Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Bill McKibben
You may not believe in climate change, but climate change believes in you.
Lee
That's Bill McKibben, one of our four guests featured on our Earth Day special episode on climate change.
John Cook
Biggest predictor of why people reject climate science is political affiliation.
Lee
And that's John Cook, with whom we'll explore the history of climate misinformation.
Plus, we'll learn why climate change is not a priority for some, and how to make it one, with Katharine Hayhoe.
Katharine Hayhoe
Look, people, I got bigger problems. Come back later.
Lee
And, we'll examine the surprising theological reasons some ignore climate change.
Debra Rienstra
It might have to do with the sort of big, overarching redemption story that's in people's minds.
Lee
All, coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
What do you think is the most polarized issue in the United States? Abortion? Gun reform? Race?
No. The answer? Climate change.
A 2020 Pew Research Survey concluded that of all the issues in U. S. politics, climate change is the most polarizing, with half of the country considering it a minor issue, if an issue at all, and the other half considering it an immediate crisis and a top priority.
That's despite the fact that multiple surveys have found that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human caused climate change is a serious and immediate problem.
So, how has this happened? How has the science been ignored by some, regarding climate change? How serious is the problem? What are the consequences? And what can we go out and do about it all?
Today on No Small Endeavor, our Earth [00:02:00] Day special on climate change. We'll examine the history of the politicization of climate change science with John Cook. Professor Katharine Hayhoe will explain why climate change might not be a top priority for you and how to help others see the pressing need. We'll see the necessity of engaging theological convictions for some with Professor Debra Rienstra. And we'll talk with Bill McKibben on why living a good life just might require reparations and solar power.
Here we go.
John Cook
My cognitive science PhD was studying this question of why do people deny climate science and what can we do about it? How can we respond to science denial and misinformation?
Lee
That's John Cook, a cognitive scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He and his colleagues study how misinformation spreads - in particular, misinformation about climate science.
John Cook
It was actually some of my colleagues at the University of Queensland who published, I think, one of the definitive studies [00:03:00] on why people deny climate science. They looked at all the different possible factors that might cause it, and they found that it wasn't education level, it wasn't intelligence, or gender, or income, or age.
The biggest predictor of why people reject climate science is political affiliation. Who you vote for determines your opinion about the greenhouse effect more than your education or your climate literacy levels.
Lee
But these findings beg the question, has this always been true? And if it is true now, how and when did we get here?
John Cook
It didn't have to be that way. It's not baked into human psychology that society has to be polarized on climate change. And in fact, a lot of the world isn't.
But what we find in the U. S. is that back in the 1980s, climate change wasn't a polarized topic. The process of it becoming polarized really began in the [00:04:00] early 1990s, and just gradually became more and more polarized over time.
What began that process was conservative think tank organizations beginning to generate misinformation and just pouring that misinformation into the public discussion about climate change, and that gradually poisoned it. It made it more toxic and polarized gradually over time.
Lee
What would be their motive behind that sort of move?
John Cook
Yeah. To state it simply, they didn't like the solutions to climate change, so they denied that there was a problem in the first place that needed solving.
More specifically, they promoted a worldview, which we call free market fundamentalism. In other words, opposing government regulation of industry, and in this case, in the case of climate change, government regulation of the fossil fuel [00:05:00] industry.
And a lot of the solutions to climate change and preventing fossil fuel emissions involved government regulation. That's not the only solution, but that's a common solution that's suggested.
And really, in the early 1990s, I think it was, we're at this historical crossroads. Conservative think tanks could have chosen to pour their energy into providing market friendly solutions to climate change, but instead they decided to pour their energy into denying the science and denying that there was a problem that needed solving instead.
And I think it's a tragedy that they went down that other road. If they'd gone towards promoting market friendly solutions, I think we would be much further along in addressing climate change right now.
Lee
Yeah. What would be some best sources or studies upon the move of these conservative think tanks that would document some of that?
John Cook
The leading research on that is done by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, kind of [00:06:00] these partners. They've published a lot of the leading research into conservative think tanks, documenting the history and all the types of misinformation that they've published, and really painting this picture of how these groups turned climate change into a polarized issue.
Lee
So in choosing to deny that climate change exists, out of the motive to avoid undesirable solutions, what then became some of the common climate myths that were and have been circulated?
