Last week, the New York Times had a short interview on the subject of sustainability with Bill McKibben, noted author, activist, and founder of 350.org. In part:

Q. Many watchers criticized countries for not sending their top leaders to the summit. Is the global economic crisis to blame for a temporary shift in focus, or is this a more systemic long-term sweeping under the rug? A. I fear we weren’t doing much even before the economic crisis. I think the UN effort will be a sideshow until we are able to match the power of the coal and oil barons. Q. What was the best thing to come out of the Rio+20 meeting? A. As always, the chance for civil society to come together and plan. The official meetings are pointless but they do provide an excuse to get together. Q. The Rio meeting was last month. When is the next big event for global sustainability? A. It’s already happened — the great American heatwave, which reminded lots of us at what’s at stake.

Speaking of this latter point,  I also recommend McKibben’s latest article in Rolling Stone, premised on three numbers: 2°C, 565 Gigatons, and 2,7965 Gigatons. What do these numbers mean? The first came out of the U.S.’s “Copenhagen Accord,” drafted in a rush following the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference—which the U.S. did not even attend—which “formally recognized ‘the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius.’” That is, our target should be to keep any global temperature increase under 2° Celsius. The rub is that, as McKibben points out:

So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.)

The second number refers to the amount of carbon dioxide that scientists estimate we can add to the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some chance of keeping the temperature increase below two degrees. However:

study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today's preschoolers will be graduating from high school.

As for the third number:

The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

I remain pessimistic that we will ever see any kind of leadership from the government (any government) on this issue (or, it seems, any issue). So it’s going to have to be up to us!