Bill McKibben (5:33)

He was running along a sidewalk in front of the Texas governor's mansion, running away, no doubt from the firebomb he had just thrown.

Mike Pesca (5:42)

That's if you want your reporting on.

Mike Pesca (5:44)

The 2008 Governor's Mansion in Texas presented with the maximum of ominous music. But yeah, it was firebombed. A lot of damage was done. $24 million worth of damage in 2011 when it was repaired. The Pennsylvania mansion will be repaired for 6 million is the estimate I've seen. It was anarchists. The Texas authorities think they honed in on a local branch of Austin anarchists, who, by the way, were arrested in 2008 for possessing firebombs at the Republican National Convention. There's a lot of political violence in the country now. Some of these are in states you don't live in or time periods that happened long ago. But wait a minute. The assassination attempts on Donald Trump back then. Politico interviewed John Ford, who was the undersecretary of intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security, and he said, I've been working with state and local law enforcement and election officials across the country over the past year to ensure that communities are better prepared to deal with election related threats. I'll say to you what I say to them. The country is experiencing the most dangerous threat environment I've ever seen in 40 years. And then soon after there were these reports.

Researcher/Analyst (6:56)

Immediately following last month's assassination attempt on former President Trump, there was a significant spike in calls for violence across online platforms. The research for Moonshot, which tracks domestic violent extremism online, found there were more than 1500 calls for civil war the day after the shooting. That is up more than 600% from a normal day.

Mike Pesca (7:19)

And what happened? Well, nothing happened. There was no political violence in the election, to quote a New York Times report from months later. At the time, many feared that the shooting of Trump would lead to a growing appetite for more violence. But researchers found the opposite. In the weeks after the attack, American support for partisan violence and murder specifically diminished and fell most sharply among Republicans. The Times quotes a researcher named Wintermute who says, I would have bet money that there would have been more support for political violence in principle in the election year. And there's nothing There's a few theories why there's a few theories why there wasn't retributive violence.

Mike Pesca (7:57)

One was that Donald Trump won.

Mike Pesca (8:00)

So I don't I am not sensing that the mood is a calm one. I am sensing that the mood is ramping up. I've been doing whatever commentary I can to convince people not to be convinced that the other side wants to kill them, however far my reach goes. But like I say, I think there is a case to be made, not even one that I necessarily endorse, a case to be made that this is not unprecedented, that people respond by being horrified, not by being extra angry, and that the worst is not upon us.

Mike Pesca (8:31)

Or because I have clearly not endorsed.

Mike Pesca (8:35)

This point of view, just want it to be aired or clearly not on the show. Today, a very different interview on however, what was told would be an existential threat. And it might be an existential threat, climate change, global warming. But it also seems like we do have a pretty good handle on it in a way that was not predicted by the worst doomsayers. Joining me now is someone who warned us about what was then called global warming before almost anyone else in the media, and he is so optimistic that his new book is called Here Comes The Sun. Bill McKibben up next.

Bill McKibben (9:24)

Foreign.

Mike Pesca (9:28)

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Mike Pesca (12:33)

You know what you could even do?

Mike Pesca (12:35)

You could tell Claude to write it in the style of and then you could name an author or two different authors and buy gum. If it doesn't do that, Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop with good enough. It is really a collaborator. I will go through the essay. I will say I wouldn't say that. I would say that. I mean it's all what I said. But it takes spoken word, turns it into proper grammar, sometimes can turn it into the proper grammar in the style of Marcus Aurelius. If I want to appeal to a stoic audience, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. I've also loaded in spreadsheets and code and asked it to give me an analysis that I was suspicious of and it 10 confirm. It can talk you through and it has talked me through. Essentially it's quote unquote thought process and Claude code is a game changer for developers. It works directly in your terminal and it understands the entire code base. It works with people like me who only understand what code is trying to do. And it works really well with people who are experts on code coding and Claude meets them at least halfway. I'm thinking of tasking it with something that it can do, which is to take control of the calendar, emails, all of my go to tools and just integrate all the incoming communication and outgoing communication in a way that really makes me look much more on top of.

