you are potential supporter take a look i'm sure they could use your help i would appreciate it because they support me. thank you all for watching and listening and thank you to may friend the brave scientist, steve. manage cyberprivacy and privacy reforms. here is bill mckibben.

>> as an investment specialist with environmental and social factors on performance but before that i was an activist because of the author we get to speak to today bill is a big deal bills book would be discussing this morning with the climate scenes and then and they threaten the collective but in the - - in some ways the world's first.

on climate change ever so prolific contribution to the new yorker. and what is important about this author not just publishing about problems about the safety of vermont that fun founded the environmental grassroots organization and as far as i can tell putting those words into action so with this professional powerhouse and then to ask me as a distinguished scholar, long story short it is my goal to have a sharper understanding

of what we are up against or how powerful we are as a collective force as we get into the discussion and then hit on them from the end. so i think we are ready. >> it's great to be here with you. a kind introduction thank you for your good work and activism. >> you make it easy. not just about the book but what it represents more broadly. and with a certain require of bravery. we dedicate that to a woman i

have known a great many activist and then spent her whole life engaged in her community but itt was that sense and miss that voice so much but we hear it echo in this great fight. can you tell us about friday quick. >> it's very kind of you to bring her up and i think about her almost daily. when we started it was the first iteration that now there is more and all the wonderful people so wine and so forth but when we started we were just reaching out around the world trying to find people who wanted to take on this

fight that seemed fairly hopeless. one of the places we immediately started to discover allies in the most vulnerable places especially in the south pacific that may well disappear before this century and the marshall islands and places like that. and she took it upon herself to be an organizer of those communities they call themselves the pacific climate warriors and i have a remarkable picture with

organized people on each of those islands they took him to australia and they use them for a day to blockade at newcastle so as burned it raises the temperature of the planet and one of the great iconic images from tiny canoes stopping the progress of the biggest warships in the world and shet was remarkable with the pacific climate warriors. >> you touched on a lot but i

love this idea that you bring up often that it can be a daunting site and then having friends that you will look up to and through your dedication to her. now we have a sense who the book is dedicated to i would like to ask you it was published april 2019. a few things have happened since then. we can definitely head on out they even before that come i don't know when you started writing the book, but i'm curious if youut imagined reading it and if used what

those lines and putting it into action and a day in a difference for 16 books. >> i think most serious writers spend their lives writing one book of different chapters. so this is part and parcel that goes back 30 years. when i first started doing this in my twenties that i wouldn't do anything more than to think ofan myself as an activist so over the last 15 years that has changed a lot

then it's hard to draw the line. so one of the things it on is the history of activism and it is a potent tool or technology to allow waste just if we needed the solar panel if we need that electricity from the power of the sun so we needed the technology to stand up to the mighty in the field. and 1 million others whose names we don't know gave us

those tools in the 20th century now we need to figure out very quickly because a lot is on the line at this point including the ability of human civilization to keep going. not to putn too fine a point on it it is the existential that the battle is not over so there is a lot of work to be done. >> i think in any other year come it would be okay to avoid talking about an existential crisis but the last 12 months there is no way around it. you probably get this question all the time so all thought

leaders contextualize their work under the umbrella back in 2020 so with the experience of the global pandemic, racial reckoning and mentioning earlier i am in texas we saw climate change in march and then shut down with a lot of peopledo at risk and then more clearly than in previous years so i'm curious if you could go back to another chapter , obviously a lot was written but what about this year has changed? what you think about the content quick. >> for those talking and

working on thosese issues. 2020 was a remarkable year. so that is not what we remember it for. because soon there will be other years that pass it. but 2020 was the year of the pandemic and that should've taught us a few things are reminded us one of them is that physical reality is real. i spent 30 years with varying degrees of success that chemistry and physics are real and that they don't negotiate or compromise they have to do their dictates so biology works the same way.

our president told us it would all go away. that the microbe was in charge then stands 6 feet apart and wear a mask. so one of the corollaries sometimes speed is a very important factor that one of the things historians will note writing about the pandemic is that the us and south korea how the first case of coronavirus samee day 2020 in january south koreans what might right to work everybody found a mask they were testing

everybody. is not like they avoided the whole thing that fewer people died in south korea in the course of a year then one day at the height of trouble in this country because what did our president do? don't worry. not a big deal. and therefore we couldn't flatten the virus curve before things got out of control. so a substitute for february and march and the pandemic substitute the last 30 years with the climate story despite clear warnings from scientists that it would go away we would not have to deal with it so now we have to do an insane amount of work in a very short time. asked what happens in your behind the curve. so this goes directly also but the pandemic was a reminder

