(attendees chattering)
(attendees applauding)
("Sun Singer" by Paul Winter)
(attendees applauding)
- Good afternoon and welcome
to the Chubb Fellowship Lecture
with our distinguished
guest, Bill McKibben,
award-winning environmental
activist and writer.
The piece you just heard
is titled Sun Singer
composed and performed by
Grammy Award winner Paul Winter
and accompanied by Janet Yieh
who is pursuing her master
of musical arts degree
at Yale's Institute of Sacred
Music and School of Music.
A pioneer of world music, Paul Winter,
has won seven Grammy
Awards for his unique genre
of Earth music which
interweaves the voices
of the greater symphony of the wild
with instrumental voices
from classical, jazz
and indigenous traditions of the world.
Through the beauty of sound,
he aims to introduce musical audiences
to the variety of species
and ecosystems on Earth.
This music is often improvised
and recorded in natural acoustic spaces
to reflect the qualities and instincts
brought into play by the environment.
With his music, Paul
Winter has found the means
to connect people to a sense of place,
promote relatedness to the
larger community of life
and assist groups
supporting local, cultural
and biological diversity.
He has performed hundreds
of benefit concerts
and used his compositions to
serve environmental causes
in a range of countries
including Russia, Brazil,
Israel, Japan and Spain.
So today, we are
delighted that Paul Winter
shaped his performance of Sun Singer
to take advantage of
Woolsey's beautiful pipe organ
built in the early 20th century
using 5,000 pieces of pipes and components
recycled from earlier retired organs.
Seems quite fitting for today's topic.
His music, I hope, has served
to gather and center us
for this afternoon's Chubb Lecture.
I wanna take a moment
and thank our sponsors
for today's program.
along with the Chubb Fellowship,
we are supported by the Yale
School of Forestry &
Environmental Studies,
the Yale Sustainable Food Program
and the Forum on Religion and Ecology.
Before we begin, I ask that you
turn off all your cellphones
so that you do not
disrupt today's program.
And by the way my name is Mary Lui.
I'm a professor in the Department
of American Studies and History
and I'm also the current head
of Timothy Dwight College.
As the head of Timothy Dwight College,
I have the honor of
serving as the custodian
of the illustrious Chubb Fellowship.
Established in 1941 out
of a prior large donation
for education purposes made
in 1936 by Hendon Chubb,
a graduate of the Yale class of 1895.
Since its establishment,
the Chubb fund has adhered
to the goals of providing
encouragement and aid
to students interested in government
and American public affairs.
The fellowship initially aimed to foster
among Yale undergraduates and
interest in public service
in local and state affairs
grew over the years
to include numerous distinguished visitors
and national and international affairs
as well as leaders in the world
of the arts and humanities.
Since the 1940s, the Chubb
Fellows Lecture series
has inspired generations of Yale students
to undertake public service
and pursue leadership roles
in the hopes of creating
a better world today
and for posterity.
The fellowship has hosted
four US presidents,
George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford,
Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman.
In recent years, we've welcomed
a wide range of national
and international leaders
including Wendell Berry,
Samantha Power, Dr. Hawa Abdi,
Shah Rukh Khan and Paul Simon.
With this quick description of the history
and aims of the Chubb Fellowship,
I'm delighted that we're
welcoming today Bill McKibben.
I'm also delighted to welcome Sue Halpern,
she's right there, Bill McKibben's spouse
who was herself a renowned
writer, Rhodes Scholar,
Guggenheim award winner and Yale alum.
Welcome, Sue.
Introducing Bill McKibben
will be Mary Evelyn Tucker
who is a senior lecturer
and research scholar
at Yale with appointments
in the School of Forestry
and Environmental Studies as
well as the Divinity School
and the Department of Religious Studies.
She teaches in the joint MA
program in religion and ecology
and directs the forum on
religion and ecology at Yale
with her husband, John Grim.
She's been involved with the Earth Charter
since its inception and served
on the International Earth
Charter Drafting Committee
from 1997 to 2000
and was a member of the Earth
Charter International Council.
Please join me in welcoming
Professor Mary Evelyn
Tucker to the podium.
(attendees applauding)
- Many thanks to Mary Lui,
Susan Wigler, Mary-Kay Kaminski,
and the Timothy Dwight
students for all their work
on the Chubb Fellowship.
Our special thanks also to
Paul Winter on saxophone
and Janet Yeh on organ for
that magnificent opening
to today's event.
I've known Paul for over 40
years and like vintage wine,
he is a joy to drink in.
A national treasure for
all that he has contributed
to the environmental movement
over so many decades.
One more round of applause for Paul.
(attendees applauding)
And this afternoon, we
will hear from another
national treasure, Bill McKibben.
Bill has won numerous awards
including the Gandhi Peace Prize
presented here in New Haven
and the Right Livelihood Award in Sweden
which is also known as
an alternative Nobel.
He is the recipient of 18 honorary degrees
and is a fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
Bill lives in Vermont with Sue
where he is Schumann Distinguished Scholar
in Environmental Studies
at Middlebury College.
But maybe his claim to fame here at Yale
is that he was arrested in 2009
in front of the White House
with Gus Speth, our former dean
at the School of Forestry
and Environmental Studies.
Another Chubb fellow and
noted writer, Wendell Berry,
demonstrated with them
for climate justice.
Bill has written 13 best-selling books
that have changed the
conversation on many topics
including how to move beyond
the economic growth model
and how to live with less
and reflections on hope.
I, like many others,
first encountered Bill
in the pages of The New Yorker
where he went to become a staff writer
after graduating from Harvard.
At age 28,
it was his 57-page essay in The New Yorker
that awoke so many of us to
the effects of global warming.
I still have the issue
which is eerily dated
September 11th, 1989.
The book was published in that same year
and was titled The End of Nature.
It has been printed in
more than 20 languages
and used by teachers across
the country including me,
but if best-selling books weren't enough,
Bill has become a distinctive
kind of writer and activist.
Let me try and describe
this special leadership role
he has moved into,
although, often reluctantly
over the last decade.
Bill has created with
the help of many others
especially gifted Middlebury students,
a global climate change movement.
That is no small feat.
350.org is the hub of the movement
but the spokes are numerous
and they extend widely
across the country and around the world.
350.org has organized 20,000 rallies
in every country on the
planet except North Korea,
spearheaded the resistance
to the Keystone Pipeline
and launched the fastest
growing fossil fuel
divestment movement.
They have been visible in making,
they have made visible
the heartbreaking plight
of climate refugees here and abroad.
All of this would merit a Nobel.
As I watched Bill over the years,
there are two things that
come to mind as to why
he has been so remarkably successful.