Mike Pesca (14:06)

Things than I really am.

Mike Pesca (14:08)

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Mike Pesca (14:49)

Bill McKibben is one of the, let us say Sears. He's on the Mount Rushmore of environmentalism. Some of the words and phrases we use that trip from our tongues are words and phrases that if he didn't coin, he popularized. And out of keeping with the nature of this expert in nature, Bill McKibben is the General tone of his new book, Here Comes the Sun, A Last Chance for the Climate and A Fresh Chance for Civilization. And I would describe the tone as, for the first time, maybe in his professional life, cautiously optimistic. Bill, welcome to the gist. Am I getting the tone right? Am I characterizing the book correctly?

Bill McKibben (15:31)

Yes, oddly enough, you are. We're at a moment when there are thousand bad things happening on planet Earth. I've never been more afraid for my own country, nor really for the state of the physical state of the planet. But there is one big good thing happening amidst all this, and for once, that's the story I get to tell. And I think it's such a big good thing that it might actually start to have, over time, some bearing on both the fate of the planet and maybe the fate of our democracies.

Mike Pesca (16:08)

So is the good thing that carbon emissions are actually decreasing, or is the good thing that the technology for harnessing solar, and especially, well, solar and wind, are increasing at a rate faster than the changes occurring?

Bill McKibben (16:23)

Yes. So what's happening is, and it's only in the last 36 months or so a just incredible spike in the rate at which we're building solar and wind and batteries. That's the trinity of crucial technologies. It's now reached such a place that, yes, carbon emissions in places that have done this are starting to fall. Chinese carbon emissions are down so far this year in California, which has done this more thoroughly than any place else in the Union. This fourth largest economy in the world, the golden state, is using 40% less natural gas to make electricity this year than they were two years ago. So the pace at which this is happening is really almost incomprehensible. When I had a cut of this book in the New Yorker earlier this summer, the reaction I got from people who've spent their lives working on climate and energy was I had no idea. I had no idea that we'd had. We were beginning to have this kind of breakout moment. And now for me, the goal is to speed it up, to make it go fast, even faster. Fast enough that it begins to start catching up a little bit with the absolutely overwhelming physics of climate change.

Mike Pesca (17:51)

That gets at a part of the interview that I want to focus on, which is the mindset of the people who are experts on this and the mindset of the public as influenced by experts such as yourself. But first, let's do a little more laying of the predicate. I'll read from very early page in your book. I have little doubt we will run the world on wind and solar 40 years from now. But if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, then it will be a broken planet. Our energy sources will hardly matter. I get the second part, but just fill us in on why you have no doubt that wind and solar in the year 2075 will be what fossil fuels are in the year 2025, or was in the year 1955.

Bill McKibben (18:36)

Yeah, because three years ago or four years ago, we went past some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from setting stuff on fire. We now all of a sudden live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that is a unbelievably huge transition, maybe as huge as learning to burn fossil fuel in the first place, which is what we call the Industrial revolution. That gave us modernity so big because it allows us to imagine a world not only that's blunting the very worst effects of climate change, but that also takes control of its power systems away from the people who now control the relatively rare deposits of fossil fuel on which we depend. And instead we're able to power the world with a resource, sun and wind, that's available everywhere to everyone. That shift is so big and the economics so compelling that it will be very difficult to, to prevent it from happening. But it may not be, as the Trump administration is now trying to prove, I think, difficult to slow it down enough that it we manage to wreck the planet before we can do what we do, before we can salvage some of it with clean, carbon free energy.

Mike Pesca (20:07)

Right.

Mike Pesca (20:08)

So I understand that we had these goals of not allowing the planet to raise by 1.5 degrees Celsius and that goal wasn't reached. And we had timeframes. Essentially we were like the greyhound chasing the rabbit at the greyhound course, which is to say the goal wasn't fixed. It kept moving. And even if we made some progress, that rabbit seemed faster than us, but all of a sudden we as the greyhound got faster than the rabbit. And it really looks like if we plan it out, we can overtake the rabbit of climate change. Up to this. Fill me in and fill the audience in because I read the book on some of the mind blowing statistics about how long it took to get to the point of some thresholds and then the exponential increase in technology to accomplish what we had spent, say the last 50 years trying.

