( AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin )
Bill McKibben, environmental activist, founder of Third Act and author of many books, most recently, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened (Henry Holt and Co., 2022), talks about the climate bill that Sen. Manchin now supports -- what's in it and its impact.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, our climate story of the week this week we'll take a closer look at a confusing duality in the big new climate bill that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has now agreed to vote yes on. The duality is that the bill is being hailed as potentially transformative for emission reductions in the United States and yet it also contains provisions to encourage more production of fossil fuels. What? Here's Senator mention on that, on NBC's meet the press on Sunday.
Senator Joe Manchin: If you're producing more and have more supply, and that supply drives basically satisfies demand and then the prices come down because there's more people shopping for the products. That's all that's capitalism. That's who we are.
Brian Lehrer: Which is why the bill is called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, not the Climate Protection Act of 2022. Let's take a closer look with none other than Bill McKibben, longtime climate activist co-founder of the climate-focused environmental group, 350.org. A Middlebury college professor, and a New Yorker magazine staff writer. His new article on The New Yorker site says the bill reflects the growing strength of the environmental movement, but also the lingering influence of the fossil fuel industry. Bill, thanks for coming on for this. Always good to have you welcome back to WNYC.
Bill McKibben: Always a pleasure to be with you friend.
Brian Lehrer: We'll get to some of the contradictions or fossil fuel protections in the bill, but you write that taken as a whole. The bill is a triumph. Why do you use the word triumph?
Bill McKibben: In the first place it's mere existence, the US Congress found out before anybody else about climate change, Jim Hanson from his office at 110th Broadway in the 1980s, figured out what was going on in the planet's climate. In 1988, he went to the US Congress to tell them and that day in June of 1988 was the launch of the public phase of the global warming era.
The first time that really all of us found out what was happening in the intervening, what 34 years that US Congress has done precisely nothing about climate change. There's never been a major climate bill. The two big attempts in the past one in the 1990s, the other in 2009 and 2010 to pass major legislation, both failed abysmal. This one looked like it was going to fail too.
A couple of weeks ago, almost everybody had given it up for dead, but some credit here to Chuck Schumer and some credit here to the extraordinary environmental advocates at the sunrise movement, people kept pushing and this compromise deal has emerged. It is, as you say, very far from perfect, but it does represent a huge chunk of money going directly where we need it to renewable energy, to building out sun and wind and batteries. To making buildings more efficient, to putting up EV chargers, basically to providing the bones, to build out what's now the cheapest and cleanest form of power on earth through renewable energy.
Brian Lehrer: Of course, we don't actually know if this bill is going to pass yet. Senator Sinema from Arizona has yet to declare, but you're right, that the bill contains hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and grants for the transition to solar and wind power, electric vehicles, efficient, home heating, and more. Do you know yet if our listeners will be able to take advantage of any of those grants or tax credits as individuals, or if these are all incentives for corporations and governments to transition production to more sustainable fuel sources?
Bill McKibben: Some of it's for individuals too, for instance, there's a lot about tax credits for and rebates for electric vehicles, and some of it's very arcane. Some of it you get more rebates depending on where the vehicle was made and where the ingredients in the battery came from and on and on and on. The policy wants who worked on this well, they were wonkish and the hope is, and what all the predictions that anyone's published over the last few days are that it would allow the US to reduce its emissions by the end of the decade, about 40% below what they were in 2005. It's not as much as we need to do, but it's a lot more than we would be doing otherwise
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we welcome your questions or comments on our climate story of the week with the legendary Bill McKibben today on the duality of the triumph of the climate provisions in the inflation reduction bill that may now pass Congress. Now that Senator Joe Manchin has signed on and the lingering influence of the fossil fuel industry in the bill, 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692, or tweet your comment or question @BrianLehrer.
Now, let's get to some of the fossil fuel protections in the bill. You write, for example, that the bill penalizes oil and gas companies that fail to cut methane emissions, but it doesn't actually pressure energy utilities to abandon coal and gas. Can you explain that duality further what the difference is between those two things?
Bill McKibben: Originally this bill, which has gone through a lot of incarnations, it started out at some level as the green new deal, and then it became build back better. Now, it's shrunk down to the inflation reduction act, but in its original form, as proposed by Biden, a part of it was called the clean energy performance plan. It would've mandated utilities to use renewable energy in ever increasing amounts. If they didn't, then they would've had to pay penalties.
