David Remnick: I talked earlier in the show with the vice chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus, which is a group of representatives in Congress who are walking a very strange tightrope. They're acknowledging, on the one hand, that climate change is real, but they resist the idea that the federal government needs urgently to do something about it. In this hottest summer on record, the impacts are being felt all over the country. Rome still burns, and that may be why the Sierra Club, one of the oldest environmental groups in the country, is pivoting toward red states.

The Sierra Club is well known for trying to close coal-fired power plants, not a popular cause among Republicans, but the organization's new director, Ben Jealous, wants to reach across the aisle. Jealous was previously the leader of the N.A.A.C.P, and he's worked in other progressive groups. The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert reached him fittingly enough sitting outside in his garden on the Chesapeake Bay. She asked Ben Jealous about his shift from civil rights to the environment.

Ben Jealous: My last N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards in 2013, I was backstage with Louis Gossett Jr. The words he said to me rang in my ears from 2013 for the next decade till I came here to Sierra Club. It was simply, he said, "Ben, it doesn't matter who's in first class on a dead planet."

Elizabeth Kolbert: Yes, that sums it up. Can you talk a little bit about what you see as either the parallels or connections between civil rights and climate advocacy, or also the tensions? There can be tensions there, too.

Ben Jealous: My first order of business at the N.A.A.C.P was launching the N.A.A.C.P's Climate Justice program. It was being demanded by the children of the N.A.A.C.P, by the N.A.A.C.P Youth and College Division. For them, by about 20 points, it was their number one concern back in 2008. What they taught us is that it's the same thing. We would then release reports like our cold-blooded report that showed the impact of coal-fired power plants and the pollution they create and really killing Black folks in a number of places around the country, you get right down to it. I remember there was one disaster a few years later after a series of climate-related disasters and us responding and sending in volunteers to help and all of that, and it was on the Iowa River. I was like, "There are Black folks in Iowa, and guess where they live?

They live in the floodplains." That was the cheapest land. That's where people were pushed during segregation and times of greater racial hostility. This is ultimately, at the end of the day, the same struggle. You cannot solve climate change without dealing head-on with poverty, for instance. If you look at why an island gets deforested, why folks in a state like West Virginia used to vote to blow up entire mountaintops, it all comes back to poverty. Why does an African country decide to cut down an ancient rainforest for oil exploration? Poverty. If you look at the heart of the fight of the N.A.A.C.P., we've always recognized that upstream of racism is greed and a system that really produces poverty like none else.

Elizabeth Kolbert: That does bring me to my next question because there's been a lot of soul-searching in recent years among environmentalists, among environmental groups, and certainly at the Sierra Club that the environmental movement is predominantly white and affluent. Do you think that perception is true, and if you do think it's true, how do you change that situation? If you don't think it's true, how do you change that perception?

Ben Jealous: The issue really has been that the organizations have been led almost exclusively by white folks historically. That's been changing rapidly. Sierra Club really has led the way in that. When I was the youngest president of the N.A.A.C.P., Sierra Club was led by a man named Aaron Mair who was the club president, and he was the first Black club president. Today, our club president is Asian American. Our treasurer is Native American. These are the national officers of the Sierra Club. We're very a mixed-up bunch. We look like the country.

It's positive because we've have to build uncomfortably large coalitions if we're going to win. It also honestly means we ought to be bigger than the Democratic party. We are in the process of hiring state directors in the half of the states that we've never had them. These are chapter directors or chapters that represent entire states. Those states almost to a one are all red states. They're the two-thirds of red states where we've never had any professional CEO for the chapter. Why is that so urgent? We estimate that 87% of large-scale renewable projects are going to be happening in red states.

Elizabeth Kolbert: I'm wondering where these potential allies are, where you see potential allies that can form these coalitions?

Ben Jealous: Sure. We have old Republicans in the club, and these are folks they're like Tom Kean, who used to be the governor of New Jersey, who's a great conservationist. They're like Mike Simpson, the Republican congressman up in Idaho who's on fire to get down the dams on the Columbia River and on the Snake River so that the snake brings salmon into Idaho again.

