NOTE: View part of the transcript of this interview at the bottom of these show notes.

IMPORTANT LINKS:

BILL McKIBBEN'S RECENT BOOK:

Here Comes the Sun A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

https://billmckibben.com/books/here-comes-the-sun/

BILL McKIBBEN'S CLIMATE ACTION ORGANIZATION: - THIRD ACT.ORG

https://thirdact.org/

SUN DAY - DAY OF ACTION, SEPT 21, 2025: https://sunday.earth/

“Sun Day” celebrating solar and wind power, and the movement to leave fossil fuels behind. Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power on the planet – and gives us a chance to actually do something about the climate crisis. But fossil fuel billionaires are doing everything they can to shut it down. We will build, rally, sing, and come together in the communities that we need to get laws changed and work done.

THE MATTHIESSEN TALKS: BILL McKIBBEN, A LAST CHANCE FOR THE CLIMATE AND A FRESH CHANCE FOR CIVILIZATION

https://www.matthiessencenter.org/bill-mckibben

The Matthiessen Talks is a series that brings together thought leaders, activists, and cultural voices to explore our interconnectedness with the natural world. Rooted in Peter Matthiessen’s deep respect for Indigenous wisdom and his unwavering dedication to environmental and spiritual exploration, this series seeks to inspire dialogue and action for a more sustainable future.

Sunday, September 28, 2025 - 4:00 PM–5:30PM GUILD HALL, East Hampton, NY

Presented with The Peter Matthiessen Center

https://www.guildhall.org/events/the-matthiessen-talks-bill-mckibben/

Writer, activist and environmentalist Bill McKibben, among the first to alert the world of the imminent perils of climate change with his book The End of Nature, comes with a powerful message: In the past two years, with surprisingly little notice, solar energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient energy choice around the world.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER, LAUDATO SI’ OF POPE FRANCIS - ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME

(mentioned by Bill in the interview)

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

*********************************************

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Megan: I am very grateful to be welcoming Bill McKibben to join us in conversation on the Spirit of Leadership podcast, and particularly today on behalf of the not-for-profit, the Peter Matthiessen Center, which has been, over the last five years, building on the living legacy of Peter Matthiessen's life as a writer, environmentalist, and Zen teacher.

As an early supporter of the PMC, Bill McKibben took part in a Zoom event along with other friends and colleagues of Peter's in which he read a passage - that influenced him early on as an environmentalist - from the first chapter of Matthiessen's first book, Wildlife in America. We are thrilled that Bill McKibben will be coming to Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York on September 28th as the next speaker in the series of dialogues the PMC is hosting known as the Matthiessen Talks, and especially to hear about his most recent book, Here Comes the Sun.

Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to the New Yorker and a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

In 2014, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the "alternative Nobel" in the Swedish Parliament. He's also won the Gandhi Peace Award and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written more than 20 books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature published in 1989 and his latest book Here Comes The Sun, which I am so looking forward to discussing with you, Bill.

So welcome.

Bill: Megan. What a pleasure to be with you.

Megan: Such a pleasure to have you. And so looking forward to meeting you in person too, at the end of the month, and to hearing about what you're planning for the 21st.

Bill: Yes, Sun Day, the Equinox. Yes. It's shaping up to be a remarkable day across the country with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of events. People can find out what's going on near them at sunday-dot-earth, but it's all an effort to let people know that this is no longer alternative energy. This is the obvious way forward for the future.

Megan: Yes. And I've been enjoying your book and learning about this amazing momentum that's happening and gearing up for this day of activism on the autumnal equinox, which couldn't be more perfect.

Bill: Exactly right.

Megan: Yes, I bet you're excited. And then you have a whole book tour that you're going on?

Bill: Yes. The book organizing tour, it all works into one. It's all the same message that power from the sun and wind is suddenly surging around the world. And it's the first thing in the 40 years of working on climate change that's scaling in a way that might allow us to at least knock a little bit off how hot this planet's going to get.

So in a world where there are many, many bad things going on, and in a country darker than any time in my lifetime, there is this one big good thing happening that I hope will take a bite out of both the climate crisis and the authoritarianism crisis.

