Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Here Comes the Sun, plus Our Fragile Freedoms | Start Making Sense

Transcript

Here Comes the Sun, plus Our Fragile Freedoms | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: From the nation magazine pisses start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weener.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Later in the show, Trump seems to pose a unique danger to democracy.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But historian Eric Foner will explain that history shows many earlier threats to our fragile freedoms.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the title of his new book of essays.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But first, Bill McKibben is suddenly hopeful about our chances for slowing climate change.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: He'll explain why in a minute.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now it's time for some good news, really good news, from Bill McKibben, the climate writer and activist.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over sixty for action on climate injustice.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bill's eighteen, eighty nine book The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about climate change.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been published now in twenty four languages.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's going on to write twenty more books
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as work appears regularly in places ranging from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone to the nation.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, Bill helped found three-fifty.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica for climate action.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks to three-fifty.org and its allies, the movement to divest from fossil fuels has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: within dominance worth more than forty trillion dollars stepping back from oil, gas, and coal.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: We reached them today at home in the mountains of Vermont.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bill, welcome back.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, very good to be with you.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've devoted a lot of your life to telling us the bad news and to leading the fight to make things better, but pretty much everything you said was going to happen is happening.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: The heat waves are hotter, the storms are bigger, the ice is melting, the temperatures rising.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: and Trump is doing his best to make all of that worse to burn more fossil fuel.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Drill, baby, drill.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: But now you have some good news.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Really good news.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: At a time when almost everything seems to be going wrong, you see one thing that is suddenly going right.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: A really big thing.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a title of your book.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Here comes the sun.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Please explain.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's disorienting for me as it is for anybody.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look, there's never been a darker moment in my lifetime, not on the planet where the heat is unrelenting and causing, as you say, exactly the kind of crises we knew it would, not in our country where, well, where democracy is flickering and faltering.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of all that, there is one big, good thing suddenly happening that people haven't really understood
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that may be big enough that it actually has some impact on both those crises, the one of climate and the one of the authoritarianism.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the sudden, finally, a surge in renewable energy.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've spent my entire lifetime talking about alternative energy from the sun and wind.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: and kind of waiting for it to come around.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's always been this sort of on the fringes, alternative.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it has about three years ago, it's not alternative anymore.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The last thirty six months have seen an almost unbelievable spike in the amount of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries on this planet.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And those three things are beginning to reshape our energy system in ways that are fascinating and potentially liberating.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The U.S.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: is the one country not, not happily participating in this vines, even the Saudis are installing vast quantities of solar panels at the moment.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But around the world and in parts of our country, we're seeing astonishing astonishing change all of a sudden.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the most striking things that you talk about in your new book here comes the Sun is how one of the biggest problems of all of our past history is the geography of resources in the world that depends on fossil fuels.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: A few countries have a lot of oil and gas.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: They became the richest and the most powerful and they dominate everybody else.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the Sun shines everywhere.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The economic and political implications of that are incredibly significant.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's absolutely right.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know the Trump has been talking about energy dominance since day one.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And his idea is he has his foot on the neck of the world because we export more oil and gas than anybody else.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they'll have to listen to us on and on.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that's not what's happening now.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: China has installed so much solar power in May of this year, which is the last month for which we have good data.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: China was installing three gigawatts of solar panels a day.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: A gigawatts the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they were putting up a solar coal-fired power plant every eight hours.