John says that there are several kinds of misinformation that fall into two larger categories. The first category of misinformation is the science based argument, or we might say the science based misargument.
John Cook
The science based arguments are basically either, it's not real, it's not us, or it's not bad.
So, either arguing that global warming isn't happening, humans aren't causing it, or the [00:07:00] impacts aren't going to be that serious. So, whichever argument you use, the conclusion is always the same. Therefore, we shouldn't act on climate change.
Lee
The second category is solutions based misinformation.
John Cook
Which typically take the form of either attacking policies like carbon pricing, saying that they will harm the economy, or attacking renewables, saying that they either don't work or they're harmful.
We saw an example of this when all the blackouts in Texas were blamed on renewables, even though they're a tiny fraction of the actual power supply in Texas. So, you had the situation where 90 percent of the power in Texas was coming from fossil fuels, and yet they were blaming the blackouts on wind power, which only produced around 10 percent.
Lee
So if some with, say, a vested interest in fossil fuels, are spreading misinformation about the science, what do scientists actually say? Is it real? Is it caused by us? And is it bad? [00:08:00]
John Cook
It's kind of interesting that some of the research that my George Mason colleagues have done, have looked at what are the key climate beliefs. What are those kind of fundamental beliefs that people have about climate change?
And the three science ones are, it's real, it's us, and it's bad. So they're kind of a mirror universe of the key climate beliefs.
And as for the scientific consensus, there's been a number of studies that have looked at what is the expert consensus on, on these questions, particularly the first two, on the questions of whether global warming is real and whether it's caused by humans.
There's overwhelming scientific agreement, specifically a number of studies found that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human caused global warming is happening. Scientists are a very independent lot, so you rarely get 97 percent agreement on anything. That's quite an extraordinarily high level of expert agreement.
There's also [00:09:00] high agreement on the fact that impacts will be bad. There hasn't been really, like, a quantified number in the same, same way that we have that 97 percent consensus on global warming being caused by humans. But when you look at consensus reports, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, which come out every six or seven years, they document all the impacts of climate change, and overwhelmingly, the negative impacts far outweigh the positive impacts of climate change.
Lee
But if you're like me, you may be asking yourself, what about my actual life? And how does this affect me in my day to day living?
To answer that question, we turn to climate scientist Catherine Hayhoe, host of the PBS digital series, Global Weirding, who has appeared alongside other climate activists, including President Barack Obama.
Katharine Hayhoe
We often think of climate change as, if we acknowledge it's real and [00:10:00] important, we think of it as being at number 18 or 25 or 52 on our priority list. And then along comes the climate scientist with, you know, some cheerleading to try to push that higher up my priority list.
But, you know, hey, I'm worried about my kids, I'm worried about my job, I'm worried about surviving COVID. I'm worried about all these things. And here these people are trying to tell me to care about climate change. I'm just like, look, people, I got bigger problems. Come back later.
Well, I'm a climate scientist. And as a climate scientist, I don't think climate change should be on our priority list at all.
It's not on my priority list. Why? Because it affects everything else at the very top of my priority list.
So climate change affects the future of my child. It affects the health of our community. It affects the poorest and most vulnerable people. Climate change affects the economy, national security. It affects the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat.
I mean, climate change affects every aspect of this life on our planet. So to care about climate change, we only have to be a human. So that's one way to think [00:11:00] about it, is that climate change isn't on our list. It just affects everything at the top of our list. And that's why we already care, even if we don't know it.
We have all of these issues that we're trying to fix, that are wrong with the world. There's poverty, there's hunger, where people literally can't feed their children. In poor and developing countries, there's women who have seen child after child die because of lack of access to basic healthcare, clean water, and disease.
We're trying to fix these issues, but it's like a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
So you're pouring all the resources you have, you're pouring your time, your energy, your money, everything we have, we're pouring into a bucket to try to fix poverty, to try to fix lack of access to resources, disease, refugee crises.
Climate change is the hole in the bucket, and climate change is getting bigger and bigger over time. So there's no way we can fill the bucket if we don't fix the hole, and that's why we care about climate change.
Lee
[00:12:00] This is one of the reasons, I suppose, that you've referred to climate change as a threat multiplier.