Megan: Right. So, what are some of the most salient parts that you would like to tell us about where we are now in relation to this whole journey that you've been on?

Bill: Well, I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change, what we then called the “greenhouse effect” back in the 1980s when I was in my twenties. And I'm afraid that all the things that I warned about then are now coming true. We see the daily toll of fire and flood as we destabilize the temperature of the planet.

But, since most of that disruption is caused by the burning of fossil fuel, the news from four or five years ago - that we'd crossed an invisible line where power from the sun and wind was now cheaper than power from coal and gas and oil - was a breakthrough, a kind of epochal moment perhaps for civilization, and it's been followed up by a just dramatic surge in this clean power.

It's most obvious in China which is becoming the world's first electro state, and putting up clean energy at an almost unbelievable pace. But there's plenty of stuff happening in this country too despite the best efforts of the Trump administration. California is now producing more than a hundred percent of its power from this clean energy source most days for long stretches. At night when the sun goes down the biggest source of supply in the California grid are batteries that have soaked up excess sunshine all afternoon. As a result of all that, California, which after all is the fourth largest economy in the world, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago.

That's as hopeful a statistic as I've heard in all the years I've worked on this. And California is now being outdone by Texas for the construction of clean energy. So there are terrible obstacles being thrown up by the Trump administration which is working for big oil. But there's a lot of momentum the other way and that momentum can be seen all across the planet.

Megan: And that's one of the wonderful things that you talk about in your book - all the places you've visited and other researchers and people who are documenting what's happening in other countries.

Bill: Yeah, I love the story out of Pakistan, Megan, the country harder hit by climate change perhaps than any other on Earth.

Two of the biggest floods we've ever recorded in the last 15 years. But Pakistan is nicely situated right next to China, so they get the easy flow of those cheap solar panels across the border. Last year, it took off. And mostly just using TikTok videos as their guide, Pakistanis erected the equivalent of half the country's national electric grid in the course of eight months.

Solar panels sprouting on the roofs of huge numbers of buildings in Lahore and Karachi and Islamabad, farmers using them to pump the irrigation water they need to survive, replacing diesel fuel that's been an expensive input for those farmers. Diesel use dropped 35% in Pakistan last year.

Now this same scenario is playing out across Africa too. We're seeing really big movement along any sort of place where there's a Chinese trade corridor. There's been the same kind of upsurge in country after country. And it's not just the power itself, it's the appliances, the machines to take advantage of this cheap clean energy.

More than half the vehicles sold in China last month came with a plug hanging out the back, and they're now quickly turning into the auto export powerhouse for the entire world. The developing world is going to come of age. If they're driving cars, it'll be Chinese EVs, and, if they're not, it'll be the even more beautiful technology, the e-bike, which is now just exploding. Bicycle was an elegant technology to begin with, but this is a bicycle without hills and it's really pretty amazing.

Megan: At this time with all of the bad news, as you say, and all of what we've been watching in terms of global warming and the devastation on nature - to have something that gives us a sense that we can get behind and work with in a hopeful way.

Bill: That's very much how I feel, and that's certainly why we're doing Sun Day. This kind of started out at Third Act, which is for older people like me, organizing around climate and democracy. But now dozens of groups across the country, big and small have joined in and it's because people feel that desire to get behind this stuff.

I called this new book of mine, Here Comes The Sun. I obviously stole the title from George Harrison. And in the course of doing it, I went to Spotify and learned that that song is by far the most streamed song in the Beatles vast catalog twice as often as, Hey, Jude, or Let It Be. And I think it's because so many people right now are feeling this sense of a kind of despair and a real need for the kind of gentle but optimistic hope that song exemplifies.

Megan: Right, and I love at the end of your book how you talk about how there's the, the economic hope and the environmental hope, but that there's this other aspect which is - however you want to define it - a spiritual aspect of tapping back into our relationship as human beings, back through even our indigenous roots to that relationship with the sun.

