Bill McKibben is the author and environmentalist credited with penning the first book on climate change written for a general audience, The End of Nature. He is also a founder of 350.org, the first global, grassroots climate change movement. Bill was awarded the 2014 Right Livelihood Prize, the 2013 Gandhi Prize and the 2013 Thomas Merton Prize, and he was named to Foreign Policy magazine’s inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Christophe Jospe: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Christophe Jospe. I have a sit-in for the usual co-host, but you’ve heard him before on the podcast. If you’re a longtime listener, we’ve got Ryan Anderson here.
Ryan Anderson: Hello.
Christophe Jospe: And it is a wonderful day here in Salina, Kansas. Ryan and I have actually been attending the Prairie Festival at the Land Institute. And we’ll link it in the show notes. We had done a podcast with Fred and Tim at the Land Institute and talking about the perennialization of agriculture. We might get into that a bit today, but it’s a different type of podcast. We’re extremely humbled and honored to have this guest sitting across from us. Ryan, would you like to say a few words about him?
Ryan Anderson: Our guest today is Bill McKibben, who really needs no introduction because one of our few guests who has written an autobiography, a little memoir called Oil and Honey, came out a few years back. And that’s really where I wanted to start with you today, Bill, is how did you get into that? What is oil and honey and how did that play into your role in the current climate movement?
Bill McKibben: Well, I got into the climate movement back well before there was one. I wrote the first book about climate change for a general audience. It came out 30 years ago this week in fact, a book called The End of Nature. It was excerpted in The New Yorker and was the first kind of treatment at that length of what we then called the greenhouse effect. What we for a while called global warming. Then we called climate change. Now I think people are pretty much calling it the climate crisis. So I wrote that book.
Wrote many more books and lots of articles and things for about 15 years convinced that we were engaged in an argument over climate change and that writing more books and having more podcasts and things was what we needed to do because eventually the weight of evidence would carry the day and our leaders would do what they should. About 15 years ago, about halfway into my life in this topic, I came to understand that, in fact, I was misanalyzing. We’d won the argument. We’d won it long ago. The science was robust and clear.
We’d won the argument, but we were losing the fight because the fight was what fights are always about, not data and reason, but money and power. And the other side in this fight, the fossil fuel industry had a surplus of both. And they were willing to use them to, well, to extend their business model for a little while longer even at the cost of breaking the planet. The only way to fight that power was with other power. And that’s when we started finally trying to build a movement. I founded with some young people, 350.
org a decade ago. And after 10 years of full-on campaigning, this climate movement is now, thanks to people like Greta Thunberg, reached a kind of crescendo in recent days. So we’re in a different place than we were 30 years ago. Some of that’s good. We’ve got a good movement. Some of it’s bad. We’ve got 40 parts per million more CO2 in the atmosphere. So take your pick, really 60 parts more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Christophe Jospe: Right. And it depends on the time of year. It’s always interesting to see the earth breathing when you have more trees in the north and the south. And so what are we today, like 408? But earlier we peaked at around 412? Yeah.
Bill McKibben: Actually, I think we touched 415 in the spring. Right around May 31st is always the spike, the highest point in the annual spike. And then, yes, the northern hemisphere, we grow some stuff and down goes the level of CO2 and then it comes back up to a higher point every year. We’re gaining about two and a half parts per million CO2 annually now, which is much higher than it was... I’ll see you next time. If that continues, it doesn’t bear thinking about it.
Christophe Jospe: You said take your pick, hope or pessimism, and it seems like you’ve already picked pessimism here. But I want to go back.
Bill McKibben: No, I’m actually entirely willing to be hopeful. I think actually the job of those of us who work on this is to pick neither, but to get up each day figuring out how to move the ball as far as possible.
Ryan Anderson: Yeah. So speaking of moving the ball as far as possible or moving it back, I guess, in the sense of atmospheric concentrations, why 350? And how do we get there from where we are now at 415 or 410?
Bill McKibben: So you guys will be more interested in the history of this than most people because 350 really is a sort of new number. In 2007- I called up my old friend Jim Hansen at NASA, the greatest climatologist the world has ever had, the Paul Revere who was gutsy enough to go and tell Congress in 1988 that in fact the era of global warming had begun, the person who inaugurated public discussion of this topic. Also happened to have the best data set for how fast it was warming and the best computer model for what was going to go on in the future.
