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Longtime environmental writer and activist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben has won the 2010 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Speaking outside the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancún, McKibben says, “In certain ways, [a U.S. walkout] would be the best thing that could happen. For 15 years … the U.S. comes and says, weaken the agreement so we can get Congress to go along. Then Congress doesn’t agree anyway. It’s wrecked the whole process, time after time after time, and now the U.S. is doing it again.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Cancún, Mexico. For more on the issue of the WikiLeaks cables and the international climate change talks, I spoke with the longtime environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben here in Cancún. He’s the founder of 350.org and the winner of the 2010 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. He received the prize last night in New York along with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards.

Well, here in Cancún on Saturday night, just before he flew to New York, I asked Bill McKibben about his reaction to the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showing how the U.S. manipulated last year’s climate talks in [Copenhagen].

 BILL McKIBBEN: Some of the new data coming out today makes it clear that everyone’s suspicion that the U.S. was both bullying and buying countries into endorsing their do-little position on climate were even sort of worse than we had realized. You know, the sums that people were tossing around and the demands that they were making of small nations, in particular, to endorse their stand were pretty-were pretty gross, not because it comes as any great surprise that we toss our power around-that’s what we do-but because on this issue, above all else, you know, in the end, making some political agreement enforcing our particular set of interests is such a bad idea, because it’s physics and chemistry that are actually driving the tune. And we can, you know, win every fight because we’re powerful and wealthy and whatever, and we’re still going to lose the war just as badly as everybody else. So, I think it kind of undermines the bankruptcy of a lot of this COP process and the fact that we’re going to need, in civil society, to build a movement big enough to really exert some power. I don’t know whether we can do that. We haven’t done it yet. The oil industry and their friends in the U.S. government are, you know, winning most of the battles. But we’re going to keep trying. And this gives us kind of new impetus to do it.