Bill: Yes. I think that's a very good point. I don't think there's a human alive who doesn't smile when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and hits their shoulders. It's a very deep relationship and the sun, the most charismatic object in our universe, already gives us warmth and light and via photosynthesis provides us our food. Now it's willing to offer up all the power we could ever need. That's a pretty remarkable occurrence.

Megan: Yes. And something to be very grateful for. And do you feel like there's something inherent in being pushed almost to the edge? Of the crisis that opens us up to that spiritual presence.

Bill: There's definitely a kind of Hollywood aspect to the fact that the crisis and the calvary are appearing at exactly the same moment. I'm afraid we're cutting it close and the momentum of physical destruction of the climate is very real and very dangerous.

But in that world, yes, I think we're more open to change. We're gonna have to change, but this is a pretty easy change, and one that benefits us in so many ways. 9 million people a year die on this planet. That's one death in five from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel, those particulates that lodge in the lungs. That's all unnecessary. There are 5 million children in New Delhi and two and a half million of them have irreversible lung damage from breathing the air. That's unnecessary. And it's also unnecessary to have the endless geopolitical fighting that we do. Think what the world would've looked like over the last 70 years if oil had been of trivial value.

How many wars and coups and assassinations and terrorist plots and things we would've avoided if we were all relying on energy that was available where we were. The sun and the wind are omni-present and that's great news. Unless of course you own an oil well or a coal mine, then it's really threatening news and that threat explains why they've, you know, spent so much money electing politicians like Trump, who they then use to try and slow this transition.

It's a potentially very liberating idea. We just have to stand up for it and make it happen. And that's why we do things like Sun Day.

Megan: Right and stand up for it and also educate people, which is what your book is doing because it's so fascinating that this information has been there.

Bill: We've stuck all this stuff in a folder in our mind, marked “alternative energy” and that sort of ghettoized it. And it's not where it belongs now. This is the most obvious common sense, straightforward way to power the planet. It's no longer...what's a good analogy? It's no longer the Whole Foods of energy. Nice but pricey. It's now the Costco of energy, cheap, available in bulk on the shelf, ready to go. And that's good news.

Megan: I think it's interesting, isn't it, that while we were busy doing other things in this country that China was just moving forward with developing what you said was actually invented here.

Bill: Yep. And they're taking off with the production.

It's not so much that they're eating our lunch. It's that we're serving our lunch to them. All this stuff was invented in the US but we're just ceding the technological future at the moment to China. That's unfortunate in lots of ways because there's lots of things about China that we wish were different.

I'm always aware that if I'd spent my life doing what I've done here in China, I would be in jail. On the other hand, the Chinese, for all their authoritarianism, have a strong rational streak. It's a country that's traditionally been run by engineers, not by lawyers. And so they get things done, and in this case, the thing that they're doing is of extraordinary importance to the planet.

The US has decided not even to participate in this year's climate, global climate talks. So I assume that China will be taking the lead role and it'll be interesting to see what they make of that opportunity and whether in certain ways or not they can see past their national interest to a global interest more fully than we have in this country.

Megan: Do you feel like they have an economic interest in that too?

Bill: They definitely have an economic interest, no question. But, at some level this is also going to take, if we're gonna do this as fast as is required, it's going to take a commitment to real global change. This world is too poor in too many places and too divided for this to happen as easily as it should.

We're gonna need some people stepping up and it's very good to see some of that leadership. China, maybe, the UN certainly - the Secretary General has been remarkable, and great credit to Pope Francis and his successor in Rome, Pope Leo, who seem to be deeply, deeply committed. These people are as close as we have to world leaders who answer to the planet, not to a particular nation, or political party.

And so it's very important that they're providing just ongoing leadership. And the Vatican actually will later this year become the first completely solar powered state in the world. They're finishing work on a big solar farm outside Rome that'll provide all the power they use, walking the talk.

Megan: That's a beautiful example.

And the former Pope with his declaration in the Encyclical about the importance of taking care of nature, as important as - what should we say - a spiritual responsibility.

Bill: Absolutely. I think Laudato Si, that Encyclical, is probably the most important environmental document of this millennium so far, and a thoroughgoing and interesting critique of modernity. And I'm very glad to see the American Pope Leo, very much following in the same vein. So I'm actually going over there to see him and his colleagues in early October. I'm looking forward to it very much.

