February 21, 2024 • 34 mins
Author and activist Bill McKibben joins the show to talk about how he's trying to bring climate action to an overlooked group: Boomers.
Show notes from Chris:
- We need to get as many people activated as possible, so get involved and share your passion, intelligence, and empathy with family, friends, and colleagues. There are many groups to help you get started and learn more. It’s a wonderful sign of the progress we’re seeing around the world that there are so many groups. But for a great place to start, check out 350.org, the Sunrise Movement, and of course, ThirdAct.org.
- If you want to learn more about how fossil fuel companies have outspent clean energy groups by an eye-watering 27 times, there is a great article here in The Conversation.
- Bill’s latest book is “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon”. You can read a great review here.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think probably we can convince them to slow this down,
but it's going to take a lot of work, and
that wouldn't surprise me to be back in jail again
in the course of the winter, trying to slow it
down with Fucked.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hi, I'm Chris Turney and you're listening to I'm Fucking
the Future, the podcast where we try to figure out
how to fix the environmental dumpster fire we're in. That
may sound pessimistic, but I promise it's not unfucking the future.
It's all about the incredible people making a big difference
(00:38):
and about how we can make a difference too. Let's
dig in.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
We're fucking the future.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
If you're walking around Burlington, Vermont back in twenty fifteen,
you may have seen the unusual sight a middle aged
dude in a baseball cap, calmly getting arrested at agasting.
As the officer cuffs him, a small group of people
start cheering.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Ex You.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
These activists had come to protest ex On Mobile, a
big oil and gas company, and their leader that middle
aged dude getting arrested. He's our guest today, Bill mckibbon's
been fighting for the climate and sometimes getting arrested for
it for almost forty years. Bill actually wrote the first
(01:32):
book on the climate crisis for mainstream audiences. It's called
The End of Nature. I was published in nineteen eighty nine,
and as a teenager, I read this book front to back,
and I've got to say it really was life changing
to me. It's part of why I decided to study
environmental science. And he's written twenty more books since. Not
(01:54):
to mention, he started three fifty dollars or one of
the most effective climate action groups out there. So safe
to say, I'm stoked to have Bill on the show.
He's been of this for longer than many of us.
So I wanted to ask him about the state of
a climate movement today, how far we've come, what we
still need to do, and how we can get even
(02:15):
more people involved. I also wanted to talk to him
about his latest initiative, Third Act, which is successfully getting
some very unlikely climate activists to take to the streets.
So how did this mild mannered writer become such a
threat to a fossil fuel industry? As he tells it,
it all started back in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
I was a young writer at the New Yorker magazine
in New York and I did a long story about
where everything in my apartment came from. I followed all
the wires and pipes back to there. I was in
the Brazilian jungle, looking at oil wells, in the Arctic,
looking at hydroelectric dams, and on and I And I
(02:59):
think by the time I was done that long piece,
I had a sharper sense than I had before of
the physicality of the world, if you want to call
it that. I lived in Manhattan, which seems like a
place that could just mint money and ideas out of nothing,
but it turned out it was exquisitely dependent on the
(03:20):
continued operation of the planet's physical systems for its survival.
And I think actually that set me up to read
the early emerging science on climate change and understand some
of its implications that really, this was the biggest thing
that had ever happened and was ever going to happen,
(03:42):
by far, the biggest thing that humans had ever done.
And I think that really was laying a little bit
at the base of all that.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Now, we've talked to a lot of people in this
show who grew up in rural places and win inspired
by the beauty around them. They came into this fight
to protect the natural wonders in their backyards. But Bill,
Bill grew up in the suburbs, which.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Are a kind of machine for hiding the operations of
the natural world from you. Everything is named for what
used to be there but isn't anymore, you know, Fox
Run Acres or something, and I had sort of no
idea much what I was missing. I'm glad that I
grew up in the suburbs because I think that I
(04:30):
have a deep understanding of the center of gravity of
American life, which is the suburb and has been since
my time.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
And it's already an established thing. But you actually saw
this incredible change post war and have a suburbs became
such a big part of American.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Life, American life, and then the model sadly spread around
the world.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I mean, what the fuck did the suburbs do to Bill?
They can't really be all that bad, right, What the
fuck are you talking about? Suburban sprawl has had major
consequences on the environment. Simply put, hundreds of millions of
people living in single family homes means lots of concrete
(05:17):
getting poured, loss of land being cleared, and a huge
demand for energy there's a certain lifestyle that comes along
with living in the suburbs. A green lawn, a large house,
two cars, and maybe even a pool. In the suburbs,
life is bigger. Plus, you're not living above your grocery
store and just a few blocks from your kid's school anymore.
(05:38):
The suburbs have made a fifteen, twenty or thirty minute
drive totally normal. For result is I fuckalowed more emissions. Historically,
carbon emissions from suburban homes are four times more than
those of homes in cities. And yet in the US,
Australia and much of a world, we've accepted the suburbs
(05:59):
as a way of life, and since of inception we've
never really made an effort to change fact.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
The car centric bedroom community became was the American ideal
and became in too many places the world's ideal, with
grievous environmental consequences. I mean, you have all those big
houses you have to heat and cool and drive between them,
but also with grievous social consequences. Perhaps more importantly, the
(06:29):
average American has half as many close friends as the
average American of the nineteen fifties. And it's because we live,
because we devoted all our resources to building bigger houses
farther apart from each other, and people just naturally ran
into each other a lot less the course of a day.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Bill's twenty twenty two memoir The Flag, the Cross, and
the Station Wagon describes how the suburbs not only super
charged of emissions, but also they super charged our wealth,
inequality in individualism, and how all of this, taken together,
has reduced our ability to actually get together and solve
(07:09):
a climate crisis. So that's what the fuck we're talking about.
What the fuck are talking about? So anyway, Bill grew
up in the suburbs, and it wasn't until he was
a young writer of The New Yorker but he began
to reckon with the environmental impact of that. And then
(07:29):
on June twenty third, nineteen eighty eight, something monumental happened.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing
our climate now.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Jim Hanson, then the director of NASA's Institute for Space
Studies in Manhattan, spoke to Congress about an emerging threat,
global warming. His testimony was headline news around the world.