• 5:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's happening so fast and spreading now to Asia and Africa with real speed.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And with it comes the absolute possibility for a kind of liberation.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look, Africa is probably going to end up buying at least for the moment.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's solar panels from China or India.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that's different from buying oil because you buy a solar panel once and then you set it up and then the Sun delivers the energy for free for the next twenty-five thirty years.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a very different proposition than being dependent on any country, much less one as fickle and erratic as the United States at this point.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: for your energy supplies going forward.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not just by the way that these energy sources are concentrated in particular countries.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's that in those countries, a few particular people end up usually controlling them.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So not everybody knows, for instance, that in America, our biggest oil and gas variants for the last quarter century have been the Koch brothers.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: They control more refining and pipeline capacity than anyone else.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as you know, they use their winnings to erode the foundations of our democracy.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you, anybody has any questions about why it was so easy for Donald Trump to kick them off earth.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's because those guys had been at work for, you know, a generation making it happen.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Russia, it's flat of your Putin biggest oil and gasparing using his winnings to launch a land war in Europe in the twenty-first century.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the idea of a world that runs on a resource available to everyone everywhere
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: that can't be horded, that can't be held in reserve, as you know better than most, because you've been writing and talking about it your whole life, humans are very good at starting wars.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's going to take some doing to figure out how to fight a war over sunshine.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the sun shines everywhere, but batteries
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: have to be built and materials that go into batteries are not everywhere.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we need lots of really big rechargeable batteries.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you read about this, there's lots of nasirs who will say that mining lithium is disastrous for the environment.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It causes significant water and air pollution.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So although the sun may shine everywhere, the materials that go into batteries have been a problem.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you have good news on that front too.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sure, I mean, first of all, let's be clear that you have to compare things with other things.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is to say, there is no free lunch anywhere, but there are more expensive lunches and less expensive lunches.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is a lot less expensive.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we should mind lithium as humanely and environmentally soundly as we can, and there have been at least the beginnings of some efforts along that also cobalt also copper.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the amount of these minerals that we need is relatively small in comparison with the amount that we're mining now.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you think about it even for a minute, you quickly realize why.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You go mind some lithium, you put it in a battery, and there it sits for twenty-five years doing its thing.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the battery finally degrades, we now have the capacity to recycle that lithium, and it's valuable enough that we do.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you just pull it out and start over with an X battery.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you go mind some cool,
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you do?
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: You set it on fire and then you have to go mine some more tomorrow.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimated last fall that all the minerals for the battery transition through twenty-fifty would be less in volume than the coal we mined last year on this planet.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember, too, that when we're thinking about as we always should be human rights, human health, human suffering, let's just lay aside climate change for a moment, because that's going to do more damage to human beings than anything that's ever happened.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But just in the right now immediate moment,
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nine million people a year die on this planet from breathing the combustion by products of fossil fuel.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's one death in five.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's five million children in Delhi, two and a half million of them have irreversible lung damage just from breathing the air.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not necessary anymore.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can really begin to change that.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And actually within the last six months, we've started to see Delhi and much of urban India quickly adapting electric rick shots to replace the two stroke gas engines that have been falling near there forever.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it goes from that scale.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: up to the, you know, the example in this country, the two examples in this country that are fascinating are first California where there's not that Governor Newsom has done everything right, but California over the last five or ten years has built up enough momentum in putting up solar panels that they crossed some kind of tipping point this past year.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every day now, California generates more than a hundred percent of electricity it uses from renewable sources
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: for long periods of the day.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: That means that at night when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply on the grid is batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The bottom line, California, fourth largest economy on planet Earth uses forty percent less natural gas to produce electricity than they did two years ago.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the kind of number applied all around the world that starts shaving tens of a degree of how hot the planet eventually gets.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, if we's putting up solar panels faster than California right now, the loan star state of Texas, and it's not from any desire to save the climate.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's sheer economics that are driving it.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get in the way of this change.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've all but banned solar, new solar and wind.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, last week they shut down
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: work on an eighty percent completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island which you know if they have their way will stand as a kind of stone hinge like ruin for generations just marking are not our wisdom like stone hinge but are falling.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And let me just say, let me just say, Trump's bizarre obsession with wind power is not based really even on the Koch brothers or on politics.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an old personal thing, but tell that story.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has something to do with his golf course in Scotland and he doesn't want to look at, but truthfully, he'd be doing this anyway.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You remember he told the fossil fuel industry last year when he was running for president.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a kind of Austin Powers moment.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was like, give me a billion dollars and you can do anything you want.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They gave him about half a billion and that was apparently plenty because we're going to do our best to stand up to Trump on all of this.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Really there's three issues aside from the underlying racism of the administration.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's tariffs, deportation, and the attack on renewable energy that seem to be the kind of three-legged stool of
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: policy if you can call it that in this administration.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: The solar revolution means we have to change a lot of things because solar power makes electricity and a lot of our houses now have gas furnaces, gas, those gas and dryers.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: If solar panels wind turbines and batteries are the Holy Trinity for production of energy, let this Methodist and Disco teacher tell you that the Holy Trinity for its consumption are electric vehicles of all kinds including e-bikes, which are pretty amazing.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Heat pumps replacing furnaces and induction cook tops, which you can get for sixty bucks on Amazon if you're inclined to do Amazon stuff.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: replacing the open campfire in your kitchen.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are all better than the thing that they replace.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are cheaper to run, have fewer moving parts, produce way less pollution.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you like going fast in cars, you can go way faster in an EV than you can in whatever you're driving now.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I know I know that while you like a electric car as you love electric bicycles, why is that?
