small and know that in the greatest country in the history of the earth your view does matter. >> to the film makers content is king and just to remember to be as neutral and impartial as possible in your portrayal of both sides of an issue. >> c-span rewards $100,000 in total cash prizes, and you have a shot at winning the grand prize of $5,000. entries must be received before january 20th, 2022. for competition rules, tutorials or just how to get started visit our website at student cam.org. >> i'm kate, a specialist focusing on impact that environment and social factors. and activist because of the --

it's a big deal and actually, bill, you're here throughout and we've got to do it. we will be discussing this morning using by the book, and begun to play itself out. tells a story of increasing rising states, climate change, engineering, and it's continuing to the first book, the end of nature, which was the first book on climate change ever. he wrote it back in 1989 he he was in his 20's. so that's a prolific and ongoing contribution to the new yorker and bill is now the-- on the climate change and i

think it's important with this author what i admire he's not just publishing about problems from the safety in his home in vermont. he's living what he's writing. through grass roots organization, 350.org and committed his life and as far as i can tell putting the word he reads and rights into action. beyond this powerhouse is a human dad, a dog dad, a sagittarius based on wikipedia, an athlete, distinguished scholar and husband. our conversation this morning with my goal is a sharper understanding how big, what we're up against is as we get into the discussion and questions come up. please submit them in the ask the question box and hit them at the end. so, bill, all right. we're ready to get going, are

we ready to get going? >> katherine, thank you for that kind introduction and for your work and activism. >> you make it easy and i'm so excited to talk not just about this book, but what the book represents more broadly and we've got to start from the beginning and it covers topics acquire a certain level of bravery to take on. and you dedicate it to a woman who passed away years before the book was published. you say about your friend, and i have this written down here, great many activists none of them had more moral-- and it's the sense of place and people that spoke with her and i miss that voice so much. we all hear its echo as long as

we are engaged in this fight. >> can you tell how her work influenced the book? >> absolutely. it's very kind of you to bring her up. she's someone i think about almost daily. you know, when we started, it was the first iteration of the global or climate movement now happily, there's lots of other help and there's the movement and extinction or rebellion and within people, following greta thunberg and so on and so forth. we were reaching out around the world trying to find people who wanted to take on this which seemed 15 years ago fairly hopeless. one of the places that we-- that we immediately started discovering amazing allies, we're in the most vulnerable places on the earth, the small islands, especially in the south pacific, and disappeared

before this century is out, you know, the solomon the and marshall islands, and places like that and who's fijin, she took it upon himself with so many of those island communities and they call themselves the pacific climate warriors and i have in my head a remarkable picture, who had organized people on each of the islands to build a traditional war canoe and they took the trip to australia which is not that far away in that part of the world and used them for a day blockade at new castle,

more coal goes through it on the planet. the coal as it's burned, melting the ice caps and drowning those island nations. and the picture of one of the great iconic images are these people led in tiny canoes, stopping the progress of the biggest war ships in the world. she was remarkable and happy ly lives on in the pandemic. the pandemic islanders are doing great work. >> you touched on and we will get to eventually. i love this idea that you bring up often, this is hard work and it can be a taunting and lonely fight and that's why having community and having really friends, right, that you look up to and do this work with is

so important so i'm grateful to learn more about her through your dedication to her. >> now that we have a sense of who the book was dedicated to, and blake asked you -- published in april, 2019. >> yes. >> a few things have happened since then, a few things have happened since then and we can definitely hit on that, but even before that, you know, i don't know when you started writing the book, but i'm curious who you imagined reading it and who you saw-- what faulter outlines and putting it into action and might different from your previous i think 16 books. >> well, i mean, most -- i

think most serious writers basically spend their lives writing one book, different chapters to, and so this is part and parcel with that work in many ways that goes back 30 years in my life. when i first started doing this in my 20's when i wrote the end of nature, i had no idea that i would ever do anything more than write. i didn't think of myself as an activist or anything and it's over the last 15 years that's changed a lot. i probably spend more time now it's hard to kind of draw the line between in-- and so faulter kind of brings the story up-to-date in a lot of ways, but one of the things reflects on in the last quarter

is the kind of history of activism and how it really is a potent tool. i'd call it a technology, really, to allow us to deal with, just as we needed technology like the panel to allow us to make electricity benignly from the power of the sun, so they needed technology that allowed many to stand up to mighty and the few. and people like gandhi and the suffer-- suffragists and there were those tools in the 20th century and now we need to figure out quickly how to bear in the 21st. an awful lot is on the line including the human civilizations to really keep going.

