 And I just want to remind you, if you could please make room. We still have some people with tickets, so you might have to push and make a little room. Before we begin, we have a special guest who's going to say a few words. Our Lieutenant Governor Suckerman. I'm here to, on the last bill called Post-it, and I figure I'm not going to receive that. And I just want to take the opportunity to thank you all for coming out, not only for Bill and Kevin and this new book, but I'm fairly certain that if you're in this room, you feel as passionately as I do, that it's time for us to do much bolder steps with respect to the legislature, with respect to our individual decisions to take on climate change. Am I accurate enough? Like me, then you are looking at the political situation in Vermont right now and going, in November of 2018, we've just selected the largest majority we've ever had of supposedly strong leaders in the legislature in order to take on this exact issue and many others. And I'm actually a little, if not a little, a little more than a little disappointed at the scale of what is happening at the State House relative to the scale of the problems and the catastrophe that we are facing, given the report we just heard yesterday, we're not going to put on the schedule and we've got about a minute. And that's it. I just want to say that we're probably not going to turn the situation around in the next week or two at the State House. At this point, most of the events are happening or are not going to happen over there. But I want to urge many people here who are probably represented by good legislators who probably generally go down here in Montpelier, in Calais, Washington County, who generally got good legislators is to call your legislators. Don't just assume good legislators are going to push the envelope a little farther than you would expect them to. There's a lot of pressure sometimes from leadership to say, well, we don't go too far because we might lose a few of our legislators in some swing districts or whatnot and have to be careful. And I just want to tell you that I was in the legislature in 2000 and we had about 15 legislators who said, I'm going to stand up for our gay and lesbian friends, brothers, sisters, relatives, neighbors. And I'm going to say, we need to stand up for equal rights for all our lives. We passed the unions and about 15 legislators lost their seats. Anybody remember that? Everybody here from up here? We want to thank those folks. But here's what the story is all about. What are we elected there to do and what are we willing to lose for? You asked a single one of those legislators, and I'd say, do you wish you hadn't voted for that? So you could have been there to do a few more good things where you could have been where it's easier to handle the problem now. I'm pretty sure you all know the answer to that question. They changed the story of Vermont and we changed the story of this country. And in fact, after that hour and around the world, people and curses all over the world made a change. We can do that with climate change. And we're in a political environment, when after the 2018 election, the turnout on 2020 is only going to be there here in Vermont. And so the risk isn't even there. So please call your good legislators and ask them, what are they doing to be bold on climate change in January of next year? And how are they going to bring home much more bold legislation? Because while I appreciate $4 million for weatherization, what if we had $30 million? I appreciate a million dollars whenever it is for expanding broadband. What if it was $30 million so people wouldn't have the commute to work every day in Vermont? So I'm going to wrap up because of your signal. I thought it was a cure. So I hope you have a wonderful evening. I'm going to wrap up when I was in Kenya where this transplants a farm to make sure it doesn't frost on them tonight. But thank you for being out here and continuing to fight my costs. Thank you. My name is Samantha from Bear Pond Books. A few housekeeping items. Please mute or turn off your stuff. There are three restrooms and they're downstairs. And please no food or drink in the sanctuary. It is wonderful to see such an enthusiastic crowd to welcome author and environmental activist, environmental activist, Bill McKinnon. Which I forgot to tell him we're starting. His newest book, Falter, has the human game begun to play itself out. It's already the best seller. Landing at number 14 on the New York Times bestseller list. This should give us all hope. Just as the size of this audience gives me hope that we can turn the sinking ship around. Four times book review state. Falter wastes no time. It's a direct attention grabbing sprint through what we've done to the planet and ourselves. Why we have stopped it and what we can do about it. And as McKinnon states in the opening notes to the book, we have the tools to stand up to entrenched power. We do have copies for sale and Bill will be able to sign your book after the talk. Our program tonight will consist of a presentation by Bill McKinnon on his new book followed by a facilitated discussion with Vermont Law School's Dean of Environmental Program and Director of the Environmental Law Center, Jennifer Rushlow. We will also hear from Vermont Law School Professor Rachel Stevens, who is the chair of the executive committee of the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club. We'll talk briefly about the work of the Sierra Club and what you can do to be involved and make a difference for Vermont and our planet. I want to thank the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club for being a sponsor of this event. Bear Corn Folks is happy to donate proceeds from tonight's book sales to them and we hope you are engaged to donate to them directly at the table in the back. I'd also like to thank our speakers for coming or the media for filming this event for public access television and I thank all of you for coming to this important call to action. If you are interested in continuing this discussion, please join us for a conversation for change with Stun Common Vermont at Bear Corn Folks next Tuesday at 7 p.m. All who attend will be offered a free copy of the book Draw Down, the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. To learn more and R-S-U-P for that event, please visit our website, BearCornBooks.com, or pick up a player if we have them at the front table where the books are available. To start us off with opening remarks, please help me welcome