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: E-bikes are, E-bikes, I think making out to be the most interesting innovation of all.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look, a bicycle was good technology to begin with.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we've essentially invented a bicycle with no hills.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it runs, it takes about a fifth of a cent.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: to buy the electricity to take it a mile.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's about what people are paying.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So elegant, it's almost unbelievable.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So these are things that we can do.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The trouble is we have to do them fast.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We cannot sit around and wait for the market to do its thing because
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: climate change.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's happening in real time.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The intergovernmental panel in climate change told us a few years ago that if we wanted to get back on anything like that Paris timetable, we needed to cut emissions in half by twenty thirty, which by my watch is four years and now as of today, four months away.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't leave us a hell of a lot of time, especially with Trump in the way.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we've got tons of work to do here and around the globe.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, the oil and gas companies are fighting this with everything they've got.
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I find that a little puzzling because couldn't they make a lot of money in solar?
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: They can make a lot of money, but not as much money.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the problem.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There'll be people who become millionaires and probably billionaires putting up solar panels and wind turbines.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But once it's up, you don't need to buy more energy.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Johnny Rockefeller realized early on that if he could control the supply of this thing, then he was in the cat bird seat like nobody before him.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's been the model ever since.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: XI makes you write them on another check every time you want some more energy.
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sun does not.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for, you know, XI's purposes, the sun delivering energy for free is the stupidest business model of all time.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for everybody else, it's the best possible model, especially for poorer people and poorer countries.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you think about countries around the world, when you hear about countries around the world that are in debt crisis, that are having to restructure, that are being having austerity imposed on them by the IMF.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost always, the biggest item in their budgetary shortfall is paying for the next load of oil from the tanker that will unload it until they've
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: got cash on the barrelhead.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is liberation in so many ways.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the lines in your book that I underlined more than once was solar and wind are almost too cheap for our economy.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to make the kind of profit that incentivizes companies to go put them up.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's probably why China is leading the way right now.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's why it made extraordinary sense for the Biden administration to be trying to incentivize the kind of first round of this infrastructure buildup.
• 16:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because, yeah, that's the problem.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got to pay to get it up in the first place.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But once you do, the benefits to everything are so enormous.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they just go on forever.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So think about where China's going to be in a few years in comparison to, say, us.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're going to be doing everything they do.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: manufacturing especially with way cheaper energy than we are, and that's going to give them a comparative advantage forever.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look, it's not the thing that worries me the most, climate change worries me the most, but it is kind of gallant to see the Trump administration handing over
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: the technological future to China.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: This stuff was invented here.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the solar cell comes from Edison, New Jersey.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's people out there who's invented in nineteen fifty-four, which means there's one or two people in your audience, my third act cohorts, who are old enough to have helped pay for the development of solar cells by dropping dimes in payphones in the nineteen-forties.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: the fact that we're just handing it all to China.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not that they're eating our lunch.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've sent a crew of waiters in red caps over to Beijing to serve our lunch up for them and it should be kind of a problem to everyone.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I have friends who say that here in the consumption capital of the world
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Isn't the real solution for us to live more modestly and reduce consumption?
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So don't get too giant SUVs, get to be bike.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Don't live in a big house, live more simply.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Avoid air travel, don't eat meat.
