Wildfires, Heat Waves, & The Cost of Climate Change Denial w/ Bill McKibben

[00:00:00] Hassan: I'm Hassan and welcome to my live stream. I am so thrilled and honored to have with me Bill McKibben, literally a legend in the world of environmentalism. I want to do a shout out for two books that he's done, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon, and the more recent one, Here Comes the Sun. Bill's an author, educator, helped to found 350.org for folks over 60. I'm a member. It was the first global grassroots climate campaign and third act rather, third act and progressively organizing people over the age of 60. Yeah, that's the one that I joined. But Bill, I've been watching you. I saw your recent interview on Ezra Klein. As we're recording this, there are wildfires and the air quality is not good. And I wanted to share your expertise with my network and the overlap of undue influence with the global fossil fuel corporations and countries trying to obscure people's clear understanding that these greedy individuals and corporations are destroying our planet. So welcome, Bill. [00:01:22] Bill McKibben: Bill McKibben: Doc, very good to be with you. And yes, it's a bit hazy here in Vermont today, but it's much cleaner than the air of the last few days, which was truly foul. And we had it relatively easy compared to much of the upper Midwest, where I'm afraid the pulmonologists and cardiologists are going to have a lot of work to do after people breathe in those particulates that are pouring down from [00:01:52] Hassan: those wildfires. Bill McKibben: Yeah. And Cammie, who's helping us produce this right now, is in the Midwest. And she said, Steve, we have had four tornadoes. We've never had tornadoes near Chicago. [00:02:06] Bill McKibben: Bill McKibben: What we're seeing, of course, is what happens when you raise the temperature of the planet to places it's not been during human times. One way to think about climate change is that by putting carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, we're trapping energy in the narrow envelope of atmosphere around the planet. And that energy expresses itself in lots of ways. Bigger storms, melting ice, much, much increased evaporation and with it drought and then fire. Deluge, when that water that's gone up into the atmosphere comes down. These are the hallmarks of climate change, the things we started warning about. I wrote the first book about this back in the 1980s when we still called it the greenhouse effect. And these are the things that we knew were coming and have come. And we're now seeing them on full display but still fairly early in this story. It's going to get hotter. And in fact, it's going to get hotter fast. The next year will be a daunting one because this very large El Nino now forming in the Pacific seems virtually certain to take the temperature yet again higher than it's ever been in human history. And with that, a new outbreak of the kind of, um, traumas that we regularly see. So, uh, we can talk about some of the ways we can still head off the worst of this, but, uh, there's no stopping climate change. We're now in, that's the world that we've built and now the world we will inhabit. [00:03:59] Hassan: And what I was so inspired when I listened to you speak and do interviews is this is a topic that the people around the world can truly unite over their need for potable water, breathable air, uh, livable climates. And with Trump saying there's a global climate hoax and saying, uh, you know, give me a billion dollars and I'll pass whatever bills you want. And, and, et cetera, we just have to call out, we can't listen to anyone in power. That's giving us BS. [00:04:38] Bill McKibben: Climate change is the, truly the first, truly global challenge that humans have come up against. And it would be a difficult challenge in the best of circumstances because the thing that drives it, the combustion of coal and gas and oil is also the same thing that's driven our economy for your and my lifetimes. So that transition would be hard in any event, even if everyone was working in good faith, but everyone isn't working in good faith. As you point out, uh, the fossil fuel industry, uh, is desperate to ward off the one thing that could help us at this point, the rapid transition to solar power, wind power, and the batteries to store that power when the sun drops or the wind goes down. And they're able to gamify our political system with their cash. You're correct. Candidate Trump running for office told the fossil fuel industry that in exchange for a billion dollars in campaign donations, he'd give them anything they wanted. They gave them about half a billion between advertising donations, lobbying to the GOP in the last election cycle. And that turns out to be, have been enough because the Trump administration has, I think probably gone even further than the oil industry imagined it might, uh, in its effort to stamp out, uh, clean energy. The rest of the world is moving fairly rapidly in this direction now led by the Chinese. Uh, and this transition to clean energy is the fastest transition of its kind in history. But yes, the Trump administration is doing its best to, uh, keep America stuck in reverse as it were. [00:06:33] Hassan: Yeah. And I was fascinated when you said on the, as Ezra Klein video, there are so many really inexpensive electric cars that China is producing and, and Musk's Tesla is like number 75. If my memory [00:06:48] Bill McKibben: says, if you, uh, if you, uh, if you, uh, were able to go to China and purchase a car, you can now purchase a quite good car for $10,000. And for $35,000, you can purchase a car far better than pretty much anything you can buy here for three times the money. Uh, uh, the Chinese auto, we think of Detroit as the center of the automotive industry. But now that we're moving to EVs, that center has