Speaker 1: Who is that, like, uh, save the whale kid or
Speaker 1: whatever that was, like you were speaking for us.
Speaker 2: Oh, Gretituneberg, Gretituneburg.
Speaker 3: What happened to her?
Speaker 4: By the way, she would take a steamboat from Sweden
Speaker 4: to yell at somebody on a on a on a soapbox.
Speaker 2: How old is she now? Has she got an OnlyFans?
Speaker 5: I don't.
Speaker 2: Twenty two?
Speaker 6: All right, she's of age.
Speaker 1: Oh we're going to hell, we're going together.
Speaker 2: Well, she got a solar powered vibrator. I remember.
Speaker 4: She got my carbon foot finish.
Speaker 7: You're listening to Carbon Bros.
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel Penney and I'm Amy Westervelt.
Speaker 7: And that was a clip of podcaster theovonn and comedian
Speaker 7: Mark Norman talking about watching Gretaituneberg's OnlyFans.
Speaker 8: Gross also classic also doesn't exist, so please don't google it.
Speaker 7: Last time on Carbon Bros. We traveled back in time
Speaker 7: to unspool the connections between masculinity and the domination of
Speaker 7: women in the natural world. And we took a whistlestop
Speaker 7: tour of the latest in seventeenth century thinking like man's
Speaker 7: dominion over the creatures of the earth and women.
Speaker 2: The doctrine of discovery and.
Speaker 7: The sanctity of private property, keep off the grass, and
Speaker 7: we ended with a gusher on petro masculinity, this idea
Speaker 7: that modern manliness, with its obsession with cars in particular,
Speaker 7: is just premised on light, sweet crude, and why some
Speaker 7: men will defend to the death their right to burn
Speaker 7: down the.
Speaker 9: Planet from my cold dead Hams.
Speaker 8: Today we're looking at why climate protest gets labeled hysterical
Speaker 8: and how the techno solutions offered by ecomodernists and abundance
Speaker 8: bros traffic in the same tropes we've been seeing since
Speaker 8: the nineteen sixties when silly women like Rachel Carson just
Speaker 8: didn't understand the science.
Speaker 7: So that's one side of the coin, a bunch of
Speaker 7: overly optimistic tech bros who think carbon capture and geoengineering
Speaker 7: are all we need to live long and prosper. But
Speaker 7: there's also the other side of the coin, the guys
Speaker 7: who are certain that civilization is coming to an end.
Speaker 7: And it is overwhelmingly men who hold this view, And
Speaker 7: you think we should all either start building bunkers and
Speaker 7: stocking up on canned beans, or more radically, who want
Speaker 7: us to ditch Planet Earth and start colonizing space.
Speaker 8: And don't get me started on the shape of those rockets.
Speaker 5: Colonel, you better take a look at this radar. What
Speaker 5: is it, son, I don't know, sir, but it looks
Speaker 5: like a giant.
Speaker 7: Those big, beautiful phallic rockets. And what these two reactions
Speaker 7: to the climate crisis have in common is a weird
Speaker 7: masculine certainty that the solutions are either easy to technical
Speaker 7: fixes or that they're so out of reach we might
Speaker 7: as well give up now. One is a capitalist fairy
Speaker 7: tale where everything will be fine if we just turn
Speaker 7: on enough nuclear reactors and start hoovering carbon out of
Speaker 7: the sky, and the other is a vision of apocalypse
Speaker 7: and survival of the fittest. And it's always, of course,
Speaker 7: these guys who are the most fit.
Speaker 8: Yeah, because they're biohacking Daniel. But ultimately they're both fantasies
Speaker 8: of control and dependence and escape that ignore the messy
Speaker 8: reality of other people in their existence or the possibilities
Speaker 8: of other ways of.
Speaker 7: Living after the break. Climate hysteria doomers and boy math solutions.
Speaker 7: Let's start with climate hysteria. This is a major talking
Speaker 7: point used to smear people who want to address the
Speaker 7: climate crisis, and obviously it's pretty sexist.
Speaker 5: Doctor.
Speaker 9: What do you know of hysteria?
Speaker 5: Ah, nothing, nothing, But it's a plague about time.
Speaker 9: It stems from an overactive uterus. In its most severe forms,
Speaker 9: it demands drastic measures, institutionalization, surgery.
Speaker 10: Even.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So, while hysteria has long been debunked as a medical
Speaker 8: condition afflicting only females, it's hung around as a way
Speaker 8: to insult and dismiss women as irrational.
Speaker 7: In the case of the climate crisis, female hysteria is
Speaker 7: used to paint protesters as unreasonable. Their claims about what's
Speaker 7: happening to the planet are too emotional and they should
Speaker 7: just be quiet and leave the climate issue to experts.
Speaker 7: Nobody is on the receiving end of this attack more
Speaker 7: than climate activists Greta Tuneberg.
Speaker 8: Let's go back to twenty nineteen, when the climate movement
Speaker 8: was at a high point and Gretaituneberg addressed the UN
Speaker 8: here's Australian conservative commentator Chris Kenny.
Speaker 9: Instead of dividing facts science, economics, technology costs and benefits, and.
Speaker 4: Of course, policy options, the United Nations hands.
Speaker 9: The floor over to a hysterical teenager.
Speaker 11: You'll come to us young people for hope. How dare you?
Speaker 11: You have stolen my dreams in my childhood with your
Speaker 11: empty words, and yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
Speaker 7: Well we the lucky ones, to hear about it. The
Speaker 7: Aussies are weirdly obsessed with Greta. What's that about it?
Speaker 8: There's definitely a lot of Rupert Murdoch to blame there,
Speaker 8: and partly because of him. Now it's not just his
Speaker 8: media but other you know, coal and oil barons have
Speaker 8: kind of gotten in on gobbling up media entities. So
Speaker 8: at this point, around seventy percent or so of Australian
Speaker 8: media is actually controlled by fossil fuel interests of one
Speaker 8: kind or another. There's this woman named Gina Reinhardt who's
Speaker 8: like a coal baron who owns a bunch of stuff too. Anyway,
Speaker 8: I feel like Australia does not get enough credit for
Speaker 8: being a full hardcore petro state, and their version of
Speaker 8: petro masculinity is like right up there with.