Most people had never heard of such a thing, and
certainly not from a senior leader at NASA. People, did
(08:00):
you any rational thing? They freaked out.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I mean, Time magazine, in the wake of that testimony,
made instead of choosing a Man of the Year, as
they had for fifty years, they chose the planet of
the year. George H. W. Bush, then Republican President of
the United States, was shaken enough that he said, we
will attack the Greenhouse effect with the white House effect. Everybody,
(08:25):
as one would expect, was sort of lining up to
try to deal with this problem, because why wouldn't you
You've just been given a crucial warning by the world scientists.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Of course, all this urgency and unity was way too
good to lost.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
We now know from all kinds of great investigative reporting
that within a year or so of Hanson's testimony, the
fossil fuel industry had circled the wagons. They'd hired the
people who used to work for the tobacco industry, and
they'd gone to work sowing doubt, denial, disinformation with billions
(09:05):
of dollars and decades of effort.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
We all know that's the case, but just how much
effort they put into this is genuinely shocking. We've all
seen the ads. How can today's resources fuel our shared tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
The world needs ways to reduce carbon emissions, especially for
heavy industry.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
We are working on solutions in our own operations, like
carbon capture and clean energy from hydrogen.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Those cheery inspirational ads about why petrol companies can fix
a problem they created our complete garbage. It's amazing. I
think anyone believes this nonsense. But sadly it seems to work.
Let's start from the beginning. Though it is nineteen eighty eight.
Jim Hanson's just presented his testimony to Congress, the world
(10:00):
looking at him going otoh, wear in real trouble. Let's
do something about it. A big oil starts to get worried.
The people are catching on. Something's got to change. So
Big Old gets together with some other manufacturing industries and
they create a group called the Global Climate Coalition. The
(10:20):
greatest success effectively lobbying the US to not sign the
Kyoto Protocol, which would have reduced global pollution by an
awful lot.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
I mean, remember, in nineteen ninety two the world gathered
in Rio de Janeiro for a big conference on all
of this, and everybody was there, and it seemed like
people were going to go to work, but they didn't.
You know, the first effort was this Kyoto protocol that
was you know, still born really because of the US
(10:54):
refusal to ratify it.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
It's a huge win for big al doesn't stop there.
Christian Downey and Robert Braule, two researchers who look at
trade organization funding, found that from two thousand and eight
to twenty eighteen, oil and gas companies outspent all other
sectors on public outreach and campaign contributions. And those cute
(11:21):
little ads, well, big oil spent are whopping one billion
dollars just on ads over ten years. So yeah, there's
a shit ton of money going into their efforts.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
The fossil fuel industry has relentlessly refused to give up
its business model. They want to keep burning coal and
gas and oil, and so they've looked for any way
to keep doing that, and the most effective way they've
had is to muscle our political system to gain our
political system. Eventually they'll lose. I mean, we now live
(12:02):
on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power
is to point a sheet of glass at the sun
that eventually that will triumph, but eventually doesn't do us
much good.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I mean, they'reknew in the late nineteen seventies this is real.
In fact, there's some of the best scientists working on
that actually, and their projections and forecasts of the future
were really, really good and frighteningly accurate. There's been decades
of disinformation and misinformation that's come from this, from these
fossil fuel companies. I mean, Jim's made the points as well,
(12:34):
and I couldn't agree more. I mean, gosh, I've basically
been working in this field since Jim testified, and it's
amazing to see how he's consistently been ahead of the
community and repeatedly so. I mean, I find them incredibly inspirational.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
He's also, let me just dad, he's also been ahead
in his willingness to be outspoken about it. I've had
to call him half a dozen times and say, will
you come get arrested with us here, which looked at
one way, is insane. It's so stupid to take the
most important climate scientists in the world away from his
computer screen and have him go sit in jail for
(13:09):
a couple of days. But it was actually super important
in building support for actually doing something about any of.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
This, and in all his work bill has one goal.
We have to stop setting things on far and instead
stop pointing sheets of glass up at the sun.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Combustion has been a big part of human life for
something like seven hundred thousand years. Darwin said language and
fire were the two things that distinguished our species, and
mostly it's been good. We learned to cook food, and
that gave us the big brain. We could move north
and south away from the equator because we could warm
ourselves up. I think the anthropologists even consider that some
(13:54):
of the social bonds in our species come from sitting
around the campfire every night for eon. Kind of proto
zoom I like that. And then we made it to
the industrial revolution and learned to control the combustion of
coal and gas and oil, and that give us modernity.
But we're at the moment when the costs are suddenly
(14:15):
outweighing the benefits. The biggest of those costs is obviously
the existential climate crisis. So that's the biggest risk, but
it's not the only one from combustion. Nine million people
a year die on this planet, about one death in
five from breathing the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion. That's
a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
That is a heartbreaking number of people who die eachy
from fossil fuel pollution. That's about a population of London.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And as we've discovered and been re reminded in the
last couple of years, if you depend on a resource
it's only available in a few places, the people who
control those places end up with way too much power.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Countries that sits on huge all of us as are
able to punched way above our wait politically, Saudi Arabia,
the UAE, Guitar, Russia, Venezuela, the US. You get a point.
But the good news is we can see our way
out of this mess.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
It's our great good fortune that it's precisely at this
moment when this trouble is mounting so fast, that scientists
and engineers have figured out how to use the power
of the sun. We can capture its rays directly on
photo voltaic panels, and we can take advantage of the
(15:35):
fact that it differentially heats the earth, producing the breeze
that turns those turbines. And now we have batteries to
store that when the sun goes down or the wind drops,
and in essence, you know, we can now take full
advantage of the fact that the Good Lord was kind
enough to hang a large ball of burning gas ninety
(15:58):
three million miles up in the sky. What we have
is cheap soilar, cheap wind, increasingly cheaper batteries. It's not free.