Bill McKibben (21:04)

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the first thing to be said is nobody should be under the illusion that we're going to stop global warming. It is too late for that. The hope is that we can still stop it short of the place where it absolutely cuts civilization off at the knees. But that's going to be a close call. Data from the last year shows that the jet stream and the Gulf stream and other most basic core components of the way the world works are now flickering and faltering and wobbling. We're in a bad place. That said, in almost Hollywood fashion, we have the gallery appearing over the hilltop and they're carrying solar panels and the blades of wind turbines. The speed with which this can be done is really amazing. In May, which is the last month for which we have data, the Chinese were installing solar panels at the rate of 3 gigawatts a day. Now, a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a coal fired power plant. So they were putting up the solar equivalent of a coal fired power plant every eight hours In China. China is, forget Petro states, China is emerging as the first electrostate in the history of the planet. And they're not only building the clean energy, they're building the Things to make use of it. We think of Detroit as the center of the automotive universe, but in fact, the new center of the automotive universe is three cities in China whose names I find it hard to pronounce. That's where the best cars, the cheapest cars in the world are coming from now. And they're the cars that the entire developing world is starting to buy instead of the stuff that we've been trying to force on them for a long time.

Mike Pesca (22:57)

Yeah. And the only reason that us, the United States, isn't buying them is they're not allowed to come into this country. But once they are, and I looked into buying one and going to Mexico, but they're not street legal here, at least there's a couple of years ago, once they come in, they're going to, I think, blow people's minds and blow away Tesla. So this all adds up to, we have this optimistic future if we stick to it, just like we have this democracy, if you can, if you can keep it, because of not a change in morality or values. I mean, that happened. People like you and the environmental movement were real and they changed our attitudes to some degrees. But didn't this really happen because the economics shifted from the thought that people would get rich from oil to now the correct conclusion that people are going to get rich from wind and solar. And it wasn't a recalculation of us becoming better people or stewards of the planet. It was just the economic incentive.

Bill McKibben (24:00)

It's a little more complicated than that, because the reason that things got cheap as quick as they did had a lot to do with great activism over the years. So, for instance, a really key moment happened in Europe. In Germany, about 25 years ago, the Green Party held the balance of power in their parliamentary system. They used that balance of power to demand what they called the energy vende, to allow Germans to put solar panels on their roofs and be paid by the government a hefty price for the electricity they were producing. That was expensive for German taxpayers. Having paid that price, it created the demand that allowed the Chinese to start getting good at building cheap solar power. So it's been a dance between good activism and good engineering all along. And we just happen to be at the moment when that dance we've, you know, has finally crossed that invisible line. So now, now the dance is working in the other way. Now the fossil fuel industry, which, whose, you know, whose business model is deeply, deeply threatened by this new economic reality, is using their version of activism, which is called huge amounts of campaign cash, to get the Trump administration to try and slow down what they can. You know that on Friday that the Trump administration issued a stop work order for a giant wind farm off the coast of Rhode island that was 80% complete. And they did it on unspecified national security grounds. It's hard to figure out exactly how the wind farm off the coast of Rhode island is going to damage the national security of the country. It's easy to figure out how it's going to damage the profit picture of the companies that poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the last election cycle. The same people remember that candidate Trump said, if you give me a billion dollars, you can have anything you want. At a secret meeting with oil executives a year ago, they gave him about half a million and that turns out to have been sufficient.

Mike Pesca (26:22)

Yeah, true. If we give in to the forces of anti environmentalism, we won't win. But my point was the market forces have now realigned to make it logical to pursue solar and wind. Right?

Mike Pesca (26:39)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (26:39)

And let's also say that the German Green Party and their vendor, which means they're winding, you know, to wind to vend, had some good and bad. I mean, they. Well, I don't even know what you think of nuclear, but I was just talking to a German expert who is telling me that the Green Party's total and antipathy to nuclear power really set that country back and made them dependent on natural gas. And, you know, it kind of.

