Addiction to Fossil Fuels is Solvable

Lots of tundra up in the far North will melt, and when it does, it will release huge amounts of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, accelerating this heating cycle. And this isn't your fun in the sun. Let's take a trip and get out of the cold type of heat. This is the kind of murderous heat that humans can not survive. And the changing climate has already begun to affect our lives now with rampant wildfires in California or the severe winter storms that cause the power crisis in Texas.

These problems are urgent to solve. We're past the point where we can make the math work one tesla at a time, One vegan dinner at a time. Bill mcibbon is the founder of three fifty dot org, and he's worked on fighting climate change since the nineteen eighties. And since the nineteen eighties, communal concerns have grown louder and louder. At first, it was just environmentalists and scientists piling up evidence, but now action is critical. We're talking massive, dramatic action

and global collaboration. There's strong limits to how much change we can accomplish through changes in individual behavior or habit. Most of the problem is deep in the guts of the system. So is climate change really solve given our dependence on fossil fuels. I believe that our dependence on fossil fuels is solvable, and I believe that we have to solve it if we're to have a chance of keeping civilizations intact over the course of this century. Bill,

I'm thirty seven, I'm unmarried with no kids. I'd love to get married and have kids within the next three years. By the time i'm forty. I want you to imagine my child and tell me what the world looks like for them when they're thirty. So i'd be seventy and they'd be thirty. If we continued on the path that we're on. Okay, we've got two ways, one the bad way and one the somewhat better way. Okay, I love it.

So if we continue on the path we're on, if we just make a kind of slow transition to renewable energy, if we don't have government pushing the pace, if we don't treat it like a kind of war effort, then the temperature is going to mount very rapidly, and by twenty fifty will really be at a point, I think where we're dealing with just such an endless onslaught of disasters one after another, with just coming ever faster at us, that no matter what your child has, what career they've

trained for, their jobs going to be emergency response because that's what human beings are going to be doing. Well, there's already parts of the world where we're getting there, you know, where the cycle of storms and things has gotten so big and things so fragile that it's that life is getting very difficult. Just last fall, we had the worst hurricane season in history, the most storms. The last two storms crashed into Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and did

unbelievable damage. They think the damage in Honduras was equivalent to forty of their GDP. If that happens a few years in a row, there's just no recovery, you know, it's just too much overwhelms. So that's the bad scenario when we don't take this seriously. The good scenario isn't fantastic. You know, it still features a world that doesn't work as well as the one we have now. But but things are starting to stabilize. We've put up so much

renewable energy and we've shifted everything to electricity. So your car runs on electricity. You don't have a gas stove in your house. You have an electric induction cooktop, you don't have a gas furnace. You've got an air source heat pump that's running off electricity. Because electricity we can produce cleanly. The job, remember, is to stop burning things,

stop burning coal and gas and oil. And the only thing that burns is the sun ninety million miles away, and that sends us solar energy, and it sends us the differentials in temperature that create wind and hence wind power. But that requires the next decade being an all outsprint. This is a timed test you get to put down

your pencil at a certain point. It picture in your mind the most average American working in nine to five, maybe an hourly retail job, just somebody just worried about their basic needs, food, shelter, taking care of their family, and explain to them the climate challenges that we're having right now. Well, the climate challenge in its largest sense is if we don't get it right, we don't get to have civilizations anymore. We're not talking your grandkids, we're

talking you, if you're a younger person. We're already seeing the manifestations of that. If you live on the West coast of the the United States, there were weeks last year when the governor was telling you to go inside and tape your windows shut because the air pollution from the wildfires was so bad you couldn't safely breathe it. You know, if you live in Texas, two years ago had the biggest rainstorm in American history. There were parts of Houston

that got five feet of rain. Wow, that's just the United States. And we're still at the early stages of this. So knowing that climate change isn't reversible at this point, that we can't solve that, I know that your specialization is in reducing CEO two emissions. Would you say that is what we should focus all of our attention on that one aspect, trying to solve that. So the most important job is over the next decade to replace coal and gas and oil burning with renewable energy. First thing

to say is we have to do it fast. This isn't like other political problems that we're used to dealing with. So, for instance, as long as you and I have been alive in this country, we've been arguing as a country about medical care. Should we provide it to everybody? That's been a contentious political issue. I think that it's a great sin that we don't, and lots of people suffer

and die and go bankrupt. But when the day comes that we decide to join all the other industrialized countries in the world and making sure that everybody has medical care, the fact that we haven't done it for the last thirty years won't make it harder to do. Climate change isn't like that. It's the first problem humans have ever faced that comes with a time limit. If we don't solve it soon, we never solve it. Because we go

