← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate
01:25:22
Already this summer, there have been huge wildfires in the Southwest and Great Plains and an extraordinary heat wave in Europe, as the world stares down the barrel of a powerful El Niño. Climate change is accelerating, and yet climate politics right now is in disarray. But something else is happening, too. Advances in clean energy technology mean it is now possible to build a world of energy abundance that was the stuff of dreams just a few years ago. That means a new kind of climate politics is possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but also can present decarbonization as a path to somewhere better, where everyone has more, not less. Bill McKibben is one of the best people at articulating that vision. He’s a founder of the climate action groups 350.org and Third Act, and he’s been at the vanguard of the climate movement for decades. His 1989 book, “The End of Nature,” is considered the first book on global warming written for a general audi...
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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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Ezra Klein
Here's the good news. Green energy is getting better and cheaper faster than we had ever dared. Hope this next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago. The energy think tank Ember found in April that all all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild. But here is the bad news. Climate change is accelerating. We're discovering new ways. The climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions than we previously thought. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Nino, and scientists say it could intensify to a super
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Commercial Narrator
El Nino, causing extreme temperatures and dramatically shifting global weather patterns.
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Ezra Klein
We are not talking that much about climate change lately. That doesn't mean it has stopped happening. And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production, kneecapping green energy, wind.
- [02:00]
Bill McKibben
It doesn't work, I will tell you. Aside from ruining our fields and our valleys and killing all the birds, being very weak and very expensive.
- [02:10]
Ezra Klein
But here's the possibility. Here's my bit of optimism. The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible, one that doesn't just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention, but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere that is better. Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth. The possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better, not less and worse. This was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we can not just imagine it. We can see it, touch it, live in is here. So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen? Bill McKibben is a Schuman Distinguished Scholar of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, founder of 350.org, a climate action group, as well as Third act, which is organizing people over 60 on climate change. He is a contributing writer at the New Yorker. He writes the substack the Crucial Years, and his most recent book is Here Comes the Sun, A Last Chance for the Climate and A fresh chance for civilization. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. Bill McKibben, welcome back to the show.
- [03:24]
Bill McKibben
Very good to be back with you.
- [03:26]
Ezra Klein
So you have a line that people think of clean energy still, like Whole Foods energy. It's virtuous, pricey, a bit of a flex, when in fact you say it's become the Costco of energy. Tell me about that.
- [03:39]
Bill McKibben
Cheap, available, on the shelf in bulk, ready to go. The stuff that we spent my whole lifetime calling alternative energy from the sun and the wind is now the obvious common sense, straightforward way to produce power. Sometime earlier this decade, we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from setting stuff on fire. That's a big line, by the way. I mean, Darwin said fire and language were the two things that marked our species. But now we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
- [04:24]
Ezra Klein
So I want to create a distinction here because sometimes the numbers we use can shift back and forth. There are a lot of things we use energy for. Solar energy, generally speaking, becomes electricity, which can also be stored in batteries. I mean, we make ammonia, we have fuels, we have jet fuel, cement, et cetera. And those things you cannot, for the most part, use the sun and the wind for. Those are the things we know how to fix and things we don't. I see you getting.
- [04:52]
Bill McKibben
We're very quickly, very quickly moving in all those directions, too. I mean, the things that are easiest is electric power. But electric power is quickly going to have to supplant, you know, liquid fuel for driving cars. That's the biggest thing we use liquid fuel for and for running furnace in your basement. You don't need it anymore because you can stick in a heat pump and it's cheaper, more efficient, and really a bit of a miracle. It's able to use electricity to take latent heat out of the air and turn it either to the heating or the cooling that you'd like in your house. Mark Jacobson at Stanford, who's kind of been the authority on this, the most
- [05:36]
Ezra Klein
optimistic on renewables of the major modelers.
- [05:39]
Bill McKibben
The most optimistic of the major modelers and the one whose predictions have come by far the closest to reality over the last two decades. He's very clear. He's modeled the data for, I think now, 150 countries, showing how you can provide all the power you need from sun and wind for electricity, Water. Yeah, for electricity. And then you have to use the other suite of new technologies, if sun and wind and batteries are the trinity of sort of generating capacity, the trinity of consumption for Americans anyway, are the EV slash, the E bike, the heat pump, and the induction cooktop to replace the open campfire in your kitchen. We used to have this whole set of things we called hard to abate sectors, things like steel making. The last couple of years, people have started figuring out how to do this with electricity. The one thing that seems hard to imagine is transcontinental jet travel. Although the Chinese are now quickly playing around with medium haul battery powered jets. Up in Vermont, where I live, one of our big new companies, Beta Technologies, is doing short haul aircraft that run on electricity. All of a sudden there really is an abundance of energy. So we're not short of energy, but we are short of time. Because if we're going to make any real difference in the single most critical question that humans face, which is the rapid heating of the earth, then we have to do this very fast. Faster than economic forces and things by themselves would produce.
- [07:36]
Ezra Klein
So one of the amazing places, I think you see something happening that feels almost unimaginable in America right now is in Australia, where, where the solar revolution has moved into something that almost sounds like Utopic. What's happening in Australia?
- [07:52]
Bill McKibben
Australia is now producing so much solar power and wind power that in the middle of the day, they have more than they need. So they're trying to get people to switch some of their demand to the middle of the day. And the way that they're doing it is saying to Australians, you get free electricity between noon and three. So you can imagine Australians are busy digging out the owner's manual for their dishwasher because it turns out that there's a way to make it run at a particular time, which none of us have ever investigated because we haven't needed to. The same thing with the ev, but they're also out there buying storage batteries, which are now cheap, so they can fill them up in the afternoon and run the household at night. That's a miracle. I mean, the first solar cell was invented at bell Labs in 1954. There are people listening to this program who were old enough in the 1950s to be putting dimes in payphones. And if they did, they helped fund the development of the first solar cell. Now, when we built the first one, which, by the way, since we're sitting here in the Times building, next to the story of the first solar cell on the front page of the Times directly next to it, it butts into a story about the first field trials of the polio vaccine. So that gives you some idea of the kind of strange twists of history that we're, you know, since we're currently living in America, that's trying not only to get rid of the wonders of clean energy, but also the wonders of vaccines. You know, but at the time, this was the most expensive power in the world. The only thing you could use it for was satellites. But iteratively we've gotten better and better in a kind of dance between activism and engineering that finally by now has produced this thing that, well, has literally become for parts of the day on one of our continents, too cheap to meter.
- [10:05]
Ezra Klein
Activism, engineering. And I know you're sort of including this in there, but state policy, a number of governments around the world, Germany was a key mover here, America has been on and off, but you know, until now, pretty on a key mover here. And China, of course, pumped money into creating a market for something that was not yet economically feasible just on its own cost. And in doing that, they pulled forward all this technology. So now it is increasingly economically feasible on its own.
- [10:39]
Bill McKibben
That's right.
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Ezra Klein
As we're talking about is Costco of energy. But I do think there's an interesting underlying thing we're thinking about there, which is that we often treat technology and policy as separate spheres from each other, but they're not. Policy can create technology.
- [10:58]
Bill McKibben
So let's go back to the great missed opportunity, which was the 1970s. Jimmy Carter, facing an oil crisis and with the first intimations of some of climate effects of fossil fuel, decides that solar is the way out. He puts solar panels, famously on the White House. But he goes to give a speech where he says, prophetically, sadly, as it turns out, a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.