Speaker 7: The US variety kriiche.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So for sure, if it's a Murdoch network, they're
Speaker 8: gonna be Greta bashing all day long.
Speaker 7: And they've done a lot of.
Speaker 8: It, and it's not just Murdoch's Australian channels. Here's Michael Knowles,
Speaker 8: a Daily Wire contributor who was banned from Fox News
Speaker 8: after making this remark. I guess it was a bridge
Speaker 8: too far even for them.
Speaker 4: The climate hysterian movement is not about science. If it
Speaker 4: were about science, it would be led by scientists rather
Speaker 4: than by politicians. And a mentally ill Swedish child who
Speaker 4: is being exploited by her parents and by the international LaRue.
Speaker 4: So what you're seeing here is a political movement and
Speaker 4: a religious movement, and it's a fulfilling religious and political
Speaker 4: goals of the left, but it isn't doing very much
Speaker 4: for science.
Speaker 7: Greta in this clip is being painted as just this
Speaker 7: poor little girl with mental problems who's being exploited, and
Speaker 7: you know, we need to leave this climate issue to
Speaker 7: the real scientists. Of course they don't actually want to
Speaker 7: do that either.
Speaker 8: No, when women with very specific scientific training on climate
Speaker 8: speak up, they get hit with the same stuff, including
Speaker 8: even stalking and death threats. Here's doctor Catherine Hajo, one
Speaker 8: of the world's leading climate scientists. I'm talking, you know,
Speaker 8: more than one hundred and fifty peer reviewed abstracts, journal articles,
Speaker 8: and other publications, and she's contributed to four of the
Speaker 8: national climate assessments for the US, so like she's not,
Speaker 8: you know, a hobbyist.
Speaker 2: She's a very legit climate scientist.
Speaker 8: But she was venting to me about this a couple
Speaker 8: of years ago, and I was kind of shocked at
Speaker 8: just how bad it is.
Speaker 5: I even get people calling me to go back to
Speaker 5: the kitchen that the problem I have is that too
Speaker 5: many women are working that well I should be back
Speaker 5: taking care of my children, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker 7: And then there's the safety concerns, yeah.
Speaker 5: Because most of the people are men, and there are
Speaker 5: some serious concerns with safety. The past year, two people
Speaker 5: found my home address and sent stuff to my home
Speaker 5: address that was really concerning and disturbing. And I have
Speaker 5: multiple times seen men kind of wandering up and down
Speaker 5: looking at the doors to see if they can find
Speaker 5: my name, and the people I don't know, and then
Speaker 5: when I see it, like oh are you got her? Hallo,
Speaker 5: and I don't know who they are where they come from.
Speaker 7: Unfortunately, there is a much longer history of these sorts
Speaker 7: of attacks against female environmental activists and scientists. This goes
Speaker 7: back to the very beginnings of the modern environmental movement,
Speaker 7: and the work of one woman in particular.
Speaker 9: This is one of the nation's best sellers. First printed
Speaker 9: on September twenty seven, nineteen sixty two, up to now
Speaker 9: five hundred thousand copies have been sold, and Silent Spring
Speaker 9: has been called the most controversial book.
Speaker 5: Of the year.
Speaker 3: If we are ever to solved the basic problem of
Speaker 3: the environmental contamination, we must begin to count the many
Speaker 3: hidden costs of what we are doing.
Speaker 7: That, of course, is Rachel Carson talking about her book
Speaker 7: Silent Spring, which was published in nineteen sixty two. For
Speaker 7: listeners who haven't read Silent Spring yet, you really should.
Speaker 7: It's an amazing investigation into the damaged pesticides and other
Speaker 7: agricultural and household chemicals were doing to the environment and
Speaker 7: human health.
Speaker 8: It's also like a really good read. I actually just
Speaker 8: reread this recently, and I was like, dang, Rachel Carson
Speaker 8: was a really good writer.
Speaker 7: So it's like, yeah, it was. It was published in
Speaker 7: the New.
Speaker 8: Yorker, Yes, yes, exactly, and it revealed that the chemical
Speaker 8: industry and the US government had been lying for decades
Speaker 8: about the dangers of these products. So that kicked off
Speaker 8: a whole public debate about just how much the public
Speaker 8: should trust the word of industry experts. This is an
Speaker 8: industry scientist responding to Carson at the time.
Speaker 9: Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major
Speaker 9: force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist,
Speaker 9: the modern biologist, the modern scientist believes that man is
Speaker 9: steadily controlling nature.
Speaker 8: It's important to remember that the chemicals industry was relatively
Speaker 8: new at the time that Carson's book came out. I mean,
Speaker 8: part of the reason that her book was so interesting
Speaker 8: and sold while was that, you know, this was this
Speaker 8: somewhat new industry that had only been around really for
Speaker 8: like maybe ten twenty years, and that people had mostly
Speaker 8: been told was like great and futuristic and amazing. So
Speaker 8: for her to come in and say, I don't know,
Speaker 8: it was challenging. And then there was this idea that
Speaker 8: these guys, and they were always guys in their white
Speaker 8: lab coats, like in the lab, creating things like this
Speaker 8: was the future.
Speaker 12: We want.
Speaker 13: Every day that we.
Speaker 14: Got everything for.
Speaker 8: This was like progress for America versus these primitive biologists
Speaker 8: outdoing field research and like hugging trees. Right, It's like
Speaker 8: the guys in the lab were creating the future. Those
Speaker 8: guys were just like catching butterflies and nuts. And add
Speaker 8: to that the fact that Carson was a woman.
Speaker 2: You get the idea of why this was like so
Speaker 2: for them.