Bill McKibben (27:05)

Yeah, there's, there's definitely some of that, but, but, you know, that's a fairly marginal story compared to what's happened with this explosion of solar and wind. We tend, as journalists often, me included, to get fascinated by somewhat peripheral parts of this story. So, for instance, last year when Google announced that they were going to build 500 megawatts of nuclear power between now and 2035 to run data centers, there were a thousand stories about a nuclear renaissance in the United States. 500 megawatts is half a gigawatt. So that's what. The Chinese are building that much solar power every four hours at the moment. So the real part of this story is sun and wind. But you're right about the economic logic and there was a good demonstration of it in Texas earlier this year. Texas is now installing clean energy faster than any place in the country, even though they're the home of the hydrocarbon industry. The oil industry tried to do what they did successfully in Congress. They tried to do in the Texas state legislature earlier this year pass a series of laws to slow this transition down. One of them was widely described as DEI for natural gas. If you wanted to put up 5 megawatts of solar, you had to put up 5 megawatts of gas, too. Everybody thought this would pass given the power of the oil industry in Austin. But people came out of the woodwork from rural Texas to say, you know what, this is how we pay for our school system now with solar farm or wind farm. Don't do this. And they were matched by businesses in Texas saying, you know what? We actually like low cost electricity. Please don't do this. And the Texas legislature, you know, backed away, returned to their other project of redistricting to give Trump some more congressional seats. The economic logic is enormous, and that's what's scared the fossil fuel industry into, you know, bankrolling the Trump administration to try and slow it down. But it's not slowing down any place else. What's happening here is that America, right before our eyes is ceding technological leadership and probably with it, a lot of political leadership to China.

Mike Pesca (29:39)

Yeah, I think DEI for, for gas would be disulfur, dichloride and ethane and maybe iodine. This would be the dei. I don't know what they're talking about. And also let's note Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. They love, don't they? So these are not blue states or states where they might even embrace recycling. In fact, I know they don't. But, you know, I've read your work for a while and I take it to heart, this book, I would say 75% optimistic. I don't know if it's your last book. Maybe a couple of books ago you wrote a book called Falter has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out.

Mike Pesca (30:16)

That was maybe the last chapter was.

Mike Pesca (30:18)

One of those all is not lost chapters. But the book was named to, you know, the best of lists in 2019. As you know, basically the one bad review was a guy who said, McKibben's too optimistic, there is no hope. And so I do look at the environmental movement and when you said that people who were well versed in it were surprised at how good things have gotten. I want to ask you about the role of painting the picture as dire. So it's a two part question. Can we say now that as we look back, it wasn't, it was dire if we did something about it, but we did do something about it, would you say that if you hadn't painted it as sufficiently dire, would people have been as motivated as they've been, do you think?

Bill McKibben (31:13)

I Don't know. I truthfully, I've never tried to paint anything as more or less dire. My job, always, since I wrote the End of nature back in 1989, has just been to tell the truth about what we know and where we are. And it remains, in some ways, it's far more dire than it was five years ago because we're five years deeper into this thing and the world is really coming apart. And we can see it now every day, this cycle of fire and flood. I mean, you're in Maine. You spent much of the summer sucking smoke from the huge fires of the Boreal Forest of Canada. Things are coming apart fast. This is a last hope that we can seize. And if we do, then we won't stop global warming, but we will be able to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets. And we think the best data indicates that every tenth of a degree that we warm the planet moves about a hundred million human beings out of a comfortable climate zone and into a dangerous one that they will probably have to abandon because their forest will catch fire, the ocean will overwhelm them, it will be too hot to grow food. I mean, look, we're in a desperate spot and we have a single scalable solution. The thing that excites me is that this is the first thing in the 40 years that I've been working on this that scales in any way. And this one scales fast. So fast. And we could be going much, much faster if we set our minds to it, if we made it the sort of international goal that, that we should. But it's, you know, it's a race. At least we're in the race now.

Mike Pesca (33:10)

And we'll be back with more of Bill McKibben right after this. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

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That's not the itinerary we're following.

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Bon voyage.

