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Episode 488: Bill McKibben, the Dark Realist, Faces the Light
2 Plays2 minutes ago
"The point of my book and the point of this big day of action that we're doing across the country is to drive that notion away that this isn't alternative energy, that it's the obvious, straightforward, common sense and very beautiful way to power the world going forward. To use the analogy I've been using, it's not any longer the Whole Foods of energy: nice, but pricey. It is now the Costco of energy: cheap available in bulk on the shelf, ready to go," says Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun.
Today we have Bill McKibben, author, at last count, of 447 books, including his latest Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. It’s published by Norton and if ever there was an American president open to the idea of non-fossil-fuel energy solutions, it’s this one.
Photosynthesize, baby, photosynthesize, just rolls off the tongue.
So if you’re a real drip and don’t know who Bill McKibben is, let me tell you a thing or two: He’s the author 19 books, including his pioneering book on climate called The End of Nature, and one of my favorite books on rethinking consumerism, Hundred Dollar Holiday. Aside from being a journalist basically his entire life, he’s an activist who helped found 350.org, and Third Act, which is a movement of Americans over 60 who bring their collective power to the climate and democracy fights. We call them silver-haired ponytails here in Eugene.
And his latest venture is SunDay, a creative climate project that celebrates solar energy through art, storytelling, and public engagement. The day of action is Sunday, September 21, whereby they'll celebrate solar, host e-bike parades, give heat pump tours, and rally for change. There’s a SunDay event in Eugene, but I’ll unfortunately be burning fossil fuels that day driving up to Portland for a book event. But visit sunday.earth to find a local event near you. Those solar panel subsidies are going bye bye since the wannabe fuhrer will be gutting anything that doesn’t belch CO2 into the air.
Bill also writes the incredibly popular Substack The Crucial Years, which has nearly 100,000 subscribers. You can learn more about Bill and his books at billmckibben.com, and you’re about to learn more about how he told William Shawn to fuck off, his start as a sports writer, being a pioneer writing about climate, and how he wrote Here Comes the Sun in about one month.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Announcements
00:00:01
Speaker
The door to my studio is open. I don't give a shit. Hey, CNFers, the frontrunner strides into fall, doesn't it? And I have three events in September. September 20th, I'm at the Coos Bay Public Library for an author talk at 2 p.m.
00:00:14
Speaker
Following day, September 21st, I will be in Portland in conversation at the Oregon Historical Society, also at 2 p.m. And on September 27th, I will be a featured author alongside Ruby McConnell for the Florence Festival of Books in Florence. It's all day, but the conversation is at 4.30 p.m.
Call for Submissions to Audio Magazine
00:00:33
Speaker
So stay clued in to my newsletters and Brendan on Maradog.com. Hey, hey. Secondarily on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Oh, and by the way, call for submission. The audio magazine is back. Did you even know, bro?
00:00:49
Speaker
The Mandalorian in his kind lived by a simple code, all punctuated by saying, this is the way. What codes do you live by? What codes were you at one time or another told to live by?
00:00:59
Speaker
Has a code led you to the right path or down the Wrong. Essay should be no longer than 2,000 words, 15-minute read. Bear in mind that in the end, these are audio essays. Write accordingly.
00:01:12
Speaker
Email submissions with codes in the subject line to creative nonfictionpodcast at gmail.com. Original, previously unpublished work only, please. Deadline is October 30 freaking 1st.
00:01:23
Speaker
That's Halloween. CNFers, there's cash on the line, so send me your best fully formed pieces and consider becoming a patron to help put money in the coffers.
00:01:34
Speaker
That helps put money in the pockets of writers because we all need burrito money. I give out two burritos worth of money for your essays. Name
Essays on Personal Codes and Environmental Themes
00:01:46
Speaker
another literary magazine that does that.
00:01:50
Speaker
There's a long playlist of songs about the sun and there is not a long playlist of songs about the glories of fracked gas.
Overview of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:02:04
Speaker
Oh hey, what's up nerds? It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show that drops it like it's hot all over your podcast feed. We talk to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell, and by we, I mean me.
00:02:15
Speaker
It's your boy, B.O., Brendan O'Meara. Hey, you ever wonder how much longer this can possibly go on? Me
Bill McKibben's Work and Environmental Activism
00:02:21
Speaker
too. Today we have Bill McKibben, author, at last count, of 447 books, including his latest, Here Comes the Sun, A Last Chance for the Climate and A Fresh Chance for Civilization.
00:02:33
Speaker
It's published by Norton. And if ever there was an American president open to the idea of non-fossil fuel energy solutions, it's this one. Photosynthesize, baby. Photosynthesize. Just rolls off the tongue. Show notes of this episode more at BrendanAmerer.com. Hey, there.
00:02:47
Speaker
You can peruse for hot blogs, tasteful nudes, getting raunchier by the day, and sign up for my two very important newsletters, the flagship Rage Against the Algorithm and Pitch Club. Issue 4.
00:02:59
Speaker
This with Cassidy Randall just dropped. It's pretty great. Pretty rad. Would love for a pitch club to catch fire. It's simmering. it's it's it's It's a controlled burn, but I'd love an inferno. Let's keep doing it. Maybe book pitches, agent pitches, radio pitches, doc film pitches.
00:03:16
Speaker
Maybe my pre-Fontaine book proposal. Maybe my next book proposal.
Newsletter Promotion and Community Building
00:03:21
Speaker
And I'll audio annotate that if and when it sells. It'll sell. It's got to sell. Right?
00:03:28
Speaker
Pitch Club will never cost a dime. I'll never gatekeep like that. Someone pledged $25 a month, though, for it, and in maybe I'll turn on pledges at some point.
