How the Super El Niño Could Reignite the Climate Movement

0:00Hello, hello from Newsweek's Long Island Bureau here in the east end of Long Island, a.k.a. my parents' house. This is the 1600, and I, of course, am Carlo Versano. This country was stone cold dead. Yeah, we have absconded from the heat of New York City for a couple of weeks, me and the family, just to be out with the folks. But that actually conveniently brings us to today's topic and today's guest, climate change, which is an issue we've talked about here a little bit. It's kind of receded from the headlines, at least among Democrats, although I strongly suspect that is about to change. And my guest today is going to help us understand why that is.

0:37His name is Bill McKibben. You've probably heard of him. He is a seminal author. He's an environmentalist, a journalist who writes a must-read substat called The Crucial Years, one of the best sources for information if you're following the climate crisis, one of my go-to sources at least, which he calls the deepest problem human beings have ever encountered. And I would certainly agree with that. So, Bill, sorry for the long-winded intro, but welcome to the show. I really appreciate having you. Pleasure to be with you, man. You're coming to us from not Long Island. That's where I'm coming to you from.

1:09From Vermont, right? Vermont, yes. Up in the Green Mountains where it's hot today, but beautiful and lush. Beautiful and lush here, too. So, Bill, you've covered climate science, climate change for a long time. You know, you wrote the seminal book in 1989, The End of Nature. You've been writing lately on your Substack about how climate is sort of one of these cyclical issues. You've you've called it. It's entering a new cycle, to use your words. You know, climate change, global warming, whatever, you know, whatever term we want to use. It's certainly been pushed off the agenda, at least in the media, mostly just by the Trump era and all the craziness of, you know, sort of covering day to day Trump administration, whether that means starting a new war or whatever it may be.

1:54I think it's going to be, and I think you also believe this, this is going to be pushed back into the forefront thanks to good old physics, good old physical reality, namely a major El Nino that's about to happen, and also mounting extreme heat. Of course, we've seen these heat waves in Europe and also in the U.S. lately. Before we get to El Nino, Bill, can you just talk a little bit about this concept of climate as a cyclical political issue? because if you care about climate, it seems like we're in the dregs right now. Sure. So the first thing to understand is that climate change has proceeded apace just as we predicted it would.

2:32The things that we were talking about in the 1980s are sadly exactly on schedule. The planet is warming quite rapidly, and the things that scientists told us that would mean are now playing out. We see remarkable increases in fire and flood around the world because warm air holds more water vapor than cold. So in arid areas, you get more evaporation and then more fire. I just came back from doing some reporting in Altadena, where the huge fires in January of 2025 in that one town took out 9 ,000 homes. Things like that happen someplace around the world every day now. It's just that in Los Angeles, there's a lot of cameras to take pictures of.

3:19And conversely, once that water vapor is up in the air, it's going to come down and it comes down hard. In wet areas, today we're watching them rescue people from floods in Missouri, but tomorrow it will be somewhere else. That deep damage is now spreading to very systemic things like the jet stream and the Gulf Stream, which are being altered and degraded by the rapid increase in temperature. This is extremely dangerous. But it happens on such a wide scale that it's possible to sort of miss it in the day-to-day political hurly-burly. And so there are moments when it rises back to the fore and becomes an unavoidable political issue, Hurricane Katrina, for instance.

4:17And we're about to enter one of those periods now. On top of the global warming that we now see, we're about to get a sort of taste of what the weather is going to be like every day in 2035 or 2040. because this massive El Nino will release huge amounts of heat from the tropical Pacific, and that will affect weather around the world. Most of the heat that will be trapped with our fossil fuel emissions ends up in the ocean, at least temporarily. If we didn't have an ocean, the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere would have increased the surface temperature of the planet from 60 degrees to about 120 degrees over the last 50 years.

5:04Happily, we do have an ocean to buffer that heat, but it only buffers it for a while. And things like El Nino kind of open the sauna door and let that heat come streaming out. So we don't know exactly how it will all play out. It's a bigger, we're going to higher temperatures than humans have ever experienced. But one can guess with great accuracy that we're going to see things we haven't seen before and that that will be enough to scare people back into worrying about climate change as a political issue. That's half what's happening. Right. The other part, the other reason that this is going to be more and more a political issue, at least for smart politicians, is that we now possess something to do about it.

