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Arun Venugopal: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Arun Venugopal from the WNYC newsroom filling in for Brian Lehrer who's off today. On today's show, as we have been many days in June, we've got our eyes on the Supreme Court. It's the last day of the term and there are two decisions left, a case involving the EPA and its ability to regulate emissions and the so-called remain in Mexico case. Both of which we're expecting any minute now. Later in the show, we'll have two Supreme Court analysts talk about these cases and wrap up this momentous term.

Also later in the show, New York city's non-citizen voting law was struck down by a Staten Island Judge. We're going to talk to an advocate on what might happen next. We'll also talk about the growing number of Americans who have either moved abroad or are seriously considering it because they're unhappy with the way this country is heading on gun violence, abortion rights, so many other issues. Maybe you're one of those people. First, as we await the Supreme court opinion on the EPA case here in the US, some good news, it seems, from Europe.

On Wednesday, the 27 countries that comprise the E.U, the European Union have agreed to ban fossil fuel cars by 2035. The deal also includes funding to protect lower income citizens from what's likely to result in higher Co2 costs. Transport and Environment, a leading clean transport campaign group celebrated the deal with a statement that said it's game over for the internal combustion engine in Europe. Joining me now to talk about the deal, what it might mean for the US, and also cover some other climate topics in the news is Bill McKibben, environmental activist, founder of third act and author of lots of 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. Welcome back to WNYC Bill.

Bill McKibben: Arun, good to be with you as always.

Arun Venugopal: The decision, Bill, is going to effectively prohibit the sale of new cars powered by gas or diesel in the E.U nations, according to Al Jazeera. Climate change is obviously a global problem. How big of a deal is this proposal in your opinion?

Bill McKibben: Well, in purely numerical terms, if all we did was put Europeans in electric cars that wouldn't solve the climate problem. Of course, no individual thing's ever going to solve the climate problem. It's the biggest crisis humans have ever wandered into. What's important here is that it represents the deployment of technology that we now have suddenly available to us on a massive scale. The next 10 years, if we're going to have any hope of dealing with global warming, is going to be about rapid execution and deployment of existing technology.

Not about waiting for some magic invention, but about taking electric cars air source heat pumps, solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, and using these things to dramatically drive down the amount of energy that we use and to make that energy come from the sun and the wind, not from coal and gas and oil. A huge part of the world's car industry lives in Europe. Germany has long been, after the US, the leading car making nation renowned for its automotive prowess. The fact that these guys are saying the internal combustion engine is dead is a good sign. California's on the same path. California was the place where car culture got all its romance, and it's on the same curve. These are good signs about an important part of our emissions spectrum.

Arun Venugopal: When we're talking about zero emission cars, are we talking about anything that's fully electric as opposed to, say, hybrid?

Bill McKibben: The zero emission cars are going to have to be fully electric. Hybrid cars continue to use gas and produce emissions. In fact, hybrid cars are on their way out because there's no great case for them. Why would you want to have both an electric and a internal combustion engine in your car if you didn't have to? It's much simpler to build much simpler to build an electric engine in the first place. One of the things that people don't always appreciate about EVs is they're much simpler technology than the internal combustion engine they've replaced. Many fewer moving parts. They don't break down.

The other thing, of course, that's important is we're talking about electric cars here, but so much of the action's going to come from electric bikes, electric buses, all the other uses that electric vehicles can be put to and those are really crucial.

Arun Venugopal: Just because an electric car produces zero emissions doesn't necessarily mean that the electricity comes from clean energy sources, does it?

Bill McKibben: No it doesn't. You can hook up an electric car to a coal fired power plant, but two things to understand. One, even if you do that emissions go way down. That's because the electric engine is far more efficient than the gasoline engine it replaces. Two, there's no way to make a gasoline car clean, but if you have electric cars out there, then you can hook them to clean sources, sun and wind, as they come online. Sun and wind are now the cheapest ways to generate power around the planet. We'll be seeing much more of them. Once you've got all these cars hooked into this grid or bikes or buses or whatever else, they're serving as a giant distributed battery that makes the whole thing easier to operate.

