As the showdown nears for the Keystone XL pipeline, environmentalist Bill McKibben says it’s time for President Obama to stand up to oil companies and just say no.
Transcript from the interview of Bill McKibben by Bill Moyers on Moyers & Company:
BILL MOYERS: Welcome. In our last broadcast I promised you more of David Simon, and I’ll keep that promise down the road, but right now, because of the news, my guest is a journalist turned activist who is often asked, how can you remain so optimistic and so energized when you’ve taken on nothing less than the threat of global catastrophe? It’s a question he’s even heard from me, and more than once, because I’ve known him for years now as both colleague and friend. After all this time, Bill McKibben’s stamina and soulfulness continue to amaze me.
We met over a decade ago on a canoe trip together for the making of my series America’s First River, about the history of the Hudson and the struggle to save it from industrial pollution.
BILL MCKIBBEN: in America’s First River: In the fall, and the winter, and the spring, it’s pretty lonely, beautiful place.
BILL MOYERS: I had read his classic work on our environmental crisis, he called it The End of Nature, a prophetic summons for a profound philosophical shift in order to save the earth from suicide. It established McKibben at the forefront of efforts to cope with the potential cataclysm of climate change.
I asked him to join the board of the Schumann foundation which promoted environmental and independent journalism. But as he continued to publish books and articles he grew impatient with the pace of public awareness and change. So in the tradition of muckrakers of old, he resigned from the board to combine his writing with activism. With the foundation’s support he became the Schumann distinguished professor in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. Soon after, he founded the grassroots climate campaign, 350.org.
STEPHEN COLBERT in The Colbert Report: And my guest, BILL MCKIBBEN:--
BILL MOYERS: You’ve probably seen him in the news since then. Maybe at one of the 15,000 rallies the group has coordinated in 189 countries, or on a nationwide bus tour to campuses across America, or in this demonstration last year when McKibben and others were arrested after chaining themselves to the White House fence to protest of the Keystone XL pipeline.
That pipeline would carry vast amounts of tar sands oil, over 800,000 barrels every day, from Canada down through the American heartland to refineries on the Gulf Coast, which opponents say would release dangerous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and accelerate the warming of the earth.
Last week the State Department released a review of the pipeline’s impact that both opponents and supporters say helps their side. And that brought BILL MCKIBBEN: to New York City for yet another rally calling on the Obama administration to say no to the pipeline once and for all.
BILL MCKIBBEN: We need people like Barack Obama to start standing up finally.
BILL MOYERS: BILL MCKIBBEN: joins me now, welcome.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Good to be with you.
BILL MOYERS: So what does it mean that the State Department said last week that there’s no evidence that there’ll be an environmental impact from the pipeline. And the White House has said indirectly that, well, the oil will get out one way or the other with or without this pipeline?
BILL MCKIBBEN: The White House and the State Department especially I think would like to approve it because big oil really wants it. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars. But their story is unraveling. The idea that it would make no difference is crazy. It's a pipeline that would carry 800,000 barrels of oil. In the last two weeks, the head of TransCanada itself has said, if we can't build this pipeline, then the expansion of the tar sands is called into question.
Yeah, they'll be able to get some oil out of there, but they've only gotten 3 percent out so far. This is one of these places where we can put the brakes on if we act now. If we did that, then there's a chance that these international negotiations that ran aground at Copenhagen in 2009 might be able to be resuscitated. That we might be able to get back on some kind of track. But somebody's got to take the first step.
Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 saying, in my administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow. He said it's time to end the tyranny of the oil industry. A lot of people believed him when he said those things. And now they're going to find out whether or not they were right to believe or not.
BILL MOYERS: You've said on other occasions that one of your objectives was to try to help the president do the right thing. And that's why you were arrested and others were arrested. Do you have any indication from, sources in the White House, friends of yours in the movement that he’s heard you?
BILL MCKIBBEN: I'm the last person to ask for inside information in the White House, I fear. I don't think I've been there since the tour in sixth grade. I was arrested locked to the gate outside, but that doesn't give me any inside information. What we've been able to do is build a movement, okay, from the outside. It started with indigenous people in Canada and the U.S.
Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network. It expanded to include ranchers and farmers along the pipeline route. Groups like the Bold Nebraska. And then it grew to include this climate community, people all over the country who understand and are scared about rapid effects of climate change that we can talk about.
They came together for the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years in this country about anything. And that was enough at least to make Keystone an issue. Without it, it would long since have been built without any peep from the Obama administration.
BILL MOYERS: There’s a marvelous story in Maclean’s magazine about a Republican rancher in Nebraska who actually triggered the first opposition because he was concerned about his water.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Concerned about his land that this, you know, pipeline was going to cross. And it crosses the Ogallala Aquifer. It's interesting. Many of those ranchers and farmers didn't care at all about climate change three or four years ago. But now when I go out to Nebraska, they say, you know, now we understand a good deal more. We watched our drought, record drought in 2012 across the Midwest.
It made, you know, difficult to grow food in the richest farmland on the planet. And we understand now why that's happening. So this is how movements grow. The only question is whether it can grow quickly enough. We're up against a time-limited problem with climate change. If we don't solve it soon, we will not solve it. So far, we've raised the temperature of the Earth 1 degree Celsius.
That's been enough to melt the Arctic, it's been enough to trigger crazy weather already, that drought across the Midwest, now a drought that's gone to California where there's no rain at all. The scientists said that this may be the deepest drought since 1500’s anyway in California. And in the 1500’s, there weren't 38 million people living in California. The news came that 2013 was the 37th straight year above-average temperatures.
That means that if you're below the age of 38, you've never seen a year that's cooler than average. You've never seen a year like the world that we grew up in, you and I, and like the world that all human beings grew up in, in the 10,000 years of the Holocene. We've moved out of that now. And the question is, how far out of it we're going to move.
We raised the temperature one degree. That's made, well, it’s made the oceans 30 percent more acidic. But the same scientists who told us that would happen tell us that we're going to raise it four or five degrees before the century is out if we keep on our current trajectory.
Please go here to continue this interview, for the complete transcript, or to watch the full program: http://billmoyers.com/episode/bill-mckibben-to-obama-say-no-to-big-oil/
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