← Which Side of History?
Which Side of History?
Climate Crisis, A Race Against Time: Bill McKibben, Saloni Multani, Tom Steyer
01:01:41
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- [00:00]
A
In the biggest car market in the world, which is China, over 50% of the new car sales have a plug. That can be a plug in hybrid or it can be a pure electric vehicle, but that number is going up every year. And they are building car plants around the world. No American car company is building car plants around the world. None. And you can buy an exceptionally good car that's an EV in China for 20,000 bucks. 8 billion people are not sitting by and doing nothing. 8 billion people are working their ass off to solve this problem.
- [00:45]
B
Welcome to which side of History? I'm Jim Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media and a longtime professor at Stanford University. Please make sure that you follow this podcast and that you subscribe to my channel on YouTube. In this episode, we tackle an incredibly important issue, climate change. How does the United States stack up against the world? What is China doing well? And which states here in the US Are leading the way on the home front? The answers may surprise you. I'm joined today by climate change legend Bill McKibben, the rock star investor Saloni Multani, and, oh yeah, my younger brother, Tom Steyer. So let's head to the campus of Stanford University now for this edition of which side of History? Bill, as you look at the state of the climate circa October 6, 2025, and you've worked on this for years, how would you frame this? And we're going to be talking about solutions, we're going to talking about politics, but how would you frame this? And then Saloni and Tom, you all give your opening thoughts about the state of climate today. All yours, Bill.
- [01:58]
C
I guess I wrote the first book on what we now call climate change, what we then called the greenhouse effect back in 1989. None of what's happening now is unexpected. In fact, it's precisely what scientists told us was going to happen. And indeed it has, has now happened, is playing out pretty much as forecast, a little faster and with more damage at this point than we would have guessed. This is by far the biggest thing that's happened on planet Earth during the period when humans have been around. It makes everything else that's happening on planet Earth insignificant by comparison. It's in essence the liberation of huge, huge amounts of carbon from coal and gas and oil deposits in a very short period of time. This has happened five times previously in the history of the Earth. Those have been the result of massive, massive volcanic outbreaks across large portions of the Earth's surface. Each of those was accompanied by one of the five mass extinctions of the planet. We're doing this far faster than has happened even in the worst of those in the past. We are an extraordinarily large volcano pouring extraordinary amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in the blink of an eye. It's now obviously raised the temperature dramatically, about 1 1/2 degrees Celsius. On land. If we didn't have the oceans to absorb 95% of the heat that we've emitted, the temperature, the average temperature of the planet would be about 120 degrees. Now, the oceans will absorb that for a while, but that's why sea level has begun to rise. And I mean, that's not a long term solution by any means to the problem that we're in. The obvious effects of that are now clear. Warm air holds more water vapor than cold. In arid areas, we get more evaporation, then we get drought, and then the second largest city in the country catches on fire and large parts of it burn down. Once that water is up in the atmosphere, it comes down in devastating flood and deluge. Now something that marks the planet on an almost daily basis. We're now seeing beyond that systemic effects to the biggest parts of the Earth system. The jet stream which draws its power on the contrast in temperature between the equator and the poles has begun to wobble. As the poles warm dramatically, it now gets stuck in high amplitude and very strange position, producing weird weather on both sides. The great currents, especially of the Atlantic, the biggest heat distribution system on the planet 100 times the flow of the Amazon river is now flickering and faltering as fresh water pours into the North Atlantic, disturbing the density and salinity and hence density differences that drive those giant conveyor belts. I could go on. We're doing severe damage to core things. If we still have a window in which to deal with any of this. And it's not clear that we still have a window, but if we do, that window is narrow and it is closing quite fast.
- [05:49]
B
Filoni, anything you want to add to Bill, comments how you view this sort of the current state and how we got here?
- [05:59]
D
Sure. Firstly, I feel like this is a game of which one of these things is not like the other. So thank you guys for having me and it's really an honor to be on stage with these luminaries. I guess my perspective and just everything Bill is saying on where we are and how quickly we've gotten here. I, I was an economics major undergrad many years ago and I feel like if you had an economist and a psychologist walk into a bar and formulate a problem that would confound humanity that basically takes advantage of every bias we have and every market failure mechanism. That's climate change. It's an externality requires pricing by some collective action authority like policymakers. We've obviously had tremendous policy failures. We're terrible at calibrating events that are way out in the future. Terrible free rider problem. You can always massive diffusion of responsibility. You can always look around and say someone else is more culpable than you are, so why should you do anything? And so it just, if you look at where we are right now, it just feels like this really unfortunate consequence of just the nature of the problem. And so it does feel sometimes intractable and sometimes like humanity really needs to get its act together very quickly in a way that we haven't before. I am hopeful and I know we'll talk about that, but I would say I'm nowhere near the mastery of the science that both of these men have, but we have now, in addition to kind of the moral authority around climate action being an existential imperative, we have a lot of other forces that are working in the right direction. Not fast enough, but working in the right direction. So we just, we need to collectively lean into those.
- [07:52]
B
So, Tom, you've been doing this for well over 20 years. What would you add to what Saloni and Bill said in terms of the current state of where we are?