There's environmental damage that comes from the mining and so on,
and they can be done in inhumane ways, and we
should do everything we can to prevent that. But the
damage is orders of magnitude smaller than the damage we're
(16:20):
doing now. If you want one way to just sort
of keep that in your mind, statistic that helps for
me is that forty percent of all ship traffic on
planet Earth is just carrying coal and oil and gas
back and forth around the planet to get burned.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
We have to change that. One of the ways out
of this mess is actually buried in the Inflation Reduction Act,
which is sending hundreds of billions of dollars into clean
energy right now. It's the biggest investment in the US
government has ever made to reduce carbon pollution. But Bill says,
(16:58):
we've got to spend this money quickly.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
You know, I know the people at the White House
and the Department of Energy who are trying to shovel
that money out the door as fast as they can,
in part because there's a real fear that Donald Trump
will be re elected, which point it'll all come to
a halt. The hardest part is getting communities. We're now
(17:22):
at the point where the rubber really meets the road.
There are one hundred and forty million homes and apartment
buildings and apartments in the US, and each one of
them has to be changed in certain ways, you know.
And there's money now to allow that to happen. But
that's still an extraordinarily complex logistical problem, you know. So
(17:43):
right now there's a lot of work in listing mayors
and city councils and governors and things in this work
as it spreads out from the center. So that's half
of what the US has to do. The other half
is it has to not just worry about its own commissions.
It has to stop exporting vast quantities of fossil fuel elsewhere.
(18:06):
We will, as someone once said, hang together, or we
will hang separately. I mean, look, humans are socially evolved primate.
It wasn't that many generations ago that we were sitting
on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of
each other's fur. You know, and that is us at
its best, our responsiveness to people around us. This is
(18:30):
what climate change is testing. Now. If we do things right,
we'll be making a transition to a world that doesn't
set things on fire anymore, and as a result, the
world itself will be less on fire, meaning that.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Is a future where we only rely renewable energy, where
fossil fuels are a thing of a past.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
We're fucking the future. We're fucking the future.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
But Bill has been parts of a climate movement for
decades and he still has hope. But we can turn
this around, but we have to get everyone activates on
these issues as quickly as humanly possible.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I've had the privilege of being there pretty much the
whole time as we've built this climate movement. I founded
the first what turned into the first global grassroots climate
change campaign three point fifty dot org with seven undergraduates
at the college where I teach, and within a year
we'd organized fifty two hundred simultaneous demonstrations in one hundred
(19:44):
and eighty one countries. We launched this fossil fuel divestment campaign,
and within a decade we've convinced endowments and portfolio is
worth about forty trillion dollars to divest from fossil fuel.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
So the good news is we're going in the rights
and we can thank longtime activists Light Bill for aggravating
the status quo and getting us to where we are today.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
We sort of kick these things off, but then everybody
just took it and ran with it. We think three
point fifty dot org has organized or been associated with
twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea.
But you obviously can't organize all those. It's just people
picking up the ball and running with it everywhere. I
think probably this is the biggest movement in human history,
(20:32):
which is good because it's by far the biggest problem
in human history. And it really has been an extraordinary
honor just to get to watch it grow and grow
and grow. Whether we've grown it big enough to take
on the you know, to make the change we need
in the time we have as an open question. We
clearly need more people. I'm spending my time now a
(20:54):
lot of it organizing old people like me in this group.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Third Act Bill, to fight a problem that seems pretty
easy to solve. We need more people to give a
shit about what's happening to our planet.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
The most effective climate activist of all time was obviously
gret At Tunberg and her movement that she inaugurated, really
the school strike movement, and things came like a bulk
from the blue and it was increasing with incredible speed
and power through twenty nineteen. In that September of that year,
(21:30):
there were ten million kids on on school strike.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
My name is Grieta Tembari, and I'm inviting you to
be a part of the solution.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
When young people go to the streets, they get attention,
and rightfully so. Ten million young people standing up to
their governments in action on the climate crisis is big news.
But it shouldn't have to be this way. Their kids
and they didn't create this crisis. My generation have its
(22:00):
generation date.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Young people have done most of the leading on this fight.
As I said, I started three point fifty dot org
with seven undergraduates with extraordinary success. You know, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge,
Princeton University, California, University of Michigan, all divested now from
fossil fuel. Those young people, when they graduated went on
(22:22):
to form the Sunrise movement that brought us the Green
New Deal and hence the Inflation Reduction Act. And around
the world, as we've said, you know, Greta and her
the ten thousand other Gretas around the world had ten
million followers, and they've done an unbelievable job. I mean,
what a pleasure it was to get to write my
friend Greta in June a letter of congratulation on graduating
(22:46):
from high school. Think about that for a minute, you know,
but I did hear one too many people my age say, oh,
it's up to the next generation to solve this problem,
which seems noble but also highly impractical. For all their
energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural
(23:09):
power to make by themselves change on the scale we
need in the time that we have. We don't have
the time for them to grow up and become senators
and CEOs and whatever that takes a while. In a
while is what we don't possess. So if you look
around for who does have structural power, it's people with
hairlines like.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Mine, which is why Bill started faird Act.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
We punch above our weight politically because we all vote.
There's no known way to stop old people from voting.
We ended up with most of the money. We've got
about seventy percent of the country's financial assets. So if
you wanted to push around Washington or Wall Street or
your state capital, having some older people would be helpful.
(23:53):
The theoretical objection to this from political scientists and things
was that people become more conservative, as so there's no
point trying to organize them. I don't know if that
was true once, but it doesn't need to be true
now because if you're in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now,
it means that in your first Act, you were around
for this moment of great epic social, cultural, political transformation,
(24:16):
when we had the first Earth Day and the birth
of the modern environmental movement, when in my country the
civil rights movement was at its apex on and on,
and so now people are Perhaps the Second Act was
a little more involved in consumerism than citizenship, but that's
water under the bridge, and now people are organizing like crazy.
