This election day, Bill Nye has a message for young people: “Vote climate in mind.”

Since September, America’s beloved scientist has been injecting social media platforms wacky, wacky videos aims to educate voters to choose candidates who fight for climate and clean energy. In partnership with Climate Power’s Too Hot Not To Vote campaign, Nye has urged voters to cast their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris — who delivered the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act and has called the climate crisis an “existential threat,” versus former President Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed climate change is a “scam”.

With his latest and last video in the seriesNye talks to Rolling Stone about the political power of the nation’s youth, why he supports the Harris-Walz ticket, and how the next United States will shape the future of our planet.

I wanted to talk about climate action in this presidential election. When it comes to environmental policy, what kinds of futures do Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump offer for America?

Donald Trump has explicitly said that he would continue to drill for oil and gas in the continental United States and wherever he can succeed in rolling back regulations against what might have been against drilling on public land or parks or national monuments and so on. Basically, he and his team say they don’t accept climate change, they don’t plan to do anything about it. Whereas Harris and Walz have plans to pursue things similar to the Inflation Reduction Act, which is also known as the Clean Energy Plan, and so I’d rather run the Clean Energy Plan than “drill, baby drill.”

What is the main driving force behind Trump and his allies’ intent to kill the Clean Energy Plan and roll back environmental protections?

I think two things: They are very strongly influenced by the fossil fuel industry, especially the oil and gas sectors of the fossil fuel industry. And through leverage, I think they’ve accepted large donations from them, and they’ve actually made a promise that they would roll back the rules in exchange for the number that he said was a billion dollars. So it’s not in anyone’s best interest, and the opposite view has caught on with the conservatives, because it’s not progressive – the science of climate change is being rejected, along with a lot of other things they want to reject.

Young people don’t have time for this. Young people, in my experience, are very concerned about the future, very concerned about the climate and the world they’re going to live in. And so these (climate) videos are aimed at young people, young voters. And I want to remind people that when I entered high school in the Motown era, you had to be 21 to vote, but when I graduated from high school you had to be 18, and that was because of the deep concerns expressed by the public about the Vietnam War, where you could draft people like me and kill us in warfare, but we didn’t have a vote. And so the world changed with it. So I just want to emphasize for young people. I traveled the country, went to some places, made the videos to encourage young people to vote, because young people have the power to change course history.

When you speak to young people, especially millennials and Gen Z, what is the biggest difference you see between generations when it comes to their perspective on climate change?

They grew up with it. So I grew up with Earth Day, and when Earth Day was created, everyone’s concern was pollution. That humanity made the environment dirty, toxic chemicals. You’ve probably heard the expression “forever plastic”, which was a big problem. But since then, climate change has been discovered, and so Millennials and Gen Z have had climate change in the background all their lives. It wasn’t something that was discovered during their lifetime, it was before they were born. So they, I think, understand it better than people, for example, people running for president, vice president, on the other side. And (young people) want to do something about it.

There is widespread misrepresentation of climate crisis solutions among Republicans, such as the cost of wind and solar alternatives, how did the party get to this point?

The other side has worked really hard to make climate change doubt an idea, and they’ve also worked really hard to make the idea of ​​doing something about climate change “extremist”. That’s a big word over there: “climate extremists.” But when you consider the scale of the problem, something like the Inflation Reduction Act is hardly extreme, it’s a couple of good first steps.

They worked very hard to dismiss science altogether and introduced the notion that scientific uncertainty is the same as overwhelming doubt. And that’s not true. It’s wrong.

When you talk to young people across the country, what are their biggest concerns when it comes to the environment?

That we have reached a turning point. The word people throw around is “doomism” – that we are doomed. But I will argue — I will bang my fist on the editor’s desk! — that the latest research indicates that there is no tipping point. You have not reached a point of no return. It’s just that things are getting worse and worse. So the sooner you do something about it, the better.

These videos I redid Constitutionapproximately climate changeIf skewed view of the world — they were made before Hurricane Helene, before Hurricane Milton, weeks before. You can call it a coincidence or you can call it “What did you expect?” … There is a real cost here: financial costs of rebuilding. And it’s not a crazy thing or a remarkable thing to suggest that people will choose to live elsewhere after they can’t get insurance, they can’t rebuild their homes, they can’t get their cars insured against corrosion, because salt water comes over the top and under the limestone. They will move. And where will they go, and what will they do when they get there? And these are real costs that we will all bear. And so young people: Get it. Let’s go. Let’s do something about it.