Much of Maui has been decimated following one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history, wildfires are still ravaging Canada, ice in the arctic is melting rapidly, sea levels are rising and we’ve had the hottest day measured on our planet this year. There’s a lot happening as it relates to climate change. “It’s not the summer from hell, it’s the summer that sort of is hell,” says our guest this week. Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, educator, author and founder of Third Act, which has a mission to organize people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. He’s also a founder of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign. His 1989 book, “The End of Nature” is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. McKibben recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker titled, “To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower?,” which talks about the degrowth movement, which calls on countries to embrace zero or negative G.D.P. growth, making a comeback. He joins WITHpod to discuss the growth debates of the 70s vs. contemporary ones, parallels between protecting the planet and our democracy, why this moment is such an inflection point and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Bill McKibben: It seems to me that climate change is a kind of test of whether the big brain was a good adaptation or not. It can get us in a lot of trouble and now, we’ll find out if it can get us out of that trouble. And my guess is that the answer lies less in the size of the brain in the end than in the size of the heart it’s attached to.
This is going to be ultimately, there’s plenty of questions of self-interest and self-preservation, but there are also deep, deep questions about human solidarity that we’re going to answer one way or another in the next few years.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why is this Happening” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
So I talked about this on the program before. We have a house north of New York City in a sort of rural area. And I feel very lucky to have it, very privileged. And, you know, it’s in the woods. And one of the things that I’ve undertaken over the last few years is a project to try to take the emissions of the house and drive them down to zero.
So this has been a kind of iterative process. So the first thing we did was, and this is something that is kind of news you can use. I think I’ve talked about it before. And we hired like, weatherization folks to come and measure the efficiency of the house and try to get it so that it’s much more efficient.
It was actually incredibly inefficient. There is a lot of air escaping. We did what’s called blower door test to test for that. And you should know that like many states, particularly under the Inflation Reduction Act and then state incentives, you can do it for free in a lot of places.
So we did that. And then we put in an enormous solar array that captures a huge amount of carbon free energy. It’s an incredible, beautiful thing. I love the little app on my phone that tells me how much energy I’m capturing. It’s a marvel of technology to me. And then after that, we were still heating the home off of fossil fuels because of it was a, you know, natural gas heater.
We replaced that with geothermal. So that now uses the sort of core temperature, you know, hundreds of feet beneath the earth, runs it through a heat pump. It’s very efficient. It’s also on the grid, right? So that’s not using any fossil fuels.
So we’re getting it close to a net zero operation. So we had this dilemma, which is like, you know, real first world problems here and I’m fully aware of that as I tell this story. But I think it actually represents a kind of fundamental larger issue.
Next to the solar array is this beautiful, huge old white oak tree, stretches up into the air. It’s beautiful. I love to look at it. It is precariously close to falling on the solar array should it ever fall. And also, it casts a huge amount of shade on the solar array so that it’s stopping the solar array from achieving its maximum efficiency.
This presented a dilemma. What should we get rid of the tree? Now, this is a fascinating dilemma because at one level, you’re an environmentalist. Trees are taking carbon out of the air. Trees are beautiful. You want to preserve trees. But also, if the tree were to fall, which could happen at any moment because it’s like right there, it would take out the solar array.
And also over time, it was significantly degrading the amount of energy that that solar array could capture. What is the correct environmentalist thing to do? What’s the conscientious thing to do in this situation? At one level, cutting down a tree seems like the least environmentalist thing you can do.
But then in the end, I made the decision to cut it down. Maybe I made the wrong decision. I want to fully cop to maybe making the wrong decision. But the solar array is really important to me and preserving its capacity for a very long time. Like the way that I think about this house is that I want to be in this house for a long time. And I don’t want this house to be at all fossil fuel dependent.
We’re almost there now. But I want it to be independent of any fossil fuels and any carbon energy for a long time. So we cut down the tree. This dilemma represents the global dilemma of development in the climate age, and it’s this. In order to get to net zero, there’s a lot of stuff that’s gonna have to be built, because the stuff that we have doesn’t give us net zero.
The facilities and infrastructure we have is based off of fossil fuel economy. So we’re gonna have to put in like a lot more solar arrays, lots, on lots of different places. And there’s a lot of infrastructure that’s going to have to go with that. Hopefully, more people like home heating. Heating a home without fossil fuels is a non-trivial thing, particularly in cold places, the Midwest, the Northeast.
We’ve got heat pumps going. We’re going to have to put a lot more heat pumps in. Hopefully we’ll deploy more geothermal. There’s fun stuff happening along like central heating where like you have a whole subdivision that’s heated by a large electric powered boiler that then like moves the heat to the different homes, the way that like the grid works.
There’s all sorts of crazy stuff happening. Point being, you gotta build a lot of stuff. Building a lot of stuff though, is often in tension with the environment writ large (ph), right? Like the origins of the environmental movement often are conserving what’s there, conserving what’s natural, stopping the encroachments and the ceaseless depredations of industrial capitalism, the fact that you’re constantly building stuff and you’re building factories and you’re polluting.
And these twin impulses are in tension with each other. And those twin impulses, if you dig one level deeper, come down to a really, really deep and fundamental question, which is, what is the point of growth? Like when we think about growth as an economic phenomenon, is it possible to have growth and preserve the habitability of the planet?
