 You can see this fantastic room. I've driven my hair, obviously, a thousand times, but never knowing what was inside. It's treasures on the underwall are remarkable. And it was an enormous pleasure, too, to get just to have an excuse to drive up Littlebury Gap from home near Grodloff. And in the dust, the yellows were really popping. And then to come down into this most beautiful narrow, steep-shouldered valleys. And a real gorgeous day. All of which makes it worse that my basic task in life is just to bump people out. So I apologize in advance. And I actually will try to end on the note, but it strikes me that the most useful thing to do, maybe, is just bring people a little bit up to date on where we are on climate change. I know that you've been paying attention in the last few weeks and watching the wonderful saga of Greta and the young people at work. And I'll tell you some stories about that. I've had to spend a fair amount of time with her in the last few weeks. Thanks. And there's much good news in all of that. But the basic underlying is pretty bad. June of this year was the hottest June we've ever recorded on planet Earth. July was the hottest month period we've ever recorded on planet Earth. August is the second hottest August we've ever recorded. September was the hottest September we've ever recorded on this planet. And we're seeing the effects of it now, you know, daily around the world in ways I don't really need to tell you about. I will say that there's a kind of dystopian cast, sort of shadowed cast, increasingly over parts of the world. I read this evening as I was coming out, a report in the news that Pacific Gas and Electric in California is shutting off power to 30 counties and to 58 counties in California. Because it's so hot and so dry and the wind is coming up that they're afraid that their power lines will spark another fire like they did last year when a city literally called Paradise literally turned into hell inside a cabin hour. So let me begin just by showing you a few pictures. Just kind of set things in a larger context. Can I just hit a button there a little bit to give this kind of beauty? These are from a trip last summer I took to Greenwood for a particular reason. But the first reason was just to see Greenwood which is truly amazing and remarkable. As you know, the great storehouse of ice in our atmosphere. The ice across the biggest island in the world just covers almost all of it often to depth for more than a mile. So to see it is spectacular, this ice sheet, and to see it start to melt is pretty ominous. And it is melting wherever you go. There's no small matter. Greenland alone has 23 feet of sea level rise in the ice that's on Greenland. Never mind the Antarctic or anywhere else. So I was there. You get a sense of how fast it's melting. I know you can see this but this was this boat that I chartered for the expedition that I'll describe in a minute. As you can see out in front of the boat there's blue fjord as far as you can see in every direction. But I was standing behind the captain's wheel looking up at his electronic chart and you can see that the black cursor that denotes the boat in which we're traveling appears to be a mile or so onto solid land. And I pointed this out with some mild trepidation being happening. And he just laughed and said, I've been charged five years old. Five years ago this was ice as far as you can see but now it's all open. I was going there as I wanted to take this woman, Captain Jett Niel Kajiner, up on the ice sheet. She's a poet from the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. The Marshall Islands are a remarkable place. People have been living there for many thousands of years. But the highest point in the whole Atoll is about a meter above sea level. It was a hard place to be in the last century because the Marshalls was where Bikini Atoll was that we exploded the first big age bomb and it still became more near. But now it's a hard place to be because a meter is way too low on a rapidly warming planet. So I want her to be able to deliver wonderful poems which are really remarkable while she was standing on the ice that when it melted would drown her home. And she recruited together with Dr. Liviana who's a Greenland native young woman whose homeland is disappearing and rising. Together the poem that they produced was really quite remarkable. You can see it on YouTube, millions and millions of people have watched it now. So it was powerful. I'm glad we did this. But it was startling, I've got to say, just to see the, this is pointed out sideways so this may not be hard to watch. It's just filmed from my, you can maybe get a sense of it, it's just filmed, you can close your eyes, I'm starting to see it. It's just filmed from my cell phone camera in front of the helicopter. We were just changing the batteries in one of these instruments that records the rescission of the glaciers and we were flying back over it. It'll take a minute for you to see why I bothered to shoot this video. But suffice it to say that when you're in Greenland you are struck by the fact that climate change is by far the biggest thing that human beings have ever done. By orders of magnitude the biggest thing that as a species we've ever done is change the chemistry of the planet's atmosphere and hence its temperature. It's actually quite hard to see. But in a minute, this is the front of the ice sheet headed back toward the glacier and it's much higher than it looks, it's about 120 feet high so that's what you're looking at in the face of a 12-story building there. And in a minute we're going to see a little, well actually not so little 12-story building just start crumbling into the sea. I'm far from the