from the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club, Rachel Stevens. My name is Rachel Stevens. As Sam mentioned, I'm a law professor at the Vermont Law School, but I also volunteer with the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club. Sierra Club is one of the largest grassroots environmental organizations in the country with over three and a half million members. But in Vermont, we actually have about 3,500 dues-paying members and about 15,000 people that participate in our events and actions. All of our executive committee are volunteers. But do we have any hands-to-face that want to... Hi, Rob. We encourage you, if you haven't heard about our chapter, to check out our table in the back. We work on everything from energy, wildlife, climate change events. We're particularly focused this spring on transportation. We're going to promote electric vehicle, public transportation, and heat streets. So if you'd like to learn more, I'll be encourage you to come to the back. So now for the main event, please join me in welcoming them in for them. And happy to be here. Thank you. A little groggy, I've been out on the road and I've been a little disorganizing in the tour the last few weeks. And I got back, my wife, and telling me all the times, oh, it's terrible. I got back yesterday. It's really good to be here. So for all the work that you do at 350, we work hard with the club all over the world, and it's always great. Thank you to Veracond. You guys don't need me to tell you this, but communities that took their local bookstore for granted no longer have a local bookstore. So Veracond is one of the great institutions in Vermont and it's always fun to get to come and do these. Yeah, I'll try to put the microphone. How's that? All right. I'm actually not going to read to you from my book, I don't think. Because it's really, it's not poetry. It's not, it does not benefit. You're all in the read. It doesn't really benefit from me reading it. Maybe a tiny bit of it will run out of other things to do. I don't see so many people here who've worked so hard on this fight over the years. I don't really want to talk about this for a minute. And where we are, or maybe in a way, to just sort of talk about the lessons that I learned over the last 30 years, because it was 30 years ago this year that The End of Nature came out, which was the first book about climate change. And my first book, and someone the other day showed me my popular photo in that book. I was 27 when I wrote it, I guess I was 28 when it was published. So I had full head black hair. And of course, it's normally correct that I've changed a good deal in the intervening three decades. Something would be wrong if I wrote the same. What's not normal is that the planet has changed enormously in that same three decades. And things as large as our planet are supposed to be stable over that period. And instead, we've seen this dramatic and violent flux. So the first lesson for me that I'll work on is things can and do change very fast. I mean, I don't particularly comment on this, just thinking about it today, because that report that you initiated yesterday on biodiversity told us we're going to lose a million species over the next few decades. I mean, even for me, we spend every day of dealing with this stuff. That's the punch in the gut. It's kind of pre-obituary for an enormous amount of the flora affronted this planet with. And it's, every word is to be taken unwaveringly seriously when you reflect on what's happened over the last three decades. 70% of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone now. I mean, oceans are 30% more acidic than they were. We've begun to see absolute discombobulation of the planet's hydrological cycles the way the water moves around the planet. We've begun to see the most extreme kind of events. Sometimes we really see the world close because there have come to places where there's plenty of cameras. So everybody got to watch last autumn as a city in California literally called paradise, literally turned into hell inside half an hour. And once, for any rural American, once you've seen people burning to death in their cars, trying to flee down a two-lane road in the forest park, you can't unsee those pictures because it's too easy to put yourself in. But many of the time there is no camera where things are going. The iron law of time had changed with the less you did to cause it. The sooner and the harder you get hit. So have some room in your heart right now for, say, the people in Mozambique. They've been hit in the last five weeks with the two largest cyclones ever to hit Southeast Africa. The second one has got six and a half feet of rain in front of parts of Mozambique, which, you remember what happened when we got 13 inches from Irene? Try to imagine six and a half feet of rain in a place that's already incredible or already underserved in terms of public health in a place where people are losing a year's clock now on and on and on. One of the pieces of the first part of this book is that a way to think about this is the planet on which we live is now shrinking and fairly combative. There were, last summer, a number of cities in the Middle East along the Persian Gulf that reached the highest temperatures, remember, reliably recorded on Earth, 129 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of them along the Persian Gulf, the humidity was so high that put the meteorologists called the fuels like temperature the heat index was about 165 degrees. 129 degrees. And by the way, I can set my oven to 130 degrees, okay? 129 degrees. Human beings can survive it for a few hours but not much more than that in an uncooled room because your body simply can't cool off fast enough to deal with it. Well, on current trajectories the scientists are quite clear that by the middle to latter part of the century a vast swath of the Earth, much of the Asian subcontinent, much of the North China Plain, much of the Middle East, we'll see those kind of temperatures dozens and dozens, maybe over two days a year. In effect, there'll be no-go zones just in the same way that our coastal cities are now under real assault. We've been expanding our footprint ever since we left Africa in the United States species but now we're on a smaller planet that's closer to the sun and that's just a way to kind of try and imagine the scale of what we're doing. The second thing that it took me that I kind of realized over those 30 years and it performs everything I do now and it was the thing that