Factually! with Adam Conover - How to Solve the Climate Crisis with Bill McKibben

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Climate change is the biggest disaster facing humanity. And yet so often, our solutions seems to be limited to buying slightly better grocery bags and cars. How do we ACTUALLY fight back against climate change — and are our solutions working? One of America’s foremost climate experts and activists, Bill McKibben, joins Adam to explain what is being done, and more importantly what YOU can do, to protect our planet. factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me on the show once again. I want to thank everybody who came out to see me in San Diego this weekend. I got one last stop on my tour for now.

I'm sure we're going to add more dates. But in just a week and a half, I am going to be in Portland, Oregon. If you are in the area, please come out and see me at Helium Comedy Club. I'm doing my brand new hour of standup. We are going to have a fantastic time. And by the way, if you want to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com slash adamconover. Just five bucks gets you access to ad-free episodes,

bonus podcast episodes. You can join our community Discord and our live book club. It is a blast. I hope to see you there. Head to patreon.com slash adamconover, and thank you for your support. Now, if you remember, we're doing a special series this month on the challenges facing us and what the fuck we can do about them. We say fuck hopelessness on this show.

We're not going to give up. Instead, we're talking to incredible experts about how you, yes, you can make a difference in the biggest challenges we face. And this week, we're talking about the biggest one of all, climate change. Now, look, it's easy to feel hopeless about the climate. We know that temperatures are getting hotter year after year, that weather is getting more chaotic and more destructive, and we know that it is all our fault. But all that the governments have done about it is, you know, convene conferences, sign non-binding resolutions, while a third of Pakistan floods or the Pacific Northwest erupts

in flames. And in the face of a challenge like that, you know, we as individuals often feel powerless. Sure, you can get paper bags instead of plastic, or you can get a better car that you drive two hours to your really far commute to work, but we all know that individual consumer choices aren't going to add up to that much, and we feel powerless to put in place the large-scale changes that we know we need. So we give up, right? We say, you know, nothing you can do about the climate. Let's just keep burning fossil fuels, go to the beach and chill out until we die because there's nothing to be done, right? Well, no, this is self-defeating and frankly, planet-defeating logic. The one thing

that will guarantee we will never solve climate change is if we all believe it is so impossible that we don't even try. That frame of mind is absolutely wrong, and it's not just morally wrong, it is also factually false. Because the truth is, those who are trying are having success. We are making a difference in the fight against climate change. For instance, the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that was just passed in the United States, is the largest investment in climate in American history. After decades of inaction, the bill will spend $369 billion to deal with climate change and speed our transition to renewable energy.

This massive set of policies and incentives will reduce, by some estimates, our emissions close to 40% from 2005 levels by 2030. This is huge. It's a triumph. But of course, it's also just a start. Incredible challenges remain. But here's the important part. This act didn't just appear out of nowhere. We would never have gotten the IRA without decades of climate activism.

Activism that will and must continue pushing governments, companies, and people to make changes to avert and lessen the catastrophes that are already baked in. But the question still remains, what can we do on an individual level to fight climate change? That's what you want to know, right? What is there to do besides getting paper bags and taking the bus instead of buying a fancy car? Well, today we have the best guest possible to help us answer this question. He is one of the most important and influential climate activists in the world, and his work stretches back decades. His 1989 book, The End of Nature, was one of the very first to explain climate change and global warming to a

general audience. He founded the international climate activism organization 350.org, and he has been instrumental in helping stop pipelines and pushing investors to divest from fossil fuel companies and stop supporting them via their investments. And it's the kind of activism that he has pioneered that brought us to the point of getting the IRA passed in the first place. There is no one better on the planet to help tell us what is currently being done to fight climate change, the progress that we are making, and what you can do to solve the largest problem humanity has ever faced. Please welcome, and it is such an honor to have him, the great writer, activist, and communicator, Bill McKibben. Bill McKibben, thank you so much for being on the show. Well, it's a pleasure to get to be with you. I have been reading your work for so many years, and I really use you as a North Star for my understanding of what is happening in climate policy with the climate generally, of what is happening in climate policy with the climate generally, because you know the field better than anyone, and you write about it so compellingly, and you are extremely unsparing

in your evaluation of where we are and the challenges that we face. I've read many of your pieces that have frightened me to death. I've read many of your pieces that have made me feel very hopeful. I want to know, how are you feeling right now, generally hopeful or or fearful? You know what? Stuck in the middle and not in a not in a bad way. We're in the middle of a race, Adam. You know, it's a race between the fast, the fast physical deterioration of the planet's systems. I mean, as we talk today, there are 33 million people displaced from their homes in Pakistan because of flooding on a scale that we haven't seen since Noah. And at the same time, the scientists and engineers have

