Bill McKibben, Co-Founder of 350.org and author of The End of Nature, will be holding an online Chat at Washingtonpost.com today. You can submit questions in advance or during the chat.

Bill had a powerful piece in yesterday’s Washington Post:

Imagine an American president willing to take his Cabinet underwater off the Florida Keys. Or, more realistically, imagine an American president who would take the press corps to Glacier National Park so they could hike the dwindling ice fields, then fly them above the millions of acres of dead lodgepole pines covering much of the West, and then take them to stand on the levees in New Orleans. These are the kinds of stunts Obama knew how to pull off when he was running for president; they seem to be the kind of things he forgot about once he got the office.

And they’re exactly what he needs to do if we’re going to deal with climate in the short time science gives us. A mediocre health-care bill is one thing; you can probably come back in a generation and make it stronger. People may suffer in the meantime, but the problem won’t become logarithmically worse. The climate, on the other hand, is full of traps and tipping points — let it get warm enough to melt the permafrost that locks away vast supplies of methane, and no future president will be able to control the heating. If there were ever a challenge that called for focus, this is it.

Via 350:

Van Jones resigned his White House post as green jobs adviser after a week of incessant attacks from the far right of American politics claiming that he was a communist or a black nationalist or wild-eyed. These are wrong–we’ve known Van for years, and there’s no more thorough-going capitalist in the environmental movement, completely committed to the principle that before we talked about polar bears we needed to talk about jobs.

Youth climate activists the world over have been wearing green hard hats the last few years largely because of Van’s example. And no one spent more time trying to bridge the gaps between races and classes than Van, addressing one of the environmental movement’s most glaring weaknesses.

The reason the right wanted to bring him down was that he was effective. And if there’s even a glimmer of good news here, it’s that he’ll be freed from the restrictions of high officialdom to bring all his eloquence and all his energy to bear on the challenges we face. We’re very proud to be among his many many colleagues.

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Time Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world hit newsstands the other day. Out of 100 individuals named, 11 have a direct connection to energy, sustainability or environmentalism. Here is a list of the 11, with an excerpt from each piece and a link to their full entry in the Time 100.

T. Boone Pickens, by Ted Turner:

Boone and I have a lot in common. We’ve both made a lot of money, and we’ve also given a lot of it away. For all his accomplishments, I respect Boone most for his vision, generosity and can-do attitude. He recognizes that investing in renewable energy isn’t just the right thing to do for the environment; it’s the smartest and most prudent financial investment we can make in these times. It’s a win-win opportunity, and when we’re talking about our kids’ and grandkids’ future, I’m listening to the man with the plan.

Ted Turner, by T. Boone Pickens:

Ted is America’s largest private landowner: 2 million acres from coast to coast. And that’s not including his properties in Argentina. He’s an environmental poster child for people who dream about pristine prairies and use terms like self-sustaining and zero carbon footprint. Just as important, his landholdings are profitmakers that generate income from ecotourism, forestry, ranching, farming and oil and gas leases.

Alexander Medvedev, by Dmitri Trenin:

If Alexei Miller, Gazprom’s CEO, is the company’s public face and conduit to the Russian political leadership, Alexander Medvedev, head of Gazprom Export, is its link to the outside world. One-third of the gas consumed in Europe passes through Medvedev’s hands, and 60% of Gazprom’s total revenues come from exports.

Robin Chase, by Craig Newmark:

The culture of the internet, at its best, involves people working together to make life better. Sometimes called cooperative capitalism or social entrepreneurship, it is practiced every day by millions of individuals and a small but growing number of for-profit companies. For years, Robin Chase, a co-founder of Zipcar, has run such a business, in which people share a community-based pool of vehicles. Customers use Zipcar, which rents cars by the day or hour (when public transportation won’t quite do the job) and makes smart use of technology like GPS to connect people with autos and trucks that are parked near them.

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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.