It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Now the journalist and climate activist Bill McKibbin, the climate journalism group covering climate now announced this morning

that they're giving McKibbin their first ever Lifetime Achievement Award. He also has a new book

about solar energy called Here Comes the Sun. Some of you know Bill McKibbin's work and may know

he's been a New Yorker staff writer. He's written influential books, beginning with the end of nature in 1989, that has been credited with helping launch the modern climate movement.

He's been at Middlebury College in Vermont for around 25 years, holding the title of Distinguished Scholar.

He founded the climate activism groups 350.org and a more recent one called Third Act for seniors

who want to be involved in the climate movement. In giving McKibben their lifetime achievement

award, covering climate now says they also, quote, hope to prompt a reexamination of the role

of advocacy in journalism at this pivotal moment in American history, unquote. And with all of that as

Prelude, Bill McKibben, thanks for joining us today and welcome back to WNYC.

I'll be with you as always, friend. Can I jump right in on that question of advocacy and journalism?

How much do you consider yourself an advocate? How much do you see yourself as a journalist?

And do you ever experience a conflict or a tension between those two roles?

Well, I couldn't go be the kind of beat journalist covering climate change at the New York Times, I guess,

because I have a clear interest, a clear hope in the outcome

here. I really want us not to overheat the planet. And truthfully, that's been the case back

since I wrote the end of nature in my 20s back in the 1980s. Halfway through that book, it was clear to me that I wasn't objective

in the sense that I cared about the outcome. But I was as objective as I've always been in my life

as a journalist in telling the truth. And I've continued to do that in an awful lot of different places. Someone

told me the other day that I'd written more words about climate change than anybody else in

the history of the English language anyway. If that's true, given the temperature of the planet,

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