There was a stick originally in this, but Joe Manchin took that out a year ago and said all I want are carrots. Since they had no other 50th vote, out went the stick, and in came the carrots in the form of all these tax credits and things. They won't be as effective as it would've been. Again, the best estimate is that they will allow pretty dramatic reductions in emissions in pretty short periods of time.
I think in the deeper sense, the real hope here is that as we build out renewable energy, it gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. At the moment each time we double the say installed capacity of solar power, the cost drops another 30%. I think the hope is that once this virtuous cycle gets going full steam, it'll have a real snowball effect. That's the hope anyway, it's going to take tons of vigilance and it's also going to take people figuring out other ways to stand up to the fossil fuel industry.
Because as you point out, Manchin was able to negotiate on their behalf a number of incredibly stupid provisions. He's taken more money from the fossil fuel industry than anybody else in DC and man, they got their money's worth back in lots of the giveaways and gifts in this bill.
Brian Lehrer: You also cite that for the next decade under this bill, no offshore wind lease can be sold unless an offshore oil and gas lease of a certain size has been sold in the previous year.
Bill McKibben: I think actually it has until unless an offshore gas lease has been offered in the previous year.
Brian Lehrer: Offered. What does that mean?
Bill McKibben: The hope is increasingly that those offers will go untaken. You may recall, at the end of the Trump years, he tried very hard to rush through in the last weeks in office, for instance, the right to drill in the Arctic national wildlife refuge. When they put it up for auction, nobody bid because environmental movements and indigenous people had managed to make that prospect so toxic that no driller and no bank or whatever was willing to go in and say, "We're going to be the ones that rip up the Arctic wildlife refuge for oil." We've obviously got to do that same work with place after place around the world.
In fact, that was some of the work that we were about yesterday in New York City with comptroller Brad Lander who is beginning to figure out how to mobilize the city's vast portfolio of funds to put pressure on precisely those banks and asset managers to stop fossil fuel expansion. We may not be able to do that in the Senate because we don't have the votes, but we may be able to do it on wall street because well, because blue states and blue cities have a lot of money, and if it's pointed in the right direction, it could be really valuable.
Brian Lehrer: Using those huge pension funds to put pressure on corporate America to do the right thing by deciding some social standards for those investments, you write that the political trade-off of this whole bill is worth it in carbon terms but it will set a problematic example around the world. What's the international implication here?
Bill McKibben: There's two international implications, the good one. It's really important is that the US is back as a actual player. Maybe even a leader in the climate fight. This was supposed to happen a year ago. You'll remember there was this huge climate conference in Glasgow and as the way, the script was written build back better was supposed to pass last fall.
Then Joe Biden would fly to Glasgow with this thing in his back pocket and slam it down on the table and say Russia, China, India, how do you like them apples? Match us. Instead, it didn't pass last year. Biden showed up with nothing. That's the biggest reason that conference just fizzled this year's version which is set for November in Egypt will be more interesting than it would otherwise have been thanks to this new development but our insistence that we're going to go on, Manchin's insistence that the US has to go on offering up leases for new oil and stuff will just people around the world are going to say if the US can do that why can't we?
The example I used in that New Yorker piece was Congo which last week the Democratic Republic of Congo announced that they were going to offer drilling rights across the rainforest the second biggest rainforest on earth. This is insane not only does it produce lots more oil to add carbon to the atmosphere it cuts down one of the biggest sinks for carbon on the planet.
It's like not only adding fuel to the fire it's like chopping the fire hose in half, but how are we going to tell the Congolese not to do this? The average Congolese produces about one 500 as much carbon pollution is the average American. Yet if we can't reign in our appetite to expand this industry it's a little much to ask that they do. There's endless more work to be done here no doubt.
Brian Lehrer: In that New Yorker piece in your reference to the Congo, you quote Congo's long-time climate representative telling I guess, was The New York Times last month that his priority is fighting poverty not to save the planet. I wonder if you'd reflect on that for a second as a global tension between worthy goals, anti-climate change and anti-poverty and if it's different you think in the affluent United States than it is in Congo obviously it's different.
The tension even here is usually framed as between long term climate protection which people consider important and short term economic pain, like inflation at the gas pumps, which is real economic pain. Does the Manchin-supported bill strike a compassionate balance or how would you frame it?
Bill McKibben: Here's how I'd think about it. First of all, look, when one talks about poverty in places like the Congo, the numbers are so incredible that it's hard for us to even imagine what that means. The per capita income is a hundredth of hours. We're talking absolute and dire poverty but the best way as everyone has now figured out to deal with that is not to burn more fossil fuel A that just enriches a few elites in these countries.
