In this episode of Climate Positive, Gil Jenkins speaks with Bill McKibben: author, educator, and one of the most acclaimed environmental voices of our time. His latest book, Here Comes the Sun, traces the rise of abundant, inexpensive solar power and argues that if we keep accelerating, we have a real chance not only to limit climate damage, but also to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. We dig into the data, the politics, and the people driving the global shift to solar, and Bill also opens up about the role of faith in his work and how he views the environmental movement’s trajectory today.
In this episode of Climate Positive, Gil Jenkins speaks with Bill McKibben: author, educator, and one of the most acclaimed environmental voices of our time. His latest book, Here Comes the Sun, traces the rise of abundant, inexpensive solar power and argues that if we keep accelerating, we have a real chance not only to limit climate damage, but also to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. We dig into the data, the politics, and the people driving the global shift to solar, and Bill also opens up about the role of faith in his work and how he views the environmental movement’s trajectory today.
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Episode recorded on October 20, 2025
About Bill:
Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.
Book Blurb:
From the acclaimed environmentalist, a call to harness the power of the sun and rewrite our scientific, economic, and political future. Our climate, and our democracy, are melting down. But Bill McKibben, one of the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis, insists the moment is also full of possibility. Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history—if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance. Here Comes the Sun tells the story of the sudden spike in power from the sun and wind—and the desperate fight of the fossil fuel industry and their politicians to hold this new power at bay. From the everyday citizens who installed solar panels equal to a third of Pakistan’s electric grid in a year to the world’s sixth-largest economy—California—nearly halving its use of natural gas in the last two years, Bill McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy. And he shows how solar power is more than just a path out of the climate crisis: it is a chance to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. You can’t hoard solar energy or hold it in reserves—it’s available to all.
There’s no guarantee we can make this change in time, but there is a hope—in McKibben’s eyes, our best hope for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.
Chad: I am Chad Reed.
Hilary: I'm Hilary Langer.
Gil: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Guy: I'm Guy Van Syckle.
Bill: Look, the sun is the most charismatic object in our corner of the universe. We have a deep relationship to it. Obviously, it already provides us with light. Warmth and via photosynthesis are supper, and now it's willing to provide us with all the power we could ever need.
Gil: Today on Climate Positive, we’ve got Bill McKibben -- author, organizer, and one of the most acclaimed environmental voices of our time. His latest book, Here Comes the Sun, traces the rise of abundant, inexpensive solar power and argues that if we keep accelerating, we have a real chance not just to limit climate damage, but also reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. We dig into the data, the politics, and the people driving the global shift to solar — and Bill also opens up about the role of faith in his work and how he sees the broader environmental movement today. I really valued this talk with Bill, and I think it’s one our listeners will appreciate. So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Bill McKibben.
Gil: Bill, welcome to Climate Positive.
Bill: Hey, good to be with you, man.
Gil: It's been about a month since Sun Day the nationwide celebration or call for clean energy action that you've helped relaunch, gimme some reflections as you look back on that. How did it feel to have this idea out in the world as you're launching the book, and what does it say about where the movement stands now?
Bill: It felt great to see people across the country. I mean, this is a terrible, dark moment on the planet. Climate change is ravaging us in the ways that, sadly, some of us predicted a long time ago, and in our country, our democracy is liquoring and faltering. So it's a weird moment to have something positive to say, but I think that's highly useful.
I think the thing we have to talk about, the rapid rise of clean energy. If it's the one big, good thing happening on the planet, it's both big enough and good enough that it might take a bite out of the climate crisis and the authoritarianism crisis at the same time.
Gil: Turning to the book, in your forward, you talked both an emotional and intellectual spark that made you feel, as you alluded to, this is the right time in this moment of darkness to write the book. But paint a picture for our listeners about that series of stats or how you were feeling that propelled you…
Bill: The last 36 months. It's just been like a rocket. This thing that we've sort of been waiting for a very long time. The rise of clean energy suddenly hit the steep part of the S-curve, and it's just remarkable to see the world.
This autumn is generating a third more power from the sun than it was last autumn. That's. Astonishing. So having seen pieces of that all over the place, you know, I do this free newsletter called The Crucial Years, and I am always collecting little pieces for that to share with people from all over the world what's going on here, there and everywhere. Some of it's climate science, but some of it's developments in the world of energy. So I had a sense of what was happening, but I think like most people, it was a piecemeal sense. A solar farm here, a wind turbine there. A big new battery installation there. Seeing how it all was beginning to add up was really quite remarkable.
