Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert: Is It Too Late to Save the World?

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert: Is It Too Late to Save the World?
Date: May 10, 2019
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert

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Overview

This episode brings together two of the most influential environmental writers—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, and New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction—to discuss the state of the climate crisis. The conversation is spurred by recent political shifts, youth activism, and a dire UN report forecasting massive biodiversity loss. Host David Remnick explores whether growing urgency and activism can counterbalance deep policy setbacks and ecological inertia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

A New Political and Social Tipping Point

• Context: Climate change has vaulted to the forefront of political debate, surpassing even the Mueller report for Democrats’ top concern. (00:09)
• Bill McKibben’s Insight:
  • It’s become impossible to ignore climate disasters, such as the Paradise, CA fire, bringing new urgency:
    • “30 years ago, we were offering warnings... Now... you watch as a California city literally called Paradise, literally turns into hell inside half an hour.” (02:09, McKibben)
  • Mass response and activism—in the streets, in Parliament, and especially among youth—has surged.
• Elizabeth Kolbert’s Observation:
  • There’s a “fascinating paradox” of active street activism coexisting with a US administration aggressively rolling back climate efforts:
    • “If we have a future that will look back on this moment, it will be a very interesting moment... the most remarkably retrograde administration in Washington... actively rolling back... whatever modest progress was made under the Obama administration.” (03:35, Kolbert)

The Role of Partisan Politics and Deliberate Obstruction

• Kolbert on Political Polarization:
  • The climate crisis has become a manufactured “belief” issue, shaped by vested interests and deliberate disinformation:
    • “They’ve taken people out of this... denier complex and put them into top offices... And now I think that... the capacity for human delusion and self delusion is limitless.” (05:18, Kolbert)

The Youth-Led Movement and Intergenerational Stakes

• Driving Forces:
  • Young people are compelled to lead because they will inherit the worst consequences:
    • “You and I are going to be dead before climate change hits its absolute worst pitch. But if you’re in high school right now, that absolute worst pitch comes right in the prime of your life.” (06:46, McKibben)
  • Coming actions: Anticipation of larger mobilizations, potentially including adult strikes.
• Media’s Priorities:
  • McKibben laments that climate catastrophe reports barely register in mainstream news compared to trivialities:
    • “It’s in the newspapers, but it’s well below the new Royal Baby and the trade talks with China. And it’s that business as usual that’s literally doing us in.” (07:20, McKibben)

Biodiversity Loss and the Sixth Extinction

• Kolbert on UN Report vs. Her Book:
  • The UN’s million species at risk confirms her reporting from a decade earlier:
    • “You don’t like to see the news bearing out what you said... more documented destruction... the general trend line of biodiversity loss... playing out, you know, sort of according to plan, unfortunately.” (08:28, Kolbert)
  • Economic growth and environmental loss are inextricably linked; even as GDP climbs, nature plummets:
    • “Those two things are very intimately linked. If you only pay attention to the GDP part, you might say, oh, everything’s fine.” (09:25, Kolbert)

The Deeper Roots of the Crisis: Ideology, Inequality, and Modernity

• McKibben on Pope Francis’s Encyclical:
  • The encyclical Laudato si is praised for seeing climate as inseparable from social and moral structures:
    • “It’s... a remarkable critique of modernity...” Markets and inequality are intertwined with rising emissions. (09:55, McKibben)
• Political Economy:
  • McKibben describes the triumph of laissez-faire ideology arriving at the worst possible time for coordinated action:
    • “The idea that government is the problem... came just at the wrong moment... when we actually needed governments to be doing something very strong to deal with climate change.” (11:00, McKibben)
• Running Out of Time:
  • The IPCC’s 2030 deadline is urgent:
    • “[We] are basically out of presidential cycles in order to deal with this problem.” (11:51, McKibben)
    • “If fundamentally transformative work was not well underway by 2030... physics was going to be too far ahead in this race.” (11:52, McKibben)

