James' World 2

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We have not been talking that much about climate change lately, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped happening. Europe is in the midst of an extraordinary heat wave. The world is staring down the barrel of a powerful El Niño.

And climate politics is in almost total disarray. Donald Trump has gutted the Inflation Reduction Act. His administration is accelerating fossil fuel production and kneecapping green energy.

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Archival clip of Donald Trump: Wind — it doesn’t work, I will tell you, aside from ruining our fields and our valleys and killing all the birds and being very weak and expensive.

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But here’s the possibility, a bit of optimism: The advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.

Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.

So how do we talk about it? How do we make it happen?

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, the co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, as well as Third Act, which is organizing people over 60 on climate change. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He writes the Substack, The Crucial Years, and his most recent book is “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.”

Ezra Klein: Bill McKibben, welcome back to the show.

Bill McKibben: Very good to be back with you.

You have a line that people still think of clean energy like Whole Foods energy — it’s virtuous, pricey, a bit of a flex — when, in fact, you say it has become the “Costco of energy.”

Tell me about that.

Cheap, available on the shelf in bulk, ready to go.

The stuff that we spent my whole lifetime calling alternative energy from the sun and the wind is now the obvious, common sense, straightforward way to produce power. Sometime earlier this decade, we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from setting stuff on fire.

That’s a big line, by the way. Darwin said fire and language were the two things that marked our species. But now we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

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Advancements in renewable energy are paving the way for a new climate politics. The environmentalist Bill McKibben articulates some of the possibilities in this new era of energy abundance. CreditCredit…The New York Times

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