Arun Venugopal: Bill, we're getting some breaking news here. SCOTUSblog just tweeted the Supreme Court sharply curtails the authority of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. In a six, three ruling, the court sides with conservative states and fossil fuel companies in adopting a narrow reading of the clean air act. Any response to that? Any surprises?

Bill McKibben: It's not, sadly, a surprise. It is an enormous blow. I know you're going to have some legal experts on later to talk about what this decision, how it fits in with the other decisions that we've been seeing. Let's talk about its environmental impact. This is a direct attack on the clean air act, which was the last significant piece of legislation having to do with air pollution that Congress ever managed to adopt. It's the legislation under which we've been trying to have some last ditch federal response to climate change. Now that's being taken off the table.

This is the thing, even more than abortion, that the people who organized the pushback of the last 40 years, the Koch brothers and people like that, this is what they've been playing for. An end to regulation of polluting business, a license to go ahead and do what they want. The way that the decision is written, obviously I haven't read the decision yet, but the way that it's anticipated is that it insists that Congress should have to make explicit regulations for every pollutant. They should have to pass new laws all the time. Well, given how well our Congress works, that's precisely the same as saying Congress will do nothing about climate change going forward.

Arun Venugopal: The clean air act was passed by the Nixon administration, correct?

Bill McKibben: It was signed by the Nixon administration and passed by Congress, but the real players in getting it adopted were not politicians, it were people. First Earth Day in 1970 drew 20 million Americans into the street, 10% of the then population. That was as big a demonstration as we've ever had in this country and it left the politicians no room to maneuver. That's why many of us keep trying to build big movements, with some success in this country, to return us to a day when this anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian stance disappears.

Arun Venugopal: What does it mean to you that 50 years after it was passed, practically 50 years, by a Republican president signed, that is, that we're at this particular juncture where we see rulings, decisions like this?

Bill McKibben: What it means to me is that we have to stand up. We've been organizing the last six months, this group called Third Act, Arun that organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and on democracy. This ruling is at the intersection of those two crises. People over 60 were there for the adoption of the Clean Air Act. They were there for all the other things that the Supreme Court has been attacking this week. The adoption of Roe v. Wade, and the moment when we began to treat women as serious parts of our society. the adoption of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court has been steadily undermining. The adoption of the federal Gun Control Reform Act of 1968, which was the high watermark for gun control in Congress being undermined by the Supreme Court.

For those of us in particular, for whom those things seemed to represent a legacy of optimism and progress, it is time for us to fight back. That's what we're doing at thirdact.org. On the off chance that you have any listeners who are over that age of 60, we hope they'll join us. If not, the rest of you tell your parents and grandparents.

Arun Venugopal: I do want to invite the listeners in. There's obviously a lot going on. We want to invite both those of you who are perhaps in Europe or have connections of yours in Europe or heard the news regarding what seems to be a success over there. how people are responding there, how you feel about it, how your friends or family feel about that. What conversations around climate change you have with family abroad compared to how things are going here in the States. We're also inviting you if you have feelings about the Supreme Court's decision today, that struck down the EPA's ability to regulate emissions. How are you dealing with that?

Call us now at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-436-9692. You can also tweet at us. We're @BrianLehrer or if you have any questions for our guest, environmentalist Bill McKibben, on the EU deal or anything else environmental just give us a call. Again, it's 212-433-WNYC. Bill, when we talk about Co2 emissions, they obviously vary from country to country. Part of the conversation I guess that makes it thorny is that you have big developed countries like the US which have been emitting for a long time. Then you have developing countries or relatively less developed countries, which are trying to catch up. You have Western countries trying to tell them that they need to slow down their emissions. How does an environmentalist square these kinds of power imbalances?

Bill: Well, there's no way to square them. They're the horrible fact of where we are. The numbers are astonishing. America, the 4% of us who live here have produced 25% Of all the greenhouse gases in the world. The entire continent of Africa, where climate change is playing out in harsher terms than anyplace else on planet Earth. Right now, there's an epic drought underway in the Horn of Africa, with rainfall deficits like we've never recorded before. The entire continent of Africa has produced 2% of all the greenhouse gas emissions. There's nothing fair about it, we owe an enormous carbon debt to the rest of the world.

