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 Bill McKibben’s Wildfireside Chat

The 2023 Pennsylvania Climate Convergence opened on September 30th in Harrisburg, PA with a hybrid Wildfireside Chat featuring Bill McKibben, a widely recognized author, educator, environmental activist, and founder of The Third Act. He cited a failure to act as the primary reason behind the climate crisis. Moderated by Ariana Genna, a recent graduate of Lebanon Valley College and a climate consultant for Elders Climate Action, the talk was attended by more than fifty people on Zoom and in person at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Harrisburg. What follows is an abridged AI-assisted transcript of the talk. 

When I wrote that book The End of Nature, 34 years ago now, the truth is we knew everything that we know today about climate change, more or less, says McKibben. We knew that when you burn oil and gas and all you put carbon in the atmosphere that is molecular structure would trap heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. Nothing that’s happened in the intervening three and a half decades surprises us really. We’re on the path that scientists told us we would be on. And now, especially after the summer of 2023, nobody with a functioning brain can fail to see (it).

In June and July, we started getting readings from the network of temperature stations, weather stations, satellites, buoys around the world that were so off the charts that I was hearing from lots and lots of scientists just saying, what’s happening is crazy. There were a series of days in June and July, a week really a month, where scientists told us that the global average temperature was higher than we’d ever recorded….it looks now pretty close to certain that not only will 2023 be the warmest year ever recorded, we will pass temporarily anyway. That 1.5 degrees Celsius warming line sometime in November.

And with all that heat has come everything that everybody’s been watching on the news all summer. We’ve seen fire on a scale that we haven’t seen before in Canada. The fires are so intense and they’re still burning and spreading rapidly this week and they’ll probably continue to do so until there is deep snow up there. Those fires have now produced way more than twice as much carbon as Canadians produce with all the cooking, heating, smoking, cooling whatever they do in the course of the year.

We’ve seen the pictures of the fires from Greece. And then you saw the pictures just last week of the incredible floods from Greece. That’s the other half of what happens. Warm air holds more water vapor than colds and you get more evaporation then, more drought, and more fire. But that water comes down someplace and it came down in those remarkable pictures from Greece. The tragic pictures from Libya, where the biggest rainstorm in their history, busted two dams and then washed a major part of a big city out to sea we think at least 10,000 people drowned. Maybe you were watching yesterday and saw the pictures from New York City, the biggest city in our country where they’ve now broken the  rainfall record. It stood for 150 years. It was broken in 2021 and it’s now been broken three times since 2021. Yesterday was the rainiest day ever recorded at JFK Airport. In New York. And it was way more water than the city could handle. There were endless pictures of people wading through knee-deep water to try and get out of the subway—really, really, really scary. And of course, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. All of this is what happens when you raise the temperature a little less than a degree and a half Celsius. But we’re on a path to raise it well more than three degrees Celsius. And if we do that, I fear we will not have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. It’s just too much violent flux and chaos. 

However, we do not need to raise the temperature three degrees Celsius or anything like that. Because even in this same year, that we’re having these remarkable, remarkable consequences of our delay in dealing with climate change. We’re also seeing incredible advances in the spread of renewable energy, which is the thing that could give us some way out here we’re now adding about a gigawatt of solar power every day to the grid around the planet, most of that in China— but everywhere really. That’s the equivalent of adding a nuclear power plant today with renewable energy. In this case, the nuclear power plant is 93 million miles away in the sky, and we’re able to capture its rays on solar panels or take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth producing the wind that turns those turbines. That’s remarkable. It means that there’s no longer any good financial or technological reason that we couldn’t move very, very fast. We’re not moving fast enough. We’re not catching up with the physics of climate change, and we don’t have much time.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has told us that we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. To have some hope of meeting the climate targets we set in Paris; 2030 by my watch is six years and three months away. That doesn’t leave us much time. And of course, the reason that we’re moving so slow is the continued power of the fossil fuel industry to prevent change. You all have seen it in Harrisburg, that’s for sure. You’ve watched the ability of the fracking companies to come in and buy their way into power in the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in place after place over the years. And so many thanks to those who have stood up to them. The same fight is going on absolutely everywhere. And we have to win it…So that’s I think the closest we’ve got to a kind of state of the climate right now. It’s not great news, but it’s not without its hopes either.

