Bill McKibbens @ Collingwood Town Hall

Most accounts of how we are tracking against climate change are bipolar. There are the pitch black scientific predictions - Old Testament stuff of fires and floods, tidal waves and droughts. Their polar opposite is deliverance arriving at the hands of a startup wunderkind or market certainty of falling photovoltaic cell prices or a march on city hall.

Bill McKibbens has heard it all before. As founder of 350.org, and author of the first book that popularised the science of climate change The End of Nature published in 1989 he spoke at Collingwood Town Hall last week.

He was able to put the grim reality succinctly. To a packed house, he projected a photo taken in 2012 from space of the polar ice caps with the outline of how much they has shrunk in the past three decades. “It’s even more than that because the ice that is still there is thinner” You could hear a pin drop.

He also spoke about going diving in the Great Barrier Reef - bleached coral as soulless “as a parking lot”. “It was a very dark time for me.” he confessed.

Yet Bill is not one to linger in the dark. As a native of Vermont - he shares a temperament with that other famous resident that he announced was running for President. Like Bernie he is shabbily entertaining, eloquent, optimistic and imbued with a frenetic energy that demands direct action.

Bill told his story of writing and writing, expecting that eventually the weight of evidence would build and global action would necessarily follow. He admitted it was naive. Shell Oil, he explained, already knew that climate change was a reality, having calibrated their oil rigs for rising sea levels. Instead they engaged in a phoney debate to buy time. This, Bill explained, was the “architecture of denial”.

Now was time to act. Bill described how he lead a group of crunchy academics on a small march from Burlington across Vermont. Bernie Sanders met them on the way and hopping up and down announced that he’d seen nothing like it since the Vietnam war, they had his full support and “what were they protesting against?” Bill explained how then a group undergraduate students divided the seven continents amongst themselves to begin movements on each to protest climate change. What began in Vermont continued coalesced into a global movement - this was the story of 350.org.

By the conclusion of his talk Bill explained that three things needed to happen now: “a transition to 100% renewables”, “no new fossil fuel projects” and “not a penny more for dirty energy.”

This last point was the most interesting of the night. Climate change has begun to receive serious corporate funding. Out front of Collingwood Town Hall, a van from Ben & Jerry’s were giving out free ice-cream. In the foyer there were tables with glossy brochures from Future Super, Australia Bank and Impact Investment Group, all sponsors and proudly displaying their pledge never to fund fossil fuel projects.

Warming up for Bill was Brynn O’Brien. Brynn told her story of moving from an office “hell has harbour views” to become executive director for Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility. This group was responsible for lobbying Rio Tinto and BHP to move away from fossil fuels - with extraordinary success. Their method was simple. They influenced international super funds to divest their vast pools of money away from mining giants that mined for fossil fuels. It seemed to be working as Brynn listed the success after success - having just the day before achieved “the largest shareholder revolt on climate in Australian corporate history” at the annual general meeting of Rio Tinto.

The takeaway for the night was the dynamic between words, money and action in the Climate change movement. Bill seemed to feel that at this present moment words had begun to lose their power - they could be too easily twisted and co-opted. Action on the other hand had direction and momentum. Money was the darkest horse. The cheers at Bill’s mention of any protest against corporate power implied that most present were deeply cynical about the influence of money. So it was a revelation that collective action could mean collective wealth - outside merely exercising one’s rights as a consumer. Instead vast sums of money could be used to change minds that understood no other language than cash. And as the crowd shuffled out through the foyer again they seemed more eager to chat the representatives of the corporate sponsors.