BILL McKIBBEN: This is the one-step-forward, one-step-sideways, one-step-back thing that we've seen so often. Look, the president's rhetoric in Alaska was truly great. He really understood what was going on. And that's a big change. You'll remember that in the last presidential campaign he didn't even mention climate change. It was too scary a topic. Now he's talking about it, and he's doing some things about it. The clean power plant is a useful thing. But he's unable so far to break with the habit of giving the oil industry what it wants.
And what it wanted this time was one of the stupidest things on Earth. I mean, look at Shell Oil up in the Arctic. It watched, as scientists said would happen, as the Arctic melted from the increasing temperature on this planet. Instead of looking at that and saying, "Huh, maybe we should become an energy company and start putting up solar panels," Shell looked at that and said, "The water has melted. That will make it easier to drill." If there is a more irresponsible company on Earth, I don't know what it is. And it's a shame to see Barack Obama helping in that process.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you look at these -- the beginnings now, we've seen some -- the first Republican debate, there will be another one coming up soon. The host of candidates on the Republican side and their perspective on climate change, what are your thoughts?
BILL McKIBBEN: You know, they keep saying that they're going to -- you know, they're going to start dealing with reality and try to move towards the -- but they can't help themselves. I mean, Donald Trump said that climate change had been invented by the Chinese in order to destroy American manufacturing. I mean, that's not even -- I mean, that we're still in 2015 listening to any people who are taken seriously deny the fact of the single most important thing that's happening on the planet is distressing in the extreme. The good news is that it's now a great hindrance to the Republicans. When they -- whoever they nominate, when they move to the general election, it's going to cause them great problems that they don't believe in physics, as it should. Part of our job is to make sure that the Democrat they face takes seriously enough this prospect and is pushing hard on it.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think? Do they? I mean, you've got Hillary Clinton. You've got Bernie Sanders, fellow Vermonter.
BILL McKIBBEN: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: You've got who was just in the studio, who you just passed, Martin O'Malley.
BILL McKIBBEN: Yes. You know, Bernie's been aces up on this from the start. If there's one guy who -- if there's one guy on Capitol Hill who really helped, say, in the Keystone fight when no one else wanted to touch it, that was Bernie. Hillary is beginning to -- you know, again, she can't bring herself to say anything one way or another about the Keystone pipeline, but she did come out against drilling in the Arctic. You know, we wait and see, as with so many things, from her, but we continue to press, and we continue to hope.
But we don't put most of our chips, I've got to say, in the political process. Or rather, we work hardest on the kind of larger political process of changing the mood of the country and the world. And that project is going extraordinarily well. It was a year ago that 400,000 people were marching through the streets of New York in the biggest demonstration about anything in this country in a long time. There are going to be huge demonstrations in December in Paris. And then, in April, 350.org announced yesterday that we're going to be doing a series of big actions at the 10 biggest, what we call, carbon bombs, these huge deposits of carbon, like the tar sands in Canada or these Australian coal deposits or the Powder River Basin. There's going to be massive resistance there, because we know that Paris isn't going to solve our problem.
AMY GOODMAN: What needs to be done for Paris?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, we've got to push hard. And, you know, we'll get more than we did out of Copenhagen, because there is a movement. I mean, you were in Copenhagen. You remember what a travesty it was. And it was because nobody faced any penalty at home when they came back empty-handed.
AMY GOODMAN: And President Obama flew in. He was the one. And --
BILL McKIBBEN: Flew in. Flew in, flew back empty-handed. No real penalty. He can't do that now, because there's a big active movement here and in most other places around the world. The other reason that Copenhagen -- or that Paris will be different, the other thing that's changed is the price of a solar panel has dropped 80 percent in the intervening six years. We're now at the point where the cheapest, smartest, most obvious, straightforward way to provide energy to all those people on Earth who do not have it is to make sure they have solar panels. And if there's any kind of commitment at Paris to serious financing on, you know, these questions, then that will happen in the next 10 or 15 years, and it will be a beautiful thing to watch.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what do you expect at the state level has changed heading into Paris in terms of the possibility of reaching some sort of truly progressive agreement?
BILL McKIBBEN: We're not going to reach anything like the agreement that we need. You'll remember that the red line that they set in Copenhagen, the only achievement was an agreement that we would try to limit temperature increases to two degrees Celsius. That, in and of itself, is a pretty weak target. We've raised the temperature one degree so far, and that's melted the Arctic. So, really, we probably wouldn't want to find out what two degrees is going to do. At the moment, however, we're on a track to four or five degrees. The best outcome from Paris is that these guys will figure out how to get that number down to three, three-and-a-half degrees Celsius, six, seven degrees Fahrenheit. That's a disastrous scenario, but at least it gives us some idea of the gap that we've got to make up by taking on these companies directly, by changing in the next year or two the politics and the economics around this question.
We're at a tipping point. I mean, look, lots of people are divesting right now. One of the reasons they're divesting is the morality of these questions. The other reason they're divesting is they're losing money hand over fist. Far be it for me to be giving stock tips, but if people had listened to us three years ago at the start of the divestment thing, they would have made a lot of money in the last few years, because these stocks are now reflecting the fact that we simply cannot keep burning carbon in the quantities we're burning it.
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