For the first 200 years of the Industrial Revolution, it just has been the case that growth is powered by fossil fuel consumption. One leads to the other. One depends on the other. If you wanna grow, over time, the amount of fossil fuels consumed per unit of growth has diminished. So the two have sort of become increasingly unlinked.
The question is, can we unlink them all together? Or do we have to think about a climate future where we’re not growing as much? And these are deep, profound questions. They’re at the core of, I think, a lot of the ways that we think about the present and the future. They were the subject of a fantastic article that I love by one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite thinkers and activists, Bill McKibben.
Now, Bill McKibben is legendary, so he doesn’t really need my introduction. But he’s got a million different hats, environmentalist, an educator, an author. He wrote for “The New Yorker” for years. He’s written a bunch of books. He just wrote a piece about to save the planet, should we really be moving slower, in The New Yorker, that sort of wrestles with some of these issues?
He’s also founder of Third Act, which is a mission to organize people over the age of 60 for action on climate injustice, the founder of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, and someone who is, you know, at the forefront of the climate movement now going on decades. So it’s my very great pleasure to welcome Bill to the program.
Bill McKibben: Chris, it’s always a pleasure to get to be with you, and this is especially cool to get to do it from your house there.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Well, here’s the question. Let me start. Did I make the right decision when I cut down the tree?
Bill McKibben: Well, you’re right. It’s a very interesting illustration. So in the easiest possible terms, you know, that tree sequesters carbon. So you want to calculate that and make sure you’re not.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Bill McKibben: But it’s pretty clear now that cutting down a tree to allow more generation of solar energy replaces that carbon fast a year or two. So in that sense, it’s a decent trade-off. There are moments when I am tempted to say, oh, if only you’d listen to me when, you know, because I wrote the first book about climate change back in 1989, a book called “The End of Nature.”
Had we started working in 1989, as every scientist said we should, we wouldn’t be faced with quite this level of insane trade-offs —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: — that we now have to make. But we didn’t. We’ve poured more carbon into the atmosphere since 1989 than in all of human history before it. And as a result, we’re now in the summer of 2023, you know, it’s not the summer from hell, it’s the summer that sort of is hell.
We’ve had the hottest day measured on our planet and probably the hottest day ever for the last 125,000 years, the hottest week, the hottest month. The temperature in the North Atlantic is not just off the charts, it’s off the wall. The charts are tacked (ph), too.
As a result, we’re seeing epic and killer heat waves and fires. As we’re talking here today, they’re trying to get them under control in Maui, where 36 people at least are dead. But north of us in Canada, they’re not going to get the biggest fires in Canadian history under control until it snows in the fall.
What I’m trying to say is we’re in an emergency. And when you’re in emergency —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — then you do things that are different from what you would ordinarily do because you have to get out of that emergency.
If we don’t, if we allow the temperature to keep going up, if we don’t stop using fossil fuel, then we’re in fairly short order, not going to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to because we can’t absorb an endless amount of this kind of violent chaos and flux. We’ve raised the temperature about two degrees Fahrenheit so far.
But we’re on track to raise it five or six degrees Fahrenheit. And that won’t be three times as bad as what we’ve done. It’ll be worse than that because the damage goes up exponentially. We think now that every tenth of a degree Celsius moves another 140 million people out of the kind of prime human habitat zone on this planet.
So, that’s the context in which this discussion is being held. And in that context, then you start making all kinds of choices you wish you didn’t have to make. Do we have to go mine lithium and cobalt? Yeah, we probably do because we can’t build renewable energy without it.
That doesn’t mean it’s a great thing to be doing because at the moment, it’s an environmental and human rights problem in some places of a serious order. But when you mine lithium or cobalt, you know, you go put it in a device like a battery and there it lasts for a quarter century. When you mine coal and oil and gas, what do you do?
You set it on fire. And so you have to get some more the next day.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, incinerate it.
Bill McKibben: We think that 40 percent of all the ship traffic on the planet is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth. That gives you some idea of how much kind of dematerialization there can be as we move in this direction. So there’s nothing even close to a free lunch. but there are lunches that are gonna kill us. And that’s the one that we’re eating right now.
Chris Hayes: Let’s sort of go back and let’s talk about, well, there’s two ways I wanna sort of approach this. So one, I wanna talk about the growth debates of the ‘70s because one of the things you do is sort of come back around to them in the article you wrote. And it’s also, I’m very obsessed.
I don’t know why I have a weird intellectual fixation with the growth debates of the ‘70s and something called the Simon-Ehrlich bet and the club of Rome. Maybe you can sort of lay out —
Bill McKibben: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — what the sort of growth, degrowth debates of, particularly they got, you know, really what got intense in the ‘70s, what they were all about.
Bill McKibben: I wrote a book once called “Deep Economy” that was largely about this question. And it’s fascinating. Really, we hadn’t focused on growth at all as a kind of policy objective or anything until the early to mid-part of the 20th century. And it was really only after World War II that it became the driving obsession.