moved to China. Uh, most of the cars sold in China last month came with a plug dangling out the back. That's why one reason anyway, that Chinese cities are much cleaner than they were even a few years ago, not just cleaner. They're much, much quieter than they were a little while ago. Uh, so there are real possibilities here. Uh, and those possibilities are good news for most of us, but terrifying for the fossil fuel industry, hence their remarkable effort to get us to believe things that aren't true. Right. And you were pointing out China [00:07:57] Hassan: by investing so heavily and concentratedly in renewable energy, they're leaving the U S in the dust in terms of our future, which is a shame because these technologies were invented right here. [00:08:15] Bill McKibben: The solar cell came out of bell labs in Edison, New Jersey in 1954. The first industrial wind turbine was in my home state of Vermont in 1943. So we really should be owning this future, but we've in the last 18 months just handed it over lock, stock and barrel to the Chinese, an active national economic self-sabotage [00:08:40] Hassan: without much parallel, I think. Right. Exactly. So I want to just, you know, bring in the, what can we do, Bill? You know, there are organizations you've helped to found, you have a newsletter, a sub stack. What can the average person do? Well, so there's two ways to answer that question. [00:09:05] Bill McKibben: Uh, one is we all have ways that we can participate in this clean energy revolution. Now, if you're a homeowner, you can put solar panels on your roof, uh, and batteries in your basement. Uh, if you're a tenant, uh, we've managed to pass legislation this spring in 10 states, including New York, legalizing for the first time what we call balcony solar or plug-in solar, the smallest increment of this stuff. You can now buy a solar panel for about 300 bucks that just plugs directly into the wall and feeds that power into your home to help run your refrigerator, whatever it is. Um, you obviously can get an EV the next time you get a car and you'd be crazy not to because they're better cars than the thing they replace and now priced comparably or cheaper and the cost of running them over the lifetime of the car is incomparably cheaper. Uh, you could get a heat pump for your home to replace the furnace and the air conditioner. You could get an induction cooktop for your kitchen 60 bucks online. Now I've used one for years and you know, they heat water twice as fast as gas. And if you have a gas stove in your kitchen, which if you think about it is essentially an open campfire, uh, there's about a 50% increase in the likelihood your child will develop asthma. So, you know, all of these things are better than the ones that we replace. So those are things that we do as individuals, but we're really past the point where we're going to solve this all one EV at a time, one vegan dinner at a time. Uh, the most important thing individuals can do, I think is be a little bit less of an individual and join together with others in groups large enough to make some difference. That's why we started 350.org 30, 20 years ago. And there are chapters across the country. And it's why for people who have passed the age of 60, we started third act, uh, uh, five years ago. We now have 125,000 or so Americans, strong working groups in most of the states, which is how we got that legislation passed in all those places this spring. So people should feel free to join in. [00:11:38] Hassan: Yeah. And I just want to emphasize, we need to have citizens act at citizen activists, people who are role modeling, but also talking to neighbors, developing community connections, because voting for candidates who are not beholding to the fossil fuel company or foreign gun countries that want to destroy democracy is really vital, especially in the coming months. [00:12:09] Bill McKibben: Oh, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, I'm spending most of my time in the next, uh, what is it now? A hundred days or so out across the country, uh, trying to win some of these congressional seats, um, because we need clear thinking people you've written about the cult of Trump. Um, we need to figure out how to lessen the power of that cult because as cults tend to do, it's now damaging, not only its members, but damaging in very deep ways, the society [00:12:51] Hassan: to which they belong. Yeah, exactly. Talk to us about, uh, data centers. That's been in the news. [00:13:01] Bill McKibben: Right. Data centers are a sudden new, aggressive new use of energy. Uh, let's begin by saying that it's not clear to me, um, how much need there is for them. Uh, it's not clear that the trillions of dollars being invested in AI is wisely invested, or that the demand for these products is as strong as people have said. But if you're going to build data centers, it's extremely clear that you should build them with sun and wind and batteries so that you don't wreck the environment and so that you can build them more quickly. Uh, at the moment, the people who run them are putting up the cheapest possible and most polluting possible gas-fired power. Uh, Elon Musk is probably, as in many things, uh, a good example. Um, his data centers to run his strange, uh, grok AI, uh, uh, program, uh, uh, are highly polluting temporary portable gas generators spewing pollution into poor communities of color in Tennessee and Mississippi. And they exemplify environmental justice and environmental racism. Um, and they exemplify the stupid use of resources. If we were going to build, uh, data centers, then there are ways that we could figure out how to leverage some of that to make things work a little better. Uh, New Jersey, I think just today passed a law uh, implementing one smart solution, which is that, uh, if a company, Microsoft, or someone needs a data center, they could go to that place, New Jersey, and find a few hundred thousand people using, um, inefficient old fashioned electric resistance heating, uh, say for their homes. And they could just hand those people a modern heat pump to use instead. And the energy saving that would result would be enough to power the data center they want to build. Wow. It'd be a win, win, win all around. So that's the kind of solution that's at least theoretically possible, but many of us are working hard at third act and elsewhere for a moratorium on new data centers so that we have some leverage with which to try and negotiate sensible solutions going forward. Yeah. And does it. [00:16:07] Hassan: Okay. Okay. Okay. I moved it back a little bit more. Yeah. So, so I had a thought and it went out my, [00:16:18] Bill McKibben: my brain in this last moment, Bill. I saw a good question while we were talking before someone was writing in about what's going on in Utah right now, uh, with Great Salt Lake. Utah, of course, is, uh, in the interior West there and is heating up very rapidly and it's, um, uh, causing a huge number of wildfires at the moment. It's one of the wildfire hotspots in the country, but it's also rapidly drying out Great Salt Lake. And that's a great tragedy, uh, because it's an invaluable natural resource for birds and lots of other things, but it's also a big problem because there's a lot of toxic chemicals in that lake as it dries out, they become exposed to the air and they begin to blow across, uh, Utah causing threatening, grave health problems. Um, and you know, it's among other things, a very strong reminder that we shouldn't be wasting water on ineffective and, uh, you know, uh, agriculture, water, which is what happens with too much irrigation water in the West, but it's also a reminder that we simply have to get the rise in temperature under some kind of control. There was essentially no snowpack in the Western United States this winter. Uh, it's different than any winter we've ever seen before. It was the hottest winter by far across the American West. And the result is that that region is now drying out very, very fast. Uh, the Colorado river, uh, which waters so much of the West, uh, is so diminished that, uh, the flow behind, uh, Hoover Dam in Lake Mead is at an all time low and sinking towards the point where it won't be able to get through the turbines that provide electricity to Las Vegas and elsewhere. So we're in a real fixed as in so many places, the only real solution is to figure out how to keep the temperature from going up any more than it has to. And really the only real scalable mechanism we have to do that are solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries to replace coal and gas and oil. [00:18:42] Hassan: Yeah, it makes sense. So we know Trump has gutted all of the scientific, uh, climate science and other things. I believe there are lots of climate scientists who are still taking measurements and reporting. Can you share with the listeners some legitimate sources of information? [00:19:04] Bill McKibben: Oh, sure. I mean, there, look, the Trump administration is doing its best to gut the basic science, uh, as in so many places, but with a particular attention to climate science, because it annoys them in very particular ways. Um, they're trying to shut down the satellites, dismantle the ocean buoys. They've even moved to try and unplug the CO2 monitor on the slopes of Mauna Loa. That's probably the most important scientific instrument in the history of the world. Um, think of it as the equivalent of, uh, the bad guys spray painting over the surveillance cameras before they robbed the store, you know? Um, there are, however, remain at least some good flows of data around the world, some maintained by universities and some maintained by other countries, but it's getting harder and harder because they've cut funding so dramatically for the national weather service. For instance, uh, the number of weather balloon launches in this country, uh, is gone way, way down. There's big parts of the country that no longer have a daily launch of a weather balloon. And that's making it much harder to predict, for example, what's going to happen with wildfire smoke as it blows around the West or, or, or whatever. Um, obviously this is, you know, the definition of penny wise and pound foolish, unless you're the fossil fuel industry when you very much need to cover up this crime that you're committing. And that coverup, of course, is a very long standing. Uh, you know, we now know from great investigative reporting that the fossil fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. When I was writing that first book, they had been studying it too. Exxon had, Exxon was the biggest company in the world. They had lots of scientists, good ones. Their product was carbon. Of course they were going to find out what was going on. And they did. And they predicted with great accuracy how hot it was going to be in 2020. And the people running the company believed their scientists. Exxon began building its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was in the offering. But they didn't tell the rest of us. They did the reverse, uh, across this industry. They spent billions of dollars building this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for, still keeps us locked in a completely sterile debate about whether or not global warming is real. A debate, remember, that both sides knew the answer to at the beginning. It's just one of them, one of those sides chose to lie. And it's been, I think, the probably the most costly lie in human history in that it's deprived us of several decades when we could have been working full bore on this. If Exxon had simply said what they knew back in 19, the late 1980s, no one would have accused them of alarmism. We simply would have gotten to work on this