Title: A Lifetime of Work on Climate Change

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, the journalist and climate activist, Bill McKibben. The climate journalism group Covering Climate Now announced this morning that they're giving McKibben their first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award. He also has a new book about solar energy called Here Comes the Sun. Some of you know Bill McKibben's work and may know he's been a New Yorker staff writer. He's written influential books beginning with The End of Nature in 1989 that has been credited with helping launch the modern climate movement. He's been at Middlebury College in Vermont for around 25 years, holding the title of distinguished scholar.

He founded the climate activism groups 350.org and a more recent one called Third Act for seniors who want to be involved in the climate movement. In giving McKibben their Lifetime Achievement Award, Covering Climate Now says they also "hope to prompt a reexamination of the role of advocacy in journalism at this pivotal moment in American history." With all of that as prelude, Bill McKibben, thanks for joining us today, and welcome back to WNYC.

Bill McKibben: To be with you as always, friend.

Brian Lehrer: Can I jump right in on that question of advocacy in journalism? How much do you consider yourself an advocate? How much do you see yourself as a journalist? Do you ever experience a conflict or a tension between those two roles?

Bill McKibben: I couldn't go be the kind of beat journalist covering climate change at The New York Times, I guess, because I have a clear interest, I have clear hope in the outcome here. I really want us not to overheat the planet. Truthfully, that's been the case back since I wrote The End of Nature in my 20s back in the 1980s. Halfway through that book, it was clear to me that I wasn't objective in the sense that I cared about the outcome, but I was as objective as I've always been in my life as a journalist in telling the truth. I've continued to do that in an awful lot of different places.

Someone told me the other day that I'd written more words about climate change than anybody else in the history of the English language. Anyway, if that's true, given the temperature of the planet, I may be the least successful writer of all time, but I do think I've stayed true to my calling of trying to tell people what the heck is going on.

Brian Lehrer: Your answer does raise the question or the thought that being objective is not necessarily the same as being neutral. You can be looking at something objectively and, based on the evidence, come to a conclusion, which is part of what you're saying, but it does raise a question of trust for some people. Pure journalism, like pure science, will always cite the uncertainties and shades of gray, and the best arguments against drawing a particular conclusion where there are competing interests or complexities. Do you feel like you've done that in your own writing about climate change?

Bill McKibben: I've done my best. This new book of mine does its best to raise and answer each of the questions about solar energy as they appear. I think it's pretty successful in that regard. It's not good journalism if you're not acknowledging what's going on, because those are the questions that rise in readers' minds. If you don't answer them, if you don't address them, then people won't be able to trust what you're doing.

Brian Lehrer: All right, let's talk about some of the work of your life in the context of this advocacy journalism Lifetime Achievement Award from Covering Climate Now. Let's start at the beginning. For the various times you've been on the show, I don't think I've ever asked you where did you grow up and how did you first get interested in science or journalism, or politics?

Bill McKibben: I grew up mostly in the suburbs of Boston, and my father was a newspaperman. By the age of 13 or 14, I was making money writing for newspapers. Not very much money. I covered high school sports for 25 cents a column inch, which may explain why I started writing long at some point, I guess. By the time I got out of college, really, since I'd worked on the newspaper around the clock while I was in school, I didn't have many other things I knew how to do. Happily, The New Yorker asked me to come to write The Talk Of The Town column in the early 1980s under William Shawn.

When I was 21, that's where I ended up and spent the next five years very happily doing that, but while I was in New York doing that and living at the corner of Bleeker and Broadway in a sublet apartment, I wrote a long piece about where everything in my apartment came from. I followed the-- I was down in Brazil because ConEd was getting oil from there, and I was up in the Arctic because they were buying electric power from the James Bay, Hudson Bay dams. I was in the Grand Canyon because they were getting uranium for Indian Point from there, and I was out with the garbage barges and along the magnificent New York City water supply system, and on and on.

That was a long piece in The New Yorker, but in the course of doing it, I think what I really realized in a way that I hadn't before was the physicalness of the world that we live in. I grew up in a suburb of Boston, which is a suburb is a kind of way for hiding the workings of the machinery around you. Where does the water come from? Who knows? It comes from the tap. By the time I was done on that piece, I realized that even a place like Manhattan, that seems like it can mint money out of thin air, is exquisitely dependent on the continued safe operation of the planet's physical systems.

