i want to start by acknowledging that we are in the traditional territory of the coast peoples and i want to acknowledge with gratitude the presence of tom spear a direct descendant of chief seattle i want to thank all the amazing people at town hall it's so fantastic to be back in this very special place space and all of the different groups you've already heard them think who have co sponsored this evening and my friend and colleague casey golden who i love serving with on the three fifty board of directors and have been inspired by his strategic thinking and he in fact has two of the best quotes in this changes everything but i won't give them away now but they have to do with the power of resistance in this region the deep love of place that is that is  behind so many tremendous victories out of the pacific northwest i want to start by reading a very short section from the introduction to the book i don't usually do this kind of thing but i'm going to do it tonight so this is  this is how the book start what gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers the ones i used to avoid it's the books i read to my two year old looking for a moose is one of his favorites it's about a bunch of kids that really really want to see a moose they search high and low through a forest a swamp in bramley bush's and up the mountain for a long legged bulgy nosed branch she and moose now the joke is that there is a moose hiding on every single page of this book but the kids don't see it and at the end of the book all the moves come out of hiding and the kids proclaim we've never ever ever ever seen so many moos and this is the refrain have you ever seen a moose have you ever seen a moves and now on about the seventy fifth reading it suddenly hit me he might never see a mo and i tried to hold it together i went back to my computer and began to write about my time in northern alberta tar sands country where members of the beaver lake cremation told me about how the moose had changed one woman described killing a most on a hunting trip only to find that the flesh had turned green i heard a lot about strange tumors too which locals assume had to do with animals drinking water contaminated by tar sands toxins mostly i just heard about how the moose were simply gone and not just in alberta rapid climate change turns north woods into moose graveyard reads in may two thousand and twelve headline in scientific american a year and a half later the new york times was reporting that one of minnesota's two most populations had declined from four thousand in the one nine hundred ninety s to just one hundred today will he ever see  then the other day i was slain by a miniature board book called snuggle woggle it involves different animals cuddling with each posture given a ridiculously silly name how does a bat hug it asks topsy turvy topsy turvy for some reason my son reliably cracks up at this page i explain that topsy turvy means upside down because that's the way bats but all i could think about was the report of some one hundred thousand dead and dying bat raining down from the sky in the midst of record breaking heat across queensland australia whole colonies devastated will he ever see a back i knew i was in trouble the other day when i found myself bargaining w red and purple ones are ubiquitous on the rocky coast of british columbia where my parents live and where my son was born and where i have spent about half my adult life there are always the biggest kid pleasers because you can gently pick one up and give it a really good look this is the best day of my life my seven year old niece miriam visiting from chicago proclaimed after a long afternoon spent in the tide pools but in the fall of two thousand and thirteen stories began to appear  strange wasting disease that was causing starfish along the pacific coast to die by the tens of thousands turned the seastar wasting syndrome multiple species were disintegrating alive their vibrant bodies melting into distorted globs with legs falling off and bodies caving in scientists were mystified as i read these stories i caught myself praying for the invertebrates to hang in for just one more year long enough for my son to be amazed by them then i doubted myself maybe it's better if he never sees a starfish at all certainly not like this when fear like that used to creep through my armor of climate change denial i would do my utmost to stuff  away change the channel click past it now i try to feel it it seems to me that i owe it to my son just as we owe it to ourselves and to one another but what should we do with this fear that comes from living on a planet that is dying made less alive every day first except that it won't go away that it is a fully rational response to an unbearable reality next use it fear is a survival response fear makes us run it makes us leap it can make us act superhuman but we need somewhere to run to without that the fear is only paralyzing so the real trick the only hope really is to allow the terror of a non livable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us had previously dared hope yes there will be things that we will lose luxuries some of us will have to give up whole industries that will disappear and it's too late to stop climate change from coming it's already here and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do but it's not too late to avert the worst and there is still chyme to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters strike and that it seems to me is worth a great deal because the thing about a crisis this big this all encompassing is that it changes everything it changes what we can do what we can hope for