But it happened quickly. And before long, you had, you know, in the Kennedy-Nixon debates and things, I can make the economy grow twice as fast. You know, on and on and on. And so growth was perceived as an unalloyed good until, as you say, the rise of the environmental movement in the late 1960s, the first birthday in 1970. And then in 1972, I think, the publication of this small book —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Bill McKibben: — “Limits to Growth,” which turned out to be one of the two or three bestselling books of that decade. It was a report prepared by three researchers at MIT, one of whom, Donella Meadows, I came to know well and admire and really, really like.
And they used a computer, which in 1972 was still a kind of innovative thing to be doing. And they —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Bill McKibben: — programmed in a lot of parameters and punched the button. And what they said was, if we keep doing this, sometime in the second or third decade of the 21st century, we’re gonna run into deep ecological walls that we’re gonna crash against. Lots of people read it and liked it. But there was lots of pushback from the usual suspects against this.
And as the decade wore on, this is the decade that E.F. Schumacher published, “Small is Beautiful.” It’s the decade that Jimmy Carter went on TV wearing a sweater and telling us to turn down the thermostat. I think that really, the central debate of the 1970s, was which side of this are we going to come down on?
Amitai Etzioni, who was then working in the Carter White House, apparently came to him with a poll in 1978 that showed that a third of Americans were now anti-growth, a third were pro-growth, and a third didn’t know. And Etzioni said, the tension here is too great. This is going to be resolved one way or its other.
And it was with the election of 1980 and with Ronald Reagan’s declaration that it was morning in America again. And that’s basically where we’ve been for the last 40 years, back very much on this idea that growth was what we wanted. It’s, you know, what Clinton and Obama, as well as the Bushes and everybody else worked on.
And we’ve now reached the second, I guess third decade of this century. And what do you know, half the sea ice in the summer Arctic is melted. Canada is on fire. You know, people are running into the sea in Maui to escape the flames, hoping that somehow the coast guard will come save them from drowning, were basically where they told us we were going to be.
So, you know, two points for Gryffindor. I mean, they figured it out. Now the question is, what do we do? Because we’re in a strange paradoxical situation. You would think that the most obvious answer would be to try and bring everything to a screeching halt and stop growing and start reducing our size and things. But that seems politically unlikely in a short term, in a democracy or in an autocracy.
Look at Xi Jinping and the trouble that he suddenly finds himself in as youth unemployment hits 20 percent, you know? And in order to get out of the incredible mess climatically that we’re in, we have to build, as you say, like we haven’t built since the beginning of World War II. This time, not tanks and planes —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: –but solar panels and wind turbines. Which happily is possible because the engineers have dropped the price of renewable energy 90 percent in the last decade. That means we live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
So you’d say, let’s go hard in that direction. And I think we very much should. But if all we do is replace the fossil fuel that we’re burning now with solar panels, yes, it will reduce the carbon in the atmosphere. But it won’t get us out of this fundamental problem that these guys identified in 1972, which is that growth is, on many, many, many environmental counts, extremely difficult.
It’s not just the climate. I mean, we have 70 percent fewer wild animals on this planet than we did 50 years ago because we’ve taken out all the habitat. Our oceans are an unbelievable mess. And we’re a planet that’s 70 percent ocean.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: On and on and on. So I think probably that the best we might be able to do at this late date is build the hell out of solar panels and wind turbines. But as we do it, try to figure out some ways to use that last great burst of expansion to change things, i.e., if we’re building solar power, one of the beautiful things about it is there’s sun and wind everywhere. It’s not like coal and gas and oil, which are owned by MBS —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: — and Putin and the Koch brothers, you know. That’s great. But to really take advantage of that, it should be owned close to the community. That’s one of the reasons that Denmark, say, has gotten way ahead of everybody because they figured out how to do a lot of that. And then we should be looking at lots of other things.
Yes, an electric vehicle is better than an internal combustion engine car. But the electric vehicles and vehicles in general that we drive are largely ludicrous. They are, you know, endlessly larger than we need them to be. You know, I’m old enough —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — that I can remember when we did not own a whole fleet of semi-military vehicles with which to transport our bodies and our stuff. It worked fine. Think about the possibilities presented, say, by the e-bike. There’s an elegant piece of technology. It flattens out the hills so you needn’t be an athlete to ride a bike.
You don’t even have to get sweaty on the way to work. And it uses very little in the way of materials. And the city that embraces it, as, say, Paris is trying to do right now, ends up an infinitely nicer place than the one that’s still clogged with cars, say, Eric Adams, New York. So it’s a moment for working incredibly hard to build out the stuff that we have to have, and also a moment for thinking creatively about how to make societies work somewhat different.
And that, in another way, resembles wartime America of the last century. I mean, the only, you know, we built planes and tanks, but we also upended our social structure. Women were suddenly hard at work in factories across America.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: Which was something entirely new. In this case, think about things that we could do, like, say, the four-day work week. Juliet Schor at BC has done a big, big pilot project with the hundreds of companies around the world in the last two or three years, to demonstrate that A, your productivity is just as high, B, your employees are much happier, and C, they end up using significantly less carbon.
You know, things like that are possible. But there’s no use pretending that we don’t have to build out renewable energy fast. Because if we don’t, the temperature is going to get so high that, forget about, you know, thinking, sitting around thinking grand thoughts about restructuring society. All we’re going to be doing is pulling people out of forest fires and, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — trying to somehow block the rising sea.
