 You know, Brian, for those of you who don't, Brian has been working on climate justice issues of at least 10 years now, and before that he was deeply involved in the movement against genetically engineered organisms. He's been an anti-nuclear activist, a green activist. I've had the pleasure of having Brian as a colleague for the past 30 years or so at the Institute for Social Ecology. He also teaches at UVM. He has a few of his numerous books out here on the table, and folks should feel free to take a look at them. It was great pleasure, and thank you, Brian, so much for coming out tonight. Great. Thanks, Dan, and thanks to... On our only witcher date. I was going to say something about that. Thanks to folks from the Energy Committee and Susan Green from the library for getting this together and getting the word around what Jay just mentioned is kind of the note I was going to start on, that it's interesting to be doing this on probably our first day with typical weather this whole winter. It's been kind of a typically dreary mid-March day here in Vermont, kind of hovering around freezing and spinning a little bit of snow every once in a while. And it's been an odd cap off to what's been, I think it's fair to say, probably the strangest winter any of us have experienced with bouts of spring weather all the way through. No appreciable snow for the entire year. Green grass, visible really almost every two or three week period. I'm going to do three things. I'm going to talk a little bit about weather patterns and extreme weather incidents generally. I'm going to talk about the correlation between that and climate change. Some of the projections for where we're headed. And then for the last part, really focus on the climate movement and how it's evolving and some of the things that have been happening around the world in here in Vermont. That's the basic plan. And since it's a small group, I'll try to go through this material pretty quickly so we have more time for a conversation. So let's go back to the beginning, which is looking at some of what's happened in the last 10 years or so that people will be familiar with. A few things that you might remember were in the news when they happened. First, Hurricane Katrina that flooded New Orleans in 2005 was the first major incident that really got people thinking about the consequences, the immediate consequences of climate disruption. Hurricane Sandy in New York in 2012 that flooded Lower Manhattan, that flooded coastal New Jersey and Staten Island and was the most extreme storm that the mid-Atlantic states have seen possibly ever. This is actually just a week or two ago in coastal Louisiana where there's been another bout of serious flooding really all the way south to cities in Paraguay that were underwater just a few weeks ago. Also wildfires, this is San Diego in 2014, you can see how close it came to the city and last summer there were major wildfires in the whole rainforest on the coast of Washington State and the Olympic Peninsula. Places that normally get steady rain throughout the year were so dry that some of that forest went up in flames. Also unprecedented droughts. This is California just a couple of years ago, they've gotten a little bit of a reprieve because of El Nino but of course we know the chronic drought in California persists. But the situation in California pales by comparison to a lot of other places in the world. This is Somalia where the drought has been persistent for getting on 20 years. There have been hundreds of thousands of refugees heading south toward Kenya and other places in East Africa to escape the drought on the Horn of Africa. Also related to El Nino the drought has extended from the east coast of South Africa across the ocean to South Africa, parts of the Middle East. There was a story in the New York Times just a few weeks ago about the pistachio growers in Iran losing their trees because it's so dry. So the droughts are spreading around the world. Next, people might or might not remember that back in 2010 the Indus River in Pakistan flooded and that flooded the area of Pakistan inhabited by 20% of the population of the entire country. In Jakarta a couple of years later other cities in Indonesia again huge areas under water that year or the year before also in the suburbs of Bangkok and other places. Some people might also remember Typhoon Haiyan which when it reached landfall in the Philippines in December of 2013 was the most severe storm to ever reach landfall. It's since been superseded by a typhoon that hit many of the Fiji islands just a few weeks ago that was even worse than Haiyan. And here's a chart that gives us a sense of how this phenomenon has been evolving over time. This is from the World Development Report that came out just a couple of years into this century. And we have two maps of the world with a bar graph on every continent and see that going back to the 1950s and 60s we started to see a steady increase in major flooding events, a steady increase in major wildfires. I first saw this slide in a presentation by a climate scientist from Woods Hole in Cape Cod in Monpelier a few years ago. And I always come back to this because this really illustrates for me better than almost anything I've seen how far back this trend goes. How at the time this came out everybody was still talking about climate change as something off in the distant future and yet we can see these phenomena of floods and wildfires increasing steadily. Next we have a chart from one of the big international re-insurance agencies. These are the insurance companies that insure the insurers. I think this is Munich re-insurance looking at a steady trend of increased weather-related catastrophes. The red bars are geophysical, not related to climate, and you can see that's pretty steady with a few peaks. But the overall trend of weather-related disasters is something that even the global insurance industry has had to pay attention to. This is a chart probably many of you have seen. This is the latest version from NASA looking at temperature trends going back to measured records in the 1880s. And this is the famous hockey stick curve which has that name because over the last 10, 15 years scientists have been able to take this back much longer periods of time by using a whole range of studies, a whole range of methods, looking at tree rings, looking at ice cores, looking at various indirect measurements of temperature. And the degree to which this spike after 1980 is unprecedented goes back hundreds of years according to some of the more recent studies, they suggest that it might go back 10 or 20,000 years before we've seen the kinds of temperature spikes over time that we're seeing right now. And of course 2015 was the hottest year on record. We'll see a map in a minute that looks at that a little bit more closely following 2014 which was also at its time the hottest year on record. It was looking at 19th century baseline and kind of a steady increase and then a really sudden spike in just the last 30 years or so. So this is 2015 and this is from NOAA, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, looking at how different 2015 was from the norm and I'm not sure if the baseline on this is 20th century as a whole or a lot of studies use 1960 to 1990 as the baseline. But you can see almost the entire earth between much warmer than average and record warmth in many areas. The two exceptions are here below Greenland and here above the main Antarctic ice shelf. These, of course, are the places on earth where ice is melting the fastest and there's a paper that came out just this week from James Hansen and his colleagues suggesting that these anomalies and the contrast between the cool conditions here and the surrounding warmth are going to be responsible in a much shorter term than