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Brian: It's the Brian Lerner Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now our climate story of the week. Here we are on the last day of February, and for the only time this entire winter, we have a measurable little snowfall in the New York area. The whole Northeast, of course, is experiencing this epical shift with challenges that include the fate of the skiing industry in Vermont. To put that change in perspective, here's one paragraph from the Rutland Herald that I read from earlier this month.

It says, "Vermont has been getting warmer and warmer. Out of 135 winters from 1816 to 1950, Lake Sam Plain froze over all but seven times. Since 1990, it's only frozen 10 times. Vermont climate scientists expect more rain and less snow in winters to come." That from the Rutland Heralt. In The New Yorker, contributing writer and legendary environmentalist Bill McKibben has an article called, What to Do When It Rains On The Winter Games. Mckibben teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont and has lived much of his life in the nearby Adirondacks. His article, What to Do When It Rains On The Winter Games, is set in Lake Placid, the Adirondack town that famously hosted the Winter Olympics back in 1980.

Bill McKibben is also the author of 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, always great have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Bill McKibben: Brian, it's great to be with you. Congratulations on your snow. As long as we're talking winter, let me just give you one-- I'm in a good mood this morning because I got up early and watched as an American, Jesse Diggins became the first American ever to win an individual gold medal in cross-country skiing at a World Championships. She did it in Slovenia this morning in fine style. I celebrated by going out for a ski in the woods behind the house. Winter is the magical time of the year when for a little while, friction gives up its remit, and we get to glide across the face of the earth. It's a great sadness that it's disappearing as the planet warms.

Brian: Leave it to Bill McKibben to something like, "friction gives up its remit. now tell us," what was that rainy day in Lake Placid that your New Yorker headline is about?

Bill: That was a few weeks ago at the start of the World University Games. I got to be an honorary torchbearer over there, and it was a great ceremony on the rink where the miracle on ice from 1980. Then all the thousands of athletes and officials and things trooped out of the ice rink into the Lake Placid evening. There were light, golden white lights strung everywhere, and it was absolutely pouring rain. It dampened the party, and that's happening an awful lot.

It's obviously not the worst consequence of climate change, but it is a dramatic reminder of how the world is shifting, that we no longer can count on the fact that come the winter months, the world will change a little and water will turn into ice and we'll be able to even the clumsy like me be elegant for a moment, gliding across the surface of the earth.

Brian: On skiis, cross country, behind your house. Those stats that I cited about the complete reversal in the last 30 years, in what percentage of years Lake Champlain freezes over Lake Champlain, for those of you who don't know, divides New York and Vermont up there by the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains. It's such a clear and stunning example of global warming at work, right?

Bill: Oh, absolutely. It comes with real cultural pinch. As far back as anyone knows, people have been going out ice fishing on Lake Sam Plain. It's one of the things that people do up here. That's not happening at the moment. It's not safe. We were out gathering sap for maple syrup two weeks ago, which is not supposed to be happening, not what Currier and I have had in mind. All of this is a reminder of how fast this change is happening.

Remember, the records we've seen in the last year or two around the planet, and we've seen some of the hottest weather ever recorded on Earth, are coming during the La Niña phase in the Pacific, when the ocean is cooler and the planet as a whole should be a little cooler. The prediction now is that we're going to enter an El Niño phase sometime late this fall and by most accounts 2024, not only could set the record for the hottest year we've ever recorded, but it might, Jim Hansen, the great climatologist, said a few weeks ago, take us past, at least temporarily, the 1.5 degree increase in temperature that the world vowed in Paris seven years ago not to eclipse.

Brian: That might happen next year?

Bill: At least for a year, yes. If you ever needed a reminder of why we need to get to work, just how fast we need to change, that's it. This is a timed test, and we are losing this time test and losing it badly. That's why we're busy working organizing. That's why, doubtless, I'll be in jail before the month is out as we do this work to take on the big banks that are funding the fossil fuel industry. We need everybody engaged in this work if you care about the world that we're going to be living on.

Brian: All right. Spoiler alert. I was going to save that action you're planning for the end of the segment, but what do you think is going to land you in jail?

Bill: We've started this new outfit called Third Act, that organizes old people like me over the age of 60 for progressive action on democracy and climate. This month we're taking on across the country, the four big banks, Chase City, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, that are the four biggest funders of the fossil fuel industry. Tens of thousands of people have signed pledges saying that they'll tear up their credit cards. On March 21st, 3/21/23, a day too delightfully palindromic to pass up, we're going to be outside and inside those banks in New York City.

People are going to be gathering at 10:30 at Daghemmersholde plaza up there by the UN and then marching down a few blocks to Citibank Branch, where there'll be lots of street theater and a giant pair of scissors cutting a giant credit card. I'm going to be in Washington, DC, where we've rounded up 50 rocking chairs, and us old folks are going to be using them to block the doors of those banks for the day. There'll be 85 or 90 of these events happening across the country, and you can get all the information at thirdact.org. It's not just for old folks, though.

Everybody is welcome. Everybody's joining in. The Sierra Club and Greenpeace and so many others are joining this day of action because we understand that one way to cut off the flow of carbon into the atmosphere is to cut off the flow of cash into the fossil fuel industry. Despite every single warning from scientists, the fossil fuel industry continues trying to expand, build new pipelines, open new oil fields. We're pushing back. A couple of weeks ago, HSBC, the biggest bank in Europe, announced that they would no longer lend money for new oil and gas fields. We need something like that coming out of these American behemoths, too.

