Bill McKibben on the Power That Could Save the Planet

The fight against climate change is at a crossroads. This past year, the climate movement in the United States achieved significant success. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act represents the single largest investment in emissions reduction in U. S. history. More than a dozen states have taken some form of climate action in 2022 alone. Earlier this year, California — which, if it were a country, would have the fifth largest economy in the world — approved a record $54 billion in climate spending alongside sweeping new restrictions on fossil fuel development. These investments coincide with a wave of technological transformation: Over the past decade, the cost of solar energy has declined around 90 percent and that of onshore wind around 70 percent, making these energy sources economically competitive with fossil fuels for the first time. “The new numbers turn the economic logic we’re used to upside down,” writes the climate activist and journalist Bill McKibben. To him, the import of this moment is clear: For the first time, McKibben argues, humanity has at our fingertips the tools needed to end humanity’s millenniums-long dependence on burning things for energy — and to save our climate in the process. To those familiar with the climate movement, McKibben is a familiar name. His book “The End of Nature” has been compared to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in terms of its impact on the climate movement. He’s founded organizations like Third Act and 350.org, the latter of which is among the largest climate activist organizations in the world today. He was a key leader in the fight to block the Keystone XL pipeline. And he currently writes the influential newsletter “The Crucial Years.” Ask anyone in the climate movement today about their inspirations and McKibben will almost certainly top the list. But in McKibben’s telling, the climate movement’s successes in getting us to this point actually require it to change. A movement founded on blocking bad things from happening now needs to turn to building at intensified speed; a movement that has long fought to preserve the natural world now has to help usher in a wholesale transformation of the global landscape; a movement that has long been critical of capitalism and economic growth now has to align itself with those forces in order to achieve its ends. Those shifts will require new tactics, new animating ideas, new motivations and new priorities — with the future of the climate hanging in the balance. So I wanted to have McKibben on the show to talk about this dawning era of the climate fight we’re entering, and what changes the movement will have to make to meet this moment. Mentioned: “The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I’ve Heard” by The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit How It Went by Wendell Berry Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. (And if you’re reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion” in the subject line.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:24Ezra Klein?

  I have this frustration with the rhythm of how we cover American politics. I've had it for a very long time. It's this. So we spend in the press all this time covering elections and campaigns and politicians, and then they get elected, and we cover their fights and their legislative battles, and is the bill going to pass? And what's happening to Build Back Better? And what is Joe Manchin doing? And then finally, sometimes, if you're lucky, something big and good passes. And then we just move on. We just go on to the next thing. But bills don't do all that much on their own. They actually have to be implemented. They have to become something real in the world to have the effect they were meant to have.

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  And that's where we are now on climate. Over the past two years, the Biden administration and the Democrats, they passed a huge series of climate bills: the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. It's about $450 billion of climate investment. And behind that number lurks all kinds of new agencies and standards and mandates and goals. And even more than that, those bills and that politics has been a signal to the private sector, which is investing here, to lots of young people who are going into climate tech and climate activism, to all kinds of members of the building trades who are reorganizing and retooling and retraining to know how to build everything we're going to need to build, to electrify, to weatherize.

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  It's big. What has to happen in the coming years is big and we can't just expect that it'll happen on its own. So I've done, a couple of months ago, this big, long conversation with Jesse Jenkins about the imagined path to decarbonization here. What the drafters of these bills hope will happen. I really recommend that conversation to understand the context. And I'll put a link in show notes. But this conversation is different. This conversation is about how to make it happen. Something I've heard again and again in the past few months is that the climate movement is fracturing under the weight of its own success. Actually getting these bills done, actually moving to where you can implement them. Now there are a lot

• 2:35Ezra Klein?

  of fights. Now there's a lot of really hard trade offs that have to be made. But I really don't think fracturing is the right term here. I think the right term is governing. Writing legislation forces choice. You gotta make all these decisions, massive coalitions that can come together in opposition, or come together when what you're passing or creating is imaginary. They always crack apart. They always find their deep tensions when they succeed and have to govern. But that is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of power. It happens to candidates all the time. They run for office as radicals, promising to change the system. Then they win and they actually have to govern. And the trade offs they make and the compromises they have to make, and the fact that they need to make

• 3:20Ezra Klein?

  a budget work, it alienates a lot of their former allies. People who looked radical begin to look incremental. But at the same time, instead of the change they imagined just being a hypothetical, it begins to happen in the real world. Real people's lives are made better. New groups and power centers join their coalition. These are transitions, not dissolutions. Fracturing makes it sound like the movements are simply losing power. In truth, they're gaining power. That's where the climate movement and anyone working on climate is now. Enough bills have passed, enough money has been set aside, enough technologies have been created or are being created, that we really do have a chance. It's remarkable, we really do have a chance to avert the worst of global warming.

• 4:05Ezra Klein?

  But that means a movement that has spent most of its life learning how to stop terrible things from happening, it needs to become something different. A movement that builds real things in the real world at a breakneck pace. A movement that doesn't just say yes, but figures out how to make all kinds of communities and groups and cities around the country say yes, yes and yes and yes, again and again and again, faster than we have in decades. The climate movement has to govern now. They have to help this country build this whole infrastructure that they have imagined. And governing and building in this country, it is damn hard. But this should be, I think, a space not just for hope, but for excitement.

• 4:48Ezra Klein?

  I mean, one reason I wanted to have this topic, this conversation right now, post-election, is that however the House turns out, these next two years are not going to be a period of passing major climate bills through Congress. There's going to be a lot of paralysis, a lot of infighting, but that doesn't mean the next two years will be a time of stasis. The next two years and long beyond that are going to be about making good on the promise of the legislation passed in 2021 and 2022. It's going to be about building the world those bills promised to make. It's going to be about actually getting us on a better path for our climate. There are very few people who have been as central to climate as an issue, to the way

• 5:31Ezra Klein?

  we understand climate and the challenges we're facing, and to the climate movement as an organization, as an ecosystem, as Bill McKibben.

• 5:40Ezra Klein?

  His 1989 book, The End of Nature, it's often compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and how big of an effect it had on this issue. He has ever since been one of the movement's most important writers and thinkers, but also activists and organizers. He did not just stand on the sidelines. He's the founder of 350.org, one of the largest climate activist organizations in the world, who's a key leader in the fight to block the Keystone XL pipeline. And he's been thinking and reading and organizing and working and trying to see what the movement has to become next, what has to happen next. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about the new era of the climate movement, the new era we're in in climate politics, and what all of us will have to do to meet this moment.

• 6:24Ezra Klein?

  As always, my email is [email protected]. Bill McKibben, welcome to the show.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Well, what a pleasure to get to be with you, Ezra.

• 6:37Ezra Klein?

  So we're talking a couple of days after the midterm election, which I think many people on the left feel did not go as badly as they worried it would. But you were saying to me that it maybe went better than not as badly as people worried it would. So tell me what you saw.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  I mean, in a sense, since I'm here in Egypt at the climate summit, I'm thinking about it in global terms. And it's one of several straws in the wind this last few weeks that at least give one outside reason to hope that maybe some of the fever around the world has begun to break a little bit. I mean, I'm probably the wrong person to be saying this, since I've spent most of my life as a professional bummer-outer of other people. But, you know, though by narrow margins, the forces of democracy and the guise of the Democrats did pretty well in the midterms. By the narrowest of margins, Lula defeated Bolsonaro in Brazil, huge victory for the planet.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And we have news in the last day or two that Vladimir Putin is at least removing his troops from the one big city he managed to capture. Some speculate in response to the midterms and the understanding that he's not going to have a GOP majority to cut off funding to the Ukraine. All of these things are deeply tied to the climate and energy story. So I guess I just am very hopeful that maybe someday, some of the fever that has engulfed the world these last seven or eight years may break enough that we can begin to take rational action about things.

