and i can't more highly recommended. thank you for joining me steve. >> this has been a great conversation and hopefully we can continue. >> it would be my pleasure. i get to close like paying almost to my masters at the manhattan institute, it's a great institute for those of you who don't know much about it who are watching. if you don't go to the website. there's lots of newsletters and i thinkthey're all free . there's lots of great scholars in many other areas. obviously there's nonprofits to steve's point about think tanks that are involved in things. if you're a potential supporter take a look. i'm sure they could use your help. i'd appreciate it if you support me and work i guess so thank you all for watching and listening and thanks to my new friend, the great scientists steve goodman. >> you're watching tv with

top nonfiction books and authorsevery weekend . tv, television for serious readers. >> my name is kate and i'm focusing on the >>impact that environmental factors on have before that i was in activist and i was an activist because of the author we get to today, bill mckibben. is a big deal and actually bill, you'll have to close your ears for this part. it would make you cringe but we've got to do it. bill's book false or that we will be discussing and that you can purchase using the bible book button as the human race begun to play itself out tells the story of increasingly rising states he is climate change, genetic engineering or ai gone wrong and how they threaten the collective us.

in so many ways it's this kind of 30 years later companion to the end of nature which was really the world's first book on nclimate change ever . he wrote in 1989 when he was in his 20s so fast-forward 16 and a contribution to the new yorker and bill is now to go to voice on climate change and i think it's important about this author when i personally admire is he's not just publishing about problems in the safety of his own in vermont, is living what he's writing. he founded the environmental grassroots organization 350.org and has committed his life to putting the words he reads atand writes into action. so beyond this professional powerhouse isalso a human dad, a dog dad , an athlete, a distinguished scholar. long story short in really

good hands for our conversation this morning. it's my goal for us to leave with a sharper understanding of how big what we're up against is but also how powerful we are as a collective force. as we get into the discussion and ask questions, submit them and ask the question box and we will on them at the end. so bill, i think we're ready to get going. you ready todo this ? >> that was a very kind introduction and thank you for your good work and your activism. >> you make it easy and i'm so excited to talk not just about this book but what this bookrepresents more broadly . i think we should start from the beginning. it covers like i said some heavy topics. they require a certain level of bravery and you dedicate it to a woman who passed away i believe two years before

the book was published. you say about your friend and i have this written down. i've known a great many activists but none has more moral force than gray. she spent her whole life engaged in the community and it was that since of taking people that focused in her. we all here it as long as we're engaged in this industry. can you tell us about freddy and how her work informs your book. >> it's kind of you to bring her up. she's someone i think about almost daily. when we started 350.org was the first iteration of the global kind climate movement and happily there's lots of other movements, there's the sunrise movement and , extension rebellion and all the wonderful young people . but when we started, we were just reaching out around the world to find people who

wanted to take on this fight which seemed 15 years ago really hopeless. one of the places that we immediately started discovering amazing allies, we're in the most vulnerable places on theearth . small islands especially in the south pacific that may well disappear for this century is out. the marshall islands, and places like that and she took it upon herself to be the organizer of so many of these communities. and they call themselves the pacific climate warriors and i have in my head a

remarkable picture of the ready who organize people to build a traditional work and they took him to australia not too far away and they used them for a day to blockade newcastle which is the biggest coal exporter in the world. the coal as it's burned raises the temperature and melting the ice caps and drowning those island nations . and one of the great images of the climate fight are for these people already in tiny canoes stopping the progress of the biggest warships in the world. she was remarkable and happily the fight lives on there in the south pacific with where the pacific

climate warriors are doing great work. >> you touched on a lot there that i think we will get to eventually but i love this idea that you bring up often. this is hard work and it can be a really daunting and lonely fight and that's why having community and having really n friends that you love up to is important. so i'm grateful to have learned more about your dedication to her. now that we have a sense of who the book is dedicated to i like to ask you to rewind. you published in april 2019 so a few things have happened since then. and we can definitely hit on that but even before that, i don't know when you started

writing the book but i'm curious who you imagined reading it and who you saw taking what falter outlines and putting it into action and how they might be different or not from your previous i think it's steamboats. >> most i think most serious writers basically spend their lives writing one book with different chapters to it. and so this is part and parcel of that work in many ways that goes back 30 years of my life. when i first started doing this in my 20s when i wrote the end of nature i didn't know that i would ever do anything more thanright .

