THRESHOLD CONVERSATIONS

Bill McKibben

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AMY: Welcome to Threshold Conversations, I’m Amy Martin, and my guest today is Bill McKibben.

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BILL: I’m not pretending to an optimism I don't have. I just know the task of the moment is to try.

AMY: Bill McKibben is an author and environmental activist based in Vermont. He’s a former staff writer for The New Yorker and he currently writes their climate crisis newsletter. His 1989 book The End of Nature was one of the first books about climate change written for a popular audience, other titles in his extensive catalog include Deep Economy, Enough, and Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, which tells the story of how his eco-political writing eventually led him into the realm of civil disobedience and nonviolent protest. In 2008, Bill co-founded 350.org, which has grown into one of the largest grassroots climate change movements on the planet.

Bill and I spoke in early May of 2020. At that time, much of the world was in lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic and oil tankers were circling around California ports, unable to offload because of the sudden drop in oil consumption.

AMY: Bill McKibben, thank you so much for joining me for Threshold Conversations.

BILL: Amy, it’s a real pleasure to be with ya.

AMY: Well there are all kinds of points of intersection between this current moment we're in with the coronavirus pandemic and the much larger broader crisis that we're also in around climate change. One of those points of intersection is in the oil industry. Because of the pandemic, global oil demand has declined radically, oil producers are reeling, and a few weeks ago, oil prices actually went into negative territory for the first time in history. You've been someone who's been advocating for a reduction in the production and consumption of oil for decades, now it's happening. I'm just so curious what you make of this moment, and what you're paying attention to right now, and why.

BILL: Right. Good questions. So, look, the oil industry has been in trouble for the last, at least the last decade, and for two reasons. One, the product they make is destroying the planet, so that increasingly causes trouble for you and brings you under regulatory pressure and things Two: competitors have come up with a better, cheaper, cleaner way to produce the same thing: energy. Abu Dhabi announced the biggest solar project in history and they're going to be producing power at 1 cent a kilowatt hour. That's as cheap as anyone's ever managed to produce energy on the planet. So if you're the oil industry, you're in big trouble to begin with. But now we reached the pandemic and all of a sudden demand drops sharply. And that's enough to just completely throw the future of the industry into question. The prediction prior to this was that we'd hit peak oil demand sometime in the next few years. But now I think it's probably safe to say that we've seen peak oil demand on this planet, that it came in 2019 and it will probably never get there again because even though people will go back to, you know, driving and whatever else, the growth that comes in energy use over the next decade is probably mostly going to be supplied by renewable energy. Now that does not solve the climate crisis because we need to send fossil fuel use to zero as quickly as possible to have any hope of catching up with the physics of this thing. In a sense, the most important part of oil's new weakness is that it will start losing political clout and power. Its ability to keep its business model alive for the next 20, 30, 40 years kind of depends on a lot of political clout, which in turn depends on a lot of money. And if it's beginning to suffer the way that it's suffering now, it may find it has a lot fewer political friends than it used to. So I do think we're at a kind of a really major shift right now. It's been accelerated by this pandemic.

AMY: I think one thing I don't understand from what you just said is why, why peak oil would be in 2019. Why wouldn't we just come back roaring from this, consuming as much or more oil as before and maybe even in fact increase out of the need to, you know, restart the economy. 

BILL: It'll obviously bounce back some, you know, as we begin, you know, getting the economy back going again, but I don't think anyone thinks the economy is going to come back to where it was right away. That'll take a period of years. I mean, ask yourself, you know, how eager most of your friends are to go jump on an airplane right now. But as demand comes back slowly, most of it is going to be met by the rapidly growing renewable energy supply. 

AMY: Why though? Why would it be?

BILL: Well, because it's cheaper. So, you know, as demand grows, it'll tend to go to the cheaper supplier. Right. I mean, I think about people who are buying cars now. Yeah, some of them will buy SUVs cause gas is cheap for the moment. But as the number of EVs on the market just keeps going up and up and up. And plenty of people are going to be buying those two in part because “hey, there are people who are going to say, I don't really want to go to a gas station as much as I used to. I kind of like the fact that I can fill the thing up in my garage off the solar panels on my roof, you know.” We're gonna keep using oil, sadly, but it's not going to have the same growth curve that it's always had historically. That's come to an end.

AMY: Hmm. One thing that comes to mind as I hear you say that is just thinking about jobs and since we're in a moment of extreme employment, a crisis right now for in so many sectors. There are a whole lot of people providing for their families in the oil industry, and I'm trying to hear what you're saying from their perspective and I think that that could sound really terrifying. Like my financial security just is, is evaporating here. And what does a person like you at the head of an environmental movement say to people like that, who, that does not sound like good news to them.

