• President Donald Trump has made it his mission to single-handedly reverse basically every accomplishment of the Biden administration. That’s especially true when it comes to the former president’s climate agenda. Trump doesn’t want to just deemphasize the fight against climate change, his policy proposals would give climate change a helping hand. But states are stepping into the void left by the federal government. Longtime climate reporter Bill McKibben tells us how.
• And in headlines: Elon Musk came out swinging hard against Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill, Gazans saw another day of violence near an aid distribution site, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced a grilling in the Senate.

• Check out Bill’s Substack – https://billmckibben.substack.com/
• Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8
• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, June 4th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that salutes White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for her clear, concise commitment to knowing things. 

 

[clip of unknown person] Does the White House have a reaction to the results of the election in South Korea? 

 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] Yes. Yes we do. In fact let me find it here for you. It should be somewhere in here. Thank you. Um we do not but I will get you one Jeffery. [laughter]

 

Jane Coaston: I have a follow-up question, Karoline. What can you tell us about South Korea, the country? [music break] On today’s show, Elon Musk comes out swinging hard against Republicans’ big, beautiful bill, and Gazans see another day of violence near an aid distribution site. But let’s start with the environment and President Donald Trump’s efforts to, well, fuck with it. Trump’s attempts to single-handedly reverse basically every accomplishment of the Biden administration have been widespread, from immigration to LGBTQ rights. But it seems to me that a lot of the Trump administration’s focus has been on overturning Biden’s accomplishments on climate change and the environment. See, President Joe Biden was the most climate-focused president we’ve ever had. And Trump is, um, the opposite. Take his deep and abiding affection for oil and fossil fuels, for example. He made that one very clear during his inaugural address. 

 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Today, I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill. 

 

Jane Coaston: Funnily enough, domestic oil production actually peaked under Biden, but who are we to let facts get in the way, right? Now the Trump administration doesn’t just want to de-emphasize the fight against climate change, it seems to want to give climate change a helping hand. Like claiming that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses, quote, “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution.” They do, for the record. Like they 100% do. And if you thought that maybe the Trump administration would care about the knock-on effects of climate change, namely more powerful tornadoes, tropical storms, wildfires and hurricanes that can kill thousands and cost billions of dollars, well, sorry, because all this administration can offer you are FEMA administrators who, quote, “joke about how they don’t know what hurricane season is” and massive cuts to mitigating disaster damage. So yeah, it’s bad out there. But what can states and cities do to fight back? And what about you? Longtime climate reporter, Bill McKibben, stopped by Crooked HQ to answer that question. Bill, welcome to What a Day. 

 

Bill McKibben: Good to be with you. 

 

Jane Coaston: So former President Joe Biden’s administration took more action on climate change than any other in US history. How has Trump tried to undo all of its progress since returning to office, and how successful has he been? 

 

Bill McKibben: Well, this this may have been his top undoing priority. You’ll remember that on day one, he the very first thing he did was announced that we were having an energy–

 

Jane Coaston: A national. 

 

Bill McKibben: -emergency. And uh–

 

Jane Coaston: Yes, an emergency that I didn’t know we had. 

 

Bill McKibben: We’re floating in oil and gas. We’ve got all the energy we could ever possibly use, but um what he wants obviously is to do the bidding of the oil industry. And so everything that’s happened since has been with that in mind. The key parts of that are trying to sabotage the transition to renewable energy that’s coming and coming fast. The Biden Inflation Reduction Act had put aside a lot of money for building battery plants and putting up EV chargers and doing all the kind of manufacturing tasks that theoretically Donald Trump is committed to bringing back to America. Factory work was actually on the increase in our country, thanks to the IRA. That’s all been thrown into reverse now and will be irremediably crippled if the Senate follows the house down the path of the big, beautiful bill, the spending plan approved by the House basically undoes everything that Biden did in terms of energy. They’ve also removed the ability of California to push ahead to mandate, as it were, clean energy vehicles in this state and in the process undercut the whole transition of Detroit to EVs. 

 

Jane Coaston: How are everyday Americans feeling the effects of the Trump administration’s actions, or rather, inaction, on climate? 

 

Bill McKibben: The inaction on to begin with on climate uh is going to be felt every time the next storm, fire, flood comes along. You may have seen that the new head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, uh told his staffers that he was surprised to have learned that there was a hurricane season. So that doesn’t exactly fill you with um uh confidence that we’re ready to handle what’s coming at us. Especially since we’ve now fired most of the people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who monitor these kind of things day to day. That’s on the climate side, the place that over the long run will do as much damage as what’s happening to energy. Because we’re foreclosing the possibility of Americans moving quickly in the direction of very cheap renewable energy. We have this idea, and it’s clearly lodged in Donald Trump’s head, that energy from the sun and the wind is expensive and that fossil fuel is cheap. That was true for many decades, but scientists over the last decade have cut the price of renewable power about 90%. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. Eight of the 10 states in this country with the lowest electric rates are the ones that use the most renewable power. And you can see this happening not mostly in blue states. You can see it mostly happening in red states across the upper Midwest or in Texas, which is building more sun and more wind more quickly than anyplace else in this county right now. 

