Expanding The Movement with Bill McKibben

Published Feb 21, 2024, 11:01 AM

Author and activist Bill McKibben joins the show to talk about how he's trying to bring climate action to an overlooked group: Boomers. 
Show notes from Chris:

  • We need to get as many people activated as possible, so get involved and share your passion, intelligence, and empathy with family, friends, and colleagues. There are many groups to help you get started and learn more. It’s a wonderful sign of the progress we’re seeing around the world that there are so many groups. But for a great place to start, check out 350.org, the Sunrise Movement, and of course, ThirdAct.org.
  • If you want to learn more about how fossil fuel companies have outspent clean energy groups by an eye-watering 27 times, there is a great article here in The Conversation.
  • Bill’s latest book is “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon”. You can read a great review here

I think probably we can convince them to slow this down, but it's going to take a lot of work, and that wouldn't surprise me to be back in jail again in the course of the winter, trying to slow it down with Fucked.

Hi, I'm Chris Turney and you're listening to I'm Fucking the Future, the podcast where we try to figure out how to fix the environmental dumpster fire we're in. That may sound pessimistic, but I promise it's not unfucking the future. It's all about the incredible people making a big difference and about how we can make a difference too. Let's dig in.

We're fucking the future.

If you're walking around Burlington, Vermont back in twenty fifteen, you may have seen the unusual sight a middle aged dude in a baseball cap, calmly getting arrested at agasting. As the officer cuffs him, a small group of people start cheering.

Ex You.

These activists had come to protest ex On Mobile, a big oil and gas company, and their leader that middle aged dude getting arrested. He's our guest today, Bill mckibbon's been fighting for the climate and sometimes getting arrested for it for almost forty years. Bill actually wrote the first book on the climate crisis for mainstream audiences. It's called The End of Nature. I was published in nineteen eighty nine, and as a teenager, I read this book front to back, and I've got to say it really was life changing to me. It's part of why I decided to study environmental science. And he's written twenty more books since. Not to mention, he started three fifty dollars or one of the most effective climate action groups out there. So safe to say, I'm stoked to have Bill on the show. He's been of this for longer than many of us. So I wanted to ask him about the state of a climate movement today, how far we've come, what we still need to do, and how we can get even more people involved. I also wanted to talk to him about his latest initiative, Third Act, which is successfully getting some very unlikely climate activists to take to the streets. So how did this mild mannered writer become such a threat to a fossil fuel industry? As he tells it, it all started back in the eighties.

I was a young writer at the New Yorker magazine in New York and I did a long story about where everything in my apartment came from. I followed all the wires and pipes back to there. I was in the Brazilian jungle, looking at oil wells, in the Arctic, looking at hydroelectric dams, and on and I And I think by the time I was done that long piece, I had a sharper sense than I had before of the physicality of the world, if you want to call it that. I lived in Manhattan, which seems like a place that could just mint money and ideas out of nothing, but it turned out it was exquisitely dependent on the continued operation of the planet's physical systems for its survival. And I think actually that set me up to read the early emerging science on climate change and understand some of its implications that really, this was the biggest thing that had ever happened and was ever going to happen, by far, the biggest thing that humans had ever done. And I think that really was laying a little bit at the base of all that.

Now, we've talked to a lot of people in this show who grew up in rural places and win inspired by the beauty around them. They came into this fight to protect the natural wonders in their backyards. But Bill, Bill grew up in the suburbs, which.

Are a kind of machine for hiding the operations of the natural world from you. Everything is named for what used to be there but isn't anymore, you know, Fox Run Acres or something, and I had sort of no idea much what I was missing. I'm glad that I grew up in the suburbs because I think that I have a deep understanding of the center of gravity of American life, which is the suburb and has been since my time.

And it's already an established thing. But you actually saw this incredible change post war and have a suburbs became such a big part of American.

Life, American life, and then the model sadly spread around the world.

I mean, what the fuck did the suburbs do to Bill? They can't really be all that bad, right, What the fuck are you talking about? Suburban sprawl has had major consequences on the environment. Simply put, hundreds of millions of people living in single family homes means lots of concrete getting poured, loss of land being cleared, and a huge demand for energy there's a certain lifestyle that comes along with living in the suburbs. A green lawn, a large house, two cars, and maybe even a pool. In the suburbs, life is bigger. Plus, you're not living above your grocery store and just a few blocks from your kid's school anymore. The suburbs have made a fifteen, twenty or thirty minute drive totally normal. For result is I fuckalowed more emissions. Historically, carbon emissions from suburban homes are four times more than those of homes in cities. And yet in the US, Australia and much of a world, we've accepted the suburbs as a way of life, and since of inception we've never really made an effort to change fact.