Gil: So the timing was absolutely right. You also talked about this in the book, maybe your past literary salad. It was a little darker, right? This book was full of hope and optimism not to be pollyannish about. Where we're going. But reflecting on that, the emotional shift.
Bill: So for the first 30 some years of the climate debate, and I wrote the first book about what we now call the climate crisis.
So I've been a part of this pretty much as long as it's been a thing for the first 30, 35 years. The basic fact that made progress so hard was that fossil fuel was cheap and clean energy was expensive. The same thing that was driving the crisis was also the thing that undergirded our economy. So therefore, it was very, very hard.
We all did what we could to try and say, raise the price of fossil fuel to change that equation. Carbon pricing, divestment to raise their cost of capital, stopping infrastructure and pipelines to keep them from consolidating their advantage. On and on. But it was always going to wait until we had. A cheap enough alternative.
Five years ago or so, we passed some invisible line. I mean, the story of solar energy, as you know, is fascinating. Solar cell invented 1954. Bell Labs, Edison, New Jersey, most expensive power by far in the world. The only thing you could put it on was satellites because there was nothing else to use. First big effort to change that comes in the US in the 1970s.
Jimmy Carter in the wake of the oil shocks, puts in his budget enough r and d as he planned to have the US getting 20% of its power from the sun. By the year 2000, we probably could have done it. There's no huge. Technical obstacle in the way, just the iterative process of getting better and better at this.
But Ronald Reagan takes down the White House panels and takes down the funding. Then we wait for Germany at the turn of the century. German greens get the balance of power in their. Parliamentary system. They use it to win what they called the Entergy vendor pricing so that Germans who put solar panels on their roofs would get a hefty price for the power they were producing from utilities.
In essence, the German government was heavily subsidizing solar power. That created the demand that allowed the Chinese to start to get good at manufacturing this. And as Carter had foreseen, it took about. 20 years for that process to really play out. And by about 2022 or so, we suddenly lived on a planet in which the cheapest way to make energy was to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that's of course a distinction that's grown in the years since then, because the more solar panels we put up, the cheaper it gets. It's not a commodity like coal and gas and oil as much as it is a kind of. Artifact of human ingenuity and human ingenuity continues to improve on itself all the time.
Gil: What was the stat about how long it took us to do the first Terawatt?
Bill: The first terawatt took from 1954 till 2022. The second terawatt took until 2024, and I think we've just about passed the third terawatt.
Gil: Yeah, that really drives it home. Well, let's have a little fun. Obviously the title of your book evokes the Great George Harrison.
Classic, but I, I heard a previous interview where you really broke down your discovery of where this sat in the Beatles catalog and then the amount of songs about Sun. Please exp expand on that.
Bill: Absolutely. If you go to Spotify, this is the most popular Beatles song out of their whole vast,
Gil: I would not have guessed that.That's fantastic.
Bill: I'm not sure I would've either, at least when I last looked up twice as many people a day were listening to it as, Hey, Jude, or Let it Be. I think that that's a, because it's a. Optimistic and gentle song in a very dark time. B, because people have a deep innate connection to the sun, which you can easily discover if you keep poking around Spotify.
There are hundreds of songs about the sun. Every great recording artist there ever was has there on Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, on and on and on, down the list. Truly, truly great songs. One after another, which by the way. If you start hunting for a similar list of songs about fracking, it will be shorter. I think that it's more than a humorous point.
I think it's a really deep one that you're making. Look, the sun is the most charismatic object in our corner of the universe. We have a deep relationship to it. Obviously, it already provides us with light. Warmth and via photosynthesis are supper, and now it's willing to provide us with all the power we could ever need, but we also have a kind of physiological and psychological connection to it.
People literally get what's called seasonal effective disorder. Sad if they don't. Get enough sunlight, and I bet there is very few human beings who don't involuntarily break out into a grin when the sun comes out from a kind of cloud and hits them in the shoulder blades. And so the idea that global warming, which if you think about it, is really just a dysfunctional relationship with the sun through a series of mistakes on our part, we've amped up, its.
Heat capacity and made it a danger to us. As is often the case with damaged relationships, the best way out is further in. It turns out that we can use the sun to cure the problem that we've been having here.
Gil: Your book talks about the liberation force, the geopolitical implications of moving to solar as we are what happens to households and towns when we own our power.