people have realized. Drastic increase in extreme storms, pace of ice melt that will flood the world's coastlines a lot more quickly than most people have been willing to admit. The next slide is the one that you might recognize from the poster. This is just looking at last month. This is February 2016 and you can see it's a little tricky because usually the gradations of color are half a degree and then they're a degree and then they're two degrees and then this last zone is everything from four degrees difference from normal all the way up to almost 12 degrees difference from normal. What the climate? Degrees Celsius. That's degrees Celsius so you have to multiply by 1.8 or 2 to just get a rough idea. Much of the Arctic averaged 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal last month and what they call the temperature anomaly, the variation from the norm. Last month, February 2016, was the largest ever measured. So it wasn't the hottest month because obviously it's hotter in July but in the southern hemisphere but globally average the temperature difference from the norm was the greatest it's ever been. And we still have these pockets of cool in the areas where there are major melting of glaciers. But one article I read describing this chart said that basically they got to this point and ran out of colors because if the scale were all proportional there would be regions up here much darker than the dark red. Things are really completely beyond what anybody has been able to imagine before. And very briefly this is looking at precipitation trends. This is from the National Climate Assessment which was actually an executive branch production came out of the White House a couple of years ago. The take home message here is the proportion of rainfall that we get in heavy storms and extremely heavy storms is 71% higher here in the entire northeast than 20th century norms. In case anybody still is harboring any doubt that these trends are the direct result of human caused interventions in the climate this data just looking at what we know about emissions of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane and the other greenhouse gases. On every continent and every ocean on this chart the dark blue highlights the range of predictions based only on natural factors that affect the climate. To come anywhere close you can see to the trends shown by the black lines which trace the observed changes in temperature over many decades you almost always have to move up into the pink zone which factors in the effects of pollution from carbon dioxide and all the other greenhouse gases. This is brand new this came out just a week or so ago the National Academy of Sciences put out a big report looking at the emerging science of weather attribution and this is all pretty new. You know if you look at media accounts they usually quote somebody saying well we can't reliably attribute specific weather events to long term climate trends but the real story is that scientists have been working hard at this especially for about the last half dozen years and they're starting to get better at it things to think about in terms of how this works. So the bottom trend is how well we understand the effects of climate change on a particular weather phenomenon and then this is the confidence in attributing specific events to their climate component and obviously everything is below the 45 degree line because we can't be better at predicting than we understand the phenomenon and obviously instances of extreme cold and extreme heat have gotten pretty easy to attribute extreme cold hardly ever happens except right up against where the glaciers are melting for droughts and extreme rainfall there's a little bit more uncertainty we're not that good yet at looking at the climate components of severe convective storms like tornadoes a little bit better fires and in the middle range are extreme snow and ice incidents which of course we had a lot of last winter tropical cyclones like hurricanes and typhoons with droughts and high rain in this middle range but there's some general things that we understand pretty well first is we know from global warming that there's about 4% more moisture in the atmosphere that's enough to explain about 5-10% increase in the intensity of storms and precipitation events that's very straightforward the second thing is to understand that the events that we're seeing are consistent with the expectations from global warming James Hansen who used to be the lead climate person at NASA he's kind of a freelancer now but still doing leading edge research as well as advocacy he says it's basically like playing with loaded dice if you know your dice are loaded the likelihood of various things is increased and that's again most reliable in terms of understanding temperature but there's also a loading of the dice with respect to the geological processes that make these kinds of extreme events more likely and then you've got these new studies and the first one I became aware of just came out five years ago in the summer of 2011 where some scientists from Oxford University in the British Meteorological Office published a paper where they looked at a series of severe floods that happened in the UK in 2000 some of the worst flooding ever measured in the UK and there the records go back several hundred years and they ask the question well how much can we attribute this to climate change and they did a massive amount of data crunching they borrowed time on computers all around the world you know about you know like the Carl Sagan search for extraterrestrial intelligence experiments where they got so much data that they rely on scientists around the world giving their project the downtime on their own lab computers this initial study in 2011 had to do that and with all this data they basically determined that with very high confidence at least 20% of those incidents those flooding incidents were attributable to climate change with medium confidence it was maybe 90% attributable to climate change so you know what you get out of a lot of data crunching are still probabilities and projections you don't get predictions you don't get climate change caused this and didn't cause that but that was five years ago and the experiments are getting increasingly more reliable the turnover time is a lot shorter no longer takes ten years to answer the question is a particular storm climate related or not and the science of attribution of extreme weather events is now a really hot topic in a lot of different circles next so let's look a little bit at where the climate scientists think we're headed this is from again the last intergovernmental panel on climate change report looking at projected changes in temperature, precipitation arctic ice and ocean acidification there's nothing but excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that could possibly be contributing to ocean acidification by the way the people who want to blame climate change on something other than greenhouse gases have no explanation at all for this so this is the first column is the projections if the average change in surface temperature is about another one degree beyond warming so far so this is given that we're close to one degree now this is close to the two degree threshold that the diplomats talk about which is really not a scientific safe level by any means anything it's about the 50% confidence level between destabilizing climate change and out of control climate change it's kind of a 50-50 point that's what two degrees is to the scientists so that's the first column and then the second column is a scenario that represents an additional four degrees Celsius rise over what we've seen so far and you can see the distribution across the earth of increased heating and changes in precipitation are quite