took me way too long to realize that I'd seen myself for was not figuring out I thought that we were in an argument about climate change for a long time. I mean, what I've told you about was 27 what I wrote in the end in the nature of my theory of change at the time was people would read my book and then they'd change. To be optimistic, I continue to think because I'm a writer that what we needed was more books more speeches, more symposiums, more articles, eventually the weight of evidence would cause our leaders to do the right thing because while we were learning it took me a long time to figure out that we were had long since won the argument by the mid-1990s the world scientists were in the or the Boston agreement about what was going on. We won the argument but we were losing the fight because the fight was not about data and reason, the fight was what fights are always about money and power and the other side of this fight had more money and more power than what? When the fossil fuel industry was the richest industry there was and they were able to use and are able to use that money to make sure that nothing changed they have done what it takes to preserve their business model even at the cost of breaking the planet that sounds hyperbolic and might not have said it a few years ago quite that way but we now have very good investigative reporting that proves the fossil fuel industry everything there has to know about climate change back in the 1980s their scientists told them how much it was going to work and how fast and their scientists would believe and started building every drilling room they built to compensate for the rise of the sea level they knew was coming what they didn't do was tell any of the rest of us instead they spent billions of dollars on building this architecture to see and then I hired all the guys who took back the wars they even hired some of the people who smeared Rachel Carson in the 1960s and they sent torque well they sent torque on the most consequential lie in human history the lie that we didn't know what was real about climate change we weren't sure that this was happening and so on and so forth they set up an absolutely sterile voting debate about whether my quote or no was real a debate that both sides would be answered to at the beginning and it's just one of them was willing to lie about it and as a result you know we've been paralyzed for 30 years we've lost 30 years of if the CEO of Exxon in 1988 after Gene Hanson testified before Congress about climate change if he'd simply gone on TV that night and said you know what our scientists are telling us just the same thing which by the way seems to be the least of any moral or ethical system of good demand no one would then have said oh Exxon just a bunch of all of us together no attention you know we would have gotten to work instead we've gone from George H.W. Bush in 1988 promising or running for president to quote fight the greenhouse effect with the white house effect for reason one we've gone from that to the current Republican president announcing that climate change was a hoax manufactured by the Chinese a physician so you were sitting on a bus next to someone again wondering that you would get up and change seats you know but there we are it is it is that confluence of videology and interest self-interest that's gotten us where we are and it's getting worse by the minute I don't know if other people saw this or not I just was finishing a piece I was sitting back there for the New Yorker for tomorrow for the website yesterday a couple of hours after that you were in the court came out our secretary of state went to a meeting of the Arctic Council up in Finland and at which point everybody else was talking about the sort of horror of the fact that the Arctic was melting and he started in on what a great idea was and how it should melt faster because as soon as it was done melting you'd be able to cut a couple of weeks off the time it took a ship to get to China in the back with Alvin and he was going on and on and on oh there's gold you know having the gallows for secretary but that's where we are I mean that's what we're up against Mike Pompeo the secretary of state took more money from the Koch brothers than any other politician in our Congress okay he's the place where the Koch brothers and the oil industry and mine ran kind of a meet in this kind of diabolical place so in now a third lesson for me was a very good thing to have the only way to balance that kind of power and wealth is to get enough people engaged in fighting and of course that's why we started 350 when we did I was thinking of that the other day because 350 organized this beautiful walk across the state from starting in Middlebury to Montelier it kind of was an echo of the one that certain people in this room were on in 2006 when we walked up to the west side of the state to Burlington when we got there after I remember I remember very well arriving at the Burlington city line around a thousand was marching and burning and the congress troops and others came to the city limits to meet us you know he's an activist but that's just his thing he was sort of thrilled to see all this he keeps saying this is so great I haven't seen anything like this since the Vietnam War this is fantastic this is so great what is this about again the absolute great champion of all these things in our Congress and really the reason that we've broken some of the political long channel the reason now that every Democratic candidate is putting forward remarkable plans about climate change and so on but when we did that march the Free Press the next day had a story that said that thousand people was probably the largest demonstration in the event taking place about climate change in the United States and I read that I thought the wonder we lose you know everything you need for movement we've got Al Gore we've got scientists we've got Paul the only part of the movement we forgot was the movement part we need that and so that's what people have built over the years and many people in this room and I would just tell you that right at the moment it feels to me like we're in a real moment as a result of all that movement built some of its things that have been going on for a while to fights against pipelines started with the Keystone Pipeline in 2011 have now spread to every possible thing that anybody tries to build sometimes we get started too late as with the gas pipeline on the west side of the state which was a tremendous sadness to see that