Speaker 7: But it wasn't enough for them to just constantly point
Speaker 7: out she's a woman. They really threw everything at Carson,
Speaker 7: that you know she wasn't a real scientist, that this
Speaker 7: was some sort of personal vendetta because she had cancer,
Speaker 7: that she was a big old lesbian. Here's that industry
Speaker 7: scientist again. In a CBS News special, his name was
Speaker 7: doctor Robert White Stevens.
Speaker 9: Miss Carson is concerned with every possibility of hazard and danger.
Speaker 9: What is the agricultural school has to concern itself with
Speaker 9: the probability the likely hood of danger and assess that
Speaker 9: against utility. If we had to investigate every possibility, we
Speaker 9: would never make any advances at all, because this would
Speaker 9: require an infinite time for experimental work and we would
Speaker 9: never be finished.
Speaker 3: Yet the public was being asked to accept these chemicals,
Speaker 3: was being asked to acquiesce in their use, and did
Speaker 3: not have the whole picture. So I said, about to
Speaker 3: remedy the balance.
Speaker 7: There, Wow, sounds like a classic case of hysteria.
Speaker 2: Yeah, get that lady some bed rest and pills.
Speaker 3: She's a star.
Speaker 8: Star. And of course, what we see in the Carson
Speaker 8: episode is not just women and environmentalists being branded as hysterical,
Speaker 8: but also the emergence of this idea that chemistry and
Speaker 8: tech are uniquely masculine and therefore uniquely good at solving problems,
Speaker 8: and that using science and tech to solve big problems
Speaker 8: is obviously superior to caring about pussy shit like birds.
Speaker 7: Yeah, fuck those birds, and yeah, the same attitude you'll
Speaker 7: get from folks who push things like nuclear, geoengineering and
Speaker 7: carbon capture as climate solutions. It's also not a coincidence
Speaker 7: that the oil industry's favorite climate solution and the only
Speaker 7: one who's funding wasn't cut in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill,
Speaker 7: was carbon capture.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 7: I spoke with Michael Levian, a professor of sociology at
Speaker 7: Johns Hopkins who studies the oil, coal, and gas industries,
Speaker 7: and we talked about the hype around carbon capture in
Speaker 7: his home state of Louisiana and what he calls reactionary decarbonization.
Speaker 13: It's being promoted by the fossil fuel industry. All the
Speaker 13: companies involved are pretty much in the fossil fuel industry,
Speaker 13: and this is just the extension of fossil fuel infrastructure.
Speaker 15: But instead of just of.
Speaker 13: Denialist talking points, they are now kind of positioning themselves
Speaker 13: as leaders in carbage management, right, so they're actually going
Speaker 13: to be the leaders of the energy transition. And all
Speaker 13: the kind of silly protesters and so on who go
Speaker 13: on about emissions are sort of like childish, and we're
Speaker 13: doing the serious work of building the kind of low
Speaker 13: carbon future.
Speaker 7: Which is basically where CO two, either from refineries and
Speaker 7: factories or from natural gas production, is captured and stored
Speaker 7: either underground or in containers above ground, or it's transported
Speaker 7: to an oil field where it's blasted underground to get
Speaker 7: more oil out through a process called enhanced oil recovery,
Speaker 7: which is absolutely not a climate solution. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I love, I mean, this is like the most amazing,
Speaker 8: magical thinking I think I've ever seen from the oil
Speaker 8: and I mean, honestly, kudos to them, fucking genius move. Personally,
Speaker 8: I prefer this the carbon sky vacuum, also known as
Speaker 8: direct air capture, where they just try to suck CEO
Speaker 8: two out of the sky so that theoretically we can
Speaker 8: admit as much as we want forever. Yeah, carbon capture
Speaker 8: is basically a way for oil companies to maintain the
Speaker 8: status quo and pretend that they're solving climate at the
Speaker 8: same time.
Speaker 7: But setting aside the fact that the math behind carbon
Speaker 7: capture does not add up, Michael's more interested in the
Speaker 7: politics of this so called climate solution and how people
Speaker 7: are accepting or fighting it.
Speaker 13: The other piece of this is, you know that, and
Speaker 13: this is why a lot of environmental justice groups are
Speaker 13: opposed to ccs, is that one, okay, perpetuates the existing
Speaker 13: petrochemical plants who they want to shut down that are
Speaker 13: poisoning their communities, especially you know Louisiana Black communities in
Speaker 13: Cancer Rally and around Lake Charles, and the kind of
Speaker 13: CCS kind of prolongs their life and makes them seem
Speaker 13: clean when in fact, you know, the carbon capture technology
Speaker 13: only captures the co two. It doesn't capture the additional
Speaker 13: pollutants that are coming out of those factories.
Speaker 7: And you've got an industry that already has quite a
Speaker 7: few spills from its pipelines building a whole new pipeline
Speaker 7: infrastructure for a substance that can cause some real problems
Speaker 7: if it leaks. While climate deniers love to talk about
Speaker 7: CO two being good for plants in high concentrations, it
Speaker 7: will kill you.
Speaker 13: So CO two is not toxic, but it's an asphyxiate,
Speaker 13: so it displaces oxygen and can suffocate you. And in Starsha, Mississippi,
Speaker 13: a handful of years ago, maybe it was four years ago,
Speaker 13: one of the existing CO two pipelines running through that
Speaker 13: state runs from City, Texas. It it leaked and it
Speaker 13: sent forty something people to hospital almost you know, almost
Speaker 13: ad asphyxiating, foaming.
Speaker 7: At the mouth, which begs the question why would anyone
Speaker 7: want this in their community? But Michael says, so far
Speaker 7: it's mostly environmental justice groups fighting it, and that not surprisingly,
Speaker 7: there's a pretty significant gender and racial divide on this issue.
