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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, September 5th, I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show that learned today that D.C.’s hottest club is the White House Rose Garden? That’s according to a White House spokesperson who told The Hill, quote, “The Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world.” I mean, it does have everything, corruption, lies, evil, an elderly man with confusing health issues. [music break] On today’s show, a showdown. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. versus the Senate Finance Committee. And former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has some thoughts on how we got here. But let’s start with the environment. You know, where we live, laugh, love, and observe how the Trump administration seems to be hell bent on reversing every bit of progress we’ve made in the fight against climate change. Because I don’t know if you know this, but President Donald Trump really, really, really hates wind and solar power. He made sure to make that point very clear during a cabinet meeting last week. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] We’re not allowing any windmills to go up. I mean, unless there’s a legal situation where somebody committed to it a long time ago, we don’t allow windmills, and we don’t want the solar panels that I was speaking with the secretary about, because they take up, you know, thousands of acres of our farmland. You see these big, ugly patches of black plastic that comes from China. 

Jane Coaston: And Trump’s specific loathing of wind power is now administration-wide. At the end of August, the Trump team ordered construction be stopped on a $4 billion wind farm project off the coast of Rhode Island that was nearly finished. The administration alluded vaguely to national security threats, suggesting, among other things, that wind farms could be used to launch drone attacks on the U.S. Here’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum talking to CNN last week. 

[clip of Secretary Doug Burgum] People with you know bad ulterior motives to the United States would launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm. The radar gets very distorted around detecting if you’re trying to have you know detect and avoid if you’ve got drones coming. 

Jane Coaston: Because I guess you couldn’t do that from one of the more than 3,200 oil platforms currently operating in the Gulf of Mexico. You know, for reasons. It’s worth noting that the company behind that wind farm, Revolution Wind, is now suing over the cancelation. None of this is good. Not just for, you know, preventing the very worst outcomes of climate change that could put billions of lives at risk and alter the very nature of human existence, but also for Americans dealing with spiraling energy bills. According to CNN, energy costs are now rising twice as fast as inflation. But despite all this, our guest today says there’s still hope on the horizon. I spoke to Bill McKibben, an environmentalist with decades of experience. His latest book is called Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. Bill McKibben, welcome back to What a Day. 

Bill McKibben: Very good to be with you. 

Jane Coaston: Okay, let’s get the bad news out of the way first, because there’s a lot of it, but then we’re going to talk about some of the bright spots you write about. As you know, President Trump has been extremely clear in his dislike of alternative energy, but lately it seems like he is at a like personal war with wind power in particular. Trump stopped construction of the Revolution Wind Farm over concerns that it could be used to launch drone attacks on the US. What was your reaction when you saw that news? 

Bill McKibben: Well, this is just the utter nadir of absurdity from this administration. They’ve just done the same thing, apparently, in Massachusetts. This is good, clean, cheap energy that we could and should be using. Electricity prices are already up 10% around this country this year because we’re constraining the supply of clean energy. It’s all some kind of just crazy idea he has in his mind that all good energy comes from setting oil and gas on fire. And it’s, you know, along with many of his other weird ideas, this one’s going to cause us endless, endless trouble. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, and it’s been wild, the administration’s pulling permits on a bunch of other projects and has tasked almost every government agency with finding problems in wind power and other renewable energies, from national security to health issues to whales. With all of this happening at once, are you worried? 

Bill McKibben: Of course I’m worried. The real problem is that, as you’ll recall last year, candidate Trump told the big oil executives that for a billion dollars in donations they could have anything they wanted. They gave him about half a billion between donations and advertising and lobbying in the last election cycle. And that’s clearly enough. He’s giving them more than they ever could have hoped for. What really is happening here is that in very short order, America is seeding the technological future to China. China is building out renewable energy at an almost unbelievable pace. In May, the last month for which we have numbers, the Chinese were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day. A gigawatt’s the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. So they were building three big coal fire power plants worth of sun every day, one every eight hours. We’re being left behind. We’re leaving ourselves behind, and these are technologies that were, of course, invented in the US. The first solar cell in New Jersey in 1954, the first commercial wind turbine 30 miles south of my house in Vermont in the 1940s. China’s not eating our lunch. We’re serving our lunch to them. 

