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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Will Record Temperatures Finally Force Political Change?
00:32:50
Will Record Temperatures Finally Force Political Change?
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- [00:00]
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- [01:17]
Tyler Foggatt
Welcome to the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. On Tuesday, check July 4th, a disturbing record was broken. It was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, and that was just one of many heat related records that have been broken this summer. Historically, high temperatures have been recorded around the planet from Canada to Kuwait, causing fires, floods and other extreme weather events. In a recent article for the New Yorker, Bill McKibben explained that we'll keep setting terrifying new records like these unless the climate movement can break the fossil fuel industry's grip on political power. Hi Bill, thank you so much for being here.
- [02:01]
Bill McKibben
Well, what a pleasure to be with you.
- [02:04]
Tyler Foggatt
Before we look at the global picture, I wanted to talk about your home state of Vermont, which was hit with massive floods just this week. Have you been affected by that?
- [02:14]
Bill McKibben
Yeah, almost everybody in Vermont's been affected because it's a small place and this is very reminiscent of the immense damage that happened in 2011 with Hurricane Irene. You know, most of the time, Vermont is relatively isolated from climate damage, but it's very vulnerable to these huge rainstorms because it's a state of steep mountains and narrow valleys. And so when we have really hot sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic that can breed these huge moisture producing storms, then we don't escape unscathed, and we didn't this time. It's been a tragic couple of days in Vermont.
- [02:59]
Tyler Foggatt
It seems like there are a lot of places that are typically sort of isolated from these larger climate events or, you know, that we think of as being safer than others that now are being affected. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about just like the extreme weather we've been seeing this summer and how unusual it is and the various places that are getting hit by it.
- [03:22]
Bill McKibben
Well, we're at a truly remarkable moment in the history of the planet and of our species. You know, early July has seen the four or five hottest days on record for the last, we think, 125,000 years or so.
- [03:41]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Wow.
- [03:42]
Bill McKibben
We have proxy records, things like tree rings and ice cores that go back a long ways. And clearly this is hotter than it's ever been in human history. And it's reached a point where no place is safe. You know, the cool, wet forests of northern Canada are on fire. Canada has seen more forest burn already in 2023 than in any calendar year total before. I mean, the tally of damage is just so astonishing, you hardly know where to start. In the last few days, we've seen heat waves like we've never seen before across large parts of the world. In Algeria had a nighttime temperature that didn't get below 103. That's a new record for Africa, across Spain, across the American Southwest, across huge parts of China, home to hundreds of millions of people. We've seen just unrelenting heat waves, setting record after record after record. When you get that hot, dry places dry out and catch on fire, and wet places see flooding on a scale we've never seen before. So, yeah, Vermont is getting hit hard right now, but so is Japan, so is large parts of China, so are big parts of Europe. The flooding is incredible. But here's the hard part. This is precisely what scientists told us was going to happen. You know, I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change, what we then call the greenhouse Effect, back in 1989, a book excerpted in the New Yorker. And none of this should come as a surprise. It's exactly what scientists told us would happen if we didn't get off coal and gas and oil and we didn't get off Coal and gas and oil. So now it's happening and unless we get off coal and gas and oil, it's going to get a lot worse and fast.
- [05:53]
Tyler Foggatt
So, yeah, I mean, scientists have been predicting this for some time now, but it's clear that, you know, any chances we had of preventing climate change or even like the worst case version of climate change, I mean, it seems like we are past that point now. And so I'm wondering.
- [06:09]
Bill McKibben
No, not. Let me just say, not completely. We've raised the temperature of the planet. Probably in the next year we'll go past the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark, at least temporarily. And that was the thing that the world pledged to avoid in Paris. And, and it's going to be bad and that's the effects of that we're seeing right now. And it is going to get worse, especially in the short term, because we're coming into an El Nino warming cycle and so the planet's going to go places that it's never gone before. That'll be very difficult. But we're currently on a trajectory, Tyler, to raise the temperature of the planet 3 degrees Celsius, 5 or 6 degrees Fahrenheit. If we do that, we will not have civilizations like the ones we're used to having. So our job is to cut it short of that and that we can still do. With a very rapid transition to renewable energy, we can lop off the worst possibilities here and will not be an easy century, but it might be a survivable one.
- [07:13]
Tyler Foggatt
Do you think that these sort of like horrendous records that we've been setting and the occurrence of just like extreme climate events all over the world, that that's actually going to be the thing that kicks people and governments into gear. Like now we're. No one is isolated from it. We all kind of have to grapple with it. I mean, you hate to think that that's how politics works, right, that you don't deal with a problem until your house is flooded. But it kind of seems like that has been the case, you know, with a variety of different problems.
- [07:42]
Bill McKibben
Yeah. The question is what it's going to take. I mean, you would have thought that, say Hurricane Katrina 15, 18 years ago would have been enough to accomplish that. The problem is that in a rational world, precisely, we'd look around and say, hey, we should have done something a long time ago, but now we better do something what we still can. We don't live in an entirely rational world. We live in a world where the fossil fuel industry in particular, has such enormous power and so much money that it's been able to prevent serious climate action for 35 years. Finally, things have gotten bad enough that we're beginning to take some action. The Inflation Reduction act last year was the first real climate bill that Congress had ever passed, and it sets aside hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits for building out renewable energy and clean energy. It's far from perfect. It wastes lots of money on schemes that the fossil fuel industry wants to play around with, on and on and on. But the basic principle is there's money available for this transition, and that money is already leveraging lots of private investment. People are building battery factories. We're now talking about the emergence of what they're calling a battery belt across much of the South. One of the ironies is that that money is getting spent largely in red states which have done everything they can to prevent action on climate change. But that's good. I mean, look, Marjorie Taylor Greene showed up for the, you know, groundbreaking at a battery factory in her district that the IRA had made possible. So it's an important, important thing. If we had all the time in the world, it would be enough. But none of it is happening fast enough to meet the targets that physics sets. That's the thing to remember here. This is not a normal political question. It's not, in the end, a contest between Republicans and environmentalists or, you know, whatever, though those things are very real. It's basically a fight between human beings and physics, and physics sets the deadlines here. Physics doesn't care about our political realities. It doesn't care about. About what part of the economic cycle we find ourselves in. It's just gonna do what it's gonna do. So the reason to be scared is we have to move really fast.
- [10:21]
Tyler Foggatt
How fast do you. I mean, is there a clear timeline for, you know.
- [10:25]
Bill McKibben
Yes, there is. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientists who we've turned to to provide us the data we need on this have told us we need to cut emissions in half by 2030 in order to have a chance of staying on track with those targets we set in Paris. Now, by my watch, 2030 is six years and five months away, which does not give us much time at all. The only good news is the price of solar power, wind power, and batteries has fallen so fast and so sharply, we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun, that there's no actual technological or financial barrier to letting us move at huge speed. And we can see the benefits of doing that. Texas just endured the worst heat wave in their history, but their grid did not go down, at least not yet. And the reason everybody has now decided is because they've put enough solar power on the grid. And solar power, not surprisingly, does well during a heat wave that they've been able to keep the AC on and Texas running. So we understand the possibilities. We just have to overcome the insane opposition of this industry, which, for example, in Texas spent the last year pressuring the legislature to make it harder to put more renewable energy into play and to prop up the oil and gas industry.
- [12:03]
Tyler Foggatt
So before we talk a little bit more about the fossil fuel industries and sort of the barriers going forward, I'm wondering if you could.
- [12:09]
Interviewer/Commentator
One thing that I've been wondering about.
- [12:11]
Tyler Foggatt
Is just this question of we're now at a point where we have these extreme climate events happening throughout the world. Is there extra work to do now that we are at that point just in terms of it's not just transitioning to green energy, but it's dealing with the fact that places are overcome by heat and flooding. And do we have extra work to do in order to account for the bad climate that is already here?
- [12:36]
Bill McKibben
Hell, yes. Hell yes. You know, Vermont, for instance, one tiny example, is going to spend weeks and tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars trying to dig out, trying to figure out how to prevent rivers from overflowing the next time this happens. Building bigger culverts, shoring up dams, on and on and on. Multiply that by every state in the union and every country in the world. And we're now seeing why, among other things, letting the climate get out of control is the biggest economic problem we've ever faced. You know, the last estimate I saw for the kind of damages we can expect from out of control, unchecked climate change this century, the doubtless spuriously accurate number that they put on it was $551 trillion, which is more money than currently exists on planet Earth. So even if all you cared about on this planet was money, even if you didn't care about being able to go outside, then we better get to work on this really hard and really fast because, man, are we behaving stupidly.
- [13:50]
Tyler Foggatt
I'm wondering if you have an explanation for. I know it seems like there are just all of these sort of like contradictory proclamations and declarations where these countries make a commitment to decarbonize, and then at the same time, they expand the fossil fuel industry. And so I'm wondering what you make of that kind of strange disparity and whether there's a way to ever get people to do more than just commit to something that they're not actually going to do.
- [14:15]
Bill McKibben
The only way is to break the political power of the fossil fuel industry, which is enormously powerful everywhere. So. So, I mean, for instance, Shell, who had promised that they were going to start reducing the amount of oil and gas that they produced in order to meet climate targets, announced earlier this spring that in fact they were going back to their old plan and exploring for more oil and gas and were going to keep their oil and gas production high. Why? Because they made a ton of money after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and they want to keep making that kind of money. That's where the power lies if you look at our country. You know, the Koch brothers were our biggest oil and gas barons. They own more pipeline and refining capacity than anybody else, and they used their winnings to purchase one of our political parties. That's had grave effects on degrading and deforming our democracy. But it's also made it impossible for us to really respond to climate change. You know, the ira, this very business friendly climate bill that works entirely on tax credits, it passed the House and Senate without a single Republican vote. That's where we are now in the facing the biggest crisis we've ever faced.
- [15:36]
Tyler Foggatt
It also seems as though the problem.
- [15:37]
Interviewer/Commentator
Isn'T just the Republicans. You know, it seems like there are obviously people in the Democratic Party who care enormously about climate change and have even made it the biggest part of their platform. But then there are others who don't talk about it that much at all. And like, I don't really get the sense that the Democratic Party has like, oriented itself around being the party of climate action.
- [15:56]
Bill McKibben
Well, I mean, it's interesting because during the last presidential primaries, there was a spate of polling that showed that climate had become the number one issue for Democratic voters. And that was the reason that, for instance, when Bernie and Biden sat down to settle their differences after the primary and emerge with the United Front, one of Bernie's conditions was that Biden set up a working group that would come to a climate stance. Bernie appointed aoc, and he appointed Varshini Prakash, the wonderful young leader of the Sunrise movement, who brought us the Green New Deal. And an awful lot of that Green New Deal language became Biden's platform. It's why we got the ira. It had been watered down tremendously, especially by Joe Manchin, who's taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else in Washington. A hard prize to win, but he won it. But that was the seed of that. I think the point is not to count on Democrats or Republicans or anyone else, but to build movements big enough to make it clear that there's reward for dealing with climate and pain for those politicians who won't.
- [17:20]
Tyler Foggatt
I guess, I mean, if Democratic voters, if climate change is really the biggest issue for them, I guess I'm just wondering why there just isn't way more legislation in general.
- [17:31]
Bill McKibben
Well, because, as you know, the Senate hangs on a 5050 balance. I don't think there's anybody in Washington who thinks you'd get anything through now because the Republicans have control of the House. What are the odds that Kevin McCarthy is going to decide that climate change is in his interest?
- [17:52]
Tyler Foggatt
Are there things that Biden can do without Congress?
- [17:55]
Bill McKibben
There are, and he's not doing all of them. And it's, I think, not only a huge thing, physical problem. I think it's a political problem, too. Biden, I think, quite unwisely approved a massive new oil and gas development project in Alaska and a lot of offshore leasing. These are things he'd promised during the last campaign he wouldn't do. And he went back on that promise. He would argue, I think, that he thought they were necessary in order to get the Inflation Reduction act passed and things. But I think they were unwise calculations, especially approving things like the Mountain Valley Pipeline that were just gifts to Manchin after the IRA passed. I think the reason these are politically unwise is that they run the risk of alienating the young voters who turned out heavily for him last time and for whom climate change is by far and away the biggest single issue, as you would expect, since, you know, I'm going to be dead before the worst of this hits. But you're not. You're going to get to spend your whole life dealing with it. So it's no wonder that young people are very much in the leadership here.
- [19:10]
Tyler Foggatt
Coming up, Bill McKibben on what to do with your climate anxiety.
- [19:18]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.
- [19:21]
Bill McKibben
I'm Michael Coloury, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [19:25]
Tyler Foggatt
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [19:34]
Katie Drummond
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [19:44]
Bill McKibben
Right. So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [19:52]
Tyler Foggatt
Affecting Washington and how they affect you.
- [19:55]
Katie Drummond
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [20:05]
Tyler Foggatt
Yeah, there's actually a clip I wouldn't mind playing. It's Obama in an interview, sort of talking about what he has heard from one of his daughters about just sort of like young people feeling somewhat hopeless about climate change.
- [20:19]
Barack Obama
Malia comes to me, she says, you know what? She's 24. All our friends, sometimes we talk about climate change, and we just feel like there is no way we're gonna be able to solve this. We're looking at the science. It feels as if we're on a trajectory that we're gonna sail past this 2 degrees centigrade benchmark, where after that, potentially, things are getting cataclysmic. And so I'll be honest with you, Dad, a lot of my friends, they just feel as if, what's the point? Because the world's burning and there's nothing I can do. And I said to her, well, she asked me what should I say to them? And what I said to her is, look, we may not be able to cap temperature rise to 2 degrees centigrade, but here's the thing. If we work really hard, we may be able to cap it at two and a half instead of three or three instead of three and a half. That extra centigrade, that might mean the difference between whether Bangladesh is underwater.
- [21:36]
Bill McKibben
Right.
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Barack Obama
It might make the difference as to whether, you know, 100 million people have to migrate.
- [21:43]
Bill McKibben
Right.
- [21:43]
Barack Obama
Or only a few.
- [21:44]
Bill McKibben
Right.
- [21:45]
Tyler Foggatt
Yeah. So I was interested in this clip. I feel like I saw quite a few climate activists on Twitter who were really upset by it, who sort of saw this incrementalist approach that Obama was arguing for as itself just indicative of, like, a kind of, like, defeatist attitude. But also, maybe that's the only thing that's realistic.
- [22:07]
Interviewer/Commentator
I mean, I wonder how you feel.
- [22:09]
Tyler Foggatt
About sort of what he's saying.
- [22:11]
Bill McKibben
So, look, I mean, there's no question that at some level, he's right. I mean, less warming is always going to be better than more. One's reaction to it is colored by the fact that under Barack Obama, the US Became the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, that he was the guy who really unleashed the fracking revolution in this country. And he's continued to boast about it for years afterwards. He went down Went down and gave a speech in Texas a couple of years ago where he said, you know, how America became the number one producer of hydrocarbons? That was me, folks. And everybody was applauding and yelling. He didn't do the things that he could have done. When he had the power to help ward this off, his record wasn't impossible. He did some things that were good. We finally forced him to stop the Keystone pipeline, for instance, and he did secure, along with other world leaders, that agreement in Paris. But now he's blithely saying, well, we're going to go way past what we said we'd do in Paris, and that's not good. And part of the reason is because he was unwilling to stand up to the fossil fuel industry in his term. So there are precious few real heroes in this fight politically.
- [23:41]
Tyler Foggatt
So let's talk about the climate movement. I guess what is kind of the state of the movement right now? I'm sort of wondering what the levels of optimism are there and whether a lack of optimism is actually a deterrent to activism in a way, and then also just sort of what they should be doing and what they can learn from earlier social movements.
- [24:07]
Bill McKibben
Well, this has to be the turn into the biggest social movement of all time, because it's by far the biggest and most global problem we've ever faced. And some of that has happened 15 years ago there was no climate movement, and now there's a very large one, and it's led largely by young people. I mean, Greta Thunberg graduated from high school last month. It's hard to pick out many people in recent history who've gotten as much done before they got out of high school. And there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of Gretas scattered around the planet. I've met an enormous number of young people who are tremendous leaders, and they have a huge number of followers. 10 million young people were out on climate strike in September of 2019. That's why we got things like the Inflation Reduction act passed. Had that not happened, then there wouldn't have been the political pressure to do that. We just need more political pressure all the time, coming from more kinds of people. That's one of the reasons why I've been spending my time in recent months, years, building this third ACT coalition for people over the age of 60 who are increasingly engaged in this fight. And the more older people we can bring on board, by far the better. So there's a lot happening, but it's not yet producing change at the speed that we need. One of the things that movements have to do now is not just oppose the fossil fuel industry, though that remains a key task, but also just organized to help people take advantage of the new technologies and the money that's available for them. We've got 140 million apartments and homes in the US every one of them filled with machines, furnaces, cook stoves, air conditioners, so on, that have to be changed out in short order. The Inflation Reduction act actually provides some of the money to make this possible, but it's still an extraordinary problem of organization just to let people know about that, to train enough electricians to do the work, on and on and on. So there's that kind of organizing that has to happen, too.
- [26:32]
Tyler Foggatt
You bring up sort of an interesting point. Just like all of the things in our apartments that use tremendous amounts of energy, and it seems like one of.
- [26:40]
Interviewer/Commentator
The sort of the barriers to truly addressing climate change has just been this idea that in order to do so, we have to, you know, give up on the things that we think of as being part of, you know, our normal, luxurious American way of life. Like, you know, flying across the country to go see relatives for Christmas or blasting your AC unit all day if it's super hot outside, which seems like something that people are going to continue to want to do as it gets hotter and hotter outside. I guess I'm wondering just how. How much of the sort of rhetoric has to sort of focus on this idea of convincing people that they're not going to have to. That either they're not going to have.
- [27:20]
Tyler Foggatt
To completely change their way of life.
- [27:22]
Interviewer/Commentator
Or that they will, but it's worth it.
- [27:24]
Bill McKibben
Well, I mean, some of these things fall into different categories. Flying across the country at the drop of a hat isn't a necessity. Heating or cooling, your home is. And happily, technology is our friend here. So take, for instance, the humble heat pump, which uses electricity to both heat and cool your home. It does it incredibly efficiently because it's taking latent heat out of the air outside and using electricity to pump it up or down a little bit. But it's three or four times more efficient than the furnace or the air conditioner you currently have. These heat pumps are available. They're affordable under the Inflation Reduction Act. You can get help putting them in. That's the kind of thing that one could do very quickly on a massive scale. And if we did, and we're beginning to, it would make an enormous difference. In fact, there's been some work just in the last few weeks of people pointing out that as we have These heat waves, instead of putting in or replacing air conditioners, that's the perfect moment to put in a heat pump, which both provides heat and cooling and does it efficiently. So in some respects, technology is our friend here. None of it's for free. The stuff you have to mine to power the batteries or build the solar panels comes at a cost. But that cost is much, much lower than the cost of climate change or indeed the cost of mining coal. I mean, if you're out mining coal or drilling for gas to run your energy system immediately, once you've got it, you set it on fire and you have to go get some more. If you go mine some lithium so that you can have a battery or a wind turbine, you mine it once and then that battery or that wind turbine works for a quarter century and the sun and the wind to deliver the power every day for free. So there's a very hopeful case for the world that we could be building. It's just we have to build it fast or it's not going to do us much good.