i didn't think of myself as an activist or anything. it's over the last 15 years it's changed a lot. i probably spend more time, it's hard to draw the line. so falter brings the story up to date in a lot of ways but one of the things it reflects on in the last quarter is his history of activism lfand how it really is a potent tool. i call it a technology to allow us to deal with just as we needed a technology that will allow us to make electricity benign and the power of the sun, so we need technology that allows this many to stand up to the mighty and the few. and people like gandhi and

the suffragist and doctor king and 1 million others whose names are not known as well gave us those tools in the 20th century and now we need to figure out quickly how to bring them to bear in the 21st because an awful lot is on the line at this point. including the ability of human civilizations to really keep going. not to put fine point on it but we're facing axis stencil crisis the likes of which we haven't faced before. but the battle is not over and so there's a lot of work to be done. >> any other year would be okay to avoid talking about an axis essential crisis. but the last 12 months, 12+ there's just no way around it .

and i know you've probably got this question all thetime . i think all thought leaders are being asked to contextualize their work under the umbrella that was 2020 where we experienced a global pandemic, a long overdue racial reckoning and i mentioned earlier bill i'm in texas and it's all climate change marched through in this year and shut down our state and put a lot of people at risk. so it's your with us. perhaps more clearly than in previous years and i'm curious if you could go back and give us another chapter in falter about this year. a lot was written on the wall so to speak but what about

this year has changed do you think about the kind of content of this book . >> i think what's happened to confirm our understanding of people in talking and working on these issues, 20/20 was a remarkable year. it was among other things the hottest year with ever recorded . that's not what we will remember it for the cause of some of the other years that passage. but 2020 was the year of the pandemic and it should have taught us a few things, reminded us of a few things and one of them of course is the physical reality is real which is i spent 30 years trying with varying degrees of success to convince people that chemistry and physics are real and that they don't negotiate or compromise that we will have to follow their

dictates. and the pandemic was a reminder that biology works the same way . it didn't do any good that our president told us it was all going to go away or whatever. he wasn't in charge. the microbe was in charge and if it said standard 60 part and wear a mask then stand six feet apart and wear a mask. it is important. one of the corollaries of that is that when you're dealing with physical reality sometimes hespeed is very important. our systems are not geared for speed. i think probably one of the things that historians will note when they write about the pandemic is the us and south korea had their first case of coronavirus on the same day in january 2020. and the south koreans went right to work and everybody got a mask.

they started testing everybody on and off. it's not like they avoided the whole thing fewer people died in south korea in the course of a year and we got died in the course of a day at the height of the trouble in this country because see what our president did. he said it was going to go away by easter, not a bigdeal . it did not and therefore we were unable to latin the virus curve before things got completely out ofcontrol . the same substitute for february and march in the pandemic, substitute the last 30 years in the climate story . despite clear warnings from scientists we ignored it, pretended it would go away and that we didn't have to deal with it . we didn't flatten the carbon curve so now we have to do an insane amount ofwork in a short time that's what happens when you get behind the curve . but the third thing and most important thing and this goes

directly into the questions about george floyd, was that the pandemic was a reminder that human solidarity really matters. i'm old enough that i, my political life has largely been spent in the shadow of ronald reagan who changed our politics in this country and his basic understanding was markets are all global. that government was a problem, not a solution. his famous last line in all his speeches was the nine scariest words in the english language are i'm from the government and i'm here to help. well, ha ha but it turns out that the scariest words in the english language are we run out of ventilators for the hillside behind your house has caught on fire. these are not problems that you call on market forces to solve. you call on that fire department and the health of