BILL: Right. So what everyone's been saying for a long time is, and environmentalist and been saying, is let's have and fund a just transition for workers who've through no fault of their own, I've been doing what's been an important job for a long time. And, and that's completely possible. You know, we actually even see some of it happening right now during the pandemics, a movement in this direction. So for instance, the Canadian government just put aside a couple of billion dollars to go to cleaning up the incredible problem of abandoned oil wells across Western Canada. And there are abandoned oil wells all over the world. And it's going to be much more than a couple of billion dollars that it takes to do it, but happily it requires the same kind of skills that built them in the first place. So they're going to be hiring people who aren't working in the oil fields now to clean up the damage that we've done. Trust me, there's plenty of damage to be cleaned up to keep people at work for a very long time. We badly need that kind of work and there's lots of other work that we need to, for instance, the buildout of renewable energy is labor intensive in the way that, you know, fossil fuel work is usually capital intensive. You know, if you have a house someplace, the insulation is not going to, the solar panels aren't going to put themselves on the roof and you're not going to send your house to China to get it done either. You know, it has to be done close to home and happily there's been a lot of research to show that the skillset that people have who work in the oil fields or in the coal fields is actually really well suited with relatively minimal retraining to doing precisely that kind of highly necessary work.

AMY: Do you think that at this moment where we are suddenly investing trillions of dollars in, in trying to shore up the economy in this crisis, what do you think the chances are that some of that money is going to go towards things like that?

BILL: In America right at the moment, nil. Because you've got a buffoon for president who's a, you know, a captive of the oil industry. And so he's just giving them, you know, high dollar bailouts to try and keep doing what they're doing. But that's completely ridiculous. Every, you know, most countries on earth are doing just the opposite. The Germans, the South Koreans, the Canadians to some extent are using this as an opportunity to, I mean, they know that you have to retool our energy economy for the future because of climate change. And since we're in a, somewhere between a recession and a depression at the moment, this is the opportunity to do it. You can borrow money at next to no cost in order to go and do work that everyone knows has to be done and in the process put lots of people to work.

AMY: One thing, I'm just fascinated by is how quickly we flipped from thinking about oil as something highly precious. Something that a lot of people are constantly worried about not having enough of, to suddenly it's something that we've had, we have too much of, at least temporarily and not, and not for ideological reasons, but just like practically like we don't have enough physical places put the oil. And to me that's just kind of fascinating and it highlights how capricious the whole thing is about what we decide is valuable versus what we decide is not. And I don't know if that will have any kind of long term effect on our thinking here, but I'm just kind of wondering what that's done to your thinking since you're a person who's been trying to say for such a long time, we have too much of this. Like what does it feel like to suddenly watch people truly struggling to have enough places to physically put the oil?

BILL: What it reminds us, I think, is that this is an industry that's always counted on the fact that it was, it was the only way to get things done, I mean, fossil fuel was the heart of modernity. I mean, you know, you can trace the world as we know it, to the invention of the steam engine and the understanding that you could burn coal to generate power in significant amounts. It, in essence, gave everybody in the Western world, you know, 50 or a hundred servants to do work for them. And because of that, because it was the kind of keystone commodity; it ruled the world. I mean, you know, the Rockefellers and so on were the most powerful people on the planet. Some of that remains, but that's shifting fast because when the sun comes up in the morning, it delivers power to people who have solar panels on their roofs. I mean, talk about a business model getting undermined. That's why the Exxons of the world have fought so hard to deny climate change to forestall this transition. I mean, their business was built on you writing a check every month for, for some more fossil fuel. From their point of view. It's almost blasphemous that the sun can just come up and deliver it to you for free.

AMY: What, what about the clean energy, the renewable energy sector. I mean, this economic downturn that we're, we're in heading into here is affectingrenewables too. I think. I think I read that over a hundred thousand clean energy workers filed for unemployment in the United States just in the month of March. So, what effect do you think the the pandemic will have on the renewable energy?

BILL: I mean, clearly it's having a short term, tough effect on literally every sector of the economy except I don't know, Netflix and…I don't know what else. But I think over time, probably relatively the clean energy industry is going to do better than the dirty energy industry. That's where the growth is continuing to come. 