Brian: You've definitely got a visual there for TV coverage of your action, the 50 Rocking Chair March.

Bill: There you go.

Brian: Taking this to the global level, you also have an article in The New Yorker called the UN Secretary General's Searing message for the fossil fuel industry. Bill, I pulled the clip that you quote in the piece from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, from his annual UN Secretary General's address this month. Here it is.

Antonio Guterres: I have a special message for fossil fuel producers and their enablers, scrambling to expand production and raking in monster profits. If you cannot set a credible course for net zero with 2025 and 2030 targets covering all your operations, you should not be in business. Your core product is our core problem.

Brian: Your core product is our core problem. Why did you spotlight the UN Secretary-General there, or is it obvious?

Bill: Because this guy is supposed to be the world's top diplomat, and we know how diplomats usually talk. They come out of a meeting and say, "We had a full and frank exchange of views." Or whatever it is. Look, this guy spends part of every week getting briefed by the world's top scientists. He is arguably the only political leader we have whose jurisdiction is the entire Earth. He is scared out of his mind. He's talking the way that Greta Thunberg and I, and others who are climate activists have been talking for years, but this guy is the Secretary General of the UN.

The only other person who's matching him in his level of alarm is the other world leader without a jurisdictional boundary, Pope Francis, who heads the biggest organization on Earth. He's been similarly outraged. I wanted to highlight it in hopes that it'll help people understand that we need more than a measured response at this point. I'm very glad that Joe Biden finally persuaded the US Congress 34 years and 40 days after Jim Hansen first testified to it about climate change.

Finally, persuaded them to spend some money and do something, this Inflation Reduction Act. We need much more and we need to be pushing much harder because we're now in literal hot water and it is literally rising.

Brian: We don't get a lot of calls from the Adirondacks being as far as they are from our studios in Lower Manhattan, but we're getting one now. Happy in Manhattan. Happy from Plattsburgh. You're on WNYC. Hi, Happy.

Happy: Hi there. I grew up in Plattsburgh, but I now live in Manhattan.

Brian: Oh, I see. Okay, good.

Happy: I can tell you winters in the North Country are not what they used to be. I can remember weeks where it would be 35 below 0 at night, and you'd look at 20 below as a warm day.

Brian: Happy --

Bill: That's absolutely right.

Brian: Go ahead, Bill.

Bill: I remember those too. People say, "Why would anyone have any remorse for the end of bitter cold?" Well, among other things, back in those days we didn't have -- Vermont now leads the country in Lyme disease per capita. That's a new development because it used to be too cold up here for ticks over winter, but it's not too cold anymore. What does that mean? Well, it means that people's relationship to the world around them changes. Parents no longer send their kids out to just play in the woods or in the fields without a thought instead this menace hangs over summer too.

We could posit a lot of more important reasons to be dealing with climate change, like the 31 million people displaced by record flooding in Pakistan this fall or the fact that Somalia has just gone through its fifth rainy season with no rain, or on and on and on. There's also real disorientation, psychological disorientation that comes from those of us who measure our lives in some respect by the turning wheel of the calendar.

Brian: You described the UN Secretary General after that clip from his speech that we played saying if the global fossil fuel industry doesn't clean up its act, it should be shut down. How literally does he mean that people are going to be dependent on some fossil fuels for a period of transition, at least? Does the UN Secretary General have any power over climate issues and fossil fuel companies?

Bill: He's got no direct power over them. It's unclear whether at some level anyone has much direct power over them. I think you could argue that their ability to run our government, not to mention Vladimir Putin's government, not to mention Saudi Arabia's government, is pretty much proof that we're not going to be able to shut them down. What we may be able to do, and what we have to do is stop them from expanding so that we can quickly begin to fill in the demand for energy with solar power and wind power. This is not a stretch anymore. Because of the engineering advances of the last decade, the cheapest way to generate power on our planet is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

We're still used to calling sun power and wind power alternative energy and thinking that real energy comes from burning oil and gas. We're used to thinking of renewable energy as the kind of Whole Foods to the D'Agostino's of oil and gas, but at this point, that's just wrong. The sensible straightforward way to produce power is by taking advantage of the large ball of burning gas hanging 93 million miles away. The only thing that gets in the way of that is the incredible political power of this industry. That's why we have to do things like try and slow down their bank financing. Even then, we're not demanding that the banks stop dealing with the oil industry.

They're going to be here for a few more years and they'll need banks. We just want them to stop funding the expansion of this industry. If you're building right now pipelines designed to last another 40 years, you're behaving in as-- well, I think it's headed onto the direction of sociopathy.

Brian: We'll follow that 50 Rocking Chairs event that you have coming up with your group Third Act in a few weeks. For now, we thank Bill McKibben, Middlebury College Environmental scholar, founder of the group Third Act, and Denizen of the North Country, from which as a New Yorker magazine contributor he wrote that article that we've been talking about called What to Do When It Rains On The Winter Games, which he wrote from Lake Placid. Bill, always great to have you. Thank you very much.

Bill: What a pleasure, Brian. Take good care.

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