Questions and Answers from the audience: 

Ariana Genna: On a recent call with others climate action you said something that I loved, which was the best thing a person can do is be a little less individual. Can you speak to the importance of collaborative action? I think this kind of ties into the hope that we can all have tonight. 

McKibben: That’s my favorite question. I think, look, we live in America, which is a highly highly-individualist country at this point. So even the best of us, when we take on a problem, we often default quickly to thinking: what can I do at my house? Which is a useful thing to think about. My house is covered with solar panels. That’s how I’m talking to you today, and I’m proud of them. There’s a vehicle in the driveway that connects up to those solar panels and I’m happy for that. But I’m enough of a realist to know that we’re no longer at a point where we can solve this one Tesla at a time. 

So the most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual. As you say, join together with others in movements large enough to make a real difference in economic and political ground rules. That’s why we set up 350.org. It’s why we set up Third Act because you know young people who were on the job when I started 350.org—with seven college kids and they’ve done amazing work. We’ve organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea. The kids who did the divestment movement on campus after campus came together after they graduated to form the Sunrise Movement that brought us the Green New Deal, which is why we have the IRA. You know about Greta Thunberg and you should. She’s one of my favorite people to work with on the planet. And she’d be the first to say there are 10,000 graduates, high school and junior high school students around the world, and they have 10 million followers. 

That’s how many people were out on school strike in September of 2019 before the pandemic hit, but at a certain point I’d heard one too many people say to me: Oh, it’s up to the next generation to solve this problem, which is a ignoble and be highly impractical. For all your energy and intelligence, and idealism, Arianna, you and your peers lack the structural power to by ourselves make change on the scale we need in the time that we have. 

So when we look around for who has some structural power, one of the answers is people with hairlines like mine. There are 70 million people over the age of 60 in this country, that’s a lot. That’s the population of France. Not only are there a lot of us, we put trump in weight politically because we all vote. There’s no known way of stopping old people from voting. And we ended up with most of the money, 70% of the country’s financial assets—fair or not. So if you want to take on Washington or Wall Street, or Harrisburg, and it helps to have people of a certain age on board, and it’s been really fun and really gratifying to watch this Third Act just explode. 

In the course of a couple of years. We’ve had chapters all over the country now including great, great work in the Keystone State. And we’ve got people doing massive amounts of work defending the climate and defending the political climate against the return of the demagoguery that we saw just a few years ago in this country. Those are complementary and important tasks, and we will keep at it in support of the young people providing most of the remarkable leadership here. So it’s really been fun, and I hope everybody figures out a way to get involved. I don’t know if there’s anybody there tonight who’s over the age of 60. If not, tell your grandparents about all this. But if you are, then join in with us because it’s a very good time.

Audience member: I’ve been trying to figure out, (considering) the talk about divestment,  where do you want to put your money?

McKibben: So I wrote once that the fires of global warming burn on the kindling, that is finance. Banks, asset managers, insurance companies provide the lifeblood of the fossil fuel industry; that thing that allows them to keep expanding the endless supply of new capital. Scientists have told us that we can’t have any more fossil fuel expansion that we have to stop building new pipelines finding new oil fields overnight if the oil companies keep doing it because the banks keep allowing them to the four big American banks Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America are the four biggest funders of the fossil fuel industry. So yes, pull your money out if you can, and go find a useful bank on the East Coast. Amalgamated Bank is particularly good, but your local credit union is also probably good too. But unless you have a very, very large bank account, it’s possible that Chase may not notice that you’ve done this, which is why the real thing is we were talking about before this coming together with others to make enough noise of what you’re doing that they do notice. We had a big day of action in March where we had demonstrations in 100 cities in Washington. We closed down those banks for the day with hundreds of people doing a sit in rocking chairs because we’re too old to sprawl on the sidewalk for hours at a time. 

It was the most comfortable sit-in I’ve ever been to… It’s how I’m doing it from now on. And it was great, and it’s gotten the attention of the banks. We’ve had good semi productive meetings with executives from a bunch of them (banks) already. 

And, and so we that’s the real work, it’s good to purify your own bank account but better to push these guys to start doing the right thing. And there are reasons to think that we may be able to do some of that. California last week passed a new law that forces every big company in the world to disclose all their carbon emissions from their suppliers, including the people that supply their money. And as that happens, it’ll get easier to track and easier to push, and I think that will turn out to be really, really important. 

And I would like to note there’s a lot of really great organizations doing work specifically on divestment. Stop The Money Pipeline is an amazing organization. And I know there’s a variety of campaigns that you could probably look at that help if you want to personally fix your funds. There is quite literally a webinar I guess, helpful training on it’s called Fix my Funds. 

There’s an organization called Green America and they put out a publication called Green Pages. And in there they list all the companies at the banks and all other kinds of companies that are green companies that are fair trade. 

Ariana Genna: Somebody asked, with so many people living on Earth there’s going to be some cutbacks that we’re going to have to do in our own personal lives if we really want to make this work. Although I know Bill has really highlighted collaborative action and the importance of that, they really wanted to know as climate activists, should we be telling people that we need to cut back— that there needs to be some sacrifice, or should we maybe focus on different messaging?

McKibben: Well, it’s a hard message to tell people that you have to change everything. Because it’s hard at this point, it’s not 1,000,000% clear precisely what things we’re going to have to change. Some things clearly are not useful. Getting on an airplane and flying someplace because it’s warmer is not sensible.  [But there’s] a fairly relevant defense of cold beer or warm showers. Electricity is a remarkable thing. We know how to produce a lot of it—renewable energy from the sun. And we now have the batteries to store those things. So I think trading on some of the things we can do, and do more cheaply than we’re doing now for people is probably a good message. If you have an oil burning furnace or a natural gas furnace in the basement, who may want to replace it because [heat pumps] are much more efficient, and in the end, much cheaper to operate, and use far, far less energy. 

And now there’s money for the inflation Reduction Act. So, my sense would be it’s probably a better message at this point. When people ask me what I do, I generally say wearing a good sweater in the wintertime is a good way to keep the thermostat turned down. And I’ve now adapted to the point where it feels way too hot to me in most places….I think job one and maybe job two and job three right now are to roll out new energy technology as fast as we can and see where we are at. 

Audience member: 

Thanks. My last job was as a research analyst, working for a PR firm that did contract contracts for solar and wind companies, which I have to say was pretty depressing. Because sometimes the companies, like any kind of company, would go into a community, and they would form only the relationships necessary to get it built. And then when it was done, they got their approvals, and they’d vanish. And then the town next over would see this, and they’d be like, we don’t want that, and then fossil fuel companies send in their PR companies which are much better funded than ours. They tell people all this bad stuff that’s going to happen and then they pass a ban on solar and wind in Ohio and Indiana. This is blanketing the whole state, and I’m scared of this because I haven’t seen a response from either industry, the renewable industry or from activist organizations that really are confronting the scale of that particular problem.

McKibben: 

There’s two very good parts to that question….But the first point is really important. One of the things we should be working for, as we roll out renewable energy, is to give communities as much of a stake in that as we possibly can. Place where this revolution has worked best, aside from China, is in northern Europe, particularly Denmark and Germany. And one of the reasons is that they’ve set it up so that there’s a very high ownership of at least part of these renewable energy assets by local people, by local churches, by local communities. So that their stakeholders in all of this as a result, are far more not just accepting of the process, but often evangelistic about it. And there’s no reason that we can’t do more of that going forward. We should because it’ll make all of this much easier. Your point is very well taken. Thank you.