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Ezra Klein
He actually says that he puts money
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Bill McKibben
sufficient people thought to power the R and D such that America would have 20% of all the energy we use from the sun. Had that happened, we would live on a different planet, a cooler one instead. Of course, Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House. More importantly, he ripped that money out of the federal budget and committed us to the project of evermore drilling, which is what's landed us where we are now.
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Ezra Klein
So let's talk through some of the objections or concerns people have here. Australia, a lot of sun, very warm
- [12:34]
Bill McKibben
half of America, 180 million people, live close to the same latitude as Australia. But here's something that will at least give you some sense of possibility. California is the place in the US that committed most thoroughly to building out renewable energy. Sometime in the last two years, they've passed a real tipping point. Most days now in California, they produce more than 100% of their electricity for long stretches of the day from clean energy when night falls on the Golden State often now, the biggest source of supply to the grid are batteries that have spent the afternoon soaking up excess sunshine. The bottom line is that California, fourth largest economy in the world, is using 60% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were three years ago. That's a very big shift or a
- [13:35]
Ezra Klein
comparison here I thought was very vivid, which is that the amount of battery power and storage California has added in the past, I think it was three years, is equivalent to having built 12 new nuclear power plants. And if California built 12 nuclear power plants, we would talk about it all the time. It would be a big political topic.
- [13:54]
Bill McKibben
Yes, indeed. Batteries are like large beige boxes, you know, so they're not as interesting. But yes, batteries are quickly turning night into day. And sun is not the only thing we have going for us. Wind power is now essentially as cheap as solar power. And wind power is beautiful in that it complements the sun perfectly. It complements it geographically. Higher latitudes with less sun tend to have more wind. It complements it temporally, in the winter, when the sun is lower in the sky, we tend to get more wind. If we build these things in tandem and then we put batteries next to them, we're talking 24. 7 power.
- [14:44]
Ezra Klein
So the concern you hear about that is that is 24. 7 power. Sometimes in some places, not everywhere, not in all places. The batteries that we have at scale do not hold power forever. So you still have significant intermittency issues.
- [15:04]
Bill McKibben
The batteries are.
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Ezra Klein
When I talk to climate modelers, they worry about this. They don't.
- [15:08]
Bill McKibben
Sure. But let's be clear. Batteries are now. If the last five years was about sun and wind, the next five are about batteries. And this technology is now moving at extraordinary pace. So all of a sudden we're assembling battery packs that last easily eight hours. So we're going overnight. But people are putting up increasingly batteries that can hold power much longer than that. And the technologies that accomplish them get more remarkable with each passing month. One of the big new batteries going in for a big data center in the Midwest uses the oxidation of iron, essentially rust as the storage mechanism for electric power. The Chinese have now moved not entirely, but increasingly from lithium to sodium. As sodium's the fifth most common element in the Earth's crust, I think. So technology is increasingly making this much, much, much easier to imagine.
- [16:15]
Ezra Klein
So let's talk a bit about the global energy picture that's been built on these technologies. So in April 2026, the global energy think tank Ember, they released their Global Electricity Review. As you know better than me, a big moment every year for energy wonks. It found that 75% of global electricity growth in 2025 was met by solar alone, which is amazing. Renewables were over a third of power generation for the first time, overtaking coal. And I found this kind of wild. I think it defies a lot of people's expectations. In 2025, in China and India, fossil fuel generation fell for the first time.
- [16:52]
Bill McKibben
Yep.
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Ezra Klein
I often hear when you start talking about energy and climate politics in America, people say, well, China and India aren't going to do it and so it doesn't matter what we do. But China's been probably the world's most important driver of electro tech.
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Bill McKibben
China is, let's, let's be clear about this. Not only are they the biggest driver of electro tech, they're using it to assume a position of technological and economic primacy on this planet that will probably come with a kind of political primacy too. And they're doing it with things that if you're an American patriot, we should own. I mean, we talked about the first solar cell in 1954. First world's first industrial wind turbine was 20 miles south of my house in Castleton, Vermont on Grandpa's Knob. Watching the Trump administration over the last 18 months, I don't think there's ever been an act of national economic self sabotage that quite compares with our decision to deliver lock, stock and barrel, the future to our theoretical main adversary. And now the Chinese, by the way, have a huge supply of cheap clean energy that they can use for anything that they want. You're more hooked into the world of AI than I am. But you know that electricity is the sine qua non of getting this done. They have endless amounts of cheap electricity. This pace at which the Chinese have worked is astonishing. This time last year, the Chinese were putting up 3 gigawatts of solar power a day. Now a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a large coal fired power plant. So they were putting up one of those made out of solar panels every eight hours. Okay, people I think can barely grasp the speed at which this has been happening. And now the good news is that it's leaking out in all kinds of places. Pakistan, across the border, is arguably the place hit hardest by climate change on this planet. But geography played them one good trick, gave them a border with China, across which have come over the last 18 months, an astonishing number of solar panels. If you go look at Google Earth images of the rooftops of Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, they're just a sea of solar panels. This wasn't a government program. This was people fed up with expensive and unreliable electricity who bought cheap Chinese solar panels and went on YouTube and TikTok to learn how to put them together.
- [19:31]
Ezra Klein
We often talk about this energy transition only in terms of climate change. But pollution is part of it, too. I was in Lahore in. I want to say it was 2019, probably. And breathing scorched your throat. Yeah, it was acrid. I mean, and I thought one of the things that was actually hard about being there was just thinking about all the kids I was seeing on the back of the motorbikes with their parents and thinking about them breathing this in all of the time. But you saw this in China not long ago. I mean, we used to talk constantly about pollution in China, and now we're making in many places such fast progress on pollution that it is actually somewhat accelerated. Warming, is my understanding, because 10 years ago.
- [20:18]
Bill McKibben
Let's do the good part of this first. You know, I remember being in Beijing on days when you literally couldn't see across the street. In 10 years, they've gotten markedly cleaner. 60% of the cars sold in China last month came with the plug. You know, they're driving EVs, so not only are they. Is the air much cleaner? I haven't been to China this year, but I've talked to friends recently in Shanghai who were saying the biggest change is it's way quieter than it used to be because so much of the traffic is electric. And does this make a big difference? Difference. You know, you talked about Lahore. New Delhi has 5 million school children. Two and a half million of them have irreversible lung damage from breathing the air. Okay. And we don't need that anymore. We can deal with this and deal with it quickly. And as you say, China and India are figuring that out. Pretty much every place is starting to figure it out. I mean, as of last month, the country that looks like it's the new Pakistan in terms of the speed of its deployment of renewables is the Philippines. They were hard hit by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. This became the clear, obvious way out. Everybody is figuring out, A, that they don't want to rely on something that can be bottled up behind a waterway no one had ever thought about, you know, before this. And B, they don't want to depend for energy on a country as erratic and unreliable as the United States.
- [21:55]
Ezra Klein
So I want to take this in some pieces, but I want to stay for a minute on the differences in living in a clean, energy, electrified world. And one reason I want to spend time on it is, I think, for a very long time, the ask has been a kind of sacrifice. And we have not talked very much about what could be better if we get this right.