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wouldn't we all be better off if we all did these things?
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've got no argument with it, and you know, you're sort of describing my life and Vermont.
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But hey, it's not going to happen fast enough to catch us up with climate change.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: A hundred million human beings enter the consuming class every year now, mostly in Asia.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the idea that they're simply going to be persuaded to not to follow what's happened from so many cases here seems unlikely to me.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, too, we kind of had an experiment about this five years ago.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You'll remember, I'm afraid, the first couple of months of the COVID crisis, we changed our lives more than any environmentalist would ever have imagined making anyone change their life.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody flew, nobody drove, nobody did anything for weeks, you know, we just sat home.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: stared at the wall.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It turns out that emissions dropped, but by a lot less than you'd expect, they were down about ten percent at the height, which means I think that the problem is less with individual choices and more with the machinery that runs this
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: thing we're currently calling civilization.
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, a hundred years from now, with humans have figured out better ways to amuse themselves in ways that put way less stress on the planet.
• 19:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I bet, I think, will live very differently.
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I've spent a lot of time writing about that, deep economy, since some ways, my favorite book I've ever wrote, and it's very much on this subject.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But do I think we're going to do that in the next four years, around the globe, in numbers sufficient to alter the trajectory of carbon in the atmosphere I don't?
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think that we better figure out how to meet the desires that we currently have with the technology that won't destroy the world and will destroy less of it in the process.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So tell us about Sunday.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sunday is our effort to try and bring this to the U.S.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's on September twenty first, the thumbnail equinox and it's going to be hundreds of events all across the country.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find them at sunday dot earth.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the website sunday dot earth.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a very beautiful website.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be a very beautiful day.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of these will be, you know, solar powered concerts and people building habitat for humanity homes with solar panels on the roof and ground breakings, it's solar farms and
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: on and on and on.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: There will also be some angry protests outside gas pipelines that we don't need because we should be putting up solar and stuff.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has two goals.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is to make it easier.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: states as well as red cities and red states can do a lot without the federal government to reduce the permitting load.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Costs three times as much to put solar on your house in this country as it does in Australia or the EU and that's mostly because we have too much licensing permitting all of this.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are good, easy, app-based ways to get around that that everybody else uses and now we should too.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Second purpose of Sunday, maybe the deepest
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just to drive home this notion that it isn't alternative energy anymore.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The analogy I've been using, we're used to thinking of this stuff as the whole foods to energy.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's nice but pricey.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the Costco of energy.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's cheap.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's available in bulk.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's on the shelf ready to go.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's get to it.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's get to it starting with Sunday on our calendars September twenty first the autumn equinox more info at sunday dot earth.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So everything is going wrong except this one big thing in these dark days there is one bright light the sun.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bill McKibben's new book is here comes the sun, a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bill, thank you for this wonderful book.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for everything you do and thanks for talking with us today.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back at you, brother, a real pleasure.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Take care.
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It often seems like Trump is posing a unique threat to our freedoms today, but historian Eric Foner says our present battles are not unprecedented.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Americans have one rights and lost them at different points in our past.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's called his new book Our Fradial Freedom's, it's a collection of essays almost sixty of them.
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, Eric taught American history at Columbia for several decades.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's written many award-winning books on the Civil War and Reconstruction Euras.
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: His book at How Lincoln changed his mind about slavery and black people.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called The Fiery Trial.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: When the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize in the Lincoln Prize, Eric's written for the New York Times, the TLS, the LRB, and the Nation, where he's a member of the editorial board.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: We reached him today at home in Manhattan.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Eric, welcome back.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Good to see you, John.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Trump doesn't read books, but he does seem to care about history.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And right now, he's launched a campaign against the Smithsonian, where he says, quote, everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about future, close quote.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what could be brighter in our history than freeing the slaves?
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if he's interested in the future, how about those who fight for our future of greater equality?
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I think that's a legitimate critique of the president's view of history.