Chris Hayes: And not to mention, I mean, there’s so much I want to say in response to that, but just on the last point, the geopolitical implications of the level of refugees and, I mean, we are seeing now, it is a routine thing for boatloads of migrants to drown in the Mediterranean Sea as a matter of course, as people flee to try to get to Europe.
We have saw blades installed between orange buoys deployed in the Rio Grande by the governor of Texas, there to slice up the desperate people who are fleeing to the U.S. across the Rio Grande. That is right now where the push factors of migration are being a whole bunch of things, including climate. We should be clear. Climate is one of the things driving it.
Bill McKibben: We now think, the UNHCR now thinks that climate and natural disaster caused by climate dramatically outpaces the war as a —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: — reason for migration.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and that’s now and that’s nothing. And what country’s politics, internal politics will look like and the stresses it will put on them.
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the sucker aid and ballast it will give to the worst kind of right-wing impulses.
Bill McKibben: Yes. We’ll think about it for a minute. I mean, a million people came out of Syria to Western Europe after the civil war, itself, by the way, largely triggered by climate change. They had the deepest drought in the history of what we used to call the Fertile Crescent and it moved hundreds of thousands of people off farms into Syrian cities that couldn’t deal with it.
That million people coming into Western Europe was enough to turn the politics of that continent upside down. You know, we’re now electing, you know, Mussolini fans to run Italy. And, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — a million or two people on our Southern border was probably the single biggest reason that we ended up with Donald Trump ransacking American democracy. The U.N. estimates that if we let climate go at a kind of business as usual pace, it’ll produce between 1 billion and 3 billion refugees before the century is out. So multiply what we’ve seen so far —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — by a thousand and then try to figure out what it does to our politics. On top of that, remember that most of the people fleeing climate disaster did nothing to cause it. You know, if you’re from Guatemala coming into Texas, you know, your carbon emissions are one-20th what a Texan’s carbon emissions are. And I mean, the iron law of climate change is the less you did to cause it, the sooner and the harder you get hit.
So, at some point, it’s just going to overwhelm our political systems, our moral systems, our everything systems. And that’s just one manifestation of this crisis.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: We can talk about food supply. We can talk about a dozen other things that are, you know, equally enormous. I mean, in the most basic terms, we are shrinking the board on which the human game is played. It’s considerably smaller now than it was when you or I were bore (ph), and it’s gonna get much smaller still.
There are vast swaths of the world that are already getting too hot for people to reliably be able to live in. And there are most of the world’s major cities perched on the edge of oceans which have begun to rise pretty dramatically.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: So, the job one, job two, job three for human civilization is to arrest the rise in temperature as soon as possible. And the only way to do that is to turn off fossil fuel. And in the world in which we live, in which people are going to continue to demand heat and air conditioning and mobility, I think the only way in the short run to do that is to build out this clean energy system.
Now, as I say, we’d be wise to build out that clean energy system in ways that were way less resource-intensive. But given the choice, we have to build it out. I mean, that’s the imperative here. And we’re in the emergency room. We’re not in the cosmetic surgeon’s office.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: We’re in the emergency room and the patient is running in unbelievable fever.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: You know, we should be freaking out.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So I want to just take a second to go back to the growth debates to resituate them —
Bill McKibben: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — because I also want to sort of give the growth side of them. I would sort of consider my politics, you know, a kind of pro-growth labor liberal, pro-growth social Democrat, you know, just to briefly make the case for growth, right? There’s basically zero economic growth among human societies from essentially Rome to the 1700 or 1800s.
You know, people died at 35. The vast majority of people are peasants living in pretty rough circumstances. There’s the burst of growth that comes with the combination of sort of industrial innovation at a technical level, the discovery of fossil fuel and the mass deployment thereof, and the creation of capitalism as a system, right? These come together.
Bill McKibben: Yeah. And they’re very closely linked.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: The way to think about it is that the adzed of fossil fuel upended everything because it gave everybody the equivalent of a hundred or a thousand servants that they didn’t have before.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: There’s hundreds of thousands of, or tens of thousands of man hours of labor in a barrel of oil. So it was completely seductive and it produced, I think on balance, all kinds of good for a long time. Growth is like that.
But, you know, I’m a father. If my daughter at age 12 had stopped growing, I would have taken her to the pediatrician and said —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: — something’s wrong. But if my daughter at age 30, as she is now, was growing eight inches every year, I’d take her to the doctor, too and say, this does not seem right somehow. So, you know, because something was good for a while, doesn’t mean that it’s good forever.
Our problem, I think deeply is that we’ve grown the world so unequally that there are now —
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s, yes.
Bill McKibben: — large parts of the world that are probably overdeveloped and large parts that are severely underdeveloped. And so part of the trick is figuring out how to —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — balance some of that going forward.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, one of the things, points I want to make is that, you’re right, depending on where you are in this growth curve, right, I think there is a diminishing returns to it.
I mean, one of the things, like, you know, growth in a country like Nigeria, which is also happening both very rapidly and at tremendous ecological costs and also in incredibly unequal fashion, right, but if you look at a place like China in which, you know, hundreds of millions of people brought out of poverty, like there are huge welfare gains to human life and human flourishing, and the things that personally I value as, again, a kind of secular liberal, to that kind of growth, you know.
