Speaker 1: I think probably we can convince them to slow this down,
Speaker 1: but it's going to take a lot of work, and
Speaker 1: that wouldn't surprise me to be back in jail again
Speaker 1: in the course of the winter, trying to slow it
Speaker 1: down with Fucked.
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Chris Turney and you're listening to I'm Fucking
Speaker 2: the Future, the podcast where we try to figure out
Speaker 2: how to fix the environmental dumpster fire we're in. That
Speaker 2: may sound pessimistic, but I promise it's not unfucking the future.
Speaker 2: It's all about the incredible people making a big difference
Speaker 2: and about how we can make a difference too. Let's
Speaker 2: dig in.
Speaker 3: We're fucking the future.
Speaker 2: If you're walking around Burlington, Vermont back in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: you may have seen the unusual sight a middle aged
Speaker 2: dude in a baseball cap, calmly getting arrested at agasting.
Speaker 2: As the officer cuffs him, a small group of people
Speaker 2: start cheering.
Speaker 4: Ex You.
Speaker 2: These activists had come to protest ex On Mobile, a
Speaker 2: big oil and gas company, and their leader that middle
Speaker 2: aged dude getting arrested. He's our guest today, Bill mckibbon's
Speaker 2: been fighting for the climate and sometimes getting arrested for
Speaker 2: it for almost forty years. Bill actually wrote the first
Speaker 2: book on the climate crisis for mainstream audiences. It's called
Speaker 2: The End of Nature. I was published in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 2: and as a teenager, I read this book front to back,
Speaker 2: and I've got to say it really was life changing
Speaker 2: to me. It's part of why I decided to study
Speaker 2: environmental science. And he's written twenty more books since. Not
Speaker 2: to mention, he started three fifty dollars or one of
Speaker 2: the most effective climate action groups out there. So safe
Speaker 2: to say, I'm stoked to have Bill on the show.
Speaker 2: He's been of this for longer than many of us.
Speaker 2: So I wanted to ask him about the state of
Speaker 2: a climate movement today, how far we've come, what we
Speaker 2: still need to do, and how we can get even
Speaker 2: more people involved. I also wanted to talk to him
Speaker 2: about his latest initiative, Third Act, which is successfully getting
Speaker 2: some very unlikely climate activists to take to the streets.
Speaker 2: So how did this mild mannered writer become such a
Speaker 2: threat to a fossil fuel industry? As he tells it,
Speaker 2: it all started back in the eighties.
Speaker 1: I was a young writer at the New Yorker magazine
Speaker 1: in New York and I did a long story about
Speaker 1: where everything in my apartment came from. I followed all
Speaker 1: the wires and pipes back to there. I was in
Speaker 1: the Brazilian jungle, looking at oil wells, in the Arctic,
Speaker 1: looking at hydroelectric dams, and on and I And I
Speaker 1: think by the time I was done that long piece,
Speaker 1: I had a sharper sense than I had before of
Speaker 1: the physicality of the world, if you want to call
Speaker 1: it that. I lived in Manhattan, which seems like a
Speaker 1: place that could just mint money and ideas out of nothing,
Speaker 1: but it turned out it was exquisitely dependent on the
Speaker 1: continued operation of the planet's physical systems for its survival.
Speaker 1: And I think actually that set me up to read
Speaker 1: the early emerging science on climate change and understand some
Speaker 1: of its implications that really, this was the biggest thing
Speaker 1: that had ever happened and was ever going to happen,
Speaker 1: by far, the biggest thing that humans had ever done.
Speaker 1: And I think that really was laying a little bit
Speaker 1: at the base of all that.
Speaker 2: Now, we've talked to a lot of people in this
Speaker 2: show who grew up in rural places and win inspired
Speaker 2: by the beauty around them. They came into this fight
Speaker 2: to protect the natural wonders in their backyards. But Bill,
Speaker 2: Bill grew up in the suburbs, which.
