Christiane Amanpour, the eponymous host of PBS’s Amanpour & Company, welcomed author and activist Bill McKibben to Tuesday’s show to partake in the latest doom-and-gloom prognostications on the environment. According to McKibben, climate change is mostly former President Ronald Reagan’s fault and any additional blame should be directed at President Trump for engaging in “economic-self sabotage.”Towards the end of their discussion, Amanpour invited McKibben to “Tell me your story about President Carter back in the ’70s. There was the oil crisis there, and he did all sorts of things, including putting solar panels on the roof of the White House. What did he tell people back then? Tell the American people?” PBS’s Christiane Amanpour asks environmental activist Bill McKibben, “Tell me your story about President Carter back in the ’70s. There was the oil crisis there, and he did all sorts of things, including putting solar panels on the roof of the White House. What did he tell people… pic.twitter.com/RM2zAWeLOm— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) July 29, 2026 McKibben mourned, “What he told people was that the sun was, in fact, the future. And in his last budget, he put aside another R&D money that the plan was for America to be producing 20 percent of its power from the sun by the year 2000. Had we done that, we would live in a very different world today, a much cooler one, because this renewable revolution would have been pushed forward several decades.”Lamenting Reagan’s election, McKibben continued, “Instead, of course, Ronald Reagan was elected over Mr. Carter, and he took down those solar panels from the White House roof. More importantly, he took that money out of the budget and locked us into this cycle of endless drilling for more oil that’s come to define not only America’s economy, but America’s politics.”McKibben then fast-forwarded to Trump, “As you know, Donald Trump has said his plan is to exert energy dominance across the earth by America’s control of oil and gas. I don’t think that’s going to work, but I do think it runs the very strong risk of turning America into a kind of theme park of internal combustion, while the rest of the world gets its act together very quickly.”He also claimed, “We’re being left behind, and I’m not sure there’s ever been a kind of act of national economic self-sabotage to compare with the last 18 months. The country that invented the solar panel and the industrial wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery is now the country ceding all of that advantage to our theoretical chief adversary.”By “our theoretical chief adversary,” McKibben was referring to China, which is interesting because the U.S. and China’s CO₂ emissions per capita data lines have gone in opposite directions since 2000, and China’s is the one that is steadily going up.Here is a transcript for the July 28 show:PBS Amanpour and Company7/28/2026CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Tell me your story about President Carter back in the ’70s. There was the oil crisis there, and he did all sorts of things, including putting solar panels on the roof of the White House. What did he tell people back then? Tell the American people?BILL MCKIBBEN: What he told people was that the sun was, in fact, the future. And in his last budget, he put aside another R&D money that the plan was for America to be producing 20 percent of its power from the sun by the year 2000. Had we done that, we would live in a very different world today, a much cooler one, because this renewable revolution would have been pushed forward several decades. Instead, of course, Ronald Reagan was elected over Mr. Carter, and he took down those solar panels from the White House roof. More importantly, he took that money out of the budget and locked us into this cycle of endless drilling for more oil that’s come to define not only America’s economy, but America’s politics. As you know, Donald Trump has said his plan is to exert energy dominance across the earth by America’s control of oil and gas. I don’t think that’s going to work, but I do think it runs the very strong risk of turning America into a kind of theme park of internal combustion, while the rest of the world gets its act together very quickly.We’re being left behind, and I’m not sure there’s ever been a kind of act of national economic self-sabotage to compare with the last 18 months. The country that invented the solar panel and the industrial wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery is now the country ceding all of that advantage to our theoretical chief adversary.