what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders it means there is a whole lot of stuff we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand and it means that a whole lot of stuff we've been told is impossible has to start happening right away can we pull it off all i know is that nothing is inevitable nothing except that climate change changes everything and for a very brief time the nature of that change is still up to us so that concludes the reading so the reason i chose this title is not because i think my book will change everything but because i think climate change changes everything and i think that that's a good place to start the discussion and when choosing a title it's good to choose a title that starts the discussion where you think it should start because a lot of interviews begin with why is your book called that and the reason why it's a good place to start the discussion is because it's important for us to understand that we have procrastinated for so long that there are now no non radical solutions left on the table so if we stay on the road we're on we face radical changes to our physical world this is what the vast majority of climate scientists tell us and now what some of our most conservative state institutions are telling us the world bank the international energy agency pricewaterhouse coopers tell us that if we stay on the road we're on we're headed towards warming between four and six degrees centigrade that's ten point seven fahrenheit on the high end that is incompatible with anything that we might call organized civilized society all the models break down really after three degrees i mean the scientists tell us they don't know what this would look like beyond the fact that it would be a radical change it would be whole huge cities underwater whole countries disappeared it would be a crop failure and possibly much worse all we have to do to arrive at this scary place is nothing all we have to do is not react as if this is an existential crisis this is known as business as usual being us only more so because that's what we do we grow more and more and emit more and more every year so that's one radical scenario on the table another radical scenario that i discuss in the book is what's increasingly being taken seriously among the very serious people and that is intervening in the climate system with through radical technologies at a global scale sometimes called geo engineering to try to make those outcomes less disastrous potentially making them more disastrous we don't know you can't find out before you do it because you can't build a model of the climate system to scale  so yeah i spent a fair bit of time hanging out with the would be geo engineers the smartest guys in the room who are talking about fertilizing the oceans pumping sulfur into the stratosphere solving  pollution with more pollution that's pretty radical dimming the sun now the good news is that it's not too late to prevent these radical physical and engineering scenarios but the way we do that at this point involves radical changes to our political and economic system these are certainly considered radical at least by current political standards they involve questioning and really breaking as argue every rule in the free market playbook to which our leaders are still in now i spent a lot of time in the book talking about the need to challenge this so called free market ideology because i feel like we can spend a lot of time talking about various solutions cap and trade versus cap and divot in and we lose sight of the fact that actually none of it's happening right certainly not in the national level certainly not at the at a level that will get us anywhere near where we need to go and that has to do with the ideology that has swept our world so the argument i make about why we have failed so miserably to rise to this challenge and the fact that we failed is now beyond debate since our government started meeting in one nine hundred ninety to come up with a plan to reduce emissions global emissions have gone up by sixty one percent so that is not a good record  and there are all kinds of theories that have been put forward to explain this in action we sometimes hear that it's just human nature that this crisis seems too far off and that were hard while ird to respond only to immediate threats but this you know that this rationale doesn't really ring true anymore because of course climate change is looking more and more like an immediate threat it certainly looked like an immediate threat when superstorm sandy flooded wall street not that wall street is has changed its behavior in any way so there is something there something else and we know that we humans have responded to abstract threats before when our immediate safety was what was not threatened  we have this in our history so then it must be something about us and i think a lot of us believe this said that that it's that it's our generation that is too selfish so this is one of the one of the rationales the other rochelle's just that it's too complicated right that you have to get all of these countries to come together and agree on a set of rules and it's just impossible we hear this a lot but of course our governments have come together and they have agreed on all kinds of things whether it's the montreal protocol on ozone depletion whether it's arms treaties but what about the creation of the world trade organization what about a global trade architecture with binding rules that our governments have ma managed to build in this very same period when they were failing to deal with the climate crisis so clearly we can cooperate and come together if the interests are our