variable especially the precipitation measures are variable obviously in the 5-degree scenario there's no ice in the Arctic at all by 2100 and that's one set of projections and people don't always realize that these IPCC reports are really consensus documents they don't look at any studies that are seen to be outliers in any way they don't really look I mean they look at a range of predictions but what the IPCC is about is really about surveying the existing data and communicating to the world the scientific consensus and also the convergence of knowledge from all these different kinds of predictions and also from different areas of science people looking at cloud patterns people looking at floods and droughts people looking at shifts in the geography of various ecosystems and the way that all of these areas of science converges is another really striking take-home message from the IPCC report I'm just looking at the second set of maps on the right and trying to understand the pattern of drought and rainfall in Africa can you speak to what you know about that because we're looking at deluges next to desert yeah that's right we're looking at 40-50% increases in rainfall right in here immediately sub-Saharan and then off the coast between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula but then increasing desertification all throughout the Mediterranean basin including in southern Europe as well as in a lot of far southern Africa and that's really helpful even just to stay with that for a minute and think about the implications in terms of food and population absolutely I mean one the earlier IPCC report from 2009 said that at current trends by the middle of this century most of Africa is going to have complete crop failure every other year and that's five or six years ago no seven or eight years ago's projections by when? by mid-century by mid-century most young people are alive today exactly that's huge yeah and I can email anybody any of these charts if you want to really take some time to stare at them because as you say there's a lot to be learned by really looking at any one of these very closely the next slide actually builds on this let's look at that one this is a study that was done by a couple of scientists at University of Washington and at Stanford in 2009 they were responding to the European heatwave in 2003 the most severe heatwave to ever hit Europe people say it killed possibly as many as 70 or 80,000 people this is in Europe and they ask the question how likely is it in the future that average temperatures will be comparable to today's most severe temperatures so if in Marshfield, Vermont the hottest summer day is say 90 degrees what's the likelihood that that's going to be the average summer temperature mid-century and at the end of the century and these percentages represent the percent of different models, climate models with a wide range of different assumptions that produce that result average temperature in the future matching today's most extreme temperature does that make sense? the percentage is a measure of the certainty of how likely that will be the case and around 2050 there are places in the world including West Africa including Bangladesh and surrounding areas little area in South America here places where that's already 90% likelihood and if current trends persist if we're not able to do something about this we see most of the world in that condition by 2090 that's really disturbing map to look at I've also spent a lot of time staring at that one you know we see, I mean here in the southwest where we're already seeing temperatures pushing 110, 115 during the summer imagine that being the average I mean they're talking about places in the world like in parts of Africa in the Middle East where the summer daytime temperatures are actually too hot for humans to be outside our perspiration can't happen fast enough to be able to function outdoors in those temperatures it's really pretty unbelievable set of scenarios and then the take home message of climate justice as it's emerged as a movement around the world and we'll look at some images very soon of how that's taken shape in different places but the key take home message those who in the world who contribute the least to excess emissions of greenhouse gases are already the most impacted by climate change and in the future that much more so so we can see these low emissions regions of the world facing some of the most severe impacts and this is a study from McGill just a few years ago again really striking observation people I know who have been working within this paradigm of climate justice have been saying this now for at least a dozen years but here we have some data that demonstrates it much more specifically than really than anybody imagined back at the beginnings of this work so in December there was as you know an international climate meeting UN sponsored climate meeting in Paris Obama and all the other diplomats came out of and heads of state came out of that meeting proclaiming it a big success and as you probably also know the real outcome of that meeting was predicted in advance to be severely disappointing and the results really kind of met people's expectations going into it the core underlying problem with the UN process over the last five or six years and I'll get a little bit more into that history when we look at some of the images from those events the core problem is that the Kyoto Protocol approved in 1997 at one of these conferences that set mandatory levels of emissions reduction for various countries in the wealthy part of the world was deemed a failure for many reasons including the fact that some of the policies that were implemented as a result of Kyoto were really doomed to fail because they relied on various financial mechanisms like so-called cap and trade to try to reduce emissions and they just didn't as any of us who were skeptical of the processes of the capitalist market would have predicted so in about starting around 2011 the US came forward well really it goes back to Copenhagen but it was really enshrined in the UN process in 2011 a couple of years after Copenhagen that the whole notion of countries being mandated to reduce their emissions by specified amounts would be discarded and replaced by this system of countries making voluntary pledges to reduce their emissions and it turned out pledges was way too strong a word for the UN process and over the course of a period of years pledges got watered down to contributions no pledges got watered down to commitments got watered down to contributions so now every country in the world has announced its intended contribution to reducing emissions there are a couple of different projects I think this is the one based in MIT that have looked at the likely result of the intended contributions that were announced in the lead up to Paris this is an emissions path that would be needed to keep the average temperature increase within that sort of baseline of two degrees this is what we would get if we continue business if the world continues business as usual and this is the projected result of the various documents that countries submitted in the lead up to Paris so it gets us part way down from the absolute worst case scenario but it doesn't get us anywhere close to where we need to be to have only a 50% probability as I said of the most extreme destabilization remaining slides are really to give you a picture of how the movement has evolved over about the last dozen years the first major of the various climate conferences at the UN level with all their problems the first time there was really a massive public response by civil society around the world questioning what was going on at the UN level and raising justice-centered concerns around the UN process was in 2007 when the climate