Bill McKibben, environmentalist, founder of 350.org and the man behind the massive People's Climate March on Sept. 21, doesn't think much is going to come of the U.N. Climate Summit on Tuesday.
Rather, he thinks it's part of testing how much pressure we can put on the systems in place, like Sunday's march and Monday's #FloodWallStreet protests, which called for action against corporate and economic institutions' roles in climate change.
"These guys [national government leaders] have had 25 years to respond, and they've essentially not responded," McKibben said at the 2014 Social Good Summit on Monday. "The thought that they're going to start doing so now in some significant way seems fairly slim to me."
McKibben sat on a panel with Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, to discuss climate justice and propelling the movement forward. Two members of the band Linkin Park also joined the panel, moderated by Mashable's senior climate reporter, Andrew Freedman.
It bothers McKibben that there will be "pious rhetoric around climate change with very little action," but it doesn't deter the movement.
"We know that there is a tipping point here, politically -- just like there is climatically -- where if we can change the zeitgeist enough, get enough people not just concerned but pissed off about what's going on, then there's a certain point at which they will come to fear us as much as they fear the power of the fossil fuel industry," he said. "That will be the tipping point at which we begin to see real progress."
In terms of expectations, Naidoo shared McKibben's sentiments, saying we'll see a "massive dose of verbal diarrhea" over the next few days, or otherwise witness "quasi-intellectual masturbation."
"I think it has to be put that way because, as Bill says, the writing has been on the wall for so long," Naidoo added. "So, yes, we will continue to push inside ... We'll be pushing individual governments and so on. But nothing that Bill and I could say to them they don't know. Nothing that we could say to them their own scientists have not told them."
"The time for words is over," Naidoo said to the leaders gathering at the Climate Summit.
Despite the understandable cynicism, McKibben did say that the past few days have brought "great news," because of the sheer number of people who showed up to the Climate March and those who were arrested on Wall Street for taking a stand. Furthermore, the Rockefeller family -- the original oil fortune in the U.S. -- pledged to divest from fossil fuels on Monday.
"We've known what to do for 25 years and we haven't done it. Now, we're going to do something," McKibben said. "The question is, at this point, whether we can do something fast enough for it to matter. And that's an open scientific question, and it depends on how much we're willing to stand up to power [and] how fast."
[wp_scm_comment]
[wp_scm_sgs_2014]