past tipping points. The temperature gets very much warmer than say, lots of tundra up in the far North will melt, and when it does, it will release huge amounts of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, accelerating this heating cycle. So the world scientists have told us now what the

deadline is. They have told us that if we want to meet the temperature targets we set in Paris at the Paris Climate Accords, holding temperature increases to one and a half or two degrees, then we have until twenty thirty, which is as we speak, eight and a half years away, to cut our emissions in half. That's hard news to hear. Here's the good news that comes with it. The engineers have done a great job over the last ten years. They've dropped the price of solar power and wind power

by ninety percent over that time. It's now across most of the world the cheapest way to generate energy. So it's no longer technically or economically impossible to imagine change at that pace. It would just take a remarkable load of work in order to get it done, and some of that work is political, because you have to overcome

the opposition of vested interests, basically the oil industry. So we understand that our political system, especially in the United States, has been, you know, wildly swinging from left to right, not really staying moderate, and definitely not being in locksed up when it comes to issues like climate change and knowing that we're going to have another election and things are going to change at least two more times, possibly

two more times before twenty thirty. So is your solution here saying that we just got to get in the streets, we got to just apply pressure all the time, or what does it look like to actually have the type of political support we need to make the changes that we need to make. First of all, this would be frank here. If we elect another moron, then we get what we deserve at a certain point. That's just what happens.

But the goal of activists in a question this big is to, above all, to change the zeitgeist, to change people's sense of what's normal and natural and obvious. Yes, we fight pipelines, we fight for divestment, we fight for all these things, and they're all important fights, but they also all add up to that change in the zeitgeist. And when we get that, then everything gets much easier.

So think about what happened with say, gay marriage. You know, ten years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were against gay marriage because it didn't pull well, you know, But then organizers did a fantastic job of getting people to understand that, yeah, of course you should be allowed to

if you love somebody, marry them. Why wouldn't you, you know, And they've changed the zeitgeist such that now, you know, not even right wing Republicans really bother to fight it anymore, because it's clearly that's what we're going to do now. Climate change is no different, except that it's a little harder because there were not huge companies making trillions of dollars a year being bigots. There are companies making trillions of dollars a year pedaling hydrocarbons. That change in the

zeitgeist is clearly coming. Even in America, the kind of capital of climate denial. You saw it in the last election. During the Democratic primaries, the number one issue or number two issue depending on the poll for voters was climate change, which is why Joe Biden was staking his ground on climate change. He said, we have to transition off the oil industry, and everybody said, oh, that's a gaff all. The pundity are like, that's going to cost you, but

it didn't. He won the oil states that were in play, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and emerged with this mandate to do something. And so you're in the course of you know, Earth Day. This year, we watched him assemble the world's leaders, you know, forty of the world's chief leaders in a virtual summit. We watched him pledge to cut America's emissions dramatically by twenty thirty. We've seen him pledge to spend two trillion dollars on this green infrastructure plan. Those are all signs

of what happens once you shift the zeitgeist. It only works when people have done the work to make that constituency exist. I think when you were talking about, for instance, when you talk about gay marriage and you talk about LGBT rights, there was really an effort of people to put a face behind all of the people that wanted those rights. And instead of making it about you know, this amorphous LGBT person that's kind of like just out of your line of sight, they made it about your cousin,

you know, your friend, you're somebody in your community. How do we make it so that, like the freeze in Texas is the face of climate Like, are we doing enough to actually push that so that it is changing the zeitgeist. Yeah, we're getting closer all the time to

people understanding how this affects them. And part of that is that the environmental movement, the climate movement, is really morphed into the climate justice movement, and people are understanding, especially young people who have a stronger sense of justice, are understanding how interrelated all this is. Think about twenty twenty.

You know, the most important thing anybody said in twenty twenty was what George Floyd said is he was being murdered, he said, I can't breathe because breathing is the I mean, that's how we define whether you're alive or not. You know. Yeah, people can't breathe because there's a racist cop kneeling on their neck. But as activists were quickly pointing out, they can't breathe too because there's a coal fired power plant down the street and it's always the same street. You know.

