 Today's fifth program in Exploring Climate Change in Vermont features Brian Tokar. I am your host, Steve Lobb, and welcome, Brian. Thank you, Steve. It's great to be here today. Good. We can start by you giving us a little background of what you do in relation to climate change here in Vermont. And tell us about what you teach in connection with the Institute for Social Ecology. Sure. I'm happy to. I've been living here in central Vermont since the early 1980s and have been part of, as you mentioned, an organization called the Institute for Social Ecology, which has been doing international education on a host of environmental and social and political issues actually since way back in the mid-1970s. It started at what is now Cate Farm, which was then part of the campus of Goddard College, and used to run huge programs with hundreds of people through the mid-to-late 1970s at the very beginning of conversations about alternative energy technology and organic agriculture. And a lot of things that we tend to take for granted here in Vermont now were brand new then, and people were coming to the Institute to study. We operated at a much smaller scale now. We had our own campus up on Maple Hill in Plainfield for a number of years. Now, we really do most of our teaching out on the road. We had a program in San Francisco this past spring. We've done seminars in New York City and Western Mass and a lot of other places, as well as an internal gathering that happens in Marshfield every summer. But I'm also lecturing in the environmental program at UVM these days. I've been there for about 10 years, and I teach a series of activist-oriented classes on environmental issues and movements around food and climate and a whole host of things, including a new class coming up this spring specifically focused on energy and climate issues here in Vermont. The students will be doing projects with a number of different organizations over the course of the semester. I've been writing about climate issues pretty intensively for about 10 years, but my background goes way back before that. I really got into environmental activism in the 1970s during the height of the movement against nuclear power here in New England and around the country and really around the world and saw how an organized social movement can really not only change policy, but change the way people think about the relationship of our communities to all of nature. And that happened in the case of stopping the expansion of nuclear power at a period when the U.S. government was planning on pushing ahead as fast as they could. And that movement also raised issues about what the world should look like, what the alternatives are, how we can build our communities in a more resilient way that doesn't depend on those kinds of inherently destructive technologies. So my background goes back to the anti-nuclear movement. I took a break from energy issues for many years focused on toxics with the movement that came out of the struggle in Williamstown that folks might remember. In the 1980s I worked on food and GMO issues for many years out of the institute. We coordinated the statewide town meeting campaign against GMOs in the early to mid-2000s where eventually more than 80 towns passed resolutions against GMOs. And that led to big debates in the legislature and was really the precursor to the more recent wave of activism that led to Vermont passing GMO labeling, which of course went into effect just before the point where our law was completely preempted by the feds. But raising consciousness through our town meetings here in Vermont is something we've been very much engaged in at the Institute for Social Ecology for many years. Now that's interesting to hear you talk of that. In the 70s and early 80s I personally was in Hawaii doing similar things where we started Hawaiian seafood plantation which was aquaculture and very experimental and very huge. There's 160 acres of intense aquafarming and then with the theme of nuclear is too much, especially Hawaii with the military we started the first wind farm in Hawaii which could have been one of the first in the United States. Fantastic. As a demonstration of how wind power is important. So as time goes on we learn our different connections to the past. Absolutely. I mean back in the 70s at the Institute they were traveling around the country finding these old wind power generators on farms in the Midwest mostly that had been out of use for decades and they were bringing them here and refurbishing them and creating the first generation of wind power here in Vermont as well. Of course those turbines were very small scale. They were basically enough to operate a single farmstead and were tiny compared to the facilities that we're seeing going up now. But in terms of climate issues I've been really focused on the climate situation again now. Again for about 10 years I started writing articles on the theme of climate justice back around 2006 starting to get messages from allies and colleagues around the world that we really needed to pay attention not just to climate science but also to the inherent social justice dimensions of the climate crisis. And that led to a series of articles that eventually led to me writing this book which folks can see hopefully on the camera called Toward Climate Justice. This is actually the revised edition that came out in 2014 and since this book came out I've redoubled my focus on these issues. I've been on the board of the Vermont affiliate of the 350.org network. 