The Era Of Climate Change Is Here - And This Is Our Only Way Out — Prof. Bill McKibben

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Our timeframe for the really active deployment of these things lasts through about the end of the decade. And I think at the end of the decade, we're probably going to have to look around, see precisely where we are, and decide whether we proceed with truly terrifying schemes like geoengineering, which nobody wants to do, but which may become eventually a break the glass solution that we have little choice but to at least consider. [00:00:42] Speaker 2: Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, author and journalist, also Schumann, distinguished scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, credited as having written the first ever book on climate change for a general audience called The End of Nature. Last year, he released another very compelling title. Here comes the sun, a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. Professor McKibben, welcome to the show. [00:01:06] Speaker 1: Well, very, very good to be with you. [00:01:08] Speaker 2: A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Professor Michael Mann, the famous climatologist, and his general point about our predicament was kind of that, yes, the state of climate change is bad, but it's not too late to avoid the most disastrous effects on our planet if we act now. I presume that was a pretty reasonable stance. However, I was kind of taken aback at how many straight up pissed off comments the episode received. I'm talking about real vitriol here, all sorts of mad conspiratorial things being thrown at the good professor. Mind you, this was not from climate denialists, but from doomists who accept the basic reality of global warming, but say it's too late and we should just give up and go live on a snowy mountain or something. Now, there's a wider scientific context to all this. Professor Mann falls on one kind of more optimistic end of the spectrum. And then we find James Hansen, the so-called godfather of climate science, on the other. He seems to believe that the amount of heating that is already baked into our climate is so great that the famous IPCC reports are practically meaningless and that we should attempt a more dramatic intervention now, a geoengineering one, for example, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight back into space. Now, I did some research, always a crazy thing for a podcaster to say, by the way, usually doesn't end well, and realized that the science around this accelerated warming debate has very much not been settled. So before we talk about renewables, I wanted to ask you, which side of the aisle do you fall on? Do we still have time to get ourselves out of this mess? [00:02:48] Speaker 1: We don't have time to get ourselves out of this mess. We've already raised the temperature of the planet considerably, and it's already caused enormous trouble. And the temperature is going to go up further, and it's going to cause yet more trouble, even if we do everything right at this point. The question is, I think, whether or not we still retain the power to lessen the eventual impact, whether or not we can start shaving tenths of a degree off how hot the planet will eventually get, which doesn't sound like an enormous amount. But we think that at this point, each tenth of a degree that we raise the temperature moves another 100 million or so people from a relatively safe climate zone to a relatively dangerous one. Stopping global warming is not on the menu. It may still be on the menu to stop it short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the knees. But we're cutting that very close. I think the things that Jim Hansen ... First of all, Jim Hansen has been correct on the general direction of the climate for a very long time. You would have lost a lot of money betting against him over the years. And I think that it's becoming clearer with each passing issue of science or nature that we're in very perilous territory when it comes to things like the great ocean currents of the Atlantic, the savannification of the Amazon. The very biggest systems on planet Earth are now coming under extraordinary stress. So I'm very worried. And I also think that we suddenly have a scalable set of tools with which to try and change the outcome some, that being cheap wind and sun and batteries. And so we should use them as fast as we can, which is faster than we currently are, and see where we can get. My guess is that our time frame for the really active deployment of these things lasts through about the year. And I think at the end of the decade. And I think at the end of the decade, we're probably going to have to look around, see precisely where we are, and decide whether we proceed with truly terrifying machines like geoengineering, which nobody wants to do, but which may become eventually a break the glass solution that we have little choice, but to at least consider. [00:06:10] Speaker 2: On a little more hopeful note, as of 2026, Clean Power is supplying over one third of global electricity mix, I believe, which I think even a decade ago would have been a pretty preposterous projection. The sheer speed and affordability, particularly of solar, has defied all odds. In the introduction of the book, you write, "We are on the verge of turning to the heavens for energy [00:06:33] Speaker 1: instead of to hell." What happened? Well, what's happened is a completely fascinating story over the last six or seven decades. The first solar