problem. Right. You have a better sense than I do of how, um, people try to control information in order to control outcomes. Um, uh, does this mimic on a, uh, on a very large scale, some of the things you see on a very intimate scale when people build cults and things? Absolutely. So I wanted to mention, [00:22:52] Hassan: I got interested in this weird field of cults and brainwashing because of my own recruitment as a college junior at Queens College into a front group of the Moonies cult, where the leader claimed to be the Messiah and I was selected to be groomed as a leader. So I got to be in the room with Sun Myung Moon as he was talking about infiltrating the U S government and how democracy was evil and God wants the theocracy, et cetera, and to how we have to take over the world for God. And this was 1974, Bill, 1975, when I got deprogrammed and went, this is unbelievable. I'm Jewish. I've learned about Nazis and the Holocaust and I would have done anything blindly that Moon instructed me to do. So I didn't plan on making it my life work, but it's been 50 years. And a few years ago, I, I'm reading this article in Rolling Stone about how the Moonies, my former cults, Washington Times, is the single biggest climate science denial institution on earth. And I'm like, I used to think, you know, global climate crisis was number one and undue influence was number two in terms of issues. And I realized undue influence is number one because it's suppressing the knowledge. And, and so I've done blogs on the Koch company corporations, how it's a corporate cult, how they were using free speech to basically tell lies and under the guise of free speech, but basically trying to, uh, advance their libertarian agenda where they want no government regulations. They want to pollute the environment, steal resources from indigenous people and continue to develop the, the, these fossil fuels all to the demise of the owner's children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and everyone else. I don't know unless they're Elon Musk and thinking we're going to put our consciousness into robots and fly to Mars. [00:25:13] Bill McKibben: I don't know what they're thinking. I imagine what they're thinking is, you know, enough money and it will be insulated from whatever's coming. Um, we'll be on our private island or whatever it is, which I think is foolish, but I do think it's sometimes how those people think. I'm more interested in the effects on, uh, people at large. Uh, the good news is that the polling shows most people still understand that we have a real problem with climate change, but the bad news is that they've been very influential and say convincing people that it's too expensive to change or so on and so forth. Um, so I'm curious about what the ways are to help people. I mean, the scales fell from your eyes at some point. Um, we can't obviously go and, uh, uh, deprogram, uh, every American there, you know, in the way that people do when they need to rescue someone from, uh, uh, unification church or something, but we do need some ways to help people just access their own good root common sense. Right. What are, what are some ideas for them? [00:26:31] Hassan: Yeah. Thank you. So for me, the solution is really education, which is the heart of all of your activities and mine. I've been working on a, a simplistic model or series of models that a average person can look at my influence continuum and say the, this is ethical influence, respect for conscience, creativity, free will, critical thinking, love based informed consent. So all of these values that we've all grew up with and thought, yeah, this is the way people should treat one another, the golden rule all the way to authoritarian mind control. And the model that I've developed that is now testing out scientifically to be valid looks at behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control. But unlike when I was recruited into the Moonies in the seventies, now we're largely in a digital environment mentally. So you don't need to be in a compound isolated physically. You can be on your phone getting messages 20 hours a day that is just barraging your brain. And we know the brain can get tricked. If it hears a lie over and over again, it starts acting as if it's true, even though intellectually, we can say this is law, a lie, but educating people about how the brain works, how neuroscience works, how to identify ethical experts who we can rely and trust for information versus people we don't know. And, but be careful of confirmation bias, because we know that we will tend to listen to people who share beliefs like ours, but the, but with algorithms, they're taking our personal data, and they're tweaking it, what's called nudging, so that they're saying five things that are true, and they'll add something in that isn't true. But you, they've created what's called the yes set. And then they slip that one thing in. And if you're not on top of it, like with a locus of control for thinking is in you not asking chat GPT or Claude or somebody, some chat bot to tell you what is true or not, but using your common sense, using your critical thinking, and developing human trust pods is what I refer to, like people that we know we can count on. Like I'm looking at news coming across. And I asked you before we started recording, Hey, Bill, I just saw a post about some company putting up mirrors to deflect the sunlight. I knew you, I know you're an expert. So I was like, is that real? Is that, you know, is that bull? [00:29:36] Bill McKibben: Right, it's good to be able to, I mean, that's why I do this Substack newsletter, which in the climate world has become the largest of its kind. And where I'll share this conversation eventually. Um, um, it's, you know, an effort to get as much information out as we can all the time. Um, and I, I would add that in this