figured out how to provide us with the stuff we need, cheap solar and wind energy. And there's at least some sign that that movements are finally being able to force politicians to start building it. This Inflation Reduction Act, for whatever reason we're calling it that, the climate bill that came through the Congress a couple of weeks ago. That's the first time that Congress has acted on the climate question since the day 34 years ago when Jim Hansen, NASA physicist, explained to the U.S. Senate for the very first time that climate change was a real threat. So now we're in a race. Can we build this stuff fast enough? Can we start dropping the load of CO2 that we're putting into the atmosphere fast enough to catch up with physics? We're obviously going to see a lot of

damage. We see a lot of damage already. Can we stop that damage short of the point where it cuts civilization off at the knees? We don't know. And the trick is to go as fast as we possibly can in the hope of averting as much damage as we can. Yeah, I mean, there's it's a great argument for doing as much as we can every moment in order to avert as much disaster as we can. But, I mean, man, the way you put that, the Inflation Reduction Act being the first bill ever out of Congress after hearing decades and decades of reports about what climate change was going to do is really, really shocking. And we've talked on this show before about the history of why that is

and the fossil fuel companies' misinformation campaign and their pushback against climate action. But I want to hear from you about the IRA specifically. What do you is is it a good bill in your view? Well, so first, let's begin with the notion that any bill represents some kind of progress. Right. Is it any progress is good progress. Is it the way I would have written it? No. Because basically, Joe Manchin got to write it. And Joe Manchin took more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else in Washington. So what you're seeing in the bill, Adam, is a kind of x-ray of where the power balance lies now. We've spent the last 15 or

20 years building big movements to demand action on climate change. They've finally gotten big enough and politically potent enough that they can't be ignored any longer by our politicians. Joe Biden ran on climate change as one of his two or three signature issues in the last presidential election. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry remains large and powerful, not as large and powerful as it used to be. We've run a divestment campaign. It's turned into the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, $40 trillion in endowments and portfolios and pension funds have divested from fossil fuel. But they retain significant political power. So that piece of legislation was a negotiation between

the climate movement, climate scientists, environmental justice activists on the one hand, and the fossil fuel industry on the other hand. And it was conducted through, you know, Joe Biden and Joe Manchin. But so the law is a sweeping advance with lots and lots ofarts. And now the hope is... Basically, what it does is funnel a ton of money into clean energy. And the hope is that that will continue to drive down the price of clean energy so much and so fast that the bad parts of the bill won't make as much difference. For instance, Joe Manchin made them promise that for every wind or solar permit they granted, they would also offer up for lease some part of the federal public lands for oil and gas drilling. Now, that's an incredibly stupid and dangerous idea. The hope is that the price of sun and wind power will be so much cheaper that no one will bother to bid on those leases in the years ahead because they won't be able to make money on them.

Isn't it the case that it's I don't really follow it very closely, but it's not as though the oil and gas companies are clamoring for this federal land, is it not? You know, some of the some of the recent auctions have shown up with no bidders at all the arctic national wildlife refuge was supposed to be turned into an oil well despite the fact that it's literally called a wildlife refuge we've done a good enough job everybody everybody around the country is led by the Gwich'in tribe that lives there. They've done a good enough job of making this poisonous politically that the banks and the fossil fuel companies just decided not to bid when the time came. Now, at the moment, thanks to Vladimir Putin, and we should probably talk about that, the price of oil is high enough that people are making money.

But an awful lot of investors look ahead and see that that's probably a temporary blip. In fact, it's one of those blips that may have the seeds of its own undoing. What do I mean? What do I mean? Well, I mean, the price of gas has been five bucks a gallon for half the year, which is great in the short term for Exxon. They're making money hand over fist after not making money for a while. But it probably is the last chance they're going to get to do that because what's the other effect of five dollar a gallon gasoline? It's that anyone with a brain is busy Googling, which electric car should I buy? And with that goes the customer base for Exxon. So we're in this period of transition.

And the point is, we need it to be a very rapid transition. Everybody knows that 40 or 50 years from now, we're going to run the planet on sun and wind because it's as close to free as we're going to get. The trouble is, if it takes 40 or 50 years to get there, the planet that we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet. That's why movements have to work so hard to catalyze this reaction, to make it happen faster than it otherwise would. And that's what many of us now, that's why we keep ending up in jail and, you know, mounting big campaigns and on and on and on, just in an effort to speed up this transition. So it happens, You know, once we melt the Arctic, no one's got a plan for how you freeze it back up again. Yeah.

Well, I want to talk about those movements in just a second, but I just want to ask you one more question about the bill first, because, you know, in my reading about it, I understand that there's been a policy shift in the policies that we put forward in terms of climate change, that there's the carrot approach and there's the stick approach. And for a number of decades, we were trying to get the stick approach, like a carbon tax or a carbon cap, cap and trade,

those sorts of policies where we make it expensive to put carbon into the atmosphere. Instead of it being free, anybody with a smokestack can send carbon up into the air. Instead, we charge you if you do it. And then if you want to be able to do it, you have to pay some money or maybe you can, there's a credit system where you can trade, et cetera, et cetera. And my understanding is all the experts believed, hey, this is the policy that will make the biggest impact. And unfortunately, it was politically impossible to pass. I believe the Barack Obama administration tried to pass it and failed.