i mean, not to put too fine a point on it, you know, we're facing extension shal crises we haven't faced before and there's a lot of work to be done. >> in any other year it would be okay to avoid talking about an existential crisis, but in the last 12 months there's no way around it. you probably get the question all the time, all leaders are being asked to contextualize their work where we experienced the global pandemic, long overdo racial reckoning and i mentioned earlier, bill, in

texas i saw change march through in this year and shut down their state and so a lot of people at risk. so it's here with us. perhaps more clearly than in previous years and i'm curious if you could go back in another chapter about this year. obviously, a lot was kind of written on the wall so to speak, but what about this year changed about the content of this book. >> he will with-- well, i think with the concurrent understanding of people and talking about the issues. 2020 was a remarkable year. it was among the hottest year we've ever recorded in human history that's not what we'll remember it for because there

will soon be other years that pass it. but 2020 was the year of the pandemic and that should have taught us a few things, reminded us of a few things and one of them, of course, that this is real, which is-- i've spent 30 years trying with varying degrees of success to convince people that chemistry and physics are real and that if they don't negotiate or compromise that you have to follow their dictates and the pandemic was a reminder that biology works the same way. and you didn't do any good that our president told us that it was all going to go away or, you know, whatever. and he wasn't in charge, that the -- was in charge and if it said stand six feet apart and wear a mask. then stand six feet apart and wear a mask because it was the

authority it is the authority. one of the corollaies with that, sometimes speed is an important factor, our systems are not geared for speed and we learned the cost of that and probably one of the things that historians wrote during the pandemic was that the euros and south korea had their first case of coronavirus and they went to work, everybody got a mask and tested and on and on and fewer people died in south korea in the course of a year than we had die in the course of a die at the height in this country because what did our president do, he said going away by easter, not to worry, not a big deal. and therefore we were unable to

flatten the virus curve before things got completely out of control. on the same, you know, 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 wouldn't have to deal with it didn't flatten the carbon curve and now we have to do an insane amount of work in a short time. that's what happens when you get behind the curve and directly also, the questions about george floyd is that the pandemic was a reminder that human solidarity really matters. i'm more than -- my political largely in the shadow of ronald reagan who changed our politics in this country. his basic understanding was that markets--

you know, that government was a problem not a solution. his famous last line in all speeches was the nine scariest words in the english language were, i'm from the government and i'm here to help. well, ha, ha, ha. but it turns out the scarciest words, we've run out of ventilators or the hillside behind your house is on fire and you don't call on markets to solve. you call on the fire department and the health-- you know, the hospital and those are our ability to work together as human beings out of some barns you call government and pull out things that allow to deal with-- so back since i think only heightened by watching what played out in the spring and

summer on the streets of minneapolis and so much else of the rest of the country. the most important thing that george floyd, that anybody said in 2020 was george floyd said as he was dying, i can't breathe, because, well, because pretty much is the definition of being alive human being and you can't breathe because there's a racist cop kneeling on your neck or you can't breathe because activists were soon pointing out there's a fire, a power plant down the road and it's always the same road, african-americans have three times the asthma rate of white americans, not because of any difference in physiology, but because of a difference in geography. you can't breathe because wildfires have gotten so terrible that the governor of your state in california or

oregon, washington, urged you to go inside, stay inside and tape the windows shut so none of the particulates get into the house and get into your lungs. you can't breathe because it's too hot. and set a new all-time record for the highest temperature observed on this planet california 130 degrees fahrenheit right at the upper limit of the human body to survive even for a few hours. the computer modeling indicates that will cover wide swaths of the planet and 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 is the a stark reminder that we live in the world of which

we're not the master in, and how to gather effectively and how to deal with questions of justice so we're not just a collection of individuals, but a working society, a working civilization. >> yeah, i think that's well put and you bring up two areas head-on, but that it sounds like last year-- which are working towards justice and urgency and i am personally-- at once in the same breath and we'll start with urgency, a little easier. recently you had a bit of a back and forth with another

bill, bill gates, who has a slightly different view on-- and there's shared knowledge, but, but obviously let's call it a nuanced approach. i think that gates offers to be for lack of a better word, moderate, they don't like climate change, they believe in climate change and find the green new deal to be aggressive, too radical. and how do you think of the neutrality not of the carbon kind, but on the sidelines, that play into addressing climate change and the shrinking of the board as you put it in your book. >> that's a really good

question, katherine. so, look, human beings and human institutions change best when they change slowly and gradual. it's less expensive, less traumatic, less divisive. so the best way to deal with climate change would be to deal with it slowly. and with the kind of cultural and technological shifts that allow us to not have to be shifts, in the best world, i've got solar panels on my roof and my brother-in-law comes over at thanksgiving and sees them and puts them on his and 30 years down the road we're where we need to be. we've changed untraumatically. and one of the things i have to keep myself from doing is saying to people, oh, if only

you'd listened to me when a few years ago trying to make. didn't listen for a series of reasons probably worth describing just the fossil fuel industry led a very effective campaign of denial and disinformation that paralyzed our political lives so now we have to change very, very fast because as i said before, the basic dynamic here is not our usual political dynamic which is different groups of people arguing with each other and reaching some kind of compromise. i think that people should get-- for their job, you think that they should, you know, $7 an hour is fine and meet in the middle at 15 and come back and fight it out again a few years later or whatever. that's how compromise in our

system works. but our problem is that the basic conflict here is between human beings and physics and since physics is compromise that becomes our job and the scientists have now told us how fast we need to work. in 2018 intergovernmental panel on climate changes, an international group of the scientists, their analysis was greatest of challenges, published their latest report and it said that if-- that we had until 2032, to fundamentally transform our energy systems which they defined as cutting emissions in half and if we did not meet that target by 2030, then the prospects for meeting the targets that we set in paris just five years ago are nil.

so that's the deadline. almost literally a deadline and in the face of that, like it or not. we have to move very fast. now, the good news is, it really is good news, that a lot of the activists and engineers who have done their jobs over the last decade and dropped the price of solar power and wind power of order of magnitude, where it's the cheapest power on earth. the batteries to store it are coming just as fast. and that means that if we want to move fast, we really can. but, but that means being willing to grapple with the interests of the fossil fuel industry that wants to keep its business model going longer. and if we have a problem with people like gates, it's that sometimes they -- they don't

want to engage in the messy work that is ending up to power. were i a multi-billionaire i may not want to stand up to power, the established order has done well. all of his technological flights of fancy what we're going to do 30, 40 years down the road are great, we may need them. we'll only need them if we do the work in the next 10 years of dramatically deploying technology we have now, solar panels and wind turbines, so that we keep this fight alive. we can't win the climate fight in the next 10 years. it's going to take a lifetime and-- but we could lose the climate fight in the next 10 years, if we don't do what we need to do, we'll go past certain tipping

points, and past those and the prospect for recovery is fomented and they have a plan freeze the arctic once it's melted and the arctic it's going to be one of the features on earth. we think that the reason that texas grows in february so much of the arc tech is melted that the jetstream works in strange ways and allows the collapse of the polar vortex and 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 when any of us, inconvenient or politically uncomfortable. it's not up to us it's up to--

so we best learn to deal with it. >> it's not up to us, but it very much relies on us stepping up. thank you. and i think i'm not alone in feeling overwhelmed by the problem sometimes. now in your book, it hits on this kind of needing people to act and look squarely at the reality of this situation pt and also needing to stay connected to it and not shut down. you're saying in reference to the fossil fuel industry, if they do what they want no one can stop them in any way

infuriating one. ip sissing that some is inevitable no matter what you do, the response of people who don't want to be bothered to stop it and i've heard it the-- when reporters say that they knew about global warming, of course they did or all corporations lie or nothing everything happens to them anyway, this kind of known cynicism is not threat to the exxons to the world, it's a gift. we don't know how it will end or giving a pass because their power makes no sense and this -- in a few different ways, but the part that i want to spell out is people in patterns and how cynicism can be a self-defense mechanism that a lot of us need to speak up and

do our jobs and be with our families and do the things. so breaking the pattern ultimately comes down to changing minds and i'm wondering if in your 30-plus years of doing this work, bill, 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 compassionately to folks who we need to show up and not resign. >> there's lots of things we learn over time, you know? and usually they result in sort of groups being -- there was a time when people thought that natural gas was going to be sort of a good bridge to the future and when it turned out