AMY: How do you think all of that...I guess I'd like to, to think about how that shift interacts with social justice issues that are embedded into the fossil fuel economy. But also are not necessarily, just because we're getting power from wind turbines or solar panels doesn't mean that we can't also continue, lots of social injustices if we make, if we want to. So how do we, as we make that transition, how do we make sure that we're not just, you know, putting wind farms on indigenous lands or putting giant solar farms in places that endanger different species and how do we do that in a way that's fair?

BILL: Right. Well, first of all, first of all, let's make clear that there's no such thing as a free lunch. There are lunches that are a little freer than others, but you can't produce energy on anything like the scale that we use without having consequences. That's one of the reasons we should try hard to use less, and why questions around consumption and things have always been really important. Second thing to say is there are some really powerful things that happen when you move away from fossil fuel. And one of them has to do with not only global warming but with other kinds of air pollution, which affect poor communities, communities of color far more than anybody else. So, so for instance, just to give the most obvious example. Delhi. In India. There are 5 million children there, two and a half million of them have irreversible lung damage just from breathing the air. And in the last few weeks in the pandemic, people there have actually gotten literally the first lung fulls of clean air that they've ever breathed in their lives. So moving toward renewable energy helps there. It doesn't mean that it solves every problem. The other place that it helps, I think is that to one degree or another, it moves us a little closer towards more local control of this incredibly important commodity. You know, fossil fuel is concentrated in a few places on the planet and the people who have control of those places have outsized influence on our lives. People are going to get rich building solar panels, but I don't think anyone's going to get Koch brothers rich simply because as I said, once the panel’s up, the sun does the work for free. So one can do this in better and worse ways and, just and more just ways and everyone should work hard to try and make sure that as we make decisions about where to do things, when to do things, that we try to do it in ways that benefit those who were most abused by the old economy and not just replicate the same injustices. That's one of the things that the Green New Deal legislation that the Sunrise Movement and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ed Markey have promulgated. That's one of the things that it's really strong on is really paying attention to what we now understand. The basic bottom line is we've got to stop the process of climate change fast or it will make life literally impossible for the poorest people on this planet. I mean, the iron law of climate change is the less you did to cause it, the sooner you get hammered by it.

We’re going to take a short break and be back with more of my conversation with Bill McKibben, right after this.

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AURICLE PROMO: Christopher Preston, Membership Drive

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold Conversations, I’m Amy Martin, and my guest today is Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of 350.org, an organization which has become a major force in the movement to prevent climate catastrophe. Bill’s writing and activism has earned him a bevy of awards and 18 honorary degrees. The name 350.org refers to the goal of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air to 350 parts per million. In the spring of 2020, we hit a record 417 parts per million --  the highest levels of atmospheric CO2 in human history. We’re going to pick up my conversation with Bill with a discussion of an article he wrote for Time magazine in September of 2019, titled “Hello From the Year 2050.” In it, he outlined a potential future in which we took meaningful action on climate change and managed to steer ourselves away from the worst possible outcomes. To get there, he says, we have to learn three things in the 2020s: first, we aren't getting out of this unscathed; second, there are solutions to the climate crisis; and third, the biggest reason we haven’t made more progress so far is because of the political power of the fossil fuel industry. I was intrigued by this thought experiment, and wanted to dig into a bit with Bill.

AMY: I think there are people out there who might be open to your first two points. People who might say, okay, I, I get it, climate change is real, it has real consequences. And the second one that yeah, there are probably things we could do to solve this problem or at least mitigate some of the worst effects. But I think that there, there are a number of people who would not be willing to go to point number three, that the biggest reason we're not making progress is because of the fossil fuel industry. And I wonder if you were talking to a person like that, maybe someone who's like, I do accept the science. I do know this is real, but when you start talking about oil companies like they're the boogeyman, I'm out, I don't, I don't buy that. And what would you say or what have you said to that kind of person?