Speaker 1: Are a kind of machine for hiding the operations of
Speaker 1: the natural world from you. Everything is named for what
Speaker 1: used to be there but isn't anymore, you know, Fox
Speaker 1: Run Acres or something, and I had sort of no
Speaker 1: idea much what I was missing. I'm glad that I
Speaker 1: grew up in the suburbs because I think that I
Speaker 1: have a deep understanding of the center of gravity of
Speaker 1: American life, which is the suburb and has been since
Speaker 1: my time.
Speaker 2: And it's already an established thing. But you actually saw
Speaker 2: this incredible change post war and have a suburbs became
Speaker 2: such a big part of American.
Speaker 1: Life, American life, and then the model sadly spread around
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: I mean, what the fuck did the suburbs do to Bill?
Speaker 2: They can't really be all that bad, right, What the
Speaker 2: fuck are you talking about? Suburban sprawl has had major
Speaker 2: consequences on the environment. Simply put, hundreds of millions of
Speaker 2: people living in single family homes means lots of concrete
Speaker 2: getting poured, loss of land being cleared, and a huge
Speaker 2: demand for energy there's a certain lifestyle that comes along
Speaker 2: with living in the suburbs. A green lawn, a large house,
Speaker 2: two cars, and maybe even a pool. In the suburbs,
Speaker 2: life is bigger. Plus, you're not living above your grocery
Speaker 2: store and just a few blocks from your kid's school anymore.
Speaker 2: The suburbs have made a fifteen, twenty or thirty minute
Speaker 2: drive totally normal. For result is I fuckalowed more emissions. Historically,
Speaker 2: carbon emissions from suburban homes are four times more than
Speaker 2: those of homes in cities. And yet in the US,
Speaker 2: Australia and much of a world, we've accepted the suburbs
Speaker 2: as a way of life, and since of inception we've
Speaker 2: never really made an effort to change fact.
Speaker 1: The car centric bedroom community became was the American ideal
Speaker 1: and became in too many places the world's ideal, with
Speaker 1: grievous environmental consequences. I mean, you have all those big
Speaker 1: houses you have to heat and cool and drive between them,
Speaker 1: but also with grievous social consequences. Perhaps more importantly, the
Speaker 1: average American has half as many close friends as the
Speaker 1: average American of the nineteen fifties. And it's because we live,
Speaker 1: because we devoted all our resources to building bigger houses
Speaker 1: farther apart from each other, and people just naturally ran
Speaker 1: into each other a lot less the course of a day.
Speaker 2: Bill's twenty twenty two memoir The Flag, the Cross, and
Speaker 2: the Station Wagon describes how the suburbs not only super
Speaker 2: charged of emissions, but also they super charged our wealth,
Speaker 2: inequality in individualism, and how all of this, taken together,
Speaker 2: has reduced our ability to actually get together and solve
Speaker 2: a climate crisis. So that's what the fuck we're talking about.
Speaker 2: What the fuck are talking about? So anyway, Bill grew
Speaker 2: up in the suburbs, and it wasn't until he was
Speaker 2: a young writer of The New Yorker but he began
Speaker 2: to reckon with the environmental impact of that. And then
Speaker 2: on June twenty third, nineteen eighty eight, something monumental happened.
Speaker 1: The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing
Speaker 1: our climate now.
Speaker 2: Jim Hanson, then the director of NASA's Institute for Space
Speaker 2: Studies in Manhattan, spoke to Congress about an emerging threat,
Speaker 2: global warming. His testimony was headline news around the world.
Speaker 2: Most people had never heard of such a thing, and
Speaker 2: certainly not from a senior leader at NASA. People, did
Speaker 2: you any rational thing? They freaked out.
Speaker 1: I mean, Time magazine, in the wake of that testimony,
Speaker 1: made instead of choosing a Man of the Year, as
Speaker 1: they had for fifty years, they chose the planet of
Speaker 1: the year. George H. W. Bush, then Republican President of
Speaker 1: the United States, was shaken enough that he said, we
Speaker 1: will attack the Greenhouse effect with the white House effect. Everybody,
Speaker 1: as one would expect, was sort of lining up to
Speaker 1: try to deal with this problem, because why wouldn't you
Speaker 1: You've just been given a crucial warning by the world scientists.