conference happened in Bali in Indonesia and I should mention that all of the slides from protests at the UN events that we're going to see are from except for the most recent ones from Paris or from our friend Oren Langell who is now in Buffalo New York amazing photographer from the Global Justice Ecology Project and he and Peter Mann and others were really closely tracking these events over this period of time and sending their photos to convey a sense of what was being talked about links to global poverty the issue of ecological debt that the North owes the South based on the legacy of colonialism and imperialism going way back 2007 was also the year at the UN meeting where there was really the first convergence of global civil society to try to articulate a concise climate justice message and the network Climate Justice Now came out of that Bali meeting and they hit the ground running a five point program calling for reducing consumption in the North wealthy countries paying climate debts as you see on the lower right there leave fossil fuels in the ground as the only viable solution and investing in energy efficiency and community controlled not corporate renewables land and resource conservation rethinking that with a priority toward protecting indigenous land rights and popular sovereignty and then lastly a focus on sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty that was the Climate Justice Now program that was first articulated in 2007 in Bali then of course Copenhagen in 2009 100,000 people in the street begging really in a lot of ways the powers that be to come up with a new climate treaty better than the Kyoto Protocol which at that point was about to expire in five years if you're remembering Copenhagen we were all told that this was our last chance to come up with an agreement that could really get us to move forward and even with 100,000 people in the streets all we got out of Copenhagen was the beginning of this conversation around countries making voluntary pledges instead of binding commitments in Cancun a couple of years later the demonstrations were led by people from La Via Campesina the global small farmers movement that's very strong not just in Latin America but really all around the world representing millions of small farmers and their local organizations this was in Durban, South Africa which was where this process that brought us these intended contributions to emissions reductions as the sole policy measure being discussed and then of course in the aftermath of the Paris non-agreement people hit the streets you might remember that the bombing of the sports stadium and the cafe in Paris had happened just a couple of weeks before the climate talks began and there was originally a plan for what was going to be the biggest climate demonstration in history probably bigger than the one in New York and that got cancelled but still at the end of the climate conference two weeks later people hit the streets to say this is not enough and people were encouraged to wear red to symbolize that the world is crossing red lines that we shouldn't be crossing and the same day as the demonstration in Paris a lot of us went to Boston for a demonstration of a couple of thousand people on the Boston Common and then marching through the commercial district downtown with a message of jobs, justice and climate with the idea that it would help bring together a social justice group organized labor there was some organized labor presence there were some Black Lives Matter folks and other people from a green wide range of people concerned about the climate situation beyond traditional environmental constituencies but the real core of this movement I would say is out around the world in the places where energy extraction is happening and this is a movement that really has spread around the world and really the beginnings of it can be traced back to some of the big direct actions and long marches focused against the coal industry that really came to a head in the early 2000s in response to mountaintop removal coal mining there was a tree set over a mine owned by Massey Energy the company that was responsible for the big mine disaster a few years ago and the CEO was finally convicted just about six months ago this is Richmond, California where Chevron has one of its biggest oil refineries in the country if not in the world and people in Richmond which is just north of Oakland and Berkeley with the toxic pollution from Chevron for decades they've been organized they've gotten increasingly well organized this was a demonstration in the lead up to Copenhagen the summer before and at this point the people in Richmond had just succeeded in stopping a major expansion of the Chevron refinery in Richmond this is just another view of that march I just really like this photo came from one of the activists in the Bay Area the Tarsans blockade people have maybe heard the term blockadia to describe these spaces that have emerged around the world where people are taking direct action against fossil fuel extraction and Naomi Klein popularized the term in her book this changes everything capitalism versus the climate but it was really our friends at the Tarsans blockade in Texas and Oklahoma that first coined that term Dan and I and others from the ISC had a chance the winter immediately following these actions to actually go down to Texas and do a week long workshop in social ecology for a lot of those core activists and they were a really impressive group of people and the actions that they did against the building of the Southern leg of the Keystone XL played a huge role in galvanizing the movement that eventually led to the cancellation of the Keystone XL along with demonstrations at the White House and around the country you see the link to the Canadian originated indigenous people's movement Idle No More which they were expressing their solidarity with and which has a set of inter-movement connections that have been really important in the development of this movement all around the world people organizing against fracking this is in the UK every place in the world where this new technology of cracking underground shale rocks to extract oil and gas that was previously considered inaccessible people have been rising up and saying no to it this was an amazing series of actions last summer in Seattle and in Portland, Oregon where a shell oil drilling rig that was on its way to the Arctic and then on ice breaking ship that was on its way to the Arctic got blockaded by hundreds and hundreds of people in canoes and kayaks and just a few weeks so some of us went down to Albany and I'll say why Albany in just a bit to hear a presentation from one of the organizers in the Seattle area who really told the whole story of how they did this and it was really a pretty incredible story and you might have also seen the images from Portland where in addition to the canoes and kayaks there was a group of about seven or eight climbers from Greenpeace that hung themselves from one of the big bridges across the river in Portland and that was really the decisive piece that held up this ship that had been taken to Portland for repairs from being able to leave and people feel pretty confidently played both of these actions played a huge role in shell oil announcing just a couple of months later that they were suspending their efforts to drill for oil in the Arctic this is around the same time last summer in Germany where a couple of thousand climate activists converged on the site of Europe's worst coal mines shut it down for a day they marched right through police lines there were some confrontations but overall the approach was basically nonviolent I think they had a lot of support from activists around the world and they're going back this summer with even more people to