the hospital to solve and those are reflections of our ability to work together as human beings out of some kind of heforming the effective bonds we call government that allow things to allow us to feel does. that sense i think was only heightened by watching what played out over the spring and summer in the streets of minneapolis and then so much else over the rest of the country. the most important thing george floyd that anybody said in 2020 was what george floyd said as he was dying. i can't breathe. because being able to breathe is the strongest definition of being alive human being. you can't breathe because there is a racist cop kneeling on your neck or you can't breathe even as activists are finding out

there's a coal fire or gas-fired power plant on the road. africans americans have three times asthma rate of white americans not because of any difference in physiology but because of the difference in geography. you can't breathe because the wildfires have gotten so terrible that the governor of new york state and california has told you to go inside and stay inside to keep the windows shut so none of the particulates destroy your alarms. you u can't breathe because it's simply gotten too hot. we set an all-time record for the highest temperature ever observed in this planet in california. it reached 130 degrees fahrenheit . that the upper limit of the human body's ability to survive .

but the modeling makes it clear that it covers wide swaths of the planet across the tropics by the middle of the century unless we get climate change under control very fast. so in the end, all of this systems are a stark reminder that we live in a world in which we are not the master to figure out how to draw together and deal with questions around justice so that we're not just individuals but we are a o working society, a working civilization . >> i think that's really well put and you bring up two areas that i think falter does it on >>but that it sounds like after this year it's

even more top of mind hiwhich are exclusivity and working towards justice and urgency and i am personally often torn on how to hold those two things at once in the same breath. and i want to start with urgency because i actually think it's alittle bit easier . recently you have a bit of a back and forth with another bill , bill gates had a slightly different view on the budget crisis. there's a lot of shared knowledge there but obviously it's more of a nuanced approach. and i think gates offered something really alluring, that they find their belief to the for lack of a better wordmoderate . they don't like climate change, they believe in climate change but they also might find something like a

green new deal to be too aggressive, too radical and i wonder how you think about the role that neutrality, not of the carbon kind but of where you stand maybe on the sidelines. how did that play into addressing climate change and the shrinking of the board as you put it in your book. >> is a really deepquestion catherine . so look, human beings and institutions change bestwhen they change slowly and gradually . it's just the truth. it's less expensive, it's less traumatic. it's less divisive. so the best way to deal with climate change is to develop slowly. with the kind of cultural and technological shifts that allow us to not have to make big ships.

in the best world, that solar panel is on my roof and my mother-in-law comes over thanksgiving and 30 years down the road we are where we need to be. one of the things i have to keep myself from doing is saying to people if only you listened to me 30 years ago this was thepoint we were trying to make . but we didn't listen for serious reasons that are probably worth describing . just the shorthand is the fossil fuel industry led campaign of denial and disinformation that paralyzed our critical lives. now we have to change very fast. because the basic dynamics here is not our usual

political dynamic which is different people arguing with each other and reaching some kind of compromise. i think people should get a good wage for their job, seven dollars an hour is fine, we meet in the middle at 15 and come back to fight it out again in a few years or whatever. that's how compromise inour system works . but our problem is the basic conflict here is between human beings andphysics . and since physics is compromised that becomes n our job. the scientists have told us how fast we needto work . in 2018 the intergovernmental panel on climate change which is the international group of scientists the word the world leans on further analysis and is greatest of challenges published their latest report and it , said if we had until

2032 fundamentally transform our energy systems which they defined as cutting emissions in half and that if we did ennot meet that target by 2030, then the prospects for meeting the targets that we set in paris just five years ago arnel. so that's the deadline, it's literally a deadline and in the face of that, like it or not we have to move very fast. the good news is and it really is good news, that a lot of the activists, they understood their job over the past decade and they dropped the price of solar power and lwind power so now that it's the cheapest power on earth and the batteries that store it. that means that if we want to

move fast we really can. but that means being willing to grapple with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry that doesn't want us to keep its business model goinglonger . if i have a problem with people like gates, it's that sometimes they don't want to engage in the messy work that is standing up to power. and i guess when i'm a multibillionaire i might not want to stand up topower either . so all his technological flights of fancy what we're going to do 30 or 40 years down the road are great and we may well need to. we will only need them if we do the work in the next 10 years of dramatically deploying the technology we