Audience member: 

And I think that’s a really important point you brought up especially because I know in state legislatures across the country, they have these energy choice bills that have been going in, and I think that’s probably what you’re referring to where it’s not really energy choice. It’s a very conceding title. But it’s really preventing people from towns from really pushing for renewable energy. So, I think that really sets up our next question quite well, which is how do we wake up Pennsylvania’s legislature to the climate crisis? 

McKibben: 

Well, you’re going to have to figure out Pennsylvania. You’re closer on the ground than I am, and I don’t know everything I should about Pennsylvania politics. The rest of us tend to get it in national terms. So, we know about your new senator and his basketball shorts, and we know about your new governor, you know, on and on, but I’m afraid that the laws of political gravity are pretty much the same everywhere. Politicians respond to pressure from lots of people. We need to be constantly reminding them that there are many, many of us who fear the dangers of climate change. Welcome, the jobs and economic vitality that comes with renewable energy transition, and that we are organized and ready to go and to the degree that you can get them done and I have no doubt that this convergence is valid. Then we will have real success. The economics are good enough now. It shouldn’t be getting at least a little easier to make this push around the world. The expansion of renewable energy continues because the economics is good. 

But in this country we are constantly up against the power of the fossil fuel industry, and its non willingness to alter its business model, and when we move away it usually means that utilities are recalcitrant as well. And so, it takes organizing everywhere, including with the public utility commissions, which often turn out to be one of the most important arenas with precisely this kind of combat. So, there’s no huge magic secret to organizing. The more people you have, the more united they’re speaking, the more likely they are [to succeed.]

Audience member: 

Yes, you have talked recently in an article about the LNG ports that are being proposed in the south. And I’m wondering, during the years that the Keystone XL, mass protests and arrests every day, probably helped to stop the Keystone. Do you see any call for another such organized protest to get to the LNG?

McKibben: 

I do think it’s going to be the next great fight here because the numbers are so big. This liquefied natural gas program, which to some degree is happening in the northeast around the Marcellus Shale, but it’s really centered in the Permian Basin in Texas and Louisiana. And with access to the Gulf of Mexico, it is I think the last gasp of fossil fuels. And it’s almost all for exports. The US is now the biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the world, even though we didn’t export any of it in 20 years or longer just shortly ago is 2016. It’s been remarkable and it is going to get bigger and bigger unless we stop it. There are seven of these terminals and operations now. They want to build 20 more. The numbers are just astonishing. Like you may have heard about this Willow Oil complex in Alaska that got approved this summer. Not a good idea. But just one of these terminals set from Louisiana has 20 times the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it over the course of its life….They’re not doing anything to help anyone here except for oil companies. And in fact, just the opposite. The more of this stuff we export, the more the price will go up with natural gas for those people who haven’t yet converted to a heat pump or whatever. 

So I think it’s winnable—political parties will take lots of organizing in the months ahead. Keep watching. I will add, it’s a difficult moment for organizers because we’re a year out from a presidential election. It could return the White House to a fascist, and a fascist who, if he gets back in office, will approve every pipeline, every LNG terminal…

McKibben                                                                                   

So it’s not the easiest organizing challenge there’s ever been…..And we’re trying to figure out how to make sure we stop that LNG expansion without doing any favors to Donald Trump…

Ariana Genna:

Someone recently read a blog post about mobilizing AARP, and they were wondering if you could speak to a little more about the importance of doing that, how we can nudge them, and why it matters.

