Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Last
Speaker 1: week was Climate Week in New York and I went
Speaker 1: for the first time. Actually, the main reason I was
Speaker 1: there was to do a panel with Bill mckibbon and
Speaker 1: Kendra Pierre leuis moderated by Genevieve Gunther on The Language
Speaker 1: of Climate Politics, which is also the subject and title
Speaker 1: of Genevieve's new book. In it, she looks at the
Speaker 1: dominant narratives around climate policy and politics and whittles it
Speaker 1: down to six key words that just keep showing up
Speaker 1: over and over again. Each chapter is devoted to one
Speaker 1: of those words and offers a deep dive into how
Speaker 1: that word and the narrative it's attached to became so dominant,
Speaker 1: how it's been weaponized to block climate policy, and what
Speaker 1: kind of messaging you could use to combat it. I
Speaker 1: got to sit down with Genevieve after our panel as
Speaker 1: well and talk about the book, why it's made some
Speaker 1: people so mad on the Internet, and a lot more.
Speaker 1: After the break, you'll hear her reading from a bit
Speaker 1: of the book, and then we're going to have that
Speaker 1: conversation that's coming up after this quick message.
Speaker 2: Fossil fuel propaganda is spun out of six key terms
Speaker 2: that dominate the language of climate politics. Alarmist, cost, growth,
Speaker 2: India and China, innovation, and resilience. Together these terms weave
Speaker 2: a narrative that goes something like this, Yes, climate change
Speaker 2: is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist.
Speaker 2: In anyway, phasing out coal, oil and gas would cost
Speaker 2: us too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth
Speaker 2: enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using
Speaker 2: them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation
Speaker 2: and increasing our resilience. Besides, America should not act unilaterally
Speaker 2: on the climate crisis while omissions are rising in India
Speaker 2: and China. This narrative is designed to foment the incorrect
Speaker 2: and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially
Speaker 2: to stop using fossil fuels, either because climate change won't
Speaker 2: be that destructive, or, in some versions of the story,
Speaker 2: because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas
Speaker 2: and still halt global heating.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Yes, awesome, Okay, I want to have you start
Speaker 1: by talking a little bit about where the idea from
Speaker 1: the book can in general, and then how you whittled
Speaker 1: it down to these six key words that I do
Speaker 1: feel like really capture the essence of the sort of
Speaker 1: discourse that we're hearing.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Because the book started out being much bigger, it
Speaker 2: was sprawling. I had, like, you know, I don't know,
Speaker 2: almost twenty seven words that I was thinking about writing about,
Speaker 2: so definitely much smaller than it was in the beginning.
Speaker 2: But I conceived of this book in twenty seventeen after
Speaker 2: The New York Times hired this commentator named Brett Stevens
Speaker 2: away from the Wall Street Journal, everybody's favorite voice at
Speaker 2: the Times.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: At the time, though Stevens was a pretty inveterate climate denier,
Speaker 2: Like he was definitely on the more extreme end of
Speaker 2: the skeptical spectrum, so to speak. Like he called, you know,
Speaker 2: climate change a religion or climate change science a religion
Speaker 2: presided over by like singularly unattractive hair fans, which I
Speaker 2: just thought was a really obnoxious thing to say about anybody, right,
Speaker 2: like what, And you know, his hiring generated a ton
Speaker 2: of controversies. Many climate scientists and activists tried to get
Speaker 2: the Times to rescind their offer to him, because they
Speaker 2: just thought it was outrageous that someone who you know,
Speaker 2: was spreading these overt falsehoods would take a position at
Speaker 2: the sort of paper of record. But of course The
Speaker 2: Times doesn't respond to outside pressure very often or really ever.
Speaker 2: So Stevens took his position, and he wrote arrogantly enough
Speaker 2: his first column about climate change, and it was called
Speaker 2: the column was called Climate of Complete Certainty. And what
Speaker 2: this piece did was sort of recycle the fossil fuel
Speaker 2: talking point that had been kind of dominant in the
Speaker 2: discourse from I would say, about twenty ten all the
Speaker 2: way through to twenty eighteen. And that talking point, as
Speaker 2: you know yourself, was that the science of climate change
Speaker 2: is too uncertain to motivate or justify the kind of
Speaker 2: policy moves that we would need to make, or the
Speaker 2: behavior changes we would need to make in order to
Speaker 2: halt global heating and resolve the climate crisis, because the
Speaker 2: climate crisis might not even be a thing right now.
Speaker 2: I had just taken a college level course in climate science,
Speaker 2: and so while I was reading this column, I was like,
Speaker 2: wait a minute, this man is using the word uncertainty
Speaker 2: in a kind of common sense, colloquial way. He's using
Speaker 2: the meaning of the word to say uncertainty means not
Speaker 2: having enough information or not knowing enough to come to
Speaker 2: some sort of decision or judgment. Right, But this is
Speaker 2: actually not the way that climate scientists use the word
Speaker 2: in their research. So in or that.
Speaker 1: Scientists in general like this is the language of science
Speaker 1: in which uncertainly means something very.
Speaker 2: Different exactly, And what it means means is the range
Speaker 2: of possible outcomes that you can project out of a
Speaker 2: model with confidence. I mean, confidence and uncertainty are actually synonyms,
Speaker 2: because you can say the confidence interval or the uncertainty interval.
Speaker 2: So when scientists would talk about the uncertainty of their research,
Speaker 2: they were not saying they weren't sure whether their results
Speaker 2: were correct or the phenomenon they were studying was real.
Speaker 2: What they were saying was there's a range of possible
Speaker 2: outcomes from bad to really bad that they could project
Speaker 2: with confidence. But the problem was that because fossil fuel
Speaker 2: interests had put this sort of other meaning of uncertainty
Speaker 2: out into the public discourse through the media sphere, anytime
Speaker 2: a climate scientist in his or her public communications would
Speaker 2: talk about the uncertainty of their research, they would seem
Speaker 2: to be confirming that they weren't sure whether climate change
Speaker 2: was real or not. What fossil fuel interest had done
Speaker 2: was a propriate weaponize and kind of distort the meaning
Speaker 2: of the scientific term in order to kind of manipulate
Speaker 2: scientists into confirming fossil fuel propaganda. So once I saw
Speaker 2: this dynamic and uncertainty, I started to see it everywhere.
Speaker 2: So I, like, you know, I got all these Manila
Speaker 2: folder files because I'm very old school, and I you know,
Speaker 2: made files in my email, and I started doing research
Speaker 2: into the words that seemed to have salience for me
Speaker 2: connected to climate change, you know. And I was doing
Speaker 2: sort of database academic style research. I was reading research
Speaker 2: in the social sciences, in rhetoric in climate science, but
Speaker 2: I was also sort of pulling news articles and like
Speaker 2: press releases and advertisements and tweets and sort of high
Speaker 2: and low discourse news media discourse, and I was just
Speaker 2: dumping it all into these files. And after about eighteen
Speaker 2: months of this kind of very broad, almost sloppy way
Speaker 2: of doing research, I noticed that the files for these
Speaker 2: words were much thicker than the other ones, and that
Speaker 2: in these files were often, you know, language that had
Speaker 2: been produced by policymakers, by scientists themselves, in oil and
Speaker 2: gas advertisements, like all the things that really sort of
Speaker 2: centered and focused on what we're going to do to
Speaker 2: try to resolve this crisis. And I was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: these are the words that dominate the language of climate politics,
Speaker 2: and I need to focus the book on these words.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 2: So that's what I decided to do.
Speaker 1: And they all kind of relate to each other in
Speaker 1: this way too that I think is really interesting to
Speaker 1: create this Well, I think of it as like a
Speaker 1: narrowing of available climate solutions or I don't know, it
Speaker 1: sort of like puts these parameters on how we're allowed
Speaker 1: to even talk about or think about this issue that's
Speaker 1: very limiting.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting you say that, because you know, for
Speaker 2: the chapter on growth, it took me a long time
Speaker 2: to write this chapter because you know, first I had
Speaker 2: to sort of really get my head around kind of
Speaker 2: neoclassical resource economics, how standard economists talked about environmental concerns
Speaker 2: and the climate crisis in order to understand what you know,
Speaker 2: counter voices might be arguing against, right, And then I
Speaker 2: read all the de growth literature and I sort of
Speaker 2: first thought to myself, well, am I going to try
Speaker 2: to talk about the language of growth in a de
Speaker 2: growth frame?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: What am I going to do here? And then I
Speaker 2: realized that actually, we can't even have the conversation about
Speaker 2: de growth. I don't think while almost everybody universally believes
Speaker 2: that growth itself is a climate solution, like as long
Speaker 2: as you believe that being rich will protect you from
Speaker 2: climate devastation, why would anyone embraced growth? And so I thought, Okay,
Speaker 2: this is what I keep bumping up against as I'm researching,
Speaker 2: this belief that growth itself is a climate solution that
Speaker 2: will be available to us even if the planet sort
Speaker 2: of heats up to three degrees or more and that
Speaker 2: the climate breils down to everyone infinitely exactly like growth
Speaker 2: will never end. So I started digging into this, you know, because,
Speaker 2: as you said, I felt like it was really kind
Speaker 2: of limiting our imagination of how we might need to
Speaker 2: transform the world in order to haul global heating. And
Speaker 2: I discovered, as you know, I say in the chapter,
Speaker 2: that this belief that growth will just continue no matter
Speaker 2: what we do to the planet is based on absolutely enough.
