 We are thrilled to be hosting Bill McKibben. You all know him. I first heard his name as a newbie Vermont resident when someone recommended his book Radio Free Vermont and in short order I discovered what a fascinating and accomplished person he is. So his book The End of Nature, published in 1989, is considered the first book for a general audience about climate change and that has been followed by 20 more books as well as contributions to the Newarker, Rolling Stone, and many others. Mr. McKibben not only writes about climate change, he acts on it helping found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, helping to launch opposition to pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and Fossil Field's investment campaign, and by founding Third Act which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate injustice. He also serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury. He is the Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he is one of the Gandhi Peace Prize honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. The right livelihood award which is sometimes called the Alternative Nobel in the Swedish parliament and foreign policy named him to its inaugural list of the world's 100 most important global thinkers. Finally, if that wasn't enough, in 2014, biologist credited his career by naming a new species of woodland nat, and I'm going to butcher it. Yeah, don't even try. Thank you very much. It's extraordinarily kind of you to have me here. It's great fun to be back at this beautiful bookstore. The last time we were here, David Goodman and I were did a program together and it was exceedingly merry. It was for Radio Free Vermont, exceedingly merry in large part because the alchemist delivered case after case of heady topper to pass out during the talk and I'm surprised we all made it through. It was a great deal of laughter and good fun. Ken Squire was a big part of it, of course, since he was in some ways the inspiration for the main character. This book's not quite as much fun, I must say, though it has its merits and I will say that I'm in a good mood because five minutes ago I got a note from my publisher saying that it had just made the Boston Globe New England best seller list, so that's good news. So it is, as I was saying to David who was just interviewing me for his Vermont Conversations program, which I'm sure everybody listens to but you should if you don't, that I had never planned to write a memoir mostly because my upbringing featured none of the obstacles, you know, miseries, difficulties, things that make for good memoirs. It was in fact as boring and average in certain ways as it was possible to be in an almost, I'll just read you the very beginning of this book so you can see precisely what I mean. In my 10th year in 1970, my family, my mom, my dad, my seven-year-old brother and I moved into the American suburbs. More precisely, we moved to the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, a community of 30,000 people which sat a dozen miles outside Boston. Our home, which cost $30,000, was like a child's drawing of a suburban home, a square block with a door and a window on the ground floor and two windows on the story above, one looking out from my bedroom and the other from Tom's. A single big maple spread its branches over the front lawn and the driveway, dropping leaves on the maroon Plymouth that carried my father on his daily commute. We were as statistically average as it was possible to be, a near perfect example of the white American middle class then in the process of rocketing to a prosperity, a widespread shared suburban standard of living that the world had never before seen. We lived, and this is the truth, halfway down a leafy road called Middle Street. So literally as middle American as it was possible to be and magnified by the fact that, you know, Lexington was an iconic American location. Battle is seen of the first battle of the American Revolution and I spent my summers in sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade giving tours of the battle green to visitors. I had my tricorn hat and would two or three times a day give the spiel about the brave men who had stood and fought and stories that affected me deeply. You know, that was at some level the first battle against a kind of imperialism and colonialism that the world had known. And so I think I came by my, you know, sort of lifetime of descent in a way, honestly. At the very least, I never confused descent with being unpatriotic or something. It seemed to me instead part and parcel of that work. And so, you know, the first part of this book is about American history at some level, the flag part, and about what we've learned since about that history. Because all of us have learned a lot about American history over these last decades and especially over the last four or five years with things like the publication of the 1619 project and things that really have darkened and shadowed and complicated our sense of the history of this country. And I write a lot about that in relation in the first part of this book to questions around race. The most compelling single story, and I'll read maybe a little bit from this, came when I went back just for my own purposes to reread Paul Revere's account of his famous ride out to Lexington, an account later immortalized by Longfellow in the poem that's, you know, as canonical as any in American history. And Revere's