have now, solar panels and wind turbines so it's imperative that we keep this fight to live. we can't win the climate fight in the next 10 years, it's going to take a lifetime to pull us out of these words . but we could lose the fightin the next 10 years .fe we go past certain tipping points and pass those tipping points a prospect for recovery is limited. nobody has planned for new york once it's melted. and it may seem like a long way away. but it's one of the two or three biggest physical features on earth . we think the reason texas grows in february is because so much of the arctic has melted the jet stream has now works in very strange ways that allows the collapse of these vortexes and the quick

intrusion of air that should be over the arctic down across the lower 48. so we're messing with huge forces here and we need unfortunately to move faster than any of us find convenient or politically comfortable. but it's not up to us. it's up to physics and so we best learn to deal with it's not up to us but it also very much relies on us having a. thank you. and i think i'm not alone in feeling overwhelmed by the problems sometimes. top two favorite lines in your book, i'm going to read it to you . it it's on this kind of

tension between meeting people to act and look squarely at the reality of the situation and also needing folks to stay associated and connected to it. you say in kind of reference to the fossil fuel industry, let if letting anyone do what they want is a flawedargument that no one can stop them in any way . insisting that some horror is inevitable no matter what you do is the response of people who don't want to be bothered trying to istop it and i heard it too often to take it entirely seriously. when investigative reporters group exxon had known all about global warming and it covered up that knowledge of people on the jaded left told me in one form or another of course they did or all corporations live or tnothing happened to them anyway. this knowing cynicism is no threat to the exons of the world.

it's a gift. we don't yet precisely know how it will end, only giving them a path because their power makes no sense. and this really lands for me in a few different ways but ke the part i want to go out is this idea of people in patterns and how cynicism can be a self-defense mechanism that a lot of us need to wake up and do our jobs and be with our families and do the things that let us. it ultimately comes down to changing our minds and i'm wondering if in your 30+ years of doing this work still if your mind has been changed on something regarding climate change. if someone has reached you in a surprising way and what that looks like so that maybe we can apply it to passionately to folks who really need to show up and not kind of threat the line

's clearly there's lots of things we learned over time and usually they result in sort of folks being a little hopes being dashed. there was a time when people thought natural gas was going to be a good bridge to the future and so on and it turned outit wasn't . for a variety of scientific reasons there were more problems than solutions. you have to recalibrate and go forward but sometimesthe surprises are really good ones . i think that an awful lot of us thought that we were going to have to completely, the thing that made it more difficult was there might be no way short of shutting down

an awful lot of what human beings did in order to deal with this. because it seemed things like solar power and wind power were sort of reckless on the edge, not capable of taking up real slack. and we turned out to be wrong happily. they human capacity for engineering asserted itself and people figured out how to build this stuff in ways that were cheap and powerful. so we now think we have access to vast amounts of clean energy. and the irony is that we have to make, if we just wait for the economics of it to work itself out, eventually we will run the world sun and

wind so n75 years from now that's what the world will run on but it takes 75 years to get there we will have broken the world it runs on our job now is to force the spring as it were. make the politics, make it happen faster than it otherwise would that's a political percentage . for me the biggest single change over 30 years of working on this is just the understanding that we were going to have to engage in that kind of inpolitical thinking. i began as a writer and i spent 10 or 15 years after writing the end of nature just writing more books and giving talks and having symposiums because i assumed incorrectly that we were in an argument. and that once we held up

enough evidence and won the argumentthat our leaders would act because why wouldn't they ? this is the worst problem we've ever faced, why would you take action? and it took me too long to figure out that we've won the argument. and the science was entirely clear. there wasn't some other side that was pushing back. we won the argument, we just were losing the fight because the fight wasn't about data and reason, the fight was what fights are usually about which is money and power. the fossil fuel industry had much money and so much power that it didn't matter that they were losing the argument, they were still winning the fight you look at texas and the extremity power of what even a few years ago with was still the richest industry on earth. so that's why i ended up doing all this organizing. because eventually it dawned

on me we were going to need some countervailing power to the fossil fuel industry which obviously wasn't going to come from money. if we don't have a lot of money but that's why the sort of history of activism is so interesting. it indicates from time to time you can assemble lots of human beings that their sheer numbers and creativity and willingness to sacrifice and things adds up to political power in its own right. so that's what people have been doing for the last 12 i'll add one shouldn't an irrational world one shouldn't really have to do this . i mean, i've been to jail a dozen times. that's absurd. why would anybody have to go to jail in order to make government pay attention to science.

