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(light music) - [Female Narrator] And now Crosscut Festival Main Stage featuring a selection of curated sessions from this year's Crosscut Festival.

Thank you for joining us for "Everything In The Balance" with Bill McKibben, moderated by Shannon Osaka.

Before we begin, we'd like to thank our environment and outdoors track sponsor, UBS.

We'd also like to thank our session sponsor, Beneficial State Bank.

Finally, thank you to our founding sponsor, the Kerry & Linda Killinger foundation.

- Hello everyone, and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Shannon Osaka, and I'm a climate reporter at the environmental magazine Grist.

Today, I am extremely honored to have the chance to have a conversation with Bill McKibben, who is a legendary writer and environmentalist.

Bill is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

He is the founder of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign.

And more recently the co-founder of Third Act, an organization that encourages people over 60 to take action for climate justice.

He is also the author of over a dozen books about the environment, including "The End of Nature," and more recently, "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?"

On a personal note, it was reading "The End of Nature" in college that actually first got me interested in studying and writing about climate change, so it's a real honor to be here.

Bill McKibben, thank you for joining me today.

- Well, what an honor for me to get to talk with you, and to say thanks for all the good work you've done at Grist and wired everyplace else.

You know, one of the pleasures for me of the moment, and one has to seek out what pleasures one can at the moment is that there is just an extraordinary group of young climate journalists, hard at work all over the country which you exemplify.

When I was first doing this work back in the '80 and '90s, it was very lonely.

If there was a major story in some English speaking publication about climate change, there was about a 70% chance I wrote it, which was a terrible on many counts for me, for readers, for everybody else.

It was that feeling of having a nightmare.

You're in a nightmare, but you can't get anyone around you to acknowledge the large monster that's bearing down.

So now I'm glad that my angst is at least more widely distributed.

- Shared with a larger group of people, that's true.

The first question I wanna ask you is actually kind of going back to that point 33 years ago, when you were first reporting on this.

So your book "The End of Nature" which really inspired me, generally considered to be the first book written on climate change for a general audience.

And at the time, you wrote this really interesting thesis, which was that because human released carbon dioxide had fundamentally transformed the entire planet, every corner of the atmosphere, every corner of the world.

This idea that nature as a world apart from man had gone extinct.

And so I'm just curious, how have your thoughts changed since then?

Do you still believe that climate change has fundamentally ended nature?

- So, in a sense, my thoughts have gotten more complicated and richer overtime.

I went back and read "The End of Nature" for the first time in a long time this year, because Penguin chose it to be on their list of modern classics and published it as well.

Which is very nice, 'cause I think now that means it will be in print, however long things are in print.

But, so I read it again.

So at that time, we didn't know much.

we knew all that there was to know about the science of climate change, but we couldn't yet point to the impacts of it.

It was all in the future, what was going to happen, sort of abstract.

So my main emotion when I was writing it, I think the emotion that runs through that book is kind of sadness.

And there's a kind of elegiac quality to it at the passing of an idea, the idea you correctly described, that there are places where human beings aren't that there's something bigger than us out there in the natural world.

'Cause at the moment the natural world reflects us in all that it's doing.

It was 122 degrees in Pakistan last night.

Well, that's us, you know.

Now that we can see those effects, like what's happening in Pakistan, there's obviously another dimension that is added in, sort of fear that of all that's happening and all that will happen now that we can attach it to individual people, especially the most vulnerable people on the planet.

And truthfully, there's also a fair amount of anger in my heart now about all this, because as it turns out, great investigative reporting, that's amply demonstrated.

The fossil fuel industry knew all about this back when I was writing about it.

They were investigating it too and figuring it out and they understood it, and they took action to figure out which parts of the Arctic they wanted to lease once they'd melted it but they didn't tell the rest of us, they just lied about it.

So now there's that combination of sadness, and fear, and anger, and that makes it all the more important for me that I can still get outside most days and into the woods.

And it's not the wilderness that thorough might have imagined, but in relative terms, it remains a place where we can at least imagine something other than ourselves.

And I will add this in the 33 years since I wrote that book, the nature role has had one other new role, it's the place you go where there is no social media, where you only a place where you can escape from the endless tyranny of Twitter and Insta, and everything else.

- I wanna follow up on that a little bit, because one of the things that you wrestled with in that book is if nature is extinct, if this sort of purest idea of nature is gone, then how and why do we fight for its remnants?

I mean, we're at this place, we've warmed the earth about 1.2 degrees Celsius.