I called Jim and said, we want to do global campaigning around carbon. And I think to do it, we need a number, partly because we want to work globally. And Arabic numerals are going to work better than English words. So what’s the number here? Actually, what kind of carbon concentration is simply too much? Now, the prevailing wisdom at the time, I think, was that 450 parts per million was what people sort of in 2007 thought about as a kind of danger point. But that was very rudimentary. There was no real good reason for it.
Ten years earlier, the danger point that we talked about was 550 parts per million. And the reason for that was simple. It was twice the pre-industrial concentration and twice was relatively easy to model on a computer. So it had the psychological effect of being the thing that we focused on, where people first drew a red line. But it was clear by then that red line was too high, that 550 parts per million was actually suicidal. So people’s sites had drifted downward to 450 parts per million. And I think that’s what I thought Jim would land.
In fact, at least for a while, I was the proud owner of the URL for 450. org, assuming that might be where we’d be. Jim called back three, four months later, said, look, the team has been working hard on this. We’re going to publish a paper at AGU in a few weeks. That’s the American Geophysical Union. They meet in San Francisco.
Ryan Anderson: We like calling out acronyms here.
Bill McKibben: They meet in San Francisco each December and it’s where the important earth science papers get delivered. And, you know, Hansen is I think about as close to royalty and AGU as it is possible to get. And he said the number, we’ve got you a number, thank you. You’re not going to like the number. The number is 350 parts per million. And I didn’t like the number for obvious reasons. We were already way past it. That paper that they published, Which I think will historically go down as one of the most important pieces of scientific effort of this millennia.
Said that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million was not compatible with the planet on which civilization devolved or to which life on Earth is adapted. You guys have read enough scientific papers to know that’s strong language for an abstract of a paper. But truthfully, no one’s advanced a counterargument of any power in the decade sense. The only argument people even tried to advance is that 350 may be too high. In fact, the trigger may have been somewhere between 280 and 350. As Jim points out, that probably doesn’t make much difference at this point since we’re sprinting in the opposite direction.
But it was very helpful as a number in terms of making people realize this was not a problem for the future, it was a problem for now. It was the difference between going to the doctor and having the doctor say, if you keep eating that way, someday your cholesterol will be too high and you’re going to have a heart attack. Or going to the doctor and the doctor saying, I just looked at your blood work. Your cholesterol is off the charts. You’re in the zone where people keel over tomorrow. I think you’ve already had a small stroke anyway.
That’s the point at which people are like, okay, what pill do you want me to take? What do I need to do? So 350 was pretty quickly, 350. org, that the idea and the organizing behind it was fairly powerful. Ten years ago this October, we had 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries. It was the first beginnings of what we now see as this kind of mass action that had 7 million people in the streets over the last couple of weeks all around the world.
Christophe Jospe: So I like that you’re using metaphors. We love using metaphors too. I want to try something out on you. And I guess just frame this challenge a little bit because, you know, carbon dioxide has a really long residence time in the atmosphere. And actually we’re not at 408. We’re touching up on almost 500 if you look at other greenhouse gases. And so it’s probably even worse, but we know it stays there. And so we’ve surpassed our limit. And here’s the metaphor. It’s like we’re on this bus that’s potentially driving. Right.
So we got to get off the bus, we got to put the bus into reverse, and we got to get back to 350. But how do we actually get there, given that the CO2 is already in the atmosphere? And like you said, right, the oceans are slowing down because they’re acidifying and not doing what they used to do.
Bill McKibben: Right. I mean, there’s not unbelievable mystery about at least some of the mechanisms that do this. I mean, you know, we’ve known... For instance, trees are a useful thing to have because they do the opposite of us.
Ryan Anderson: It’s proven technology as well.
Bill McKibben: They take in CO2 and hand back oxygen. And what do you know? You put one up and it drops an acorn and the next one grows.
Ryan Anderson: I mean, this is a useful thing.
Bill McKibben: Well, forest is a useful thing. In fact, we’re finding out more about them all the time. I was just doing some reporting for The New Yorker a few weeks ago on the work that a guy named Bill Mumaw, who was at Tufts for years, has been doing on forest. It’s one of these things that you’d think someone would have done a long time ago. But he did it a little bit in response to all the stuff, all the studies about tree planting. And we said, yes, tree planting is a good idea.