Bill: Well, let's think about it At many levels. Think about it at your own household level. I've had solar panels on my house for many years, a quarter century. I love them. I love being liberated from the utility, although we're still tied to the grid, but when the grid goes down, as happens here in the mountains, sometimes the batteries that have been soaking up sunshine all afternoon keep us good for days.
Take a state like the one I live in in Vermont, we spend $2 Billion a year importing fossil fuel into Vermont. No oil wells in Vermont. That's a waste of money. A check we have to write to Texas or Saudi Arabia every month when we have our own sun and wind. Think what that $2 Billion a year would be doing in our local economy.
That's a much more important case for countries, especially poor ones around the world. 80% of human beings live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuel. When we hear about countries having a balance of payments crisis or going deeply in debt, or the IMF is gonna come in and restructure their economy with austerity, generally a big reason is they're paying
huge amounts of money for the next tanker load full of oil that they need to keep their economy running. It would be infinitely better for them to have their energy provided by their own sun and wind, and we can see that starting to happen, or at least we can see that debate playing out right now.
Donald Trump has announced that he wants what he's calling energy dominance in the world for America, which he sees as us controlling oil and gas flows, and he's been using the tariffs to coerce countries into buying American liquified natural gas in large quantities. That'll work for a little while, but any country with a brain and most countries have them, will quickly figure out that.
They may have to buy some of this next year. What they also need to buy are a bunch of Chinese solar panels and wind turbines, so that after that they don't have to buy anything from anyone so that they can depend on the sun and the wind. We're seeing this everywhere. We're watching, for instance, in Ukraine, people start to figure out that there's a huge amount of resilience.
It comes from renewable energy. People who've in cities watched the Russians bomb their thermal power plants over and over again are now putting up solar panels In the book, I think there's an interview with the biggest energy guy in Ukraine who's saying, you know, when they take out one of my coal fired power plants, it takes me seven, eight months to get it back online.
When they take out a solar farm, I just find out which panels got smashed and replace 'em with some more cheap Chinese solar panels, and we're back in business. On the very largest kind of global sense. Think about what geopolitics on this planet would've looked like in the last a hundred years if oil had been of trivial value during that period, even back to World War ii.
Why was Japan on the move in Asia? They had no oil, and that's why they wanted the greater East Asia co prosperity sphere to have an indigenous source of the second most important commodity in the world. After food, I guess. That would be a great relaxer. Humans are good at fighting wars, but starting one over sunshine is going to take some doing.
Gil: That's right, and a few more global examples. Your book highlights this incredible story of Pakistan.
Bill: Pakistan is in many ways more screwed by climate change than any country on the planet. They've had the two worst floods since NOAA 2010 and 2022. Often it gets in the a hundred and twenties now in their cities in the summer, but their geographic advantage is a long border with China.
And China has been overproducing. Solar panels, the more even than China can absorb at the extraordinary rate that they're putting up, clean energy there. And so those panels were suddenly being exported in large numbers to Pakistan. The guys who were exporting rice and cement a few years ago were now doing solar panels.
People were going on YouTube and TikTok to figure out how to put them up, and they were going up everywhere. They put up 17 gigawatts last year. The whole electric grid in Pakistan before that was 43 gigawatts. The numbers are crazy this year. They're importing them at the same pace and they're adding a lot of batteries.
This is now spreading into Africa and. Pretty quickly along any place where China has a trade route, not as quickly as it should, because Africa's very poor and you need some money to buy these things. Although I wish that you didn't. If it were up to me, I think we'd take the whole global climate. Cox process and for the next two or three years, just forget having big meetings and just spend every penny we can muster around the world running those Chinese factories 24 7, taking the solar panels and piling them on every wharf and railroad siding.
In the world and let people come take them away and do their own Pakistan version, wherever they are and see where we were in a couple years, I suspect we'd be in a very different place
Gil: And just staying on form factors, bringing it back to Europe and the US since you're pretty fired up about balcony solar. Talk about that. And the one place in America you can currently have balcony solar.
Bill: So across Europe in the last couple years, apartment dwellers who usually lack access to a rooftop, have been instead hanging solar panels off the railing of their balconies. These are much less complicated systems. You just go down to, I don’t know what you call Best Buy.
Brussels, but you go down there and give them a few hundred euros and you come home with a panel and one of the beauties of it is you just plug it into the wall. You don't need an electrician. There's no fancy wiring, and it often provides 20% of the energy and apartment uses. So it's not gonna save the world, but it's not insignificant step and it's a huge gateway drug to renewable energy.