are aligned with those in power so i think that you know there's little bits of truth in all of these rationales and some that i haven't mentioned but i think that we haven't paid enough attention to one of the biggest obstacles to change which is just bad timing bad historical timing and by this i mean that scientists have known about climate change for a long time but the point where we lost all plausible deniability we the public was really nine hundred eighty eight that was the year that james hansen testified on capitol hill that he now had a high degree of certainty that there was a connection between emissions and warming that was the year by then eighty seven percent of americans knew about global warming and that year when the editors of time magazine needed to choose their man of the year they decided not to give it to a man they were still only giving it to men but man of the year nine hundred eighty eight was plan earth the planet in peril and there was it was a really interesting essay that accompanied that cover story which talked about how climate change really called into question the whole western civilizational paradigm of dominance based thinking the idea of the earth as a machine traced it back to francis bacon it was really interesting essay to read in time magazine you could never imagine it appearing today  and there was you know speaking to people who were involved in the movement at that time there was actually really a feeling that this was the dawn of a new consciousness this moment and and  then the berlin wall collapse the next year one thousand nine hundred nine this was the moment when francis fukuyama declared history over when the ideology that in most parts of the world is called neo liberalism declared victory over all other economic models and it was then exported around the world one thousand nine hundred eight the same year that cancer testified was the year that canada and the us signed the historic free trade agreement that was the next expanded into nafta became the paradigm used the model for for future bilateral and multilateral trade deals a few years later the world trade organization was  formed so you had these two parallel process processes now this was a problem and it was a problem not just because the global economy as it was being called that was being created was a particularly high emissions one  but because the ideology of neo liberalism had as its pillars privatization deregulation cuts just taxes paid for with cuts to social services now called austerity never ending austerity all locked in through this architecture of free trade or investor rights deals now what i do in the book is show how each one of these pillars of this ideological project that so successfully spread around the world has stood in the way of what we need to do to respond decisively to the climate threat and i'll just give you a quick examples i mean a lot of this is obvious take austerity i mean the idea that i mean in my lifetime all i have known of the public sphere is is it's dismantling you know my parents generation built things but since i have been a conscious adult it has only been about stopping the cuts topping the attacks we don't get to build things anymore and of course this is reach catastrophic levels in this country particularly in europe in the wake of the of the financial crisis which has been passed on to the public and  and you see the direct clashes because of course if we're going to respond to climate change we need to invest seriously and on a large scale in not just protecting the public sphere but reinventing it along the lines that casey was talking about  and and we see the clash when disaster strikes i mean you see it in this country during hurricane katrina that clash between heavy weather and weak neglected infrastructure a government that doesn't seem to be home can't seem to find new orleans you we saw during superstorm sandy where you know if you have these why oddly divergent experiences a natural disaster or not a natural disaster  but you know if you have resorts is you're kind of ok but if you're in public housing that has been allowed to decay the lights are out for weeks and weeks no one shows up and it was you know a bunch of you know twenty somethings from  occupy sandy as it was called who were doing frontline work which was  amazing and we did some filming of this makeshift health clinic that was started in the rockaways and it was it was incredible i mean it was just heroic work but the people there going we're going we didn't where is the government you know why are we doing this  during there were historic floods in england this year and it was really interesting to see the logic of austerity clash with what the public wanted in that moment which was they wanted a forceful public response now this was a problem for for for david cameron said mr austerity himself because he had slashed the agency responsible for flood response knowing that increased flooding is  is it's clearly going to be one of the impacts of climate change in britain nonetheless he had laid off more than a thousand people cancelled hundreds of flood defense programs and people connected the dots and he was so panicked in this moment he had another another thousand jobs were on the chopping block and cameron was so was so panicked that he had to publicly say money is no object we will spend whatever it takes right and that's just a glimpse of how you know if we take this crisis seriously this logic of austerity cannot hold you know our governments have to find the money and that means going to where the money is which part of the responses going after the fossil fuel companies polluter pays will come back to that but you know this is happening all over europe in greece the fire trucks go don't have spare tires going into forest fires i mean greece is a tinder box and this is how  a country whose two major sectors are tourism and fisheries right so you know what i call the book capitalism versus the climate people say well that's divisible you know but the thing is is capitalism is already waging war on the climate and the point of this is you know i think that there is a will there are different levels of denial you know we talk a lot about this a right wing to deny denial where it's really obvious and it's easy to laugh at the people of fox news but i think we all engage in our own versions of climate and i and one of the reasons why we have to stop is that these are that is that if we look and let ourselves feel the depth of this crisis we have some of the most powerful arguments we've ever had to argue for a saner economic system i'll give you another example free trade now a lot of people in this room i think have been involved in these battles how many of you were were were part of the battle in seattle fifteen years ago  know one of the things we're finding is that you know we knew when we were fighting the world trade organization that this was a system that sacrificed workers rights and environmental rights in the name of short term profits but we did not know how right we were  because what's what's been happening in recent years is that some of the best climate policies are being successfully challenged in trade court i'll give you an example from close to home for me i mentioned spending half my adult program in north america was lauded by many people in this country including al gore for its for it's extremely ambitious plans to get one hundred percent off coal this is canada's most populous province by tw and the green energy act was introduced in two thousand and nine in the midst of the economic crisis and it was introduced because of concern about climate change but it was primarily introduced because of concerns about unemployment because ontario is an economy that is extremely reliant on manufacturing and in particular car manufacturing and our auto sector was getting decimated by the fact that the big three automakers were on their knees at this point and it was easier to close canadian plants than to close american plants when you're going to the american government for a massive bailout which is what was happening at that time so there were huge numbers of layoffs in the manufacturing sector in ontario so very smartly the ontario liberal government introduced this green energy plan that had these ambitious emission reduction targets but also had very ambitious drop job creation targets and required that sixty percent of their equipment in ontario so it was a job creation plan it was about rebuilding our moribund manufacturing sector and i profiled this company in the book called silver which was sort of like the poster child for how this was supposed to work because it was it's a solar plant on the outskirts of of toronto that opened up in a closed down auto parts factory so it was the perfect symbol of like old economy dying new economy opening all these workers who had lost their jobs at chrysler and magna which the big auto parts manufacturer got jobs on the assembly line making solar panels for this for this new program and thirty one thousand manufacturing jobs were created so all is going well but then japan and the european union challenge ontario's screen energy plan at the world trade organization argued that that  requirement that a certain percentage of the jobs remain local was discrimination against their companies against european companies and japanese companies and the w t o ruled in their favor and  lost and and rolled over very very quickly in fact in part because the canadian government wasn't about to fight for renewable energy women this is an extension of the oil and gas industry as you may have noticed but we're seeing more and more of these cases this is not an isolated case the u s has challenged china's renewable energy subsidies india's renewable energy subsidies and it's tremendously ironic because you go to you know you listen in on a summit like the one that just happened in new york and it's all about government sort of pointing the finger at each other you're not doing enough no you're not doing enough i won't lead you leave right but in fact what these governments are doing is running to the world trade organization and trying to knock down each other's windmills at precisely the moment when we need all of our governments to be rolling out the you know the most ambitious plans they can and to do it in a way that will get political buy in right i mean this was about a just transition this was about supporting a sector that was getting hit hard and having a just transition to the new economy and we were told that's not allowed and in the book i quote joseph stiglitz the nobel prize winning economist who talks about how absurd it is that we are leaving the fate of the planet in the hands of what he calls the silly lawyers who didn't even understand the issue when they wrote the rules nonetheless it is happening now the good news is we're facing a whole flurry of new deals new trade deals that's not good news in and of itself but the good news is i think worse we're starting to pay attention to trade again after tuning it out for a long time a lot of us are very concerned about the new  about t p p and the european deal and how specifically how it is undermining the actions that we need to take on climate and i think that this once again is the best argument we have ever had against these deals we cannot allow trade to trump the planet it doesn't get much stronger argument than that but that is precisely what these deals are doing and we can't be afraid to use that argument so another pillar of the neo liberal era of course is privatization and i want to talk a little bit how this the way in which so many of our cities states provinces have have have sold off key sectors that are central to the energy transition that we need to enact is is standing in the way now many of you have heard a lot about germany transition to renewable energy which is a really it's a complicated case you know it's not all perfect but nonetheless it is definitely worth appreciating that a highly industrialized economy like germany that does not have a lot of sun has managed in a decade and a half to go from six percent of its electricity coming from renewable energy to twenty five percent coming from renewable energy mostly wind and solar most of it decentralized so this is a real success story and one that shows that when we want to win the political will is there we can move quickly you know and we need those success stories one of the things we don't hear about the german transition is that one of the things that has how loud germany to transition as quickly as it has is that in hundred of cities and towns big cities as well as small towns citizens have voted and decided democratically to take back control over their electricity grid from the private and they're doing this because they want to be part of this energy transition they want their their power to come from clean energy and the private players are not willing to move fast enough so they are so they are deciding to take their  energy back but it's not only that it's also that they want the the money from the power generation to stay in the community so it's it's both addressing the austerity crisis and climate change at the same time it's the problem is not just that that that the that it's dirty energy it's also that the money is just hemorrhaging from communities into shareholder's pockets and that's not acceptable either so it's become a pro democracy movement it's become an austerity movement and it's a climate movement and these are the types of paradigms that we need i think to win and it's also starting to spread it's happening in this country too in the book i tell the story about boulder colorado which is a fantastic example you know boulder this you know green city very much like you know some of the cities in this region and it had this problem which is despite the fact that everyone by two more fleece and all their all of their energy was coming coal so they wanted to switch and they went to their local private energy provider xcel energy and talked about how they wanted to switch to renewable energy and were basically shut down and at that point started exploring taking their power back taking their energy back not because they were ideologically opposed to privatized because they wanted to be part of the green energy transition in line with their values and the profit driven interests of this company were standing in their way they found that and that and they took that step and i think it is interesting that these aren't ideological movements these aren't movements that are starting by saying we're anti privatization they're movement saying we want to do something about private we want to do something about climate change and discovering that they need to take on the logic of privatization in order to make that happen you know it's there are other ways of bringing in green energy and i think there are a lot of examples of that in this region but there is clearly a tight correlation between a very ambitious renewable energy targets and keeping energy in public hands we see examples of that in this country too like austin sacramento are two of the cities with the most ambitious  emission reduction targets and they never sold off their energy so there's lots of public utilities that are producing dirty coal but i think the point is that they're it's easier for us to change our public utilities than it is for us to change for enterprise so i said germany is complicated one of the reasons it's complicated is that while anglo merkel has been willing to put in place some great incentives to encourage renewable energy what she has not been willing to do is say no to the fossil fuel industry and coal is is is continuing actually to expand and even though demand is dropping in germany the coal companies are just that energy sound familiar and so it's not a simple success story because you know sometimes we tell ourselves we can do this all with market mechanisms and having the right incentives in place but it's clear that it has to be a combination of finding creative ways to say yes to what we want and bold ways of saying no to what we don't want and part of you know part of what has a stock right now is that we have a leadership class globally that has really lost the gnat of saying no to big companies and you know when they're when they're dangling big investment projects is just automatically say asking you look at obama and that it has taken him now more than three years to just say no to the keystone x l pipeline he's you know i'm starting to think he's going to leave office with i would just punting this decision so the exciting thing is that as it with our leaders failing to lead failing to do what they need to you know and it's it's been so powerful in this part of the world i really do think that the fossil fuel industry did not know what they were in for when they decided to build so many tentacles through the pacific northwest and this in many ways is the flipside of the carbon boom that we're in the midst of because of course the fossil fuel companies are doubling down they're building all kinds of new infrastructure they're doubling down on some of the dirtiest carbon sources they have to build all this infrastructure and it takes them into territory that is distinctly hostile and and this you know i used to say that the the world trade organization built our coalitions for us so in many ways the fossil fuel companies are building our coalitions for us by their sheer ambition of their coltrane's and their oil trains and their pipelines and their ellen g terminals and the rest of it we are and that was what was so exciting about the climate march this past week is you saw that network  that is place based really coming together in the streets in common purpose  ning out of time so i'm going to make some quick cuts here  you know in canada one of the most exciting parts of the emergence of this fossil fuel resistance as our friend bill mckibben calls it is the way in which it is building really powerful ties between native non native and native communities and  it's i think you know it in whenever there's a big resource battle we see these connections but there's something new happening and we saw this really clearly with the emergence of i don't know more and all these resistance movements whether it's to the cherry point kollek sport terminal or the northern gateway pipeline through b c i think what more and more of us are starting to understand is that indigenous  nation's treaty rights and aboriginal title are the most powerful legal barrier to the plans to just play and those rights become more powerful when there are mass movements defending them and when they are embraced by whole societies and and this is really starting to change and i think it's it's it's it's actually changing the way we think as well as the way we fight because i think that it's about war then and it has to be about more than just a sort of extractive relationship to those rights like those rights are useful to us because they help us protect our water so we want to use those rights that's exactly the wrong the wrong way of thinking about this that these that these are rights that come out of a vision of how to live well that were hard won and hard protected and they point towards a non extractive regeneration based way of living on this planet and that is the most hopeful and exciting part of this this new wave of activism now like casey was saying this can sound overwhelming anything about climate change can sound overwhelming and it's certainly easier to talk about changing light bulbs than changing the economy but here's what we need to remember it's not like we're talking in about an economy that is working beautifully except for the small matter of rising sea levels we're talking about allowing sea levels to rise in the name of protecting an economic system that is failing the vast majority of the people on this planet with or without by responding robustly to climate change in line with what scientists are telling us we have a once in a century opportunity to solve some of our biggest and most intractable social and economic problems we can create countless good unionized jobs in the next economy every dollar invested in renewable energy efficiency public transit creates six to eight times as many jobs as that dollar would create if it went into oil and gas infrastructure those jobs can rebuild our ailing public infrastructure and that infrastructure will give us more livable cities stronger communities healthier bodies we all know this we can find the money by making polluters pay whether it's the fossil fuel companies or the bloated defense companies or the financial speculators to do any of this of course we must dramatically reduce the power of corporate money in politics now everybody who is trying to get anything done in this country that is in any way vaguely progressive whether it's fighting private prisons or for gun control or universal health care knows that money and politics is the single greatest barrier the question that i'm left with is whether climate change can provide the big tent that we need to build a new kind of coalition intel put us on a science based deadline and tell us that we cannot afford to lose i think it can and i'll tell you why the atmosphere is already our big tent we are already under this big tent and we have to start acting like we're coming up on the fifteenth anniversary of the battle of seattle when the streets of the city were choked with cheer about gas and flooded with hope because a mass coalition a movement of movements put the system of short term corporate greed behind the world trade organization on trial it disrupted the negotiations and in bold and internal dissent in the talk and the talks broke down they never quite recovered but after september eleventh that movement broke apart some were spooked by the new war on dissent others turned their attention understandably to stopping war and increased criminalization but we stopped talking about the system underneath it all then three years ago this month the occupy movement sprung up and put corporate capitalism on trial once again to draw the connections between the logic of deregulation and austerity and the inequality crises ravaging our communities the whole world listened in i firmly believe that movements like that never die they just go quiet for a little while they learn they change and reemerge now another movement is taking the stage the climate justice movement it's made up of all these past movements and many more older ones deeper ones the civil rights movement the indigenous rights sovereignty movement calling for the deep shift in worldview that we know this crisis is really about because underneath all of this is the truth that we've been avoiding climate change is an issue to add to the list of things to worry about next to health care and taxes it's a civilizational wake up call a powerful message spoken in the language of fires floods droughts and extinction telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet telling us that we need to evolve thank you benefits of voluntary population reduction do you think we can ignore that question i'm not sure voluntary population reduction means and i i do think that i wouldn't say that population has nothing to do with the ecological crisis but i think that we sometimes overplay it where population is growing fastest is in sub saharan africa and that is where emissions are lowest if if  we want to deal with this crisis most effectively we would talk about consumption among the wealthiest people on the planet not procreation among the poorest people on the planet thanks this is just a quick question about the title of your book i was a little bit puzzled when i heard the title because i had in my possession several copies of the book this changes everything that was created in collaboration with us magazine  about the story of the occupy movement and i was wondering if that had anything to do with your title i have an essay in that book in this changes everything so i realized it would create some confusion  there's actually a lot of books out there with the title this changes everything and i think you know i think they'll probably be more i what i what i thought of it for this title it's not that it's it's such a great title it's that i really think that it works with climate change in a particular way in the way that i started about you know just just lending us where we need to land in terms of understanding that everything's going to change one way or the other so realizing that other people would use the title and that i had an essay in a book with that in that some people might be confused about which book is which you know it might sell more of that book that yes magazine produce which would be great it's a great book and you did mention that the money and politics is sort of the base core of it all and that's what occupy was about well it's all connected absolutely do you think climate change is the perfect topic to introduce a wider conversation about capitalism i mean in a sense we have the equivalent of why when climate denial might be on the left capitalism the desire to use go the free market or corporations without asking the kind of wider questions that connect to things like you say about how elections are found those other things i mean i obviously agree with you because i call the book but i do think that there is this weird thing and i been feeling particularly this week like people really like there are there's a significant there's a larger constituency of liberals that really does not want to talk about capitalism that i anticipated like a lot of the criticism of the book has just been about the name  and and i like it when one of the subtitles that the subtitle i almost went with is the revolutionary the revolutionary power of climate change as you you know heard from the talk like that's the argument i'm making but i do think that that this core tension between our economic model and what our climate needs from us here that we have an economic model that is built on short term expansion and we have we need to contract are used to resort says we don't need to contract every part of our economy we can grow other parts of our economy we need to grow other parts of our economy that are low carbon already and that are going to the parts of the economy that are going to make this transition possible but at the same time we do need to contract so i think we do we dance around we really don't like saying the word capitalism particularly in this country but even even easier to talk about growth than it is to talk about capitalism and there is and i actually think growth focusing on growth is less helpful then it's talking about capitalism because i think in a lot of people's minds when you talk about capitalism you're talking about greed you're talking about court you're talking about corporate greed and you get closer to that whereas if you talk about growth then the first thing people think is that it's all going to be contraction it's all going to be loss and that's a very negative discussion to have and it isn't true that we only that it's all about contraction it's really about how we manage our economy why you didn't mention nine hundred eighty nine and it's a good point that before nine hundred eighty nine the fact that a lot of people in the world were talking negatively about capitalism and the capitalism was ready to give more to people who weren't who asked for things so maybe if you start talking we will scare people  d just like to say that i always enjoy these talks but it sometimes feels like it's kind of preaching to the choir and i just wanted to know what your thoughts are on disseminating all the information that you have presented tonight to people who mainly get their information from news outlets that want that it goes against their financial interest to report on all these topics they might have corporate ties to fossil fuels so they won't want to report on the climate market they won't want to report on any of these issues and will continue to maintain that status quo  so just how do you think that the movement is best it's going to be spread out to beyond the people who already know about it i mean i'm not i feel like that is starting to happen to me i think and and some of it's happening in a more old fashioned way and i mean this is the kind of march in new york was it extraordinary exercise a popular education and really old fashioned community organizing and it was incredibly diverse march did not look like a choir it mobilized all kinds of communities that are normally left out of environmental movement and and that was that was not done with the help of any corporate media that was like really legwork you know and and it was that hard old fashioned organizing work of building bridges across different constituencies doing popular education and i think we need to return to some of that where you know like just teach ins just basic popular education a lot of people don't participate in the climate discussion because it seems you really really want key and they're afraid of making a mistake you've got the science side the policy side the u n and like you know it's there's a whole bunch of you know worlds that have their own language in their own jargon and so just unpacking it for people and creating contacts where where they're not afraid to make a mistake is really important but i don't know about that this is about going through corporate media at this at this stage i mean there is some of that but you know like there was the years of living dangerously in that kind of that kind of work but i'm not sure that that would build  movement i think the movement building is when people see the connections with their daily lives and it comes from trusted sources and i think we spend a lot of time sort of thinking about how we reach people who watch fox news you know and we actually have a lot of work i think more work just building a broad diverse progressive movement you know and  building bridges between the various constituencies in that world and before we worry about you know reaching the climate deniers i don't know if that's what you're talking about you know store and you go home to your polyester sheets and and the plastic in everything that you buy and you know even a lot of people who went to the climate protests you know food there and how do we get over this like kind of conflict within ourselves when we use fossil fuel every day and we don't want to but you really can't get away from us i think it's tricky because you know casey talked about and i'm mention that in some ways i think that we overemphasize we the environmental movement over emphasize the individual actions at the expense of the big systemic changes that we need and you know we was all about recycling and carbon offsetting and you know turning your personal life into like a low carbon piece of performance art and a lot of it was like you know but and a lot of it was quite sort of classist too because in so you know that there are so many communities that have no good transit options where people are so overworked as well that your people are having to make convenience based decisions that are about low cost but also about zero time and this is what our culture does to people and this idea that it's about being perfect and green and buying more green stuff you know was so super early amazing to a lot of people and i think it was part of why it was the climate movement was so meaning white and male and but i think there's there's something really key and i actually think it's that i don't think we should let ourselves off the hook like we should all try to bring our actions in line with our values but i also think that we should all embrace our inner hypocrites and stop playing gotcha because if you need to be you know if you need to be fossil free in order to fight fossil fuels that's a great way of having a really small movement thank you for your speech and for being with us and all your inspiring work around the world here in washington state we have the fourth ranking republican climate denier in the house of representatives and we also have a native american man running against her and i've met him and he's great and i would like my question is how can your organization lead in inspiring voter registration across in all the places where we have low to low of voter registration and to teach america a new story about finding the right candidates to run for office and to win for office because the stories that we're told right now have to do with money and here we have a situation where we have the right person running against somebody who needs to be out of office thank you yeah more and more engagement elections especially right now is absolutely vital and i should say i do work for  three organization but it's sunday night and i am not on the clock and any political views i happen to express right now would be my own that is a great race for folks to get involved and there's also a huge there's actually three or four really pivotal  state senate races right now on which the balance of the state senate will probably hinge i know the wash and state labor council jeff johnson is here and is organizing big voter turnout and door belling and that's a just incredibly important thing we need to be doing in the short run and nonprofit organizations can be doing exactly what you said increasing voter engagement increasing voter turnout even without endorsing candidates and that's a big part of how we went and i would just add that it's you know it's about getting involved in politics at every level including at the local level where maybe that it's a little bit easier to break through and i would be remiss if i left seattle without just saying how incredibly inspiring it was for everybody to watch the fifteen dollar minimum wage victory