Bill McKibben on Climate Activism in the Age of Trump 2.0

The Inflation Reduction Act [the Biden administration’s signature climate law] represented the first significant act by the U.S. Congress to deal with climate science. It was a far from perfect bill, but powerful in many ways. So powerful that the fossil fuel industry needed to do what it could to shut it down and to shut down the energy transition to the extent that it could. And hence, the oil industry spent unprecedented sums of money — the number I saw most recently was $455 million — on the last election cycle.

I’d say the two slight saving graces are, one, as the U.S. retreats from leadership here, there are others, especially the Chinese, who have been stepping up to fill this vacuum. I have a lot of problems with the Chinese government and don’t particularly look forward to their hegemony. But on issues around energy, they’ve been more responsible than we have and built out most of the world’s clean energy at this point.

And the second saving grace is that though they can delay this energy transition, they can’t stop it. It’s rooted in the simple fact that we now live on a planet, as of the last three or four years, where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that won’t change. So, Americans may be denied some of the fruits of that technological revolution, and it will be delayed in ways that make the climate crisis far worse, but it’s not as if [the Trump administration] has complete control of this situation.

Kolbert: The moratorium that the Biden administration put on export permits for liquefied natural gas was a big climate win. You were very much a part of that. But now Trump seems to be using the threat of tariffs to get countries to increase their liquefied gas imports from the U.S.

McKibben: This scares me a ton. It’s one thing for us to derail our own energy future, and it’s another to try and derail everybody else with what is essentially a shakedown. My guess is that it’ll work in the short run, and it’ll backfire in the long run. Europeans have figured out in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine that it was foolish to be dependent on the good graces of Vladimir Putin for their energy supply. Anyone who puts themselves more under the thumb of Donald Trump than they need to is a fool.

Kolbert: You’ve indicated you are worried about civil disobedience as a form of climate activism, because instead of looking at a night in jail, people might now be looking at a year or more of jail, as some activists in the U.K. have gotten.

McKibben: I think that we need to continue to use all the tools that we have, and we will. But I do think that at the moment civil disobedience of the sort that we’ve been doing a lot of in recent years is unlikely to be particularly effective. I think that the Trump-MAGA world welcomes resistance of that kind. They like those kinds of fights. It energizes them. They’re cruel, and cruelty really is their kink in a lot of ways.

We’re gearing up to do this big national day of action in September. It’s called Sun Day. I think it’s going to be a huge celebration of possibility. And I think that that’s more dangerous right now to the MAGA agenda. They depend on people staying in a fearful crouch, convinced that whatever they have is under threat from somebody. And the idea of Sun Day, instead, is that we’re on the edge of this extraordinary possibility for solar. I’m excited about figuring out how we do huge parades of e-bikes, and inaugurate dozens of community solar farms, and have thousands of Americans opening their homes so their neighbors can see their heat pumps. And get millions of people who already have solar panels to put a green light in the window that night to tell everybody that they’re powered by the sun.

I sense in everyone’s despair and upset — all of which is completely justified and correct — a sort of hunger for some kind of joyful possibility, for something to rally around as well as stuff to rally against.

Kolbert: The Inflation Reduction Act put billions of dollars towards clean energy manufacturing. So far something like 80 percent of the manufacturing investments spurred on by the law have gone to red states. Do you see any payoff for that with support for clean energy in those states?

McKibben: I don’t know. The laws of normal political gravity in America don’t seem to be operating. That’s why we’re doing the Sun Day thing. We need to build again, and maybe from the ground up, a real constituency demanding action. And it’s got to include workers at that factory. It’s got to include solar panel installers. It’s got to include local officials who would like to keep energy money close to home instead of sending it off to Saudi Arabia.

Kolbert: There’s some hope that climate action will continue at the state and local level. Do you see that happening?

