JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to go back to Bill McKibben for a second. Bill, the Trump administration recently confirmed that Brazil and Argentina will be allowed to import a combined 300,000 tons of tariff-free beef into the United States over the next three months. You’ve written about that in a piece for The New Yorker. Your response?

BILL McKIBBEN: Can’t wait to eat it, Juan. It sounds really enticing. This is some of this stuff that they didn’t want to let into the EU, apparently, because — and now we get to eat it. Just another — just another prize from the Trump administration. This is the — the sort of combination of tawdry nonsense like this, attempting to somehow drive down the inflation that he’s created, combined with the all-out efforts to let oligarchs do whatever they want, is really starting to take a toll.

Kavita was talking about this huge project in Texas. If you flesh it out — Bloomberg had remarkable numbers last week. If you add up the gas that all these data centers are going to burn, U.S. data centers are going to be burning more gas than any country except the U.S., Russia, China and Iran. It’s as if Donald Trump is helping invent a whole new country to burn fossil fuel, precisely at the moment when our system is about to break. So, whether it’s, you know, gross beef or disgusting natural gas or whatever else, he’s got it on the menu.

AMY GOODMAN: People should check out our interview with Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, about the mystery meat we’re talking about today. But before we go, Bill, I wanted to ask you about the midterm elections. There are almost 40 days until the elections in November. You’ve written you plan to visit swing states, helping to support your groups — and you can explain them — Third Act and GrayPAC in close races. Talk about what role a potential Democratic Congress can play in addressing the climate.

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, Amy, it’s actually — I’m in New York, and it seems almost relaxing to be in the same place for a couple of days. Pretty much on the road all the time now and through November 3rd, because Third Act, which is this organization we’ve built with — you know, for old people like me who want to work on climate and democracy, we have about 125,000 members now. And we have a PAC, GrayPAC, so we can, you know, throw an elbow or two in this political fray. And it’s very exciting to see people around the country really mobilized. The degree of interest, of desire, almost fervent desire, to get out and vote is one healthy sign in our otherwise unhealthy country.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it — are the senior citizens the highest percentage of voters who vote?

BILL McKIBBEN: There is no known way to stop old people from voting. That’s one of the reasons that we work so hard at Third Act.

Look, the Democrats in control of one or both houses of Congress won’t have power to do new things. Any smart idea they put forward will be immediately stomped on by the White House. But they will have power to start being able to draw attention every day to these outrages. And that’s, we have to hope, going to be important in and of itself. And let’s be clear: These elections are also starting to set the groundwork for 2028. And that’s going to be, at least in climate terms, probably, maybe the last election that happens in a timeframe when we still really have an opportunity to affect some of the outcomes of these things. So our politics are desperately important at the moment, and that’s why it’s so good to see people, young and old, signing up to really help.

I’ll just add, it’s not as if we can’t still get some stuff done. Third Act managed to sort of lead a coalition of people that got 12 states this spring to legalize balcony solar. And the places where we can work, people’s demands for a new energy future are really possible. We just need to push and push hard. We’re making big announcements tomorrow of a big new global push for — we’re going to do a global Sun Day in the summer solstice next summer. And so, across the world, we’ll have people celebrating this promise of renewable energy. Remember, we now live on a planet where, all of a sudden, the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That should allow us to make extraordinary progress, finally and quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. A last question, 20 seconds. You just wrote a piece on your Substack this morning about what the vice — former Vice President Al Gore said about AI, downplaying AI threats and data centers, the man who won the Nobel Prize. He had the film, Inconvenient Truth.

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, he’s right that we’re going to have to come up with more power to air condition the world over the next 20 years than to run data centers. In America, data centers are the overwhelming new use, but that reminds us that most of the world has actual needs for energy that we should be fulfilling. That’s the challenge, not to figure out how to power some technology whose proponents tell us will take half our jobs and run a 10 or 20% risk of killing us all. Are you surprised that people around America are pissed off that someone wants to put the local outlet for that kind of nonsense in their backyard?

AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, co-founder 350.org, founder of the organization Third Act. He writes the Substack The Crucial Years, his latest book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. Kavita Sthanumurthy is a former software engineer at Amazon and a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

Coming up, millions are left without power in Cuba after another nationwide blackout. We’ll be joined by Cuba’s deputy foreign minister. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “New River Blues” by the late folk legend Michael Hurley, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.