Part of the intricate torturous negotiations underway around the world are some attempt to pay back some tiny fraction of that debt going forward. It's the deepest and saddest part of this crisis and it's manifesting itself in lots of ways. One of them that we're going to have to figure out how to deal with, and we're not dealing with so far, is the fact that climate change is already setting off extraordinary movement of people around the planet, and that's just going to grow. The prediction from the UN is we could see a billion climate refugees by mid-century. That tempo was already picking up and not only are walls and cages immoral responses to that, they're also likely to be highly ineffective.

Arun Venugopal: How significantly here in the US have car emissions gone down as people have been switching to hybrids or electric vehicles?

Bill McKibben: Well, we haven't switched in significant enough numbers to hybrids and electric vehicles for emissions to really go down yet. In fact, Americas' progress on automobile emissions stalled somewhat because people just keep buying bigger and bigger and bigger vehicles. You would think that America must be a country where you have to cross untamed rivers every time want to go to the grocery store when you consider the things we purchase for transport. Those numbers should begin to change fairly dramatically now, because all of a sudden EVs are taking a bigger and bigger bite out of the market and it's happening fairly exponentially.

The big news for this year probably will be the introduction, the sale of the Ford electric f150 pickup. That's been the most popular vehicle in America for decades. Not, I might add, out of any real necessity for pickups. 90% of those never carry anything very heavy but people like to drive around them. The electric one is winning all kinds of plaudits, like all-electric vehicles, it's better than the thing it replaces. It's quieter. It doesn't break down, and so on. That doesn't mean that it solves the other problems that automobiles represent. People in New York are particularly aware of that. I've been reading for years, Doug Gordon and his work on The War on Cars.

New York will be marginally better if it has electric cars everywhere instead of internal combustion ones but it'll be a hell of a lot better when people finally come to their senses and say, "You know what? We really don't need anywhere near this many cars in our city, or for that matter in our country."

Arun Venugopal: Bill, I want to go to our first caller. This is Brandon in Garden City. Hi, Brandon, you're on the air with Bill McKibben. You got a question?

Brandon: Yes. Just that I'm a retired energy geophysicist and now also retired environmental attorney. Just to ask Bill what he thinks the state implementation plans under the Clean Air Act may allow the states to individually ratchet up more pollution control and push back on the Supreme Court decision?

Bill McKibben: Well, I think that, as with the abortion ruling and other things, there'll be some attempts. there's already a series of cases in the pipeline before the Supreme Court that would stop that from happening, and it's brought by the same Republican attorneys general. I don't see any reason to think, given the breadth of this ruling today, it was a six to three decision that the courts likely to. I think it's going to get harder for states to do the right thing. At the moment California enjoys an exemption under the Clean Air Act that's allowed it to be the leader and other states to follow along. That may continue but today's ruling makes it harder, not easier.

Arun Venugopal: Thanks for that question, Brandon. We have another caller, Gareth from Brooklyn. Gareth, you need some advice from Bill. You're on with him.

Gareth: Hi, there. Hi, Bill. I'm a public school teacher and climate activist with New York City DSA. This June, we got through one house in Albany, the State Senate, our bill called the Build Public Renewables Act, which would enable New York State to expand its renewable energy generation and renewable energy infrastructure democratically through our already existing New York Power Authority. Then we would sell it at cost to low-income residents. It feels like a win across multiple dimensions but this bill fell in the State Assembly. Carl Hasty, the speaker, would not bring it to a vote, even though we had the votes ready to go to vote.

Bill, I'm wondering about your advice on how grassroots organizations, New York City DSA and so forth, should plan over the next four weeks for this hearing. Also to request your attendance at the hearing because I think this will be a huge moment for the environmental movement in New York City and New York State. Thank you.

Bill McKibben: I haven't been following action as closely in Albany as I probably should because I've been doing a lot of other things, including recovering from some surgery that's going to keep me from attending anything in person for a little while. I do know that there were a whole spate of bills that are of great importance that the speaker managed to bring down, even though there was big support for them in the state house in Albany. Like the one the caller describes, he one that I was particularly following was the mandate that all new construction would have to be connected to electricity, not to gas.