top there in a minute. And the thing to realize is that we have to have a trim here. There's waves of 60, 70, 80 feet high. It was a grateful sinister beauty watching this crash into the fjord. But just to realize that this is happening someplace in the frozen parts of the planet now every second, every minute, every hour, every day. And each time it happens the ocean rises some tiny fraction of a millimeter but all in all it's changing the world we live in in the most dangerous and really incredible ways. Half the summer sea ice in the Arctic has gone now. The ocean itself that you're looking at all the world's oceans are about 30% more acidic than they were 40 years ago because they're absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. You know the biggest living structures on the earth are the Great Barrier Reef is literally the biggest living structure on the planet and it's half as living as it was 30 or 40 years ago because it's bleached very dramatically in that. Before we get seasick let's just turn that on. The change is astonishing and what's really serious we're still relatively near the beginning not the end of this process. We've raised the temperature of the earth one degree Celsius so far and that's accomplished all the things that I'm describing. That's why the Arctic is melting. That's why California burns. That's why storms like Irene can drop more rain on Vermont than have ever dropped in its history with the results they've shown. They do well. That's with one degree Celsius, 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Even if we kept the promises all the countries in the world kept the promises that they made in Paris the temperature of the earth would still rise by 3 degrees Celsius and 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit. And of course some of the nations of the world one of the nations of the world has decided not even to pretend to keep the promises they've made in Paris we have to do much better than that much more quickly if we're at any chance of a world in which civilizations like the ones that we currently enjoy will be able to survive. They can't deal with the temperature 3 degrees Celsius, 4 degrees Celsius, higher. It's just too hot. In fact literally too hot. Over the last couple of summers we've seen the highest reliably recorded temperatures ever on planet Earth. It got over last summer and this summer before a series of cities across parts of the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent the temperature reached above 129 degrees Fahrenheit. So the next time it's next summer when it's 89 and you're complaining about maybe thinking you need an air conditioner in Rochester or something try to imagine it 40 degrees hotter. In fact in some of those cities in the Persian Gulf it was simultaneously so the human that the heat index was about 160 degrees 129 degrees human beings can live for a few hours but after that your body can't cool down fast enough to keep ahead. If the temperature of the planet goes up 3 degrees Celsius then then there are going to be huge slots of the planet across the subcontinent the North China Plain and much of the Persian Gulf where those temperatures will be common for weeks each year and people really won't be able to live there anymore. The UN estimates that we'll see a billion climate refugees in the course of this century. So you saw what a million refugees coming out of Syria did to the politics of Western Europe. You've seen what a million refugees on the southern border many of them climate refugees fleeing the drought and Honduras and Guatemala have done to dislocate the politics of the United States now multiply that by a thousand and try to imagine the planet with the results. So the goal has got to be extremely rapid reaction to the crisis that we now are in not a future crisis for a present crisis extremely rapid in hopes of not stopping climate change but of stopping it short of what it will otherwise get to and here we actually have some good news at least the prospect of possibility of change is here in a way that it wasn't say a decade ago over the last decade the engineers have really done their job the price of solar power or wind turbines cropped about 90% in that period to the point where it's now the cheapest way to generate power over most of the earth and that means that if we wanted to move with extraordinary needs we probably could at this point the other thing that's happened over the last five years is that the engineers have dramatically dropped the cost of storage batteries for power so that now the fact that the sun goes down at night or the wind sometimes ceases to blow is less of an issue than it used to the city of Los Angeles last week signed a new contract with it it will be a new solar farm with storage batteries on the edge of Los Angeles to provide 8% of that city's power and the cost is about two cents a kilowatt hour which is cheaper than anyone's generated power on this continent before so that's a very good sign, very good possibility the problem of course is that we're not moving with anything like the speed we need to to take advantage of that we can't just wait for it to happen solely out of kind of economic principles because it will take way too long yes 75 years from now the planet will run on sun and wind because it's cheap but if it takes 75 years to get there the planet that runs on the sun and wind will be a broken planet so the job is to make things happen much more quickly than they otherwise would and the reason that they're not most profoundly and this took me a long time to realize and we can talk about it later if you want but the reason that we're not moving with the speed we should is mostly because of