account, which he wrote down 20 years after the fact, is fairly long, but here's just this small section. I set off on a very good horse. It was then about 11 o'clock and very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown Neck and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on horseback under a tree. When I got near them, I discovered they were British officers. One tried to get ahead of me and the other to take me. I turned my horse very quick and galloped toward Charlestown Neck. So the phrase that struck me that I had never noticed before, and as it turned out almost no one else had never noticed, was just that passing reference to that happening, this encounter happening, nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains. It took a lot of work to figure out what it was about because it's not a history that historians have really told, but it turns out that 20 years before the revolution, there was a slave in Boston named Mark Codman. There were a fair number of slaves in Massachusetts and indeed in most of New England in those days. And he had a particularly brutal master, everyone acknowledges. And so at a certain point, he and his sister also enslaved, murdered this master in hopes that they would get a new one. They were both charged with treason and instead of murder and both executed. And Mark Codman was drawn and quartered and then hung in an iron cage, a gibbet it was called, above the Charlestown Common where his body stayed for the next 40 years as a reminder to people not to be insubordinate to their masters. And reading that, and clearly everybody in New England knew this story because all you had to, in the same way that we would say, if you were giving directions, you'd say, oh, it's the next street after Prohibition Pig or something. It was just opposite the place where Mark's hangs in chains. Revere knows everyone will know just what he means. You get a different sense of quite what the Sons of Liberty were exactly about and what that fight was about and things. It doesn't mean, I think, that there weren't important and powerful and noble things happening in Massachusetts and in America, but it does mean that we need to work harder than we've worked to try and figure out and then redeem what that history was about. And in the context of the American suburb, that discussion bleeds into this whole discussion about how it is that the wealth gap in between black and white in America has kept widening even over the course of the last 50 years. It turns out that the single biggest reason is because black people were more or less excluded from participation in the incredible wealth creation machine that was the American suburb. Lacking the money to buy in at the beginning, even in places where they weren't statutorily forbidden from doing so, they missed that incredible explosion. My parents' house, as I said, was bought for 30 grand, which would be about $200,000 in today's money, but it sold last year for a million dollars. And that $800,000 was just that nothing more than being in the right place at the right time, which lots of people couldn't have been in. And so the echoes of that story are profound, it seems to me. There's a large section in this book, a section in the middle about the cross, which is about what happened to American religiosity in this same period. In 1970, American religiosity mostly meant 52% of Americans belonged to one of the mainline Protestant liberal denominations. They were Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, what am I forgetting? Congregationalist. And 52%. Now that number is 15%. And if like me, you still go to the Methodist church on occasion, you'll note that almost all that 15% are my age, or in some cases even older. That shift has been as profound as anything that happened in America over that period. In particular because that expression of religious conviction, though flawed in all kinds of ways, at least was about trying to build some kind of working community. It was socially conscious in the ways that it should have been and certainly moving ever more in that direction. Its frame of reference was the community to large degree. And it's been replaced to the extent that it's been replaced by anything by an evangelical Christianity whose frame of reference is highly personalized, the individual relationship between believer and God with very little interest in the community outside. And we see of course the political echoes of that in many, many ways. I won't, I don't think I'll read anything from that today, but it fits very powerfully with this main story of what was happening in American politics and that derives from the, I think the third part of this book, this discussion of prosperity that I've grouped under the heading of the station wagon. Maybe I'll read a tiny bit about from that. The station wagon for those of you who are too young to remember them was what people, I mean, they at the time seemed quite large. Now they seem a sort of quaint relic, you know, now that everybody drives semi military vehicles everywhere they go. It's hard to remember, but everyone in my town had one driveway after driveway filled with country squires and Pontiac safaris and Buick estate wagons. The Silvermans, for instance, with whom we shared a double driveway and who on a warm summer evening would pile all the kids in back and all the kids in front for the three mile drive to the Buttrick's ice cream stand, which happened