Speaker 13: Is there a reason why we see a lot of
Speaker 13: the environmental justice struggles being organized by women, and is
Speaker 13: that because of the way men are more absorbed into
Speaker 13: the industrial economy through their jobs. Does it have to
Speaker 13: do with the division of labor in the household and
Speaker 13: who is home suffering from the pollution war of the
Speaker 13: day or who is doing the care work for people
Speaker 13: who are sick, dying of cancer, or kids who have
Speaker 13: respiratory disease.
Speaker 8: And they've put a neat little rhetorical trick here too.
Speaker 8: Sometimes you'll see technocratic folks using the language of environmental
Speaker 8: justice to push their ideas as better for the world
Speaker 8: than things like reducing consumption or increasing efficiency. Darigrmitt goes, Roughly,
Speaker 8: those environmentalists want to go back to some sort of
Speaker 8: primitive state of pristine nature. But we want humans to
Speaker 8: thrive and technology can do that for us.
Speaker 7: Yeah, don't you care about people in the third world? Amy, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: It's it's that thing.
Speaker 7: This has basically become the abundance line.
Speaker 8: Yes, And of course we are talking here about the
Speaker 8: book Abundance by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that
Speaker 8: you've probably seen clips about all over social media if
Speaker 8: you are a person with internet access in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 7: And we should say about Abundance as our client's book.
Speaker 7: We don't want to paint it in like a completely
Speaker 7: broad brush. There are some ideas in there that are
Speaker 7: worth debating or exploring, but the thing is that it
Speaker 7: has become a kind of wedge or like an icebreaker
Speaker 7: being used by the right to force through all kinds
Speaker 7: of policies that are absolutely not climate solutions totally.
Speaker 8: The thing that I find really interesting about the abundance
Speaker 8: stuff is that I don't know whether Ezra kleine knew
Speaker 8: that the Koch brothers and people like Chris Wright, our
Speaker 8: energy secretary, were using this framing for like the last
Speaker 8: ten years as like a really pretty clever way to
Speaker 8: push expansion of fossil fuel development. But they were, they
Speaker 8: have been for quite a while, and this just he
Speaker 8: just mainstreamed it. I don't know if you meant to,
Speaker 8: but that's the net result. And so now it's become
Speaker 8: this shorthand of like you're either for abundance and like
Speaker 8: who's against abundance, right, or you're like, you know, a
Speaker 8: colorless shrew who doesn't want anyone to ever have any fun,
Speaker 8: like Greta Tunberg. Every time I hear the word, I
Speaker 8: think of this like I think of like a really
Speaker 8: like foul smelling men's cologne, passion fire.
Speaker 2: Their abundance.
Speaker 9: It stays so good.
Speaker 8: So you know, this is not a new idea for
Speaker 8: the climate sphere either. There are a lot of people
Speaker 8: who have been kind of pushing the argument, which is
Speaker 8: overarchingly that are you know, this is obviously it's a
Speaker 8: whole book, so like, don't let us stop you from
Speaker 8: reading it. By all means, read the whole book. There
Speaker 8: are some good ideas in there, and there are some
Speaker 8: you know, there's some stupid ones too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but but in.
Speaker 8: General it's it's the same old, same old of like,
Speaker 8: you know, if we can get everyone up to a
Speaker 8: certain level of economic stability, then that will be what
Speaker 8: kind of fixes everything else. We can tech and growth
Speaker 8: hack our way to solving a bunch of these problems.
Speaker 8: In that way, we don't have to ask anyone to
Speaker 8: sacrifice anything or scare anyone with climate crisis narratives and
Speaker 8: things like that. A lot of that stuff, and that's
Speaker 8: been around for quite a long time, especially the techno
Speaker 8: optimist side of it, although it has gone under a
Speaker 8: different brand name in the climate space for a while back.
Speaker 8: When I started working as a climate journalist, we called
Speaker 8: it ecomodernism. Here's Ted Nordhaus, author and the director of
Speaker 8: research at the Breakthrough Institute, laying out the ecomodernist argument
Speaker 8: in an interview we did a couple of years ago.
Speaker 12: You know, historically there have been sort of two defining
Speaker 12: ideas in the modern environmental sort of discourse, and one
Speaker 12: is that we sort of need to shrink the human footprint,
Speaker 12: the footprint of human activities to reduce the impact on
Speaker 12: the environment. And the second is that we need to
Speaker 12: harmonize human societies with nature and with the natural world.
Speaker 12: We need to get back closer to nature. And in
Speaker 12: the manifesto we argue that you can do one of
Speaker 12: those things, but you can't do both of them. And
Speaker 12: obviously we argue that it's the former that in a
Speaker 12: world with seven billion people going on nine or ten
Speaker 12: billion people, most of whom want to live something that
Speaker 12: looks like a modern life, you just need much more
Speaker 12: efficient technologies, you know, environmentally efficient, you need cities, you
Speaker 12: need energy density, you need intensive, really efficient agriculture. And
Speaker 12: if you don't have those things, you're just going to
Speaker 12: turn the entire planet into like a kind of big farm. Basically,
Speaker 12: people are going to be poor, they're actually going to
Speaker 12: be higher emission, and you're going to just destroy all
Speaker 12: of the biodiversity that remains. And so, you know, better
Speaker 12: technologies are the thing, and technology is the kind of
Speaker 12: key folk rum that kind of mediates that relationship between
Speaker 12: living standards and environmental consequences of those living standards.
Speaker 8: But Nordoues didn't spread the good word alone. He co
Speaker 8: authored the Ecomodernist Manifesto with a bunch of guys, but
Speaker 8: especially with one guy who'd been his longtime collaborator and
Speaker 8: who has already appeared in another episode of Carbon Bros.
Speaker 2: And Guess What, Daniel.
Speaker 8: He's also a frequent guest on another of our favorite podcasts,
Speaker 8: The Joe Rogan Experience.
Speaker 14: Climate change is just going to be solved by producing
Speaker 14: energy without carbon emissions. Like it's just a technical problem.
Speaker 14: It's not like, oh, we all have to ride our bikes.