that i am old enough my political life has been spent in the shadow of ronald reagan in hisan basic understanding is that markets solve all problems with the government not a solution those nine scary his words i'm here from the government and i'm here to help but it turns out the scariest words of the english language are we run out of ventilators or the side of your house is caught on fire this is not what you call on market forces to solve you : the firerc department and hospital to solve and those

are reflections of the ability with those bonds that we call government that allow us to deal with. >> so that sense was only heightened by what played out of minneapolis and the rest of the country. what anybody said i can't breathe. because that's the definition of being alive. you cannot breathe because there is a racist cop kneeling on your neck or you can't breathe as activist are pointing out because a gas-fired power plant down the road and it's always the same

road african-americans have three times the asthma weight rate and white americans because of a g difference in geography. he can't breathe because the wildfires have gotten so terrible. and then stay inside tape the window shut so they make their way into your house. you can't breathe because it's gotten too damn hot. and all-time record hot ever observed on this planet that is right at the upper limits the human body's ability to survive a few hours. that will have a wide swath of

the planet and as we get climate change under control veryon fast. so this is a stark reminder so to deal with that has to be to figure out how to really deal with questions by and a working society and civilization. >> and those that have hit head-on after going to this last year. of the inclusivity working towards justice and urgency

and i am torn how to all those that once in the same breath. so to have a back-and-forth with bill gates who has a slightly different view there is a lot of shared knowledge there for the sake of today. and that is for folks for lack of a better word to be moderate they don't like climate change that they also might findbe something like to be to t radical and how you think of the role of

neutrality of where you stand being on the sidelines? how do you address climate change? >> that's a really good question. so human beings and human institutions change best they change slowly and rationally. it's less expensive. it is less traumatic. it is less divisive. the best way to deal with climate change is slow. with a kind of cultural and technological that allow us to not make big ships.

my brother in law comes around and thanksgiving and then 30 years down the road one of the things i have to keep myself from doing is to say to people why didn't you listen to me? but he didn't listen for a series of reasons and with that fossil fuel industry with denial and disinformation. because as we said before it's not the usual pre- dynamic.

and then to reach some type of compromise. and then seven dollars an hour is fine. so that is how compromising our system works but the problem is between human beings. and that becomes our job. and then to tell us how fast we need to work. in the intergovernmental panel on climate change or with their analysis and then publish the latest report that if we had until 2032.

and if not by 2030 then the prospects for meeting those targets of just five years ago are now. so in the face of that like it or not we have to move very fast. so a a lot of activist and the engineers have done their job over the last decade and with the solar power and wind power to the point is the cheapest power on earth. that means if we want to move fast but that means willing to

grapple with a vested interest in thepl fossil fuel industry who wants to keep the business model going. people that have a problem with gates is they don't want to engage standing up to power as a multibillionaire i may not want to stand up to power either. so all of the technological fights 40 years down the road we may need them if we do the work in the next ten years of dramatically deploying the technology that we have now.

so we have to keep this fight for life. but we coulda lose that climate fight in the next ten years. and pass those tipping points the prospect for recovery is limited nobody has a plan it may seem like a long ways away is the reason that texas froze was because so much of the arctic has noted that the jet stream was now works in extreme ways to allow the collapse of the polar vortex. of this intrusion that should

be down across the lower 48 so unfortunately we need to move faster than any of us are politically comfortable. but is not up to us. so we had best learn to deal with it. >> it's not up to us but it relies on us. >> well put. >> thank you. >> i think i'm not alone in feeling overwhelmed by the problem sometimes. so you're my favorite line in your book that the tension between meeting people and to

look squarely at the reality of the situation and then to be associated and connected to it. see you say in reference to the fossil fuel industry to let anyone do that than that is infuriating. so now that it is no matter what you do that not only try to stop it but i have heard it too often to take the entirely seriously mention know all about global warming andga then plenty of people told me in one form or another all corporations lie but nothing happens anyway but there is no threat to the exons of the world we don't know how it ends but of their power since

then. this is in a few different ways but it is the idea how cynicism can be a self defense mechanism that to be with the families. >> so breaking a pattern it ultimately comes down to changing theirrn minds so in your 30 plus years if your mind has been changed as every has reached you in a surprising way? and then we need them to show up and not resign.