Hope, Pessimism, and the Reality of “Cumulative” Damage

• Kolbert’s Realism:
  • She warns that climate change is compounded by delay—damage accumulates, not reverses:
    • “There’s a lot of time lag in the system. There’s a lot of inertia in the system. And we are in the system.” (13:37, Kolbert)
    • “Once we decide, ‘Oh, we really don’t like this climate,’ you don’t get the old climate back for many, many, many generations.” (14:09, Kolbert)
• McKibben’s Qualified Hope:
  • He stresses that some tipping points are passed—like Arctic ice and ocean acidity—but mass mobilization could prevent civilization’s collapse:
    • “No one’s got a plan for refreezing the Arctic once it’s melted... We’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible.” (15:02, McKibben)
  • Historical precedent: The first Earth Day in 1970 was transformative; perhaps mass action again can shift the political reality.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On irreversible loss:
  • “No one’s got a plan for refreezing the Arctic once it’s melted. And we’ve lost now 70 or 80% of the summer sea ice in the Arctic, so that’s a tipping point, more or less crossed.” —Bill McKibben (15:02)
• On generational stakes:
  • “[If you’re in high school right now] that absolute worst pitch comes right in the prime of your life. And if we’re not able to take hold of this, then those lives will be completely disrupted and they’ve figured that out.” —Bill McKibben (06:49)
• On the false debate:
  • “[Climate change] has nothing to do with your belief. It has to do with geophysics and geophysics that have been established for quite some time now.” —Elizabeth Kolbert (05:16)
• On inertia and hope:
  • “We are fighting a very, very, very uphill battle. And I think the point that Bill has made, and I agree with it, is maybe we can avoid the worst possible future, but I don’t think [we can] avoid a lot, a lot, a lot of damage.” —Elizabeth Kolbert (14:31)
• Historical parallel:
  • “In 1970, 20 million people, 1 in 10 of the then American population, went into the street [for Earth Day]... That outpouring of public energy shifted the zeitgeist. We better do it again, and in spades.” —Bill McKibben (15:28)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:09 – Opening context: Political urgency and climate activism
• 02:01 – McKibben on why the moment is different now
• 03:34 – Kolbert on political reversals and atmospheric CO₂ benchmarks
• 06:43 – McKibben on youth leadership, adult strikes
• 08:26 – Kolbert on biodiversity loss, economic growth, and environmental destruction
• 09:55 – McKibben lauds Pope Francis’s critique of modernity and inequality
• 11:00 – McKibben connects ideology, the Reagan era, and missed chances
• 12:30–14:44 – Kolbert and McKibben debate hope versus pessimism; the irreversibility and “tail” of climate damage
• 15:00–16:22 – McKibben on what is still possible and the need for massive social action

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Takeaways for Listeners

• The climate crisis is now undeniable, with both political momentum and institutional resistance at new highs.
• Intergenerational divides are sharpening youth activism; however, time is desperately short due to accumulated damage.
• Political ideologies and willful denial have cost critical decades, but history shows public mobilization can achieve rapid legislative action.
• “Hope” lies not in restoring the past, but in averting the very worst future.

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This episode offers sobering realism but also charts the potential for meaningful change—with mass mobilization, scientifically grounded urgency, and, perhaps, a shift in the public’s and policymakers’ imaginations.

Transcript

[David Remnick]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. While the headlines from Washington have been dominated by the fallout from the Mueller report, even now, what we're hearing from the voters is that this is not the most pressing issue on their minds, not at all. For Democrats. In fact, the top concern appears to be not the president, but climate change. According to a new CNN poll that reflects a new sense of urgency around all of this. Students around the globe are walking out of school on climate strike.

[Karen Russell]

We are in Genova, Italy, protesting against climate change because politicians today are not willing to do enough about it.

[David Remnick]

In Britain, the House of Commons just declared that the planet is in a climate emergency.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

Declare an environment and climate emergence.