Asthma rates are three times as high for African Americans as they are for white Americans, not because there's some difference in physiology just because of a difference in geography. You know, people who people can't breathe because we watch the temperature last year in California hit one hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit. That's at the edge of what the

human body can tolerate even for a few hours. But the computer modeling makes it very clear that if we don't get this under control, that's what the world is going to be like for huge swaths of the Earth's surface, all the tropics by the middle of the century, for weeks on end. One of the problems with climate change, of course, is that the worst damages are always in the future, and so it requires a certain amount of

imagination in order to deal with them. Now, the actual consequences are real enough that it gets easier and easier for people, i think, to make that leap in their minds. You know, with all the politics that are involved in well in everyday life and even in life and death situations, there's a lot of cynicism when it comes to what the US political system is able to do, like the legislative body is as in a lot of ways, been rendered moot when it comes to actually passing viable laws

that could help eating in things like climate change. So it seems like a lot of this is going to be done through a lot of ways through executive action. So is this about making the vote for president account even more? Yeah, So let's hope that the president can figure out how to get important stuff through Congress, because you need Congress to spend money, and we're going to

have to spend some money. But there's a lot of other things that are really important that are happening right now, and maybe the most important is what's happening behind the scenes at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. With any luck, by the time the Biden administration is a couple of years old, every company in America will have to be legally assessing every

year it's climate risk. You know how this world works, Those things that you measure are the things that you start to work on. And so if we get that going, it'll be a huge change. The Federal Reserve and others are working to try and rein in this absurd policy of the banks handing over big sums of money to

the most dangerous industry on Earth. You know, so these things are happening kind of behind the scenes in Washington and in Wall Street, but they're extraordinarily important and they're one of the things that movements are pushing very hard to accomplish. Let's talk about divestment. What does that look like. So this divestment campaign was completely modeled on the one that activists built a generation ago to take on apartheid

in South Africa. And one of the first people we reached out to when we thought about doing it with fossil fuel was Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of South Africa, who'd been at the kind of head of that work, and he said, please do it again, because climate change is the human rights challenge of this moment. People started asking colleges and universities, pension funds, on and on to sell their stock in these fossil fuel companies, and by god,

a lot of them did. The most famous colleges on Earth, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of California, the University of Michigan, the country of Ireland, all its public accounts were divested from fossil fuel. It's added up now to the point where it's putting huge pressure on this industry. The Norwegian Sovereign Well Fund, which is the single biggest pool of money on Earth trillion dollars, most of it made from oil in the North Sea. Over the last few decades, they said, Okay,

we're getting out of this. We're leaving this casino and going somewhere else. Shell Oil set in its annual report two years ago that divestment had become a material risk to its business. If your exon at this point, your only hope is to just keep your business model going for a couple more decades and you get twenty more years of profit out of it. But if they do, if they're able to do that, then they're going to break the planet in the process. So that's what the

race is about. Can we shut these guys down before they shut everything down? So do you think that the US is leading the charge or do you think there's models from other nations that we could be learning from. There are other nations that have provided real leadership. And it's funny because they don't all come in places where have a lot of sun and wind, but they're come in places that have a lot of political will. Germany is the place that provided the original early demand for

solar panels. They put together this big program called in German the Energy Venda, that provided big subsidies for people who would put solar panels on their roofs. If you take a train through Germany and you look out the window, you see solar panels everywhere. And that demand from Germany was what allowed the Chinese manufacturers to get really good at making this stuff cheap. So the Chinese have played a huge role in the Chinese or rolling out renewable

energy faster than any place on the planet. So there are countries around the world that in one way or another, have started showing the way forward, and now we need everybody catching up very fast. That's one of the problems with global warming. I mean they don't call it well for nothing, you literally can't. I mean, you know, one country could do absolutely everything right, and if everybody else wasn't cooperating, it wouldn't help a bit. Let's think about

the pandemic when it first arrived. You know, there was a lot of things people were talking about that had changed in the world. Some people said that the oceans were bluer, and you know, of course there was less traffic. All of those like little little things. One thing they talked about was the drop in emissions. We weren't moving, there were no cars and planes going to many places, and we weren't pumping a lot of pollution into the air.

But in May of twenty twenty, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere was at the highest had been in human history. Was that emission statistic just a positive spin on an awful situation, or was it significant in some big picture way to the climate challenges that we're facing now. The pandemic was extraordinarily interesting, learning opportunity and lots of ways. One of the things that people noticed was, well,

everybody's changed their lifestyle. You far more than any environmentalist ever would have dreamed of calling for. And it's true that emissions went down some, but as it turns out, not as much as you would have expected. At the peak. We think that carbon dioxide emissions fell ten or twelve percent worldwide. So what that means is that there's a strong limits to how much change we can accomplish through

