Bill McKibben: Tomorrow Will be Sunny - podcast episode cover

Bill McKibben: Tomorrow Will be Sunny

Nov 11, 202540 min
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Summary

Bill McKibben, author of "Here Comes the Sun," explores the global surge in solar and wind power, now cheaper than fossil fuels, presenting a hopeful yet urgent outlook on climate change. He critiques the US administration's prioritization of fossil fuels, which hinders progress and cedes technological leadership to countries like China and India. McKibben emphasizes the vital role of local activism and innovative solutions like agrivoltaics and balcony solar in accelerating the energy transition, despite federal setbacks.

Episode description

A confident prediction from the man who first brought our warming planet to public attention some 35 years ago. Energy from solar and wind is now cheaper than traditional fossil fuels and is being rapidly adopted across the world. The exception is the US where the federal priority is planet-warming coal, oil and gas. But even in the US, local action, prompted in part by McKibben-backed organizations like Third Act and 350.org, is promoting innovative uses of solar power.


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Transcript

Intro / Opening

Tis the season of gifting and holes to deck, and the who's in who Newville were in love with new tech. Where can we find Sonos, and Samsung, and Nintendo, they shouted. Would they find it in one place? This they questioned and doubted. When suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start. And each who added headphones, TVs, and games to their carts.

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Global Warming: Crisis and Opportunity

I'm Alan Alda, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating. In May, the Chinese were putting up... three gigawatts of solar panels a day. A gigawatt's the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant. So one of those was going up every eight hours. Here's the thing.

If we lived in a world where climate change was not the greatest crisis we've ever faced, then we could just sit back and let economics do its thing. 30 years from now, we'll run the planet on sun and wind because it's... cheap. But if it takes us anything like 30 years, sadly, then the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet. That's why, alongside the forces of economics, we need the forces of activism.

to help make this happen at the pace that gives us some chance of catching up with physics. That's Bill McKibben. It's over 35 years since his book, The End of Nature, was for many people their first introduction to the dangers of global warming. His latest book is both optimistic and sobering. It's called Here Comes the Sun.

a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. Its optimism stems from what he argues is the astonishing surge in the use of solar and wind power around the world. What's sobering? is that the United States seems determined to live in the fossil-fueled past, giving over leadership in the fight against global warming and in the technology that's powering that fight to countries like China and India.

Renewable Energy's Economic Advantage

Bill, I saw you speak in East Hampton out on Long Island a couple of weeks ago. Oh, I'm glad. You were terrific. What a communicator. You talked to us as though we were in your living room. You were so at ease. And then you gave us the most positive news. And I really needed to hear positive news. In the last two years, production of renewable energy in this country has gone up tremendously, hasn't it?

We're producing a third more energy from the sun this fall than we did last fall around this world, which is just a very, very sudden surge, Alan, this stuff that we spent 40 years calling alternative energy. is suddenly the common sense, obvious, straightforward way to make power. And this surge over the last 36 months is just beautiful to see because it augurs not salvation from things like climate change.

but at least the idea that we have a tool to use in that fight. The amazing news to me was that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel. I hadn't heard that before. Probably five years ago, we crossed some invisible line. Remember, solar panels, solar cells were only invented in 1954 at Bell Labs in Edison, New Jersey. There may be people... listening to this, old enough to have helped pay for those solar cells by dropping dimes in payphones back in the 1950s, you know?

At the time, it was the most expensive power in the world. The only thing you could use it for was satellites because there was nothing else to use for them. But over time, and with the push from a lot of activists... scientists and engineers have kept iterating and iterating. And about five years ago, we crossed this invisible line where, for the first time,

it was cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than from coal and gas and oil. That's a potentially epochal moment for our civilization. I mean, that's the... moment at which suddenly you can imagine humans breaking this 700,000-year-old habit of setting stuff on fire. Fire had been good to us. I mean, back in the day, we learned to cook food and that gave us the big brain. You know, we could move north and south from the equator.

