Post Carbon Fellow Bill McKibben was quoted in this article on recent student protests to demand climate action.

From the article:

“Young people have long been at the forefront of climate action,” Bill McKibben, environmental activist and author, told ThinkProgress. It was a group of seven university students who formed climate group 350.org with McKibben in 2008.

One reason younger people are good at leading such activist movements, he said, is “they haven’t yet become as set in their ways, I guess would be the way to say it. It’s not as scary for them to contemplate changes in the way we do things on our planet. And so they’re the natural leaders here.”

But there’s another factor that can’t be ignored: Today’s youth will be forced to live with the consequences of decades of inaction on climate change. “I’m going to be dead before things are at their absolute worst,” McKibben said. “If you’re 12 right now, this is going to dominate your entire life. And so it stands to reason that you’d be some combination of angry, scared, determined, hopeful.”