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Kousha Navidar: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Kousha Navidar, filling in for Brian, who's on vacation this week. Now for our Climate Story of the Week, I've seen a lot of people walking around with those portable personal fans this summer. They're trying to manage the heat in during what has been one of our hottest summers. Maybe you felt the effects of climate change this summer. It's on track to being the second warmest summer in New York City on record. That's according to the National Weather Service.

It may make you wonder who should pay for the costs of climate change. Now, obviously, I'm not talking about reimbursing those personal fans. I'm talking about improving shorelines and stormwater management systems and elevating streets and railways. The New York State legislature recently passed a bill that would make polluters pay for the costs of climate change. It's now awaiting Governor Kathy Hochul's signature.

Joining me now to talk about what this bill could do in New York State and also discuss the climate politics of Kamala Harris, we have Bill McKibben, the environmental activist, founder of Third Act, and author of many books, most recently the book The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened. Bill, welcome to WNYC.

Bill McKibben: Kousha, what a pleasure to be with you.

Kousha Navidar: It's a real pleasure to have you. Can you tell us more about the idea this principle of polluters pay for climate change?

Bill McKibben: I sure can. Let's look at this week in America. Right now, there's a huge storm, Debby, that's come ashore in Florida and now is going to wander over the lowlands of the Carolinas and Georgia. By week's end, it may well be dropping an awful lot of rain on Southern New York. It brings back memories of Irene and Sandy and lots and lots of these other superstorms that we now see.

The rainfall totals may be higher than any storm on the East Coast from this storm we're seeing now, and that's directly attributable to the fact that the temperature, both of the air and of the oceans, are higher than we've ever seen. Warm air holds more water vapor than cold. All of this is because, as everybody has known for 40 years, the product that the fossil fuel industry sells causes the temperature of the earth to rise. There's no mystery here.

There hasn't been any mystery since Jim Hansen of NASA, working at 110th and Broadway, told us in 1988, exactly what was going on. The question becomes, who should have to pay for the damage that comes from those storms, from those floods, from all those other clearly climate-related events? Should it be the taxpayers of New York or should it be the shareholders of Exxon who've made a fortune over the last 30 or 40 years while they've continued to sell that oil and gas?

That Climate Superfund Act says that some of the tab should be on the people who've gotten rich off big oil. That piece of legislation, which passed the New York State legislature with pretty significant margins, now sits on Kathy Hochul's desk. I think it's become the test of whether she's got any environmental chops at all, a question people clearly are wondering about in the wake of the congestion pricing debacle.

For me, this is just the no-brainer of all time. Why would you want to charge the people of New York when the damage was done by big oil in Houston? It's very much akin to charging the tobacco companies for the damage that they did instead of making state taxpayers have to pay all the tab for the healthcare that went with lung cancer.

Kousha Navidar: Help us contextualize this a little bit about how it looks in New York specifically. Can you tell us more about the costs of climate change in the state?

Bill McKibben: To the best that anybody can quantify them, the latest study has shown that over a couple of decades to come, this could be about $825 billion for New York taxpayers. Well, that's because you've got to keep fixing roads and bridges and culverts over and over and over again. Look what you have to do. Look how much money the city of New York is spending just to protect Lower Manhattan from sea level rise.

It's astronomical and it only defends Manhattan and below. I don't know. What about 40th Street or something like that? Because the price of doing it for the whole city is just too much for anybody to bear. We're talking huge sums of money. There's never been an economic problem to compare with climate change. At a certain point, you could have said, "Well, this isn't big oil's fault because what are they?"

Nobody knew that climate change was going on and we all were using their product and things, but we now know from great investigative reporting that beginning in the 1980s, when I was writing the first book about climate change for The New Yorker, that Exxon at all knew everything there was to know about climate change. They knew it and they believed it. Their scientists were predicting in the 1980s with stunning accuracy what the temperature would be in 2020.

When their executives read those predictions, they started doing things like building all their drilling rigs higher in order to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming. They didn't, however, tell the rest of us. Instead, across the industry, they invested billions of dollars building this architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that's kept us locked for 30-some years in a sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real. Remember, a question that both sides knew the answer to at the start.

This is justice delayed, and if Governor Hochul doesn't get around to putting her signature on it, it's going to be justice denied. There is no reason that people in New York City or in Upstate New York or in Long Island should have to pay for stuff that someone else profited from. That's just simple, straightforward justice.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, we're talking to Bill McKibben, environmental activist and author. We want to know from you, listeners, what are your thoughts on making companies pay for pollution? Do you have any other ideas on how to fund disasters caused by climate change? We're going to get to this in more detail in a minute, but we're also interested in what you would like to see on Kamala Harris's climate agenda.