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Mike Pesca (34:49)

We're back with Bill McKibben. He is the author of Here Comes the Sun. And Bill, you had this framing which was you talked about the defiant reflex and you were saying in your early books, decades ago, you were saying that continuing the patterns of destruction and consumption and dominance was the prescription to take us over the cliff. You said the only way to solve the problem was for all people to get away from this defiant reflex, to upend and overhaul their very way of living, their patterns of consumption. But I have to ask you, given all the optimism and all the innovations around solar energy and the like, I mean, have we really stopped consuming? I'm going to say we haven't. I'm going to say if you look at the sizes of houses in America as one metric, they're big and getting bigger and the distance between them is a lot and getting more. So yes, we are slowly adopting EVs and the biggest piece of evidence that we didn't get away from the defiant reflex is China. China doesn't care about stopping consuming. China wants to consume. Look at how they mine, look at how they treat large segments of the population. So I just want to give you the opportunity to reflect on all of that and to say if it was true or as true as you thought it was, that the fundamental thing we need to do is, is to overhaul our consumption patterns.

Bill McKibben (36:21)

I think that what you're saying is right. And I also think that the switch to renewable energy is probably going to be the key towards building a quite different kind of world on the other side. That in fact if we're able to do this, that, that it will not only help us with the climate fight, but that it will also produce a world that's quite different going forward. Think, just start with geopolitics. Think about how the geopolitics of the last 70 years on this planet would have been different if oil was of trivial value. How many wars and assassinations and coup plots and terrorism we would have avoided in that scenario. I mean, humans are good at fighting wars, but it's hard to figure out how to fight one over sunshine. Think about what it means to be able to locally produce a truly valuable in some ways alongside food, the most important commodity that we have. The concentration of wealth in this world really got its start when John D. Rockefeller figured out that you could control the supply of this crucial thing. And an awful lot of the sort of dominance politics of the world we live in is very connected to all of this. So I think that yes, humans are not going to give up their desires, but I think that we're actually, that this is actually a more revolutionary potentially change than simply a modest switch in technologies to rely on a resource. Look, the sun already gives us light and warmth and food via photosynthesis. Its willingness to provide us with all the power that we could ever need is a. It's a kind of keystone switch, you know, something that helps create a very different place on the other side or I'm not sure I'll live long enough to see it. But it fascinates me with those implications.

Mike Pesca (38:47)

The last thing I want to ask you about is geoengineering, which is the idea that scientific solutions can be part of the mix to solve the problem. Now I understand that there's a lot of opposition to this insofar as if people think we're going to out clever the fundamentals of the environment, it's not true. In fact, there was so much opposition that I was kind of surprised to learn that in 2010 there was a UN moratorium on geoengineering. I don't know how much teeth it had, but this just expressed the sense of the nations of the world that an unregulated planetary tinkering and halting premature experiments or having experimentation rather than fundamental change was not the way to solve the problem. Then I read a story you wrote in the New Yorker in 2022 and it seemed to me that you cautiously embraced it or embraced it insofar as I think you knew you were talking to the people of this mindset and you had of the lead of one of the paragraphs was everyone studying solar geoengineering seems to agree that it's a terrible thing. But you were still saying, but we still might need to do it. Have you changed your thinking on geoengineering?

Bill McKibben (40:03)

I've always thought that it's a terrible idea. I think it's, you know, I used to run a homeless shelter in the basement of my church, so I spent a lot of time dealing with junkies. And junkies have their own peculiar logic about how they're going to get out of the trouble they're in without actually having ever to try and do anything different. And this strikes me as very much the kind of solution that junkies arrive at. Let's pour a bunch more chemicals into the air and see how that works. And the, you know, the physical, the worries about what will happen if we do it just get more and more intense as we start to understand things like what causes the monsoons to go where they go. That said, if we don't very quickly embrace solutions like sun and wind, then we're going to be in so much hurt that there will be every kind of break the glass solution that you can imagine. I mean, in his great novel Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson writes about a. A heat wave so dire that it kills 20 million Indians. And within weeks, the government of India is trying to geoengineer the atmosphere. That seems to me what's going to happen if things get entirely out of control. It's a dangerous thing to do. So our job, at least for the moment, is to do everything we can to keep us from reaching that point. That's why I'm, you know, spending, not just writing about it, we're getting ready for this big Sunday day of action across the country. On the fall equinox, September 21, there'll be hundreds of actions across the country with people, just people doing their best to move this out of the mental category of alternative energy and into the understanding that this is the obvious, straightforward way forward. If we can do that and change, begin to change the politics, then we have some chance of avoiding putting ourselves in the kind of Hobson's choice that you otherwise describe. So at least for the moment, that seems worth spending one's time on.