anachronism built when it didn't need to be but it won't be nothing like that when we get built in Vermont again I'm almost sure because we will make sure that it doesn't happen but now very frack well it will get spot and it's amazing we win a fair number of these even when we don't we cause them all kinds of trouble ahead of the American National Gas Institute to give speech to industry peers about a year ago when they said somehow we have to stop the Keystoneization everything that we're trying and made by dark heart happy to say that the best work that people have engaged in is well maybe isn't where I was talking to Billy Klein on the phone on the way up here today she and I sort of dreamed up this idea in 2012 and neither of us thought when we started that we would now have 80 trillion dollars working down those portfolios that have divested our old lost fuel it's been astonishing to see you know and it's working when the Shell Oil declaring its annual report assured that divestment had become a material risk to its business the coal CEOs at their big meeting in Easton last week there was a story of a political with one after another just complaining that they could no longer find capital to expand because too many funds had divested from fossil fuel it made me really happy that it's now that New York City has divested its 200 billion dollar pension fine that the regions have divested their sovereign wealth it's the biggest pool of investment capital on birth the whole country of iron divested every single public dollar out of the fossil fuels last summer I gotta say it makes me a little sad that for reasons that no one has ever been able to explain to me Vermont has refused habitably to divest its pension fund it's not going to make or break the campaign it's a great sadness that they were not in the lead on this and I was extraordinarily happy to see middle grade college joining in earlier this year that was a good and useful deal now the movement is just blossoming with millions of people coming from every direction it's so beautiful to see bunches and bunches of the kids who fight divestment and college who wanted to do something else they form this thing called sunrise movement that's the moving prime degree new deal they're the ones who recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the congressman from the Bronx and head market to push forward this legislation that's really visionary and powerful and going to make a difference some of you saw the people from extinction rebellion in London in the British and Irish and the world stand up and do the right thing. Beginning with Greta Thunberg in Sweden last September, but now there are millions and millions, and I have one of the pleasure to be out around the country is getting to meet so many of them. I was in Denver the other night with a 12 year old who we had met before when we had a distance co-written and hot bent piece for the LA Times, kind of in the form of an excuse for you to give your principal to explain why you were out of school for the day because you had to be the same as a girl or anything. It's so much fun to see that enormously important. And now we need to do what they're asked to, which is to back them up. We don't quite have a day together, we will soon, but keep your eyes peeled, come product, there's gonna be all ages and climate strikes beginning, okay? And we're gonna need everybody to take a day away from everybody before the news and days away just to leave away from their job and out on the streets and things for a day, sometime in the fall and maybe sometime again in the spring. We need to do it because literally disrupting the business as usual is now the goal. It's business as usual, it's essentially doing this thing. It's the fact that we all get up and do more of us the same thing we did the day before even in the midst of an enormous crisis. That's why we are all in the off. It's also important that we do it because there's something mildly undidified about putting all the weight on fourth graders. Okay, so for no one to use the nap, we're gonna need people to act in the morning. So, you know, the other lesson I've learned and this is a, I don't know if this is, this is, I should even say it, but I will because I think in the end, our driver of honesty is what we do. We don't know if we're gonna win this fight. That's the thing. It's not like other fights that we've had. We're used to fights, political fights where compromise is the sensible outcome, you know? Maybe if I think a minimum wage should be $30 an hour and you're cool with slavery, we should meet in the middle and call it $15 an hour and come back and try again. That's how the change works, you know, for the most part. You want us to kind of compromise and get some place. But just as you really can't morally compromise with slavery, you can't physically compromise with the climate change. The adversary here isn't other people. The adversary is physics, it's chemistry. And it won't compromise if we don't make it. If we don't solve a problem soon, then we don't solve a problem. I've said before that, you know, my particular hero, Dr. King, used to involve his speeches by saying, if arc of the moral universe is long, but if that is toward justice, this may take a while, but we're going to win. The arc of the physical universe is short and if that's toward he, if we don't win, it's fair to defend it, we don't win, we don't win the outcome. We will win the outcome at the right times whenever we're in this room. Maybe at least we'll have a good idea of whether we made the beginning important changes that we actually have to make over the next few years. That's the relevant timeframe here, okay? Which is why it seems so urgent to me. So I do what I do and why so many other people do what they do now every day to try and make that change come in time. And I will just say, I think it's well worth the effort because the planet that we live on is so uncommon and beautiful. And the people want it for the most part, so I mean, interesting and kind. It would be a great shame to see the bookends in sort of ugly and deep cadavel because I became, I was doing some writing about all the kind of richest people on the planet because there's something here about inequality too and the way just the temperature is risen so it's inequality on this earth. They're laying it into profound ways, but one of the things that's very noticeable when you start looking at all the richest people on earth is one thing that happened in common is they all want