but that's the world we live in and it's not entirely irrational so you have to cover and work in it. and i'm sorry i didn't figure it out sooner. >> i think your point about we've won the argument but we haven't won the fight, it sounds kind of similar to wheat got the question right but we haven't figured out how to turn it into the solution. and i think one area where this is just my perspective, you can push back, you've been at this for much longer but one area where the climate movement hhas some growth opportunitiesis around inclusivity . and centering the voices of folks who are both most impacted by climate change and things like ethical ai

and genetic engineering and also those who have done so much good work but just don't quite get the spotlight. so i'm wondering from your perspective first if you would cosign that sentiment and if so, where are the areas that we need to do a better job being sensitive and which voices do we need to do a better jobat censoring ? >> i think you're absolutely right. i've always been told environmentalism was something rich white people did and if you didn't know where your next meal was coming from you wouldn't be an environmentalist as you have bigger things to worry about. for me, that understanding just dramatically when we did our first big day of action in 2009, we've been working about a year myself and certain college students and we did this international of

anaction and it turned into probably because of beginners luck a kind of big thing. we managed to coordinate 5200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. cnn instead said it was the most widespread day of political action in history and it was a coming-out party for the climate movement but we asked everybody to upload pictures of their events and my job that weekend, one of them was to be monitoring them as they came in. and starting them out again, we rented the billboards in times square that are normally showing ads and things and instead we were flashing these pictures as they came in. they werecoming in 10 and 20 minutes around the world . just one after another and watching those it took me about half an hour to realize that idea that it was

affluent white people at the heart of the environmental movement . most of the people we were working with were poor, black and brown and asian or young because that's what most of the world is. by far most of the world is. and people were exactly as worried about the future in those places. maybe more so because the future bears down harder the more vulnerable you are. the sooner and harder you get hit so i think it's entirely good, useful and appropriate for people like who are at the absolute forefront of this work. the frontline communities, vulnerable communities all

have been in the vanguard of activism now in recent years. and we can at least give a particular shout out to indigenous peoples around the world. there are a very large percentage of the world's population but in this case among many other cases there punching way above their weight. and i think that it's people saw this emergence of a lot of indigenous worship on this continent. it didn't surprise me because many of those people are people i've been working with for years knand i know them to be the best activists around the same thing is true around theworld . in the pacific, in latin america, in regional communicated communities in australia andnew zealand ,

just about everyone and i think that's really important for a couple of reasons. one e is when we exiled indigenous people from the places where they work and put them on reservations and things, we thought we e were getting them worthless land but it turns out now that it sits on top of a lot of hydrocarbons, a lot of coil coal and gas and oil, corridors that you need to get towards a lot of things so there's practical means people are using as the fight over tucson and dakota access and minnesota now and things. but also in a deeper sense, it's powerful to see the oldest wisdom traditions on the planet and the newest wisdom traditions on the planet kind of syncing up. the view from the sweat lodge and the view from the

satellite upof the supercomputers seem very much in sync to me. and what they're seeing is that the view of the rest of us, the conventional wisdom will keep growing that the size of our economies and having morestuff is essentially wrong . and that we need to think a l lot more deeply and to me that is a very powerful moment and those new ones coinciding so it's been really a pleasure to watch those sort of moments when elders from native communities and great scientists can come together on the same stage from the same jail cell. it's a powerful moment. >> i think you've done a really good job in your career as far as i can tell. recent hearing voices who

have been doing this work orfor a long time and who are impacted by this work but who haven't always received the credit or the service for doing it. so i couldn't agree more that these folks are at the heart of the movement. >> i get to do this newsletter on the climate crisis, this green newsletter and the part i really like his this section called passingthe mic . and so that's i think i've managed to do it now for a couple of years but without interviewing any other white guys. because there are an extraordinary number of powerful interesting rich voices that help us see a lot more interesting corners than we noticed in the past. that's awfully useful.