Jane Coaston: But you have written that Trump’s attacks on renewables will fail. How can you be so certain? 

Bill McKibben: Well first of all, the war is being fought across the planet and every other country on earth is moving in the right direction, maybe not the Russians um at varying rates, but many of them quite fast. So he’s going to lose the war around the world and then he’s gonna lose it here because sooner or later, Americans are going to ask, why do we have to pay so much more for electricity than everybody else on the planet? Why is everything in our economy bogged down by the high price of energy? And they’ll have no answer. At some point, cooler heads will prevail. The problem is that at some point doesn’t do much good for our very, very overheated climate. We only have a few years to try and make this transition. We’ve been given one last real shot at it. By the rapid fall in the price of renewable energy. So we should seize that moment just as fast as we can. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, and it’s interesting because you talk about how there are some really good things happening on this front. Can you explain what’s going on in California? 

Bill McKibben: Yeah, California is a great story. California has taken this more seriously than anybody else. It’s not that they’ve done everything right, but they’ve a lot right. And as a result, they’ve hit a tipping point. In the last 10 months, almost every day, California produces more than 100% of the energy it uses from renewable sources for long periods of the day. At night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply to that grid is batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. Um. Bottom line, California, fourth largest economy on planet Earth, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago. That’s a big enough number that applied broadly you start shaving tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And it’s an even better number when you know that California is now being outpaced by Texas at the pace in which it’s putting up renewable energy. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, let’s talk about Texas because Texas is kind of an interesting story where you have political leadership who are largely in lockstep with the president, but they’re reporting the benefits of investment in renewable storage, especially in a state where the power grid has been not so very good. So what can Texas tell us about the fight for renewable energy? 

Bill McKibben: Well, it’s an even more wild story than that, because of course, Texas is also the absolute headquarters of the world hydrocarbon industry. And so, big oil has been doing its best to shut down this energy transition in Texas, but it’s been failing. The state legislature had a number of bills this year introduced by big oil, the most prominent of which commentators started calling DEI for natural gas. It would have required anyone putting up five megawatts of solar to also build five megawatts of expensive natural gas generation. But out of the woodwork, especially from rural Texas, emerged many, many people who came to Austin to say, don’t do this. This is how we pay for our school system now. This is what keeps the old folks home going in our rural community. Renewable energy is our lifeblood and so the Texas Legislature slinked away, didn’t do it, went back to work redistricting Texas to give Donald Trump some more Congress people, but it didn’t do anything to mess with renewable energy. And I think the lesson is that any place where we can view this on straight-ahead economic terms, we’re going to make progress. That’s what terrifies Big Oil. That is why they are doing everything they can to make sure that the Trump administration slows down this transition. 

Jane Coaston: The governor of Massachusetts shared her concerns with Bloomberg this week over Trump halting wind projects off the coast there, and she’s basically asking the Trump administration to work with states on this, not against them. What’s the best path forward where you have an administration that hates renewable energy, but you have a lot of states where they’ve said, like, hey, this is working for us and we like it? 

Bill McKibben: I think the best path forward is to get people out in the street demanding action. We have this big Sunday event coming up on September 21st across the country, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of events in cities and towns celebrating the rise of renewable energy and demanding that our leaders do more about it. You can find out about it at Sunday.Earth, but that’s the kind of uprising that it’s going to take because at the behest of big oil, Trump will do everything possible to slow down this transition. It won’t last forever. I think cooler heads will prevail just because the economics are so powerful, but it’s not gonna be Trump that bends, especially not if we’re not out in the streets. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, I think that that’s my last question for you, which is that it’s not just about climate change. It’s not just about protecting the environment because we know that the Trump administration doesn’t care about those things. But–

Bill McKibben: Yes. 