The anthropologists even think that standing around the campfire every night for millennia helped create the social bonds that mark our species. You know, before there was Zoom, there was the campfire. And then when we learned to control the combustion of coal and gas and oil, that was the industrial revolution and it gave us modernity. But the price is high now. We can talk about climate change. We can talk about 9 million people a year dying, one death in five.

from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. We can talk about the endless wars that we have fought over control of oil and gas on this planet. All of that makes it very good news. that now we don't have to depend on it. If we want, we can just take full advantage of this large ball of burning gas that the good Lord was kind enough to hang 93 million miles up in the sky.

Global Transition vs. US Lag

I think I read in your book that in March of this year, U.S. fossil fuels made less than half of our electricity. That's right. For the very first time, fossil fuel was accounting for less than half of our electricity. around the world 95 percent of new generation last year came from renewable sources in may the chinese were putting up

Three gigawatts of solar panels a day, a gigawatt's the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant. So one of those was going up every eight hours. Here's the thing. If we lived in a world where climate change was not the greatest crisis we've ever faced, then we could just sit back and let economics do its thing. 30 years from now, we'll run the planet on sun and wind because it's...

cheap. But if it takes us anything like 30 years, sadly, then the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet. I spent my whole life dealing with the climate question. I wrote the first book. back in the 1980s on what we now call the climate crisis, what we then called the greenhouse effect. So I have too vivid a sense of just how fast this world is changing.

We have a few years, the scientists tell us, to do anything about limiting how hot the world gets. We're not going to stop climate change. Too late, sadly, for that. we can shave tenths of a degree off how hot the world eventually gets. And every tenth of a degree that we raise the planet's temperature now moves 100 million human beings.

out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one. So this is vitally important work, but we have to make it happen quickly. That's why... alongside the forces of economics, we need the forces of activism to help push, help force the spring, help make this happen at the pace that gives us some chance of catching up with physics.

Political Obstacles to Clean Energy

Those hundred million people pushed out of the zone that's livable, is that going to include all of us, or will it just mostly be people that we don't seem to care about that much? Well... Sadly, probably most of them are people we don't care about that much. But you know what? This is now reaching everyone. Look.

So many things happen in the world that we forget them. It was only nine months ago that the second largest city in America, large parts of it burned to the ground after the hottest, driest conditions that... Los Angeles had ever seen. And those weren't poor people. Those homes up in Pacific Palisades were million-dollar homes. This is happening everywhere now.

The real problem with the current administration is not that they care too little about the poor world, though obviously they do. It's that they care too much about the oil companies. You'll recall that candidate Trump said in a not very secret meeting with oil executives, if you give me a billion dollars for my campaign, I'll give you anything you want. The president has delivered.

even more than they could have imagined. The president ordered the cessation of work on an 80% complete wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Last week, we learned that the largest solar project in The country in Nevada was not going to happen. This project would have produced enough electricity for two million homes. Now that's gone.

all in an effort to protect the profits, the business model of the oil industry for another, I don't know, decade or something. It's very sad to watch, in part because it's, if you're an American. ceding the technological and economic future to China. Remember, these things were invented here. SolarCell, Bell Labs, 1954, first industrial wind turbine, Vermont, 1943. But now the Chinese are going to own this technology.

Solar's Dual Benefits and Agrivoltaics

And with it, they're going to own the future. It's astonishing to see how quickly that can happen. I was just reading in this morning's paper about getting energy from the desert. and putting it on high-powered lines 2,000 miles to the east, to the big cities. Exactly right. And here's a remarkable thing about that. you know that one of the biggest problems they've had in China is the rapid spread of those deserts. The Gobi Desert keeps growing and sandstorms blow into Beijing and so on.

What they're finding is that these big solar farms that they're putting up are the best barrier they've ever had towards encroaching desertification. Because... a solar panel a solar farm does two things it creates electrons but it also creates shade And that shade retains moisture. It allows small plants and things to grow even in the desert. And they're slowing down the rate at which they're losing land across China.