the extraordinary power of the fossil fuel industry and their willingness to well, to do what it takes to keep their business model going even at the cost of breaking the planet that sounds hyperbolic and I wouldn't have said it that way even four or five years ago because I try not to exaggerate there but great investigator reported over the last few years from places like the Los Angeles Times and the Columbia Journalism School going and talking to whistleblowers digging through archives has established beyond any doubt that the big oil companies knew everything there was to know about climate change in the 1980s they had huge science departments they were the richest companies on earth their product was carbon of course they were going to investigate and find out what was going on Exxon they found in the archives graphs that the scientists presented to the executives showed with spot-on accuracy what the temperature and the carbon concentration in the atmosphere would be in 2020 exactly where we are and the scientists will believe Exxon literally began building all its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level that they knew was coming they didn't of course tell any of the rest of us instead they invested billions of dollars in building this kind of architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that well kept us locked in a completely funny debate for 30 years about whether or not global warming was real a debate that both sides knew the answer to at the beginning is just one of those willing to lie about and it turns out to be the most consequential lie probably in human history because it cost us that 30 years that we would otherwise have been at work and I don't know what more to say about that really except that it became clear to me I wrote the first book about climate change 30 years to 30 years ago this month what called the end of nature and I spent 15 years thinking that my job was to write more books and so on eventually the weight of evidence would carry the argument and so on at a certain point it just became clear to me that we won the argument we were just losing the fight because the fight wasn't about evidence it was about money and power and so it was time to try and build some power of our own and that process began in many ways you know in the western side of the world there's people here who remember that first march that we did in 2006 that began ripped in and ended in Burlington five days later first march for the climate we had no idea what we were doing but there was a story in the free press the day we got there with the thousand people that that had been the largest demonstration that had yet taken place in the United States about climate change so when we read that we were like ok no wonder we're losing you know we have everything you'd need for movement you know Al Gore and policy experts and scientists and so on the only part of the movement we've left out is the movement part we just need people so we began trying to do it and the vehicle first was this thing called 350.org that I formed with 700 graduates at Middlebury in 2008 and it took its odd name from the number that's really the most important number in the world 350 parts per million CO2 the scientists had just established it that year as the kind of safe upper bound for carbon in the atmosphere of course we're way past that upper bound now we're about 415 parts per million going up about 3 parts per million per year that's why we're in the trouble we're in but the number was good and it was good in part because it allowed us to be in an era of numerals to think about organizing global which is what we started thinking about you know there were 700 graduates there are 7 continents each one took one we got a door the guy who took the Antarctic also took the internet and off the land and these are pictures from the first day of global action in 2009 so 10 years ago this month and I'll show them to you because I want you to sort of see the baseline now against which to judge the wonderful images of the last few weeks from around the world this was the first attempt at this and it was on his day of action we'd ask people to gather wherever we were able to locate them around the world and they did there were 5200 demonstrations in 181 countries CNN called it the most widespread day of political action in its history most of them were fairly small some of them very small but all of them were very beautiful and serene one of the things that became very clear watching the pictures roll in was that I always been told that environmentalism was something that rich white people did and if you didn't know where your next needle was coming from you wouldn't be an environmentalist or whatever it just turned out to be nonsense you know it turned out that almost everyone we were working with around the world was poor, black, brown, Asian, young because that's what almost everybody in the world is and they were exactly as concerned as anybody else about climate change maybe more so because the picture really bears down hard on me in places like that so people brought the witness there the first time there was a big religious involvement in these fights they had Muslims in South Africa indigenous traditions the Anglican Archbishop behind them there that's barriers in the way but that's Jordan and Palestine and Israel cooperating on this day we did 200 big demonstrations in China which isn't easy because China's doing remarkable things now on energy they're installing renewable energy faster than in the place on the planet those are your brothers and sisters in the Maldives just demonstrating the existential problem that comes when you're that close to the water again