- [08:02]
A
So let me say that the way that I got involved in climate was when Kat Taylor and I took our four kids to Alaska to show them the most untouched part of the 50 United States, to show them what it looked like before the Europeans showed up. And all we could see was the state was melting. We came back home and sat around the kitchen table, six people and said, maybe this is something we can work on together. Cat and I started something at Stanford University basically to commercialize the research being done here in 2006 or 2007. And that has turned into over $10 billion worth of climate related solution companies. And this university really has subsequently started what's probably the most significant school of sustainability in the country, maybe in the world, which is the door school, which we're also involved with and which we've supported both in terms of time, but also in terms of anything else we can do in terms of contributing to what John and andor started and which is running here right now in terms of just want to give you that preamble, but I would say, let me start by saying I know everybody here in the Stanford community and therefore can do math but whenever we talk about degrees Celsius, I didn't grow up thinking about degrees Celsius. And I think 99% of Americans have no idea what the word Celsius means or what 1.5°C means in the real world. Just to be clear, 1.5 degrees Celsius is something like 2.7 degrees the way we think about temperature. And if you think about in the context of a temperature in the world that's approximately 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and then you think about the percentage of that compared to the percentage of your body, 98.6 goes up something like 5%. If you go up from 98.6 to almost 104 degrees, you're in a very dangerous position as a human being. And that's kind of the way to think about the temperature in this planet. We are not dead, but as Bill was saying, we're pushing the envelope of what health looks like. So that's the first thing I'd say. And just so you guys know, the theory behind the UN is that we would reduce emissions in this decade by 40%. So that, you know, the only year we've ever gone down was the year of COVID because the economy went down so much that emissions went down. But that's the only year that we've ever gone down since like 1900 or something. So that's a little bit of addition to thinking about where we are. But let's talk about where we're going for one second because I know this is what we're going to talk a lot about this. But let me say that last year, globally, new electricity generation. So think power plants, think combustion. 93% renewable. Globally, it's good, but it's not good enough. If you think about where we are in terms of transportation, we hear a lot about EVs, and everybody says, you know, EVs are sort of falling apart. In the biggest car market in the world, which is China, over 50% of the new car sales have a plug. Now, that can be a plug in hybrid, or it can be a pure electric vehicle, but that number is going up every year. And they are building car plants around the world. No American car company is building car plants around the world. None. They are building car plants everywhere. And you can buy an exceptionally good car. That's an EV in China for 20,000 bucks. Extremely good. When people go over there, they're blown away at the quality. For 10,000 bucks, you can buy a totally adequate good car and the prices go down 1% a month. The second thing I would say is what's going on in this world is 8 billion people are not sitting by and doing nothing. 8 billion people are working their ass off to solve this problem. And we're going to talk about how that's going to shake out. But that's the second thing you should know. And the third thing that I would say is this. There's the natural world that Bill talked about and Saloni talked about and I glancingly talked about. There's the economic world. I just gave you a few stats to know that it's actually changing a lot of. And there's the attention economy. Let me say that the week before last in New York City was so called Climate Week, and that coincides with the UN General assembly and all of the talk at Climate week. There were 1,000 events in New York City for climate week, 1,000 events like this one. They were dwarfed by the speech that Mr. Trump made at the UN that week.
- [13:05]
B
I want to talk about and Bill Saloni, Tom, about the politics of all of this, both at home and abroad. And so, Bill, maybe start with you briefly, but you can respond however you want. But how do you see the politics of this playing out both domestically but also globally? You literally just came, you met the Pope win yesterday.
- [13:25]
C
The politics are a function of, of the economics here. So, I mean, let's be clear. Fossil fuel has been the dominant economic force on this planet for the last century. It's how we built modernity. And it was the reason that climate change was so difficult to deal with. As long as fossil fuel was cheap and clean energy was relatively expensive, it was essentially impossible to wean our economies off of it. The efforts that we made were mostly about the process of trying to make fossil fuel more expensive with carbon taxes, on and on and on. But that was largely unsuccessful. The important thing that happened about five years ago is that we crossed an invisible line where after endless iteration, the price of energy from the sun and wind passed below the cost of energy from coal and gas and oil. We now live on a planet where it is the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is astonishingly good news. It is potentially the only possibility, the only escape route we have from the crisis that we're in. And, and it's potentially an epochal moment for human civilization. We can put behind us 700,000 years of setting stuff on fire and relax on the fact that the sun is capable, which already gives us light and warmth and via Photosynthesis. Our supper is now in a position to provide us with all the power that we could ever need. That power is liberatory in the sense that it can't fall under the control of oligarchs and plutocrats. Think how the geopolitics of the world would have been different over the last hundred years if oil had been of trivial value. I mean, this is all astonishingly good news, unless you own an oil well or a coal mine, in which case it is the most dangerous news that you have ever come across and, and you will do whatever you can to stop it, because you are an immoral son of a bitch. And you'll recall that last summer, candidate Trump not very secretly said to oil executives, give me a billion dollars and I will give you anything that you want once I'm president. They raised about half a billion in the form of donations and advertising and lobbying in the last election cycle. That was clearly enough. He has, in his administration, has gone to war to slow down or stop this energy transition and to assert an American energy dominance based on our export of natural gas, mostly natural gas. I must say, while