case, we're painfully aided by the fact that mother nature is a fairly good communicator too. And you can, you can tell people a lot of stuff, uh, and they may believe some of it and then they look out the window and the sky is turned orange, you know, and at some level, I think, uh, it helps us understand that. What do you know? The scientists actually did know what [00:30:29] Hassan: they're talking about. Right. And, and I just want to come back to what your question. So one of the things I've learned, uh, over the 50 years is that governments like China and Russia and the CIA, et cetera, have been researching mind control techniques for decades and decades and decades. And in the eighties, when you wrote your first book, a guy named William Lind wrote, uh, he's a military, American military strategist came up with fourth generation psychological warfare. And the goal was to demoralize the enemy. So this was being used on other countries and the assault was on the country's experts, science itself, and democratic institutions, all to confuse, to cause chaos. And it makes people more uncertain and anxious. So they'll be more susceptible to an authoritarian voice of certainty. I've got this. I know more than the generals. I know more than the economists, et cetera. It, uh, it appeals to very child part of our brains when we're scared and uncertain. Well, he, he must know what he's talking about. He's the president. But if you understand, this guy was recruited by Russia in 1987, his first trip to Moscow. And I have this from a former KGB official who was there in the KGB at the time. And then he came back from his first trip, Trump and took three full page ads out against NATO. And if what that wasn't a tell. [00:32:20] Bill McKibben: Yeah. The, um, good news is that there are large numbers of people who are organizing. I'm sure you've seen these, uh, no Kings demonstrations, for instance, been there. They've now been three. Yes. And, uh, you know, one of the things that's noteworthy about them, and I don't really know how this fits into this, into your experience, but one of the things that's notable about them was the number of older people who've been taking part. And that's certainly our experience at the third act where we organize older people. I wonder sometimes if perhaps just having been alive longer gives you a certain kind of, um, perspective that makes it maybe a little easier to resist some of, uh, some of this nonsense. [00:33:10] Hassan: I agree. I think it's fundamentally true. I'm 72, Bill. We had a radio, then we got a black and white TV. I mean, for me, I've seen the development of technology. I participated in it. I was afraid of computers in the eighties until my father-in-law got me an Apple two or whatever it was. And so I've gotten into computers. So I have a, a, a, a center of gravity based on being in real life, you know, and, and, and being with people, not on a phone. [00:33:49] Bill McKibben: I'm very glad to watch the, to watch younger people. Now, you know, this phrase that's spreading among younger people, uh, you need to touch grass. Uh, you need to get away from the screen out into the natural world or out into the actual human world and in contact with other people. And I'm very glad to see young people, uh, figuring that out, uh, more and more and more. And yeah, heaven knows there's plenty of older people who, uh, spend their days, uh, locked into Facebook, uh, and not [00:34:24] Hassan: a very healthy way to exactly the world. Yeah. My, my disinformation, uh, researcher colleague, Dave Troy recently interviewed a university of Oxford professor named Carissa Valise on her book, prophecy. I highly recommend the book. I saw you were recommending books for Ezra Klein. This is a really important book because she goes back in human history to our earliest memories where we would want certainty in a very dangerous world. So we would read entrails of animals, or you look to gods to predict the future, et cetera, et cetera. But she brings it all the way to AI and algorithms. She, she, she says totalitarians want surveillance. They want control. They sell it as freedom. And they, they make it sound like it's going to help you and that it's inevitable, but the future is not inevitable. We don't know what inventions are coming. We don't know about all the brilliant minds who are putting their attention now on the real problems facing humanity and the planet earth. And she, she says rebel, buy a book, paper book, like make a statement, be in real life. And, and it's a really valuable, uh, scholarly book. I highly recommend it. That's good. And, and though I'd never tell [00:36:00] Bill McKibben: anyone not to buy a book, uh, I recommend that they go to the library too, because there you not only get some books, you might run into some other people. Yeah. And that's probably healthy for us too. [00:36:13] Hassan: Yeah. And libraries sponsor speakers and getting to know your local community folks and what they're doing and such. It's so incredibly valuable. Um, I'm looking at some other questions that are here. Um, [00:36:34] Bill McKibben: I see someone correctly pointing out that, uh, you know, the effects on our lungs of these wildfire smoke is, are mimicked by the effects, the daily effects on our lungs by living near a coal fired power plant. Um, it's very true. And we sometimes forget about the, um, public health implications of all of this. About 9 million people a year die. That's one death in five on this planet from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. Mostly these various fine particulates that lodge in your lungs and lead to heart disease and pulmonary disease. And, um, uh, uh, uh, the good news is that we can dispense with a lot of that now, if we'd like to, you know, the very rapid fall in the price of solar energy and wind energy is a great potential