If you wanted to list the people who first effectively sounded the warning about climate change, Bill McKibben would be up there. 1989's The End of Nature was the first large-circulation book to tackle the topic head on. In the US he has remained one of the loudest and most effective voices on the topic ever since.

In March last year he founded 350, an organisation devoted to creating a mass movement around the debate leading up to this November's pivotal UN Climate Change conference, COP15. The figure 350 relates to a target figure of parts-per-million of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere.

The number was arrived at last year by eight scientists led by NASA's James Hansen, who was himself a key figure in raising climate as a political issue before Congressional Committees in the 1980s. To put that number into perspective, the current EU target - which politicians are already having trouble implementing - is  to keep levels below 550ppm. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, figures stood around 280ppm. The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 384ppm - already well in excess of the safe level defined by James Hansen. [Hansen's paper Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim can be downloaded here.]

Politicians are routinely accused of foot-dragging on climate change. Without a popular movement to back them, they remain reluctant to take decisive action. Climate Change  minister Ed Miliband hinted as much last month in the run up to COP14 when he called for a popular movement to demand climate change reform along the lines of Make Poverty History:

"When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilisation. Maybe it's an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there's a real opportunity and a need here." 

Obviously there's nothing less likely to inspire a popular movement than a government minister calling for one - as was obvious from the Jarvis Cocker's recent encounter with Milliband. So can Bill McKibben create the kind of world-wide popular movement that can kick politics into action with 350? William Shaw spoke to him at his home in Vermont.

Bill McKibben: Hello there, how are you? Nice day in London or not?

Oh, it’s not bad, actually. We’ve got some sunshine which is a little bit of a novelty.

Great.

You were at the recent COP14 Climate Conference at Poznan, which appears to have not been that positive an experience. I’d be interested in your perspective on it.

From our point of view, Poznan was great. Look, the policy stuff, none of it’s going to matter until the last minute and we’ll see what Obama does.  But politics leads to policy and the reason that we’re getting nowhere on climate is because we have no movement - just a bunch of experts convening at meetings, none of them with anybody pushing them to do anything. We need a mass movement, and we are finally building one. 350.org is the first real global attempt at a grass roots climate movement.

We had a huge breakthrough there at Poznan, Al Gore endorsed this number, it means now that both the world’s leading scientific authority on climate change, Jim Hansen, and the leading political authority [on climate change], Al Gore, have said the same thing: that we need to go way beyond what we have been talking about. It changes the politics of this debate and it gives our campaign, anyway, room to really rally people for next October, 24th.  If we can succeed in making those three digits the most well known number on the planet in the course of next year, then we will move those negotiations quite a way. 

Essentially Jim Hansen and I had been talking about it all about a year ago.

Yes, and in a sense I even asked Jim to produce a number. I didn’t know what it would be, but knew we needed a number to work from and he was thinking the same way.  So when his team put it out that’s what they found, yes it is shocking. I’m no Pollyanna on this, you know. I wrote a book about it 20 years ago called The End of Nature so I’m not chipper about the whole thing.  But, I think like everybody else, I’d assumed that we had a little more room than we do. I mean, the Arctic melted 50 years ahead of schedule. That was the real daunting wake up call.

And you think those three digits are really important. I mean, you are talking about something invisible…

That’s what everyone keeps saying but you know I don’t think it’s that hard. I can send you the pictures from last month of 1500 Ladakhis rallying in the city of Leh, forming a huge human 350 against the backdrop of the Himalayas, and that’s the equivalent given the population of two-and-a-half million Americans assembling on the mall in Washington. 

Our team has done things like that in forty or fifty countries and we’ve got great contacts all over the world who are busy organising things for Masai tribesmen and 350 scuba divers across the Great Barrier Reef and on and on and on. What we’ve done for the last 20 years, artists included, is kind of flail around and tell people we’ve got to do something about global warming.  But that doesn’t really matter.  I wrote the first book on all of this [The End of Nature], twenty years ago so I’ve had much time to reflect on my sins. The only way we are going to get something is if everybody piles into the same boat and if everybody uses their art, their music, their political witness to make one concrete, coherent, credible, demand. 

You know, what we don’t want coming out of Copenhagen is for the political class of the world able to say we’ve done something about climate change, but a), something so obscure that no one can tell what it adds up to and b), something that doesn’t add up to enough.  It is better to have no agreement out of Copenhagen than to have one that sets us on what we now know would be a track towards the disintegration of the planet just slightly more slowly than otherwise. 