we're being kind to the Dorr Institute and everything else Stanford has been a little too engaged with over the years. It's the most dangerous fuel on the planet now. We're going to eventually lose this fight, this fight for energy dominance. Clean energy is eventually going to win this fight. Economics dictates that, and the Chinese are now driving things. New numbers today. China in the last year has exported about 40% higher dollar value of clean energy than the US has exported dirty energy to the rest of the world. That's a huge moment. They're winning and we're in. The last nine months have sacrificed technological and economic primacy in this country to the Chinese. American historians will view the last nine months with something about the rise of fascism, but world historians will concentrate on that shift of leadership around the planet. The only problem really here is timing and pace, because eventually doesn't do us much good when it comes to the climate crisis 30 years from now. I have no hesitation in saying that the US and the rest of the world will run on sun and wind and batteries based purely on economics, with the sprinkling of nuclear fusion and geothermal and other things thrown in. But if it takes us 30 years to do that, then the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet. We don't have that time. So the job of anyone who cares about this is to try in every way to speed up this transition and, and in America, that means relentless opposition to what Trump is trying to do and relentless promotion of clean energy. We've just come off this day. We called Sunday across the country two weeks ago where we had 500 events across the country designed to kind of drive home the narrative. And here I will stop that. This stuff is no longer to be considered alternative energy. The analogy I've been using is that we've thought of sun and wind for a long time as kind of the whole foods of energy. Nice, but kind of pricey. And for special people, they are the Costco of energy now. Okay? They're cheap, they're available in bulk. They're on the shelf ready to go. We have to figure out how to deploy them as fast as we can. And one final piece of good news. California has done a very good job here in certain ways. They've made some mistakes, but they've also done a pretty good job. They've now been surpassed in the rate of clean energy installation in this country by Texas, home of the world hydrocarbon industry, but also a place that takes free markets pretty seriously and hence where sun and wind and batteries are, are being deployed on a. Not a Chinese scale, but a fairly remarkable scale.
- [19:45]
B
Anyway, so let me, Selena and Tom, I want you to talk about that leadership issue, but I also want to tell you, so I said I was at the Google conference today, and they talked a lot about China, right? Because there were two big issues. The number one issue was AI, which we're going to talk about next week, by the way. But the other issue was energy, because some of the tech companies we're going to get into this later, have completely understood both the significance of climate issues and energy issues to their own businesses. But it was all about, not all about, but a significant amount was the discussion about the US versus China. Not just AI, but energy. Saloni when you listen to this and Tom, when you listen to that, who do you think are leaders? Because they cut across the aisle. You're saying Texas is like leading. They have a very conservative Republican governor. They've got a, et cetera. Where do you see leadership in the US and where do you see the leadership globally? Just a handful of either people or examples as we talk about the political dynamics at play. Saloni
- [20:48]
D
I think leadership now, I think there is obviously sort of the moral and philosophical and sort of movement leadership. And then there is somewhat out of the economics and the necessity, folks who are moving fast. It's the fastest speed to compute. You can't get a gas turbine for years. Right now, the fastest speed to compute is renewable. So you're seeing a lot of those tech companies commissioning and building and co locating renewable power alongside data centers. A lot of them are funding water projects because permission to operate of a data center requires an extraordinary amount of water to cool the data center. And if you don't replenish the local water table, you're not allowed to build a data center. So because it is so linked to this speed to compute issue that is considered existential, that is considered a matter of national security, not to mention profitability for the tech companies in the decade to come, they are, again, it's not leadership from a place of necessarily strong philosophical alignment, but to be honest, that's okay. And I guess that's my. The first half of the year, and this is right in the teeth of all the IRA rollbacks in the US 11 out of 15 gigawatts in the IRA, not everybody, sorry, everyone here, hopefully the IRA, huge tax credits extensions, new ones for wind, solar, residential, electrification, hydrogen, the list goes on. Basically, as part of the, I can't even call it the triple B. As part of that, you saw, sorry, tremendous rollback in all of those, both in terms of the timelines and then some, just most money being literally revoked that had already been awarded. But even in the teeth of that, 11 of 15 gigawatts of power built in the first half in the United States were renewable. And so again, that's at this point now, it is about the work. And that is part of what day to day, when we're doing our jobs, it's about just doing the work of these technologies that have scaled down the cost curve, seeing them deployed. And I mean, I look at our politics and feel like, I mean, I'm a mom of two, my kids are 14 and 12. And I know I sit in a position of privilege and luxury to have this at the very top of my list of things that I care deeply about day to day. I know I'm living kind of at the tip of Maslow's hierarchy. I appreciate that. And I appreciate that for most people, their discount rates are just a lot higher than mine are. And if you look at the trend lines, the surveys are different. But in general versus 20, 25 years ago, the proportion of Americans who think their kids are going to be better off than they are is meaningfully lower than it was at the turn of the millennium. And that's just the reality. And when that happens, your discount rate goes up. You can't think about the Future, you can't think about a global problem again. I appreciate that. That is the challenge of climate as a political issue, as I see it. And so I think we just need to lean into these things that are the work where kind of self interest of people, which is kind of the only thing that feels like it scales in this world is people acting in their self interest at the scale we need to actually make a dent in this problem. So I mean, I feel like, what I feel like I see is the leadership in a really positive way is coming from places that are actually not necessarily expected and not for reasons that are rooted.