• 8:14Ezra Klein?

  I'll note something that occurred to me as you were saying that, which is an inversion, at least in America, of the way we traditionally saw the politics of some of these issues. So I go back a couple of years, and I think the idea was healthcare is a popular issue for Democrats. If they do something on healthcare, give people health insurance, give people Medicaid, it's gonna look great. Climate is this elite issue, nobody really cares about it, it's something that, you know, the Nancy Pelosi's of the world want to do. And, you know, if you've got a big majority, maybe you can force something like that through, but you're probably gonna pay for it. But you go back to 2010, Democrats pass a massive, near-universal healthcare bill. They get, as Obama famously says, shellacked in the next election.

• 8:59Ezra Klein?

  And you look over the past two years, the main thing Joe Biden does, the core of his legislative agenda, is a series of bills on climate, culminating in the Inflation Reduction Act, which has a huge amount of climate work in it. And Democrats do just fine in the election. There's nothing like the backlash to the climate agenda that there was to Obamacare. That's an interesting fact about our politics right now.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Well, I think the real tell, in a way, is that the Republicans weren't running against the Inflation Reduction Act at all. They hardly mentioned it. And the reason for that is that the zeitgeist has shifted. Partly, that's been the work of movements that we've built over the last decade, since the last time that Congress failed to do anything about climate change back in 2009. Part of it's been the ongoing educational efforts of Mother Nature, who keeps hitting us upside the head with the two-by-four. And partly, it's the fact that as renewable energy has gotten cheaper, it's gotten more and more popular. One of the very few things that you find consistently high levels of polling support

• 10:07Speaker 01

  for among Republicans, Democrats, and independents is more support for solar energy. People love solar panels. They may love them for different reasons. I think sometimes that conservatives think that with the solar panel on their house, their home is finally their castle, and they don't have to deal with anyone ever again. And I think liberals like the idea that the groovy power of the sun is connecting us all. But those kind of differences one can work with, and I think that there may be some room in our politics now. It won't be easy, because, as we should discuss, the fossil fuel industry has by no means

• 10:48Speaker 01

  given up and will continue to try and slow the assault on their business model. But there is an opening here.

• 10:55Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on that, because the impetus for this conversation was exploring how the climate reality, the climate decarbonization technology, climate legislation, and thus the climate movement are going to have to change in this new era, and change because a result of success, not because a result of failure. You wrote an essay for The New Yorker earlier this year where you argued that we are living through a really major transition point in how we address climate change and what needs to be done. Tell me a bit about that, that shift.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, what I said in The New Yorker was, we're at the point where we might well be able to end the 700,000-year habit of setting things on fire. Fire has been good for human beings. You know, we learned to cook food, which let us get bigger brains. We were able to migrate north and south away from the equator. The anthropologists even think that gathering around the campfire helped build the bonds that make us a social species. And, once we learned to burn coal and gas and oil with the Industrial Revolution, we produced modernity and the prosperity that came with it. But now, burning stuff

• 12:13Speaker 01

  has turned into a big problem. There's climate change, there's the direct health effects, the new data indicates that nine million people a year die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel, which isn't hard to believe if you've spent any time recently in Delhi or Shanghai. And, we have the problem exemplified by Putin, the way that fossil fuel and autocracy seem to be closely linked. The good news is, we don't need to be burning stuff anymore. In the last decade, engineers have brought down the price of renewable energy about 90%. The cheapest way to generate power on planet Earth is to point a sheet

• 12:55Speaker 01

  of glass at the sun. That's an extraordinary breakthrough. We could stop combustion, stop the spark in your spark plug, stop the fire that's burning in your basement to heat your home, stop the fire that most of us have in our kitchens to cook our food, and replace it with the fact that the good Lord hung a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles away in the sky and we know how to use it. We can capture its... Raise directly on photovoltaic panels. We can take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, creating the winds that turn those turbines. We now have the batteries to store that power when the sun goes down or the wind drops.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  So we're at a moment when we could make dramatic, rapid change. And boy, do we need to, because unlike every other political issue that we've almost ever faced, we have a timed test with climate change. I mean, we've been talking about, say, national health care as long as I've been alive. And to our great shame, we've never gone all the way there. Someday, doubtless, we'll join other industrialized countries in guaranteeing health care as a right. People will have died or gone bankrupt in the meantime, but it won't be harder to do it because we delayed when we finally get around to it. Climate change isn't like that. Once you've melted the Arctic,

• 14:21Speaker 01

  no one has a very good plan for how you freeze it back up again. And, you know, the scientists have told us that if we want to keep on track to the targets we set in Paris seven years ago, we've got to halve emissions by 2030, which by my watch is seven years and seven weeks away.

• 14:41Ezra Klein?

  So to signpost this conversation, one thing I want to draw out here are some of the tensions, the trade offs, the choices, the transitions that are going to face climate governance and climate thinking in the coming years. And I want to draw out one from that answer in particular, because there has been a tension between those who say the only way to handle climate change is to accept our limits as a species, to accept a future of, you might call it less or you might call it a kind of climate austerity, but you might just call it limits, you know, a smaller world. And those who say we can transcend those limits, we can decouple the technologically advanced,

• 15:26Ezra Klein?

  materially abundant lives we lead from setting things on fire in order to harness the energy to make the things we want. And one thing that I think can be missed in this conversation is that the the case for accepting limits was very, very, very strong for a very long time because we didn't know how to make cheap solar energy or cheap wind energy or advanced geothermal or other things. But that's changing a bit. And I'd be curious to hear your personal evolution on this. I mean, you wrote a book, one of your early books was about having fewer children in order to impose less stress on the environment. But I get the sense, reading you, that you've moved more towards this decoupling perspective. So tell me a bit about how you've seen this change in yourself

• 16:09Ezra Klein?

  and in the world around you in the past couple of decades.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So I've written a lot over the years about economic growth and about whether or not it's done all the things that it's told us it was going to do. And I have some real doubts about that. I wrote a book once called Deep Economy, and it was a real attempt to figure out whether the world that we're building, a world of infinite, constant growth, actually makes us particularly happy. And the evidence is not all that great. But the physics of climate change enforces a certain brute reality in one's set of solutions. And the timing question is the single biggest enforcer of that reality.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  We have to make very, very rapid change. And so changes in kind of basic human desires or even changes in the physical setup of our world around us come, if they come at all, more slowly. I think in 100 years, it's unlikely human beings will be amusing themselves by consuming immense amounts of stuff. I think we're likely to have moved beyond that. But in seven years, I doubt it. I think for the moment, we're stuck with things like the suburb where I grew up and the physical limits that it enforces on us, which means people driving, lots of people driving cars.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  So we better figure out how to make electric cars work, at least for now, and we better do it very quickly. So I think that we've been given a tremendous gift. It's not a free lunch. It comes with many costs that we can describe, but...

