We have to do a lot more to bring home that news. Even people who care about this stuff still think of sun and wind as alternative energy, as if it was kind of the whole foods of energy. But in fact, it’s now the Costco of energy. This is the stuff that’s available, cheap, in bulk, off the shelf.

We’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got Bill McKibben on the program, very noted environmentalist, very excited to have bill on the show. He’s distinguished scholar at Middlebury College, went to Harvard, started three fifty.org wrote a book called The End of Nature, and back in 1989 which really jump started the environmental movement.

About a dozen books that Bill has written about the environment recently. Wrote the book, Falter: Has the human game begun to play itself out? Wrote that in 2019 he won the Gandhi Peace Prize. In 2013 named as top 100 thinkers in 2009 by Foreign Policy magazine called the nation’s leading environmentalists. And I could go on and on, but we got to get down to the show.

So Bill, I can’t read all your accolades out there. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Matt, what a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

So I always like to start with a little bit about your background and kind of what got you into the environmental movement.

Absolutely, I’m not a activist by background or training or maybe even by inclination, I’m a writer, and my first job as a young writer was at the New Yorker magazine in New York writing the talk of the town call when I was 21 and the first long piece I did about the New Yorker was an examination of where everything in my apartment, Bleecker and Broadway came from. I followed every pipe and wire. You know, I was up in Brazil because Con Ed was buying oil from Brazil, and up in the Arctic, looking at the giant hydro dams that were sending power to New York, in the Gulf of Mexico, at natural gas wells and on and on and on.

And that was actually an important piece for me, because it trained this suburban boy to suddenly understand that the physical world actually mattered. You know, the suburbs are kind of a device for hiding the physical world’s operations from you, and in a certain way, Manhattan even more so it seems able to mint money out of thin air, but it turns out it’s exquisitely dependent on the continued operation of the physical world.

So that really set me up that piece of writing to be hit hard when I started reading the early papers in the late 1980s about climate change, the first real scientific publications leading up to Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 and hit me hard enough that I wrote that book that you referred to the end of nature, which is generally regarded as the first book for a general audience about what we now call climate change, what we then called the greenhouse effect.

And that book, probably because of timing, as much as anything else, was successful. It appeared in 24 languages and was a best seller all over the place. And in a way, I guess it determined the rest of my life, because I’ve been to work on this ever since, it took me too long, 10 or 15 years to figure out that the basic job was not to win the argument about climate change. That was the easy part, and really, by the mid 90s, the world scientific community was in consensus. The hard part was to win the fight, because it wasn’t about reason or data or evidence, it was about what fights are always about money and power.

And the fossil fuel industry had so much money that it was able to lose the argument about climate change, but keep its business model ticking along right to the present day, when having spent 450, $5 million on the last election, it now is getting everything that it ever asked for from Donald Trump. So the story remains the same, and the job is to challenge that power, not with money, because we don’t have it, but with building big movements of people. The first attempt to do that was three fifty.org The first big global grassroots climate campaign.

We’ve organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country except North Korea, and that work happily with wonderful people at the four is still ticking along, and in the last few years, I’ve also organized this thing called third act, which is for old people like me. We organize people over the age of 60 for action on climate and democracy, and we’ve got about 100,000 people and working groups in every part of the country and doing. A tremendous work of all kinds.

That’s fantastic. What an amazing story arc. And yes, it is disappointing to see the oil companies and Trump win this victory for the presidency. I guess being kind of naturally inclined towards optimism and trying to find the solution in all of this I did hearken back to his election in 2017 and I thought that a lot of great things happened down on the state and local level during his four years in office.

Obviously, it’s important that we have national policies, but what I thought was heartening was that the states and the local officials didn’t give up on the climate and really dug in and did some incredible work. What do you see going forward?

I think they’ll definitely be some of that. They’re much better organized this time around the Trump team, and so they’re going to make it hard. And the banning of new wind projects and things was a bad sign about how hard that works going to be.

But there are things to be done. In late December, New York State, the 10th largest economy in the world, assigned this Polluter Pays climate super fund bill that will essentially send the bill for climate damage off to headquarters at Exxon and Chevron and the people who’ve caused that damage, California, spurred by the fires, seems likely to be next in line to pass it, and they’re the fifth largest economy in the world. These are the kind of steps that will take an impact.