Bill McKibben: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: People liberated from the grinding toil of the fields like —
Bill McKibben: Yes. And the good news is we can lock in most. I mean, we don’t have to worry about people dying at 35 because we learned about sanitation.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: And we learned about antibiotics. And we learned about vaccinations, though we’re now forgetting about them.
Chris Hates: Yes.
Bill McKibben: As long as we keep our minds together, we should be okay. And we have this substitute to provide a lot of energy. One way to think about it is, you know, for 700,000 years, human beings have been happily burning things on this planet. Darwin said that fire and language were the two things that set us apart. And it was all good.
You know, we learned to cook food, so we got the big brain. We could move north and south away from the equator. The anthropologists think that gathering around the campfire for a few eons was enough to kind of build the social bonds in a sort of protozoon, you know?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: And then we got to the industrial revolution. And burning, controlling the combustion of coal and gas and oil brought us modernity. But now, we’re at the point where that math has flipped. So there’s not only the climate crisis, which is utterly existential.
If we don’t solve it, then every other question around us is essentially moot. There’s also the fact that we don’t pay enough attention to that 9 million people a year on this planet die. That’s one death in five on our earth from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: Those particulates that get lodged in your lungs. If you’ve been —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Bill McKibben: — to Delhi or Shanghai, you’d get this in a minute. But it happens here, too. We have hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma every year. And it’s all, you know, we know who gets to live next to highways and refineries. So we know whose kids get asthma.
And third reason, as we’ve been reminded in the last couple of years, relying on a resource that only exists in a few places means that people who control those few places get way too much power and they’re likely to use it to, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Bill McKibben: — in this case, launch a land war in Europe in the 21st century. So the reasons for trying to move quickly off this seem to me larger than any other question we face as a society. The question becomes how to do it. And you’re right, because we’re used to a growth model, we can’t just immediately turn it off.
I mean, people who drive cars now and live in a suburban neighborhood are in all likelihood going to be driving cars and living in a suburban neighborhood five years from now and 10 years from now. Their kids may not be. Their kids may figure out that they want to live in Brooklyn —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: — and ride e-bikes for the, you know, or live in Paris or whatever.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: So there’s a real possibility for a different world that we build out, but we also get that possibility if we have any kind of world left at all. And if we don’t quickly, and that’s the thing about climate change that we forget, it’s the only real time test that our political world comes up against. Think about all the other things that we argue about in our political life.
I mean, we’ve been arguing about national health insurance for as long as I have been alive. And, you know, we’ve made small incremental steps in that direction. Sooner or later, we will get to the place that every other industrialized country in the world has gotten and regard health care as our right and that’ll be a good thing because people die and people go bankrupt in the meantime.
It won’t be harder to do it because we delayed. But once you’ve melted the Arctic, it’s not like someone has a great plan for how you freeze it back up again, you know. Once you’ve —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — incinerated half the forests in Canada, you know, we’re going through huge, huge one-way ratchet ecosystem changes now.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the last thing I would just say about the growth thing when you talk about, you know, locking in that, I mean, one of the things I’m obsessed with is the U.S., the fact that we, you know, in the last 20 years, life expectancies have declined and happiness has declined as growth has gone on, which really suggests to me there like really is a diminishing return situation. Europe has had lower growth and has not seen its happiness and its life expectancy decline.
So it’s like at a certain point when you get to a certain level, it’s a different tradeoff.
Bill McKibben: Let me make a suggestion about why that is because I think it’s interesting. And this is, as I say, I read a book about this one, so I’ve thought about it a lot. The data on happiness, which is a question pollsters have asked since the end of World War II, the number of Americans who said they were very satisfied with their lives peaked in the 1950s and have gone down since.
And if you think about it, that’s not so odd. What did we spend our money on more or, you know, most of it in the decades after the Second World War? Basically, our project was, let’s build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And what happens when you do that? You run into fewer people.
The average American has half as many close friends as they did in the 1950s. We’re socially evolved primates who, you know, it wasn’t too long ago that we were sitting on the floor of the savanna picking lice out of each other’s fur, you know? So it’s probably that, I think more than anything else, is the reason for the decoupling between growth past a certain point and human satisfaction.
But once you’re in that world, it’s hard to get out of. Among other things, as you can tell from looking around, we’ve lost some of our talent for being good neighbors. And I think that’s gonna be one of the most interesting things for the next, for the last 75 years, you really haven’t needed neighbors. I mean, if you had a credit card, you could get someone to deliver everything that you needed to your front porch.
The next 75 years aren’t going to be like that. I mean, I live in Vermont. We just went through two rounds of unbelievably epic flooding. And that requires everybody with a strong back to get out and help dig the mud out of their neighbors’ basements, you know, rescue them so they don’t die. That’s the kind of world we’re going to be living in now.
And that sounds grim, but it’s not entirely grim. I always remember Rebecca Solnit’s remarkable book, “Paradise Built in Hell,” which looks at all of these pieces of natural disasters and finds that in case after case, people really keep together in remarkable ways without the government particularly telling them what to do.
And people regarded it as some of the most meaningful and even happy times in their lives. So a lot’s gonna change. The question is, can we manage that change enough to keep literally our heads above water as we’re doing it?
