Bill McKibben

Two pieces of crucial evidence emerged in the tar sands fight yesterday. One, happily, got all kinds of notice -- Jim Hansen's op-ed in the New York Times was the "most emailed" item of the day, which is appropriate since he explained new calculations showing that those Canadian...

A Planet Connected by Wild Weather

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence...

Maybe you've heard. We are facing a climate crisis that threatens life on our planet. Climate scientists are unequivocal: We are changing the world in deep, measurable, dangerous ways -- and the pace of this change will accelerate dramatically in the decades to come.

Then again, if you've been a...

There are lots of types of people who have been taking action on climate change over the last several years: environmentalists (of course), students and young people, community-based groups, labor activists, indigenous peoples, Appalachian and Gulf Coast residents, ranchers and more. Among them, importantly, have been people from the many...

And Why Taxpayers Shouldn’t Stand for It Any More

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Along with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.” Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in...

The president makes a potentially interesting speech on Thursday in Cushing, Oklahoma.
 
It comes amidst a completely unprecedented March heat wave -- 2,000 records fell last week as cities like Chicago broke records dating back to the 19th century, and that heat is expected to...

Today was... quite a day. The bell that people struck last August when they sat in at the White House to block the Keystone Pipeline was still resonating. Not loudly -- the oil money in Congress muffled the sound. But loudly enough that we squeaked through by a 4-Senator margin,...

There were two scientific studies this week that set the ongoing Keystone pipeline battle in sharp relief.

One was a reminder of just how crucial this fight is. A secret report delivered to the Canadian government's chief bureaucrat showed that changes in tarsands mining methods, which the industry...

*** Updated at 1:00 pm ET: We're now at 777,000 signatures and going even higher. Stay up to date at 350.org/kxl ***

This has been an amazing 24 hours, the third in a trio of events that took Keystone XL from an obscure pipeline project to the country's central environmental...

At least for now, the battle over the Keystone Pipeline -- the most visible environmental cause in many years -- has moved from the scarred boreal forest of Alberta and the Sand Hills of Nebraska to the halls of Congress. Or rather, it's moved to send button on your email...

Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday...

In November, President Obama listened to the nation's top climate scientist and to bipartisan voices along the route of the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, and declared that the project required further review. After all, the Keystone XL's...

Time to Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating,...

The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the...

In the ongoing fight to keep tarsands oil in the ground, no group has been more vocal, more consistent, and more effective than native and indigenous groups on both sides of the border.

When I...

If you wanted one word to sum up this year, it's "noisy." From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, people who have gotten tired of the old politics have started grabbing the microphone away from the authorities and speaking themselves. And not just speaking; chanting, drumming, singing-conjuring up a new future.

Is Global Warming an Election Issue After All?

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision...

By now we know that Occupying was a brilliant tactic -- if you go someplace and just stay there long enough, eventually your message starts getting out. Persistence is the first great attribute of organizing success, as I wrote the other day in the (quite wonderful) Occupy Boston Globe.

But...

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

For connoisseurs, Barack Obama’s fundraising emails for the 2012 election campaign seem just a tad forlorn -- slightly limp reminders of the last time ‘round.

Four years ago at this time, the early adopters among us were just starting to get used to the regular...

For me, it’s the closest thing to Christmas come early.

For three years now 350.org has coordinated giant worldwide rallies -- CNN has called them ‘the most widespread days of political activity in the planet’s history,’ involving every nation but North Korea.

But if you think it gets old, you...