If climate is your number one or two issue in the presidential election, how are you feeling about Kamala Harris? We want to hear from you. Give us a call or send us a text at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Bill, at the top of the segment, you've mentioned that we've known about these impacts for 40 years, it's not new news. This also isn't necessarily the first bill of its kind.

There's a federal Superfund law called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act that passed in 1980 and created a tax on companies that release hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment, and the money went to a trust fund to clean up hazardous waste sites. This new bill coming through, why do we need that if there's already a federal Superfund law?

Bill McKibben: This is an extension of that. That law, of course, was prompted, in large part, by events in New York out at Love Canal and the toxic mess out there, but that's about damage to particular sites from chemicals on the ground. Here we're talking about chemicals that were poured into the air and then caused the climate change that produced damage of all kinds over vast swaths of land. The principle is the same.

In that case, it was chemical companies, Hooker Chemical and Love Canal, I think, that was trying to evade responsibility for cleanup. In this case, it's Exxon and Chevron and Shell and BP that are trying to evade responsibility for the damage that they've caused. This just takes that same principle and extends it beyond toxic pollution to climate pollution.

Kousha Navidar: You're saying it was a start. I'm assuming you're thinking a good start, but not enough. Is that fair?

Bill McKibben: Yes. It's a model for how you deal with this, but it doesn't apply to climate change, the federal Superfund Act. Of course, as you now know from looking at Washington, there's no hope of getting a Superfund law or any other environmental law through Washington in the near term, not over the filibuster efforts of Republicans. We're going to have to do this state by state, and the good news is that we've already started.

All Governor Hochul has to do is look across the state line at Vermont, where Republican Governor Phil Scott let Vermont's climate Superfund law go into effect this year. Vermont's going to be sending a bill for its culverts and bridges and roads cleanup off to big oil. New York should be doing the same thing.

Kousha Navidar: When you say do it state by state, just to be clear, you yourself support the New York State law and you are advocating for it, right? How are you advocating for it?

Bill McKibben: I sure am. [chuckles] I'm advocating for it by talking with you. Actually, I saw Governor Hochul backstage at the Chautauqua Institute out in Western New York two weeks ago and told her then that I thought this was a crucial piece of environmental legislation and that she should sign it. As I say, it's not been a good year for Governor Hochul and the environment, and feelings are very raw after the stunt she pulled around congestion pricing and the last-minute switcheroo.

I think people will be watching with particular closeness as this bill-- waiting to see if she'll sign it. I have no idea why it's taking her so long to sign it. It's not like it's going to cost New Yorkers anything, just the opposite. It's money on the table for New Yorkers to get. It's not like Exxon or Chevron or someone can go and raise the price of gasoline in New York to compensate the price of oil set on world markets. This is a way to get those companies to pay their fair share. Having made record profits, man, they can afford it.

Kousha Navidar: When you were backstage with the governor, what was her reaction? What was that conversation like?

Bill McKibben: [laughs] Her reaction was, "Stop lobbying."

Kousha Navidar: [laughs] Okay, fair enough. Time and place. Time and place, Bill. You say there's no cost to consumers here. Opponents of the bill say it will cause oil prices to rise up and drive up the costs for customers and local businesses. We see that that kind of tax liability always pass on to consumers. What would you say to that?

Bill McKibben: There's no liability here. You're just sending a bill off to these companies to pay. Exxon can't raise the price of gasoline for New Yorkers. That's not how the price of gasoline works, as you can tell, because the price of gasoline goes up or down depending on events around the world. It's a world price for gasoline. That's why we worry about things like the Brent Crude market or West Texas Intermediate Crude or all the other benchmark oil prices that we set. That's just the usual scare talk from the oil industry.

Kousha Navidar: I see.

Bill McKibben: That's not going to happen.

Kousha Navidar: Let's go to some callers. Let's start with Keanu in Manhattan. Hi, Keanu. Welcome to the show. Tell us about yourself.

Keanu: Hi. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I'm a long-time climate organizer in New York City, youth activist. I'm 19 and it's super great to hear Bill talking about the Climate Superfund. This is a bill that we've been pushing in Albany for years now. I've been up to Albany on countless lobby trips. So many people in my generation have taken buses to try to get this bill passed, and now that we've finally got it across the line on the governor's desk, it's so important that she signs it.

I know my generation is scared about the future we're going to grow up into. Every day now, it feels like it's a new record for the hottest day on record. Every time it rains, it feels like our schools and subways are flooding. Our generation is scared about what this is going to look like in 2 years from now, 5 years from now, definitely in like 20 years from now. At the same time, we have a governor who is casting doubt on our climate goals, failing to pass legislation so far, refusing to sign this bill, pausing congestion pricing.