But I think that the real difference between now and 2017 is that over that time, the price of renewable energy has dropped by 75 or 80% in those years, we passed some invisible line where the cheapest way to produce power on our planet became to point a sheet of glass at the sun, not to sit on fire some coal or gas or oil. And so I think we have an extraordinary opportunity now, even in the face of the Trump administration, to make that new law of economic gravity.

Tell you know California last year, and California has gone farther than anybody else in the states anyway, at building out its renewable resources. California, it reached some kind of tipping point in 2023 and for most of the days of the year, it was producing more than 100% of its electricity from renewable energy.

At some point during the day, at night, the biggest source of supply to the grid was often batteries that have been soaking up that excess sunshine all afternoon, and as a result, California in 2024 used 25% less natural gas to produce electricity than they had in 2023 that’s a big number in a single year. That’s the kind of number that freaks out the fossil fuel industry.

That’s why they spent so much money on this election, and it’s the kind of number that greatly heartens climate scientists spread around the world. Numbers like that are big enough to start taking a chunk out of the three degrees Celsius that we’re currently on path to see the temperature rise on this planet?

Yeah, I guess another hardening thing I saw was that the Chinese, their rate of growth of consuming fossil fuels, particularly for their autos, have dropped because they have so many electric cars that are coming online and and that’s hardening that, hey, they may turn things around there.

Yes, it’s worth saying that earlier today, we got news that apparently China’s carbon emissions have peaked, or they peaked in the last 10 months of 2024 appear to have gone down slightly, and that’s, again, at least in part, the result of the first Trump administration, as Thomas Friedman wrote at the time, that concentrated the minds of the Chinese, and they got to work building out their world leading technology, around cars, around batteries, around solar panels.

They install more than half of the renewable energy in the world now, and the export of those solar panels to the rest of the world is probably the single most useful thing they’ve ever done. Pakistan, last year saw people using cheap Chinese solar panels install the equivalent of 50% of the country’s electric grid on tops of factories and homes and schools, and they did it in six months the changes that are underway as a result of China’s technological prowess here are quite remarkable, and Trump can hold that off for a while, even in the US with tariffs and things, but at a certain point, word may get out that you can buy a nifty, I mean, better than Tesla. Uh, electric vehicle from China for 20 grand.

The word certainly gotten out across the developing world, because that’s what people are buying, if they’re buying cars at all. And of course, the other thing they’re buying in even larger numbers are the E bikes, that probably will be even more transformative in technological terms, truly elegant piece of machinery that takes the hill out of the bicycle. There’s some remarkable possibilities appearing. We have to do a lot more to bring home that news. Even people who care about this stuff still think of sun and wind as alternative energy, as if it was kind of the whole foods of energy, but in fact, it’s now the Costco of energy.

This is the stuff that’s available, cheap, in bulk, off the shelf, and if we put that to work, then we will get places fast. The US may not Trump may be able to prevent the us from doing it, but the US isn’t the world and less and less all the time. I think everybody else has figured it out. You can see the Europeans installing this stuff at extraordinary speed. Solar power now out produces coal for electricity across the EU as of last year. So we’re starting to see change, whether or not Matt, we can see it fast enough to catch up with the physics of global warming is the key question, and it’s going to have to come very fast indeed.

The IPCC has told us to cut emissions in half by 2030 if we want to be on something like a Paris timetable, and 2030 by my watch is four years, 11 months away, so it doesn’t give us much time. We have the technology. We’ll see if we can muster the political will.

Yeah, it’s certainly going to be an incredible challenge to put this across the finish line. The Biden administration did pass the IRA, which was, by many people’s account, the best piece of environmental legislation US history and possibly in the history of the world. A, do you agree with that statement and B, do you think enough of it’s going to survive to make the difference over the next five years?

Yes, it’s definitely an imperfect bill, but a remarkable one. It’s the first thing really that Congress did to address climate change in the almost 40 years since Jim Hansen explained to Congress what was going on and the money that that bill liberated and that the Biden administration did a very good job of shoveling out the door a lot of before they left office has been transformative in a lot of ways, not all of which people are kind of aware of.

