On this episode, Bill McKibben discusses the climate movements that could spur the world to action and help us avert the worst impacts of global warming.

As an environmentalist, author, journalist, and activist, Bill McKibben is very much on the frontlines of the fight to rein in global warming. He joins the Mongabay Newscast to tell us about the movements he’s particularly hopeful about — and why he is no longer looking to the UN climate negotiations that produced the Paris Agreement as a source of meaningful action to halt global climate change.

Climate change has made a number of headlines in 2018, and media reports weren’t solely focused on wildfires, floods, extreme weather, and other impacts of Earth’s rising temperatures. Climate science has been in the news, as a report released in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change caught many people’s attention when it laid out the exponentially increasing impacts of 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius of warming (the Earth has already gotten warmer by an average of 1 degree Celsius, and we could hit 1.5 as early as 2030, per the report). And, despite the Trump Administration’s attempts to bury a newly released National Climate Assessment by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that report has been big news, as well, as it determined that the “impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans’ physical, social, and economic wellbeing are rising.”

So you might think that the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would be closely followed by Bill McKibben. The author of a dozen books on the environment and climate change, McKibben is also a founder and leader of the global climate organizing effort known as 350.org. But McKibben is not looking to the upcoming COP, taking place in Poland next week, to make much progress in the world’s attempts to combat climate change.

McKibben joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss why he thinks these international climate efforts have run out of steam, the climate movements that give him hope, and what’s at stake if we don’t find a way to check global warming.

Here’s this episode’s top news:

• Amazon deforestation at highest level in 10 years, says Brazil
• ‘Not all hope is lost’ as outlook for mountain gorillas brightens
• Google searches reveal public interest in conservation is rising

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