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The Keystone XL pipeline defeat is one goal in a game, and we’re way behind
Posted by Guardian: Bill McKibben on November 6th, 2015
Guardian: In the first two weeks of the Keystone fight, we couldn’t get any press to pay attention to our work to defeat the environmental disaster we knew it would be if it were approved – none at all. Because back then in the summer of 2011 everyone knew that we couldn’t win. No one ever beats big oil.
Now I’m sitting here fielding dozens and dozens of phone calls and emails from reporters, because we did: President Obama announced on Friday that he had denied TransCanada’s proposal to build the Keystone...
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Universities should keep leading Australia’s push to divest from fossil fuels
Posted by Guardian: Bill McKibben on April 9th, 2015
Guardian: In the UK, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has demanded that his alma mater – King’s College London – sell off its fossil fuel shares and Oxford’s former finance director threw his weight behind calls for divestment by helping to take over a university administration building.
In the US, Harvard alumni – including Star Wars actress Natalie Portman – have backed student calls for civil disobedience later this month. At historic Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, 44 students have been occupying the president’s...
Obama’s Keystone veto threat proof that climate activism works
Posted by Guardian: Bill McKibben on January 7th, 2015
Guardian: When the news arrived from the White House on Tuesday that Barack Obama would veto the GOP’s Keystone pipeline bill – or at least “that the president would not sign this bill” as is – I thought back to a poll that the National Journal conducted of its “energy insiders” in the fall of 2011, just when then issue was heating up. Nearly 92% of them thought Obama’s administration would approve the pipeline, and almost 71% said it would happen by the end of that year.
Keystone’s not dead yet – feckless...
IPCC stern on climate change – but still underestimates the situation
Posted by Guardian: Bill McKibben on November 2nd, 2014
Guardian: At this point, the scientists who run the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must feel like it’s time to trade their satellites, their carefully calibrated thermometers and spectrometers, their finely tuned computer models – all of them for a thesaurus. Surely, somewhere, there must be words that will prompt the world’s leaders to act.
This week, with the release of their new synthesis report, they are trying the words “severe, widespread, and irreversible” to describe the effects of climate...
United States: Hurricane Sandy has drowned the New York I love
Posted by Guardian: Bill McKibben on October 30th, 2012
Guardian: New York is the city I love best, and I'm trying to imagine it from a distance tonight. The lurid, flash-lit instagram images of floating cars in Alphabet City or water pouring out of the East River into Dumbo, the reports of bridges to the Howard Beach submerging and facades falling off apartment houses – it all stings. It's as horrible in its very different way as watching 9/11.
But it's the subways I keep coming back to, trying to see in my mind's eye what must be a dark, scary struggle to...
Martin Luther King’s legacy and the power of nonviolent civil disobedience
Posted by Guardian: Bill McKibben on August 25th, 2011
Guardian: I didn't think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days. As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet.
But frankly, I wasn't up to it. The police, surprised by how many people...