(24:39):
We've just been a kind of pell Mell sprint these
last two years, and people are great at registering voters
and lobbying legislatures, on and on, but they're also willing
to take direct action. We had Third Act coordinated demonstrations.
One hundred demonstrations in one hundred cities in March against
(25:00):
the four big banks Chase City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of
America that are the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry.
And these were great and quite milletant.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
When I told you Bill was a real deal, I
meant it. On March twenty first, twenty twenty three, Bill
and thousands of other people whose hairlines look like Bill's
demanded that banks stop funding bad actors in the climate crisis.
During one hundred events in over thirty one states. They
pledged to closer accounts, cut up their credit cards, and
(25:34):
boycott Bank of America, Chase City Bank, Wells Fargo if
they didn't move their investments out of fossil fuel. This
kind of action works because, like Bill said, these people
have large financial power in the United States, and that's
true of just about every other industrialized country in the world.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
I was in Washington, DC, and we shut down the
banks for the afternoons with Citi ins. We're too old
to sprawl on the sidewalk easily for hours at a time.
We went to all the thrift shops in the Greater
Washington area and came away with hundreds of rocking chairs,
and that's what we used to The New York Times
(26:16):
the next day called it the rocking share of Rebellion.
It's very good to be able to back up the
young people who are leading in this work. It's a
lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That was something that really struck me from writing. Actually,
is this idea that you've got a really impassioned, mobilized,
energetic generation, but without the resources the networks for relationships
of powers. You say, and I think we're just bringing
these two together. It's just such a fascinating and really
hopeful momentum and lots of fun. Yeah, and lots of
(26:46):
fun as well, you know, moving forward, for people who
are listening, how do they help get their parents and
if they're fortunate enough to still have them grandparents involved.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
You know, there's some people who can't reach there have
just spent too much time I'm listening to you know,
Donald Trump or rush Limbau or something. But there are
plenty of other people who you can reach. With older people,
there's definitely the idea that and it turns out to
be correct that your grandkids will will think you're cool
(27:19):
if you're whoever whatever, you're doing. But I think it's
just a sense of responsibility. I mean, look, climate change
is basically a test at this point of whether the
big brain was a good adaptation or not. You know,
it can get us in a lot of trouble, can
it get us out? My sense is that that probably
will have to do with the size of the heart
(27:40):
that that brain is attached to, And so having a
kind of human sense of what we need to do
is really important Americans. You know, we tended to fault
towards the individual, and you know, if someone tells you
about climate change, you start worrying about what on your roof,
(28:01):
what's in your garage. The truth is that at this
point it's still policy at as large a level as possible,
national level, state level things. That probably is the most
where the most leverage lies. The most important thing an
individual can do is be a little bit less of
an individual and be instead joined together with others in
(28:25):
movements large enough to make real change. That's why we
set things up like Third Act.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
And look, if that's not enough to get your mom
out into the streets, I don't know what is.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
We're fucking the future, weird fucking the future.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Before I closed out with Bill, I did want to
ask him one more question. I've read a review in
the New York Times about Bill's book, and in it
but right to shed the famous art In Luther king
junior quote, the ark of a moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice. To me, it perfectly encapsulates
all social justice movements, including climate justice. We must have hope,
(29:15):
and we must believe a world can be better, but
it will be better. Bilbo feels somewhat differently.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
The arc of the physical universe is short, and it
bends toward heat. That quote about the ark of the
moral universe comes from my great hero, Martin Luther King,
and what he meant was this may take a while,
but we're going to win. And that was a powerful
source of comfort to the brave people of the civil
rights movement. But we don't have that comfort. You know,
(29:46):
we've got six years. If we melt the Arctic, nobody's
got a coherent plan for how you freeze it back
up again. So if we don't win fast, we don't win.
And hence the sense of extraordinary urgency that underlies all
this work. So many thanks for this conversation.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Bill, it's me. It should be thanking you honestly, thank
you so much. It's an absolute privileged to be speaking
to you.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Thank you so much, welligious mine and thanks for all
your good work.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
And you two sir, you too. Bill was so inspiring
to talk with. Honestly, he's a force of nature. And
now it's on us, yes, all of us, to build
on this amazing work.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
What fuck can I do?
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I wanted to bring in Maggie bed once again to
talk about what we can take away from our conversation
with Bill mckibbon. Hey, Chris, Maggie, Geez. I just feel
like there's so many things I want to talk about
from this interview.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Oh right, there was.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
So much there.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
The big one for me, though, is that Gen X
and Boomers need to step up. Those generations have a
lot of political power. And when I say those generations,
I mean my generation. We are so often hearing people say, oh,
the younger generation will save us. Younger generation cares Our
(31:09):
generations have to step up. So I would say the
obvious follow up here is to get involved with Bill's organization.
Third act, I mean, if you're from the boomer generation,
there are a lot of resources on their site to
help you figure out how to take action. And if
you're not from that generation, there are resources to help
(31:29):
you talk about climate with the boomers in your life.
So to learn more, visit third act dot org, slash
get involved, and you know all that talk about the
Inflation Reduction Act. That is an important reminder of the
importance of civic engagement. And the main part of civic
(31:51):
engagement is voting. So vote Boomers, gen xers, vote, vote
for climate candidates, vote for climate Paul, vote like your
life depends on it, because it.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Does, absolutely Thanks so much, Maggie, And that's what the
fuck you can do to help This week?
Speaker 3 (32:09):
What the fuck can I do? Oh?
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Fuck, that's it for now, but I can't wait for
next week. I'll be talking with Kaylin O'Connor, a brilliant
philosopher who's working on one of the biggest obstacles in
the climate crisis, misinformation.
Speaker 5 (32:31):
A lot of what is driving that, I think is
cylinical actors who are trying to erode public trust in science,
and especially you see this in the US among right
wing politicians and especially populist type politicians, because of course
populism is associated with this kind of rejection of authority
(32:55):
or expertise.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
That's next time on Fucking the Future. For now, We're
fucking the Future. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by
Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted
by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meredith Bryan.