Speaker 2: It's based on beliefs that have no appeir empirical foundation whatsoever.
Speaker 2: It's almost itself a form of religious faith. So one
Speaker 2: of these beliefs is that human beings will be able
Speaker 2: to adapt to climate change no matter how bad it gets.
Speaker 2: And you know, humans are pretty ingenious, we are adaptable.
Speaker 2: But in fact, there is no research showing that any country,
Speaker 2: including developed nations in the global north, have to date
Speaker 2: adapted to climate change, and it's just going to get
Speaker 2: harder to do that. And there's something nonlinear about these
Speaker 2: climate change impacts. So you know, if you have a
Speaker 2: sea wall, it'll keep the water out until the day
Speaker 2: that the water gets so high that it won't keep
Speaker 2: the water out anymore. But none of those complicated risks
Speaker 2: that we're facing, and none of this sort of lack
Speaker 2: of historical evidence that we are going to be able
Speaker 2: to adapt to the climate crisis make it into economic models.
Speaker 2: In fact, what economists do is the opposite. They look
Speaker 2: at sort of historical relationships between say, heat and GDP
Speaker 2: growth rates, and then they try to project those out
Speaker 2: into the future, and then they adjust their results by
Speaker 2: using a mathematical variable called adaptation, which allows them to
Speaker 2: downplay or adjust the dangers that they project by looking
Speaker 2: at the past and drawing it out into the future
Speaker 2: using this mathematical variable that they give value to simply
Speaker 2: based on the economist's belief in how much we're going
Speaker 2: to be able to adapt in the future. So at
Speaker 2: the bottom, it's just about the individual economists trust that
Speaker 2: adaptation is possible and it's something that we're going to do,
Speaker 2: not based on any kind of empirical data whatsoever. And
Speaker 2: that's just one of the fan dies or the ephemeral
Speaker 2: beliefs that support or at least justify this fundamental belief
Speaker 2: of the entire planet that growth will just continue even
Speaker 2: if we ruin our climate system.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting because a lot of the things, like
Speaker 1: a lot of the things in here had me also
Speaker 1: thinking about how a lot of this stuff gets painted
Speaker 1: in very gender terms or even just science versus humanities
Speaker 1: kind of totally language too, where it's like, oh, economists
Speaker 1: are hard science, objective measurement, whatever, but climate activists don't
Speaker 1: understand that, or in technologies it's like, oh, well you
Speaker 1: just don't understand the engineering behind totally or whatever. I've
Speaker 1: had this experience of digging into an economic model and
Speaker 1: realizing that it's just based on yeah, one person's assumptions
Speaker 1: or beliefs or whatever exactly and being like, no, I
Speaker 1: must be wrong, you know, I must not be understanding
Speaker 1: the numbers or whatever, and like I.
Speaker 2: Had that experience too. But let me be clear, every
Speaker 2: single chapter in this book, the chapters on economics were
Speaker 2: read by some of the most respected climate economists working today.
Speaker 2: And the chapter that I wrote on innovation, which turned
Speaker 2: out in climate discourse to be code for carbon dioxide
Speaker 2: removal and carbon capture and sequestration so CDR and CCS.
Speaker 2: So in that chapter, I had not only one of
Speaker 2: the most prominent scientists who's working on CDR read this chapter,
Speaker 2: but I had two other climate scientists read this chapter.
Speaker 2: So I also thought, is this possible, like.
Speaker 1: How asim as I think it is exactly.
Speaker 2: And in fact.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: And it's hard to to tell because very often when
Speaker 2: we encounter these things in our public discourse, it's through
Speaker 2: news media articles or sort of treatments that are decontextualized
Speaker 2: or just sort of touch on one thing, but they
Speaker 2: marshal these ideological beliefs that I try to sort of
Speaker 2: disabuse in the book. And it only becomes clear how
Speaker 2: this ideology is very often based on either no information
Speaker 2: like in the growth case, or false information like in
Speaker 2: the CDR case. And so once you compile all the
Speaker 2: information and put it together, it becomes easier to show
Speaker 2: how a lot of the beliefs that we hold about
Speaker 2: growth and technological innovation are influenced or shaped by fossil
Speaker 2: fuel propaganda themselves.
Speaker 1: Yes, totally. Like I felt like that was one of
Speaker 1: the very compelling things about this book is that you
Speaker 1: see it, You're just like, oh, thank you, that's a
Speaker 1: nice you like how that has shaped Okay, I want
Speaker 1: to ask you about the Breakthrough Institute, because they've been
Speaker 1: very mad about your book. Yes, also you mentioned them
Speaker 1: in the book, and they have been quite adamant proponents
Speaker 1: of some of these ideas. Yeah, and particularly in the
Speaker 1: vein of kind of castigating climate people for not thinking
Speaker 1: about growth in the right way or reivation in the
Speaker 1: right way. But anyway, I wanted to ask you about
Speaker 1: just kind of your thoughts on how much they have
Speaker 1: shaped the public discourse and how they have been able
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I you know, I got into the climate movement,
Speaker 2: as I said in twenty seventeen, and so I don't
Speaker 2: perceive them as people who are instrumental in shaping the discourse.
Speaker 2: But I do see them as kind of exemplifying a
Speaker 2: kind of centrist position, left center position on the climate crisis,
Speaker 2: which is why they're very friendly with many centrist journalists
Speaker 2: and business leaders, because they put this sort of impromoter
Speaker 2: of environmentalism on this centrist position. And the problem with
Speaker 2: this position, in my view, is not that it's advocating
Speaker 2: for developing new technologies. Clearly we will need that, like
Speaker 2: I am a proponent of lab grown need for example.
Speaker 2: To me, it is not that they are pushing for
Speaker 2: nuclear I actually also think that nuclear energy would be
Speaker 2: an excellent thing to bring into our energy mix, maybe
Speaker 2: for thermal heat things that are harder to produce with
Speaker 2: solar or wind. For example. You know, like eight million
Speaker 2: people a year die from fossil fuel pollution, right, and
Speaker 2: the number of people that we can trace, of course,
Speaker 2: who have died from nuclear accidents is probably a lot
Speaker 2: small than that. So if you want to just judge
Speaker 2: two different forms of energy based on the number of
Speaker 2: people it kills historically, then obviously nuclear wins. Right. My
Speaker 2: problem with the Breakthrough Institute is that they promote expanding
Speaker 2: fossil fuels. That is my problem with them, because this
Speaker 2: is to me, the belief, the false belief that is
Speaker 2: really preventing our politics. Are business leaders, even our climate
Speaker 2: movement advocacy from solving this problem or even really knowing
Speaker 2: what to fight for. There is this idea that we
Speaker 2: can do both. We can develop clean energy and we
Speaker 2: can support expanding fossil fuel extraction. We can have more,
Speaker 2: ever more oil and gas and ever more clean energy,
Speaker 2: and somehow we're going to deal with climate change anyway.
Speaker 2: So this is the false belief that is not just
Speaker 2: coming from fossil fuel interests on the right, it's also
Speaker 2: coming from these center left groups, which give a permission
Speaker 2: structure for these fossil fuel interests to seem legitimate and
Speaker 2: not like the murderous monsters they really are. And so
Speaker 2: the Breakthrough Institute argues for increased fossil fuel production. They
Speaker 2: say that coal plants in the Global South quote save lives.
Speaker 2: I mean, let's be clear, it's electricity that saves lives,
Speaker 2: and that electricity does not need to be generated by coal,
Speaker 2: which is killing millions of people a year, mostly in
Speaker 2: the Global South. And for them, they justify their argument
Speaker 2: for increasing fossil fuel production, not by even saying that
Speaker 2: we can capture the emissions with CDR, which is something
Speaker 2: that they support. It's a position that they support and
Speaker 2: they platform people who do make that argument. But really
Speaker 2: the reason they say we can continue to expand our
Speaker 2: fossil fuel production and consumption is that climate change will
Speaker 2: never be that bad. It's never going to be worse
Speaker 2: than I think. Northhouse called it a case of planetary diabetes,
Speaker 2: right that you can just sort of manage with what
Speaker 2: he calls medicine, which what he means is adaptation or whatever. Now,
Speaker 2: climate scientists like Joel Gergis, the Australian climate scientist who
Speaker 2: is one of the lead authors of the last IPCC report.