I think that set me up for reading the earliest climate science that was just starting to come out in the journals in those days. I think I took it a lot more seriously than I might otherwise have done, understanding to some degree the fragility of our arrangements. That's why, when I was 28, I published this book, The End of Nature. That was the first chronicle of what we now call the climate crisis. Back then, we still called it the greenhouse effect. Ever since, this is the work I've been engaged in because it's the most interesting intellectual problem there's ever been, and because it's the deepest, most dangerous cul-de-sac into which our species has ever wandered.

Brian Lehrer: If I had to guess which department of The New Yorker did Bill McKibben start at, I never would have guessed Talk Of The Town.

Bill McKibben: You wouldn't have been able to guess, because back in those days, it was all anonymous. I had a great fun exploring New York City, but I would have guessed back then that I would have ended up spending my life writing about urban issues. I lived for a while on the streets as a homeless person because Mr. Shawn wanted to understand what then seemed like a novel emergency homelessness on the streets of New York City. It was before we just decided it was going to be a regular part of the urban fabric, sadly. The story of climate change became so compelling to me that I stuck with it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our phones are open for anything you always wanted to ask climate journalist and former Talk Of The Town writer Bill McKibben, journalist and activist Bill McKibben, or want to ask him now about his life's work as he gets this Covering Climate Now Lifetime Achievement Award, or his new book about solar energy, Here Comes the Sun. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. When did you start the activist group 350.org, and remind people what the number 350 represents?

Bill McKibben: It represents the amount of carbon we could safely have in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. A number we were already past by that point, and now we're at 425 parts per million. Which is why Los Angeles catches on fire, the poles melt, and so on. I started it in about 2008. I had spent the better part of two decades after publishing The End of Nature writing more books on the theory that if we won the argument, then our leaders would do what was necessary, because why wouldn't they? I think journalists and academics tend to prize argument above all.

At a certain point, it became clear to me that you could win the argument and still lose the fight, because the fight was less about data and reason and evidence than it was about money and power. Of course, we still see extraordinary evidence of that. We had the President of the United States engaging in crazy climate denial from the podium of the United Nations the day before yesterday. This is a guy who told the fossil fuel industry that if they gave him a billion dollars during his last campaign, he would do whatever they wanted. Indeed, he is doing whatever they want, including a lie like that.

I will say that one of the reasons this award makes me so happy is just because Covering Climate Now has done a great job of helping support and rally climate journalists around the world. Nobody is more grateful than me for that. There was a 10 or 15-year period when I felt very, very lonely as a climate journalist and writer. I felt like one of those people who's having one of those bad dreams, where you can see a monster coming, but you can't get anybody to pay attention to you. I have been so grateful over the last 10 years for there's been just a great surge in wonderful climate journalism. The Times Now and The Post and lots and lots and lots of places are doing really good reporting. Nobody is more grateful than me for that.

Brian Lehrer: Some of the other recognition you've gotten over time, especially for listeners who don't know your work, just to put you in context, have included Foreign Policy magazine, naming you one of the world's 100 most important global thinkers. That was in 2009. In 2010, The Boston Globe called you probably the nation's leading environmentalist, and on from there. Your new book is Here Comes the Sun. Why focus on solar in particular at this time?

Bill McKibben: Well, because actually, this is one of these cases where I've got a scoop. When I published a cut of this book in The New Yorker earlier this summer, the thing I heard from everybody, and these were mostly people in the climate and energy world, was, "I had no idea." What they had no idea about was the fact that over the last 36 months, solar energy and wind energy have suddenly surged. This stuff that we've been calling alternative energy for decades is alternative no longer. 95% of new generating capacity around the world last year came from sun and wind, and batteries.

The Chinese, in May of this year, were putting up 3 gigawatts of solar power a day. A gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant. They were putting up one of those worth of solar panels every eight hours. The world's getting a third more energy from the sun right now than it was this time last year. This sudden surge in a world where most of the things that are happening right now are very big and very bad, this is the one big good thing, maybe big enough to take a bite out of both the climate crisis and maybe even the authoritarianism crisis a little as well, because, of course, it's one of the things that gives oligarchs power is that we rely on fossil fuel, which is only available in a few places, and the people who control them end up with extraordinary power.

