-Welcome back to the show, Al. How are you?
-I'm doing great. How are you doing?
-I'm doing well. I can't help but start
by mentioning the fact that when you were on the show in November
in the studio, it was the middle of impeachment,
and you were saying it was as dangerous a time
as we've lived through,
and yet it seems incredibly quaint now.
This does seem to be a pattern that every time
we think that things are really bad,
they unfortunately get worse. How are you feeling right now?
-[ Laughs ] Well, yeah.
It's a scary time in many ways
because everybody, whether you're a Republican
or Democratic or Independent or something else --
just about every single group is feeling
that there's nobody really in charge,
or at least not in charge in a positive way.
And back when we talked before, that's exactly the time period
when the country should have been moving full speed ahead
to make preparations for the pandemic
about which we had already been warned.
-You weren't necessarily warned during the Clinton-Gore
administration, but you were prepared.
Um, I've read that President Clinton
had read a book about biological warfare
and took it seriously,
and you did begin stockpiling medicine.
You did begin stockpiling vaccines.
How hard is it to watch an administration
that does not take this seriously as a threat?
-Well, it's hard.
Of course, it's much harder to watch and listen
to the families that have gone through
such horrific experiences, and I won't recap them here.
We've all been going through that,
vicariously, for most, thankfully.
But it's hard. Yes.
And, um, you know,
it's connected to climate in this sense.
The scientists who warned us about the pandemic
included the very best epidemiologists and virologists
in the world, and they warned us
to prepare for a pandemic that was almost exactly like
the one that we're struggling with now.
So when we hear the climate scientists
arguing for even longer that we need to do
something to stop the onrushing climate crisis,
the lesson seems clearly that it's best to listen to them.
One other thing they have in common --
both the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis
hit the communities of color and the poorest Americans
first and hardest
and, in that process, reveal the really stark
and incredible inequities and injustices
that have been allowed to go on for way, way too long.
We got to do something about it.
-Certainly in parts of the United States and worldwide,
it does seem like governments are taking this very seriously.
It does seem like we are mobilizing
against police brutality
in a way that we maybe haven't ever before.
Does that give you confidence
that we can do the same for climate?
-I really believe, Seth,
that we are witnessing a kind of general awakening.
I don't think these things compete.
I don't think it's, you know, a zero-sum situation,
where the more attention paid to the pandemic,
the less attention paid to these other things.
I think, for example, about the gains made
by the LGBTQ community over the last decade or so.
Those gains are not going away. They're being consolidated.
We just had a significant Supreme Court victory
consolidating them.
Gender equity gains of the last several years,
they're being consolidated.
And I think that this awakening has touched people
in cities all around the world
after the heinous George Floyd murder.
It was such a horrible event
and such a cue for people
to take off whatever blinders they had on
to see and understand the incredible injustice
that we have allowed to persist for so long.
And, by the way, the burning of fossil fuels,
which creates the global-warming pollution mainly,
also creates the air pollution
that elevates the death rates under COVID-19.
There have been multiple studies
showing that communities and counties
that have more air pollution from burning fossil fuels
have a significantly higher death rate from the pandemic.
That's true in other countries, as well.
So we need to -- we need to put the Black Lives Matter agenda
in the center of the plans
now being developed for a green recovery.
We need a just transition
so that those who are likely to suffer economically
if we don't provide them with better jobs
in this transition are taken care of.