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Survival and demands that we move quickly. And here's the real, I think, kind of moral way to think about this. The survival that's most at risk at the moment is the survival of the people and places that have done the least to cause this problem. Those of us who have caused it by pouring carbon into the air for several generations need now to, at the very least, move very quickly to make sure that our lives, our institutions, our societies aren't making that problem still worse.

• 18:35Ezra Klein?

  Do you mind if I wander us down an alley on the metaphor of growth for a moment?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:42Ezra Klein?

  So I've been thinking a bit about this for a book project I'm doing and some of the work I've been doing. And I've been thinking about how much I hate the term growth. And in particular, how much I hate the metaphor of growing the pie. And the reason I dislike both of them is that they imply a sameness, but a morness, right? Growing the pie, right? If you grow a pie, if I have an apple pie, and now I have more apple pie. What I have is more apple pie, right? But the same pie. And the thing that we're describing with the term growth, which, you know, is a metaphor from the physical world. I mean, I have small children, they grow. But they are my children, but bigger.

• 19:27Ezra Klein?

  But growth, as we talk about it in the economy or over long periods of time, is actually about difference, not sameness. When we grow at a fast rate, what it means is the future is much more different than the past or the present than it would be otherwise. And I think it's important to this conversation because one of the questions about growth, what makes growth of certain kinds interesting here.

• 19:54Ezra Klein?

  Is exactly something you were saying a couple of minutes ago. Growth may not mean just more setting of things on fire, which is what it has meant for a very, very, very long time in human history. If we get the kind of growth, but much more to the point, the kind of change that many of us are hoping for. What you get is a future built on very different technologies with very different possibilities. Cars that work in different ways and heating systems that work in different ways and ways of moving people around the world that work in different ways. And I just think it gets very missed because there are versions of growth that are very destructive. And there are versions of what get called growth that are very productive.

• 20:37Ezra Klein?

  But really, what you're talking about is directions. You know, do you want to keep moving in the same direction? Or do you want to try to move in a different direction? And I think the whole language of growth has really obscured the question of direction.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  I think that's very smart. I mean, when you think about your kids, if they didn't grow at all next year, you'd take them to the doctor and ask why. But if your kids, I mean, my daughter's 29 now. If she grew six inches next year, I'd take her to the doctor too. You know, it's a bad metaphor in that way. And in certain ways, we can imagine growing or doing things differently in ways that allow us to shrink. So here's an example. And it's a number that really stuck in my mind when I figured it out about a year ago. So 40% of all the ship traffic in the world is simply carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth across the seas

• 21:33Speaker 01

  so that someone can burn it someplace. If we move to renewable energy, you don't need that. Now, look, you're going to have to ship a blade for your windmill. But once it gets to Kansas and is there spinning in the breeze, you won't need a new one for, you know, hopefully a quarter century. So that's a kind of visual example of what it might be like to live in a world that was changing in the direction that allowed us to use less. Now, there's no Free lunch here. You know, we're going to go have to mine lithium and cobalt to make these things happen, and we should figure out how to do that as well as we can and

• 22:13Speaker 01

  as humanely as we can. And there's no excuse not to do those things. But the difference is that at the moment, the stuff we mine, we immediately consume. If you mine lithium and make a solar panel with it, it catches the energy every day for the next 25 years when the sun rises above the horizon. That's very different from mining coal, which you set on fire and then have to go mine again the next day. That's the reason that this is so hopeful. It's also the reason the fossil fuel industry hates it so much and have fought so hard against it because their business model for 100 years has been making you write

• 22:56Speaker 01

  a check every time you need some more energy. And for them, the idea that the sun would deliver it for free is just the stupidest business model there ever was.

• 23:06Ezra Klein?

  I'd intended to come to this a bit later in our conversation, but since you brought it up, let me do it now. Whenever I talk on the show about decarbonization, I get a number of emails about the evils of lithium mining in particular, but cobalt mining would fit in there, etc. We talk about renewables, we talk about solar, we talk about wind. You mentioned pointing a plate of glass at the sun, but it does require these rare earth materials. It does require production chains. And there's a view, many hold, that the level of mining and resource extraction and production and land use necessary to build this decarbonized

• 23:46Ezra Klein?

  quote unquote clean energy future is simply another form of environmental destruction and human recklessness. You've looked at this quite closely. How do you answer that concern?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Well, it does come with some environmental destruction. Everything that humans do does. So the question is, does it come with less or does it come with more? Mark Jacobson at Stanford, who I think has been proven so far to be the most reliable calculator of these things, estimates that the total mining burden on a planet that ran on renewable energy would drop by about 80%. That's the direct reflection of the fact that when you mine for coal or drill for oil, you have to keep doing it over and over and over again because you consume it. So none of it's beautiful or pretty. No one's ever going to make, no matter what they do, a mine that's clean and attractive. And we should be careful about where we cite them and how we cite them.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And we should be especially careful about the human rights abuses that too often have accompanied mining of all kinds. But we also should understand that we are in an emergency and that when you're in an emergency, you act on the ways that you have to act. Nine million people a year die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That alone would give you lots and lots and lots of reason to take steps in another direction. Add to that the fact that climate change is the first truly existential risk that we've faced as a globe. If we don't get it right, the death toll is measured in numbers we can't even imagine.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  You know, the UN estimates that unchecked climate change on the kind of path we're on at the moment would produce a billion climate refugees or more by the middle or end of this century. Try to imagine that world. Try to imagine the instability, chaos, destruction of that kind of planet. And when you do, the incentives for moving quickly in the direction of sun and wind seem profound.

• 26:01Ezra Klein?

  This speaks to a tension, I would say, in the environmental movement, but I also think in a lot of just normal people's thinking on these issues when confronted with some of the more specific questions of how we decarbonize, which is the environmental movement, as I understand it, is very much formed on the idea of conservation, conservation of the ecology in which we live, the lands that we love and enjoy, the ecosystems as they exist. And we've also talked for some time about conservation of the climate, conservation of the climate that in this very, very narrow band has fostered all of human civilization.

• 26:41Ezra Klein?

  But as we've moved to this place where we have very cheap solar and wind power, and we could think about geothermal and nuclear, and we could talk about things like carbon capture, but as we move to this place where we can potentially power the civilization we have, and an even larger one than that, it seems to me these ideas are diverging. You can imagine a world where we conserve our climate nearly, right? We're not going to stay stable, but in a great world, 1.5 degrees, maybe more likely one, two-ish degrees.

• 27:16Ezra Klein?