I think that the biggest solar panel factory in the Western Hemisphere is now in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Georgia. So it’ll be interesting to see if that sort of political savvy that the Biden administration demonstrated in making sure that much of this money was going to red states. We’ll see if that’s enough to protect some of these investments in the years ahead from Trump and the oil industry. I don’t know, let us hope so, because that money is really important.

Well, they’re certainly not talking so much about canceling the IRA as other things like the immigration stuff seems to be taking front and center stage. I’m afraid that what they may do is cancel the good parts of the IRA and keep the stupid ones, the carbon capture and sequestration and the things that the oil industry likes, and I think it’ll be hard fought to make sure that the incentives for heat pumps and EVS and so on stay in place. It’s going to take all the organizing that we can do to try and make sure that happens.

Well, kind of puts Elon Musk in a situation where he’s having to kill the electric car that has brought him hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth. So I think if I was a cynical person, I’d say that that’s the reason why back Trump is to prevent Trump from completely gutting his investment in Tesla, and in particular his investment in China that he has in Tesla, it’s possible, and it’s also possible, given the events of the last week, that he’s just a Nazi too. So who knows, a hard man to figure out, right?

But I think it was an act of political genius and forethought for Biden and the administration to put so many things in those red districts that makes it very difficult for the Republican Congress to cancel them, particularly with that razor thin majority, there’s allegedly, I think, 18 or so congressmen in the Republican Party that have said, No, don’t cancel the IRA because we think it’s beneficial to our district, if not. Not the country at large, so hopefully they hold but what do you see as the things that both we as a country can be focused on and we as individuals could be focused on in the coming years and days to make real change in blue states and blue cities, we’ve got plenty of work to do, including passing those Polluter Pays climate Superfund bills really important.

But I think that the task I’m going to spend most of my time on for the next year, though we haven’t officially announced it yet, is an effort to really make people understand the remarkable place where we stand with regard to renewable energy, protect September 20 and 21st on your calendar, that’s the weekend of the Fall Equinox. We’re going to use it to do a big national and I think global event that we’re going to call Sun day, not Earth Day, but Sunday.

And it’s going to be all about the way that we can capture the rays of the sun on those photovoltaic panels and take advantage of the fact that it produces the breeze that turns those turbines and between them, that they’re capable of providing us with the power that we need, and capable of, among other things, saving people a lot of money in the process, and that the only thing that stands between us and that future are the billionaire class who want to prevent us from getting there.

So I hope it’s going to be a day of great celebration and positivity. I think we’ve got a potential national mission, international mission, global mission, not completely unlike, say, the moonshot in the 1960s when I was a boy, one of the last things that unified Americans around a single project. In this case, though, it’s not to land two men on another planet. It’s to bring our star down to the earth and use it to power the beautiful world that we were lucky enough to be born into.

So look for lots and lots of different ways of celebrating the possibilities on that weekend, and stay tuned for further announcements. You know, I publish a free newsletter on sub stack called the crucial years that keeps people informed and but I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding out if things go as they should, by springtime, I think most of the nation’s environmental groups will be fully engaged in work around this grand day.

Well, I definitely encourage people to check out your sub stack and the newsletter that you send out, which I’ve been reading and feel like is it’s an excellent source of information. You obviously have done incredible research to pull that information together and digest it.

For those of us who may have less time to be researching all day and really get down to some major developments that are affecting all of us. Maybe you could tell people how to access your sub stack. I think if you just Google Bill McKibben, the crucial years, it’ll take you there. And as I say, it’s free of charge. So it’s my, my small public service to just keep people informed about what’s going on.

Yeah, it’s it’s really great. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I feel like it really hits the high points really well and gives insider information to those of us who aren’t professional researchers. So everybody check out Bill’s sub stack on that. But tell us, what are the things that you kind of feel most optimistic about at this point in time that you think hold the most promise for the US and for the world, I

think in the US really, the only thing that I feel really, truly optimistic about and really this, in a certain way, holds for the world, is this advent of very cheap renewable energy. I don’t think that there are other ways that we really have of addressing the climate crisis. I don’t think that humans are going to decide to use a lot less energy anytime soon, 100 million or so human beings every year now enter the kind of consumer class for the first time.