- [22:21]
Bill McKibben
I mean, let's just talk about it for a minute. We live in a country built by the automobile, the defining feature of America in the 20th century. For people who like cars, once you've been in an ev, you're not going back to a gas car. They're quiet. They have almost no moving parts, so they don't need to be repaired. Even better than the EV is the E bike, which I think may turn out to be the transformative invention of our time on Earth.
- [22:58]
Ezra Klein
You know, that's a big statement right there.
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Bill McKibben
Well, you remember. It's funny because you remember. You may be too young to remember this 20 years ago or something, everybody was saying, there's a fancy new invention coming that's going to change everything. And it turned out to be the segue.
- [23:13]
Ezra Klein
The segue. I do remember that.
- [23:14]
Bill McKibben
That was the most disappointing. Well, the E bike's different than that.
- [23:18]
Ezra Klein
Kids. Look up a segue. If you want to see. If you want to see what we're talking about. It's an. It's a interesting visual.
- [23:23]
Bill McKibben
Everywhere around the world, you can, for a few pennies worth of electricity, go miles and miles and miles on a bike. It's pretty remarkable technology.
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Ezra Klein
It's funny, I often don't get the E bike. I do a lot of city biking around New York, and it's a testament to the technology of the E bike that I often don't choose it because it is too fast, too capable. It takes away also the fun of riding.
- [23:48]
Bill McKibben
And you're a Puritan, so, you know.
- [23:50]
Ezra Klein
No, I actually mean I find it a little bit unnerving to move that fast on New York City streets. I don't fully trust myself in my reflexes. I want to move to. Maybe. I don't want to call this technological utopianism. I feel like every time you talk about a way technology can make people's lives better. It's like, are you a technological utopian? Are you now or have you ever been a technological utopian? But a lot of what we can't do that we would like to do is because the energy to do it is too expensive. So a lot of the world lives under water scarcity. The cost of desalination is very heavily the cost of energy that goes into desalination. A lot of the world lives under food scarcity. The cost of vertical farming is very heavily influenced by the cost of energy because a huge amount of the price of it is light. There are a series of climate change which we'll talk about, given the path we are on. There's a world in the future where we need to begin doing capture of carbon in the atmosphere that is not economical to do. It has other problems, but it's not economical to do if you do not have cheap and abundant clean energy. I pick these three because I think they're interesting in a very particular way. They one could really improve the lives of people, right? Having enough water, having enough food, not living in a heat trap. But the other is that there are ways where technology and a more harmonious relationship with the earth can actually connect to each other. That there, for instance, farming is a good example where if we were able to do more farming vertically, we would not have to use as much land for agriculture as we currently do. There are things that would become possible that are not now possible, that are
- [25:43]
Bill McKibben
really profound even now. You can see small miracles in this book of mine. I describe being in a warehouse. This would have been 18 months ago in Oakland and in sort of beat up industrial district of Oakland. And behind one door there were these two guys, one of whom had come from Tesla, who were pioneering how to make magnesium. Magnesium is a structural metal. It works as well as steel or aluminum. But it's been. There's been a high energy cost associated with making it, but. But it had other technological advantages. So for instance, unlike aluminum, you can interrupt the smelting process. It doesn't freeze into a crystalline state if the temperature deviates a few degrees. So what these guys had figured out was that in a place like California, which now has a big surplus of electricity in the afternoon, and hence it's very cheap, they could run their smelter during the afternoon, turn it off at night, come back the next day and run it again. They were making metal out of sunlight and seawater. That gives you some sense of the possibilities. And there are 10,000 stories like that around the world.
- [27:07]
Ezra Klein
So Widen that out for me. What do you think becomes possible here or in other countries? Right. In a world where there is more accessible energy.
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Bill McKibben
More accessible energy is at, you know, the sinequa known for getting anywhere near what we've called the Sustainable Development Goals around the world. And you really get a sense of this when you get to Africa where there's still 6 or 700 million people with no real electricity. I remember being in a village in Ghana, far away from Accra, where there would never had power. And they'd put up one of these community micro grids the day before with rudimentary wire, 50 panels and rudimentary wiring out to each of the very small homes in this village. And I was sitting the next day with the village elders talking. They kept handing me bottles of cold water to drink, which I was grateful for. I'm a Vermonter, the equatorial sun is not my thing, but. But it took me in my clueless Western Way 15 minutes to figure out why they were so proud to be handing me bottles of cold water. Until the day before, there really hadn't been anything cold in that place. No one had ever had a refrigerator. Now, the most important use for that refrigerator was going to be storing vaccines, but the other use was going to be providing cold water some of the time and in fact ice cream. Because there were kids having their first taste of it that day too. You really get a sense of what a miracle this is.
- [28:54]
Ezra Klein
One of the other dimensions of that is it makes it possible for a village with a little bit of money to do it on their own. It does not need to be granted to them by a centralized authority. And there are many, many, many places in the world where the reason they don't have power and another place does, even in that same country, is they are part of the disfavored ethnic minority or just there weren't enough of them there to put them up in the priority list of where gets the infrastructure. So when you don't have large capital investments as what you need in order to have steady energy, really remarkable things become possible.
- [29:36]
Bill McKibben
And some of those things are very. You wouldn't think of right away. So I was at another village that had had electricity for six months and I asked the some of the older people in the village what had changed. And one of the things they said was our families that moved to the city will come out and visit us now because it doesn't get dark the minute the sun goes down, because we have a fan, you know, those sort of things. Those are enormous differences for people.
- [30:33]
Commercial Narrator
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- [31:32]
Bill McKibben
Hi, it's Michael Sullivan from Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from the New York Times. And today we're in the kitchen testing canned tomatoes.
- [31:39]
Ezra Klein
We're tasting for sweetness, acidity, definitely the color, the texture.
- [31:43]
Bill McKibben
These tomatoes, they're pretty velvety, like they break apart easily with a spoon. The guides that we write are living, breathing things.
- [31:50]
Ezra Klein
It's a piece of fruit in a can. So it's going to change every year.
- [31:53]
Bill McKibben
At Wirecutter, we do the work so
- [31:55]
Commercial Narrator
you don't have to.
- [31:55]
Bill McKibben
For independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world, come Visit us@nytimes.com Wirecutter
- [32:05]
Ezra Klein
I do want to spend some time in the space of possibility and in the space not of the technologies that clean energy make possible now or in the next year or two. But if you imagine something we don't imagine that often, which is the wealth of clean energy, clean energy abundance, every person in the world. But let's for now talk about Americans, every American having access to much more energy per American than we do now. It it's easier for people to imagine cheap energy, right, what we're talking about with Australia, than what that kind of clean energy abundance makes possible that is not now possible. But so when you think of that world, what is in it that is not in our world?
- [32:49]
Bill McKibben
So look, I'll say truthfully, I don't think Americans in our personal lives need access to much more energy than we have now. We already use huge quantities of it and we use it for my money. Strangely, we build enormous houses that turn out not even to make us very happy because our families are all off in separate ends of them, and so on and so forth. So for me, the pleasure is not imagining now, who's a Puritan, all of this. The pleasure comes in imagining, by contrast, how it allows us to imagine a kind of different political world. If you depend on a resource that's only available in a few places, then the people who control those few places end up with way too much power. Our biggest oil and gas barons in this country were the Koch brothers. They used their winnings, I think, to erode the foundations of our democracy over the last three decades. If you wonder why it was so easy for Donald Trump to kick them over, it's because they were kind of rotten to start with. Vladimir Putin, you know, his winnings in the hydrocarbon casino have funded a land war in Europe in the 21st century, the king of Saudi Arabia. And so one of the abundances that comes, I think, with clean energy is a. Is a kind of liberation from the concentrations of power that we've grown accustomed to with dirty energy.