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: When you talk about a lot’s gonna change, that’s where we get to, and I wanna zoom, now I’m gonna zoom back in, right? We’re talking about like zooming way out and zooming back in, which is —
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — okay. So back to my tree dilemma, now that we’ve gone through this context, right?
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So what’s one version up from the tree dilemma is, we wanna build a bunch of new power lines to move hydroelectric power from Quebec to the Northeast because they are generating a lot. They can actually sell us some of that carbon-free power because —
Bill McKibben: Yup.
Chris Hayes: — they don’t use all of it. We can buy it. And it will not create any more fossil fuels. The dam is already installed. So whatever ecological damage is done, that is in the past. We now have this access.
Are we going to do it? And there are people who are like, I don’t want you to build a bunch of power lines through this —
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — expanse.
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Or we’re going to put on offshore wind and you’re going to now look at wind turbines off the coast or et cetera. These are going to be increasingly fights. They’re already happening around exactly this nub of the issue.
Bill McKibben: Exactly right. I wrote a piece from Mother Jones earlier this year, just offering a few principles for kind of privileged —
Chris Hayes: Great piece.
Bill McKibben: — white, old guys to think about as they were deciding whether or not they wanted to join in these fights or not. Do you and Ocean City want to stop the construction of offshore wind? Which by the way, it’s gonna be 15 miles offshore. I mean, when you look at it, it’s gonna be like looking at your thumb held up to the horizon, you know?
Chris Hayes: Right. Good point, yes.
Bill McKibben: But the questions are many. For instance, yes, it’s a noble thing in a sense to protect your backyard, but not if it comes at the cost of destroying backyards for people all over the world, which is what’s happening here. I mean, Pakistan last year had a flood so bad that a third of the country was underwater.
Second question, yes, you’ve now bought a Tesla and put a solar panel on your roof, so you’re feeling, you know, better about things. But you need to look back and think about what you’ve spent your life doing. In my case, I’ve spent my life pouring carbon into the atmosphere.
I mean, the CO2 —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: — that came out of the back of my family’s maroon Plymouth Fury when I was getting my learner’s permit in 1974 is still up there in the atmosphere trapping heat.
Chris Hayes: It’s still there. Yes.
Bill McKibben: And so, you know, we have large debts to pay off. And one of the ways to pay off those debts is to develop a slightly different aesthetic. You know, I’ve come to think of wind turbines on the horizon as beautiful. I’ve devoutly wished and have worked to try and get one built at the top of the pass where I live in Vermont. I think that solar panels are beautiful, too in their way, partly because they’re a way of saying we’re taking some responsibility, and partly because they’re just sensible.
So for instance, where I live in Vermont, there’s a lot of people saying we don’t want to use farmland for solar panels. Farmland is great. Farmland is great. But what do we mostly grow on farms in this country? We mostly grow corn and most of it goes to make ethanol, 60 percent of the corn in Iowa, that’s the richest top soil on our planet —
Chris Hayes: So insane. So insane.
Bill McKibben: — -s just turned into ethanol.
Chris Hayes: Completely insane.
Bill McKibben: And you could get the same amount of automobile mileage by taking a twentieth of that land and putting up solar panels and connecting them to EVs. You know, in Vermont, we grow corn to feed cows to produce milk. But we have way more milk than we need. Everybody’s going broke doing it.
And corn stock is a kind of inefficient solar collector that you need to pour nitrogen on to make it grow. And that nitrogen washes into the rivers and the lakes and pollutes them badly. Instead, imagine a world where some of that land, not all, but some, is covered with solar panels, maybe for the next 25 or 30 years, until we do whatever we’re going to do, work out fusion reactors or whatever, then we can take it off. And Atlantis (ph), had a, what does the Bible say, a 25-year jubilee, a rest, you know.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: So, I do think that we’re capable of thinking more creatively than we are at the moment in many cases.
Chris Hayes: It’s so interesting you mentioned the word aesthetic, because that was actually the next place I was going to go because I think there’s a really fascinating aesthetic and generational aspect to this. And I think you’re the perfect person to talk to about this, partly because of the third ax thing. Everyone wants to be in the great battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. You want to be Jane Jacobs.
Robert Moses is the big authoritarian social engineer who wants to run the highway through this beautiful part of New York City. And Jane Jacobs is the activist and brilliant urban theorist who organized her neighbors to stop and to preserve Greenwich Village. Now that’s an urban version of this story, but there’s a million different stories of that in bucolic settings, in agricultural settings, in natural settings, right? You don’t want to be the Robert Moses in the story.
And that’s almost like, that’s a normative thing. It’s aesthetic, too. It’s very generational because I think your generation specifically thinks of it in these terms.
Bill McKibben: Well, I’ll tell you a story. I can remember a few years ago going over to Dartmouth to have a debate with a guy who was so, you know, sort of aging hippie, which is a group I very much like and Third Act is —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: — largely opposed to often things. But he was dead set against some wind turbines for all the, you know, obvious reasons. Don’t want to cut down a tree to do it. Don’t want to disrupt an ecosystem. What are all perfectly good reasons, but all small reasons compared to the scale of the damage that we’re doing.
