![\"Not](\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/copenhagen\/files\/2013\/04\/EarthBeforeGreed.jpg\")
<\/a>Not radical?<\/p><\/div>\n
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McKibben then moved on to talk about what he has done and is doing personally, with students, with 350.org, and with others to bring attention to climate change. To make it politically untenable for elected officials to ignore climate change and continue to take no action. To make it socially unacceptable to profit from the extraction and burning of fossil energy.<\/p>\n
He also spoke to us about our responsibilities for action. Responsibilities as individuals, as students, faculty and employees of a college, and the responsibilities of institutions such as Dickinson. His words give us much to think about. We are already engaged as an institution in acting on climate change. We teach about climate change, its causes, its consequences and strategies for limiting climate change and its negative impacts. We provide our students, and other members of the Dickinson community, with sills and encouragement to be active, engaged citizens. We are, as a signatory of the American College and University President\u2019s Climate Commitment, working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are generated in operating our campus.<\/p>\n
But we are also invested in corporations in the fossil energy sector. What will we do about this? What should we do? Dialogue on these questions began at Dickinson before McKibben\u2019s visit, and his visit has energized and inspired many who are engaged in the dialogue.<\/p>\n
Much of what McKibben said that evening is familiar to me, having spent much of the past 20 years working on climate change. But one thing he said was new to me and gave me a different framing for thinking about the problem: there\u2019s nothing radical about advocating to limit CO2 <\/sub>in the atmosphere to 350 ppm; radical is making money from fossil energy. Here\u2019s what he said:<\/p>\n \u201cThere is nothing, and I mean nothing, radical about anything that I\u2019ve been saying. All we are asking for is a world that works like the world we were born into, and that every human being for 10,000 years has been born into. That\u2019s not radical by any reasonable definition. That\u2019s a conservative request that we are making.<\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0Radicals work at oil companies. If you are willing to get up in the morning and go to work making a fortune by altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere, when science has told you what it will do, once you\u2019ve seen by watching the melting artic what it will do, if you are willing to do that, then you are engaged in a more radical act than any human being who has come before you.\u201d <\/i><\/p>\n McKibben went on to say: \u201cAnd, if you\u2019re willing to hold stock in that company, then you are, at least, a kind of participant in that radicalism. \u00a0Our job is to check that radicalism.\u201d<\/p>\n