 

Jane Coaston: You wrote a piece recently about the dangerous lies the Trump administration is pushing about climate change, specifically the notion that greenhouse gasses from power plants that burn fossil fuels don’t contribute to climate change. What is the administration’s actual argument here? I mean, it seems to me that their argument is that like, well, it’s not that much in comparison to other countries. It’s like we’re in a terrible group project or something. 

 

Bill McKibben: Well, and it’s an absurd argument anyway. I mean, they’re saying that we’re not going to take any action. The EPA is not going to any longer even bother to count our CO2 emissions because US power plants are only 3% of the global problem. Only 3%, it’s second only to power plants in China. And of course, America is the place that’s put most of the greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere historically. All of which are still up there. I mean, the stuff that came out of the tailpipe of my family’s Plymouth Fury in the 1970s when I was getting my learner’s permit is still up in the air trapping heat. If we adopted this argument that 3% was too little to care about, then literally Japan or Britain or France or Mexico would have to do nothing, nobody would ever have to do anything about climate change and the planet would just burn up and that would be that. 

 

Jane Coaston: You also mentioned a speech Energy Secretary Christopher Wright gave earlier this year where he seemed to imply that wildfires, specifically the deadly 2021 Marshall fire in Colorado, are not fueled by climate change. Can you debunk that one for me too? 

 

Bill McKibben: Yes. There is absolutely no doubt within the community of people who study wildfire that we are seeing many more and many bigger wildfires now, which you would expect because when it’s hotter, it gets drier. And that means that when you get a spark, things go up like tinder. Look, you here in California know this as well as anybody in the world, fire season in California now stretches often from spring until January. It’s not the you know couple of months in the fall that it used to be, and the same thing is true across the West. We’re setting new records month after month after month for the hottest April, the hottest March, the hottest February. We’re setting records year after year after year for the biggest fires. I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change, what we then called the greenhouse effect back in the 1980s and the only things that we got wrong back in the 1980s were how fast and how hard this was going to hit. It’s come faster and hit harder even than we expected back then. 

 

Jane Coaston: This all seems to confirm something I can think I kind of already knew, which is that the people in charge of climate policy, and more importantly, how we address the damages caused by climate change in this administration, have no idea what the hell they’re doing and don’t want to try. But in lieu of competent leadership in the federal government, states are stepping up to ensure that the planet stays livable, or even just that their states stay livable. For example, we talked on the show last week about Hawaii becoming the first in the nation to have a tax on short-term rentals that would fund the state’s efforts to repair damage caused by climate change. But Trump is trying to squash those efforts. The Department of Justice recently filed complaints against New York and Vermont for their laws that require fossil fuel companies to pay into so-called climate super funds dedicated to addressing climate change related damage. How successful do you think states will be or could be amid Trump’s executive order that has tried to ban states from taking action on climate? 

 

Bill McKibben: So the hardest part for state and local action is that they don’t have access to money in the quantities that the IRA put forward. And if that money all disappears, it’ll be hard to keep moving. 

 

Jane Coaston: The Inflation Reduction Act? 

 

Bill McKibben: Exactly right. But there’s lots and lots that states can do. Some of it is going after the fossil fuel industry with things like these polluter pays, climate superfund bills. But even more deeply, what states and cities can do is figure out the quite easy steps to help supercharge this transition to renewable energy. Let me give you an example. Putting solar panels on top of your roof is an important part of this. It’s not the only part. We also need to build big solar farms and things. But it costs about three times as much to put solar panels on your roof in the US as it does in Australia or the EU. And almost all of that extra cost comes from all the welter of regulations, bureaucracy, inspections, and things that happen here. And those things are quite possible for blue state governors and blue city mayors and city councils to override, to push us quickly in the direction of Australia or Europe. In Australia, a third of houses have solar panels on the roof, compared with about five or 6% of houses in the US. This is the future. And we’re gonna lose out on that future if we don’t really move. 

 

Jane Coaston: I know it’s very tempting to just say that we’re just screwed, especially with this administration. But I don’t like people thinking we’re screwed because doomerism doesn’t work. So what can we do without the federal government’s support? You mentioned blue states and blue cities, but what could people listening to this podcast, watching it on YouTube, do? 