But as we know, there’s not enough ground to just plant the endless number of trees. And as he pointed out... You actually get more carbon accumulation in the second quarter century, at least on the species he was studying of a tree’s life, and yet more in the third quarter century. And we don’t really have data set beyond that, but there’s no reason to think, in fact, that it doesn’t. So not cutting down trees may turn out to be... At least as important as planting new ones. So there’s a number of things like this we can and should be doing, but we should resist the temptation to think that any of them alone We’re going to scale to the point where we, as I have been saying for 30 years and widely quoted as saying in one scheme or another, there’s no silver bullet here.
There may be enough silver buckshot if you pick it all up to make some damp. Job one, however, and let’s be clear about this. I mean, the work that everybody that you guys are doing on pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, it’s all really crucial. Job one. With a bullet is to stop pouring more in. I mean, everybody’s got a job and they’re all important and we all work on them. But the most immediate benefit, the thing that we absolutely have to do in the next few years is make the transition of coal and gas and oil.
Stop putting more carbon in because those flows, every one of those flows... Every year of that flow makes the job we have to do of pulling it out that much harder and bigger. Because as you know, what we’re talking about are volume problems, scale problems. And it’s really important for people to realize that, that it’s not like pollution that we were sort of used to dealing with. It’s not like carbon with one oxygen atom, carbon monoxide, which is a minor trace gas that came out of the back of your car and it killed you.
If you breathed it, Carbon with two oxygen atoms, carbon dioxide isn’t like that. It doesn’t kill you and it comes out of the back of your car in volume. You burn a gallon of gasoline, it weighs eight pounds, you release five and a half pounds of carbon, it combines with those oxygen atoms, you’ve released 22 pounds of CO2 by burning your gallon of gasoline. It’s a volume problem. And the quickest way to deal with volume problems like that is to stop making them worse. There are many rules of holes, but the very first one is stop digging.
Ryan Anderson: And there’s been a tremendous amount of progress within the mobilizations of the climate movement, you know, that you’ve been a part of since the beginning around fossil fuel divestment campaigns and so forth. But a question that, you know, we have as a company focused on building a carbon removal marketplace and getting back to this, you know, the silver buckshot is that do we actually need the oil and gas companies to be part of it in terms of running the system in reverse, so to speak, going from not just extracting it but pulling the carbon down?
Bill McKibben: Well, you guys would – you guys may – No better about this. In political terms, what we need to do is break the power of the fossil fuel companies. That’s what keeps us from ever really grappling with the fact that we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere. Their political power based on their wealth is such that they are able to And then work with the landscape that you’re left with after that.
Christophe Jospe: You’re getting feisty, Bill. I like it. Yesterday, Amory Lovins gave an interesting presentation. I didn’t agree with everything he had to say, but I did enjoy some of his comments where the fossil fuel industry is actually in the wrong business of selling hydrocarbons. They should see themselves as an energy service provider. If they were to wake up tomorrow and say, hey, we’re in the energy delivery business and we’re in also the atmospheric service cleanup business, would you change your mind or would you still want to put a stake through them?
Bill McKibben: I just don’t think it’s going to happen. I mean, the history of technological transitions indicates that the incumbents virtually never are the people who go on to do the work. It was not the guys who were good at building carriages for horses that turned out to be good at building horseless carriages, you know. And there’s a thousand other technological transfer transition stories that go the same way. Because if you’re Exxon, your expertise is not in being an energy services provider. Your expertise is in finding new pools of oil and drilling for them.
That’s what your entire business is geared to. Everybody who works in your office, that’s what they’re... But that doesn’t mean someone else isn’t going to play that role. It doesn’t mean that the flows of capital that are now supporting companies like Exxon can’t be diverted to support people who do have... Good ideas about what’s coming next. So far, I mean, look at the much less complicated task of just providing solar power or wind power. These are now the cheapest ways to provide power in the world almost everywhere. Have Exxon or BP or anyone diverted any significant percentage of their CAPEX to doing this?
No. The highest – I saw the Financial Times at a piece two days ago. One of the European oil companies, Total, I can’t remember which, the greenest of them all had devoted 4% of its capital expenditure to anything that might even be vaguely labeled as responsible and most of which was probably ethanol anyway which is – Pretty hard to label that way. Instead, they’ve diverted huge amounts of resources to the political campaigning that’s kept us for 30 years from doing anything about any of this. So I could be wrong, but my guess is Exxon does not ride to the rescue in the final reel of this particular Western.
Christophe Jospe: I love how poetic you describe it, and I think it’s an important insight to...