and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean that has 0.82 meters above sea level so this 5,000 year old paradise probably won't make it to the center but they're fine there were a bunch of pictures that came out of the final arms 350 adorable and they were adorable and they were also hard to look at I mean those kids are going to be refugees and not because of something they did, because of stuff we did so we've done about 20,000 demonstrations around the world that have kind of laid a good ground work for what comes now there's a lot of fun work to do all over the planet in places we know in places we've got to know we've got these giant art projects and that is one of my favorite images from this art David will we've borrowed a satellite to take images out of because they're so big and similar there's dry riverbeds in the southwest the Santa Fe Art Institute got about 3,000 people out in that Arroyo on the satellite the blue light gets up overhead for a second and drive the river back to life a little bit as an art project if we had 50 years this is the kind of work we would just keep doing because human beings work best when they change in kind of slow and generational ways it's the cheapest, least traumatic we don't have 50 years the oil industry wasted the last three decades for us so now we've got to move way too much so in addition to education we do a lot of confrontation now and this was the pictures seven years ago from the start of the first big civil disobedience around climate change in DC over the Keystone hub one when we started people said there was no possible way we could win the oil industry had never lost a fight like this national journal the trade paper in DC pulled its 300 energy insiders on Capitol Hill they said that Transhandle would have its permit by the end of 2011 for this after four years of hard work including some of our people in this room Barack Obama said no we won't grant you a permit which was a huge victory the first time we had Donald Trump on his first day in office signed a piece of paper re-cranting the permit for this pipeline he labors under the impression that it's already been built because he keeps announcing it in speeches and things but in fact it has not yet TransCanada still has been unable to raise the money and they're scared of opposition I was extraordinarily happy today to see pictures from the Midwest Carter Thunberg and a woman named Her Age another 16 year old named Dakota Iron Eyes Lakota Sue at the head of a big procession protesting plans for the Keystone pipeline those two girls were still in diapers when this fight started and now we're at the forefront of it it's been wonderful to watch more importantly as it went on was that people saw you could fight everything and so they did and there hasn't been in the years since a pipeline, a frack well a coal mine, an LNG terminal it's been built without extraordinary opposition sometimes in fact a lot of it a surprising amount of the time we win in these fights even when we don't we win because we slow them down to raise the price of what they're doing and every month the engineers drop the price in solar panel another percent or so and the spreadsheet gets a little harder for them to justify there are times when we get started too late the gas pipeline from Burlington down to Middlebury was a perfect example it's not going to go past Middlebury now I'm pretty sure so that was a winning part but not at all often we're able to stop things whether we've stopped any of this in time there's a very hard question to know and I can show you that all day from people around the world these are people in Siberia we now have forest fires four, five, six degrees of latitude north of where we've ever seen them before there's extraordinary reporting in the Washington Post this week about what's going on in Siberia there's the Pemepros and Melts it's terrible it's making it impossible for people to do anything up there except the one kind of growth industry is people sumbling through the melting permafrost trying to find woolly mammoth tusks as they thaw out so they can sell them to the Chinese as Afrodisiacs that's a kind of dystopian picture of the world on which we live so we don't know for a time but we know that those people are leaving their homes in Micronesia they're too hot but that top level in Sweden that's 45 years ago I mean these are brothers and sisters in Pakistan and you should be able to identify with this given what Rochester went through these guys were in the heart of Pakistan that in 2010 had the worst flooding since you know them it rained so hard the way it could only rain in a globally warmed world the warm air holds more water vapor than cold so there's just the potential for rainstorms the upper bound is much higher than it used to be well these guys it rained so hard in Pakistan that the Indus River swelled to cover about 25% of the country 20 million people were out of their homes so basically everybody from Boston to Baltimore had to be evacuated and if you look at them you instantly recognize the kind of law of climate change which is the less you did to cause it the more in this year you suffer from it this is not these guys fault in any sense of the word and you know that's why it's so important to kind of want to sort of bear in mind that go full time this picture for two reasons this is a small unimportant demonstration of a small provincial city in that peninsula down in the southwest of Haiti it's in there for two reasons one the year later in much bigger hurricane than the one on this day swept through that part of the world the biggest hurricane they ever had and it wiped out that city 80% of the buildings were gone the