I don't know what our governor is doing well on climate right now, and my generation simply can't accept that this is our future. Simply, the biggest opponents to this bill is the fossil fuel industry. There's projected to be hundreds of billions of dollars in climate damages over the next few decades, just in New York City alone. I think it's really a choice of whether the governor will stand with our generation or once again, side with big oil, side with the fossil [crosstalk].

Kousha Navidar: Bill, go ahead.

Bill McKibben: Keanu, I want to say thank you so much for that. Just to make the point that this is a broad intergenerational thing, I started a group called Third Act, which now has chapters in every state in the country organizing Americans over the age of 60 for action on climate. The Third Act New York City and Upstate New York chapters have been working super hard on this and pushing the governor as hard as they can too.

This is young people worried about their future. It's older people worried about the legacy that we're leaving behind. It's everybody who's thinking about the future. The governor really does have to step up here. Look, even just an hour ago, Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who with a much, much smaller Democratic majority in his legislature, has managed to do far more on climate stuff in just a couple of years than she's done. It's really time for her to up her game.

Kousha Navidar: Keanu, before we let you go, I'd love to get your perspective on this as well. First, how old were you when you started your climate activism?

Keanu: I think I was around 15 or 14 years old.

Kousha Navidar: Okay, about five years there, maybe five or six years. What do you feel like people often miss in the climate conversations? You talk a lot about your generation, people around your age, or you yourself in your work. What do you folks see is missing in the current climate conversations?

Keanu: I think there's a real loss of grounding in the actual urgency of the moment. I think there's somehow a misconception that we have more time than we can, especially coming from people like the governor who thinks it's an appropriate time to be reconsidering our climate goals. The reality is this is more urgent than really we can overstate this. UN Climate head, Simon Stiell, recently said we have two years left to save the world. That is not exaggeration.

We have to be taking drastic, drastic, systematic changes and action that we know we need to be taking. Climate Superfund is really just a small part of that. It's an important part of that, but it's really only the beginning. If we can't get the most basic level of accountability for fossil fuel companies passed, I think we're in a really scary place.

Kousha Navidar: It's that sense of urgency for you, for sure. Keanu, thank you so much for calling in and sharing that with us. Let's keep going on the phones. Let's go to Joy in Upper West Side. Hi, Joy. Welcome to the show. [silence] Hey, Joy, can you hear us?

Joy: [unintelligible 00:17:02].

Kousha Navidar: Hi, Joy.

Joy: Hi. Can you hear me?

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Hi. Welcome.

Joy: Sorry about that. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the polluter pays principle. I should preface this by saying I am an environmental economist by profession, and I've been working on this stuff for like 40 years. It's true the oil companies are making an unconscionable amount of money, and there should be ways to prevent that. That would probably depend on national legislation, good luck politically, but the bottom line is, if you look globally, Americans are the ones who are putting out the greenhouse gas emissions. We drive cars too much, we consume too much.

If we want it to be even remotely equitable, sure, poor New Yorkers should not have to pay a lot of stuff, and New Yorkers don't own cars the way other people do, but it's our consumption. We are the polluters. It's not just the oil companies getting rich. We have to recognize that. We have to recognize that globally, this will never be solved in an equitable way if we don't reduce our consumption.

Kousha Navidar: Joy, thank you so much for that. I'm looking at the clock. I want to make sure that we get to the other part of our conversation here, Bill, about Kamala Harris and the 2024 presidential election. We had you on our show a few months ago about what's at stake for the climate during this election. Now we have Kamala Harris as our vice presidential choice presumptive and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. What do you know about Walz's climate record?

Bill McKibben: Walz's climate record is pretty good. It's not perfect. He takes correctly some grief for backing the Line 3 pipeline down through the state of Minnesota. They had to arrest a lot of people to get it built, and it was an environmental mistake. With a very slim majority in the Minnesota House, he's pushed through really effective climate legislation. Minnesota will be 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 at the latest. He's done all kinds of things like electric school buses and things like that in a big way. He seems good at talking about climate change in ways that all kinds of people can understand.

He's made a sort of emphasis on the fact that agricultural practices need to be shifting and changing in order to help here too. He's not afraid at all to talk about climate change. He's up against someone named JD Vance, who back when he was a green tech venture capitalist, used to go on and on about how climate change was a big deal, but then decided when he fell in love with Donald Trump that he would adopt his guy's position that no one knows if humans are heating up the climate or not. So basically, a climate change denialist, one of the last left in those two in high public position around the world.