350 Vermont was established just a few years ago as really the first state-based group affiliated with the big international network to take on its own campaigns and have a distinct identity as a Vermont-based organization. We helped start that along with some of my students from UVM back then. And right now through 350 Vermont and a number of other organizations great support from the Vermont Sierra Club for example. Once again we're going to town meetings around the state this time with petitions calling for a number of things one a ban on any further expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in Vermont the gas pipeline that many of us were involved in fighting over the last four or five years in Chittenden and Addison counties was really the biggest expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure here in Vermont in many decades and it's clear that if we're going to do something about the climate situation the first thing we have to do is end the expansion of the use of fossil fuels and of course anything we build now is going to be expected to be operating for 30, 40, 50 years into the future and we need to be off fossil fuels by then according to all the climate scientists in order to have any chance of the world of the future bearing any reasonable similarity to the world that we grew up in. So ending fossil fuel infrastructure more rapid adoption of energy conservation and renewable energy because you know the state has set these general goals of 90% by 2050 but we're far behind where we need to be in order to get there and then to make that transition in our energy systems in a way that's genuinely just and equitable and people in communities that have a high energy burden because they have long commutes or we live in houses that aren't well insulated, Vermont is the oldest housing stock in the country and a lot of drafty old houses that use much more energy than they should it shouldn't be the burden of those individuals to bear the cost of the transition it needs to be shared in a reasonable way and there are a number of proposals including for carbon fees and changes in the tax system to address the problem in an equitable way and then also a number of towns, Marshfield being one, have added to their petitions a number of specific steps that their town energy committees have developed changes that they want to see happen to their town infrastructure, to their transportation systems specific measures that can happen on the town level to get us to where we want to be at a more reasonable pace so that's a very current effort and here in Montpelier folks are petitioning to get it on the town meeting day ballot and I hope people will be following the discussion and coming out and voting for more renewable energy and a ban on more fossil fuels on town meeting day town meetings are a very wonderful and efficient way to let the voices be heard to those who make the laws and that's a wonderful part of Vermont that means we have a little bit of edge on other places that don't have town meetings definitely it's wonderful okay now to set the stage for further conversation and to emphasize to the public the unprecedented weather phenomena that has been going on just in the past six months the summer I'd like to point out a few things so that we don't lose focus of what goes on outside Vermont and will as time goes on influence what goes on inside Vermont a whole lot so I'll mention here whether a bench unprecedented in extended regions will say around Vermont and think of how we might relate them to what we might expect here in the future and maybe near future just in the past summer in North America and Caribbean there were three powerful hurricanes all at one time going down Hurricane Alley where the water was up to 90 degrees the sea water in the Hurricane Alley I used to live and dive in those waters and anything above say 82 both stirs up a hurricane and it's miserable to swim in I'm sure and 90 degrees for me is like the frog in the boiling pot but no one would have believed such a thing even 10 years ago that heated water also applies to acidification of the ocean killing the basis of the food chain and the coral reefs and so much so there's a lot of powerful things going on in that way there were also at one time last summer five different hurricanes threatening U.S. all at once this is the first time and the intensity I think the crucial point is that the intensity of this past summer's hurricanes was unprecedented and the intensity of hurricanes is directly correlated with sea temperature the heat of the ocean in the tropics and subtropics is where hurricanes that actually sweep across the Atlantic from the continent of Africa the temperature of the ocean is what determines how strong those storms are and another occurrence last December and then again recently having hurricanes wander up past the 45 degree latitude right up into the way northern Atlantic up between Norway and Greenland almost going around Iceland and then one this summer reached all the way across to Ireland and Scotland yes I don't believe has ever happened exactly no no this is this is all new and the worst effect in some ways of these big storms is the big waves yes that won't let the ice freeze right so particularly in December where ice is trying to freeze if we send big waves up there and break it all up it's just not good plus that warm water of course both from the Norwegian sea and from the Bering Sea go up and go under the North Pole wow so that last December I do remember many times it was warmer at the North Pole above freezing yes that's right and I didn't check it today but that could well be the whole ladder I don't think that's the case right now but the whole ladder part of last year Arctic temperatures were running 30-35 degrees warmer than normal yes including the last another unprecedented situation and before we get past the hurricanes of this past summer we have to make sure we don't overlook the incredible devastation that people experienced in the wake of those storms the devastation of neighborhoods in and around Houston, Texas and the rest of the Texas Gulf Coast and then the subsequent two storms the effects they had on so many of the Caribbean islands including Puerto Rico Puerto Rico is for me special in that I have two children born there wow and I have lived and loved Puerto Rico very much fished and sailed and what is going on now government-wise with our federal government well do yeah I just read this week that there are parts of Puerto Rico that expect to be without electricity for another seven months yes and that could be way longer yeah and there's actually a delegation of a handful of Vermont activists I just read that are heading down to Puerto Rico to help some of those communities that are still without electric power get equipped with water filters and other