How do we think about inspiring sort of the next generation of environmental activists as we shift ever farther away from that natural temperature that sort of pre-industrial natural world?

- Well, it's a really good question.

And one of the things that I've had to come to Grits with in the course of my life and thinking is everything is relative.

So look, we're past the point where we can stop global warming.

I have lost that fight early on.

That doesn't mean that we can't stop it sort of what it would otherwise be, IE, all the work that millions of people are doing around the world now is to make sure the planet warms 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius instead of 3 or 4 degree Celsius.

Not 'cause it's gonna be great 2 degrees if 1 degree melted the Arctic, we really fools to find out what 2 degrees does, but that's kind of where we are now.

We're having to do everything to try and get to 1.5 or 2.

But it's incredibly better, it's a miserable outcome, but not perhaps an unsurvivable one.

At this point, I think it's pretty clear that if we let the planet warm 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, we're not gonna have civilizations like the ones we're used to.

The stress, and flux, and stuff, just probably too much.

By the same token, the world around us is relative too.

That is, there is no fewer nature, I guess.

I think my argument holds, I think that's why 10 years later, scientists started talking about the Anthropocene.

But in a certain way, it's made the places that are Wilder than other places, all the more valuable stick out all the more, that the relative wild is should be protected as best we possibly can because for its instrumental value, because it sequesters carbon, because it allows plants and animals to escape to the north, so on.

But also because we need places to be out in the natural world, and better an imperfect natural world than none at all.

- Absolutely.

And I feel like COVID was sort of a wake up call for a lot of people of appreciating these pockets of more wilderness and more nature.

- I think that's so true.

I lived my whole life out in the woods and it's really been a pleasure over the last couple years to watch in the winter.

You can't buy a pair of cross-country skis in Vermont.

Everybody wants to be out doing something.

- You talked about sort of the importance of these relatively better situations that we'll be in, you know, 1.5 is better than 2 degrees, which is infinitely better than 3 degrees or 4 degrees.

And we're in this place where, I mean, I've talked, I spoke to a high school class last week and I've talked to some climate scientists who say that when they're talking to young people, they feel like they're interacting a lot more with people who are saying, who are worried that after 20, 30, the world is going to end, they're not gonna be able to have children.

These scientists are saying, I almost interact more with these people than I do with climate deniers.

- Yeah.

- How do we talk to young people specifically about how bad things are getting, while also pointing out how much bad we can still avert?

I mean, how do we walk this sort of narrow line?

- Yes, this is a very good question.

One that I've been trying to answer a little bit.

I just published last week my first book for children, in this case, quite small children, like it's a picture book.

I didn't do the pictures 'cause I can barely doodle, but I wrote the words.

And the strategy I chose for that.

I mean, these are very young kids, so obviously it would be wrong to scare them in any way, and worry them or whatever, but people are worried and they know that there's trouble and things.

So the point I was trying to make was with this book was that the title is "We Are Better Together."

And I'm trying to help people know that there are people working to make big changes and that they can play a part in that work.

The scariest thing about climate change is our sense of lack of agency around it.

It is so big and each of us is so small that the idea that we might actually make a difference seems far-fetched And indeed at this point, I'm afraid it really is far-fetched, if we're thinking of ourselves as individuals, which we've been trained to do since at least the Reagan years in this country, that's what we're supposed to be.

As Margaret Thatcher memorably said, "There is no society, there are only individual men and women."

The chance that we can solve things individually is vanishingly small.

I'm proud that I have solar panels all over the roof and that they connect to an electric car, but I don't try to fool myself that that's what how we're gonna do this.

The most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to matter, so that's why we started 350.org, and why people started the Sunrise Movement, and Extinction Rebellion, and why we're organizing Third Act and on and on and on.

And young people in particular, need to kind of feel and know this.

And they definitely can.

I mean, some of the best organizers in the world now are junior high and high school students.

- People ask me since becoming a climate journalist, "Do you get depressed all the time?"

"Isn't this sort of a terrible job?"

And I think, I do get depressed sometimes, but at the same time, when you spend all day talking, and I work mostly on solutions and policies, when you spend all day talking to people who are very engaged on trying to pass policy and get these climate solutions through, it's hard to be depressed all the time when those are the people you're interacting with.

- The only depressing part for me is realizing that there are fairly large number of extremely important and powerful people who are not working to help, who are working to hinder progress here.

This would be an extremely difficult task to pull off, even if everybody was working with good faith in the same direction.

And the fact that we also have to overcome people whose only interest is vested interest, is the only part that gets me down.

And I've been glad not...