other reason is that their suns always just destructing your actions affect me which is really true I mean the reason they had a huge hurricane is we put so much carbon in the atmosphere that the ocean is hotter than it used to be and that's how hurricanes that's where they get their power your actions affect me but not vice versa there's nothing they can do most people they aren't using anything to speak of now they can't come to the White House in protest we actually don't let the oceans come into the country much less for the purpose of the protest they can't sell their stock portfolio because I guarantee you there's more stock portfolio and the retirement savings in this small room than in that entire province of Haiti is the stuff that we have to do that's one of the reasons that we launched this huge divestment campaign six years ago when we started it wasn't huge at all it was small the effort was simply to get institutions to begin selling their stock in coal and gas and oil companies on the theory that that would send a powerful signal that it wasn't okay what they were doing that their business plan was incompatible with continued existence of the planet in its current form when we started we had no idea how well it would go it turns out to have gone very well indeed it's now the biggest corporate campaign of its kind in history we had a party two weeks ago in New York to celebrate the fact that we'd gone past the 11 trillion dollar mark in endowments and portfolios that had divested their holdings two weeks ago the University of California system divested its 80 billion dollar endowment and pension fund from fossil fuels partly we've had this enormous success because people are waking up to climate change and don't want to be on the wrong side for moral reasons probably more importantly it's become incredibly clear that those who were divesting from fossil fuel were making more money than those who weren't because the fossil fuel sector has been dramatically underperforming the rest of the economy which is no surprise because as I said earlier it's the sector of our economy that faces an enormous technological challenge from a new technology that's cheaper and cleaner so it's not surprising that it's lagging and that's one of the reasons that people are divesting it's been really powerful to watch 10 days ago I stood on a stage in New York City with Mary Powell the CEO of Green Mountain Power Vermont when she announced that they were divesting the Utilities Pension Fund the first time that that's happened in any place in the world that was a really remarkable announcement it also for me as a Vermonter put in pretty stark relief the fact that our state treasurer has adamantly refused to divest the state employees pension fund for a decade now that the purists have refused to take any action and as a result has lost Vermonters money but also has slowed down this process similarly the University of Vermont whose Board of Trustees is appointed by the Legislature and Governor has refused to take any action these are important things that it might be worth writing a letter about just trying to make your voice heard there's going to be a lot more work forthcoming around these questions around finance that's what I'm going to be spending the next few years doing Greta and her crew young people have asked adults to join which is appropriate happy as I am to see that part of work there is something highly undignified about putting the biggest problem the world has ever faced on the shoulder junior high school students so one of the things we're going to be doing I just wrote a big piece for the New Yorker about this was trying to figure out how to take this divestment thing to the next ring and go after the banks that are funding the fossil fuel companies the biggest of them banks like well Chase is the biggest of them all Chase has dramatically used its funding to the fossil fuel industry in the three years since the Paris Climate Accords they've spent $196 billion in the last three years financing which means there are in many ways a bigger carbon giant than Exxon or Chevron or anybody else and you know it's hard for us to completely stop using fossil fuel just given the if the train doesn't come or you are it's hard to take the train but it's easy relatively for everybody to take their Chase card out of their wallet in an appropriate moment and cut it in half and find somebody else that's not doing that so stay tuned we're going to give you all the information you need in order to do things like that let me just finish by saying you know a few more pictures just to say there really is a colorful resistance now around the world and it's beautiful to see these pictures from not this last week last month but there were 250,000 this is 400,000 people in 2014 and what was until last month the biggest climate march in the planet's history it was very beautiful and there were other things going on that same week around the world the ones I want to show you come from my favorite college from 315 in the south that same week that we were marching in New York these guys were they each of these islands, nations Monoatu, Tuvalu, the Marshalls Micronesia, the Solomon's all these places that are in literal hot water they each cut down a tree on their islands and made a traditional canoe and they took them to Newcastle in Australia so in their part of the world Newcastle, Australia is the biggest coal port in the world more coal moves through it than it does in the planet and so for the day it gives these canoes to blockade the biggest ore shits in the world and keep them in Harvard it was a very powerful symbolic witness in fact a month later the Newcastle City Council remember the