People love watching the app and figuring out how much they're doing. This is illegal. Everywhere in this country, except as you point out the state of Utah, where the state legislature unanimously passed law earlier this year enabling it because some Republican state legislature said, well, if they can have this in Stuttgart, why don't we get to have it in Provo?
And nobody had a good answer. To me, it highlights the fact that solar power cuts across ideological and partisan lines fairly neatly. As I say, I live in rural America and I have my whole life and some of it in red State and some of it in Blue State, rural America, but always on dirt roads. So I have lots of Trumpy neighbors and I actually know a lot of people who have Trump flags on the mailbox and solar panels on the roof.
And when I talk with them, it's not because they care about climate change. It's because essentially my home is my castle. It has an independent power supply. It's a better castle. And I think that feeling is very strong. And truthfully, I feel it myself though. It's not the reason I put up solar panels. I like that American feeling of independence that comes with it.
So it's one of the things that gives me some hope about the possibilities here.
Gil: Me too. And also in your book and staying in the us, talk about the Texas paradox. What happened this spring and summer? As happens every two years, company and industry was engaged, trying to push back on the legislature, but I won't give it away. Why don't you unpack pack what's going on in Texas?
Bill: Texas has now surpassed. California is the place where clean energy is going in the fastest sun, wind and batteries at a huge scale. And it's working great. Texas has had trouble with blackouts in the past. That's why, uh, Mr. Cruz had a cruise. Yes, it's unscheduled vacation to Cancun to avoid the. Dark house he was in, they didn't have any blackouts this summer, and the head of the Energy Reliability Council of Texas, which they call their grid regulator, said it's because we've now got so many solar panels and batteries on the grid, it's very stable. Obviously Texas is also the world headquarters of the hydrocarbon industry, and they were not happy.
What was playing out in their backyard, and they were determined this year to use their influence in Austin to change the rules. They had a number of Bills, one that editorialists were calling DEI for gas. Everyone expected it to pass until Texan started appearing out of the hinterland saying, you know what?
Don't do this. This is how we keep taxes low in our rural county. This is how we keep the schools open. Please do not do this. And the Texas legislature. Backed away. They returned to their more important task of redistricting Texas to give Donald Trump some more seats. That was an interesting sign that Texas legislature only meets every other year, so there'll be that much more momentum behind clean energy by the time they're back in there.
Of course, at the federal level, these guys were winning and that winning. Matters a lot and it's going to cause huge trouble. Not for the worldwide progress of Solar. America's only about 11% of emissions at this point, which is a lot, and we don't want to be increasing them, which America now is, but the rest of the world will continue on, perhaps even accelerating.
I think what's happening is that over the last nine months, if American historians look at that period, they'll be looking at the rise of whatever strange off-brand version of fascism we're playing around with. But if world historians look at it, they'll really see the rapid seeding of technological and therefore economic primacy from the US to China, and with it probably a kind of political primacy in the world as well.
It's almost breathtaking, the degree to which we've just decided to abandon clearly the most important technological transition of our century, and we're gonna pay for it in all kinds of ways. We're already paying for it with higher electricity prices in this country, but we're also gonna pay for it with the loss of our leadership in the world.
Gil: I sort of feel like I'm jumping around the greater continental states. I want to ask you about your visit with an Illinois farmer.
Bill: Yes, which was really fun for me because I think one of the reasons that progressives or environmentalists or whatever sometimes have trouble with renewable energy is it takes up some space.
In fact, it probably takes up less space than oil and gas, but it does take up some. We're going to need one or 2% of the land surface of the country as it turns out. We're already devoting that much to energy in this country. Growing corn for ethanol requires 30 million acres, half the corn crop, that produces about 3% of all the energy in America.
Now, as it turns out, if you just covered those 30 million acres with solar panels, you'd produce. Not 3%, but more like a hundred percent of the energy that America currently uses. We don't want to do that. Indiana's a nice place. It doesn't need to be covered stem to stern in solar panels, but it is illustrative and what's really beautiful is to see how we can do this in ways that work for lots of things.
So yeah, I was in Illinois with this farmer who was converting part of his field. So he is like, this field over here is in corn, goes to ethanol. An acre produces enough to drive my Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in America for 45 years. Drive it about 25,000 miles this acre over here, putting in solar panels.
