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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our spring membership drive, trying to reach our goal of 100 donors this hour. Thank you for being one, if you can. We are now up to 60 donors. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 40 to go. Not going to continue talking about it, just giving you the score and saying 40 more of you. We have done our part for this hour to keep the whole station going. Thank you, Brian Lehrer Show listeners.

Now our climate story of the week. Whoever wins the presidential election this year will be in office until 2029. Scientists believe that these next few years are the most crucial years to act in order to prevent some of the worst impacts of climate change and to keep global warming to no more than one and a half degrees Celsius as called for in the Paris Agreement. Here to break down what's at stake for the climate during this presidential election is environmental activist Bill McKibben. He's the founder of Third Act and author of many books. Most recently, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon.

A graying American looks back at his suburban boyhood and wonders What The Hell Happened. Yes, that's actually the title of the book. His recent piece in The New Yorker is called, It's a Climate Election Now. Hey, Bill, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Bill McKibben: Indeed, indeed, Brian. What a pleasure to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: You write that this election arrives at the most critical possible moment in the climate fight. We'll dig into each of the candidate stances a little bit, but what do you see as at stake right now that people may not already know who follow climate news?

Bill McKibben: This really is the crux. I wrote the first book about all this now 35 years ago, and this is the moment to which it's all been building up. On the one hand, the climate itself is increasingly out of control. Last year was the hottest year in the last 125,000 years, so far this year is hotter. The heat waves that we're seeing even this week in places like Central America and Florida are so off the charts that they're off the wall the charts are pinned to, and at exactly the same moment we're finally seeing renewable energy at a place where it can play a huge role.

In the last year, its rollout across the world has started to accelerate. By last summer, we were putting up about a gigawatt's worth of solar panels a day on this earth, which is the rough equivalent of a nuclear power plant. Half of that was in China, but that leaves a lot for the rest of the world, including the US which thanks to Biden and his Inflation Reduction Act is finally in this game in a larger way.

The question that hangs over this election above all other questions is, will this momentum continue and be accelerated with a Biden win, or will all that momentum be stopped cold on day one as Donald Trump has promised? And stopped not only here, but I think realistically stopped or at least slowed around most of the world, because if the world's historically biggest emitter isn't going to do it, no one else will feel much pressure.

Brian Lehrer: Historically biggest emitter of the United States, although I think recently China has passed us if I'm not mistaken, but that still makes us one of the biggest emitters.

Bill McKibben: [crosstalk] China now produces more as you would expect, since they have four times more people but no one will ever catch up with us as the historic emitter champion.

Brian Lehrer: All of time.

Bill McKibben: All the stuff that came out the back of my family's Plymouth Fury when I was getting my learners' permit in 1974 is still up in the air trapping heat.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners to the show they know basically Biden talks about climate. He had the Climate Oriented Inflation Reduction Act. Trump is running on baby drill. Take us back to the actual Trump administration. Was it all talk, or did he actually weaken or get rid of any major environmental policies that increased emissions compared to what they would've been if Hillary Clinton was elected?

Bill McKibben: Yes. He got rid of every environmental policy that he could. [laughs] The only thing that saved us from even more carnage was his relative incompetence in the first term, which clearly won't mark a second. The Heritage Foundation has already given him this Project 2025 playbook for all the things to do, and he's announced he'll be doing them from day one. The biggest thing he did last time, of course, the biggest of all, was to withdraw America from the Paris Climate Accords, thus grounding the momentum that had begun to build after those Paris agreements in 2015, the year before he took office. Now he's in a position to do just the same thing.

It's not that he's being coy about it. He summoned all the oil industry executives to Mar-a-Lago a couple of weeks ago and told them for a billion dollars they could have anything they wanted. I think they may have laughed a little bit at him because they already know they're getting everything they want even without the billion dollars. On the other hand, for them supporting the Trump campaign financially offers a good return on investment. Exxon made $36 billion last year, Chevron $21, I think. If they can ensure a set of policies that give them another decade, instead of letting the transition to renewable energy play out at the speed it's now starting to go, that's very good investment for them.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you brought up that moment when Trump jokingly or not asked fossil fuel industry leaders to donate a billion dollars to his campaign because one of the-

Bill McKibben: He has claimed that it was a joke. I don't even think they've attempted to deny it.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it wasn't a joke. It relates to one of the lines in your article that jumped out at me. "Given Four years to finish the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act," you write, "a second term, Biden administration might finally be able to break the hold of fossil fuel's political influence." That jumped out at me because you weren't just talking about what Biden could do with respect to actual carbon emissions, but you think he can break the fossil fuel industry's political influence?

