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Sam Cedar Emma vigland on the majority report pleasure to welcome back to the program Bill McKibben now contributing writer at the New Yorker and founder of thirdact.org uh Bill uh welcome back to
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the program good to be with you as always salmon hello Emma hi Bill um so Bill uh you're up in Vermont right now uh we were just watching some footage of of Montpelier I
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I I don't think I've been up there really actually to be honest with you in like maybe 25 years uh but it is stunning to see um the city half underwater
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um like that and um just give us I mean you write about this in your in New Yorker uh piece as the um as you were on sort of high alert where you live uh for possible flooding
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it it feels like it it almost got to sort of like super catastrophe in Vermont and just barely missed but I I don't I don't I mean I I
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don't know how you parse that really I think it's pretty catastrophic uh you know this is the this is as dramatic damage as we saw with Hurricane Irene in 2011 and in both
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cases the same thing is going on the North Atlantic is super super hot uh absolute record temperatures and that just means the air can pick up huge
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amounts of water uh and it has and the water came streaming up the Hudson Valley and into Vermont the um you know Vermont places like it are somewhat more insulated from some of the effects of
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climate change than other parts of the world it's uh you know away from the ocean and it's a high enough latitude that it's we're not overheating but
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um it's a reminder that absolutely every place is deeply vulnerable to climate change Vermont's particular geography very steep uh mountains with narrow
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valleys in between is a recipe for tough flooding um and that's you know what's what's happened it's tragic but it's tragic everywhere around the world exactly the
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same thing is going on in Japan right now uh they've had the worst flooding they've ever observed across Southwestern Japan many people dead same thing going on in parts of China same
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thing go I mean the list is endless that's because we've had the seven hottest days that they've ever been recorded on this planet probably the seven hottest days in the last 125 000
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years the temperatures just gotten to a point where it's now there's so much energy in this system that it's just driving all kinds of things um you know you and I uh we have spoken
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obviously you've you there's been so many campaigns that you've been involved in um and uh uh for years and um I think you made this point in your piece that you know Joe Biden can say
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that he has done more uh as president to um um to deal with climate change than any president in the past but that's just a function of incredibly low bar um that has been set
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um and you know yesterday we played a clip of uh of Barack Obama when he was telling a story of talking to his daughter about you know what needs to be done with climate change and his his
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um he said we need to work harder um and so I mean I the do we need I mean well like where are we
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now do we need this this connection this relationship like our people you know one thing that it I think has occurred to me really I think has become really clear is that the issue is is not
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exclusively that the the climate's changing the issue is is that it maybe it's changed in the past but never we have built a civilization around the climate as we know it in every Locale uh
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and it's changing in such a way that it's going to make so many of these places so many places are going to be inhabitable just because they're just it's too hot but it's not inconceivable that you'll have places where you cannot
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live because every uh 16 months or every year it floods out in in a way that makes it uh just this is the wrong place to be we just chose the place based upon the climate that was and now it's not that
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way yes you know uh the book before last of mine opened with the long description of the fact that after many many many Millennia of expansion uh the sort of
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board on which we play the game of being human is now Contracting um shrinking there's going to be fewer places that humans can live fewer places they can grow food uh so on and so forth
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and that's going to be a um that would be very hard in any circumstance but the fact that it combines with this moment of Maximum political disintegration nihilism
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cynicism lack of solidarity whatever makes it uh all the harder that's really the reason one of the reasons why at third act where we organize old people like me over the age
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of 60. we're concentrating on democracy and on climate they seem uh they seem the twin crises that we face and the things that can't be solved in a vacuum
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well I I mean speaking about that relationship like I can understand why our lack of of of democracy and I and by this I mean it's in terms of not just from like an electoral standpoint but in
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terms of responsiveness uh and an ability to sort of represent the interests of the broadest amount of people uh limits our response our ability to respond as a society to
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climate change is there is it going the other way as well yeah um one of the things that rapid climate change is now rapidly producing are very
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large numbers of refugees having to leave their homes um and you all are conversant enough with how politics Works in our world at the moment to understand that the flow
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of immigrants and refugees is enough to discombobulate political systems in powerful ways I mean the Syrian Civil War in many ways a climate-fueled crisis
