Mar 12, 2008 5:19 pm US/Central
SXSW: Building A Worldwide Climate Movement
Anna Gonzalez, Web Producer
AUSTIN (CBS 11 News) ―
CBS11TV.com Web Producer Anna Gonazlez is attending SXSW. She's there covering it as a journalist, but she's also a fan of a lot of the stuff there. These reports are her impressions of what she's seeing.
For his interactive panel at South By Southwest, Bill McKibben spoke about building a worldwide climate movement. He said people are eager to do something more than screw in a new, energy-saving light-bulb. And the way to capitalize on that momentum is on the Internet.
"Only Washington can effect the price of energy," he said. "We need a political movement to force that change to happen."
Here's how it works: Online, people become informed about what political action they can take in real life. That human interaction is then shared to others on the web, spreading ideas of political demonstrations.
McKibben said he first realized the power of the Internet when he mobilized 1,000 people to walk across Vermont in five days. That was enough to get candidates to meet with his political group.
According to McKibben, before the walk, a conservative candidate said more research needed to be done on global warming. But as it turned out, McKibben said, "The research wasn't about physics and chemistry, but about how many people would walk across the State of Vermont."
After meeting with the group, she made it her campaign promise to reduce the amount of carbon in the air by 80 percent by the year 2050.
For the campaign that followed, McKibben set up an informational website and sent out emails. People picked up on the project and three months later, on one day there were 1,400 rallies in all 50 states. The organizers were only hoping for 400.
Now McKibben is working on a new campaign, 350.org. "That number represents safety for the human enterprise, species, flora and fauna and everything else," he said.
He asked the audience, "With that number, what kind of music, art, videos, political demonstrations can be created? The whole thing is an open source experiment. Guerilla, artful use of the web will be the key."
When he was done speaking, about 20 people lined up to ask a question. One of the people in line used the microphone as a bullhorn. "We're all busy and we all want to help the environment. Let's invent the next Napster for green energy instead of the next Flickr. Let's develop things to help the world and not thing that are just fun!" He was met with a roar of applause from the audience.
That is the kind of power that fosters democracy.
"This whole thing is sort of a 'Hail Mary' pass with a hope that it might make the connection in time," said McKibben. "The one wildcard that we have is this new technology in the developing world. Even in the most humble of villages there is at least one person with a mobile phone."
And we can no longer retreat into a virtual world to hide from these or any other issues, said McKibben. There are environmental consequences for those actions too. McKibben said, "An aviator in Second Life will use the same amount of power as a person in Sub- Sahara Africa over the course of a year."
To me, that idea is scary. If we're so scared to interact in real life, we create a duplicate of ourselves to act for us. And those clones are also a drain on our resources.
And people think China's growing population is a problem. What if we develop an online clone problem? It's almost a comical idea, but we need to be aware of it.
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