to leave. They're all building rocket ships just as fast as they can even. Might not be the worst outcome possible. But you know, what is fun to watch the rocket, how much one of you must watch rocket ships? It's fun. I mean, I was nine years old at the ball of a weapon. I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, but what was even more beautiful the night before was to lie on a beach and there are pretty much full moon and watch a sea turtle come out of the ocean and dig her pit and put her eggs in it and trumble back into the ocean like a few years sea turtles have done for 120 million years. And it's just reminding me that the least hospitable square meter of planet earth, some place in the Sahara or up at the top of the Himalayas or something, is that the hours and the times more hospitable than any other place we're ever gonna find out in the cosmos, you know? So, man, it just seems worth our lives to figure out how to preserve as much of this world as we can and as we're going to. And I just really, really want to thank you all because I know that's precisely the work that we're going to be doing every day. And it's just an honor to get to do it with you and I'll look forward to just doing it with your shoulder and shoulder with y'all going forward. So thank you very much. Good to see you. Good to see you too. So you've written a few books. This one's a little bit different. So why did you write this particular book? I've written a lot less in the last number of years because I've written a lot less in the last couple of years because the last 10 years is, or actually I've written a ton but mostly it's in the form of tweets and op eds and things. My wife added up. I have a large Twitter address. She said, if you'd just turn all these tweets into books you would have written like three books. But I wanted to sort of bring this up to date where we were now. It strikes me, we really need to understand where we are physically and politically important to figure out what we need to do. We're entering this phase where there's enough pressure of the wind that eventually our whole systems are going to start to enter into something. The question will then be, what is it yielding? And this is the place where it's hard because 30 years ago there were a bunch of small things we could have done that would have made it into the northern surface. 30 years ago a small place out of the harbor would actually have steered the ocean liner that is our economy three or four or five degrees off its course and 30 years later it could be an entirely different ocean. But since we didn't do any of those things, now we're going to wear and require different kinds of dislocation. We're going to have to move faster than is politically or socially or economically comfortable to have any hope that we can face. So that wasn't the sort of message that I really wanted to get across. And then I thought that there were hopeful things to build up. There are two things that are really good to me. Two technologies from the 20th century that strike me as saying this up to three and using them to build the 20th century. The first is the sort of the old one. It's really good to turn out to be the old one. The fact that it really is a mirror of the solar panel. The fact that the engineers have taught the price of this thing down to 80% in the last decade or so. But now I'm describing several long trips to very broad parts of Africa. Watching villages that were never, ever going to be connected to the grid. We know that there are more than a million people on the plane, but they're not as far away as they are. All of a sudden, the solar panel is keeping up. We can over night put a little white coat and get outside the village and water together the hot sun that sort of space the size of the sanctuary. And suddenly, 200 or 300 people suddenly had to talk to a doctor who used to deliver babies with a flashlight clenched in his teeth. Now he has a refrigerator to store vaccine. And we're sitting in a room in a bunch of elders in the government and the village that had just gotten his regularly in. And it was really hot. It's always really hot in the night. And it's really cold bottles and bottles of water in the night. But it took me in my clueless, westerly way, a good 15 minutes to figure out why we were so proud. Until the week before, they'd never been anything cold in this film. And the point is, the sun and out the back comes light and cold, hot words of scale magic. And in the rational world we've been about, putting that absolutely everywhere we can is a fascination. The same with wind turbines and probably other things that we've waved and worked. The other technology I was just saying in passing because I've been talking a lot about it is this technology of what? I don't have a new video, which self-adjusts and Gandhi, Dr. King, the civil rights movement, a million other people managed to develop in the communist century and now are taking better and better reviews. That's the thing that gives hope for the small, but many of us to stand up to the mind and the fear. And I've got to tell you, when we started at Keystone in the first place, a whole team of energy experts in DC and 93% of them said trans-Canada would have its permit by the end of 2011. But then 1,200 people went to jail, and hundreds of thousands of people abandoned us. And Friday, trans-Canada said, that again, we're not going to get our construction underway on Keystone this year. I don't think they're ever going to get it built. And what the projected impacts are going to be. And yet, in this book, I felt that you managed to dig up some that I hadn't even heard before. And I work in this area, including projected impacts to public health, which I think is an area that advocates sometimes have difficult time making the link. So in your many travels around the globe, what is the one thing you've learned about climate change and its impacts that you think people don't know? Talking about public health is really important. One of the things that turned me into an activist was being in Bangladesh to do some recording. And I had their first three out there, they were dentists, which, if you know, is a mosquito-borne disease that's spreading like wildfire because the mosquito that carries it, maybe he's a gypti, truly likes the one world that we really don't expect to have. I remember watching, I was spending a lot of time in the slums, so eventually I got hit by the wrong mosquito. I was as sick as I was, but I was strong and healthy when