Bill McKibben: I hope I’m not screwing up your business plan along the way here on the...
Christophe Jospe: We’re just shills for the fossil fuel industry. I don’t know if you figured it out.
Bill McKibben: I figured it out. Yeah, it was pretty clear.
Ryan Anderson: That’s what brings us to the Land Institute today. It was pretty clear.
Christophe Jospe: It was pretty clear. You caught us, Bill. But I mean, we’re talking about sort of levers to push on and forces of change and- I’ll tell you a lever I think is important to push on now.
Bill McKibben: I just wrote a long piece for The New Yorker about it. It’s financial markets. These are the guys who’ve been, and completely shamelessly, I mean, just amoral, bad people. I mean, the big four banks in the U. S. , Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, have dramatized. They’ve dramatically increased their lending to the fossil fuel industry in the years since the Paris Climate Accords. Chase, which leads all contenders, and by the way, whose lead director was the CEO of Exxon for 15 years before he retired to become the lead director at Chase Manhattan.
They’ve lent huge sums of money for the most extreme and absurd companies. That’s bad. That’s why we’re going to be campaigning hard against them. What makes it interesting is that unlike politics, our other kind of center of power, which takes a long time to change, When change comes in financial markets and in the financial community, sometimes it comes very fast and I mean by very fast in a matter of hours. I mean you wake up one morning and the valuations on the stock market tell you one story in the world about the world and by 3 in the afternoon you turn on CNNBC and there’s an entirely different story about the world that’s being told.
It doesn’t happen often. I don’t know if we can make it happen. But the divestment fight against the fossil fuel industry, which has been very, very useful and become very, very big, is also going to be turned against the financial industry that is their lifeline.
Christophe Jospe: Interesting. So, I mean, you flew here, we flew here. The global economy still runs on fossil fuels. Most of our energy sources come from fossil fuels. You know, you hear Greta Thunberg talk about the global economy, and I think she’s very eloquent in calling a spade a spade and pointing at the hypocrisy, but still... We humans would not survive if we were to just shut off fossil fuels tomorrow.
Bill McKibben: Well, we wouldn’t survive if we’re going to shut off tomorrow. No one is saying that, okay? But it’s very clear we need to shut them off much sooner than people thought we did and much sooner. Right. Right. Right. And that storage batteries are now falling on the same kind of aggressive curve. I mean, that’s the one thing that’s really broken right in this debate about climate change since we started. Not incremental improvement and possibility, but exponential order of magnitude change. It means that if we wanted to, we were at the place now where we could rapidly replace most of the things for which we use fossil fuel.
That we’re not doing so is some combination of inertia, but mostly reflects the staggering power of the fossil fuel industry to prevent change.
Christophe Jospe: I appreciate that response. I guess where I was going with my question is to say, today, we’re just dumping our carbon into the atmosphere for free. There’s no way to put it back. But if actually the fossil fuel industry were to say, okay, yeah, we get that this is an externality. We get That this is causing climate change. Actually, we agree with the science. And you know what? We’re going to do something about it. We’re going to remove one ton or more for every ton that we emit. And Exxon just has a come to Jesus moment.
They say, hey, you know, I’m responsible for this. For every ton we emit, we’ll remove two tonnes. Would that let them off the hook?
Bill McKibben: If Exxon’s willing to do that, then I’m happy to say, you know what? It won’t be necessary for the entire C-suite of Exxon to go to jail. That seems like a relative reasonable compromise to me for the 30 years of damage that they’ve done by preventing the... I’d be willing to make that deal.
Unknown speaker: That’s your stay out of jail card? Okay. That sounds good to me. I take your point.
Ryan Anderson: So I’d be remiss to not ask you here as we wrap up here, Bill, about your latest book. And you mentioned, you know, Falter kind of in passing. So tell us about that. I mean, it’s about the human game. And you sort of pick these, you know, two, you call them sort of technologies of solar and nonviolence. You’ve touched on the solar part. You’ve touched on the resistance movement a bit, you know, of climate justice and youth activism. So how does that all play into this narrative we’ve been talking about here?
Bill McKibben: Well, I think that’s the place where this all comes together. Two of the great inventions of the 20th century, it turns out, were the solar panel, which is really coming to fruition in the 21st. Beautiful not just, let me add, because it generates carbon-free electricity. And, of course, it comes with, you know, they’re not the most beautiful physical objects in the world. And producing them creates some pollution and so on and so forth.