I mean, your job in the last year, I'm sure has been very tough in part because you're getting to watch this drama, and probably one of the latter chapters of it play out.

I mean, watching Joe Manchin hold up the Climate Bill month after month after month, because his paymasters at the fossil fuel industry have told him to is depressing.

There's no way around that.

So that's why we try and organize.

We can have some countervailing power to that money and greed.

- We talked about sort of the very young side of organizing, and I wanna ask you about the older side of organizing.

I actually first found out about Third Act through my 67-year-old father.

So the message is getting out.

I just wanna ask you about the organization and what's behind the focus on baby boomers.

I mean, what can they add to the climate conversation and to sort of the political energy behind the movement that hasn't been there before?

- So first of all, it's directly out of this sort of experience of working with young people that this came, 'cause that's mostly what I've done in my life.

Believe it or not, I was once one myself, back when I was writing "The End of Nature," I was in my 20s.

I think I was 27 or 28 when it came out.

When I started 350, I was in my 40s but I did it with seven college students.

A ton of that work was on divestment, and so I worked with kids on every college campus in the country, tons of whom went on to start the Sunrise Movement.

I've gotten to know and love all the really young organizers, Greta that who everybody knows and everybody should, 'cause Greta Thunberg is a great brilliant organizer and a good human being.

But there's 10,000 Gretas around the planet.

I got worried at some point that we were taking the most difficult problem in human history and assigning it to 17 year olds.

Pleads in between precalc and field hockey practice, would you mind also saving the world while you're doing.

And that's ignoble, but it's also unlikely to be successful, it seems to me, because they bring some of the ingredients, extraordinary passion, curiosity, openness to new ideas, but they don't have some of the things they need, which are political and economic power.

So, enter the over 60 crowd like me, we vote like crazy.

There's 70 million of us, so a bigger population than France, but we vote in such large numbers that really there might as well be a hundred million of us when it comes to politics.

And we ended up with all the money.

I mean, fairly or not, people over the age of 60, have 70% of the country's financial assets.

So if you wanna lean on politicians, you need voters.

And if you wanna lean on bankers, you need people with money in their vaults.

And I wanna lean on both those guys.

So it's a good group to try and organize, especially because for this group of boomers and the silent generation above them, their first act, we have good generational DNA.

Our first act back in the '60s or '70s was a time of really profound social, cultural, political transformation.

Women's Movement, Civil Rights Movement, Anti-war Movement.

But in the environment, this was the first Earth Day in 1970, which was not some celebration of the planet, it was a protest.

There were 20 million people in the streets, 10% of the then population, and a huge number of those 20 million are still alive and still wanting to do stuff.

And so it's been great fun to be corralling them and trying to do this cross generational work.

We've been doing a lot of work on banks, and part of the reason is that that's what young people were working on.

In October, the Fridays For The Future coalition in the US asked us to come support them as they were doing these protests outside banks.

We said, "Sure."

And I was in Boston that day.

And so there was a big crowd of young people marching, and at the back marching more slowly, a big crowd of us older people.

And someone had a big banner that said, "Fossils against fossil fuels."

So that was our rallying cry, and on we go.

- So we're at a place now where we've seen this huge outpouring of support.

We're at a moment where there's more support for climate policy than ever before.

We've seen the Sunrise Movement.

We've seen Greta Thunberg.

we've seen Fridays For The Future.

And yet here in the US, we have yet to see substantial legislation on climate change.

We have yet to see sort of action that rises to the level that we need.

What do you attribute that to?

Do you think of it as fossil fuel money?

I mean, are you hopeful that we will see the government action that we need in the future?

- So, we're in interesting moment, to answer this.

There's no longer what there was for many years which was a technical or financial obstacle.

IE, 10 years ago, solar power and wind power were still expensive.

They're not anymore, this is the cheapest power in the world.

Scientists and engineers have really done their job.

So now all we're left with to explain the delay is inertia, which is always a problem in human affairs, but not unovercomeable one.

What is perhaps unovercomeable in the time we have is the extraordinary power of vested interest.

Now I haven't given up and we're definitely getting closer, like 2009 was the last time that Congress even tried to do climate legislation, and it didn't even come close.

I mean, it wouldn't have had 30 votes in the Senate.

We're one vote away from passing extraordinary.

We've got 49, I don't know we're for the moment, assuming that Kyrsten Sinema is in a rational mood for the day and whatever, but we've got 49 Democrats ready to go with ambitious climate action.

That's painfully close, but not quite enough, and so we try to keep building power and building things bigger.