it wasn't so that, you know, scientific reasons it was more problem than solutions, you kind of have to recalibrate and go forward. but sometimes the surprises are good ones, you know. i think that an awful lot of us have thought that the only-- that we were going to have to completely-- we didn't-- that the thing that made it so difficult was that there might be no way short of just shutting down an awful lot of what human beings did in order to deal with it, you know? because it's seen things like solar power and wind power were sort of frivolous on the edge, not capable of taking up real slack in the system. and about that we turned out to be wrong. you know, the great human

capacity for engineering asserted itself and people figured out how to build this stuff in ways that were cheap and powerful. and so we now think that, you know, that we have access to vast amounts of clean energy and the irony is that we have to make the -- if we just wait for the economics of it to work itself out, eventually sun and wind, because it's free, you know? so 75 years from now, that's what the world will run on, but if it takes 75 years to get there it will be a broken world that runs on it so our job now is kind of to make the burst of spring, as it were. make the politics-- make it happen faster when it

otherwise wouldn't and it's a political challenge. to me, the biggest single change over 30 years of working on this has just been the understanding that we were going to have to engage in that kind of political work. i began as a writer and i spent 10 or 15 years after writing nature, writing more books and giving talks and symposiums because i had assumed incorrectly that we were in an argument and once we piled up enough evidence to win the argument our leaders would act, why wouldn't they? the biggest problem we've faced why wouldn't you take action and it took me too long to figure out that won the argument, the science was entirely clear, there wasn't some side pushing back in the scientific community, we've won the argument, but we're losing

the fight because the fight wasn't about -- the fight was what fights are usual about, which is money and power and the fossil fuel industry had so much money and so much power that it didn't matter they were losing the argument. you live in texas you have some sense of the extraordinary power of that even a few years ago one of the richest industries on earth. so that's why i ended up doing all of this organizing because eventually done and then you're going to need some counter veiling power to the fossil fuel industry. it wasn't going to come from money, you know, don't have a lot of money, but that's why this sort of history or activism, it indicates from time to time if you can assembly 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. >> and i'll add, one shouldn't-- you know, in a rational world one shouldn't need to do this. i've been to jail that's absurd why would anybody have to go to jail in order to make governments pay attention to science, but that's the world we live in. it's not entirely rational so you have to figure out how to work in it and i'm sorry i didn't figure 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 we 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've been at this for much longer, but one area where the climate movement has been growth opportunity is around inclusivity and centering the voices of folks who are both most impacted by climate change and the genetic engineering and whose who have done so much good work that doesn't get the spotlight, and for example, and so i'm wondering from your perspective, you know, first if you would co-sign that sentiment and if so, where are the areas that we need to do a better job being inclusive and which voices do we need to do a

better job at centering. >> the i think you're absolutely-- environmentalism is something that rich white people did and coming from a-- you have more important things to worry about on and on and on and for me, that understanding shifted dramatically when we did our first big day of action in 2009, and college students, we do an international day of action and turned into, probably because of a big thing we managed to coordinate 5200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries the most widespread political action in history, the first coming out of the climate movement and uploading pictures of their

events and that weekend ones of them was-- spreading them out again and the end of times square normally showing whiskey ads and instead flashing pictures up as they came in. and they were coming in 10 and 20 in minutes sometimes from around the world. and peru and wherever in one afternoon and we're watching those, it took about a half hour to realize that that idea that, you know, those people at the heart of the environmental movement were simply incorrect. and most of the people they were working with were black, brown, asian and 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 and maybe more so

because the future bears down harder on the poor and more vulnerable you are and the iron law global warming, the sooner and harder you get hit. so, i think it's entirely good, useful, appropriate for people are absolutely forefront of this work. frontline communities, vulnerable communities who have really been in the -- the vanguard or activism now in recent years and we must give it particular shout out to indigenous peoples around the world. a large percentage of the world's population, but in this case, and in many other cases,

we're punching way above our weight, and i think that it's, you know, people saw at standing rock and occurred emergence of a lot of inge-- indigenous people on this continent and didn't surprise me working for years and known to be the best activists around, but the same thing is true around the world. in the pandemic, in latin america, communities in australia and new zealand, just about ever, and i think that's really really important for a couple of reasons. one is that the indigenous people from places where they were and keep them on reservations and things we thought they were giving their best land, but it turns out it sits on top of a lot of

hydrocarbons and that you need to get it and put it in things so there's a lot of practical power that people utilize and dakota access and line three in minnesota now and things. r... traditions on the planet kind of syncing up. sweat lodge and the view from the satellite and the super computers seem very much in sync to me, and what they're seeing is that the view of the rest what they are saying, the conventional wisdom in much of the world that will just keep growing the size of our economies and having more. we need to think a lot more detailed, and to me that is a

veryme powerful moment with thoe for ancient wisdom traditions and very new ones coinciding. and so it's been really a pleasure to watch the moments when elders from native communities and great scientists sorted together on the same stage or in the same jail cell. it's powerful moments. >> i think you've done a really good job in your career so i thank you for that, the re-centering voices who have been doing this work for a long time and impacted by this work but who haven't always received the credit for the lipservice for doing it, and so i couldn't agree more that h it's these fos were at the heart of the movement. >> i get toee do this newsletter every week for the new yorker on the climate crisis, which is a free newsletter that a lot of people read, and the part i really like is this intersection

call passing the mic and so that's, i think i've managed to do it now a couple of years without any doing any other white guys because therein are n extraordinary number of powerful, interesting, which voices. rich voices, and help us see a lot more interesting corners than we noticed in the past. there are that's awfully useful. it's going to be a very, very close call to make it out of the cul-de-sac we're in now as a civilization if we make it out, and if we do it will be because we managed to get all voices working here-everybody working in the same direction. we haven't been very good about that as societies, and it's one of the things that better change fast. solar power is useful but a kind

of broad people power is at least as useful going forward. >> host: i want to make sure we hit on that idea of passing the mic i. think specifically with your transition within the movement that you helped create at 350 and the role you play now. it's an interesting model for leaders to think about cultivate thing next generation of talent that can help uplift these ideas that maybe older generations helped leave, but before we get there i just want to close out this idea on inclues sift, something i'm -- for lack of a better word was bad at for a while, is understanding that the nuance within the kind of proposition of a just transition, 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 def fitly a way -- definitely a way to thread it but can you help us understand the tensions and how you have improved navigating it over the years. >> guest: the very real people who through no fault of their own, the grownup working industries that now are dangerous to the planet, shouldn't bear the brunt of the -- this is to say oil fuel workers are different from oil executives who knew very well

what they were doing and i hope contemplate occasionally the thought they might end up in a jail cell at some point for what they've done. but that's not true. just the opposite of people who have 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, too, going forward and it's one of the best things bout the green new deal that outcome people have propose -- young people have proposed and large parts of that have made its way into the new biden infrastructure bill. they have to because it's right, and they have to because it's politically necessary, too. think about who holds the power here? it's people like senator mansion or west virginia who probably represents more coalminers than anybody else. and he's in a position to make sure they can -- that they can

either if they're young be retrained to do something else and if they're not, they can retire in -- with dignity, and that's a perfectly good bar -- bargain to mack. it's well within our economic able to do it and it should be one of the firsting the should focus on so i'm grateful to people like aoc and joe biden for focusing and precisely that issue. >> host: it's really helpful. thank you, bill. i see some questions coming in. we'll hit on one or two more ideas here before we turn it over to the folks that are with us at home and online, who have some really interesting ideas and thoughts for you, but i have to name the fact that a big part of this book is about a.i. i haven't really asked you any

questions about it because as you point out, it is a scary and overwhelming topic that is not a straightforward as climate change. it makes climate change, which i pretty complex, look straightforward. you have-helped me where figure out where to start when i was 18 or 19, how to act on climate change. can you help me now at age 30 figure out how to act on the threats you bring up in your books about a.i. >> guest: so i think that they're kind of in the same category that climate change was 30 years ago when i was your age. that is we can see them on the horizon and as potentially overwhelming threats and be very smart to have the conversation about them right now, not 30

years from now when they're fait accompli, when they're -- 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 is doing -- forget a.i. doing insane amounts of damage already just with things like algorithms that run what you see in your facebook feed and are devoted to making you angrier and contracts 'er with every -- crazier every passing day. so breaking the power -- when we get concentrations of power that are too large, whether they're in the ends of exxon or mark

zuckerberg, it is a good idea to lessen that power quickly before it overwhelms society society's ability to cope and it's possible that facebook has already jumped past the point where it can be controlled but i'm glad to see finally people in power beginning to ask real and important questions. so i think for me moment it's really important just to be talking about questions around a.i. and human jeanettes tick engineering and saying let's until we reach some social consensus on these things let's not take steps that take us irrevocably past places where we can retreats from because they do represent an enormous challenge and they do have the possibilities of reordering what it means to be human, and those are big enough questions that we