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: that it's either all good or all bad.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think, you know, the most historians would say this is not a very good way of categorizing historical scholarship.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Some of it will generate brightness, some will generate darkness, but most of history is a kind of a mixed bag.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are many things to be proud of in American history, some of them you just mentioned a few minutes ago.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there are many things to be ashamed of, slavery number one, Japanese internment during the Second World War.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: My favorite quotations about the writing of history that I used to pass along to my students came from the philosopher Nietzsche, who basically said there were three kinds of history, three kinds of writing of history.
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: One is what you'd call antiquarianism, people searching for their roots and their relatives, etc.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nothing wrong with that.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: The second kind is what he called monumental history.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what most history is actually, and it's certainly what President Trump wants.
• 25:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: He wants to build an entire park full of statues of great Americans in Washington, D.C.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not exactly that it's false, it just is rather limited and doesn't give you a full picture of our history.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the third one is critical histories at nature, critical history, the history that judges and condemns.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think there are many more kinds of history than the current debate is allowing for.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: You write in your new book that your own education as a historian began at home.
• 26:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about your father and about your uncles.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, my father, Jack Fona, was also a historian, although he didn't go to college planning to be a historian, and I needed to die when I went to college, I wanted to be an astronomer.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in my home, it was on the sort of liberal left wing part of this political spectrum in the suburbs of New York where I grew up.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: My parents were among the minority of white people who thought that racism, Jim Crow was outrageous.
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a violation of the Constitution and that this was really something they devoted a lot of their time and energy to fighting against.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: the way racism was so pervasive in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: teacher in high school had never heard of Frederick Douglas, but my home Frederick Douglas was an important presence.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what about your uncle's Henry, who became head of the fur workers union, and Mo, who was the head of the eleven ninety-nine hospital workers union?
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Ah, how could I forget them?
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: All four of these gentlemen, my relatives, my father and uncles, all four of them were blacklisted in the nineteen, forty's and fifty's.
• 27:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: They could not get teaching jobs because of their left wing political views.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that was another thing I learned at home.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in a way, I was thinking of that when I wrote the title of this book, our fragile freedoms that I learned from observation of my parents and my uncles
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's get back to Trump here, when Trump does something terrible, like, I don't know, sending ICE agents to grab undocumented residents off the streets of Democratic cities and taking them away to faraway countries.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: People say nothing like this has ever happened before, but in many cases, as you point out in your new book,
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, especially like this one, it has happened before.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, worse has happened before, for example, ice enforcement today has a lot in common with what happened under the fugitive slave act of eighteen fifty.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, the fugitive slave act authorized the federal government to appoint new officials who could do what ice does, just grab people off the streets.
• 28:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: hold them to a judge who would then, it was really just a question of identification, not of whether the person was really a fugitive running away from slavery.
• 29:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the fugitive playback also had a different effect, which was the galvanized abolitionist sentiment in the north, many people who
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: were not radical abolitionists before the eighteen fifty found the fugitive slave law more than they could more than they could swallow and took to the streets to prevent the apprehension of people accused of being fugitive slaves but the the basic picture here
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: of oppressed people running away trying to get across a border in order to enjoy freedom and being apprehended by federal agents.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: That picture is here in our streets today.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: One other interesting parallel today we have these sanctuary laws that declare that cities and towns refuse to cooperate with ICE.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: How does today's sanctuary movement compare with the resistance of the fugitive slave act of eight and fifty?
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's considerable similarity between communities that say our police or our judges will not cooperate with the apprehension and deportation of people accused of being illegal refugees, you might almost say.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a pre-quarter of Wisconsin declared the fugitive slave law on constitutional.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: the Supreme Court of the United States overturned that judgment.
• 30:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So in other words, this battle over who's entitled to freedom, who enforces the law or tries to enforce the law, those things have been a part of our history for quite a while.
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another parallel, Trump thinks there's too much about how bad slavery was in our textbooks in our teaching, and he'd like to basically hide that history.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: You write in your new book, Our Franchal Freedoms, about a terrible chapter of American Black History that was hidden for a century, and then recently, rediscovered.