boon. Uh, maybe five years ago, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than by setting stuff on fire, which is a big deal. Humans have been setting stuff on fire for at least 700,000 years, you know, right. Sort of Darwin said language and fire were what defined our species. So this is a, uh, this is a big deal. Um, and if we could implement it quickly around the world, we would save a lot of lives and we would not stop global warming too late for that, but we would shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets. And we live on a planet where each 10th of a degree that we raise the temperature now moves about a hundred million people from a relatively safe climate zone to a relatively dangerous one. Uh, so this is an extraordinarily important set of changes that your questioner is, uh, onto the, uh, so where, [00:38:32] Hassan: where do you go for sources of information? Do you have scientists emailing you? [00:38:37] Bill McKibben: Oh yes. I talk with scientists all the time and, but I read, I, you know, I know who and where to read. And that's really why I do this for you. The sub stack. Yeah. Is basically to communicate, you know, link out stuff to people all the time. It's a service I can provide because I've been at this so long that I, you know, have a pretty good sense of the contours, but climate change is, of course, an extremely interesting problem because at one level it's about physics and chemistry, but it's also deeply about economics, political science, sociology, psychology, uh, theology, uh, all kinds of, um, things intersect. And these are the vast problem that we face. [00:39:23] Hassan: So I have a question that's been on my mind. Um, the military, my understanding is, for example, the Navy has a whole area studying the future, like what's, what's the future of, of con conflict and such. They know about this. This is a fact to them. This is not a hypothesis. Yes. The Pentagon, [00:39:50] Bill McKibben: uh, in its pre Hegseth days published, uh, a number of reports on climate change and what they would conclude. And for fairly obvious reasons was that this was probably the greatest source of instability in the coming century. And the reason for that above all has to do with people, she isn't bless you people, people on the move around the world. The UN estimates that somewhere between one and three billion humans will have to migrate over the next 50 years from their homes, because their homes will be underwater. The fire will have destroyed it. Uh, it'll have gotten too hot to raise food where they are that those kinds of things. Um, that's an extraordinary number. I mean, a billion people, a million refugees on our Southern border was enough to discombobulate our politics and bring out the ugliest and worst things we've seen in our, our lifetimes in this country. Um, so, uh, multiply that by a thousand and try to imagine what the world looks like. That's a recipe for chronic instability, insecurity, fighting, terrorism, warfare, whatever you want. So the Pentagon has been rightly worried about this. They're also well aware that much of the expensive infrastructure they've built is very close to the ocean and as sea levels rise, it's in trouble. Uh, go take a look at the naval bases at Norfolk. Uh, you know, if you want just some small sense of what we're talking about. Um, so they've, you know, they've correctly said we need to take action on this. My guess is that's not the kind of, uh, thing that the Pentagon is doing right at the moment. At the moment, we seem convinced that, uh, the answer to our problems is, uh, injecting testosterone into our, uh, soldiers. So they'll be more, um, aggressive. I, I, I don't know how you look around the world and decide that that's, um, that's going to be militarily effective, but, uh, you know, I'm going to just say as the author of [00:42:15] Hassan: the cult of Trump and my thesis, uh, that this was, uh, uh, many decade plan to take down American hegemony of the world. If you want to dismantle trust in the U S government, uh, elect someone who's a rapist and an abuser and a serial, uh, you know, fraudster with multi-level marketing this and that with Russian ties, but put into power uniquely unqualified people in every single branch so that the real people either are forced to either resign or, or, or kowtow. And it it's, it's amazing that so much has happened with Opus Dei's project 2025, uh, to usurp our Supreme Court and, and, and our country. [00:43:13] Bill McKibben: So fast. It's a good time to a good time to try and fight back. And this November's elections are obviously going to be crucial. One of, there's a question about, uh, uh, outbreak of tropical disease as the temperature warms. And that's actually a very important thing to talk about. One of the things that really got me activated as an activist was, uh, a visit to Bangladesh some decades ago when they were having their first big outbreak of a disease called dengue fever, uh, mosquito borne virus. That's, uh, one of the really emergent diseases, the mosquito that spreads it likes the warmer wetter world that we're building for it. And I was very struck then by, well, a by how sick I was. It's a nasty disease that I highly recommend people not get, but B how unfair it all was, you know, there's 180 million people in Bangladesh, but they're a rounding error in terms of how much carbon they've put in the atmosphere compared with the 4% of us who call ourselves Americans who've put about 25% of all the greenhouse gases up in the air. Um, so we have a lot to answer for, but now those diseases are coming, as your questioner says, much closer to home. And we see many, many diseases of a changing climate that are causing huge problems, including, I think, psychological problems. Where I live in the Northeast, the spread of ticks carrying Lyme disease, a direct effect