by Bill McKibben

Posted 2 weeks ago President Obama has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate, as evidenced by the announcement from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month's Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session. Read More

Posted 1 month, 1 week ago The 350.org campaign has gone viral in recent weeks, in the lead-up to the International Day of Climate Action. There will be more than 4,000 events in almost 170 countries on Oct. 24—pretty much every place that isn’t Burma or North Korea. Join author/activist Bill McKibben, Grist founder Chip Giller, and people around the globe to demand real climate action. Read More

Posted 3 months, 1 week ago Amazing news just arrived at 350.org headquarters.  Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.'s top climate scientist, has endorsed a target of 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. Read More

Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago Four years ago, you'd have been hard-pressed to find a song, or a photo, or a play about climate change. All that's changed, as artists of every stripe confront our greatest global challenge. Read More

Posted 9 months ago The day's scorecard:

1) Largest anti-coal action yet in the United States: Thousands and thousands of people flooding the streets around the Capitol Hill power plant.

2) Largest demonstration in many years where everyone was wearing dress clothes: The point was to stress that there's nothing radical about shutting down coal-fired power. In fact, there's everything radical about continuing to pour carbon into the air just to see what happens.

3) Smallest counter-protest in world's history: By my count, the Competitive Enterprise Institute managed to muster four demonstrators for its "Read More

Posted 9 months ago We'll still be protesting on Monday in D.C., but it looks like the protest may be half victory party too!

Late Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter off to the Capitol Architect -- the guy in charge of buildings and grounds, as well as the century-old, mainly-coal-fired power plant that Congress owns and which is located just a few blocks from the fancy dome and the National Mall. The two leaders told him to stop shoveling coal into the power plant's boiler and finish the switch to natural gas.

… Read More

Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago Given the sheer number of candidates for "worst legacy of the Bush years," it may seem perverse to pick the hundreds of coal-fired power plants that have opened across China during his administration. But given their cumulative effect -- quite possibly the concrete block that broke the climate-camel's already straining back -- I think they may be what history someday seizes on. And they are emblematic of George W. Bush's utter failure to help the world rein in carbon emissions at what may have been the last possible moment.

When Bush first took office, China (and really India as well)… Read More

Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago

I spent the last few nights of the recent Poznan climate conference sleeping in the By the Way youth hostel, an excellent accommodation filled with excellent young people who had done excellent work at the negotiations. After the final day of deliberations, many of these young people visited the doubtless excellent discotheques of Poznan, returning home beginning about 4 a.m. in various states of excited giddiness. This allowed those of us (well, the one of us) of a more elderly persuasion an excellent opportunity to lie awake, thinking over the… Read More

Posted 12 months ago

The big international climate conferences, at least the ones I've been to in Kyoto, the Hague, and elsewhere, are pretty much the same: caffeinated, adrenalized, endless, chaotic, and incredibly hard to read. Much goes on behind closed doors, and small signals from the big players at the last minute generally make the most difference.

I'm not going to Poznan until next week, for the last few days of this conference. And in an odd way, it's been easier to figure out the proceedings from a distance to make out the forest for the trees.

The biggest… Read More

Posted 1 year, 1 month ago Thank heavens for the "average citizen."

After approximately 4 million debates over the past year, someone finally asked the right and real question about climate change. Ingrid Jackson, over in Section C of the audience in Tuesday night's debate, didn't ask if the candidates thought global warming was real, and she didn't even ask what they would do to fight it. "[W]e saw that Congress moved pretty fast in the face of an economic crisis," she said. "I want to know what you would do within the first two years to make sure that Congress moves fast as far as… Read More