It produces enough electrons every year to drive my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, not 25,000 miles, but about 700,000 miles. And as he pointed out, I don't have to pour nitrogen and phosphorus on the solar panels to make them work. Stuff that will wash down into the Gulf of Mexico where it causes this great dead zone.
I don't have to strafe them with herbicides and pesticides. In fact, I only have to use half the field. And so in between. I've got half a field left to play around with, and in fact that half a field is the popular Raza for this very new human endeavor that we're calling by the clunky name of Voltaic.
But basically it means farming next to solar panels. And what we're starting to realize is that a solar farm creates electrons, but it also creates shade, which. On an overheating planet is not such a bad thing. It's a lot of moisture retention. There's a lot of crops that seem to do pretty darn well in these places.
In Vermont where I live, what we're increasingly doing is inter planting the solar farms with pollinator friendly flowers and weeds, and the number of pollinating insects in an acre goes up by a factor of about a hundred compared with the cornfield that was there before, a hundred times more, which means that the farmers in the surrounding fields are getting far more pollination.
Fruit set on their orchards is up. 30, 40%. We're actually addressing some of the biodiversity crisis at the same time that we're addressing some of the energy crisis.
Gil: And you know, Bill, too, one of the other benefits of agrivoltaics takes is the OpExfor the solar plant owner. There's less mowing that they have to do when you plant a certain cover crop that's friendly for pollinators.
Bill: yep. You can bring some sheep in to do the mowing.
Gil: That's right. It's exciting to see so many different applications of solar here. So where do you see progress on the state and local level for solar? While the federal government seems less interested in that, at least for the next three and a half years.
Bill: That's why we did Sun Day . It's an effort to spur people into getting action from their state and local places. City halls and state houses can make a big difference here. Let's think about rooftop solar for a minute. Costs three times as much to put solar on your roof in this country as it does in say, Australia or the EU. A little tiny bit of, that's tariffs on solar panels, but mostly it's what they call soft costs. And the biggest of those is the cost associated with the endless delays in permitting and stuff. We've got 15,000 municipalities in this country. Each one has its own building code, its own team of building inspectors who would like to crawl on your roof, which isn't really necessary because this is not very dangerous technology.
Almost 40% of homes in Australia have solar on the roof. So we have a solution to this at least to beginning of a couple of years ago from a national renewable energies lab. It's called the Solar App plus. It's basically a piece of software that allows for instant permanent. You're a contractor, you tap in.
The address and the equipment you're planning to put there and it looks and makes sure there's no trouble. And if there isn't, it grants you an instant permit and up on the roof you go. The hope is that someday the US will be like other countries where you can order up some solar power on Monday morning and Friday afternoon there it'll be up on your roof in the same way that you order a refrigerator.
You don't wait six months for it and have teams of people come look at your kitchen and you know, on and on. So far, California. Maryland have mandated use of that solar app, plus it's passed the New Jersey legislature. The last I heard it was waiting for the governor's signature. That leaves 47 states for us to push on.
Same with this balcony solar stuff, which is generally up to City Hall. And all we really need for them to do is say, look, here's the two pages of legislation they passed in Utah. We're passing it to go to work everybody.
Gil: There's some other permitting. You know, Texas also passed a helpful distributed solar implications, permitting reforms to speed the process. I think Florida has done one, they haven't adopted the app, but you're seeing it in unusual places, cutting the red tape. So I think you're right to highlight that. It's one of the encouraging things we can do in this period.
Bill: Absolutely. And I, this is one of these technological seismic shifts and you can either grab it and run with it, or you can sit around for a long time waiting to see how it all works out and whatever.
And if we do that, we're gonna have our lunch eaten for us. The places that get on this earliest and fastest will be the ones that benefit the most.
Gil: I gotta ask you, as the founder and co-founder of 350.org, I want you to talk a little bit about third act, which is for older folks. How are different generations of activists learning and working from each other today?
Bill: Oh, that's a really good question. What's interesting about solar power is that at some ways it's been with us forever. Third act is for people over the age of 60 like me, oldsters, and. There's plenty of people. When we were planning Sun Day , we were working hard with Dennis Hayes, who ran the first Earth Day back in 1970, and then did a thing called Sun Day in 1978 to help launch all that Carter work I was describing.
There's lots of people left over from those days who have been interested in playing around with whatever solar power for. Generations playing with the lead acid batteries in their basement and who love what they're seeing now. And then there's lots of other people my age who just knew about it as kind of alternative energy and are struck to find out that it's now a.
Affordable. Makes sense. Young people obviously are more conversant with it. On the other hand, given other dumb policies in our country, they're less likely to have houses. So it's often they're working with parents or grandparents to make all this happen. But this is something that passes across generations in big ways.
Gil: I want to shift to something about your personal story too that's resonated with me because I'm a preacher's kid, Bill and my grandfather was a theologian in the UCC. So you've described yourself as a good mainline Protestant of many flavors. A Presbyterian baptized, was it? You taught a UCC youth.
Bill: I was confirmed at UCC and then by the time I was an adult and living out in the country, it's mostly Methodist out there.
Gil: So tell me, how's your faith lens, it comes through in your writing, certainly for me, but tell me how it's shaping how you view the work today and in the past.
Bill: Well, your grandfather was a theologian. I'm not a theologian. I'm a fairly simplistic, you know, I'm a Sun Day school teacher at best, but none of this seems very complicated.
The very first thing we're told to do. In the Old Testament is take care of the Earth We've been given. Steward it, steward it. We have been not very good stewards because the creation we've been given is now much hotter than it was supposed to be. And all the animals that God created and announced we're good are now all dying out.
So we're not doing that so well so far and in the gospel, in the New Testament, we're. Told that our main job is to love our neighbors, but at the moment, we're drowning our neighbors and making it hard for them to grow food and setting their forests on fire and on and on and on. So not so great either.
So I think that this is clearly the reason that faith communities of all kinds have become more and more attuned to this. I was just in Rome a couple of weeks ago to meet with. The American Pope with a bunch of environmentalists on the 10th anniversary of Lado Sea. Pope Francis is encyclical and clearly Pope Leo is determined to keep it right up, stay on the same track, and that was very powerful to see and really to see how institutionalized within the church that Lado see.
Document has become, we were staying at a huge center called the Lado Sea Center. It was just filled with people whose job it is to do this work across the Catholic Church, which is the largest human organization on our planet, 1.4 Billion. Souls. So that's very, very good to see. I can remember when there really was no religious environmental movement when liberal Christians viewed the environment as something you would get to once you dealt with poverty and hunger and war, and when conservative Christians viewed it as a way station on the road to paganism.
And so I'm very glad to see that, at least in some cases that's really shifted.
Gil: And it must be what gives you hope or restores you? I mean, you've been arrested, celebrated, vilified.…
Bill: Well, one of the really within third act, which has now grown to about a hundred thousand people across the country, one of our most active groups is Third Act Faith, which is largely retired clergy.
And there's a. Guy Jim Antal, who was the conference minister for the UCC in Massachusetts.
Gil: Sure, I know Jim Antal. That's great to know.
Bill: A wonderful book about all of this and has been an absolute stalwart all along for many, many years, so it's a great tradition that you come out of
Gil: and you as well. And do you still teach Sunday school?
Bill: I'm rarely around long enough. One of my sadness is I enjoyed teaching it, although I confess that we spent more time on Noah than most else in my Sun Day school. Really? You asked the question you did about music and all of that. 'cause I do think that there's an absolute. Practical necessity to do this because of climate change.
There's a deep economic utilitarianism. There's a geopolitical imperative, but there's also the fact that this is extremely beautiful energy from heaven, not from hell, is the mantra that we've been using, and I think it's a powerful one. I really started work on this book two years ago. We had a solar eclipse that reached totality in Vermont.
So people from across the east were piling into Vermont biggest traffic jams in the state's history, but very happy traffic jams 'cause everybody had been so moved by this spectacle. I was on the campus at Middlebury College with 1500 undergraduates who. Put down their phones for a full half hour to watch this spectacle happen across the sky, and reminded me the fact that we're hooked up pretty good with this large nuclear reactor, 93 million miles away.
And it gives me, we're obviously not going to stop global warming at this point. But we can shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets, and that matters a lot. Every 10th of a degree moves another a hundred million people from a safe climate zone to a dangerous one. But we also, I think, can imagine building a future, a world that works better than the one that we experience right now. And I hope we do.
Gil: What a wonderful note to end it on. Thank you, Bill.
Bill: Thank you Gil.
Gil: Really appreciate this.
Bill: Yeah, what a pleasure. And thank you for all your good work. You do all kinds of good stuff.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week's podcast, please leave us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. It really helps us reach more listeners. You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @climateposipod, or email us at climatepositive@hasi.com. I'm Gil Jenkins and this is Climate Positive.