Brian Lehrer: We'll take some calls in just a minute, but I want to tell you a little anecdote that the listeners might find interesting as well, because China, as you just mentioned, as well as California, play important roles in your book. I was only in China one time. It was on a tour for journalists in 2012 led by a group that was critical of Chinese authoritarianism, but also wanted to improve understanding kind of people-to-people. One of the things they took us to was a gigantic solar panel factory or farm. I still have a photo I took of solar panels as far as the eye could see. They said at that time, 13 years ago, that China was very interested in developing solar energy as far as they could take it.

Yet the US criticizes China for being exempt from the Paris Climate Treaty Accord, some of the provisions, because it's also seen as a developing country. China, despite what you said about solar, is also very big into coal, and they lead the world, along with the US, in greenhouse gas emissions. How does this all compute?

Bill McKibben: What's happening right now in China is a sea change like we've never seen before. Having built a lot of coal-fired power to run their industrial might over the last two decades, though, one must add, in per capita terms, they've never really gotten close to the US in how much carbon they produce. The Chinese are now, over the last three or four years, quickly transforming themselves into, not a petrostate, but the world's first electrostate. They've built something like 75% of the clean energy in the world over the last few years. Their emissions are now falling as of this year, even as ours are rising.

They're not only putting up a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, they're beginning to dominate all the technologies that will take advantage of that flood of clean energy. For instance, you and I, because of our vintage, are used to thinking of Detroit as the center of the world's automotive industry, but that's not true. There's a couple of cities in China whose names I find it hard to pronounce that are now more important than Detroit. They're producing better, cheaper, and more automobiles. Those are the things that are selling across the developing world.

Any place where China has good trade routes were all of a sudden seeing, not only solar panels, but EVs, E-bikes, heat pumps, all the things that go with that flood of clean electricity. As an American, I got to say, I find this aggravating as can be because these are American inventions. The first full solar cell in 1954, Bell Labs, Edison, New Jersey, first commercial wind turbine in the world, 30 miles south of my house in Vermont along the spine of the Green Mountains in 1943, but we're just turning these technologies over to the Chinese while we try to squeeze the last bit of profit out of 19th and 18th century technologies. Coal, gas, oil.

We just put a new subsidy in the President's big beautiful bill, a new subsidy for coal, something that human beings have been using since about 1725. If we haven't figured out how to do it by now, the thought that another subsidy is going to help is absurd. Clearly, these are just the payoffs you get when you hand over enough campaign cash.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I'm going to cite a critical review of your book because we engage in these kinds of discussions here, by the writer Ted Nordhaus, who you may know as a critic of many tenets of mainstream environmentalism. His review is called How Bill McKibben Lost the Plot. Two of his critiques are that compared to gas or coal or nuclear, which can produce energy around the clock, wind and solar depend on the weather at any given time and are therefore unreliable. That even with battery storage with solar energy, the batteries can only hold so much.

He writes, "With 30% of California's total electricity generation now coming from solar," and he gives you credit for the accuracy of that stat, "the state is already frequently forced to curtail solar generation, undermining its economic viability unless it receives continuing subsidies." How would you respond to that?

Bill McKibben: In the first place, California is just installing more batteries all the time. Now, at night this summer on the California grid, the biggest source of supply when the sun goes down has usually been those batteries that didn't exist three years ago. Batteries have fallen in price just as fast as solar panels, but if you really want to see this at work, forget California and move your gaze a little ways east towards the state of Texas, which is the biggest now producer of clean energy in America. We just had, two days ago, the head of Texas's grid regulator, which is called the Energy Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT.

He said, "We got through the summer of 2025, despite very high heat, without any of the blackouts that we've ever had to worry about in the past because we now have so many solar panels and batteries, and they stabilize as opposed to destabilizing the system." When you have coal-fired, gas-fired power plants, they go out of service a lot, but the sun is, so far, come up every morning. We're talking about a new world of energy. Of course, the people who profit from the old world of energy are going to be resistant to the change. That's why what's happening in China is so interesting.