- [24:19]
B
We're going to come back to that. I'm going to come back to that leadership, Jim, Totally.
- [24:23]
A
So I want to talk. Jim's asking where the leadership's coming from,
- [24:25]
B
including globally, who do you see? A few people or I'll try and think. We're going to do the young. We're going to get to the what son you just talked about.
- [24:33]
A
So let me talk about three countries. Let me talk about the U.S. china and Pakistan. Okay, Pakistan. Pakistan in 2024 added somewhere between a third and a half new electricity generation to their country. All of it solar, none of it through their utility and none of it through their government. People in Pakistan bought solar panels for their houses, period. And that is happening all over the world. What Bill was talking about, people don't have electricity in this world and their answer is solar. When we talk about 93% of new electricity generation in the world is renewable, Pakistan is 100 million people. This is not some shrimp. What we're seeing is just the way with phones, the developing world never built copper wire. They just went straight to cell phones. They're going straight to renewables. And that's happening all over the world. So when we think about where this is going, that is, remember that in the back of your head, one country is Pakistan. Let's talk about another country which is China. China is a third of emissions in the world. A third of the. We're 11%, they're 33% of emissions. They are also leading in the production of virtually every climate related solution. Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs. They're doing it for money. They exported in 2024, 6 million cars. In 2010, they probably exported 50,000 cars. They are trying to dominate the world's car market and they are succeeding and they are moving on this. And so that, you know, they had said that they would start to reduce their emissions. Their UN promised they would start to reduce their emissions in 2030, their emissions went down. In the first half of 2025, from the standpoint of a globe, this is a third of global emissions. For the first time, China went down. And from 2018 until 2024, China was 95% of the increased demand for fossil fuels. They were the whole ball of wax. If they start going down, the world will start going down. But they're doing this on a money basis. And the last is the United States of America. That's the third country we live in, the United States of America. Let's talk about what this looks like for us. I'll try. I don't want to. I'm talking too much.
- [27:22]
B
I'll cut you off. Don't worry.
- [27:23]
A
Okay, let's talk about the United States of America. First of all, you should. I'm sure people know, but basically, energy is prosperity. If you look at energy use in the world since 1800 per capita and do it by country, it's absolutely linked with prosperity. The first people to really use energy intensively were the Brits with coal. And they were the leading country in the world. And they were the richest country in the world because of that. And then we've been dominating the oil market for a long time. We're the richest country in the world. We're the most important country in the world. Okay, 80% of the world does not have fossil fuels. 20% of the world exports fossil fuels. We're the biggest producers of fossil fuel in the world, 13.5 million barrels a day. We are Saudi Arabia plus Russia. We are the biggest fossil fuel. We're the biggest oil company in the world by far. We are also. We have the highest marginal cost. So for all of you people who think economics in the Permian basis, what I'm told is we have somewhere between 55 and $60 marginal cost for a barrel of oil. It cost us 60 bucks to produce a barrel of oil out of the ground because we've been digging it out for a long time. And so we have to go further. And people are really professional, but. But it's hard. Okay, what do you get to sell that oil for? This morning it was $61.70 in the Persian Gulf. Their marginal cost of oil, $8 to $12. So what I'm saying is, would you bet your country on a commodity price where you have a spread of $1.70 this morning, and that's our future in a country where 93% of new electricity generation is renewable and where I think inevitably the world is moving to electric vehicles so I'm just saying for us as Americans, we should be asking the money question.
- [29:33]
D
Maybe you should start an investment firm focused on decarbonization.
- [29:36]
A
That's crazy. Saloni, I could never get anybody good to join me.
- [29:41]
B
One more question about leadership. You mentioned California, Bill. Right. Look, we're going to have the Attorney general, possibly the governor and several other very well known Californians in this class over the next coming weeks. How do you look at California and then show us Texas, a conservative state, doing it? Explain that about leadership in the US and is it really sort of non partisan focused on, on the market?
- [30:07]
C
So I agree with what Saloni and Tom have said about money being paramount here. But let's be clear too that in California is a perfect example. There have been some other things at work. I mean, Californians at a certain point noticed that their air was filthy and needed to do something about it. They got, you know, and this was the work of what lots of environmental advocates over long periods who figured out how to do this. An early example of one of those people was Jerry Brown. And he was absolutely instrumental in brothers like him in setting out the set of regulations and plans that began to, that led to the rapid build out of clean energy around California. Before it was an economically easy thing to do, California took some economic hit for bigger goals. And by the way, the same thing is in some measure true in China too. A lot of what's happened in China was the result of the fact that Chinese cities had become unlivable. And the Chinese Communist Party understood that its legitimacy depended on Beijing and Shanghai being inhabitable by human beings. And it's one of the reasons that they went to work. And they also understand that say, the Pearl River Delta, where 80% of their manufacturing is concentrated, is a meter or two above sea level. For the most part, they're very concerned about climate change. So all these things play together. California hit some kind of tipping point about 18 months ago. Now, most days in California, 100% of electricity comes from renewable power for long stretches of the day at night. Batteries at dusk are the biggest source of supply to the California grid through winter and early spring. This year, California was using 40% less natural gas to generate electricity than they were two years ago. That's a huge, huge change.
