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.
As the world contends with increasingly destructive and costly climate-fueled disasters, the Trump administration has announced that it is eliminating the government’s ability to fight climate change.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is erasing the scientific finding, known as the “endangerment clause,” that permits it to take action to protect public health and the environment.
“Led by a president who refers to climate change as a ‘hoax,’ the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be,” reported the New York Times.
I turned to Bill McKibben to glean the significance and implications of this latest development. McKibben is arguably the world’s foremost reporter and organizer on the climate crisis. His 1989 book The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about climate change, and he has gone on to author over 20 other books.
He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times, and to his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. McKibben is also the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change.
The following excerpt is edited for clarity and length. Click on the audio bar above to listen to the complete interview with Bill McKibben.
David Goodman
A recent headline from the New York Times declared, “Trump administration erases the government’s power to fight climate change: The Environmental Protection Agency rejected the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gasses threaten human life and well being.” What the heck just happened?
Bill McKibben
It’s a very stupid thing to do by a very stupid set of people who are very dishonestly carrying out the agenda of the fossil fuel industry, which is trying hard to keep its business model alive. That’s one part of this. But the Times is wrong when it says this will erase the federal government’s ability to deal with climate change. The reason for that is that the climate debate is different now than it was in 2005-2006 when the EPA made this endangerment finding. For the first 35 years of the climate fight, we lived in a world where fossil fuel was relatively cheap and clean energy from the sun and wind was relatively expensive. We don’t live in that world any longer. Four or five years ago, we crossed an invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil. It was a huge moment, and what it’s resulted in around the world is a sudden, dramatic surge in clean energy, headquartered in China but spreading all over the world really fast. Africa is now the fastest growing solar market in the world, with 60% more than they had a year ago. So that new fact really changes how climate policy works. The idiot climate denialists who hold power in Washington are too late. The cat is effectively out of the bag.
David Goodman
We both remember the 70s and 80s and our parents’ cars. They were land yachts, the big Oldsmobiles and other gas guzzlers–
Bill McKibben
Plymouth Fury, baby. That’s what I got my learner’s permit in.
David Goodman
I remember the Arab oil embargo of the 70s when suddenly everybody was looking for fuel efficient cars and they couldn’t find American-made models. So our generation bought these small, cheap little cars called Toyotas and Nissans. That was the end of a lot of our generation ever buying our parents’ brand of American cars. And here we are again. Chinese EV brands like BYD — we will soon be looking at their taillights.
Bill McKibben
We’re already looking at their metaphorical taillights as China accelerates into the fast lane. We’ve ceded to them technological and economic superiority and probably with it, a kind of political high ground in the last year. Trump and the oil industry did what they’ve done on the theory that they had sufficient power to keep oil dominance all over the world. I don’t think that that’s working. Smart rulers all over the world right now are moving just as fast as they can in the direction of clean energy. The Chinese are obviously moving at lightning speed. In May, they were installing three gigawatts of solar panels a day. A gigawatt is more power than Vermont uses. They were doing that every eight hours. This is the place where this war is being fought, and it’s not being fought around the idiot climate denial that the Trump administration is now engaged in.
David Goodman
How do you balance the fact that China is an authoritarian country and the expansion of their EV market is empowering some bad actors?
Bill McKibben
I’m afraid it’s a little easier to balance it now that we’ve decided to become bad actors too. I’m well aware that if I had spent my life doing in China what I do in the US, I would have spent my whole life in jail. But I also have a certain admiration for the bottom line rationality of the administration in Beijing, at least when it comes to science, they’ve traditionally promoted engineers instead of lawyers in their system. And the result is what you now see: the very, very rapid capturing of the planet’s future. If we weren’t in a climate crisis this would be a more interesting debate, but we are in a climate crisis, and so I think that we’re going to end up being thankful to China for providing leadership in this realm.
David Goodman
I want to pivot to one of the other hats you wear as a movement leader and thinker. What should we learn from the resistance that we’re seeing in Minnesota and elsewhere to Trump’s immigration crackdown?
Bill McKibben
I’ve been incredibly moved by what’s been happening in the Midwest. I was at a protest where people on a very cold night were chanting, “We’re not cold, we’re not afraid, Minnesota taught us to be brave.” What’s happened in that state in the last two months is as important a demonstration of nonviolent power, tactics, solidarity and beauty as what happened 70 years ago this winter in Montgomery with the bus boycott, or what happened 95 years ago with the Salt March in India. I very much hope that the Nobel Committee will decide to award the people of Minneapolis the Peace Prize this year, partly because they deserve it, and partly because nothing would frost our idiot leader more. I’ve been very proud of the role that older Americans are playing in all this work, because we’ve been organizing at Third Act for the last four years and now we’ve got about 120,000 Americans over the age of 60, including a fantastic chapter in Vermont. And we’re working a lot on climate and energy, but we’re working just as hard on democracy. We’re trying to get across to other Americans how weird and illegitimate and absolutely abnormal this moment in our time is, and nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the immigration assault in America. I hope that when we’re tested, Vermont comes up as strong as Minnesota. What the Trump administration wanted them to do was riot. Instead, they conducted themselves with the kind of organized dignity that really did bring back memories of the Black people of Montgomery walking to their jobs for a year instead of riding the bus.
David Goodman
So many people are experiencing whiplash as they consume news. There’s climate denialism here, immigration crackdown there. How do you connect the dots between these things?
Bill McKibben
The way to connect the dots is to ask, what is to be done? And the answer for 2026 is to win the midterm elections so that there is some kind of leverage point to begin to claw our way back. This is a more desperate time than we’ve ever lived through. One of the few really powerful possibilities we have is what remains of our electoral system. Our job is to protect it and use it at all costs.
David Goodman
You wrote recently on your Substack about how the industrial scale of lying that we’re now subject to on a daily basis has its roots in the climate denial movement. You’ve had a front row seat to this. What have you seen over the years that has led you to recognize where we are now?
Bill McKibben
So much of Trumpism is familiar because (climate denial) is the first big lie that got told over and over and over again. We know it’s a lie because we know back in the 1980s when I was writing the first book on all this stuff that the big oil companies were diligently researching it and reaching exactly the same conclusions I did. Exxon started building all its drilling rigs higher because they knew that the ocean was going to be rising quickly, but they didn’t tell anybody. The whole industry joined in this big deception effort, and it had a huge political element. It provided the kind of training for getting good at telling other kinds of whoppers like “they’re eating the cats and dogs” that now routinely mark our political life. The state of living in unreality, which is dawning on everyone now, is one that those of us in the climate debate have lived with for a long time, and it doesn’t make it any more fun.
David Goodman
Finally, this current moment we are in with resurgent authoritarianism and climate denialism — how does this all end?
Bill McKibben
Those are the two big bad things happening on this planet: The temperature is going up very rapidly, and we live in this era of surging authoritarianism. Against those two big bad things, there’s one big good thing happening on Earth, and that’s this rise of clean energy. And the only good news I can provide, and the only activist strategy I really have, is that the rapid installation of solar panels and wind turbines, made possible by the fact that they’re cheap, takes a bite out of how hot the temperature gets, and it also takes a bite out of authoritarianism. We live in a world where it would be relatively easy to make oil unimportant, and if we did, then we’d be in a different planet in a lot of beneficial ways. I don’t know whether I will live to see it. I will do my best to, along with millions of others, to make it so.