passive technologies to help them survive this interim period until they get the power restored so people can look that up and support that effort yeah that's a biggie in my books I was in Hurricane Hugo in the eye of it wow in St. Croix aboard a boat my own boat that I built amazing with four children on board one was four month old and was that ever a nice little plane ride can't even imagine it wasn't that bad for us because we were well tied down right but of course it was six months to a year before we got electricity back in St. Croix and St. Croix is small and actually the homes are built pretty more substantial than in most places in the Caribbean where in St. Croix and I was part of this we set hurricane building standards and that helps a lot but as the hurricanes get stronger well the standards got to be stronger it gets absurd at some point and you know there are places all along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. that are facing similar problems I mean we read about the streets of Miami now being flooded on a regular basis and increasing vulnerability to intense storms and ocean waves all the way up the coast at least as far as Virginia and there are some incredibly vulnerable there are some especially vulnerable places all the way up through the Carolinas in Virginia that we don't hear much about here in Jersey we remember Hurricane Sandy that happened the year after Vermont was hit by Hurricane Irene Irene was in 2011 in 2012 Hurricane Sandy became a so-called superstorms the convergence of several storm currents coming from different directions and yes the coasts of New Jersey and Staten Island and other places all the way up into Connecticut but I am always wondering like Sandy is a good example as storms get stronger and moving areas where they aren't typical of before when are we going to get something or some storms that we can't repair from and there are parts of Vermont that are still rebuilding from Irene and people may or may not remember that Irene which happened in August came on the heels of widespread flooding here in central Vermont and other places just that previous spring so I remember that May there was major damage to almost every significant road and even a lot of smaller back roads here in central Vermont and then on the heels of that we got hit by Irene at the end of August and that had never happened before here and we just a matter of time before it comes again and you know there are some infrastructure improvements that have been made to prevent the same thing from happening again but there are still a lot of people living in those narrow valleys that are almost certain to be hit again at some point in the not too distant future I was working on the Slayton farm during Irene when the river rose 12 feet knocked out that trailer park right down the road and the organic farm there was inundated and I mean it was bad it was like a lake and I remember leaving as the water rose coming here to Montpelier and getting ice chest full of food kind of responding to the way I would in the Caribbean we get that a lot and I went back to see at three in the morning police and fire department with their lights which is freaky in the middle of the night while boats were parked there people were swimming ashore unbelievable that's a big mark in my mind I'm recalling that just before we went on the air you described yourself as a Vermont climate refugee yes I am a climate refugee from the Caribbean as my age increased and with heart attack I decided I needed to seek healthier climate and I'm happy here we're glad you're here and of course I think it's important to remind folks that there's still a lot of uncertainty and uncertainty isn't a problem uncertainty is inherent to the process of scientific inquiry but there is still and will continue to be uncertainty about the climate contribution of particular weather events but there are a number of things that are very clear and I think it's important as people weigh the relationship between particular weather events and long range climate trends to understand some basic facts the first is warmer air and the earth on average is a degree warmer a degree Celsius that is which is almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in pre-industrial times warmer air holds more moisture at this point it's a difference of a few percent but that few percent is enough to create a situation where a higher proportion of our precipitation comes in the form of extreme storms the northeastern U.S. turns out to be the most affected by that you know we're not as affected by the hurricanes and the extreme floods and droughts and wildfires that we read about in other parts of the country but here in the northeast the proportion of our precipitation that comes in the form of extreme storms has increased has almost doubled it's gone up by 75 percent in just the last decade or two so the first is warmer air holds more moisture and that means that more of our precipitation comes in the form of these drawn out periods where the weather doesn't change you know the atmosphere holds more moisture and then it takes longer to release it so that's one thing the second thing it seemed to me this past summer and particularly toward fall that the rivers were just drying up after they were at some of the highest levels we can remember in the spring and early summer I built a dinghy to take down the Winooski river from the headwaters to the lake and do some camera work and fun adventure and the river was so low I couldn't float my dinghy and I had to put wheels on it oh no and then I decided it's getting to be a silly project that I better put on the back burner but both the dog river where I am often and Winooski so low and lower than I'd ever seen it and that's not a statistic because I don't really see it all the time and I haven't been here that long but anyway and that was immediately following a period where the rivers were at their typical spring maximum well into the beginning of the summer longer than I can remember that being the case for and I've been here 30 years so you know there's just the correlation of water vapor with temperature then we have the extent to which