5:54And that something is cheap and popular. It's the substitution of sun and wind and batteries for coal and gas and oil. And that'll mean that the next time this becomes a political issue, smart political leaders will be able to really seize on it and help us make this move in America that now is being made in so many other parts of the world. Three or four days ago, Australia, for instance, a whole continent, started offering free electricity to all its residents for three hours every afternoon because they built so many solar panels. I'd like to run on that. Yeah. Too cheap to meter. No, exactly.

6:38It seems like that would be a excellent catchphrase for a Democrat running for president in 2028, right? Abundance, energy abundance to the point where you don't even have to think about it because it's just like air. Before we get to some of the science, I want to play a little bit of sort of devil's advocate here because you've talked about how climate has cycled sort of in and out of public attention since the 80s, as we just talked about, right? We had the, you know, the furor over the greenhouse effect, the Coyote Protocol, Bush getting out of that, the collapse of Copenhagen, us ending our participation in the Paris Climate Accords.

7:13Each time you've written that it's been knocked down by the hard work of big oil, using your terminology, which I certainly agree with. Um, just to play devil's advocate, though, don't Democrats deserve some blame here? And I'm thinking and I've written about this a little bit recently, like the Green New Deal was supposed to be the sort of like landmark climate policy coming from the progressive left. It was not popular. It didn't get any votes in the Senate. You don't even really hear Democrats talking about it anymore. And I think part of that reason is, you know, the right, which is very good at this, was able to make a lot of political hay out of some of the more, you know, out there elements of the Green New Deal, right?

7:51Talking about upgrading every building in America in the next 10 years, talking about getting rid of cow farts and methane and air travel like writ large. It just seems like I get that the right takes things like that out of context, but isn't it the job of politicians to frame policies in a way that makes them digestible to voters? Sure. And the Green New Deal became the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate. Passed the Senate. and did an extraordinary amount of useful stuff. But as you point out, the Biden administration didn't do a very good job of messaging it, beginning with its name.

8:33And, you know, I think most Americans don't really know that we passed a major law that you might have really realistically called the Try and Catch Up with China Act, which was beginning to work until the new Republican Senate shut it down. So, yeah, look, Big Oil has purchased one of our political parties, and they've terrified the other one. So, yes, Democrats, it is true, can be feckless in all of this, but at least they're generally willing to stand by the basic principles of chemistry and physics, which is a start. No, I think that's fair. Bill, you've got some good slogans. I hope the Democratic Party, to the extent that it listens to anybody these days, is taking your counsel, or at least reading your sub stack.

9:26Do you think that the midterms are going, is climate, could it be an issue in the midterms? And do you think it's political malpractice for Democrats to not call out Trump as the anti-climate act, anti-renewables president? I would, if I was planning this midterm, I would spend less time probably talking about climate and more time talking about cheap, clean energy. I think the place where Trump is truly vulnerable here is the insane degree to which they've attacked clean energy. Shutting down wind farms that were 90 percent complete off the coast of New England, putting federal land off limits to solar power, resubsid, coming up new subsidies for coal fired power.

10:12None of these things are popular in any way. And in fact, they're deeply unpopular. solar energy continues to be one of the few things that polls very well across Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. Everybody understands at some level that this is where the future lies. And the fact that he's clearly just carrying water for big oil, it's not like there's lots of voters with huge affection for Exxon and Chevron. Right. No, it's so true. And it's so, So just as an observer and as a voting Democrat, it's just so infuriating that this stuff has become a political cudgel, right? Because if you talk to anybody in Brooklyn who just has panels on the top of their house, I don't think anybody thinks that that's going to be the thing that solves this problem, but they certainly understand it as a thing that makes their energy bills go down, right?

11:05Well, and what's really interesting is that works as well in red America as blue America. I've spent my whole life living in rural America, much of it in red parts of the country, always at the end of dirt roads. And that means that I have plenty of neighbors who have Trump flags on the mailbox and solar panels on the roof. And when I talk with them at church, at fire company, whatever, about why, they're reasoning has less to do with climate change usually, although rural Americans do understand better than suburban Americans what's happening to the planet, I think. But their reasoning generally is my house is my castle and it's a better castle if it has an uninterrupted power supply.