  But we do that with quite a lot of building over and through the land that in other guises the environmental movement was built to conserve. So you have this tension between conserving the climate and conserving the spaces. How do you think about that?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Well, I confess that sometimes it makes me grumpy. I love my state of Vermont where I live, and I love the people in it, and I love the fact that they're environmentally attuned, which means that they love the landscape. But earlier this year, or late last year, the Public Utility Commission in Vermont turned down a solar farm solely on the grounds of aesthetics, that people didn't want to look at it. I don't think that that's okay anymore. In the world that we live in, in the kind of emergency we face, we need to have some change in that aesthetic. If you look at a wind turbine spinning on a hill,

• 28:22Speaker 01

  you have to be able to think there's something beautiful about it, that it's the breeze made visible, and that it's a sign that you're taking some kind of responsibility for your own energy. Part of this is just a kind of status quo bias. So, for instance, it's going to take a certain amount, not a huge amount, but a certain amount of farmland to put up solar panels and windmills. That's not ideal, perhaps, but think about what it's used for now. 60% of the cornfields in Iowa, some of the richest topsoil on the face of the earth, 60% of that corn is just being turned into gasoline at the moment.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  It's converted into ethanol and stuck in cars. With a tiny fraction of that land base, you could produce enough electricity through solar panels to provide the same mileage for electric cars. And when you do it, you're growing a crop electrons that we badly need instead of a crop corn that we actually have so much of that most of it gets turned either into gasoline or to high-fructose corn syrup or fed to cows. Not only that, in order to produce it, you have to pour nitrogen on those soils that washes into rivers and streams and produces big dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Looked at one way,

• 29:51Speaker 01

  a set of solar panels on some of that land is a kind of Sabbath for those places. It's not going to destroy the landscape. In fact, it's going to let it lie fallow for a little while, maybe a generation or two, until people have developed whatever's going to come next: small modular nuclear reactors or tidal power or whatever. But the thing that we have now to get us through this absolute bottleneck in human history is solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries to store their power. That's the stuff that we can build fast and cheaply. And it's the only stuff that we can build fast and cheaply and that will get things done at scale.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Now, I don't know whether we can do it quickly enough. We can talk about all the obstacles that stand in the way. And the number of analogues for when we've done stuff at this pace are fairly few and far between. I wrote a piece years ago, looking in some detail at exactly what America did in the two years before it entered and after it entered World War II, in order to ramp up industrial production of tanks and planes and things. That's really the only analog we've got to moving at the scale and the pace that we need to go. And so there's no guarantee that it's going to be done, especially since the fossil fuel industry will do what it can at every turn to stand in the way.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  But at least the passage of this Inflation Reduction Act this summer has given us some of the money that we need to work on it. And so now we'll find out whether execution and deployment are possible at that scale and that speed. My guess is that the limiting factors are going to be, A, whether we can overcome the fossil fuel industry's meddling, and B, whether we can build out above all the human capital that we need. I mean, the best estimate is it's going to take at least a million more electricians in the US. If you know a young person who wants to do something that's going to help the world and wants to make a good living at the same time, tell them to go become an electrician.

• 32:25Ezra Klein?

  To go back to the idea of there being directions, not just growth. If you look at growth between 1980 and 2000, and you look at growth between 2000 and 2020, there are differences in the numbers, but they're not dramatic. But if you look at the directions of what was happening in the energy systems, they are very, very, very dramatic. And what gives us a shot here is the kinds of technological advances we've seen. And as you say, specifically solar, wind, batteries. You've written quite a bit about this. Give me a sense of the scale of it and the cause of that rapid change.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The cause of the rapid change is what economists call a learning curve. And it's one of the most remarkable things that there is if you have a technology that gets on a learning curve. Our first solar panels came in the 1950s and they were built for satellites, the first generation of satellites. And so, of course, they were unbelievably expensive, tens of thousands of dollars a watt. But ever since then, and pretty steadily, engineers have been managing to bring down that cost. And it hasn't been one particular breakthrough that's done it.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  It's been the steady accretion of technological innovation, year after year after year after year. And at some point in the last four or five years, we passed the point on that curve where that energy became cheaper than the energy provided by fossil fuels. Because fossil fuels aren't on a curve like that. They were pretty cheap to begin with, but they haven't gotten cheaper. If anything, they get more expensive because now you have to go back further in the mine to find the coal. Now you have to drill down beneath the Gulf of Mexico to find the oil.

• 34:24Ezra Klein?

  I often hear this story told as the heroic efforts of engineers and technologists. And in some versions I hear, you even hear this as the heroic efforts of engineers and technologists pitted against a climate movement, which is at best focused on the wrong things like blocking pipelines, and at worst actively harmful, actively impeding technological progress.

• 34:51Ezra Klein?

  And I don't know, when I look at it, it always looks much more complex to me, given all the policies that got passed by the environmental movement, given the sort of cultural force that they managed to bring to climate change, which changed a lot of what people decided to spend their lives doing. But you've been reporting on the technology of this for years. You've been a major part of the climate movement on the activism side. I'd like to hear a little bit about your sense or your observations of the interactions between the two.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, let's just, for a minute, let's just talk about movements in the climate movement in general. At some level, it's completely irrational that we had to have one. I can remember when Jim Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, and the next year I wrote this, you know, the first book about all this. It wasn't like there was a, didn't feel like there was going to be the need for a climate movement. Everyone was in agreement that we were going to go to work. The Republican President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, said, "We will fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect." Pretty good line. We now know that the fossil fuel industry, whose

• 35:58Speaker 01

  scientists had informed them in great detail about what was going on with climate change, and whose executives had believed those scientists, Exxon, we now know, began building all its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was in the coming. In the offing, they decided to build across the industry this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for 30 years in this entirely sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real, a question that both sides knew the answer to from the start. It's just one of them was willing to lie. And that lie was powerful. It prevented serious action and policy for decades. And it took me a

• 36:43Speaker 01

  long time to figure out what was happening. I was a writer, and writers tend to think, I think, that if we win the argument, then that's what's essential, and that good action will follow. It took me too long to figure out that we had won the argument, but we were losing the fight, because the fight wasn't about data, nor reason, nor evidence. It was about money and power. And therefore, we had to build some power of our own. And that's when, you know, a lot of this movement building got underway, when more and more of us realized that. And we built it where we could.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  There was no way in 2009 or something, there was not a way to get good policy through Congress. We didn't even, the Senate wouldn't even take a vote on things like cap and trade because they knew it would lose. And so we built movements slowly and patiently, much too slowly for our taste. We did things like fight pipelines, build this fossil fuel divestment campaign that's become the largest sort of corporate campaign of its kind in history. I've been to jail on towards a dozen times. And every time, as I found myself in handcuffs, I've thought, this is incredibly stupid.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  This is not what we should have to do in order to get our leaders to take seriously questions of physics, of simple physics, about which there is robust agreement within the scientific community. But that's what we did have to do. So now we're at a point when the zeitgeist has shifted enough that there's public policy that's producing money that will continue to spur innovation and allow us to move and deploy more quickly. We're going to have to keep up the political fight as well because, I mean, to give you an example. Third Act, this group that we founded in the last year for people over 60 like me to sort of get them engaged in fights to save the climate and democracy.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  We're taking on the four big American banks, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, B of A, because they're the four biggest funders to the fossil fuel industry in the world. And they continue to pour money into these projects, vast amounts of money. And when they do, they lock us into a fossil fuel future far past the point where scientists think is safe. So we're going to continue that kind of advocacy, but we're also, people are fanning out across America to try and figure out how to speed up deployment, how to make this stuff really happen. So there are people who are hard at work, arguing with their local school boards about whether or not to deploy electric school buses.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  There are people at state public utility commissions all the time now urging them, imploring them to force the utilities to start making change in how they produce energy, on and on and on. So the movement necessarily shifts as conditions shift. But that movement, those people coming together, were what allowed us to get to the place where we are now in the time that we got here. So, you know, God bless them for it, and now we'll see if we can move fast enough. The question about pace is a scary one, Ezra. I mean, we wasted thirty years. Now we have to move incredibly fast. We may have wasted more than thirty years.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  You know, in my last book, which was sort of as close to a memoir as Oliver Wright, I was, did some reporting back on what seems to me the most important election of my lifetime, my first election I got to vote in, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. And Jimmy Carter, in his budget for the next year, if he'd been elected, had set aside money quite a bit to put America on the path to producing twenty percent of its energy from solar power by the year 2000. Had we done that, or anything like it, had we made that effort and gotten going then, there was no physical obstacle that stood in the way of progress, no miracle invention

• 41:04Speaker 01

  that hadn't happened yet, we would have been in an entirely different place now. We wouldn't have solved climate change, but we'd be right on the road to doing it. So there's just no way to divorce the need for political pressure from the ability to change.

