The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.
Donald Trump launched his second term as president this week by enacting executive orders authorizing mass deportations, curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, withdrawing from climate accords and pardoning his supporters who assaulted Capitol police officers. Flanked by an assortment of the richest men on Earth, Trump’s inauguration vividly symbolized the dawn of a new age of oligarchs.
This has many people — including the nearly two-thirds of Vermonters who voted against Trump — in despair.
Bill McKibben has long found hope and opportunity in the face of daunting challenges. As one of America’s leading climate activists, McKibben freely admits that he has lost more fights than he has won, as evidenced by the inexorably rising global temperatures and the proliferation of climate-fueled disasters, most recently in Los Angeles, where wildfires have burned over 40,000 acres and destroyed over 15,000 structures .
But McKibben keeps writing, organizing, and launching movements. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org that helped to stop major oil pipelines. And he launched a fossil fuel divestment movement that has resulted in more than 1,500 institutions with $40 trillion in assets committing to divesting from fossil fuels.
Four years ago, McKibben launched Third Act, a political movement of people over 60 to use their “unparalleled generational power to safeguard our climate and democracy.” The organization is now 100,000 volunteers strong.
“It feels to me as if a kind of arc of American history that began with the election of FDR has come to an end,” said McKibben. “The idea that America was a group project that we were working on together trying to make things better, always imperfectly, often dangerously for other parts of the world, but nonetheless a consistent effort to build a country that that worked, that feels like it’s over and we’re now in some new era where we do not understand what the goals are, what the rules are, what the ideas are, what the etiquette is. I mean, watching Elon Musk throw up a Nazi salute was a pretty breathtaking moment.”
McKibben said that currently immigration is one of his biggest concerns. “The thing that we should be saddest and scared about is what immigrants to this country must be feeling right now. The amount of fear there must be in people’s homes every night when they go to bed, just that quanta of apprehension and fright, must be off the charts,” he said. “I don’t know quite how we’re going to be able to come to the defense of people, but I hope that we can figure out some ways to do it in the longer term.”
McKibben added that his other big concern is “the single deepest problem facing the planet, and that’s its rapidly escalating temperature.”
Trump declared in his inaugural speech that he was declaring an “energy emergency.”
“Of course, that’s absurd,” said McKibben. “We have no shortage of energy. We’re producing more oil and gas than we’ve ever produced before. The real problem, the real urgency, is that the people who control that oil and gas are worried that we might use less of it someday.”
“We’re in an emergency,” he continued, “but it’s not the one that he’s describing. The emergency that we’re in, obviously, is the one that drove temperatures higher in 2024 than they’ve ever been before, and the one that set our second largest city on fire.”
McKibben said that Trump and his oil industry backers hope “that they can get another 10 or 20 years out of their business model even at the cost of breaking the planet, because that’s clearly going to be the cost.”
McKibben noted that the fossil fuel industry is losing a race against the burgeoning renewable energy sector, in which China I leading the way with cheap solar panels and electric vehicles. “Every day on this Earth people are putting up solar panels equivalent to a nuclear power plant. … We’ve roughly doubled the pace at which we’re putting renewables up, and we need to roughly triple it in order to get back on a kind of Paris (climate accord) pathway. But it’s a remarkable, remarkable change.”
McKibben observed that even in a hostile political environment “we also need to just celebrate where we are, the fact that we do live at a moment when we could make this decisive turn towards the sun and towards the wind, where we could reconnect with the natural world as the source of our power.”
McKibben is the author of some 20 books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He writes regularly for the New Yorker at his Substack, The Crucial Years. His latest book is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.” McKibben is the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College.
“I don’t think that we’re actually going to be able in the short term to defy Trump’s energy regime. I don’t think we can prevent them from doing lots of drilling. I think the place where his ideas are weak and vulnerable is precisely in the fact that now we know how to make the same product — energy — just cleaner and cheaper and more beautifully. And if we can hammer on that, then maybe we’ll get somewhere despite it all.”