biggest coal port in the world voted to divest its pension funds from fossil fuels so you know, bear that in mind when we think about life or life hasn't gotten around this so I want to show you just because I'm a writer by trade and so I know that there are kind of a few sort of tropes that live in the human imagination and one of the most powerful of those tropes is the kind of battle between the small and the thinning against the mighty and the few so this is this is the Israelites and Pharaoh this is the rebel arts and the death spot and once you start seeing that you see it that was that same summer in Seattle and 40 story monolith there is a drill rig at hard to go up and open the Arctic for the first time oil drilling think about that for a minute scientists have carefully explained that if we kept burning coal and gas oil we would melt the Arctic we kept doing all those things the Arctic melted did Shell Oil say maybe we should go into a different business like solar panels? No they said now that it's melted up there it'll be easier to drill for more oil that's higher rigging so which term? like that's the calling what is the big brain? a good evolutionary adaptation? I don't know happily there were lots of people with reasonable size brains attached to large hearts who got in the way and now the canoes by the thousands of course kind of activists and they did their job took them a week Shell finally after a week got a Coast Guard cutter to get them all out of the way but by that time the damage had been done Shell essentially threw in the towel they said we cannot deal with endless pictures of people in kayaks you know somehow trying to block us with a million dollars on this project but no more this damage is too much so we were done and that was very victory and we've had a lot of victories like that but basically it demonstrates what this fight is this small event against the mighty and the few and we don't know how it's going to come out the only thing I would say to you guys is we know we're not doing well right now we know that because the planet is way way way outside its comfort zone the the carbon that we put in the atmosphere so far is tracking each second the equivalent of about four or the heat equivalent of about four ocean-sized bombs that's why we are that can do all these other things the planet is outside its comfort zone so we probably should be somewhat outside our comfort zone too whatever we've done so far this hasn't been enough and so I don't know exactly what you need to do to be outside your comfort zone I know it's been an interesting experience for these last decade or so for me I've seen myself in jail a number of more times than what ever happened to me and things like that and I'm happy to see today that around the world there were thousands of people blocking streets in big cities in Europe and things as part of this extinction rebellion and I don't know quite what it's going to take but we better get things moving faster than we're moving now we're literally out of decades to waste pulling around on this yes it would be nice to be able to go very slowly and to let the state Charter take as long as it feels comfortable but we're not in that place anymore we have to move fast and I'll add one last thing just looking at the demographics of this room it's true that young people are in the lead but it's also true that they're calling on us to join I remember writing the letter asking people to come to Washington to get arrested and to start that fight over the Keystone pipeline and it was a hard letter to write but one of the things I said in it was I don't think in this case that young people should actually have to be began on fire if you're a 19 then a rest record may not be the best thing for you has to serve the point so it was with pleasure that I watched people with airlines like mine arrive and watch now we did not ask people when they were getting arrested how old are you that would be true but we did cleverly I think say who was president when you were born and the two biggest cohorts on the last day there was a kind of arrest when we were 1254 at a sign around his neck that said world war two vet with care he was so old he'd been born in the war on the hardening which was so old I forgot there was a war on the hardening it was really good for young people who were there to see their elders acting away to elders acting in a working society that's one of the reasons I wrote that kind of funny novel a couple years ago because I wanted the points that I wanted to try and bring out this is not a fight like other fights because we don't know how it's going to come out other fights we've been relatively sure that if we kept that long enough we win Dr. King would say at the end of the speeches quoting I think from the Massachusetts abolitionist Peter Carter he'd say the art of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice this may take a while but we're going to win the art of the physical universe is short and it bends toward heat if we don't win soon then we won't win so that's the challenge that's the urgency amidst all the other crazy things going on in the world this is the most important thing that's happening every day on our planet and we've got to figure out some of it politically some of it by changing the power that's lies in political institutions and some of it by changing the power that lies in financial institutions we've got to figure out how to move faster than we're moving now so that's that's what I got I'm sorry it's a little depressing but I'm not hopeful right now it really was fun to be 350 hours sort of served as the logistical backbone for all the youth climate strikes over the last couple of