• 41:23Ezra Klein?

  That brings up a pretty big transition that the climate movement is undergoing and will have to undergo, which is climate movement, like the environmental movement broadly, was built around blocking things. I mean, you go back to early environmental movement efforts, stop building over wetlands, stop destroying habitats for endangered species. If you go to the climate movement, it's stop building this pipeline, stop building this fossil fuel project. And now, all of a sudden, you have this dizzying inversion of what is needed, which is building and building and building and building, building at a pace and scale that we have not seen in generations, maybe arguably, we have not seen ever, the

• 42:06Ezra Klein?

  number of transmission lines, of solar panel arrays, of wind farms. Tell me a bit about the differences in organizations and tactics between stopping something from happening and helping to make something happen.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question that we don't entirely know the answer to yet and how it's going to look. But what people have done so far is try to stop a truly dangerous technology, fossil fuel combustion, and they've figured out lots and lots of ways to do that. Now, we have to figure out how to channel the demand for energy, which remains, into clean energy. And we have to do it, as I've said repeatedly now, because it scares me, over the constant efforts of the fossil fuel industry to slow that down. Look, they know that their business model isn't going to last forever. Seventy-five years from now, we're going to run the planet on sun and wind or some other clean energy because it's

• 43:09Speaker 01

  cheap. But if it takes us anything like seventy-five years to get there, the planet we run on sun and wind is going to be a broken planet. So our job is to make that transition happen as quickly as possible. And it's going to be hard. Now, it can't be done, I think, without real recognition of the fact that the fossil fuel industry...

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Took a particular toll on indigenous communities, on poor communities, on vulnerable communities. So we have to build this new one. The sacrifices that should come should not, again, land most heavily on those communities. And one of the good things about the Inflation Reduction Act is that it lays out more explicitly than before in public policy, a real effort to guide funding to those communities, to let them get some of the good things, the jobs and stuff that will come with this transition.

• 44:11Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask about something you mentioned a moment ago, which is something that frightens you. The ways in which fossil fuel companies still might or want to stand in the way of this building. I'm not saying that isn't true. In many cases, it is true, and they are fearsomely capable of wielding political power. But I also think that's not the whole truth. A lot of what stands in the way of the kinds of building we're going to need is just people. People who don't want a large solar array right next to them. People who don't want to see land they like turned into something they don't really care about. People who are afraid of what this kind of building might mean. People who don't want to see lithium mining.

• 44:55Ezra Klein?

  Sometimes it's folks organized, right? Organized into a specific community, a tribe, or an interest group, or, you know, the committee to save Beverly Hills, or whatever it might be. And we have different levels of sympathy, maybe, for different levels of those associations. But a lot of the work here is actually just city by city, county by county, place by place, going to these local planning board meetings and trying to neutralize

• 45:26Ezra Klein?

  Convince, buy off, whatever it might be, just neighbors who have a lot of power over what gets built. I mean, the reason housing doesn't get built in San Francisco is not because the fossil fuel companies won't allow us to put up apartment buildings. It's because people in San Francisco don't want a bunch more housing built here, or maybe they do, just not right where they are, not where it might affect their view. And when I ask about what the climate movement is going to have to become in order to deal with this, that's sort of what I'm getting at, too. I mean, there was a story, and they eventually backed down, but a local affiliate of the Sunrise Movement joined in arguing for a moratorium on solar development because, you know, they're just like, too much was

• 46:08Ezra Klein?

  being built in the, in the local forest. And so, I don't know, I think there's a pretty big difference between the urgency people feel about solving this problem, and then what happens when you say, well, part of the solution to this problem is going to happen down the block from you. And that's where it seems you really are going to need both good policy, but also a movement that's there to try to, to be the affirmative voice for this kind of building in this kind of emergency setting. But that does not seem to me to be what the movement is set up to do. And worse than that, I do think there are elements of the environmental movement that end up on the, on the other side. I mean, I think about the policy in Minneapolis to end single-family zoning, being sued and

• 46:53Ezra Klein?

  stopped for a period of time by the Audubon Society out there. So how, how do you think about that transition in, in tactics and also in, in thinking?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  First thing is, don't underestimate the effect of the fossil fuel industry on trying to build that kind of opposition. Some of the big think tanks funded by the fossil fuel industry are the ones rolling out these programs of rural resistance and setting up scoreboards and going around community to community, trying to encourage people to oppose these things, often with completely bogus arguments. Now, there may be limits to that effectiveness, and I think that there are ways that we can counter it. Among other things, the economic good that renewable energy does for community after community is a story that eventually gets told in a lot of places.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  And you'll notice, one of the reasons why the Republicans have not been as outspoken about renewable energy as you might expect is because there's a number of places, Kansas, Texas, Iowa, parts of Oklahoma, where this has become a real and serious economic force of its own. That'll grow over time. My guess is that one of the effects of the IRA will be to eventually produce enough lobbyists for solar and wind companies that they'll begin to have serious power on Capitol Hill. But yeah, you also have to be doing this place by place and town by town, and it's going to be hard.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  It's going to require people trying to develop a new sense of aesthetic, of what is beautiful. It's going to require the economics of it really working for local communities so that not all the value is captured by the out-of-state developer that's coming in to build the solar panel. If you look at places that have really succeeded at this, examples like Denmark, one of the things that they did very right was allow, indeed encourage, some of the investment and some of the return to come from and go to local communities, church organizations, so on and so forth.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  We're also going to see big and useful shifts in sort of how we deal with these technologies. The best place to put them, if we can, is up on rooftops. That's going to require, because it's more expensive to do than build arrays in fields, that's going to require lots of civic institutions figuring out how to aggregate demand. At the moment, it costs about $4 a watt to put it up on your roof as opposed to about a dollar eighty a watt or so to stick it out in a farmer's field. And the main reason for that is because the acquisition costs, as the marketers say, of finding customers willing to put it on their roof are expensive.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  You've got to pay a lot of guys to go door to door talking to people. But we can get around that if civic groups and things do much of the vetting and much of that consolidating. There's a group called Solar United Neighbors that's hard at work on doing just that. So yeah, there's plenty of work to be done, and it's good work that will result in lower costs for people and lower impact on the environment. And we're going to need to roll it out in all kinds of ways. And that's, I think, going to be one of the tasks of the next few years. My guess is that there's not going to be anytime soon huge efforts to get Congress to do more, pass another bill or anything.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  I think most people understand that it took 34 years to get the Inflation Reduction Act. Between the time that Jim Hansen testified in Congress and the time that Congress finally acted, that's a symbol of the dysfunction of our politics. And my guess is that that's not going to be the focus of environmentalist efforts. Focus, a lot of it's going to be around this deployment, around this execution. To the degree that there are big activist campaigns coming, I think they're going to be aimed less at politics than at finance to try and make sure that they're no longer funding fossil fuel expansion and that they are funding as much as is humanly possible

• 51:15Speaker 01

  the build out not just here but around the world of renewable energy. It does not do much good to solve this problem in America alone. We need to be able to do it everywhere. And that's going to require, among other things, lots of money. Now, that money's mostly going to be private capital seeking return. And that's okay, but we have to structure it in such a way that this stuff gets built and built at terms that are advantageous to the people who need it most.