And so this is now, we've devolved to the carrot approach where we're doing credits and we're doing incentives in order to try to accelerate the development of the clean energy infrastructure in order to make it more competitive with fossil fuels. And I'm just curious in your view, is that going to be enough? Or I guess enough is the wrong word, because even when you do enough, you can do more. But is that all right that we have made that transition? Or do you regret that we were not able to do cap and trade? What we probably should have done was just a straightforward series of regulations saying, here's how much you have to switch if you're a utility every year. You know, you have to get 5% more solar and wind and 5% less fossil fuel. And that was actually in the bill. That was actually in the bill, but Manchin took it out about a year ago. I mean, he's been systematically doing the work of the fossil fuel industry here.

And so what's left, you're correct, is just a big pile of money. Politicians are generally happier spending money to let people do something new rather than telling them they got to stop doing something that they're doing now. That's more, that's more painful. And the hope here is that, that this will, people will stop doing what they're doing now because it'll just become so outrageously more expensive than the clean option. And, and so that's the hope, you know, in, in a, in, in a rational world, you know, scientists warned us 35 years ago, we would have started almost immediately with some kind of modest price on carbon or something. And the giant super tanker that is our economy, you know, would have steered a couple of degrees to port. And, you know, 35 years later, it will be sailing in a whole different ocean. But that's not what we did. Thanks to the climate denial efforts,

thanks to the really big lie that came from the fossil fuel industry, we doubled down. We just went straight ahead, but faster. Human beings have produced more CO2 in the 35 years since we were warned about this than in all of human history beforehand. So, you know, now we're in a place where we have to move extraordinarily fast. Instead of having four decades, we've got seven or eight years to make huge changes. That will strain our ability, you know, politically to get things done, but also just physically to get things done. You know, that's an extraordinary number of solar panels and air source heat pumps and induction cooktops and electric vehicle chargers and things. Among other things, the estimate is we need a million more electricians than we have in the U.S. If you know a young person who wants to make a difference in the world and is also kind of worried about the stability of their economic life,

you could give them a lot worse advice than trained to be an electrician. Because we're going to need an enormous number of them for a very long time. because we're going to need an enormous number of them for a very long time. And the work they're going to be doing is absolutely critical to making the planet a habitable place. Yeah. But that's, I love the way you put that though, because it makes it look like, hey, this is opportunity. This is opportunity knocking that there's a lot of work to do.

And guess what? We can step up and do it and we can make money doing it too, right? Right. That's like this is always a good incentive. This is going to be the biggest economic transition in human history. I mean, we're taking out the heart of our current economy, which is burning stuff, coal, gas and oil and replacing it. And that's, you know, just think of the hardware involved. So, yes, it's people are going to make money. Now, they're not going to make money. And this is the reason that Exxon et al

have opposed it. They're not going to make money on the scale that the oil industry did. And if you think about it for a little while, you can figure out why. You know, once you put up a solar panel, you know, you have to, somebody is going to become a billionaire putting up solar panels. People already are. But once you've got a solar panel on your roof, the sun delivers your energy for free every morning when it rises above the horizon. That's, you know, if you're Exxon, who's profited by having people write you a check every month for 100 years for their next supply of energy, that's the dumbest business model on Earth. And that's why they've thrown everything they have for over 30 years into making sure that it gets, you know, that if it ever happens, it happens as slowly and painfully as possible. slowly and painfully as possible. And, and their ability to politically game the system has, you know, stuck us in the fix we're in right now, where we see heat waves and floods. I think you, I think you underestimate them because they, they will figure out how to rip

people off on the solar panels. They'll figure out how to make it, you lease the solar panel on the roof and you pay them an installation fee fee and then you pay them all other kinds of, you know what I mean? There's definitely some of that going on. The Oklahoma utility last year announced that if you wanted to put a solar panel on the roof, you had to pay them a $1,500 exit fee to get away from their utility. exit fee to get away from their utilities. So there's plenty of that going on. But the basic truth is that scientists and engineers have lowered the cost of renewable energy 90% over the last decade. We now live on a world where the cheapest way to generate power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That's a Hogwarts scale magic. And what it means is that, as I wrote earlier this year in The New Yorker, that human beings could quite legitimately hope to end our 200,000 year career of setting things on fire sometime in the next decade or two. Like, you know, literally fire made us who we are. Darwin said that language and fire were the two