Speaker 2: Of course, all this urgency and unity was way too
Speaker 2: good to lost.
Speaker 1: We now know from all kinds of great investigative reporting
Speaker 1: that within a year or so of Hanson's testimony, the
Speaker 1: fossil fuel industry had circled the wagons. They'd hired the
Speaker 1: people who used to work for the tobacco industry, and
Speaker 1: they'd gone to work sowing doubt, denial, disinformation with billions
Speaker 1: of dollars and decades of effort.
Speaker 2: We all know that's the case, but just how much
Speaker 2: effort they put into this is genuinely shocking. We've all
Speaker 2: seen the ads. How can today's resources fuel our shared tomorrow.
Speaker 3: The world needs ways to reduce carbon emissions, especially for
Speaker 3: heavy industry.
Speaker 1: We are working on solutions in our own operations, like
Speaker 1: carbon capture and clean energy from hydrogen.
Speaker 2: Those cheery inspirational ads about why petrol companies can fix
Speaker 2: a problem they created our complete garbage. It's amazing. I
Speaker 2: think anyone believes this nonsense. But sadly it seems to work.
Speaker 2: Let's start from the beginning. Though it is nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 2: Jim Hanson's just presented his testimony to Congress, the world
Speaker 2: looking at him going otoh, wear in real trouble. Let's
Speaker 2: do something about it. A big oil starts to get worried.
Speaker 2: The people are catching on. Something's got to change. So
Speaker 2: Big Old gets together with some other manufacturing industries and
Speaker 2: they create a group called the Global Climate Coalition. The
Speaker 2: greatest success effectively lobbying the US to not sign the
Speaker 2: Kyoto Protocol, which would have reduced global pollution by an
Speaker 2: awful lot.
Speaker 1: I mean, remember, in nineteen ninety two the world gathered
Speaker 1: in Rio de Janeiro for a big conference on all
Speaker 1: of this, and everybody was there, and it seemed like
Speaker 1: people were going to go to work, but they didn't.
Speaker 1: You know, the first effort was this Kyoto protocol that
Speaker 1: was you know, still born really because of the US
Speaker 1: refusal to ratify it.
Speaker 2: It's a huge win for big al doesn't stop there.
Speaker 2: Christian Downey and Robert Braule, two researchers who look at
Speaker 2: trade organization funding, found that from two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: to twenty eighteen, oil and gas companies outspent all other
Speaker 2: sectors on public outreach and campaign contributions. And those cute
Speaker 2: little ads, well, big oil spent are whopping one billion
Speaker 2: dollars just on ads over ten years. So yeah, there's
Speaker 2: a shit ton of money going into their efforts.
Speaker 1: The fossil fuel industry has relentlessly refused to give up
Speaker 1: its business model. They want to keep burning coal and
Speaker 1: gas and oil, and so they've looked for any way
Speaker 1: to keep doing that, and the most effective way they've
Speaker 1: had is to muscle our political system to gain our
Speaker 1: political system. Eventually they'll lose. I mean, we now live
Speaker 1: on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power
Speaker 1: is to point a sheet of glass at the sun
Speaker 1: that eventually that will triumph, but eventually doesn't do us
Speaker 1: much good.
Speaker 2: I mean, they'reknew in the late nineteen seventies this is real.
Speaker 2: In fact, there's some of the best scientists working on
Speaker 2: that actually, and their projections and forecasts of the future
Speaker 2: were really, really good and frighteningly accurate. There's been decades
Speaker 2: of disinformation and misinformation that's come from this, from these
Speaker 2: fossil fuel companies. I mean, Jim's made the points as well,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't agree more. I mean, gosh, I've basically
Speaker 2: been working in this field since Jim testified, and it's
Speaker 2: amazing to see how he's consistently been ahead of the
Speaker 2: community and repeatedly so. I mean, I find them incredibly inspirational.