This case could not be clearer from climate terms. Either we're going forward with the momentum built up in the Inflation Reduction Act, or we're going back to the days of leaving the Paris Climate Accord, shutting down wind, all the other things that Donald Trump has promised.

Kousha Navidar: Let's go to a caller. We've got Rebecca in Columbia, South Carolina, that wants to talk. It looks like you have a question regarding Kamala Harris. Is that right, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Yes, it is. I'm a paramedic down here in South Carolina, and we are currently dealing with the beginnings of massive historical flooding, torrential rainfall. Again, it's always historic in these last many years here in South Carolina, so it's very pertinent right now. It's my number one issue in this election. I will vote for Kamala Harris because no issues whatsoever mean anything if our earth is not here for us to functionally inhabit it.

One and a half degrees Celsius was the limit for climate change really impacting us back when I was in college 15 years ago, and now we've hit that. For the last 16 months, we're there. How are we going to move forward and help people on every other policy level and question if we're not combating climate change with everything we have?

Kousha Navidar: Rebecca, thank you so much for that-- Was that your question, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Yes, that's my question. How are these single-issue voters from my generation focusing on the question of Palestine when that's short term? I'm an anti-Zionist Jew, and it hurts every day to listen to the news. I will vote for Harris even if she's not going to change her opinion and goals on Israel because the number one issue for me is climate. How do we move forward?

Kousha Navidar: Bill, what's your--

Rebecca: [unintelligible 00:22:06].

Kousha Navidar: Rebecca, thank you so much for that question. Bill, it sounds like Rebecca is interested in knowing how to move forward. Climate sounds like it's the number one issue from her perspective.

Bill McKibben: First of all, Rebecca, we're thinking of you over the next couple of days. South Carolina is going to see what may be the most intense rainstorm in its history. At the same time, that storm surge along the Atlantic is keeping those rivers from flowing easily out into the ocean. The resulting flooding, I'm afraid, may be off the charts, but everything's off the charts now. In fact, they're off the wall. The charts are tacked too.

We see temperatures like we've never seen before. Rebecca's right. In the end, this is by far the biggest thing that human beings have ever done, and nothing, nothing is going to matter if we don't manage to get it right. Just even in terms of people who think about the world economically, the latest data I've seen for what the price tag of unabated global warming is by the end of the century, checks in at $551 trillion, which is more money than currently exists on our planet.

There's no way to overstate the scale of the danger here. It's why we have to move fast. That's why it drives me crazy when people like Governor Hochul just wait around. It's like we'll wait another month or two or three or four to figure out whether or not to sign this bill, so on and so forth. Let's get it done and get onto the next part because this is a big, big job that we have to do. If we don't do it fast, our governments are going to be broke and the rest of us are going to be broke. Try buying insurance if you live in a low-lying part of this state now.

Kousha Navidar: Rebecca, we want to thank you for that call and for offering that question. Just got a text here that I want to address as well. Bill, it says, "You," I think it's referring to the show here, "just ignored the importance of the call a few moments ago." I think it's referring to Joy from the Upper West Side. "I'm referring to the person who said it's not just the oil companies who are making money. Basically, I think she was saying that it's all of us and we have to change our lives. Even if she didn't say that, that's what has to be said, and you let that go. Please come back to that point because as soon as people are asking not to drive or not to use the air conditioners, they get angry and that has to change."

I think that's a really interesting point there, the sense of personal responsibility and that being put into the narrative. What do you make of that, Bill?

Bill McKibben: I think that that's, of course, right, but the problem is that the fossil fuel industry has spent, as I said, decades and billions of dollars poisoning the well here to make sure that people don't think that this is important, don't worry about it, don't act on it. Now that climate denial is essentially impossible, what they're spending their money doing is what you might call solutions denial, trying to convince people that moving to sun and wind is impossible. In fact, it's easy, comparatively, with dealing with climate change.

When we look around the country, we can see that the few places that have really tried are doing spectacular work. I just wrote a piece for The New Yorker about what's happening in California on the other coast this spring. California has put up now so much solar power and so much wind power and so many batteries that most days this year they've produced more than 100% of their energy from renewable sources. When the sun goes down at night, batteries on that grid have become the biggest source of supply.

Those batteries weren't even there three years ago. You can tell why the big oil doesn't like this. California's use of gas to produce electricity is down 40% from last year. Those are the kind of numbers that begin to matter. Look, personal choice is important, but we learned a little bit about the limits of that during the pandemic. In March 2020, New Yorkers and everybody else shut down their lives in a way that no environmentalist could ever imagine. Nobody traveled, nobody drove, nobody flew. Carbon emissions went down, but they went down about 10%. That's not very much.