- [34:29]
Ezra Klein
I have to be honest, I'm pretty skeptical of this vision. I want to believe it, right? I want to believe it. But I look around and it's of course true that oligarchs and authoritarians in the world we live in, many of them have derived their power and their wealth from fossil fuels, right? That's inarguable. But you look around and has Xi Jinping lost power as China has become more of an electrotech state? The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is one of the great clean vehicle entrepreneurs. Oh, come on, Bill, that's ridiculous. You don't have to like the guy, but if you're not going to give Tesla its due on the EV transition,
- [35:11]
Bill McKibben
you know, Tesla now is like the 75th best EV you could ever purchase,
- [35:18]
Ezra Klein
but the only one in America that makes money.
- [35:20]
Bill McKibben
The only one in America that makes money because we don't let many competitors from the rest of the world.
- [35:26]
Ezra Klein
Well, I agree. Listen, we can talk about whether or not we should bring the China ev, but what I am saying.
- [35:31]
Bill McKibben
I take your point.
- [35:32]
Ezra Klein
What I am saying is China is concentrations of money.
- [35:35]
Bill McKibben
Yes, but there won't be concentrations of wealth in the same way. You know, one of the questions that people always ask is why doesn't Exxon just go into the solar panel business, especially now that we know that Exxon knew all about climate change back in the 1980s. They had their own good internal research, research that let them know what was coming and would have given them a hefty lead in getting ahead of this curve. The CEO of Exxon explained the answer to that year before last. He said, essentially, we're never going to do this because it doesn't offer above average returns for our investors. And he was right. Because once you've got the solar panel up, when the sun rises in the morning, it delivers your energy for free. And from Exxon's point of view, that's the stupidest business model of all time.
- [36:35]
Ezra Klein
So I'm going to hold my skepticism on at least some of that. But one thing you now hear people talking about, I'm curious to know to what degree you buy this, is that for a long time the topic was climate politics and now it's climate economics. So obviously Donald Trump came into office a second time, gutted much of the key wind and solar subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. And when I talk to people around these industries, they're upset about that, but it has not wrecked the industry or the transition in the way it might have been other time. Or do you, do you feel it has?
- [37:12]
Bill McKibben
That's the hopeful vision. There's been some data even in the last couple of weeks looking at the number of projects that have been canceled. And I think what we're seeing for the moment still is the momentum that was built up in the Biden years. And I think what we're going to see pretty quickly is just how effectively the Trump administration has quashed a lot of that momentum.
- [37:36]
Ezra Klein
It's, I mean, and why would that be true if the economics are as good as you say they are? Because there's a tension there between saying this is a Costco of energy, it's cheaper than anything else, and, and also taking away government subsidies to destroy it.
- [37:48]
Bill McKibben
Because those. Well, it's not even just taking away government subsidies. I mean. So first let's talk about the economic part. I mean, the economics of renewable energy are different than the economics of fossil energy. All the cost comes up front. Solar panel. Once you've got it up, the electricity is free. So getting people enough money to take and finance that solar panel and get it up, one thing, it's important. But taking away those subsidies wouldn't have been completely fatal. What's been fatal is the full on absolute onslaught of the federal government against renewable energy. In fact, the US Taxpayers have written checks for billions of dollars to buy back the wind leasing rights that companies had paid for in the Biden Administration completely. In an effort to make sure that wind industry never expands offshore federal lands have been essentially put off limits to solar panels off federal lands. The federal government, on looking at onshore wind which powers much of the Midwest, they've in the last year stopped giving out any new permits on completely absurd and spurious grounds. About that it might, I don't know what, do something to radar. None of this is true. It's all just carrying water for the fossil fuel industry. As you'll recall fairly publicly, candidate Trump declared to the fossil fuel industry, if you give me a billion dollars for my campaign, I'll give you anything you want.
- [39:34]
Ezra Klein
So this is a good transition into where climate politics stands. The ferocity of the movement between where climate politics stood in the Biden years, not just the Inflation Reduction act, but the way it existed as a constant concern, as a lens through which much of the world was seen.
- [39:56]
Bill McKibben
All the Fortune 500 companies were happy to at least talk A good game
- [40:00]
Ezra Klein
here to what has happened since is not just the demolition of those subsidies, not just the closing of federal lands to solar panels, but what I've heard people describe as climate hushing. So you don't hear Democratic politicians talk about climate nearly as much as they did before. You do not hear the Fortune 500 companies doing this. And this is true not just for, you know, centricity or moderate Dems, but, but on the left, right. If you. Oh, it's completely like I, the root.
- [40:36]
Bill McKibben
I mean the perfect example is close to home is Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, who's essentially gutted the state's climate policy over the last few months again out of some combination of fealty to donors and worries about affordability as the new mantra.
- [40:57]
Ezra Klein
Well, so you did a kind of air quotes around affordability, but I think actually Democratic politicians do have worries about.
- [41:03]
Bill McKibben
Oh, I agree.
- [41:04]
Ezra Klein
And not just about affordability, but a generalized sense that climate was something that was putting them out of step with voters. Not because voters don't care about it in a poll, but because the versions of this I've heard from Democrats are one that it seemed that they got a lot of survey data and they were persuaded by people that the picture the electorate had of them was that they care about climate and not the day to day struggle of people working on the pocketbook. And the second, the second dimension of it was simply seeing something which was that when oil prices went up, when prices in general went up, that that really dissolved the willingness people had for so sacrifice or limitations.
- [41:52]
Bill McKibben
And there are other Factors here too, like the politics, sort of movement, politics around climate, you know, achieved most of what it had set out to do with the Inflation Reduction Act. That was the kind of natural endpoint of a lot of the work that people had been engaged in for decades. And so a lot of people sort of disarmed, you know, put down their rifles and went off to do the work of building out this new future. I've. One of the, one of the few advantages of being an old person and having been around this story for a very long time, I wrote what's often called the first book about what we then called the greenhouse effect back in the 1980s, is that I've seen these cycles come and go. We've had, you know, we had intense interest in 1988 and 89. My book ended up in 24 languages. Then that, you know, dipped as the oil industry geared up for the Kyoto talks and went into a real lull as Bush and Cheney took over American policy. Al Gore managed to gin it up again, but then it subsided. After the failure at Copenhagen, we built a big movement that made climate change important and helped yield the Paris Accords. When that momentum began to flag, Greta Thunberg and her movement emerged and that scared the hell out of Fortune 500 companies and they got on board. Now the fossil fuel industry is fighting, has fought successfully back in this country. Let's be clear, pretty much the rest of the world remains committed to working on climate. And on a. Oh, there's been a
- [43:38]
Ezra Klein
fair amount of regression in Europe.
- [43:41]
Bill McKibben
We'll see. I mean, the Brits are about to name a new chancellor. My money's on Ed Miliband, who's been the most effective energy and climate guy in the uk. But we'll see. At any rate, I think that this particular cycle of climate hushing is coming quickly to an end. In Europe, we've just gone through a heat wave so epic that it's rewriting the politics as it happens. You know, I mean, lots and lots and lots of people dead. The Earth is about to enter a 12 or 18 month period unlike any in its history. The El Nino that's gathering force in the Pacific as we sit here today looks like it's going to be the strongest thing of its kind in a very long time. That means that the earth in 2026 and definitely in 2027 is going to see temperatures higher than it's ever humans.