- [32:23]
A
I agree.
- [32:23]
C
And there is a. That number comes from a guy at Stanford who deserves real praise. Mark Jacobson here was the one person who really figured out 10 years ago what was possible on this world with renewable energy. His small lab here did more than any. I mean, far More than the door, school or anything else to explore and probe how we could do this and make it happen. A true guru who deserves real, real praise. Texas is. And by the way, when the governor's here, I mean, California is doing some things that are very dumb right now. California has changed the rules to make it harder to do rooftop and residential home solar. That's a mistake because among other things, as this technology evolves, it's extremely valuable to have lots and lots of residential solar. We now know how to knit together the batteries in people's basements across California to provide a virtual power plant that's larger than any power plant in the state of California, my home state of Vermont. Our biggest power plant are the Tesla powerwalls and other batteries in people's basements that the utility is able to knit together and draw on on peak days. So Governor Newsom should change course and make it possible, I think, to do that. Texas is a different case. Texas did not do the hard things that California did in terms of building code and energy efficiency and conservation and whatever. So that means that they're still using energy at a much higher rate than Californians per capita, but also per dollar of GDP or anything else. But Texas innovation is basically just let it rip. And in that world, sun, wind, and especially now, batteries are out competing everything else. The Texas legislature earlier this year had a series of bills that the oil industry introduced to try and squash this transition. And people expected them to pass because of how political power is sort of usually distributed in Texas. The most prominent of these was called, somewhat impolitically, incorrectly, they were calling DEI for natural gas because they would have required anyone who put up 5 megawatts worth of solar to also put up 5 megawatts worth of natural gas to, you know, same time. These did not pass because out of the hinterlands of Texas, mostly rural Texas, came lots and lots of people to Austin saying, this is how we pay for schools in our county. This is what keeps the old folks home open. We don't have any oil in our county. This is how we make money. Don't do this. And the Texas legislature backed off. They returned to the pressing task of redistricting Texas to a task that you all can make pointless by voting yes on ACT in a couple of weeks.
- [35:49]
B
This is a nonpartisan class.
- [35:51]
A
I didn't say that.
- [35:53]
C
But it is a really interesting demonstration. It's not enough to overcome what's happening in D.C. right now. The federal government is throwing up an endless series of barriers to further progress here. And Some of them are literally insane. I mean, we stopped work on a wind farm off the coast of Rhode island that was 80% complete a few weeks ago. A federal court has temporarily allowed its construction to continue. But going forward, nobody in their right mind is going to invest in large scale clean energy development in America in the next few years. Why would you? And the other thing that America's doing that's extremely dangerous is Trump, is the otherwise inexplicable tariffs are being used as leverage to force countries around the world to buy large amounts of LNG liquefied natural gas, which is the only growth market the fossil fuel industry even potentially has left. We just. Europe has promised to buy $750 billion worth of this stuff, and Japan another 400 billion in order to avoid tariffs. It seems actually unlikely that they're going to buy as much as they're promising to do. And it seems very likely that all other countries, all countries around the world, including the Europeans, are just looking at this and as Tom was saying, are thinking, why would I trust my energy future to a country as erratic and unstable as the United States when I could just buy some Chinese solar panels and trust in the sun, which so far has come up every morning, you know. And so we watched a couple of weeks ago as Indonesia announced plans for 100 gigs of solar over the next five years, for instance, fourth largest country in the world. A pretty good straw in the wind, I think, about where things are heading around the world.
- [38:01]
B
So let me ask you guys a question about tech and about young people.
- [38:03]
A
Okay, can we keep going on California for a second?
- [38:06]
B
Here you go.
- [38:08]
A
We should talk a little bit about California because we live in California.
- [38:11]
B
And Tom Rand. Gavin pointed. Tom, the head of some economic commission with some of the biggest leaders in the state.
- [38:19]
C
They've just passed this great Cap and Invest thing.
- [38:23]
A
Let's talk about California for one second. We are 60% renewables. The rest of the United States is 24% renewables. We are approximately. We're a little less than half the EVs in the United States of America. We're a little less than half the installed battery capacity in the United States of America. We use, as Bill said, half as much energy per capita as the rest of the United States of America. When you think about what California is doing here, there are a lot of ways to cut this. We also have the second highest cost of electricity per kilowatt hour, just so you know. But in a lot of ways, we are way, way, way ahead. And we have always been ahead. The epa, the Clean Air act, the Clean Water act, building codes all came out of California.
- [39:19]
D
Our cost of power is not because of renewables, by the way, because of our T and D. So I just want to.
- [39:23]
C
Because you have to charge PG&E for wildfires. Yeah.
- [39:27]
D
And you have to move electrons through wires. So that's not.