Christophe Jospe: Actually uses coal, right? Yeah. You burn metallurgical coal to produce solar.
Bill McKibben: Depends. In fact, there are now people who are saying they’re managing to produce solar panels straight off wind and solar power. So we’ll see. But at any rate, beautiful also in that they decentralize the control of our energy system. They take it out of the hands of a few... I mean, at the moment... An immense amount of the inequality political and economic that also devastates our period on Earth flows from the fact that a few people sit on top of the deposits of coal and gas and oil that are the most valuable things on the planet.
That’s why the Koch brothers have been able to purchase a political party and use it to all kinds of ugly ends. That’s why we pay attention to, you know, complete and utter horrible people like Vladimir Putin or the king of Saudi Arabia. I mean, it’s not because the king of Saudi Arabia has some interesting idea about how to run the world. He just cuts people’s heads off with swords if he doesn’t like them, you know, in a world that ran on... We’d still have, I have no doubt, bad people. And we’d also have some solar billionaires, but I don’t think we’d have the equivalent of Koch brothers.
The reason that the Koch brothers and Exxon and so on have fought so hard against solar energy is precisely because... Once you get the panels on your roof, when the sun comes up, your power is delivered for free. And if you became incredibly wealthy on the business model of write me a check every month for your delivery of energy, this just seems like the stupidest business model anyone ever invented, you know? So I like solar power for that too. Nonviolence is the other great invention of the 20th century. The suffragettes and Gandhi and...
Dr. King and a million other people in the civil rights movement and so on and so forth figured out the kind of counterintuitive and decentralized power source that came from a willingness to take on some unearned suffering. It has over and over and over again. In fact, the political scientists tell us now that the success rate of nonviolent revolutions is far higher than of armed and violent conflict for obvious reasons. You’re not picking the weapon that the other side specializes in. You’re picking the one they don’t know how to handle.
So I’m not telling you we’re going to win. I’m telling you, if we win, at least in part, it will be because people manage to organize themselves in movements large enough to matter. I will say that I’m optimistic, save for the fact that climate change is the first time-limited problem that we’ve ever really run into. And time, Dr. King would say at the end of speeches, quoting from the Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker, he would say, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. This may take a while, but we’re going to win.
The arc of the physical universe is short, and it bends toward heat. We win soon or we don’t win. So that’s the part that gives me pause. That’s the part that makes me very grateful that people like you guys are working hard on the other side of this equation, figuring out how to get this stuff out of the atmosphere and back where it belongs. I don’t know whether we can make this equation square in the time we have or not. There are days like last week with 7 million people in the streets when I feel hopeful.
There are... Days when I look at, you know, the damage that the last hurricane did in the Bahamas and think, we may have waited a little too late to get started here. And if we did, it’s much my fault as anyone on the planet because I knew about this, understood it sooner than others and wasted 15 years. You know, writing books when I should have been building movements, you know, but we do what we can from where we are and it’s going to take everybody with their particular set of skills and particular approaches, not just doing those things, but figuring out how to make them work cooperatively that will get us where we are if we can get there still.
Christophe Jospe: I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself about writing books. Sometimes it takes writing books to inspire movements.
Bill McKibben: Books are very useful, but my theory of change when I was 27 and wrote The End of Nature was people will read my book and then they will change. That’s actually not how it happens. Not if you have inspired opposition with a few trillion dollars ready to spend on making sure change doesn’t happen. Then you have to figure out what the currency of change is. For social movements, it’s passion, it’s spirit, it’s creativity. Sometimes it’s being willing to spend your body and go to jail. So those are the things we make use of.
Christophe Jospe: So I wanted to pick up on something you said. You said, we are going to win. Who is we and how are we our own worst enemies?
Bill McKibben: History indicates that victory in social movements doesn’t come when you get 51% of people or 90% of people. You need to get 3% or 4% of people really engaged in a fight to usually win. That’s because, and this is a very helpful thing to remember, apathy cuts both ways. Trust me, it took enormous amounts of good organizing to get 7 million people in the streets around climate change. We were worried about how many porta-potties they were and were the communication links right and on and on and on. We were not worried about...
The next day, 7 million people will come in the streets demanding more global warming. That we weren’t worried about. Apathy cuts both ways. So building social movements is hard, but those are the tipping points. And you can tell by looking at what happened 50 years ago with the first Earth Day in the U. S. We think 20 million Americans, 10% of the then population of the US was in the streets. Almost certainly the biggest day of protest in American history. And that was enough. Within a year or two, Richard Nixon, who you guys are too young to remember...