I would say it comes down to
strategy and spirituality.
Both are brimming with his
particular intelligence
and authenticity.
I offer these two observations
to see what we all might learn from Bill,
to continue to build an
environmental movement
that is inclusive, nimble and creative.
Attentive to the cry of the
Earth and the cry of the poor
as Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato si'
reminds us in its clarion
call for eco-justice.
Bill's work and the encyclical
should encourage those of us
that Yale faculty and
students and staff alike
to speak out regarding
the greatest cutbacks
in environmental regulations and funding
for science research in
our nation's history.
To deny climate change and
its devastating effects
around the planet at the
highest levels of our government
especially at the
Environmental Protection Agency
is no longer politically
expedient, it is morally bankrupt.
To repeal.
(attendees applauding)
To repeal the Clean Power
Plan would be ignoring
the fact that we are already
in a worldwide revolution
toward a clean energy future
keenly embraced by China,
Germany and many in the
business community in the US
as the Kerry Initiative conference
demonstrated here at Yale.
So what can we learn
from Bill about strategy
and spirituality that we
can bring into our thinking
and teaching here at Yale?
Bill is one of the most
strategic thinkers I know
coming out with creative campaign ideas
and then implementing
them with amazing effect.
It is partly because he
works intergenerationally,
drawing in students and young people
who want to know how to get involved.
This includes our own Fossil Free Yale
which will have a meeting after this talk
in Silliman College, please join them.
And it includes supporting
Tim DeChristopher
who will speak at the forestry
school on October 24th
but the other reason
Bill has become a leader
is because he holds open a space
into which emerges a moral
force around climate justice
and a spiritual energy around nature.
There are few people who can
do this without preaching
but Bill in his modest and unassuming way
has allowed that moral energy to guide him
and that spiritual force
of nature to renew him
for the work ahead.
In doing this, he gives us all the sense
that against great odds,
hope will not desert us.
We live in difficult times,
yet the beauty of the Earth
will continue to inspire us to
create a flourishing future.
Please join me in welcoming Bill McKibben.
(attendees applauding)
- Well.
(attendees applauding)
Thank you.
Enormously, it's very, very,
very, very good to be here.
Thanks to Mary Evelyn and to Mary Lui
and to everybody at Timothy Dwight
and at Yale for having me.
It was good fun to arrive
on campus and see all
the posters that were up
and they had a big
picture of me in a t-shirt
and across the top it said in
big letters, simply too hot.
(attendees laughing)
And I must say that conforms
with my self-image completely
and it's so rare that people recognize it.
I did worry when I saw it
that you all would think
that I was just a pretty face, you know
and that's why I made sure
that my wife came with me.
Sue's here someplace.
There she is.
She's the actual beauty in
our family but also the brain,
she was a graduate of this
institution of Morris College
and then she was the first
female Rhodes Scholar
in the country.
That's all of which is to say.
(attendees applauding)
All of which is to say since the president
was talking about IQs today.
I just want you to know that
the mean IQ of our household
is very high and if there are
any problems you have with me,
I want you to take them up
with Sue afterwards, okay?
You've heard a great deal about
climate here in recent weeks
and my guess is that
most of you are on board
with the basic proposition
that climate change
is a deep problem and that we
need to do something about it
and in that, you are like
most people in this country
and in this world.
The polling data shows that quite clearly.
Donald Trump notwithstanding
and more on him later.
This intellectual argument
about the existence
of climate change is largely won,
a consensus established
within the scientific
community long ago.
So today, I wanna try and
advance the discussion
a little further beyond that.
The question, the word that I
want to highlight here today,
the focus of my remarks
will be the word pace.
Okay, how fast are we going
to deal with this crisis?
And I'll try to do that in five parts.
The first is to describe the pace
of this unfolding crisis to date.
I did, as Mary Evelyn said,
write the first book about this
back in 1989 which I am well aware
was before many of you were born.
At that time, we knew
that we were in trouble.
We understood that when you
burned coal and gas and oil,
you put carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere.
We knew that the molecular
structure of CO2 trapped heat
that would otherwise
radiate back out to space.
What we did not know then was how fast
this was going to happen and
how hard it was going to pinch
and the story of the last
30 years is it's happening
much faster and pinching much harder
than people would have guessed.
The most commonly used
phrase by scientists
in papers over the last 10 years
has probably been faster than expected.
The things that we're seeing now,
the phenomenon playing
out around the world
were things that 30 years ago,
we would have guessed would have happened
late in this century.
But as it turned out, the
pace of climate changed,
the world was more finely
balanced than we understood.
So far, we have raised the
temperature of our Earth
one degree Celsius, 1.7
or so degrees Fahrenheit.
That doesn't sound like an enormous amount
but in the context of the planet,
it turns out to be quite large.
We could express it in
other units if we wanted to
and that might make it easier.
Each day, the carbon that
we've put in the atmosphere
traps the heat equivalent of
400,000 Hiroshima sized bombs.
That's enough heat to do enormous things
and we can see them now unfolding.
More than half of the summer
sea ice in the Arctic is gone.
Think about how much heat it takes
to melt a continent-sized, millenias-old,
meters-thick sheet of ice to
turn it from white to blue.
The planet looks, from a satellite,
entirely different than
it did 40 years ago.
There is a lot less white up top.
We're an ocean planet.
70% of our surface is the sea
and the sea we have forced to
undergo astonishing changes
in the most blink of an eye.
Some of the carbon that we've
poured into the atmosphere
is absorbed in the seawater
and as it is absorbed,
it changes the chemistry of that seawater.
The ocean is roughly 30% more acidic
than it was 40 years ago.
That combination of extra heat
and different chemistry in the ocean
is now wreaking violent damage.
Sue and I were in the far
Pacific 18 months or so ago
with our colleagues at 350 in the Pacific
who do amazing work trying to protect
those low-lying islands
but we happened to be there
when the wave of warm water,
in 2017, the warmest year
ever recorded on this planet,
when that wave of warm water swept
over the course of a couple of weeks
across the Pacific in the
Indian Oceans and as it did so,
it wiped out 50, 60, 80, in some places,
a hundred percent of the coral reefs
around those atolls and islands.
The Great Barrier Reef
is the largest living
structure on our planet
but it is half as living
as it was 18 months ago.
You can see the way that
that heat is expressed
in the way that hydrological cycles
around the planet have changed,
the way that water moves.
If you wanted one fact
to hold in your mind
to understand this century,
it would probably be
that warm water holds,
warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
That means that in arid areas,
you get far more evaporation
and far more droughts.