I think what we'll look back on these last-- I think American historians will look back on the last eight months as a rise of whatever we're calling this kind of off-brand fascism that we're seeing. I think world historians will see it as the eight months in which the America seeded a kind of economic and technological primacy, and perhaps with it, a kind of political leadership from the West to China.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, a lot of people will debate the word fascism. Just acknowledging, but I hear what you're saying. Bob in Highland Park, you're on WNYC with Bill McKibben as he gets the Covering Climate Now Journalism and Activist Group Lifetime Achievement Award and publishes his new book, Here Comes the Sun. Hi, Bob.

Bob: Hi, how are you doing? Thanks for taking my call. Earlier in the discussion, he mentioned that he used to report on this when it was called the greenhouse effect. I wonder if we haven't lost something in terms of the discussion by using that simpler term more that the public at large could probably grasp better than climate change, even though climate change is a much more encompassing term.

Brian Lehrer: Bob, thank you. Actually, greenhouse effect, global warming is another one, or climate change that people tend to use as meaning the same thing. Is there one you prefer?

Bill McKibben: Truthfully, I think the caller has a good point. The greenhouse effect was a good name because it described accurately what's happening here. That whereby putting this blanket of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, and a few smaller ones into the atmosphere, we're, in essence, putting a blanket around the planet and heating it up. People started calling it global warming or climate change. Truthfully, I think the most accurate term now is the one that a number of periodicals started using a few years ago, when people just started referring to it as the climate crisis.

I think that probably, at this point, most accurately captures where we are, but I do miss the greenhouse effect because it helps people just grasp the science quite easily and quickly.

Brian Lehrer: On climate crisis, that same writer, Ted Nordhaus, also wrote an article arguing that climate catastrophism, as he sees it, based on recent events, is being way overplayed. He writes, for example, "The list of the worst climate-related disasters in US history, those that claimed a thousand or more American lives, is dominated by events that occurred before 1940. There were hurricanes in 1893, 1893 again, 1899, 1900, and 1928. Heat waves in 1896 and 1936. Floods in 1862 and 1889, and wildfires in 1871 and 1918," that he sees as, I guess, taking more lives. I don't have that stat in front of me.

He writes, "By contrast, since 1940, only three climate disasters have claimed a thousand or more lives." I guess that's the metric there. A heat wave in 1980, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Hurricane Maria in 2017. How do you respond to that?

Bill McKibben: Think about what a hurricane was like in 1899, Brian. It pounced on you, entirely unaware. You had, until a few hours before, no idea what was about to descend on your crazily flimsy housing, wherever you were along Galveston Bay at the time. Now, what happens if there's a hurricane coming? Eight days out, CNN is running pictures of the cone of uncertainty and federal officials, well, at least before we got rid of FEMA, are helping figure out who's going to evacuate where, and so on and so forth. This is the kind of unscientific stuff that climate denialists of one kind or in one flavor or another love to engage in.

Obviously, as any hurricane scientist will tell you, we've now created the conditions for larger and more rapidly intensifying hurricanes than we have ever seen before. That's because hurricanes draw their power from the hot water in the first few meters of the sea surface. There's more of that now. It goes down deeper, and so there's a bigger heat engine. Thank heaven we have the satellites and sensors and things that allow us at least to see them coming, so we don't die in them.

If you have any doubts about whether or not they're for real, you could ask the insurance industry, which has been basically refusing to underwrite millions upon millions of Americans in the hurricane zones of the Gulf, in the flood zones of the Appalachians, in the fire zones of California. These are the guys we ask to analyze risk in our economy, and they're telling us this is real. I don't think you could find a scientist who would tell you that climate change isn't real, but you can find a president who will tell you that, and that is a real problem.

Brian Lehrer: David in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Bill McKibben. Hi, David.

