McKibben’s Math: Climate Action and College Campuses

Reader Contribution by Lindsay Mcnamara
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“All we’re asking for is for the type of planet we were born on. It’s not radical,” said Bill McKibben in the Rutgers University Student Center (New Brunswick, NJ) on Monday, February 4, 2013. “Radicalism is the scientists of fossil fuel companies who are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere more than any human has before them,” he added.

Bill McKibben, author, educator, and environmentalist, wrote The End of Nature, the “first book for a general audience on climate change” in 1989. Since that publication, McKibben has stepped into a lifetime of climate activism, founding the global nonprofit 350.org in 2008. 350.org’s mission is to build a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. The organization has led online campaigns, grassroots organizing and mass public actions from the bottom up in over 188 countries. The number 350 is significant because it is believed by leading scientists to be the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists measure carbon dioxide in “parts per million” (ppm), so 350 ppm is “the number humanity needs to get below as soon as possible to avoid runaway climate change.” 

As 350.org calls for a cohesive global movement, the number transcends the over 4,000 languages spoken across the world, to create one unified message. 350.org calls for a different kind of PPM, a “people powered movement” to solve the climate crisis.

McKibben spoke to a full house at Rutgers University on 350.org‘s latest movement, the divestment rising. He called movements a means to “spread awareness and build on that awareness into meaningful action on the scale of the problem.”

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