If you look across Africa you see case after case of how it impoverishes even further the whole of the country, but B renewable energy is what offers a real way out. I wrote a piece for the New Yorker a couple of years ago spent a lot of time across both west and east Africa watching as solar powers now become cheap enough that it can be deployed to start bringing energy for the first time to the billion people around this planet who are still without electricity still off the grid.
Not only does it provide power for them doing it that way also make sure that people avoid the health effects that come with combustion. That BIG Study last year demonstrated that just breathing the particulates from burning coal and gas and oil kills 9 million people a year on this planet. That's more than COVID, that's more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, war, terrorism combined. The level of human development that will go with clean renewable energy is remarkable.
It allows us to think optimistically for once about the future but we've to get there fast. This bill helps in the context of the United States or the whole world. Look going to renewable energy fast saves us huge amounts of money. Think about it for a moment. If you power your civilization by burning gas or coal, well every day you burn up the gas and coal and you've got to go find some more and pay for it.
That costs a lot. If you power your civilization with sun and wind. It costs some money to put up the wind turbine or the solar panel but once you've done it well, the sun delivers the energy for free every morning when it rises above the horizon. That's why the economists say that it would save us trillions and tens of trillions of dollars to rapidly move to a renewable energy economy. It's also why Exxon at all fight it so hard, from their point of view Brian, that's the stupidest business model on earth. The sun delivering energy for free, who would want that, not someone who owns an oil well or a coal mine that's for sure.
Brian Lehrer: Maybe the sun can patent itself. We have a few more minutes on our climate story of the week on The Brian Lehrer Show for this week with Bill McKibben from the climate protection group 350.org. He's a New Yorker staff writer where he wrote in the last few days about the dualities in the bill that looks like will pass the Senate now with Joe Manchin's backing the duality between the triumph of the climate provisions that are in the bill and the protections for the fossil fuel industry that are also explicitly in the bill. 212-433-WNYC. Tristan in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi Tristan. Thanks for calling in.
Tristan: Hi, thanks for having me. I had a question about this news that broke yesterday about a side legislation that got Joe Manchin over that would expedite oil and gas projects and would specifically expedite a project in West Virginia for a new gas pipeline and just how that fits into this pros, cons of this bill. Just the general, what feels a little bit just free giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.
Bill McKibben: They absolutely are free giveaways Tristan and the mountain valley pipeline seems to have been Manchin's pound of fleshier or one of them and they're gross. That's what happens when you have a balance of power like we have. The balance of power has gotten better between the climate movement and the fossil fuel industry. That's why there's a bill of any kind, instead of nothing we've had for 34 years but the balance of power isn't strong enough to do all the things we should be doing.
That's why they're still able to get lots of gifts and giveaways. They're very strong. They own one of our political parties not a single Republican Senator would vote for this thing. They own enough of Joe Manchin that they've been using him as their proxy in this fable. That's just how it works and it's why it was so important yesterday to have Brad Lander come out and say not only was New York going to use its power, its money power to try and stand up to fossil fuel expansion, but he was going to try and enlist treasurers and comptrollers from other parts of the country.
This is really important because that may be a way that we're able to stand up to some of these projects even the ones that Manchin has managed to get into this bill.
Brian Lehrer: Tristan, thanks for the call. Now this is the inflation reduction act we should remember. We played that Joe Manchin clip at the beginning arguing it will bring down energy prices by getting more energy into production more quickly. Is any of that from a projected increase in supply of renewables in the short term not just supply of fossil fuels in the short term?
Bill McKibben: That's the actual inflation reduction that it produces will come precisely because renewable energy's cheaper than fossil energy. If you get more of it should drive down the total price of energy. That's the real hope, going and building out some new oil field over the next 5 years someplace isn't going to bring down the price of gas at the moment.
What will bring down the price of energy is rapid expansion of renewables, because it's so much cheaper. Look we're at a moment when it's actually possible to imagine that our planet's 200,000-year career of our species 200,000-year career of setting stuff on fire could come to an end, We now know how to take full advantage of this large ball of burning gas that the good Lord hug 93 million miles up in the sky. If we do that, then the future looks brighter than it did few days ago.
Brian Lehrer: Nick in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Bill McKibben. Hi, Nick.
Nick: Hi. I don't know if Bill McKibben can shed light on this. I was just wondering why fossil fuel companies who clearly have the means to do so haven't invested in alternative energies only because it takes a certain technology to transform solar and hydro and wind into electricity and, more practical things that we use. Why don't these companies take it?