11:55People don't like utilities either. And I don't like them. I'm very happy to have solar panels all over my roof, so I don't have to depend on mine very much either. No, it's true. Yeah. Besides big oil, I don't think you're going to find anybody who's like, man, I really love Con Ed. National Grid is the company that I want to support in this election. Okay. We're going all over the place, which I knew was going to happen because I have so many questions. Let's table the politics for two seconds. And I do want to ask you a little bit more about this new El Nino, which is specifically the reason why I brought you on.

12:30They're calling it a super El Nino, they being us in the media, which is, I don't believe is the scientific name. You wrote recently that if this El Nino does develop into as strong as what some climate scientists are predicting, you wrote, quote, prepare for bedlam. So the NOAA is saying that it's, it could strengthen to a, quote, strong to historic events, 63 % chance of a very strong El Nino between 26 November of this year and January of next year, potentially among the strongest on record. The strongest on record, my understanding was this one in 1877, which killed almost 50 million people around the world, something like 4 % of the global population, mostly due to famine.

13:11Obviously the world has changed. We're much more resilient as a species. Well, among other things, we had no idea what was going on in 1877. El Nino hadn't even been identified as a thing. It's only retrospectively that we sort of understand it. And theoretically, we should be able to prepare and make sure that people don't die in famine. This, of course, reminds us how foolish it was to, say, shut down USAID in the early days of Elon Musk's attack on the federal government, because we have fewer of the systems we need to keep people from starving. But it's going to be chaotic, I think, in the best of circumstances, because the heat that comes out of the Pacific doesn't stay there.

14:02We can easily measure changes across the entire world. We get, in some parts of the world, say California, huge increases often in rainfall and flooding. In other places, Australia, Africa, huge increases in drought. So we don't know. We can't tell you which zip code is going to get exactly hit on which day, but we can tell you that the damage is going to be big and widespread. Brad. What is the worst case but still plausible scenario for this specific El Nino? I mean, look, here's the thing. It comes at us on top of an already very hot and dangerous world. So this spring, before El Nino, we've come through these insane record heat waves across, us, say, Europe, but also Asia, that we don't pay as much attention.

15:00You know, pretty much every European country just set records for their all-time high temperature, and a lot of people are dead. In the Western U.S., we've just come through a winter, the warmest winter by far on record, again, before El Nino, and one with no snow. The scientists called it a no-pack up in the Rockies and the Sierras because there was none of the white stuff up there. You know, these are the kind of things that get exacerbated and exaggerated during an El Nino. You get more intense, you know, changes to the jet stream that allow these heat domes to form over particular places. And, you know, it's going to give us, as I said before, a real taste of what planet Earth will be like all the time in a decade.

16:03If you want to have a sense of what global warming is going to feel like, this year will be a good year to get that sense. God, it just makes me it's such a fatalistic conversation sometimes. I guess my question is from journalist to journalist is, you know, how do you responsibly cover this story without inducing this sense of fatalism? Because I think I think what happens, again, from sort of like a media critique perspective is people because this is a collective action problem. Climate change is like the definition of a collective action problem. It takes a lot of people moving at once, rowing in the same direction, which our politics does not allow at the moment.

16:43And I think what ends up happening is people are like, yeah, I believe in climate change. I can see it in my own backyard, in my own community, but other than these little things around the edges, there's nothing much I can do. So let's just hope the problem solves itself, right? Yes. I think that that's a very acute observation. And happily, we live at a moment when that is no longer how we need to respond. Five years ago, we crossed some invisible line on this planet where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than from setting stuff on fire. Big deal that human beings have been setting stuff on fire for 700 ,000 years.

17:23Darwin said language and fire were the two things that set apart our species. But we don't need to be burning stuff anymore. And in places around the world, we can see this dramatically starting to happen. The Chinese are taking what was originally American technology, and they're going to own the future with it. They're building out the solar panels, the wind turbines, the EVs. They're transforming their society. In America, California is the one place that's really taken this seriously. They've now built enough of this stuff that they're built. Most days, California now generates more than 100 % of its electricity for long periods of the day from renewable sources.