to be on the very spot where the British actually eventually captured Riviera that night. When I say the kids piled in the back, I mean we crammed into the back cargo area. And if memory serves correctly, on the back roads Mr. Silverman would actually lower the tailgate and let us dangle our legs over the back. Needless to say, all of this would now get you arrested for child endangerment, but we loved it. Loved it without thinking about it because the car was the absolute unquestioned reality of our lives. Americans, of course, have been buying cars since Ford started up his assembly line in 1913. But truthfully, the numbers were not that large. At the end of 1950, there were still only about 25 million cars registered in America. But that summer, 1950, over Lexington, a fleet of seven sky riding planes every day puffed out the same gasoline advertisement in the sky. New blue Sonoco, it said day after day. That message took, all such messages took. U.S. factories produced eight million new cars in 1950 and by the end of the decade, there were 67 million cars on the road. Those roads stretched everywhere since the 1950s also saw the construction of the interstate highway system, the largest public works program in American history. I'd never left the continent until well past college, but I'd seen an awful lot of the U.S. Vacationment piling in the car and driving covering ground along the route that someone in the AAA office had highlighted in our travel guide until about five in the afternoon when it was time to search for a motel. My brother and I would, you know, commandeer the travel guide and make sure we found a motel with a swimming pool. And then, and I was very glad I was checking this with David earlier into the day when we're doing the interview because I find it hard to sort of credit my memory here. The other thing that we looked for in the travel guide was a motel that had a technology called Magic Fingers. I don't know if anybody else would, and it's impossible for people, younger people to imagine, but you put a quarter in and the bed would then shake for several minutes. And we were so, our lives were so, you know, simple that we considered this the greatest of all miracles. It just was beyond belief. Anyway, it took no time, a decade for America to construct itself around the car. That's what the suburb was, a reflection in concrete and wood and brick of the logic of the automobile designed right down to its dimensions, its turning radius. More than three quarters Americans drove to work, and most of them drove by themselves. By 1970, Americans, three percent of the world's population consumed a third of the world's energy, more than the Soviet Union, Britain, West Germany, and Japan combined, and mostly because of the car. By then, by 1970, there were 118 million cars and trucks on the American road, almost five times what they'd been 20 years before. The cars were big, 20% bigger than they'd been just five years before. Three quarters of them now came with air conditioning up from 20% in 1960, which subtracted about two and a half miles a gallon from the fuel efficiency. Not that that was a thing anyone even thought about in 1970, because gas was 36 cents a gallon. I got my learner's permit the day I turned 15 and a half. And of course, I sat through Driver's Ed with its interminable film strips about kids who took a bewildering variety of drugs and subsequently crashed their vehicles. We practiced on a driving simulator and then on a road with a baseball coach supplementing his pay. He directed me to merge onto the highway, Route 128, at 70 miles an hour, four minutes into my driving career. I loved it. I loved it. And not just because cars meant sex, we literally called it parking because it meant economic freedom. You could work in order to get money to buy gas. But my work by that point, by the time I was 14 or 15, was for the local chain of weekly newspapers out in this part of suburbia. And the story that I found myself covering more than any other was the sudden violent collision between that car culture and world geopolitics. Because, of course, these quickly became the years of the oil shocks and the gas shortages. And so one of my first jobs as a newspaper man was phoning every service station in town every week to find out which hours they were going to be open, because they all had very few hours a week, because they had so little gas. And these stories were read as probably as closely as anything I've ever read. Information people actually needed. But along with the gas station owners, I also got to interview the number three man in the country's energy department. John Deutch was an MIT professor. And in between Washington's stints, he lived in Lexington. So I interviewed him the week before his boss, President Carter, was to give a nationwide address on energy conservation. Deutch was sounding appropriately sober. If you're a person in a situation where there's too little oil, you would look for easy solutions and for scapegoats, he said. But there is no quick fix. There's no question about the fact that until the American people understand there's not as much oil as they want, at prices they want, there will be a problem. Carter had been striking the same note all along. And I'm going to read just a few things from Carter here. And as I do, I want you to just try and imagine any American politician of any kind, up to and including my hero, Bernie, being willing to say anything like this today. Carter in his first address, as President said, we have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits. The energy crisis, he said, was a reminder that ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. As the gas lines grew longer, his sobriety deepened. All the legislation in the world can't fix what is wrong with America, he said. Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption, he said. We should change. We should learn that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning, that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose. So if that sounds like an attack on suburbia, it kind of was, or if not an attack, then an invitation to think a little differently and an invitation that might actually have been answered, because it was not as crazy for him to be saying that in the context of his time as it sounds now. The 1970s had opened with the publication of a book called The Limits to Growth, which was the best-selling nonfiction book of that decade. Its 50th anniversary edition is about to come out, I think, an argument that we're reaching ecological boundaries. A few years later, E.F. Schumacher had produced Small as Beautiful, a book so powerful that when its German-British author came to America, Carter posted him at the White House. The sociologist Amitai Ezzione was a young policy advisor in the Carter White House, and in 1980 he bought the president polling data to show how up in the air America really was. The data showed that 30% of Americans were pro-growth, 31% were anti-growth, and 39% were highly uncertain. That kind of ambivalence, he told the president, is too stressful for societies to endure. I think he was right, and I think that explains the outcome of the 1980 election, which is the most pivotal election of my lifetime, the thing that set us on the course that we have been on since. It was pivotal because it was essentially a choice between two visions of the world, one the kind of America that had come through the Depression and the Second World War, and then in certain ways the turbulent decades of the 60s, a nation thinking of itself as a collective and looking for ways to sort of better itself as a nation. The other choice was a nation of individuals whose job was to look out for themselves and explicitly really not to care about each other. Reagan's slogan was, government is the problem, not the solution. Government just being the name we have for the efforts that we make to do things together. It was Reagan's great buddy and ideological equal Margaret Thatcher across the pond who said, memorably, there is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women. That approach to the world is the approach that has dominated American political life ever since. Barack Obama in an exit interview about two or three years ago when someone said, well, you had 60 Democratic senators when you took office. How come you weren't able to make fundamental change? He said, we were still laboring under the constraints that Reagan had set upon kind of American politics. Still enamored of the idea that markets would solve problems and so on and so forth. Well, that's been the story of most of my life. It's a story that turns out to have extraordinary implications for the larger world. Jimmy Carter in that 1980 election had proposed, put in his budget for the year that had he been elected, a plan to have America getting 20% of its energy from solar power by the year 2000. That was entirely within the realm of possibility. With enough money applied to it, we could have done it. There's been no technological breakthrough since that was incomprehensible then. Indeed, he made that promise while standing on top of the White House as he put solar panels on its roof. Of course, as you all know, Reagan immediately took those solar panels down because solar power was for sissies and real men dug stuff up and set it on fire. That's what we've been doing ever since. As a result, well, as a result, most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic is now melted. As a result, last week, more than half of America was living under extreme heat warning. As a result, last week, the two biggest fires in the history of New Mexico were simultaneously burning. At the same time, Yellowstone, most iconic of American landscapes, was ravaged by floods after the greatest rains ever measured there. That's just in America. It's far, far worse in the rest of the world. The iron law of climate change is the less you did to cause it, the more you feel it. There are Somalia and that part of Africa is in the fourth year of a period with no rain at all. There's now hundreds of thousands of people starving to death. The entire continent of Africa has put 2% of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere compared with the 4% of us who live in this country who've put 25% of those gases in the atmosphere. Most of it, as I said, coming from cars, not from factories. It coming from the fact that we devoted ourselves in the years since World War II to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from each other. Houses that had to be cooled, heated, filled with stuff, and crucially driven between at all times. So that's where we stand and the question becomes what to do about it, or in some ways for this book the question becomes who should be doing something about it as we try to fix this great crisis. And the answer really at the moment is to