Bill McKibben: It's the perfect question, Nick. Especially since we now know from great investigative reporting, companies like Exxon knew all about climate change back in the 1980s. They could have been, stolen a march on everyone, and been the pioneers here, but the reason they didn't has been made pretty clear over time. In fact, their executives have said it.
You can make money putting up solar wind power, and they'll plenty of people will become millionaires and billionaires doing it. You can't make the same kind of money that you can from fossil fuel, just for the reason that I said before, that the sun delivers it for free. Instead of you having to write a check to Exxon, month after month, your whole life. That's why they fought so hard to keep it from happening.
There was a study that came out last week that showed that over the last 50 years, the fossil fuel industry has made $3 billion a day in profit. It's been the most profitable business. It's writing a boom right now, because Vladimir Putin with whom most of the big energy companies have done business quite happily, for many years, has with his barbarity driven up the price of fossil fuel, so they're getting a temporary boom. With any luck, it'll be the last boom that they'll ever get like that.
That's why they not only didn't invest in stuff, it's why they spent 30 years funding a massive effort to make sure no one else did, to deny climate and to keep us from making these kinds of shifts. It's a truly tragic story. We wouldn't be in a completely different place. Brian was joking about it earlier, if there was some way for Exxon to own the sun, they probably would have done this and maybe we'd be further ahead.
The good news now is Exxon doesn't own the sun and so when we build out renewable energy, nobody, not Vladimir Putin, not the king of Saudi Arabia, not the Koch brothers, not anybody will be able to keep the sun from shining or the wind from blowing.
Brian Lehrer: You can't patent the sun, but there is a solar panel industry and otherwise, the solar power industry, there is a wind power industry, somebody has to make the windmills and the turbines and all of this. I think the caller's question even still applies, and for all I know, because I haven't looked into it, the major fossil fuel companies who probably see themselves as energy producers, are investing in these things so they can have all the means of production.
Bill McKibben: They're not really they're investing tiny, tiny percentages of their CapEx 1% or 2%. Mostly, they're just continuing to do what they know best because they cannot make the same return. They can't make as much money. Their decision has been, we will cling to our existing business model as long as possible. If you look back through history, it's pretty rare for incumbent industries to be the ones that lead you into the next technology.
It wasn't the guys who made carriages for horses that figured out how to make cars. That's because people cling to their old ways of doing things. Meanwhile, sharp-eyed young entrepreneurs are figuring out how to bring us what comes next. There are lots of them, and this bill will help them. That's the best argument for it. It'll provide them with some of the capital they need to take on these behemoths of-- you could almost literally call them dinosaurs and so that's part of what they're digging up to burn.
Brian Lehrer: One more call Bernadine in Garden City. You're on WNYC with Bill McKibben on our climate story of the week. Hi, Bernadine.
Bernadine: Hello, big fan of you, Bill, and of you Brian as well. Bill, I recently read your book review in the New York Review of Books of Griffin's book, Electrify. In it, you mentioned that he is not for the development of additional nuclear power plants. I'm wondering where you stand on that we've been talking about fossil and renewables. What about nuclear?
Bill McKibben: Then there's some money in this bill for nuclear power, too. I think we probably should be doing research about new generations of nuclear power. We probably should be keeping open those nuclear power plants that we've already built that we can run safe. My guess is burning, and it's going to be a small part of the answer and the reason has everything to do with money.
The price of renewable energy has plummeted in the last decade. It dropped 90%, over 10 years, but the price of nuclear energy has gone up. That's because it's huge centralized production operations. It's possible that as we move, at some point to small modular reactors, they'll get cheap enough to compete but my guess is that it's that big nuclear reactor in the sky. That's going to be providing most of the energy on which we depend.
Brian Lehrer: We will leave it there, listeners now you know more of what's in the, oh, it's not a climate protection bill. I keep forgetting it's the Inflation Reduction Act that Joe Manchin has now agreed to, but that is a triumph. As Bill McKibben puts it, in his New Yorker magazine article for climate protection. The first major piece of climate legislation in the 34 years since James Hansen of NASA, first blew the whistle in this country or sounded the alarm in this country about the global warming that scientists were seeing coming.
They have finally broken large and they will be bill and other environmentalists say major emission reductions from this bill, even as it contains the duality that we've been talking about. That it also offers protections to the fossil fuel industry. Bill Mckibben is a co-founder of the pro-climate group 350.org, teaches in, Middlebury, and is a New Yorker staff writer where he wrote this up. After the Manchin announcement Bill, we always appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Bill McKibben: A real pleasure, friend. Take care.
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