>> clearly there's a lot of things we learn over time and usually they result in hopes being a little dashed. there was a time when people thought natural gas would be a good bridge to the future and it turns out that there wasn't. so a variety of scientific reasons see you have to recalibrate and go forward. but sometimes the surprises are good ones. i think an awful lot of us thought that what made it so difficultwa there's no way to shut down a lot in order to deal with this.

because it sees things like solar power and wind power that is frivolous on the edge not capable to take up real slack in the system we could be wrong. the great human capacity for engineering asserted itself and in ways that are cheap and powerful and that have access to vast amounts of clean energy. the irony is that if we just wait for the economics of it, if we allow it because it is free. so 75 years from now that's

the road we're on. but if it takes 75 years to get there it t will be a broken world so our job now to make the politics half then faster than it would. for me the biggest single changes the understanding that we areof going to have to engage in that political work. i began as a writer and i have spent ten or 15 years just writing more books and having talks because i assumed incorrectly that once we have enough evidence that our leaders would act because why

wouldn't they? why wouldn't they take action? and it took me too long to figure out we won the argument there wasn't another side pushing back in the scientific community we won the argument because the fight was about money and power in the fossil fuel industry has soow much power that itwe didn't matter living in texas to have some sense to have that extraordinary power of even a few years ago. so that's why i ended up with a countervailing power.

so that is why the history of activism so time to time to share numbers and creativity to sacrificeness and set to political power in its own right answer people have been doing. >> i will add one really shouldn't have to do this. that is absurd why would anybody have to go to jail to make governments pay attention to science but that's the world that we s live in.

sorry i did not figure out sooner. >> your point that we have learned the argument that that is similar that we got the question right but we haven't figured out how to turn it into a solution. so one area for us to be at this for much longer but one area where we have some growth opportunities around exclusivity to center the voices of folks who are most impacted by climate change ethical ai and genetic engineeringh they've done so much good work so i am

wondering from your perspective if you would cosign that sentiment and where are the areas we need to do a better job in which voices we need to do a better job at centering quick. >> you are right i was told environmentalism is what rich people dead i didn't know your next meal then more importance to worry about. but for me that interest on —- that understanding in 2009 we were working one year myself and some college students and we did this international day of action probably because of beginners lack managing to

coordinate 5200 simultaneous demonstrations so cnn said thehe most widespread day of political action but i asked everybody to upload pictures of their events my job that weekend to monitor as they come in and with the billboards at the end of times square. coming in ten or 20 minutes. and then watching those it took a half an hour to realize it was affluent white people most of the people we were

working with were brown or black or asian because that is what most of the world is. so people were worried in those places maybe more so because the future bears down harder the more vulnerable you are. but then the sooner and harder you get hit it is useful and appropriate at the absolute forefront of front-line communities who really have been in the vanguard of activism.

and let me give a particular shout out too indigenous peoples around the world so a very large percentage of the population in this case are many other cases punching way above their weight. so people saw it at standing rock it didn't surprise me because i know them to be the best activist around the same thing is true around the world in latin america. in australia and new zealand i think that's really important

and when we ask i'll indigenous people and put them on a reservation, without we were giving them worthless land but it turns out now it sitsts on top a lot of coal or gas or oil or what you needed to so there is a lot of practical that people are utilizing very wisely with keystone and dakota access but also in a deeper sense to see those tradition in the newest wisdom sinking up and the view from the satellite and the supercomputers are very much in sync.

what they are seeing is the conventional wisdom but we would just keep growing the size of our economies is essentially wrong. and we need to think a lot more deeply. to me that is a very powerful moment of wisdom and traditions to coincide it has been a pleasure when elders from native communities and greatta scientists together on the same stage those are powerful moments. >> i thank you have done a really good job. and to re- center those voices you have been doing this work for a long time but always haver it received the lip service for doing it so these

folks are at the heart of the movement. >> and with the climate crisis and the part that i really like i've managed to do it now for a couple of years because there are an extraordinary number of powerful, interesting, rich voices to let us see more interesting corners and that is useful. it will be a very very close call to make it out of the

cul-de-sac we are in now but if we do because we have all voices working in the same direction. and that better change fast solar power is useful with the broad people power. >> i definitely want to make sure we had on that idea specifically with your transition within the movement you helped create at 315 because it's an interesting model for a lot of leaders to think about cultivating the next generation of talent to uplift these ideas. but i want to close out this idea of exclusivity that for

lack of a better word is that ass and understanding the proposition of a just transition understanding the folks at work in the coal mines on the oil wells are being paid more competitively than the renewable opportunities you can pinpoint fingers why that is happening but taking a step back and what seems to be within the environmental movement there is definitely a way to thread that. but to help us understand those tensions and how you have improved navigating. >> people through no fault of