That's one of the beautiful things, by the way, about this whole solar business. Yes, it takes some land to do it, but not a... intense amount, maybe one or two percent of the land surface of most countries. In our country, when we think about land, our biggest crop is corn. We grow 60 million acres of it. 30 million acres of that half is grown for ethanol, grown for gasoline. That 30 million acres provides about 3% of the energy that America uses.

If you took just those 30 million acres and covered them in solar panels, they would produce not 3% of America's energy, but about 100% of the energy that we currently use. Now, that's not how we want to do it, because you don't want to just... Iowa stem to stern solar panels. We have lots of other places and rooftops and things where we can put a lot of it. But that's certainly where we can put some of it. And I'll tell you a story. I was in a field in Illinois.

last summer, summer before last, with a farmer who was converting his land. And he said, look, here's one acre of corn. It's being grown to be used for ethanol. If I put the ethanol from that acre in my truck, my Ford F-150, it would give me about 25,000 miles. This acre over here I'm converting to solar panels. They'll produce enough electrons to drive my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles. Wow.

And, as he pointed out, I'm only using half the land. I've got all that room in between the solar panels to do something else. And this is what we're calling... agrivoltaics, not a very good name, but it's this new human endeavor of what you can grow in between solar panels. And you can grow a lot. In Vermont, where I live, we're using a lot of that land to grow.

pollinator-friendly weeds and flowers. The number of pollinating insects in those fields is a hundred times greater than when it was a cornfield. That means that the farmers in the surrounding orchards and things are seeing huge increases in fruit set, in pollination. We're addressing the biodiversity crisis in the same place that we're addressing the...

climate crisis. We just have to adjust our aesthetic a little bit, because when we look at a cornfield, we think, oh, that's nature. But really, in many ways, it's highly industrialized. Plants are a certain kind of solar collector, but you have to pour nitrogen and phosphorus on them to make them work. And that washes into the water system and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. And you have a huge... dead zone of water. Instead, you've got this acre that's producing two crops.

and doing it in a much less intensive way. And the same thing goes for wind turbines. Wind is just another form of solar energy. The sun heats the earth differentially, creating the winds that turn those turbines. I've come to think that they're some of the most beautiful things on Earth. They're like great calder mobiles just spinning there. When you talk about the number of miles that you can travel on a half acre of electricity...

compared to a half acre of corn. It sounds so overwhelmingly economically attractive that you wonder what can be said against it. Why aren't people rushing to the door to dig up the corn?

Developing World Embraces Solar

Hugely economically attractive unless you own a coal mine or an oil well, in which case it's deeply economically threatening and you would be willing to. spend a lot of money to game our political system to make sure that it went as slowly as possible. And that's what's happening. Around the rest of the world, this is happening much faster now than it is here.

You can really see that in the developing world. One of the stories I tell in the book is about Pakistan. Pakistan has been a rough place these last years because the climate crisis is just... clobbering it. They've had the two worst floods since Noah in 2010 and 2022. I mean, like a third of the country. underwater. In the summertime, the temperatures routinely reach 120 degrees now in urban centers. But Pakistan does have one geographic advantage.

And that's its long border with China, across which over the last two years or so, vast quantities of solar panels have flowed, not through government programs. This is just people who are tired of the expensive and unreliable electric system in Pakistan and who have purchased these things. And then gone on YouTube or TikTok to watch videos about how to snap them together and covered the roofs of apartment houses, of factories, of mini malls, of whatever it is with solar panels.

built astonishing quantities. Early adopters were farmers in Pakistan. You've traveled in rural Asia, so you know that the soundtrack of much of that part of the world is the home of diesel generators. pumping irrigation water up from those deep tube wells that are a legacy of the Green Revolution. That's often the biggest cost, that diesel that a farmer has. So farmers were eager to get their hands on solar panels.

They usually lacked the money to build the kind of solar, the kind of steel supports that we're used to seeing to point them up. no matter. They just laid them on the ground, pointed them straight up at the sun. Pakistani farmers used 35% less diesel last year than the year before. Now this story is playing out across Africa. There are 600 million people in Africa with no electricity. Fossil fuel never did them a lick of good. In 250 years, it never reached where they were to provide power.