So we had this debate. And I was being, you know, polite and things because I’m a polite guy. Then we had the question and answer period and one of these undergraduates walked up to the mic and he said to the other guy, he said, I just have one question. How did you get your head so far up your butt? And I remember thinking like, okay, there is a generational, I mean, look, if you’re 18 right now, the world looks scary as hell. I mean —
Chris Hayes: It sure does.
Bill McKibben: — it looks scary to me, but I’m going to be dead pretty soon, you know? So that’s some consolation.
Chris Hayes: That’s one way of putting.
Bill McKibben: If you’re 18 right now and you’re watching Hawaii burn up, you know, I mean, how does the future look to you? Great hope is that we can do, as I’ve said, exciting things. One of the things that really made me sad about what Joe Manchin did to the, whatever we call it now, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Build Back Better Act, the endlessly reduced Green New Deal, one of the things that made me really sad was that he took out Bernie’s call for $10 billion civilian climate core to get —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — young people all over the country out building the stuff that we need. And that would have been useful but more than that, it would have been beautiful and morale-boosting, and which is precisely why Joe Manchin took it out, you know. Last thing he wants is a bunch of empowered youth figuring out how to get his past coal.
Chris Hayes: You started this group called Third Act, which is specifically, I think focused on precisely this generational question. This generational question of —
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — the fact that this is a story about both the present but also the future and the irreversible decisions that we’re making now —
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and your generation. Tell me about the origins of it. I think it’s a really fascinating undertaking.
Bill McKibben: Sure. Sure. It actually has been the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done, I think. I’ve spent the last 20 years as a volunteer organizer. It’s not what I’m cut out to do. I’m a writer, but it’s what I ended up doing. And so we built 350.org and, you know, helped beat the Keystone pipeline and ran these vast divestment campaign that’s now at 40 trillion.
Most of that work was done with young people. I founded it with seven college students here at Middlebury. And we worked with young people all over the world. Most of the kids who brought us the Green New Deal, cut their teeth doing college divestment work. Varshini Prakash, who I know you’ve talked to, you know, I first met her when she was 17 and divesting UMass Ambers from fossil fuel.
And she’s one of the great heroines of the story. And then of course, there’s Greta organizing the even younger. And there are 10,000 Gretas around the world and I mean, I know an endless number of them and they’re fantastic. I heard one too many people say to me, oh, it’s up to the next generation to solve this problem.
That seemed A, ignoble, and B, it seemed highly impractical because for all their intelligence, energy, idealism, young people lack the structural power to make change on the scale we need in the time that we have. If you look around our society to see who has structural power, it’s people with hairlines like mine. There are, in the U.S. of A, 70 million people over the age of 60, 10,000 more every day, which I believe is more people that are born every day in this country.
Not only are there a lot of us —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — we punch above our weight because we all vote. There is no known way to stop old people from voting. And we ended up with most of the money. We’ve got 70 percent of the country’s financial resources. So, if you want to take on, you know, Wall Street or Washington or Albany or Sacramento, having older people is a huge help.
What we’ve done is figure out ways to line them up behind the young people who are doing such great work. And it’s been really, really fun. People said it would not work because the consensus idea is that people become more conservative as they age. I don’t know whether that was true at one point or not.
But I think it’s not true for this generation. If you’re in your 60s or 70s or 80s now, your first act was this period of extraordinary social, cultural, political transformation. You know, we have people working hard, include people like Heather Booth, who went down to register voters in Mississippi in 1963, and then founded the Jane Collective in 1965 to provide abortion access before Roe.
We have people like Sam Brown, who in his late teens or early 20s organized the Vietnam Moratorium Day, the single biggest of all the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. We have a lot of people like that, and we have a lot of people who’ve never done anything like this before. But they now are sensing, where young people sense that the future is dark and they want to do something about it.
Older people, I think, sense that their legacy is going to be dark. And legacy sounds —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — to someone your age, Chris, very abstract. But at a certain point, you begin to realize that your legacy —
Chris Hayes: Less so every day, Bill. I gotta be honest.
Bill McKibben: It’s what’s the world you leave behind to the people you love the most. And we’re gonna be the first generation to leave behind a suckier world than the one we were born into, which is not a good legacy. But that’s why people are turning out in huge numbers.
We’ve now got chapters in virtually every state. We organized this day of action against the big four big banks, City Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, that are the biggest funders to the fossil fuel industry in March. We had a hundred demonstrations in a hundred cities.
I was in Washington that day where we closed down the banks with mass sit-ins. But we’re too old to just sprawl on the concrete for hours on end. So we went to all the Goodwill stores and got hundreds of rocking chairs. And that’s what we shut down the banks with. The Times called it the rocking chair rebellion the next day, you know. So people are rising to the occasion.
We’re trying to protect the climate and the political climate, trying to protect democracy because they’re very linked together and they’re because they’re the things that seem to have gone most powerfully off the rails in the course of our lives. So, I don’t know whether we will succeed. You know, there are times and this summer has been one of them, when it feels like we’re very far behind here.
On the other hand, we have the possibilities presented by both new technology and new activism. So if we can bring those together, then perhaps we can shift the political climate in ways to allow much faster progress than we’re making now. Right now, we’re not going fast enough. The fossil fuel industry has figured out for the moment how to slow walk this transition. They’re doing a masterful job of it. We have to figure out how to overcome that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, the thing that I keep coming back to as a source of hope is that, you know, there’s a million different challenges for slowing, halting, then reversing the trajectory of climate change, right? First, you’ve got to slow down your carbon emissions, and you’ve got to stop carbon emissions.