Mike Pesca (42:17)

I'll give one last observation about geoengineering and the approach that you articulated in general, with all due deference and acknowledgement, that you are about 10,000 times more well informed on this than I am and have given your life's work to it. But it always struck me that an all hands on deck and let's try everything approach was just more logical. And I understood the other side of that argument, that this is a false hope and Maybe some people who are claiming that geoengineering is a solution are pawns of fossil fuel industry. That all could be true, but let's try it. I would say, and I've interviewed some of the people in your book too who are, or in your article who are trying some geoengineering. And also just by my orientation, a un moratorium on science, on the application of science seems somewhat terrible to me. And I'm basing a lot of this. I just learned about the moratorium based on that New York Times magazine article about some very specific localized geoengineering projects with fog and the coral reefs.

Mike Pesca (43:22)

But. And to expand it out, I, I.

Mike Pesca (43:26)

Have a somewhat technocratic relationship to all problems in the world, but even this one. And from you talking about reading your books and talking about junkies, it seems to me that you have a values based or moralistic one that I don't want to say moralistic, that sounds conservative. That you have a values based one. And maybe you're right and maybe. But yeah, go ahead.

Bill McKibben (43:48)

No, my thought always when I was working with my junkie friends in the homeless shelter was this. Your approach isn't actually going to work and it never did. I'm technologically fascinated. I mean I've written this whole book is about the beauty of this particular technology to get us where we need to go. I love the idea that engineers have produced something that reduces the human impact on the world around it. That strikes me as incredibly beautiful. And I love now the sight of wind turbine blades turning in the distance. I love the sight of the solar panels on my roof because they're a reminder that humans have the wit to take something as ephemeral as the photons streaming out of the sun and turn them into what we need. Energy from heaven, not from hell. Baby, we've got a chance here.

Mike Pesca (44:53)

Yeah. So what I was saying, that is if you give them the junkies methadone, I don't know if you've gotten to root causes or change the values or morals of the junkies, but you might have helped them if you give yes. Over that's true. GLP1 completely with you. That's sort of the geoengineering obesity again. I'm more drawn to the amoral technocratic solutions than you are.

Bill McKibben (45:17)

I guess I'm fine with that. But what junkies generally wanted was not methadone. They wanted to win the lottery. And you know that was going to solve their problems. And I don't think, I think we're losing the lottery here as people usually do. But we've got it. We've got a ticket. We've got a golden ticket right now and we should get cash it in. That's, that's our chance right now. And we may not get another one in time. That counts.

Mike Pesca (45:47)

Bill McKibben's new book is Here Comes the Sun, A last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. There's a lot of hope in the book, many facts, including did you know that in Spotify plays the Beatles song Here Comes the Sun more plays than hey Jude or Yesterday. That tells you something, does it not? Bill thank you so much, Mike.

Bill McKibben (46:07)

Thank you so much. You have a good one.

Mike Pesca (46:14)

The Gist was produced by Cory Wara.

Mike Pesca (46:17)

The very nimble and able Cory Wara.

Mike Pesca (46:20)

Ashley Kahn is our production coordinator. Kathleen Sykes and I collaborate on the Gist List substack every Wednesday. It's a straight up Pesca profundities newsletter. It's a lot of labels here, but.

Mike Pesca (46:33)

I will just tell you.

Mike Pesca (46:33)

Go to Mike pesca.substack.com to see what I'm writing about. And Michel Pesca is COO of Peachfish.

Mike Pesca (46:40)

Productions, Oomproo gpru do Peru and thanks for listening.

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