That's going to come instead from solar panels, the village scale solar micro grids that people are quickly putting up with Chinese equipment across that part of the world. And once you've got the power, then all the things that use it follow close on hand. You know, we're used to thinking in this country that Detroit is the center of the automobile industry. That is no longer true. As of the last couple of years, it's a few cities in China whose names I find hard to pronounce that are the...

center of automotive excellence on our planet. They're producing the cheapest and best cars in the world. You can get a good car for... 10 grand, and an unbelievable one for 30 grand. And that's what people across the developing world are buying. Either that or e-bikes, which are an even more beautiful part of this. You know, the bicycle was good technology.

to begin with. And now we have a bicycle that has no hills, which is really pretty magic. So the Chinese are going to be dominating the sale of all these things across this world. Which is sad news for us, I guess, as Americans, compensated for by the fact that it's probably good news for the planet as a whole.

Activism Amidst Policy Setbacks

When we come back from our break, Bill McKibben tells me how even though national policy favors the fossil fuel industries, volunteer activist groups like Third Act and 350.org are making real progress toward the adoption of solar energy at the local level. Just a reminder that Clear and Vivid is non-profit.

with everything after expenses going to the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Both the show and the Center are dedicated to improving the way we connect with each other and all the ways that influence our lives. You can help by becoming a patron of Clear and Vivid at patreon.com. At the highest tier, you can join a monthly chat with me and other patrons, and I'll even record a voicemail message for you.

Either a polite, dignified message from me explaining your inability to come to the phone, or a slightly snarky one where I explain you have no interest in talking with anyone at the moment. I'm happy to report that the snarky one is by far more popular. If you'd like to help keep the conversation going about connecting and communicating, join us at patreon.com slash clearandvivid.

P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash clear and vivid. And thank you. Tis the season of gifting and holes to deck. And the who's and who Newville were in love with new tech. Where can we find Sonos and Samsung and Nintendo, they shouted. Would they find it in one place? This they questioned and doubted. When suddenly a who yelled, Walmart's the place to start. And each who added headphones, TVs, and games to their carts. With Walmart, their shopping was done in a flurry.

They cried out, who knew? And ordered their gifts in a hurry. Shop the latest tech gifts in the Walmart app. At Lowe's, before the holidays is the perfect time for upgrades and upkeep. During Black Friday, get up to 50% off select major appliances and buy more to save more with up to an additional 25% off when you bundle select major appliances.

Plus, grab select DeWalt 20-volt max drill or impact driver kits for just $99. Lowe's. We help you save. Valid through 12-3. Selection varies by location. While supplies last. See Lowe's.com for more details. This is Clear and Vivid, and now back to my conversation with Bill McKibben. It seems from what you say that it would be an intelligent strategy for the United States to compete with China.

and becoming more energy efficient. But that's not the direction we're going in. The administration now is not only blocking our efforts, but trying to get other countries to block their efforts. Exactly right. You know, the Biden administration made a good-hearted attempt to get us on that path.

That's what the Inflation Reduction Act was. And it was supposed to have 10 years worth of incentives for building out this clean technology. Instead, we only got about a year and a half before the Republicans in Congress. And the Trump administration gutted the whole thing. A huge mistake. Now, Donald Trump says we're trying for what he calls energy dominance by controlling the flow of oil and gas to the rest of the world.

But that's not going to work very well. Already, China is exporting more dollar value worth of clean technology than we are of fossil fuels. But it's only going to get... bigger, I think. You know, the Trump administration has used tariff policy to try and coerce countries into buying lots of LNG. They made the Europeans promise they'd buy $750 billion worth of American liquefied natural gas. Japan, another $400 billion.

That may or may not happen, but clearly any leader looking at this is going to think, do I really want my country? dependent on a country that's now as erratic and unstable as the United States for its supply of energy? Or would I rather buy a bunch of solar panels from the Chinese and then depend on the sun, which so far has come up every morning?

