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You’ve said efforts to combat climate
change have largely failed. What needs
to happen for progress to be made? At
this point the great obstacle is the
political power of the fossil fuel industry. As I showed in that recent
Rolling Stone piece, their business
plan calls for them to burn 5 times
the amount of carbon that even
conservative governments think
is safe—in order to do that, they
have to warp our political systems,
which they do with massive donations and lobbying. At 350.org, the
night after the election, we’re going to mount a massive effort to try
and focus on their irresponsibility—we hope we can spark a movement something like the one that
led campuses and communities
to divest from companies that did
business in South Africa.
What does a clean energy future look
like? Could fracking be part of a bridge
to it? Given the math of climate
change, fracking’s no help. We
don’t need a bridge—we need to
make the leap to renewable energy.
Germany’s done more than anyone
else in the last decade—they’re
already at the 25 percent mark,
and one day in June they generated more than half the power
they used with solar panels within
Q&A
HUFFINGTON
08.19.12
their borders. (And remember that
Munich is north of Montreal!) We
have the technology; what we need
is the political will.
Given rising CO2 emissions and more
troublesome numbers, do you ever want
to give up? Some days, sure. But
there are so many good people
around the world engaged in this
fight, many of them in places that
have done nothing to contribute
to this problem. As long as they’re
willing to fight, so am I.
We need to demonstrate
who the radicals are in this
fight. They’re not us.”
How do you reduce your own carbon
footprint, and what do you tell your
daughter about the troubling world her
generation may face? The year we
built our house, it got a prize as
the most energy efficient in Vermont. I drove the first Hydrid
Honda Civic in the state (and
still do); I spent a year feeding
my family nothing that wasn’t
grown in our valley and am still
a committed locavore. There are
solar panels all over the roof, and
on a big stalk in the yard. But—I