cell was invented in 1954, Edison, New Jersey, Bell Laboratories. And at the time it was invented, it was the most expensive source of electricity on the planet. Literally the only thing you could use it for was satellites because you had no alternative. Over time, a mix of activism and engineering steadily, steadily lowered that price. You know, we had the first solar-powered home in 1971 or so in the U.S. By the end of the decade, Jimmy Carter, the President of the United States, was putting solar panels on the roof of the White House. We were on an interesting trajectory that was interrupted by the election of Ronald Reagan and the power of the oil industry. But that trajectory resumed at the turn of the a century. This time, not in America, but in Germany, where the Green Party held the balance of power in the parliamentary system and used their leverage to demand what the Germans call the Energiewende. Basically, it was a subsidy for people who put high-priced solar panels on roofs. And the government, the German government paid that subsidy essentially to Chinese factories to figure out how to start producing these solar panels more cheaply. That work kept going and a quarter century later. And it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from setting things on fire. That was a big moment in human history. Humans have been setting stuff on fire for 700,000 years at least. You know, Darwin said that language and fire were the two features that marked our species out. And fire was pretty good for us. You know, we learned how to cook food. That helped give us the big brain. We were able to move north and south from the equator. When we learned to control the combustion of fossil fuel, coal, gas, oil, coal, gas, oil, coal, gas, oil, we called that the industrial revolution. And it produced modernity, all that we know around us. But eventually, the cost has become very, very high for all that burning. There's not only the most important thing, the destruction of the planet's climate system on which we all depend, but there's also just the straight up fact that 9 million people a year on this planet die about one death in five from breathing the combustion byproducts of those fossil fuels. And then there's the ongoing realization that as long as we depend on scarce fossil fuel deposits, we're going to be fighting wars over who controls them, as this year has demonstrated. So it's very good news that we now have a affordable, indeed cheaper alternative in the form of sun and wind. The question now becomes, will we deploy it fast enough to give us some chance in this climate fight? 40 years from now, we're going to run the planet on sun and wind on sheer economics. But if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken one. [00:10:47] Speaker 2: Why 40 years if the economics are sound now? You said purely on economics. [00:10:53] Speaker 1: Yes, because two things, two factors, inertia and vested interest, both of which are important players in human affairs. So inertia, we've got a massive system that we've built up over 200 years of pipelines and refineries and gas stations and, you know, on and on and on. That just, that takes a while to replace and dismantle. It would be possible to do it very quickly, I think, were it not for the vested interest. People who own oil wells and coal mines aren't happy at this new development. That's because at current market prices, the oil that they have in the ground is worth, depends on the day, but 30 or 40 trillion dollars. That gives you a lot of incentive to corrupt our political systems so that we'll keep doing what we're doing at the moment or transition off it as slowly as possible. I mean, the oil companies are well aware, because their scientists were studying this back in the 1980s when I was writing my book, that the price of slowing this down is destroying the planet. But they seem willing to pay that price, eager to really. [00:12:22] Speaker 2: So despite having this potential for nearly limitless energy at only a fraction of a cost, the adoption of renewables is somehow still having, like you said, to prove itself against fossil fuels, this dirty, noxious relic of a technology from the 19th century, really, but somehow still very much one of the forces running our world. How, if we're being a bit more concrete, has this industry in light of everything we know about where they're taking us managed to hold onto power and even slow [00:12:52] Speaker 1: down our efforts to electrify our civilization? Well, I mean, let's look at my country. Donald Trump, when he was running for president two years ago, convened all the executives of the oil industry and told them quite publicly that if they donated a billion dollars to his campaign, he would give them anything they wanted. They donated and advertised and lobbied at closer to half a billion dollars. But that turned out to be enough because Trump, true to his word, has enacted a series of policies designed to help them and to actively depress the growth of renewable energy. He's closed down wind farms that were 90% complete off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. He's spent billions of dollars in taxpayer money buying back the rights to harvest the wind off those coasts in order to make sure no one ever does. He's put all federal land off limits to solar energy. He's taken away any support for the transition to electric vehicles and indeed made it much more expensive to drive those on and on and on. So this doesn't stop dead in its tracks, the progress of renewable