hopefully shut down this coal mine for an even longer stretch of time and of course people remember the climate march in New York about a year and a half ago about 200,000 people a significant part of that was the labor contingent again raising the concerns that increasing numbers of labor activists have about the climate situation and there have been some real clashes of course in the labor movement between some of the unions that are still aiming to get jobs as much as possible from building up fossil fuel infrastructure and some of the other unions who have expressed that conversion to renewable energy has a lot more job and economic potential as well as being what's needed for the climate there was a compromise one year where the AFL-CIO actually made a statement emphasizing the need for repair and maintenance of existing fossil fuel infrastructure rather than advocating for more but then the next year the laborers and some of the other more right wing unions came back and got a resolution in favor of the Keystone pipeline the day after the people's climate march in New York a lot of us went to Wall Street and shut down those streets for a day and a few months later on the west coast people went to the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco and did flood Wall Street west speaking of pipelines the Portland pipeline is no longer pumping oil that's right I read that and they had a major spill in the 50's a big tire mess for people who don't remember this is the pipeline that was in danger of being reversed we'll see an image in just a minute of one of the actions we did here around that that was in danger of being reversed to send tar sands from Canada to be exported from Portland so people in Portland stopped that bypassing an ordinance prohibiting the conversion of that port from an import terminal to an export terminal and as you said they now are no longer pumping oil either way through that pipeline because there's so much of an excess of oil in the system that there's no longer any need at all for the refineries in Montreal to ensure the destination of that pipeline to be getting any oil from imports and that really just came out in just the last few days this is of course the state house lawn and the theme of our work and this is an alliance of several groups including 350 Vermont Rising Tide Vermont the alliance of landowners Addison County that sometimes goes by the name Just Power and allied groups in the Rutland area and the Connecticut Valley and many parts of Vermont increasingly coming together around this theme no new fossil fuel infrastructure and I think this might have been a demonstration that culminated in a number of people going up and being arrested in the governor's office at the top of the pavilion building we did a couple of walks along the route of that pipeline that you mentioned across the Northeast Kingdom from North Troy we went one year from North Troy to Irisburg and the year before that we started in West Burke and headed west to Irisburg but the pipeline continues to the east through to Newham, across New Hampshire and down to Portland, Maine so we followed much of the route in Vermont and this was just the tail end of the march there was a whole other section Was it Vermont 350 doing that? Yes, that's right This was one of the other rallies last summer The Woman Speaking lives in the town of Shoreham on Lake Champlain the people in Shoreham and surrounding towns succeeded in stopping the leg of the proposed gas pipeline that was supposed to go under Lake Champlain to serve the huge paper mill owned by International Paper They stopped that but she is continuing to be a central person in the effort to try to stop the first leg of the pipeline from Colchester to Middlebury and then there's still active plans to extend it down to the Rutland area and eventually hook up with the whole national and regional infrastructure for transmission of fracked gas from the Marcella Shale in New York and Pennsylvania as well as from Alberta which is where Vermont Gas is currently getting its gas So this was a demonstration last summer and then of course this past October there was a huge march in Montpelier that I know majority of us in this room were at and one of the slogans was decolonize and you see the little two CO2 emissions, carbon dioxide being seen as a direct form of colonialism critique that's come forward through people's connections to Iowa and other indigenous movements and of course that action quite unexpectedly culminated in a two day long occupation of state street right in front of the state house people camp there right through the weekend and on Monday morning three people got arrested blocking the entrances to the People's United Bank building where the public service board and the department of public service both have their own rights right on state street Just a few months ago a lot of us stood out alongside somebody's land in Moncton that is in the process of being seized by imminent domain these are people who have refused to sign an easement with Vermont Gas Vermont Gas by the way is not a Vermont company Montreal and Gas Metro is owned by a number of Canadian holding companies including the pipeline company Enbridge so there are a number of land owners along the route that have refused to sign easement with Vermont Gas and we've been standing in support of them this was on the day they were supposed to send a surveyor in to survey this one person's land as part of the process of seizing it for imminent domain and this one particular Moncton resident lives on a private road and we were able to stand perfectly legally with the agreement of both of the people who live on that road blocking the road and not letting the inspectors in you probably also know that there were a couple of hearings, imminent domain were disrupted one in Moncton and then two at the public service board offices in Montpelier and right now there's a tree set happening I don't know if everybody's aware of that in Moncton in a tree yeah one of the core rising tide folks from Burlington got a call from somebody that there's a tree on their land that is governed by a rule that says that because of its importance for that habitat if the tree is still standing on April 1st it can't be cut until next winter it's a weird rule I mean if they're concerned about that habitat it would say that they can't cut the tree at all but it says they can't cut the tree after April 1st they're hanging in trying to get people to sign up to be there to support people there's a need for food and other supplies if anybody has any time in the next two weeks to go down there and help support the tree set in Moncton that's a matter of real urgency right now there's a call for this May for actions around the world on the theme of break free from fossil fuels really focusing on the most illustrative sites of extreme fossil fuel extraction around the world the circle in Germany is around the same site where the action happened last summer people are going back there there are actions on just about every continent in the US there are six actions planned two on the west coast Colorado, Chicago and the closest one to here is in Albany, New York and there are going to be buses and trainings and organizing the issue in Albany is the transport of oil by train down the west shore of Lake Champlain there are oil trains passing through Albany being offloaded onto barges that ship oil down the Hudson River every single day it's an extreme hazard people might remember the explosion just north of the border in Lac Megantique in Quebec a few years ago where a trainload of oil was supposedly in storage overnight and slid down the rails and basically incinerated the entire town and people are really concerned that this could happen anywhere on the west coast of Lake