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of its own because it resulted in part from the deepest drought in what we once called the Fertile Crescent that put a million refugees headed towards Western Europe and that was
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enough to upend the politics of the entire continent you know uh in ways that are still playing out uh likewise you know uh how easy it is to demagogue the
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appearance of refugees on our border and what that does to politics is so that's just one example of how it works in the other direction too what um do you have a sense as you look
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at like the the implications all this that will have what at this point will have the most the sort of the greatest impact and and perhaps sort of like cause a policy
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response like as I see this stuff in Florida when you know the fifth major insurer uh is is planning to leave the state I guess they got to give 90 days notice or something for that effect um at one point like this is gonna be
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come not not just tangible like tangible in tangible twice over right I mean it's one thing to see you know that it's flooding but it's another all of a sudden to like see like oh the people
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who are betting on this stuff Have Decided this is a Bad Bet I think that for the whole combination of reasons the next 18 months is going to be the crucial period
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we're right at the beginning of an El Nino warming period in the Pacific that'll be enough to keep driving already record high temperatures ever higher for the next 18 months or so anyway
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and that'll produce violent chaos and havoc in our climate system we don't know exactly what forms it will take and where it exactly will manifest but we can count on the fact that it's
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going to and in ways that no human has ever seen before this coincides with the moment when we're also starting to finally see the playing out of the first
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sort of round of semi solutions to this crisis we're finally starting to see renewable energy uh at scale uh you know the thing that kept Texas together the last six weeks in this horrific Heat
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Wave kept the grid from crashing was the fact that they had a lot of solar on it so there's things that are going to be cross-cutting um I think that this will be the last
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big wake-up call that we get in a period that's still relevant to the outcome when we still are going to be able to do things that will really affect how high
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the temperature eventually gets so I think the politics of this have to be supercharged for the next 18 months and I don't know quite what forms that will take um but we're going to have to try and
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build movements on as massive scale as we can to pressure for as much quick change as we can because right at the moment we're clearly behind and getting a little further behind uh I I want to
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just uh dwell on that point because I think you know you wrote um in uh in that New Yorker piece that this is a hinge moment and and so the and and and certainly I feel like over the past couple months there's been
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more pieces where you read scientists saying uh this is this is actually playing out worse than we had thought or we have crossed some type of precipice
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and and and I mean what's the best metaphor for that because it feels to me like we're at you know it's there's a big boulder at the top of a hill and it's it's just getting to the point
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where it's being pushed that it rolls down the hill and there's nothing that's going to stop it if we if we don't keep it from that ledge yeah well that's a perfectly good metaphor and we're clearly right near that moment we don't
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know whether we've crossed over it yet the best science indicates that we may have you know the ipcc told us that if we cut emissions in half by 2030 we had some
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chance of keeping on the pathway that we set out at Paris just eight years ago 2030 by my watch is uh six years and five months away that doesn't give us a lot of time and that's why I say I think
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we're going to get one last big push here and some of that push is going to come from Mother Nature but we're going to have to respond to that and back it up with a big push from Civil Society in
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as many parts of the world as we can I'm curious about your best guess and I'm kind of channeling the shock Doctrine here for what some Industries
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are going to do to capitalize on the coming chaos the migration the insecurity for water and food as it comes what are some of the things that you could anticipate in terms of
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exploitation of the Fallout from the crises to come well I'm sure there'll be plenty of that and you know Naomi will and the rest of us will keep track as best we can but I think in the short run
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the real example of that is the fact that the fossil fuel industry is doing everything it can to kind of co-opt the effort to cut emissions so they got a lot of
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money stuck in the ira by Joe manchin for these you know Carbon sequestration schemes and things like that stuff that is is expensive and not particularly
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helpful and really meets their goal of slowing down what has to happen and what has to happen because it's what we have because it's what's affordable is solar
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panels wind turbines and batteries those are the Trinity of things that if applied at large enough scale might begin to shift the underlying dynamics
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of the planet's climate system I have no doubt Emma that as the you know things flood and whatever else there'll be all kinds of people figuring out how to take rotten advantage of it
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all but the the basic job remains transform our Energy System into it in ways that hopefully in the process will at least somewhat strengthen communities