energy. Its economics are favorable enough that it continues to grow even in places like Texas that are the heart of the hydrocarbon industry. But it grows much more slowly than it would. Around the world, Trump has used his tariff policy to coerce countries into buying American liquefied natural gas. The way you got out of, you're in Japan at the moment, the way that Japan was able to reduce its tariffs somewhat was to promise to buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American LNG, on and on. Now, the other side of this is that Trump is so stupid and ill-equipped to be the other side. America's war in Iran, ill-planned, ill-executed, ill-conceived notion, has turned out to be a great boon for clean energy. Around the world, leaders have realized that though sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. And so, especially in Asia, but in other parts of the world too, there's been a very, very rapid increase in, say, the sales of EVs or the transition to building out big solar farms in countries like the Philippines or Vietnam or Thailand. People are understanding that not only is it an environmental risk to depend on fossil fuel, it's also a geopolitical risk. So, look, it's not clear exactly how all of this were going to play out, but it's very clear that around the world, the oil industry is doing everything it can to keep its business model alive. I mean, I assume that the CEOs and shareholders of [00:16:30] Speaker 2: Shell and BP and Exxon have kids, maybe even grandkids. I'm genuinely curious, if you're one of these people, what kind of wild acrobatic figures do you have to perform in your mind to justify the degradation, if not destruction of the world of your immediate descendants? The mind boggles, truly. [00:16:50] Speaker 1: I think that at heart their calculation is, if I can make enough money, I can insulate myself and my family from the chaos that's here and the greater chaos that's coming. Build a bunker in New Zealand. Well, I mean, it's very literally what a number of these people are doing. [00:17:11] Speaker 2: It still doesn't make a lot of sense to me, like a bunker where you're going to spend the rest of your days isolated from everybody and from everything you liked in the world. I mean, what's going on here? [00:17:23] Speaker 1: Not my cup of tea either. That's why I've spent my life trying to move us in the opposite direction. [00:17:29] Speaker 2: Another twist that not many Western pundits expected or predicted is the rise of China as an absolute green energy titan. They're not only installing renewables at a breakneck speed, they're also producing most of the green tech that we use worldwide. And yet it seems that instead of kind of trying to learn something from them, we are much more content with wagging our greasy fingers at China claiming that they're still the biggest polluters. So we should just take it easy on our side and kick the can down the road like we're used to. I also want to address that. But before I do, I want to ask you, how did China manage to call this bet in such a spot on manner? It's like James Bond and Casino Royale or something. And the rest of us are Le Chiffre. [00:18:12] Speaker 1: There's a lot not to admire in the Chinese system. It's a repressive government. I'm well aware that had I spent my life doing in China what I've done in the US. I would have spent my life in jail. [00:18:27] Speaker 2: You did spend some time in jail in the US. [00:18:29] Speaker 1: I've spent some time in jail. That's true. But it's also true that China has elevated, tended to elevate, where America has tended to elevate lawyers to positions of importance in its government. China has tended to rely on engineers. That's the most common career track for Communist Party officials. And engineering brings with it a certain dose of reality. The Chinese realized a few things, I think. One, they understood very clearly the dangers posed by climate change. China's exquisitely dependent on, for instance, the Himalayas for their supply of water. And they understand that the trend lines are not great in the Himalayas, as we were reminded by the collapse of that glacier on the Nepalese-Tibetan border. The Chinese also have great risk that comes from sea level rise. Most of their manufacturing capacity is concentrated on the Pearl River Delta, which is a few meters above sea level. But they also, I think, understood that there was enormous opportunity here. That the combination of clean energy and electrification was opening up a new industrial frontier that they were ready to exploit. Remember, they got into some of these businesses very much at the behest of the West. They started learning about batteries because they were the cheap labor force to build iPhones and things like that. And a battery in an EV is essentially a scaled-up version of the one in your phone. And so they were well positioned. And they made a series, as you say, of bets in their ongoing five-year plans to stakeout territory. And now they're being handsomely rewarded for it. The last numbers I saw showed that the value of the green tech that China exported in the last year was roughly half again as much as the value of the oil and gas that the U.S. exported in the same time frame. So it turns out that they're already profiting from this, and it's pretty clear that they've made the right bet about the future. The, you know, I don't think there's anyone who looks ahead 20 years and thinks, I'd rather be in the oil business than the battery business, you know, because it's pretty