it's going to be a very very close call when we get out of the cul-de-sac we're in now as a civilization if we do make it out and if we do it will be because we managed to get all voices working, everybody working in thesame direction . we haven't been very good about that as a society and it's one of the things that better change fast so a little power is always useful but kind of brought people power is at least as useful. >> i definitely want to make e sure we had on that idea. i think specifically with your transition within the movement that you helped create, the role that you play now because i think it's an interesting model for a lot of readers to think about cultivating the next generation of talent that can help uplift these ideas that maybe older generations help

lead the but before we get there i want to close outthis idea on inclusivity . something that i for lack of a better word was bad for a little while. it's understanding that the nuance within the kind of position of a just transition and understanding that the folks at work in the coal mines out on the oil wells, they are being paid right now more competitively than some of the renewable opportunities which you can point fingers at why that's happening but just taking a step back and looking at what seems to me to be a little bit of classism within the environmental movement and i think there's definitely a way to spread it but can you help us understand what some of those tensions are and how you have onimproved navigating

it over the years. >> the very real people who through no fault of their own wound up working in industries that now are dangerous to the planet shouldn't bear the brunt. this is to say oil workers are different from oil executives. we know very well what exthey are doing and i hope contemplate occasionally thought that they too might end up in a jail cell at some point for what they've done but that's not true, it's just the opposite of people who've done perfectly honorable work over the years and now as we have to transition away from that we have to figure out how to make their lives work to going forward and it's one of the best things about the green new deal. that young people have proposed. and in large part of that

have made its way into the new by the infrastructure. they have to because it's right and they have to because it's politically necessary to. think about who holds the power here. it's people like senator manchin of west virginia who probably represents more of those coal miners than anybody else he's in a position to make sure you are trained they're not retire with dignity. that's a perfectly good bargain to make. it's well within our ability to do it. it's ecthe one of the first things we should focus on so i'm really quite grateful to the people like aoc and joe biden who focus on precisely

that issue. >> i see some questions coming in but we will just hit on one or two more before we turn it over to the folks that are with us at home and online who have really interesting ideas and thoughts for you but i have to name a big part of this book is about ai. i haven't really asked you questions about it because as you point out , it is a scary and overwhelming topic that's not as straightforward as climate change and climate change is pretty complex. you figure out where to start when i was 18 or 19 on climate change. can you help me now at age 30 figure owout how to act on the threats you bring up in your

books about ai. >> i think that there kind of in the same category of climate change was 30 years ago when i wasyour age . that is we can see them on the horizon and as potentially overwhelming threats and we would be very smart to have a conversation about them right now , not 30 years from now when we're faced a complete and one of the first things we can and should do is at least make sure that the forces behind them are not so powerful that they can't be checked in any way which means taking on silicon valley and whose power has grown unchecked in recent years and who's doing,

forget ai. who's doing insane amounts of damage already just with things like algorithms that run what you see on your facebook feed are devoted to making you angrier andcrazier with every passing day and doing it effectively . so breaking the power, when we get concentrations of power are two large whether they're in the hands of exxon or in the hands of mark zuckerberg, it's a good idea to lessen manpower quickly before it overwhelms society's ability to cope and it's possible that facebook has already come past the point where it can be controlled but i'm glad to see finally people in power beginning to ask really important questions. so i think for the moment it's important just to be talking about questions around ai and genetic

engineering and saying until we reached some social consensus on these things, let's not take steps that take us there irrevocably past the places where we can retreat because they do represent enormous challenges and we really do have the possibility of reordering what it means to be human. those are big enough questions that we should think first. thinking is something that human beings are theoretically good at. theoretically is what sets us apart so it might be agood idea to do it once in a while . >> in that same section of the book you also talk about flow which is a slightly easier concept to get your arms around. and we are of course albeit virtual talking thanks to a