I understand that India is also a big factor in this. If India and China come to dominate the global solar energy business, what will that mean to the world and to the United States? It's a very important point. So India is sort of where China was on the energy curve about 15 years ago, growing very, very fast. And so what they do will be in large measure determinant about how hot the planet gets.

This year, the Indians met their 2030 goal for solar installation about five years early. Something like half the capacity of their electric grid can now be achieved in... solar panels. That's remarkable. And hopefully it continues full speed. I think it may because the U.S. has decided that it would be a good idea to tariff India, too, and seems to be in the process of driving them much closer to the Chinese. So what this is going to mean for America?

You know, if we stick with what we're doing now, what it means that is in 10 or 15 years, if we're still giving out tourist visas to come visit America, people will be coming to look at the colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. They'll be coming to see how people lived their lives back in the olden times when they still had to set stuff on fire. I hope that we wake up long before that.

And understand that if we're going to compete with a cheap energy world, we're going to have to have some cheap energy ourselves. But that's not going to happen in the immediate future at the federal level.

Grassroots Solar Solutions and Appeal

What can happen is at the state and local level, continuing real progress towards clean energy. We just did this big thing called Sunday last month, not Earth Day, but Sunday. We had about 500 events all across the country. They were beautiful. Designed to drive home for people. possibilities that now exist and the changes that we can make at the local level to take full advantage of that. For instance, Americans pay

three times as much as Australians or Europeans for putting solar on the roof of their homes. That's a little bit because of tariffs on the panel, but mostly because we have... way more regulation. We've got 15,000 municipalities. Each has their own building code, their team of inspectors who would like to climb on your roof.

But that's not necessary because this is not dangerous. This is not how it's done anyplace else. We have an app, the Solar App Plus, developed by the National Renewable Energy Lab that allows for instant permitting. And it should drive the time down to days instead of months for getting solar panels on your roof. And in the process, drive the cost way down. We're pushing hard at that for that, trying to get that done.

It's one of the things that Third Act is most heavily engaged in. Third Act is this thing that we set up three years ago for... Those of us of a certain age, you have to be 60 to join. But third act is this movement for protecting our climate and our democracy. And it's been extraordinary fun.

to do. We've got about 100,000 older Americans now engaged in this fight. It's been extraordinary fun and extraordinarily effective. There are working groups all over the country. Each state has one. Here's an example. Every state in America, Alan, has something called the Public Utility Commission or Public Service Commission that regulates utilities. They're extremely important. They set rates. They determine what kind of energy projects get built. But they're also extremely boring.

You know, they meet in some anonymous state office building all day, Wednesday and Thursday and whatever, and no one ever goes. They've been captured by the utility lobbyists who are paid to be there. Well, we've trained up. Hundreds and hundreds of people, older people, who have Wednesday and Thursday free to do things. And there they show up with a, you know, basket of knitting or a crossword puzzle book, but also to be...

paying witness, testify, keeping track of what's going on. And it makes a huge difference. We're introducing legislation to allow this instant solar permitting in state government after state government. We're even... hard at work. Here's a very beautiful little part of this that I'll tell you about. We're hard at work on this project called Balcony Solar. Now, you know, apartment dwellers...

have a hard time taking part in the solar revolution because they don't have a roof. But they often have a balcony with a railing on it. Three or four million Europeans in the last... three years have put up these balcony solar rigs. You just go to... whatever they call Best Buy in Brussels, and you come home with a solar panel designed to be hung over the railing, and it just has a standard plug on the back that you plug into the nearest socket.

It often produces 20 or 25% of the power that an apartment uses. This is illegal everywhere in America, except... The state of Utah, that progressive bastion, where the state legislature unanimously passed the enabling legislation earlier this year. On the very sound grounds that if it's good enough for Stuttgart, it's good enough for Provo, you know? And now there's...

Hundreds of videos on YouTube of happy Utahns plugging in their balcony solar rigs. We're determined at Third Act to make sure that this is all across America. before the next couple of years are out. If we can do it in Utah, there's no reason we can't do it anywhere. One of the good things about solar, actually, is that it crosses... ideological lines. Now, I've lived my whole life in rural America, some of it in red states, some of it in blue, but always on dirt roads. So I've got plenty of...