months and so I really got to work closely with a bunch of people and with Greta in particular who turns out to be just a wonderful candidate who's taken care of autism or asked for her syndrome which she talks about quite freely super power because she is enormously focused and unworried by the kind of endless attacks that come her way every day from the obvious people in our society and I enjoyed most of all here I really will end with this story I went down to Washington with her just to kind of stand by what she was testifying before the house committee I don't know the house committee I'm talking about the inside of the house committee and she came beautifully they you know the members the ranking member the second ranking member things all gassed on and they finally said now this is Thunberg what's your testimony I'm not here to testify I'm just here to deliver this report from the world scientists and handed over the latest IPCC reports I think you should read it and they were sort of flummoxed by that but then they started asking questions and the lead Republican went on this five minute tirade about China it is, China that China produces more carbon there were lots of easy ways she you know China is actually reducing its carbon emissions now unlike the U.S. China is building more renewable energy in per capita terms China produces a fraction of what Americans do but much more wisely she just she said very kindly she's yay tall on 80 ways 70 miles I came from a small country named Sweden and in Sweden sometimes people say why should we do anything because the United States is so big at least so much just so you know she said I'm going to be very happy I've consoled myself I've never gotten depressed so many thanks for coming and if you've got questions or comments just use them more than happy to I teach visitors and I spend a lot of time on the change and I also have 183 kilowatts of affordable takes on my land supplying 38 families I get all my energy except for my propane cookstone which I can't figure out every place from the sun I have a test slide charged out on affordable takes and you know the one thing about when you talk about 30 years ago we didn't have the technology at the right price to really probably have done anything then and now we do now as you mentioned is cheaper I have a couple of Tesla power walls I can run for 7 days without being connected to the grid between that and my phone with old tags which allows them to run and I showed my students the first thing to be true is that they're going to be in Washington next week and they will see the sequel to that and we do the calculations I've done with the class are worse than what you said about the amount of Hiroshima bombs we came up with about 1,000 per second of the ocean heat that has gone up with the 1 degree Celsius right because we're doing that in class yeah I'm going to make first of all I want a small bit of coal for a place now with these amazing induction cooktops that run on electricity in here but are extremely efficient and quite cheap you can get one for 40 or 50 bucks and cook anything on it so I'm looking to it but thank you enormously for doing that work around solar power and if you can do it in Vermont you can literally do it any place on the planet of course we also have an enormous good resource here with wind that we're probably not taking for a long time that would be good too but this is what we need to be doing and thank you very much there's one comment on the fossil people who shares in that are getting 11% per year return and investment tax per year that's pretty good yeah who wants to do a demonstration that can follow power plants oh yes and it's certainly thinking that here in Vermont GMP serves their peak energy with this group of stores in Tesla Walls which is good for you but the power company in the hair cheer refuses to do that and in the process it spends more money yes what is your rationale I actually have written a video about utilities for the New Yorker I interviewed a lot of utility executives including Mary Powell who I really like I said the other day in my experience you can count the number of utility executives in America on the fingers of one finger wow and it's really sad because she's retiring although apparently she's got a good replacement in another one so if you're a utility you tend to be locked into around the country they've done enormous things to defend their current way of doing things because they don't like none of the incumbent players really like the fact that you could move to a system where people in essence didn't have to write a check to somebody for their power every month so if you're an Exxon or if you're an investor on utility or something what a horrible business model the sun comes up and provides you power for free the wind blows if you're used to having people pay their money that's a bad business model so around the country utilities have done I wrote in New Yorker about the utility in Arizona which was taking great payer money using it to elect candidates to the public service commission that regulated them those people once elected to the public service commission put in place $60 a month tariff on anyone who wanted to put a solar panel on their roof forever which meant that Phoenix which Phoenix is they call it the valley of the sun no one has ever called this valley the valley of the sun they call it the basketball team is called the sun college basketball is the Arizona sun devil if you fly in an airplane into Phoenix you hardly see a solar panel that's why you know same Florida in the sunshine state it's almost impossible to get and put a solar panel on your roof so there aren't any if you go to Germany which