David: Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Bill. I'm one of your students from Bard College, 1988, the Bard Summer Times. Thank you for taking the seat back then of environmental justice. I think you'll also recall, I was with you at the final day of the arrests against the Keystone pipeline, along with my comrades from Casa Pueblo and Puerto Rico, who were also fighting a pipeline then. We fought Keystone, and we fought the Via Verde project in Puerto Rico. We were successful on both fronts. I wanted to give you your props on those things and always ask you to keep Puerto Rico in your mind and in your thoughts and in your words, because it's often forgotten in the conversation about climate catastrophe and climate change.

We just commemorated the eighth year after Maria, and we've got a privatized distribution and energy generation crisis in Puerto Rico. The governor, who is a MAGA, also signed a deal worth some $2 billion or $3 billion with New Fortress Energy, and we need to continue to fight for climate justice in Puerto Rico. Thank you, Bill.

Bill McKibben: Thank you. We did this big Sunday event last week around the country, 500 events celebrating renewable energy, with a beautiful one in Manhattan with Brad Lander and many others on hand. One of the things that we released was a beautiful documentary movie, about half an hour long, called The Light Won't Dim. It begins with a really beautiful section on what's happening in Puerto Rico, where many, many, many people are now turning to solar power, in part because they saw what happened after Maria and how slow the government was to respond and try to get electricity back up and things.

Now, more and more and more people are taking this into their own hands, which is a good reminder, by the way, that though the president is, for his own selfish reasons, against renewable energy, it's by no means clear that that's true for conservatives around the country. In fact, since I've lived much of my life in rural America, some of it red state, some of it blue, I have lots of Trumpy neighbors along the dirt roads where I live, and an awful lot of them have solar panels, often less because they're concerned about the climate crisis, and more on the grounds that my home is my castle, and it's a better castle when it has an independent power supply.

I don't think it's impossible that we can make real inroads here, even with the Trump administration trying to get in the way. We're going to keep pushing. It's one of the things that, at Third Act, this group that we organize among older Americans, people over the age of 60, that we're really focused on trying to make it much easier for Americans to get the cheap solar power that's easy to come by in Australia or the EU, but that's much more expensive than it needs to be in the US.

Brian Lehrer: Bill, let me ask you a behind-the-scenes question right here on the air. We have come to a fork in the road, which is to say the end of our scheduled time, but we have a lot of interesting callers lined up who'd like to ask you a lot about solar energy relevant to your book and maybe a couple of other things. Are you available to stay the rest of the hour?

Bill McKibben: I am. I will say only that Mark Hertsgaard, who runs Covering Climate Now, is expecting me for lunch at noon, but I have a feeling he'd be okay with me sticking on, and I'm sure he's listening. I'd love to answer some more questions if people have them.

Brian Lehrer: Since he's giving you this award, I guess lunch can be 12:10. We're going to continue with Bill McKibben and your questions on the occasion of the climate journalism and activist group, Covering Climate Now, announcing this morning that they're giving Bill McKibben their first ever Lifetime Achievement Award, and on the occasion of his new book about solar energy called Here Comes the Sun. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our last few minutes with Bill McKibben. AJ in La Mesa, California. You're on WNYC. Hello, AJ.

AJ: Hello, Professor McKibben. First, congrats on the award. Second, I wanted to ask you about distributed capacity and its benefits over remote generation. For example, in New York State, Governor Hochul is planning to build another nuclear fission power plant up on the Saint Lawrence River. In California, back in the day, Governor Schwarzenegger spoke about a Million Solar Roofs. I would posit that having distributed capacity and siting it locally rather than afar has numerous benefits.

For one thing, if you utilize local incident solar radiation to create capacity, you will decrease the urban heat island effect, which can be substantial. Plus, you have far lower line losses and improved reliability. I'll take your comments off the air. Thanks very much.

Brian Lehrer: AJ, thank you. I'll note, for the listeners, that California plays a very significant role in your book. You can even go beyond a specific question and talk a little bit about that.

Bill McKibben: I will. His specific question is just fascinating because it exemplifies the kind of new energy world that we're moving into. California did a test this summer of what they're calling a virtual power plant. What that virtual power plant consisted of was about 100,000 batteries in the basements of Californians who have solar panels on the roof, but these are networked together into the grid, so at times of peak demand, if people give permission, the utility can call on those batteries to meet that need without having to turn on expensive fossil fuel generation capacity.