[David Remnick]

No, I think the ayes have it. And as if we needed more evidence of the sense of crisis, the UN last week released the findings of a report describing the potential disappearance of a million varieties of life on Earth. It's all very frightening to read. Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change for decades. His book the End of Nature, which was published in the New Yorker, has been credited with breaking the news of climate change to a wide public. And our staff writer, Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book the Sixth Extinction, which was excerpted in the magazine. We all spoke last week on the day the UN's findings came out. Bill, you wrote the End of Nature, which was really the first popular book on climate change 30 years ago. What are you seeing now in the current moment that's different than what you've seen before? We've had so many missed opportunities. What's different about now?

[Bill McKibben]

Well, one of the things that's different, of course, is it's much easier to see precisely what's going on. I mean, 30 years ago we were offering warnings. Even 10 years ago, it was still a little hard to make out the precise shape of climate change as it started to affect the planet. Now, I mean, you watch as a California city literally called paradise, literally turns into hell inside half an hour. Once people have seen pictures like that, it's no wonder that we begin to see a real uptick in the response. In the last six months, we've seen this rise of the demand for a green New Deal in the Democratic Party. We've seen the people at extinction rebellion shut down London in the center of London for a week. And the Tory led Parliament in the UK declare a Climate emergency. And most poignantly, we've watched a few million school children following the lead of Greta Thunberg in Sweden and walking out of classes. It's not a good sign that we're asking 12 year olds to solve the problem for us, but it's good that they're stepping up.

[David Remnick]

Betsy, I think what Bill is saying is that we're at a certain kind of tipping point now, a political tipping point where climate change is concerned that hadn't existed before. How do you perceive the politics around climate change at this moment? Because in many ways, the Trump administration is proactively making the problem much worse.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

Yes, I think it's going to be. If we have a history, if we have a future that will look back on this moment, it will be a very interesting moment because we do have these two extraordinary trends happening simultaneously. You know, there is a lot of energy on the street and for the first time, you know, you have Democratic candidates competing to be the climate candidate with some, you know, very detailed and pretty significant programs to try to wean us off of fossil fuels. At the same time, you have just the most remarkably retrograde administration in Washington, which isn't just not making progress on these issues, but actively rolling back, you know, whatever modest progress was made under the Obama administration that will take, you know, at a minimum sort of years to undo that, if we decide to undo it, you know, if we don't decide to give them another term. And meanwhile, just the facts in the air, as it were, are really bad. When Bill wrote the end of nature, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were approximately 350 parts per million. We just hit 415. So things are going in the wrong direction and very rapidly now.

[David Remnick]

Why would Donald Trump, who was not an executive in the oil industry, believe something like if in fact he believes it? It's just not a tenet of cynicism that global warming is a Chinese hoax. And why, correspondingly why, is a matter of science a matter of partisan politics. You say that the Democratic Party believes X, but a lot of Republicans believe otherwise.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

Well, this has been kind of a long history of a combination of moneyed interests and political interests colluding, as it were, the word of the hour to make this issue seem to be one of, you know, belief. It has nothing to do with your belief. You know, it has to do with geophysics and geophysics that have been established for quite some time now. And so how we got into the situation, you know, they've taken people out of this, you know, denier complex and put them into top offices in the, in the federal government. And those guys know exactly what they want to undo and they are pretty systematically going about doing it. And now I think that one of the lessons of the last couple years, unfortunately, is the capacity for human delusion and self delusion is limitless. So, you know, it's possible that you could administer truth serum to these guys and they would still be saying the same thing because they actually, you know, quote, unquote, believe it. I honestly don't know.

[David Remnick]

Well, what's so striking about the movement in large measure is that it's led very often by kids, by teenagers. In mid March, nearly a million and a half kids worldwide went on a climate strike and refused to go to school. Why is this generational shift happening and what effect is it having?