The car centric bedroom community became was the American ideal and became in too many places the world's ideal, with grievous environmental consequences. I mean, you have all those big houses you have to heat and cool and drive between them, but also with grievous social consequences. Perhaps more importantly, the average American has half as many close friends as the average American of the nineteen fifties. And it's because we live, because we devoted all our resources to building bigger houses farther apart from each other, and people just naturally ran into each other a lot less the course of a day.

Bill's twenty twenty two memoir The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon describes how the suburbs not only super charged of emissions, but also they super charged our wealth, inequality in individualism, and how all of this, taken together, has reduced our ability to actually get together and solve a climate crisis. So that's what the fuck we're talking about. What the fuck are talking about? So anyway, Bill grew up in the suburbs, and it wasn't until he was a young writer of The New Yorker but he began to reckon with the environmental impact of that. And then on June twenty third, nineteen eighty eight, something monumental happened.

The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.

Jim Hanson, then the director of NASA's Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, spoke to Congress about an emerging threat, global warming. His testimony was headline news around the world. Most people had never heard of such a thing, and certainly not from a senior leader at NASA. People, did you any rational thing? They freaked out.

I mean, Time magazine, in the wake of that testimony, made instead of choosing a Man of the Year, as they had for fifty years, they chose the planet of the year. George H. W. Bush, then Republican President of the United States, was shaken enough that he said, we will attack the Greenhouse effect with the white House effect. Everybody, as one would expect, was sort of lining up to try to deal with this problem, because why wouldn't you You've just been given a crucial warning by the world scientists.

Of course, all this urgency and unity was way too good to lost.

We now know from all kinds of great investigative reporting that within a year or so of Hanson's testimony, the fossil fuel industry had circled the wagons. They'd hired the people who used to work for the tobacco industry, and they'd gone to work sowing doubt, denial, disinformation with billions of dollars and decades of effort.

We all know that's the case, but just how much effort they put into this is genuinely shocking. We've all seen the ads. How can today's resources fuel our shared tomorrow.

The world needs ways to reduce carbon emissions, especially for heavy industry.

We are working on solutions in our own operations, like carbon capture and clean energy from hydrogen.

Those cheery inspirational ads about why petrol companies can fix a problem they created our complete garbage. It's amazing. I think anyone believes this nonsense. But sadly it seems to work. Let's start from the beginning. Though it is nineteen eighty eight. Jim Hanson's just presented his testimony to Congress, the world looking at him going otoh, wear in real trouble. Let's do something about it. A big oil starts to get worried. The people are catching on. Something's got to change. So Big Old gets together with some other manufacturing industries and they create a group called the Global Climate Coalition. The greatest success effectively lobbying the US to not sign the Kyoto Protocol, which would have reduced global pollution by an awful lot.

I mean, remember, in nineteen ninety two the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro for a big conference on all of this, and everybody was there, and it seemed like people were going to go to work, but they didn't. You know, the first effort was this Kyoto protocol that was you know, still born really because of the US refusal to ratify it.

It's a huge win for big al doesn't stop there. Christian Downey and Robert Braule, two researchers who look at trade organization funding, found that from two thousand and eight to twenty eighteen, oil and gas companies outspent all other sectors on public outreach and campaign contributions. And those cute little ads, well, big oil spent are whopping one billion dollars just on ads over ten years. So yeah, there's a shit ton of money going into their efforts.

The fossil fuel industry has relentlessly refused to give up its business model. They want to keep burning coal and gas and oil, and so they've looked for any way to keep doing that, and the most effective way they've had is to muscle our political system to gain our political system. Eventually they'll lose. I mean, we now live on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun that eventually that will triumph, but eventually doesn't do us much good.

I mean, they'reknew in the late nineteen seventies this is real. In fact, there's some of the best scientists working on that actually, and their projections and forecasts of the future were really, really good and frighteningly accurate. There's been decades of disinformation and misinformation that's come from this, from these fossil fuel companies. I mean, Jim's made the points as well, and I couldn't agree more. I mean, gosh, I've basically been working in this field since Jim testified, and it's amazing to see how he's consistently been ahead of the community and repeatedly so. I mean, I find them incredibly inspirational.