Speaker 14: I love riding my bike. But it's like it became
Speaker 14: the moralizing and the wokee culture.
Speaker 2: Global cooling is way scarier than global warming.
Speaker 7: Michael Shellenberger. Of course, in case some of you missed
Speaker 7: this Easter egg, he was a guy saying that we
Speaker 7: needed to stop scaring kids about climate change, and his
Speaker 7: story is kind of a perfect illustration of the way
Speaker 7: the manisphere and climate did course overlap. Amy. I'm going
Speaker 7: to hand you the mic because I know Schallenberger is
Speaker 7: kind of an obsession of yours. What's his deal?
Speaker 8: I am, I'm totally fascinated by this guy, because twenty
Speaker 8: ish years ago he was seen as this kind of
Speaker 8: genius propagandist of the left.
Speaker 2: Actually he like radical left, far left.
Speaker 8: He worked for all these environmental nonprofits, but he was
Speaker 8: also Ugo Chavez's pr guy for some period of time,
Speaker 8: and he you know, like lived in Brazil for a while,
Speaker 8: and he was hanging out with all of these kind
Speaker 8: of really like radical leftist groups. He was actually the
Speaker 8: guy who really got the world to start paying attention
Speaker 8: to Nike's use of sweatshop labor in like late nineties,
Speaker 8: early two thousands, for example. Then he started to get
Speaker 8: a few criticisms here and there for occasional blind spots
Speaker 8: around gender or race or class.
Speaker 7: And this is a classic Manisphere of Origin story. Unfairly
Speaker 7: canceled man would rather become a right wing grifter than
Speaker 7: apologize right.
Speaker 8: So in the early two thousands, he teams up with
Speaker 8: Ted Northhaus, who's also been working for a bunch of
Speaker 8: environmental organizations and is similarly kind of annoyed by them,
Speaker 8: and the two of them co write this essay really
Speaker 8: laying into environmentalists. They called it Death of Environmentalism, and
Speaker 8: they like printed it out and handed out print copies
Speaker 8: of it at this big conference in Hawaii that all
Speaker 8: of these high level environmental philanthropists were at, and they
Speaker 8: argued that the environmental movement had gotten two set in
Speaker 8: its ways, that it needed to stop being so afraid
Speaker 8: of capitalism and technology, that it needed to focus less
Speaker 8: on polar bears and more on people.
Speaker 15: Oh my gosh, now you bring it back some history.
Speaker 9: I know.
Speaker 8: This is from an interview Shallenberger did with me back
Speaker 8: in twenty twenty one when his book Apocalypse never came out,
Speaker 8: So this is like his big addition to the universe
Speaker 8: of climate skeptic literature. Schallenberger is an interesting case because
Speaker 8: he definitely acknowledges that climate change is real and it's happening,
Speaker 8: and it's caused by human emissions. But his argument is that, like,
Speaker 8: it's not as bad as everyone says, and that we
Speaker 8: should stop freaking out about it. So he described the
Speaker 8: book as sort of a bookend to the conversation that
Speaker 8: he and Nordhouse started with Death of Environmentalism.
Speaker 15: For me, it's it's really a bookend on death of Environmentalism.
Speaker 15: I think there's almost no chance I'm going to do
Speaker 15: another book on the environment. I anticipate I will always
Speaker 15: write on the environment, always work on the environment. But
Speaker 15: I'm excited that for this, I feel like I've cleared
Speaker 15: this part of my LIFEVE kind of got to the
Speaker 15: bottom of it. I've said my piece.
Speaker 7: So he got on the gender train because he ran
Speaker 7: out of things to say about climate that can't be right.
Speaker 8: No, a few things happened on his way to the manosphere. First,
Speaker 8: him and his best bro ted Nordhouse.
Speaker 2: They broke up.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it was sad because they were genuine, real friends,
Speaker 8: Like they were always together. They co authored everything. Really,
Speaker 8: I can't think of a single thing that they wrote
Speaker 8: during this time that wasn't co authored. They were always
Speaker 8: in interviews together, every event they did, they were on
Speaker 8: panels together. It was just this total bromance. They were
Speaker 8: best men at each other's weddings. They were tight, like
Speaker 8: really tight. And twenty fifteen, Michael and Ted worked on
Speaker 8: the last thing they would ever co write together, and
Speaker 8: Ecomodernist Manifesto. This was sort of an updated version of
Speaker 8: the Death of Environmentalism essay that they'd written before, laying
Speaker 8: out a pretty similar argument, but with a lot more
Speaker 8: defense of tech. And after it came out, Michael left
Speaker 8: Breakthrough to start his own organization. It was called Environmental
Speaker 8: Progress and it focused on saving nuclear plants from what
Speaker 8: Schollenberger saw as angry mobs of environmentalists who wanted to
Speaker 8: shut them down.
Speaker 7: But how does he get from defending nuclear reactors to
Speaker 7: defending the rights of downtrodden young men?
Speaker 14: Thank Heaven for young men finding their testosterone around the world,
Speaker 14: breaking from the woke orthodoxy saying masculinity is not toxic,
Speaker 14: masculinity is natural and healthy and needed.
Speaker 8: It's really this whole k not of things that we've
Speaker 8: been talking about. So first he keeps kind of getting
Speaker 8: kicked out of the clubs he's in and finding new
Speaker 8: groups of people to take him in, and they're progressively
Speaker 8: more right leaning and conspiratorial. And then you know, there's
Speaker 8: money too, So he gets in with the heterodox free
Speaker 8: press folks. This is Barry Weiss's whole thing, and he
Speaker 8: starts his own newsletter, and then Barry Weis invites him
Speaker 8: in on the Twitter files and the whole time his
Speaker 8: profile is rising and he's starting to bring and really
Speaker 8: big subscriber money on substack and a lot bigger checks
Speaker 8: to his organization, again from more and more conservative entities, and.
Speaker 7: At some point he starts calling himself a journalist too,
Speaker 7: which is just that gives me some adjecta.