Speaker 1: He's also, let me just dad, he's also been ahead
Speaker 1: in his willingness to be outspoken about it. I've had
Speaker 1: to call him half a dozen times and say, will
Speaker 1: you come get arrested with us here, which looked at
Speaker 1: one way, is insane. It's so stupid to take the
Speaker 1: most important climate scientists in the world away from his
Speaker 1: computer screen and have him go sit in jail for
Speaker 1: a couple of days. But it was actually super important
Speaker 1: in building support for actually doing something about any of.
Speaker 2: This, and in all his work bill has one goal.
Speaker 2: We have to stop setting things on far and instead
Speaker 2: stop pointing sheets of glass up at the sun.
Speaker 1: Combustion has been a big part of human life for
Speaker 1: something like seven hundred thousand years. Darwin said language and
Speaker 1: fire were the two things that distinguished our species, and
Speaker 1: mostly it's been good. We learned to cook food, and
Speaker 1: that gave us the big brain. We could move north
Speaker 1: and south away from the equator because we could warm
Speaker 1: ourselves up. I think the anthropologists even consider that some
Speaker 1: of the social bonds in our species come from sitting
Speaker 1: around the campfire every night for eon. Kind of proto
Speaker 1: zoom I like that. And then we made it to
Speaker 1: the industrial revolution and learned to control the combustion of
Speaker 1: coal and gas and oil, and that give us modernity.
Speaker 1: But we're at the moment when the costs are suddenly
Speaker 1: outweighing the benefits. The biggest of those costs is obviously
Speaker 1: the existential climate crisis. So that's the biggest risk, but
Speaker 1: it's not the only one from combustion. Nine million people
Speaker 1: a year die on this planet, about one death in
Speaker 1: five from breathing the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion. That's
Speaker 1: a lot of people.
Speaker 2: That is a heartbreaking number of people who die eachy
Speaker 2: from fossil fuel pollution. That's about a population of London.
Speaker 1: And as we've discovered and been re reminded in the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, if you depend on a resource
Speaker 1: it's only available in a few places, the people who
Speaker 1: control those places end up with way too much power.
Speaker 2: Countries that sits on huge all of us as are
Speaker 2: able to punched way above our wait politically, Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 2: the UAE, Guitar, Russia, Venezuela, the US. You get a point.
Speaker 2: But the good news is we can see our way
Speaker 2: out of this mess.
Speaker 1: It's our great good fortune that it's precisely at this
Speaker 1: moment when this trouble is mounting so fast, that scientists
Speaker 1: and engineers have figured out how to use the power
Speaker 1: of the sun. We can capture its rays directly on
Speaker 1: photo voltaic panels, and we can take advantage of the
Speaker 1: fact that it differentially heats the earth, producing the breeze
Speaker 1: that turns those turbines. And now we have batteries to
Speaker 1: store that when the sun goes down or the wind drops,
Speaker 1: and in essence, you know, we can now take full
Speaker 1: advantage of the fact that the Good Lord was kind
Speaker 1: enough to hang a large ball of burning gas ninety
Speaker 1: three million miles up in the sky. What we have
Speaker 1: is cheap soilar, cheap wind, increasingly cheaper batteries. It's not free.
Speaker 1: There's environmental damage that comes from the mining and so on,
Speaker 1: and they can be done in inhumane ways, and we
Speaker 1: should do everything we can to prevent that. But the
Speaker 1: damage is orders of magnitude smaller than the damage we're
Speaker 1: doing now. If you want one way to just sort
Speaker 1: of keep that in your mind, statistic that helps for
Speaker 1: me is that forty percent of all ship traffic on
Speaker 1: planet Earth is just carrying coal and oil and gas
Speaker 1: back and forth around the planet to get burned.