Speaker 2: She figures climate change as a cancer, as a disease
Speaker 2: in our planetary body that has been established and is
Speaker 2: now getting worse, and that we have to cure and
Speaker 2: cut out before it metastasizes out of control. But Northouse
Speaker 2: and the Breakthrough Institute are very often on the opposite
Speaker 2: side of that. They would call her an alarmist and
Speaker 2: they would claim that actually, people who think that climate
Speaker 2: change is like a cancer or will be very dangerous
Speaker 2: as the planet continues to heat up our emotional hysterical
Speaker 2: very often women in the climate movement, people who aren't serious,
Speaker 2: and their kind of Lukewarmer position that oh, climate change
Speaker 2: isn't going to be that bad is actually somehow the
Speaker 2: serious position. But what I try to argue in the
Speaker 2: book is that in fact it is a dishonest position.
Speaker 2: It misrepresents what the science says is happening to our
Speaker 2: planet and will happen if we do not phase out
Speaker 2: fossil fuels, bring our emissions down to real zero, and
Speaker 2: halt global heating. So it's not a realism, it's actually
Speaker 2: a falsehood that they're advancing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I do find it really interesting that Nordhouse
Speaker 1: in particular takes these really strong stances on science when
Speaker 1: he has no scientific background, you know, I mean, it
Speaker 1: was a PR guy forever.
Speaker 2: I love that he was a PR guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then started the breakthrough and like you know,
Speaker 1: now kind of does PR for their ideas, right, Like.
Speaker 2: I mean, I will just say that they've been coming
Speaker 2: after me for a couple of weeks now at the
Speaker 2: point we are recording this, they've been coming after me
Speaker 2: for a couple of weeks now. And first he tried
Speaker 2: to suggest that I didn't have the credentials to write
Speaker 2: this book, right, And then I thought, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: I'm going to go look at his academic credentials. I
Speaker 2: have a PhD in English literature for UC Berkeley, and
Speaker 2: he is a BA in history from UC Berkeley. So
Speaker 2: I don't understand how he's just on that metric more
Speaker 2: credentialed to talk about the climate crisis than you are
Speaker 2: than I am. And I'm talking about the rhetoric that
Speaker 2: leads to political beliefs, which is literally something I've been
Speaker 2: studying since I went to graduate school because that was
Speaker 2: what I was studying in the English Renaissance too. Like,
Speaker 2: this is not a different topic for me. It's just
Speaker 2: a different domain into which I'm bringing my expertise. But
Speaker 2: it's interesting because other ways. So once I sort of
Speaker 2: like disabused him of that strategy, then they started to
Speaker 2: suggest that somehow I wasn't a serious scholar because there
Speaker 2: were some sloppy errors and the footnotes they found what
Speaker 2: I would claim or two errors among three hundred in
Speaker 2: three chapters. The book has six hundred footnotes, and it's
Speaker 2: been peer reviewed and extensively fact checked and every single
Speaker 2: book in the world will have one or two details
Speaker 2: that are wrong. But what they're doing is they're trying
Speaker 2: to come after me to suggest that I'm not serious,
Speaker 2: I'm all vibes, I don't have research credentials because they
Speaker 2: don't want to engage with my arguments. They have never
Speaker 2: defended their position on supporting fossil fuel use. They have
Speaker 2: never explained why they believe that economic growth will just
Speaker 2: continue indefinitely and shield the wealthy from climate devastation. They
Speaker 2: have never engaged any of the arguments that I make
Speaker 2: in the book and defended them. They have only come
Speaker 2: after me with these ad hominem attacks because they know
Speaker 2: they don't have a position from which to argue. In fact,
Speaker 2: Northouse on Twitter or x or whatever you want to
Speaker 2: call it these days, he got mad at me because
Speaker 2: I quoted him as having said that the agenda to
Speaker 2: phase out fossil fuels was impossible, And so I said, okay,
Speaker 2: does that mean right here that you're going to say
Speaker 2: that it is possible to phase out fossil fuels? And
Speaker 2: he sputtered and fulminated, but then reiterated that the climate
Speaker 2: movement's agenda to phase out fossil fuels in the next
Speaker 2: decade is impossible. And then I like tweeted a screenshot
Speaker 2: of my book which is quoting him saying that exact thing,
Speaker 2: and I was like, dude, what is your problem? The
Speaker 2: problem is is that they're scared of what I say
Speaker 2: in the book, because I honestly think, and not to
Speaker 2: be arrogant about this, but I think this is the
Speaker 2: first book that ties what we think of as traditional
Speaker 2: climate denial on the right to these centrist democratic positions,
Speaker 2: showing that actually the reason our climate politics is blocked
Speaker 2: is not that it's polarized, even though that's a problem too,
Speaker 2: but because it's weirdly unified on this belief that we
Speaker 2: don't need to phase out fossil fuels when we absolutely do.
Speaker 1: Yes. I have been seeing this in the last couple
Speaker 1: of years, you know, increasingly, this weird hesitancy to just say, yeah,
Speaker 1: we need to phase out fossil fuel, yes, and almost
Speaker 1: a shift towards acting like that's a radical stance. Totally, totally,
Speaker 1: it's very strange.
Speaker 2: Well, there's comms. I mean, it's a I'm not saying
Speaker 2: it's an easy problem, because there is comm's research that
Speaker 2: shows that people don't like it when you tell them
Speaker 2: they can't use something they're already using, right, So that
Speaker 2: I mean it's it's a fiercely challenging problem to communicate
Speaker 2: that we do need to phase out fossil fuels. I
Speaker 2: don't want to downplay that, and so I think people
Speaker 2: shy away from saying it because it does seem like
Speaker 2: tricky or radical, and it has radical implications for our
Speaker 2: whole economic system for sure. But if you believe that
Speaker 2: climate change is real, if you understand what the science
Speaker 2: is saying about what's going to happen to our climate
Speaker 2: system and the links between our planet and our economy,
Speaker 2: if the planet just keeps heating up, and if you
Speaker 2: understand that the planet will keep heating up until emissions
Speaker 2: get too net zero or real zero, then you know,
Speaker 2: every scientist will tell you that we need to stop
Speaker 2: using coal, oil and gas. It's really not up for
Speaker 2: debate anymore.
Speaker 3: Including like you know, the IEA, the I yes, yes,
Speaker 3: so this is what I quote in that, This is
Speaker 3: what I quote in the introduction to the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty three, in their Synthesis Report, the IPCC
Speaker 2: said that we already have enough fossil fuel infrastructure, yes,
Speaker 2: because that infrastructure is projected to omit the total carbon
Speaker 2: budget for two degrees celsius, which means that we actually
Speaker 2: have to like strand some of that infrastructure, strand some
Speaker 2: of those assets because the total carbon budget has to
Speaker 2: include like agriculture and wildfires and other things. So people,
Speaker 2: so to me, you can say, yes, climate change is bad. Yes,
Speaker 2: I believe in climate change until the cows come home.
Speaker 2: But if you are denying that fact, you are a
Speaker 2: climate denier. I mean, just think about being an alcoholic,
Speaker 2: right You're drinking a lot of booze, your liver is
Speaker 2: about to croak, and your doctor says to you, you're
Speaker 2: an alcoholic, you have to stop drinking, And you say, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm an alcoholic, but I'm not going to stop drinking.
Speaker 2: Like we all know that that person is still in denial.
Speaker 2: If you say climate change is real, I want to
Speaker 2: help stop it, but I'm going to ignore the fact
Speaker 2: that we already have too many fossil fuels to hault
Speaker 2: global heating at a relatively safe level. I'm sorry you
Speaker 2: are a climate denier.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the Innovation chapter in more
Speaker 1: detail because We've been doing this series too on like
Speaker 1: on CDR and carbon capture and will eventually get to
Speaker 1: like hydrogen and biofuels and all that stuff too, the
Speaker 1: solutions exactly exactly. But it is like I find it
Speaker 1: interesting how the industry and then like people who are
Speaker 1: kind of carrying water for them do really mess with
Speaker 1: the building blocks of information in this way of like
Speaker 1: it's like because I feel like there's been there has
Speaker 1: been like this real focus on disinformation, which I almost
Speaker 1: see as like the end result of all of this.
