Tag Archives: Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben Steps-down from 350.org Board

First of all, enormous thanks for being part of 350.org’s family over the years. We’ve all depended on you, and I think together we’ve done useful work.

As 2020 ends I will transition from active to emeritus status in my work at 350.org, both in my role as ‘senior advisor’ and as a member of the board. Please read my full letter about this transition.

Second of all, I’m still going to be doing what I can to help 350.org, and to back up the climate fight. I’ve known from the very start that one of my jobs was to train the next generations of climate fighters, because this is going to be a struggle that takes place over decades. I’m proud of the people running 350.org these days, and know that with the proper support they will make enormous progress. It’s especially clear in their decisive embrace of the idea that we need to think about a just world even as we think about a safe and working one; the fusion of these ideas will produce enormous changes.

I won’t tell you we’re winning this battle: it now looks like 2020 will turn out to be the hottest year in the earth’s history. But I will say that, with your great help, we’ve accomplished at least a little of what I set out to do. The fossil fuel industry is no longer the colossus it was a decade ago, capable of blocking change. Increasingly we have it on the defensive, which means there may finally be room to start making the changes we should have embarked on three decades ago. The young people now leading 350.org will help make those changes happen!

The main thing I’d like to say is: thanks. These have not always been easy years for me—though it’s nothing compared to the violence experienced by environmentalists elsewhere. At times, the counter-attack by the fossil fuel industry has felt almost unbearably fierce, especially since they also went after my family. I’m truly grateful for the support of my wife and my daughter. And I’m truly grateful for the friends that I have made these past decades in this fight—they are so many in number, and spread so widely across the earth, that I can’t begin to list them. But they know who they are, the companions in this fight who have done so much, against such great odds. I look forward to supporting them, and those who will emerge, in every way possible in the years ahead.

Onward,
Bill McKibben

P.S. Please read more about 350.org’s new board members here.

Glaciers and Arctic ice are vanishing. Time to get radical before it’s too late – Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben — Wed 10 Apr 2019 06.00 EDT

No one should be annoyed when schoolkids start leaving class en masse or surprised that Green New Deal advocates call for dramatic overhaul of American society. We should be grateful. @billmckibben

‘The respectable have punted; so now it’s up to the scruffy, the young, the marginal, the angry to do the necessary work.’ Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Images

Forget “early warning signs” and “canaries in coalmines” – we’re now well into the middle of the climate change era, with its epic reshaping of our home planet. Monday’s news, from two separate studies, made it clear that the frozen portions of the Earth are now in violent and dramatic flux. Continue reading →

“Falter”: In New Book, Bill McKibben Asks If the Human Game Has Begun to Play Itself Out

All three parts of the interview can be accessed from this page link.

Thousands are taking to the streets in London today to demand radical action to combat the climate crisis. Protesters with the group Extinction Rebellion have set up encampments and roadblocks across Central London and say they’ll stay in the streets for at least a week. It’s just the beginning of a series of global actions that will unfold in the coming days, as activists around the world raise the alarm about government inaction in the face of the growing climate catastrophe. The London protests come just days after schoolchildren around the globe left school again on Friday for the weekly “strike for climate” and as the push for the Green New Deal continues to build momentum in the United States. The deal—backed by Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey—seeks to transform the U.S. economy through funding renewable energy while ending U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. We speak with climate activist and journalist Bill McKibben, who has been on the front lines of the fight to save the planet for decades. Thirty years ago, he wrote “The End of Nature,” the first book about climate change for a general audience. He’s just published a new book titled “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”

Bill McKibben: To slow down climate change, we need to work together