As you know, we meet today
while our countrymen in California
are cooking with what
looks like it may turn out
to be one of, if not
the biggest fire storms
that's ever hit that state,
that whole city that 36
hours ago were intact
are now in ashes.
That's the kind of thing
we see more and more of
all over the planet.
Once that water has evaporated
up into the atmosphere,
it is going to come down.
The average residence time
for a molecule of water vapor
in the atmosphere is only about seven days
so when it comes down now,
it comes down hard in deluge
that we haven't seen before.
The US set the new record for
the largest rainfall event
in our history last month
when Hurricane Harvey
came ashore in Texas.
Some places saw 54 inches
of rain, 4 1/2 feet of rain.
Think about that.
We can see it in the way that
when that storm has changed,
the great cyclones and
hurricanes of our Earth
draw their power from the heat
in the first few meters
of the sea's surface.
When you raise the
temperature of that water,
you allow them to become more powerful.
September, the month just concluded,
September of this year was
the most hurricane activity,
what the scientists call
accumulated cyclonic energy
that we've ever recorded
in a month in the Atlantic.
We saw what that meant in Puerto Rico
when our country men and women
there took the full brunt
in the eye of a Category 5 hurricane
ripped diagonally across that country
and devastated everything in its path.
I hope that, I'm sure that
most of you already have.
I hope that people when they go home
will try to figure out
something material to do
to help people in the recovery
from one of the greatest catastrophes
we've ever witnessed in this country.
We see the effect simply in the sheer heat
that now envelops parts of this planet.
A couple of times in the last 18 months,
we've set the record
for the highest reliably
recorded temperature ever
measured on this planet.
In cities in Pakistan and in
Iraq, big cities like Basra,
the temperature has gotten
above 129 degrees Fahrenheit.
Okay, we're we're feeling warm today.
It's 80 degrees out.
Think what it would feel
like to add 50 degrees
to the temperature we're feeling now.
People can't work when it's 129 degrees,
people can't sleep when it's 129 degrees.
People really can't live very
long if it stays 129 degrees
because your body simply
can't cool off fast enough.
When Paul Winter and
Janet Yeh were playing
and summoning up the beauty of this world
that we were born into,
it is sobering to reflect on how much
we have already changed that planet,
how discordant some of those notes
are already becoming on this Earth.
This is already the biggest
thing that human beings
have ever done and the most unjust
because there's an almost
perfect inverse relationship
between how much of
this trouble you caused
and how quickly and how
hard it comes after you.
So that's the first
consideration about pace.
So far, we've done a lot of damage.
The second consideration is what the pace
of damage is likely to
be in the years ahead.
Even if all the nations of the world
kept the promises that they made
as part of the Paris Climate
Accords and of course,
our nation the largest
contributor over time
to carbon in the atmosphere
has already announced
it will renege, break, go back
on the promises it made in Paris.
Something that should cause every American
a real pang of shame but even
if we kept those promises,
the actions that countries have pledged
are small enough and slow enough
that the temperature of the
Earth would continue to rise,
something like 3 1/2 degrees Celsius
in a lifetime of people in this
room, six or seven degrees.
If, indeed, we allow that to happen,
then we cannot have civilizations
like the ones we are used to having.
That is the bottom line.
Those zones, when it becomes
too hot for human beings
really to successfully inhabit places,
will expand steadily out from the equator
until they cover a sizable
portion of the Earth's surface
and as people retreat
above them and below them
to find some respite from the heat,
they'll find a host of other problems.
Some of them, extremely basic.
We believe at this point
that each degree increase
in global average temperature
should cut grain yields
something like 10%.
So if I've told you
that it's going to raise
temperature three degrees, you
can do the math in your head
and figure out what
that's going to be like
on a planet with seven billion,
headed for nine billion
people and less and less
in the way of calories.
We're already seeing dramatic
rises in sea level, okay?
Enough so that coastal cities
are already threatened.
There were pictures
three days ago from Miami
where there was a so-called King Tide,
the tide of the year with the full moon
and water was in the
streets of Miami Beach
just like it had been when
Hurricane Irma came through
a couple of weeks before.
But we've just begun
to see what's going on.
We've understood now that
we are near tipping points
in Greenland and in the West Antarctic
and that that continental ice
that's currently above rock
is beginning to melt in much the same way
that the sea ice has already melted.
When that sea ice, melted
it did not raise the sea
any more than melting
the ice and your drink
sends it over the top.
But when that ice that's above rock melts,
it does indeed raise the sea's surface.
We thought as recently
as two or three years ago
that we might get away
with as little as a meter,
three feet of sea level rise this century.
Those numbers now seem
very optimistic indeed
and we're looking at two or
maybe three times that much
and then extending far on into the future
because the last time
we let carbon dioxide
get as high as it currently is,
hundreds of thousands of years ago,
the sea level settled many,
many, many meters higher
than it is now.
High enough to make sure
that we can't inhabit the coastal cities
where so much of our population now lives.
High enough to make sure that much
of the world's richest farmland
the river deltas and plains
especially of Asia will be
underwater and unproductive.
We worry that we're near
very near the tipping point
because of that melt in Greenland
where the conveyor belt of ocean current
that brings warmth north from the tropics
will begin to slow or even collapse.
An enormous effect and
we're worried, in fact,
we're all but certain that
if we keep on this same path
of pouring ever more
carbon into the atmosphere
that the oceans will go from their current
already perilously acidified
state into something
much darker than that.
A conference of marine biologists meeting
a year and a half ago,
at the end of the conference
published their joint report,
they said that on current
trends, we can expect an ocean
that by century's end, is in their words,
sour, hot and choking.
All of this means that we are at least
in the beginning stages of
what is likely to become
the sixth great mass extinction
event on this planet.
We think that the other extinction events,
even the most recent, have
been driven at least in part
by the same thing we're seeing now.
The release of massive
quantities of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere as natural
deposits of coal or gas
or oil were burned by volcanic activity.
Now, it is us that is doing the burning
and we're doing it more quickly
than we've ever seen
in the geologic record.
So that is the pace of
the immediate future.
This is what happens if we keep
doing what we're doing now.
If we keep on the pace that
we congratulated ourselves
at Paris for getting on,
okay, that's what happens,
which brings me to the third section.
A nicer one.
The possible pace of the
future is very different.
We have been given a great
gift in the last decade.
The engineers have done their job
and done it very, very well indeed.
The price of a solar panel has fallen 80%
in the last decade.
Around the world, most places wind energy
is now the cheapest way that
we can produce electrons.
That means that we're,
because of that gift of the engineers,
at the outer edge of possible
of changing those numbers
very dramatically of moving far beyond
what people talked about in Paris.