who should be doing something about it is mostly seems to be young people should do something about this. I started 350.org with seven college students over at Middlebury and it grew into the first big climate movement around the world. And then we started this divestment campaign which found deep roots on college campuses and the kids who did that who managed to force Harvard and you know the idea pretty much a lot of colleges to divest. They when they left college went out and formed this sunrise movement that brought us the Green New Deal. The sort of distillation of which is this build back better build now still gamely trying to somehow get past Joe Manchin and into into law. And of course there's the extraordinary work of junior high and high school students around the world exemplified by Greta Thunberg but there are 10,000 Greta Thunbergs all over the world and I know Greta and I know many of them and they are fantastic and doing amazing work. They have 10 million followers that's how many kids went out on school strike in September of 2019 at the apex of this movement right before the pandemic kind of shut it down. And that's wonderful it's great but there's something at some level not okay about demanding that 17-year-olds solve the deepest crisis we've ever gotten into you know sort of you know after algebra homework before field hockey practice would you mind also you know saving the world. It's ignoble and it's also impractical because for all the earnestness intelligence idealism inspiration that young people bring they do not have the structural power necessary to affect change. So I've become mildly fixated on this idea that we need people of a certain age like me working hard on this. If you're 60 years old 82 percent of the world's fossil fuel emissions have occurred in your lifetime. For three quarters of your adult life you've known about the dangers of the climate crisis but for most people it hasn't impinged much if at all in your lifestyle. But now if we're to hold the temperature increase to a degree and a half as the world promised in the Paris climate accords the global lifetime carbon budget for someone born today will be 43 tons of CO2 about an eighth as much as for someone born in 1950. And even if they do the hard work to meet that target those kids will still get to live on their lives on a planet without an arctic where forest fire season stretches implacably on. That debt and other debts like the fact that people had to pay huge amounts of money to go to college and things translate into among other things a reluctance to form families and have children. In November of 2020 researchers surveying people aged 26 to 45 found that 96 percent of them were very or extremely concerned about the well-being of their potential future children in a climate changed world. One of the researchers said it was often heartbreaking to pour through the responses a lot of people really poured their hearts out. There are it seems to me three ways to react to that heartbreak. One is to pretend one is to pretend that it doesn't exist which is easy to do if you watch Fox News the go to network for older Americans. The median viewing age for Fox News is 68 years old which means that half of its viewers are older than that. According to Fox you don't need to worry much about younger generations because they're just a bunch of snowflakes who eat avocado toast while burning down most American cities and canceling everything that makes life worth living. Another option is to take care of your own family and friends and to volunteer in the community in which you live to take care of some other people and that's fine and good it's why I love living in Vermont you know but it's also sort of what got us into this mess it's good as far as it goes but as far as it goes isn't good enough the wealth gap the carbon gap just keep growing and so the third option is to actually rise to the political moment and play some role in turning the clock back or forward and that's just to say that the introduction to just the last thing I'll talk about which is just this work that's preoccupying me now this work we've started at this thing called third act which organizes people over the age of 60 for work on climate and democracy um and it it it's it's really interesting work at some level it seems completely obvious that you would this is a cohort of people that one should be trying to organize there are 70 million of us um it's a population larger than France 10,000 people turn 60 every day in this country which is more people that are now born in this country on a given day not only are there a lot of us we punch way above our weight politically you cannot keep nothing known to man can keep old people from voting you know uh and we ended up with all the money um we've got 70 percent of the country's financial assets compared with about five percent for millennials so if you wanted to pressure either congress or wall street both of which I'd like to pressure it's a good idea to try and get some older people engaged but really no one's done much to try and do this for a very long time the last attempt was a group called the gray panthers uh and a wonderful woman named Maggie Kuhn in the 70s and 80s um and the reason is that there's a uh widely held conviction that people become more conservative as they age and there's a certain amount of statistical evidence to back that up you know it's probably because people have more