changes in individual behavior or habit. Most of the problem is deep in the guts of the system, and so one has to go into the guts of the system and pull out the coal and oil and gas and put in the sun and wind and efficiency and conservation, and that's at hard a political and economic task. So really, I think the pandemic demonstrate to some of the limits of individual behavior. Human solidarity really matters. It's not some

ephemeral thing. It's core to the solutions here. I've lived most of my life in the political shadow of Ronald Reagan, who really changed the way we think about the world. Told us that markets were going to solve all problems, that we should just concentrate on getting rich. His famous laugh line and all his speeches was the nine scariest words in the English language are I'm from the government

and I'm here to help. Ha ha ha. It turns out the scariest words in the English language are either we've run out of ventilators or the hillside behind your house just caught on fire. Preach it now, and neither one of those you're going to solve by you know, every somebody getting rich. Those you solve when you work

together to deal with problems. And hopefully the pandemic has at least begun to remind us that we're going to have to work together, because that's the prerequisite for doing what we have to do to deal with a crisis that's far worse than the pandemic would ever have been. Hearing you say that is a little tricky for me because on the one hand, I'm recognizing what you're saying

about individual action only doing so much. But with that being said, how do we prevent individuals from feeling helpless? Because when you say that to be as an individual, the first thing I think is like, well, don't need to recycle these bottles anymore, just throw them in the air, like so, so, how do you keep me engaged as

an individual in the fight? The hardest part of the climate fight has always been that sense of agency, because it's so big and we seem so small in comparison to it, that it's hard for us to imagine that anything we do as individuals is going to make much difference. And truthfully, there's a point there. I mean, the roof of my house is covered with solar panels. They're connected to an electric car. I'm very proud of that in some way, but I don't try to fool myself that

it's how we're going to really deal with this. We're past the point where we can make the math work, one tesla at a time, one vegan dinner at a time. Those things are important, but they're not if we have ten years now eight and a half years to make wholesale change. We know that it's going to have to come by making big political shifts. So the really sad thing is when I wrote The End of Nature in nineteen eighty nine, we knew most of what we know

now about climate change. It's not like anything really has shifted all that much. You burn coal and gas and oil, you put carbon into the air. The molecular structure of that co two traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. And really the subsequent three decades have followed the path that scientists said they would, And it should come as no surprise to anyone that we've lost half the sea ice in the Arctic, or that we're

seeing huge increases in storms and fires and things. The one thing that has changed over time is my kind of political understanding of the problem. And it took me too long to figure out that we weren't. We'd won the argument, I mean, the science was completely clear and robust. We were just losing the fight because the fight wasn't about data and reason and evidence. The fight was what

fights are always about, money and power. And the fossil fuel industry had so much money, it was the biggest industry on earth, that it had enough political power to keep us from doing what we needed to do. And so that's when I became more of an activist and started trying to build movements so that we could have some power too. So there's people that are listening to this that are probably you know Chom. We got the

bit to saying like, well, what can I do? Can you give us some viable actions that listeners can do, Like, right now, what can we be doing? You know? The first thing you should do is organize, get everybody together. Second thing you should do is get together with your friends and neighbors and organize. You know. The third thing you should do is make sure that your community as well organized to try and take on this. That's what

we have to do. If you've got some time left over after that, then yeah, eating lower on the food chain, or putting in the right light bulb, or next time you buy a car making sure that it's electric or thing. Those are easy. The hard thing for Americans because we're so individuals. The hard thing is joining together in movements to make change happen. But that's what's required, and the good news is that's now not that hard to do

because there are movements everywhere. There's three fifty dot org, which I helped start it as chapters everywhere. There's the Sunrise Movement for people under thirty. They're the ones who brought you the Green New Deal. There's for kids, younger kids. There's this Climate strike Fridays for the Future Movement. There's Extinction Rebellion. There are the big environmental groups that are all doing good work. All these things are adding up, and you can find one to plug in and make

yourself count. But I guess the way to say it is individually, we're not going to get where we need to go. So your job is to figure out how to get some leverage here, how to make your actions count for five, ten, twenty times more than they would if you were just acting alone. Bill McKibbin is an author, educator, environmentalist,

and the founder of three fifty dot org. To learn more about three fifty and the other organizations that he mentioned, check out the links in our show notes next week on Solvable of talking with the musician and software developer who's working to decolonize electronic music. Wondering what that even sounds like. Be sure to subscribe and join us for that conversation. Solvable Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank, Research by David Jah, Booking by Lisa Dutton. Sasha Matthias is our

managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. And special thanks to Sophie mckibbon. Solvable as a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review it. It really helps us get the word out. You can find Pushkin Podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple Podcasts. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.