(33:18):
I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen
and Rene Colvert. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carral Welker, and
Nathan Chloch are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse
Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice.
Sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by
Lillly Hayden, and producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton
(33:42):
wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you
enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking
the Future on Apple Podcasts or whether you get your
podcasts
I think probably we can convince them to slow this down,
but it's going to take a lot of work, and
that wouldn't surprise me to be back in jail again
in the course of the winter, trying to slow it
down with Fucked.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hi, I'm Chris Turney and you're listening to I'm Fucking
the Future, the podcast where we try to figure out
how to fix the environmental dumpster fire we're in. That
may sound pessimistic, but I promise it's not unfucking the future.
It's all about the incredible people making a big difference
(00:38):
and about how we can make a difference too. Let's
dig in.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
We're fucking the future.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
If you're walking around Burlington, Vermont back in twenty fifteen,
you may have seen the unusual sight a middle aged
dude in a baseball cap, calmly getting arrested at agasting.
As the officer cuffs him, a small group of people
start cheering.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Ex You.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
These activists had come to protest ex On Mobile, a
big oil and gas company, and their leader that middle
aged dude getting arrested. He's our guest today, Bill mckibbon's
been fighting for the climate and sometimes getting arrested for
it for almost forty years. Bill actually wrote the first
(01:32):
book on the climate crisis for mainstream audiences. It's called
The End of Nature. I was published in nineteen eighty nine,
and as a teenager, I read this book front to back,
and I've got to say it really was life changing
to me. It's part of why I decided to study
environmental science. And he's written twenty more books since. Not
(01:54):
to mention, he started three fifty dollars or one of
the most effective climate action groups out there. So safe
to say, I'm stoked to have Bill on the show.
He's been of this for longer than many of us.
So I wanted to ask him about the state of
a climate movement today, how far we've come, what we
still need to do, and how we can get even
(02:15):
more people involved. I also wanted to talk to him
about his latest initiative, Third Act, which is successfully getting
some very unlikely climate activists to take to the streets.
So how did this mild mannered writer become such a
threat to a fossil fuel industry? As he tells it,
it all started back in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
I was a young writer at the New Yorker magazine
in New York and I did a long story about
where everything in my apartment came from. I followed all
the wires and pipes back to there. I was in
the Brazilian jungle, looking at oil wells, in the Arctic,
looking at hydroelectric dams, and on and I And I
(02:59):
think by the time I was done that long piece,
I had a sharper sense than I had before of
the physicality of the world, if you want to call
it that. I lived in Manhattan, which seems like a
place that could just mint money and ideas out of nothing,
but it turned out it was exquisitely dependent on the
(03:20):
continued operation of the planet's physical systems for its survival.
And I think actually that set me up to read
the early emerging science on climate change and understand some
of its implications that really, this was the biggest thing
that had ever happened and was ever going to happen,
(03:42):
by far, the biggest thing that humans had ever done.
And I think that really was laying a little bit
at the base of all that.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Now, we've talked to a lot of people in this
show who grew up in rural places and win inspired
by the beauty around them. They came into this fight
to protect the natural wonders in their backyards. But Bill,
Bill grew up in the suburbs, which.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Are a kind of machine for hiding the operations of
the natural world from you. Everything is named for what
used to be there but isn't anymore, you know, Fox
Run Acres or something, and I had sort of no
idea much what I was missing. I'm glad that I
grew up in the suburbs because I think that I
(04:30):
have a deep understanding of the center of gravity of
American life, which is the suburb and has been since
my time.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
And it's already an established thing. But you actually saw
this incredible change post war and have a suburbs became
such a big part of American.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Life, American life, and then the model sadly spread around
the world.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
I mean, what the fuck did the suburbs do to Bill?
They can't really be all that bad, right, What the
fuck are you talking about? Suburban sprawl has had major
consequences on the environment. Simply put, hundreds of millions of
people living in single family homes means lots of concrete
(05:17):
getting poured, loss of land being cleared, and a huge
demand for energy there's a certain lifestyle that comes along
with living in the suburbs. A green lawn, a large house,
two cars, and maybe even a pool. In the suburbs,
life is bigger. Plus, you're not living above your grocery
store and just a few blocks from your kid's school anymore.
(05:38):
The suburbs have made a fifteen, twenty or thirty minute
drive totally normal. For result is I fuckalowed more emissions. Historically,
carbon emissions from suburban homes are four times more than
those of homes in cities. And yet in the US,
Australia and much of a world, we've accepted the suburbs
(05:59):
as a way of life, and since of inception we've
never really made an effort to change fact.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
The car centric bedroom community became was the American ideal
and became in too many places the world's ideal, with
grievous environmental consequences. I mean, you have all those big
houses you have to heat and cool and drive between them,
but also with grievous social consequences. Perhaps more importantly, the
(06:29):
average American has half as many close friends as the
average American of the nineteen fifties. And it's because we live,
because we devoted all our resources to building bigger houses
farther apart from each other, and people just naturally ran
into each other a lot less the course of a day.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Bill's twenty twenty two memoir The Flag, the Cross, and
the Station Wagon describes how the suburbs not only super
charged of emissions, but also they super charged our wealth,
inequality in individualism, and how all of this, taken together,
has reduced our ability to actually get together and solve
(07:09):
a climate crisis. So that's what the fuck we're talking about.
What the fuck are talking about? So anyway, Bill grew
up in the suburbs, and it wasn't until he was
a young writer of The New Yorker but he began
to reckon with the environmental impact of that. And then
(07:29):
on June twenty third, nineteen eighty eight, something monumental happened.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing
our climate now.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Jim Hanson, then the director of NASA's Institute for Space
Studies in Manhattan, spoke to Congress about an emerging threat,
global warming. His testimony was headline news around the world.