should think first. thinking is a thing that human beings are theoretically good at. theoretically is what sets us apart so might be a good idea to do it once in a while. >> in that same section of the book you talk about flow, which is easier concept to get your arms around, and we are of course, all albeit virtual, talking thanks to a festival but reading and books, and i'm wondering if you can tell us about flow and how reaping might activate it in a way that scrolling -- >> guest: think of one of the -- the reason i write is because i'm trying to write about human beings at their best and unthing we thirds thank you the work of important thinkers and

researchers is that human beings are at their best when they enter into a kind of state of absorption, get lost in whatever it is they're doing, painting paintings, climbing difficult rock faces, whatever it is, and everybody who is a reader knows that the feeling of becoming absorbed in a book, losing track of time and losing track of your surroundings, and at some level entering mentally into the -- with a good writer into the -- that's not something that happens with twitter, and it's the opposite. you're forever jarred by the next little hit of dope mean whenever the night -- dopamine

and never escape out into that kind of place of absorption and so on that's why it's so unsaferring at the end of the day and hopefully why books will persist, though one worries that at a certain appoints our attention spans will get so attenuated that even sitting down to read a book will seem too hard, and when that happens we'll have lost something very, very important. >> host: we heard yesterday on a panel about listening, about how shrinking our attention span is, but i couldn't agree more that it's just a different experience. you do access flow when you read in a way you are right that twitter -- the last question from me and then we can hit on the questions that come. in you open this book dish love this

opening. you open this book by saying that an author does not owe its reader hope, and there's a great quote by michael stone but hope without optimism. this idea that hope is motivating and the belief there's still some wiggle room that change is possible, and i do feel that come through in your writing, not just in this book but in most of your publications and in 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? >> guest: beautifully put. so, you're right, the best proof of my willingness to -- my able

to be hopeful is the fact i still get up every morning and work hard on this stuff, and if i didn't think it was reason to do it issue want do it. i don't have a martyr complex or something. i would just go sit on the porch and smoke cigars and drink whiskey and that would be fine and maybe i'll reach an age when that's all i can do anyway but for the meantime, the fact that we watched over the last 10 or 15 years as this enormous movement has arisen, gives me enormous hope that at the very least we'll make a fight out of this. i don't know where we will win. we avoided so throng get started the systems are so large that we're not going to stop climate change but maybe we can stop it short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the knees and if we can, its will be

because enough people aroused themselves and for me it's always particularly moving, since i work all over the world, we have organized demonstrations in every country on earth except north korea. it's always extremely moving to me to reflect that so many of the people that we're working with come from places that's have done nothing to cause the problem we're in. and that being the case its does seem to me it should be possible for those of white house -- of us who live in the belly of the beast to get together to do what we can. so, that's why i. happy to keep going. >> host: it is my deep sorrow to share that we're coming up on time. so i'm going to give you one last kind of lightning round question from the folks at home. i think it's one i don't have

the answer to. and then we religion close our -- he we'll close our time together. folks are curious in this country, which i'm guessing in the u.s., at this time, what would be the most significant legislation to address climate change that we should urge our government to enact? >> guest: at this opinion in time it's absolutely crucial to get biden's infrastructure bill through congress. it's not going to solve the problem, burt it's going to do far more than any piece of legislation the federal government has ever pass nets the last 30 years to do something about it. it's a real start. and it's completely moderates, sensible, straightforward way to address the economic crisis from the pandemic and try to start down the path of protecting us against this next crisis that looms much larger than the pandemic. so, make the phone call.

make sure that your senator is willing to stand up for families and jobs and the future, and it shouldn't be too hard. >> host: i thought you might have an answer to that one. thank you for leaving us with an 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 are, doing nothing can feel better or at least is easier to reach for. so, my hope is that today we'll leave this conversation with recognizing what we heard from bill really that two things can be true at the same time, that things are really bad and that we are a beautiful and powerful species on a beautiful and

powerful planet and together we have a shot at this. so, bill, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your, and thank you for being with us so from the bottom my heart thank you so much and thank you for being with us today. >> katherine, back at you. thank you for all you do and you are very, very good t at this. this was a great pleasure this morning, and i will look forward to the next time. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

>> booktv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. >> watch booktv every sunday on c-span2, find a full schedule into program program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. >> welcome to the latest in a series of t