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