of the fact that our winters aren't cold enough anymore to kill off those tick populations. It's not only led to lots and lots of disease, it's led to a changed relationship with the natural world for many, many people. There are, mothers are no longer eager to just send their kids out into the fields and woods to play. It comes with a sense of foreboding and at the very least in need to, uh, carefully scrub and check, uh, then when they return to the home, because there's all too good a chance they're going to be carrying, uh, uh, disease carrying insect. Yeah. Yeah. Including your dogs and other [00:45:37] Hassan: creatures that are out in the woods and such. Um, so I'm an optimist. I don't know. I feel like that it's, I want to be a realist, but I also feel like it's so easy to fall into the vacuum, uh, energy of doomsday errors. Like there's nothing we can do. It's too late. And I'm just gonna, you know, binge watch Netflix, or I'm gonna play video games and, and pretend, you know, enjoy the last days that I have. And I just want to mobilize people and give them hope. Like, [00:46:15] Bill McKibben: Yep. I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I'm, I'm a realist. And part of that means that accepting that we've caused changes that we can no longer forestall, you know, that's just the way it is. But it also means accepting that there, if we act quickly, we, there are things we can do to be useful, hence we should, but we need to be doing that together. Uh, there's really no way as an individual to affect the, um, big forces at play here, which is why we form things like third act. Uh, they allow us to aggregate our efforts. I think sometimes Dr. Hassan that the two great inventions of the 20th century are going to turn out to have been the solar panel and the nonviolent social movement, the kind of movements invented by Gandhi or Dr. King or a a million people whose names we no longer know. And I, I, I, because that's a way for the small and the many to stand up to the mighty and the few. And, uh, uh, so I, I, I think it's some combination of those things, social movements and solar panels that give us a, uh, uh, uh, well, as close to an escape route as we're going to get from the ecological peril that we're in, and maybe also from some of the political peril that we're in. One of the things that's nice about solar power and wind power is that it's decentralized. Uh, the power that comes from coal and gas and oil means that since those are rare and scattered around the world, the people who control them end up with more power than they should have. Uh, you've talked about the Koch brothers who are our one among our biggest oil and gas marines in this country. Uh, and there are plenty of other examples of people who lead at a national level, what seem sort of like cults, uh, Vladimir Putin in Russia at the moment being a very good example. Um, a place where, uh, uh, uh, people are forced to believe things that they at some level know aren't true. Uh, um, um, and, and so I, you know, I just like the idea of a planet running on, uh, something that's available to everyone everywhere. You can see the wind moving the trees behind me. You can see there's, uh, there's my solar panels up standing in the, you know, in the backyard, um, catching the sun. I'm a little less, uh, you know, uh, I'm a little freer than I would be if those things weren't there. [00:49:10] Hassan: Yeah, I hear you. So, um, I want to say my model can be used on a one-on-one abusive undue relationship, or it can be a country like a Putin and a she, if they're controlling everyone's behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions to make people dependent and obedient. That's the, my recipe for a destructive mind control cult. So on my website, freedom of mind.com, people can download a free PDF with the influence continuum, which is the framework and then the bite model. And you can literally reality test any situation you're in a group or religion or whatever. How authoritarian is it? Does it allow you to read books and talk to people who are critical? Are the leaders accountable or are they malignant narcissists or is there informed consent or is [00:50:12] Bill McKibben: there? When you, uh, when you got out of the Mooney thing, how long did it take to sort of feel a sense [00:50:18] Hassan: of relief that, uh, at that? So I was a leader. I was a fanatic. I nearly died in a van crash, Bill, when I fell asleep at the wheel because I hadn't slept for three days. I should say I was sleeping three to four hours a night, seven days a week as a Mooney. So when I was in the hospital away from the cult and not constantly being re indoctrinated, my brain started to come back a bit, but it's still, I still needed help. And I, my family tried an intervention with me that I was very resistant. I threatened to kill everybody that I could. Of course, I had a cast from my toes to my groin, but, um, I wanted to prove to my family I wasn't in a cult and I wasn't brainwashed. So I was agreeing, but fighting it, but was learning about Chinese communist brainwashing models from the fifties that gave me a touchstone to be able to go, wait a minute, like Robert J. Lifton's seminal 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. The Moonies were doing all eight. So that was where the wheels started turning. But when the, when the bubble burst, it was when I realized Moon was a liar. And if he was a liar, then he couldn't be a man of God. He couldn't be the Messiah. He was not trustworthy. And that's when I felt like I was falling off a skyscraper, you know, just like I invested everything and now it's not true. I don't know who I am. I don't know what to believe. It was horrifying. I cried for hours, but I had had a life for 19 years before the Moonies. And fortunately I had a loving family. The person who introduced me to your