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what happened in Tulsa in nineteen twenty one.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: we always were told it was a race riot but it turns out it was a massacre probably the deadliest instance of racial violence in the country's history and we're just now learning more about what happened there and how that history was hidden remind us briefly what we now know about what happened in Tulsa in nineteen twenty one Tulsa at the time was an important place the oil capital of America where the flourishing black community
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, Tulsa was sometimes called the Black Wall Street because it had a thriving middle class.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is most of the Black people living there.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is around
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: uh... nineteen twenty twenty one as you said uh... most of the black people living there were not war street people black or white but were uh... poor laborers working in the homes of white people or uh... other kinds of media jobs but uh... you know that the world war one era was one with many racial altercations in the united states uh... he's saying louis chicago you name them
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tulsa was probably the most violent of them all, when it ended up with the entire neighborhood of Black Wall Street being burned to the ground hundreds of people without place to live.
• 32:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Another added of historians is history is what the present chooses to remember.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: the people of Tulsa, or that is to say anyway, the white people of Tulsa, made a very concerted effort to hide in a sense what had come to forget what had happened in the Tulsa race massacre of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of,
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, Scott Ellsworth who wrote the book that I was reviewing in this case.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's very clear about this.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: The police went around from photo studio to photo studio, apprehending photographs that showed the destruction after the riot was over in
• 33:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tell the teachers would told if they mentioned this in class, they would not keep their jobs.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: In other words, it was a concerted effort to avoid any discussion.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And probably black people were kind of frightened that if they started talking about it again, you might run into further violent problems.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're probably known best for your work on reconstruction after the Civil War in your book.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The second founding is about the amendments to the constitution that were passed in the wake of the Civil War.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: The thirteenth abolishing slavery, the fourteenth guaranteeing equal rights and establishing birthright citizenship.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: the fifteenth guaranteeing the vote to black man.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: The fourteenth is the one that's in the news these days because Trump for a long time has said he wants to abolish birthright citizenship and on day one of his second term he signed an executive order abolishing birthright citizenship, which courts have ruled this unconstitutional.
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I notice it's on its way to the Supreme Court, but thus far
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trump has not appealed the substance of the rulings that say the whole concept of abolishing birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: All these challenged is peripheral and the procedural issues
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wonder if this could be because his even his flunkies and his yes men at the Justice Department are telling him that his case to abolish birthright citizenship is a sure loser at the Supreme Court because it's definitely in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're expert on the Fourteenth Amendment.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tell us how it was past and why.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the culmination of a long battle, which took up most of the first half of the nineteenth century.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's in there because abolitionists and anti-slavery people of all kind
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: led a campaign to create a situation where anybody born in the United States is a citizen of the United States automatically.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they wanted to create what Frederick Douglass after the war called a composite nation.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: a nation in which all people of all backgrounds of all races, religions, creeds could cooperate with each other.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment says any person born or naturalizing the United States is automatically a citizen.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: What will happen when the substance of this gets up to the Supreme Court?
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am not a betting man, and I'm not going to throw my money away by betting on this, but I think one could certainly imagine scenarios in which the Supreme Court went along with Trump.
• 36:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you go by the text of the Constitution, which is what many conservatives think is the best way to interpret the Constitution, you're going to have to end up with birthright citizenship being part of the constitutional system, something that the President can't just abrogate with one executive order as he has tried to do.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: The basic lesson here is that rights can never be taken for granted.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You cannot assume that because rights have been gained that they can't be lost also.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's one lesson it's exactly as many people used to say in the nineteenth century.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and where will end up?
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We cannot say.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Eric Foner, his new book is our fragile freedoms.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a collection of almost sixty essays.
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton calls the book a vital tool for navigating our present struggles for justice and equality.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Eric, thank you for all your work and thanks for talking with us today.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, John.
• 37:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nice to be here.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Say, say, say, say, say, say, say, say, say, say, say, say,
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Start making sense, the podcast from the nation magazine, is recorded in Los Angeles at our Blive Avenue Studios.
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer, Jack Merkinson is executive producer.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Baskar Sunkara is president of the nation, Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of the nation.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons,
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can find out more about StartMakingSense at theNation.com and you can subscribe to StartMakingSense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weener.
• 38:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening.