Good evening, everyone. Welcome. So I want to talk about my journey yesterday. I took
a 12-hour overnight bus ride Saturday night to Washington DC and came back,
took a 12-hour overnight bus ride last night back here to Chicago. I'm still a
retired. I went to the Climate Forward Rally in Washington DC yesterday. So I
wanted to kind of give a report on that and talk about it. There were two full
buses organized by the Sierra Club. There were some other bands too from Chicago.
They were on my bus with amongst 50 people, pretty diverse ages. There were
about half a dozen or so college students, two 11-year-olds. And there
were, oh, well at least 35,000, 30,000, 50,000 people at the rally yesterday
around the Washington Monument. And it was a time, it was pretty cold. Washington DC is
not as cold as Chicago generally, but it was in the 30s and it was open and
pretty windy at times. So I want to talk about what we were doing there. And I have a
lot of background information and I'll say a little bit of that. But I
decided to go in late November when I heard Bill McKibben, the founder of
350.org, speak in Chicago. So this was a demonstration to oppose the Keystone
Pipeline. And this was a demonstration to support, well to oppose climate change
and to support sanity around energy policy. So I've been following
Bill McKibben's work for a while. He wrote a wonderful book called Earth, E-A-A-R-T-H,
which I've talked about here before. And I talk about this stuff sometimes.
Sometimes I talk about Zen koans also. But we just chanted the Metta Sutta,
which says may all beings be happy. And I don't take that as a platitude or
something theoretical. We are connected to all beings, including beings of the
future. So whether our children or our children's children have a habitable
planet is in question. And even for those of us who don't have children, I called
my nephews, a senior in college in California, from the rally. So climate
change is here, of course. Storm Sandy and Katrina and all of this extreme weather,
none of which by itself is caused by the climate change, but all of it is
exacerbated by it. And as Bill McKibben was saying, when I heard him in late
November, the business plan of the fossil fuel industry will certainly release far
more carbon into the atmosphere in the next several decades than can sustain
human life. I mean, this is science. This isn't speculation. He compared fossil
fuels to the tobacco industry and other industries that are damaging to life,
clearly, and talked about the need to stop the Keystone Pipeline. So I'm going to
talk about that and give some of the background about that before I talk
about just, you know, what happened yesterday. So he's been calling on trying
to stop the Keystone Pipeline and also calling on people to try and start a
campaign to divest from fossil fuels. He said, again, the fossil fuel industry's
business plan is detrimental to the future of human life. So compared to South
Africa, apartheid, which was ended partly by colleges and unions and other
organizations divesting from businesses doing business with apartheid.
Well, at this point, stopping further investment in fossil fuels and then
gradually stopping all investments. So I wrote for our Temple Facebook page
It is crucial for all future generations that we pressure our government policy
and policy makers to adopt a sane energy policy that addresses the climate change
happening around the world and shifts rapidly from fossil fuel to sustainable
energy sources. We still have time to lessen the suffering arising from climate
and environmental damage. This is a key moral issue of our time. This is maybe
the key moral issue of our times. So our practice is, of course, to sit upright,
face the wall, face ourselves, allow meditative awareness into our own lives
to see our own patterns of grasping and greed, hate, and delusion to see how
the spaciousness of meditative awareness can change how we respond to our own
lives and people around us, but also into the issues in our own world as well.
And we each may have our own way to respond to all of this. But actually, this
is a situation where there is something that can be done that will make a huge
change. And it's something that can be done in the next few months. So again, I
want to talk about what happened yesterday. But just as background, I wanted
to quote from a couple of articles. James Hansen, who's a NASA climate scientist
and considered maybe the primary climate scientist. Well, one thing he says,
if the Keystone pipeline goes through, it's game over. There's no chance to
avert catastrophic climate change. In an article on December 12th, he said,
amongst other things, that the science is clear. Climate change is here now. Super
storm Sandy, which has just happened, is not the first storm, certainly won't be
the last. No credible scientist disputes that we have warmed our climate by
almost one and a half degrees centigrade over land areas in the past century. Most
of that in the past 30 years. And in peer-reviewed studies published this
summer, climate extremes are already occurring much more frequently in the
world. We have warmed through our reliance on fossil fuels. So the
increase in climate extremes is much more than forecasted even 10 or 20 years
ago. Extreme summer heat anomalies used to be infrequent. They're much more now.
Such extremes have covered 10% of the land. We had the hottest year on record last year.
And I forget now, six of the ten hottest years on record were in the last ten
years, or maybe it's more than that. The heat also leads to more extreme
surface temperatures. Hansen says this was a key culprit behind Sandy's
devastating force. The latent heat and atmospheric water vapor is the fuel that
powers tornadoes, heart thunderstorms, and hurricanes. The chances of getting a
late October hurricane in New York without the help of global warming is
extremely small. Another article which is much longer and I can forward to any of
you interested is from a very good scholar, a peace scholar and an oil
scholar, fossil fuel scholar named Michael Clare, who was around when I was in
college during the Vietnam War. And the introduction to this article from
Thomas Dispatch, because of the international border that the Keystone
XL pipeline crosses coming from Canada, two people stand between us and its
construction, Secretary of State and President Obama, who alone will make the
final decision on whether the project will proceed. The new Secretary of State
who recently swept through the nomination process, former Senator John
Kerry, has expressed great concern about the climate already and he will be
deeply involved in the State Department's review of the pipeline. President Obama
on the State of the Union expressed very deep concern about climate change. I was
very happy to hear that and yet he faces this tremendous decision and the
pressures on the other side are very strong. The fossil fuel industry has huge
investments and many lobbyists. So Clare writes, presidential decisions often
turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a
president decides actually determines how the world turns, such as the case of
the Keystone XL pipeline, which if built is slated to bring some of the dirtiest
carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada to refineries on the US
Gulf Coast. It could determine the fate of the Canadian tar sands industry
and with it the future well-being of the planet. Again, just reading a little bit.
Alberta's tar sands are the continent's biggest carbon bomb. Clare is quoting
Bill McKibben. If you could burn all the oil on those tar sands, you'd run the
atmosphere's concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per
million, enough to cause the climate havoc we're currently seeing, to nearly
600 parts per million, which would mean, if not hell, then at least a world with a
similar temperature. Unquote. Clare goes on, extracting and processing tar sands is
an extraordinarily expensive undertaking, far more so than most conventional oil
drilling operations. Considerable energy is needed to dig the sludge out
of the ground or heat the water into steam for underground injection. Then
additional energy is needed for the various upgrading processes. The
environmental risks involved are enormous. The massive quantities of water
needed and the upgrading processes, for example, become
contaminated with toxic substances. Once used, they cannot be returned to any
water source that might end up in human drinking supplies, but that environmental
say that it's already occurring. All of this and the expenses involved mean that
the multi-billion dollar investments needed to launch a tar sands operation
can only pay off if the final product catches a healthy price in the
marketplace. Then he goes into it in the article about geography, that that only
will work if it comes through the United States, through the Midwest,
down to the Gulf. There are plans for pipelines to the east and west coast of
Canada. The stakes in this battle could not be higher. If Keystone XL
fails to win the president's approval, the industry will certainly grow at a
much lower pace. So a lot of it is up to President Obama. With the pressure he
faces from the fossil fuel industries, a lot of it is up to us to support and
pressure President Obama to do the right thing. So on Wednesday, the day after, this
last Wednesday, the day after the State of the Union speech, 48 people were
arrested protesting. This was leading up to the event yesterday, protesting the
Keystone pipeline. Amongst those arrested were James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., Julian Bond, the great civil rights leader, Darrell Hanna, the head of
the Sierra Club, Michael Broon. The Sierra Club has been very active in supporting all
of this and organizing for it. This is the first time that anybody in the Sierra Club
has expressed a similar disobedience. So it was really an amazing event yesterday.
Just the masses of people and the rally, the march, the march after the rally, just the
march around, very, very slow march around and to the front of the White House. It was
a powerful event. Not to mention the long bus rides before and after. So I thought I'd
just share with you some of the, some bits of some of the speeches at the rally, and
then some of just impressions of what I saw in terms of the march. And then just open
to discussion and questions and comments. Again, you know, I felt that, that I felt
I had to be there. Not that I felt that I had to pressure anybody else to be there,
but I wanted to be there just to report to you all and to witness to this event, which
is very important. And, you know, I feel the pressure for President Obama, it's really
up to him. This is a time when he can make the decision. It doesn't matter what Congress
does. It doesn't matter what anybody else does. It's up to him. So amongst the many
speakers at the rally itself, well, as I've mentioned, Bill McKibben talked about how
the business plan of the fossil fuel industry will certainly release far more carbon into
the atmosphere than can sustain human life. He said this is a fight for a living planet
and, and all the people there and the people supporting this are the antibodies of the
planet kicking in as the planet tries to fight its fever. The Arctic is melting. Half the
last winter, half the Arctic, the North Pole Arctic ice melted. It's unprecedented. So
McKibben said, when you're in a hole, stop digging. And that's what the Keystone pipeline
is. He said, again, President Obama can stop the Keystone with the stroke of a pen. So
he said, as a start, we need to keep pressuring President Obama to reject the Keystone pipeline
over the next several months. And to remember this in the hottest days of the year coming
in July. So this is something that all of us can do is just to keep calling and writing
to President Obama, encouraging him and supporting him.
Afterward, McKibben wrote, this was the biggest climate change rally in the United States
history. By our count, 50,000 people gathered by the Washington Monument that marched past
the White House demanding that President Obama block the Keystone pipeline and move forward
toward climate action. Today was the day. Finally, powerfully, decisively, the movement
to stop climate change has come together.
Amongst the other speakers, Van Jones spoke. I knew of his work in the Bay Area. He's done
a lot of good work there when I lived there. Organizing in Oakland, working to develop
green jobs. He had been working in the Obama administration as former green jobs czar.
He said, this is the last minute in the last quarter of the last game. That's how he put
it in terms of sports metaphors. In terms of what this means, in terms of the environment
and the climate. And he spoke directly to President Obama, who he knows. He kind of challenged
him and drew a line in the sand. He said, President Obama's legacy will be up to his decision
on the Keystone XL pipeline. And he said, anything good that you do or have done will
be wiped out by one thing. History will judge you 20 years from now. Based on one decision
alone. And it's in your hands alone. This is like jabbing a dirty needle into this country
from Canada, or like lighting a carbon bomb. So these are people saying this, are people
who have studied this, who are serious people. There were a couple of Native American leaders
there. There was a large contingent of indigenous people from Canada and elsewhere. One of them
was a woman named, a chief named Jacqueline Thomas. She's part of an indigenous alliance
from the British Columbia. I'm not going to pronounce Sycuse. I can't pronounce her tribe
correctly, but they're related to the Diné people who are cousins of the Navajo. And
she's from British Columbia, but her neighbors in the Alberta area where they're digging
up the tar sands are sick and their animals are sick and their land is sick. And she said
they, her alliance is going to stand firm trying to stop the pipeline that's destroying
their native lands. Already the pipeline is spilling in places. So one of the issues that,
you know, is that, and this is true with a lot of the energy companies that they say
that they're doing it safely and, you know, this is an issue with fracking as well. She
mentioned that in her area, there have been spills that are responsibility of Enbridge.
She mentioned Enbridge as helping to unite her, the native peoples in that area. And
she also mentioned Enbridge as last year, I think they were responsible for a leak of
tar sands oil on the Kalamazoo river in Michigan, near Nathan's hometown. So there have already
been leaks along places where parts of the Keystone pipeline are supposed to be. And
already some of this tar sands oil is being processed in Northern Indiana. So it's, this
very much affects our area, our region. There was another speaker, an investor and
I guess investment counselor named Tom Steyer. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name correctly.
He invests millions of dollars and guides multi-millions of dollars in investments. And as an investor,
he was talking about how fossil fuels are no longer a reasonable investment. And that
alternative energy is a better investment now instead. He said, he was talking about how
already in the world and in this country, there are changing views on fossil fuels, many
places in the world. And even in this country, you mentioned some places, Nebraska, he gave
specific examples. And in Texas, there are places that are now relying increasingly on
wind and solar and other alternative energy sources for their energy.