It takes what we're talking about with EVs and adds air source heat pumps and magnetic conduction cooktops to the kind of trinity of clean appliances that we need to be rolling out fast. Let's be clear, there's no economic reason not to be doing these things right now. They save money for individuals. They save money for this system and they do it even if you don't take into account all the damages that are coming from climate change. The only reason not to do them is the kind of toxic vested interest of the fossil fuel industry and the people employed in it. They've been able, as they so often have, to slow down action.

At this point, they know that eventually we're going to go in this direction because it's clean and because it's cheap. They're just trying to delay it and get a few more years out of their business model. The problem with that is that those are the same few years that are going to take down the planet if we're not careful.

Arun Venugopal: Lots of others calling in with questions. First, we're going to take a quick break. back in a minute with Bill McKibben and your calls.

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Arun Venugopal: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Arun Venugopal from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom filling in for Brian Lehrer, who's off today. My guest is Bill McKibben, environmental activist, founder of Third Act, and author of many books, most recently The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon. Lots of people calling in. We're going to get right back into that. We have a caller, Janet from Mountain Lake, New Jersey. Janet, you have a question for Bill or a comment to make?

Janet: I do. I have just a brief memory to share with both of you. My father was a professor in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, and he had worked during many summers for the EPA. I remember so vividly his pride and celebration when the Clean Air Act was finally passed. He worked on that whole project, I guess you could call it. We went down to campus and the whole large conference room was full of people. I remember him also telling a story of how if you were to fly into Los Angeles even a few weeks after the Clean Air Act was passed, how the air was so much cleaner. I just wanted to share that memory and thank Bill so much for his effort. In a lot of ways, it's a sad day for many of us. Thank you so much.

Arun Venugopal: Thank you for that call, Janet.

Bill McKibben: The caller makes such a good point. When we pass laws to get things done they work. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act worked. Our air and our water got much, much cleaner. That's why the Exxons of the world have invested so much money in making sure and so much political influence in making sure that we don't pass laws like that. We've known about the climate crisis for 30 some years, and Congress has never done anything about it. They've never passed anything. The build back better bill currently held up in the Senate because Joe Manchin, who's taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else in Washington, won't let it through.

This caller's reminder is really apt. We have to get back to a place where we can act on these things. The Supreme court ruling today makes that harder, but that's why we have to organize and build movements and do it fast.

Arun Venugopal: We have a caller here who is actually responding to today's decision in Supreme court with a rally is it? Let's go to that caller. Is it Jose? Are you there? Are you on the air with Bill McKibben?

Jose: Yes. Hi Bill. This is Jose from New York Communities for Change.

Bill McKibben: Hello.

Jose: How are you? I just wanted to first of all, thank you for the urgency that you bring to remind people how important this is, climate change in general, and how we should be reacting. On that note, for the Supreme Court ruling, a bunch of groups from New York City are planning an action at 5:30 today, at 5:30, 6 o'clock at Foley Square in response to the Supreme Court ruling. I just wanted to get on first of all because you're on Bill, just to say thank you, and also to ask folks, anybody who wants to come, to join us.

Bill McKibben: I wish I was in New York, so I could join you at Foley Square at 5:30. That sounds important. Just so people know, New York Communities for Change has been fighting this good fight for a long time. They're the reason that New York City, or one of the reasons, that New York City has this law that is forcing buildings to become much more energy-efficient going forward. They're also a big part of the reason why New York City divested from fossil fuels a few years ago. Good leaders to be following in this kind of fight.

Arun Venugopal: We're going to pull in some other callers, but I just want to pose a philosophical question. You have people like Jose who are helping organize and respond and rally the troops, but on the other hand you have, I'd say, a sort of paralysis. I'm just wondering, how does one deal with paralysis of people who are confronting just the enormity of climate change?

Bill McKibben: It's that paralysis is real. The problem with climate change has always been it is so big. By far the biggest thing that human beings have ever done by orders of magnitude. We're changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere, melting the poles, raising the ocean, setting forests on fire. On and on and on. The magnitude of that compared with how small each of us are is the thing that makes it seem so unlikely that we'll make change. It is unlikely if we're working as individuals. We are past the point where you can make the carbon math square one Tesla at a time.

That's why the most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual and join together with others in groups large enough to make change happen. New York Communities for Change or 350 New York or Third Act if you're an older person or the sunshine Sunrise Movement, if you're a younger person. These are the groups that have done things like block big pipelines, like divest $40 trillion in assets from the fossil fuel industry, like bring us the build back better bill. That may still limp over the finish line in this congressional session. It only happens when people join together.