clear where the future is heading. China also has a growing, they've also, I think, decided that this is their ticket to a kind of global legitimacy that they've lacked in the past because of their authoritarian system. They've become supplanted, the U.S., in many of the kind of U.N. and international forums, when America walked away, say, from the Paris Climate Accords and the UNFCCC climate negotiations that are held every year, China was only too happy to step into the breach and become the responsible player in these questions. It's embarrassing for Americans to have our officials wandering around the world telling people that climate change isn't real and that they should shut down their wind turbines and, you know, so and so. I mean, why are ordinary Americans tolerating this sort of anti-scientific lunacy masquerading as environmental policy under this administration? [00:22:56] Speaker 2: I guess I suppose it happens everywhere, but it seems much more pronounced in the U.S. [00:23:11] Speaker 1: Yes, I think that's fair. You know, I think Americans elected Donald Trump on some combination of economic grievance around inflation after COVID and out of a, in too many cases, out of a set of sad, racist beliefs about some of their fellow Americans. I don't think almost anyone elected him to be anti-science, but that's certainly what they've gotten. And the only good news I can tell you is I think that Americans are beginning to get fed up with the whole package. We'll know more in a few weeks. I've been spending most of the last months on the road around the country helping people campaign for Congress in the midterm elections. I hope that they'll represent the beginning of a repudiation of all of this, but obviously the damage that has been done is sharp and deep and it will take a long time to recover if indeed we ever do. [00:24:19] Speaker 2: While we're here, I never really understood why fighting climate change is considered an exclusively left-wing thing, given the fact that we're on a planet that we're all sharing. [00:24:34] Speaker 1: It shouldn't be, but about 30 or 40 years ago, the oil industry began the project of sort of purchasing the Republican Party. Previous to that time, environmentalism had been a fairly bipartisan undertaking in the US, but no more. Now you can't step out of line on this and stay in the Republican Party. It's, you know, big players like the biggest donor to the Republicans over the last decades, the Koch brothers, who are also the biggest refinery and pipeline entrepreneurs in America, made sure that that was the case. [00:25:15] Speaker 2: All right, professor, we already kind of outlined that renewables are our ticket, not out of this, but kind of blunting the worst impacts. Yes, well put. But lest we be accused of being a couple of techno-optimist shills, I think it's fair to outline some of the problems as well. And the first one is perhaps the most concerning one, to me at least. And that's the fact that despite this incredible rise of renewable energy that we talked about at the beginning, CO2 emissions are still rising, which is petrifying, especially given all the headlines recently. You mentioned the disaster in Nepal. They haven't even plateaued, if I understood everything correctly, much less reversed course. So the more energy we add, the more we seem to use data centers popping up left and right doesn't help, obviously. What's your view of this overall situation? [00:26:10] Speaker 1: Well, I mean, what we're dealing with here is the long-term ongoing increase in demand for energy around the world. Most of that is now coming out of Asia, because Asia is now finally developing the way that North America and Europe did over the previous centuries. So they're inevitably using more energy. The good news is that though CO2 is still rising, we can see hopes, places where emissions indeed have really begun to plateau. The most important of those is China, which seems to have reached an effective plateau in its emissions of greenhouse gases and done it many years ahead of when people had originally hoped. It's not the only place. But California, which is the fourth largest economy in the world, has put up a huge number of solar panels in wind turbines and crucially batteries in the last three years. And as a result, it generates now much of its electricity most days more than 100% for long stretches from renewable sources. At night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply to California's grid are batteries that spent the afternoon soaking up excess sunshine, batteries that didn't exist three years ago. And the bottom line is that California, again, the fourth largest economy in the world, is using about 50% less natural gas to produce electricity than it was three years ago. That's a big number, the kind of number that if we managed to replicate it around the world, would really begin to make a quick difference in how much carbon was accumulating in the planet's atmosphere. So what one can do is try and speed this up. [00:28:21] Speaker 2: Another issue that I'm not going to pretend that I fully understand as a person who can barely operate an email is apparently with the grid that was supposed to be made for kind of like the old way of storing and using electricity. What's going on there? [00:28:42] Speaker 1: Well, we definitely need an upgraded grid to make it easier to access all this stuff and put it online. And, you know, in places like America, that grid is hard to modernize and build. People get in the way. They don't want to see