Speaker 2: We have to change that. One of the ways out
Speaker 2: of this mess is actually buried in the Inflation Reduction Act,
Speaker 2: which is sending hundreds of billions of dollars into clean
Speaker 2: energy right now. It's the biggest investment in the US
Speaker 2: government has ever made to reduce carbon pollution. But Bill says,
Speaker 2: we've got to spend this money quickly.
Speaker 1: You know, I know the people at the White House
Speaker 1: and the Department of Energy who are trying to shovel
Speaker 1: that money out the door as fast as they can,
Speaker 1: in part because there's a real fear that Donald Trump
Speaker 1: will be re elected, which point it'll all come to
Speaker 1: a halt. The hardest part is getting communities. We're now
Speaker 1: at the point where the rubber really meets the road.
Speaker 1: There are one hundred and forty million homes and apartment
Speaker 1: buildings and apartments in the US, and each one of
Speaker 1: them has to be changed in certain ways, you know.
Speaker 1: And there's money now to allow that to happen. But
Speaker 1: that's still an extraordinarily complex logistical problem, you know. So
Speaker 1: right now there's a lot of work in listing mayors
Speaker 1: and city councils and governors and things in this work
Speaker 1: as it spreads out from the center. So that's half
Speaker 1: of what the US has to do. The other half
Speaker 1: is it has to not just worry about its own commissions.
Speaker 1: It has to stop exporting vast quantities of fossil fuel elsewhere.
Speaker 1: We will, as someone once said, hang together, or we
Speaker 1: will hang separately. I mean, look, humans are socially evolved primate.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that many generations ago that we were sitting
Speaker 1: on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of
Speaker 1: each other's fur. You know, and that is us at
Speaker 1: its best, our responsiveness to people around us. This is
Speaker 1: what climate change is testing. Now. If we do things right,
Speaker 1: we'll be making a transition to a world that doesn't
Speaker 1: set things on fire anymore, and as a result, the
Speaker 1: world itself will be less on fire, meaning that.
Speaker 2: Is a future where we only rely renewable energy, where
Speaker 2: fossil fuels are a thing of a past.
Speaker 3: We're fucking the future. We're fucking the future.
Speaker 2: But Bill has been parts of a climate movement for
Speaker 2: decades and he still has hope. But we can turn
Speaker 2: this around, but we have to get everyone activates on
Speaker 2: these issues as quickly as humanly possible.
Speaker 1: I've had the privilege of being there pretty much the
Speaker 1: whole time as we've built this climate movement. I founded
Speaker 1: the first what turned into the first global grassroots climate
Speaker 1: change campaign three point fifty dot org with seven undergraduates
Speaker 1: at the college where I teach, and within a year
Speaker 1: we'd organized fifty two hundred simultaneous demonstrations in one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty one countries. We launched this fossil fuel divestment campaign,
Speaker 1: and within a decade we've convinced endowments and portfolio is
Speaker 1: worth about forty trillion dollars to divest from fossil fuel.
Speaker 2: So the good news is we're going in the rights
Speaker 2: and we can thank longtime activists Light Bill for aggravating
Speaker 2: the status quo and getting us to where we are today.
Speaker 1: We sort of kick these things off, but then everybody
Speaker 1: just took it and ran with it. We think three
Speaker 1: point fifty dot org has organized or been associated with
Speaker 1: twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea.
Speaker 1: But you obviously can't organize all those. It's just people
Speaker 1: picking up the ball and running with it everywhere. I
Speaker 1: think probably this is the biggest movement in human history,
Speaker 1: which is good because it's by far the biggest problem
Speaker 1: in human history. And it really has been an extraordinary
Speaker 1: honor just to get to watch it grow and grow
Speaker 1: and grow. Whether we've grown it big enough to take
Speaker 1: on the you know, to make the change we need
Speaker 1: in the time we have as an open question. We
Speaker 1: clearly need more people. I'm spending my time now a
Speaker 1: lot of it organizing old people like me in this group.
Speaker 2: Third Act Bill, to fight a problem that seems pretty
Speaker 2: easy to solve. We need more people to give a
Speaker 2: shit about what's happening to our planet.
Speaker 1: The most effective climate activist of all time was obviously
Speaker 1: gret At Tunberg and her movement that she inaugurated, really
Speaker 1: the school strike movement, and things came like a bulk
Speaker 1: from the blue and it was increasing with incredible speed
Speaker 1: and power through twenty nineteen. In that September of that year,
Speaker 1: there were ten million kids on on school strike.
Speaker 5: My name is Grieta Tembari, and I'm inviting you to
Speaker 5: be a part of the solution.
Speaker 2: When young people go to the streets, they get attention,
Speaker 2: and rightfully so. Ten million young people standing up to
Speaker 2: their governments in action on the climate crisis is big news.
Speaker 2: But it shouldn't have to be this way. Their kids
Speaker 2: and they didn't create this crisis. My generation have its
Speaker 2: generation date.
Speaker 1: Young people have done most of the leading on this fight.
Speaker 1: As I said, I started three point fifty dot org
Speaker 1: with seven undergraduates with extraordinary success. You know, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge,
Speaker 1: Princeton University, California, University of Michigan, all divested now from
Speaker 1: fossil fuel. Those young people, when they graduated went on
Speaker 1: to form the Sunrise movement that brought us the Green
Speaker 1: New Deal and hence the Inflation Reduction Act. And around
Speaker 1: the world, as we've said, you know, Greta and her
Speaker 1: the ten thousand other Gretas around the world had ten
Speaker 1: million followers, and they've done an unbelievable job. I mean,
Speaker 1: what a pleasure it was to get to write my
Speaker 1: friend Greta in June a letter of congratulation on graduating
Speaker 1: from high school. Think about that for a minute, you know,
Speaker 1: but I did hear one too many people my age say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's up to the next generation to solve this problem,
Speaker 1: which seems noble but also highly impractical. For all their
Speaker 1: energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural
Speaker 1: power to make by themselves change on the scale we
Speaker 1: need in the time that we have. We don't have
Speaker 1: the time for them to grow up and become senators
Speaker 1: and CEOs and whatever that takes a while. In a
Speaker 1: while is what we don't possess. So if you look
Speaker 1: around for who does have structural power, it's people with
Speaker 1: hairlines like.
Speaker 2: Mine, which is why Bill started faird Act.
Speaker 1: We punch above our weight politically because we all vote.
Speaker 1: There's no known way to stop old people from voting.
Speaker 1: We ended up with most of the money. We've got
Speaker 1: about seventy percent of the country's financial assets. So if
Speaker 1: you wanted to push around Washington or Wall Street or
Speaker 1: your state capital, having some older people would be helpful.
Speaker 1: The theoretical objection to this from political scientists and things
Speaker 1: was that people become more conservative, as so there's no
Speaker 1: point trying to organize them. I don't know if that
Speaker 1: was true once, but it doesn't need to be true
Speaker 1: now because if you're in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now,
Speaker 1: it means that in your first Act, you were around
Speaker 1: for this moment of great epic social, cultural, political transformation,
Speaker 1: when we had the first Earth Day and the birth
Speaker 1: of the modern environmental movement, when in my country the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement was at its apex on and on,
Speaker 1: and so now people are Perhaps the Second Act was
Speaker 1: a little more involved in consumerism than citizenship, but that's
Speaker 1: water under the bridge, and now people are organizing like crazy.
Speaker 1: We've just been a kind of pell Mell sprint these
Speaker 1: last two years, and people are great at registering voters
Speaker 1: and lobbying legislatures, on and on, but they're also willing
Speaker 1: to take direct action. We had Third Act coordinated demonstrations.
Speaker 1: One hundred demonstrations in one hundred cities in March against
Speaker 1: the four big banks Chase City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of
Speaker 1: America that are the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry.
Speaker 1: And these were great and quite milletant.