- [44:49]
Ezra Klein
Can you describe. I think people have heard the term, but can you describe what an El Nino is?
- [44:52]
Bill McKibben
El Nino is the periodic Phenomenon where heat is released in large quantities from the Pacific and that heat then expresses itself all over the planet. And it comes at a time when, say, in this country we're already vulnerable. We just had the hottest winter in the western United States by a large margin. I was in Colorado yesterday where there was no snowpack this winter to speak of, and where yesterday, day before, three firefighters died on the Colorado, Utah border fighting what I think is going to be one of the earlier fires of the year. I think we're going to see, I'm afraid, an extraordinary plague of flame.
- [45:40]
Ezra Klein
California. When I grew up in California, fires happened. They were not the constant frightening fact of life. I mean, I had family lose their homes in the LA and Altadena fires. And it has made California into a fundamentally different place to live.
- [46:01]
Bill McKibben
Look, let's talk about climate in two dimensions. The first is the stuff that we can see every day. Warm air holds more water vapor than cold. That means that in arid areas we're now seeing lots more evaporation and drought and with it, fire. And those fires are now in places that we just would never have thought be even possible to catch on fire. Once that water's up in the air, it comes down. It comes down in deluge in wet parts of the world. My town in Vermont, you know, we've had two of the worst floods in our history in the course of this decade. The last one isolated our town for days, weeks. The road both east and west of town was destroyed by river. So there's that kind of damage that we can see and it is enormous. And it's much worse in the poorest parts of the world that have done nothing to cause the problem. Then there's now an emerging understanding of the damage we're starting to do to the most fundamental physical systems on the planet. The jet stream draws its power from the temperature differential between the equator and the pole.
- [47:25]
Ezra Klein
Can you describe what the jet stream is?
- [47:26]
Bill McKibben
The high altitude movement of air and hence weather and whatever around the planet. Because we've now raised the temperature of the pole so dramatically, the jet stream is gone wonky. It gets stuck in weird high amplitude positions. That allows, among other things, for these extraordinary heat domes like the one that just settled over Europe, the ones we've seen in the US in recent years. Probably even more remarkable are the series of currents, including the Gulf Stream that we call the Atlantic. Meridional overturning currents, AMOC. Together they are 100 times the flow of the Amazon River. They're the biggest heat distribution engine on planet Earth. We've always known that there was danger here as melting. As water, fresh water pours off a melting Greenland, it changes the salinity and hence the, the density of seawater in the North Atlantic. And it's that density differences that drive this giant gyre. We used to think that this was a problem for the next century. The most recent science, the scientist who's maybe the leading authority in all of this, said a few weeks ago, in response to the latest series of papers, that he thought there was a 50% chance of the large scale damage beginning collapse of those currents in the decades ahead. If that happens, it'll be the biggest civilizational event in human history.
- [49:05]
Ezra Klein
What happens if that happens?
- [49:06]
Bill McKibben
Well, I mean, the first thing is that, you know, Western Europe suddenly gets paradoxically very cold. If you look at a map, Milan is on a latitude line with Montreal, but it's kept artificially warm by the flow of heat coming up through these currents. But more fundamentally, you begin just a profound, that contrast between then the Southern Hemisphere and the Northern hemisphere starts to produce the capacity for storms of a violence we only imagine in movies. Everything changes.
- [49:47]
Ezra Klein
So I think we've now set up that there are three forces happening simultaneously. So we are on a worse track on warming than we had even believed ourselves to be. So that's one piece. At the same time, climate tech, energy tech, whatever you want to call it, has also accelerated faster than anybody had dared hope. But then there is this kind of intermediary force, which is climate politics or energy politics, for lack of a better term. And that is where I think there is a lot of dispiritedness. I get this feeling that a lot of people in climate movement don't quite know where to go next, because something that I think is quite tough for movements, I think it happened to liberalism in general after Obama, when it then hit Trump is finding a very high level of success, right? The IRA in this case, only to then almost immediately see that undone in a kind of backlash politics, all of that traction kind of pulled back. It can leave movements a little bit shattered. So I guess I'd ask the question this way. What lessons are there to learn if what you're saying comes true in its own kind of horrible way, the kind of politics is going to come back. But having just lived through this, you know, the rise and the fall, what has been learned?
- [51:15]
Bill McKibben
If you think about the climate story, the first 35 years of it, post Jim Hansen's testimony in Congress in 1988, those 35 years are spent in a world where fossil energy is relatively cheap and renewable energy is relatively expensive. So most of the work of. Much of the work of climate movements and things has to be devoted to, in essence, making fossil fuel more expensive. That's what carbon taxes and prices and things were. That's why we ran this giant divestment campaign that's reached $40 trillion in endowments and portfolios that began to get out of coal and gas and oil. We wanted to raise the cost of capital. Those things remain important, important work, you know. But now we live in a world where clean energy is cheaper. That means that the forces of economic gravity are working in more or less the right direction now. And that explains, I think, why there's been the extraordinary political reaction from the fossil fuel industry that there's been. That's why they were suddenly so in bed with Trump and with. I mean, because, remember, prior to this, even the Exxons of the world had been talking about climate change as a real challenge. And we will do what we. They've now seen the future.
- [52:46]
Ezra Klein
Bp, beyond petroleum.
- [52:48]
Bill McKibben
The future is we actually can go beyond petroleum. We don't need it anymore. And we're beginning to dispense with it.
- [52:56]
Ezra Klein
We're beginning.
- [52:57]
Bill McKibben
One of the most interesting parts of the Iran war has been that oil prices didn't get any higher than they did. You know that the price of oil topped out at $130 a barrel. That's largely because the Chinese are using something like 5 million barrels a day less than we thought than they were projected to be using. So anyway, some clever Democratic politician at a certain point is going to say to people, look at Australia. They're getting free electricity. They don't have more sun and wind than we have. They live on the same planet that we do. We could be doing the same thing if we had a sensible energy policy. And I think that that's going to become a ever more enticing argument because the rest of the world is not waiting around. They are moving, especially Asia. And, you know, Asia more or less defines humanity. It's 60% of the world are moving very, very quickly in this direction.
- [54:17]
Ezra Klein
Some of the parts of climate politics that have ended up proving the most politically difficult are the places where people feel their autonomy is being taken away. So in California, where it looks likely that Javier Becerra is going to be the next governor, I think it is unlikely, given things he has said and given where the politics have gone, that the aggression on phasing out internal combustion engine cars that you saw under Gavin Newsom is going to move forward. We've talked about Kathy Hochul here in New York, who's been shifting out of some of the sort of major climate projects and targets. The thing that I have heard from many politicians who actually are good on this issue and do care about this issue, but is what they are trying to figure out, and this is, I think, some of what the Inflation Reduction act, the balance it was trying to strike was, was can you move the transition fast enough by giving people things that they want, right? Subsidies for heat pumps and solar and so on, without doing the things that I think people have often found are more politically dangerous, which is people's feeling. You're taking something from them, you're taking their autonomy, you're taking a technology they like. People as good as EVs are people, people still have range anxiety or they worry about, you know, they just have attachment to cars they currently have that. There's a lot of desire people have for options, but they don't want to be told what to do. And at the same time, to get where we need to be as fast as we need to get there. It is hard to say that that is all going to happen through carrots, subsidies and stories that everybody can agree on.