Champlain the preliminary action that we did last summer on this theme right outside of Ticonderos we actually had a little canoe and kayak flotilla across the lake from Vermont and marched on the tracks and sat on the tracks for a period of time and the idea for Albany and I've got some flyers just a few that I can pass around the idea is for this to be a mass scale civil disobedience action where potentially hundreds of people will be arrested blocking the tracks at the same time people are organizing a kayak action around the port where they offload the trains onto barges so that's the next major action coming up in this part of the country a number of people from 350 Vermont have been involved in that also the whole support group for civil disobedience that was started by Tim the Christopher who did the famous action where he disrupted the lease sale of forest land in Utah and did some jail time a few years ago really interesting mix of different people from different spheres there's a primarily African-American community living very close to the port that's been complaining about the toxins from the oil operation in the port of Albany for a long time people have made connections with some of those folks there supporting this action so that's something to keep an eye out for ongoing I just made some quick notes this afternoon to kind of hopefully get us thinking a little bit about the movement and where it might be heading going forward from here and I listed seven qualities of the movement that I think are really important and rather than explaining these in any detail I'll just read through them and hopefully it'll motivate some conversation the first is a slogan that came out of the organizing in Paris and lead up to the climate conference the synthesis of blockadia and here they used actually a basque term alternative so linking the oppositional and alternative building dimensions of the movement second we've already talked about the justice centered outlook focusing on the needs of most affected communities intersectionality which is a term that's relatively new but the young activists I know use it in every paragraph now of their conversations it's a way of describing the essential links between environmental issues and broader concerns especially around race class indigenous rights the idea that grassroots mobilizations are what need to drive policy changes when the policy people are driving the agenda we end up with false solutions like cap and trade if we want real solutions it needs to be driven by movements from below the idea that we can preserve a high if not higher quality of life with much less energy use and even just comparing the US to Europe and Japan begins to illustrate that but we can go further than that the theme of energy democracy community control of renewable energy the argument is often made that because we need to develop renewable energy as quickly as possible that it's okay to buy into various kinds of financial schemes that ultimately benefit corporations and there's a whole global push for energy democracy that's trying to articulate an alternative to that and then lastly the need for a long range vision for a completely different economic system and ultimately a liberated society because we can't solve the climate crisis under the suffocating constraints of capitalism so I'm going to end there and thank you everybody for your attention and we'll open it up for some questions and discussion if you get a chair hang on we get a chair you say you don't support cap and trade right certainly people who are working from a climate justice perspective share an analysis of cap and trade as an absolutely false solution it's like a money maker pretty much control more control I think I'm glad to hear that most people I work with do support the proposal that's in circulation in Vermont now for a carbon tax it certainly has some problems because it assumes some rationality in the system that I think most of us agree is just not really there it can itself be manipulated in various ways but I've been impressed with how committed the advocates to making sure it's done in a progressive way that there are specific subsidies for lower income people including a large rebate of as much as 90% of the tax they'd be paying so that the people who are really paying the tax on carbon are the fossil fuel companies including the fuel dealers and those who are best able to change the technology they use and reduce consumption these slides are certainly very impressive illustrating the growth of the movement in the last couple of years from basically nothing to 400,000 people in New York I was here but are you hopeful? is this just too little too late? I don't want to be like Cassandra here that's the big question and I guess my answer to that sometimes varies from day to day you know, in a week when I'm reading a lot of new science I generally get pretty glum about it the couple of things that I was going to mention when we were looking at the hockey stick curve was a couple of the studies that have come out just this week I think I already mentioned the James Hansen one about the acceleration of ice melt and sea level rise and super storms being much faster there's another study that just came out this week it turns out that scientists have been counting in order to get a better handle on the patterns and consequences of carbon dioxide emissions have been looking back into the fossil record to try to understand what was going on on Earth just the last time carbon dioxide was being released at a rate comparable today to today you have to go back 60 million years for a time when carbon emissions from various sources mostly volcanoes and such then were comparable and paper came out just this week arguing pretty convincingly that the rate of carbon dioxide release then was a tenth of what it is now so we can't even find an analogous time that's meaningful within the last 60 million years so when I read stuff like that and when I look at the specific analysis of what came out of Paris it's really hard to stay hopeful but we also know there's a lot of uncertainty in the system there's still a lot of questions about what they call the sensitivity of the climate system which is how much it takes to cause how much damage and even if we're facing a completely unstable situation the measures we take now are still necessary to prevent a completely catastrophic situation so we're kind of at a period where there's a lot of conversation about how bad things can get and at what point we say we can't let things get any worse and that's an important conversation but I think for those of us who believe that it's possible to live well on a lot less energy it creates an opportunity to raise, as Naomi Klein says or at least alludes to in her book a much more fundamental critique of the system than people have been open to for a long time that I counted in her first chapter of her visiting as a reporter the big climate denial conference and people spinning these disastrous scenarios for the economy she concludes that maybe the denialists are more honest about the extent of social and economic transformation that's necessary if we're going to have any chance of preventing worst-case scenarios that maybe the denialists are more realistic about that than most mainstream environmentalists are and I think that's a confounding argument Brian, what do you think of the almost complete lack of discussion of climate issues in the presidential race? It's kind of predictable I mean presidential election years are always awful for movements that have a more fundamental critique of the system I think a lot of the energy that's going into the presidential campaign is not going into the climate movement right now and that's a serious problem I mean there was a pretty heated exchange