Source: Ruminating with BILL MCKIBBEN – by Jonathan Alter – OLD GOATS with Jonathan Alter
So in the streets in Glasgow, that was a kind of consortium of many different groups?
BILL MCKIBBEN:
It was largely organized by the wonderful Fridays for the Future movement that sort of sprung out of Greta [Thunberg’s] work. And there are now thousands of Gretas around the world. I love her and think she’s one of the greatest activists—a master of the politics of gesture. A remarkable human being. But she’d be the first to say the really good news is that there’s now 10,000 like me, and 10 million followers.
When I started 350.org with those college kids there wasn’t quite as much youth climate activism and you still heard some people saying, “Oh, kids today, you know, they’re apathetic or whatever.” That was nonsense then, and it’s completely gone now.
JON:
Greta called Glasgow “the blah, blah, blah conference.” Do you agree with that?
BILL MCKIBBEN:
Yeah. All the drama went out of the room when it was clear Biden couldn’t show up with the full Build Back Better legislation in his back pocket, toss it on the table and say, “Match this, amigos.” Then Joe Manchin strips the clean energy pricing plan out of it, and he holds the whole thing up so it can’t pass just in time [for Glasgow]. So Biden shows up there [at COP26] with nothing. Joe Manchin has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else in D.C. in the last cycle and the fossil fuel industry got their money’s worth—1000 times over. It’s the best return on investment that these guys ever made.
“All the drama went out of the room when it was clear Biden couldn’t show up with the full Build Back Better legislation in his back pocket, toss it on the table and say, ‘Match this, amigos.’”
I think it’s possible that [the COP conference approach] is beginning to reach the end of its usefulness, because there are so many illiberal governments around the world now that aren’t taking useful part in the whole thing. That was the U.S. under Trump. But now even with Trump gone, there’s Bolsonaro [Brazil], Putin [Russia], Orban [Hungary], Modi in India. Xi in China. There’s really no way these guys aren’t making their own national calculations about what to do.
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