Extremely hard to tell them not to do that. And as far as I can tell, it’s extremely hard to tell anybody in the rich world to use less. I haven’t had extraordinarily good luck doing it, though we’ve certainly tried. And let me add, even if you do get people to change their lifestyles dramatically, it doesn’t really get the job done.

We know this because in the early months of the COVID crisis, Americans and people around the world changed their behavior more than any environmentalist could ever have imagined. I think. Everyone just stayed home. No one got on an airplane, no one was commuting to work. Emissions went down, but not that much, about 10% at the peak, which means to me that this is not the product of a series of individual choices.

It’s the fact that the machine that is our modern society runs at the moment on fossil fuel, and while it’s running, we have to reach in and pull out the coal and oil and gas and stick in sun and wind and batteries. And that’s a hard task, but that’s the task, the doable one. So watching that proceed in the places that have really tried, California, now, Texas actually going very fast. Pakistan, China, those give me some hope that we’re capable of changing the seemingly undauntable math of climate change.

Again, I don’t know whether we can do it in time or not, and I know enough climate science to be very worried. As you know, the science of the last couple of years about things like the jet stream and the Gulf Stream and the world’s hydrological cycles all paint a even darker picture than we’d originally thought about climate change.

If there was a motto for climate scientists, I think it would be faster than expected, because that’s what’s happening to one system after another. So even if we do everything right, it’s going to be a very close call. But our job, given the stakes, is to do as much right as we possibly can.

Yeah, certainly. And yeah, it does seem quite daunting what is happening in the Arctic, and the change in temperature there is dramatic, and it’s even more dramatic than we’re experiencing more temperate climates. You know, we seem like a degree or two, and people don’t seem to be alarmed. Where in the Arctic, it’s five times as much or more, which is catastrophic. If we continue in this direction.

We’re not getting out of this unscathed. You know, we’ve already seen huge damage. Most recently, of course, the remarkable fires in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has been the backdrop for the world’s dreams about itself. You know, its sense of what constitutes the good life is set against a lot of Southern California landscapes, because that’s where Hollywood filmed them.

But now that’s on fire after the hottest and driest stretch of weather that Southern California has ever recorded. It’s no wonder that it happened, but it’s still a very, profound warning, not just about the physics of climate change, but about the economics of it too. What’s happening in Los Angeles will go a long ways towards crashing the country’s insurance system. It is buckling under the weight of dealing with the climate catastrophes that we have unleashed, and having two really expensive ones, Hurricane Helene in the southern Appalachians, and then the fires in LA. Having two of them back to back is an extraordinary strain.

Yeah, it’s truly incredible. I saw numbers. Initially. They were thinking 20, 30, 40, now I saw an estimate $250 billion you know, and it keeps escalating.

That’s what I saw, too. And that puts it side by side with Katrina as the most economically devastating disaster in American history, and probably behind, maybe, if anything, only the tremendous earthquake and tsunami in Japan of a decade ago as the most costly disaster in the planet’s history.

Well, unfortunately, it takes a lot to get humans attention, and maybe this event gets, you know, humanity’s attention, I’m not sure exactly that it will. It may have gotten the entertainment industry’s attention, which could be a valuable ally in getting out the message of climate change, because it’s now become very real to the movers and shakers in the entertainment industry in a way that it never has before. Yep, your lips to God’s ear on that one for sure.

So in terms of, I hadn’t heard of Pakistan, I you know as them rolling out that much solar. That’s incredibly good because they were rolling out a tremendous amount of coal fired plants that the Chinese were selling them at a record rate. So the fact that they’re substituting solar for coal is very good news.

Demand on the electric grid in Pakistan, the National Grid dropped about 10% last year because there’s now so much private solar those coal fired utilities are in big financial trouble because they’re unable to, well, they’re unable to find customers for expensive, unreliable power. And it’s particularly appropriate that it’s happening in Pakistan so rapidly, because there’s probably no country on earth that’s taken more of a licking from the increased temperature of the planet.

Not only does it annually record now some of the hottest temperatures on Earth, but twice in the last decade, they’ve had flooding on a scale that we haven’t seen since Noah, you know, the last time something like a third of the country flooded. So there’s some poetic justice there too.