Katharine Hayhoe
It's actually a term that was coined by the military.
Lee
Katharine Hayhoe
So I think it's a very effective term to use, because they understand threats.
So they think of climate change as a threat multiplier, in that you often have a situation where people are already poor, or they're already in an unstable political situation, like a failing state. They already have resource scarcity, they already have many of the different issues that lead to crises, and then along comes climate change on the top, it's like the final straw in the camel's back. The camel was already overloaded in many places, its legs were already starting to buckle, and then you just put one extra bale of straw on the top, and that's enough to kind of precipitate a crisis.
Lee
Right. What about, "climate change won't affect me?"
Katharine Hayhoe
Ooh. You know what? That's actually our biggest problem.
Because when you ask people across the U. S., "is climate changing?" over 70 percent of people say yes. When you say, "do you think it will affect plants and animals and people in the future?" about 70 percent of [00:13:00] people say yes. "Will it affect people in developing countries?" About 65 percent say yes.
So we think it will affect people in the future, not now. People who live far away from us. Plants and animals. And then you say, "do you think it will affect you personally?" All of a sudden the number drops to 40%.
Lee
Katharine Hayhoe
We don't think it matters to us.
Why? Because, one of the biggest reasons is whenever you read a story about it, what's the number one picture they put on the front? A polar bear or melting ice.
And most of us don't live somewhere where we see polar bears running around the streets. I have been to where they do, but you have to go really far north to see that.
So, climate change-- and this is what I study. The better way to think about it is that it's loading the weather dice against us. So, wherever we live, we always have a chance of rolling a double six, naturally. There's hurricanes and heat waves, there's droughts and floods. That just happens. But what happens as the world warms is it's like climate change is sneaking in and taking one of those numbers on our dice and changing it into a six, and another six, [00:14:00] and then a seven.
So then you're living in Houston, Texas, and you're like, we just had three 500 year floods in three years.
Lee
Katharine Hayhoe
How could that be happening? Or you live in California, and you're like, we just saw more area burned by wildfire in one year than we have seen burned in decades. And in fact, since they started keeping records in the 1930s, of area burned by wildfire in California, a third of the area burned happened last year alone.
Lee
Oh my goodness. Since 1930.
Katharine Hayhoe
Lee
Katharine Hayhoe
A third of the area was burned last year. And as of 2015, climate change had already doubled the area burned by wildfires.
Hurricane Harvey. It's estimated that 40 percent of the rain that fell during Hurricane Harvey was because of a warmer world, powering a stronger storm, with more water vapor in the atmosphere for that storm to sweep up and dump on us.
So the Galveston Hurricane hit the same area back in 1900 and it was devastating.
Lee
Katharine Hayhoe
So it isn't that a direct hit on Houston is at all unusual. It [00:15:00] sadly happens all too frequently. But a hurricane that big, that slow, with over 50 inches of rain in some parts of the county, that is how climate change is loading the dice against us.
And that's why I really feel like 'global weirding' is the way to think about this. It is just getting weirder.
In fact, I was standing in line to pick up my son from Sunday school a couple years ago, and the man in front of me was turned around just to make conversation. He said, "Do you think the weather's getting weirder?"
And I said, "Actually, I do, I've studied the data."
Lee
Little did he know who he was talking to, the poor sap.
Katharine Hayhoe
I think he kind of did. Yes.
But I keep it short. I mean, we're just standing in line. So I didn't say, I believe it is. I said, I have looked at the data and it is.
We see that our weather is getting weirder, our heatwaves are getting more extreme, our droughts are getting longer, our heavy rainfall vets are more frequent, our hurricanes are bigger, our wildfires are burning greater area.
I said, "Yes, it is." And he said, "I knew it." He said, "I've lived here for 30 years and I can tell, it is just [00:16:00] getting weirder."
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our episode on climate change.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
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Coming up, we'll hear from Professor Debra Rienstra and the [00:17:00] theological reasons why some do not believe in climate change, or tend to ignore it. And, some theological reasons to the contrary.
As we heard from Professor John Cook a moment ago, some conservative think tanks began employing intentional climate misinformation, especially since the 1990s. Then the issue of climate change denial got bundled with other issues on the political right, and this bundling has contributed to climate change denial in one of the largest American political subgroups - those who identify as evangelical Christians.
To explain some of the impact of this, and why you should care, we turn to Calvin University Professor Debra Rienstra, herself a Christian, and the author of the book, Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth. Deb's book explores various theological responses to the climate [00:18:00] crisis.
Debra Rienstra
I came to writing this book, really through other books. I'm a renaissance and early modernism British literature scholar. That's my field. So it does seem kind of out in left field, so to speak, to be writing this book.
But I've also taught creative writing at Calvin University for a long time. And for a long time, I was involved in our Festival of Faith and Writing, where we invite writers to campus every two years and have 2,000 guests on campus and have this amazing kind of book party.
And as part of the planning committee for that, I got to know a lot of nature writers and was sort of taken by nature writing, and that became part of my scholarly work, too.
And when we had Bill McKibben to campus, I read a bunch of his books and was really convicted by his 2010 book called Earth, E-A-A-R-T-H, and it's spelled weird in order to make the point that the Earth we live on now is [00:19:00] not the same planet that we lived on 30, 40 years ago, and will not go back. So, that book I found really convicting.
And then I sort of went down that trail and learned a lot more about the climate crisis. And you do have a response, immediately, of despair, that that book and many others, you know, they will trot out all the statistics, and the first thing you think is, oh my gosh, we're not going to survive. You know, like this is the end.
And so you have this, this reorientation of despair. But there is something that comes out the other side of that. And I think I've been reading about this long enough to understand there is another side to it. You sort of go through that despair window and then you reach this kind of resolve and conviction. And even, I would say, a kind of passion or excitement.
And for [00:20:00] me, I don't know if I'm strange or what, but sometimes when you just read someone telling the truth or hear someone speaking the truth without any kind of spin or attempt at deception, there's something really exhilarating, and it's almost a relief, to hear somebody just speaking the truth.
So, as I went down this road of learning more about the climate crisis, yes, it's frightening, yes, it's upsetting, but there's also this kind of exhilaration of, oh, okay.
Lee
So why is it someone like Debra, herself a Christian, can be convicted by the findings of climate science, and her faith then fuel an exhilaration towards constructive work in this regard... why is it that she can be convinced, while other Christians in the U. S. seem either to deny the science or just not care?
Debra Rienstra
There are a lot of Christians, to be fair, who are deeply involved in the climate movement. Bill McKibben himself is a practicing and devout Christian. He's a Methodist. And there are many, many people who are doing this, [00:21:00] many Christian groups, denominations, who are attempting to get people involved. But it's a slog.
And I think, partly, there are just normal human psychology reasons for that, and partly there might be some particular, reasons particular to Christian theology and Christian church, kind of sociologically speaking.
So, some of the reasons that are just human psychology is, like, nobody wants to face a terrible, scary truth. We are so, so good at denial. I think we all feel that in ourselves about this or other things. So it's just kind of natural to-- people talk about the climate crisis as so big that you can't get your mind around it, and so we're sort of wired not to look.
We're wired to focus on smaller things that we can manage, which might explain why different Christian groups are so obsessed about what some people see as really small things. We love to major in the minors, you know?
So that might be an explanation. It's [00:22:00] because looking at the big things is too frightening. So I think there's a kind of human psychology piece to it.
But over these past few years, I've been thinking and reading a lot of other people and trying to figure out the answer to that question, too. I'm certainly not the only person asking that question. Like, why are Christians not in this? Why are they not full on in this?
And, you know, there are any number of reasons. Some of them might be theological and or biblical. It might have to do with the sort of big, overarching redemption story that's in people's minds, whether that's truly Christian or truly biblical or not.
So one common story that's in people's minds is that... basically human history is this drama of human redemption, and the Earth itself is just kind of this theater set that that drama occurs on. So the Earth is not in [00:23:00] itself valuable. When this Human Redemption drama concludes at the Eschaton and it resolves with a happy ending, well, then we just strike the set.
So, why do we care if the set gets shabby, is the idea. So this is the, you know, the world is going to burn up in the end anyway, so why should we care? It's surprising how often you hear that argument.
I was talking about this with a group of doctoral students that I'm working with this week, and they too, you know, had seen that argument out there. And we commented that that is an argument that works if you are very, very privileged. Because, if you think, you know, oh well, there's going to be a lot of suffering on the way between now and the apocalypse, you're assuming that that suffering isn't going to happen to you. It's going to be shunted off to somebody else.
Or you are in a position of such [00:24:00] desperation and so stripped of agency, that you have no hope for the here and now, and the by and by is all you've got. Either you're so desperate that you've been stripped of human agency, and that in itself is a tragedy, or you're so privileged that you figure, I'm gonna be fine and I don't care about other people.
So, neither of those feels like a good narrative that we want to, like, promote, you know? And I don't think it's orthodox. I don't think it's biblical or orthodox.
So, that's one thing that people have pointed out, is this kind of big, bad eschatology, the sort of big mythological story that allows us to tell ourselves that story so we don't have to deal with the here and now.
Lee
And then there's what Deb calls the 'infantile authority fantasy.' A destructive tendency that can take theological shape or political shape. And then Deb comments on what she sees as an alternative theological vision that can fuel and sustain work for sustainability. [00:25:00]
Debra Rienstra
Oh, you know, we're all guilty of that. Don't we just want someone else to fix things?
Lee
Debra Rienstra
And of course, that's a kind of infantile attitude. It's a drawing back from a sense of responsibility and agency, which once again, I acknowledge, you know, not everybody has the same amount of agency, but for those of us who do have a certain amount of agency, you know, our job is not to be passive, little serfs in the kingdom of God, our job is not to wait around for God to do everything. That's not what providence is.
So, this idea that we just wait around or that someone else will take care of it, I can see why that seems like a really good thing to feel, but it's just not the testimony of Scripture, I don't think, and it's not good theology. We're called to be witnesses, and that means not just witnesses of theological ideas, but witnesses of the work of God, the redemptive work of God, [00:26:00] here and now, in creation, here and now.
Lee
But too many, Debra says, are actively contributing to the planet's destruction. And passivity is no longer a viable theological response, at least, if one's theology requires love of neighbor. And what's more, she says, we have already arrived at the unsustainable consequences of a theology that fuels collective greed.
Debra Rienstra
We have now outpaced what the earth can offer or heal from. We are so many people now and we are so powerful that we can extract out of the earth more than the earth can heal from.
And you know, I should be the first to say, I don't pretend that I'm stepping outside of this and pointing fingers. I am totally embedded in empire, and to some extent the church of empire too. I mean, I have benefited from extractive capitalism. And I like my comfortable life. I don't want to pretend that I'm, you know, some holy hermit out there. We're all hypocrites [00:27:00] because we're all part of this system.
But we have reached a point where allowing that theological underpinning to continue to support and allow for the continuation of that kind of dominance, that kind of violent, over the top dominance of the created world, we've reached the endpoint of that. It's simply not sustainable.
So, we have to sort of examine those idolatries underneath that - the idolatry of growth, the idolatry of bigness. Um, we have to examine those and name them for what they are. They're, they're kinds of idolatries. They are stories we tell ourselves that we have to sort of untell ourselves now.
So when we think about, you know, what is it going to take for us to address climate change, you know, the first fear I think that we all have, I do too, is like, what am I going to have to give up? Like, how is my life going to get worse because of this? But I think it kind of helps to realize we've already sacrificed a lot.
Even people of [00:28:00] privilege, there are beauties that we have lost and ugliness that we just take for granted every day that is necessary to create this lifestyle, not to mention all the injustices that are perpetrated on people that we don't see and places that we don't see.
Lee
At one point you raised the question, should we turn back the clock on our industrial infrastructure, unravel our technological achievements and tear down our cities?
And you indicated a sort of qualified 'no,' but then what you do go on to say is that whatever we do, we must take seriously the costs, give a full accounting of the cost. And you use that word that you've already used there. And we're trying to give an account of all the externalities, right? So in other words, what I hear you saying there is that typically in free market language, we have this sort of naive notion that the accounting only looks at sort of a profit and loss [00:29:00] statement, but doesn't take into account all the other sort of significant costs that are saddled off on someone else.
Is that, is that a fair enough kind of summary of what you're getting at there?
Debra Rienstra
Exactly. So in economics, for example, you have people who are thinking through what we use as metrics to measure economic health. And you will always hear on the news, you know, what's the GDP for this quarter, the gross domestic product for this quarter, which is more and more being recognized as a really blunt instrument for economic health. There's a lot that it doesn't take into account.
In businesses, sort of these cutting edge businesses who are thinking, all right, we need to have integrity, just because integrity is good, but also because we'd like to survive, like with everybody else, we'd really love to survive. Businesses who are thinking, alright, what if we did account for all these externalities?
So you have businesses who are thinking through like the whole lifetime of their product. They're not just making a [00:30:00] product, extracting the resources, making the product, throwing it out into the market. And once a person purchases the product, the company is not responsible for what happens next. So what you have is this vast amount of waste plastic, for example.
Who's responsible for the waste plastic? Well, nobody. You as a consumer are responsible for recycling. So, you know, the onus has come to the consumer.
And businesses with sort of a lot of integrity are saying, but that's not fair. You know, why don't we take responsibility for the whole lifetime of the product and think of ways to create this circular economy where we not only figure out how to produce the thing, but how to recycle the thing. We partner to make those next steps in this kind of circular process so that we don't produce all this waste, and so that we're thinking about sourcing.
So, you know, there are a lot of people who are doing that work, but I think Christians have been able to be sort of blissfully unaware for the most [00:31:00] part.
They're just not paying attention, for the most part, and I think it's time for us to get much, much more involved in kind of the day to day nitty gritty practicalities of asking the question, you know, sort of, what is the good life?
We have assumed it's affluence and upward mobility. We have assumed that's the good life, but that good life is not sustainable. So shouldn't we as Christian people be part of this conversation, having this kind of moral and wisdom tradition that we have, of rethinking what the good life is and then being involved with the sort of nitty gritty of what does that mean.[00:32:00]
Lee
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, we hear from Bill McKibben, who is an exemplar when it comes to climate activism and justice, and an opportunity provider for those over the age of 60 who wish to take steps to help heal climate change.
And just a note that if you would like to access the full interviews of the guests on this episode, including Katharine Hayhoe, Bill McKibben, and Debra Rienstra, we'll have links on the episode page for this episode that you're listening to, to each of those additional interviews.
Before the break, we heard from Debra Rienstra, author of the book, Refugia Faith, who insisted that our grappling with the question of climate change raises this very question:
Debra Rienstra
What is the good life now? We have assumed it's affluence and upward mobility. We have assumed that's the good life. But that good life's not sustainable.
Lee
[00:33:00] Our next guest takes that one step further.
Bill McKibben
Consumption cannot bring us the happiness we're looking for.
Lee
That's Bill McKibben, author, journalist, and prominent climate activist. He's been on the front lines of the climate activism movement for over 30 years, finding ways for regular folks like you and me to advocate and work for the healing of the Earth. And he points out, in quite sobering fashion, the way regular folks have made such massive contributions to the problem.
Bill McKibben
The fact is that American suburbanization was the single largest cloud of carbon dioxide that's gone into the atmosphere. It beats out even the number two candidate, the industrialization of China in the last 25 years.
In 1970, America was using a third of all the energy on the planet. Americans, who represent 4 percent of the planet's [00:34:00] population, have produced 25 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And all that stuff we put up there in the 1970s and '60s and '50s and '80s and '90s, it's all still there, because carbon dioxide lasts more than a century in the air. That's what's heating the planet. And it's heating it in ways that are incredibly unjust. The iron law of climate change is, the less you did to cause it, the sooner and the harder you get hit.
So Africa, which is the number one casualty of climate change so far, I mean, right now we're seeing droughts so epic across the horn of Africa that the pictures are like the ones that were coming back from Biafra in my youth, babies with swollen bellies and things. Africa, the entire continent, has produced 2 percent of all the carbon that's in the atmosphere, and yet they're taking it on the chin.
Lee
If living a good life [00:35:00] includes the virtue of justice, then the United States has a real opportunity to bring it about, because the harm we have caused around the world actually costs something. Actual lives lost, quality of life lost, and economic impact. Justice demands that something must be done, and Bill has a suggestion.
Bill McKibben
As with reparations for America's racial past, we owe a debt, too, to the rest of the planet that we need to figure out how to repay. I guess the good news is we got wealthy as a nation, even if it wasn't divided equitably over these years, so we have some money to pay those debts if we want to.