In Vermont, where I live now, the virtual power plant of batteries in people's basements is the single biggest power plant in the state. We are moving from this world where energy comes from a few big centralized plants, into a world where it's distributed in many of the ways that the caller is describing. For that to be easier, we have to make it more and more possible, not just to build solar farms and transmission lines, but also for people to do this on their own roofs and balconies.

I'll give you two examples. Americans pay three times as much for solar power as Australians or Europeans. That's mostly because of the excess bureaucracy here. Every municipality has its own building code, and we can get around that easily with this thing called the SolarAPP+, the federal government put out a couple of years ago, and that California and Maryland and the New Jersey legislature, though I don't think the New Jersey governor has yet signed off on it, have adopted. It basically allows a contractor to get an instant permit just by plugging in the equipment that he's using and the address where he's going to use it. It's the kind of thing that makes it so much cheaper on other places.

For New Yorkers, many of whom lack their own roof, we also have this thing called balcony solar that has swept Europe in the last few years. Millions and millions and millions of apartment dwellers. This is so simple. You just go to whatever the equivalent of Best Buy in Brussels is, and you come home with a panel that you hang over the railing of your apartment balcony, and plug directly into the wall, no electrician needed. Often, it'll provide a fifth of the power. That's illegal everywhere in America, except in the state of Utah, where the legislature allowed it earlier this year.

Now, there's many videos on YouTube of happy Utahns doing this. I think that New York Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher may be introducing a law like that in Albany sometime in the next few days. If it passes, then New Yorkers, many of whom are apartment dwellers, obviously, will be able to take part in the solar revolution themselves.

Brian Lehrer: We get one more in here for you. Aisha, in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hello, Aisha.

Aisha: Hello. It's so lovely to hear this conversation, and I'm very inspired by everything you're sharing. I just wanted to quickly talk about some global crises that I feel like are affecting New York. My family are climate refugees coming from Pakistan. I know many diasporas across the globe that have had to flee due to constant climate injustices happening. I wanted to get more insight as I'm connecting more here at the Javits Center with communities of climate anthropologists and scientists about what you feel like our organizing capacity can be as people in the global north, and as people who are the heavier contributors for a lot of these climate catastrophes that are affecting the global south, including people like communities we might come from.

I just wanted to bridge something in, to kind of show the relevancy, is that I have worked with a lot of farmers here on the ground. I know that, in India, since 1995, according to The Guardian, more than 300,000 farmers and farm workers have committed suicide because of the crop production failure. It's estimated that by 2050, according to the World Bank, there's going to be near-zero crop production in Pakistan, which is going to cause catastrophic effects for, I would say, all of the other nations.

As we're seeing the responses to these refugees and other people coming in that we might see as alien, I just wanted to get your insight on how the youth, because I am part of the younger generation, how we can continue to organize in an effective way that is also aware of-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: This global view is a great way to end.

Bill McKibben: It's a beautiful question.

Brian Lehrer: Bill, we have about 45 seconds.

Bill McKibben: I'll just end by saying it lets us end on a piece of good news because she's absolutely right about the global injustice here. In Pakistan, where she comes from, farmers in the last year have been one of the biggest adopters of solar power on the planet. There's cheap Chinese solar panels available, and they're using them to replace that expensive diesel to run irrigation pumps. Often, they lack the money to build the metal stands that we've seen. They just lay the solar panels on the ground and point them at the sun. Pakistani farmers used 35% less diesel last year than they'd used the year before.

It's not America leading the train here. America is the caboose, and we're trying to put the brake on. It's precisely people like Pakistani farmers that are showing us a graceful way forward.

Brian Lehrer: Bill McKibben getting today the climate journalism and advocacy journalism group Covering Climate Now Lifetime Achievement Award, and he has a new book, Here Comes the Sun. Bill, thank you very, very much.

Bill McKibben: Thank you so much, friend. Have a good day.

Brian Lehrer: We say goodbye today to our summer intern, Vito Emanuel. He has contributed many ideas, much great writing, including his morning's lead segment on the government shutdown politics, and abundant curiosity. Vito, we thank you, and we hope we served you by helping you learn a lot as an intern. We think you'll go far.

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