Speaker 2: Stuff, right exactly.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, like that's what we end up with,
Speaker 1: But like that gets built by you know, very strategic
Speaker 1: investments in particular types of research or like you know,
Speaker 1: white papers from thought leaders or whatever it is. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like it gets built in that way. So I'm
Speaker 1: curious how you honed in on CDR and CCS as
Speaker 1: like the things that you wanted to focus on in
Speaker 1: that chapter.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I really.
Speaker 2: Didn't set out to focus on those two technologies in particular.
Speaker 1: Yeah at all.
Speaker 2: I was just like, why are people talking about innovation
Speaker 2: in this way?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Why are people talking about innovation as a independent climate solution?
Speaker 2: What does this word mean, that's so vague. And usually
Speaker 2: when you drill down, this was often in sort of
Speaker 2: you know, climate journalism, or even just political journalism or
Speaker 2: business journalism, and you would drill down and it would
Speaker 2: be about these technologies that would either capture or remove emissions.
Speaker 2: And then I started to see Exxon Mobile and other
Speaker 2: oil and gas companies use the word innovation in their
Speaker 2: advertising and on their websites and whatever, and then drilling
Speaker 2: down into that, I was like, Oh, for them, innovation
Speaker 2: also means carbon capture and to some degree also carbon
Speaker 2: dioxide removal. I was like, Wow, this word is actually
Speaker 2: code in climate discourse for CCS and CDR. And it's
Speaker 2: interesting because I don't think it is anymore because I
Speaker 2: think that oil and gas companies were really greenwashing themselves
Speaker 2: with very thick paint right after the IPCC report on
Speaker 2: one point five in twenty eighteen, in the rise of
Speaker 2: the global climate movement, blah blah blah blah, they all
Speaker 2: came out with net zero targets.
Speaker 1: They you know, they they no longer feel the needs.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly, so a Exxon.
Speaker 1: Partly because of all of this rhetoric that yes, thank
Speaker 1: you exactly we can it's fine because we can decarbonize
Speaker 1: oil and gas exactly one, thank you, that's exactly the point.
Speaker 1: So what happened was, around this question of innovation, oil
Speaker 1: and gas companies started to claim that they were going
Speaker 1: to turn themselves into carbon management companies and they were
Speaker 1: going to be able to either capture the emissions of their.
Speaker 2: Products or they were going to be able to decarbonize
Speaker 2: their products, decarbonize oil by removing the emissions, removing the
Speaker 2: carbon from the atmosphere after their products had been used
Speaker 2: and combusted. So, you know, usually I don't start with
Speaker 2: the research. Usually I start with the rhetoric. But I
Speaker 2: started this chapter with the research into how challenging it's
Speaker 2: going to be. Well, first, the historical account of the
Speaker 2: fact that most, I mean if not all, carbon capture projects,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, the technology that captures emissions at
Speaker 2: the source, most if not all carbon capture products to
Speaker 2: date have failed. Yes, they have captured nothing close on
Speaker 2: like a very large scale, a very large scale. They
Speaker 2: have captured nothing close to their targets, and very often
Speaker 2: they've had to build an additional fossil fuel plant to
Speaker 2: power the technology, which means, if you do a full
Speaker 2: life cycle assessment. They're actually carbon additive and not carbon neutral.
Speaker 1: That's right. There's really good research from Mark Jacobson on
Speaker 1: that in particular.
Speaker 2: So insofar as you want to use methane gas as
Speaker 2: a kind of firm generation instead of batteries or something else,
Speaker 2: you might want to slap CCS on that, but it
Speaker 2: would be very challenging to do it in a way
Speaker 2: that would actually be carbon neutral, and it would be
Speaker 2: much much more expensive even potentially than building out a
Speaker 2: system of redundancy and lots of storage are nuclear or
Speaker 2: something else. So you know, and even if the economics
Speaker 2: pencil out better fors CCS just doesn't work. So that's
Speaker 2: really what you need to come back to.
Speaker 1: And the technology has been around for a really long time,
Speaker 1: like exactly. It doesn't mean it's impossible that it will
Speaker 1: improve at some point whatever. But yeah, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of plans being made with the assumption that CCS
Speaker 1: will somehow magically start to work better than it ever has.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: What's so interesting, So the rhetoric and I'll get to
Speaker 2: CDR in a minute, but the rhetoric about CCS from
Speaker 2: oil and gas company these and from advocates trade advocates
Speaker 2: is that CCS is a proven technology.
Speaker 1: Yes, right, that's what they say. So I've been around
Speaker 1: for so long, right.
Speaker 2: And it's a proven technology. They've been using it for decades.
Speaker 2: This is great. And so now the EPA has come
Speaker 2: up with a new regulation saying that by a certain date,
Speaker 2: fossil fuel power plants need to have CCS attached.
Speaker 1: And then in their public comments, they're all like, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. You can't hold us to this. It's hilarious.
Speaker 2: So the climate guy at the Cato Institute requested a
Speaker 2: review copy of my book because he said he wanted
Speaker 2: to write a review about it. Okay, I don't know
Speaker 2: if he's actually going to write a review about it,
Speaker 2: because then and then he tried to like chase me
Speaker 2: down on Twitter to ask me about this EPA regulation.
Speaker 2: He's like, how what do you think about the EPA,
Speaker 2: you know, requiring requiring this if it's not a proven technology,
Speaker 2: you know, do you think the EPA is being dishonest?
Speaker 2: And I was like, dude, talk to your industry. They
Speaker 2: have been saying that read public comics exactly.
Speaker 1: Exxon API. They all were like, this is asking too much, but.
Speaker 2: This is after literally decades of saying it was a
Speaker 2: proven technology, and then ironically they've also been lobbying on
Speaker 2: the hill for tax breaks to help them get ccs
Speaker 2: in place and working and economical. And it's not clear
Speaker 2: to me why you need tax breaks for innovation if
Speaker 2: you already have a proven technology. But anyways, that's a
Speaker 2: whole other issue. So this is one boon doggle that
Speaker 2: people use to justify keeping fossil energy in the mix.
Speaker 2: And then the other boon doggle is carbon dioxide removal.
Speaker 1: Yes, so.
Speaker 2: Just to say upfront, in order to create a net
Speaker 2: zero economy, we are going to need some form of
Speaker 2: carbon dioxide removal that you know, we do not add
Speaker 2: to the stock of carbon in the atmosphere because things
Speaker 2: like agriculture you know, emits carbon, and wild files will
Speaker 2: emit carbon and so on. So you need some form
Speaker 2: of carbon diet.
Speaker 1: And there are legitimately hard to abate sectors. Correct, might
Speaker 1: need this, correct because there isn't a ready alternative. Power
Speaker 1: generation is not one of them, right, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: I'm just like, yeah, but we have an alternative. We
Speaker 1: have alternatives for that that are cheaper and more effective,
Speaker 1: But fossil fuel interests are claiming that we can use
Speaker 1: these technologies to continue to expand fossil fuel production. But
Speaker 1: as Jennifer Grenholm once said, in a way that's clean.
Speaker 1: The National Academies modeled how much solar we would need
Speaker 1: to remove one million tons of carbon dioxide from the
Speaker 1: atmosphere with the technology called direct air capture. And I
Speaker 1: want everyone to keep in mind who's listening to this,
Speaker 1: that one million tons of.
Speaker 2: Carbon dioxide is about fifteen minutes of our annual emissions,
Speaker 2: so a quarter of an hour of a whole year
Speaker 2: of emissions. And just to do that, we would need
Speaker 2: to cite solar panels on like around twelve hundred football
Speaker 2: fields worth of land.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And we would also, at least in their model, need
Speaker 2: to build another methane gas plant to power the thermal
Speaker 2: energy that the process needs to capture the carbon from
Speaker 2: the atmosphere. So you know, that's a lot of land.
Speaker 2: We have it. We have enormous amounts of agricultural land
Speaker 2: that could be repurposed. But the point is it's not
Speaker 2: a simple, easy solution to just say, oh, we're just
Speaker 2: going to remove these emissions with CDR. Furthermore, it's extremely
Speaker 2: expensive to do this, like basically you're trying to put
Speaker 2: back together some like a bowl that's already been broken,
Speaker 2: and it's very time consuming and it's very labor intensive.