I'm not promising you were going to win. I wrote the first book about all of this, and that came out almost 35 years ago. It had the cheerful title, The End of Nature, so I'm no Pollyanna, but I can tell you that if we don't organize, we have no choice. When we look at things like what happened in Europe today, you get some sense of how much good organizing can do. Europe's ahead of the US in, and really the rest of the world, in action on climate change, because public opinion is ahead there. It's impossible for governments and corporations in the EU to behave as limply as they've been behaving in North America because people won't put up with it. We shouldn't put up with it.

Arun Venugopal: : Let's take a call from long island. Randy, you're on the air calling in from Melville, is it?

Randy: It is. Thank you for taking my call. I've listened a long time. First time to call in.

Arun Venugopal: Great. You're on with bill.

Randy: Well, thank you. Bill, I agree with much of what you said, especially when it relates to the science. The politics I don't agree with, but the science is compelling. I am an enterprise architect for technology at the very large data center level. My wife is a civil architect, my daughter's a mechanical engineer and I'm also a home inspector. I have a small company that deals in eventually smart homes. Right now, as we're in the initial first year or two, it deals in safety, security, and storm preparation in which we sell Generac generators. I would love to be able to sell the battery backup and the solar. In my opinion, they're just not ready yet. They're not efficient enough. Their carbon footprint of what it takes to make them is just too great. The return on investment is just too great.

I'm looking for them to be cut by 50% before I can legitimately feel that they're saving money, that I can legitimately say you're saving carbon footprint, and that there are no children crawling in fields to get the ingredients that you need to make the batteries in the solar panels. If we left the politics out of it, and I know that I know the technology fairly well, it's compelling all by itself. I think a lot of the politics actually are like a buyer that pushes people away because it's too hot. When it was first being introduced to reduce those very large battery arrays that we use in these several thousand-foot data centers, that's great.

Arun Venugopal: Randy, we do have to get Bill on, the segment's wrapping up. Is there a question or just a comment?

Randy: To make a company more energy efficient is the ultimate goal. I really commend that. What do you think about what I have said?

Bill McKibben: Well, I think that what's very clear is that these technologies become better with each passing month. We're now at the point where solar panels, which used to take 10 years to pay back their energy costs of their construction, are so efficient that they pay back that energy cost in a matter of months. The data on learning curves in the big study produced by Oxford University, the biggest study we have yet last year, showed that each time we double the installation of these technologies, we drive the cost down another 30%. I'll just add, it is important to think about and try and clean up the supply chain for things like lithium.

Remember with fossil fuel, that quite aside from global warming, every year 9 million people on this planet die from breathing the combustion byproducts of coal and gas and oil, mostly particulates. Most of those people are poor. That is one death in five on this planet. It's bigger than HIV aids, malaria, tuberculosis, war, terrorism, combined. The vaccine for these deaths is completely clear. It's solar panels, it's electric vehicles, it's air source, heat pumps, it's wind turbines. It's moving very quickly off the place where we burn stuff on this planet, where we have fires under the hood of your car, fires in your basement, fires in your kitchen, and move to the place where we rely on the fact that the good Lord hung a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles away in the sky. We now have the wit to make full use of it.

Arun Venugopal: Bill, we have to wrap up real soon. I should mention there's a whole cottage industry of people who are listening to the birds in your midst and are just loving the sound. One person on Twitter by the name of Kate Hines, sound suspiciously familiar, WNYC's own Kate Hines says she's identified house sparrows and phoebes singing in the background. I'm not sure if you can verify or deny that. In that context, any words of inspiration to leave us on in this last minute? We've been a lot of doom and gloom.

Bill McKibben: It does remain a very beautiful world, Arun. Our job is to keep it as intact as we can and work as hard as we can. I'm glad that the birds have been reminding people of that.

Arun Venugopal: Bill McKibben. Thanks so much for joining us today. We're going to have to leave it there. Bill McKibben is an environmental activist, founder of Third Act and author of many books, including The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon. Thanks. Thanks so much for coming on today, Bill.

Bill McKibben: Take care.

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