A top environmental activist wants to put the Pentagon’s defense budget to work against what he calls the nation’s most ominous threat: climate change.
“If you think we don’t have the money then you’re not paying attention,” said Bill McKibben, founder of the group 350.org. “We have things like the defense budget that need to be put to work defending us against the most dangerous adversaries we face.”
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McKibben’s group has been a leader of the anti-fossil fuel “Keep it in the Ground” movement, which seeks to generate all the nation’s energy from wind and solar and eliminate all coal and oil use within the next two decades.
His comments were made Thursday during a climate change conference held at Oberlin College in Ohio. McKibben has been a reluctant supporter of Hillary Clinton for president and was a prominent supporter of former Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
McKibben’s group has been prodding Clinton’s campaign to go more to the left on climate policy and doesn’t believe her choice of Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., does anything for her on the issue of climate change. At the same time, he has criticized the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and Mike Pence as a step backward on clean energy and climate change.
“By all the measures that we normally count as warfare, that’s what’s going on,” McKibben said. “We’re losing territory day by day. People are being killed day by day in great numbers,” he said.
“We’re at war, we’re just not fighting back, and the time has come to do that, and it will take as the history of WWII shows, government leadership to make that happen,” he said. “It will take a concentrated national effort and a concentrated international effort to make that happen. It won’t happen on its own, it requires leadership.”