festival about reading and books and i'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about flow and how you think that might activate it in a way that scrolling. >> the reason i write about it is because i'm trying to write about human beings at their best and one of the things we learned from understanding is through the work of really important thinkers and researchers is that human beings are at their best when they enter into a kind of state of absorption. whenthey get lost in whatever it is they're doing . painting paintings, climbing difficult rock faces. whatever it is. and everybody who's a reader knows that feeling of becoming absorbed in a book, of losing track of time and losing track of your surroundings and at some

level entering mentally into like a good writer into the scene. that's not something that happens with twitter. and it's the opposite. your forever jar every few seconds by the next dopamine, whatever the next light for whatever comes through. and never escape out into that kind of place of absorption and that's why it's so unsatisfying at the end of the day and hopefully it's like books will persist. at a certain point our attention spans will get so attenuated that even sitting down to read a book will seem just too hard and in fact when that happens, we will have lost something very very important. >> we read yesterday on the

panel about listening, about how shrinking our attention span s,is. i couldn't agree more that it's just a different experience . you do access slow when you read in a way that you can't with twitter. last real question for me and we have a few minutes to hit on some of the questions that have been coming in. you open this book, i love this opening. you open this book by saying that an author does not know what the reader holds there's a great quote by michael stone about open without optimism. it's imdifferentiating between the two. this idea that is motivating and the hope is there's that change is possible and i do feel that come through in your writing, not just in this book but in most of your publication and most of your

thought leadership. if it wasn't there, you probably wouldn't be so relentlessly advocating for it. so i don't want to ask you what gives you hope but i want to hear from you what does hope feel like. >> beautifully put. so you're right, the best proof of my willingness, my ability to be hopeful is the fact that i still get up every morning and work hard. i didn't think there was reason to do it, then i wouldn't do it . i don't have a martyr complex for something. i would just go sit on the porch and smoke cigars and drink whiskey and have a good time and maybe i'll reach an age where that's all i can do anyway but in the meantime the fact that we've watched over the last 10 or 15 years

as this enormous movement has arisen gives me enormous hope that at the very least we're going to make a fight this. we've waited so long to get started and the physical moment the systems are so large that were obviously not going to stop change but maybe we can stop short of the place where it cut civilization off at the knees and if we can't, it will be because the people roused themselves and for me it's always particularly moving article over the world we organized demonstrations in every country except north korea . it's always extremely moving to reflect so many of the people that were working with are coming from places that e have literally done nothing to cause the problems we're in that the case it does seem to me that it be possible for those of us who live in these two o get together to do what

we can so that's why i'm happy to keep going. >> is my deep sorrow to share that we're coming up on time so i'm going to give you one last lightning round question from the folks at home. i think it's one i don't have ththe answer to. and then we will close out our time together. folks are curious in this country and i'm suggesting in the us what would be the most significant legislation to address climate change that we should urge our governments to act? >> at this point in time is absolutely crucial to get biden's infrastructure bill

through congress. it's not going to solve the problem but it's going to do far more than any piece of legislationthe federal government has ever passed in the last 30 years . it's a real start and it's completely moderate, sensible, straightforward way s to address the economic crisis that is coming out of the pandemic and try to start on the path to protecting us against this next crisis that looms much larger even than the pandemic. so make the phone call, make sure your senator is willing to stand up for families and jobs in the future and it shouldn't be too hard.>> i thought you might have an answer to that one. thank you for leaving us with action, something we can take away from this conversation and put into place. i think what i heard today and what i read in the book is that the worst thing we can do is nothing. and given how big the problems we're up against

our, doing nothing can feel better or at least it is easier to reach for. so my hope is that today we will leave this conversation with recognizing what we heard from bill really back to things can be true at the same time. athings are really bad and we are a beautiful and powerful safety and what a beautiful and powerful planet and together we got a shot atthis . so bill, from the bottom of my heart thank you for your work thank you for being with th us today o. >> back at you, thank you for all you do your good at this. this was a great pleasure this morning and i look forward to the next time. >>.

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