BILL: Well, first of all, I, I rarely find that that's a problem. I find most people don't like oil companies much to begin with. And so they're open to the idea that they might not be honest actors here. And then once you start laying out what we now know, people really begin to get appalled. I mean, there's been great investigative reporting, your brothers and sisters at the LA times, and Inside Climate News with the Columbia Journalism School have done remarkable work over the last five years to document from whistle blowers and, and things that the single most startling fact of this era, which is that the fossil fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change in the 1980s. They studied it and they understood it. I mean, if you think about it, it makes sense. Exxon was the biggest company on earth and it had great scientists on staff. Its product was carbon. Of course, they're going to try and figure it out. And they did. You know one of the really remarkable documents I've seen recently comes from Exxon scientists in the 1980s. It predicts with uncanny accuracy what the temperature and the CO2 concentration were going to be in 2020 they got it right. And they were believed, you know, internally, Exxon began building all its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level. They knew it was on the way. What they didn't do was tell any of the rest of us. Instead, the whole industry joined together to build this sort of series of front groups and, and they concocted basically phony 30 year debate about whether or not global warming was real. A debate that both sides knew the answer to at the beginning. It's just that one of them was willing to lie. And it became really the most consequential lie in human history because it's cost us 30 years when we could have been at work on this. So I think that people are now catching on to that. I mean, we didn't catch onto it in time. There's a lot of irreversible damage from global warming that's already happened. Maybe we're in time to keep it from getting absolutely utterly out of control. We don't know that, we may have let things get too far already, but the best science indicates we have a narrow window, one that stretches perhaps to 2030, according to the last IPCC reports to make very fundamental change that might still give us some breathing room. 

AMY: I guess I just want to press you a little bit though, because whether or not, um, there's more people who, who do accept all of those things you just laid out. There is a segment of society that doesn't. And I'm just curious how you engage with people who don't go that route with you or who are put off by talk of the oil industry being kind of the enemy or the villain. How do you reach people like that who might be open to hearing about the science but are not onboard with some of the more political elements of what you're saying?

BILL: Well, there are other ways, of course that people can understand all this, sometimes people are impressed and moved by the fact that the Pentagon considers climate change a huge national security risk, as well they should. Sometimes people are moved by the fact that religious communities are now at the forefront of this work. Above all Pope Francis has been changing a lot of minds within the biggest religious movement on the planet. Sometimes it's just the economics of it. One thing that everyone seems to like is renewable energy. Now, I think the reasons that people like it are different. Conservatives I think often tend to sort of enjoy the every man in his own castle, I'm not going to depend on anyone for anything, you know, while liberals are enjoying the warmth of the sun, we're all in this together vibe. Doesn't matter. Gets you pretty much the same place. And that place is a world that runs the way we need it to run. 

AMY: Does it matter though, that we all, or the majority of us come to see the oil industry as a nefarious force here that has to be stopped? Do you think that's a crucial element in actually making progress? Is having that... what you as that truth be known and shared and acted upon collectively?

BILL: Yeah, I think that, I think that if we, I mean, it doesn't take everyone doing it, but it takes the people in power willing to stand up here. And you know, that's one of the great political divides of our time. Now you're never gonna convince everybody of, of anything, especially when there are people that make a lot of money from the status quo. But we're getting much closer to seeing the kind of political willingness to take action that we need. So, you know, I helped write the democratic platform in 2016. No matter who the nominee is they’re now on energy issues well to the left of where that platform is. You know, Joe Biden's talked about on the first day in office ending new drilling on federal land, which would be a big deal. Federal land... in the U.S., federal land would be the fifth biggest nation in the world in terms of its carbon contribution. So change is coming because activists have worked so hard to make it come.

AMY: You know, one of the things that people are talking about a lot during the pandemic is social trust and we're in this weird conundrum where we can feel we're simultaneously feeling this urge to help each other out and we're unable to actually physically come together and, and work together right now. And it, it kinda struck me that that was a little bit of a, of an analogy -- that tension between those two things -- between something that I feel like I observe in the climate change movement where on the one hand, you know, leaders of that movement and, and I consider you one of those leaders are tasked with, or have taken on the task of, of trying to wake people up. And, and that involves, you know, saying like, “things are going to get really, really bad here, possibly irreparably bad.” But at the same time trying to say, “Hey everybody, let's come together. Let's organize, let's run for office, let's try to change things.” And I wonder if you feel a tension between those two messages, because...

BILL: I do sometimes. 

AMY: Yeah, go ahead.