But we need to get to it, and in this case, sooner rather than later, because the climate is changing very, very fast. And if we don't fix it soon, then we will never fix it.
Lee
When Bill was a young man, he was a journalist working at the New Yorker magazine. It was one particular writing assignment that took his life down the path [00:36:00] of climate activism.
Bill McKibben
I did a story, long story for the New Yorker, about where everything in my little apartment came from.
Traced all the pipes and wires back to their source, as it were.
Lee
So, every product, every raw material in his place, he tracked down. Where had it come from, and what were the costs of manufacturing and transportation to get it all there into his apartment?
Bill McKibben
So I was down in Brazil looking at the oil wells where Con Ed was getting oil, and along the remarkable water system of New York City, and out on the garbage barges, and so on.
And I'll tell you what it did for me. It made me understand, viscerally, just how physical the world was.
Look, a suburb is a way to kind of hide the physical operations of the planet from you. No one in, you know, you don't know where your water comes from. It's all hidden.
Once I [00:37:00] understood that even Manhattan, a place that seems so powerful that it can mint money out of nothing, just out of sheer ideas, that it was exquisitely dependent on the safe operation of the physical planet, I think that set me up for reading the early science around climate change in the mid and late 1980s and understanding, in a way that most journalists didn't, just how vulnerable we were.
With that in mind, I wrote that first book, The End of Nature, when I was, I guess, 28. And luckily, I guess, it was a great success, came out in 24 languages eventually, and really set me on my life's work.
But one of the problems was that it made it, in a sense, impossible for me to just go on being a kind of beat journalist, because I knew that I [00:38:00] cared about the outcome. I wasn't purely objective. I didn't want the world to overheat and, you know, wither away.
And so I kept writing books and things, but I also began edging closer to the activism work that takes up, though it's all volunteer work, more of my time than writing does these days.
Lee
Bill went on to found an organization called Third Act. It's for people over the age of 60 to build a better tomorrow. They tackle climate change and issues of democracy. And in his work, Bill has had to explain the science of climate change to a lot of folks over the years. And he says lately, things are changing.
Bill McKibben
Well, you may not believe in climate change, but climate change believes in you.
Look, this has gotten a lot easier. Partly because we've built these big movements, the zeitgeist has really shifted. The polling data makes that clear. We're at about 70 percent of Americans who understand that we have a real problem and want the government to go to work on it. [00:39:00] And 70 percent is a lot to get Americans to agree about anything these days.
The other 30 percent are unlikely to shift. I don't think another study from, you know, in the next issue of geophysical research letters is going to shift them, because their opinion is ideological. And if one had spent the last 30 years, you know, marinating in Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson and whatever, you know, it's, it gets hard to think straight about things.
The bigger problem is taking that 70 percent and getting more of them kind of actively engaged in this fight. But sadly, that gets easier too each year, because at this point it's not just book writers and movements and things that are educating people. It's Mother Nature who continues to, you know, hit us upside the head with a two by four with increasing regularity.
I mean, at a certain point, once you've seen enough forest fires and floods and things, you know, who are you going to believe, Fox News or your own lying eyes?
So [00:40:00] we're also reaching a point, and this is the positive part of this, where people understand that we have real alternatives. Scientists and engineers have really done their job.
The price of renewable energy, solar power, power from the wind, the batteries to store them, these things have dropped 90 percent in price over the last decade. This is the cheapest power on earth now.
Lee
This interest in new alternatives holds a surprising reality for the U. S. today. The thing that most unites Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, the place where you find the greatest agreement at the highest numbers, is found in one question:
Bill McKibben
Would you like more solar power?
Everybody in the earth, everybody in the country seems to want more solar power. The numbers are about 80 percent across the ideological spectrum. Now, I think sometimes for different reasons.
Sometimes conservatives think, well, [00:41:00] solar panels on my roof, then my house really is my castle, and I don't have to depend on anyone else. And liberals are like, the warm power of the sun is uniting us all. Whatever. I mean, we can work with those kind of differences. And we should. We should move very quickly in this direction.
I remind often my Christian brothers and sisters that it'll be a good day when we, um, move away from energy that comes from hell towards energy that comes from heaven. The good lord was kind enough to hang a big ball of burning gas 93 million miles away in the sky and now we have the wit to make full use of it, so that we should.