Jane Coaston: Higher and higher energy costs make voters mad, and Donald Trump somewhere within him cares about voters being furious at him about rising costs. That’s something he pointed to a lot during the election, you know, talking about how groceries was an old-fashioned word or something. So if places like Texas, as you just mentioned, if you know rural folks can go to Austin and say that this is how we are paying for our school districts and this is how we’re having good jobs. If they can agree that renewables can help lower energy costs, the administration has got to see some of the benefits too. I mean, yes, I’m aware of the role that big oil is playing in this administration, but also like big oil isn’t gonna pay my energy bill. 

Bill McKibben: You know the hope is that at some point, the conservative case for renewable energy will rise to the fore. I’ve lived my life in rural America, much of it in red state rural America. I have plenty of neighbors with Trump flags and solar panels, and their reason is–

Jane Coaston: It can be done. 

Bill McKibben: Well, it’s like, my home is my castle. I’m going to defend it with my AR-15, but it’s much more my castle if it has an independent power supply. And that’s why I’ve got solar panels up on the roof. Those kind of impulses might not be mine. I mean, I want to fight climate change above all, but we can work with those kinds of differences and we should. It’s the absolute sellout to big oil that’s the travesty here and the fact that that hands the future over to our theoretical adversary, China, who, as far as I can tell, we’re doing absolutely everything we can think of to help Xi Jinping along. 

Jane Coaston: Bill McKibben, thank you so much as always for joining me. 

Bill McKibben: A real pleasure, many, many thanks. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Here Comes the Sun: A last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] I’m happy to give have a detailed discussion with you about it. You’re so wrong on your facts. 

[clip of angry Senator 1] You’re interrupting me and sir, you’re a charlatan, that’s what you are. 

[clip of angry Senator 2] Maybe President Trump should have asked you, are you a trustworthy person? And we should have waited for an answer then. Let’s move on. 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] I don’t even know what you’re talking about. You’re talking gibberish! 

[clip of angry Senator 3] You are putting America’s babies’ health at risk, America’s seniors’ health at risk, all Americans’ health at risk and you should resign. 

Jane Coaston: Those were just a few of the exchanges between angry senators and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a fiery Senate hearing that was supposed to be about making America healthy again. RFK Jr. testified before the Senate Finance Committee for three hours Thursday, three hours of Robert F Kennedy Jr. and during that hearing, Kennedy Jr. tried to defend his efforts to pull back COVID-19 vaccine recommendations. And explain the turmoil he’s created at federal health agencies by laying off thousands of workers, firing science advisors, and remaking vaccine guidelines. There’s a lot to get into, but let’s start with recently ousted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, Susan Monarez, and her Wall Street Journal op-ed. Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden pressed Kennedy Jr. about her claims. 

[clip of Senator Ron Wyden] So, my first question, Mr. Secretary, is did you, in fact, do what Director Monarez said you did, which is tell her to just go along with vaccine recommendations, even if she didn’t think such recommendations aligned with scientific evidence? 

Jane Coaston: Hmm. Let’s find out. 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] No, I did not say that to her. 

[clip of Senator Ron Wyden] You didn’t? 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] And I never had a private meeting with her. Other witnesses to every meeting that we have, and all those witnesses will say, I never said that. 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] So she’s lying today to the American people in the Wall Street Journal. 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] Yes, sir. 

Jane Coaston: It’s a classic game of brain worm said, she said. Monarez’s legal team said Kennedy Jr. is the one who’s lying. We certainly dismiss Secretary Kennedy’s claims as false and at times patently ridiculous, they said in the statement. Obviously, medical groups and several Democrats in Congress have called for Kennedy to resign or be fired. But on Thursday, even some Republican senators seemed a little put off. They noted that Kennedy Jr. has said President Donald Trump deserves a Nobel prize for the 2020 Operation Warp Speed Initiative to quickly develop mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which is odd, considering Kennedy Jr. also attacked the safety and continued use of those very shots. Here’s Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy laying that trap. 

[clip of Senator Bill Cassidy] Mr. Secretary, do you agree with me that the president that the president deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed? 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] Yeah, absolutely, Senator, that was phenomenal. 

[clip of Senator Bill Cassidy] So let me ask you. So let me ask you. But you just told Senator Bennett that the COVID vaccine killed more people than COVID. 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] Wait. 