work, Monica, was my next door neighbor who we grew up literally together. And when I got home, she baked me chocolate chip cookies and said, welcome. Oh, I'm choking up just remembering how much that touched me. But the point is, is it took me a few months to realize, hey, I've learned something important that needs, the public needs to understand. I'm not stupid. I was an extra honor student. I skipped eighth grade. I was reading postgraduate level when I was eight years old, but they got me. And so mind control is not for the stupid and the weak and the complacent. They want smart, ambitious, idealistic people who will work their asses off. So anyway, what I'm trying to convey is that there's millions of former members out there. So for me, the folks that have read my books, like combating cult mind control and such, and the lights turned on, they're like, wait a minute, the Mormons are not God's soul or religion on earth or the Jehovah's witnesses or any number of other, other groups that are authoritarian. So there are millions of us. So I've been trying to mobilize folks to start sharing their story and sharing the bite model to educate the people that they know so that we can have a psychoeducational movement about mind control. And so it's a, it's a piece I think of solving the global climate crisis. Um, but it's also understanding we need to evaluate people who have integrity, who have credentials, who have a track [00:54:11] Bill McKibben: record, who are decent moral people. One of the things that's difficult at the moment is that we've, uh, um, downgraded our belief in expertise of any kind. Um, and, and opened the door to what seemed to me to be obvious charlatans. I mean, I don't think Bobby Kennedy Jr. knows any more about public health than he doesn't believe in germ theory, bill muttering on the bench down in the city park, you know? Um, um, um, but it is, I, I understand how people can get caught up in all of that. I've had neighbors who decided not to vaccinate their kids and so on and so forth. Uh, and, and who thought of themselves as free thinkers, uh, you know, unwilling to go along with the herd. Um, I'm very grateful to have lived, grown up in an age when for the most part, people were willing to, uh, have some trust in doctors and scientists and researchers and people who, you know, because in a modern complex world, you kind of have to, I mean, nobody's capable of going out on their own and developing a computer model about the climate and, you know, doing their own research about what, you know, if you're unwilling to trust people who have spent their lives doing this, then you're going to be out of luck, you know? [00:55:47] Hassan: So, right. I want to do a plug for the scientific method. So unlike the fundamentalists and the extremists who believe they have the truth with a capital T and therefore to question anything they say or do, if they say they have a revelation from God or whatever is satanic. The scientific method is like we have a hypothesis and we test it and we depend on a community of scientists who challenge that hypothesis and try to break it down and falsify it and we'll abandon that hypothesis if we have a better explanation that comes along. So it's an open, open loop. Yep. You know, the scientific method is [00:56:32] Bill McKibben: wonderful and it's not incompatible with the spiritual sense of the world. I mean, I'm a, I'm a Methodist, which strikes me as a fairly, uh, benign, uh, uh, sect as things go. Um, quite open to the larger world and all of that. And I've been quite moved to watch in recent years as, uh, the most important religious leaders in the world, the heads of the Catholic church have been reminding us to turn to science and pay attention to what it has to tell us and to combine it with a sense of human dignity and what that has to tell us. And, uh, so I, you know, I think it's, we're not at a loss for, uh, uh, possibilities and examples and things here, but it is a very difficult time, especially when one is bombarded by the algorithm, um, uh, 24 seven. And I worry very much about the world that my grandson grows up in as a result. Yep. You and me, people will, I hope people will join to do what we can about this. And if any of your, uh, uh, uh, listeners have people who have, you know, uh, managed to reach the age of 60 or not, send them at our way at third act. And, uh, it's a good home for people who, uh, want to [00:57:57] Hassan: work with others on this stuff. Absolutely. I'm there. I'm a member. I I'm so grateful that you're willing to share an hour with my audience. We have international folks who are interested in this lens of undue influence and brainwashing and cults. And like I said, there's a lot of people who were raised in cults and recruited like myself who've gotten out. And we, we have a lot to say, uh, to warn people against fascism and authoritarianism. So I want, I've been grateful for the chance to talk and it [00:58:34] Bill McKibben: really is a pleasure and, um, um, keep up the good work. I just want to plug your, your books, [00:58:40] Hassan: the flag, the cross and the station wagon. And the more recent one, the title from George Harrison, here comes the sun and your emphasis on the technology is more affordable now to get off of the dependency of oil and new technologies are coming with solar panels. I'm, I'm reading, this is another question I wanted to ask you, but I'm reading the developing film that you can put on [00:59:09] Bill McKibben: your house windows that will be able to keep getting better, but don't delay the stuff that's out there [00:59:15] Hassan: now is plenty good enough. Great. So go to, is a bill McKibben on sub stack. It's called the crucial years on sub stack, the crucial years on sub stack. And we will share this, uh, vigorously on our social media. Thank you so much. Bill McKibben. God bless.