the severity of storms directly follows the predictions of the climate models climate scientists have gotten more and more sophisticated at modeling the earth's atmosphere predicting long term trends and the climate models have been telling us that we're going to be experiencing increasingly severe storms and that the pattern of severe storms and the pattern of temperature increase is going to follow a certain profile over the map of the earth where the most intense effects are in the tropics and subtropics and in the extreme Arctic and here in Vermont we feel a little bit protected as you've said from some of those extremes because we're in that intermediate zone between the heightened effects in the tropics and subtropics and the heightened effects in the extreme Arctic but that distribution of climate and weather effects is what the climate modelers have been predicting and talking about for well over a decade now and then the third thing is that finally in just the last six or seven years climate scientists have gotten a handle on the methodology for how to actually calculate the climate contribution of particular weather events 10 years ago nobody really knew how to do that and the first significant paper came out at the early in 2011 looking at some catastrophic flooding that happened in the UK in the early 2000s and they were able to say that within a particular statistical confidence level you could say that the likelihood of this storm having happened without climate change was much much smaller and that science of calculating the climate contributions of particular weather events is getting better and better the major national meteorological organization now issues a major report on this every year and they're able to say you know that for example hurricane intensity is a function of ocean temperature so what's that contribution what are the contributions of other specifically climate related factors and we can say some much more definitive things about the attribution of particular weather events to long range changes in the climate just a observation that I've wondered about and this is more of a gut feeling than the fact that I've kept up with all the climate modeling but so many times in looking at the models I've said to myself this can't be right and what now I'm hearing from some well-known high-powered very respectable climate scientist is that our models have been off on the timing bad so the things that were supposed to happen 100 years ago or 50 years ago that what looking from 15 years ago are happening today You mean 150 or 100 years from now are happening today Yes It's happening faster Yes, way faster Yes And this hockey stick effect the exponential effect has seemed to kick in stronger than anybody anticipated Yeah, I think that's true Like another strange You know 10 years ago most climate scientists believed that if we were able to keep average warming worldwide below one and a half degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels that we would be able to continue living in a relatively stable climate and now we're only two-thirds of the way there and we see the effects that it's having and of course the diplomats have been pushing for a two degree limit and all of the projections from the various pledges that countries have brought to the table at the UN negotiations since the Paris Agreement was signed a couple of years ago those projections take us out to three, three and a half, maybe four degrees relative to pre-industrial times again that's four degrees Celsius which is about seven and a half degrees Fahrenheit so we're getting, we're approaching if we're not able to do something relatively quickly about this situation a range of temperature difference comparable to the difference between the present day and the last ice age the difference is getting is heading toward becoming that extreme and you know we talk about wildfires and floods and hurricanes now and the projections for what we're facing if we get into that three to four degree range are just truly horrifying we're talking about the complete breakdown of any semblance of climate stability anywhere on earth yeah and then that leads to government instability and then we don't even want to think about where all that leads well you know people have been saying for a long time that if we can't solve this problem I remember Al Gore wrote this in his first book back in 1991 before he ran for vice president that if we can't address this problem in a sensible way relatively soon we're going to be facing very extreme very authoritarian militarized approaches to trying to solve and that was twenty years ago and now our military does take this way more seriously than our leader exactly and yes it's a huge factor in national security it is another thing that happened this summer which is kind of an irony I have built a boat called Saled meant for the Arctic and it is a work boat with an underneath configuration almost like Catamaran so it is in fact a Saled wow and in my dreams five years ago this summer it was going to be the time when I sail out the St. Lawrence up to Greenland and then we'll see from there well for the first time ever and unthinkable for everybody there was an ice jam from the Arctic all the way down the coast of Labrador to Newfoundland there were ancient icebergs that because of the warming of the Arctic waters had dislodged themselves from sort of being frozen in and were able to move with the current they mixed with frozen ice and this is summer we'll say coagulated for lack of another word and that whole coast of Labrador and Newfoundland jam packed so inaccessible well thank God I didn't make it my little boat had been eaten alive but the coast guard with their latest research vessel was there to do research on ice and they got stuck the icebreaker stuck along with ferries fishing boats the worst is oil tankers I mean this isn't nice to hear oil tankers stuck in big icebergs it's a bad combination especially for those of us who remember what happened in Alaska in the late 80s these oil spill type things there's no way to clean them up and particularly in that part of the world there's a fishing industry that is hugely