- [56:07]
Bill McKibben
Look, let's first again stipulate that we're mostly just talking about the US here, which now is about 11% of the global emissions on the planet. So the other 89% people are to one degree or another really working at. And these are countries where policy seems in some cases to be a little easier to figure out, either because, like China, you don't. No one gets a say except Xi Jinping, or because they're just working more robustly.
- [56:41]
Ezra Klein
It's actually a question you would know the answer to that that I, I didn't look at in prep for this. The US Is not on its, you know, Paris pathway, et cetera, are other countries. Do you see a fidelity to climate promises there that you don't hear? Because my understanding is they're not being great.
- [56:55]
Bill McKibben
Well, you see, you see a lot of countries that are setting up the conditions now that are going to allow them to change much more quickly. And in fact, there's new data today showing that the US Is the main place in the world where emissions are increasing now, which is just unbelievable. I mean, let's be clear, the US has already put more carbon in the atmosphere than anybody else, and no one, including China, is ever going to match us historically. And it's all still up there. I mean, the stuff that came out of the tailpipe of my family's Plymouth Fury when I was getting my learner's permit in the 1970s, is still up there in the atmosphere, trapping heat. Okay? So it's unbelievably shameful that we're. That we are the outlier here, especially given that we invented the necessary technology. But I do think that it's not going to be a matter of much longer before politicians start emerging who understand the ways to talk about and act on this issue. And I think it is probably going to be more carrots than sticks. But I think the real thing that happens is that every time a solar panel goes up, every time an EV drives off the showroom, every time someone switches to an E bike from a car because they figured out they don't need 3,000 pounds of sheet metal to get their kids to school, every time that happens, the political power of the fossil fuel industry incrementally decreases. And we're going to come at some point to a place where their political power is broken. And when that happens, we will finally, in this country, be able to have a more rational discussion of what our choices are and how we move forward. I kind of take that as our work at third act, and my work and whatever elsewhere is to figure out how to do the things that break that political power, because it has been the golden thread of obstruction all the way along.
- [59:20]
Ezra Klein
So that. So that is still the way you see it, that the, the core obstruction here is the political power of the fossil fuel industry, not the preferences or resistance. Just to finish the argument of voters who may not want to do some of the things, who don't want to replace their furnace, who don't want to replace their car, who don't want to be told, you know, that. That the way they're doing energy has to change.
- [59:45]
Bill McKibben
There's always going to be some of that, but I don't think those are that hard. If you get people, I, because I've done this a hundred times, if I put my neighbors in an EV and let them drive it, they're like, this is great. You know, if we have people over for dinner and show them the induction cooktop, which you can buy for 60 bucks online, you know, and which boils water faster than you can boil it on a gas stove, very few people are like, I must have an open flame in my kitchen to make me happy. With my sapphire preferred card, we took a trip to a desert Oasis, earning
- [60:45]
Ezra Klein
five times the points on Chase Travel, two times the points on all other travel plus 100 hotel credit Chase, Sapphire
- [60:50]
Commercial Narrator
preferred a car that's preferred for a reason.
- [60:52]
Ezra Klein
Cards issued by JP Morgan, Jay's bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply. I'm Paul Tanorio. I cover soccer for the Athletic. And I'm Amy Lawrence, I cover football for the Athletic. Whatever you call it, the biggest competition
- [61:04]
Bill McKibben
competition in the sport is happening right
- [61:06]
Ezra Klein
now and the Athletics World cup coverage
- [61:08]
Bill McKibben
has everything you need to follow the tournament.
- [61:11]
Ezra Klein
There's 48 countries taking part, from the tiny island of Curacao to the five time champions, Brazil. Even if you don't know your offside from your onside, if you're eager to know more about the teams, the matches, all the stories on and off the pitch, we've got you sorted. Maybe you're the kind of person who's already up early every weekend waking the
- [61:28]
Bill McKibben
neighbors when your favorite club scores.
- [61:30]
Ezra Klein
We'll make sure you get equipped with
- [61:32]
Bill McKibben
more information, more insight than anyone you know.
- [61:35]
Ezra Klein
We've got more than 70 obsessive reporters on the ground covering the ins and outs from every game. I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the Athletics World cup
- [61:45]
Bill McKibben
coverage in our app.
- [61:46]
Ezra Klein
Download the Athletic app and see you there. China's come up a lot in this conversation and there's a tension in the way I think the left sees and treats China, particularly on renewable energy. So you can imagine a world where what China has done is hailed as heroic and we embrace it. We import their cheap electric vehicles, which work really well and are much cheaper than what we make. We embrace how rapidly they have pushed the world forward on solar energy and other forms of green energy infrastructure, and we adopt it. What we've actually done, and this goes back to the Biden administration, not just Trump, is tariff a lot of that, particularly the EVs. We've treated China's dominance or primacy over the solar supply chain as a threat that needs to be combated, not as a kind of global cooperation to be embraced. Is that a mistake?
- [62:55]
Bill McKibben
Look, I mean, it's understandable, for instance, why we tariff EVs from China, because if we let them in right now, our car industry would be overnight. You can get a great Chinese EV for 20 grand now, as good as any car you've ever seen. So it made sense to erect a tariff wall to try and preserve our auto industry. What makes no sense is to erect the tariff wall and then behind it keep everything the same. The only rational reason for building the wall of tariffs would be to spend the next three years busily incentivizing and building an American EV industry that can compete. And there's no reason that it can't. I mean, in fact, these cars are actually relatively easy to figure out how to build because they have so few moving parts. Detroit's capable of this, but we're just using.
- [63:57]
Ezra Klein
You're losing a lot of money trying it right now.
- [64:00]
Bill McKibben
They lost a lot of money because we changed policy. There's no technological barrier to us doing. It's not like the Chinese have some incredible technological insight that we haven't come up with.
- [64:16]
Ezra Klein
No, they have manufacturing ecosystems that we don't have.
- [64:19]
Bill McKibben
That's right. They've done that hard work to get that done, but we are completely capable of doing that. You know, that was really what the IRA envisioned. I mean, the ira, among other things, one of the worst named pieces of legislation in American history was really, you could have called it the, you know, trying to catch up to China finally Act, and that would have been a much clearer name for it.
- [64:46]
Ezra Klein
But that doesn't quite answer the question behind it, which is what should the relationship, what should the orientation towards China be? Look, in Washington right now, not just under Trump, but this is true for Democrats, there's been a real rising level of antagonism towards China. A sense that we are locked in a profound competition and such that advances that come from China are not celebrated. Each one is a new kind of threat. If they've gotten better at solar panels, instead of that being a boon for the global environmental ecosystem, we treat that as a venture to American, you know, supply chain capacities.
- [65:21]
Bill McKibben
I think that's a huge mistake. You know, China has extraordinary capacity to build, say, solar panels. They're now shutting in some of that capacity to try and drive the price up a little bit because this stuff got so cheap. But instead, imagine a world where we just decide this is going to be a priority and we work together to globalize those factories, run them 24 7, turn out solar panels by the gazillion, stack them on every railroad, siding and wharf on planet Earth and tell people to come take them away and make their own Pakistans. You have begun to diffuse some of the potentially very dangerous competition between these two countries. You've done it in a project that helps the rest of the planet in ways that you can figure out how to share the credit for. And the option, the, the other option is to inhabit an Earth where we continue in competition with these guys even as the sea level rises around us. I think it's a no brainer, I gotta say.