Speaker 8: I know it's kind of galling, but it's also really
Speaker 8: critical to how he's been able to build credibility in
Speaker 8: this world. So, by my account, Shallenberger has changed his
Speaker 8: bio at least four times in the past five or
Speaker 8: so years. First he called himself a writer and an author.
Speaker 8: Then he was self publishing a blog on Forbes, so
Speaker 8: he called himself a journalist. Then it was environmental journalist,
Speaker 8: then it was Leading Environmental Journalist. Then his friend Barry
Speaker 8: Weiss brought him in on the Twitter files and he
Speaker 8: wrote one Twitter thread and changed his bio to leading
Speaker 8: Investigative Journalist. From that point on, especially because of the
Speaker 8: Barry Weiss Elon Musk effect, he really blew up. So
Speaker 8: three of his four Joe Rogan appearances have been since
Speaker 8: late twenty twenty two. His substack has exploded too, so
Speaker 8: he's kind of had to keep feeding the beast. The
Speaker 8: posts there have become increasingly conspiratorial and Schellenberger has really
Speaker 8: started to become the manosphere's climate guy, not just because
Speaker 8: he's so good at promoting himself, which he is, but
Speaker 8: also because he actually has a certain amount of credibility
Speaker 8: that most of the other guests who go on these
Speaker 8: shows to talk about climate just do not have. So,
Speaker 8: you know, Jordan Peterson talks a lot about climate change,
Speaker 8: but he doesn't know shit about climate science. He's a
Speaker 8: clinical psychologist. Schellenberger, on the other hand, was actually a
Speaker 8: pretty legit climate dude for a really long time. He
Speaker 8: might have had opinions that mainstream climate people disagreed with,
Speaker 8: and that might have become more and more true over years,
Speaker 8: but you know, he was in the conversations. He actually
Speaker 8: knows stuff, and he can play this whole reformed environmentalist
Speaker 8: card that's like catnet for people. Plus he still leans
Speaker 8: on his connections to the Breakthrough Institute for credibility.
Speaker 7: And did the Breakthrough Institute still support him because it
Speaker 7: seems like he's gone way past the ecomodernist zone into
Speaker 7: the danger zone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he totally has.
Speaker 8: And for a long time they kind of kept quiet
Speaker 8: about it, Like the most they would do would just
Speaker 8: sort of be like, you know, that's him. He hasn't
Speaker 8: been with us for a while, like our take is this,
Speaker 8: and like kept it at that. But in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 8: Ted Northouse finally like fully publicly denounced Schellenberger in this
Speaker 8: very scathing blog post that I'm convinced like sent him
Speaker 8: further down the path to the manosphere.
Speaker 16: His original superpower was for finding an audience and getting
Speaker 16: its attention. I find what Michael has become in recent years,
Speaker 16: on the one hand, entirely predictable, not because of his politics,
Speaker 16: which were always more malleable than many might have imagined,
Speaker 16: but because of his personality, which always cast himself as
Speaker 16: a heroic agent of history. And yet it is also
Speaker 16: completely gob stopping. His politics, his writing, his demeanor, and
Speaker 16: even his physical appearance is hardly recognizable to me any longer.
Speaker 8: It is that I actually when I read it was like, ooh,
Speaker 8: like ouch, I feel bad for anyone that like would
Speaker 8: have a close friend write this about them.
Speaker 7: That's like e' it's kind of similar to what happened
Speaker 7: to Naomi Klin.
Speaker 8: I think, wait, you mean the other Naomi, the bad Naomi.
Speaker 7: Sorry, not Naomi Klin. This is what her whole book
Speaker 7: is there Naomi Wolf.
Speaker 8: Yes, yes, like the whole feminist community turned on her
Speaker 8: or she felt like they did, right, and then yeah,
Speaker 8: I mean I actually feel like this is a thing
Speaker 8: that happens not infrequently, and al it like kind of
Speaker 8: gets weirdly discounted. But like, man, people's personal feelings do
Speaker 8: tend to be major drivers of things that they do
Speaker 8: in life.
Speaker 7: I think people in the minisphere would disagree because, you know,
Speaker 7: facts don't care about your feelings. Yeah, we're all about.
Speaker 2: Facts here, Fuck feelings.
Speaker 3: This is like a.
Speaker 7: Story that you know, you could go back to the
Speaker 7: like origins of the neo conservative movement, Like so many
Speaker 7: of those people were leftists who then became somehow disenchanted
Speaker 7: with the left and wound up on the right.
Speaker 8: And a lot of times it is like a personal
Speaker 8: slight of some kind. I know so many climate operative guys,
Speaker 8: like hardcore climate you know, that spend all their time
Speaker 8: just trying to like tear down environmentalists, right, and like
Speaker 8: almost all of them have some story of like being
Speaker 8: a pretty standard you know, scientist or something, and then
Speaker 8: like an EPA official was like condescending and rude to them,
Speaker 8: and then like here we are.
Speaker 7: Their vegetarian girlfriend broke up with them.
Speaker 8: Yes, I mean Tucker Carlson right, Like that's his mom
Speaker 8: was like a hippie vegetarian and like abandoned him. And
Speaker 8: I swear to God that has so much to do
Speaker 8: with his entire trajectory.
Speaker 7: That's actually an interesting theory.
Speaker 2: Everyone go to therapy.
Speaker 7: So Shellenberger has really landed at this point where he's
Speaker 7: saying climate change is not that big a deal, we
Speaker 7: have the technology to fix it, and that tech is
Speaker 7: nuclear for him, and climate activism is just part of
Speaker 7: like the woke mind virus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally sums it up.
Speaker 8: And he's really emblematic of ecomodernists, even though some of
Speaker 8: them think climate is more of a problem than he does,
Speaker 8: and others might have a different preferred technological solution like
Speaker 8: deew engineering or carbon capture or whatever their thing is.