He's also, let me just dad, he's also been ahead in his willingness to be outspoken about it. I've had to call him half a dozen times and say, will you come get arrested with us here, which looked at one way, is insane. It's so stupid to take the most important climate scientists in the world away from his computer screen and have him go sit in jail for a couple of days. But it was actually super important in building support for actually doing something about any of.

This, and in all his work bill has one goal. We have to stop setting things on far and instead stop pointing sheets of glass up at the sun.

Combustion has been a big part of human life for something like seven hundred thousand years. Darwin said language and fire were the two things that distinguished our species, and mostly it's been good. We learned to cook food, and that gave us the big brain. We could move north and south away from the equator because we could warm ourselves up. I think the anthropologists even consider that some of the social bonds in our species come from sitting around the campfire every night for eon. Kind of proto zoom I like that. And then we made it to the industrial revolution and learned to control the combustion of coal and gas and oil, and that give us modernity. But we're at the moment when the costs are suddenly outweighing the benefits. The biggest of those costs is obviously the existential climate crisis. So that's the biggest risk, but it's not the only one from combustion. Nine million people a year die on this planet, about one death in five from breathing the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion. That's a lot of people.

That is a heartbreaking number of people who die eachy from fossil fuel pollution. That's about a population of London.

And as we've discovered and been re reminded in the last couple of years, if you depend on a resource it's only available in a few places, the people who control those places end up with way too much power.

Countries that sits on huge all of us as are able to punched way above our wait politically, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Guitar, Russia, Venezuela, the US. You get a point. But the good news is we can see our way out of this mess.

It's our great good fortune that it's precisely at this moment when this trouble is mounting so fast, that scientists and engineers have figured out how to use the power of the sun. We can capture its rays directly on photo voltaic panels, and we can take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, producing the breeze that turns those turbines. And now we have batteries to store that when the sun goes down or the wind drops, and in essence, you know, we can now take full advantage of the fact that the Good Lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of burning gas ninety three million miles up in the sky. What we have is cheap soilar, cheap wind, increasingly cheaper batteries. It's not free. There's environmental damage that comes from the mining and so on, and they can be done in inhumane ways, and we should do everything we can to prevent that. But the damage is orders of magnitude smaller than the damage we're doing now. If you want one way to just sort of keep that in your mind, statistic that helps for me is that forty percent of all ship traffic on planet Earth is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth around the planet to get burned.

We have to change that. One of the ways out of this mess is actually buried in the Inflation Reduction Act, which is sending hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy right now. It's the biggest investment in the US government has ever made to reduce carbon pollution. But Bill says, we've got to spend this money quickly.

You know, I know the people at the White House and the Department of Energy who are trying to shovel that money out the door as fast as they can, in part because there's a real fear that Donald Trump will be re elected, which point it'll all come to a halt. The hardest part is getting communities. We're now at the point where the rubber really meets the road. There are one hundred and forty million homes and apartment buildings and apartments in the US, and each one of them has to be changed in certain ways, you know. And there's money now to allow that to happen. But that's still an extraordinarily complex logistical problem, you know. So right now there's a lot of work in listing mayors and city councils and governors and things in this work as it spreads out from the center. So that's half of what the US has to do. The other half is it has to not just worry about its own commissions. It has to stop exporting vast quantities of fossil fuel elsewhere. We will, as someone once said, hang together, or we will hang separately. I mean, look, humans are socially evolved primate. It wasn't that many generations ago that we were sitting on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of each other's fur. You know, and that is us at its best, our responsiveness to people around us. This is what climate change is testing. Now. If we do things right, we'll be making a transition to a world that doesn't set things on fire anymore, and as a result, the world itself will be less on fire, meaning that.

Is a future where we only rely renewable energy, where fossil fuels are a thing of a past.

We're fucking the future. We're fucking the future.

But Bill has been parts of a climate movement for decades and he still has hope. But we can turn this around, but we have to get everyone activates on these issues as quickly as humanly possible.

I've had the privilege of being there pretty much the whole time as we've built this climate movement. I founded the first what turned into the first global grassroots climate change campaign three point fifty dot org with seven undergraduates at the college where I teach, and within a year we'd organized fifty two hundred simultaneous demonstrations in one hundred and eighty one countries. We launched this fossil fuel divestment campaign, and within a decade we've convinced endowments and portfolio is worth about forty trillion dollars to divest from fossil fuel.