• 52:06Ezra Klein?

  I want to draw out another of the core tensions here. And as I draw it out, I want to say really, really clearly that I don't think it has an easy answer. It's something that I've been working around a lot. And it's the most, to me, morally and politically complicated question in all of this, which is the tension between speed and voice. We talk a lot now when we're talking about housing, when we're talking about clean energy build out, when we're talking about the construction of all the different things we need to have a more just society about the ways in which, you know, local homeowners or community members will show up at these meetings that most people skip and say, hey, I don't want this and actually be able to stop it.

• 52:50Ezra Klein?

  And then we look at that multiplied out 100, 1,000 times and think, oh, something's really going wrong in our society. So that leads you then to this idea that, you know, maybe we have a little bit too much of this kind of non-representative voice. Maybe we need policies and processes that allow for more speed, for more building, for more discretion on the part of political leaders. But there's also real reasons we've moved to having so much of voice. We've moved to having so many opportunities for community input. They're maybe best utilized by more powerful communities, richer communities. Very, very hard to build new housing in Georgetown and Washington DC, for instance. But they also are there to protect weaker communities that have traditionally been steamrolled in these projects. How do you think about, how do you balance?

• 53:35Ezra Klein?

  How do you imagine the activism around somehow balancing the needs, like the moral need to have voice in a democracy? And the simultaneous moral need to be building the things so that the people of the future or the people who don't have the power to have voice now have a livable climate and world in which to flourish?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think you begin by trying to make sure that the burden doesn't fall on the people that the burden has always fallen upon in the past. And that's moral and practical. But I also think that you need to keep telling the story of why this change is required. Movement building of any kind is essentially another form of storytelling. Now, you're right. It's difficult because the benefit doesn't come immediately and specifically to you from making these changes. And the costs, when you perceive them as costs, I have to look at a solar panel, do come immediately to you.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  And I don't exactly know how one gets around that, except by continuing to try and persuade and convince people that this is change that's necessary in the greater good and in the interest, maybe above all, of their kids and grandkids. We've been doing this work now for a year at Third Act with older people, who are usually considered to be the most conservative members of our society. We're finding an enormous receptivity, training people by the thousands to go be, sit at Public Service Commission meetings and things like that.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  And the thing that unites people is this deep sense around legacy, around the fact that they have kids and grandkids, and they're scared about what their world is going to look like. Legacy seems like an abstract concept, but it's really not. It's the legacy is the world you leave behind for the people you love the most. And right now, that's a world that's going to be shabbier than the world that we found. And that's not a legacy people want. So trying to figure out, in the end, how to persuade people to think... Not as individuals all the time and only about their own immediate interest,

• 56:02Speaker 01

  but to think about the larger interest. Well, I mean, this is the task of almost all good politics. And it's why that Carter Reagan election seems so crucial to me. That was the moment when we, I think, abandoned for a while the idea of America as a group project and embarked instead on the idea that we were each supposed to maximize our own self-interest and that would produce a better future. It hasn't produced a better future. It's melted the Arctic. So now we need to figure out how to get past that. And I will say that I think that whatever the combination of Bernie Sanders and Joe

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Biden that we see reflected in things like the Inflation Reduction Act is an attempt to do that. That bill, and especially the larger Build Back Better bill that Manchin shrunk it down from, those aren't efforts to do Obama era policy or Clinton era policy. Those are efforts to do LBJ era policy, to really use the power of all of us collected together in the government to try and build a better society. And we're going to need to build on that if we can. It's fragile and it may not work. And I'm not telling you it's gonna work. I mean, you know, as I said before, the the name of the very first

• 57:27Speaker 01

  book that I wrote and that anybody wrote about climate change had the cheerful title, The End of Nature, because we may not make this happen in time, but we sure better try.

• 57:39Ezra Klein?

  I was interested to hear you a moment ago say that the Inflation Reduction Act was an amalgam of Biden and Sanders, because as you, I think, then noted, very much also an amalgam of Joe Manchin. And the IRA passed and then part of the deal that Manchin extracted was that this permitting reform bill that he was excited about would get attached to must pass legislation. And that bill had a couple of main provisions. It had a reduction in time for environmental reviews. It had a carve out for this big natural gas pipeline that he's been wanting to see happen. It had new powers for the regulatory authority that governs electrical transmission lines to

• 58:20Ezra Klein?

  be able to build more and practically build more interregionally and interstate. Huge fight happened over this. It ended up dying. I found this to be a very, very complicated question. There was good in that bill. I'd like to say the permitting reforms on transmission. It was bad in the bill, like the carve out for the pipeline. You opposed the bill. Tell me a little bit about your opposition to the bill and how it left you thinking about permitting reform.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  I opposed it mostly because of that carve out for the pipeline and for other efforts that were included in it to make more oil and gas expansion possible and to speed it up. Because the one thing we can't afford by any stretch of the imagination is more oil and gas infrastructure. And this was, by the way, just almost absurdly obnoxious bill in that regard. I mean, it literally instructed federal agencies how they were supposed to respond to complaints about, you know, what they were supposed to say in response to environmental complaints about this pipeline.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And then it assigned it to a particular court that Manchin figured would be friendly and a terrible precedent in those ways. So if we're going to do permitting reform, we should rationally do it in order to speed up the thing we need more of and not to speed up the thing we need less of. So we'll see what happens down the road, but that was as obnoxious a attempt as it's almost possible to imagine.

• 59:58Ezra Klein?

  So I knew a bunch of climate hawk people in the Senate who are supporting that bill, people like Ron Wyden, the Finance Chair, who's been a leader on a bunch of these issues, Brian Schatz from Hawaii. One of the points they made about it, to me and to others, is that when you looked at the set of projects that would have a little bit of faster path review and possibly to construction, again, putting aside the, as you say, quite obnoxious carve out for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Because so much more clean energy is being built right now than fossil fuel infrastructure, it would on net have been more of an accelerant. On the clean energy side, I think there were something like 30 projects that would have

• 1:00:39Ezra Klein?

  gotten a boost in this, and 25 of them, or maybe it's 31 projects actually, and 25 of them were clean energy or transmission lines, and then another five or six were fossil fuel. And so their argument for it was that net-net, there is so much more clean energy being constructed, that speeding up the path does more for clean energy by a lot than it does for fossil fuels. How do you think about that argument?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  I think it's probably unlikely. There are some specific examples, and transmission lines are the best one, that do require that kind of federal permitting and things to go quickly. And so it would be helpful there. But most of the opposition and most of the permits and stuff for clean energy things, because they're inherently smaller in scale and more localized, thank heaven, are at the state and local level. And that's where most of these battles are going to be fought. So I think the impact of it would have been not overwhelming on clean energy and would have, as again, locked in these big fossil fuel projects.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  So I understand completely why people in those communities were opposed to it, and their arguments seemed to me powerful. You know, if you build something like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, it has the same or more obnoxious effects on your local situation as building a transmission line or whatever else, but it also has this massive effect on the planet. And so those things combined to make people really opposed to it.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I hope that we can figure out, as I said, how to speed up clean energy rollout in every way. I don't think that the permitting reforms there are going to be the biggest part of that, but it'll be fine to do some permitting reforms around that if they speed up what we need instead of what we don't need. We're not at a point where we can take any more fossil fuel expansion. The International Energy Agency said last year that the new expansion of any fossil fuel projects had to come to an end then, 2021, that if you wanted to meet the targets that we would set in Paris, there just was no more room for any more oil and gas or coal.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  And I think they're right. I think that the physics of this is pretty clear.