Speaker 8: But it'll be really interesting to see if his new
Speaker 8: friends in the tech world he's hanging out a lot with,
Speaker 8: like Elon Musk and JD. Vance in that whole universe,
Speaker 8: It'll be interesting to see if those guys shift his
Speaker 8: thinking any because they have a completely different tech will
Speaker 8: fix it worldview.
Speaker 7: Unlike Schellenberger. They think the climate crisis is apocalyptic to
Speaker 7: some extent, and tech will fix it by protecting us
Speaker 7: or protecting them from that apocalypse. And the hysterical climate
Speaker 7: activists and anyone questioning gender norms, those people are still
Speaker 7: the enemy, and they're an enemy that hopefully will burn
Speaker 7: up in a fiery or drowned in a rising sea.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's like very eerily similar to the beliefs of
Speaker 8: a lot of like end Day's religious groups. Actually, which
Speaker 8: I'm sure the tech guys would totally reject that comparison,
Speaker 8: but like, having spent time with those people and talked
Speaker 8: to them about their beliefs, it's really shockingly similar. So
Speaker 8: before Schallenberger took the stage at Jordan Peterson's ARC conference
Speaker 8: this year, the audience heard from a guy named Eric Weinstein.
Speaker 2: And this guy's like he has like a weird.
Speaker 8: Space within the manosphere and the tech kind of universe.
Speaker 8: He was the former longtime managing director of Teal Capital,
Speaker 8: that's Peter Teal's venture capital fund. Weinstein claims to have
Speaker 8: coined the term intellectual dark web.
Speaker 2: Do you remember this?
Speaker 17: Oh yeah, I remember the intellectual dark web, Yes, of
Speaker 17: which you know Wise and Michael Schllenberger definitely count themselves
Speaker 17: members and he is also a repeat Joe Rogan guest.
Speaker 1: All of these people appear to be in Locke step.
Speaker 1: This is coordinated through the whole of society approach. Because
Speaker 1: they have chosen the name for it, we will call
Speaker 1: them pose.
Speaker 2: Did he just call us hose, Yes, yes he did.
Speaker 8: This talk that he gave it, ARC was was like
Speaker 8: very unhinged.
Speaker 2: This really really something.
Speaker 7: More unhinged than Schellenberger is. That's impressive.
Speaker 2: That really yeah, he really went there.
Speaker 1: I would put to you that we are the benighted
Speaker 1: rest of society. ARC represents the bros benighted rest of
Speaker 1: society fighting Klaus and Davos in the World Economic Forum,
Speaker 1: who at least knows that there's a war when we
Speaker 1: do not. Culture war hypothesis is that the culture war
Speaker 1: is domestic hybrid war. Earth is our womb, not our home.
Speaker 1: We cannot stay here because we have to go. We
Speaker 1: cannot all share one atmosphere safely. The tools are too powerful.
Speaker 1: If an indefinite human future can be restored, and I
Speaker 1: believe that it can, there is one way out, and
Speaker 1: that's physics.
Speaker 7: When he said he couldn't share the same atmosphere. All
Speaker 7: I could think about was that scene in Total Recall
Speaker 7: where everybody is slowly asphyxiating. Sir, the oxygen level is
Speaker 7: bottoming out in sector G.
Speaker 17: What do you want me to do about it?
Speaker 3: Don't do anything.
Speaker 7: But they won't last an hour, sir.
Speaker 2: Lock them. Such a weird thing to say, But yeah,
Speaker 2: like a lot.
Speaker 5: Of these guys talk like this.
Speaker 2: Here's Peter Til just.
Speaker 8: A couple months ago on one of the New York
Speaker 8: Times opinion podcasts.
Speaker 6: Mars is supposed to be more than a science project.
Speaker 6: It's supposed to be a political project. And then when
Speaker 6: you concretize it, you have to start thinking through, well,
Speaker 6: the woki will follow you, the socialist government to follow you,
Speaker 6: and then maybe you have to do something other than
Speaker 6: just going to Mars.
Speaker 7: You can't even escape the woke mind virus on Mars.
Speaker 7: Of course, Til also spent a large segment of that
Speaker 7: podcast interview obsessing over Greta Tundberg, who he no joke
Speaker 7: called the Antichrist.
Speaker 6: The way the Antichrist would take over the world is
Speaker 6: you talk about armageddon NonStop, you talk about existential risk NonStop.
Speaker 6: And this is what you need to regulate. It's the
Speaker 6: opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the seventeenth
Speaker 6: eighteenth century, where you know, the Antichrist is like some
Speaker 6: evil tech genius, evil scientists who invents this machine to
Speaker 6: take over the world. People are way too scared for that.
Speaker 6: In our world, the thing that has political resonance is
Speaker 6: the opposite, the thing that has political resonances. We need
Speaker 6: to stop science, We need to just say stop to this.
Speaker 6: And this is where yeah, I don't know. In the
Speaker 6: seventeenth century, I can imagine a doctor Strange Love Edward
Speaker 6: Teller type person taking over the world. In our world,
Speaker 6: it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he did.
Speaker 8: That part was really really something, and it puts Teal
Speaker 8: in his Pals squarely in the camp of what researcher
Speaker 8: Hannah Morris calls apocalyptic authoritarianism.
Speaker 10: There was a lot of anxiety and fear and recognition
Speaker 10: of the risks of climate change. Why introduce apocablic authoritarianism
Speaker 10: is that with this feeling of just total instability, total anxiety,
Speaker 10: there became there's imagining of a certain group as being
Speaker 10: saved and those who are more traditional figures of power,
Speaker 10: those who claim to be able to right the ship
Speaker 10: again in return on the stable path of manifest destiny,
Speaker 10: you bring the nation out of this. And this led
Speaker 10: to a lot of reactionary posturing that united the traditional
Speaker 10: figures of power on the rights and in the center,
Speaker 10: who are united around this common enemy of the so
Speaker 10: called new New Left that was blamed as further suspending
Speaker 10: the nation in the world into total crisis and position
Speaker 10: these sort of traditional figures as the ultimate authorities that
Speaker 10: must be followed.