McKibben: There are lots and lots of things that localities can do to make things much easier. For example, it costs about three times as much to put solar on your roof in this country as it does in Europe or Australia. The panels are the same price. The soft costs, which are mostly around permitting and marketing, are much, much higher because we have this endless welter of regulations that gets in the way of what should be a very simple act: just giving someone a permit, if they should even require one, to put a solar panel, a safe thing, on their roof. And so those are the kinds of barriers that we can continue to knock away in blue states and blue cities and really in some red states.

Last year in Germany, a million and a half people put solar panels on their balconies of their apartments. And in many cases, those were supplying 20 percent of the electricity they used. You can’t do that in this country. You can’t go to IKEA the way you can in Germany and just buy a solar panel and hang it from your balcony and plug it in. It’s illegal. And those are the kind of things that can and should shift.

Kolbert: One of the things that the new administration really has taken a sledgehammer to is every environmental justice program.

McKibben: [Environmental justice] manages to combine the things they hate most in the world: clean energy and sensitivity to American history. It’s truly terrible. Just in terms of sheer honesty, we need to keep reckoning with the fact that the people who’ve done the least to cause the problems that we face suffer the most from them, here and around the world. And because these are people who are paying a huge percentage of their income for energy, in a rational world, that’s where we’d be concentrating this stuff first.

Kolbert: We also seem to be looking at the government potentially not doing any climate research under Trump.

McKibben: At this point we’ll be very lucky if we keep operating the observatory at Mauna Loa [in Hawaii, which measures global carbon dioxide levels]. It has provided the single most important scientific instrument in the history of the world. But if there’s any good news in this, it’s that most of the really crucial science has been done. It’s certainly a kick in the teeth to watch what’s going to happen at NOAA and every place else. But my prediction is that the­­ Chinese will pick up a lot of this slack, because they’ve understood that this is their ticket to some kind of moral high ground on this planet.

Kolbert: The U.S. has always had an uneven role in global climate negotiations, waffling in and out. But this time it feels different.

McKibben: You can make an argument that it might not be the worst thing in the world to have the U.S. out of the way, because we’re the reason that Kyoto didn’t work, we’re a big part of the reason that Copenhagen didn’t work, just on and on and on. And that’s a kick in the teeth because America is really where we learned about the climate crisis — it was from great research. And America is where the first wind turbine and the first solar cells and other key things came from. But, as I say, the slight silver lining to that cloud is we’ve been in many ways a stumbling block as much as a boost to getting anything done.

Kolbert: I’m wondering if you are feeling at all hopeful right now.

McKibben: In a world where there are a lot of bad things going on, the one overwhelming good thing is this sudden emergence of this possibility [of clean energy]— a possibility that I think most people haven’t fully recognized yet. Even those of us who want it still refer to it as alternative energy, and that’s no longer the truth. It’s not the Whole Foods of energy, pricey and a bit nice. It’s the Costco of energy: cheap, available in bulk on the shelf, ready to go.

Our species is now fully capable, in short order, of moving from an energy source that’s concentrated in a few hands in a few places to one that’s diffuse and ubiquitous, available everywhere. And I think that’s the most subversive and liberating possibility that we really have at the moment on this planet. And in the places that have started to do the work, we get the sense of what’s possible.

Kolbert: What are some of those places?

McKibben: California last year used 25 percent less natural gas than it did the year before to generate electricity. They reached a tipping point. They have enough batteries and enough solar panels out there that day after day they’re supplying more than 100 percent of their electricity renewably. And Texas is now putting up clean energy faster than California.

Pakistanis over the last three years imported enough solar panels to build out the equivalent of half their national electric grid. Truly amazing what happened inside of 12 months just because they had access to a lot of cheap Chinese solar panels. The same thing seems to be happening in parts of southern Africa.

And so those numbers — 25 percent less fossil fuel in a year — those are numbers big enough to take a bite out of the 3 degrees Celsius [of warming] that we’re aimed at right now. And I think this is the only way forward. I do not think humans are going to change their behaviors in large numbers in short order in ways that will reduce our emissions. I think this is the path.