Post Carbon Fellow Bill McKibben’s talk on his Yale campus visit as a Chubb Fellow was reported in Yale News.

From the article:

He noted that other historic mass extinctions were driven by the release of “massive qualities” of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when natural deposits of coal, gas, or oil were burned in active volcanoes.

“Now it is us who is doing the burning, and we’re doing it more quickly than we’ve ever seen in the geologic record,” he said.

There is still a chance, however, that the tide of environmental harm could be turned, said McKibben.

“We’ve been given a great gift in the last decade,” he told his audience. “The engineers have done their job and done it very, very well indeed. The price of a solar panel has fallen 80% in the last decade. Around the world in most places, wind power is the cheapest way that we can produce electrons. That means that because of that gift of the engineers, we’re at the outer edge of possibly changing those numbers [of rising Earth temperatures due to fossil fuels].”