[Bill McKibben]

So young people have been at the forefront of this for quite a while. When we started 350. Org, it was myself and seven undergraduates here at Middlebury. And I think the reason that, that young people are so involved is because, well, you know, you and I are going to be dead before climate change hits its absolute worst pitch. But if you're in high school right now, that absolute worst pitch comes right in the prime of your life. And if we're not able to take hold of this, then those lives will be completely disrupted and they've figured that out. That said, keep your eyes peeled. But I think soon there'll be calls for adult strikes, as it were, to follow and back up the kids beginning in the autumn. And I was just looking at the newspapers today. The UN just published a truly remarkable report saying that we're going to lose a million species on the planet sometime over the next few decades. And yet it's in the newspapers, but it's well below the new Royal Baby and the trade talks with China. And it's that business as usual that's literally doing us in and we have to figure out how to disrupt it a little.

[David Remnick]

Betsy, I hate to be a competitive journalist, but when I read the report about the sixth extinction in the UN report, I said, the New Yorker had that 10 years ago when you published in 2009 the very same thing. What is the difference between 2009 and, and 2019 in terms of the extinction of hundreds of thousands of species on the planet Earth?

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

Well, I think that it's one of those cases where, as I'm sure Bill would say, you don't sort of like to see the news bearing out what you said. But in this case, it really is the only Difference is the, you know, more documented destruction, really, and a lot more studies piled on the ones, you know, that were available to us five, ten years ago. But, you know, the general trend line of biodiversity lost, it's all just playing out, you know, sort of according to plan, unfortunately. And it's true that, you know, global GDP is larger than ever. And at the same time, you know, species loss and destruction of the natural environment, natural world is also greater than ever. And those two things are very intimately linked. And if you only pay attention, you know, to the GDP part, you might say, oh, everything's fine. But I think what the point that this report is really trying to make is those lines are going to cross. You know, people are still dependent on the natural world. All the oxygen we breathe, all the food we eat, all the water. You know, these are biological and geochemical systems that we're still dependent on for better or worse, and we are mucking with them in the most profound ways. I think that that is the message, the take home message of that report.

[David Remnick]

Bill, I was really interested to read that you think that the great climate change document of our time is by Pope Francis.

[Bill McKibben]

Well, I think that the encyclical that he wrote three and a half years ago now, Laudato si, is amazing mostly because though it takes off from climate change, it's actually a fairly thorough and remarkable critique of modernity. And it talks really about precisely the things that, that Betsy's been talking about. Understanding this as, yes, a problem of physics and of the need to put up a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, which we now can do because the engineers have made them affordable, but also understanding it as a problem of human beings and their relations with each other. As Francis points out, the last 40 years, this period of time when we've worshiped markets and assumed they solved all problems, has not only spiked the temperature through the roof, it's spiked inequality through the roof. And the two are not unrelated.

[David Remnick]

How are they related? What is the essential relationship between the two?

[Bill McKibben]

One of the things I spent some time doing in this new book is kind of teasing out the history that begins with Ayn Rand and kind of reaches a first zenith in the Reagan administration. And the idea that government is the problem, that if you leave corporations alone, they'll get done what needs doing. This reigning ideology came just at the wrong moment. It came at precisely the moment when we actually needed governments to be doing something very strong to deal with climate change. And that combination of ideology and interest has been enough to suppress our reactions in the crucial 30 years. I mean, David, we're basically out of presidential cycles in order to deal with this problem.

[David Remnick]

How do you mean? What's the matter?

[Bill McKibben]

Well, the un, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued their most recent report, and it was by far their most pointed to date. It said if really fundamentally transformative work was not well underway by 2030, and we were not going to catch up with the math of climate change. Physics was going to just be too far ahead in this race. And you know enough about political life in this country or any other to know that a decade is a short period of time. If we want to have anything substantial happening in a decade, then we have got to be doing it right away.

[David Remnick]

You know, for nearly 20 years that I've been working together with Betsy, the running joke between us is about Betsy's pessimism, which is well founded, but we managed to joke about it anyway. And, Bill, early on in Falter, your new book, you write, there is one sense in which I am less grim than in my younger days. This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. And I sense in both of you, each in your own way, and it might be different, but each in your own way, some sense of hope is informing your work now in 2019, the way it might not have five years ago. Am I right, Betsy?