Speaker 2: So you know, I quoted a review essay in the
Speaker 2: chapter that said most of the sort of lower estimates
Speaker 2: for how much this is going to cost comes from
Speaker 2: industry or from startup advocates, and the scientists who are
Speaker 2: not connected to those interests proposed that it's going to
Speaker 2: be kind of unlikely to get this down to or
Speaker 2: down below around five hundred dollars a ton, Like right now,
Speaker 2: I think it's about seven hundred and fifty dollars a ton,
Speaker 2: but they think a realistic goal for price would be
Speaker 2: about five hundred dollars a ton. Now, even if you
Speaker 2: wanted to remove like ten gigatons, which is only a
Speaker 2: quarter of our annual emissions, right, that's just an enormous
Speaker 2: amount of money, Like it's it's five trillion dollars or
Speaker 2: something like that. So we are not going to use
Speaker 2: this to decarbonize the fossil fuel system. We are going
Speaker 2: to use this at the margins to capture what I
Speaker 2: call in the book these essential emissions. And so the
Speaker 2: message must be not that we need CDR or CDR
Speaker 2: can decarbonize oil, but that we need to phase out
Speaker 2: fossil fuels. But the reason that this propaganda from.
Speaker 1: The fossil fuels or whatever is left, that's well, that's
Speaker 1: the other issue.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, Oh my god. That's the other issue.
Speaker 2: Is that one thing we would also want to do
Speaker 2: if we could, is achieve negative emissions, where we start
Speaker 2: drawing carbon dioxide or carbon out of the atmosphere so
Speaker 2: that you know, hopefully we could maybe start to reverse
Speaker 2: some of the warming that we've seen. So you're never.
Speaker 1: Going to be able to do that if you don't
Speaker 1: decarbonize first. And that's exactly the piece that I feel
Speaker 1: like I really appreciate. Like David Hoe and Jane Flagel
Speaker 1: and c.
Speaker 2: House Father, all of whom are researchers in the CDR space.
Speaker 1: They are all researchers in CDR. They're all positive about
Speaker 1: CDR and its potential usefulness in addressing some of this stuff,
Speaker 1: and all every single one of them says, it's not
Speaker 1: going to do anything if we don't decarbonize first. But
Speaker 1: it is the equivalent of like continuing to.
Speaker 4: Fill a bucket of holes with water to exactly not
Speaker 4: decarbonized first, it's very very and yet the supposed like
Speaker 4: you know, smart guys in the room continue to kind
Speaker 4: of repeat this idea that like, oh, it's going to
Speaker 4: be fun because they.
Speaker 2: Don't know anything. They haven't actually read the scientific research
Speaker 2: which they're taking their cues from so called think tanks
Speaker 2: like the Breakthrough Institute, who are not actually facing reality
Speaker 2: and coming up with plans that can get us to
Speaker 2: where we need to go.
Speaker 1: That's the piece that I find troublesome about Breakthrough because yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not like de facto opposed to technology or even
Speaker 1: market based.
Speaker 2: Us to this stuff.
Speaker 1: But if the proposed solution is so obviously flawed and
Speaker 1: or if you're you're misrepresenting what.
Speaker 2: It can do right exactly.
Speaker 1: You know, then the problem that's not what you're doing right,
Speaker 1: you know. That's the piece that I'm just like, it's
Speaker 1: not that you promote nuclear or you're optimistic about CDR.
Speaker 1: It's that you're overstating the solution and understating the problem.
Speaker 2: So in my chapter on innovation, you know, again, these
Speaker 2: ideas don't take root unless they're being repeated by both sides, right,
Speaker 2: It's not just sort of disinformation that's coming from the right,
Speaker 2: which is easily mockable. This is disinformation that's circulating and
Speaker 2: creating a kind of bipartisan centrist consensus that upholds the
Speaker 2: status quo. And you know, even even Democrats, a majority
Speaker 2: of Democrats want America to pursue in all of the
Speaker 2: above energy strategy. Yes, because partially, I think they don't
Speaker 2: know that phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to halt
Speaker 2: climate change. Because the majority of Democrats who want the
Speaker 2: US to pursue in all of the above energy strategy
Speaker 2: is the same majority that says they want the United
Speaker 2: States to achieve net zero by twenty fifty, like sixty
Speaker 2: nine percent of Americans. More broadly, which means that like,
Speaker 2: you know, practically one hundred percent of Democrats support net
Speaker 2: zero by twenty fifty, but don't understand that actually we cannot.
Speaker 1: Do both, right. I think the other thing that I
Speaker 1: was thinking about reading your book too, that I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is an important thing for people to clock is
Speaker 1: that I think a pretty significant number of Democrats and
Speaker 1: even climate people have been convinced by some of this
Speaker 1: stuff that's out there that it's not actually possible to
Speaker 1: get off of the fossil fuels, and that's the piece
Speaker 1: that I think is so dangerous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: hear people kind of like reiterate this stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, firm generation, firm generation or something sensical like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or about it as like securing the base like
Speaker 1: base load energy to go with intermittency and all that stuff. Right,
Speaker 1: But like even if you accept that we need some
Speaker 1: amount of gas to continue to do that, we don't
Speaker 1: need increase in the amount of gas is being generation
Speaker 1: to do that. You know, It's like we can do
Speaker 1: that easily with what we have correct still have access.
Speaker 1: The US is the number one exporter of natural gas now,
Speaker 1: Like we are not generating this stuff just to support
Speaker 1: the expansion of renewables now, not at all. And we
Speaker 1: know from like internal documents from all these companies that
Speaker 1: they very explicitly were like, in order to keep people
Speaker 1: thinking of gas as a clean.
Speaker 5: Fuel, we need to tie it to renewable We need
Speaker 5: more research into academic research funded by BP, who make Yes,
Speaker 5: that makes that precise argument exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's BP that like laid out that whole strategy.
Speaker 2: I mean, people are ignoring all the actions that these
Speaker 2: companies are taking through their trade associations in particular to
Speaker 2: block the passage of climate policy to sh public belief
Speaker 2: that we need fossil fuels and that climate policy is
Speaker 2: dangerous to living things and themselves. Like it just totally
Speaker 2: ignores how these people, these companies are bad actors in
Speaker 2: the space, right, Why would they embrace the energy transition
Speaker 2: that they're fighting with every resource to block. Yes, I
Speaker 2: mean the myopia. You have to look at the whole,
Speaker 2: especially for something like climate change, which is this sort
Speaker 2: of like extremely systemic broad issue.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about something that I saw
Speaker 1: recently and it made me think of this innovation chapter
Speaker 1: because there were actually and of the stuff you talk
Speaker 1: about with uncertainty and early climate denial too. Because there's
Speaker 1: this there is a carbon capture pipeline project in the Midwest.
Speaker 1: It's called the Summit Pipeline. Have you heard about this ye?
Speaker 1: It goes across five Midwestern states and there's been a
Speaker 1: ton of pushback against it, right, and it's created some
Speaker 1: kind of unusual bedfellows in the opposition because it's got
Speaker 1: like see our club people an indigenous rights activists and
Speaker 1: like land and water defenders and then it's also got
Speaker 1: John Bird's Society. Yeah, just like they don't like it
Speaker 1: because they're using eminent domain to take land right to
Speaker 1: build this pipeline. But there's this whole faction of people
Speaker 1: that are opposed to it because they are climate deniers.
Speaker 1: They're like, you guys told us that this wasn't a problem,
Speaker 1: and now you want to take a bunch of people's
Speaker 1: land for us to thanks for this problem. And to me,
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is a really interesting rhetorical bind that
Speaker 1: the industry finds itself in.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Yes, they have been saying that it's not that big
Speaker 1: of a deal and we don't really need to do
Speaker 1: that much about it, and it's all in hand, but
Speaker 1: now they're trying to get like these billions and billions
Speaker 1: of dollars worth of tax credits from carbon capture and
Speaker 1: to build these hydrogen hubs and they're all of these
Speaker 1: things are going to require infrastructure, which means they're going
Speaker 1: to be land use changes and all of this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: And like that's so interesting that, Yes, So I'm curious
Speaker 1: what you think about that of like like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know, like what we can maybe
Speaker 1: expect to see them do to try to like have
Speaker 1: both those things hold.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I low see industry
Speaker 2: investments in carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal as line
Speaker 2: items in their pr budgets, and people are trying to
Speaker 2: create the carbon dioxide removal industry as a for profit industry, right,
Speaker 2: but really it's it's it's a public utility in a way.
Speaker 2: I don't see what the profit structure would be here.
Speaker 1: Jeez, you know what it would be is I mean,
Speaker 1: this is the thing that I'm using the carbon for
Speaker 1: enhanced oil production.
