Answer to Question #303738 in English for MUNIZ

Question

Who does McKibben say is responsible for climate change? 

Answer 1

Climate change is not only a daunting problem, but also becoming more so as further evidence comes to light. “Every time we thought we understood something about climate, the truth has turned out to be worse than we thought,” said McKibben, who noted that in the past 18 months the necessity of achieving an agreement on climate change has become incredibly pressing. This panic, however, might provide the political fuel to tackle the issue in a substantial way as we approach the December 2009 date of the next U. N. climate change meeting where a successor to the Kyoto Protocol must be finalized.

After many years of inaction on global warming the United States appears ready to do something. “Finally this year it looks like there will be a serious effort by Congress to put a cap on the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere,” said McKibben. A cap is a crucial step toward addressing climate change, argued McKibben, but it is only the first of many measures we must immediately implement to make winning the fight against global warming a remote possibility. “What we do this year in Congress is not going to be the thing that saves the planet,” McKibben warned. “We’re going to have to have thorough transformation of this country’s and this world’s energy system away from fossil fuel.”

McKibben considers it his responsibility as a climate activist to mobilize a grassroots movement that will give Congress the space they need to pass legislation. McKibben made the leap from writer to organizer through his involvement with Middlebury students—in 2006 he organized a climate rally with students in Vermont that drew over 1,000 people. “The next day the paper reported that this 1,000 people may have been the biggest climate rally in the U.S,” said McKibben. “It got me thinking about the climate activist groups on the Middlebury campus and how to bring that to a national scale.” This led McKibben, along with six Middlebury students, to create the Step It Up campaign, which organized over 1,400 climate demonstrations across the country in April 2007.