Trumpy neighbors, you know. I know plenty of people from the volunteer fire department or the church or whatever who have Trump flags at their mailbox and solar panels on their roof. They don't have solar panels on their roof because they're worried about the climate crisis. They have them there because... My house is my castle, and it's a better castle if it has an independent power supply. There's something about that that appeals to the American...

And though I put my solar panels up 25 years ago because I cared about the climate crisis, I'm American enough to enjoy that feeling, too, of being my own utility, not dependent on anyone else. I think that this works across lots of partisan lines that are very hard to cross in other ways right now. On the subject of what we can do, as you were saying about Third Act. What about 350.org? Well, 350.org for younger people is continuing to do great work.

20 years ago, became the first big global grassroots climate campaign. We've organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country but North Korea. So we have a good sense of how things are happening around the world. And 350 just pulled off a big, well, we were doing this Sunday thing in the US. They were doing something similar, focused on solutions. all over the world. Their representatives will be at the big global climate conference that's happening next month in Brazil.

the first of the global climate talks that'll happen without the U.S. in attendance because Trump has pulled us out of the Paris Accords. But that may turn out to be... I hesitate to say a blessing in disguise, but it may turn out to be something like that because with the U.S. out of the way, the rest of the world may find it somewhat easier to talk about the crisis that we're in.

AI's Energy Demand and Economic Impacts

Let me ask you about a scary scenario that worries me a little bit. It seems that artificial intelligence and global warming are competing for the title of most likely to succeed in extinguishing us. And while AI can probably help solve some of the problems of global warming, it's the possibility that it can screw things up in a way that's unintelligible to us at the moment. Makes me wonder what bad AI...

combined with global warming, could do to us. Is anybody working on this? Yes, there are people working on it. Suffice it to say that, as usual, we are, as humans, rushing into something that we don't understand without... Thinking about the implications. I'll tell you, though, in the very short run, a dangerous implication of AI is that it uses immense amounts of energy.

In a rational country, this would be the reason to build lots and lots of solar energy, because that's the thing that can be built quickly enough to help build these data centers. But we're not doing that. The Trump administration, on the one hand, is giving the AI gurus all the help they could ever want. Build a data center wherever you feel like it. And on the other hand...

They're constricting the supply of clean energy. As a result, demand for electricity is skyrocketing. The supply is constricted, so the price of electricity is going up, up, up, 10% up across America already this year. This is going to be a very important political issue in the midterm elections. And it's crucial that we figure out how to make Americans understand that the reason for it is this.

absurd restriction on building cheap energy, cheap, clean energy. That may prove to be the most potent political issue in the next election. Though, if you ask me, it should probably be authoritarianism. I'll tell you the other kind of sleeper economic issue that's building in this same vein, the price of insurance.

is going through the roof across America because the insurance companies have no idea how to deal with climate change, how to price insurance because they, you know, fire and flood are all of a sudden these huge new realities. If we're going to get our economic house in order, it's going to require that we deal with these energy and climate questions. But we've been given this huge gift of much cheaper, clean energy that would...

help bail us out if only our leaders would take advantage of it. A positive way to conclude our conversation. We're running out of time, but we always end every show with seven quick questions.

Insights on Communication and Life

Are you game? I'm game. Roughly to do with communication. First question. Of all the things there are to understand, what do you wish you really understood? I wish I really understood the... political psychology of Americans right now. I always thought I'd understood the country in which I lived, but I don't completely understand it now. And I wish I could see more clearly into the hearts of our countrymen and women. Okay. Second question.

How do you tell somebody they have their facts wrong? That's hard, but the gentlest way to do it is just to roll out the information that you have and explain where it came from. I've had good luck with that over the years. People are open, especially since I live in rural America, people are open to the idea that things are changing very quickly in the weather around us.