new transmission lines. The, you know, coal and gas people try and block them because they know that it means more renewable energy. You know, there's a number of causes in places like China, where for better or for worse, local opposition is not a problem. The grid gets built and modernized very quickly. Most of the world is somewhere in between these two extremes. It should be said that the technologies around this are changing extremely rapidly. And if the last five years was mostly about sun and wind, the next five years will be mostly about batteries. And batteries are getting very cheap and at every size. And we're learning how to use them to really change the way that energy systems work. So, for instance, in Vermont, the small state where I live in the northeastern United States, our biggest power plant is no longer a power plant. It's thousands of batteries in people's basements across Vermont that we hook together with computer software to allow the utility to draw on them when it needs power. We call it a virtual power plant and the same things are springing up around the world. [00:30:22] Speaker 2: I asked the same of Professor Mann. How bad do you think the whole data center build out is in terms of like setting us back? [00:30:32] Speaker 1: I think it's definitely not helping on a global basis, not going to make or break us. I think the IEA is estimating that data centers will take up something like two or three percent of the world's electricity supply by mid-century. In particular places, especially parts of America, a huge, huge, huge, huge problem. You know, I was just in the state of Montana where there's one data center proposed so vast that it will use seven times as much energy as the entire state is currently, seven times as much electricity as the entire state currently uses. And for the world as a whole, probably the greater challenge is the need, especially as the planet warms, for more air conditioning everywhere. In numerical terms, that'll probably pretty dramatically outpace the demand from data centers. But all of it's hard. And, of course, data centers, as long as we're talking about existential risks in the end of the world, it's worth reminding ourselves that the technology these data centers are supposed to be supporting, artificial intelligence, is one whose creators seem, you know, seem eager to warn us, runs a 10, 20, 30 percent chance of wiping us all out sometime soon. So it's a particularly egregious waste of energy, it seems to me. [00:32:23] Speaker 2: How did Sam Altman put it? Yes, it probably destroyed the world, but at least we're going to have some cool companies built in the meantime. It certainly wouldn't want to interfere with their IPOs, no. Fantastic. Which leads me to the final problem. More of an indictment of the levels of pathology built into our system is the fact that since renewable energy is potentially infinite, it's not going to make people much money, which, of course, is considered material worthy of a Greek tragedy in our society. I read an amazing headline on Bloomberg the other day that perfectly illustrated this point. It read, Spain built too much solar, investors want out. And the article says that Spain's massive push into renewable energy inadvertently created an oversupply crisis, that's the word they used, that is crushing investor profits and causing power prices to plummet below zero. Professor, help me not lose my mind here. [00:33:26] Speaker 1: Yes, no, I'm afraid that it's a very real problem. There's obviously money to be made from renewable energy, but there's not, you know, oil money to be made. And the reason for that is clear, you know, you know, when the sun comes up in the morning, it delivers energy for free. That's the exact opposite of the current model where we hoard supplies of scarce energy and dole them out to people for heavy prices, you know, that they have to pay over and over and over again. That's good news for almost everyone on Earth. You know, 80 percent of human beings live in countries that have to import net fossil fuel. So for them, extraordinary health, especially the poorest countries on Earth. But yeah, it's that's precisely I mean, what you've just said explains the strange politics of the moment that the fossil fuel industry is doing, spending whatever it needs to in order to try and keep its business model alive. [00:34:35] Speaker 2: We seem to be kind of constantly teetering on a tightrope between irreversible disaster or potentially a next stage in the possible evolution of our society. And the tighter the rope becomes, the scarier every next step seems. Do you think we're going to make it? I don't know. [00:34:55] Speaker 1: I think that I'm quite worried by the momentum that physical systems have built up. What's happening in the Atlantic is a good example. The great currents of the Atlantic are the biggest heat distribution engine on planet Earth. The things that keep Western Europe, places you're from, much warmer than they otherwise would be. But those great currents are beginning to flicker and falter as fresh water pouring off a melting Greenland changes the salinity and hence the density of seawater in the North Atlantic. And that's the density differences are what drive those enormous conveyor belts of water that stretch across the planet. So we used to think this was a problem for the 22nd century. Now the scientists who study it most closely have been saying in the last few months that there's a 50% chance of their failure sometime in the decades ahead. And if that