Bill McKibben, Environmentalist:
Well, William, we’re seeing an incredible rollback pretty much of all environmental regulation dating back to 1970.
We’re coming up on the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, and it was in the immediate aftermath of that we started basically regulating pollution, and now we’re deregulating pollution of all kinds. The most serious consequences are what’s happening around climate and energy, and they’re serious for two reasons.
One, as you say, the planet is getting hotter and hotter and hotter all the time. March was the hottest March we have ever measured on this planet. And, two, we’re making a series of extremely foolish choices about energy. We’re the only place in the world that’s decided that somehow coal is the future of the planet.
And we’re going to have our lunch eaten by the rest of the world, which has quite rightly figured out that sun and wind and the batteries to store their power when the sun goes down or the wind drops are the cheapest, cleanest, easiest, fastest way forward. So, on both counts, we’re making just the most savage mistakes.