I have no doubt the movement will keep growing.

What worries me of course, is that unlike our other political challenges, this is a time test.

If we don't get it right soon, we never get it right.

Once the Arctic's melted, it's not like someone has a plan to freeze it back up again.

And that's why along with political action, I think it's super important that people work hard to pull on the other big lever.

The other lever big enough to matter.

One of those is marked politics, that one pulled almost all the way to the floor.

Joe Manchin's struggling to keep it from working.

The other one's marked money, and we've made real progress here.

This divestment campaign that Naomi Klein and I sort of helped dream up is become the largest anti-corporate campaign in history.

We're $40 trillion in endowments in portfolios that have divested it's weakened these giant companies, considerably in both reputation and in ability to access capital.

And now we're going hard against the banks that remain their lifeline.

That's a lot of the work we're doing at Third Act and elsewhere trying to get people and companies to pressure these banks, to stop funding the fossil fuel industry.

The big four American banks, Chase, Citi, Wells, B of A, they've lent the fossil fuel industry more than $1 trillion since the Paris Accords were signed.

They didn't need Donald Trump to sabotage the thing, they were happy to do it themselves.

So we have to get one or both of these two systems, politics or economics out of kind of suicide mode and into survival mode.

- I've been a climate reporter for just two years, and it's hard imagining have some of the people in journalism and in policy who have watched sort of getting closer every time, but sort of the same process play out in so many different administrations.

So it takes a lot of focus and determination to see it through.

- Things do change.

And right now, one thing that is changing, that's a real wild card, and it's unclear how it's gonna break is Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.

Clearly a war that emphasizes the other one of the other gross things about fossil fuel, which is that it's in almost invariably a friend of despots.

The fact that it's concentrated in a few places on the planet means that if you happen to control one of those places, you get a lot of unearned power.

Hence Putin, hence the king of Saudi Arabia, hence in our country, the Koch brothers, our biggest oil and gas parents, who use their winnings to buy a political party and to form our democracy.

The world passed that, the world that runs on sun and wind isn't some utopia.

But everybody's got some sun and some wind, so there's a more small democratic world on the other side, which is why the Exxons of the world fight so hard to keep us from getting there.

But, so their reaction to Ukraine is let's go pump more oil and that'll be how we get around Putin.

That strikes me as insane, oil's a global market, Putin's receipts have gone up not down this year as the price of oil's gone up.

But if we seized the moment instead to make this the chance to all out wartime effort, make the switch to renewable energy, it's probably the last really great opportunity like that we're gonna get in a physically relevant timeframe.

So that's what I've been working hard on these last weeks and the heat pumps for Europe project and things.

And, I don't know whether we'll get them through or not, but I'm excited that people are understanding the opportunity anyway.

- I remember learning and reading in college about sort of the way that different energy sources can structure political structures, right?

I mean, the way that you could have renewables, which as you're saying are not perfect, but they're more distributed, they're sort of almost a more democratic aspect to having power from renewables versus having this fuel that you have to put through pipelines and so has very specific tracks.

And it's interesting just seeing people realize that more globally.

- Vladimir Putin, would've a hard time embargoing the sun, turning off the wind, but he can do that with the gas tap at least for the moment.

So, it's important we send weapons to help Ukraine defend itself, but it's even more important I think that we send the technology in large numbers to Europe to help free it from having to fear Putin quite so much.

And we better do it before October, 'cause even on a globally warmed world, it's gonna start getting cold again in October.

- Yeah, for viewers who don't know, Bill's suggestion for heat pumps for peace and freedom, I think it was, which was in your subs stack, was about sending basically systems that can electrify buildings, such that you can get heat from electricity as opposed to natural gas or oil or... - And one beauty of it is, yes, heat pumps are great, they're the kind of electric replacement for the furnace in your basement and they work great and they save huge amounts of energy.

And if Biden wanted to do this in this context, he could do it invoking the Defense Production Act, which doesn't require Joe Manchin or anybody else to sign off on it.

He used it as Trump did to spur the production of vaccines.

This is the same sort of level of emergency.

- It looks like we're out of time.

It has been so great talking to you today, Bill.

I really appreciate you joining us at the Crosscut Festival this year.

- The pleasure's been all mine.

Thank you so much for your good work you're doing.

And people should really make sure to be reading Grist to see it.

And keep it up.

Thank you very much.

- And before I go, I hope everyone gets a chance to enjoy some of the other fantastic sessions happening at the festival.

You can go to crosscut.com/festival to see all the incredible speakers and sessions.

Thank you all so much for joining us.

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