Most people had never heard of such a thing, and
certainly not from a senior leader at NASA. People, did
(08:00):
you any rational thing? They freaked out.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
I mean, Time magazine, in the wake of that testimony,
made instead of choosing a Man of the Year, as
they had for fifty years, they chose the planet of
the year. George H. W. Bush, then Republican President of
the United States, was shaken enough that he said, we
will attack the Greenhouse effect with the white House effect. Everybody,
(08:25):
as one would expect, was sort of lining up to
try to deal with this problem, because why wouldn't you
You've just been given a crucial warning by the world scientists.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Of course, all this urgency and unity was way too
good to lost.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
We now know from all kinds of great investigative reporting
that within a year or so of Hanson's testimony, the
fossil fuel industry had circled the wagons. They'd hired the
people who used to work for the tobacco industry, and
they'd gone to work sowing doubt, denial, disinformation with billions
(09:05):
of dollars and decades of effort.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
We all know that's the case, but just how much
effort they put into this is genuinely shocking. We've all
seen the ads. How can today's resources fuel our shared tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
The world needs ways to reduce carbon emissions, especially for
heavy industry.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
We are working on solutions in our own operations, like
carbon capture and clean energy from hydrogen.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Those cheery inspirational ads about why petrol companies can fix
a problem they created our complete garbage. It's amazing. I
think anyone believes this nonsense. But sadly it seems to work.
Let's start from the beginning. Though it is nineteen eighty eight.
Jim Hanson's just presented his testimony to Congress, the world
(10:00):
looking at him going otoh, wear in real trouble. Let's
do something about it. A big oil starts to get worried.
The people are catching on. Something's got to change. So
Big Old gets together with some other manufacturing industries and
they create a group called the Global Climate Coalition. The
(10:20):
greatest success effectively lobbying the US to not sign the
Kyoto Protocol, which would have reduced global pollution by an
awful lot.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
I mean, remember, in nineteen ninety two the world gathered
in Rio de Janeiro for a big conference on all
of this, and everybody was there, and it seemed like
people were going to go to work, but they didn't.
You know, the first effort was this Kyoto protocol that
was you know, still born really because of the US
(10:54):
refusal to ratify it.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
It's a huge win for big al doesn't stop there.
Christian Downey and Robert Braule, two researchers who look at
trade organization funding, found that from two thousand and eight
to twenty eighteen, oil and gas companies outspent all other
sectors on public outreach and campaign contributions. And those cute
(11:21):
little ads, well, big oil spent are whopping one billion
dollars just on ads over ten years. So yeah, there's
a shit ton of money going into their efforts.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
The fossil fuel industry has relentlessly refused to give up
its business model. They want to keep burning coal and
gas and oil, and so they've looked for any way
to keep doing that, and the most effective way they've
had is to muscle our political system to gain our
political system. Eventually they'll lose. I mean, we now live
(12:02):
on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power
is to point a sheet of glass at the sun
that eventually that will triumph, but eventually doesn't do us
much good.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I mean, they'reknew in the late nineteen seventies this is real.
In fact, there's some of the best scientists working on
that actually, and their projections and forecasts of the future
were really, really good and frighteningly accurate. There's been decades
of disinformation and misinformation that's come from this, from these
fossil fuel companies. I mean, Jim's made the points as well,
(12:34):
and I couldn't agree more. I mean, gosh, I've basically
been working in this field since Jim testified, and it's
amazing to see how he's consistently been ahead of the
community and repeatedly so. I mean, I find them incredibly inspirational.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
He's also, let me just dad, he's also been ahead
in his willingness to be outspoken about it. I've had
to call him half a dozen times and say, will
you come get arrested with us here, which looked at
one way, is insane. It's so stupid to take the
most important climate scientists in the world away from his
computer screen and have him go sit in jail for
(13:09):
a couple of days. But it was actually super important
in building support for actually doing something about any of.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
This, and in all his work bill has one goal.
We have to stop setting things on far and instead
stop pointing sheets of glass up at the sun.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Combustion has been a big part of human life for
something like seven hundred thousand years. Darwin said language and
fire were the two things that distinguished our species, and
mostly it's been good. We learned to cook food, and
that gave us the big brain. We could move north
and south away from the equator because we could warm
ourselves up. I think the anthropologists even consider that some
(13:54):
of the social bonds in our species come from sitting
around the campfire every night for eon. Kind of proto
zoom I like that. And then we made it to
the industrial revolution and learned to control the combustion of
coal and gas and oil, and that give us modernity.
But we're at the moment when the costs are suddenly
(14:15):
outweighing the benefits. The biggest of those costs is obviously
the existential climate crisis. So that's the biggest risk, but
it's not the only one from combustion. Nine million people
a year die on this planet, about one death in
five from breathing the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion. That's
a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
That is a heartbreaking number of people who die eachy
from fossil fuel pollution. That's about a population of London.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And as we've discovered and been re reminded in the
last couple of years, if you depend on a resource
it's only available in a few places, the people who
control those places end up with way too much power.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Countries that sits on huge all of us as are
able to punched way above our wait politically, Saudi Arabia,
the UAE, Guitar, Russia, Venezuela, the US. You get a point.
But the good news is we can see our way
out of this mess.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
It's our great good fortune that it's precisely at this
moment when this trouble is mounting so fast, that scientists
and engineers have figured out how to use the power
of the sun. We can capture its rays directly on
photo voltaic panels, and we can take advantage of the
(15:35):
fact that it differentially heats the earth, producing the breeze
that turns those turbines. And now we have batteries to
store that when the sun goes down or the wind drops,
and in essence, you know, we can now take full
advantage of the fact that the Good Lord was kind
enough to hang a large ball of burning gas ninety
(15:58):
three million miles up in the sky. What we have
is cheap soilar, cheap wind, increasingly cheaper batteries. It's not free.
