Bill McKibben of 350.org spoke about climate movement as a means of change. He left students of Lund University with several hints of hope.
The message was very clear – ‘we are not ever going to have as much power in terms of money as the fossil fuel industry, in fact we are not going to come close. We have a different source of power and the only one that really exists, that we can come up with, is the power of movement, the power of people’. Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist who believes in people power as a driver of change. On 2nd December, 2014, when Bill McKibben spoke in Eden’s auditorium, the atmosphere was made up of youth power, as if, about to erupt against environment terrorists at any moment.
Divestment Action Week at Lund University launched itself with Bill McKibben. Even with a jam-packed auditorium and the guard who felt like a ‘tyrant’ while maintaining order, it was impossible to close the door on students who were standing in significant numbers, trying to listen to the warning shared by Bill McKibben. ‘The fossil fuel industry is the richest industry that there has ever been on the face of the earth by far…and that money all around the world is enough to keep change from happening’. Bill McKibben was very candid in identifying the purveyors of environmental degradation. He continued to explain that the delay in realising economic opportunity among oil companies in new geographic areas is now reducing. Realising that the Arctic ice is melting, oil companies think to themselves ‘it will be easier to drill for more oil, let’s go get leases’. Thus, in contrast, what is the solution?
Bill McKibben started a global movement led by youth. He recollects his first steps to fight climate change, ‘there was no global movement around this (climate change)…in 2008, myself and seven undergraduates at college in the United States… (came together towards this global movement). The main thing that we were worried about is how would we communicate with people given the fact that everyone speaks their own language around the world. The solution that we came up with explains the somewhat strange name of this organisation, 350.org’.
350 parts per million of carbon dioxide is a measure of the ratio of CO2 molecules to other molecules in the atmosphere. In Bill McKibben’s words, ‘the number refers to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, (targeted at) 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. This number was worked out with James Hansen in NASA, the greatest climate scientist in the world. I asked him to do this study, to come up with the number because I knew we needed a number if we wanted to work globally because Arabic numerals translate easily across linguistic boundaries in a way that words don’t. So we started 350.org’. Bill McKibben could have included that we are currently fighting against 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere which keeps adding by 2 ppm annually.
Bill McKibben mentioned that the Rockefeller family decided to divest from fossil fuel as it was not ‘economically wise’ anymore. At this point, a question arises. Can the common man, who is not necessarily employed in the environment sector, really prove his fight against environment exploitation without monetary muscle such as that of the Rockefeller family? Bill McKibeen did not really illustrate the relation between climate movements through green money. Can movements really influence change through the investment of time and money in such movements? How and after what point does the change take place? Although when Bill McKibeen, LUCSUS, LUCID, Fossil Free Lund University and Utrikespolitiska Foreningen (Association of Foreign Affairs) came together to realise the talk, it showed one form of contribution towards change, to educate the youth about realities of the time we live in.
Bill McKibeen concluded the evening by answering a question which drove the imagination of the audience into a world where 350 ppm of CO2 emissions had been achieved. Bill McKibben answered, ‘I’d be sitting on my porch with a beer in my hand waiting to see what all you excellent young people do with the earth…but come out of this consumer coma…there is many beautiful possibilities but you have got to spend some time working on this challenge that we have. We don’t want to loose everything else along the way and part of that everything else is the possibility of building a new future.’