And at a certain point, we’re gonna have to like, get them out of the air, right? We’re going to have, like —
Bill McKibben: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — because it’s already gone too far. We’re gonna have to like figure that technology out, too.
Bill McKibben: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That’s like several bridges to cross. But for a long time, there was always a political problem and a technical problem, right? And the two are always intertwined. They’re not like separable. But the one thing that does give me hope now is the progress on the technical front is inspiring and almost shocking to me just in the time that I’ve covered it. Like the fact that right now, this recording is being powered by the sun in the yard.
Now, that was available for decades. But the fact that that’s happening now.
Bill McKibben: No, the fact that it’s cheap now is what’s important. The cheapest way —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — to produce power on our planet is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is a profoundly new thing. I talked before about how we’ve spent 700,000 years burning things. We don’t need to anymore. We could —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — within a decade or two, end large-scale combustion on this planet and rely instead on the fact that the good Lord hung this ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: And we have the wit to make full use of it. It’s a possibility for a real sea change in what, how humans interact with the cosmos.
Chris Hayes: That’s such an important point. And to me, it’s utterly transformative and opens up this space that felt foreclosed to me 20 years ago. Because 20 years ago, you know, it was like, well, this is what we got. What do you want? What are people supposed to do? Like, and there was something to that, right?
Bill McKibben: It is worth remembering the reason that it took us this long to get here. In 1980, running for president, Jimmy Carter proposed putting enough money —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: — in the federal budget that the U.S. would be getting 20 percent of its power from solar energy by the year 2000. Had we done that, we would have been in an utterly different place. Instead, in the most important by far election of my lifetime, we elected Ronald Reagan, who tore down the solar panels on the roof of the White House.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Yeah.
Bill McKibben: And you know, that was that for a very long time.
Chris Hayes: You’ve done so many different things and you’ve moved in and through different intellectual milieus and you’ve been a writer and an activist and an organizer and an educator. Where does right now, when you talked about the transformations in the 1960s, you talked about the inflection point of the 1980s, like where does right now feel to you given the fact that you have a longer lens on all this than I do?
Bill McKibben: Well, I think actually, right now, the next 18 months feels like the key moment. Look, the —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — physicists have told us that if we want to have any chance of meeting those climate targets we set in Paris, which are none too aggressive, we’d need to cut emissions in half by 2030, which by my watch is six years —
Chris Hayes: Six years.
Bill McKibben: — and four months away. And that means that we’d have to basically do the work in the next couple of years. This coincides with this extraordinary El Nino now dawning on the planet that’s going to keep raising the temperature at least for the next 18 months. And we’re going to see things that we have never seen before. That’ll be tragic. It will be grim. And it will also be a test of our maturity as a species.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Bill McKibben: Can we take in that spectacle and say, okay, we have to do this? We have to do this in the same way that we had to fight fascism in Europe in the middle of the last century and we had to do it then. That’s the question. And I think we’ll find out. I think, right, not to put too fine a point on it, Chris, but it seems to me that climate change is a kind of test of whether the big brain was a good adaptation or not.
It can get us in a lot of trouble.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Bill McKibben: And now, we’ll find out if it can get us out of that trouble. And my guess is that the answer lies less in the size of the brain in the end than in the size of the heart it’s attached to. This is gonna be ultimately, there’s plenty of questions of self-interest and self-preservation, but there are also deep, deep questions about human solidarity that we’re going to answer one way or another in the next few years.
And it’s a horrible burden at some sense for all of everybody who’s alive now to deal with that, but it’s also a tremendous privilege to get to deal with that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Bill McKibben: — and to answer deeper questions than any human beings ever had to answer before about what our point is here on this planet.
Chris Hayes: Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, an educator, and an author. The article that I was talking about called “To Save the Planet Should We Reconsider Growth” is in “The New Yorker.” He is author of a bunch of different books. He also is the founder, as you heard, of Third Act, which is a mission to organize people over age of 60 for action on climate and justice. He’s also founder of 350.org. And I have to say, one of my great intellectual and moral heroes, so it’s a real honor to have you on the program.
Bill McKibben: Such a pleasure to get to talk always, Chris. And thank you for your good work. You’ve been working hard at this for a long time, and we’re grateful for it.
Chris Hayes: Thanks.
Once again, great thanks to Bill McKibben, a man that I’ve read and followed and admired for years. Awesome to have him on the podcast. I hope you found that as sort of motivating, embracing as I did. It’s so important to just constantly be checking back in with the major once in a lifetime and once in a human time civilizational challenge that we all face.
Would love to hear your thoughts. You can get in touch with us on the site formerly known as Twitter using the hashtag, #WITHpod. You can let us know what’s on your mind, send us questions, thoughts, and feedback to our e-mail address, withpod@gmail.com. We try to answer as many as we can and we’re gonna have an upcoming mailbag. So send them in for that.
You can also follow us on TikTok by searching for @withpod. You can follow me on Threads at @chrislhayes and Bluesky @chrislhayes as well, if you are on there. “Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?