we were in it, so I didn't die. But lots of people did die. And I remember sitting in the edge of this bat's clinic with just people in clots who were shivering in this proper fever. And thinking to her, this is so unfair. There's 180 million people in Bangladesh. When you try to measure how much carbon you put out, it's like a bounty of calculations, you know? They didn't do anything to cause this, this was us. So, yeah, those are really important things to bear in mind. I think the thing that people don't really understand about carbon change is just the speed with which it happens. Our default in our minds is that geology takes an enormously long time. We all know we're going to great school worrying about the plasticine and the flies and the geological epics that last 140 million years. And then we're alive completely in all of this time. We dug up 100 million years worth of biology and burned it in the course of a few decades. And now that's changing everything that has faced that has happened since the last astralis slandered the planet before 75 million years ago. So that's what's happening now. Speed is the thing. It's why what David Sarkin was talking about was important. It's like good if the legislature is nibbling around the edges of this. It's better than being Mike Pompeo and trying to make the whole thing worse and so on. But in truth, winning slowly on the climate change is just another method of losing. We have to do it at speed. I found myself thinking about politics a lot as I was reading your book. And you know that climate change exceeds the boundaries and capabilities of politics. And yet it seems to be the tool that we often find ourselves using for these types of conversations toward the end of your book. And I hope this isn't a spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't read it, hopefully you'll remedy that tonight. You talk about next steps as including the need for a long, deep, engaged discussion about what we want. We don't want to let climate change and rampant technology development just happen to us. We need to decide if that's what we want or if we want something else. What is the role of politics in that? I think on climate change, we've had a number of discussions. I think we know a lot about it. I was part of this book turns out to be about, and I haven't talked about it tonight, but about identifying a couple of threats that feel to me of the way climate change felt to me 30 years ago. Something that worked yet breaking over our heads because it was easy to see coming if you really carefully address it. There's a lot here about artificial intelligence and its plans, forms, and about human engineering and engineering, which we're getting closer to all the time. We used to first do design, but we didn't control it at all. But those are things about which we need to have a discussion. And the point I was trying to take into the book is it would be a good idea, in this case, to have the discussion before things were out of control instead of afterwards, because that's what we didn't do with climate change thanks to the possible windscreen. And that's why we're in this fix where every answer is a top answer. And so with this upcoming presidential election, what would you like people to keep in mind about where ahead of their positions? So the first thing to keep in mind is the presidential election is 18 months away. So do not spend the next 18 months possessing every moment about how your person is doing and so on and so forth. Some of them will sort itself out. We've got a lot of work to do anyway. The election's going to be important, but elections are not the only thing that need to happen. We need to stand up to corporate power in all kinds of ways, so on and so forth. That said, it's very good to see that this is now not just an issue, but in some ways the issue at least within the Democratic Party. The polling last week for the CNN said that among Democratic senators, climate change is now by far a number one issue. Health care, education, and absolutely everything else. That's appropriate, and that's a enormous change. We used to beg and plead that they would ask one question about climate change in debates and they never did. That's not going to be a problem this year. But emphasis now is on making sure that every one of those two votes is a climate change candidate, and that whoever wins the nomination, I think they're going to use it as a real budget against the incumbent because it's a mile as high of a touch from where most Americans are on this issue. You find very few people who believe that climate change is at close. Much less than the ones invented by the Chinese. And you find very few people who are going to join Mike Pompeo in cheering on the rabid young people in the Arctic and disintegration of our other systems. I think this is one of the places, I think it's going to be a huge political issue, which is good because we're running out of, we actually are out of presidential cycles. You remember the ITCC and the government, the National Climate Change said in their report last November that if we weren't making fundamental transformation by 2030, there's no way we can catch up with climate change all in all of our politics. And I mean, if we're going to be making the fundamental change in 2030, we're going to have to be doing all the groundwork for that in 2020. I mean, that's how long it takes to get anything to be an approach that's fundamental in this field. So, this is a crucial election, but I would put, but we can't, that's not the only thing that's important. I'm doing my best to think as a little less possible about it for the moment because we've got other tasks to do too. That's a skepticism about the potential for politics, but I can't help myself, so I'm going to have to ask another one. What are the kinds of policies that you want to see politicians pursuing within the bounds of what you think politics can accomplish? You can go, we have a 350 now has a 501c400 literary. That's the thing where you can do political things. And our main contribution so far has been to set up this scorecard on this side. And you can find it easily, we just Google 350 climate scorecard, and there are three things that we think are important for presidential committees. One, are they going to support the Green New Deal? Now, at the moment it's a little hard to say exactly what that is, because it isn't completely now not here for yet, but for the moment it means a really broad, deep, thorough-going commitment to decarbonization