- [66:37]
Ezra Klein
There is both the question of having the technology and this question of deploying the technology. So even before Trump, you have this problem is beginning to affect the rollout of the ira, which is one, it is hard to build a lot of what needs to be built. So solar. The solar rollout was going really, really well. Wind turbines were tougher. A lot of wind was undershooting the expectations of modelers. And the other big problem we're facing is transmission lines. So you build a big solar array or wind farm, you've got to get that energy from where it's generated to where it's going. We've seen the construction of interstate transmission lines fall. There was an effort. This was like the big mansion compromise sidecar that progressives fought and helped kill, but it had both, like the acceptance of a large natural gas pipeline, but also would have had pretty big reforms on how you cite interstate transmission lines that didn't pass. And so the transmission lines problem has just kind of festered. We have the technology, but we have to build and move it in a way that is less sexy than sometimes just thinking about the solar panels can be. What do we need to do there?
- [67:54]
Bill McKibben
So, a few things. One, the Biden administration was deeply committed to building this stuff, and they were actually getting a lot of it done. They had in the White House a team of people who were shepherding each one of these transmission projects through its various hoops. And. And that was important work, and it was sad that it's disappeared. Obviously, the Trump administration is not going to allow any of this. They've shut it down everywhere. But there are a few, for the moment, technological aids here. We've actually figured out how we can more or less double the flow of electricity across a lot of transmission lines just by changing the wire that hangs from those poles. And that presents very few permitting problems. And it's beginning to happen in lots of places. It's also true that people are starting to learn how to use batteries to island energy, as it were, and perhaps reduce some of it. But people are also coming up with other workarounds that are stranger. There are parts of the country now where people are near big solar installations, filling batteries on the backs of train cars and then rolling them to the nearest metro area, you know, to back and forth, back and forth to provide power. In the end, there's going to need to be, when we have some kind of sane politics back in Washington, there's going to need to be some kind of way forward here where we figure out how to do this and you know, how that deal gets structured will depend on the, as it always does, the strength of the competing political forces.
- [69:54]
Ezra Klein
Well, I want to ask you what that deal should be. I mean, one of the reasons I'm bringing up transmission lines is that this all gets sort of bucketed under this term. Permitting reform. Permitting reform is, I think, generally understood as first like a right of center thing, and then sometimes it's like a bipartisan deal making space. What I've actually not seen that much of is people in the climate movement, in the broader left saying this is what I think it should look like. This is my priority for permitting reform.
- [70:20]
Bill McKibben
So in a rational world, rational country, you'd have a permitting reform or permitting system that prioritized clean energy over dirty energy. There's no good reason to be building gas pipelines anymore in this country. In the political world in which we live, there's probably some compromise that has to be reached there between the oil industry and sanity. So in the meantime, there's a lot that we can do. Third act is this movement that I and a few others started a few years ago to organize old people like me, people over the age of 60, for action on climate and democracy. And I'll tell you what we've been doing at third act for the last 10 months or so. One, getting states to make it much easier for people to put solar panels on their roofs. Americans pay three to five times as much as Europeans or Australians for a home solar system. Not because of the cost of the panels, even with tariffs, it's de minimis. It's because we have way too much bureaucracy here. Every jurisdiction, and there are 15,000 of them in the United States. Every town, every county has its own zoning code, its own team of inspectors. They want you to, you know, they want to climb up on the roof and they want you to send them diagrams. And this is not how it works in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, buying a solar panel is like buying a refrigerator. You call up a guy Monday. By Wednesday, he's up on your roof hammering away. By Friday, you're connected to the grid. That's why 40% of homes in Australia have solar panels. That makes it very cheap if you go fast like that. There's an app for this. The National Renewable Energy Lab, before it was trashed by the administration, produced what's called Solar App Plus. It's an instant permitting app. You type in the address of the house, you want to put it on the kind of equipment that you're going to put up there. If the computer likes it, it prints you out a permit, you're up on the roof ready to go to work. We've managed to get that legislation going in a bunch of places. Now. Even more striking, though less numerically significant, is what third act and a few others managed to do over that eight months with what we're calling balcony solar or plug in solar. If you've been to Europe in the last five years, you have maybe not even noticed, but 5 million Europeans have paid a few hundred dollars and come home with a solar panel designed not to go on the roof, but to be zip tied to the railing of your apartment balcony. On the back is a plug which you plug into the wall, no electrician required, produces often 20% of the power an apartment uses. So not everything, but not nothing either. This was illegal in the US pretty much everywhere until this spring. And in the last 12 weeks or 14 weeks, we've managed to get now 10 states where we've authorized this. It's not going to change everything, but by next year there'll be a big market for cheap solar panels that you can apartment renters can use.
- [73:48]
Ezra Klein
I don't think of Europe as a low regulation, low bureaucracy.
- [73:51]
Bill McKibben
Those Germans very loosey goosey with the rules.
- [73:54]
Ezra Klein
So why has it been easier to to do solar panels there than here? What's behind that?
- [73:59]
Bill McKibben
I think that they've had less power from the fossil fuel industry and the utility lobby. You know, there have been a couple of times in the last few months when I've been listening to the your podcast and I've been loving what I'm hearing, but I've also been wanting to like shout at the, you know. No, no. You did this great interview with this woman who was talking about sort of the misogyny of the maga movement and things, but it evolved into a really interesting discussion of aesthetics and political aesthetics and what they look like. One of the things that a kind of progressive political aesthetic is going to look like in the years ahead is not going to be like Corinthian columns versus Dorian. What? I can't even remember what the. It's going to be solar punk. It's going to be people. You've seen the COVID of my book Solar panels everywhere. Exactly right. It's going to be beautiful. There's also.
- [74:52]
Ezra Klein
Okay, hold on. I want to hold here because this is something that I have a lot of interest in. I agree aesthetics central to politics. I also agree that the natural aesthetic for the left to move to is solarpunk and I can tell you that a huge number of people on the left had a viscerally negative reaction to the techno solar punk aesthetic of the book, that they don't like seeing the satellites there. They think solar panels are ugly. One of the sort of natural spaces I think that the left could find both optimism and aesthetics and a kind of appreciation for human excellence and ambition and ingenuity is around this kind of basket of this basket of futurism. But I think people associate it with Elon Musk, they associate it with Silicon Valley.
- [75:51]
Bill McKibben
So we need to start some other associations.
- [75:53]
Ezra Klein
There's a complicated relationship between the left and technology.
