Bill McKibben Talks Activism, Democracy and the Struggle For the Earth

It is quite rare to find someone who is a first-class academic and analyst, and is also able to become a first-class activist, but Leah Stokes is a triple threat. A political scientist at UC Santa Barbara, she wrote the book on utilities in America, Short Circuiting Policy, and then got drafted into preparing what became the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate law in American history and already one of the most significant pieces of legislation of the 21st century. She did some of that work from the neonatal intensive care unit, where her prematurely born twin daughters spent weeks while she was helping write the bill. Her new book, The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood and the Race to Protect Our Planet, is the inside account of that saga, told from the White House, the Senate floor, and the streets.

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I should say up front that I’m not a disinterested reader. Leah is a friend, I endorsed the book, and I turn up a couple of times in these pages myself. When we sat down to talk, I wanted to ask about things only she could answer: what it’s actually like when a bill becomes law, what Joe Manchin was thinking, and how to keep going when the attacks come from your own side.

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Bill McKibben: So let me start by asking you: you’re often in the middle of a climate policy fight, you’re a professor, you’ve got a thousand other things to do. Why did you decide to take the time to write a book?

Leah Stokes: I always wanted to write a book like this. Very few books give people an inside look at how political change happens and how they could be a part of it. Your book Oil and Honey is one example: that book lets people sit next to you through the campaign against the Keystone XL Pipeline and see what improvisational activism looks like.

Policy work is about power, and people who feel they don’t have power sometimes attack the people closest to them rather than the ones who actually hold power.

Giving people a behind-the-scenes view matters. Without it, when people ask “What can I do about climate change?” they end up with paper-straw suggestions—not the things we actually need people to do, which is to join campaigns and organizations. And that is too complex a story for a hundred words, or a few thousand. I needed to write a book to tell that story.

BM: Let me ask another writing question. You wrote this book while being an important part of the climate fight, a professor at UCSB, and—more importantly—the mother of two very young daughters. What was your writing process? How did you find the time and mental space?

LS: I started with what an anthropologist might call “field notes,” which was just a giant Google document where I would jot down my late night thoughts, like if I was dealing with some problem in the campaign. Sometimes, a person would say something crisp on a call and I’d write it down as a quote. I collected these little gems in a disorganized, stream-of-consciousness way, and that was the seed of the project.

But I knew I wanted to tell this story from other people’s vantage points. That meant figuring out who those characters were, then interviewing them—in some cases for a dozen hours or more—visiting them in person, gathering emails, text messages, and videos so I could recreate their stories in a way that made the reader feel like they were in the room when this huge bill was negotiated. That part of the writing process unfolded over years and relied on a lot of different strategies.

BM: Your first book was an academic book—a well written, accessible one, but it was academic. What did it feel like to be writing this very different kind of book here?

LS: We just had our annual political science conference, where an author gives their book to a group of senior colleagues to read and discuss. I was nervous going in, because this really is not an academic book. It’s a work of narrative nonfiction and memoir.

But my colleagues received it well, I think that’s because it can be read at multiple levels. You can read it as a story, and there is a lot of suspense that carries the reader along. But you can also read it at a deeper level, through its concepts and theories.

My first principle was to make the story as accessible as possible—so that someone who has never heard of Senator Joe Manchin could feel connected. And a lot of people tell me they cry reading the book. That’s such a compliment. Moving people to emotion is something we need to do as a climate movement.

BM: Let’s stay with your work as a political scientist for a minute. You now have firsthand knowledge of the sausage-making of the legislative process, which is rarely about high principles. How did your view of how a bill becomes a law change from the standard political science—or Schoolhouse Rock—version?

LS: At that political science book panel, one of my colleagues joked that I should collaborate with Schoolhouse Rock on a new version of that famous video, “I’m Just a Bill,” because the truth is not that simple. It’s a lot more drama. There is so much conflict in policymaking. People know that at the level of the White House and Congress, but I didn’t understand it also holds within coalitions and activist organizations. Policy work is about power, and people who feel they don’t have power sometimes attack the people closest to them rather than the ones who actually hold power. One idea I developed in the book is the “fight of enactment”: when a bill text is finally on the table, groups have to decide whether it’s good enough, and that can lead to a lot of conflict.

On this point, there’s actually a story about you in the book. When we knew the bill was coming in July 2022, I called you up and said, “I’ve heard Manchin will put poison pills in this bill, but there will still be twenty times as much good stuff as bad. How will this be received?” You said, “I think this could really split the movement.” And you were right, unsurprisingly.

BM: Let’s stick with that. You were quite unfairly attacked, in very personal terms, by some activists at the end of this. How hard was that, and how did you get past it to continue your work?

LS: You know more than most humans how hard it was. When it happened, the bill was on the Senate floor, going through the vote-a-rama. I was home with my kids. We all had COVID. They had just turned one. And the morning I woke up to watch this bill become a law, I was attacked by individuals within the climate movement, very personally. By that point, the attacks had been going on for days and it felt like I was being hunted by a bear. I was just in such a state of fight or flight. It’s one thing to be attacked by the fossil fuel industry, and quite another to be attacked by your own side.