It's a reminder that the problem here is in the guts of this system. We have to rip out the coal and the oil and the gas, and we have to install sun and wind and batteries, and we have to do it while the machine is running. It's going to be, among other things, take some money, and that money should come from the fossil fuel industry that's been lying and profiting for years now.

Kousha Navidar: Where would you suggest that money go from the proceeds of this bill?

Bill McKibben: The money from the proceeds of this bill is going to go straight to building those roads and bridges and culverts instead of making New York workers pay for them. This sounds theoretical, but it's not. The people for 25 years that I've found easiest to talk with about climate change are the people who run Department of Public Works at small towns all over the Northeast. That's because they've spent those last 25 years systematically ripping out 12 and 14-inch culverts and putting in 18 and 20-inch culverts. That's because the old book just doesn't work anymore. There's too much water.

The basic bottom line of climate change, or one of them, is that warm air holds more water vapor than cold. That means you get more drought and more forest fire in arid areas. It means that in wet areas like ours, you get more downpour and deluge a lot more. Dealing with that is just absurdly expensive. Water management is not easy because we built our civilization along the waterways, the coastlines, the rivers. Now that those coastlines and waterways are swelling with extra water, thanks to global warming, it's a [unintelligible 00:28:14] problem to figure out how to manage it all.

Kousha Navidar: It seems like the Think Locally, Act Globally mantra may work in some contexts, but to really move the needle, as you're saying, to get anything beyond that, only a drop of about 10% that you were mentioning before, it would really take collective national action. I think Frances on the Upper East Side, a caller that we just have on deck here, might have something to say about that. Frances, hi. Welcome to the show.

Frances: Thank you. Yes, I would like to underline, what solution can you see when you have a president or a former president that withdraws from the Paris Agreement and is still not answering questions about climate change during the presidential debate. I'm European from Rome originally, that is really affected from the increase of temperature. The city has become inhabitable. That's the situation in Europe in a lot of cities facing the Mediterranean Sea.

Kousha Navidar: Frances, is your question here? What should you do or what must be done when we have leaders who aren't participating the way that they could be?

Frances: Yes, exactly. In my opinion, it's a human crime because really, this is affecting globally. What can you do if a president rejects the Paris Agreement or things like this? I've been joining as a hostess, meeting about oil companies since 25 years ago, and they know exactly what they're doing.

Kousha Navidar: Bill, any sense of that about Frances's question there?

Bill McKibben: Absolutely. First, the perspective from Europe is fascinating. In the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, Europe has transformed its energy system in really, really rapid succession. Now the use of natural gas is dropping like a stone, and renewables are replacing it place after place after place. We could do that here too. The question about action really comes down to this. Americans default to the individual when we think about things. When we think about climate change, we think about, I don't know, what's in our roof or what's in our garage.

I'm proud that I have solar panels on the roof and that they connect to an EV, but we're not going to solve this one Tesla at a time. The most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to make change. On a national level, that means taking part in this election. We had a Elders for Kamala call last night. That was amazing. Jane Fonda and John Kerry and Robin Wall Kimmerer and a dozen other great climate warriors coming together to rouse older people at thirdact.org in order to win this election.

On a state level, it definitely means getting this Superfund bill across the finish line. It should not even be a question. This should be the easiest no-brainer that there ever was, but of course, with as much money as there is in politics and with contributions coming from oil industry and things, nothing's ever the no-brainer than it should be. We have to work hard. I'm glad that people like Keanu are doing that work. There was a big rally in Albany a couple of days ago with lots and lots of people showing up to say, "Time to get this darn thing signed."

Kousha Navidar: Frances, I just want to say thank you so much for your question and bringing that up and offering a part of the European perspective there. Looking at the clock, got to wrap soon, but I want to make sure we bring it back to the current race. Just on the announcement today, there's been a lot of talk about Walz as coming from rural America. You, Bill, come from rural America. How are you feeling about the choice in general? Do you think fellow rural Americans are feeling good about Walz?

Bill McKibben: I have a feeling that for those of us who've spent our lives on dirt roads, this is a really interesting moment. It really is a constituency that's been largely overlooked by all sides, although Trump at all pays it lip service. It's good to see the Democrats making an appeal to rural America. I think it'll be really helpful. I think that that coastal and Midwest combination might be really powerful. It wasn't by accident that Bernie Sanders, who represents the most rural state in the union, Vermont, came out in favor of Tim Walz, I think.

Kousha Navidar: We'll have to leave it there. We've been talking to Bill McKibben, environmental activist and author. Bill, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Bill McKibben: Thank you. What a pleasure.

 

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