But people say that 550ppm and 450ppm is unachievable politically at the moment, so 350ppm is unlikely…

Not necessarily. I mean, yeah although it is going to be hard and disruptive I believe it was your man, Churchill, who remarked that once you’ve got a big fire built in the boiler of great economies change could happen pretty quickly. I mean we are talking WW2-scale mobilisation to deal with this and the only way that that will happen is if there’s a WW2 sense of urgency, and if we understand what the stakes are. And that started to happen at Poznan. A number of countries in the world began to say out loud, “This is about our survival.” 

Do you think people have been afraid of talking about the downside of climate change too loudly? Jim Hansen’s paper came out in April said, “This is not good. There is no soft landing here.” But people have been reluctant to talk about the real consequences of doing nothing in case it scares people off doing anything at all.

Yeah, I mean, I think we are finally getting to the place where that is becoming more obvious. Once the Arctic is melted there is really very little that you can do to hide the scale of the problem that we are now facing.

So what do you want people to do through 350?

We want people to, to make that number the most well-known number on earth, because it is the most important number on earth at this point.  So there will be rallies everywhere on October 24^th. Hopefully they will be deeply creative – the kind of things that make incredible images in front of all the world’s iconic places. We need lots of art, graphic design, fine art, poster art, theatre, street theatre, to get those three digits out. We are working hard with young people around the world. Most of our volunteers and staff are younger partly because they are very good at using the new tools of the net and partly because they are the ones who are going to live with this for the next 60 years.  And we are also working hard with communities of faith. Around America over the last few weeks we’ve had hundreds of churches ringing their bells 350 times in the middle of the day. And that immediately draws all kinds of attention and media interest and whatever.  The point is that if we go into Copenhagen with this number on everybody’s lips then the negotiators there know that they will have to come out of the room and answer the question: “Does this give us any hope of getting back to 350?”

From the European perspective, seeing Americans acting like this it gives a lot of hope. Rightly or wrongly, Europeans perceive Americans as the ones dragging their feet.

Yes. Actually that has been an accurate perception and of course.

Well, Europe didn’t look too pretty at the Brussels conference in December I have to say.

Well, the fact that we have been dragging our feet has given everybody else, including the Europeans, cover to you know half drag their own feet. And it will be really good to turn this into a competition as to who is actually going to move with some speed.  And of course it all depends on everybody else agreeing to do it.  No one is going to take this step entirely by themselves. The thing that will make it most difficult is the radical inequality of the planet as we approach this crisis. It’s very difficult to figure out how to persuade the Indians and the Chinese that burning their cheap coal is not the smartest course of action, but it can be done with enough will and enough resources.

And so set the date of the 24^th October, which is a matter of days, before the actual event.

Yes, that’s the plan. You’ve got to do it at the moment when people are beginning to pay some attention and before it is all over. And who knows, I don’t think there is any assurance that Copenhagen is the place we are going to have the final agreement. I think it might be best if people begin to understand that the agreement that we are working on at the moment isn’t going to do the job and we’re going to have to do something better, fast.

Do you think that is part of the problem that we have focused on this United Nations mechanism?

Yeah. The whole process that we have fallen into made sense, 15 or 20 years ago given what we knew then about the science of climate change.  But it has taken on a life of its own, and we’ve got to make sure that the end point of this exercise isn’t about getting a treaty, it is about getting a planet instead of complete chaos. 

As you’ve said, you’ve got a 20 year history of looking at this and and writing about this. Is there something different in the air this year?

Oh there are several things that are different, One is that just the scale of the stakes is more obvious with each passing week. I mean if you read Nature or Science - the two big peer review journals - you get a weekly update on the way that the world is collapsing. It is no longer a future problem it is very much a present one. The melt of the Arctic, the rapid release of methane from beneath the oceanthe spread of storminess, on and on and on, all make it very clear that this is happening much more quickly than we thought.

The other thing is that with the election of Obama there is finally some at least outside possibility that we will do something about it. But Obama can’t do this by any means on his own. He needs a powerful movement behind him and a powerful movement pressurising him. Giving him the room that he needs to work in this country and to provide some leadership around the world, we need to have him perceive this as the big foreign policy question of our time. More than anything we just need that mass movement.

For more information on 350, go to Bill McKibben's 350 website.
Bill McKibben (© Nancie Battaglia)

Transcribed by Naomi Darlington..