crucial human inventions. Fire let us cook food, which in turn allowed our brains to get larger. which in turn allowed our brains to get larger. Fire let us move north away from the equator. Anthropologists think that the bonds we formed around the campfire at night helped make us a social species. 300 years ago, when we learned how to burn coal, combustion transformed the planet, producing modernity. But now the bad effects of that combustion are so enormous that we should be struggling very hard to bring it to an end and instead

rely on the fact that the good Lord hung a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky, and we know how to make full use of it. The need for speed in this transition, by the way, is not related just to climate change, though that is the existential risk that could easily destroy our civilizations. There are also at least two other extremely important reasons for this. The new data makes clear there was a big, finally, a big study last year by doctors all over the world, makes clear that about one death in five on this planet is the direct result of breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. People, mostly poor people, end up breathing all those particulates if you live

next to the highway or the coal-fired, whatever it is. And they kill you. One death in five, nine million people a year. That's more than HIV, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, war, terrorism combined. It's way more than COVID. And it's all unnecessary because the vaccine for dying of particulates in your lungs is called, you know, electric vehicles and e-bikes and so on. The other reason that's really come into sharp focus this year is because there's a gruesomely tight link between fossil fuel and autocracy. gruesomely tight link between fossil fuel and autocracy. You know, we've sort of known this for years. Our biggest oil and gas barons in this country were the Koch brothers, and they used their winnings to, you know, purchase one of our political parties and deform our democracy. We've known that the, you know, king of Saudi Arabia gets to cut people's heads off with a sword because everyone depends on his supply of oil. But this year, Putin really made it, you know, as plain as the

nose on your face. I mean, 60 percent, 60 percent of Putin's export earnings that power the Russian economy come from selling oil and gas. Look around your house, Adam. Try to find some object of Russian manufacture that in a fit of indignant rage you could boycott. Unless you have an old bottle of Stolichnaya someplace at the back of the liquor cabinet, I wager you cannot find anything made in Russia. All they are is a gas station. And they've used that control of oil and gas to intimidate Western Europe for many years. But, you know, now it's going to be a very difficult winter in Europe, and it's going to be cold and expensive. But within a year or two,

the EU has made the strong commitment to moving much more rapidly to renewable energy, not just because of climate reasons, but because they're sick of being under Putin's thumb. Boris Johnson, of all people, earlier today in the right wing British tabloids was boasting about the fact that wind power in the UK is now nine times cheaper than natural gas fired electricity. So numbers like that just become hard to beat at a certain point. And hopefully we'll move fast in that direction because it is just tragic to watch a malevolent jerk like Putin able to carry out his fantasies simply because he has a lot of oil money sitting in his pocket. And he's not even the biggest oil producer. He's just one of them. But well, look, we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Bill McKibben

when I want to ask you about the movement that is helping power all of these changes we're seeing. We'll be right back with more Bill McKibben. So, Bill, we've been talking about the Inflation Reduction Act. You talked about how Joe Manchin was the largest receiver of donations from the fossil fuel industry and how he made all these little cuts to the bill and didn't allow things through. But then at the end of the day, he signed it. We thought he wasn't going to, and then he turned around and signed it after all. And I was sitting there going, why, if he was the receiver of all these money of all this money, did he sign it? And was it because of the movement that has built around, you know, doing something about the climate?

Is that what forced his hand? Indirectly, anyway, one of the goals of movements is to win lots of small battles along the way. So we've fought like hell to beat the Keystone Pipeline or to have all these divestment actions or so on and so forth. But important is each of those things were in and of themselves. payoff comes when taken together, they manage to start shifting the zeitgeist, I think would be the right word, people's sense of what's normal and natural and obvious. And the polling data makes extraordinarily clear that this is what has happened over the last 10 or 15 years. We've reached the point where a vast majority of Americans want action on climate change. And that's not been enough to sway the Republican Party. They remain basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry. But the Democratic Party is now fully engaged at some level in this project. Biden, to make sure that he picked up

Bernie's voters after the 2020 primaries, Biden set up a little committee and he appointed a couple of his people to it. Gina McCarthy, now the domestic climate czar, and John Kerry, now our climate envoy. And Bernie put a couple of heavy hitters of his own on it, AOC, and a woman named Varshini Prakash, the woman who had first divested UMass Amherst from fossil fuel, and then went on to found the Sunrise Movement that brought us the Green New Deal. And they hammered out what, you know, basically the basic outlines of what two years later would become the Inflation Reduction Act. And Biden knew that his success depended on that. And so he kept just unrelenting pressure on Manchin until finally he got at least some kind of deal. So that shift in the zeitgeist has been a product of extraordinary movement building by millions of people over many years.

