Bill McKibben (one of the founders of 350.0rg) is currently touring the country. It has been great to see how much media attention he has received. A few of his themes have resonated for me including:
- Environmentalists are not the radicals. Carbon producers and their supporters are the radicals because they are willing to radically play with the composition of the earth’s atmosphere.
- Imagine a restaurant or other business that was allowed to throw its waste just out on to the street and didn’t have to pay to clean up after itself. Yet coal and oil companies and other carbon producers are allowed to churn out tonnes and tonnes of carbon dioxide without being held responsible for its environmental and social impacts.
- If we allow coal and oil companies export all the known reserves they currently have there is no way we will be able to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.
- We might need to put our bodies on the line and be willing to get arrested as we strive for change.
Here is a brief (3 mins) “thought bubble” by him.
This is the full (45 mins) documentary “Do the Math”. I strongly encourage you to watch it.
He’s been on Lateline (watch them here and here), he’s been interviewed in the Conversation (read it here), been in numerous papers (read about him in the Age here) and he wrote a long piece for the Monthly (read it here)
Thanks to the people who helped bring him out.
As an aside, I looked for him in the Daily Telegraph and I found:
- ABC gives Bill McKibben free reign for his climate scare by Andrew Bolt (here)
- Flight of the Bumble Bill by Tim Blair (here).
No wonder I don’t trust the Telegraph for my news.
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