• 1:03:09Ezra Klein?

  One thing that I've been surprised by, maybe a little bit disappointed by, is I can certainly see the case for opposing the mentioned permitting reforms. But you really do, among many, many other things you need, need permitting reforms or an idea of how to speed up permitting and how to give clean energy a faster pathway to construction. If you're going to get this bill out done at the speed it needs to get done at. And I've really not seen the climate movement or the clean energy movement come out and say, this is what we want. This is what the bill we would agree to looks like. I'm curious if you have ideas of what a bill like that should look like.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  I don't have any specific ideas about that bill, but I think it's a fair critique. You know, I was sitting down a couple of weeks ago with some of the people who are opposing a particular lithium mine up on a pass in Nevada because it's a sacred site for indigenous, the indigenous community, which, fair enough. I mean, these are people whose sacred sites have not been respected in any way for several hundred years, but I said to them, I think it would help this effort a lot if we could also work to identify the sites where we should mine lithium. It's not the job of the local tribe to do that, but it is the job of the environmental

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  groups that are working with them to block that mine, to suggest instead Where else we can find it. And happily, it turns out there are a dozen other places in Nevada alone where there's lithium to be found. And happily, it turns out that we're figuring out how to use the brine from the Salton Sea to concentrate lithium and produce it, and on and on and on. The technological learning curve helps a lot with this technology because we get better at it and it gets more efficient. But yeah, suggesting what we do instead is a reasonable question, I think, for environmentalists. A reasonable question for everyone.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  One of the ideas that's, I think, really wrong here is the idea that environmentalism represents some special interest that needs to, you know, answer all the time for everything. Environmental, I mean, most of us, me for instance, are all just volunteers in this work and we do it because we care about the planet we live on. And it's not a special interest in that way. It should be everybody's interest and everybody should be engaged in that work.

• 1:05:39Ezra Klein?

  I fully agree with that. And one particular reason I find these trade offs interesting. I've not figured out how to actually say this next part. I'm not sure if what I want to say is that the tensions facing the environmental movement are the same as the ones facing everyone, or if the climate movement has been so successful that basically not literally everyone, but a huge swath of the governance and business and cultural worlds are now actually part of the climate movement. You know, the decisions Gavin Newsom has to make, the decisions Gretchen Whitmer will have to make as governor who just won reelection for governor in Michigan, the decisions, basically

• 1:06:25Ezra Klein?

  anybody running anything, you know, including Republicans running cities and counties and states where there are going to be solar companies trying to take advantage of new tax credits and figuring out where to place their solar arrays. I mean, Texas produces quite a lot of renewable energy. And so there's this way in which you see a kind of sharp set of questions here that environmentalists have to answer. And I think it's important that they do because they are leaders in coming up with the ideas that then end up to some degree or another getting adopted across society. But I really want to affirm what you say, that this is not some special set of problems for the environmental community. They're just going to be grappling with them first.

• 1:07:08Ezra Klein?

  You know, and if they're not well grappled with, we will do them badly because this stuff is going to have to go somewhere. But that also brings up another thing that has been on my mind is attention and here again, attention within the community and then attention more broadly, which is just a, an interesting fight that I'm not sure people always recognize is happening between those who want to solve climate change or slow climate change is probably the more accurate way to put it, using only the energy sources that get called renewable, wind and solar and some other smaller things like that versus what sometimes gets called the all of the above strategy, which

• 1:07:47Ezra Klein?

  includes nuclear and geothermal and natural gas, carbon capture sequestration systems. And this is a kind of tough fight in California where I live, there has been this very, very big nuclear plant called Diablo Canyon and they had made a decision some number of years ago to begin shutting it down. But it provides about 20% of our clean electricity and we have very, very, very aggressive, ambitious clean energy goals. And shutting it down when it's operating, you know, fairly safely was a little bit of a crazy thing. And now it looks like they might be extending its life and but it's been a very big fight here. And part of that fight goes to a discomfort with things like nuclear. But at the same time, if we need to move so fast, maybe you need to have them or even

• 1:08:32Ezra Klein?

  have more of them. Can you talk a little bit about that attention and how you've started to think about it?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Sure. What I've been saying for some years now is that where we have nuclear power plants that can be operated safely, we should probably keep them open. And I don't think that's a rare position on the environmental movement. In fact, Greta Thunberg said the same thing a few weeks ago. And I think people are, for the most part, supportive of more money for research into doing things like small modular reactors, or even fusion or things. My sense is that, some anyway, of the environmental opposition to nuclear power has waned over the years, although it hasn't helped any to watch tank battles going on in the parking lots of nuclear reactors in Ukraine.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  A reminder that this is technology with real risks. At the moment, though, the biggest risk from nuclear power is the fact that it just costs a crazy amount of money to do it. And so if we decide we're going to build it instead of renewable energy, the opportunity cost in terms of cash is really large. And there are utilities trying to make that decision because they like the degree of control they have over centralized energy systems. So in North Carolina, for instance, the current plan for getting to net zero for the utility involves waiting until the 2030s, when they hope that there'll be working small modular

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  reactors that are cost-effective. We don't know if theirs will exist, we don't know what they will cost, and we certainly shouldn't be waiting in order to see, we should be deploying the stuff that we have now. But in general, I think people are eager to see what research and innovation can give us as we go down the road. And if geothermal power, or tidal power, or things prove out, then I think lots and lots of people will be enthusiastic about it. There are other things that are, fall deeply into the category of false solutions. And natural gas plants with carbon capture equipment are the perfect example.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Look, it's already cheaper to produce electricity from renewable sources than from burning gas.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  And when you add on the cost of a giant chemistry project to the top of the natural gas plant so that you can capture the CO2 from its smoke stream and pump it underground, that cost gets enormous. And that's why they're demanding that taxpayers bear that cost. It's a silly indulgence, the only point of which is to allow the utility and the fossil fuel industry can continue with their business model of setting stuff on fire. So as always, the devil is in the details here. But I do think that people that I know in the environmental movement are open to the possibilities of ongoing technological innovation. They just don't want it delayed while we have a tool

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  at hand right now that's affordable and effective.

• 1:11:47Ezra Klein?

