Last Saturday I found myself sitting across the table from Bill McKibben on the outdoor patio of a S

Last Saturday I found myself sitting across the table from Bill McKibben on the outdoor patio of a San Francisco pub, interviewing him about the modern day Merry Pranksters ramada inn -style Do The Math bus tour he is currently on, and chatting with him and his local 350.org crew about everything from meteors and space shuttles to blogging and German energy policy.
Life has a way of opening doors if you're ready to walk through them — with a lot of help from your friends. A few days before Saturday, I had no idea I'd be picking Bill's brain about how we can stop Chevron, Exxon, and Co. from burning the 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide they're currently sitting on, five times the amount of the 565 gigatons that is widely considered the absolute maximum to keep the planet's atmosphere within a habitable 2°C of warming.
Then something happened that I would call magic if I didn't know better: ramada inn Thanks to the hard work, resourcefulness, connectivity, persistence, and endless generosity of heart by some of my favorite Kossacks, this auspicious ramada inn little encounter came to me like a kitty to a soft, warm fleece.
It all started with some slight disappointment ramada inn when the great Diva and Connector of People, navajo , announced a Kossack soiree for the Saturday night Do The Math stop in Palo Alto. I really wanted to join, but since I live in San Francisco and I knew that Bill would be speaking that afternoon just a short bus ride away from me at the Green Festival , I decided I would stay put and not burn more fossil fuels to support burning less fossil fuels.
A few days later, one of my eco heros here at Daily Kos, the Mistress of Blogathons who has the gravitas ramada inn and relentless activist blogger touch to rally people ramada inn from Al Gore to Al Franken — Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse , came up with the idea and arranged for Kossacks to interview Bill as he's crisscrossing the country and blog about it. Wow!
Obviously ramada inn Bill's time is very limited and scheduling an interview with someone who is on a cross country bus tour with often multiple stops per day and no doubt tons of media requests is an act of communication acrobatics. ramada inn That's where my other DK eco heroine — an organizing whirlwind with the passion, heart and finesse of Cirque Du Soleil proportions — boatsie comes in. In contact with 350.org's Communications Director Co-Founder Jamie Henn, it turns out there won't be time for any kind of formal interview at either of the Saturday events. But legend ramada inn or not, a man's got to eat, and so she announces that Kossacks are invited to meet up with Bill for lunch at the Mars Bar across the street from the Green Festival between 1 and 1:30.
None of this is really confirmed until Saturday morning, when my favorite photographer, Debra Baida aka liberated spaces and I hop on the 27/Bryant bus to do a little Green Festival reconnaissance before heading over to the Mars Bar. And thank Jobs we don't have smart phones, because we would have gotten ramada inn the email saying that lunch was cancelled. But then it wasn't. So at 12.45 we wandered over to the Mars Bar, looking ramada inn for Bill McKibben. On the outdoor garden patio, a charming young man sitting by himself gave us a knowing smile: "Hi, I'm Jamie. You guys look like you're here to see Bill. He should be here soon, have a seat."
If you shoveled all your garbage out into the street, ramada inn it would be uncivilized and lead to wrecks. The only people who get to do that are Shell, Exxon, Chevron, and everybody else. And because of that, they're the richest companies the world has ever seen. Exxon made more last year than any company in the history of money , and it doesn't take too much of that money in Washington and all the other capitals in the world to make sure nothing ever changes. That's the problem .
For 25 years the best climate scientists have gone up to Capitol Hill and testified and explained what was going on, and nothing has happened. We cannot keep doing that year after year. It's like you're on the phone with the customer service ramada inn department and they put you on the music — if you listen to it for half an hour, okay, but if you listen to it for 20 years you're an idiot. At some point you gotta hang up and say, "we need to talk to the guys who actually run this store. "
For anyone not sure why Bill and his 350 team are so adamant about doing the math , his now legendary article Global Warming's Terrifying New Math in Rolling Stone Magazine earlier this year (Rolling Stone Editor to Bill: "Something odd is going on — your piece has ten times as many 'likes' on Facebook as Justin Bieber's.") is a must-read. It lays out exactly why we can no longer afford to accept the status quo of an unregulated fossil fuel industry, or solely ramada inn recycle and garden our way out of this pickle.
