 Welcome, everybody, to Bridgeside Books. Welcome, Bill McKibbin, back to Bridgeside and back to Waterbury. We're honored to have you join us again here. Thank you, David Goodman, from the Vermont Conversation for joining us again and facilitating our conversation. Without further ado, again, welcome to Bridgeside Books and enjoy the evening. Without further ado, I am going to turn it right on over to you. Great. Well, thank you, Hayata, for having the best independent bookstore in central Vermont, so it really is a precious resource. Let's see, this week I just read that Barnes and Noble, the last of which used to be considered sort of a hemoth of book publishing, the only one after orders went down. It just got bought by a hedge fund. So the world of book publishing independent bookstore is far essential if these are sacred spaces in our communities, spaces for free thinking, for having people who would know the pulse of the community and what you want. So please support this and you support that by getting books that we'll be talking about here, among other books that we have. So this is a special treat on many levels. First of all, we have Bob Farnham here, who is known in the digital world as Bob the Green Guy, or bobthegreenguy.com. And Bob is recording. And you can see the video of this on his website afterwards. So I want to just thank Bob for bringing these words to the world. He's also, I think, Facebook Live-ing. Yes, it's on Facebook Live right now. OK. And the audio that Bob will get will then allow this to become this week's Vermont conversation on WDEV, which is every Wednesday at 1. So there will be an edited version of this conversation. And I want to say what we're going to do here. We'll do our own little conversation here for 40 odd minutes. Turn it over to you all for Q&A. And I do want to remind people that signed, author signed books are the best Father's Day gift going. Just saying that would be this Sunday. So you too can be a hero by handing somebody Bill McKibben's latest signed book. And you can do that tonight. I know Bill will be delighted to sign your books. So Bill doesn't really need much introduction. But for those of you who haven't been paying attention and just came in here thinking that there was free Hedy Topper or something else that would be next door. But Bill is, of course, a internationally renowned author and journalist and co-founder of 350.org, the global climate and environmental group that has really been stirring things up since 2008 and beyond. And he is also his title is the Shuman Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, which is his home base for jetting around the world. So I wanted to start by noting Bill and I have a few things in common. And I figure in the interest of disclosure it's worth noting that. We were college classmates. And we both had our first book published seven years after we graduated college. So the pub date was the year 1989. So Bill's first book was this one, The End of Nature. It's a really lightweight book. It's a guide to where you can see natural highlights. You can see there, I think that's a solar eclipse. I think Bali is where he recommends. This is the best place for viewing those. Well, that's what I hoped, because my first book was also in 1989, and it's a guide to backcountry skiing in New England. And the problem for me is that if the title of Bill's book is correct, if this was really The End of Nature, as he had predicted a month or two before my book came out, then I was pretty hosed. There wasn't going to be any backcountry skiing. And the things that we enjoy doing in nature were going to be an exceedingly perishable commodity. But truth be told, a lot of what I was thinking about as I was exploring the backcountry trails was The End of Nature and talking about it. And I would say that Bill has been right in many of his predictions, but I have to caveat that. He was wrong before he was right. What we have with Bill's new book, Falter, has the human game begun to play itself out, which just came out this spring, is a bookend on the 30-year window that Bill has been writing about. And when I say that he was wrong in 1989, even he did not predict the speed and intensity of what hasn't sued in these 30 years. And I'll just read a little snippet from what he writes here. Bill writes, in the 30 years I've been working on this crisis, we've seen all 20 of the hottest years ever recorded. So far, we have warmed the earth by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, which in a master piece of understatement, the New York Times once described as, quote, a large number for the surface of an entire planet. This is humanity's largest accomplishment. And indeed, the largest thing any one species has ever done on our planet, at least since the days 2 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria, the Green algae, flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, killing off much of the rest of the archaic life on the planet, faster than expected is the watchword of climate scientists. So as I have been reading Falter this past week, the most unsettling thing for me, as somebody who's been reading Bill's writing for, well, longer than 30 years, because I was reading him when he was the editor of the college newspaper. But the unsettling thing is for anyone who thought with the end of nature that he was an alarmist, this was saying the sky was falling. What we now know and he makes convincingly clear is that he has been prescient, which makes everything that he is saying now very hard to ignore. And so on that note, Bill, let's turn to how you start your book. Your book begins with something you call an opening note on hope, in which, and I quote you right, I have no doubt that there are other books that would offer readers a merrier literary experience. So this kind of feels like you had this guilty feeling once you had finished that maybe you were bumming people out too much and you had to go back and stick this thing on the beginning to prepare them. Why did you put an opening note on hope in there? That's a good question. I actually wrote it at the beginning before I wrote the rest of the book because I knew where it was going. The end of the book, the four sections, is actually somewhat hopeful or at least offers some ways out. But as I say in that note at the beginning, authors don't actually owe readers hope. That's not one of the, I mean, they owe them only honesty. But I wanted people to know that the book was being written not from a stance of despair, but from a stance of engagement, of continuing to fight and fight hard, not because we're any longer at a point where we can stop global warming. That's not an option at this point. But we are still in a place where we think we may, if we act with extraordinary nimbleness and speed, be able to slow it down to the point where it doesn't completely cut the knees out from under civilizations. It's an open question whether we still have that capacity or not. We've obviously waited a very long time to get started. And there are an endless number of bad indicators around the planet. Some of them subtle insidious and long term, we've lost 70% of the summer sea ice in the Arctic. Some of them dramatic and immediate. I was just over at Sun Common, and we were reflecting with the staff there on the fact that last fall when those pictures emerged of the California city literally called Paradise, literally turning into hell inside half an hour, it did something to the polling data, among other things around climate change. It sort of shook people up. So that's where we are now. I mean, 30 years ago, I was offering warnings about what was going to happen if we didn't do anything, because the science was, even in 1989, pretty clear. We knew enough about the CO2 molecule to know that it was trapping heat that would otherwise have radiated back out to space. 30 years later, since we didn't do anything, those warnings are now we're offering bulletins on what's happening day in, day out around the planet. It doesn't mean that there aren't some room for optimism or at least room for some things on which to build, but that's the basic place we are now, which means, yeah, it's not. The last time I was here, we had the great, I mean, for me, the enormous fun of, you know, I was talking, I was reading from my last book, this sort of funny little novel set in Vermont with WDEV as its sort of main character, in a sense. And, you know, we were serving up Heddy Topford because it was, you know, and this is not that kind of book. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. It's like me to Heddy Topford, isn't it? Yeah, it appears for different purposes here. You know, there is, I mean, this is the biggest crisis that human beings have ever stumbled into, um, by far. We got, just to end this long answer, let me say that every year at the end of May, we get the high point of CO2 in the atmosphere, that the monitor, the register at the site of Montaloa that was set up in 1959, the CO2 monitor that's been set up by Charles Keeling. So the graph that shows the steady climb in CO2 is called the Keeling Curve. Um, um, at the end of May, there's some, there's enough vegetation is leafing out in the Northern Hemisphere and temporarily sucking up some CO2 that we reached the high point. This year's high point was 414.87 parts per million CO2. That's up to three and a half parts per million from a year ago, which is the second biggest rise we've ever seen. It's scary because it indicates not only that we're continuing to burn lots of coal and gas and oil, but also that acceleration seems to indicate that the planet's forests and oceans are getting less adept at soaking it up, that we've done some fundamental damage to some of those systems that should serve as sinks. So that four hundred and almost 15 parts per million is the highest CO2 on this planet for 10, 15 million years, higher than it's been since the start of primate evolution. The last time it was that high, you know, the level of the oceans rose dozens and dozens of feet so on and so forth. We're in a real fix and hence the, you know, hence some of the urgency of the book and hence the urgency of organizing around it, which we should talk about before we leave. Remind me that we have tasks to assign people before we go. You write that a source of your disquiet can be captured in one word, leverage, explained. So human beings have figured out lots of dumb and bad and whatever things to do from time to time over human history empires have risen and fallen. We've had wars, all these things have been enormously devastating to wherever they were, but they lacked the ability to damage the entire world at once. I mean, the Roman Empire fell and that was a big deal if you were in Rome, but if you were in, lived in the Mayan Empire, you didn't even notice that it had happened. So now in a heavily interconnected world, we're able to change everything at all at once. We've reached a kind of level of operation with that in the course of 30 or 40 years of spewing carbon into the atmosphere, we can fundamentally alter the chemistry of the oceans. That was something that sort of level of leverage has never been available before. And so we can get in big trouble fast. We've, among other things, emitted more carbon dioxide since the end of nature came out 30 years ago than in all of human history before 1989 just to give you some sense of the scale and momentum. So that's one of the things I meant by leverage. The other and even more pressing was that in this case, the leverage not of our kind of size of our society as a whole, but of a very small number of people at the top of it able to really chart the course of history. So 35 and 40 years ago, just as we were beginning to kind of find out about climate change, was also precisely the moment that we were taking a strong political tack in a new direction. So Ronald Reagan emerges to say, government's not the solution, government's the problem. Margaret Thatcher emerges to say, there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women. This is the kind of moment when a kind of iron ran, the libertarian view of the world is suddenly really powerful. And it stayed really powerful for the next 40 years right at the worst possible moment, okay? And one of the things that's resulted has been not only the temperature of the planet has gone up, but so has inequality on the planet in the most dramatic ways, almost cartoonish ways as Bernie is loath to be liable to point out at the drop of a hat that eight, which is people on planet Earth, now control more wealth than the bottom three and a half billion people on the planet. These are both sides of the same phenomenon, you know? The different, the trouble is that the leverage exerted on the climate system is likely to be permanent. We're gonna see the pendulum swing back against inequality. We're already seeing thanks to Bernie, thanks to Liz Warren, thanks to people all around the world who have had enough of it and are fighting back. And eventually they'll triumph maybe even, you know, the pendulum will swing back the other ways it did at the end of the gilded age and whatever else. The problem with climate change is that we had, they were able to exert leverage at just the moment that may have kind of broken the back of this system. The pendulum, when it swings back, won't be able to recover that damage because climate change, unlike all the other political problems we wander into is a timed test. Everything else that we break, every sort of part of the human system that we break causes great problems for ordinary people, you know? We screw up healthcare and people suffer for a decade or two and people die and people have huge bills and lose their houses and all of it unnecessary. But when we're done with that political fantasy dream that we've been living in, it won't be impossible to build a good healthcare system. It will be impossible to rebuild the climate. No one has a plan for how you re-freeze the Arctic once it's melted, you know? And so that leverage exerted by that ideological triumph in one part of the world for one short period of human history is going to be where if there are people around they'll be able to read our moment in history in the geological record hundreds of thousands of years hence. They may not, unless someone has carefully preserved copies of my book, they may not be able to understand that it was Ayn Rand's fault, you know, that it all happened, but they'll be able to tell we will leave behind unfortunately remarkable evidence of our particular disturbed moment. So, well, since you mentioned Ayn Rand a bunch of times, one of the things that I appreciated in the book, many people may not know who Ayn Rand is other than, you know, that she's often mentioned by leading sort of right wing thinkers, be it Paul Ryan, the former speaker to Alan Greenspan, the former Fed Chairman to Donald Trump, a real estate mogul, he once ran for president, but I don't think he could ever win, so. But in any case, this is this cross cutting figure and you take some time and you're going to explain to people, it's not so important who she was, but the ideology and you're dealing here a lot about, you know, what is the ideology that got us in this place? So just explain what the whole Ayn Rand thing is about in this briefly. Well, I mean, she's the patron saint of libertarianism, of this idea that, you know, it became powerful that markets solved all problems, that we should get out of the way of rich people and let them do their thing and everything would work out for the best, so on and so forth. And much more than, I mean, she was important, I mean, arguably the most important, you know, philosopher of our time. Not because her ideas are profound, they're not. Her books might as well be written in crayon, but they were incredibly congenial to the most powerful people in the world. Alan Greenspan, no kidding, the most powerful person in the world for the crucial 20 years, you know, as chairman of the Fed running the biggest economy on the planet. He literally was an Ayn Rand acolyte in the late 50s and early 60s. Every single Saturday night for a decade and a half, he would be in her apartment sitting at her feet as she read the latest chapters that she'd written from the fountain head or Atlas shrug, I guess, the second one. So what's the gist of the philosophy? The gist of the philosophy is greed is good. Don't, you know, altruism is a trap. Look out for your own self and nobody else. You know, the most, and so in all of this actually probably wouldn't, I mean, she was probably particularly effective because she wrote novels as opposed to essays. She did write some essays there entirely and her novels are fairly hard to read, but they have a kind of learned drama to them and they're very simple-minded. So Donald Trump asked what his favorite book was, which I think it's a short list from which to, you know, not really, but he said the fountain head is my favorite book. It has everything in human nature is in there. Well, everything that's in there is captains of big business going on strike to, you know, because they don't like what the peasantry is. Up to, and it has, you know, the captains of industry, they're, you know, the sex scenes are truly terrible. The captains of industry are basically get to, I mean, rape people and that's their, you know, that's their approach to romance and the people that they're raping like it, you know. I mean, so it's no question that why this is Donald Trump's favorite book, you know, but it's truly disturbing in a way to read, but what's disturbing really is just to understand the effect that they and many ideas like them. So, I mean, look, the libertarian impulse in our time is most powerfully represented by the Koch brothers. David Koch ran for vice president on the libertarian party ticket in 1980, 1980, and didn't do very well. And so the lesson that he and his brother took from that was, it was pointless to try and do these third parties, they would just purchase the Republican party instead. And it proved to be one of the great investments of all time, you know, their ownership of a political party is one of the reasons we've done nothing at all about climate change and doing nothing at all about climate change has been quite profitable for the two biggest oil and gas parents in the world, you know. Explain who the Koch brothers are. The Koch brothers are our biggest, but taken together, the two of them are the richest man in the world, I think, or at least in North America now that Jeff Bezos is getting a divorce. So there are roughly 120 billion, 125 billion, the two of them, and they're by far the biggest political players, the network that they've assembled spent close to a billion dollars on the 2016 election cycle, so more than the DNC and the RNC combined. So these two guys are, you know, and they're libertarianism, I mean, if you really wanna understand the best book to read is Jane Maher's remarkable book, Dark Money, which really, that's it, who they are, you probably have a year, it's a classic, classic book. But that's, I mean, they're the exemplars of what happens when this set of ideas so congenial to big money, recruits big money to then go game our political system and it's why Bernie is right to go on and on and on about Citizens United and so on and so forth. I mean, they're a good reason for, and not to be too US centric, but in that 20 and 30 year period, right at the end of the Cold War, America really did determine the course of how the world was going. So, explain what you mean when you write that the size of the board in which we're playing the game is going to get considerably smaller and this may be the single most remarkable fact of our time on Earth. Explain what you mean by the human game that is in the subtitle and the size of the board. By the human game, I just mean everything we do, you know. Dinner and art and commerce and sex and music and all the things that make the human experience so interesting and unique and we take all of that very much for granted but we probably shouldn't. Some part of the book we may or may not want to discuss talks about some of the threats that come from this sort of newly emerging tech threats to this advanced artificial intelligence, human genetic engineering. Things that seem to me, threats sort of like climate change was 30 years ago, emergent, you can see them coming but they're not yet. It would be nice to discuss them now instead of 30 years from now. But, and those things might actually take out, I mean you can construct scenarios where science fiction writers have where they kind of take out the human experience. Climate change probably can't do that or probably can't kill us all off we're an adaptable species but it's going to kill a lot of us off and it's going to do it by shrinking the size of the world that we inhabit. So, you know, today, yesterday in Brownsville, Texas the heat index was 128 degrees. Last summer we had the highest temperatures ever reliably recorded on the planet. It was 129 degrees Fahrenheit, not the heat index just the temperature in a series of cities across Asia and into the Middle East. Some of those places along the Persian Gulf the humidity was high enough that the heat index was close to 160 degrees but human beings can survive at 129 degrees Fahrenheit but only for a little while only for a matter of hours outside because your body can't cool off fast enough to cope with that kind of temperature. So, last summer, you know, it was the highest we've ever recorded but the scientists, the people who make the projections are very clear that on our current path by the middle to latter part of the century those temperatures will be routine. We'll occur dozens if not hundreds of times a year across a vast swath of the planet that includes much of the subcontinent the North China Plain which is home to 400 million people and much of the Middle East. These places will be in essence uninhabitable. You won't be able to go out those days and do the kind of tend to feel or whatever else. That's why the UN estimates that we can expect up to a billion climate refugees in the course of the century to get some sense of what that'll mean. I mean, just think about, well, think about Syria which we understand more and more as an example of climate refugees the deepest drought in the history of what in my school boy days we called the fertile crescent drove a million Syrian farmers off their fields and into cities in the course of a single year. That seemed to be the key factor in destabilizing already brutal and incompetent Assad regime and launching this kind of gruesome civil war. It spun a million, not a billion, a million refugees off into Western Europe and a million refugees turned out to be enough to completely discombobulate the politics of an entire continent. Meanwhile, people have been reading Nick Kristoff in the Times the last couple of weeks have seen good stories about how closely the refugee crisis in Central America is tied to climate disruption there. If you look at a map, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua are the few places on earth where there are big oceans on both sides nearby. Oceans are heating much faster even than land that's causing, in that, in this case, tremendous drought across that part of the world. It's driven maybe a million refugees north to our border. We are all too well aware of how that's helped discombobulate the politics of our continent. So now just multiply all this by a factor of 1,000 for a billion climate refugees and you get some sense of what kind of world our children are going to inhabit if we don't get things under control very soon. So the size of the world on which we play the human game is shrinking because of that. It's obviously shrinking because sea level is now started to kind of an extroval but quick rise. That's gonna mean that most of the coastal cities of the earth are gonna be under real siege. Some of them are not going to make it. I think at this point, the coastal geologists and things are pretty clear that Miami is, there's not a way to defend Miami. It sits on limestone, it's just pretty difficult. Other places will try to defend for a long time but at an enormous cost. So New York City being a great example or Mumbai or just pretty much name it, Shanghai. Places with so much, there's so much money embedded in the buildings and settlement patterns and things that we would be very, very low to abandon them but it's going to get more and more difficult to defend them. So the size of the board on which we play things is shrinking and among other things that's the reason that the Pentagon remains quite focused on this question of climate change as one admirable general after another is said is the kind of biggest threat to stability going forward. They're very well aware of what happens when there are people on the move in those kind of quantities. So it's gonna be a difficult century at best. So you've been doing a lot of traveling and for this book and your other reporting. You went to the Great Barrier Reef, a world famous hotspot of biodiversity. What did you see when you went smart? That's a loaded question. So I was in Australia to do work with 350 in Australia. Australia's huge ongoing battles over plans to open the biggest coal mines in the world and things, these are knockdown drag out fights that are not going great right now. The Australian election came out badly three weeks ago and the fossil fuel industry poured so much money in and it's a particular shame because Australians have a real front row seat to this disaster. Not only have they had epic forest fires and so on, they've been able to watch the Great Barrier Reef which is the largest living structure on planet Earth except that it's about half as living as it was three or four years ago. The rise in temperature of the oceans causes these periodic bleaching events that just go through decimate and not decimated. What's the, what do you call it on the white path of something out, not a tent of something out, destroying. So we went to the place, same crew, same captain to take us out to the place for three years earlier he'd taken David Attenborough to film the most spectacular scene maybe in Blue Planet, the spawning of the coral reef spawn once a year under some kind of lunar influence or something and everything is just, I mean, it's a fertility, I mean, it's a back and all of, you know what I mean, it could not be more remarkable to see and whatever. And so he's like, I think you have to exactly the same place here in the GPS coordinates. We're gonna go to just the same spot. Trap anchor, now you put on the mask and go to, so we went down in that place three years later you might as well be diving on the parking garage. There's nothing left alive. You can still see the forms of some of the corals, these stag horns and, you know, great things but they're dead, completely dead. These ones are not coming back. There's some places where, you know, with a first year's damage or something you can sometimes get some regrowth and things but these places were hit so hard with it there now which is, that's bad. And then he's pretty staggering to look at. It helps you understand when you saw this report from the UN three or four weeks ago that we can expect a million species to go extinct over the next three or four decades. We've already, over the last three or, since you and I graduated from college the number of animals on the planet, not the number of species, the number of animals has been cut by about half. At first that was largely destruction of habitat and over hunting and whatever. At this point it's largely being driven by climate change. So I wish I had better news for you than that, what this stuff. I guess I would say one of the takeaways for me from that is part of our job is to get out and spend a little time in the world around us just bearing witness to it because it's not gonna get any more intact or beautiful than it is at the moment. And so when we have, stretch like we had the last few days, one job is to be out there and seeing it. We can talk about what the other jobs are. Okay, I promise we're gonna get there. But first we have to go back into the abyss. You've spent the last 30 years engaged in a debate for the most part over whether global warming is real. And this gets put to you all the time. And frankly, many of us in conversations we all have, this is put to us in various ways. Well, the climate change has been always changing. You talk about this as a debate in which both sides knew the answer from the start but one side was willing to lie. Where did climate denial come from? Because it wasn't always a thing. And that's an important part of this story and one that I was happy to get to tell. 45 years ago, great investigative reporters at the LA Times, at the Columbia Journalism School and at a Pulitzer Prize winning website called Insight Climate News began doing really remarkable reporting. They found a lot of whistleblowers and they did a lot of archival research in sort of just the document deposits in various places. And what they proved beyond any doubt was that the fossil fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change in the 1980s. If you think about it, it makes great sense. I mean, Exxon's the richest company on earth by far. It has great staff of scientists and its product is carbon. So of course they're gonna find out what's going on and they did find out. Their scientists did a great job, produced forecasts that are almost unkeening in their accuracy about how much and how fast it was gonna work. Some of the best forecasts really from that whole period is they have access to the most resources to do the work. And the executives at places like Exxon believed their scientists. They were used to believing them about everything, you know, they looked for oil, whatever else. They believed them. Exxon started building every drilling rig that it built to compensate for the rise in sea level that they knew was coming. What they didn't do was tell any of the rest of us, just the opposite, beginning in about 1988 or 89, just as the end of nature was coming out and as Jim Henson was testifying at Congress, they put together across this industry, they started investing ultimately billions of dollars in this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation. They went out and hired people who had worked in the tobacco industry during the tobacco wars. They even found people who'd been in the PR firms and things that had smeared Rachel Carson in the 1960s. And they built together this series of front groups and so on to spread what they knew was utter nonsense. But it worked. Any time a propaganda works, if you have enough billions of dollars to put behind it. So we went from 1988 when the Republican president in the United States, George H.W. Bush, before this barrage of propaganda confronted with the science said, well, you know, we must solve the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. And we're ready to go to work. That was good. But you know, fast forward 30 years. So the science has gotten 100% more best than it was in 1988. But because we've been lying about it all the time, the current occupant of the White House operates under the belief that climate change is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese. You know, a point of view, delusional enough that if you were sitting on a public bus next to someone muttering this, you would get up and change your seat, you know? But that's what happens when you're able to apply that kind of money to that kind of lie. And it is the most consequential lie almost certainly in human history because it cost us 30 years. Those were the 30 years that we desperately needed to be hard at work. And if, I mean, the sort of man in the high castle alternate history here is, you know, let's say Jim Henson testifies before Congress in the June of 1988. And that night, Lee Raymond, the CEO of Exxon, goes on the CBS Evening News and says, you know what, our scientists have found the same thing, which seems, by the way, the absolute least that any more ethical system you could imagine would require him to do. If that happens, no one says, oh, Exxon, there are a bunch of climate alarmists, pay them no attention, you know? Everyone says, damn, we've got a problem now. We best go to work. And we go to work for 30 years and we don't, you know, we haven't solved the problem entirely, but by this point probably, because it's a big problem, but we're well on the way there. 30 years ago, there were small things we could have done that would have made a huge difference. A modest price on carbon 30 years ago would have steered the giant ship that is the global economy two or three degrees to starboard. And in the course of 30 years, that would have sailed us into an entirely different ocean, you know? Instead, we not only went full speed ahead, we accelerated in the direction we were going, which means now that to cope with this, we have no easy solutions, no modest steps you can take that make enough difference. We only have very difficult things to do. We have some advantages, you know, the engineers over the last 10 years have done their job and dropped the price of the solar panel 90% or so. So that's an opening. It gives us hope. I was just over at Suncombe and talking to all the staff over there, just saying, thank you. And we need, you know, you're the kind of shock troops of this fight. You're the ones who are on the ground getting the job done. But we're only doing it now, not 30 years ago, is an extraordinary problem. So as you alluded to earlier, as people wind their way on this journey through the climate world, they're going to take a detour into the world of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and gene editing. Why is this part of your concern? Well, as I said before, these are things that also offer a challenge to this ongoing human gain. And we don't have time to discuss it sort of great length. But suffice it to say that one of the reasons that they're interesting to me is not only that they're intrinsically interesting, and they really are, trying to understand a little bit about what it means to, I mean, in October, a Chinese doctor produced the first two designer abilities in human history. The scientific means actually reacted pretty well to that, and we're trying to put a moratorium on this work going forward to understand why and to understand the kind of threats to human meaning that come when you start treating people as products is something I wanted to do in the book. But I also wanted to do it because I was interested in the fact that the sort of linkage between the kind of coax of the world and the fossil fuel barons, that sort of old school libertarians and the new school libertarians of Silicon Valley. These guys are culturally completely different. They're socially progressive, whatever. But Fine Rand is as much a God in Palo Alto as she is in Palm Springs for the folks put together their network every year. The same idea that they should be left alone to do what they want without regulation or oversight for many of the rest of us is pervasive. We're beginning to sense some of the problems, early problems with that as we look at the way that, Facebook and YouTube and stuff have managed to lay waste much of our political life. And it's very good to see a kind of challenge being mounted to it. I think Senator Warren's declaration that it was time to break up the big tech companies, maybe the single most useful idea to come out of this presidential cycle in a lot of ways. But one needs to understand their extraordinary power and where it comes from. And as I say, my hope with all of that only is that we decide to have this conversation about whether or not we want to go down that road in advance before we've actually gone all the way down it instead of 30 years later when we're trying to somehow retreat back down a path we've already been down. So that was the whole thing right in that part of that book. So solutions, you talk about two technologies holding the key to our salvation as a planet and a people. Tell us what they are. I said that conceived of the last part of the book was that there were two great inventions that came out of the 20th century that might really help here. The first is the solar panel. And for obvious reasons, you know. And I was saying before it's uncommon. We have less of a sense of just what a miracle it is because for us it replaces other kinds of power. You know, we're already gonna have electricity. There's a fairly extensive reporting in the fourth section of this book from Africa, stuff I did for the New Yorker and Ghana and the Ivory Coast and things where you're watching solar power provide the first power that people ever get in places where they were never ever, I mean fossil fuel might as well never been discovered and they were never gonna run the grid and give them electricity. All of a sudden it's cheap enough with the solar panel to do it. And then you get a real sense of, you know, that you talk to a doctor who spent his whole career trying to deliver babies without flashlights stuck in his teeth, you know. And now he has a vacative refrigerator that can store vaccine. I mean, that change is so immediate and so palpable and that you really have the sense we lack of what a miracle a solar panel is. You can point a sheet of glass at the sun and out the back flows light and cold and information and the daremity and, you know, it's important. That's hard work scale magic and we should be employing it. I mean, our only task for the 21st century should be to make sure we employ it every possible place it could be, you know, that should be our, what we should be rallying around. That we're not, obviously, has largely the result of the efforts of the fossil fuel industry to keep us from doing it. They obviously hate solar energy for precisely the reason that all everybody else likes it. But once you have the solar panel up on your roof, the sun delivers your energy for free. If you're Exxon, I mean, and you've prospered by making everybody right, you would check every month for 100 years for your energy supply. This is the stupidest business model imaginable. You go free energy, why would we want that? So we will take our riches and stomp it out. In order to make it happen, at the scale we need, we need the other invention of the 20th century that strikes me as crucial and that's the kind of nonviolent social movement. The 20th century saw the suffragettes. It saw Gandhi. It saw Dr. King. It saw a million other people refine, begin to refine this idea that we could build movements that would allow the small and the many to stand up to the mighty and the few, whether it's the British Empire or Exxon. It's, you know, and that's where we now have to turn if we're going to make change in the time that we have. Left to its own devices, the economy will eventually deliver us solar power and wind power because it's free. But the pace at which it happens means that the world that they would power would be fundamentally broken. If we want to do it in the speed that physics requires, we need to make this happen fast and the way to do that is to rethink to mobilize people. That's why we started building 350.org a decade ago. It's done pretty well in certain ways. The decision to fight fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines started with the Keystone pipeline has now blossomed around the world. Everybody fights everything and that really helps. It slows down these guys and every time we slow them down for a month, the engineers drop the price of the solar panel another percent and that changes the spreadsheet and you're that much closer right here to go. We got after their financing hard with this divestment campaign. It's, when we started it, and then we finally kind of dreamed it up and, you know, we hoped it'd be a good idea, but we had no idea it would become the largest anti-corporate campaign in history. We're $8 trillion now with the endowments and portfolios that have divested and it's really begun to tell. Shell described divestment as a material risk to its business in its last annual report. There was a story in political a month ago and Roger Coyle executive was complaining at great length that they could no longer really raise capital for expansion because too many funds had divested from fossil fuel. So that's good. People who helped with that, thank you. It would be the easiest single thing that Vermont could do would be to finally join New York City, Paris, London, whatever in divesting our pension fund from fossil fuel. The fact that we haven't done it so far. There's not enough money in Vermont's pension fund to swing the battle one way or another, but I will just say I find it incredibly mortifying that we haven't and so should everybody else in Vermont. It's that I understand why we're slow to do some things, although I think the legislature is experimenting now with slowness at a pace that's truly embarrassing, but this one's easy on a list of things that people have to do to deal with climate change. Selling your Exxon stock is pretty much on the easy end of the scale, especially since they make more money once you've gotten rid of it than you did anyway. So the foundation of this movement is we've built over the last 10 years and in the last year we've really seen it take off in all kinds of ways. The Green New Deal thing is terrific. The young people who started it on the sunrise movement are almost to a person veterans of the campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns. They graduated, they wanted to know what to do next. They started this sunrise movement thing. They got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on board. They are doing fantastic work, it's a good thing. Some people saw in England the rise of the last few months of this group extinction rebellion. They've shut down with civil disobedience much of Central London for a week and it had a really good effect. British people perhaps tired of talking about Brexit all the time suddenly decided that climate change was the biggest issue. The Tory-led Parliament passed a climate emergency declaration the first of these that any nation has passed which will be a really helpful legal tool with nothing else. Most beautifully has been the rise of these school strikes that Greta Thunberg began last September in Sweden and that have spread around the world now. At the end of the last one Greta who is a remarkable person who I quite like wrote a letter asking adults to please join in. I had some advanced knowledge of this letter so I wrote the response that we had signed when ready to go with about 100 leaders around the world promising that we'll do the first all ages climate strike on Friday September 20th. So wherever you are we need you organizing for that. We need you shutting your stores closing your businesses leaving your retirement community whatever it is you're doing to get out and rally and make some noise. That kind of work is very useful politically changing the zeitgeist really helps and it's also necessary at some level. If for no other reason then there's something somewhat embarrassing about making 14 year olds shoulder most of the burden for dealing with this crisis. If Greta and her crew ask for help we're absolutely obligated to provide it and I think it'll be really good. She's coming to the States in August she'll be here for that day. Some of us will be in New York at the United Nations and then down on Wall Street trying to make as much of it as we can. But we need everything everybody figuring out how to make some noise. Waterbury among them I don't know quite it would be there's going to be some way for Waterbury's great industry craft brewing to figure out how to grind things to a halt for a few hours and make a statement that really tells you know but at any rate it's going to be the next big day in this fight we'll have to do it more than once going forward but the point is disrupting business as usual is precisely what's required because it's business as usual that's the problem we're in the greatest crisis we've probably ever faced and yet we mostly get up every morning and do the same thing we did the day before and so it's no wonder that we don't really solve the greatest crisis that we're facing. You know when our not the first time humans have ever had to face a crisis our parents or grandparents had to deal with fascism in Europe you know and so they had to get on boats and cross the ocean and kill people and get killed you know we don't have to do that we get to do things that are much more life-referring and good but we don't have the option of just not doing anything and not doing anything is to solve decisively with I mean that's what Exxon most desperately wants you to do is nothing let us keep going the way we want it. This commitment that so many activists have made to make the world a better place or save the world including you in the countless volunteer hours and the fact that you've been personally surveilled and harassed by the fossil fuel industry that has set up camp near your house in Ripton only to have some attentive neighbors let them know they're unwelcome I believe I think they'd also have a problem in keeping up with you on the ski trails so that will always be your advantage when you make your big getaway. What gives you hope, Bill? Well, so this is a chance to return to what a really important book that we were discussing classic back country skiing. And, you know, I mean, look, we're incredibly lucky when we get to we have this beautiful world to inhabit at least for the moment and for me it's that's a crucial part of how we keep going and what we do for me is the source of great strength and what fun it was to have an actual close to old school winter this year. Take no snowstorm for granted is my advice. Make full use of it because it's a great pleasure but clearly it is, you know, we're not going to have as much of it at all in the future but what gives me hope is just that there's lots and lots of people coming together to do this work and I don't know whether there'll be enough and I don't know whether there'll be in time and no one knows. This is a different kind of crisis than we've faced in the past because it's almost like a time limit. So Dr. King could always say at the end of the talks always would say, quoting I think from the Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker could say the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. So translated, this may take a while but we're gonna win, all right? The arc of the physical universe is short and it bends toward heat. If we don't win soon, we don't win. So that's, you know, that's the stakes. That's the thing that makes it so hard but it's also the thing that's concentrating people's minds and bringing people into the streets and allowing people to do this work. I feel guilty asking people to disrupt their life even for a day. I feel guilty always when I have to go recruit people to go to jail and so on and so forth. In a rational world, we wouldn't have to do any of this. Scientists gave us the good, concise, blunt warning 30 years ago. In a working world, we would obviously, you know, then gotten to work doing so many other things but ours isn't as rational a world as we would hope and so sometimes we have to do things and that we shouldn't have to do. So you can either, I mean, you can either look at that, you probably should look at it in both ways. It's a burden to have to do this, for all of us to have to do this kind of work but there's also certain way to certain honor for all of us to get to engage in this kind of work, you know? Very few people in the course of a lifetime get to say at any moment, I'm doing the most important thing I could be doing on the world right now. There's nothing I could think of that would be more, well, if you're engaged in this fight then you get to say that and that's, if nothing else, a good place to be. So, David, enormous thanks to you for keeping this conversation literally going in Vermont year after year and you and your whole family keeping it going and many fronts. And many thanks to Bookstore. It's really good again to be here at each side. One of the things I've written a lot about is local economies. I can tell you from having traveled around the country to Bookstores for three decades with communities that took their local Bookstore for granted no longer have a local Bookstore. So don't take it for granted. Friends do not let friends buy their books from Amazon. You know? But mostly just thanks to y'all, I mean, this is, the planet's now running a warble fever. We are, y'all are the antibodies that that fever has mobilized to try and fight off the infection at its root. That doesn't necessarily mean we're gonna win. Sometimes people get fevers and have an infection and all the antibodies rally and they still die, you know? So that's one of the possible outcomes here, okay? But the other one is that we do everything we can and it'll be enough to pass this fight on to the next generation of people. That's probably the best we can hope for at this point, keeping things under control enough that someone else in the future will continue to have some reason and opportunity to fight for them. But that's more than enough reason to fight, you know? That's a useful thing to fight for. So thank you all enormously for doing it. Make sure Bill has time to sign your books, but I did promise that we'd have time for a few questions from the audience that we'll keep it to a few, but let's go over there. There you go. As I understand, climate change is only one of even others that might topple it as far as important things that the world has to deal with. But as I've read the list, they all seem to deal with the fact that we have too many people living on the earth. And I'm wondering why all of these people are talking about climate change. That never seems to be an issue that gets brought up, it's a population control. Well, I from can't be accused of this because I wrote a whole book called Maybe One and Argument for Smaller Families years ago and I'm happy to report that our single child is doing just fine and it's a good thing. But I'm also happy to report, this is a good place, this allows us to be a little optimistic. Population is the most interesting place to think about this. 30 years ago, when Paul Ehrlich was writing the Population Bomb and when we were first thinking about it, it's really closer to 40 years ago now, people thought that there would just be an endless exponential increase of human beings till they just overwhelmed the planet and so on. And it's on no way out. Happily, when people went to work, they found ways out. Most of that work was done in the developing world and what we figured out, what they figured out was that educating women and empowering them to one degree or another caused fertility to drop like a rock. So the average woman 35 years ago on this planet had six children and that number is now 2.3 and continuing to fall. It turns out that given some say in the matter, most women don't wanna have six children. And so it was, that's been, there's probably been no single trend that's changed more in a shorter period of time in human history. Yes, the population continues to go up because there's a certain amount of momentum built into demography. So there's enough people coming into their childbearing years that even if they're having one or two kids, the total population's continuing to go up but it won't for too much longer. We think we're gonna top out in some place nine and a half, 10 billion in some place, middle of the century, then flat out and go down. It's true that adding another billion or two people to the planet won't help matters but there's not much one can do about it at this point beyond making sure that there's contraception available all the places that there should be in things. And it's not the thing that's driving climate change at this point because the population growth that is coming comes almost entirely in places that use so little energy that they can't cause this trouble. I was told that I was in Tanzania for the New Yorker so I was looking at the numbers. The average American family uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and dinner on January 2nd than the average Tanzanian family uses in a year. So as far as climate change goes, you could have, the Tanzanians are a rounding error. It's not their fault and won't be. So for me, it's a very good sign that humans, when they put their minds to things, can actually make very large change in very short period of time. We don't know quite what the equivalent of female education empowerment is. Maybe it's some serious price on carbon that reflects back at us all the time or whatever. But if anything, you would have thought fertility would be hard to change because it must be hard-wired in some Darwinian biological fashion. But in fact, it turns out to be highly plastic. So let's hope that consumption is similarly plastic and we can figure out how to make it shift. I have two quick questions here for David. I don't want to pose my grandchildren but I find it difficult to get their attention with their items and to talk to them about the second question. I understand that agribusiness that they're producing is a big, big failure, which you haven't mentioned in the way that you're kind of a silent partner for this. So the first thing about grandchildren and kids is mostly they're well aware of what's going on and doing good work. And so they have lots of peers now to turn to to sort of see how to do that good work. I was in Hardwick the night before last and there was terrific young woman from Hazen School who had been organizing the climate walkouts there. There's a network of kids across Vermont, often sad as it is to admit young people are more likely to listen to their peers and to their parents and grandparents about things. So that's good, spread the news and be receptive when they ask you to do things so that we do. Yeah, agriculture is a player here. We think about 18% of emissions are tied to agriculture so that's a big chunk, probably the second biggest chunk after fossil fuel, direct fossil fuel combustion. A lot of it's from deforestation as we take down rainforests in order to have more pasture land and things. And some of it's just from methane emissions from cattle, from the energy it takes to grow the corn that we currently feed into. So all those things. So one way to attack that would be to just sort of mount a big campaign to get people to be vegans and things. Which is a useful thing to do and people should be lower on the food chain, no question and the only reason I don't spend my time doing it is I think it's a pretty low leverage campaign. That is to say, half a percent of Americans are vegans now. If we campaign like hell, I bet we could get it to 5% in a decade. That would be an order of magnitude, so that'd be good campaigning, take to do that. And then you'd have 5% of people, 18% of their emissions. It would make a difference, but it wouldn't make any kind of decisive difference. All right. So that's why we try to figure out less about what humans should do with their individual lives and more about how to change them. If you can get 5% of people engaged in a fight to change the basic rules of the economy and political system under which we operate, that's usually enough. 5% applied to a political system turns out to be an enormous amount because apathy cuts both ways. It takes huge amount of effort to get 400,000 people in the street in New York chaining about climate change, but the one thing you don't have to worry about is that the next day there'll be 400,000 people chanting for more fossil fuel, you know? Apathy in that sense becomes our friend, you know? So if we can do that, if, say, there was a stiff price on carbon, one of the things that would happen is that the agricultural industry would change quickly. It's developed the way that it has because it has access to unlimited amounts of very cheap fossil fuel. And if that were not the case, if you were keeping track of the methane emissions from fertilizer factors, you know, on and on, we'd shift that fairly fast or at least to have some chance of doing it. So that's what I look for, Beverage. The other reason that agriculture's hard, I gotta say, is that when we fight with the fossil fuel industry, we're fighting with people with enormous power, but it's a very limited target set. There's 20 huge companies that we somehow have to bring to boot and 10 huge banks that are funding. If we can do that, then we can make huge progress. Agriculture, one of the problems is that there are literally a billion farmers on Earth and figuring out how you make change that scales quickly across that many places with that much sort of deep rooted cultural and economic tuition and things. These daunting. People are working on it and there's good work being done on it. You can Google, some of it in Vermont, carbon farming, you know, the friendship has a lot to demand an increase, incentivize an increase of some 10th of a percent or something each year in the amount of organic carbon in the soil. Those are working, they're useful, they can be a big help, but it's not a panacea. It's not gonna happen at really rapid speed. It doesn't excuse us from the job, the basic job of shutting off the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Okay, I think we're gonna call that enough for the open session. You can continue to chat with Bill while he's signing books. And Bill, I wanna thank you for yet another contribution to making the world a better place. I also am quite sure that you had a hand in the Red Sox winning the World Series last year, which kept us all sane, even while environmental things and political things drove us insane. So thanks for all you do, brother. Jasper played a much larger role. But we should say, we should say as long as we're here that the other job of everybody today is just to say a prayer for Lee Poppy, who was one of the great souls to ever inhabit the language. And, you know, job is an immense amount of pleasure. And as we live in a world of crisis, we also live in a world of great duty and meaning and all of that. So one of our jobs, as I said before, is to enjoy it. There you are. Thank you.