about fracking at one of the debates between Bernie and Hillary Clinton and that was pretty striking it was in Flint, Michigan and I think the biggest applause Bernie Sanders got was calling for a a total ban on fracking even though people in Flint are facing a lot more immediate threats to their health and their survival day to day from the water contamination that was what really got the strongest response and you know Clinton and Sanders have a set of climate proposals which are incrementally better than the status quo or than what's been put forward by the Obama Administration so discussion but I think the closer we get to the election the less we're going to see and that's the way it always is in electoral politics In terms of grassroots organizations where when students and others say where can I turn for information for examples of good work going on where do you send them to talk about 350 and it's sort of to my mind it's arc of activities that it's involved in where do you see their work as being most salutary where would you like to nudge them to go if they would I've been really impressed with the evolution of 350 at the very beginning I was extremely skeptical they were doing these kind of photo ops around the world and the geographic scope of it was pretty impressive but there really wasn't much politics behind it there wasn't really much of a sense of a movement building strategy and that's really changed in the last few years people I know who were really key organizers in the global justice movement around the Seattle WTO and the actions that followed that have been brought on board as organizers by 350 in many parts of the country they were a major supporter of that huge action in Germany which was pretty militant last summer I think they've really come around to an understanding of the kind of movement building that we always talk about which is why I've continued to be on the board of the Vermont affiliate and continue to promote the stuff that they're doing I mean there are questions like in any big organization around decision making and accountability and all those kinds of things but the work on the ground is really impressive and Dave Stember who was really the person who founded 350 Vermont as an independent state affiliate now has a job for all traveling around the country supporting the formation of local groups that's what he does full time and he's really good at it and then what's also really key is the rising tide network that provides more of a political edge more of a consistent focus on direct action and there's a lot of synergy there that's certainly in the work here in Vermont and I know it's also the case in the Bay Area and a lot of other places so it's really those two large networks that I point people to and then the incredible diversity of local efforts in places around the world I have actually sent it to you and have Eva send it to you even just wrote an article and this will be in the monthly review sort of arguing that we can't neglect unions and have to find a way to step in and notice what a lot of us have been doing for decades trying to figure out ways to support the radicalization or the progressive movement of unions I'm wondering if you see examples within unions that are worth sharing A little bit I mean I don't have a lot of specifics there was a big strategy meeting in D.C. that Traven Lachon who most of us know was one of the organizers of that brought together people from unions from around the country I was actually invited to go and the scheduling was just such that I couldn't get there two people from the Vermont worker center did go along with Traven so there were three people there from Vermont and people from around the country and the focus was really on developing a more coherent strategy around climate for the labor movement and then there were two national and international networks there's the labor network for sustainability founded by Jeremy Brecker whose work I know a lot of people are familiar with that's been doing a lot of work in the trenches with different unions and then there's an international effort that was initiated by Sean Sweeney who used satishia Cornell who's now based in New York City called trade unions for energy democracy and they really focus on the community and worker control dimensions of how to rethink the transition to renewable economy with that as a priority and they've had a couple of big international meetings with people from unions from every corner of the world really articulating that platform and they've got a number of position papers and really thoughtful stuff online that you can look at from there I think it's just energydemocracy.org or something like that so it's ongoing it's a struggle I mean some of the unions outside the energy sector have really made this issue a priority like some of the nurses unions have made this issue thank you a priority because of the obvious health consequences of climate change and just gave me a paper a couple of weeks ago there's a whole set of new data from the World Health Organization trying to map out a methodology for teasing out the climate contributions of various health problems around the world and that's an increasing area of research so the nurses unions are involved and some of the public sector unions obviously but you know the traditional blue collar unions still in many cases have a lot of interest in jobs in the energy sector so even though going back to the anti nuclear movement in the 70's and unions like the machinists being in the forefront of proposing economic conversion and renewable energy there's been some backtracking there so Aiden spends a little bit of time or 18 year old for those of you who don't know doing research from Michael doing some research from Michael Klein who's who's teaching at Hampshire and they're looking at global security and climate change and can you wind us can you give us the synthesis of your latest thinking well the world's militaries and the whole military industrial complex is probably the single most energy consuming and energy wasting instead of activities there is U.S. Navy's the number one consumer of controlling the world just the Navy and that's something that the climate movement has sometimes mentioned but has yet to be a major focus and it really needs to be and then the other thing I know Claire has been focusing on a lot lately is the coming resource wars and we've had a bit of a reprieve from the especially the oil industry having over developed and over built for many years to the point where prices are so low now that a lot of them are going bankrupt and I think that's obviously a good thing but there's still a lot of issues on the horizon we saw the image of the drought in Somalia energy wars are one thing but a lot of people are predicting water wars in the not too distant future and that's a very real possibility I mean Klein points out that the U.S. military has been watching climate change for a long period of time and I imagine every other military around the world is watching climate change and preparing for these research wars so it's a huge issue that can be brought to peace groups and other people concerned about any of the anti-war movements that still exist all around the globe yeah I mean all these right wing interests on the one hand are saying there's no climate change but you look at what the Pentagon's been saying for you know a dozen years or more they're obviously really worried about increasing warfare and instability as a result of people not being able to get war not being able to get enough food I mean we know that for example in the years leading up to the civil war in Syria there's such an extreme drought that there are parts of Syria where I've seen figures as high as 85% of the livestock died because there