Yeah, I had some people on the show a while back. Scientist Leslie field, who teaches at Stanford, and she’s worked on preserving the ice because in Pakistan, and they’re talking about, well, potentially the Himalayas melting, and the water source for 3 billion people, yeah, there’s nothing potential about it. I mean, I’ve been up in the Himalayas, and it is definitely melting, and it’s painful and dangerous to watch in every way. These are the things that happen when you dramatically change the temperature of the earth.

The temperature of the earth over very deep time, of course, has changed before, gone up and down over millions of years. The difference now is that we’re doing it so much faster. There was a big study released last year of the most detailed temperature record that we’ve yet assembled over the last 500 million years, and there’s no stretch in that that comes close to matching the speed with which humans are now changing the temperature of the planet.

We’ve released so much CO2 that it’s as if we’re just a kind of endless spewing super volcano that’s altering the chemistry of the atmosphere in the most profound ways. My understanding, I thought I read recently that the CO2 emissions went up yet again in 2024.

Yes, that’s true. Globally, that’s true. There’s a lot of momentum in this system, Asia, and 60% of humanity is in Asia is just now entering its period of really rapid economic development what the West went through a century ago. That’s where India is right now.

So it’s very, very difficult to blunt this rise in CO2 emissions, but clearly we’ve managed to now begin, at least, to influence the trajectory, the angle of that rise. I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to plateau the world CO2 emissions within the next few years, and then the question will become how steeply they go down. That’s what we really are going to need to see a very, very rapid decline, which will only come from the very, very rapid build out of renewable energy.

Well certainly my understanding is we’ve seen a reduction in the US emissions over recent years. And you mentioned Texas as being a leader in this area. And it’s kind of interesting the tension between the Republican Party in Texas, and the people that are building out solar in Texas. What’s your understanding of how that’s playing out in real time?

It is completely fascinating. Texas has a kind of commitment to a sort of cowboy capitalism that makes it easier for people to go build solar and wind projects, and they’re desperately needed there. Texas has done a bad job of controlling its use of energy. Unlike California, it has poor building codes, huge amounts of energy wasted because people have resistance heating instead of putting in heat pumps or things like that. But to deal with it, they have been very progressive in their adoption of Sun wind, and particularly batteries to smooth out the rises and falls in the use of energy.

So it’s an interesting test case to see whether ideology or economic logic prevails, and frankly, who knows. Right at the moment, Trump is riding a wave of ideology instead of economic logic, but it’s such foolishness that you know even the oil industry doesn’t want his drill, drill, drill thing. They know that if we dramatically increase the amount of drilling we did, the price of oil would go down, and that would make their businesses less tenable, not more.

So the trouble with the Trump presidency is it comes at just the wrong time and provides a break to the momentum that was otherwise developing. On the other hand, it probably will hand global leadership on climate issues to the Chinese, and given our track record, frankly, over the last few decades, that may not be the worst thing in the world in terms of global progress on climate because we’ve been holding things back, not spurring them forward.

Yeah, it’s pretty remarkable to be in this position, that we are ceding leadership of this important technology to the Chinese.

It sure is because. Because, you know, not only was the US the place where we understood climate change, the US at Bell Labs in 1954 was the place where we invented the photovoltaic cell, which is going to be the most important technology of the 21st century. It’s just that it’s probably going to be the Chinese and not the US that dominate that technology now, in terms of the IRA investments and, for instance, the Marjorie Taylor Greene factory, are we starting to produce solar panels at scale, at prices that are on par with China, not on par with China, and not anywhere near the same scale yet?

But there’s no reason that we can’t this is not really, is not rocket science. This is fairly straightforward work, and the US should be fine at it. We just have to get down to it, and that’s very much what Biden was trying to do with the IRA.

Well, thank you, Bill for being on the show. I appreciate your time and the great work that you’re doing. And I encourage everybody to check out your website and your sub stack, as well as check out 350.org.

Join bill in being a volunteer, being an activist, yes, and tell your grandparents about Third Act. You know, we need all us oldsters leagues together to get things done.

Matt, many thanks to you for all your good work, and I’ll look forward to the next time.

Thank you so much. Bill.