Megan: Oh, that's wonderful.

And how do you feel… so there's what needs to happen in a governmental way, and then there's also what's happening just in a grassroots way. And like what's happening in a grassroots way of the people who are putting up, like in Pakistan, putting up their own solar panels, how do you see those working together?

Bill: We need… it would be much easier to do all this if governments made it easier. So in the US for instance, it costs three times as much to put a solar panel on your roof as it does in Australia or the EU. And that's almost entirely because we have a government that gets in the way instead of helping out - cumbersome licensing and permitting procedures that aren't necessary and aren't used elsewhere in the world.

So we'll be pushing hard at Sun Day to get the government out of the way in these cases and allow people to do this. That should make it much cheaper and more possible for many more people to join in. So it's some of both. It helps a great deal to have governments that care about and push forward on this stuff.

And we also need people willing to do this work.

Megan: Are there ways that people can use the solar panel technology, et cetera, without plugging into the grid and therefore just bypassing regulation.

Bill: Yes.

Many people now havegone off grid by connecting their solar panels to batteries, which are becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.

That's good. I think for my money, I like the notion of a more connected network of people each bringing their small part to this. We see this being realized now in what are called virtual power plants, where utilities are able to connect together the batteries in the homes of thousands of people, to provide power when it's needed.

When the day comes that we have the entire US vehicle fleet on electric vehicles, those batteries alone will be enough to power the entire country for two days. So there are real remarkable possibilities, if we don't completely isolate ourselves and connect together in as many ways as we can.

Megan: So what are some of your main rallying points for Sun Day?

Bill: Sun Day will be a collection of beautiful, beautiful events, solar panels going up on Habitat for Humanity Homes and big solar powered concerts and some protests outside gas pipelines that we shouldn't be building and things.

But it's really all devoted to this task of helping people get past the idea of “alternative energy” onto the idea that this is what we should be doing. And it's a powerful set of rallying cries. So many different groups involved, including big contingents from the faith community.

Our friends at Green Faith and Dayenu and other organizations have done a wonderful job of preparing, and their mantra, I think, has mostly been, Energy from Heaven, not from hell. So there we are.

Megan: That's excellent. And how is your work with the Indigenous… I know you were working a lot with the activism around the pipelines.

Bill: Of course. So there's a huge amount of indigenous activism around renewable energy. One of the great shames of the fact that the GOP Congress has just upended Biden's Inflation Reduction Act is that a lot of money was designated for tribes and reservations for solar stuff. And that's now in limbo.

But these are places where this argument makes the most obvious sense. They're often at the very end of the pipeline of the electric wire out past the grid. There are tens of thousands of people on places like the Navajo Reservation who have no real access to electricity, but now they do as solar power begins to flood into those places.

The huge coal mine, coal fired power plant, at Black Mesa, on that reservation replaced by big solar fields and things. So there's some beautiful stories out there.

Megan: Yeah, it's good to have the beautiful stories to keep you energized.

Bill: Keep one’s spirits up. No question.

Megan: Yes. And I was fascinated that you wrote your book basically in a month.

Bill: Yeah, it took a while to research it, but I had to write it quickly to stay ahead of the news and, so I wrote it in January and then I was able to keep rewriting and adding right up until the beginning of June, which was good because so much that the Trump administration has done has been so deleterious here.

So it's a big fight, no question.

Megan: And can we go back to your relationship, your friendship with Peter Matthiessen because he was an environmentalist and an activist as well. And can you talk a little bit about your friendship with him and your connections?

Bill: Yes. I, my biggest connection, I knew him for many years, but never closely, my biggest connection with him was as a reader, as so many other people, and just to be introduced to those worlds that he knew was the gift that great writing offers. And he of course, long before he was a kind of literary superstar, he was very engaged in this work, I think in part because he'd grown up in contact with the natural world and the out of doors and had always been important to him.

And hence that early Wilderness in America contribution and then, evermore far flung, outside this country to the rest of the world, a truly remarkable writer.

Megan: Yes. Yes, his way of expressing it all in words is… you could just read one sentence. It's just amazing

Bill: And very ephemeral things too. It's very difficult to figure out how to write about something like meditation and have it make any sense to anyone.

Megan: He was my Zen teacher ever since we moved here, so…

Bill: That's pretty good.

Megan: …a special place in my heart for him.

Bill: Yes. Even us Methodists were fans, so there you go.

Megan: Yeah, he didn't just isolate himself within, he was also interested in indigenous teachings too.

Bill: Yes, of course.

And very glad that Leonard Peltier finally out of prison in January. That would've meant a lot to Peter, I think.

Megan: Yes, that's another piece of good news, and gratitude to Biden for that.

Bill: Absolutely,

Megan: Yes. So how is it in Vermont? How is the morale in Vermont, your home?

Bill: Vermont is its own wonderful place, and we're as discouraged as anyone else by national events. But we have our own patron saint in Bernie - keeps us pushing ahead.And it's a place of remarkable spirit, so lots of very strong and good local communities, very high levels of social trust and connection. and so we continue. Not to downplay the dark moment for American society. I don't think there's any way to overstate how much trouble we're in, but one of the ways we get around that is with strong, strong communities,

Megan: And building that resilience. And what is your… I'm just curious where this all started for you. Where did the impetus for these interests come in your life?

Bill: I was a young writer at the New Yorker, and that's where I went to write when I got out of college. And I ended up writing in my early twenties or mid twenties, The End of Nature and realizing that this was the most interesting, important subject in the world, what we were doing to the planet's climate, but also in many ways the most interesting because it required some science, but really more a kind of understanding of economics and politics and sociology and psychology and theology and on to make sense of. So that's where I've spent my life. It took me a while to figure out that just winning the argument, which is what journalists and academics are generally trying to do, wasn't enough.

That we would also have to win the fight which was about money and power, not reason and data. So that's when I started my volunteer life as an organizer and hence 350.org and then Third Act, that have consumed much of my life in the last couple of decades. Now I write as relaxation as much as anything else from the labors of the day.

And, I'm not sure it's, if I'd really had a choice, that dealing with this most difficult of emotionally and practically of subjects would've been how I would've wanted to spend my whole life, but it's never been boring.

Megan: Mm-hmm. Yes, we're very grateful to you particularly to pull together, to cross all of those different realms and bring them together with a vision because only so much each of us can do, to gather the truth.

And the way you've brought it together and then have gathered people together who are going to help with this activism, but with a sense of we're doing this for the good of all.

Bill: Yes.

Megan: There's a certain momentum I think that has, both, the kind of hermit-like life of being the writer and the researcher, but also working as a teacher and an organizer and rallying people and finding that balance between alarm and: this is what we can do about it.

Bill: Exactly right. Exactly right. Well put.

Megan: What are some of the things that you would like for people to consider putting their energy into moving forward?

Bill: In the short run, very much. this work we're doing around Sun Day on September 21st, sunday-dot-earth. It's beautiful. And if you happen to come across any people who are older like me, send them our way at thirdact.org. It's really proved to be a remarkable organizing locus. We've got about a hundred thousand people now organized into working groups all across the country, and they're making magnificent change, place after place, and having, I think, a very good and deep time doing it. A good place for people to make connections if they're feeling a little isolated as they age.

Megan: Yeah, having something meaningful to connect around is really important.

Bill: Yeah. Yeah.

Megan: To assuage that despair that can come over and so I'm really glad that you're coming here to our area.

Bill: I look forward to it.

Megan: To give the talk and read from your book, and also I'll put these links in the show notes

Bill: Beautiful.

Megan: So that people can find everything about Sunday-dot-Earth. Is that Sunday-dot-Earth?

Bill: Sunday-dot-Earth Exactly right.

Megan: Yes. Yes, and join together in one's own area.

Bill: Exactly.

Megan: For the equinox.

Bill: Exactly right. Many, many thanks for that and many, many thanks for a very good conversation. I'll look forward to seeing you in the end of the month.

Megan: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Bill.

Bill: God bless. Take care.

Megan: God bless. Bye.

Bill: Bye.

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