00:03:40
Speaker
But not this day. All I ask is for your permission, because platform is currency, and that's really all I care about. Both are first of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat them. So, if you're a real drip and don't know who Bill McKibben is, let me tell you a thing or two.
00:03:55
Speaker
He's the author of 19 books, not 447, including his pioneering book on climate called The End of Nature. And one of my favorite books on rethinking consumerism, $100 Holiday.
00:04:08
Speaker
Slim little books, pretty cool. Aside from being a journalist basically his entire life, he's an activist who helped found 350.org, Third Act, which is a movement of Americans over 60 who bring their collective power to the climatic democracy fights.
00:04:22
Speaker
We call them silver-haired ponytails here in Eugene. And his latest venture is Sunday. a creative climate project that celebrates solar energy through art, storytelling, and public engagement.
00:04:34
Speaker
The day of action is Sunday, September 21st, whereby we'll celebrate solar, host e-bike parades, give heat pump tours, and rally for change. There's a Sunday event in Eugene, but I will unfortunately be burning fossil fuels that day, driving up to Portland for a book event.
00:04:51
Speaker
But visit sunday.earth to find a local event near you. Those solar panel subsidies are going bye-bye, since the wannabe furor will be gutting anything that doesn't belch CO2 into the air.
00:05:05
Speaker
Bill also writes the incredibly popular substack, The Crucial Years, which has nearly 100,000 subscribers. You can learn more about Bill and his books at billmckibben.com.
00:05:17
Speaker
And you're about to learn more about how he told William Sean to fuck off, his start as a sports writer, being a pioneer writing about climate, and how he wrote Here Comes the Sun in about one month.
00:05:30
Speaker
One fucking month. Great chat. So let's get after it, CNFers. Riff.
00:05:43
Speaker
You need to be a truffle pig. But, you know, it was a machete brandished. I almost always have a very specific reader in mind. I know. i sometimes wish I would have never done any of these things. This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:06:07
Speaker
I started writing for money when I was...
00:06:13
Speaker
14, 13 for the local newspaper. Of course, back in the olden days, each town had its own newspaper. And so I started out covering junior high school and then high school sports, and which was lots of fun.
00:06:28
Speaker
And it paid 25 cents a column inch, which may explain my verbosity at times. you know if you wanted to make three or four dollars a piece, you had to write a reasonably lengthy account of basketball games. So Yeah, that was was the start for me.
00:06:46
Speaker
And when you were kind of got the the bug for ah for writing, who were some of the you know the writers that you admired ah you know you know decades ago? I was just a straight-on newspaper guy in a lot of ways.
00:07:02
Speaker
That's the only world I you knew, and I assumed I would sort of go to work in it. When I went to college, I just worked on the Crimson Round the Clock. That was...
00:07:13
Speaker
what I did. And it came out six days a week. So there was, you could absorb an endless amount of labor, ah which I was happy to provide. But when I was ah senior, beginning of senior year, Mr. Sean called me up and said, would you like a job at the New Yorker?
00:07:34
Speaker
And I knew that this was someone spoofing me. So I just swore at him and hung up the phone. I figured it was someone from the Lampoon or something. But he called back about four months later, something like that. And this time, for some reason, I took, recognized, I knew it was the same voice. And iring and and so I said, sure.
00:07:55
Speaker
And, but you know, three or four days after graduating from college, I went to New York and went to work at the New Yorker. And really, was incredibly happy in many ways, including the fact that for the first time in my life, i started reading the New Yorker and serious writing about it much of anything, you know.
00:08:18
Speaker
And I got to know immediately all kinds of wonderful people who were hanging out there, I was very much by, you know, 15 years, the kid in the, and for the most part, by 45 years, the the kid in the thing, but, you know, ah Mark Singer and Sandy Frazier and Jamaica Kincaid and, you know, these, you know, just an endless long list of people who, and and and people and people who became very close friends, Jonathan Schell, sort of chief among them.
00:08:50
Speaker
So I was learning to write and kind of read serious, semi-serious stuff. was mostly writing talk of the town, but notes and comment also at the same time.
00:09:02
Speaker
And there were a few, you know, a few of the true geniuses of of the craft were still there, albeit getting on in years. And I got to know them little bit too, Joe Mitchell and people like that. And of course, I became close friends with Mr. Sean in the last four or five years of his editorship at the New Yorker.
00:09:22
Speaker
that was pretty good place to learn to the great glory of the New Yorker in those days was, uh, what they called the library, what in a newspaper you'd call the morgue, the collection of old clippings. And they came in these black, big black bound volumes that they would, someone would patiently paste up every week, uh, by writer.
00:09:49
Speaker
So, you know, and you could go take them out. And it was instructive, the ones that were, you know, off the were cave often out. I mean, I haunted the place, but Sandy Frazier's volume was somebody was always reading.
00:10:04
Speaker
Because, of course, a lot of it in those days, Sandy or me anybody else was writing talk of the town stories, and they didn't have bylines. So this was really the only way to go read all that Sandy Frazier had ever written or all that James Thurber had ever written or whatever it was.
00:10:22
Speaker
And so I spent a lot of time with them. Oh, wow. How does that phone call happen? How does Sean find you? ah I think because I'm not sure that his network extended much beyond Harvard in those days. I think that he looked around, looked around the office and realized that might need some new blood coming in and picked up the crimson and ah what I was writing. And, you know, happily what I was writing was, it was June, but not bad.
00:10:59
Speaker
And, uh, so he called up the mark of our, uh, friendship and of his particular and somewhat peculiar character was that neither one of us ever found it necessary to,
00:11:14
Speaker
comment on the fact that our first phone call had ended up with me telling him to fuck off and hanging up the phone. So I feel like that's a common reaction to his phone calls. Cause everyone thinks it's a prank.
00:11:27
Speaker
it's We just went on. So it was, it was good. And we, and as I say, we became, he was a wonderful, wonderful guy. And I, you know, I quit the New Yorker when they fired him. He, In part, I think at the time sort of I was thinking I was acting as noble principle.
00:11:48
Speaker
um But in truth, it was probably a good way to escape what could have been for me a kind of velvet prison, you know, and a chance to move out into the wild world and, you know, out into the woods and a chance to stretch my wings in other ways.
00:12:07
Speaker
And I will say, and I've since written this, though I was very mad at the Newhouses for firing Sean and claiming control of the magazine and stuff. And though I didn't care much for their first couple of choices as replacement editors, they've been magnificent custodians of the New Yorker and finding Remnick and letting him have his hand at the New Yorker was one of the great gifts, one of the one of the few things that's gone absolutely right for American letters in the last, yeah you know, last few decades.
00:12:44
Speaker
when ah when When you're starting there and you know further developing your repertorial chops and your writing chops, you know, what was just big lessons in and development there for you in the five years you were there?
00:12:59
Speaker
so You know, the the New Yorker, especially in those days, loved facts. I mean, in fact, they didn't call it nonfiction writing, there was the fiction department and the fact department.
00:13:13
Speaker
So I grew to love, I think I always did anyway, but I said you know, the one of the first long pieces I did was Sean asked me to go out and live as a homeless person for a while.
00:13:29
Speaker
This was the very beginning, very first intimations that we were going to have this thing called, it was at a time it seemed like a new emergency that there were people living on the street in large numbers.
00:13:43
Speaker
So I did that and learned an enormous amount and ended up setting up a homeless shelter in the basement of my church and spending a lot more time with it. And then can't remember quite how we decided to do this, I think I just told them I wanted to.
00:13:59
Speaker
i said, I want to do a piece about where everything in my apartment, which was at Bleecker and Broadway, where it comes from. Follow the sewer lines and where it goes comes from and goes to. Follow the sewer lines. Follow the water line. Follow the electric line as far as I can.
00:14:16
Speaker
and And in those days, you would write like a one or two sentence proposal like that handed to Sean. he would say yes. And that would be, then you could just go off on your own for a year or two.
00:14:30
Speaker
And the New Yorker had unlimited amounts of money to spend on this kind of thing, or or at least acted as if it did. So I went off to Brazil to look at where Con Ed was getting oil and up into the Arctic to see where the, you know, the big hydro dams on James Bay at the tip of Hudson Bay. And, you know, spent,
00:14:53
Speaker
months out along the water supply system for New York, which is one of the great wonders of the world. and And it was very important development for me because it made me realize in a way that I hadn't before as a good product of the American suburbs, that the world was a very physical place.
00:15:14
Speaker
that even Manhattan, where it seemed like you could mint money out of thin air just on the basis of your eye ideas, was exquisitely vulnerable to the proper operation of the world.
00:15:26
Speaker
And I think if I hadn't written that, I wouldn't have been as attuned as I was in the next couple of years to reading the early science around climate change and realizing its implications.
00:15:41
Speaker
The world was a more vulnerable place than I had understood. And I think that's why and i was sensitive to that and why I, you know, when I wrote The End of Nature, it was the first book about climate change, at least for a general audience.
00:15:57
Speaker
and And I think that was why that I had that that that that earlier piece had set me up to sort of think about the world in interesting ways. Yeah, it's great that that that that story is kind of a el lead domino that kind of sets you on this path.
00:16:15
Speaker
In and around that time, what was maybe the most alarming thing that you came across that flipped that switch on? Like, oh we're heading headstrong into an emergency.
00:16:28
Speaker
Well, mean, what was interesting, if I haven't gone back to read The End of Nature for a few years. I'm going to probably show at some point. But... um What was interesting about it was, it wasn't exactly, I mean, it was it was two books in one.
00:16:43
Speaker
Half of it was the first sort of original reporting about where we stood with what this thing was, climate change, and what we knew about it.
00:16:55
Speaker
And in those days, I could fit all the studies that there were on the top of my desk. You know, there weren't that many, but they were very, to me, they were extremely persuasive. And I I understood the science and understood its implications and understood what it meant.
00:17:11
Speaker
The other half of the book was kind of amateur philosophy, and lay theology about what it meant. And that was heavily influenced by the fact that when I'd left the New Yorker, I moved to the Adirondacks, deep into, so you know Saratoga, so sort of Southern Adirondacks, Central Adirondacks, kind of country around North Creek.
00:17:34
Speaker
Very, very, very wild. I mean, our house is on the edge of a couple million acres of wilderness, which I've fallen in love with and was spending all my time in.
00:17:48
Speaker
And so the other half of the book was a sort of series of reflection. The title was sort of series of reflections about The fact that that this place that was so wild and that I loved so much wasn't actually wild anymore and was going to become progressively less so as human habits and appetites changed its temperature and hence its operation, its flora, its fauna, its seasons, on and on and on.
00:18:16
Speaker
And, you know, I was writing that when I was 27 and 28. And so the other thing that probably was important for me... ah was from the New Yorker was a certain sense of, you might call it arrogance, the sense that I was entitled to have big opinions or big ideas about the world.
00:18:39
Speaker
And that I was entitled to write philosophically, even though I was, you know, had and have at best a bachelor's degree and, you know, and I,
00:18:53
Speaker
So for me, part of that was because I'd spent my time, you know, my closest friend at the New Yorker was Jonathan Schell, who had just finished, when I got there, had just finished writing The Fate of the Earth about nuclear weapons.
00:19:08
Speaker
In those days, the when I first got there, the halls of The New Yorker were filled couple of times a day by messengers hauling in big canvas sacks full of letters to Jonathan Schell from people who had read Fate of the Earth.
00:19:22
Speaker
I doubt that if i if I hadn't had that particular experience, I doubt I would have had the courage to write as broadly and insistently as I did in The End of Nature, at least at the age of 28.
00:19:38
Speaker
twenty eight I'm a little surprised and impressed by my own audacity when I go back and read it because I was out somewhat on a limb um in a lot of ways.
00:19:50
Speaker
and And by the way, I would dearly love to have been proved wrong about all of this. I would be more than happy to give up, you know, that book and all that came after in return for the planet not warming up.
00:20:06
Speaker
but But that there it was. I mean, that was what I was.
00:20:13
Speaker
That's what my history at The New Yorker in particular had kind of prepared me to do at that age. Yeah, and I love how, yeah I believe at the start of ah your latest book, you know, you write, if I have a literary reputation, it's for a kind of dark realism. And that's a something that seems right right right on point. So yeah had how did that ah how did that groove start developing for you over the last, you know, say, 40 years of writing?
00:20:45
Speaker
Well, it it's funny. I didn't anticipate at all that I would spend my life writing about the environment, if you'd asked me, I would have said probably more likely I would have spent my life writing about cities and poverty and things.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah. Because these were things that deeply did and do deeply concern me. But I quickly understood that this was the most important story of my time.
00:21:14
Speaker
At least that's what I thought. And I don don't think many other people thought so, but that's what I thought. and i And I also thought, that it was the most interesting because it encompassed so many different things.
00:21:29
Speaker
People tend to think about it as a kind of science story, which at one level it is. But truthfully, the science is not that complicated. We put way too much carbon in the atmosphere, carbon traps heat, so the planet's warming up.
00:21:44
Speaker
That's basically climate science in a sentence, you know. It's hard to do. you have to You have to be very good at physics and chemistry to make advances in it and things.
00:21:57
Speaker
But it's not it's not conceptually hard. The reason that it's so interesting is because the same thing, fossil fuel, that was causing the planet to warm up was also the thing that it was the very heart of the world's economy.
00:22:16
Speaker
That's what made it interesting, a thousand times more interesting, say, than the hole in the ozone layer, another important scientific story. But the thing that caused it, chlorofluorocarbons, were a kind of marginal part of industrial chemistry and easily replaced with something else and on and on and on.
00:22:34
Speaker
In this case, because fossil fuel was so central, it meant that um that you had to think about developing an understanding of economics, sociology, political science, psychology, some theology, finance, all the most important and most interesting things in the world all converged on this question of whether or not we can figure out how to do anything about this crisis.
00:23:03
Speaker
You know, I've obviously wandered occasionally to write about other things, but this has been the central intellectual organizing principle of my life. And it's completely compelling because it's a drama where we don't know the outcome.
00:23:21
Speaker
At a certain point, 10 or 15 years in, i mean, I, you know, felt as if I had no choice but to try and go beyond just writing about it and see if I could help influence the outcome.
00:23:35
Speaker
i mean, from the beginning, i mean, when I was writing The End of Nature, I quickly knew that I had taken sides here. Like I didn't want the planet to overheat and get destroyed.
00:23:50
Speaker
yeah um And that that made it me unfit for, you know, sort of beat writing in a newspaper about it. You know, the Times tried to hire me when I left The New Yorker.
00:24:03
Speaker
And I just remember sitting down with John Darnton, I think, just saying, i I don't think this is really going to work. um Much as I would love to go, much as I spent the early years of my life thinking the times is where I would end up and how I would spend my life, I don't think I'm quite fit for it anymore because of that.
00:24:23
Speaker
But I, for many years, sort of stayed as a writer about this until at some point, you know, it just became clear to me that what I had understood as an argument was really a fight and that the tools of argument data and reason and you know so on, while absolutely important and what I remain absolutely committed to them, um were by themselves not enough because there was another side in this fight, the fossil fuel industry, and they didn't care at all about data and reason and analysis.
00:25:02
Speaker
They cared about money and power, which actually are the things that most fights are about. And that if we were going to actually do anything about climate change. And since we lacked the billions of dollars that the exons of the world had, we were going to have to build some power. And the only way to do that was to build movements. And that's so that's what I started trying to figure out how to do.
00:25:27
Speaker
And we started 350.org, you know, which is now had 20,000 demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea. And, you know,
00:25:38
Speaker
fought the Keystone Pipeline fight that became the big environmental battle of the last decade and ran this giant fossil fuel divestment campaign and so on and so forth.
00:25:51
Speaker
And in more recent years, started the Third Act, which organizes now old people like me for action on climate and democracy.
00:26:03
Speaker
I've come at it from several directions over time. yeah the Yeah, you write towards the very end. there may might have be they been They had the very close to the end of... Actually, no, I think it was in the beginning.
00:26:16
Speaker
ah Where your writing and your activism kind of intertwine. And I wanted to get a sense of when your your writing and your activism became, um not synonymous, but very well interwoven and braided.
00:26:30
Speaker
In one sense, they're not that intertwined in that I... write for a living. That's how I make money.
00:26:43
Speaker
And I act, I'm an activist completely as a volunteer. I've never taken a penny from, you know, just the opposite over time. um And so there are different parts of my life, but they're about the same things, you know, I was very, i remain extremely grateful for my training and early life as ah just full on journalist.
00:27:09
Speaker
Because it means that that's, ah that's the code by which I approach the world as both as a writer and an activist, you know, understanding and truthfully telling stories, reporting, giving straight information is as important to me as it ever was.
00:27:32
Speaker
And I'm, extraordinarily grateful for the rise of serious climate journalism over my lifetime. You know, for the first decade that I was doing, know, decade of the nineties and in well into the odds, if there was a major article or something about the climate crisis in American, you know, in ah American magazines, there was like a 70% chance it was written by me.
00:28:01
Speaker
That was terrible. It was, ah you know, It was ridiculous because there's only so much one person can do. And I just, I remain so happy that there's now a robust, powerful climate journalism that's sprung up.
00:28:17
Speaker
How long it will last, I don't know, but I'm grateful for it um now. I'm reasonably sure I will go to my grave. I'm able to say that I've written more words about climate change than anyone else, which given the temperature of the planet,
00:28:33
Speaker
probably makes me the least successful writer in the history of the world. But, uh, but I've certainly tried and I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed being able to do it in all kinds of ways, you know, at length and creatively in, uh, books one after another that explore different parts in there, you know, but also I've enjoyed,
00:28:58
Speaker
six or seven years ago, Remnick started me writing a newsletter for the New Yorker on climate change, is just as kind of newsletters that kind of were starting to be a thing. And a couple of years in, I, you know, just decided it was probably time to go do it at the Substack instead.
00:29:16
Speaker
And I've greatly enjoyed that. And it's got a, I like the audience. It's free. So it has a big audience. yeah um But it's, so it's ah it's the thing I enjoy about it most is that I'm able to point at other people's work all the time.
00:29:30
Speaker
You know, everyone includes a long kind of annotated list of all the good things that people have been writing that week or saying or doing.
00:29:42
Speaker
So it's it's been extremely rich, both both parts of this for me. And right now is a sort of perfect example. I've written this book, which I'm very proud of because i think it's I mean, I think I basically had a scoop, you know, that other people didn't know about. You know, when the excerpt came out in the New Yorker earlier this summer, the biggest reaction I've gotten from people over and over again, mostly from people deep into the world of climate and environment was I had no idea.
00:30:17
Speaker
I didn't have no idea how fast this was coming. So that journalistic part of me is very happy about that. And I'm pleased with the book. I really had fun writing it.
00:30:27
Speaker
though I had to write it very fast. But at the same time, I'm using the book tour that you know as mostly a chance to you know drive attention to this Sunday thing that we're doing at the end of September, which will be a big day of action across the country.
00:30:47
Speaker
So yes, I'm happy to go out and sell some books along the way, but the real point is it's a way to you know, have the publisher get me to every big city in America so I can turn out people for for action on this stuff.
00:31:01
Speaker
Yeah. And
The Rapid Development of Solar Energy
00:31:02
Speaker
what was it about this particular moment that really invited ah you to write about solar in this book? Well, mostly just that it was happening. Like I, because I have been doing this so long, I have a good sense of what's important, what the rhythms are, how it you know,
00:31:19
Speaker
So I've been paying, I knew all the players and I'd been paying attention. So I knew that there was a moment about two and a half years ago when things really started to shift. And I got you got, you know, suddenly we were installing this stuff at rapid rate.
00:31:35
Speaker
But even i was a little bit behind in that. I told editors at Norton, I had originally thought the book would, we'd probably I'd be writing the book now and it would come out next year.
00:31:48
Speaker
that would have been easiest for my schedule. And and that's what I thought was going to happen. But by this time last year, it was clear to me that the pace of this stuff was accelerating so much that the story was going to be cresting right about now.
00:32:04
Speaker
And I wanted the book to be out. I wanted it, i mean um as I say, you know, there's a large part of me that still is the city reporter for the Crimson Covering car crashes and murders and stuff and and wanting to do it now you know with the news. um So i last summer asked Norton if we could speed up by a year the schedule for it.
00:32:32
Speaker
And you know about you know how book publishers work, that there's a long yeah lead time generally. But Norton was fantastic. And because they're their own thing, because they're a worker-owned publishing us, as it were, ah they have some more flexibility, I think, to and they've been just magnificent in sort of, so I started writing in right about 1st of January, the last week of December, first week of January, and, you know, had the thing written by the end of January.
00:33:14
Speaker
I mean, I really sort of wrote the last words on inauguration day. um That's crazy. And then, and then, and then I've spent the, and then ah then they were great because they, you know, we were simultaneously doing the work to, you know, all the work you have to do to get it in between covers and let it, they were letting me revise right up through June.
00:33:43
Speaker
So the thing is, you know, pretty much on top of the news, you know, through June. And I can't tell you how I just I know that writers complain constantly about their publishers.
00:33:59
Speaker
And I've got nothing but praise for Norton. They've been it's been really interesting. working with him and I hope they've enjoyed it too. Yeah.
00:34:11
Speaker
Well, I think oh yeah of the many things in the book that, um that were illuminating, inspiring, um but certainly surprising was so much of the renewable energy growth in the United States is happening in very red States, be it wind in Iowa and solar in Texas. they That blew me away.
00:34:35
Speaker
yep the and And it's that's what I mean about this being such a fascinating story that cuts across so many different things and so many different ideologies.
00:34:47
Speaker
So one of my favorite things is this rise in the last couple of years of this stuff they're calling balcony solar across Europe designed for apartment dwellers. Just cheap solar panel, you hang over the railing of your balcony and just plug into the wall.
00:35:06
Speaker
Provides... 25% of the electricity you use in many cases. Well, that's illegal every place in this country, except as of three months ago, the state of Utah, where some libertarian state senator said, why should the people of Hamburg and Frankfurt enjoy this privilege and the people of Provo and Salt Lake City be forced to and no one had a good answer so they passed this law and now people you go on YouTube people are busily installing balcony solar on their Salt Lake apartments and we're busy at Sunday
00:35:47
Speaker
pressing very hard to make this same kind of legal change happen in blue and red places alike across the country. Yeah, the I love, you know, one at one of your lines, like, the sun burns so we don't need to.
00:36:02
Speaker
And, you know, part of the thing that you enjoyed writing about this book or researching it was ah getting to talk about how the sun works. For me, the great pleasure, mean, the the the reason that the book needed to be written was to tell the story of what's happening with solar power now and stuff.
00:36:18
Speaker
But, and and and what that means for what we can do going forward and so on. But for me, the pleasure of the book was thinking about much more generally, ah the kind of very big stories, like like the fact that humans have been setting stuff on fire for 700,000 years, but we don't need to anymore. And it was really fun to just go learn about how, you know, how archeologists deciphered that we were starting to burn things and what that meant to the size of our brains and, you know, on and on and on.
00:36:53
Speaker
And then the other part of it was to understand what the sun had meant over time, religiously and ah psychologically people and to understand that there was a, that that my sense of kind of deep connection to was that was was not atavistic. It was shared by an enormous number of people who'd come before me, including great creative people.
00:37:25
Speaker
I obviously borrowed the title of the book from George Harrison, and it was a delight to learn in the course of researching it that Here Comes the Sun is by far the most popular song in the Beatles vast catalog at least if you go by how many times people stream it on Spotify and I think that's because people feel ah kind of that gentle and optimistic connection to our local star and once we were just doing a sort of playlist for Sunday and there are hundreds of songs beautiful and popular songs in the canon all about it just as there are hundreds of
00:38:07
Speaker
great artists peaking with Van Gogh who really figured out how to render this thing that you actually can't really look at you know and and I loved all of that that it confirmed my sense that this was a not just an important economic moment, but a kind of epochal moment for possibly for human civilization as we learn to rely on, you know, that the thing that already gives us warmth and light and food via photosynthesis now is willing to provide us with all the power that we could ever need.
00:38:50
Speaker
that's a That's a very cool story, you know.
Positive News on Solar Energy and Global Challenges
00:38:55
Speaker
It's fun. I mean, it's obviously fun for me. It's also weird for me to be the bringer of good news, especially at a moment when there's more bad news than there's ever been in my lifetime. I mean, look, the physical planet is disintegrating fast. Climate change proceeding precisely along the lines that I and second would in 1989. And, you know, the scientists were right.
00:39:20
Speaker
And we're at a moment in our country when I don't even recognize our country when the democracy that we'd all taken for granted is now disappearing before our eyes. So it is as dark a moment as it's possible to imagine.
00:39:37
Speaker
And we're working hard to try and counter that. You know, the third act, we work on climate and we work on democracy and we work hard on it. We have 100,000 people out across the country.
00:39:48
Speaker
If you go look at the pictures of the demonstrations against Trump, they're dominated by people with hairlines like mine, you know. Stephen Miller yesterday, and one of his odious talks, explained that the major problem that they were having in D.C. was that a lot of elderly white hippies, as he put it, was getting in the way of the police.
00:40:14
Speaker
And, you know, that made me happy because that's our crew, you know. Yeah. um So it's a horrible, dark moment. But amidst all the big bad things that are going on, there's one big good thing that's going on.
00:40:29
Speaker
And most of the people who are writing about it, you know, in the trade press and things where it's being written about, don't have the latitude to back up and try to figure out what that means for, you know, what the rate of solar panels going up means for things like whether or not we can take a chunk out of the grotesque inequality that dominates our world at the moment. I think we can. I think that i think that people have barely begun to ah get at the depth of all this. I mean, think about what the geopolitics of the world would have looked like for the last 70 years if oil was of trivial value.
00:41:14
Speaker
Obviously, we're all impressed by the ability of human beings to fight wars about lots of things. But even humans will be hard pressed to fight one over sunshine. I think this is a moment of extraordinary possibility.
00:41:28
Speaker
And want to write about it. And I want to um work on it in other ways. The point of Sunday, more than anything else, I mean, we obviously have big policy goals around permitting for solar panels and you know on and on.
00:41:44
Speaker
But the biggest goal of it is an almost literary one, which is we've thought about renewable energy for 40 years as alternative energy. That's what we've called it. That's where we've filed it in our minds.
00:41:58
Speaker
The point of my book and the point of this big day of action that we're doing across the country is to drive that notion away, that this isn't alternative energy, that it's the obvious, straightforward, common sense, and very beautiful way to power the world going forward.
00:42:19
Speaker
It's not, to use the analogy I've been using, any longer the Whole Foods of Energy, nice but pricey. It is now the Costco of energy, cheap, available in bulk, on the shelf, ready to go.
00:42:32
Speaker
But it's also, it is also very beautiful. There's a long playlist of songs about the sun, and there is not a long playlist of songs about the glories of fracked gas.
00:42:45
Speaker
So there's, so i I've enjoyed this immensely. And I've been very grateful to have something to enjoy amidst the horrors of the year that we're you know coming through.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah, and you you cite a moment in the book too about the, you know, specifically United States' capacity to ramp up production. it was around World War II and at the height of the production, you know, this country was building ah bomber every single hour. And you itemized some of the parts. Like all that stuff is happening.
00:43:19
Speaker
And a similar ramp up can and should happen around this, and which could drastically improve improve matters. And it's happening in China, you know, that's the other interesting part of the story for me. I'm really quite fascinated by the history of all of this, that the solar cell came out of Edison, New Jersey, you know, uh, it came out of Bell Labs. I mean, uh, you know, I'm old enough that I helped fund Bell Labs by dropping dimes in pay phones for the first half of my existence, you know, a thoroughly alien concept to, uh, uh,
00:43:57
Speaker
you know, my daughter or my grandchild. And the fact that America invented this stuff and is now just ceding it to China is mildly, more than mildly, and should be infuriating to anyone who thinks of themselves as a patriot of any kind.
00:44:15
Speaker
Makes me mad. I mean, I'm glad China's doing it. But I wish we were doing it too. Yeah, like a little while ago, you talk about money and power and like you're there's going to be this shift in money and power that's already happening you know towards these other superpowers. And that's right. And and and our money and power is devolved into a complete short term fixation.
00:44:43
Speaker
So the fossil fuel industry is only cares about whether they can keep their thing going a few more years. And so I think does Donald Trump. I mean, I don't think he has any organizing ideology beyond Donald Trump, you know, which which makes one hope that should cholesterol ever do the thing that they tell us it does, that, you know, maybe some of this ugliness will well pass away, but who knows.
00:45:12
Speaker
Yeah, you're also right. If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is is a key form of resistance. And yeah, like, yeah, it's your point, it's, yeah, the getting making that the alternative energy now is the way to yeah harness, harness to get the power back. Great resistance.
00:45:33
Speaker
It's certainly a part of it. nothing Nothing by itself solves the immense problems that we face. But this is the most interesting wild card in the deck at the moment, I think.
00:45:44
Speaker
And i I think when especially when you're, you know, um as deep in the hole as we are, wild cards are something to to cherish. Yeah, in there, ah one thing, like several of the numbers that you kind of bring up throughout the book that really blew me away. One is, you know, ah in chapter five, ah can the poor afford and being, you know, be a poor countries or just, you know, but yeah like 80% of human beings live in countries that are net importers or fossil fuel, which is one of those stats that takes a minute to sink in is as you write. And it's just like, oh yeah, like it's, and and there's the land to do it. You just need to ramp it up and yeah change the. Yeah, absolutely.
00:46:25
Speaker
One of the parts for writing of writing this book that was really interesting, so for me, I'll just say, as I write nonfiction, my goal all the time is to anticipate right where an objection is going to occur in the brain of my reader and deal with it right then, so that the flow is as smooth as possible and people aren't So and I think I'm pretty good off it. But in this case, it was quite explicit at places where I was sort of trying to deal with the objections to all of this because I wanted to understand them.
00:47:00
Speaker
And the one that was most interesting to me was writing and thinking about land and the way that we use it and or fetishize it. Because I think the argument that's often strongest against solar panels, people well, we don't want to use farmland for this, people say in tones of shocked.
00:47:20
Speaker
As it turns out, we do want to use farmland for this because hey We're already using farmland to grow vast amounts of energy. It's half of America's biggest crop, corn, is just turned into ethanol.
00:47:37
Speaker
And B, that's insanely inefficient process. I think my favorite statistic in the whole book might have been standing with this guy in the cornfield in Illinois and he's saying, well, if I take this acre and grow ethanol on it, that's enough ethanol to take my Ford F-150 25,000 miles.
00:47:58
Speaker
But if i use it same same acre with solar panels on it in the same year, it'll produce enough electricity to take my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV model of the same truck, not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles.
00:48:17
Speaker
um And to me, that sort of drove home the incredible efficiency of these technologies. But then the other part was just standing there noticing that they were only using half the field, i.e. there were big rows between these panels.
00:48:31
Speaker
And the human ingenuity is now hard at work figuring out how you use that for what we're inelegantly calling agrovoltaics.
00:48:41
Speaker
It was a beautiful part of the story. And it's a beautiful part of the story, especially if you're kind of thinking in the broadest terms. So for what I came to understand is that On an overheating planet, shade is actually a valuable commodity.
00:49:02
Speaker
um And now we have a new way of producing shade at the same time that we're producing clean electricity, and we can leverage that shade to do all kinds of things. European wine Growers are finding that their grape yields go up 60% in these fields.
00:49:20
Speaker
In Vermont, we're figuring out how to lure back extirpated insects by planting native species of wildflower. And in return, those insects are increasing fruit set on the surrounding orchards by 40%.
00:49:37
Speaker
Just the idea that the world can be a much more interesting place than it is appeals immensely to me, you know. Yeah, and I think you know some some of the people who are, you say, haters of this technology or even environmentalists to say, well well, what about all the mining of the lithium and everything? And you know you write, all the refined metals needed to reach net zero by 2050 will add up to less than less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone. And you have us read that sentence again because it gives you a sense of
00:50:09
Speaker
ah Just the yeah the the vast amount of coal being harvested and the argument to keep mining lithium. It's like, no, it doesn't make sense. and this is quite This is why journalism is important and the stress on just fact, because people make assumptions and claims and they're easy to do. They say, well, we have to go mine lithium. People tell me, oh, you have to go mine lithium. And that's, yes, true. It is but hard and dirty business just like any mining is.
00:50:38
Speaker
So let's take your point that there's no such thing as a free lunch, but then let's explore the question of whether there are more and less expensive lunches. And clearly there are, and clearly you want to pay for pay less the same thing.
00:50:55
Speaker
The idea that we can produce the energy we need at a fraction of the environmental disruption and at the same moment, save the 9 million people a year who die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel, almost all of them poor, and at the same time, reduce the power of the oligarchs who get to control the scarce supply of hoarded reserves of fossil fuel. by replacing them with something that's available to everyone everywhere.
00:51:26
Speaker
mean, that just all strikes me as fascinating, but it all derives from a series of fact you know yeah well bill it it's such a yeah it it is an optimistic book you know from someone who they has the the groove of dark realism and this is uh turning our attention to the daytime sun as you daytime sky as you say towards the end it's uh it is an ah optimistic and i'm definitely energized in a sense to try to maybe get solar panels on our roof if we can afford it i don't know but the tax credits are running out for homeowners at the end of the year yeah
00:52:01
Speaker
So got to hustle. um but But as I bring these conversations down for a landing, Bill, I always just love asking the guests for a recommendation for the listeners. And that's just anything that's like making you happy that you want to just ah share with the listeners.
00:52:16
Speaker
Oh, so many things to choose from. I'll tell you what really makes me happy every day that I go check in at. The website that we've built for Sunday, which is at sunday.earth, has, among other things,
00:52:32
Speaker
So the logo that we have is this half a sun in black, but we have this great drawing tool that allows people to complete it online. And there are now tens of thousands of these things in the global gallery part of it. And it's just a constant reminder of people's sense of beauty and creativity.
00:52:52
Speaker
yeah And so I go check it more mornings than not. And I think people, if they do, will get a just kick out of seeing what people are doing. So Sunday dot earth.
00:53:02
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. And Eugene's got a Sunday event in, you know, a over the weekend, September 19th through the 21st in that ballpark. And yeah, it'll be, yeah, really ah activating, inspiring day. So, you know, thank you for ah bringing more and increased attention to this ah very, very important issue, Bill. So, and thank you so much for the work.
00:53:25
Speaker
Well, and thank you for the huge library of fascinating conversations. It's really good that someone's keeping track of, you know, what's going on and what a pleasure to get to be a little part of it.
00:53:43
Speaker
Oh, I'm just rolling recording my intro right into my outro. What is that? I'm not even doing the magic trick here. Yes. Awesome. Isn't this great? Wasn't that awesome? Hearing Bill McKibben talk about stuff.
00:53:54
Speaker
Talk about the climate. Is time at the New Yorker. Can you imagine David Remick just giving you a call and be like, hey, I'd like to hire you. At 45 years old, I am unhireable. I can't even get and editor at a Eugene news organization to like and email me back after I submitted an application.
00:54:15
Speaker
Yeah. Am I that shitty? I guess so. Here comes the son's name of the book. BillMcKibbin.com is there where you can go to learn more about him.
00:54:27
Speaker
As always, thanks to you for listening. Thanks to Bill for coming on the show. Pretty great. Get a weird meandering parting shot here. just Just go with it, alright?
00:54:38
Speaker
i mean, you do anyway. Just go with it. So most of my journal entries of late are like chastising and beating the shit out of myself for not sticking to my caloric intervention, which is to say putting myself in that deficit so that I might lose 20 or so pounds of fat. I need to lose to keep my blood pressure in check and my clothes relatively comfortable. And my joints a little less banged up.
00:55:00
Speaker
You know, my plan is to cut 300 a day for my typical calorie input. I i was able to cut 300 for my breakfast, which really i wasn't able. I didn't even really feel that. So that was good.
00:55:12
Speaker
And then just burn 300 a day, which it really isn't that much. So keeping everything else constant, I should drop about half a pound to a pound a week. I'm willing to play the long game, 20 to 40 weeks to get this done right.
00:55:25
Speaker
It seems so fucking stupid and silly to worry about shit like this when there's so much pain and hurt in the world, but shit, here we are. but and And just now, against my better judgment, I ate two bananas and with at least one tablespoon of almond butter.
00:55:39
Speaker
This wasn't in the plant, and I was feeling the munchies, and I work from home. So I have my entire fridge and pantry at my fingertips when I'm feeling stressed or bored or in the need of procrastination, which is quite often.
00:55:53
Speaker
Point being, I have bad habits that are counter to my goal. which makes me feel guilt and shame, which compounds, usually, into a feeling of haplessness that causes me to say, fuck it, and drink six IPAs.
00:56:05
Speaker
Not midday. Most days. Does this story have a point, B.O.? Little and often over the long haul, a quote from the strength coach Dan John goes both ways in our health or our writing. There we go. There it is.
00:56:20
Speaker
Nobody got out of shape overnight. It was probably 10 years. An injury here, a health scare there, an illness in the family over there. You don't write a book in a week.
00:56:31
Speaker
It's a page at a time, maybe over months and years, and suddenly there it is. But without good habits that keep you on track, it's easy to get discouraged. And then all we're doing is losing time.
00:56:42
Speaker
And I'm 45 years old. I'm not exactly old, but I'm certainly not objectively young anymore. If I were a betting man, I'd put my life expectancy probably at 75, which means I only have like 30 years remaining, which means maybe 20 to 25 of those will be enjoyable, perhaps.
00:56:59
Speaker
That I find terrifying to the point of paralysis. But Father Time and his mistress, the Grim Reaper, aren't waiting around for anyone. I guess what I'm trying to say is the quicker we slash I can better or better form or form better. There you go.
00:57:15
Speaker
Habits in the direction we say we want to go, the less time we'll waste. Like, dude, one fucking banana and a teaspoon of almond butter or peanut butter is plenty.
00:57:28
Speaker
I have no control with food. I'm like the cookie monster, only all the fucking shit like goes into my mouth. And holy fucking shit, wouldn't you know, and one of my awful habits is ah I've checked my phone, I just did it.
00:57:42
Speaker
Instead of focusing, like I should, ah the bullet journal app right there on my home screen, it fed me this quote from Mark Twain that said, the secret to getting ahead is getting started. And the secret once getting started is doing a little every day, born by our habits in the direction of our goals.
00:57:59
Speaker
I live in fear of future regret and I can see them coming, man. Like I can see the regrets down the road. I see myself in my deathbed and I can quote the regrets coming. I can, I see it.
00:58:12
Speaker
I almost feel like I can't stop the regrets from coming because I don't know. It's in my power to stop now. But what is it? that Fear, comfort, fear of failure, fear fear of success.
00:58:27
Speaker
success At book talks, I talk i tell people that Prefontaine crammed a lot of life into 24 years. It's amazing that he died so young, seeing what he accomplished in such a short amount of time.
00:58:40
Speaker
Never wasted time. i tell i tell them at book talks, I tell people there, that I've wasted more time than he had alive. And it gets a laugh, um but I'm not entirely kidding.
00:58:53
Speaker
If you ever wonder how you connect the dots from eating too many bananas to your greatest deathbed fear, I just gave you a masterclass. Okay? So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do interviews, see