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one of the good things about sun and wind is that they're available unlike coal and oil and gas everywhere and that's a um that's a help I mean it does feel like there is an
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understanding in that fossil fuel industry that um they're ultimately going to lose this battle and they're just basically squeezing every single dollar they can capture and stuff like
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that right so they can keep doing what they need in the store they can keep burning they've got you know but the latest I haven't checked the price of oil in the last couple weeks but
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in their reserves of fossil fuel this industry has some place between 50 and 100 trillion dollars worth of um hydrocarbons that they've cataloged that they have in deposits below the
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ground that they want to dig up and sell and if we take climate change seriously that 50 trillion dollars stays underground um that's the stakes that's why uh
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that's why they fight so hard that's why it's well worth purchasing political parties and so on um how much do you in in terms of like you
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know where we are at this point and and from a as a as a political matter and um and I guess getting back to that question of sort of democracy and how
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um our the failures of democracy um inhibit our ability to to stop that those interests how much of this ends up becoming and I feel like there's been there's always been I think a a
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significant amount of uh of of of writing to this effect um and I just read a piece in Jacobin about you know research that has shown you know that there is a real class war
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element to this I mean and it's it's obvious in the sense that as a uh as as the wealthiest country in the on the planet we have created far more uh
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uh climate change as it were I mean ultimately then uh those less wealthy countries that are going to pay the price even more so um but even within the context of of of
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these societies how much of of how much of a of a class war and an understanding of of this being a you know driven by the rich and wealthy interests um uh
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how much how helpful do you perceive that as as as an understanding or as as a strategy well I mean first place the grotesque inequalities of our society
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are probably the biggest reason why our democracy is so weak and unable to respond to the challenges like this that you would hope it would um and it's certainly true that rich
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people use more carbon than uh poor people on average it's also true that uh uh all Amer almost all Americans have figured out a ways to use large amounts of carbon compared to the rest of the
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world so the uh you're right to stick it in a global context too and understand that there are all kinds of inequities here them the
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the good news if there is good news is that um there are a lot of things a lot of technological answers at this point that are going to be helpful
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um um for everyone if we can get them deployed uh so say a heat pump which is the Necessary Technology for getting much more
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efficient Heating and Cooling it's also much better for the people who have them in their homes they're cheaper to operate you don't have the boom bust pricing cycle that you do for oil you know on and on and on um
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um you know electric vehicles are a great idea because of their help with the climate and e-bikes best of all but they're also useful because you know we nine million people a year on this
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planet die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel that's one death in five in this country it manifests in hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma a year and
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they're obviously concentrated in you know poor and vulnerable communities because that's who gets to live next to refineries and next to highways and so on and so forth so
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this is um this is the biggest single challenge that our civilizations have yet faced can we quickly
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change our ways of powering our lives in time to avert a pretty much existential catastrophe and we don't know the answer to that we know that left to its own
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devices the system won't go fast enough that inertia invested interest will keep it from responding nimbly we're going to have to try and find out is if we can Goose that system
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continue to Goose that system in in ever larger ways with ever more mass movement I you know that's what it takes the first Earth Day in 1970 saw 20
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million Americans in the street that was about 10 percent of the then population of the U.S I'd wager that if we could get 10 percent of the population of the U.S out in the street that would
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probably change the political Dynamic here enough to allow us to make considerably faster progress than we're making at the moment and the same around the world do I know how to get that many people out in the street I don't we
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helped organize what have been the biggest demonstrations yet about climate change you know 400 000 people in New York in 2014 we helped provide the a lot of the logistics work when there were
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millions of young people out around the world in September of 2019 on school strike and things but if you ask me that's what it's going to continue to
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take week because our system is not yet exerting anything like maximum effort City deal with this crisis Bill McKibben uh folks can check out
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thirdac.org for more information uh and um I really appreciate your time and um thank you for keeping uh uh eyes on this crisis and on everything else um on we
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go thanks Bill all right stay safe
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