- [39:30]
A
But I want to. Bill is making a point that it's important to highlight, which I want to do now, which is that policy matters. If you think about the way that I think about it, and I hope Saloni thinks about it too. Stanford Business School, Educated humans is. Yeah, we're in favor of competition. Yes. We're in favor of capitalism. We believe that people working to compete and produce the best product is the way the. That's what scales and profit scales. And that's how you build huge responses. When you need to marshal trillions of dollars to solve a problem, it's gotta be profitable solution. Okay, fine. Policy matters because basically that is the framework for everybody to decide how they're gonna work. And so when you blow policy, you blow outcomes because people do things that aren't in the interest of society. And I'll give you the quick analogy here, but before we do, just remember, in the United States of America, it used to be completely legal to hire a 12 year old, make him or her work 14 hours and give him a quarter. Completely legal. We've done everything under the sun. That's not the worst thing we've done that was completely legal in the United States. Policy matters because that's the framework that people work under. And that's how it works. And we can see it right now in the United States of America. That's what business does. So when we think about energy, why are we even having this conversation? We do not need to have this conversation. The issue is people are polluting for free. That's the only issue really going on here. People are sending stuff into the atmosphere that they didn't know they were sending into the atmosphere. It turns out it's dangerous. And they make a couple trillion dollars. And if they actually had to pay for their pollution, they definitely wouldn't make a couple trillion dollars. And they would have to compete against people who are already underselling them without them selling them, paying for their pollution. That's all that's going on here. That's a policy issue. Free pollution is a market failure based on people's lack of understanding. And to be fair, no one did oil and gas to like ruin the world. They did oil and gas to get the cheapest possible energy to as many people as possible and make people's lifestyles go up and make a ton of money doing it. But it's now ingrained into the system. So when we think about what's going on here, profit scale governments set the rules. If we set the rules, we wouldn't have to have this meeting because everybody would be doing the right math on their computers to project what to do. But we're not. And so everything else, including the Inflation Reduction act is a very complicated workaround to a very straightforward problem that's not going away until we deal with it directly. Even if we win.
- [42:23]
B
You tax pollution, period.
- [42:27]
A
That's the easy thing to say at CEMEX Auditorium. It's a hard thing to do in the real world.
- [42:33]
B
That's correct. The Mexican cement company. Correct.
- [42:37]
D
8% of global emissions.
- [42:39]
B
Correct. Okay, Saloni, let me ask, I want to talk about young people a little
- [42:42]
D
on this because am I representing young?
- [42:45]
C
Yes, you.
- [42:45]
B
Well compared.
- [42:46]
A
Better be not compared to me.
- [42:52]
B
Compared to Tom and Bill, you're young. But here's my question you said earlier because I think this is a really interesting. I'm interested because Bill's been a professor forever at Middlebury and Tom's been talking to, has, has a bunch of them and has been talking to young people with his brother for many, many years. Why don't young people care more about this? I mean I like look at the Stanford students and go, I mean one, what do you think is going on in your country? Guys, really? And number two, why is climate, if you, by the way, the issues that I'm working on, like AI and the stuff we do at Common Sense, it's a common sense mom over here. She knows how good common sense media is. And the truth is young people really do care about the mental health issues they're dealing with. Really they care most about the job. Their fear that they won't be as well off as their parents, that's so obvious by the way, as a parent, that's devastating, as the parents in the audience know. But why aren't young people who are looking at this planet and this reality very like Stanford students, really well educated, smart young people? More why isn't it higher on their issue list and also how they vote?
- [44:05]
D
I think it is higher for young people than the average American. Tom, you could tell me that's absolutely true. It's been interesting for me to see through the lens of my 14 year old daughter who I've been working in climate for some time. She was very mobilized around it for some time in the past nine months. What she's become more mobilized around is whether or not she lives in a democracy. And so again, I think it goes back to this kind of discount rate. Do you have the luxury of worrying about something further out when the problems, like right in front of you today feels even more existential? And to your point on policy, getting democracy right feels like a precursor in the US to us. Getting the policy right on the climate side feels highly unlikely. We're getting it right in the current paradigm. And so I think some of this is to be able to kind of think further out, you have to feel better about the immediate issues. And I think that's true for young people and for Americans more broadly. I think it's kind of a Darwinian concern.
- [45:12]
C
Right.
- [45:12]
D
It's sort of if you don't think your kids are going to be better off, if you don't know if you're going to have a gentleman if you don't. I actually, I looked for this information before this class and couldn't find it. So if anyone has ever seen, like, longitudinally how people's attitudes change about climate over time, if you're a young person and you care a lot about it when you have kids, when you start worrying about other issues, is climate still your top issue, even if it once was? I don't know the answer to that, but that's at least what I've observed.
- [45:40]
C
Personally, I think your premise is wrong. I think you do.
- [45:45]
B
My premise is wrong.
- [45:46]
C
Young people care enormously about climate. But I think that Saloni's right. They correctly understand it at the moment as a part of this equation around power and control in our society. You know, they're not. I mean, they're completely. I mean, I've spent much of my life organizing young people. We started this called 350. Org, that became the first big grassroots climate movement. We've organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea. We stopped big projects, divested $40 trillion in endowments and things. And it's mostly young people doing that work. And they continue to do it across this nexus. It was wonderful to see Greta Thunberg today standing up on the deepest questions of power on our planet right now in. In Palestine. I'm much more interested now, and I'm looking around the demographics of this audience just a little bit in how old people like me are dealing with all of this. We started this thing three years ago called Third act on the premise that it was time for people over the age of 60 to play a much deeper role. The two things we took as our job three years ago were defending the climate and defending democracy. And I think we thought those were the two biggest threats on the horizon. And I think we were correct in that estimation. There's now 100,000 of us across the country engaged in this work, with a superb chapter in Northern California. One of the. And you can find. Find it@thirdact.org and I hope you will. One of the things that we've really come to realize is how important it is to be backing up young people in this work. There is a lot of climate despair, climate anxiety among younger people. It's not, I think, because of the actual physics of climate change that people understand as the threat that it is. I think most of the despair and anxiety is over the sense that they have been abandoned to deal with it themselves. The very first demonstration we did at Third act was because a bunch of people from Greta's movement in this country, Fridays for the Future, called up and said, we want to be demonstrating. We want to take on these banks, B of A Wells, Citi Chase, that are the biggest funders of the fossil fuel industry in the world. We want to take them on, but we don't have credit cards or checking accounts or anything. Will you guys help us? And I was like, yes. If we have one thing we have, it's credit cards. And the first demonstration we did, just before we'd even really officially founded Third act, we were in Boston down in the financial district, and there were three or four hundred high school kids there. High school kids, to a person, understand the barrel of the gun down which they are staring. They are somewhat spryer. So they were at the head of the march, but at the back of the march, there was a bunch of us from this nascent Third act with a big banner that just said Fossils Against Fossil Fuels. Okay. And all the young people who saw it were like, yes, that's very funny, and thank you very much. It's. It's fun to be working together. It is fun to be working together. We spearheaded the work that produced, alongside the ira, the biggest win in the Biden years, which was the pause in permitting for new export facilities for LNG in the Gulf, also like the ira, immediately overturned by the Trump administration. So we will be fighting hard, among other things, in the midterms this year, because we understand deeply how this works and how power works, and we really need older people engaged in this work. Our legacy is going to be a planet way worse than the one that we were born onto unless we very quickly step up. But we have the skills and the networks to do something about it. And we punch above our weight politically because we all vote. There is no known way to stop old people from voting, okay? And so we should be able to mobilize in powerful ways to get this done with the next generation of people who are coming up and providing enormous. Look, they've got all the energy and idealism and intelligence about all this. What they lack is structural power to get stuff done. If you've reached the age where you have hair coming out your ears, then you have structural power coming out your ears, too. It's time to put it to use. Would be my. I would say.
- [50:55]
A
So Bill is talking pretty much about the United States of America, which is where most of us live, but we are a small part of the world. And if you get a chance to travel around the world to virtually anyplace else, not anyplace else, but virtually anyplace else. So if you go to Asia, if you go to, literally Kuwait, and you talk to people, there's a much clearer shared understanding of what's happening. And if you talk to the head of the Kuwaiti Petroleum Company, who is in charge of lifting up the oil, underneath that sits the huge lake of oil that sits under Kuwait, and ask him about this, you can have a very, very constructive conversation with virtually entirely shared understanding of what's going on in the world. So when we think about the issues in the United States around climate, it is important because we're an important country. We're not just 330 million out of over 8 billion people. We're more than that because we're the biggest economy in the world. We want to be the technological leaders in the world. We want to be the financial leaders in the world. We want to drive an awful lot of what happens in this world. And we've been able to do that for a pretty long time. But let me say, when you look around the world, people are going a very, very different direction from us. All over the world, they are choosing something different. When Bill is saying, okay, this administration is telling people, if you don't buy our lng, we will levy tariffs against you. Now, normally, when you think about a disruptive good product, you don't have to put a gun to somebody's head and say, buy a color TV or I'll kill you. It's like they want the color tv if you have to threaten them with a gun, Usually they don't want the product. And that's. If you really looked at the economics of lng, you'd be like, absolutely not. You wouldn't do it for the money, let alone the fact that LNG is probably dirtier than coal. So when you think about where we're going as a planet, look as an American, as somebody from California, we want to be prosperous, we want to be technological leaders. We want to do the right thing. We want to speak ahead of the about what's right in the world. We want to do all that and we want to win. And what we're doing right now is none of those things. And if the world is going to be saved because everybody else in the world decides to do the right thing because it's so obvious, that's good. It'd be a hell of a lot better if we were in there in the vanguard with the other countries trying to lead the way.