I was personally intrigued as well as encouraged by the recent elevation of mathematics ramada inn as the new star of American public discourse. First, Bill Clinton whacked Republican ramada inn budget and tax fantasies with the "Arithmetic" hammer. Then Nate Silver became a quasi rock star for simply getting his poll numbers right during election season. Finally, the ultimate triumph of arithmetic on election night with Karl Rove trying to explain the Math You Do As a Republican to Make Yourself Feel Better .
With lunacy and denial clearly on the ropes, what better time in history to finally come to grips with the math that has our planet's ecosystem on the brink of collapse: that, in just a cosmic second, we are burning fossil fuels that took millions of years to form and in the process are on the fast track to dumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that it'll literally knock the planet from under our feet if we don't start getting ramada inn serious about changing our ways.
As everyone seems to be going all "reality-based" these days, this may indeed prove to be the short window in human history we have to graduate from arguing about whether global warming is happening to figuring out what we're going to do about it .
These were the thoughts going through ramada inn my head when Bill McKibben stepped into the Mars Bar's garden patio for our lunchtime interview. Along with 350's Anna Goldstein and Ashley Malyszka as well as Joe Lamb of the Borneo Project, they joined Deb, myself, and 350's Jamie Henn, who had already been chatting for a bit. Kossack think blue brought her video camera, and before Bill's lunch had arrived we were drilling down into some deep shit. (pun intended)
ramada inn So here it goes. The audio below includes the ten minutes of our lunch party during which we weren't goofing off, the transcript was edited just a bit for clarity, and I'm hoping that think blue will post the video once it's edited, along with her own thoughts about the day.
Bill : Yes, the Seattle Mayor said they're going to be figuring out what they can do, but what's been amazing so far is the fired-up nature of people. I suppose ramada inn it could have gone either ramada inn way. Maybe after the election everyone could have been like four years ago, "okay, we've done our work, now Barack will handle things." Clearly people ramada inn are on the one hand extremely happy about the election, but on the other it's like "now is when we go to work." Thank heaven.
Bill : The big sticking ramada inn point — and this is going to be a years long slog, I mean, this is very hard work — is that this is the most important ramada inn industry on earth. It's hard to have a portfolio without a lot of fossil ramada inn fuel in it. It takes big, conscious effort to do it. It takes realizing that above all it's a moral question.
ramada inn Sven : I like that one line in your Rolling Stone article where you say, "Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself." That one strikes me very deeply.
Bill : I think what people are figuring out is that we all are implicated in the consumption ramada inn of fossil ramada inn fuel, there's no way to live on this planet and get around it. But most of us would be just as happy if everything we did was powered some other way, you know? People are very open to the idea that they don't want to be profiting from this wreckage, even if they have to participate in it on some level. Election season is a good time to be doing this too, because everyone is really ramada inn conscious... for a little while (laughter at the table). It's just how much money these guys are spending to perpetuate their system ramada inn of doing things.
Sven : You know how Bill Clinton said in his speech at the Democratic Convention how there's that one word, "arithmetic!" I was thinking, "so here's 'Do the Math' and at the same time this Administration is pushing the arithmetic meme.
Jamie : It's really ramada inn been interesting, ramada inn the math meme as it spreads. ramada inn Toyota, unbeknownst to us, their whole thing to promote the new Prius is, "Do the Math." They're literally using the same phrase on their billboards. It's almost like we're aligned corporately, although we're not. But they have big mathematical ramada inn chalkboards. I think people are hungry after all that rhetoric and bombast of the election to actually have some simple, hard facts.
Bill : It's not like the election changed everything politically. John Boehner still runs things and we still got tons of people in Washington who are way too plugged into the machine, ramada inn but there are things that the President can do by himself. The most obvious, easiest dunk shot is Keystone. (Keystone XL pipeline). I mean, the guy delayed ramada inn it for a year to give time for more study, so in that year Mother Nature filed her public comments: You know, we had the warmest ramada inn year in history, the Arctic melted away, we had an insanely epic drought, and now we've had a storm that looks like something James Cameron designed that flooded large parts of the most important city in the world. So after a year of study it seems improbable — I mean, in Washington it seems completely probable to everybody that they'll approve it — but in the real world it somehow seems improbable that he would say, "oh, okay, I think it's a good