Elizabeth Kolbert: If we're relying on old-school conservationist Republicans, it seems like a smaller and smaller group these days.

Ben Jealous: It's not that you depend on them. It's an approach to organize. It's saying, "If you strongly agree with us on any one thing, we need you in the tent." There's a lot of, maybe not Mike Simpsons in office with the Congressional Republicans, but there's a lot of them who live in Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. We need them in the coalition, too. The reality is that, and it may not be politic or may make some Democrats who, say, voted for NAFTA 30 years ago, uncomfortable, but for the rest of America where 63,000 factories have shut down since NAFTA was passed. NAFTA's not a good word. It destroyed ways of our lives and it opened up entire communities to surging drug addiction. It sent factories to Mexico and ultimately even more to China that are polluting the environment at a rapid rate because these are countries that don't enforce the environmental regulations that they have, unlike those factories were enforced on in the US.

What the Inflation Reduction Act is really, this is our anti-NAFTA moment. This is us opening factories again. There's two solar panel factories going up in West Virginia. There's a big one going up in Georgia. They're even going into the jurisdictions where the politicians did everything they could to stop that bill. What that means for local people, it means jobs, it means good-paying jobs, it means jobs where you get to take pride in having made it and made it with your hands and made it well again. What changes people's vote is jobs. What changes people's vote is healthcare.

The good news for the environment is that the biggest, boldest effort we've seen in this country to change our trajectory when it comes to whether the United States will lead the world in helping to save it or lead the world in ultimately destroying it for humanity, all of that's being driven by the biggest invest in growing American industry that we've seen in most of our lifetimes. There is a real connection between saving the environment and creating good jobs, opening factories. We've got to link those things in voters' minds. I'd say that we haven't done as good of a job as we could.

Elizabeth Kolbert: You and I are speaking at a moment when a lot of the world, I was just reading a headline that it's winter in Buenos Aires and they're having temperatures 30 degrees above normal. We have had a record-breaking heat wave in the American Southwest, water temperatures off Florida-

Ben Jealous: 100 degrees.

Elizabeth Kolbert: -are off the charts. The coral reefs are all dying. Do you see attitudes on the ground changing in some of those sweltering red states?

Ben Jealous: Yes and no. If you look at younger voters, yes. Young people get it. There's a lot of young Republicans who believe the scientists when it comes to climate change. If you look at older voters, it's much more of a mixed bag. There's been very effective disinformation funded by the oil and gas industry, just straight-up lies. They've created a culture war over what kind of stove do you own. We got folks bamboozled that it's offshore wind that's killing whales and not shipping lane traffic. Then you have companies like Toyota. You can't go to a Sierra Club meeting where like half the vehicles aren't Toyota Priuses. Toyota has become the worst. They went from the fuel efficiency leaders to the fuel efficiency laggard, and now they are pushing to attack policies designed to help accelerate electric vehicles because the company that used to lead the world in fuel efficiency is now gone exactly in the wrong direction. We have a weird moment where oil and gas sees this as an existential moment for them. Of all the species that are threatened, fat cat oil lobbyists have the most money. [laughs] They're a tough beast to fight, and that's who we're really focused on fighting.

Elizabeth Kolbert: A lot of environmentalists I know have that really despair about the impact of corporate money on our political system. Some will and have gone so far as to say that the fossil fuel industry has bought itself a political party. I wonder how does a group like the Sierra Club fight that, fight the power of big money in politics?

Ben Jealous: Part of it is that we have to be conscious about how we talk. We suffered a massive defeat when the president put Willow online up in Alaska and opened up very sacred part of the Arctic for additional oil exploration and extraction. It would be the equivalent of millions of cars, gas-guzzling cars being put on the road, or 75 new coal-fired power plants. I had our team. I was just coming in the door at Sierra Club, and I had our team like, "Let's look at our talking points. Let's look at their talking points."

Their talking points were, "This is about energy independence and keeping costs low." By the way, neither one of those is actually true. Could get into that separately, but good talking points. Our talking points really resonated if you had a master's degree and you were already an environmentalist. We've got to talk to voters about what this means for them. Meet them where they are and then lead them towards us. If we start with where we are, they tune out.