BILL: But I think the only way to an... to deal with the tension is just to try and be as honest all the time as possible. You know, we don't know what we can still prevent here. It's pretty clear that we're going to be very hard pressed to stop the rise in temperature short of two degrees Celsius. And it's clear that two degrees Celsius is going to do a hideous amount of damage, but a lot less damaged than three degrees or four degrees.The best thinking I think indicates that if you get up around three degrees, look, probably you can't have civilizations like the ones we're used to having, the damage just gets too unbearable. So, you know, at least for the moment it's clear that our job is to try and limit the damage and work really hard to do that. And so I, I, I think that's all we can say really at this point. I just try to be honest about it. But I think your larger point about social trust is really key. I mean, one thing that I hope happens in the pandemic, and I think is happening in a way, is that we're starting to realize that the political truths we've lived under the last 40 years aren't truths at all. We've kind of lived our life in the shadow of Ronald Reagan. And the idea that markets would solve all problems and that our job was to each try and get as rich as we could. And I mean, what were his, you know, his most famous line and you know, the scariest words in the English language are, “I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.” But that's not clearly not true. I mean, the scariest words in the English language are, :sorry, no more ventilators.” You know, watch out the hill behind your house has caught on fire. You know, and those are the kinds of problems you can only solve when you have a working government, when you, when we come together to do the things that need doing. And I think maybe we're might be starting to get that we look around the world and we see who's dealing better and worse with the pandemic and it's pretty clear that it's not an advantage to have, you know, to, to have what we have, which is just everyone running, you know, every state having to fend for themselves, so on and so forth. We'd be a lot better off if we had responsible, sane collective leadership.

AMY: And yet I hear a lot of deep cynicism and lack of trust in those very institutions coming from people in the climate movement. I mean certainly I'm not trying to say everyone, but there is a strain within the climate movement of, an attitude of everything is broken. Everyone is corrupt. The system doesn't need to be changed. It needs to be destroyed. You know, I mean, you, you know what I'm talking about? I'm sure you've encountered that as well. 

BILL: Sure. 

AMY: I think that's what I'm, I'm kind of trying to get to is like how, how do marry that kind of deep, deep disillusionment, and with the work that needs to be done basically to survive this?

BILL: I don't really know. I mean, I don't know whether those are the people who've, you know, reached a point of that kind of cynicism or open to doing the kind of work together that we need to do. I am happy to observe that the size of the movement of people who do want to work together keeps growing all the time. You know, I mean we started out with things like 350.org but those were early iterations. Now we also see, you know, the Sunrise Movement, which came out of all the campus fossil fuel divestment work, but it birthed the Green New Deal. Now we see Extinction Rebellion around Europe and increasingly in other parts of the world really bringing a strong challenge. We see profoundly the rise of the youth climate movement. Everybody knows Greta Thunberg, but, and she's wonderful, it's been a great pleasure to get to know and work with her. But an even greater pleasure is the fact that there are 10,000 Gretas around the world, young leaders who are just amazing and millions and millions of followers of those people. So that's who, you know, that's who I work with because they're willing to work. You know, and, and as a say, those movements are growing and getting stronger. One of the things we understand about nonviolent social movements now that we've had on to a century to kind of study them since people like Gandhi and the suffragettes invented them really in the 20th century. One of the things we understand is that it doesn't take everyone to make change. And that's because apathy and cynicism cuts both ways. The record would indicate that most cases, if you can get four or five percent of people really involved in a fight, you'll generally be able to win. We have some sense of that, you know, in the U.S. because the first Earth Day 50 years ago, we know that about 10% of Americans, about 20 million people were in the streets that day. And that means that, I mean, that was enough to change the zeitgeist. And that got the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the EPA passed and what do you know? The air and the water got a whole lot cleaner than they had been before. So, you know, we operate on the faith that if we build movements of that size and scale and skill and passion, then we've got a chance. You know, and I'm not pretending to an optimism that I don't have. I just know that there's, you know, the, the, the, the task of the moment is to try.

AMY: Yeah. I would love to just get your thoughts about crisis and time. I saw, I saw a photograph of a poet protester on Earth Day who was holding a sign that said ‘normal was a crisis.’ And a month before that you were writing about the nature of crisis in your newsletter for the New Yorker. And I just, I wonder, you're, you're thinking about this particular moment of crisis, which is sweeping over us in a matter of months when, as you just said, for for 30 years you've been trying to get the world to pay attention to this, this climate crisis. Are you finding yourself at all frustrated? Like, hey world, I've been talking about a really important crisis for a long time. How come you haven't been paying attention or how are you sitting with this current crisis?