 

Bill McKibben: Well the real truth is the most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to make more fundamental change. Go to Sunday.earth and join up for this thing on the equinox in September. It’s gonna be the next of these big days like No King’s day and things that, except that instead of just playing defense against Trump, we’re also need to offer a vision of what the world might look like on the other side. And it’s a quite beautiful vision. You know not only do we start taking the edge off climate change when we put up renewable energy, we also take the edge of oligarchy. Think about what happens when you rely on a fuel, coal, oil, gas, that’s only available in a few places. The people who control those places get too much power. Think then about a world that ran on sun and wind, which are available everywhere and which you cannot hoard. No one’s ever gonna fight a war over sunshine, you know? So the possibility that we could move rapidly, and I mean rapidly, into a new world is very real. 

 

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

 

Bill McKibben: A real pleasure to be with you. 

 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with longtime climate reporter Bill McKibben. We’ll link to his substack, The Crucial Years, in our show notes. 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 unnamed person] How mad do you think President Trump is going to be when he finds out that Elon Musk said, I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive outrageous pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it. 

 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] Look, the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill. It doesn’t change the president’s opinion. This is one big, beautiful bill and he’s sticking to it. 

 

Jane Coaston: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was even more smug than usual as she brushed off Elon Musk’s criticism of the Republican spending bill that’s making its way through Congress. You know, the one that President Trump has been pushing. Musk’s tweet, calling Trump’s big, beautiful bill a, quote, “disgusting abomination,” sent Republicans scrambling on Capitol Hill Tuesday. His criticism came after a recent CBS interview in which the Tesla CEO said the bill, quote, “undermines what the DOGE team is doing.” Oh, no. House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday he’s disappointed in Musk’s comments. 

 

[clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson] With all due respect, my friend Elon is terribly wrong about the one big beautiful bill. 

 

Jane Coaston: Does Elon know you guys are friends or is this a one-sided thing? Anyway, other Republicans, though, were quick to side with Musk. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul wrote on Twitter, quote, “We have both seen the massive waste in government spending and we know another $5 trillion in debt is a huge mistake. We can and must do better.” Senator Mike Lee of Utah also agreed in a post on Twitter that the Senate must improve the bill. The legislation squeaked by the House last month and has made it to the Senate. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and other independent analysts, the bill would increase federal deficits by well over $1 trillion. Palestinians came under fire from Israeli soldiers Tuesday morning as they waited for humanitarian aid at a new food distribution site in southern Gaza. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 27 Palestinians were killed and more than 90 were injured in the shooting. A reporter from ITV News was at the site hours after the attack occurred. 

 

[clip of unnamed reporter from ITV News] [sound of child speaking] Mum, come back to me. Please come back to me. They are the pleas of Ahmad Zeidan, as the body of his mother lies in front of him. She’d been walking to get them food when she was shot dead by Israeli forces. 

 

Jane Coaston: The IDF claimed responsibility for the shooting, saying they had fired a series of warning shots and that, quote, “after the subjects failed to retreat, additional shots were directed toward a few individual suspects who advanced towards the troops.” The attack marks the second time in three days that Israeli forces reportedly carried out large-scale shootings near the same aid site in Rafah. On Sunday, major news outlets reported that Israeli soldiers killed 31 Palestinians on their way to the same site. Both the IDF and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates the aid site, denied those reports. Later in the day, though, an anonymous Israeli military official briefed reporters on what he said were only warning shots fired near the site on Sunday. On Monday, the United Nations Secretary General called for an investigation into the alleged incident. U.S. Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee to discuss her department’s 2026 budget on Tuesday. During the hearing, she was grilled by senators on both sides of the aisle. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut pushed McMahon on her decision to cancel $1 billion worth of grants dedicated to students’ mental health for schools across the country. 

 

[clip of Senator Chris Murphy] You must have weighed this. I assume you weighed this when you made this extraordinary decision to shut down a billion dollars worth of mental health programming for kids. Did you worry about what you would do to those specific kids? 

 

Jane Coaston: McMahon defended her decision in part by claiming that some of the grant money wasn’t going to mental health support, but rather to diversity, equity, and inclusion and what she referred to as, quote, “gender issues.” She also said her department would be combining programs into a block grant for the states, leaving it up to them to decide how best to use the funding. Murphy went on to ask McMahon about her department’s letter to Harvard that confusingly demanded the university both end DEI programs and also institute viewpoint diversity.

 

[clip of Linda McMahon] No, the diversity programs that we’ve asked uh and demanded to be eliminated were the were the DEI, where they were, uh those programs actually were pitting one group against another. Um. That was–

 

[clip of Senator Chris Murphy] But isn’t viewpoint diversity a diversity program? 

 

[clip of Linda McMahon] A viewpoint diversity is an exchange of ideas that’s actually better, absolutely. 