McKibben: The American Association of Retired people is the single most effective lobby in the history of lobbies. AARP is enormous, rich, and powerful, and good at what they do. And so it’s really important to kind of bring them on our side on finance, though their inclination is to avoid political controversy, except around Social Security and Medicare. Increasingly, they’re, they’re starting to engage here. I was writing about stuff that’s happening in California. The AARP, among other things has been working a lot on these important environmental questions around denser housing, better transportation for cities, things like that. And the reason they’re doing it is that some of us begin to worry how we’re going to stay in the places where we live now because it gets harder when you get older. There’s this phrase aging in place. Aging in place is a lot easier to do in a vibrant, walkable community where there’s lots of other people. I want some other ages living there who can help take care of me. And that’s why AARP gotten more engaged….They’re protecting people’s Social Security checks and Medicare…In order for all of us to fly, we can need AARP more and more on board. The odds of those things happening go up or up because as I say, there’s no better lobbyists.

Audience question:

My question is about centralization versus decentralization. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on Well, big huge solar arrays versus local backyard solar arrays, and I guess that goes for wind and all sorts of other alternative energy too. I think it’s an important distinction. What do you think?

McKibben

I think it’s an important distinction. But truthfully, I think we need some of both. We use a lot of energy, an awful lot of energy. We couldn’t use less as we electrify things will automatically use of somewhat less because electricity is more efficient but are in need a lot of electrons because among other things, we’re talking about converting our whole transportation system off fossil fuels. A lot of that can happen on the rooftops, in backyards, and we’re getting much better at dealing with those working right now.

There’s an emerging technology that people are calling a virtual power plant which allows if you elect them the utility to tweak the time at which you’re doing things like heating hot water. You won’t change anything in your house. It will just change the demand on our energy system to allow those distributed resources to do a lot more of it. But I don’t think we’re going to see extraordinary changes in the demand for energy in the next six years. My guess is that it’s going to be very hard to persuade people to make radical, radical changes in their lifestyle.

And that means we’re going to need some solar farms and it means that we’re going to need some wind turbines.

It takes a while to wrap your head around. But I think that they’re necessary. A great deal of our agriculture is growing corn that we feed to cows to produce milk. Corn, what that one was, is an inefficient solar collector that requires you to dump a lot of nitrogen on it every year that washes into our water system. And that milk that it’s producing, we have more of than we need. That’s why it’s such a terrible time to do a dairy farm. So, if you’re a farmer, and you can get a decent price, guaranteed for years to come for putting a solar panel solar farm and some of your acreage then you’re producing a crop of electrons that you really need, and you’re giving the soil beneath it a rest. Because who knows by the time Arianna is as has aged like me, maybe we’ll have 10 other things that we can do. Maybe these small modular reactors that people are talking about will come online. Maybe we’ll have figured out tidal power, deep geothermal, I don’t know. But then the only thing you have is cheap solar panels and pretty cheap wind turbines and ever cheaper batteries to store the power. When the sun goes down, I think those are the things we’re going to have to figure out.

Genna from the chat: What are some of your favorite book recommendations? For climate activists?

McKibben:

That’s a good question. Everybody should read Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger is smart as hell. It’s only sort of about climate, but what it’s really about is the strange and skewed information world that we now inhabit. It’s living Elon Musk’s world is a difficult endeavor because [in an alternative] reality, vaccines make you sick. Wherever you go, all of these kinds of permutations of the stuff that really originated with basic lies around climate change are spreading and metastasizing.

There’s an increasing amount of good nonfiction available. I’m kind of guessing that people by now have read Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson’s book but if you haven’t, make sure you have it. If you read it and I liked it, then read another of his books, New York 2140, which I think the future is very best. And it’s very appropriate for the moment because it’s a New York, it’s gone largely underwater. It’s not as common as it sounds. It’s partly about human resilience, even in the face of incredible change.

If you’re feeling a little despairing, I would read Rebecca Solnit’s remarkable book, A Paradise Built in Hell, about the human response to disaster over time and how often it’s brought out the best. Rebecca is remarkable; she’s a famous essayist, and a huge help. So I without reservation, I recommend reading everything that she writes.

Audience Question:

My question is about utility scale, as opposed to you know, I’m kind of against anything that’s utility scale because our utility because then they’re in control…Whether it’s fossil fuels or solar panels, is there some way that we can, do something on to scale without it having to belong to a corporation?

