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