18:11But it's surplus. Amazing. At night, that's right. At night, the biggest source of supply to the grid in California are batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. California, fourth largest economy in the world, is using 60 % less natural gas to generate electricity than it was three years ago. That's the kind of number that applied around the world would begin not to stop global warming, too late for that, but definitely to shave tenths of a degree of how hot the planet gets. And every tenth of a degree that we raise the temperature of the Earth now moves about 100 million people from a safe climate zone to a dangerous one.

18:56So there is obviously we are in grave trouble, but there is no point in being fatalist about it. Not when there are dramatic things that we can do to keep it from getting worse than it needs to get. And those things also would save us money. And those things would also help us in lots of other ways. Nine million human beings die each year, about one death in five, from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That's no longer necessary. I mean, those Chinese cities that a decade ago were the dirtiest cities on the planet are now nowhere near the top of that list. They're as clean as American cities or cleaner in some cases because 60 % of the cars that got sold last month in China had a plug hanging out the back.

19:48Not only are they cleaner, they're cheaper. I've talked to friends in Shanghai in the last few weeks who say, you know what the biggest difference is? Our city is way, way, way quieter than it was a year ago, which, you know, that's no small thing either. No. And as somebody who lives in the city and complains about the noise constantly, I would love nothing more than to be seeing more of this where we live. I'm stuck a little bit on this issue of like, again, as a media professional, climate is such a hard issue to cover, right? When I worked in TV, climate stories never raided, which is why we rarely did them.

20:30In digital media, the only ones that people tend to click on are the Doomer catastrophe ones. want, you know, this is what sea level rise will, this is what New York City will look like if sea levels rise 10 feet, those sorts of things. And then again, you know, those things don't happen or they don't happen right away. And then that ends up giving ammunition to people like Trump to talk about how this is all a big hoax and, you know, don't pay any attention to your, don't believe your lion eyes, right? But, and you've touched on this, right? The geopolitical moment right now is interesting because there's a nexus with climate politics, right?

21:04And I think that it creates a way for people to look at climate and look at these issues as writ large, not about climate change or global warming or even about cheap energy, but about national security and energy independence. Absolutely. You could argue that Donald Trump was the EV salesman of the month when he foolishly took us to war in Iran because all of a sudden leaders around the world recognized that something upon which their countries depend could be bottled up behind a 20-mile waterway that no one had ever heard of before. They quickly recognized that though sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.

21:51So that's a pretty big selling point. And it wasn't just Iran, right? I mean, Ukraine showed Europe that they can't rely on cheap oil and natural gas from Russia. Two shocks in one decade, yep. Yeah, I mean, it is pretty remarkable. I think Bloomberg had a good line in a piece recently about how this mess in Iran has become Asia's Ukraine, right? Because Asia is so dependent on... We're a net energy exporter, at least that's what they tell us. So we're sort of a little bit more cushioned, although these prices are set on global markets, which is, of course, is why Cass is$5 where I am right now.

22:25But it feels like this could be an inflection point for fossil fuel consumption in places that are not energy, net energy producers, right? 80 % of human beings live in countries that have to import fossil fuel. Yeah. They spend a ton of money. They write a check to Texas or Saudi Arabia every week, you know, and they'd prefer not to. India spends 5 % of its GDP importing fossil fuel. Think what India could do with 5 % of its GDP. They've thought about it, and that's why they're now building solar panels as fast as they possibly can. And they're not just building solar panels. They're building the factories to make them so they don't depend on China.

23:11Do you think this idea of energy security is a more persuasive argument for the renewable push than, quote-unquote, climate change, quote-unquote, saving the planet? I think that climate change, cost, public health, and energy security are all strong arguments. And left to themselves, they'd be triumphant arguments. Now, given enough time, they will, in the end, win out. But we don't have a lot of time, and climate change is the clearest example of that. And so we need to move quickly. The thing that's in the way, the problem here, is that though everything you and I have been describing is good news for most people, it's really bad news for people who own oil wells and coal mines.