So the good news is we're going in the rights and we can thank longtime activists Light Bill for aggravating the status quo and getting us to where we are today.

We sort of kick these things off, but then everybody just took it and ran with it. We think three point fifty dot org has organized or been associated with twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea. But you obviously can't organize all those. It's just people picking up the ball and running with it everywhere. I think probably this is the biggest movement in human history, which is good because it's by far the biggest problem in human history. And it really has been an extraordinary honor just to get to watch it grow and grow and grow. Whether we've grown it big enough to take on the you know, to make the change we need in the time we have as an open question. We clearly need more people. I'm spending my time now a lot of it organizing old people like me in this group.

Third Act Bill, to fight a problem that seems pretty easy to solve. We need more people to give a shit about what's happening to our planet.

The most effective climate activist of all time was obviously gret At Tunberg and her movement that she inaugurated, really the school strike movement, and things came like a bulk from the blue and it was increasing with incredible speed and power through twenty nineteen. In that September of that year, there were ten million kids on on school strike.

My name is Grieta Tembari, and I'm inviting you to be a part of the solution.

When young people go to the streets, they get attention, and rightfully so. Ten million young people standing up to their governments in action on the climate crisis is big news. But it shouldn't have to be this way. Their kids and they didn't create this crisis. My generation have its generation date.

Young people have done most of the leading on this fight. As I said, I started three point fifty dot org with seven undergraduates with extraordinary success. You know, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton University, California, University of Michigan, all divested now from fossil fuel. Those young people, when they graduated went on to form the Sunrise movement that brought us the Green New Deal and hence the Inflation Reduction Act. And around the world, as we've said, you know, Greta and her the ten thousand other Gretas around the world had ten million followers, and they've done an unbelievable job. I mean, what a pleasure it was to get to write my friend Greta in June a letter of congratulation on graduating from high school. Think about that for a minute, you know, but I did hear one too many people my age say, oh, it's up to the next generation to solve this problem, which seems noble but also highly impractical. For all their energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural power to make by themselves change on the scale we need in the time that we have. We don't have the time for them to grow up and become senators and CEOs and whatever that takes a while. In a while is what we don't possess. So if you look around for who does have structural power, it's people with hairlines like.

Mine, which is why Bill started faird Act.

We punch above our weight politically because we all vote. There's no known way to stop old people from voting. We ended up with most of the money. We've got about seventy percent of the country's financial assets. So if you wanted to push around Washington or Wall Street or your state capital, having some older people would be helpful. The theoretical objection to this from political scientists and things was that people become more conservative, as so there's no point trying to organize them. I don't know if that was true once, but it doesn't need to be true now because if you're in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now, it means that in your first Act, you were around for this moment of great epic social, cultural, political transformation, when we had the first Earth Day and the birth of the modern environmental movement, when in my country the civil rights movement was at its apex on and on, and so now people are Perhaps the Second Act was a little more involved in consumerism than citizenship, but that's water under the bridge, and now people are organizing like crazy. We've just been a kind of pell Mell sprint these last two years, and people are great at registering voters and lobbying legislatures, on and on, but they're also willing to take direct action. We had Third Act coordinated demonstrations. One hundred demonstrations in one hundred cities in March against the four big banks Chase City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of America that are the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry. And these were great and quite milletant.

When I told you Bill was a real deal, I meant it. On March twenty first, twenty twenty three, Bill and thousands of other people whose hairlines look like Bill's demanded that banks stop funding bad actors in the climate crisis. During one hundred events in over thirty one states. They pledged to closer accounts, cut up their credit cards, and boycott Bank of America, Chase City Bank, Wells Fargo if they didn't move their investments out of fossil fuel. This kind of action works because, like Bill said, these people have large financial power in the United States, and that's true of just about every other industrialized country in the world.

I was in Washington, DC, and we shut down the banks for the afternoons with Citi ins. We're too old to sprawl on the sidewalk easily for hours at a time. We went to all the thrift shops in the Greater Washington area and came away with hundreds of rocking chairs, and that's what we used to The New York Times the next day called it the rocking share of Rebellion. It's very good to be able to back up the young people who are leading in this work. It's a lot of fun.