- [54:00]
C
And to be clear, that's what the IRA was. That was America's, you know, Biden's effort to get America back in this game and have some hope of catching up with China and being a player in this stuff. And that's why it's so, I mean, what's happened over the last 10 months is so should drive any American crazy. The First Solar Cell, 1954, Bell Labs, Edison, New Jersey. First Industrial Wind Turbine, 1943, Grandpa's Knob, Vermont. We developed this technology. Places like Stanford did much of the engineering that brought us many of the iterations that made it real. And now we're just completely throwing it away. And it's, I mean, if the US Government had set out purposely to figure out how to make China the dominant power in the world and to weaken our country, they would have done nothing different than we have done over the last nine months. And it's, you know, I'm completely with Tom. In the end, all the planet cares about is how much carbon goes into the atmosphere. If it's China. But we have a role to play in trying to speed up our transition here that will be helpful to the rest of the world. And it depends on political power now.
- [55:33]
B
So, Lonnie, I was going to. Well, you go answer. But I was going to ask a question because you do all this investing. Right. But I also, I'm interested to hear your reaction. Do you agree with what Tom and Bill are saying? And also because it was your, my conversation with Saloni that led me to say that younger generations have sort of moved, have not been as active on this, Bill. And what you said is an incorrect premise But Celoni, as an investor, but also listening to what these guys said, do you agree with everything they're saying? And also, if the investment makes so much sense, because it is, you guys are doing pretty darn well. What's your explanation for this?
- [56:11]
D
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd start by saying, I don't think. I didn't mean to say that the younger generation isn't engaged on the issue. It's just that the younger generation has a lot on their minds right now and a lot of concerns about their future. I think very rightly, on the international kind of stage in our standing. One thing it feels like we've really failed on here is just the narrative case around the alignment of climate progress with people progress. So in India, MODI has incredible targets around renewable deployment because it is part and parcel with democratizing access to power and bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And so when you can build a kit in China, it is how do we build. And yes, it's, you know, a pollution narrative, but also how do we build a car?
- [56:59]
C
How do we create an industry that
- [57:00]
D
we can be dominant in? How can we enter the car business when we've never been in the car business before? And so it just feels like here we are clinging to yesterday's narrative around what dictates sources of power drilling into the ground, pulling things out that should stay there. And releasing atmospheric carbon is associated with being powerful. And that's what got us here and the rest of the world. I will say when we tried to make the argument to India that you should not pollute and you should not emit because we need you to not, that was a tougher argument than simply, better deal, better deal. And I'm going to do it. India is doing it, but it's doing it for kind of its own reasons. And so it does feel to me like we've just kind of missed the plot here on.
- [57:49]
A
We missed the. We've lost the attention economy.
- [57:51]
D
We've lost the attention economy. We also, we abdicated. As you said, the IRA was our attempt to kind of take some leadership.
- [57:58]
B
When you define the attention economy, what do you mean by the attention economy? Tom? I think I know, but what do you mean for the audience?
- [58:03]
A
Well, I just mean in the national conversation in the United States, what gets reported? What do people hear? What do they see on their news feeds? What do they see on, you know, if they're getting their news from their phone, what are they seeing? If they get their news from tv, what are they seeing? God forbid someone here reads a newspaper. It's just what are, you know, who is dominating the news every single day? Well, and I think, and you know, we're saying to you, we are killing it. Clean energy is killing it in the real world. But if you read the newspaper or picked up your newsfeed, you would Never hear that 93 to 7 in a football game is not a close game. We are killing it. And killing it is going to get more. So the number of EVs sold. The issue is when you sell an electric vehicle, you don't necessarily retire you an internal combustion engine. When you add renewable energy, you don't necessarily retire a coal plant. So the truth is we're keeping this stuff on longer and it's still emitting because the demand for energy is virtually limitless and there are billions of people on this planet who don't have electricity. The issue is not that we're not winning in the marketplace, we're crushing in the marketplace. The issue is we're not also retiring the old dirty energy sources. The old dirty energy sources we used to.
- [59:37]
B
I was just at the Google conference. This is their major event every year. And one of the biggest discussions, it's very. Conde spoke. The opening speaker today was Conde and Walter Isaacson. Right. And. And it's a really, really good conversation. And to the great credit of the people who built Google, which was started in someone in this audience's garage who I will not identify the biggest thing people were talking about, we were mostly talking about. Connie was talking about democracy. Right. And the fact that the narrative and how people are so polarized because they're only looking at their own news feeds. This is going to be a topic we're going to talk about next week. We have three remarkable guests. We're going to be talking about it through the rest of the quarter. But it's really, really true now for young people in particular because all of their news is coming to them on a phone or on a social media platform. It's just not the way that people over the age of 40 or 50 get their news. And the truth is the narrative has changed so differently in that way from what reality is. It's one of the issues we're going to talk about in the quarter. It's one of the reasons I'm so glad that we stumbled into Common Sense Media 22 years ago and we're able to go after all these issues and do. But this is a theme I would like you to think about throughout the rest of this quarter and in this class because whatever issue we talk about, whether it's about the rule of law or it's about tech and democracy, or it's when we have Neil Ferguson and David Kennedy and Margaret Spellings here talking about the state of the economy, the way people get their information now has so fundamentally changed that it is completely messing up the dynamics of reality. So this is a theme I just want you we will focus on a lot this quarter. Thanks very much for listening to which side of History. Please hit that follow button on your favorite app. And please head to my YouTube channel for more great content. I'm Jim Steyer, and this is which side of History.