- [29:42]
Tyler Foggatt
I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the rise of the degrowth movement which you wrote about recently, this idea that one way to use less energy is to work less and to consume less. Because that seems like somet something that goes beyond installing a heat pump in your apartment, which people I think would be willing to do, but it seems a bit more all encompassing.
- [30:03]
Bill McKibben
So there's this degrowth movement that in some ways you can trace its lineage back to the Limits to growth report in 1970. And it's an obvious and important point. You don't want to use solar power or whatever just to create an ever larger version of what we have now. Because not only does it make it harder to deal with climate change, we're also running into lots of other ecological boundaries that get harder and harder the bigger our economy gets. So the point of my piece was it's a good moment to be using the changes that we're making, say to our energy system, to also think about how to change other systems. You can save a lot of energy by putting in a heat pump. It also turns out you can save a lot of energy by going to a four day work week. The studies that we've done on the carbon concentrations that result from that are quite fascinating. And what do you know, that's not really a huge loss. Most people I know like three day weekends. So trying to build a society that works with different goals than the ones we have now, the kind of relentless, more More. More is a very good idea. The rub is, the thing we have to do a lot of is build more clean energy and we have to do it fast. So that paradox between those two things, that's the interesting place we find ourselves.
- [31:39]
Tyler Foggatt
Then lastly, one thing that you touch on in your piece is just especially regarding Canada, which has been hit so.
- [31:47]
Interviewer/Commentator
Hard by climate change, is just that you write that a lot of. I think it's like 75% of Canadians are anxious about climate change and 20% are either having fewer children or considering having fewer children because they're so worried about the planet and bringing more people into it. And we recently published a piece from Gia Tolentino and the Digital Therapy issue about this idea of eco anxiety and sort of what it's doing to people.
- [32:14]
Tyler Foggatt
And I guess I'm just wondering for.
- [32:15]
Interviewer/Commentator
Listeners at home, particularly people who are really struggling with these kinds of hopeless, listless feelings, you know, what. What they can do with that energy.
- [32:26]
Bill McKibben
I've had 35 years to deal with eco anxiety and grief, and it's very real and people shouldn't minimize it in any way. The only antidote that I've found that really matters is to get in this fight to try and do something about it. There's lots of things we can do as individuals, but truthfully, we're past the point where we're going to make this math work one Tesla at a time, one vegan dinner at a time. The most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual and, and join together with others in movements large enough to make basic changes to our political and economic ground rules. That's why young people set up the Sunrise Movement with chapters across America. That's why old people like me have set up Third act with chapters across America. These are places where people can come together to do profound and important work. And it's really the best chance we've got.
- [33:30]
Tyler Foggatt
Well, thank you so much, Bill.
- [33:32]
Interviewer/Commentator
I really appreciate you coming on.
- [33:34]
Bill McKibben
Thank you so much. It's very good of you to have me. And, you know, best wishes to people in every corner of the country and around the world who are dealing, as we are in Vermont today, with this incredible onslaught of harsh weather, among other things. It's gotta be a moment when we figure out how to be better neighbors, how to increase sort of human solidarity. That's not something we've always been great at in the hyper individualized society that is America, but it's something we're going to need to draw on in the decades ahead.
- [34:10]
Tyler Foggatt
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
- [34:14]
Bill McKibben
All right, take care.
- [34:19]
Tyler Foggatt
Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to the New Yorker and the founder of Third Act. This has been the Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt. The show is produced by Michelle Moses with editing help from Catherine Winter. This week we had editorial support from Dan Richards. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Enjoy the rest of your week, and we'll see you next Wednesday.
- [34:51]
David Remnick
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [35:22]
Bill McKibben
From prx.