Sometimes, they even get scared. I'll give you another example. We're preparing for COP and we'll be headed back over there. We've got our own goals to help this country meet its 30x30 goals. I was talking to a friend who's a fisherman. I grew up in an old fishing village in Northern California. He said, "I went on your website and I saw your 30x30 land preservation goals. It just scares me. It's just like people should be able to use the woods wherever they want. It's a place of freedom, da da da da."

I said, "What if I just told you that all we're trying to do is double the size of the National Park system?" He said, "Oh, well, I love that. I love Yosemite." Well, so you talk to a voter, let's talk about doubling the size of the National Park system. They know the good parks bring to their lives. They know why they love them. If a byproduct of that is that we preserve more carbon sinks and we meet our 30x30 land preservation goals for the United States, wonderful. They really have no quarrel with that.

As a movement, we have to recognize that the populist campaign on the other side is fueled by lies, it's fueled by disinformation, but they're doing one thing right. They're talking to people where they are, and that if we're going to beat them, we have to talk to people where they are, too. For environmentalists, there's a real comfort to talk in a way that reflects our university education. For us to revert to the comfort of talking to politicians who we know completely agree with us. When we need to be spending more energy talking in a way that everybody can understand.

Elizabeth Kolbert: You mentioned the Biden administration's Willow decision to open up a big tract in Alaska to oil drilling. I'm wondering, let's talk a little bit about the president whom this Sierra Club has endorsed for re-election. That doesn't mean we can't be critical. If you had to give the Biden administration a grade on environmental issues, what grade would you give him?

Ben Jealous: Probably give him an A minus. What the president has done as far as accelerating the production of technologies and the investment. The Inflation Reduction Act, it's the closest thing to a Marshall Plan for the United States that we've seen. It's a massive investment in rebuilding American industry and doing it in a way that accelerates a green future, puts us on the cutting edge as a country, but also makes the day when the all-electric F-150, for example, is being produced at levels that meet the incredible demand for the truck, and therefore the prices are reasonable.

On conservation, he gets more of a B plus. He average that out, probably hits about an A minus. On conservation, again, big courageous stands like Bears Ears and Bristol Bay, but also he blinked on Willow. Unfortunately, when you blink on a project in Alaska, it's a big deal.

Elizabeth Kolbert: What specific goals would you like to see the Biden administration achieve by the end of this first term? How's that? Is there any hope of getting anything more done with the current house?

Ben Jealous: Our big fear right now is that the looming end-of-year budget battle. The moment when the Republicans, once again, threaten to force our country into default, will be used by them to try to slash and burn the Inflation Reduction Act, and really undermine the good that it's doing across the country. It's ironic because dozens of them have already seen jobs significantly increase in their districts because of a bill they didn't vote for and they're still trying to kill.

Elizabeth Kolbert: With climate policy, there always seems to be this huge gap between what's politically possible and what we are told and know really in our bones, I guess, is fundamentally necessary. Is there any way to fill that gap?

Ben Jealous: Yes. The way you do it is good organizing. We've got to talk to them about the things that we know are important to them and then show them how that connects to what the science and the urgency that flows from that science is telling us. The hardest things for me in my daily life is I've got an 11-year-old boy who wonders openly about whether he should have kids, because he sees the headlines, and he does the math, and he respects the science.

I live here in a bird sanctuary in the Chesapeake Bay, where my son once complained that bald eagles are like pigeons. [chuckles] What he doesn't know is that when I was a kid, we feared the extinction of the bald eagle. We, as a movement, were able to explain to the American people why DDT was nothing they wanted anything to do with, even though farmers had been using it for a long time.

We were able to stop the extinction of the bald eagle. My hope is that his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren will have no idea that he feared the extinction of humanity, long before his dad led the Sierra Club, just by listening to the news himself.

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David Remnick: Ben Jealous became executive director of the Sierra Club in January. He spoke with the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of Under a White Sky and other books on climate change. You can find Kolbert's reporting on the environment and other subjects at newyorker.com.

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