And the good news is that it's not just happening in this country. It happens all over the world. You know, I helped start 350.org, which became the first iteration of a global climate movement. We've had 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. And so there's the same pressure happening in lots and lots and lots of places. And it's beginning to tell. Finally, it shouldn't have to be this hard. It's stupid that people have to go to jail and march in the streets and things to get our politicians to pay attention to the clear warning of existential peril from scientists. scientists, but, you know, it's not the most rational of worlds. So that is what we have to do. And happily, people are doing it and doing it in all kinds of fashions. You know, much of the action has come in recent years from young people. I formed 350.org with seven college students. These divestment campaigners were young. They formed the Sunrise Movement. You know about the

remarkable Greta Thunberg of Sweden, and you should. She's one of my favorite people in the world to work with. I adore her. But she would be the first to say, look, there's 10,000 of me around the world, and we have 10 million followers in high school and junior high school. That's how many kids were out on climate strike in September of 2019 before the pandemic hit. And that's fantastic. I did begin to worry at some point, Adam, that I was hearing too many people say, oh, this is up to the next generation to solve, you know, which seemed both ignoble and impractical, um, young people for all their energy and ambition and intelligence and idealism lack the structural power necessary to make these

shifts happen in time. Yeah. So we've been formed this last year, this new operation called third act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on democracy and on climate change. And we've been having lots and lots of fun. I'll tell you just that one of our campaigns is to get the big banks, Wells Fargo, B of A, Citi, and Chase to stop handing over money to the fossil fuel industry for expansion. And so we've been doing these demonstrations outside banks. I was at one recently, and there was a big crowd of high school kids there because they get this completely, and they being somewhat spryer were at the head of the march. But at the back, you know,

there was a big, big crowd of people with hairlines like mine marching under a banner that said fossils against fossil fuels. And so, you know, we're going to do what we can to build out as big and broad a coalition as it's possible to have. Wow, that is that is really impressive to see that happen. And look, one of the things, though, that bums me out about climate activism is I often hear my own peers say, well, look, it's too late or there's such a big problem, there's so little I can do. It seems like and often in my darker moments, I think like, hey, there's a lot of things I could be an activist about, but like climate change seems like the one that is the biggest

lift where my input will make the smallest difference, you know, and how do you overcome that as an organizer? Your intuition is not incorrect. I mean, the problem with climate change is it is very big and we are very small. And really, there is not much that as individuals we can do that will affect the outcome. I am extremely glad that I have solar panels all over my roof and that I've had them for years and that they're connected to an electric vehicle in the garage and, you know, on and on and on. I don't try to fool myself that that's how we're going to solve this in the time that we have. So the way to think about it is the most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to have some hope of shifting the basic political or economic ground

rules here. And if that happens, then change can come at a pace that might matter. So, you know, it's for all sorts of good common sense reasons you want to buy an electric car, but that shouldn't be the main focus of your work. The main focus of your work should be once you've got your electric car or even better yet, your electric bike, you know, riding it to the next meeting of the people who are going to shift the law so that everybody in California or Massachusetts or Texas or wherever can have an electric car too. Or driving your old used car to that meeting as well. Like if you can't afford a car, go to the meeting. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Very well put.

Well, look, I want to ask you more about the activism piece of it, but something that's a framing that you gave to the climate problem years ago that stuck with me forever. I think I read this article 10 years ago. I believe it was in The New Yorker. And you wrote about how the amount of oil that is currently in the ground that is owned by fossil fuel companies, or the amount of fossil fuel total that they own that is in the ground, they have counted it, they, you know, intend to pump it out and sell it, all of that put together would be enough to, you know, cause catastrophic amounts of climate change to have us blow past all the different targets that, you know, the scientists want us to meet. And that part of our challenge is a very difficult political one of somehow getting these giant corporations to

leave this resource in the ground when it is already priced into their stock prices, when they've already made revenue projections based on the, you know, it's sitting in the warehouse on a bunch of pallets ready to go out. And how do we convince them to take a loss on it instead? And that was such a powerful framing that I'm paraphrasing, maybe I've gotten a little bit wrong, but it really stuck with me. And I'm curious if that's still a framing that you think is apt and how do you think we do that? Or do you think we're on the road to doing that? figure out that framing. I mean, I wrote the first book about climate change back in 1989, but it wasn't until 2010 or 2011 when there was a little report from a London think tank that started laying out these numbers that it really, that part of it really began to sink in. The big oil companies and coal companies have in their reserves about five times as much carbon as is necessary to take us past the targets that we all

agreed to in Paris in 2016. So, I mean, if they carry out their stated business plans, if they do what they've told their shareholders and their banks they plan to do, then there's no drama about how this story comes out. We know the ending. So our job is to upset that story. And that's why we launched, you know, Naomi Klein and I read that original little London study. And that was the genesis of what became this vast divestment movement. And eventually, I mean, this is where the, you know, the fight will be. Can we keep most of that carbon in the ground? Key to that happening is going to be the continued fall half the price then the then no one in their right mind is going to gain up that stuff to because you'll just lose money on it right that's how you keep