of a balanced bill. Second thing is, will we work, and this is something presidents can do with executive authority to keep carbon in the ground? That is to stop granting new permits to drill and mine and public land and will you do everything possible, which is a lot, to stop the construction of new possible infrastructure. Make sure that there are no federal permits that are necessary to build things like pipelines. And the third thing is, the easiest one of all, will you stop taking money from the fossil fuel industry? I've got to say that there's actually just a lot of stuff behind them at the moment, have sort of a trifecta across the board, for, honestly, Elizabeth Warren, who's going to just remorn them, I'll stop with the public land policy which is a really smart way to address it. Jay Inslee, governor of Washington, Christian Children in New York and I forget. Maybe better. I bet on, definitely, this week, an M.C. take no more money from the fossil fuel industry, and he said, and they said, why do you say that? He said, well, I said it because so many activists kept asking me about it everywhere I went. So they were like, okay, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. Thank you very much. In your book, you talk about how, after the revelation that Exxon knew about climate change, how long they knew about it, you talk about the useful naivete of protestors who reacted with rage and expected more, as opposed to many people probably a little older who said, what do you expect? That's what you can get from the corporation. And we see a lot of powerful action coming from it, as you mentioned earlier. What is so useful about naivete? Well, so then, in an Exxon thing, it was really interesting. When the news came out, Exxon, these expos days, explaining that Exxon, when all of the science around climate in the 1980s, and everything about it, that to me was the, the missing, the one thing we didn't have understood until that point was the kind of death, the deceit that she came to her in going right there. And for a moment, it would have been, that was the man in the high castle, kind of alternative history books, you know? That's the difference, I said before, the CEO of Exxon, he said, yeah, you know what, the answer's right, the temperature's going up, you gotta do something. That would be the place where history would return in a very different way. So I didn't want those revelations to disappear, and I was a little tired of people immediately tweeting out, oh, of course Exxon, you know, and so on and so forth. That's a gift to them to say that. The better and more appropriate reaction is to be outraged by them, and say, that's what we did is despicable and wrong. We're gonna push them down the court and everybody can think of it. I mean, for me, at the beginning, because I did not want the story to disappear, that meant I wouldn't, you know, make myself to the pump that Exxon station in Middle of Burlington, with the little sign that says this pump is closed because Exxon arrived. Just on the theory that it would extend this story a couple of days, and again, right after I got out of the police station, I got a note from a friend of mine at Facebook, he said, yeah, that was the top trending thing that I had, half an hour until it was replaced by a video of a corking parking and a miniature pumpkin. And the pumpkin, that was a great, you know, the curtain in the police car, I like. And so, I think that that kind of naivete, even if you have to fake it a little bit, it's the right reaction in a lot of these cases. And kids don't have to fake it. They're actually really, you know, non-class at the fact that their elders aren't trying to take care of this, you know? They've been two or three times before the kids have marched to the state house this year, saying, get with it, do something about this. And they're hopeful of all the state residents, oh, thank you for bringing us all this hope. Well, come on about next year, the kids are not gonna be so hopeful, and they're gonna be a little more angry, and they wanted to convince my grandma, Tunebird is, she's autistic, which she talks about a lot, and it allows her a kind of hopefulness, that I don't know who anybody saw, but he'll look for it at the House of Competencies and you can't, but it was great. She kept saying, can you hear me? Is this microphone working? Because I'm not sure you're hearing me. Because I'm not sure you're understanding what I'm saying. It was a very effective, more effective, please. I'm gonna give it a little bit, and I think we're all interested in getting to know you a little bit and what brings you to this work. What would you say is your job description? You know, at this point, I wasn't, I mean, I thought of myself as a writer and I still do. That's why I think I know how to do it. But at a certain point, as I said, when I figured out that Tunebird was an argument and then another quote was not being sufficiently moved to me about this, I had to sort of try and teach myself how to do other things. The other thing that actually made it to me, writers are almost always in for this by nature. I mean, it's good to know with you all, but just to soon be a narrative title, I don't know, but that's all right. One way to say it is, I learned to go outside of my comfort zone because the planet is involved outside of its comfort zone, so that's what people need to learn from Tunebird. There are many different things for Tunebird. It never occurred to me I was gonna end up going to jail sometimes, sometimes, and I don't think it's not for me to do white lady, and I'm not enjoying it. It's not the end of the world. At least if you have skin color almost everyone in this room, the end of the world is the end of the world, so that's how it needs to do these kind of things. Other people do different things, but it's definitely time to do more than we're doing because it's abundantly carried and things we're doing aren't getting out enough to an end. The temperature continues to rise. So I guess the best description, I mean, I'm sort of all into your bubble. You know, I said before, I don't know if we're gonna win or not, and I really know. And there are days like today when you're at that UN report and when it just wakes up somewhat disparate. And there's are days when it just has to be known that you're making life much harder for moments. That has to suffice sometimes just to get more into the future of the next moment. But I do think that we're in a climate moment now. It feels different to