Mark Jacobson and his team at
Stanford have produced plans
for 139 nations around the world
and really all the ones with
significant carbon footprints
showing that by 2030, in all of them,
we could be generating 80%
of the power that we use
from the sun, from the
wind and from water,
from hydroelectricity.
It would take an extraordinary
amount of work to do that
but if we did, we would
be very much on the path
to upsetting that math, to
getting way ahead of the pace
that we'd set for ourselves
and there are tantalizing
glimpses around the world
of places that are making it happen.
If you go to Denmark, you
will find them generating
half their power from the wind.
Either
the sly and crafty Danes
have figured out a way
to steal the world's wind
supply for themselves
or they have figured out
how to take advantage
of the same resources
available to all of us,
the resource they've added
is the political will
to make it happen and happen fast.
I had the extraordinary pleasure
of being in pretty remote
rural parts of Africa
for a good portion of the spring
doing some reporting for The New Yorker.
I was in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire
and then across to East
Africa and Tanzania.
Looking at villages that
have never had power
and really would not
have gotten it at best
for several lifetimes if they were waiting
on the grid to slowly expand.
There's still more than a billion people
on this planet without power.
More people lack electricity
now then lacked electricity
the day that Thomas Edison
invented the light bulb.
Almost all of them in
Africa or a lot in Asia
but the bulk in Africa.
It was incredibly beautiful
to see those places
come literally to light for the first time
because solar panels
had gotten cheap enough
that the 30 cents a day
that people were spending
for the kerosene to run one guttering lamp
that filled their house with smoke
would now leverage through the miracle of,
small amounts of credit,
a solar panel on the roof
and an inverter on the wall
and four or five LED lights
and a cellphone charged
maybe a small television.
I sat one day, hot day, much
hotter than this in Ghana
with the elders of a village
that had just turned on
this solar microgrid in their village
from the 40 or 50 small houses,
their huts were now
wired for the first time
and these elders of this village
were obviously very happy
and they kept giving me
bottles of cold water to drink
which I was grateful for
'cause it was very hot.
It took me in my clueless American way
a few minutes to figure out
why they were quite so proud
and happy to be giving
me bottles of cold water
until two weeks before, there
had never been anything cold
in that village, okay?
That was the first time.
It was beautiful to see that
and beautiful to reflect
that it came from the
entirely benign process
of pointing a sheet of
black glass at the sky
and letting the sun's beams
be transmuted into light
and into cold and into all
the things that people need
for a full life.
That miracle is not
one that we should take
for granted at all.
This is J.K. Rowling stuff.
You can point a piece of glass at the sky
and the electrons come out the other end.
That should allow us to
change absolutely everything.
But at the moment, we're
not really making use of it.
We're not doing it
anywhere near fast enough
to even begin to catch up with physics.
Yes, by the end of the century,
there will be solar panels and windmills
supplying most of our energy.
Free is a hard business
proposition to beat, okay?
But at the pace we are doing it,
those solar panels and windmills
will be powering a busted world.
Our job is to make it go much faster.
So the fourth reflection about pace
is why are we moving so slowly?
Given that we have the biggest crisis
we've ever faced as a planet and given
that we have a powerful solution at hand,
why are we not putting it to use
with the speed with which we should?
And here, I confess is
the part of the story
that took me a very long
time, too long, I kick myself
to think about how long
it took me to understand.
When I was 27 or 28 and
wrote The End of Nature,
I believed that we were engaged
in an argument about climate change
and being a good writer and academic.
I believed that the way
one proceeds in arguments
is to write more articles
and hold more symposiums.
Perhaps, some of the rest of you
have engaged in that work
too and in most cases,
it's exactly right.
But in this case, we'd won the argument.
The argument had been settled
by the middle of the 1990s,
the world's scientists had come together
and robust consensus about what to do.
We'd won the argument but
we were losing the fight
because it was not about
data and reason and so on.
It was a fight as most fights are,
about money and about power
and the fossil fuel industry,
the richest industry
the world has ever seen
had enough money and enough power to,
despite having lost the argument,
continue to win the fight.
They were clearly willing to,
their hope was is to
extend their business model
another two or three decades
and they are willing to do it
even at the cost of breaking
the one planet we have.
That sounds hyperbolic and unkind to say.
I might not have said
it even a few years ago
except that beginning about 2015 or so,
great investigative
reporters, the L.A. Times
and the Columbia Journalism
School and InsideClimate News
and other places began producing a series
of the most remarkable exposes.
Probably the most important journalism
anyone's done about anything
for a very long time.
What they demonstrated beyond any doubt
from document troves, from
interviews with whistleblowers
was that the fossil fuel
industry, its biggest players,
particularly Exxon, the single
biggest fossil fuel company,
nay, the biggest company on Earth
for much of the last 50 years
had known everything
that there was to know
about climate change and known it
by the late 1970s or the early 1980s.
They had all the money on Earth,
they had superb scientists,
their product was carbon,
they set to work to find
out what was happening
and they found out.
Their scientists told them
how much it was going to heat
and how fast and they were correct
and their management believed them.
Exxon started building
all its drilling rigs
to compensate for the sea level rise
that they knew was coming.
They started mapping out
the parts of the Arctic
they knew would soon be melting
so they could get the
leases to drill there.
What they didn't do was
tell any of the rest of us.
Instead, they spent the next three decades
spending hundreds of millions of dollars
to build the architecture
of deceit and denial
and disinformation that has kept us locked
in a completely phony debate
over the critical generation.
The generation that may, in many ways,
cost us much of what we
value on this planet.
There has never been a corporate
crime of that magnitude
had they merely said in 1989
when Jim Hansen was
testifying before Congress
about the existence of global warming
had Exxon merely said, you know what?
Our scientists found the same thing.
No one would have accused them
of being climate alarmists.
People would have said,
okay, this is a problem
and we best get to work on it.
We wouldn't have solved it by now
because it's a very big problem
but we would be well on
the way to solving it
instead of moving rapidly
in the other direction.
Instead, this lizard of
disinformation succeeded so well,
I think even beyond their wildest dreams
to the point where we now have
a president of the United
States who apparently believes,
sincerely believes that
climate change was a hoax
invented by the Chinese.
That is
incorrect, okay?
(attendees applauding)
Their plan, their goal, which we know too
from all these documents is
not to forever forestall,
it's just to make the
conversion as slow as possible,
to raise as much doubt, to
put as much mud in the water
as possible to keep us from acting
as swiftly as we need to act.
What do I mean by mud in the water?
Let me show you a picture.