They're willing to listen if you're not a blowhard, if you tell them a thing or two. What's the strangest question anyone has ever asked you? The strangest question anyone ever asked me was I was touring around a book tour around Brazil. And people kept asking me questions about DDT. And I couldn't figure out why until someone said that the Portuguese...

Brazilian edition of the book, said on the cover that it was by the author of Silent Spring. So people had confused me with Rachel Carson, and that was the strangest quandary I ever found myself in. Okay, here's the next one. How do you deal with a compulsive talker? That may be me, I don't know.

I'm actually not. I'm more of an introvert, but I've had to teach myself over time. So compulsive talkers are a problem, and I do find myself sometimes just nodding sagely while I think about something else entirely. Let's say you're sitting at a dinner table and you're next to someone you've never met before. How do you begin a genuine conversation? This sounds trite, but I am a big believer in place.

I find that much more interesting than what someone does for a living. I like how people are connected to their geography. Okay, next to last. What gives you confidence? What gives me at least hope, if not confidence, are the number of good-hearted people on this planet. Spending the last 20 years as a volunteer organizer has convinced me that there are millions upon millions of people who really do want to help.

And if we can figure out how to harness their energy working together in the same direction on the most crucial tasks, then we've got a chance. Okay. Last question. What book changed your life?

You know, I think that the books you read when you're very young tend to be the most important. And for me, again, somewhat tritely, those were the C.S. Lewis books about... which I had read to me as a young boy, and I think set me on my path of being on the side of the underdog, understanding that that was the... place that one was called to be. So I got to read those to my daughter and she's turned out very well. And I now have an 18-month-old grandson and I cannot wait to read them to him.

Reflections and Episode Credits

That's great. Thank you so much for today. This has been such fun because with all the dire possibilities we face, there's a positive message you have for us. And I think I can travel farther on a positive message. than on the ethanol of dire. Brother, I have enjoyed it immensely. And what an honor for me to get to say thank you to you for all the work you've done all over the years. We're truly, truly grateful.

This has been Clear and Vivid. At least I hope so. My thanks to the sponsor of this podcast and to all of you who support our show on Patreon. You keep Clear and Vivid up and running. And after we pay expenses, whatever is left over goes to the Aldis Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. So your support is contributing to the better communication of science. We're very grateful.

For over 35 years, Bill McKibben has kept the public aware of what was once called the greenhouse effect and is now a planet-threatening crisis. He's done this in hundreds of articles and more than a dozen books. Maybe even more importantly, He's been a leader in creating grassroots activist organizations like Third Act and 350.org. His new book is Here Comes the Sun, a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization.

This episode was edited and produced by our executive producer, Graham Shedd, with help from our associate producer, Gene Chimay. Our publicist is Sarah Hill. Our researcher is Elizabeth Ohaney, and the sound engineer is Erica Huang. The music is courtesy of the Stefan Koenig Trio. We're taking a short break from recording new episodes of Clear and Vivid in November and using that as an opportunity to replay two shows with special meaning to me personally. The first next week.

is my conversation with Michael J. Fox from 2018, at a time when he had been living with Parkinson's disease for 27 years, and I was still learning to deal with my own early symptoms. Then in a couple of weeks, we'll rejoin the MASH gang in an episode from 2019 when we look back on the show that changed our lives. We'll be back with all new episodes of Clear and Vivid in December.

For more details about Clear and Vivid and to sign up for my newsletter, please visit alanalda.com. And you can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at Clear and Vivid. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. The best deals of the season are right around the corner at the Home Depot with our Friday door busters starting at 6am this Friday in store only. Get ready to save on everything.

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The Who's Down and Who Newville were making their list, but some didn't know. Walmart has the best brands for their gifts. What about toys? Do they have brands kids have been wanting all year? Yep. Barbie, Tony's, and Lego. Gifts that will make them all cheer. Do you mean they have all the brands I adore? They have Nintendo, Nespresso, Apple.

And more. What about... So the Who answered questions from friends till they were blue. Each one listened and shouted, From Walmart? Who knew? Shop gifts from top brands for everyone on your list in the Walmart app.

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