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

He said, I hope I haven't given you that impression, Dave. He said, hopefully, hopefully the dog came home. I think, you know, I. No, I'm gonna be. I'll play my usual role here, Eeyore, you know. Yeah, Eeyore. I think that I do see glimmers of hope on a political front, but it's sort of like mountains after mountains after mountains. And I think, as I say, the facts on the ground, climate change, the. The thing that distinguishes it from a lot of other environmental problems is it's cumulative. You know, it's not something where you can say at the moment, you don't like things, you know, let's undo them. There's a lot of time lag in the system. There's a lot of inertia in the system. And we are in the system.

[David Remnick]

Meaning. Meaning. Meaning in science that there's no.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

In the climate system. In the climate system. So we have not yet experienced the full impact of the greenhouse gases we have already put up there. And once we do, in whatever a decade or so, there's a sort of a long tail to that. We will have put up that much more. So we're always chasing this problem, and you can't decide once we decide, oh, we really don't like this climate, you don't get the old climate back for many, many, many generations. So we are fighting a very, very, very uphill battle. And I think the point that Bill has made, and I agree with it, is maybe we can avoid the worst possible future, but I don't think avoid a lot, a lot, a lot of damage.

[David Remnick]

And we're seeing it already.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

We're seeing it, but it's just beginning. And it's not just beginning. And then we can turn it around. It's just beginning, and a lot more is built in.

[David Remnick]

What can be held back, Bill, and what can't be held back at this point?

[Bill McKibben]

Well, I mean, look, Betsy's right. The problem with climate change is that it's a timed test, and if you don't solve it fast, then you don't solve it. No one's got a plan for refreezing the Arctic once it's melted. And we've lost now 70 or 80% of the summer sea ice in the Arctic, so that's a tipping point, more or less crossed. The oceans are 30% more acidic than they used to. So we're not playing for stopping climate change. We're playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn't make civilizations impossible. I mean, here's the hopeful case if you want it. 50 years ago next spring, we had the first earth day. In 1970, 20 million people, 1 in 10 of the then American population, went into the street. And that anger transformed the flavor of this issue in America. Over the next four years, Richard Nixon, who had not an environmental bone in his body, signed every piece of legislation on which we still depend. The Clean Air act, the Clean Water act, the Endangered Species act that Betsy described as now under siege. Those all came because of that outpouring of public energy that shifted the zeitgeist. We better do it again, and in spades.

[David Remnick]

Elizabeth Colbert, Bill McKibben, authors of really the Essential Works on Climate change these last 30 years, thank you so much.

[Bill McKibben]

Thank you, David.

[Elizabeth Kolbert]

Thank you, David.

[David Remnick]

Elizabeth Colbert won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, The Sixth Extinction. Bill McKibben's new book is called has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Karen Russell is a writer who just loves the outdoor, and her best known book, Swamplandia, was set in the Everglades. It's about a family of alligator wrestlers at an alligator wrestling theme park. Russell is a native of South Florida, and the state has Shaped her very particular and fantastical view of the world. But a few years back, she met a man at a writers conference in Portland, Oregon. She visited him for the summer and never went back. And that's where we found Karen Russell recently in Portland, where she took us on a walk through Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.

[Karen Russell]