stuff to protect you know and that leads to a but we can't let it happen in this case and and I don't think we need to um because these particular generations the people if you're in your 60s or 70s or 80s now um um you're the generational DNA is extremely interesting and just the timeline means that you are around in your first act to either participate in or bear witness to these remarkable and epic social and cultural and political transformations you were around at the moment when we decided what do you know let's make uh treat women as if they're more or less uh actual human beings and parts of society um you know this was the apex of the civil rights movement a moment when we were extending the franchise to weigh more people instead of now engaging in voter suppression this was the moment of the first earth day in 1970 when 20 million Americans one in 10 of the then population of the U.S. was in the streets and and what do you know it worked I mean within a year or two we'd passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the air got cleaner and so did the water you know um on all these fronts extraordinary progress maybe enough progress that some of us went to sleep a little bit in subsequent decades whatever the reason and with many noble exceptions who I'm sure are the people represented in this room I think it's fair to say that the generation's second act focused somewhat more on consumerism than it did on citizenship um that is water under the bridge and um now in our third act we've got resources we've got skills acquired over a lifetime we've got time which we might not have had previously and we've in many cases got kids or grandkids which take this abstract idea of legacy and make it far more real and present um you know our legacy is going to be that we left the world a shabbier place than we found it which is a new thing for generations to do and not the thing that we're hoping for and it turns out lots of people feel this way we've only been organizing third act for four or five months but we've flooded with people um um signing up more than we really in some ways can deal with and happily people are developing chapters and doing lots of work there's a third act of remont already that's doing really good things um and and one of the things that we've really been working hard on is um uh uh making sure that the kind of real goal is to sort of back up and support the work that young people are doing um and that's been lots and lots of fun we've been doing say demonstrations at banks across the country and big pressure campaigns on banks because uh it turns out the big american banks are the by far the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry and allow it to keep building more pipelines and things even when scientists are saying no no no stop um so we've been out doing these demonstrations and usually like the one in burlington a few weeks ago brought lots and lots of kids from the high school showed up to join in and it was really fun so they were out there sort of in front they're louder and and and you know so on but behind them there's a big crowd of older vermonters under a banner that says fossils against fossil fuels um um um so you know very much in the in the right spirit of how to do this work and we've even had a couple of early unlikely wins you know i wrote a piece for the i wrote a piece the three days after the invasion of ukraine saying look why don't we invoke the defense production act uh uh not just to make more anti-tank weapons for ukraine though that may be necessary but also to build a lot of peak pumps these you know highly efficient uh uh devices for heating your home and let's get them off to europe or wherever so that we can undercut putans oil and gas leverage and you know help save the climate in the meantime and so on and so forth and we started writing lots and lots of letters from third act thousands of them into the white house it turns out that the um i mean everybody makes fun of uh uh uh uh older people for their limitations in their ability to use modern technology and their complete reliance on their grandchildren to make their you know machines work but it turns out that the ability to uh completely lost on younger generation to write a letter put it in an envelope and stick a stamp on it is kind of a superpower because they you know they those those get read and listened to and and they so we poured letters into the white house meanwhile um uh an 11 year old uh wonderful 11 year old girl in new york had read this thing and she set up a website and started collecting signatures from her generation and things and what do you know last week the white house said okay we will invoke the defense production act to build heat pumps um uh good idea let's get on it um and you know it's not going to be in a big enough scale to solve either the war in ukraine or the climate crisis but it's a good reminder that if we push we can still get some things done some of the time at least we can try and try hard so that's the that's the work that we're about now there might be one or two people in this room of the right uh demographic to join in if you want and the rest of you can tell your parents and grandparents about this and let them know um um because i i do think that it's um to get back to the book i do think that we have a serious role to play in redeeming the story of america um that it's possible to do much of that work um the odds are obviously long um we took things for granted that we should not have taken for granted one was the physical stability of the planet it was hard to imagine that you could you know take the earth and change it in ways that we have so that those pictures that came back from the apollo missions of the first pictures of the earth they don't look like the earth anymore there's way less white up top i mean there is out of date as my high school yearbook picture and we took the stability of our democracy for granted i mean having lived through watergate it was obviously bad but the system worked you know we booted the guy out on his rear end and and on we went and it wouldn't have occurred to me anyway 50 years ago that we would have reached the point where people would be invading our nation's capital and killing policemen in order to stop the counting of votes you know um so we've got extraordinary work to do and it's all time limited i mean if we're going to deal with climate change it has to happen soon or it won't work and democracy feels like the next couple of elections may be the ones that tell the story you know one way or the other so we got a lot of work to do and we need everybody including people with hairlines like mine engaged in this fight so that's what i got this is more of turns out to be more of an organizing talk than a book talk but you should if you don't buy my book you should buy some book while you're here because i'll just finish by saying that independent bookstores are a remarkable thing in our society that they survived the pandemic is a bit of a miracle communities that took their bookstores for granted in my experience no longer have bookstores so um find something to buy while you're here and if you want to buy this i'm happy to uh i'll put my mask back on uh and sign books if you'd like for a little while but thank you all very much that's kind of you and i should say i mean is it all right if i mean if there's a question or two i'm happy to indulge them also all right good good so questions or critique or abuse or whatever appeals is fine yeah congrats on this as i was reading it you managed to make me feel as uncomfortable as is any modern black obviously uh yet in a way uh self-evaluating so congrats i think it's an important book thank you um you cover the these three topics so well and the fourth topic kept coming to mind as a gap and i just wondered your thoughts on it the the sort of hyper um accumulation of wealth among a very very small number of people seems another gigantic factor in this same time frame yes and i wondered your thoughts absolutely you know i'm afraid you're going to have to go back and read my last book it was called falter um which has a long section about the strange um uh the a large a long section of that book attempts to come to grips with one of the important if i think horrible figures in our um history ein rand and the influence that she cast over our political life um as the kind of teacher of reagan and his ilk and things um and of the you know the idea that that greed was good and that uh and that altruism was a trap and that uh and that therefore we would put we would come to venerate wealth 1978 which was the year i graduated from high school was the year that what economists call the great compression the narrowing of inequality that began in the wake of world war two that was the year that it came to an end and ever since then the wealth gap has been widening to the cartoonishly grotesque uh place it's gotten now where we have individual human beings individual americans who have more money than the bottom half of all americans combined you know um and and that was not by chance that that happened that was in ideologically driven set of decisions um um taxes are evil you know so you know we don't want to you know that accounts for a huge amount of that and that dates straight to that period in those ideologies so that kind of inequality and accumulation um and the veneration of that kind of accumulation um um you know the idea that uh that that um one should naturally pay great deference to people of great wealth um is an extraordinary problem in our society one senses that there's a uh i don't know whether it's whether we're beginning to wake up to it or not i i guess we shall see um and um and certainly the story of trump and things is a kind of you know late blooming uh uh addendum to this story but it's it's very real and so the library probably has falter someplace that you can go check out so i had the chance to do some cool watching down in george i had the trepidation of knowing that i was going to sit next to a republican for three days and it turned out to be a very interesting uh kind of engagement on issue after issue we spent three days and i felt that kind of went toe to toe pretty well until it was one issue i wish you'd comment on he said the biggest problem we have with government programs is not that they may not have a good idea they may not have some you know valid benefit we don't implement them very well we stink at them and therefore i'd rather not do them than have them done poorly and i had no answer to that so i'm curious yeah i mean i think the answer to that is basically that the reason that we do them poorly is because there's we've decided that they're a bad idea and so we go out of our way to make sure that they're never properly funded overseeing you know on and on and on we i mean when you have an entire you know at least you know half the country that's bought into the idea that government is the problem not the solution we undercut at every turn every effort to do to do things well and so you know i mean certainly when it comes to things like energy or the environment you know we haven't we've been hobbled at every turn in the attempt to do anything about them so it it's it's powerful to watch biden what was interesting about biden at least at the beginning before a series of really difficult and unfortunate events sort of have cut the legs out from under him was a full-throated attempt to go back not to not to just sort of before reagan but really back to kind of lbj and the notion that government might really be able to solve some problems and do some things um and and that clearly was sort of grew out of i mean the person who was most responsible for that even being a possibility was our junior senator who really enunciated a idea that we might once again try but just think about i mean for instance think about the way that with health care instead of just doing what every other country in the world has done and industrialized country and providing health care in a way that and it works i mean canadians and brit people love their health care system even if there are flaws with them instead you know the best that we were allowed to do was cobble together this obama care thing which was you know ungainly you know hard to it was a good idea when it got but it wasn't if you were designing an efficient government system you would that's not how you would do it um and but it was because of that constant pressure from the pharmaceutical industry from whoever else um so it's been a long time since we've actually really tried to do anything uh you know uh by a government action of any note and it'll be interesting to see whether or not we retain any of the ability to do uh uh uh you know we're going to try and spend at least some money that came through this bipartisan infrastructure bill and we'll see how it goes you know who knows if our abilities to do this even exist anymore i was extremely happy to see the announcement yesterday that uh that that uh trained service from burlington new york is resumes as of july 29th so there's one small victory along these lines yes i haven't had a chance to read the book yet so maybe there's an answer in there but you referenced how you know we built up a car culture yes in years do you think there's a way or a strategy to scale that back especially considering yeah it's a really interesting question and there's and there's a real live debate so so in the short run i think the answer is not really um in the short run in the long run i think we very much want to to try to do it as much as we can because i i just wrote a piece about this yesterday and i i do a little newsletter every week and uh and there's a lot of reasons beyond their damage to the environment to really think long and hard about cars mostly the fact that we just um you know it was more than anything else the thing that atomized us that just think about uh uh we went from a world in the first part of the 20th century where if you traveled anywhere you were definitely doing it with other people you know um you could in 1920 you could take just by switching lines you could ride from Boston to Detroit on street cars because every single town suburb whatever had its own system we went from that to the highly privatized thing the automobile represents and so one would love to move away from that for lots of reasons um um and and some argue that the you know the climate crisis is the perfect moment to do that and so when i you know when people i when i write things applauding electric the advent of electric cars there's always people who say no no we need to get rid of cars all together this is stupid so on and so forth i take the point but reality intrudes here um 98 percent of vehicle miles travel passenger miles traveled in the us last year were in private cars and trucks two percent was via public transit um i don't think you can reverse that in the period of time that physicists tell us we have to deal with climate change so i think it's a i think it's a necessary thing that we go through a generation of electric cars and uh uh and as we're doing it i hope we also take the opportunity to move towards way more electric bikes and electric buses and things but you can't having built this vast physical infrastructure that is the kind of suburban american world it's extremely difficult to unbuild it in the blink of an eye and so but electric cars are a good um interim step um along the way not only that for those of you who drive cars they're way better than the car you had before um um i will just say uh they are very few moving parts um they're very quiet um and if for some reason you like to accelerate it will make you giggle how fast they they go when you press down on the accelerator so um they're exactly right exactly right i did say my my daughter took me out today for my first long ride on an electric bicycle and i gotta say they're pretty cool too if you haven't tried one yet they really do open up some remarkable possibilities and the good news is there were more of them sold last year than cars around the world but china and india are adapting very quickly to e-bikes and they are an elegant means of transportation so that may be an important next step thank you all enormously and um enjoy the rest of the day