There's environmental damage that comes from the mining and so on,
and they can be done in inhumane ways, and we
should do everything we can to prevent that. But the
damage is orders of magnitude smaller than the damage we're
(16:20):
doing now. If you want one way to just sort
of keep that in your mind, statistic that helps for
me is that forty percent of all ship traffic on
planet Earth is just carrying coal and oil and gas
back and forth around the planet to get burned.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
We have to change that. One of the ways out
of this mess is actually buried in the Inflation Reduction Act,
which is sending hundreds of billions of dollars into clean
energy right now. It's the biggest investment in the US
government has ever made to reduce carbon pollution. But Bill says,
(16:58):
we've got to spend this money quickly.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
You know, I know the people at the White House
and the Department of Energy who are trying to shovel
that money out the door as fast as they can,
in part because there's a real fear that Donald Trump
will be re elected, which point it'll all come to
a halt. The hardest part is getting communities. We're now
(17:22):
at the point where the rubber really meets the road.
There are one hundred and forty million homes and apartment
buildings and apartments in the US, and each one of
them has to be changed in certain ways, you know.
And there's money now to allow that to happen. But
that's still an extraordinarily complex logistical problem, you know. So
(17:43):
right now there's a lot of work in listing mayors
and city councils and governors and things in this work
as it spreads out from the center. So that's half
of what the US has to do. The other half
is it has to not just worry about its own commissions.
It has to stop exporting vast quantities of fossil fuel elsewhere.
(18:06):
We will, as someone once said, hang together, or we
will hang separately. I mean, look, humans are socially evolved primate.
It wasn't that many generations ago that we were sitting
on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of
each other's fur. You know, and that is us at
its best, our responsiveness to people around us. This is
(18:30):
what climate change is testing. Now. If we do things right,
we'll be making a transition to a world that doesn't
set things on fire anymore, and as a result, the
world itself will be less on fire, meaning that.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Is a future where we only rely renewable energy, where
fossil fuels are a thing of a past.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
We're fucking the future. We're fucking the future.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
But Bill has been parts of a climate movement for
decades and he still has hope. But we can turn
this around, but we have to get everyone activates on
these issues as quickly as humanly possible.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I've had the privilege of being there pretty much the
whole time as we've built this climate movement. I founded
the first what turned into the first global grassroots climate
change campaign three point fifty dot org with seven undergraduates
at the college where I teach, and within a year
we'd organized fifty two hundred simultaneous demonstrations in one hundred
(19:44):
and eighty one countries. We launched this fossil fuel divestment campaign,
and within a decade we've convinced endowments and portfolio is
worth about forty trillion dollars to divest from fossil fuel.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
So the good news is we're going in the rights
and we can thank longtime activists Light Bill for aggravating
the status quo and getting us to where we are today.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
We sort of kick these things off, but then everybody
just took it and ran with it. We think three
point fifty dot org has organized or been associated with
twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea.
But you obviously can't organize all those. It's just people
picking up the ball and running with it everywhere. I
think probably this is the biggest movement in human history,
(20:32):
which is good because it's by far the biggest problem
in human history. And it really has been an extraordinary
honor just to get to watch it grow and grow
and grow. Whether we've grown it big enough to take
on the you know, to make the change we need
in the time we have as an open question. We
clearly need more people. I'm spending my time now a
(20:54):
lot of it organizing old people like me in this group.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Third Act Bill, to fight a problem that seems pretty
easy to solve. We need more people to give a
shit about what's happening to our planet.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
The most effective climate activist of all time was obviously
gret At Tunberg and her movement that she inaugurated, really
the school strike movement, and things came like a bulk
from the blue and it was increasing with incredible speed
and power through twenty nineteen. In that September of that year,
(21:30):
there were ten million kids on on school strike.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
My name is Grieta Tembari, and I'm inviting you to
be a part of the solution.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
When young people go to the streets, they get attention,
and rightfully so. Ten million young people standing up to
their governments in action on the climate crisis is big news.
But it shouldn't have to be this way. Their kids
and they didn't create this crisis. My generation have its
(22:00):
generation date.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Young people have done most of the leading on this fight.
As I said, I started three point fifty dot org
with seven undergraduates with extraordinary success. You know, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge,
Princeton University, California, University of Michigan, all divested now from
fossil fuel. Those young people, when they graduated went on
(22:22):
to form the Sunrise movement that brought us the Green
New Deal and hence the Inflation Reduction Act. And around
the world, as we've said, you know, Greta and her
the ten thousand other Gretas around the world had ten
million followers, and they've done an unbelievable job. I mean,
what a pleasure it was to get to write my
friend Greta in June a letter of congratulation on graduating
(22:46):
from high school. Think about that for a minute, you know,
but I did hear one too many people my age say, oh,
it's up to the next generation to solve this problem,
which seems noble but also highly impractical. For all their
energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural
(23:09):
power to make by themselves change on the scale we
need in the time that we have. We don't have
the time for them to grow up and become senators
and CEOs and whatever that takes a while. In a
while is what we don't possess. So if you look
around for who does have structural power, it's people with
hairlines like.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Mine, which is why Bill started faird Act.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
We punch above our weight politically because we all vote.
There's no known way to stop old people from voting.
We ended up with most of the money. We've got
about seventy percent of the country's financial assets. So if
you wanted to push around Washington or Wall Street or
your state capital, having some older people would be helpful.
(23:53):
The theoretical objection to this from political scientists and things
was that people become more conservative, as so there's no
point trying to organize them. I don't know if that
was true once, but it doesn't need to be true
now because if you're in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now,
it means that in your first Act, you were around
for this moment of great epic social, cultural, political transformation,
(24:16):
when we had the first Earth Day and the birth
of the modern environmental movement, when in my country the
civil rights movement was at its apex on and on,
and so now people are Perhaps the Second Act was
a little more involved in consumerism than citizenship, but that's
water under the bridge, and now people are organizing like crazy.
(24:39):
We've just been a kind of pell Mell sprint these
last two years, and people are great at registering voters
and lobbying legislatures, on and on, but they're also willing
to take direct action. We had Third Act coordinated demonstrations.
One hundred demonstrations in one hundred cities in March against
(25:00):
the four big banks Chase City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of
America that are the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry.