I called you that Sunday morning, Bill, and you picked up the phone and listened to me in my distress. That was such a gift. You gave me the broader context of someone who has been in the movement for decades: in that moment it was me being attacked, but there was a bigger history and pattern to this kind of infighting in progressive spaces. I found that depersonalizing these moments made it easier to move past them.

I’m more hopeful than I’ve ever been, and yet the clock is running short. We seem to have written the very suspenseful version of this story. Now we have to live it.

And Bill, this is another thing I learned from you. Before we met, I read a story you wrote about being harassed by fossil fuel aligned groups—they’d photograph you if you so much as carried a plastic bag at the grocery store. But in that piece, you turned that into a bigger point: look at what happens to environmental activists in other parts of the world, in Latin America for example, where people are literally murdered for trying to protect a forest or a river. When we contrast the emotional pressure we face—from the fossil fuel industry, from colleagues—with activists who are killed for speaking out, it’s a blessing to be doing this work within a democratic system where, mostly, we are safe.

BM: Let’s hope that it remains democratic. And on that note, let’s return to the negotiations over what became the Inflation Reduction Act—long, torturous, and in certain ways disheartening. This started out as the Green New Deal and got smaller at every turn, largely through the influence of Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who was the 50th vote and could turn his thumb up or down on anything. In the end, though he exacted many painful compromises, he voted for it. First, what was that process like? And second: why do you think he came around?

LS: It was a really hard process to get that bill to turn into a law. Some readers have told me the book calls into question how well our democracy functions, because the process should not be that hard. In the book, I tried to show that process from many angles, and to tell a truthful story: being part of making these bills happen involves real personal sacrifice. Adrian Deveny, Senator Chuck Schumer’s lead climate negotiator and one of the main characters, says in the book: “To be a part of these historic pieces of legislation, you put yourself on the line, and you make sacrifices because it’s important. It’s much bigger than you, and your needs, or your sleep. That shit doesn’t matter compared to the scope of what you’re working on. And everybody has that attitude, or they don’t last very long.”  I wanted to capture those tradeoffs, because that is what it’s really like.

As for why Manchin voted for it—I did my best to get to the bottom of that. I tried to paint him as a real human with real motivations. He was concerned his constituents in West Virginia would miss out on things like new clean energy jobs and an extension of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund. Plus, when Manchin walked away from the package in July 2022, he faced a huge backlash. A heat wave was hitting Europe at the time, and it felt like the world’s anger over the climate crisis was directed at one man in that moment, fairly or not. I don’t think he personally wanted to doom the planet for his own grandchildren. For all his flaws, he had his own legitimate concerns about inflation and the economy, and I think that’s why he dragged the process out for so long. I tried to humanize him and understand things from his perspective. Whether a reader comes away more sympathetic to him or not will depend on the person. But I tried to be fair.

BM: For what it’s worth, I’d say this was in certain ways a triumph of the long-running climate movement. I don’t think Senator Manchin wanted his main legacy to be the vote that kept America from doing anything about climate change—which it would have been.

Let’s end with young people, in particular the two who now share your household, whom I have met and who are spectacular. First, reflect on the experience—which few of us can quite imagine—of being in the NICU with them while your attention was divided between them and this incredibly important battle. Then talk about the world they’re going to inherit from all of us.

LS: While I was working on this bill, I became pregnant with twins, and it turned out to be a very high-risk pregnancy. My daughters were born very early and very small, and in the end we spent 75 days in the NICU. I took work calls from storage rooms in the hospital, surrounded by medical equipment, while trying to pump. I flew to Congress and testified while my daughters were still in the hospital. I did it because this was an opportunity to pass a climate law, and I felt I could not let that pass us by.

When we think about making the world safe for our kids, it’s usually in a narrow sense: get a car seat, plug the outlets. I have a more expansive view of what it means to keep my kids safe—really, all living beings safe—and that is taking on the climate crisis. When we join with others through groups and organizations, we can have outsized impacts. That’s how we make sure the world we leave to our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, our neighbors and cousins, is a safe one. With this year’s El Niño and the horrible tragedy in Nepal in recent weeks, all of us can see what happens if we don’t work together to change the course of history.

So I’m cautiously optimistic. Bill, your most recent book, Here Comes the Sun, ends where I’d say I am: we have the technologies we need and we can do this. I’m more hopeful than I’ve ever been, and yet the clock is running short. We seem to have written the very suspenseful version of this story. Now we have to live it.

BM: Exactly right. Well, that’s the perfect place to stop. And with many thanks—in my case, as someone with new grandchildren—for this book, and for the effort it describes: a saga people will be thinking about and reading about for a very long time to come. And I, for one, am extremely grateful that we have such a powerful and moving account of how a climate bill becomes a law.

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Leah C. Stokes is Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara. As a leading climate advocate, she has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine’s Time100 Next list and Business Insider’s top 30 global climate leaders. A recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship, she is the author of the award-winning Short Circuiting Policy, which was listed as one of the top 5 climate books in 2020 by The New York Times.

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.

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The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood and the Race to Protect Our Planet by Leah C. Stokes is available from MIT Press.