put in feeding tariff 30 years ago make it really possible Germany but no one has ever got beach vacation in their life your use is more of its power from the sun than just about any place on the planet so that's what it takes that kind of work yes all over the place and there is a wonderful, wonderful 350 VT, 350 Vermont here look 350 is just this endless I'm a volunteer everybody in it most of the volunteer 350 Vermont is the local chapter they do great work just around these things Maine is a great example and it's largely because there's a young woman who led the fight to get Harvard to divest its fossil fuel stocks who has now been elected the state legislature from one of the most conservative and rural parts of Maine and she's leading the fight and it's been wonderful to watch that happen change can come and it needs to come now really fast in these places but it has to help the cooperation of the government well the governments in my experience cooperate only to the extent that people more or less make them cooperate on that note there Rochester being the heart of Vermont this Monday night on the select board agenda we have a discussion of climate emergency declaration this only works as voters come out and have a discussion this is our opportunity in our town to speak to Vermont how we feel about all this and once you declare a climate emergency send a letter off to Montpelier saying now that we divest our old things so we don't make this problem worse you know that's great thank you the first solo panel was at the St. Louis World's Fair the same fair that brought us with the ice cream cone and the hot dog so there you are and the real first it's not uncommon the place where they actually really developed them was in the space program because they needed a source of power and of course you know in fact it was incredibly expensive didn't matter because they had no alternative through generating power so that's where they first started developing and there was a kind of brief a heyday of when you're right after the first oil shock and Jimmy Carter put the solar panels on the roof of the White House now I can tell you what happened the oil industry actually did not like that and as soon as Ronald Reagan was elected he took down the solar panels from the White House and I went and found the solar panels that had been on the roof they moved them to when they took down a professor at a tiny college in the central main a place called Unity College collected these solar panels that had been on the roof of the White House and put them on the roof of the dining hall in this college and so early on in the Obama administration I went up and asked if we could have they were now they got some new ones we have these historical relics and we'll take them back to Washington and give them as a gift to President Obama to see if he'll put them on the roof and we did we had a great four or five day extravaganza dragging them down from Maine and we stopped and did big events in New York and Baltimore and Boston we finally got them to the White House in the Obama administration which at least in the beginning was not very big on dealing with climate change no thank you we don't want them maybe left them there anyway finally at the very end of the Obama administration they put the solar panels back up but that's the kind of perfect story of the wasted three decades you know and it reminds us that it wasn't always quite as partisan craziness as it is now in 1988 when it first really started talking about climate change George H.W. Bush was running for president and he said I will fight the greenhouse effect with the White House which was a good line 30 years later after 30 years of dedicated lying by the fossil fuel industry the current Republican president announces over and over again that climate change is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese a position on and off that I mean if you were sitting on the greyhound bus and the person next to you began to water it you would look around for consent but that's what we're gonna do now and I will say it did give me great pleasure today along the scene a picture of Greta standing up against the Keystone pipeline to see a picture of Jimmy Carter swaddled in bandages from the fall he took yesterday out of Habitat for the University House putting up the house with the solar panel on the roof so history works in all kinds of interesting cycles it's kind of you to say I spend more time taking myself for not figuring out some of it earlier if you're getting to work but it is, I will say as you work on all of this just know that you have an enormous number of brothers and sisters around the world who are working on it and now we can kind of see them coming out in their Williams around the planet marching and getting involved and it's all it's always sobering to me that so many of them are in places that did not cause the problem and if they can get over there were pictures coming in the other day during the climate strikes the first pictures I saw were from the Solomon Islands and there's young people in Canoe who's arriving on the main island for the demonstration and there were pictures pretty big demonstrations in Bangladesh where I've been in Bangladesh if there's any country on earth it's going to be it already is millions of people have had to leave their farms along the coastal edges if they're willing to kind of join with the rest of us in this work it kind of moves me all the time it makes me so it's really good to be in a little filled with people who I know who are working on this I'm really grateful for it and just to say in the next little while because the next little while is in fact the time that we have thank you