wasn't enough water so massive movement of people from the countryside to major cities like Damascus and Holmes and Aleppo and all the places that are just completely destroyed now it also underscores have an interesting student who just sort of did a concept paper on the let's say the horrors of colonial rooted state you know just look at the globe and the artificiality of the borders and the lack of alignment with any sense of true environmental or ecological need it's the craziness of colonial colonialism and imperialism is going to be ever more evident in the coming years with international migrations in the in Bangladesh there's already an electrified fence that's 12 feet high that's in place and so there's going to have to be massive militarization to attempt to control and contain the migratory flows in Bangladesh with a population of at least tens of millions maybe more than that if you look at one of the maps in Hanson's paper that just came out this week it's all under water potentially before the end of the century so it's heavy stuff and sometimes it's a little overwhelming to be following this closely and the only thing that really keeps me going is the energy on the streets and the seeing that people especially younger folks that I know are not only being really committed in their organizing but also developing an analysis that's addressing some of the systemic issues that's good we still have a lot to do my students I just finished teaching a class on a survey class on World Civ and the last discussion question this is online so it's all about discussions with your peers and the last discussion question was about what did you learn from this class which covers the last 500 years about problems facing the world today and what we'll be doing about them and what are the big problems in your opinion and nobody except me had to intervene it mentioned climate change it was all about terrorism there was a bit about racism in the students of minority students in this class but nothing one student responded to me and said that it's just not you know it's too incremental it just doesn't I mean they're not living in Vermont during the winter here or in New York during Hurricane Sandy or New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina but for many people it's still just a very incremental thing that makes it hard it does I mean there are all these opinion studies there's a group at Yale that's been looking at public opinion how it's evolved over the last 10 years and there was a real peak around the time of the 2007 IPCC report an Al Gore's movie and some of the media attention to climate during those years and then it dropped way off after Copenhagen and has just now started to get a lot of gotten back above the level from around 2006-2007 but even though the overall level of concern is higher you still have large majorities of people seeing it as something often the future that probably won't affect them personally or people they know so our work still cut out for us here you talked about the intersectionality and what are you seeing as the most unexpected and necessary solidarity work going on between agriculture movements and climate justice movements because when you look at those maps of where the areas are going to be and where the desertification is and where the floods are we're looking at this extraordinary here we have the local war movement in Vermont but it's really about this global process of taking the ecological food systems away that we worked hard to protect the larger issues are enormous yeah I mean there are different food movements as you know and the US a lot of it is still dominated by affluent people willing to pay a lot of money for local food but around the world where the movement is much more led by farmers and by communities of self-identified or self-reidentified peasants that are part of the accomplicina as we saw those folks really get it they know that it's about climate they know it's about neoliberal economic policies that have been imposed and they've been a big presence at all of these events and they're definitely making the connection the people who are traveling around the world teaching agroecology methods really drawing on ancient traditions but also applying them in a more scientific and systematic way are really looking a lot at climate effects plus they know they have to are you seeing any changes in universities or creating more programs that are looking at global health issues and global climate change related to agriculture you see any exciting things happening on levels of conventional education I don't really have that good a handle on what's happening in conventional education at UVM there's a lot going on a lot of activity around more than ever around food and more than ever around climate and more than ever about connecting the two and environmental studies there where I teach is one of the two or three biggest majors but I don't really have that good a handle on what's happening in other mainstream universities you know to go back to the question of agriculture and climate change I just want to mention that another speaker in this series that you've initiated for us tonight is going to be Grace Christiani who's going to address that topic directly agriculture and climate change and I think that's going to be next month so I hope people will join us for that and there's a great new book by our friend and former student Eric Tonesmeyer who's one of the world's leading permaculturists now and he's got a book that has a title that I'm not that thrilled with it's called The Carbon Farming Solution but that's marketing but what it's really about is using permaculture and agroecology methods to promote climate resilience and really an encyclopedic look at the variety of things that can be grown in different parts of the world that can play a role in helping build more climate resilience agroecol systems there's a I'm not sure if we've got Soulfire Farm yeah there's a I find it extraordinarily amazing place Grafton New York outside Albany a couple with have bought maybe 20-30 acres of land probably even less than that and they see it as they'll use different words but in essence a radical education center with special emphasis on bringing people of color back to the land and supporting that and then also doing anti-racism work so they invited me to come and spend a week with them in this summer coming up but they're working with several hundreds people and they have a completely systemic analysis so they're having ex-prisoners deliver food to CSAs that are sliding scale they're just thinking holistically and they've got an extraordinary group of supporters I sat in on some of the strategy conversations and it was the most organized, coherent kind of conversations that I've ever experienced and one of the reasons I was curious about the intersection of looking at food sovereignty and employment is it just seems like between water capture and learning how to create calories in an increasingly desert environment becomes the agriculture of the future for a huge part of the planet and to get out ahead of that and to try to get the best thinking and practices Tones Meyer is a great resource person how it must be I'm just imagining there are people like that all over the place with all different finding those people yeah well he's connected I mean he's teaching classes in Mexico and New York and all over now you know the food movement in Detroit inspired partly by James and Gracely Boggs' work going back to the radical trade union movement in the 60s and evolving toward a focus on renewing the inner city and a lot of it centered around food yeah and gardens and using all the vacant land there to feed the communities well thanks so much for coming great thanks everybody hit under one of the diggers