But who had not an environmental bone in his body signed into law all the laws, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act on which, you know, all the laws that Donald Trump et al are currently doing their best to gut. That’s what happens when movements build. Whether we can build this one in time, we will see.
Christophe Jospe: Interesting. A couple more questions we wanted to ask you. So I’m going to try to sneak this one in because I think it’s so interesting when you look at all of the different strategies for climate change solutions out there. There’s a large continuum, there’s a large spectrum and 350. org and the movements that have followed from those footsteps have gone in one direction. But I’m curious on your opinion on the diversity of communication strategies for addressing climate change.
Bill McKibben: What are you thinking of? So I’m willing to do some of each. I mean, I have a cover story in the cover of Time Magazine this week about a kind of looking back from 2050 and what we did earlier. That managed to let us survive. I think that my friends who are working on the Green New Deal are doing tremendous work, I think, in offering a vision for this country and this world that might actually capture people’s imagination and work. I really love it. But those people came straight out of the...
I mean, the kids writing the Green New Deal at the Sunrise Movement came straight out of the campus divestment movement on fossil fuels. That’s where they cut their teeth, where they were correctly raging at the fossil fuel industry for its amoral irresponsibility. It doesn’t strike me that just in the same way that you go through different moods in the course of a day, the idea that there’s kind of one... Key in which to pitch every message that you want to deliver seems odd. I mean, I’m a writer. I know you have.
I mean, if you just keep... I mean, it’s as if we just conducted this whole interview in a monotone. Or if we did it all in perky... I mean, you know, you got to... I will say honesty does seem to be a useful trait over time. When we started 350, people were like, that’s too depressing. You know, no, we say people can deal with it. I mean, yes, we’re past 350, it’s bad news. Human beings can deal with bad news, you know. I mean, that’s what mature people do.
Ryan Anderson: But putting that goal out there of 350 is also a way of inspiring potentially. Some people could say it’s impossible, but others could say, like Nori, we’re going to rise to the occasion and make our mission Reversing Climate Change. You do it.
Bill McKibben: Absolutely.
Ryan Anderson: Exactly right.
Christophe Jospe: We’re not doing it. You don’t want it alone at all. You want the world to do it. Absolutely. But you know what? You use the word truth. I think it’s so important. It reminds me of this phrase, which every time I hear it, it gives me chills, which is speak truth to power. Then yeah, that’s totally what’s happening right now. And you have a bunch of kids who have the gumption and guts to stand up against power. So final question, Bill, because I know you’re trying to get out of here and we got to get you on stage to go inspire some people.
But who is your best critic? Or to put it otherwise, who is the smartest person who disagrees with you?
Bill McKibben: I think actually at this point, I mean, on the sort of basic issues of things, I can’t think of... The opposition to the idea that we need to stop pouring carbon into the atmosphere is universally just driven by some combination of ideology and greed at this point. On the basic points around climate change, there is, I think, no serious opposition that I can think of. Doesn’t mean there isn’t opposition, and it doesn’t mean it’s not effective. I mean, the story of the last 30 years is that the fossil fuel industry figured out how to hijack the science and turn it into a debate about whether or not global warming was real.
A debate that diverted us for 30 years, even though, as we now know from great reporting, All sides, including the fossil fuel industry, knew exactly what was going on 30 years ago. Just that one of them was willing to lie. And they were very effective at it. I mean, look... They’ve convinced the President of the United States that climate change was a hoax manufactured by the Chinese. You know, a sentiment delusional enough that if the guy next to you on the bus was muttering it under his breath, you’d get up and change seats, you know.
But this guy is President of the United States. He pulled America out of the Paris Accords. He’s, you know, gutted even the most obvious things like automobile emissions. I mean, so they’re not serious critics, but they’re super effective.
Christophe Jospe: And if you are one of those critics and you feel strongly about burning fossil fuels and not paying for the externality, please come on the podcast. We’d love to talk to you. I want to hear that one too. Yeah, we’ll let you surface your ideas. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Bill.
Bill McKibben: Guys, this is terrific. And thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for what you’re doing on the podcast, but more thank you what you’re doing in the world. Nothing could be much more important than figuring out how to get some of that carbon out of the air.
Christophe Jospe: Thank you.
