57 percent of respondents believe there is solid evidence that the world is getting warmer, down 20 percentage points in just three years. The poll also found only 35 percent of Americans believe global warming is a very serious problem.
Well, today we're joined by two of the major thinkers, writers, activists tackling climate change.
With us here in New York at our firehouse studio is writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben, co-founder and director of 350.org. Twenty years ago, he published The End of Nature, the first general audience book about global warming. Bill McKibben has described the talks in Copenhagan as, quote, "the most important diplomatic gathering in the world's history."
We're also joined by the Australian scientist Tim Flannery. He is the author of the international bestseller The Weather Makers. His latest book is called Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future. Tim Flannery is chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council. He is a mammalogist and paleontologist by training. As a field zoologist, he discovered and named more than sixty species. In 2007 Tim Flannery was named Australian of the Year.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! And as we go to broadcast, Bill, the protests, rallies, actions around the country, in this largest day of global action in the history of the world, are already underway.
BILL McKIBBEN: People are jumping the gun a little bit, and we're getting amazing pictures beginning to arrive from places like Addis Ababa, from all across the Pacific, from New Zealand and Australia.
It's quite remarkable to think that the largest day of political action in the planet's history will center around a fairly arcane scientific fact, a data point. You would have said that it was too complicated for people or too hard for them to assimilate, but this is the most important number in the world. People are realizing that. People are realizing that their future, in the starkest terms, depends on the world's leaders understanding that this debate is not so much between the US and China and the EU, it's mostly between human beings, on the one hand, and physics and chemistry, on the other. And today and tomorrow, in 177 nations, people are standing up for this science, saying, "Pay attention to the real situation."
JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet, there remains this huge disconnect between the American public and the public in the rest of the world. As we said, only about 35 percent of the American people believe this is a serious problem. Your understanding why there is this huge disconnect?
BILL McKIBBEN: Two things. One, we're the most addicted country in the world, so it makes sense that we'd be deepest in denial, I suppose. The second is, we've never really had a popular movement about climate. We've left this to the experts, on the theory that if we keep repeating how bad the peril is, our leaders will take action.
Now we're doing the work of building the kind of grassroots movement that changes hearts and minds, that moves people to understand what the problem is. And hopefully those images flooding in from around the world will really open people's hearts, when they understand that people are protesting across Africa, across Asia, across Latin America, across places where people did nothing to cause this problem but are willing to take a real role in helping to solve it.
The most important thing here, for me, is McKibben's statement, "we've never really had a popular movement about climate." There's been a long sporadic lead-up, just as there was decades of civil rights activism before Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So we're not starting from nowhere. But we have to build momventum very quickly just the Civil Rights Movement did--even faster, in fact. It was less than 4 years from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to LBJ's announcement that he would not seek re-election, but instead would devote all his energy to ending the war in Vietnam. He didn't succeed, of course, due in part in Nixon's meddling. But it took less than 4 years of intense activism, starting from much less than we have today to reverse the course that we were on. Citizen mobilization can bring about dramatic changes that are also quite swift.
Or we could learn the hard way, as they're already learning in Australia:
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Flannery, you've been traveling the United States. Talk about the awareness in Australia and the awareness in the United States around global warming. What's your sense?
TIM FLANNERY: Well, Amy, you know, they're very different things. In Australia, it's impossible to avoid an understanding of climate change, because it's in our face every day. We have terrible problems with water security at the moment across southern Australia. Our fifth-largest city, Adelaide, may be out of drinking water next year. Our national water commissioner's said that he can't guarantee drinking water to that city as of the end of next year. We've had dust storms. We've had fires. We've had cyclones. We've had bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. And so, no matter where you live in Australia, you become aware of climate change.
Here in the US, I think you've been a little bit buffered from those changes. There's certainly some impacts; particularly in the western forests here, you can see it. But Australia is a harbinger, I think, for what will happen in the United States.
But one of the big factors here that's so very different is that the population's views seem to be divided along political lines. It's a tragedy that, in a way, you know, the Democrats represent the proactive side, and the Republicans seem to represent a side that wants to ignore the issue. Elsewhere in the world, that isn't the case. In Britain, for example, the Conservative Party is a very green party.
So there's something about the political mix here and the sort of the relative insulation of the population from some of these changes that have made levels of awareness here much lower than elsewhere in the world. And that is such a problem for us, because unless the US can move forward with its cap-and-trade bill to deal with this issue, I'm afraid many other countries are going to take a less-than-adequate stance during these negotiations in December.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Tim Flannery, you mentioned the problems that you've had there. You recently had the wildfires that took about 170 lives there. And here in the United States, obviously, wildfires, especially in the Southwest, have grown dramatically in recent years. But again, there's like no connection that the public is making between these calamities and the overall change in the earth's climate.
TIM FLANNERY: That's very strange to me. And maybe it's just that in Australia the situation is so stark. You know, up until twelve years ago in southeastern Australia, we enjoyed a regular winter rainfall regime. And the rain still falls, incidentally; it just falls over the southern ocean, about 200 miles south of where it used to fall. And we can all see that. We all experience the impacts of it. And somehow or other, it's become widely understood in the Australian public that this is the result of a changing climate. You really have to live in our country a little while, I think, to understand just how profound these impacts have been. There's no getting away from them. It's not just one phenomena; it's a series of things that have changed. And everyone who takes an interest in this issue really does understand it.
The utter stupidity of GOP opposition to doing anything to save the planet for human habitation was also touched on:
AMY GOODMAN: Can we play for you recent comments by Republican senators on the Boxer-Kerry climate bill?
SEN. JAMES INHOFE: It can't be denied that this would be the largest tax increase in the history of America.
SEN. KIT BOND: The Kerry-Boxer bill is a giant new energy tax on families and workers.
SEN. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON: And your electricity rates, your gasoline per gallon costs are going to go up. This is not the time to be adding costs.
SEN. JOHN BARRASSO: What we know, that it is going to raise prices for American families. It's going to make it much tougher for American families.
SEN. JOHN THUNE: All we know is that everything is going to go up. Electricity is going to go up. Diesel fuel is going to go up. Natural gas is going to go up. Fertilizer is going to go up.
AMY GOODMAN: Just an example of some of the opposition, Tim Flannery. Your response?
TIM FLANNERY: Look, there is no doubt that there will be modest cost increases across some of those areas, most of which can be dealt with, incidentally, by just some efficiency gains in very, very simple ways.
But, you know, unless we invest in the future now in that regard, American manufacturing and American industry is going to suffer greatly over the next decade or two. And the reason for that is that countries like China are now moving ahead with their eye firmly on that market of five billion people around the planet who can't get enough energy. We know that we can't deliver that energy to those people using traditional means; we'll pollute the planet out of existence. So the big gains to be had over the next decade or two or three are building a new energy economy, and America needs to invest in that, so its own manufacturers and its own chambers of commerce and businesses are in a good position to take a slice of that enormous market that's emerging.
"Dumb as a stump" is an insult to stumps everywhere.
More on global warming later today. |
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