  Let me try to offer the other side of that. So I had Jesse Jenkins from Princeton on the show recently, and we were talking about carbon capture, sequestration issues, and particularly about natural gas. And the way I understand the role it plays in the modeling that his and other teams have done is nobody really wants that as a permanent solution, right? It's not how you want to be powering energy 50 years from now. But particularly in a world where the build out to get to the numbers we want to hit has to happen at a rate that is implausible, given everything we've seen our country and frankly, other countries do in recent years, that it acts as not so much a false or real

• 1:12:29Ezra Klein?

  solution as a kind of hedge, as a way of buying time. If you can keep things that are currently operating, operating in a low carbon output, much lower than the otherwise would be, then that maybe gives you a couple more years to do the build out of these other energy solutions. And so in a world where, you know, we hope we can do it that fast, but I think, you know, that's a real place where one should reasonably have skepticism, that they end up playing an important bridge role.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Well, my guess is that it's a time and money suck that will slow things down. But in the case of natural gas, the other problem, and this is a place that has been particularly problematic for Democrats over the years on energy. You know, natural gas was always the solution that Democrats liked. It was a way to appease the fossil fuel industry and still reduce carbon emissions because natural gas produces about half as much carbon when you burn it as coal does to produce the same number of BTUs. The problem is, as always, that physics doesn't care about any of this.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  And it turned out that in the course of doing natural gas, we were producing huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane's a more potent heat-trapping gas than CO2, and its concentration is rising more quickly at the moment. So, natural gas that Democrats prefer, fossil fuel, turns out it's not really the other white meat. I don't know quite what the right metaphor is here, but it's not helpful. Getting off the practice of burning things is our job, and telling that story, since we've been talking a lot about storytelling, is, I think, important here.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  If we don't tell that story right, we're going to go in exactly the opposite direction. So, I think our job, as I say, is to tell the story of a rapid transition from setting stuff on fire here to using the fire that's up in the sky. And that's a powerful story, a powerful narrative that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:14:43Ezra Klein?

  I want to close here by looking forward into the next couple of years. I think that the animating goal of the climate movement, and also just people who are in politics who care about climate, has been getting big legislation passed.

• 1:15:00Ezra Klein?

  And maybe the Inflation Reduction Act combined with the bipartisan infrastructure bill and CHIPS, it's not as big as some of us would have hoped, but it is profound. And it's coming in a context where other countries are passing legislation and coming in a context where the cultural movement towards seeing climate as a problem, the number of smart, young people going into climate tech, the number of businesses, some of them are just greenwashing, but some of them take it more seriously, who are trying to align themselves on the right side of this issue is much higher. I think it can sometimes seem to people that the questions of politics are all, can you get the president elected that you want, and then can you pass a bill?

• 1:15:45Ezra Klein?

  But there's this whole space, as you've mentioned before, of implementation and deployment. So if you are a person listening to this, and, you know, we don't know, maybe Kevin McCarthy will be the next speaker, maybe not, it's still a little bit uncertain, but we're not going to have very big climate legislation in the next two years. What is your role? What could you do to help this move forward? If you have cared about doing this, what is next now that the bills are signed and the era of deployment and implementation has begun?

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  I think you're right in your analysis about what's going to happen in Congress going forward, not much. I think that if you care about making things happen fast, one, try and persuade the president to use his executive action in as many places as he can. Two, work hard on state and local governments to get them to move more quickly. State public utility commissions are a really good place to start because almost nobody pays any attention to them and they wield enormous power. And it's a place where a little bit of attention goes a long way. Three, step back from the political realm for a minute and look for the other

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  large lever here, the other lever big enough to matter. That one's not marked politics, it's marked money or finance. Pressure on the big banks and on the big asset managers and on the insurance companies to stop financing fossil fuel expansion remains a crucial, crucial tactic in helping us make this change at the speed that we need to make. So those are the places I would concentrate. Executive action, state and local action, pressure on the financial world.

• 1:17:33Ezra Klein?

  One person is one person. You've been involved in the climate movement, our delete350.org, there are other groups out there like Sunrise. If people want to join something, so they're part of a community that is engaging in collective action, you know, what do you, what do you suggest to them?

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Let me say, I think it's just the right impulse. The most important thing, I mean, look, I'm happy that I've got solar panels all over my roof, but I don't try to fool myself that that's mostly how we're going to do this. We can't make the math work one Tesla at a time, okay? The most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to make big changes in the basic political or economic ground rules. So if you're under 30, the Sunrise movement is a great place to start. If you're over 60, join us at Third Act. I think we're beginning to do really interesting work in bringing that generation, huge and

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  politically powerful, into line here to help. If you're in between, there's lots and lots of places that are in groups and movements that are doing all kinds of good work. Look around your local community, your local chapter of the Sierra Club or whatever it is, is probably engaged in all kinds of interesting fights. But yeah, the two technologies that came out of the 20th century that may still save us. One technology is the solar panel and the other technology is the big nonviolent social movement. It was invented by people on the margins, Gandhi, Dr. King, the suffragettes, a million other people whose names we don't know.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  And it's the way that the small and the many can stand up to the mighty and the few. You have to build those movements because otherwise vested interest and inertia will keep us from moving at the pace that we need to move.

• 1:19:33Ezra Klein?

  So something that movements have to do, that people have to do to remain influential is to change as the world changes. And so I want to close here before going to the books by asking you about the ways you've changed. I've heard you talk about an old fight in Vermont around closing a nuclear plant that you cheered on and feeling that if that fight came up today, you'd actually be on the other side of it. Tell me about how your sense of what is needed here has shifted as the structure of the problem has shifted.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  Sure. And as technology changes and things, you get different options and different possibilities. Truthfully, I think I'd probably err on the side of letting that, say, the nuclear power plant in Vermont stay open, in part because in its wake, Vermonters did not rally to make sure that we could replace it with solar power and wind power. Just the opposite, the state has had de facto moratorium on wind turbine development in all the years since. And that's not okay because it means that the burden falls on someone else, someone's mountain who's getting ripped apart for mountaintop coal mining, or as always, somebody in the rest of the world who's having to deal with the carbon that we're producing in this part

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  of the world. So yeah, as with all things, new, what is it? Lowell said, "New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth. They must upward still and onward, who would keep a breast of truth." But the North Star for me hasn't changed. Our job is to respond to the demands of physics. That's what makes this different from other political fights. And it's one of the reasons that it's hard sometimes, I think, for politicians to completely understand it because the normal course of political life involves lots of compromise. That's probably how it should be, you know?

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  You think that having a minimum wage is absurd liberal affectation. I think the minimum wage should be $30 an hour because that's what it really takes to raise a family. We meet in the middle at fifteen and come back to fight it out again in a few more years and whatever. That's how change necessarily works in a human society. But in this case, the basic frame of the problem is not between different human communities. Yes, there are battles between Republicans and Democrats, industry and environmentalists, the global South and the global North. But the basic fight is between human beings and physics. And that's not a fight we're gonna win. Physics is immature. It doesn't compromise. And so

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  we need to respect its limits, especially those of us who produce in our course of our lives and in the places where we live, lots and lots and lots of the carbon that's heating up the planet.

• 1:22:30Ezra Klein?

  Bill, thank you so much for the time today. It's such a pleasure. And I know you're coming to us from Egypt and at an odd time for you. But always our final question. What are three books that have influenced you you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Well, three recent ones. You've talked a good deal with my dear friend, Kim Stanley Robinson, and about his book Ministry for the Future, which is wonderful. But because I love New York City so much, my favorite of his books and my favorite book about, novel about climate change is a book called New York 2140, which couldn't be more fun and in a certain odd way, more cheerful. Speaking of cheerful, the sort of best writer about realistic hope, it seems to me, at the moment is Rebecca Solnit. And her most recent book was about one of my greatest literary heroes, George Orwell. But it's called Orwell's Roses,

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  and it was about his relationship with the natural world. And it's a beautiful, beautiful book. And good news for all of us, Wendell Berry has a brand new set of short stories tracing his community, the Port William membership, just out. It came out on election day. And I think the title is How It Went. So those are mine right now.

• 1:23:50Ezra Klein?

  Bill McKibben, thank you very much.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Ezra, thank you enormously.

• 1:24:06Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Clan Show is produced by Emma F. Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Raji Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. And special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Christina Sami-Luski.