That was something that really struck me from writing. Actually, is this idea that you've got a really impassioned, mobilized, energetic generation, but without the resources the networks for relationships of powers. You say, and I think we're just bringing these two together. It's just such a fascinating and really hopeful momentum and lots of fun. Yeah, and lots of fun as well, you know, moving forward, for people who are listening, how do they help get their parents and if they're fortunate enough to still have them grandparents involved.

You know, there's some people who can't reach there have just spent too much time I'm listening to you know, Donald Trump or rush Limbau or something. But there are plenty of other people who you can reach. With older people, there's definitely the idea that and it turns out to be correct that your grandkids will will think you're cool if you're whoever whatever, you're doing. But I think it's just a sense of responsibility. I mean, look, climate change is basically a test at this point of whether the big brain was a good adaptation or not. You know, it can get us in a lot of trouble, can it get us out? My sense is that that probably will have to do with the size of the heart that that brain is attached to, And so having a kind of human sense of what we need to do is really important Americans. You know, we tended to fault towards the individual, and you know, if someone tells you about climate change, you start worrying about what on your roof, what's in your garage. The truth is that at this point it's still policy at as large a level as possible, national level, state level things. That probably is the most where the most leverage lies. The most important thing an individual can do is be a little bit less of an individual and be instead joined together with others in movements large enough to make real change. That's why we set things up like Third Act.

And look, if that's not enough to get your mom out into the streets, I don't know what is.

We're fucking the future, weird fucking the future.

Before I closed out with Bill, I did want to ask him one more question. I've read a review in the New York Times about Bill's book, and in it but right to shed the famous art In Luther king junior quote, the ark of a moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. To me, it perfectly encapsulates all social justice movements, including climate justice. We must have hope, and we must believe a world can be better, but it will be better. Bilbo feels somewhat differently.

The arc of the physical universe is short, and it bends toward heat. That quote about the ark of the moral universe comes from my great hero, Martin Luther King, and what he meant was this may take a while, but we're going to win. And that was a powerful source of comfort to the brave people of the civil rights movement. But we don't have that comfort. You know, we've got six years. If we melt the Arctic, nobody's got a coherent plan for how you freeze it back up again. So if we don't win fast, we don't win. And hence the sense of extraordinary urgency that underlies all this work. So many thanks for this conversation.

Bill, it's me. It should be thanking you honestly, thank you so much. It's an absolute privileged to be speaking to you.

Thank you so much, welligious mine and thanks for all your good work.

And you two sir, you too. Bill was so inspiring to talk with. Honestly, he's a force of nature. And now it's on us, yes, all of us, to build on this amazing work.

What fuck can I do?

I wanted to bring in Maggie bed once again to talk about what we can take away from our conversation with Bill mckibbon. Hey, Chris, Maggie, Geez. I just feel like there's so many things I want to talk about from this interview.

Oh right, there was.

So much there.

The big one for me, though, is that Gen X and Boomers need to step up. Those generations have a lot of political power. And when I say those generations, I mean my generation. We are so often hearing people say, oh, the younger generation will save us. Younger generation cares Our generations have to step up. So I would say the obvious follow up here is to get involved with Bill's organization. Third act, I mean, if you're from the boomer generation, there are a lot of resources on their site to help you figure out how to take action. And if you're not from that generation, there are resources to help you talk about climate with the boomers in your life. So to learn more, visit third act dot org, slash get involved, and you know all that talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. That is an important reminder of the importance of civic engagement. And the main part of civic engagement is voting. So vote Boomers, gen xers, vote, vote for climate candidates, vote for climate Paul, vote like your life depends on it, because it.

Does, absolutely Thanks so much, Maggie, And that's what the fuck you can do to help This week?

What the fuck can I do? Oh?

Fuck, that's it for now, but I can't wait for next week. I'll be talking with Kaylin O'Connor, a brilliant philosopher who's working on one of the biggest obstacles in the climate crisis, misinformation.

A lot of what is driving that, I think is cylinical actors who are trying to erode public trust in science, and especially you see this in the US among right wing politicians and especially populist type politicians, because of course populism is associated with this kind of rejection of authority or expertise.

That's next time on Fucking the Future. For now, We're fucking the Future. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meredith Bryan. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen and Rene Colvert. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carral Welker, and Nathan Chloch are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice. Sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by Lillly Hayden, and producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking the Future on Apple Podcasts or whether you get your podcasts

Unf*cking the Future

Unfucking the Future takes us on an environmental journey with our knowledgeable guide, scientist Ch 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 13 clip(s)