That's from a group called
The Heartland Institute.
Originally set up with money from Exxon,
funded by all kinds of
various fossil fuel groups
that devoted themselves to
climate denial over the years.
This was a set of
billboards that they set up
around the country and they
took famous mass murderers
and put pictures of them next to this.
They have one about Charles Manson too.
I still believe in global warming, do you?
And that's Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber,
a horrible figure in our history.
One that Yale has had far too
much knowledge of, you know.
The legend, the billboard makes no sense,
logical sense whatsoever.
I mean it's like putting
up a picture of Hitler
and saying I believe in gravity, do you?
But it's emotional meaning is clear.
Climate scientists are
crazy serial killers
who are trying to wreck your life, okay?
That's the level at which this campaign
has been conceived and carried out.
As it turned out, the day that
those, by surprise, went up.
We at 350.org just happened
to it that same weekend.
We do these huge global days of action
with rallies and things around the world
and we had one set for that time
and we called it connect the dots
and it was for people in
places all over the world
who had already felt the
sting of climate change
to be rallying in those places.
And so we were able, we were happy
that same weekend to
show what the real face
of climate change looked like.
There were 3,000 of these rally.
The day begins in the far Pacific
so there were people down in the Marshalls
on their coral reef, you know.
I'm talking about its destruction.
You would think that people in Afghanistan
had worse things to worry about
but the Kabul River
drying up is a big deal.
All over the world, the pain of drought.
Some places, the problems, you
know, less life-threatening
but the disappearance of the seasons
for those of us who
psychologically mark our lives
by them as a big deal.
And one that hurts and should hurt.
Those guys are in the part of Siberia
where we we now see forest fires,
three four five degrees of latitude north
of where we've never seen them before
and we see them routinely.
Last year, Canada had to
evacuate the biggest city
in the North, Fort McMurray.
Hundred thousand people
had to leave their homes
down a single road because of wildfire
that destroyed much of the city.
People literally having to
leave their homes forever,
that's Micronesia.
These people's houses are now wet.
They can't live in them anymore.
By the way, as we're going through.
I could literally show you these pictures
all day and all night because
there's 75,000 of them
in our Flickr account and
you're welcome to go look at it.
One of the things that's
most compelling about them
and that struck me, I'd
spent my whole life hearing
that environmentalism was something
that rich white people did
and if you didn't know where
your next meal was coming from,
you wouldn't be an environmentalist.
It was very early on into
the process of this work
that we realized just from
looking at the pictures
coming in from all over the world
and day after day of action
that almost everybody we
were working with was poor
and black and brown and Asian and young
because that's what almost the whole world
is composed of, okay?
That's who the leaders
of this movement are.
It must be said that it has
crossed my mind once or twice
that rich white people
might be slightly more
the problem than the
solution to some of our woes
but we will leave that for the moment.
The pictures were amazing.
If it wasn't drought, then it was flood.
These people are in the part
of Pakistan that in 2010,
saw the greatest flood since Noah.
It rained so hard in the Khyber Pass
that by the time that
water had trickled down,
25% of Pakistan was under water,
20 million people were out of their homes
and if you look at them, it
does not take much imagination
to know that they are not
the cause of the problem
that they are the victim of, okay?
What these people are demonstrating
is what our job is at this point
and this is the fifth and
final section of this talk.
Our job is to speed up the pace
at which we make this transition,
to act as accelerants in this process,
to figure out each one of us in our lives
and in our organizations
how to build the movements
that push hard enough to
make this change happen
fast enough to matter.
I show you that picture
because it's not a big demonstration,
it might be the smallest
one that we ever had
but it's just six kids
there, seven kids in a street
in Les Cayes in Haiti that
turned into a river in a storm.
I show it to you for two reasons.
One is the sign that
those kids are holding,
your actions affect me
which is true.
We've seen what happened to
the Caribbean this last month
with islands literally obliterated.
There's nobody living on the
island of Barbuda anymore
that people have been there
for hundreds of years but now,
there is no one there because
there is no place to live.
Your actions affect me but not vice versa.
There's nothing that
anyone in Les Cayes can do
to materially affect the
outcome of this problem.
They can't burn less fossil fuel
because they don't burn any now.
They can't come to the
gates of the White House
and try to convince the
world's sole super power
to do the honorable thing
because we don't let them into the country
to come do that kind of thing.
They can't divest their holdings
in fossil fuel companies
because I would wager that the entire pool
of investment capital in
the entire island of Haiti
is considerably smaller than
the Yale endowment, all right?
(attendees applauding)
It is our
job now as institutions, as societies,
as communities to seize this
and work before it is too late.
The year after that was taken,
Hurricane Matthew swept
through the Caribbean.
It did some damage up in the Carolinas
but the real damage it
did was in the southwest
peninsula of Haiti.
80% of the buildings in
Les Cayes were destroyed.
I have no idea if those
kids are still alive or not
because a lot of people died
in the course of that hurricane, okay?
Too late for them, that's why
we have to pick up the pace
and especially now that we have
Donald Trump in Washington.
There is no fallback
argument for inaction.
No sense that someone else is somehow
going to take care of it.
There are a number of ways
in which we can do that work
of picking up the pace.
Where run, we help organize
this whole big effort to,
as we say, keep it in the ground,
to keep fossil fuel
where it is by blocking
every proposed plan for
a pipeline or a coal port
or a new fracking well or
whatever coal mine, whatever it is
and those fights which really began
with the battle over the
Keystone Pipeline in 2011,
a battle not yet settled
but which for seven years,
we've managed to keep
800,000 barrels a day
of the dirtiest oil underground.
Thank you to all who took part in that.
That battle has now spread.
People saw that one could stand up
to the fossil fuel industry and so now,
every one of those projects
is met with resistance
and often, it works.
We've blocked all kinds of pipelines.
TransCanada announced last week
that it was pulling the plug
on its plans for an
even bigger tar pipeline
out of the tar sands to
the Atlantic in Canada.
Just last week, Scotland
became the, I think,
14th country in the world to ban fracking.
We had a huge day of action
three days ago in Australia
with 45 huge demonstrations against plans
for what would be the biggest
coal mine on planet Earth.
I am all but certain that
we're gonna be able to beat it
because the rise of popular
protests is so strong.
So keep it in the ground.
If there are those things happening
and you can figure out
how to join in that work,
then you should.
We have massive campaigns going on
across the environmental movement now.
Many, many groups lead
really by the Sierra Club
to get cities and towns
and counties and states
here and around the world to commit
to a hundred percent renewable energy
and that is beginning
to work in a big way.