Bill McKibben: Their political influence is based entirely on money. If it becomes clear that we're making this transition rapidly to renewable energy, we'll still be using plenty of gas and oil four years, hence, no matter what Biden does. If it's clear that this is a waning, dwindling industry, then its political power will begin to erode and erode quickly, and you'll begin to see things like the big banks being willing to stand up to them. Right now, they're continuing, as we saw in new reports this week, to lend them hundreds of billions of dollars. That's why my colleagues from Third Act and many other groups are outside Citibank all this summer protesting that ridiculous willingness to keep going on funding this industry but that will erode too.

This is a powerful psychological moment. A lot of what happens in both politics and economics has to do with psychology. If Biden wins and it becomes irretrievably clear that we're now committed to this transition, then we will live in a very different place. If he doesn't, then the economic arguments for renewable energy, the fact that sun and wind are now the cheapest way to produce power on this planet are strong enough that we'll continue in that direction, but at such a reduced rate that we'll never catch up to the physics of global warming. The building crisis will just keep us in this limbo where we've been for many years.

Brian Lehrer: Another thing from your article that people may not already know is that Trump promised he would get rid of Biden's "mandate on electric vehicles." This is a talking point he's recently been mischaracterizing, I think it's fair to say. Can you explain what the Biden rule actually is? I think it has more to do with tailpipe emissions than actually requiring electric vehicles in any way, right?

Bill McKibben: That's right. They've said that you have to keep bringing down emissions, which any physicist would agree with. The obvious way to do that is to build EVs, which is what the Detroit automakers have decided to do. They'd like to go much more slowly and get another decade of profits out of SUVs and things, but obviously, the planet can't take that. This is a key moment. The thing that seems to be limiting EV take-up so far is people's worry about the lack of a sufficient network of chargers. This is one of the top items, I think on the Biden second administration to-do list. We're already starting to roll them out, but I think that is the thing that they want to accelerate. If they do, then we'll probably see the same tipping points here that we've seen in European countries and now in China where the vast majority of new cars are electric.

Let me just add. As a longtime electric car user, once you get somebody into one of these things, you're never getting them out because they're way, way, way better than the car you used to have.

Brian Lehrer: I want to name a name here because people if they're following campaign news, may have seen that Trump has been appearing a number of times recently with North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, not exactly your household name around the country. Not the most maga Republican by a lot of traditional measures. He doesn't have Steve Bannon or Rudy Giuliani's way of rhetoric. The Washington Post reports that Doug Burgum, who is being considered very strongly for running mate for Trump, is one who's been talking extensively to these oil industry donors and CEOs. What do you know about Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota as a potential vice president of the United States in this respect?

Bill McKibben: More sophisticated campaigner on these issues than Trump not going to go around saying that wind causes cancer because indeed, North Dakota is the sixth biggest wind state in the country, but it's also the third biggest oil-producing state in the country. He'll square the circle by saying, give us endless amounts of taxpayer money for carbon capture and sequestration so that we can keep drilling, mining, burning fossil fuel and we'll build enormous and expensive chemistry sets to try and collect the carbon and pump it underground instead of using that money to build far more capacity for solar and wind and batteries which is the obvious, straightforward economic solution if you're anybody other than the oil industry.

His other appeal to Trump obviously is that he's personally wealthy and will bring money to the campaign. As usual, we're managing to see with Trump some combination of outrageously policy especially on climate and intense personal and political corruption. At Third Act where we organize people over the age of 60 for action on climate and democracy, it's no wonder why the combination of those two things has put us into a code red state as we approach the election.

We're confident that a silver wave is building, that older people are actually going to play a huge role and that their concerns about climate, older people trail only the very youngest voters in their concern on climate will play a big role in that silver wave forming to protect our country.

Brian Lehrer: I've seen those numbers and I think it's so interesting. People stereotypically say, "Oh, climate change, that's a way Biden can appeal to young voters," but a lot of older people, and you wrote a whole book about being an older person. A lot of older people they care about it as legacy, as what kind of world they're leaving to their children and their grandchildren, most of all. That's a wonderful way to end our climate story of the week. For this week, my guest has been Bill McKibben, founder of the group Third Act, and author of many books, including most recently, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon.

A graying American looks back at his suburban boyhood and wonders what the hell happened? You put, What the Hell Happened in the title of the book. His piece in The New Yorker, because he writes for the New Yorker, is called, It's a Climate Election Now. Bill, always great to have you. Thank you for coming on.

Bill McKibben: Indeed. Take care, friend.

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