McKibben

Well, it’s a very good question. I’m working right now this month with old friends up in Maine who are running a big referendum campaign to take their two private utilities in the state of Maine and turn them into a public utility country power…. And it always works better than private companies in Maine, those private companies skim $187 million in profit every year off the top. That’s money that can reduce rates and also pay for the transition to renewable energy. So it’s definitely something to look into. But you can’t let the perfect be the absolute enemy of the necessary. Whatever system will have to work with over the next six years. It’s got to produce a lot of renewable energy. Because, though the consequences of corporate control and energy and things are bad, nothing is as bad as the existential crisis we’ll face if we can’t bring this heating rapidly under control.

Chat question: Can you explain a little bit about hydrogen hubs and then what your thoughts are on them?

Oh, this is all one complicated discussion about hydrogen. And truthfully, I think it’s probably not going to be a huge deal going forward is smart. To replace fossil fuels with real green hydrogen made from renewable energy would be useful. But it’s competing with this rapidly, rapidly falling price of electricity…. Most of the schemes around hydrogen aren’t really green renewable hydrogen. There are schemes to allow the fossil fuel industry to continue using their existing infrastructure. They like to burn stuff. And really, we don’t need to be burning things, anything here on the surface of the Earth.

Audience question:

How can we combat the disinformation that is inundating our schools coming from Prager University, for example?

McKibben:

Very good question. Prager University thing is just insane. I mean, there’s just there now in Florida and elsewhere, substituting for the science curriculum for stuff that might as well have been written by Exxon. And you have to take it case by case in the schools. I think though, that the other way to counteract it, is to make sure that there are as many good young people working on these issues as possible. And high schoolers are completely up to that task or some of the best climate leaders we have around the world. So, figuring out how to back them up and support them. Truthfully. It’s been a long time since I was in high school. But my memory is that people pay more attention to what their peers say and think about things than they do to whatever filmstrip is showing. One way to counteract it since that question is figure out all the ways to support the young people in groups like Fridays for the Future, across the country that are doing remarkable counterprogramming—really spreading truth.

Audience question:

And I know that I hail from New Jersey. I know my state was the very first state to introduce climate curriculum…. But what’s really saddening now is that there’s a lot of people attending board meetings to try to tear that down. And I think [you] start with your community as well. And you know, if you want there to be a climate, go attend that board meeting and get people to come with you.

Audience question:

Hi, one thing we haven’t touched on is sequestration. And, you know, I think Pennsylvania is an agricultural state, and there are people talking about going organic, not tilling the soil, and also there’s, like so many million tree campaigns here. How do you see that impacting over the long term? And one thing I was thinking about as the climate dries in the Great Plains, should we be transitioning back to giving incentives to replant the prairies?

McKibben:

All of these things are good and useful ideas, and people are working more and more on it. Regenerative agriculture is interesting in lots of ways….The necessary work of changing lives and practices is complicated by the sheer scale. One of the advantages of going up against the fossil fuel industry is that though it’s immensely powerful, there’s only six or eight companies that will now be around the world. A couple of billion farmers that’s hard organizing to take up. So over time that you see, there may be some real solutions here. But there are solutions that are really about widening the drain at the bottom of the bathtub to let carbon out. It’s a good idea to be doing emergency operations is to turn off the taps at the top of that, because that’s the problem, logistics overcomes.

McKibben in closing:

So work hard on it. The more we work on it, the more understanding you have…New ideas would be one huge source of energy. And I’m really grateful to everybody else who’s there. And I know it’s going to be a remarkable Convergence. 

I unfortunately have another one of these sorts of things I have to go do out on the West Coast now. So I’m going to leave you in Harrisburg and just say enormous thanks, and I can’t wait until I get down there in person, especially to see my Third Act colleagues, but also to see the young people who I know are included in this fight. Many, many thanks for your leadership and everybody’s hard work. Thank you.