Speaker 2: When I told you Bill was a real deal, I
Speaker 2: meant it. On March twenty first, twenty twenty three, Bill
Speaker 2: and thousands of other people whose hairlines look like Bill's
Speaker 2: demanded that banks stop funding bad actors in the climate crisis.
Speaker 2: During one hundred events in over thirty one states. They
Speaker 2: pledged to closer accounts, cut up their credit cards, and
Speaker 2: boycott Bank of America, Chase City Bank, Wells Fargo if
Speaker 2: they didn't move their investments out of fossil fuel. This
Speaker 2: kind of action works because, like Bill said, these people
Speaker 2: have large financial power in the United States, and that's
Speaker 2: true of just about every other industrialized country in the world.
Speaker 1: I was in Washington, DC, and we shut down the
Speaker 1: banks for the afternoons with Citi ins. We're too old
Speaker 1: to sprawl on the sidewalk easily for hours at a time.
Speaker 1: We went to all the thrift shops in the Greater
Speaker 1: Washington area and came away with hundreds of rocking chairs,
Speaker 1: and that's what we used to The New York Times
Speaker 1: the next day called it the rocking share of Rebellion.
Speaker 1: It's very good to be able to back up the
Speaker 1: young people who are leading in this work. It's a
Speaker 1: lot of fun.
Speaker 2: That was something that really struck me from writing. Actually,
Speaker 2: is this idea that you've got a really impassioned, mobilized,
Speaker 2: energetic generation, but without the resources the networks for relationships
Speaker 2: of powers. You say, and I think we're just bringing
Speaker 2: these two together. It's just such a fascinating and really
Speaker 2: hopeful momentum and lots of fun. Yeah, and lots of
Speaker 2: fun as well, you know, moving forward, for people who
Speaker 2: are listening, how do they help get their parents and
Speaker 2: if they're fortunate enough to still have them grandparents involved.
Speaker 1: You know, there's some people who can't reach there have
Speaker 1: just spent too much time I'm listening to you know,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump or rush Limbau or something. But there are
Speaker 1: plenty of other people who you can reach. With older people,
Speaker 1: there's definitely the idea that and it turns out to
Speaker 1: be correct that your grandkids will will think you're cool
Speaker 1: if you're whoever whatever, you're doing. But I think it's
Speaker 1: just a sense of responsibility. I mean, look, climate change
Speaker 1: is basically a test at this point of whether the
Speaker 1: big brain was a good adaptation or not. You know,
Speaker 1: it can get us in a lot of trouble, can
Speaker 1: it get us out? My sense is that that probably
Speaker 1: will have to do with the size of the heart
Speaker 1: that that brain is attached to, And so having a
Speaker 1: kind of human sense of what we need to do
Speaker 1: is really important Americans. You know, we tended to fault
Speaker 1: towards the individual, and you know, if someone tells you
Speaker 1: about climate change, you start worrying about what on your roof,
Speaker 1: what's in your garage. The truth is that at this
Speaker 1: point it's still policy at as large a level as possible,
Speaker 1: national level, state level things. That probably is the most
Speaker 1: where the most leverage lies. The most important thing an
Speaker 1: individual can do is be a little bit less of
Speaker 1: an individual and be instead joined together with others in
Speaker 1: movements large enough to make real change. That's why we
Speaker 1: set things up like Third Act.
Speaker 2: And look, if that's not enough to get your mom
Speaker 2: out into the streets, I don't know what is.
Speaker 3: We're fucking the future, weird fucking the future.
Speaker 2: Before I closed out with Bill, I did want to
Speaker 2: ask him one more question. I've read a review in
Speaker 2: the New York Times about Bill's book, and in it
Speaker 2: but right to shed the famous art In Luther king
Speaker 2: junior quote, the ark of a moral universe is long,
Speaker 2: but it bends toward justice. To me, it perfectly encapsulates
Speaker 2: all social justice movements, including climate justice. We must have hope,
Speaker 2: and we must believe a world can be better, but
Speaker 2: it will be better. Bilbo feels somewhat differently.