Speaker 2: Well, that's but then it's not a climate solution. So
Speaker 2: if you're going to have like CDR as a climate solution,
Speaker 2: you're really only going to get that with the same
Speaker 2: politics that's going to get us the renewables transition, that's
Speaker 2: going to get us sort of less meat eating, that's
Speaker 2: actually going to be systemically transformative because nobody's going to
Speaker 2: pay for CDR. Nobody's going to like get on board
Speaker 2: with CDR unless they're already on board with solving the
Speaker 2: climate crisis. So I don't think oil and gas companies
Speaker 2: are too worried about that necessarily, because I just think
Speaker 2: they're trying to sort of extract as much profit from
Speaker 2: our children as they can while they can. But I
Speaker 2: do think that CDR advocates who are arguing that we
Speaker 2: can just use CDR to to carbonized fossil fuels, to
Speaker 2: carbonized oil, keep the system in place and not do
Speaker 2: anything disruptive don't realize that actually building out a global
Speaker 2: CDR industry is a climate action, and it's going to
Speaker 2: take the kind of support that any kind of climate
Speaker 2: action is going to take.
Speaker 1: So, you know, industrial facilities to which I feel like
Speaker 1: people forget about one.
Speaker 2: Hundred percent like seven stories tall with giant worring fans.
Speaker 2: I mean, nobody wants that in their backyard. I'd rather
Speaker 2: have a solar panel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Like as it's funny because you you know,
Speaker 1: there's been some community resistance to industrial scale renewables, some
Speaker 1: of which is very authentic to the community, and I
Speaker 1: feel like this is this is a thing that like, no,
Speaker 1: for sure, climate people didn't handle particularly well initially, where
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, like if you move to a small
Speaker 1: town in you know, a rural county, you're not it
Speaker 1: didn't it probably wasn't on your radar that you might
Speaker 1: end up living next to industrial.
Speaker 2: Exactly facility exactly.
Speaker 1: Like that is actually a significant change in you know,
Speaker 1: people's conception of where they live and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: Really like they need to like be able to talk
Speaker 1: through that and not be accused of being like a
Speaker 1: climate denier or whatever. Right, absolutely, And like, of course
Speaker 1: the energy trans needs to be equitable. You know, it
Speaker 1: doesn't work if it costs people more money to use
Speaker 1: renewable energy. That's where there are fewer jobs or any
Speaker 1: of that stuff. Right, Like, all of that I totally
Speaker 1: agree with. But like the thing that I find interesting
Speaker 1: is that, Okay, so if you are in favor of CDR,
Speaker 1: where's that deep canvassing on CDR?
Speaker 2: Right, Well, that's what it's going to be the same issue.
Speaker 6: It's the same issue, you know, Like it's exactly the
Speaker 6: same issue. Yeah, It's interesting because the most illuminating part
Speaker 6: of this Climate Week for me was going to a
Speaker 6: panel on disinformation in the Clean Energy space in which
Speaker 6: Tim Ands Roberts a Brown University and J. L. Halsman,
Speaker 6: the journalist at heat map who's written deeply on this,
Speaker 6: and a bunch of other incredibly expert and brilliant people.
Speaker 6: We're talking very knowledgeably about how disinformation, you know, intersects
Speaker 6: with the community engagement issues and other economic questions, et cetera,
Speaker 6: to create community resistance to these projects. And then a
Speaker 6: few days later I was on a panel with leaders
Speaker 6: of industry trade groups clean energy trade groups, and they
Speaker 6: were talking about their experience of being kind of confronted
Speaker 6: with disinformations like the lie that building out wind turbines
Speaker 6: is killing whales, Like this was being spread when there
Speaker 6: was literally no construction in the Atlantic at all of
Speaker 6: any turbines.
Speaker 2: Right. But by the time the industry actually came in,
Speaker 2: people had already arrayed themselves against new wind projects because
Speaker 2: they thought old wind projects, which had never even been built,
Speaker 2: were killing whales. And they were just shocked by having
Speaker 2: to deal with this information pollution when they see themselves
Speaker 2: as investors who are going to create jobs and deliver
Speaker 2: value to rate payers through the grid. Right. So there's
Speaker 2: this sort of of disconnect between researchers and the climate movement,
Speaker 2: who know a lot about this issue and how to
Speaker 2: combat disinformation, and then the industry, who are business people
Speaker 2: and are only now beginning to realize that they are
Speaker 2: going to have to start doing this kind of community engagement.
Speaker 2: They are going to have to start doing pre bunking.
Speaker 2: They have to put a line for advertising in their
Speaker 2: project proposals because they actually have to go in there
Speaker 2: and sell these projects to the community because the fossil
Speaker 2: fuel industry is there. They're there through private Facebook groups.
Speaker 2: They're there for they find sort of vociferous opponents, correct,
Speaker 2: and then they fund them, you know, they.
Speaker 1: Feed them more information exactly they can get like exactly
Speaker 1: in a lot of these situations, I feel like you
Speaker 1: end up with both things happening at the same time.
Speaker 1: You have some amount of like organic community level resistance
Speaker 1: that's then weaponized by that's right.
Speaker 2: And very often in these community meetings there isn't someone
Speaker 2: who's arguing for the project because the industry or the
Speaker 2: developer hasn't put someone into the community, and there's no
Speaker 2: one in the community who's actually playing that role. And
Speaker 2: you know, they found that when community members do play
Speaker 2: that role, usually these projects go through. Like on Long Island,
Speaker 2: there were wind turbines that were built off Montauk Point
Speaker 2: and the cable for them was going to go under
Speaker 2: this very storied street in this little hamlet called Wainscott,
Speaker 2: where like incredibly wealthy people have houses like the Laughters,
Speaker 2: and you know, lots of other people. And so there
Speaker 2: was this woman, Bonnie Brady, who lives in Montalk, who
Speaker 2: is just a vociferous clean energy opponent and who was
Speaker 2: clearly being funded by industry, so she was out there
Speaker 2: on the front lines too. So she had industry funding,
Speaker 2: Bonnie Brady, And you had these very wealthy people arrayed
Speaker 2: against this project because they just didn't want this cable
Speaker 2: under the street. But the rest of the community was very,
Speaker 2: very vocally supportive of clean energy. There's actually a lot
Speaker 2: of climate change awareness on the East end of Long Island,
Speaker 2: and so there was a lot of conflict in the
Speaker 2: community meetings about the project, but ultimately the project went
Speaker 2: through and I find that incredibly inspiring. But it does
Speaker 2: mean that industry itself, where they get clean energy, industry
Speaker 2: has to understand that they can't just be businessmen, that
Speaker 2: they're any business women and then they're in a political battle.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think they had a lot of like pretty
Speaker 1: naive assumptions that they would be like welcomed with open arms, yes,
Speaker 1: like everyone loves clean energy, you know, and it's like no,
Speaker 1: that's in fact no, or that yeah, people would know
Speaker 1: that their energy bills are going to go down.
Speaker 2: People don't know anything about anything, and.
Speaker 1: The thing that they've heard the most is scary stuff
Speaker 1: like exactly, they're electricity's going to be intermittent, that you know,
Speaker 1: these industrial things might harm animals or land or soil
Speaker 1: or whatever.
Speaker 2: Exactly, or like that solar panels give off some sort
Speaker 2: of electricity radiation exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which you know again is not to say because
Speaker 1: I feel like this is this weird way that this
Speaker 1: conversation gets polarized too. I like, I'm fully aware of
Speaker 1: the many, many problems with rare mineral mining. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I actually I had this like very clearly illustrated when
Speaker 1: I was working on the story a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: I was covering the Line three resistance in Minnesota, and
Speaker 1: I was at like a resistance camp and all the
Speaker 1: people there were mostly Indigenous people, were packing up to
Speaker 1: go fight the exact same fight at Saker Pass Nata
Speaker 1: over Lithia mine, you know. So to me, I think
Speaker 1: it is a very good example of like having to
Speaker 1: really think through bigger strugsructural changes so that the renewable
Speaker 1: energy does not become as extractive exactly. The fossil fuel
Speaker 1: energy exactly. And I think that this like community engagement
Speaker 1: in community building is an important part of that.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely essential. And I also think that clean energy
Speaker 2: developers should think about how to make their projects as
Speaker 2: beautiful as possible. Yeah, I think that that's a completely
Speaker 2: legitimate concern.
Speaker 1: Totally, you know, yes, because I have seen a very
Speaker 1: unfortunate kind of like oh, these people need to like
Speaker 1: get over it and just deal with it, which I
Speaker 1: find interesting because I'm like, this is the United States.
Speaker 1: We don't have a deep history of putting aside our
Speaker 1: personal exactly, like goals, well being, whatever the common good ever,
Speaker 1: like except maybe in World War Two it's not rewarded, right,
Speaker 1: you know, But now all of a sudden, you want
Speaker 1: people to just make this huge leap to ring. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't care about my neighborhood completely changing, because it's
Speaker 1: for the greater good that work needs to happen too.
Speaker 1: I think actually that stuff is kind of a necessity
Speaker 1: for climate action in general, like just like people have
Speaker 1: got to start to think about the greater good, the
Speaker 1: common well being.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because you know, we talked earlier about how
Speaker 2: there's little support for phasing out fossil fuels. But the
Speaker 2: same research that found that also found that if you
Speaker 2: talk to people about love and the people they love,
Speaker 2: the places they love, what they care about, and you
Speaker 2: juxtapose wanting to protect and wanting to cultivate these things
Speaker 2: that you love with pollution, which nobody likes, then support
Speaker 2: actually does rise for fossil fuel phase out. And if
Speaker 2: I may just plug my book please five seconds? Yeah, yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: So I actually had the messages because so the chapters
Speaker 2: are deep investigations into fossil fuel propaganda, but they also
Speaker 2: each end with new messages that you can use in
Speaker 2: your own, you know, work about climate change or even
Speaker 2: just talking to your friends about climate change. And I
Speaker 2: had those messages pull tested by Lake Research Partners.
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: And if you know, and the book is written for
Speaker 2: people who are already concerned about climate change. It's not
Speaker 2: written for like deniers. It's written for people to talk
Speaker 2: to other people who are concerned about climate change but
Speaker 2: who don't know or don't believe that we need to
Speaker 2: phase out fossil fuels. And among those people Democrats and
Speaker 2: Republicans who are concerned about climate change. The messages in
Speaker 2: this book increase support for phasing out fossil fuels by
Speaker 2: up to ten points, so they do shift the needle
Speaker 2: a little bit, and that sort of you know, shifting
Speaker 2: the needle, I think is is basically all you can
Speaker 2: ask of a book totally.
Speaker 1: Now I love that that it's like it lays out
Speaker 1: the problem, but there are recommendations. Okay, can we talk
Speaker 1: about this, especially because you're right that I come across
Speaker 1: this all the time people that genuinely are concerned, they
Speaker 1: want there to be action, write whatever, and then we'll
Speaker 1: immediately follow it up with like, but you know, we
Speaker 1: can't just like get off of fossils. Well, actually we can.
Speaker 2: We can, and I show in the second chapter of
Speaker 2: the book on how the rhetoric around the cost of
Speaker 2: climate change has benefited fossil fuel interest today that yes,
Speaker 2: there are going to be major investments into these transformations,
Speaker 2: into new systems, into new modes of production and consumption.
Speaker 2: But on the other side of this transformation, yeah, everybody
Speaker 2: is going to be wealthier and healthier because our electricity
Speaker 2: bills will go down, our transportation bills will go down,
Speaker 2: our heating bills will go down, and our healthcare costs
Speaker 2: will go down. Yep, because you take the effects of
Speaker 2: fossil fuel pollution out of the American economy, even if
Speaker 2: no other country decarbonizes, and the savings are something like
Speaker 2: I don't know, but since I have the book right
Speaker 2: in front of me, I think I can just double
Speaker 2: check it. Drew Schindel, who's at Duke University, testified in
Speaker 2: front of Congress and said that decarbonizing quickly enough to
Speaker 2: halt global heating a two degrees celsius would in the
Speaker 2: next fifty years prevent roughly four point five million premature deaths,
Speaker 2: about three point five million hospitalizations and emergency room visits,
Speaker 2: and approximately three hundred million lost work days in the
Speaker 2: United States alone, even though US air quality is actually
Speaker 2: relatively good already.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And avoiding this sickness and death amounts to a healthcare
Speaker 2: and labor savings of over seven hundred billion dollars per year.
Speaker 2: Seven hundred billion dollars per year, an amount of money
Speaker 2: that will pay for the majority of the transition to
Speaker 2: net zero. I mean, you know net not.
Speaker 1: Directly, of course, right, but that's the things It's like
Speaker 1: that again, I feel like because of the way that
Speaker 1: cost has been discussed and because of the way that
Speaker 1: these models have been built. There's this idea that it's
Speaker 1: just all trade off, no benefits.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and their bensites are huge. Yeah. The trade off
Speaker 2: is the for the industry and for the super wealthy
Speaker 2: people who are heavily invested in that industry and adjacent
Speaker 2: industries and whose life is basically a festival of fossil
Speaker 2: fuel consumption, whether it's their yachts or their private jets,
Speaker 2: or they're you know, going to the fashion collections four
Speaker 2: times a year and buying a whole new wardrobe four
Speaker 2: times a year or whatever it is. Yeah, those are
Speaker 2: the people who are going to be facing some trade offs, right,
Speaker 2: But the rest of us are going to be healthier, wealthier,
Speaker 2: and guess what, we get to have a Liverpool planet
Speaker 2: for our kids. So, you know, I don't know, to me,
Speaker 2: that seems like a really good deal.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you what I always ask people, which
Speaker 1: is like, what is the thing that you wish people
Speaker 1: would ask you about your book that you haven't been
Speaker 1: able to talk about in interviews? Is there a question
Speaker 1: that you're like, Man, I wish someone would ask me
Speaker 1: about this so I can talk about it.
Speaker 2: I mean, weirdly, nobody asks me about China, like I actually.
Speaker 1: Wanted to ask all about that, but too like actually,
Speaker 1: but then you get it's hilarious to me how quickly
Speaker 1: we've gone from like, oh, but India and China or
Speaker 1: the problem, to China's taking over the solar industry.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean to they have already taken it over. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean they came back from the Copenhagen conference and
Speaker 2: in twenty ten designated solar, rare, earth minerals, electric vehicles,
Speaker 2: and environmental conservation as quote strategic emerging industries and then
Speaker 2: just invested and had domestic content and deployment real requirements
Speaker 2: on the subsidies. And you know now they absolutely have
Speaker 2: cornered the markets for all of those technologies that we're
Speaker 2: going to need. But the thing that really blew my
Speaker 2: mind when I was researching this book that nobody talks about,
Speaker 2: and even after the book came out, nobody can get
Speaker 2: their head around this is that China actually has the
Speaker 2: most comprehensive, detailed and actionable climate policy in place in
Speaker 2: the whole world. When I started researching the India and
Speaker 2: China chapter, I was really worried because I had totally
Speaker 2: bought that talking point hook line and sinker. I was like, how,
Speaker 2: I know it can't be truthful because it's being spread
Speaker 2: by fossil fuel interests, but I don't know exactly how
Speaker 2: it's not true or whatever. And then I discovered that
Speaker 2: not only has the United States often played or invariably
Speaker 2: actually played the spoiler role in international climate negotiations, you
Speaker 2: know China in fact, once they pledged to peep their
Speaker 2: emissions at twenty thirty and zero them out by twenty sixty,
Speaker 2: just put in this, like all of government, all of
Speaker 2: society policy architecture that actually has real targets and a
Speaker 2: reward and punishment system in place for the bureaucracy to
Speaker 2: actually meet those targets. So you know what I say
Speaker 2: the message, and that is that if America doesn't get
Speaker 2: its proverbial tushy off the pot, we're going to have
Speaker 2: an authoritarian government dominating the economy of the post carbon
Speaker 2: society and essentially being in a position to set international
Speaker 2: governance norms.
Speaker 1: Please.
Speaker 2: I mean it. To Biden's credit, I think Biden recognized it,
Speaker 2: which was part of what he wanted to do with
Speaker 2: IRA the Inflation Reduction Act to try to de risk
Speaker 2: the supply chains and have American clean energy manufactured domestically
Speaker 2: so that we wouldn't be in this position of being
Speaker 2: essentially dependent on China.
Speaker 1: And actually it's funny because I talked to people UK
Speaker 1: government shortly after the IRA passed and they they and
Speaker 1: that you start did start to really freak out about
Speaker 1: oh shit, now America has moved. Yes, now we're you know,
Speaker 1: And it did have that impact of like totally you know,
Speaker 1: which in some ways I'm like, well, maybe that is
Speaker 1: the you know, that is the market based mechanism at work,
Speaker 1: like you know, they're competing and whatever. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but like I like it.
Speaker 2: I think it's good. I would like people to compete
Speaker 2: to achieve net zero first. You know, the US government
Speaker 2: has acted as the protector of corporate profits for decades now,
Speaker 2: you know. And and I think we need to shift
Speaker 2: our priorities because climate change is an existential threat. It's
Speaker 2: a timed test later is too late, and we don't
Speaker 2: get a do over at the end either, So I
Speaker 2: just you know, That's the piece.
Speaker 1: I find really interesting about about a lot of this rhetoric, too,
Speaker 1: is that it does all really contribute to this idea
Speaker 1: that like there's just sort of endless amounts of political compromise, right, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: That's not actually how the atmosphere works.
Speaker 2: No, that's not how physics works, and that's not how
Speaker 2: time works either, you know, And I realized that political
Speaker 2: exigencies are real. But the problem is to my mind
Speaker 2: that these political fights and the question of what we're
Speaker 2: going to compromise on and not compromise on is taking
Speaker 2: place on an arena where we haven't agreed that we
Speaker 2: need to phase out fossil fuels, where we still think
Speaker 2: we can do both. So I don't know, I just
Speaker 2: feel like, yes to compromise, but like you compromise on
Speaker 2: what field? Like, there has to be a kind of
Speaker 2: parameter around the debate that I feel like is still
Speaker 2: missing into my mind.
Speaker 1: No, I totally agree. There really isn't another political issue
Speaker 1: that is similar to that, like where exactly actually there
Speaker 1: is an objective reality and real baked in consequences no
Speaker 1: matter what you know. It's like, of course, there are
Speaker 1: consequences to policies, right, Like you know, the ongoing healthcare
Speaker 1: debate costs plenty of people money, time, health lives. Right,
Speaker 1: there are real consequences to that stuff. However, you can
Speaker 1: infinitely really like iterate on exactly exactly, you know, and
Speaker 1: you just don't have that in this situation.
Speaker 2: Now later is too late. Yeah, And you know, I
Speaker 2: talk about this in the first chapter of the book
Speaker 2: a little bit too, that there really was this sort
Speaker 2: of ground swell of alarm. Yeah, after that IPCC report
Speaker 2: and through the way Greta Thunberg amplified indigenous activists and
Speaker 2: the whole thing. And then this narrative emerged from the
Speaker 2: Breakthrough Institute, mind you, that we had made so much
Speaker 2: progress that now we have averted the worst case scenario.
Speaker 2: So I detail the recent history of climate politics, this
Speaker 2: rise of alarm, this narrative filtering through the media ecosystem,
Speaker 2: that we've avoided the worst case scenario and we can
Speaker 2: all exhale, and then I end the chapter with you
Speaker 2: talking about the latest science, which shows that, in fact,
Speaker 2: it's turning out that the impacts of warming, how warming
Speaker 2: affects the climate system, is emerging, or the impacts are
Speaker 2: emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes.
Speaker 2: So even if it seems like we're headed towards three
Speaker 2: degrees celsius of warming or a little under by twenty
Speaker 2: one hundred. It turns out that that warming is going
Speaker 2: to look a lot more like the four degrees we
Speaker 2: thought were five degrees we thought we had avoided, that
Speaker 2: we had anticipated. So actually we can't exhale at all.
Speaker 2: And you see, now climate deniers like Ross Dothit, who's
Speaker 2: a Lukewarmer. I mean, there's no air between the position
Speaker 2: of the Breakthrough Institute and the predition of Ross Dothit
Speaker 2: and the predition of someone like Matt Iglesias, who all say, yeah,
Speaker 2: climate change is real, but you know, we can take
Speaker 2: time for markets to solve it. We need to increase
Speaker 2: oil and gas production because Americans like that and don't
Speaker 2: worry because we've avoided the worst case scenario. This is
Speaker 2: their take now, and it's so wrong and it's so dangerous.
Speaker 2: And I realized that there are these, you know, waves
Speaker 2: to history. And we've just been through like a global
Speaker 2: trauma with the COVID nineteen pandemic and people have deep
Speaker 2: crisis fatigue and we're still kind of recovering from that emotionally, economically,
Speaker 2: et ceter But again, it's like climate change is accelerating.
Speaker 2: It's here right now, and you know, no matter what
Speaker 2: else is going on. If you're being pushed off a cliff,
Speaker 2: you've got to find a way to stop yourself or
Speaker 2: else you're going to go over. I really really don't
Speaker 2: want us to go over, you know. I love the kid,
Speaker 2: I love all with his little friends, Like, I just
Speaker 2: don't want that to be what humans are on this planet.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because I feel like, in a way that
Speaker 1: mismatch between what scientists were kind of warning about and
Speaker 1: then what they're finding now that it's like actually even
Speaker 1: slightly worse. I do feel like, and at least for
Speaker 1: some scientists, that the discourse around alarmism, uncertainty and all
Speaker 1: that stuff did put pressure on them totally to make
Speaker 1: more conservative protection totally. And it's like a really good
Speaker 1: example of like the result of this stuff.
Speaker 2: And so that's you know. So in the first chapter
Speaker 2: where I talk about this tactic of accusing people of
Speaker 2: being alarmists, I talk about how there are actually lots
Speaker 2: of different positions within the climate movement, and that the
Speaker 2: majority of them actually kind of reinforce or give a
Speaker 2: kind of legitimacy to the accusation that people who talk
Speaker 2: about danger are alarmists. So you've got the lukewarmers like
Speaker 2: the Breakthrough Institute of Gleasias's, etc. The Ross staffits, everyone
Speaker 2: at the Wall Street Journal. And then you have the
Speaker 2: techno optimists, someone like Hannah Ritchie, who is very aware
Speaker 2: of how much danger we're in but feels that it's
Speaker 2: more effective to point to what's hopeful and to kind
Speaker 2: of create a sense of can do optimism. And you know,
Speaker 2: not every message works for everybody, so there might be
Speaker 2: a role for that in the discourse. But she also
Speaker 2: kind of, at least in some of her writings around
Speaker 2: her book Not the End of the World, she also
Speaker 2: sort of bashes people who exaggerate the dangers or seem
Speaker 2: a little bit emotionally unstable to kind of distance her
Speaker 2: climate discourse from them. But I feel like what an
Speaker 2: unintended consequence of that strategy is to end up downplaying
Speaker 2: dangers in a way that's ultimately unhelpful. So it's very complicated.
Speaker 2: And then you've got the scientists, as you just said,
Speaker 2: who are like, you know, being so scrupulous because this
Speaker 2: is a tactic of the deniers to pounce on any
Speaker 2: little error or any little misspeaking and like shred the
Speaker 2: person to try to make them seem untrustworthy, as the
Speaker 2: Breakthrough Institute just did with me. And also they don't
Speaker 2: ever want to exaggerate because now they want to just
Speaker 2: say only what they can absolutely back up one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: And also like science is supposed to be this dispassionate,
Speaker 2: objective endeavor, so they're just like it's overdetermined for them
Speaker 2: to err on the side of least drama. But then
Speaker 2: what ends up happening there is that they in a
Speaker 2: way end up reinforcing the message that people who talk
Speaker 2: about the dangers of climate change are just like either
Speaker 2: stable or like trying to manipulate everyone into accepting socialism
Speaker 2: or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: So it's a very messy and complicated media ecosystem. But
Speaker 2: I just feel like there's no way to read the
Speaker 2: scientific research to trace what's already happening on our planet
Speaker 2: and not feel fear. And I feel like, you know,
Speaker 2: fear was motivating for me. That's what got me into
Speaker 2: the climate movement. I know a lot of people became
Speaker 2: active around climate change after they read David Wallace Wells's
Speaker 2: book The Uninhabitable Earth because it scared them. So fear
Speaker 2: can be motivating, you know. And also it's not even
Speaker 2: like a question of whether it's instrumentally positive or not.
Speaker 2: It's like, when people feel bad things, you have to
Speaker 2: see that and validate that, acknowledge that, because part of
Speaker 2: what feeds into denial is just like feeling overwhelmed and alone.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, I didn't fly for a while
Speaker 2: because I just felt like it just felt bad at
Speaker 2: a certain point, like I was like the only one
Speaker 2: not flying. It felt like and you nothing is worse
Speaker 2: than feeling like you're alone.
Speaker 1: You're out on like a crusade on your own.
Speaker 2: And so like, I'm not saying that people need to
Speaker 2: stop playing. I'm just saying that sometimes even just thinking
Speaker 2: about climate change or talking about it in your social
Speaker 2: circles will make you feel like you're alone or something,
Speaker 2: and like you're not alone. Vast majorities of people in
Speaker 2: this country are concerned or alarmed about climate change, and
Speaker 2: they don't know that other people are, but like people are,
Speaker 2: and it's it's it's in what I say ultimately in
Speaker 2: the end of this chapter on alarmism, it's not a
Speaker 2: symptom of emotional weakness to feel this fear. It's a
Speaker 2: symptom of courage. It's a sign that you are enough
Speaker 2: to look at the science to see what it implies,
Speaker 2: and then not to look away, to stay with that
Speaker 2: and to kind of engage with it because you want
Speaker 2: to fight against these interests that are willing to trash
Speaker 2: our miracle of a planet just to make some more
Speaker 2: money for a few more years. It's courage, and courage
Speaker 2: is a really important virtue and you should embrace it.