I live about maybe 15 minute walk from here and I come here. There was a period where I came here every single day and it's one of my favorite places. When we were looking for houses, I discovered it. I didn't. We hadn't really been up this way and I went on a jog and it just felt like Narnia or something. I mean, you know, it's, it's pretty industrial up this way. So you sort of go from a grittier area and then there was just this green parentheses that opened up and it feels like the true woods. And it's really surprising to sort of turn off southeast Milwaukee and find yourself in this like envelope of what I still think of as the real woods. I grew up in Miami, Florida. We have amazing ecosystems down there, but you know, we don't really have Doug firs and maples and sort of the tremendous woods of the West. So I think this still feels very storybook to me, you know, as a Floridian, to come into this kind of forest. I mentioned it's, it's not enormous, it's 144 acres, but it feels enormous. So right now you can't even see the street anymore. And if you could see what I'm looking at, I mean, Portland's totally erased, basically. There's just every kind of green all around us. There's just these felled giants of these old trees. They look like kind of fraggle rock meets Dr. Seuss. You know, there's sort of like a Jim Henson quality to them because they're all wearing this fabulous shag of moss. Describes how contributing to the fairy tale dimension of this walk is the fact that many Portlanders have waist length beards. The first time that I, that I went on a jog in Oaks Bottom, I didn't know any of this was here. And I went on when I had always just kind of gone straight down the trail and then I kind of turned off. I hadn't even seen this path. Now we're going over what looks like this ferry draw bridge that obviously a troll is sometimes under. I mean, it just feels like a little bit you get like the old Hansel and Gretel panic or something where you're like, wait, maybe I should proceed with caution. Now we don't know what's on the other side of this bridge. You really get the sense that the crows are telling you you're trespassing. They're not being impolite about it, but they just want you to know. So now we're walking towards this vast lake that is kind of adjacent to the Willamette. And this is the first moment where you can see, like a hallucination, this Ferris wheel through the trees. There's a really flat meadow, and so you have kind of a clear sight line to the Ferris wheel at Oaks Amusement Park. And the first time I saw this, it was such a shock. I really just doubted the evidence of my senses, you know. Now we've got a cool, green, musky smell in Wapato Pond, which is just. Looks like some of the swampier places that I loved when I was growing up. Everything's kind of sunken and watery. Oh, my gosh, is that a nutria or a beaver? We've got just the sweet, furry head of a nutria doing donuts in the water below our bridge. Wow. Looking like a piece of bark that just swam to life. A lot of my early work, my first joy collection, and my first novel, Swamplandia, were set in the wetlands of South Florida. I grew up near a mangrove estuary and would just, like, muck around for hours. I mean, just thousands of hours as a kid I spent climbing mangroves and wading around. And I think what is so attractive to me as a writer about this kind of space is it really, it feels uncanny in the best way. It feels like Freud's uncanny. And as you see, you know, from this walk we've just taken and from this vista that we're looking out at, it is almost impossible to say where the land ends and where the water begins or which is which. And there's something about that sort of liminal, slippery place that is so exciting to me. You can hear them, right? You can hear the kids on this pirate ship. This, like this. This metronome on the skyline full of tiny human bodies. Look, we did it. There it is. Okay, this is very exciting because we just walked out of the woods. It feels like it ends pretty abruptly. And now there's this meadow and we're coming up towards the entrance of the amusement park. This is an analogy that will only work for some, but I think if you've ever had a psychedelic experience where the palate can change really dramatically over the course of, like, a. A relatively brief period of time, now we're out of like the dark green intense period and things are starting to normalize. This is more like the matte color of consensus reality again. So we're sitting on a picnic bench. The miniature choo choo is doing donuts around us. And you can see kind of the river sparkling through the trees. And our backs are to like what looks like the spine of a giant dragon. This roller coaster. People are carrying these towering ice cream cones around. I love amusement parks. I keep writing about them. Oaks park feels a little homespun to me in that way. There's nothing sort of aggressively modern or commercial about it. But I think, yeah, amusement parks, it's just, it's humanity at its best. Everybody comes here looking to have a good time. And we've made all of these machines that are like anti capitalist in a funny way. I mean they're like go nowhere machines, like do nothing machines. Just plug your body into this machine. And this far from being like a factory assembly line, it's just a wheel of joy, you know, you're just gonna pulse adrenaline through your body and remember that you're lucky to be alive.

[David Remnick]

Karen Russell at Oaksbottom Wildlife Refuge and the Oaks Amusement park on the Willamette River. Russell's brand new book of short stories is called Orange World. That's our show for this week. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. Have a great week.

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