their own are dangerous to the planet should not bear the brunt to say workers are different fromex executives and then i contemplate occasionally to wind up at a jail cell from some point but it's just the opposite of people who've done perfectly honorable work over the years as we transition away we have to figure out how to make their lives work going forward some of the great things about the green new deal in parts of that of the new biden infrastructure they have to

because it is necessary. think about whoeo holds the power like senator manchin from west virginia who represents those coal miners more of those than anybody else. he is in a position to make sure and then they can retire and that's a perfectly good bargain to make. and it should be one of the first things i would focus on. like aoc and joe biden. >> that's very helpful i see

some questions coming in your head on one or two more ideas for those that are at home and on line. so the big part of this book is about ai. i haven't asked you any questions about it it is a scary and overwhelming topic that is not as straightforward as climate change which is pretty complex so figuring it where to start when i was 18 or 19. so can you help me now at age 30 figure out how to act on these threats.

>> and that of climate change 30 years ago and among the horizon and potentially overwhelming threats and we would be very smart to have a conversation right now and not 30 years ago her 30 years from now. one of the first things we can and should do to make sure the forces behind them are not so powerful that they cannot be checked in any way so taking on silicon valley and the power has grown unchecked in things like algorithms and

like what wede see in your facebook feed making you angrier and crazier with every passing day. so so to have concentrations of power that are too large in the hands of mark zuckerberg and then to lessen that power quickly with the ability to cope and itt is possible facebook has jumped past c the point but i'm glad to see people in power beginning to ask important questions. so that moment to be talking about questions around ai and genetic engineering that until

we reach a social consensus let's not take steps that take us past places where we can retreat from because they do represent and they do have the possibility of reordering of what it meansns to be human and asset we should think first human beings are theoretically goodt at that is what sets us apart so might be of that idea. >> in that same section of the book you also talk about an easier concept to get your arms around and of course although virtual talking about a festival about reading and books so can you tell us about flow and how that might

activate it in a way that scrolling one of the reasons i read about it as i'm writing about human beings. and that is really important for the researchers that human beings are at their best when they get lost in whatever it is with the paintings. everybody who was a reader knows to become absorbed in a book losing track of time or your surroundings so that's

not something that happens with twitter. it is the opposite. or t dopamine or for whatever comes through. and then to never escape into that place of absorption. that's why it's so unsatisfying. and hopefully why books will persists or at a certain point the attention span is so attenuated even just to read a book is too'l much when that happens we will have lost something very important. >> wee heard yesterday on a panel about listening how

shrinking our attention span is but it is a different experience and then to head on the questions that are coming in. you open the book i love this that an author does not oh. and there's a great quote about hope without optimism to differentiate between the two. and that there are still some that change a is possible and that comes through in your writing through most of your publications and top leadership if it wasn't there you wouldn't be so we let

leslie advocating for it. so what is hope look like? >> beautifully put. the best proof of my willingness to be hopeful is the fact i didn't think there was reason to do it i would not do it. so i would sit on the porch and smoke cigars and drink whiskey. but for the meantime the fact we watched over the last ten or 15 years has this enormous movement has arisen for us to

hope at the very least i don't will when we've waited so long to get started these systems are so large that it will not stop climate change. that's because enough people are around us but for me since i work all over the world we organize demonstrations so it's always extremely moving. and those have literally done nothing and then that being the case it is possible for if we live in the belly of the beast to get it together to do what we can that's why i'm

happy to keep going. >> and now we're coming up on time so one last lightning round question from the folks at home. so folks are curious in this country what would be the most significant legislation to address climate change to encourage government to enact quick. >> it's absolutely crucial to get the biden infrastructure bill it will not solve the problem that be far more than legislation is

completely moderate sensible straightforward way to address the economic crisis and try to start down the path to protect us against the next crisis that is much larger than the pandemic to make sure your senator is willing to stand up for families and jobs in the future it shouldn't be too hard. >> i thought you might have an answer. so something that you can take away from this conversation. 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 are up against our or at

least it is easier to reach. semi hope is today we will lead the conversation with recognizing that two things can be true at the same time that we are beautiful and a powerful species on aho beautiful and powerful planet so thank you for being with us today. >> thank you for all you do. . . . with relevant to guest hosts

interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. all "after words" programs are available as podcasts. >> host: catherine flowers, first thing i'd like to say is huge congratulations on your macarthur grant announced pretty recently. >> guest: thank you. >> host: some amazing accomplishment and has come out around the same time as this book which we are going to discuss today. just curious, you've been working in lowndes county now for 20 years or so. what madeow