it in the warehouse because no one's going to want to buy it because hey this is too expensive right and in this case the warehouse is you know uh well underground. Yeah, yes, of course. And, and, and, and that's why, you know, what became, you know, one of the slogans of this sort of movement over the last decade has literally been keep it in the ground. And, and so that's why there was a great deal of pressure on Biden, for instance, to promise that he would stop new leasing on federal lands for oil and gas drilling. Now, I had to go back on that promise to get Joe Manchin to sign on to this Inflation Reduction Act. But the hope is that, as I said before, most of that won't ever get drilled because it won't be economical to do it. But this, I mean, this explains why the fossil fuel industry pushes so endlessly,

so hard, always against climate action, because those reserves are measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. And, you know, if we strand those assets, that's money that's never going to go to the CEO of Exxon. So that's the fight. Because it's like, look, a lot of people make their money in that industry, but we need to eventually agree this is not an industry that should exist at the scale, at least that it did in the 80s. And, you know, we need to, unfortunately for all the people who make their living that way, we need to end that industry and find or transition that industry. Right. And what we can't do is what happened with the tobacco industry, which is just let them move their operations overseas and sell cigarettes to Chinese people instead. Right. Because, you know, if you emit it's, you know, climate change is the ultimate secondhand smoke problem. No matter where you put the carbon in the atmosphere, it heats the whole planet. So that's why we have I mean, they don't call it global warming for nothing. And that's why we organize all over the world. But yes, that's exactly right.

Now, the economics of it are sound. I mean, you create far more jobs in the course of using and building out renewable energy than you did with fossil fuel. Fossil fuel tends to be highly capital intensive and not take much labor. And renewable energy is sort of the other way. But that doesn't mean that, you know, it's exactly the same people who get the jobs. And this is why every plan that Democrats have put forward for decades now to deal with climate change has had lots of money for this transition, you know, for retraining people and so on and so forth. And the Republicans never let it pass because they understood politically that they were better off holding coal miners as hostages, that that benefited them politically. So that's what they've done.

Now, in that Inflation Reduction Act, there is some money for these transitions. And for the communities, you know, if you build a, say, a big solar array, and you do it, you get a tax credit to begin with now. But if you do it in what's called an energy community, some town in West Virginia that has had a lot of coal miners thrown out of work, then you get another 10% tax break on top of that. So it should steer a lot of investment precisely in those directions. People have sure tried. investment precisely in those directions, people have sure tried. Well, let's ask about, since you mentioned overseas, look, you know, the U.S. and China are always battling for the title of the greatest emitter, the dubious record holder. And, you know, China is not a country where the sort of, you know, let's say democratic movement tactics that you can use in the United States are necessarily effective.

And, yeah, and obviously China is always used as a bugaboo by, you know, folks on the right in the in the U.S. who want to say, well, why should we, you know, why should we decarbonize in the U.S.? Because China is just going to keep doing it and then they'll lap us and beat us in the economy. It's a terrible argument. But what do you think is going to happen in China? Well, so let's just talk about what is happening in China. Yeah. It's true that China is now the world's leading emitter, which makes sense because they have most of the world's people. In per capita terms, the U.S. remains much larger emitter of which makes sense because they have most of the world's people. In per capita terms,

the US remains much larger emitter of CO2. And in historical terms, China will never catch us for the amount of carbon we've poured into the atmosphere, which is really the number that counts because that CO2 stays up there for more than a century. I mean, the stuff that I was pouring into the atmosphere when i was learning to drive in my plymouth fury in suburban america in 1974 is still up there heating the planet you know yeah um and and but china uh understands that they have a serious problem uh china has just come through probably the most savage heat wave in human history this summer.

80 or 90 days across swaths of land with hundreds of millions of people in them where the temperature was elevated 20, 30, 40 degrees above normal, where it didn't get cool off much at night. I mean, just this Yangtze River dried to a trickle. The Chinese have produced far, far, far more renewable energy than anybody else on the planet. They've been putting up for years at a pace three, four, five, in some cases, 10 times faster than the rest of the world. in some cases, 10 times faster than the rest of the world. They developed the manufacturing expertise was one of the things that brought the price down so sharply. So China is probably

at this point seeing its peak production of coal fired power, and maybe its peak consumption of hydrocarbons and is beginning to come fairly quickly down the other side, I think. Now, it's going to be a plateau and a kind of bumpy one. And China has lots of other problems. You know, when they get in these economic slowdowns, their instinct is always to fire up the coal-fired power plants and build some more infrastructure just to put people to work. fire up the coal-fired power plants and build some more infrastructure just to put people to work. But the trend seems pretty clear. Probably the most interesting case at the moment is not China, but India. And India's, because it's about 10 or 15 years behind China in that kind of energy curve.

And it really could be, given the changing economics of renewable power, the first big country to skip at least some of the fossil fuel era in its industrialization. They have their own political pressures. I mean, Modi, who's a jerk, ran for president, literally campaigning via the private jet of the biggest coal company in India. But they also have countervailing political pressures. Air pollution in China is now, and India is now worse than China, the worst in the world. Yeah, it's terrible there. And so then, you know, I think we're going to see in cities like Delhi, a super rapid conversion to electric vehicles, electric scooters, on and on and on. Just because, I mean, the last time I mean, I love India. It's one of my favorite countries on Earth.

But the last time I was in Delhi, I just sort of hunkered down in the hotel room. It just hurt too much to go outside and walk around. I've been there. You feel it on day one. You know, it felt like when we had fires in Southern California and you would feel it at the end of the day, you know, the soot in your lungs, that is what it feels like to be in Mumbai, at least where I was. Forest fire all day, every day, year round. And so it'd be a huge improvement in quality of life if they were to make that conversion. I mean, the last numbers I saw were from three or four years ago, but of the 5 million

children in the Delhi area, two and a half million had deep lung damage just from breathing the air. Wow. So when we talk about one death in five around the planet being the result of breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel, it's places like Mumbai that we're talking about. But it would make such a difference for India to leapfrog in that way because you hear this argument from developing countries. Well, hold on a second. Why should we be deprived of all of the prosperity and, you know, better lives that, you know, the people have had in the US? But if you can have an even better, better life and even more prosperity with solar and electricity rather than fossil fuels, if your quality of life is even better, if India can prove that, then that's a huge, you know, model for the rest of the world. That's right. And it's not like anybody in, you know, India or Africa is like saying, we must have landline phones because you had them in the West. Right.

Yeah. OK. So we got cell phones. That was pretty smart. Right. So maybe they'll skip cold, too. Well, we have to take one more super quick break. And then when we come back, I want to ask you about what we individually can do

to help solve climate change. We'll be right back with more Bill McKibben. Okay, we're back with Bill McKibben. We only have a few minutes left, so I want to make use of them. One of the things that really strikes me about these movements around climate change is that they are not the biggest social movements in the country. The protest after George Floyd's murder, whereby some measures the largest protests in American history.

When the climate folks have a march, it is not quite as big. When the Sunrise Movement people took over Nancy Pelosi's office, that was what, you know, two dozen kids maybe. And yet the results seem like they've been really large. Is it really the case that, you know, it seems like we have a lot of individual power in this movement that, you know, a small number of people can make a big change here? It's not that small a number of people. That small a number of people. I mean, you know, the last round of big climate strikes before the pandemic hit. I mean, I was in the down in the battery in New York with Greta Thunberg and there were 300000 people spread out across lower Manhattan protesting. You know, we've done these divestment campaigns at thousands, literally thousands of universities, churches, places across America. So people have scattered out to figure out how to take on the oil industry in a thousand different locations. Now we're doing it with banks and people could really help here.

banks and people could really help here. We've got this pledge going that you can find at thirdact.org and you can sign up even if you're not 60 and it won't turn you into an old person simply because you signed up. Pledging to cut up their credit cards from Chase, Citi, Wells, B of A next spring if these guys haven't made serious progress. And we're going to do it in style, you know, the day that we do it. There's going to be people, you know, doing down in scuba gear underwater on the dying coral reefs and up against the, you know, fire scars of California. But also at the electric battery factories and EV dealerships and things. We're going to try and really change the zeitgeist here once more. And people of all ages are joining in, and it's starting to work powerfully.

Partly it's starting to work powerfully because we've got new data about it, and the numbers are really astonishing. There's a new report that came out in March that I wrote about in The New Yorker that finally managed to quantify just how much carbon you produce just storing your money in the American banking system. If you have $125,000 in the bank, it's probably producing more carbon because it's being lent out for pipelines and things than all the cooking, heating, driving, flying, cooling that you do in the course of the year. We looked at big companies like these big tech companies that have all pledged to go net zero. Google's emissions went up 111% when you

counted in the cash they had on hand. Netflix's cash in the bank produces more carbon than all the streaming of every baking program and whatever else they've got on every night in every living room across the world. Amazon produces more carbon from its cash on hand than from all the warehouses and delivery vans that it owns. So this is a really powerful pinch point for going after this, the fossil fuel industry. And it's going to be take a couple of years to do it, but it's starting to wind out now. And we really need people joining in. This is an easy way to really maximize your leverage here. Yeah. And these are companies that are responsive to public pressure on issues like this, you know, a company like Netflix or a Google. Don't, yes, the banks in particular, don't try to do it by yourself though, because unless you're very, very wealthy, indeed, it's possible that Chase might not notice you were cutting up your credit card.

That's why we're going to do it all at once. And in dramatic ways that will bring this message home. And that's, you know, that's the kind of thing that movements are good at. That's why we set them up. So that's at thirdact.org. People can sign up for that pledge. But I think people also feel, and I know I feel this way, that when I sign up for a pledge, I'm like, okay, that's a nice way for me to get on a mailing list and for me to do this action later on when it comes on, when it actually happens. But what do I do to actually join the movement myself if I want to so here's the next part i mean you know as we set up is we're setting up chapters of third act and for younger people there's chapters of 350.org and the sunrise movement and every day you know we're busy like finding the state treasurers and city treasurers in blue parts of the country and saying look you, you know, here, Mr. Comptroller for New York City, you've got $250 billion in the bank. You've got to start putting some pressure on Chase and Citi now. And that's work that we're used to doing in the kind of divestment campaigns

and things. And very, very powerful, but it takes lots of people doing it in order to make it work. I mean, for the next few months, you know, we're in a we're an even numbered year and it's autumn. So for the next couple of months, your biggest leverage point is probably politics. You know, I mean, if we'd had 52 Democratic senators, then we would have ended up with a good, really good climate bill, you know. And so there's work to be done in this state and city level as elections approach. But don't be gulled into thinking that elections are the main part of politics. They're only one part of it. And the day after Election day and the week after

and the month after are just as important parts of the political calendar. In general, we've got two levers to pull big enough to be worth pulling. One of them is marked politics. The other one's marked money. So think of them as Washington and Wall Street. These are the power centers big enough to make a difference that might actually show up in the CO2 level in the atmosphere, the temperature on the earth, the height of the seas. So those are the places where we've got to really pull, but it only works if we do it en masse. That means organizing. That means movement building. That's incredible. And there's so much that can be done locally. I mean, talking about the changes that we can make at the city level or the county level in our transportation system. So we have a local chapter of Sunrise Movement here in Los Angeles, and I'm not a member, although I often

feel I should start going to meetings. I do follow what they do. And, you know, there's where I live in Los Angeles, there is oil drilling or oil pumping, actually, that happens just literally in the city that these folks are trying to get stopped. I think that that's a case that we've basically won a big campaigning over the last few years with wonderful people around California and the environmental justice movement in the forefront. And I think that Gavin Newsom has finally announced that there won't be new oil drilling within 2,500 feet of people's homes or schools, which you would think would not be something you'd have to fight this hard to get. No, the governor says, good news. No one's going to, I finally decided,

no one's going to drill an oil well within 2,500 feet of your home. On the playground, yes. Yeah. Okay, small steps, small steps, Bill. Yeah. But a good step. A good step.

So there's lots more to be done just like it. Well, and thank you for giving us a vision of how we can be a part of it. You know, just showing up to those local meetings, the Sunrise Movement or your local 350 chapter is it can be really meaningful. Absolutely, man. I mean, look, this is a. this, this, what we're in right now, climate change is a test of whether or not the, um, the big brain was a good evolutionary adaptation or not. It can obviously get us in a lot of trouble. And the question is now, can it get us out?

And I think actually the answer will be less about the big brain than about the hopefully big hearts that those brains are attached to. If we can remind ourselves that we have to be watching out for each other, then we've got a chance here. Yes. Thank you so much, Bill. That's a wonderful message to end on. I thank you so much for coming. And by the way, just tell us, you have a new book out. Please just give us the synopsis and the title, please. I regret I didn't make you plug it earlier. It's called The Flag, The Cross, The Station Wagon.

A graying American looks back at his suburban boyhood and wonders, what the hell happened? It's my attempt to make a little bit of sense of the crazy America into which we've stumbled and to suggest that there might be some ways that working together, we could stumble our way back out to something that looks a little more coherent than the mess we're in right now. Oh, that sounds really beautiful. And of course you can get it at our special bookshop, factually pod.com slash books. Bill McKibben, thank you so much for being with us. This has been a pleasure. A real pleasure, man. Well, thank you once again to Bill McKibben, thank you so much for being with us. This has been a pleasure. Adam, thank you. A real pleasure, man. Well, thank you once again to Bill McKibben for coming on the show.

If you want to check out his books, head to factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank Bill for coming on the show, and I want to thank everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. Ethan Jennings, Hillary Wolkin, Jim Shelton, Julia Russell, Kelly Casey, Kelly Lucas, Lacey Tiganoff, Lisa Matulis, Mark Long, Miles Gillingsrode, Mom Named Gwen, Mrs. King Coke, Nicholas Morris, Nikki Battelli, Nuyagik Ippoluk, Paul Mauck, Paul Schmidt, Rachel Nieto, Richard Watkins, Robin Madison, Ryan Shelby, Samantha Schultz, Sam Ogden, Spencer Campbell, Susan E. Fisher, and WhiskeyNerd88. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And of course, I have to thank our engineer

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so we will see you next week on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. I don't know anything.