Speaker 1: The arc of the physical universe is short, and it
Speaker 1: bends toward heat. That quote about the ark of the
Speaker 1: moral universe comes from my great hero, Martin Luther King,
Speaker 1: and what he meant was this may take a while,
Speaker 1: but we're going to win. And that was a powerful
Speaker 1: source of comfort to the brave people of the civil
Speaker 1: rights movement. But we don't have that comfort. You know,
Speaker 1: we've got six years. If we melt the Arctic, nobody's
Speaker 1: got a coherent plan for how you freeze it back
Speaker 1: up again. So if we don't win fast, we don't win.
Speaker 1: And hence the sense of extraordinary urgency that underlies all
Speaker 1: this work. So many thanks for this conversation.
Speaker 2: Bill, it's me. It should be thanking you honestly, thank
Speaker 2: you so much. It's an absolute privileged to be speaking
Speaker 2: to you.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, welligious mine and thanks for all
Speaker 1: your good work.
Speaker 2: And you two sir, you too. Bill was so inspiring
Speaker 2: to talk with. Honestly, he's a force of nature. And
Speaker 2: now it's on us, yes, all of us, to build
Speaker 2: on this amazing work.
Speaker 3: What fuck can I do?
Speaker 2: I wanted to bring in Maggie bed once again to
Speaker 2: talk about what we can take away from our conversation
Speaker 2: with Bill mckibbon. Hey, Chris, Maggie, Geez. I just feel
Speaker 2: like there's so many things I want to talk about
Speaker 2: from this interview.
Speaker 4: Oh right, there was.
Speaker 2: So much there.
Speaker 4: The big one for me, though, is that Gen X
Speaker 4: and Boomers need to step up. Those generations have a
Speaker 4: lot of political power. And when I say those generations,
Speaker 4: I mean my generation. We are so often hearing people say, oh,
Speaker 4: the younger generation will save us. Younger generation cares Our
Speaker 4: generations have to step up. So I would say the
Speaker 4: obvious follow up here is to get involved with Bill's organization.
Speaker 4: Third act, I mean, if you're from the boomer generation,
Speaker 4: there are a lot of resources on their site to
Speaker 4: help you figure out how to take action. And if
Speaker 4: you're not from that generation, there are resources to help
Speaker 4: you talk about climate with the boomers in your life.
Speaker 4: So to learn more, visit third act dot org, slash
Speaker 4: get involved, and you know all that talk about the
Speaker 4: Inflation Reduction Act. That is an important reminder of the
Speaker 4: importance of civic engagement. And the main part of civic
Speaker 4: engagement is voting. So vote Boomers, gen xers, vote, vote
Speaker 4: for climate candidates, vote for climate Paul, vote like your
Speaker 4: life depends on it, because it.
Speaker 2: Does, absolutely Thanks so much, Maggie, And that's what the
Speaker 2: fuck you can do to help This week?
Speaker 3: What the fuck can I do? Oh?
Speaker 2: Fuck, that's it for now, but I can't wait for
Speaker 2: next week. I'll be talking with Kaylin O'Connor, a brilliant
Speaker 2: philosopher who's working on one of the biggest obstacles in
Speaker 2: the climate crisis, misinformation.
Speaker 5: A lot of what is driving that, I think is
Speaker 5: cylinical actors who are trying to erode public trust in science,
Speaker 5: and especially you see this in the US among right
Speaker 5: wing politicians and especially populist type politicians, because of course
Speaker 5: populism is associated with this kind of rejection of authority
Speaker 5: or expertise.
Speaker 2: That's next time on Fucking the Future. For now, We're
Speaker 2: fucking the Future. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by
Speaker 2: Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted
Speaker 2: by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meredith Bryan.
Speaker 2: I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen
Speaker 2: and Rene Colvert. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carral Welker, and
Speaker 2: Nathan Chloch are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse
Speaker 2: Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice.
Speaker 2: Sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by
Speaker 2: Lillly Hayden, and producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton
Speaker 2: wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you
Speaker 2: enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking
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