Michael Broon, who was the executive director of the Sierra Club, who was one of the people
who was arrested for civil disobedience Wednesday. There was no civil disobedience, by the way,
in the event yesterday. It was just a large group of people expressing their opposition
to the Keystone. But anyway, Michael Broon, when he was in his talk yesterday, predicted
that President Obama would veto this $7 billion project because of the adverse effects developed
that the Canadian oil sands would have on the global climate. It's rare that a president
has such a singular voice on such a major policy decision, Mr. Broon said. Whatever
damage approving the pipeline would do to the environmental movement pales in comparison
to the damage it would do to his own legacy. There's also an interest, you know, the argument
for the pipeline has to do with jobs and the economy. And, you know, there's a very
good counter-argument that alternative energy sources long term could be a much better source
of jobs and economy. Another one of the speakers was Reverend Lennox Yearwood from the Hip
Hop Caucus, who was one of the major organizers of the event, kind of a cheerleader type guy.
He compared the rally to Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington for civil rights.
But he said, well, they were fighting for equality, we're fighting for existence. So it's a pretty
heavy situation. And, you know, in terms of precepts and moral values, you know, it's
easy to, you know, kind of go on day to day and ignore what's going on. And then there's,
you know, a big storm or a hurricane and, you know, but the droughts in the Midwest,
you know, affects food prices. It's around us, it's happening all around the world.
So just to finish up, a little bit about the rally itself. There was, you know, there were
a lot of people from, and it was very diverse, from diverse ages, especially kids, a lot
of older people, a lot of young people. I liked a lot of the signs. I just jotted down
some of them. There was a picture, a drawing of the planet Earth with the caption, I like
our planet, can we keep it? Another sign, again, with another hand-drawn picture of
the Earth said, with a caption, no planet B. There was this man in this full polar bear
costume with a sign, hands off our Arctic. There was a guy, one of the parts that was
kind of, that for me was kind of cool was just being in front of the White House. And
then we heard later that actually President Obama wasn't there, you know, we were wondering
if he was going to look out and see us. But apparently he was in Florida playing golf
with Tiger Woods. Well, I'm sure he heard about it anyway. But in front of the White
House, there was this army captain with, you know, full uniform and full decorations, and
he was speaking to some media, and he was speaking very eloquently about how serious
the climate damage is, climate change, and the need to protect our environment, talking
about projects, you know, he was in the military to take care of the environment. Another sign
I saw said, don't change our climate, change our energy system. And one that I liked particularly
said, we can't keep careening from disaster to disaster. That's kind of what it feels
like we're doing now. So, you know, I found the whole thing very inspiring. I'm glad I
went. I'm still a little bit tired. I've heard there hasn't been that much media attention,
but I'm sure President Obama heard about it, and the politicians and fuel companies, fossil
fuel companies heard about it. And I wanted you to know about it. And I know some people
from our song that went, there was a climate event here in Chicago. I don't know if anybody
here was at that, we can report, but some people in our song went. And I think a couple
of other people who aren't here went yesterday, I didn't see them, but to Washington. Anyway,
I did want to leave time for comments or questions or discussion. And again, I have a lot more
material, just knowing the science and the background of the whole thing, if people have
questions about that. But I'll just stop for now. So questions, comments, responses, please
feel free. Dawn.
Well, thanks for going and sharing. I was wondering, because I wasn't sure about when
the decision would have to be made, but when is the deadline for that? Is there a deadline?
I'm not sure if there is, I'm not sure, I don't know. I think he's put it off a couple
of times. And I'm not sure if there's exactly a deadline, but it's supposed to be in the
next few months or so. So I don't know the answer to that. Bill McKibben mentioned July,
so maybe it's as far away as that. But in the next half year anyway, for sure. I think
at some point the pipeline companies need to know or else they just can't do it. And
so it's a huge impact on fossil fuel companies and actually on the whole fossil fuel industry.
So the pressures on him are going to be tremendous to say yes, which is why there's no way he's
not going to say yes unless there's a lot of pressure from people. So all of us can write
a call or whatever.
Well, I know that up where my folks live in Bemidji, Minnesota, they have some kind of
pipeline just going through, and that's where they're trying to buy it. But one of the big
things is that there's jobs to be had, right? But in building, they brought up people from
Mexico, so people with local jobs, and that was kind of a too-bad-for-thing. But there
was cool Mexican restaurants that opened up, you know, up in Bemidji, Minnesota. So that
was great. But then we just went up there, and that's shut down now. And my folks are
like, it's terrible. I mean, some families have relocated up to Bemidji, these families
from Mexico, these Mexican families, but now they're gone. And there's really, once they've
been building, unless it's a major area, there are no jobs there, really. And so that's kind
of, you know, it's too bad. If that is a major argument, then for a minute, there might be
jobs, but yeah, it's not going to look good.
Yeah, that's a very important point, and this is happening all along the way in these projects
that there's the advertisement for it, the promotion for it is based on job picture.
Lots of jobs. This is happening with the fracking things, too. Lots of jobs and the economy,
but actually then they bring workers from Mexico or elsewhere who will take less money,
so it's not that many jobs for local people. And then once it's built, they go away, but
the pipeline is still there, and the chance of spills is still there, and the effect on
the land, on the local land, is long-term negative.
I'm glad that there are jobs for the people, the families that are coming up.
Yeah, but long-term in terms of the economy. Another point is that there is development,
and President Obama talked about this, that places like China and India and Russia are
developing alternative energy sources, and that is developing, actually, and if we worked
on that, that has potential for longer-term sustainable jobs and economic growth.
Bill.
Well, just on that last point, I would like to know how the Keystone pipeline is so much
a tipping point compared to some of these things that are going on in China, especially
where I know they're developing some alternatives, but they also do a lot of things that are
extremely destructive of the environment. But even apart from that, I'd just like to
understand better how the Keystone is such a tipping point, as far as James Hansen understands
it. The other thing I'd like to know more about is what are the specific corporations
that are behind the Keystone that most stand to benefit. And I guess that just goes to
another concern, which is I wonder to what extent did people address simply the question
of capitalism and the fact that it's predicated on never-extending consumption and predicated
on the accumulation of profit, apart from whether the world keeps going or not. That's
not really part of the calculations that capitalism takes into account.
Well, that's a different issue that did not specifically come up yesterday, and that's
something that is also something to discuss. But in terms of just the, at this point, survival
of the economy, I think it's a tipping point because of how dangerous the tar sands are,
in terms of how dirty the tar sands are. Dirty in the technical sense of carbon dioxide,
carbon footprint in terms of the whole total. Well, the part I read about the oil and the
tar sands. Oh, one other point, going back to what Don was saying, another argument that's
made is that this will help our not being dependent on foreign fuel, but actually all
the tar sands oil, the reason they're shipping it to the Gulf of Mexico is that almost all
of it is going to go overseas. It's not going to be used domestically. It's all going to
China and other places. So it's actually not for domestic use even. So that's just one
other point. But part of why this is so bad, the part that I read, which I can read again
from McKibben, that there's a 350.org, the website that has a lot of answers to a lot
of this, but 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is what's safe.
And Laurel may know more about this too. Yeah, we're up to 393.6. Okay. Yeah. So we have
to bring it down actually, but this source, the tar sands will bring it to nearly 600
parts per million, which means there's no way we ever bring it back down just to something
that's sustainable, that is part of the human habitat. In terms of corporations, I can send
you Michael Clare's article, which has a lot more detail. I just quoted little bits of
it, but, and I'll send that to you if you'd like, which mentions a lot of the corporations,
but it mentions, I'll read you one part, the availability of so much untapped energy in
a country like Canada, which is a private enterprise friendly and where the political dangers
are few, has been a magnet for major international energy firms. Not surprisingly, many of them,
including ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell have invested heavily
in tar sands operations. So that's the answer to one of your questions.
GP is the one at the end.
Okay. Yeah. So if you'd like, I can send you this article, which has a lot more information.
Laurel.
But I do think it's a really important point that the tar sands is one big important part
of a very large issue that has other things that we need to change. And one of them is
we really need to have a carbon tax in this country. We really need to have a carbon market
because 20 plus percent of the emissions in the world come from deforesting rainforests,
et cetera. And if you had a carbon tax, then people would have to pay to not cut those
trees down. And that would also save a lot of biodiversity. So that's a huge, huge, huge,
huge piece of it that has multiple benefits. And I think when we're talking to our elected
officials, we should tell them we need a carbon market because people need to pay to invest
and that money needs to get used to save the forest so they're not cut down. And in Canada,
they do have a carbon tax.
Yeah. So, yeah, the Keystone pipeline is not the only bit of it. But one point that I forget
who made it yesterday, maybe it was Bill McKibben, maybe Dan Jones, but that if President Obama
does this, if he stops the Keystone pipeline, it will be the first time that a major world
leader has done something to actually stop the spread of climate change. It would be
just that happening would be a major event. And he can do it without any, he doesn't need
Congress's approval or anything. He can just do it himself. But he needs popular support.
Jeremy?
Yeah, I hope this will be useful. There's a trend that's occurring also with the fossil
fuel industry that's getting more desperate, which is why this is even a subject. The reason
why the fossil fuel industry is so lucrative or why it was so lucrative is because you
used to be able to find oil that was just sitting on top of the land and you could go scoop
it with a spoon and go ahead and refine it that way. And this is why it's called black
gold. It's because you could literally just take the stuff, do very little refining and
turn it into whatever you needed. And the thing about the tar sands is they're so energy
intensive in order to change them into something useful. That's the trend we're headed in.
The availability of this fossil fuels is getting to be lower and lower and lower and lower
that places like Saudi Arabia that was once a place where you could just literally take
a straw, you know, a big straw and just suck it out, which is like heavy blood, and get
it really cheaply. Now they are indeed going into the ocean doing offshore drilling, which
is also very energy intensive. So if this Keystone pipeline could be stopped, I mean,
that's like, it's a huge blow to the industry because you're saying that it's like it's no
longer okay to be desperate to get this energy, right? You can't go to the nth degree to get
this energy anymore. It's just not worth it. It's amazing.
Yeah, that's an important point. It's related to the British Petroleum, Deepwater Horizon
spill in the Gulf Coast that destroyed so much of that whole biosystem because that's
also another example of the deepwater drilling is also, you know, kind of a desperate, very,
very dangerous process to get oil from, you know, that's it's unsafe. They don't really
have the safety measures. And that's the same with the tar sands pipelines, really. So yeah,
so there's so many. So in terms of the safety of the environment and of human beings, the
fracking is another example of a very dangerous technology. So just in terms of sanity and
sustainability, developing safer alternatives is, you know, it's going to take a shift in
how we live, you know, it's going to take a shift in political culture and all kinds
of things. But it's in terms of, you know, our surviving, it's going to have to happen.
Who gets it?
So I love, you know, Kim's kind of comparison to smoking.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, tax it. And, you know, people stop. Because what it does is it interrupts
a certain kind of habit. Because to me there's this addictive quality that's just like everything
that we do. I don't see it as particularly evil by nature. I just feel like people have
habits. You know, in European cities, they tax the heck out of people to park and use
cars. I mean, the consciousness in Europe is totally different. Like everybody knows.
And so, like, their habits have been interrupted by, you know, taxing things and having a political
process. And so, you know, what I hear you doing with us is trying to interrupt our habit
of just thinking, you know, these carbon, you know, fuel products are fabulous and we'll
just cruise around in our cars and not invest in things. But I think of it, you know, as
sort of this turnaround of habit, which is something that Zazen, I think, is really helpful with.
Yes, indeed.
You know, and really being present with, like, how, like, I was thinking sucking the oil
out of the girth of a straw. Gross. So, like, that's a nice image to carry around every
time I put my key in my car.
Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, that's the connection to our practice. And, you know,
I talk about this stuff and I always feel a little nervous because, you know, I'm just
talking about Koans and Dogon all the time or something. But, you know, our Bodhisattva
practice is to actually see what we're doing individually, but also how that connects with
how we are in the world. And yeah, it's about habit and change. And the example of smoking
is such a good one. I remember when, I've told this story, when I was 17 and I learned
to smoke and it wasn't easy. And I was so proud of myself because I could actually inhale
and smoke. And, you know, I had to learn how to do it. And back then that was glamorous.
All the movie stars did it and, you know, and our society has changed. It really has.
It's not with, you know, apologies to any of you here who actually still smoke. It's,
you know, it's not, it's not glamorous anymore. So it's possible to change. That's the point.
And we see that in our own lives and in practice and doing Zazen regularly. It is possible
to change our habits. And, you know, South Africa is another example. Apartheid ended
relatively peacefully. It's not perfect, but, and the Berlin wall coming down in the Soviet
Union, things can change. In fact, that's one of the first principles of Buddhism, that
things change. So as entrenched as it feels like we have to live this way in terms of
fossil fuels, there are alternatives. So thank you.