Environmentalist Bill McKibben, left, and journalist Frank Sesno discusses the importance of connecting older, younger generations in climate fight Wednesday in the Amphitheater.
Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, according to average temperatures reported by networked thermometers placed all across the globe. The records only go back 200 years or so, but scientists at the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which oversees the thermometer network, are “quite confident that Sunday was the hottest day in the last 125,000 years,” said Bill McKibben — at least.
And, at least, Sunday was the hottest day on record, until … Monday.
“We’re living through sadly historic times, which gives the conversation and the work that we’re all doing a certain special piquancy and urgency,” McKibben said Wednesday morning in the Amphitheater, diving into his conversation with Frank Sesno, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and administrator at George Washington University, where he created Planet Forward, a multi-platform media project focused on climate storytelling from the next generation of journalists.
McKibben, an author and environmentalist, is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. The two men, working with two different generations on a shared goal, spent their portion of the Week Five morning lecture series in conversation about how they’re working to connect generations through stories in order to effect real climate action. Sesno, former White House correspondent for CNN, said he left full-time journalism because he wanted to invest in the future. His formula for that was, essentially, “take media, plant it at a university, engage young people, tap into the knowledge that faculty and researchers and scholars are doing as they search for new knowledge,” and give that work the attention typical media isn’t able to do.
“What if we could motivate young people to tap into their imagination and their creativity to connect it with fact and knowledge to build narratives from across the world where they come from and focus on the ideas, the innovations, the research to actually move the planet forward?,” he said. “We know a lot about the doom and gloom stuff out there and it can be overwhelming. … But there are so many people doing so many interesting, exciting things. What if we tell their stories?”
At George Washington, Sesno is working with the next generation of environmental communicators; at Third Act, McKibben is working with older folks. Together, Sesno said, they’re “working with book ends of generations that can knit together to boom, make change.”
McKibben pointed to the “extraordinary amount of leadership” coming from young people in the climate fight. When his organization 350.org started its fossil fuel divestment campaign, much of that work was happening on college campuses. Those students graduated, but wanted to keep going — thus, the Sunrise Movement was born. That movement led to the Green New Deal, which eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act.
Unique among political problems, climate change comes with a time limit. There simply isn’t time for younger generations to grow up, assume roles of power, and save the day.
“That’s why we started Third Act, because if you’ve reached the age when you have hair coming out your ears, then you have structural power coming out your ears, too,” McKibben said. “There are 70 million Americans over the age of 60. That’s the population of France. We have most of the money, 70% of the financial assets in this country, and we punch above our weight because we all vote. There is no known way to stop old people from voting.”
If young people want to take on Washington or Wall Street, they’re going to need old people — the generations rooted in moments of “extraordinary social and cultural and political transformation,” McKibben said — the Civil Rights Movement, Earth Day, Roe v. Wade, the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act. The list went on.
A year ago, Third Act held sit-ins at 100 banks in 100 cities. McKibben was in Washington D.C. when Third Act shut down, for one afternoon, the four biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry: Citi, Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. It’s important work, and it’s work that “people our age, I think, are uniquely equipped to do. If you’re 19, an arrest record might not be the best thing for your resume, but at a certain point what the hell are they going to do to you?”
At George Washington and Planet Forward, Sesno is engaging networks of young people who want to act. The project is connected with three dozen colleges and universities, with student correspondents reporting all across the country.
“What we are trying to do is prompt them, encourage them, incentivize them to go and find out what’s happening in the community,” Sesno said. “Talk to leaders, find those people who are making change, however they’re making change, through new ideas, new technologies, new actions.”
The students then take those new understandings, bolster it with data, and produce a narrative — print, audio, visual, or any other platform there is.
Sesno puts a thought experiment before his students; he calls it the Grandma Game. He asks each class, who in this room has the oldest grandmother? 78 years old? 98 years old? Then, he asks, “If you live to your grandma’s age, what year is that?” For a college student born in 2002, that year is 2100. In that time, he asks them: “What you are going to see and experience and how are you going to be a change agent in that?”
There is a generational torch being passed, he said — Kamala Harris is 20 years younger than Donald Trump, and is the first Gen X presidential candidate. J.D. Vance is the first millennial vice presidential candidate. The November election, McKibben said, is a critical one for the future of climate action. There’s a huge economic toll of climate change, and it has a disproportionate impact on regions that contributed minimally to the problem. These are difficult, grief- and anxiety-producing stories, he said, but there are also powerful, interesting stories to tell. In the last 10 years, renewable energy has become so affordable that “we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. … There is an almost-miraculous possibility that in the lifetimes of the people in this Amphitheater, we could stop combustion on this planet. That would be a new story of almost unbelievable grace and beauty and power.”
It would take an enormous amount of work, McKibben said, in part because not everyone on the planet is working in good faith — the fossil fuel industry, in fact, is “doing absolutely everything it can to prevent us from doing it, to slow down that transition.”
He understands why young people may be sad and cynical — and not just cynical, Sesno countered, but angry, outraged and motivated. They know this is a challenge we can do something about, he said. But the question is, are we doing it fast enough?
“The greatest story we’ve got is the story of the planet,” he said. “The tension, the mystery, the suspense at the center is, can we move quickly enough? So far, the answer is ‘no,’ by the way.”
Eight years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that to stay on track with the Paris Agreement, global emissions must be halved by 2030. As the timeline tightens, the work becomes more urgent. McKibben highlighted California, which boasts the fifth-largest economy in the world, which significantly reduced its reliance on natural gas by rapidly expanding its renewable energy infrastructure. However, he also pointed to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s move last month to put an indefinite pause on congestion pricing in New York City — “because there was some pressure coming from suburban car drivers,” McKibben said. “We can’t have that anymore. We need courage on every front.”
The stakes are high, he said; the United Nations estimates that on its current trajectory, climate change will produce between 1 and 3 billion climate refugees in the coming decades. Imagine the politics, he said — and that’s not even considering the future state of public health or agriculture. Americans must stop acting individually and start leveraging the power of collective movements to produce change. That’s complicated, Sesno said, but not impossible.
“If we’re going to get this done, we’ve got to start and do better at talking past our own thoughts and past people who think as we do,” he said. “How do we engage people in a more direct way?”
Sesno thinks that that is through stories. A few years ago, a fourth-generation Maryland farmer came to speak to Sesno’s students. The farmer worried about his finances but, more importantly, he worried about rain.
“He talked about rain, and how rains have come differently now than when he was a young man,” Sesno said. “… (He talked about how) the rains in the spring, especially, were long, soaking rains, and now, more and more there are these deluges that wash off the topsoil, wash off the seed, and what a challenge that is.”
The farmer never said the words “climate change.”
“We can talk about these things in ways that can reach people who may be resistant to some of these terms,” Sesno said. “I think we need to do more and better of that, too.”
As older people, McKibben said, “one of the useful things we possess is a kind of baseline sense of how the world is changing.” With Sesno’s Intergenerational Climate Storytelling Workshop this week, he said he’s seeing both generations learn and listen from the other. Parents and grandparents are sharing personal stories about their lives, how they’ve seen the world and the planet change; younger counterparts are sharing, in turn, what they’re hearing, seeing and thinking about the their future.
“How do we give hope to a new generation, to understand the love and the inspiration that can come from the next generation?,” Sesno asked.
To love a person who will be alive in the 22nd century, McKibben said, “takes things that seem abstractly important and makes it concretely important,” but it’s important to understand how hard it is to be a young person in 2024.
“You really feel like the generations in front of you got most of the cream skimmed off the milk,” he said, “that most of the good stuff came our way, and you’re left holding the bag. … That’s really tough, but it’s much easier if people don’t feel abandoned or deserted.”
McKibben has demonstrated with young people, and he can “tell what a relief it was for people to not feel like they’ve been left entirely on their own to figure this out.” Young people, he said, need to see their elders “getting outside your comfort zone, doing something, anything together that’s difficult, that takes you places where you haven’t been before because obviously we need to go places we haven’t been before. What we’ve done so far hasn’t been enough.”
Intergenerational connection, Sesno said, creates a sense of “lived history in context.”
“One of the things that’s part of the human experience and that you will experience as a young person — because yes, you give me hope, but I’m not dumping that on you — is that you now inherit the human mantle,” he said. “… It’s ever been easy.”
These issues have become more and more personal to people, even in just the last five years, Sesno said. Now, half the students in his classes talk about first-hand experiences with climate change: wildfires in California, rising sea levels in Florida.
“This has become personal for many people, not just young people — for all of us,” he said. “This is entering a new place in our politics and our culture and that, I hope, augurs well for more stories and more action.”
