As well steve. Welcome to the show. Hi thank you so much guy Bill you mentioned the prospect of having to resettle A billion climate refugees. Where do you think the cities of the future will be and should should. We begin focusing less on remediating current infrastructure and more starting to build cities. Well it's a really important question and this there's sort of two sides at the moment to the climate fight one is adapting to that which we can no longer prevent so the sea level is definitely going up and probably way by a lot new york city as you know has started trying to build a seawall that will protect at least lower manhattan of from sea level rise. It's expensive but it's necessary and there's going to be much more of that it's necessary up but what we have to along with adapting to that which we can no longer prevent. We desperately have to prevent that to which there is no real adaptation so if the sea level goes up you know not one meter but four five six seven meters. Then you don't get to have new york city are indeed most of the other cities of the world anymore because our cities tend to be built along the coastline. And so it's worth almost anything to try and arrest the rise in temperature before you know that kind of dislocation becomes mandatory. That's why as i say job. One between now and twenty thirty is to replace as much carbon generation as we can with clean energy. And then we'll be able to take better stock of where we are and what we're you know. What sacrifices Those who come after us. We're gonna have to make our job right now. Is to limit the scale. That by making that transition as fast as possible speed. Is the question here you know. This is the first real time limited problem that we've ever faced and and winning slowly is just another former losing. That's terrifying prospect though bell because we have we haven't we haven't even one slowly for decades now absolutely. That's why it's a good thing that over the last ten years we've seen this great boom in engineering and we've seen this great boom activism and if those two things can unite then they have a chance of changing the political equation fast enough to let us make some progress. There's not any guarantee that's going to happen. We don't know what the outcome is. But it's desperately desperately that's why people are going to jail. That's why people are are spending their lives trying to get this shift to happen. Let's go to richard in manhattan richard. Welcome to the show Thank you very much I have two questions for bill. First of all the thank you very much revenue. Doing because it's about time. Somebody shook us up and got us active active wherever you call it active. I'm a bicyclist. I'm over sixty and i'm gonna ride a bicycle from manhattan to northern ontario canada for my mother's ninetieth birthday if i'll get into an airplane and and like you did talk about that talk about transportation alternatives bike route's rail trails commuting to work and alternate ways. Secondly i'm an architect. And i'm really interested in passive solar design which is an international organization. That's training architects engineers builders manufacturers of building products in designing net. Zero your high-rise buildings and houses so that we generate zero carbon footprint in each of these house. I'd like to hear what you have to say about each of their. Let's talk first about houses as we build new ones. There's no excuse for producing housing construction of any kind anymore. That doesn't get as close to zero missions as possible. The technology is there affordable usable. The real challenge sadly is that we already have one hundred million buildings in this country. And we're going to have to retrofit. Does that's why that local ninety seven is so crucial on transportation richards. Exactly right we need to make all of our cities Much more amenable to people who wanna get around on the power of their muscles or on an e bike or whatever it is. Some parts of the world really used the pandemic to do that. All of a sudden paris is one of the most bike friendly cities on planet New york seems to be struggling with the concept of how fast you can build out bike lanes and stuff. We don't have time for this to take decades while we go. You know adjudicate every single block of the city one by one. We really need some vision here in getting things to happen at speed. It's why it's good that there are groups like transportation alternatives I follow doug gordon in the city whose bike advocacy has been terrific This is not this is not stuff that's beyond our it just means we're really miss case. It just means standing up to the cars and saying In new york city and other cities we're going to let other people have some priority for once journalists and activists bill mckibben. His new organization is called third. Act targeting people over sixty bill. Thank you so much for this conversation. What a pleasure cayenne. Very good to have you back in the studio man. Thanks to everybody who called in tweeted at us if you didn't get a chance to speak. And that's the voice memo at anxiety at wnyc dot org. The united states have anxiety is a production of wnyc studios mixing by jared paul kevin bristow and milton ruiz at the boards for the live show. Our team also includes emily. Not regina dahir karen freeman and kush navarre. Our theme music was written by. Hannah's brown it performed by the outer boroughs brass band. Real and williams is our executive producer. And i am kyw right. You can keep in touch with me on twitter at kai underscore. Right arp should be an email at anxiety at wnyc dot. Org loved to get voice. Memos there and as always. I hope you'll join us for the live version of the show next sunday six. Pm eastern stream it at wnyc dot org or tell your smart speaker plate wnyc till then.