In a wide ranging interview with Yale’s E360, environmental leader Bill McKibben lays out what the United States must accomplish in the next six months in order to be taken seriously internationally on climate change. The full interview is worth reading.

e360: We talked about the Obama administration, and the need to give them more space and more room to work. But to do what? What steps do you see that the U.S. needs to take, particularly before the Copenhagen [international climate] talks in December?

McKibben: We sure need a strong cap on carbon. All else is commentary — the tax, what you do with the money. But we need to stop putting so much into the atmosphere, and it’s got to be clear that’s going to happen. And until we commit to that, our credibility to talk with anybody else about all this is as under water as our mortgages. So that’s what I hope we are going to see.

And we also need, and I think Obama realizes this, too, some really powerful diplomacy to figure out how we are going to be able to bring especially the developing world into some scenario that cuts carbon quickly. Because it is not going to be easy. Hard enough for us here in the rich world, much harder for people still mired in the poor world, for whom burning all that cheap coal is the most obvious way out.

On a related note, Nature has a great review of James Lovelock’s new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning.