other surprise was how little reaction there was in our political system…

AMY GOODMAN: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

BILL McKIBBEN: You know, 30 years ago, when I started writing about this, it was a distant threat. We were issuing a warning. Scientists knew that as we burned coal and gas and oil, we were putting carbon in the atmosphere. They knew the molecular structure of CO2-trapped heat. We didn’t know how fast and how hard it was going to pinch. The story of the last 30 years—or one of the stories of the last 30 years—is that it pinched a hell of a lot harder and faster than even we had feared. The things we’re seeing now—half the sea ice in the summer Arctic gone, the ocean 30% more acidic, half the coral reefs under siege—these were things we thought would happen 50, 60, 70 years from now. But the planet turned out to be very finely balanced. So that was one of the surprises of those 30 years.

The other surprise was how little reaction there was in our political system, how slowly it’s moved. In essence, we’ve done almost nothing as a world to grapple with the biggest problem that we’ve ever wandered into.

Excerpt from DemocracyNow.org interview of Bill McKibben by Amy Goodman during the release of his new book FALTER.  Source