Lee
I think one question that, a stereotypical conservative question, wondering how you would respond... that, let's say for a moment that one agrees about a lot of the social justice questions, [00:42:00] questions of inequity, injustice, disparity. So, a stereotypical conservative question might be to use something like, if I agree with you that we need to make changes with regard to these issues that you've raised, but I also am suspicious of big power, what do you do with the possibility that big power solutions or big systemic solutions are yet one more step or one more possibility of tyrannical systems?
Bill McKibben
I think that's a good question. And truthfully, it's one of the reasons I like living in the little state of Vermont, you know? Scale's important to me.
And it's one of the reasons that I really love renewable energy. Quite aside from the fact that coal and gas and oil are destroying the planet at this point, it's also worth remembering the huge amount of unearned power that they give the small number of people who happen to live on top of those [00:43:00] scattered deposits of hydrocarbons.
So, the king of Saudi Arabia, this is a guy who cuts people's heads off with a sword when he doesn't like them. The only reason any person would ever pay attention to him is because his desert covers the biggest oil deposits in the world.
At the moment, the best example of this phenomenon is Vladimir Putin. Russia gets 60 percent of its export earnings from oil and gas. If you don't believe me, search your house for something of Russian manufacture that you might want to boycott in response to their invasion of Ukraine. Unless you have an old bottle of Stolichnaya in the back of the liquor cabinet someplace, I wager you won't find a thing from Russia, because they're just a big gas station. That's all they are.
And they use that power to try and intimidate Western Europe, successfully, for the last few decades. Now, people are standing up, and they're doing it, realizing one of the great things about [00:44:00] power from the sun and the wind is that we all have some of them. Vladimir Putin can't block the sun. He can't turn off the wind. They're omnipresent.
And so, as we move in that direction, we move inexorably in the direction of a little more small d democratic power for-- why would anyone want to send a check off every month for their life to Saudi Arabia, or to Houston for that matter, for their supply of oil when the sun, when it rises above the horizon in the morning, can deliver it to you for free?
It's a start on a world with very different kinds of power bases.
Lee
You, uh, near the end of your book, you talk about how, a drunken essay you wrote, I think, for the Harvard College newspaper, the night that Reagan won against Carter, that you thought you would probably end up spending your life fighting battles that can't be won.
How do you look back upon that, that phrase, that potential notion of your life's work these [00:45:00] days?
Bill McKibben
Well, I think to some degree it's been true. We've been fighting an uphill battle ever since. Barack Obama, asked to explain why he got so little done when he had 60 Democratic senators in his first term, said we were still operating in a kind of Reagan world. The constraints around turning to markets for every solution and things were still there.
I'm very excited at the moment, though, by the number of people who are turning out to try and change that. And at the moment, the place where I'm working is with other people like me of a certain age. We've started this operation called Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and on democracy, trying to stand up to the voter suppression and so on.
It's been really, really fun because people are arriving in huge numbers to try and help [00:46:00] out. People who may not have been political at all in their lives, but as we get nearer the exit than the entrance, we're beginning to realize that we don't want to leave behind a world that's shabbier than the one we inherited.
So it's been great fun to get to do that work, to get to do it in the company of young people.
You know, I was just recently outside, at a demonstration outside Chase Bank, because Chase is the biggest lender to the fossil fuel industry that there is. And half the demonstration was high school students, you know, sort of following in the Greta Thunberg mode, great moral witness.
They're a little sprier than the rest of us, so they were at the front of the march. Behind them, there was a big crowd of older people marching under a banner that said, "fossils against fossil fuels," you know? So it was in the right spirit.
And when the young people sometimes get in their "okay, boomer" mode and are being a little snitty about the mess we may have left [00:47:00] them, I do tell them, fight me if you will, but our generation did at least produce the greatest music of all time.
And so it's, it's really fun to have at Third Act, people like Carole King and Bette Midler and, you know, Neil Young and Patti Smith and others joining in. Those cultural icons from our first act are still around, and they can re-summon some of that spirit that helped us do things like the first Earth Day or the rise of taking women seriously or all those other things 50 years ago.
Lee
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our Earth Day special on climate change.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly [00:48:00] Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.