By Bill McKibben and Mark Orlowski
After a summer of record heat, unforgiving drought, and unprecedented Arctic melt — and after a campaign season where the candidates barely acknowledged the climate crisis — many were left wondering what, if anything, they could still do to slow global warming.
One answer is: Go to school on it.
Beginning last week, 350.org went on a roadshow — 20 cities in 20 nights — designed in part to spark a movement for campus divestment from fossil fuel stocks. Called the “Do the Math” tour it lays out the straightforward case that coal, oil and gas companies already have in their reserves five times the carbon that even the most conservative governments have decided is safe to burn. Exxon alone has 7 percent of the carbon necessary to warm the planet past the two-degree mark, and they spend $100 million a day searching for more. These are rogue companies, outlaws not against the laws of the state (with their massive lobbying budgets they write those rules), but against the laws of physics.