happens, that alone would be the single biggest event in our civilization's history, civilization of our species. And that's just one of the kind of physical systems that we're playing around with at the moment. I mean, the jet stream draws its power from the temperature differential between the equator and the poles. As we melt the poles, the jet stream gets stuck in these high amplitude wonky curves that bring almost unbearable heat domes to place after place around the world. All of this is very real and very, very scary. I think that if we move with enormous speed, we could do a lot to improve our odds. Chinese factories alone are capable of producing roughly twice as many solar panels as they currently are. And I think on a rational world, we'd probably globalize those factories and the ones in India and everywhere else and run them around the clock and take the solar panels that pour out of the assembly line and stack them on every wharf and railroad siding on planet Earth for people to come and take away and do with what they will. See how quickly we can build a world that runs on a very different energy system. And I think if we did that, our odds would go up of ameliorating this rise in temperature. But that's – so that's what in a way we work for. I mean, we're in the middle now of building support for what we call Sun Day, a big celebration of renewable energy that will happen on the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere next June, 2027. People who want to participate can go to sunday.earth to find out. Hopefully, things like this will allow us to spur change. In the U.S. in the last year, my group of colleagues, what we call Third Act, an organization of old people like me, we've managed to press for and pass legislation that allows for plug-in solar or balcony solar in 12 states, including California and New York. Those were big legislative wins that will produce a national market for this form of the technology over the next year. So it's not impossible, but it's not easy, and it won't happen without people coming together to make it happen. [00:39:09] Speaker 2: I totally forgot to ask you, because what you're saying is so interesting, I got completely carried away. What are the current projections for renewables if things stay the way they are right now? [00:39:21] Speaker 1: I mean, I think the sort of current hopeful projections are that we'd be getting somewhere near – that we're capable of getting somewhere near net zero by, you know, 20 – sometime later this century, 2050 to 2070. But that's not fast enough. [00:39:43] Speaker 2: You added the adjective hopeful projections. [00:39:46] Speaker 1: Yeah, hopeful projections. That's – but in any event, those hopeful projections aren't fast enough. We need to go much faster, and we're capable of going much faster. But are there any signs that we are going much faster or – As the California numbers that I read you demonstrate, I mean, a 50% reduction in natural gas use in three years, we're capable of going much faster. That's good news in that those should be easier to change. If we didn't have cheap renewable energy, then we would be facing technological and economic barriers that would be impossible to surmount. But we're not – we're facing political barriers that are difficult to surmount, but we're capable of doing it, so we should try. [00:40:47] Speaker 2: I had quite a few conversations with climate scientists over the years, and I keep asking the same question, and I get different answers. So I want to ask you as well, how bad do you think the disasters or the extreme weather events have to be in order for the majority of society to start paying attention to this issue or give it the attention it deserves? [00:41:16] Speaker 1: The majority of society wants to take on this work. I mean, the polling data from every country on earth makes that clear, including the U.S. There's widespread, broad support for a quick transition to renewable energy with government support. But, you know, there's a lot of things on people's agenda. The question you're really asking, I think, is what level of desperation will it take to move this to the point where it becomes something that people absolutely demand from their leaders? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that, but I suspect that over the next year we'll get a better sense. The El Nino, now aborning in the Pacific, is of historic, epic scale. The damage it will do around the world over the next 12 months is likely to be extraordinary. Human beings will endure temperatures higher than any member of our species has ever endured. We shall see, but my guess is it will increase political support for quick change. I hope so, because I think we're reaching the point where this may be, you know, kind of the last warnings of this kind we're going to get in a timeframe when we still have some room to maneuver. [00:42:48] Speaker 2: Yeah, you say that people kind of support action, but they're not exactly, we are not exactly out on the streets, are we? Even though… [00:42:56] Speaker 1: I've been out on the streets, so what can I, and we've definitely mobilized lots of people to be out on the streets. I mean, we've put 400,000 people in the streets of New York in 2015, which was a key part of winning the Paris Climate Accords a year later. Credit Thunberg had, we think, seven or eight million young people on the streets in 2019, before the pandemic hit. So, there have been lots of people willing to go out in the streets, but we could always use some more. That's