[clip of Senator Bill Cassidy] That was a statement. 

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] I did not say that. 

[clip of Senator Bill Cassidy] Okay. Then let me ask, because you also [?]–

[clip of Robert Kennedy Jr.] Senator, I just want to make clear, I did not say that. 

[clip of Senator Bill Cassidy] Well, we’ll check the record. That’s a question of fact. 

Jane Coaston: I think it’s safe to say that after this contentious hearing, both Democrats and Republicans are starting to get tired of this guy’s bullshit. 

[clip of Texas Governor Greg Abbott] We’ve been able to pass legislation after legislation after legislation, so much so Texas has passed more pro life legislation than any state in the United States. 

Jane Coaston: That’s Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, two weeks ago, praising his own pro-life agenda. Well, now, his signature is the only thing standing in the way of one of the most aggressive anti-abortion measures in the country becoming law. And given what we just heard, it sounds like he’ll give a stamp of approval pretty swiftly. House Bill 7, which the Texas Legislature passed Wednesday, allows private citizens to sue any individual or entity that provides medical abortion pills to Texans. That includes manufacturers, doctors, and anyone who mails the medication to Texas, even if they’re out of state. Those who break the law would face minimum damages of $100,000 per violation. Opponents of the bill say it encourages vigilantism by using citizens rather than the government to enforce abortion bans. Those who sue successfully would receive $10,000 per case. The law would be the first of its kind in the US and would take effect in December, barring legal challenges. Washington DC is suing the Trump administration over its deployment of National Guard troops to the city. The complaint, filed Thursday, argues that it is illegal to use the U.S. Military for domestic law enforcement. It asks a federal court to intervene, as the president floated plans to send troops to other cities, like Chicago and New Orleans, to combat his so-called crime emergency. Trump recently extended National Guard deployment in DC through December. The lawsuit goes after pretty much everyone involved. Specifically suing the Department of Justice, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Army, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others. A White House spokesperson said that the lawsuit is, quote, “nothing more than another attempt at the detriment of D.C. residents and visitors to undermine the president’s highly successful operations to stop crime in D. C. But D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, who filed the complaint, said in a written statement, quote, “No American city should have the U.S. Military, particularly out-of-state military who are not accountable to the residents and untrained in local law enforcement policing it’s streets.” And well, we know what happens to officials who go after Trump. On Thursday, The Washington Post obtained a draft summary of legislation from Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. It outlines a slate of legislation they’re considering that would overhaul criminal justice policies in D.C., including one that would remove the locally elected attorney general, in this case, Schwalb, and replace him with a presidential appointee. Former Kentucky Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell made an unusual comment to a Kentucky newspaper this week. He said Trump’s second presidency has been, quote, “the most dangerous period since before World War II. Huh? I wonder how we got into that period. Could it have anything to do with Mitch McConnell? Maybe it’s because of the time he denied President Barack Obama a Supreme Court pick, thereby personally paving the way for the current ultra-conservative court majority. The same court that gave Trump total immunity for criminal acts committed while in office. Or the time that he voiced his support for Trump over and over again in 2016 and continued to support him as the 2024 nominee even after saying the president was morally responsible for the January 6th insurrection. 

[clip of unknown speaker] If the president was the party’s nominee, would you support him? 

[clip of Mitch McConnell] Oh the nominee of the party? Absolutely. 

Jane Coaston: Look, maybe McConnell just can’t get over the time Trump called him a, quote, “dumb son of a bitch” in 2021, or the time Trump called him an old crow, or the times Trump made racist comments about McConnell’s wife. Who knows? But I do know that of all of the people who should not be shocked that there’s gambling going on in this corrupt casino, it’s Mitch McConnell. And that’s the news. [music break]. 

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, celebrate a 13-year-old New Hampshire boy who caught a 177-pound halibut, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how the massive halibut was caught off the coast of New England by a kid who weighs 50 pounds less than the fish he snagged, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and I have a question. What does one do with 177 pounds of halibut? Because that is a lot of halibut. Almost a hell of a lot halibut. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Gina Pollack, and Laura Newcomb. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with the headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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