- [75:56]
Bill McKibben
So here's some ways to start thinking about that. As I say, I've lived my life in rural America. So one of the things that people sometimes say is in minor, we don't want to use farmland for this. Okay, so first you start just by kind of talking about what that means. At the moment, we use a huge amount of our farmland for energy. Corn is the biggest crop in America. We grow something like 95 million acres of it. 30 million of those, more or less, we use for ethanol, which is incredibly stupid. That 30 million acres produces something like 3% of all the energy that America uses. If we covered that same 30 million acres with solar panels, we'd produce pretty close to 100% of the energy we currently use. Photosynthesis is a miracle, but it's not as efficient as a photovoltaic system. You don't want to cover Indiana and Iowa stem to stern in solar panels. We've got lots of rooftops and parking lots, but we can use some of our land for this. No one's talking about more than a percent or 2 of our land. And it's a very good crop to be growing. Clean electrons is way more useful than corn syrup. You know, we need more of it. And once you start this conversation, you can go on to say a couple of things. One of the virtues of this crop is you don't need to pour nitrogen and phosphorus on solar panels to make them work. The stuff that washes down the Mississippi river into the Gulf of Mexico and forms this giant anoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and you're left with half the field to do something else with. It's now traveling under the clunky name of agrivoltaics. But this is actually the biggest new canvas for human ingenuity that we've had in a very long time on this planet. And people are doing something fascinating things with it. Turns out that on an overheating world, there are a lot of things that would like some shade. One of those things are deserts where it's able to, as you retain a little bit more moisture, it's possible for that crust and the biotic crust in the desert to reform and grow, holding sand in place. This is the first place the Chinese are having some luck stopping the giant sandstorms that have plagued northern China. But you can do lots of other things. In Vermont, where I live, one of the things that we've done in a lot of solar farms is interplant the rose with wildflowers and weeds that are attractive to native pollinators. And the numbers are astonishing. You find 10 times more of these insects than you did in the farm field that was there before. And what does that mean? It means that the surrounding farms and orchards see a big increase in pollination and in fruit set. Human ingenuity can take these things and make them beautiful. That's when I talk about aesthetic. We just need to start allowing people to picture this stuff in different ways. And part of that means allowing them to understand that it can be owned by communities, that it doesn't have to be owned by just utilities. We can have a real mix of this kind of stuff around the country.
- [79:26]
Ezra Klein
One of the dimensions I find interesting in this conversation and in your work is this sort of new story that's emerging, that, yes, there is this terrible calamity building and currently unfolding. And also there is this way to solve it that is moving through towards a future that is better not just because of the absence of catastrophe, but because of the presence of new possibilities.
- [79:53]
Bill McKibben
Absolutely. We don't know how prehistoric people thought about the world being prehistoric. They failed to write it down. But we know that every pile of rocks that they built, anything like Stonehenge, pointed to the equinox or the solstice. We know that the minute we started making myths on this planet, culture after culture, the very first thing people had to explain was, how does this thing rise over here in the morning, set over here in the evening, and get back over here next morning? The sun is the most charismatic object in our corner of the universe.
- [80:34]
Ezra Klein
The Bible Let there be light comes first.
- [80:36]
Bill McKibben
Exactly right. Actually, that's a good place to go with this story. I was in Rome last September. The new Pope summoned over a bunch of people for a kind of conference to mark the 10th anniversary of Francis's great encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si. And when he gave his talk, he talked about how they were Going to keep going with Francis's work on climate, a lot of good stuff about stewardship and creation. And almost in passing, he adds, and, you know, sometime this year, we're flipping the switch on our big new solar farm outside Rome, at which point, apparently, Vatican City will become the first fully solar powered nation on Earth. So when my turn to talk, I said, you know, that was excellent, your holiness. And it provides us not only with a kind of technological hope, it's very nice, but a kind of mantra under which to operate henceforth. You know, let's just keep saying energy from heaven, not from hell. I think this is an easy sell. I think that people are going to get more and more and more intrigued with the possibility that we're going to be able to run the planet on new terms going forward.
- [82:04]
Ezra Klein
I don't want to let you be quite this optimistic here. I don't even think it says great pessimism. There you go. I don't think even you think it's as easy a sell as you're describing there. So when you're out there doing your activism, you hear from someone who says, look, I believe in climate change. I don't like it, I don't want it, but energy is already too expensive and I've seen a lot of things fail. And I'm worried Democrats are worried about the penguins and not about my life. What do you think? What do you say? What do you think a political leader should say?
- [82:39]
Bill McKibben
Well, I mean, I'll tell you what I say, which is, here, I'll show you my electric bills and you'll quickly figure out that I'm paying a lot less than you are for power because I've had solar panels on my roof for a long time. I'll show you how my house or my car or whatever works, and you'll see that there's nothing strange, foreign weird about it. I think that the politician who starts figuring out how to make that case will, Will find a kind of motherload of political, new political energy to mine because it moves us past some of the. The places where our politics has gotten so hung up and stuck in recent decades. The fact that Republicans find themselves hating clean energy is just a function of the fact that 20 years ago, the oil industry decided to purchase the Republican Party and did so successfully. And that set up a whole series of things. But there's no intrinsic reason for that to happen. Just the opposite. I actually think that the next great leader in American politics is going to be someone who starts figuring out how to appeal to our better angels, not without an appeal to our own needs, but in a different register than we've heard before. That's what, for instance, interests me about the mayor of this city, Mr. Mamdani, not so much his policies, but his ability to figure out how to start making people feel interested, excited going forward. So I think that people will make the economic argument about where we can go and so on, but I also think that they're going to. Someone's going to start seizing on the idea that the planet now has, for the first time in a long time, a group project to work on. And that project is the rapid electrification of this planet, which would have huge advantages for people around the world and for our climate future. And I don't think those things are impossible to imagine. I've always thought that of all the forces that animated the first earth day in 1970, which remains the biggest political demonstration in American history, 10% of the then population of the US in the streets. The oil spill in Santa Barbara and the Cuyahoga river and things catching on fire were key to that. But I think the most important thing were the pictures that had come back from Apollo 8, which showed our planet floating out there in space. I think someone's going to recapture some of that energy and some of that hope and do great things with it. Now that there's no longer any technological or economic obstacle in the way, it's
- [85:54]
Ezra Klein
a good place to end. Also, final question. What a few books you recommend to the audience.
- [85:58]
Bill McKibben
There were two books this spring that I really enjoyed. Terry Tempest Williams, great nature essayist, a book called the Glorians, and Rebecca Solnit, pound for pound, maybe our best political essayist. And her book, the Beginning Comes after the End. But because as Dr. Johnson, I think, once said, the natural flight of the human mind is not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. There are three books that are coming out this fall that I've gotten to read. The galleys of that I think are crucial. Leah Stokes, maybe our leading expert on utilities, played a huge role in getting the IRA through, and she tells that story in a book called the Carbon Wave. It's a great kind of insider political account, and it's also a beautiful story because she was writing much of the IRA while she was in the neonatal intensive care unit with her newborn twins. Amy Westervelt, tremendous freelance reporter on a lot of climate and energy issues and on larger things, a new book called Brought to youo How Corporations have Warped the Truth, that tells the story that we didn't really get in here to today, but just how the oil industry has spent the last 40 years doing its level best to destroy our information system. The first big lie and the one that really set the template for so many of the lies that mark our politics was the lie that physics wasn't real and we didn't have to pay attention to it. Final book from Astrid Taylor and Naomi Klein, who you had on for a very memorable interview earlier this year and who I think Naomi is the finest mind on the left in the world. They have together a new book called End Times, Fascism and the Fight for a Living World that's coming out in the fall and that I think will be a kind of playbook for a lot of how progressives respond to the fix we find ourselves in.
- [88:13]
Ezra Klein
Bill McKibben, thank you very much.
- [88:14]
Bill McKibben
Thank you Ezra, very much.
- [88:34]
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