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Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

The “Existential” Climate Crisis with Bill McKibben

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.68.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Much of Maui has been decimated following one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history, wildfires are still ravaging Canada, ice in the arctic is melting rapidly, sea levels are rising and we’ve had the hottest day measured on our planet this year. There’s a lot happening as it relates to climate change. “It’s not the summer from hell, it’s the summer that sort of is hell,” says our guest this week. Bill McKibben is an environmentalist, educator, author and founder of Third Act, which has a mission to organize people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. He’s also a founder of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign. His 1989 book, “The End of Nature” is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. McKibben recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker titled, “To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower?,” which talks about the degrowth movement, which calls on countries to embrace zero or negative G.D.P. growth, making a comeback. He joins WITHpod to discuss the growth debates of the 70s vs. contemporary ones, parallels between protecting the planet and our democracy, why this moment is such an inflection point and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0

But it seems to me that climate change is a kind of test of whether the big brain was

0:04.4

a good adaptation or not.

0:06.6

It can get us in a lot of trouble, and now we'll find out if it can get us out of that

0:10.5

trouble.

0:11.5

And my guess is that the answer lies less in the size of the brain in the end than in

0:17.0

the size of the heart it's attached to.

0:20.0

This is going to be ultimately, there's plenty of questions of self-interest and self-preservation,

0:26.1

but there are also deep, deep questions about human solidarity that we're going to answer

0:31.1

one way or another in the next few years.

0:34.7

Hello and welcome to Wise Is Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

0:41.1

So, I talked about this on the program before.

0:49.3

We have a house north of New York City in a rural area, and I feel very lucky to have

0:55.5

it very privileged, and it's in the woods.

0:59.3

And one of the things that I've undertaken over the last few years is a project to try

1:02.7

to take the emissions of the house and drive them down to zero.

1:06.6

So this has been a kind of iterative process.

1:09.1

So the first thing we did was, and this is something that it's kind of news you can use,

1:13.1

I think I talked about it before, and we hired weatherization folks to come and measure

1:17.8

the efficiency of the house and try to get it so that it's much more efficient.

1:21.5

It was actually incredibly inefficient.

1:24.0

There's a lot of air escaping.

1:25.8

We did what's called Blower Door Test to test for that.

...

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