24:05And our political system in particular is so easily corrupted and gamed by people who have large amounts of cash flow. You'll recall that candidate Trump told the oil industry that if they gave him a billion dollars, he would give them anything they wanted. The industry between advertising and lobbying and donations ended up ponying up something like half a billion in the last election cycle to the GOP. and that was enough. He's given them more than, I mean, the things we're doing are just crazy. You may have missed this in the middle of all the other fun, but all of us as taxpayers in the last few weeks wrote a check for something like two and a half billion dollars to buy back the wind leases offshore in the Atlantic and Pacific that companies had paid the American government for the right to go harvest that wind.

25:01Now we've bought it back just to ensure that that wind will forever go unused. Trump has a particular bee in his bonnet about wind energy that has never made any sense to me. Like he talks about how they kill the birds as though he's like, you know, a great... It's because he thought it was going to damage the view from the ninth fairway of his Scottish golf course. Right. But, you know, once an idea gets lodged in that steel trap of a mind, And it's extremely difficult to extricate it. God, ain't that the truth? Well, it's a perfect segue for what I wanted to talk about, which is the Trump administration's climate rollback, which when you put it together is among the more depressing parts of this current saga that we're in.

25:50Obviously, you know, one of his first things was to formally withdraw of the Paris Agreement. He signaled intent to leave the UN, the IPCC, the Green Climate Fund. And Treasury is, I just saw this, they're narrowing tax credit eligibility for wind and solar. Interior has a new project density rule requiring renewables on federal land to match fossil fuel energy output per acre. The Department of Energy has added climate change, green emissions and decarbonization to a list of words not to use, which is really Orwellian. He also obviously got rid of the endangerment finding that underpinned all of our climate policy.

26:25I mean, we're literally trying to shut down the ocean buoys and satellites that monitor the temperature of the planet. I mean, it's the equivalent of, you know, in a heist movie where you spray paint over the surveillance camera before you blow the bank vault, you know. So, yes, everything we're doing is nuts. And none of it has any political appeal. There's nobody has a poll showing don't, you know, don't talk about climate. In fact, when you do the polling, it turns out to be maybe the single thing on which the administration is most out of touch with how people think about the world. I think the problem is, though, that the flip side of that is that climate just never polls as a top priority for voters.

27:14Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, I think that it does on occasion. When we were in the Democratic primaries in 2020, climate was the number one issue on Poland before COVID hit. And that's the reason that there was this widespread support for what became the Inflation Reduction Act. It's why Joe Biden spent most of his political capital trying to get that done. But one of the things that happened was the minute that that was signed and passed, much of the political pressure went away. You know, environmentalists went to work building out our clean energy system instead of politically arguing for it.

27:58And I think that that pressure will rebuild. I think by the time we get to 2028, there'll be a robust movement demanding action. And as I say, I think it'll be more popular than ever because, among other things, it will be about the affordability of energy. Do you see any? Yeah, go ahead. No, no. And by the way, it will tie in pretty directly to these questions around data centers that have become so politically salient. We, you know, five years ago, I started this thing called Third Act, which organizes old people like me for action on climate and democracy. We now have 120 ,000 people around the country, and we've gotten very good at political work on this, and it's by no means impossible.

28:50For instance, this spring, we spearheaded the effort to change the laws in state legislatures around America on what we call balcony solar or plug-in solar. So this cheapest form of solar energy for a few hundred dollars, you can get a solar panel and millions of Europeans have done it in the last. Throw it on your balcony. Just plug into your wall. No electrician required. That was illegal everywhere in America until this spring. But we've gotten it through 10 state legislatures, some of them Republican, some of them Democratic. Democratic. There's enormous, it's very hard to get a new idea through 10 legislatures in the first year that it's up and around.

29:33But the Third Act did a good job, but there's deep political appeal for this kind of thing. I'm glad you brought up Third Act because it's fascinating to me. So this, as you mentioned, this is your organization that advocates for people over 60. Well, it doesn't advocate for people over 60, but it attempts to organize people over 60. on this issue. I think that it's a fascinating form of activism because, I mean, you don't really usually see groups that organize around age or generation, even though you probably should, since the generations are so different on so many issues. What can older, retired Americans do that younger activists can't when it comes to either their time, their financial leverage, political way, right?