important anyway that was also a unprecedented phenomena but the goal stream I'm told is beginning to slow down yes I've read that too and the effects of it sending currents up around Greenland has a lot to do with this phenomenon of the ice jam makes sense and not only and also the ability of that hurricane to reach across to Ireland absolutely that as well and then we all know about the unprecedented floods and fires we're having everywhere particularly in states just all over what's happening in California now and then Northern California just a couple of months ago temperatures well over 100 for most of Northern California all the way up to Seattle this summer Seattle was 124 degrees Fahrenheit at one day that I didn't hear yeah I did I heard it was over 100 the reason it wasn't hotter they said like 4 degrees hotter was that there was a film of smoke making a cooling effect from the forest fires in Canada anyway these are big numbers to confront and then here's another thing I'll mention that when when I see the jet stream on the weather news and the way the Arctic vortex polar vortex wobbles right it seems to wobble nicely for Vermont and I'm trying to grasp this if that isn't also part of the reason Vermont has less problems in many places but here's what I'm going to mention now last spring the Arctic polar vortex crossed the equator right I remember that first time ever such a thing and it was sort of a one-shot affair but later in the summer there was a period where both the Arctic and the Antarctic polar vortexes wobbled all the way down to the equator at the same time and mixed with each other and that was all around the world and then it wasn't long after that that we had all this hurricane activity in the Caribbean leading up to Irma but this wobbling of the jet stream never having crossed the equator before in our history doing it on massive scale is really unnerving it is and there's a lot of debate about the extent of it and the severity of it but it's clear that everywhere on earth things are happening that we haven't seen before I mean this we're having this conversation the last week in December and we're getting our first extended period of consistent single numbers and below zero weather in quite a number of years and I have a lot of friends who don't remember that this is the way it used to always be this time of year I've been praying for sub-zero weather here we've gotten used to whole seasons going by without any of it that's for sure and of course this all leads to a thing we touched on a little while a bit ago here in the conversation the migration of people when you add the weather phenomena to the war phenomena in the Middle East and the unrest in Latin America you wonder and there is a very small amount of say migration now here in Vermont the wonderful Mexican dairy farmers who have saved that industry here is an ongoing phenomena we are getting a trickle of migrants from war-torn and weather-torn Middle East and of course the Syrian Civil War was partly a climate-related phenomenon because the drought that's affected the Middle East all the way across to parts of Central Asia and as far south as Southern Africa over the last several years forced a lot of a lot of people in Syria off the land there are parts of Syria where people lost more than 80% of their livestock due to drought in the last 5, 10 years people got forced into the city and that was a contributing factor to the beginning of the Civil War it turned out not so much that people who were recent immigrants to major cities like Aleppo didn't get along it's that they had common grievances and we're coming together and that was seen as a threat by the dictatorship in Syria so those refugees from the Syrian Civil War are to some extent also climate refugees of course massive migrations of well over 100,000 possibly several hundred thousand people from the Horn of Africa from Somalia, parts of Ethiopia that have been in drought for close to 10 years now fleeing to the south creating a lot of instability and problems in other parts of Africa and then of course the refugees trying to get into Europe which Europe is finding itself increasingly unable to deal with in a politically sensible way big time I remember something that came to my mind politically was when the Wall fell the West German government and people were happy to accept Eastern refugees from East Germany and they didn't even talk about how much it will cost they just said it's the right thing to do let's do it, bite the bullet whatever it costs, so be it and then Germany and Europe is the leading country for accepting refugees from war-torn Middle East and now Merkel has a backlash about that she wants to accept hundreds of thousands and even the attitude of whatever it costs it's the right thing to do but politically it's getting harder and harder with the right turning elements and the most vicious anti-immigrant politics possibly in the world significantly more extreme than what we're seeing here in the US is in parts of Eastern Europe Hungary and Poland some of the most vicious racist politics is even closer to the surface than it is here now yes that's true that's so true and I can think of many things to get off the subject in that direction but here's a thought I believe it was in The Guardian I read an article that said United States and then we can throw England in there too are the countries that are mostly responsible for the industrial revolution for much of the CO2 that's already been put in the air that even if we stop today that effect will go on and on and on because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and add to that starting wars all over the place there's a certain sense in which particularly US is responsible for a big part of all the upheaval of migrations of peoples all over the world absolutely so if we want to do fairness and justice in the light of what we have much created of course not all then how many refugees should we be bringing in and the numbers were hundreds of thousands up to 100 million can the richest country in the world afford it it depends on if you want to bite the bullet or not and depends on what we're spending our money on instead giving tax cuts to people who don't need it absolutely continuing to build up the military at a point when US military expenditures far exceed the rest of the world combined we're throwing money in all the wrong directions at a point when the needs are really clear for what we need to be doing and the institutions and individuals that have the most influence over this political system and it's become so much more blatant under the current administration where agencies that are supposed to regulate various industries are being stocked with operatives from those industries we saw that during the Reagan years we saw that during the Bush years it's gotten so extreme now that it's really unlike anything we've seen where you know the CPA and other agencies are being filled with the staffs of those agencies are being filled with people whose mission is to shut them down and literally prevent them from functioning in some ways it's the death throes of a system that's proven itself to be completely unsustainable and in some ways it's kind of the last effort of those incredibly powerful economic interests to extract as much as they can to concentrate as much wealth and power as they can before the consequences of the system become so extreme that they don't have a chance they're really trying to lock in changes in the legal system changes in the financial system changes in the political system that if they have their way would make it impossible for us to make the changes that we need to in order to move to a sane or more humane and more ecologically sustainable future Thank God Vermont has at least Saunders and McGibbon here among many many other people that have a vision on the right track and it can make us feel glad and proud to be a part of that Absolutely, and of course our current state administration is really an obstacle right now but we can have some confidence here in Vermont that that's temporary Can you speak a bit on that? Well you know, Phil Scott the governor has been making statements about how given events like the wildfires in California that Vermont looks so much better in climate terms and that people should come here and everything's going to be rosy and we have a good quality of life here but we know from some of the events that we've been talking about over the last hour that in the long run we're facing some pretty extreme threats and that we know we're a small state with a small population but as on so many other issues we can set an example for how to do things right and we can't let the obstructionists in the Scott administration stand in the way of Vermont continuing to set a good example that hopefully the rest of the country and other countries can start to follow I believe he set up a panel on climate effects He did and I haven't followed that I haven't been to any of the meetings but my friends who have had some pretty disturbing reports people have been going and testifying and making good statements about what's needed in terms of fees on carbon emissions to help ease the transition to a more sustainable energy system about changing transportation more sustainable agriculture simple things like electrifying the fleet of school buses which lots of people have been hoping the settlement money from Volkswagen when they cheated on their emissions had to pay a big settlement that's being distributed to all the states in the U.S. and people have been saying let's use Vermont's share of that Volkswagen money to do some sensible things like electrifier school buses and Phil Scott wants to instead invest in cleaner diesel buses which means again being locked in first there's no such thing as clean diesel that's the lesson of the Volkswagen scam and second it locks us in just like building the pipeline in Addison County locks us in to more dependence on fossil fuels further into the future than we can afford I feel like because it's part of my background that marine engineering is going leaps and bounds we have boats that have just recently sailed around the world on solar power no sail, no fuel solar cells there's a new movement in recreational boating, sailing to use electric motors interesting and this is something I've thought and dreamed about that never thought I would see and it's happening even charter boats in the Caribbean electric engines which are much more efficient than any technology that involves combustion that's a simple fact of thermodynamics and I believe it's Rolls Royce is experimenting with a cruise ship not a cruise ship a transport vessel for cargo and that could also mean oil even but a cargo ship run on mostly solar but still back up with fossil fuel because they have to make their schedule on time but to try to incorporate solar into these gigantic vessels it's just a marvelous way to think it makes our little thing with the cars and even the school bus not childish but smaller Volvo and some of the other European car companies have pledged to stop building fossil fuel burning cars in the next few years a number of countries in Europe and even India have banned the sale of fossil fuel driven vehicles at various points in the future they're getting ready to phase out the internal combustion engine here in this country we're going backwards the clowns in the White House are promoting more coal which the rest of the world has come to realize is an archaic technology it's not just a source of climate pollution but it's a source of extreme air pollution it destroys the health of first and foremost the people who work in the industry that we've known for a long time and it's on its way out of course China and other countries are continuing to build coal driven power plants in various parts of the world because they can export that technology and the US is trying to get into those same export markets because it's clear that there's no future for coal domestically electricity from the sun and wind is already so much cheaper but we're at a point where we're fighting all these defensive battles nationally and to some extent here in Vermont and it's happening at a time when we know we don't have a lot of time left we were starting to see some forward motion the Obama administration was not wonderful on a lot of these issues they were for example continuing to promote fracking and offshore oil drilling and all the rest but we were making some progress in terms of efficiency standards for cars and other modest but significant measures they were so slowly starting to maybe steer the ship in the right direction but the kinds of assaults on every aspect of what's needed to move forward around these issues that we're facing right now makes it hard for those of us who work on these issues every day there are times when we can see fossil free future but we're just able to all live better as a result of being relieved of these destructive and expensive dependencies on technologies that it's time to phase out and then there are times especially when we look at the climate science when we look at the numbers when we look at the weather trends where it's really very difficult to see our way out at a time when we're so focused on defensive battles when we should be moving forward exactly I sort of felt as you're indicating that it should be over for the times of trying to prove scientifically that climate change is happening and it's man-made we're still working on that and that was clear 25 years ago to anybody who was seriously paying attention and I wonder how we ever got to this level of ignorance and are the universities and high schools teaching things about required courses in climate change and the public is willingly or by lack of education grossly ignorant on so much of this I think in some places people are getting this in school but we also have a propaganda system in this country in the form of advertising and corporate-owned and controlled media that makes it really hard for people to think clearly that we have a denial industry as Naomi Oreski's wrote in her book Merchants of Doubt that was turned into a terrific documentary that I highly recommend folks check out the same mentality and in fact some of the same people who for years were speaking on behalf of the tobacco industry claiming that there was too much to legislate against tobacco against cigarettes a lot of the same people are now working for the fossil fuel industry and in fact some of these propaganda methods originated at a much earlier time with the fossil fuel and utility industries so this goes way back these kind of false elite populisms the idea that people are rebelling against elite control and handing more control over to the elites that are actually running things and giving them huge tax breaks apparently this goes back a hundred years some of the work of the famous turn of the 20th century Robert Barron Andrew Mellon who first pioneered this kind of right wing pseudo-populism that we see sweeping the country now we have a propaganda system in this country not just mainstream media and it's extremely well funded and we have of course interests manipulating elections and controlling candidates and threatening and succeeding in running primary opponents against Republican members of Congress who are perceived as being too moderate and at the same time extremes of wealth inequality in this country the likes of which we haven't seen since the onset of the Great Depression of the late 1920s so it's really the whole system that I point to as the source of the problem we really need a different economic system that's controlled by communities that's controlled democratically and this is really one of the core lessons of psychology as well in order to overturn the power of the interests that are holding us back in the area of climate progress that are holding us back in the area of political and economic policies that are holding us back in terms of our ability to control the excesses of the corporations that have everything to gain from continuing to destroy the stability of the Earth's climate Let me ask you about the conference that was held in Bilboa, Spain in October I believe of this year as a way maybe to sum up with a happy ending what we have just discussed the problems of economy, politician the populace but in this conference there were people from Kurdistan boss country of course from areas on the globe where we have ethnic groups you might say that are having huge problems with nationalism however that goes into the picture there were kind of people from Catalan which is going huge right now anyway tell us a little bit about we still have another five minutes tell us about that conference I wasn't there in Bilboa but this was an international gathering of mostly representatives of municipally based movements around the world that are fighting for municipal control that are fighting for direct democracy as an alternative to the kind of elite control that we've been talking about and in the last few years there's been an incredible flowering of people organizing from below of people in many cases taking power in their cities and towns and asserting their democratic rights as a counter power to the continued management of the economy and politics by those elite interests that are destroying the planet and that's happening here in the US as well in the Pacific Northwest there's been an incredible flowering of community assemblies of neighborhood meetings working on taking power back from powerful institutions in Jackson Mississippi they just elected a mayor who comes from a black nationalist background who's committed again to neighborhood control and political and economic renewal from the ground up this is happening in many corners of the country there are several efforts I'm aware of in New York City along these lines and at the institute we've actually been talking about doing an event sometime later this year to bring together folks doing this kind of work across the US so that we can be more effectively networked with genuine movements for local, directly democratic people's power in other parts of the world well good I want to thank you so much for this discussion for your insights for your experience and I certainly hope that you'll carry on strong as a teacher and a fighter for democracy which seems to be an underlying given in order to correct the climate change problem so keep up your good work Thanks Steve, always a pleasure to talk with you Yes