And these were great and quite milletant.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
When I told you Bill was a real deal, I
meant it. On March twenty first, twenty twenty three, Bill
and thousands of other people whose hairlines look like Bill's
demanded that banks stop funding bad actors in the climate crisis.
During one hundred events in over thirty one states. They
pledged to closer accounts, cut up their credit cards, and
(25:34):
boycott Bank of America, Chase City Bank, Wells Fargo if
they didn't move their investments out of fossil fuel. This
kind of action works because, like Bill said, these people
have large financial power in the United States, and that's
true of just about every other industrialized country in the world.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
I was in Washington, DC, and we shut down the
banks for the afternoons with Citi ins. We're too old
to sprawl on the sidewalk easily for hours at a time.
We went to all the thrift shops in the Greater
Washington area and came away with hundreds of rocking chairs,
and that's what we used to The New York Times
(26:16):
the next day called it the rocking share of Rebellion.
It's very good to be able to back up the
young people who are leading in this work. It's a
lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That was something that really struck me from writing. Actually,
is this idea that you've got a really impassioned, mobilized,
energetic generation, but without the resources the networks for relationships
of powers. You say, and I think we're just bringing
these two together. It's just such a fascinating and really
hopeful momentum and lots of fun. Yeah, and lots of
(26:46):
fun as well, you know, moving forward, for people who
are listening, how do they help get their parents and
if they're fortunate enough to still have them grandparents involved.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
You know, there's some people who can't reach there have
just spent too much time I'm listening to you know,
Donald Trump or rush Limbau or something. But there are
plenty of other people who you can reach. With older people,
there's definitely the idea that and it turns out to
be correct that your grandkids will will think you're cool
(27:19):
if you're whoever whatever, you're doing. But I think it's
just a sense of responsibility. I mean, look, climate change
is basically a test at this point of whether the
big brain was a good adaptation or not. You know,
it can get us in a lot of trouble, can
it get us out? My sense is that that probably
will have to do with the size of the heart
(27:40):
that that brain is attached to, And so having a
kind of human sense of what we need to do
is really important Americans. You know, we tended to fault
towards the individual, and you know, if someone tells you
about climate change, you start worrying about what on your roof,
(28:01):
what's in your garage. The truth is that at this
point it's still policy at as large a level as possible,
national level, state level things. That probably is the most
where the most leverage lies. The most important thing an
individual can do is be a little bit less of
an individual and be instead joined together with others in
(28:25):
movements large enough to make real change. That's why we
set things up like Third Act.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
And look, if that's not enough to get your mom
out into the streets, I don't know what is.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
We're fucking the future, weird fucking the future.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Before I closed out with Bill, I did want to
ask him one more question. I've read a review in
the New York Times about Bill's book, and in it
but right to shed the famous art In Luther king
junior quote, the ark of a moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice. To me, it perfectly encapsulates
all social justice movements, including climate justice. We must have hope,
(29:15):
and we must believe a world can be better, but
it will be better. Bilbo feels somewhat differently.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
The arc of the physical universe is short, and it
bends toward heat. That quote about the ark of the
moral universe comes from my great hero, Martin Luther King,
and what he meant was this may take a while,
but we're going to win. And that was a powerful
source of comfort to the brave people of the civil
rights movement. But we don't have that comfort. You know,
(29:46):
we've got six years. If we melt the Arctic, nobody's
got a coherent plan for how you freeze it back
up again. So if we don't win fast, we don't win.
And hence the sense of extraordinary urgency that underlies all
this work. So many thanks for this conversation.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Bill, it's me. It should be thanking you honestly, thank
you so much. It's an absolute privileged to be speaking
to you.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Thank you so much, welligious mine and thanks for all
your good work.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
And you two sir, you too. Bill was so inspiring
to talk with. Honestly, he's a force of nature. And
now it's on us, yes, all of us, to build
on this amazing work.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
What fuck can I do?
Speaker 2 (30:33):
I wanted to bring in Maggie bed once again to
talk about what we can take away from our conversation
with Bill mckibbon. Hey, Chris, Maggie, Geez. I just feel
like there's so many things I want to talk about
from this interview.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Oh right, there was.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
So much there.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
The big one for me, though, is that Gen X
and Boomers need to step up. Those generations have a
lot of political power. And when I say those generations,
I mean my generation. We are so often hearing people say, oh,
the younger generation will save us. Younger generation cares Our
(31:09):
generations have to step up. So I would say the
obvious follow up here is to get involved with Bill's organization.
Third act, I mean, if you're from the boomer generation,
there are a lot of resources on their site to
help you figure out how to take action. And if
you're not from that generation, there are resources to help
(31:29):
you talk about climate with the boomers in your life.
So to learn more, visit third act dot org, slash
get involved, and you know all that talk about the
Inflation Reduction Act. That is an important reminder of the
importance of civic engagement. And the main part of civic
(31:51):
engagement is voting. So vote Boomers, gen xers, vote, vote
for climate candidates, vote for climate Paul, vote like your
life depends on it, because it.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Does, absolutely Thanks so much, Maggie, And that's what the
fuck you can do to help This week?
Speaker 3 (32:09):
What the fuck can I do? Oh?
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Fuck, that's it for now, but I can't wait for
next week. I'll be talking with Kaylin O'Connor, a brilliant
philosopher who's working on one of the biggest obstacles in
the climate crisis, misinformation.
Speaker 5 (32:31):
A lot of what is driving that, I think is
cylinical actors who are trying to erode public trust in science,
and especially you see this in the US among right
wing politicians and especially populist type politicians, because of course
populism is associated with this kind of rejection of authority
(32:55):
or expertise.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
That's next time on Fucking the Future. For now, We're
fucking the Future. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by
Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted
by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meredith Bryan.
(33:18):
I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen
and Rene Colvert. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Carral Welker, and
Nathan Chloch are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse
Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice.
Sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by
Lillly Hayden, and producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton
(33:42):
wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you
enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking
the Future on Apple Podcasts or whether you get your
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