 

Jane Coaston: So it is a diversity program. Anyway, McMahon cited Title VI as a statute that allows her to, in the words of Senator Murphy, quote, “micro-manage the viewpoints of a college.” She said the lack of viewpoint diversity at Harvard and Columbia is a civil rights violation. Sure. Last month, federal prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into New York attorney general Letitia James over alleged mortgage fraud, allegations that were initially made by the Trump administration, which isn’t exactly James’ biggest fan. 

 

[clip of Letitia James] We’ve responded to the baseless um attack, um and my attorney um has prepared um a two page, three page letter responding to each and every allegation which is baseless. 

 

Jane Coaston: On Tuesday, Attorney General James sat down with Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett to discuss President Trump’s weaponization of government, how elected officials can fight back, and she weighed in on New York City’s upcoming mayoral primary. 

 

[clip of Letitia James] They’re holding us hostage. And they’re basically saying, yeah, they’re using a cudgel to say, if you don’t follow the Trump’s, President Trump’s agenda, we’re going to withhold you funds, federal funds. 

 

Jane Coaston: But New York’s attorney general had some advice for elected officials dealing with the Trump administration’s intimidation tactics. 

 

[clip of Letitia James] You gotta continue to stand up. Listen, a lot of this is performative politics, right? 

 

[clip of Jon Lovett] Yeah. 

 

[clip of Letitia James] A lot of this is for headlines. A lot of this is an attempt to uh basically intimidate individuals, a chilling effect on elected officials who who have some steel in their backbone. 

 

Jane Coaston: Head to Pod Save America’s YouTube channel to watch Lovett’s interview with Attorney General James. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. If I had five minutes with every progressive voter in America, a power that, let’s be real, I should not have, I would have a lot to say. I’d say that on so many issues, progressives are morally correct. But I would also say that if progressives can’t win elections and get people into office to do good things to help people, then being morally correct is, well, nice, but that’s pretty much it. But the most important thing I would have to say to every progressive voter in America is this. Assume that no one agrees with you, on anything. And if you want that to change, you will have to convince them. Too often, I see folks let themselves believe that people generally agree with them, or they would if it weren’t for the media or misinformation or those dang algorithms. We see this falsehood pretty much all the time. How many times have you gotten a political fundraising email with the words Americans agree at the top? Well, we don’t. Americans don’t agree on pretty much anything. I’m pretty sure ice cream is good would get like 65% support. Actually, according to polling conducted by Gallup in 2024, the only thing a lot of Americans agree on, 80% of Americans in fact, is that Americans are greatly divided on important issues. And this matters, because the stories we tell ourselves can put us on a path to repeat our mistakes in ways that can hurt not just our favorite policies, but the lives of real people. For example, we now have data from the Cooperative Election Study, or CES. A high-level survey of 60,000 voters that tells us the true story of the people who didn’t vote last year. Via The Nation, quote, “Democratic nonvoters in 2024 appear to have been less progressive than Democrats who voted.” For instance, Democratic non-votors were less likely to support banning assault rifles and sending aid to Gaza. They were also less likely to believe that slavery and discrimination make it hard for Black Americans, and they were more likely to support building a border wall with Mexico. So if you’re a progressive American who, for example, opposes Israel’s actions in Gaza, the people who didn’t vote in 2024 probably didn’t agree with you on that, or on a lot of other issues for that matter. So why might you have thought otherwise? I’ve said this before, but it’s incredibly easy to surround yourself with people who already agree with you, particularly in the age of social media. But on any number of critical issues, lots of people don’t agree you. And what convinced you to support a cause might not convince them. Now what? Now the work happens. Actual, annoying work. Think of some of the great progressive victories in our nation’s history, because many of them required convincing millions of people to change their minds. It took time and effort and conversations. This month marks the 10th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized marriage equality nationwide. When I was nine years old in 1996, the idea of marriage equality, or gay marriage as they called it, was very, very unpopular. According to Gallup, it had just 27% support from Americans. Getting legalized marriage equality was a pipe dream. Heck, being out as LGBTQ and having that be a normal thing you could just do seemed unimaginable to me when I was a kid, like having a Black president or something. Today, 68% of Americans support marriage equality. LGBTQ people didn’t get better or more deserving in those 30-odd years. The queer people who came before me were probably cooler, smarter, and way more awesome than I am. Rather, it took the slow, irritating, often low-key terrible process of changing minds. Are there people who still oppose marriage equality today? Sure, but now they’re the minority, and for once, I’m not. If I had five minutes with every progressive voter in America, I would tell them that being right is good, even if everyone disagrees with you. But I would also say that if you want to see change, big change, change that impacts people for years to come, for the better, you have to be ready to do the hard work of convincing. It will suck, but it’ll be worth it. [music break]

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, recognize Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene for confirming that she did not do the reading, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how the Republican noted for never seeming like she did the reading tweeted that she hadn’t actually read the big, beautiful bill before voting for it and now wouldn’t vote for it, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and this is the polar opposite of surprising news. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.