Our guest blogger is Bill McKibben, who spoke to Occupy Wall Street at Washington Square Park on Saturday. Below are text and video of his speech, via TreeHugger and It’s Getting Hot In Here.

Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built.

On November 6, one year before the election, we’re going to be in DC with a huge circle of people around the White House and they’re going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to DC to find out where they have locked that guy up. We have to free Obama, because there is some sort of stunt double there now. So on November 6, I hope we can move, just for a day, Occupy Wall Street down to the White House and get them in the fight against corporate power.

The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.

I spend a lot of time in countries around the world organizing demonstrations and rallies in solidarity. In the last three years at 350.org, we’ve had 15,000 rallies in every country except North Korea. Everywhere around the world, poor people and black people and brown people and Asian people and young people are standing up. Most of those places, don’t produce that much carbon. They need us to act with them and for them, because the problem is 20 blocks south of here. That’s where the Empire lives and we’ve got to figure out how to tame it and make it work for this planet or not work at all.

Thank you guys very much.

Todd Gitlin is Wrong:  Occupy Wall Street Protesters Aren’t “Anarchists,” The Tea Party Members Are.

We are seeing an accumulation of “wealth” by the super-rich to shame the Gilded Age.  The richest “400 people have more wealth than half of the more than 100 million U.S. households,” Politifact was grudgingly forced to agree that Michael Moore’s statement was correct.

I don’t think this is disconnected from the question I raised 2 years ago, “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“  As Tom Friedman reported:

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

But I suppose it isn’t a full Ponzi scheme in one respect.  The super-rich have so much wealth that they can insulate themselves from the collapse far longer than everyone else, with their gated and moated communities, multiple homes in multiple climates, security guards, private jets and general insensitivity to the price of anything — and hence insensitivity to the value of everything.

If you have $1 billion, well, even if you lost half of everything, even if you lost 90%, you’d still have an incredible standard of living to pass on to your children, assuming you could stomach the misery of billions.

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A great cartoon from Non-Sequitur by Wiley.

It’s a bit long, so I’m putting the rest of it below the jump:

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For some it’s Columbus Day. But why not also celebrate it as Anti-Flat-Earth Day*.  It’s a holiday so I’m going to repost a classic, “Conservapedia: The theory of relativity is a liberal plot.”

I’m reposting it in honor of the Flat-Earth anti-science crowd — starting with Robert Bryce, of the Manhattan Institute, who tried to make a mockery of Science in the Wall Street Journal concerning a recent experiment related to Einstein’s theory.

But of course we have the larger point that Chris Mooney made in his column on how “Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left.”  And that brought out the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green who pulled a Charlie Sheen.

Progressives don’t need an alternative to Wikipedia because we are fact-based and science-based.  Indeed, science is the foundation of progress.  Perhaps that is why so many conservatives are anti-science and why the extremists among them set up the Conservapedia, which claims to be “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia,” and brags “Over 290 million Views & Over 900,000 Edits.”

And yet after all those edits, they still have the same unadulterated nonsense on the theory of relativity and all of science that I wrote about 2 years ago.  And so I would ask you to put on your head vises — or your cranial containment field, if you dropped a dime on the deluxe model — and  go back to the future.

First though, it’s worth noting that the Conservapedia entry for Christopher Columbus states, “As conservative historian Wilcomb Washburn explains, if Columbus had not discovered the New World, the process of European discovery might have been very different. Rather than standing as a symbol of inexorable forces, Columbus is better seen as a representative of the spirit of inquiry, Christian religious zeal, and the notable achievements of Western Civilization.”

Yes, Columbus is a representative of the spirit of inquiry in the same way that Conservapedia is representative of an attempt to destroy that same spirit of inquiry, a spirit that created modern science, one of the most notable achievements of civilization.

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Last week I wrote about the dysfunctional, lop-sided geoengineering panel that is trying to launch the greenwashing euphemism, “Climate Remediation.”  Many others joined in the criticism.

In particular, freelance science journalist James Hrynyshyn has a devastating critique of the report at ScienceBlogs, “The Task Force on Climate Remediation Research is wrong, and here’s why.”

I interviewed an ethicist who withdrew from the panel, Prof. Stephen Gardiner.  I also interviewed climatologist Ken Caldeira.  I asked him about the euphemism, “Climate Remediation.”  I also asked him if he stood behind his 2009 statement:

Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, “Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat. It’s crazy….  If I had to wager, I would wager that we would never deploy any geoengineering system.”

Below is the email he sent me (and above is a figure he created that the Task Force embraced).

Note:  Caldeira is heavily involved in geo-engineering research and at the end I’ll include an earlier statement he sent me laying out his involvement with that research and Bill Gates.

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