me that it's felt that it was at any point in the last 30 years. And so all I say is let's do not waste this climate moment as it may be the last moment life is to be yet at a time when you're still able to make the real use of all of that. So if you've been for some reason keeping your powder dry, waiting for the moment when it really matters, this is the moment when it really matters, this is the life. Here, our practice. So what small decisions can you tell us that we might learn from that you made day to day to make a difference so that we're not just living our lives in a manner that's not different from how we did the day before in the middle of this crisis? So this is the, we should have just stopped before we got here, this is the moment when we were wanting to just be 90 minutes. People keep talking, people keep talking about, and I don't have any answers to this and I don't know everything about it or whatever else, but just as a small example, like, my guess would be in the circle of 2019 on this planet, building a giant parking garage and the 20th century was like the breeding farm at Shelburne Farms, which they built in like 1908 thinking they were gonna breed the next generation of hacky cow horses, you know, only to have the automobile two years later replace it. I don't know any of those words. All I'm saying is, when you think about small things to do, think about everything, think about sort of transformations. I don't know the answer to this. I don't know, I want to hear it. I hope I'm coming here and it'll suffice for me if you keep it McDonald's free, you know, that way, that would do. But in one's life, there are lots of things that everybody can figure out how to do. When I gather, I would get the distance of people who have done the least of their things. The most important thing that the tools can do is just be less individuals, joined together and other people will do the little things that are big enough to start correcting policy. So this year, around the world, 355, around the world, that's why people started with these things. So that they had so ability to be more, to be more, to stand up to the cover of this. You know, one evening all at a time, one in 10s, one at a time, you know, my house is covered with solar panels, I'm really proud of it, but I don't quite feel myself at this point. But that's how we stop climate change. It's if we take what industry we have and figure out how to combine. And here's what I would just say about that. When you do these things, when you work on an investment or a stop on high fives, or I'm striking when the time comes next year or whatever it is, just realize that you have many arms, you know, like brothers and sisters, and every quarter of the party who are in the same fight and who are watching and loving what it is that you do. And you should take great strength from them in the pleasure of watching them hold off their heart and spine, especially in places where people have done nothing in crisis at all. This book is dedicated to one of my just favorite colleagues when he died much too early in the past year, and we've been credited to him all. She doesn't organize her in the 350 in the South Pacific. She organized all those islands, Ottawa, to the people who were in the Marshalls, Guy from the Asia, the Solomon's, that probably are not going to exist by the end of the century. But they're not giving up. Their slogan is, we're not down to the level of fire. And the fighting they're doing is amazing. Some of you will remember when we did this big climate party at the New York City, more than a thousand different ones, it's the North, that same week, they had already organized the malls and each of those are islands built in the indigenous community. They built a tree, they built one of their kind of traditional trees. They took them all to Newcastle in Australia, just the biggest coal port in the world. And the biggest of the per day, blockade, the biggest warships in the world. I wish I had a picture because I want to show you what I want to say. When you saw the picture, you saw the fight. You see these pictures of the people in the canoes just becoming these giant ships that can't meet the power. This same summer in Seattle, our thousands of our brothers and sisters used canoes in a small path to blockade the giant drilling rigs that Shell was sending to New York. We call them diachronists. And in both cases, when you saw the picture, you sort of understood, this is a fight between the small but the many against the big and the keel. And that's one of the oldest, I'm a writer, that's one of the oldest kind of literary tropes that there is. It's the rebel alliance against the Death Star. If any doubts about the Death Star or repeat that Mike Pompeo speech from yesterday, just look it up online and see someone, see the Secretary of State of the United States, arguably the second most powerful person in the country, applauding the idea that the Arctic is rapidly melting, talking on about their gold and diamonds that they're gonna find over there. It's kind of, it's coral and we can't beat it, and we can't beat it, but only if we come together in large numbers and we do it fast. The thing that I hold in my mind that makes me understand the possibility is that when there's people in this room, if you remember, in 1970, the first Earth Day, the four Earth Day is what it is now, so we're based in a part of the county. First thing, 20 million Americans in the street, 20% of them are gay population, okay? And they weren't all married about it, some of them were pretty pissed off, you know? That 10% of the population turned out to be enough for the next four years, Richard Nixon, who had not been in environmental voting as powerful, so every piece of legislation on which he still depended was the Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Andrews pieces Act. Everybody in the front's trying to get up, but that's enough, you can do something on that scale. The job of activists, the job of activists is not in the end to win particular pieces of legislation, it's to change their values, just to change what people perceive as normal and natural and obvious, and if we can do that, then we can do it quickly, then we have a shot, and not a shot of stopping global warming too late for that, okay? But a shot at stopping it in a short of a place where it makes civilizations like the ones we've known in the past, that's what we're playing. So that's a long answer to the short of a big question. I apologize, thank you all.