BILL: There are probably two or three things that come out of what we're learning about the covid crisis that help us understand the larger overarching crisis of the century around climate. One of them we already discussed this kind of need for social solidarity and the kind of end to the fantasy that problems just fix themselves automatically. The, the second thing I think that's really important is underlining the idea that reality matters. You know, I've been, as you point out, spent 30 years saying physics and chemistry are real. You can't spin or negotiate or force them to compromise. You have to respect the CO2 molecule and, and what it means. And the covid microbe is the same way. I mean it's forcing people to understand that biology is real and it doesn't matter exactly what you want. If it says stand six feet away, you'd be well advised to stand six feet away. So that's good in that sense just to have that lesson underlined. There are no silver linings to a pandemic, but if you're going to go through this much trauma, you might as well learn something. And the other thing I think to learn is that when you're dealing with reality, timing is crucial. We've seen the country, you know, the U.S. and South Korea got Coronavirus on the same day. The South Koreans went to work flattening the curve and by now they're kind of looking at things in the rear view mirror. They took some disruption upfront and went to work in the U.S. didn't. So now the thing is crashing through the windshield. You know, similarly we could have flattened the carbon curve 30 years ago with some pretty modest interventions, a price on carbon, that kind of thing. Since we didn't, now we still have to move with even greater speed, but the disruption will be larger and we're not going to avoid paying a heavy price no matter what we do at this point. So to me, those are things worth taking away from these odd weird months that we've endured.

AMY: I was interested to learn that the word crisis actually was a Greek word and it means the turning point in a disease, it's the point where you either recover or you die. And the, the problem is though it's so hard to see that point when you're living through it. And I feel like that's another thing that we can kind of learn from this moment is that we really, it's really hard to see right now where we are. Like, should we be reopening or should we not? Because we don't exactly know where we are on the timeline here. And with the climate crisis, it's even harder to, to see that because it's playing out over decades or centuries. 

BILL: Yes, it is. On the other hand, with the climate crisis, we understand the underlying science much more, much more firmly. You know, there's still a lot of variables. We don't know about COVID-19, but carbon we've got, we've got a handle on, we know precisely what's going on. I mean, we know exactly, you know, if you burn this much oil, that's how much temperature goes up. So, so really we have no excuse for not, taking stronger action, save the excuse that the power of vested interest gets in the way.

AMY: But, but with the coronavirus pandemic, people are feeling the fear in a very immediate way. And, although we may have the science well understood, understanding the science and feeling the actual physical fear of like, this thing is going to hurt me are two very different things, you know,  terms of motivating human behavior. 

BILL: I take the point but remember, I mean it depends where you are. It's not like people in Australia or California or, the other places that have felt the sting of the climate crisis don't get it at some visceral level. They do. And that's one of the reasons that the polling on, it's moved so powerfully in the last few years.

AMY: Well…

BILL: Mother nature is a good educator. 

AMY: They do and they don't though because I mean, I've spent quite a bit of time in the Arctic now and I definitely talked to some people who are very much directly impacted by climate change, who are still saying that they don't believe that it's caused by humans and -- 

BILL: Well there’s always going to be people who can't deal with science. I mean, there's people holding demonstrations saying we shouldn't vaccinate anybody either. I mean, if the question is how to convince people to, you know, be in contact with reality, I don't have a perfect answer for that. It's going to work in every case.

AMY: Yeah. I guess I think I would, I was, was trying to get to is just that it feels, it's remarkable to me to see, you know, I guess it's starting to fray now as people are starting to have fights about whether or not we should reopen. But there was a moment there when I felt like the country was more unified than I've seen it in, in years around the idea of: this danger is real. We need to stay away from each other to protect everybody. And, and I had a moment, I guess internally of, if only we could feel this same immediacy with climate. Right. You know, and, and I just wondered how you're processing that. 

BILL: So do yourself the thought experiment on the day that Jim Hanson in 1988 explains to the Congress that climate change is real. Say the CEO of Exxon had gone on TV that night and said, you know what? Our scientists are finding exactly the same thing, which they weren’t. No one would have said, Oh, Exxon, just a bunch of climate alarmists everyone would have said, okay, we got a problem. Let's get to work. That didn't happen. Instead, it was used to fuel the divisions that we see around us and we ended up in a really difficult, dangerous place. Eventually people will understand and get to work, but eventually maybe too late. And the job of movements is to try and force that spring to make things happen faster.

AMY: Well, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much for taking the time.

BILL: It's been a great pleasure for me, and thank you for your good work.

NICK: This episode of Threshold Conversations was funded by the Park Foundation, Montana Public Radio, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. We’re also funded by contributions from our listeners. Join our community at thresholdpodcast.org/donate.

SPONSORSHIP: Clearwater Credit Union, Joe Loviska

AMY: The Threshold team includes Caysi Simpson, Angela Swatek, Taliah Farnsworth, Eva Kalea and Nick Mott, with help from Caroline Kurtz, Dan Carreno, Hana Carey, Kara Cromwell, Katie DeFusco and Matt Herlihy. Our music is by Travis Yost.