Speaker 7: For all their obsessing about Greta being apocalyptic, Hanna says,
Speaker 7: it's Musk and Teal who are part of that grand
Speaker 7: tradition of apocalyptic environmentalism, not unlike a group started in
Speaker 7: the nineteen fifties called peak oil or the peak Oil movement,
Speaker 7: and those folks they call themselves peakists, have for decades
Speaker 7: been predicting that we will run out of oil and
Speaker 7: it will cause sudden chaos.
Speaker 10: A part of this is, of course, it's apocalyptic fear
Speaker 10: of toll destruction. But key to this, and what you
Speaker 10: can see from apocalyptic environmentalism as it comes and goes,
Speaker 10: is that there's this assumption that there is a saved group.
Speaker 10: And so for the peak oil movement, it was those
Speaker 10: who knew about peak oil and who started preparing. You know,
Speaker 10: those are the origins of preppers and proper societies and
Speaker 10: building post apocalyptic bunkers and learning how to survive in
Speaker 10: harsh conditions. So those who are part of the peak
Speaker 10: oil movement imagine themselves as surviving this total collapse industrial civilization.
Speaker 7: I would say peak oil is kind of the right
Speaker 7: wing mirror image to the population bomb, so does does
Speaker 7: In the sixties, there was this kind of end of
Speaker 7: the world conspiracy, more associated with like the left side
Speaker 7: of the environmental movement, and that the population was increasing
Speaker 7: too quickly and that we would consume too many resources
Speaker 7: and we wouldn't be able to handle all the people
Speaker 7: on planet Earth, and that we would have a kind
Speaker 7: of civilizational collapse as a result. And the right loves
Speaker 7: to bring up the fact that the population bomb predictions
Speaker 7: did not come to passy pan out. Yes.
Speaker 8: In fact, actually Michael Schellenberger does this all the time,
Speaker 8: except he references not just that, but he takes it
Speaker 8: all the way back to Thomas Malthus, and he says
Speaker 8: the word Malthusian in such an annoying way that I'm
Speaker 8: going to have to play it for you here.
Speaker 15: Well, Malthusian.
Speaker 14: Malthusianism.
Speaker 10: Yeah, there's this consistent tapping into this real disdain and
Speaker 10: this real feeling of needing to control people. And also
Speaker 10: it's taken to an extreme when people are sort of
Speaker 10: position you know, the masses, the people are positioned as
Speaker 10: also unnecessary. This chaos that is predicted with climate apocalypse,
Speaker 10: for example, and the mass death that's imagined is almost
Speaker 10: welcomed by some figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel,
Speaker 10: the techno libertarian extreme, where they almost morbidly celebrate the
Speaker 10: prospect of their being this apocalypse, this mass death and
Speaker 10: destruction of the masses, because then it affords them the
Speaker 10: opportunity to have total control power. There's no accountability, there's
Speaker 10: no need for that pesky thing called democracy because everyone's gone.
Speaker 10: It's just them, and they're able to now build their fifetoms,
Speaker 10: their colonies on Mars there, you know, they can do
Speaker 10: what they want.
Speaker 7: If you're hearing a lot of masculine tropes that we've
Speaker 7: been talking about this season echo throughout that there is
Speaker 7: a good reason. Morris says, this is a distinctly male phenomenon.
Speaker 7: And here she's talking about the peak GISTs again.
Speaker 10: They learned about this peak oil and this collapse of civilization,
Speaker 10: and this provide them a sense of control, a sense
Speaker 10: of power because of feeling like they are among a minority,
Speaker 10: a small minority of people who knew what the future holds,
Speaker 10: and that they can then navigate through that through their
Speaker 10: sort of rugged individualism, this frontiersman kind of identity, and
Speaker 10: start tapping into really longstanding American masculine identities of feeling
Speaker 10: as though there's a special trait among American men who
Speaker 10: can really grapple with harsh conditions and build a new society,
Speaker 10: build a new civilization. And it's interesting to see that
Speaker 10: there was this sense of control and empowerment that came
Speaker 10: over the members of the peak oil movement, which are
Speaker 10: eighty nine percent white, middle class men. So it's a certain,
Speaker 10: very particular demographic that are clearly trying to find a
Speaker 10: sense of purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of
Speaker 10: control in their lives among periods of social change.
Speaker 8: Jesus Christ, it's the cool dudes, just over and over again,
Speaker 8: world without end. Amen. But I do think that this
Speaker 8: thing Hannah's talking about here about these men wanting a
Speaker 8: sense of purpose and control is really key to how
Speaker 8: we fix some of the issues that we've been talking
Speaker 8: about throughout this series.
Speaker 7: Next time the real solutions, whether that's finding democratic candidates
Speaker 7: who can actually appeal to young men using the language
Speaker 7: that resonates with them, or policies that help men and
Speaker 7: women connect their everyday lives to the problems of climate change,
Speaker 7: or the narratives that we can use to change the
Speaker 7: conversation and invite men back into the climate movement because frankly,
Speaker 7: we can't do it without them. Join us next time
Speaker 7: Carbon Brose for integration.
Speaker 8: Carbon Brose is an original series from Drilled and Non Toxic,
Speaker 8: written by me Amy Westerveldt.
Speaker 7: And by me Daniel Penny.
Speaker 8: Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoldzkostwick.
Speaker 2: He also composed our theme song.
Speaker 7: Check his stuff out.
Speaker 8: Our engineer is Peter Duff. Fact checking by Shilpa Jindia.
Speaker 7: Original artwork by Matthew Fleming.
Speaker 8: Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton, with the First
Speaker 8: Amendment Project marketing by Maggie Taylor.
Speaker 2: Check out a Non Toxic podcast
Speaker 8: For more on the Manosphere and good at Drill Media
Speaker 8: for more climate reporting and to support our work.