what this Sunday thing is about. [00:43:34] Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I was just thinking about, like, even in the most affluent cities in the world, like New York, people sometimes wake up and the sky is orange for days. And yet, we go about our days like nothing happened, you know. And the headlines just keep getting scarier and scarier and the situation seems to keep getting more and more grim, which leads me to my final question. So, despite all of this, you seem pretty hopeful in some sort of way, at least in the way that you're extremely active in campaigning and writing and publishing and doing podcasts and trying to sway people's minds and opinions. So, where do you draw this energy or this hope from? Because I know a lot of really young people who are, like I said at the beginning, given up and are doomed and are just waiting for the apocalypse to arrive. [00:44:36] Speaker 1: I think it's actually easier for older people. So, when I was young, we had examples of political efforts really working. The first Earth Day in 1970 in the U.S. brought 20 million people into the streets, 10% of the then population of the U.S., biggest demonstrations still in American history. And they were enough within a couple of years to produce the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency that became the templates for similar action in countries around the world. And that managed to dramatically clean up the air and the water in the U.S. Cities got much cleaner. Lakes and streams got much cleaner. So, at some level, it's easier for us to believe that political action might get somewhere. If you're 25 right now in America, all you've ever gotten to see is Donald Trump and the complete constipation of our political system. So, I get why it's more difficult. I've helped create large organizations, 350.org, the first big global grassroots climate campaign, the third act, this work among people my age, in part so that I'll have other people to work with. And that makes it much easier, very hard if you're kind of isolated. So, I always tell people that the most important thing an individual can do, and the most empowering, I think, is to be a little less of an individual, to join together with others in movements large enough to change the basic political and economic ground rules here. And, you know, like you, I'm a journalist by heart. But I've understood that it's necessary to go beyond journalism as well, and also do activism, to be work as a citizen in order to make things happen. And I think it's going to take all of us doing that. [00:46:52] Speaker 2: That was my final question. So, instead, I'm going to ask you something a little bit more crazy. As a big fan of, like, the prison genre, I wanted to ask you, how was it in prison when you were arrested? [00:47:03] Speaker 1: Well, American jails are truly terrible places. I believe that. And, you know, I knew that I wasn't going to be there long, that there were people actively trying to get me out. And I knew that, you know, because of the color of my skin and whatever, I was unlikely to be subjected to the worst abuses of them. But I will tell you this, I've, each time I'm in jail, I come out more determined to help those who are working to improve conditions in our prison system, which are truly terrible. And that's wrong on any number of counts. The only, for me, blessing with being in jail is, there's a slightly oddly calming thing about it, because you can't do anything. So, you know, in a way, the pressure's off for a little while. [00:48:09] Speaker 2: Professor McKibben, thank you so much for taking the time. I know how busy you are. I wish we could extend this conversation for a couple more hours, but I do appreciate it. [00:48:18] Speaker 1: This has been a good conversation and thank you for your work. [00:48:21] Speaker 2: We're going to include the link to Sunday in the description, as well as the link to your latest book. All right, good. It's a fantastic read. Thank you so much. Thank you. And wish you all the best. Bye-bye. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to the Smart Cookies Podcast on YouTube. Follow and rate on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It really helps. But you know what would help even more? If you'd consider supporting me on Patreon or becoming a member on YouTube. That way, you're going to get all episodes early. They're going to be ad-free. And there's also going to be bonus ones available only there. Yes, yes. Also, you'll feel good knowing you're supporting a smaller, truly independent creator. It feels good. It feels nice. You know who else feels nice? The absolute legends. The absolute legends. Kings and queens doing the Lord's work out there. Seriously, peeps. Without your support, I would have given up a long time ago. And you should know that. So my eternal gratitude goes to: Philip Boyd Turner, Long, Jan Podgornik, Barbara Dušak, Zeiklar, Mukipek, Lennox, Dumi Holdis, Kremen, Črtomir Perheriš, Hanna Cirman, Dermastia, Porno Passion, Charlie Bulbeck. Zala Vilkevr, Matija Wallinger, Sluge, Katja Glinšek, Bač Mačkin, Simon Vidmar, Luke Johnson, Jim Bird, Bewildered Beauty, Davorin Pavlica, Črt Gosar, Saša Sodja, Amy Jones, Matija Renčel, Florian Hava, Dejan Žolir, Dareju, Rok Tržan, Sasha Vipetnik, Neven Cvjanović, Juš Premrov, Sirkezi, Goran Ivašičan, Že Sever, Ole, Marin Ferrara, Aljaš Macher, Štrole, Aida Mancian, Miha Medved Medinjo, Goran, Gordon, Lorenzo, Jurečuk, Mila Karmen, Vronika and Tai Chi. I'm deeply touched, as always. Thanks again.