At first, of course, it was
Berkeley and Madison, Wisconsin
that signed up but now, it's
Atlanta and it's San Diego
and it is Salt Lake City.
When Trump pulled us out of
the Paris Climate Accord,
he said, "I was elected to
govern Pittsburgh, not Paris."
The next day the mayor of Pittsburgh said,
"Thank you very much, we've decided
"to go a hundred percent
renewable in our city."
You know that.
(attendees applauding)
So keep it in the ground and
this fight for renewable energy
to provide the stimulus, the subsidy,
the pace to make sure
that it happens fast.
And one of the other fights
is to try and interfere
with the financing of
the fossil fuel industry.
That's why this divestment fight
has been so important around the world.
It went much better than
we ever thought it would
when we launched it five
years ago now, I guess.
And at this point, there are
endowments and portfolios
with assets of about $6 trillion
that have divested from fossil fuel.
Earlier this week, 40
big Catholic institutions
chose Saint Francis's feast
day to divest their holdings
and they included the Diocese of Assisi
which was a beautiful
moment in this struggle.
The hardest places to convince
have been the rich, elite
universities on the East Coast
of the United States.
My alma mater, Harvard, I'm
not sure it will ever divest.
It's ties to Wall Street are so strong
although there are people
here who are trying hard
to make it happen.
We will not stop.
I, instead of my reunion last time,
I got to spend the night in a sleeping bag
in the shrubbery outside
the president's office
as part of a big
sit in around the thing
and it was much better than
the reunion, I must say.
It's not okay at this
date for places like Yale
to have hundreds of millions of dollars
invested in this stuff.
It's not okay if it is wrong
to wreck the planet then.
(attendees applauding)
If it is wrong to wreck the planet,
then it is wrong to
profit from that wreckage.
The profit from that
wreckage is very small.
Any institutions that took
the advice of students
five years ago and divested
have made out like bandits
because the fossil fuel
sector has underperformed
every other part of,
but it also means the other
reason not to be engaged
in that work is remember
that picture I showed you
about the Unabomber?
If you're in bed with those companies,
then you are engaged in the process
of undermining our democracy,
of spreading lies constantly.
You're saying and doing
things that would get you
kicked out of Yale for
violating the honor code
if you did them on a
test or a paper, okay?
It's not any different if you do them
with the money that you
invest and now, especially,
that we have Donald Trump in office
and so many people are saying
how sad they are about that.
Now, especially, is the time
for people to understand
that we need to act at every
other level that we can act at
because nothing is going
to happen in Washington
at least for the next few years.
So it be good idea to go
have dinner in Silliman Annex
with all the good people
from Fossil Free Yale
who are organizing hard
and thanks to them for keeping
up this fight going forward.
(attendees applauding)
And they are by no means alone.
There is resistance underway
every place around the
world now, as I say,
and it's beautiful to watch
and it comes from everywhere.
So much leadership provided
by frontline communities
and especially, I think most gratifying
over the last five years
by this rapid emergence to the leadership
of indigenous traditions around the world.
You saw what happened at
Standing Rock last autumn.
A beautiful, beautiful powerful gathering.
It didn't surprise me because the people
who organized that, we've
been working with for years,
they are great leaders.
It's a good sign that the oldest,
I was saying this to someone at lunch,
that the oldest wisdom
tradition on the planet,
indigenous wisdom tradition
is meshing now powerfully
with the newest, that the word
that comes from the sweat lodge
and the word that comes
from the supercomputer
is the same word about what
we need to be doing, okay?
(attendees applauding)
And now, people gather in their numbers.
These were 400,000 people on
the march in New York City
a couple of years ago.
Until the Women's March at
the beginning of January,
the biggest marches about
anything in this country
in a very long time and it
wasn't just in this country,
it was, as usual, all
over the entire world.
I think I wanna close just
showing you a couple of pictures
that illustrate, in my
mind, the kind of drama
of this moment in which
we find ourselves, okay?
You know, there are sort of
tropes that go on and once
that fit the human mind, our image of,
and one of them is the battle of the small
against the very large, okay?
The David and Goliath story.
These are our friends in the Pacific
in those islands like Vanuatu and Tuvalu
and the Marshalls and
Micronesia and the Solomons.
That'll probably be underwater
by the end of the century
but boy, people, their slogan
is we are not drowning.
We are fighting and boy, they are.
While we were in marching in New York,
they'd cut down on each
island a single tree
and made a big traditional war canoe
and they took them to
Newcastle in the Pacific
which is the biggest
coal port in the world
and there, they used them for
a day to blockade that port
and keep the largest war
ships in the world in harbor
so they couldn't come out
without running them over.
It was brave and beautiful action.
It's been one of the reasons,
the things that's galvanized Australians
into opposing this crazy plan
for this giant coal mine.
And it illustrated perfectly
this trope that the small
and the many against the
few and the very big.
We saw the same image
from the Pacific Northwest
the next year.
This was when Shell Oil announced
that they were gonna go
drill for oil in the Arctic.
Think about that for one
minute, by the way, okay?
Scientists had said if
you warm the planet,
the Arctic will melt.
Shell Oil and its ilk paid no attention
and went ahead and what do
you know, the Arctic melted.
Having looked at that, did
the leadership of Shell Oil
say huh, maybe we should go
into the solar business instead,
this seems not to be working out?
No, the leadership of Shell Oil said,
hey, it's melted up there now.
It will be easier to drill for more oil.
If you were looking for an illustration
to support the argument that the big brain
was not a good adaptation, okay?
That would be, it seems to me.
On the scale of human folly,
it doesn't get much larger
but happily, there were lots of people
with perfectly good brains and
big hearts attached to them
who decided to get in
the way and in Seattle
and in Portland, for days they blockaded
the two giant drilling
rigs with small craft.
We called them kayak-tivists, okay?
And it was beautiful and it,
it threatened brand damage to Shell
that was more than they could contend with
and by the end of the year,
Shell said, well, we didn't
find enough oil in the Arctic.
We're going home.
Really, what they found
was far more trouble
than they could deal with
and so they turned tail
and ran and that was a very good moment.
(attendees applauding)
But we need lots more moments like that.
This, I guess, the way
to say this is the planet
is now way, way outside its comfort zone.
That's what it means when
the Arctic is melting,
when coral is dying.
Because it is way, way
outside its comfort zone,
we need to be outside
our comfort zones too.
We need to be doing much
more than we are doing now
because it is manifest
that what we are doing now
is insufficient, that's
why the temperature
keeps going up, okay?
Now, what exactly it means to
be outside your comfort zone
will be different for different people.
But since we were over at the
forestry school earlier today,
I was reminded, I told
the students there a story
about one of my great
friends and heroes, Gus Speth
who was the dean of that
institution for a long time
and built that magnificent
building there and so on.
Gus Speth was one of the
great environmentalist,
is one of the great environmentalists
that this nation has ever seen.
He helped found the Natural
Resources Defense Council
and won many of the
lawsuits that helped us
begin the process of
environmental regulation.
He was the first head of
the President's Council
on Environmental Quality.
So he worked the system from Washington,
from the inside, he went to the UN
where he ran the United
Nations Development Program,
the whole thing so he worked
the global bureaucracy
from the inside.
Then he came and became a dean at Yale
at which there is no higher
possible accomplishment.
And then when he retired, he wrote a book
looking back on his life
and it was a kind of sad book in a way
because what he said was
none of the kind of inside
and obvious normal things
that I did very, very well
better than anybody
else added up to enough.
They didn't begin to
make the kind of change
that we need to make.
When I was recruiting
people to come to Washington
for the civil disobedience action
that launched the Keystone fight
which became the largest
civil disobedience action
in 30 years in this country about anything
that sent 1,200 and some people to jail.
One of the first people
that I called was Gus Speth
and I said, will you
sign this letter with me
and will you come to
Washington and he said,
"Yes, I will, thank you very much."
He and I were arrested on
the first day of that protest
and because the police were
trying to send a message
to the others that were coming behind,
they treated us somewhat more harshly
than usually people who are charged
with failure to yield are treated.
We spent three days in
Central Cell Block in DC
which is as much fun as it
sounds like it would be, okay?
Gus was on the next
cell over so we could
speak through the bars
and we talked a lot.
In fact, he, for the 50 or
60 people who were there,
he gave a lecture through the cell bars
about his new book and it was excellent.
But he, because his son
was a white-shoe lawyer
who was papering the jailhouse with writs,
he was the only one of us who got out
even for a couple of minutes.
They let him go meet his son shackled
but he got to go talk to his son briefly
and he passed him a message
to pass to the reporters
and what he said was,
and I think that this
bears thinking about
four elites of all kinds
which anybody who is
at this institution is.
What he said, the only
sentence he said was,
"I've occupied a lot of
important positions in this city
"and none of them seem as important
"as the one I'm in right now," okay?
That, I think, bears thinking about
as we decide what we're gonna do.
You don't all have to go get arrested
although an increasing number
of people have explained to me
that it's now on their bucket list, okay?
And I will add looking at
the great age diversity
in this audience,
when I wrote the letter
asking people to come
to get arrested there,
I said I don't think young people
should have to be the
cannon fodder in this case.
They're doing most of the
leading in this movement
as you've seen from the
pictures but if you're 22,
it's possible an arrest record
might not be the best item
for your resume, okay?
One of the few unmixed
blessings of growing older is,
past a certain point,
what the hell are they gonna do to you?
And so it was with
pleasure that we saw people
with hair lines like mine
descend on Washington.
We did not say, how old are you?
That would be rude but we
did cleverly, I think, say
who was president when
you were born, okay?
And the two biggest
cohorts were from the FDR
and the Truman administrations.
On the last day, a man was arrested
with a placard around his neck that said,
World War II veteran, handle with care.
He was so old, he had been born
in the Warren Harding administration
which was so long ago,
I'd forgotten there was a
Warren Harding administration.
It was good for the young
people who were there
to see their elders acting in the way
that really elders need to
in a working civilization.
I will just add that this
same principle of risk
since we're at a university,
goes triple for anyone with tenure, okay?
You guys are the most
bulletproof people in any
place on Earth.
Put it to good use.
We also told people if
they wanted to get arrested
that they should wear
a necktie or a dress,
not 'cause we're big into formal wear.
Sue and I live in Vermont
which I believe has a
constitutional provision
exempting people from
wearing neckties, okay?
We wanted to make the same visual point
that I've been trying to
make throughout this talk.
There is nothing radical about
what we are talking about.
All we are asking for
is a world a little bit
like the one that we were born on to,
a little bit of ice at
the top and the bottom,
the odd coral reef in the middle.
That's not a radical demand,
that is a conservative demand.
Radicals work at oil companies.
If you get up in the morning
willing to make your fortune
by altering the chemical
composition of the atmosphere
and you are willing to
do it after scientists
have told you what will happen
and if you're willing to keep doing it
after you've seen it happening,
then you are a radical in a way
we have not had on this planet before
and our job is to check that radicalism
and it is our job.
(attendees applauding)
And it is our job to check it fast
because that's the only way that matters.
Climate change is the first
time limited challenge
humans have ever really had to face, okay?
Dr. King would always
end his talks by saying
the arc of the moral universe is long
but it bends toward justice.
This may take a while but we're gonna win.
The arc of the physical universe is short
and it bends toward heat.
If we do not win soon,
then we will not win ever
and that is why pace has
become the most important word,
why fast is the only
thing that really matters.
If you remember, no other
line from this talk.
Remember this, when it
comes to climate change,
winning slowly is a different
way of losing, okay?
Because that's what we're doing now.
We are winning very, very slowly
and that is just another way of losing.
I cannot guarantee you
that we will win this fight
even if we do everything right.
We have waited a long time to get started.
It is a bad sign that
the world's ice sheets
are rapidly disintegrating,
that the chemistry of
seawater is changing.
I cannot guarantee you
that we do not know,
though the best science indicates
there is still a narrow window,
narrow and closing, that we
should be able still perhaps
to prop open.
The only thing I can guarantee you
is that there is going to be a real fight
and you've seen it in all these pictures
from all over the world.
I am so grateful to those
who have been engaged
in this fight for a long time
and I am so grateful to
all the reinforcements
that I know are coming from
so many other quarters.
It will be a great
privilege to get to stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with y'all.
Thank you very much.
(attendees applauding)
Thank you all.
Now,
I talked on for a very long
time for which I apologize.
No moral opprobrium will attach to anyone
who decides that it
would be nicer to go out
into this beautiful
evening but if there are,
students in particular, I think,
with some questions or comments or abuse,
it would be okay to offer it up.
Where is the microphone, Mary?
Over here, over there.
And Mary, you said you wanted students
in first to be asking
questions, all right.
Fire away if you've got any.
- [Attendee] Is this one working?
Okay, so wanna say thank you so much
for urging us into action today.
And I've got a question.
So you talked about the
hundreds of millions of dollars
that Yale has invested
in fossil fuel companies.
And we're really worried about that.
As students, we're also
wondering how can we imagine
the role of universities beyond divestment
in terms of responding
to the climate crisis.
- So there's so many
things that universities
need to be doing and of course Yale
is doing some of them magnificently.
The work that goes on here,
the research and teaching
around these things is
extraordinarily important
and the modeling of different futures.
I had the best lunch out at the Yale Farm
and garden and it was very good to see.
We need, though, people at Yale,
like people everywhere else
to beyond their role as
students and teachers
and whatever else, to also
assume the role of citizens
which is a role that
we've sort of put down
too often in recent years.
We need to take it up again.
That means joining these larger movements
in the larger world outside this bubble
that are working on
pipelines and coal mines
that are working on pushing
for a hundred percent
renewable energy.
You need to join up with people.
You know, there's lots
of things that one can do
as an individual and one should do.
Our house in Vermont is
covered with solar panels
and so on and so forth but
we try not to fool ourselves
that that's making much difference.
The most important thing
individuals can do at this point
is not be individuals.
It is joined together with other people
in movements large enough to matter.
That's why we set up things like 350.org.
- [Attendee] Hi, thank
you so much for coming.
This is a bit inarticulate
question but I guess like,
I feel like I'm lucky enough here
to be able studying environmental things
but I have a lot of friends
who have other day jobs
and kind of recognize that something small
like buying an electric car isn't enough
but also can't become
full-time environmentalists
or activists and I was wondering
if you could speak more
to the middle ground.
- We don't need most people
to be full-time environmentalists.
The work of citizenship
is done after hours
and on weekends, okay?
That's when we need people engaged.
There are enough people who
are doing this full-time,
either as volunteers,
whatever, to help coordinate.
We don't even need 50%
of Americans engaged.
The academic literature is
clear that if you can get
four or 5% of any population
actively engaged in a fight,
it's almost always enough to carry the day
and we're starting to get
close, Trump notwithstanding.
The polling data is obvious.
We just now need to move so fast
that we need people stepping up.
So bring them along in
whatever stage you can.
Get them as engaged as
it's possible to get them.
You say it then I'll repeat it.
(attendee speaking off mic)
- [Attendee] First one
you say that I believe,
coal mine, there is
human-caused climate change.
Now, since leaving the mines,
I've gone on to work on
Just Energy Transition work,
environmental activism, attended
college in communications
where I recently graduated
and throughout my work and travels,
one of the problems I've
seen in the jobs versus,
the job versus environment dichotomy
is the perceived eccentricity
of the environmental movement
amongst the majority of people
especially working class conservatives
and it's so much so that the industry
and political advocates have used that
to exacerbate people's belief
in the rural urban divide.
They've used it to
exacerbate people's belief
in downward looking elitism from academia.
So my question is how is 350.org
and other such organizations
and academic institutions
working to address working
class conservatives
to communicate across those lines
to drive better socio-political change
and prevent another Trump
from entering office.
- That's a really good question.
We've spent much of our
life living in very red
rural parts of the country
and so I know exactly where of you speak.
Most of our work at 350
isn't about that our works
trying to take the 70% of people
who are already engaged in
and already understand
that there is a big problem
and get them active enough
to make a difference
because most of them aren't, okay?
And that's mostly our mission field.
But one works in all
kinds of other ways too.
So I'm a Methodist and done
a lot of work over the years
on building a religious
environmental movement
among all kinds of churches.
I was down a year ago
at New Orleans Baptist
which is seminary which is the,
I think, the second biggest seminary
in the Southern Baptist Convention.
I was down there for a few days
and there was some of that
hostility at first, you know,
Yankee in the first place
and Baptists don't
necessarily like Methodists
and whatever else but
what really got people, what
really made it a wonderful time
was telling those stories
about what was happening
with renewable energy
all over the place.
One of the most interesting things
is to look at the polling
data for solar panels,
they're the only thing
when you ask people what's
your opinion of solar power
and should the government
be doing more to support it?
You get 80% of Republicans,
80% of Democrats
and 80% of independents say yes,
it's sometimes for different reasons.
Conservatives tend to
think I'd really like
this thing up here because
I don't wanna depend
on anybody else, you know.
And Liberals tend to think,
god, I love the sun, it's really cool
and I don't know what
independents thinking.
I don't know what their,
but that's one of the ways in.
Now, I'm really glad
you're doing this work
around Just Transition
because there has to be some,
what I mean, it's not the fault,
my mother's family is
all from West Virginia
from coal country.
It's not the fault of
people who mined coal
that we can't burn coal anymore, okay?
And the Trumps of the
world have done a good job
of kind of holding them hostage
and using that but that
shouldn't be how it works
and that's why the work you're
doing there is so important.
We'll see how it comes out.
The good news, of course, in the long run
is the cornucopia of jobs available
as we make this transition
dwarfs the amount of people
who ever hardrock mined in their life.
It's gonna take a lot of
people swinging hammers
up on a hundred million American roofs
to carry out this solar revolution
and it is the best kind of work
because no one is gonna
put their house on a boat
and send it to China to
get a solar panel up on it.
It's work that stays here.
So let's hope that we can figure out
how to bridge what are I
think devised more of culture
than of interest in a sense.
Thank you.
Do we have time for one more?
I feel bad that we're keeping people going
but I'm happy to do,
let's do one more here
and then y'all can go out
into the nice night.
- [Attendee] Thanks for being here.
My question for you is given everything
that you've told us about the science,
given the political climate,
given that Paris wasn't enough
and we're not even in it anymore.
What gives you hope?
- Well, you saw a bunch of those pictures
and I only showed you a tiny fraction
even of the ones I have on my computer.
You should be grateful.
There are now millions of
people around the world
engaged in this fight.
Most of them are in places that
did not cause this problem.
If they're willing to do that,
if they're willing to work together
with the people who
did cause this problem,
then it seems like we have
some obligation to do it
so even on days when I'm not
feeling all that hopeful,
that's one of the things
that keeps me going
but I think I'm remain
against a certain amount
of evidence, sometimes.
Hopeful that there really
is something special
enough about us as a species that we will
take the hint and not do
ourselves in, you know.
I mean it's such a remarkable proposition
that we stand on the edge
of the most perilous danger
but we've gotten the warning.
People have told us that
it's going to happen.
They've told, and there
was no guarantee of that.
If it turned out that the danger point
had been at 315 parts
per million, not 350,
then we would have passed it long before
we had the supercomputers
and the satellites
in order to provide that warning
and I guess I want enough
and hope enough
that there's something
special about our species
that we will actually and it just
annoys the hell out of me when we don't.
And so that's one of the
things that keeps me going.
Thank you for the work you're doing.
Thank everybody here for
the work they're doing.
On we go.
Thanks.
(attendees applauding)
