Hello, and welcome back to Drilled Season fourteen. Obstruction. In our Carbon Brose season, we talked about one way that climate obstruction intersects with the far right, the rigid enforcement of gender norms and the feminizing of a politics of care, care for the environment and for each other. Today we're digging into the history of far right approaches to the environment in general and how that history informs how right wing campaigners in the US and beyond approach climate issues.
Today I'm joined in the first half of the show by Jesse Bryant, a researcher at Yale University who studies far right conceptions of nature, and in the second half by Dieter Plowe, a lecturer at University Kessel in Germany who studies the intersection of far right politics and environmental issues in Europe. I found both conversations absolutely fascinating and really helpful for understanding the content we're dealing with in
many parts of the world at the moment. I hope you find them helpful to Here we go.
My name is Jesse Callahan Bryant. I am a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of the Environment.
One of the first questions I wanted to ask is to have you explain the difference between conservatism and far right culture.
Yeah, I can try my best, you know, I will say that this is like a distinction that even in the broader literature, I think is a tough distinction to make. I think, you know. The way that I think about it, though, first is that both categories need to be situated geographically
and historically. The conservatism and the far right I think are useful categories, but they mean really different things in the United States, as they do in Europe, as they do in China, as they do in India, and so I think the first thing is when we're talking about these categories is to be pretty culturally specific, because what matters to I think conservatism is a commitment to the status quo in many ways. In the United States context, I think there are many ways in which the center left,
mainstream Democrats even quite conservative. Actually, if you sort of step back and let our partisan identifications and identities dissolve a little bit, you know, there are a lot of ways in which Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton especially are were deeply conservative figures and are sort of oriented towards upholding, you know, whatever social order exists now. So that's how I sort of think about conservatism. You know,
there are touchstones in this sort of ideological canon. Edmund Burke is often pointed to as a figure. It's important to conservatism, a sort of sincere conservatism, that's you know, slow, slow change tradition, sort of humble politics. And I think when you think about the far right or radical right or extreme right, I think the first thing that comes to mind in contrast to conservatism, which is the politics
of stasis, is just the politics of change. And when we think about something like the second Trump administration, well the first as well, but what the MAGA movement has become. I mean, it is a politics of change. There are a lot of things that they would like to change. And the question, you know, in distinguishing between conservative and far right is is just like, okay, are these people looking to switch the social order in some way? If so, then they might be far right. And then the question
is are they on the right? And it's sort of like, yeah, they seem to be on the right. So I think it's totally fair to call the current MAGA coalition a far right movement. And another good example I think is, you know what I think people often refer to as fascism in early twentieth century Europe. Nazism is different. But like Nazism itself was a very in some ways progressive movement at the time. It was towards It was change oriented. It was about a new vision for the social order,
as was Mussolini's fascism in Italy. And so if you're dealing with the politics of change, for me, at least, I will say, people will disagree with this. You're not dealing with conservatism. You're dealing with something else. That something else could be a lot of things. It could be far right, it could be far left, it could be some other thing. Right rightis versus change. That's so helpful.
This is infinitely fascinating for me, and also complicated because because right now, if you look at the Maga Coalition, you can say, yeah, it is a politics of change, for sure, But when you think about the kinds of change at play for me, there are two really distinct, almost like imaginaries at play. There's, on one hand, an imaginary that is much more related to a Nazi imaginary, which is this nostalgic, a sort of conservative nostalgic revolution.
So there's a part of the MAGA Coalition I think imagines this sort of like you know, the American chestnut will return, and like the nuclear family will return. And then of course there is the totally unrelated winds of change that are extremely future oriented, in the form of Elon Musk wanting to build a new society on Mars and Peter Teel and the rest of the tech bros trying to imagine you know, new forms of technologically driven
futuristic societies. Both of those are far right in right sense that they are pro change and in my estimation super pro hierarchy, super pro inequality. But they are different. Once driven by nostalgia, it's a change of nostalgia, and the other is driven by a change of sort of futurism. And so within even sort of you know, there's conservatism, which is sort of stasis. Within the far right, there
is a politics of change. But within that politics of the far right, there is this really important cleavage right now between the sort of politics of nostalgia and this politics of futurism. And I think we see that play out in the United States like literally every day.
Totally you know, related to the climate stuff too. I was thinking about the Peter Teel kind of end of the spectrum, this cyber libertarianism. And there's this group called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. I'm sure you've heard of them. I don't know. There's so many of these groups, but this one was like started a couple of years ago.
Jordan Peterson is nominally in charge of it, but it's like funded by the people who funded Brexit, and it includes like a bunch of right wing politicians from the US, Canada and Australia, and then a ton of anti trans people and then also climate skeptics. It's a really interesting crowd, and a bunch of nationalists as well. The guy who like used to be in Momford and Sons and then left because he's like a far right guy. Now he's in there.
He's not Marcus Mumford. Wait, what the hell?
It's so wild. I'm obsessed with this group because it's such a random mix of people. And they made their annual conference available for a streaming past this year, so I bought one so I could tape all of it.
There's this guy, Eric Weinstein, who was the head of Peter Thiel's venture capital firm for years and then they had sort of a like falling out, but mostly because Peter Teel's so weirdly sensitive about his public perception, even though it's like everyone thinks you're a giant weirdo dude, Like.
He's so weird.
Jeanie's not going back in the bottle on that one. Litally, yeah, but he's really sensitive about it. And some of the sort of rowe podcast universe started to turn on Eric Weinstein because he had a bizarre appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. Anyway, this guy Eric Weinstein gave this talk at the ARC conference and it was so unhinged, but it totally made sense in the world of these guys, where he was just like, we can't share an atmosphere with these people anymore.
You think you've been through the culture wars, which is some sort of cute Internet conflict that seems really draining, exhausting. No, No, this is actually something that has recently been termed hybrid war. It's a two thousand and seven concept from Frank Hoffman, and it says that in the current situation, non shooting wars have no border and no end. Anything that can come through the Internet means that there is no frontier.
We are all.
Combatants to the people who practice hybrid warfare. We can all be manipulated from abroad, Tokyo roses, everywhere, cyber attacks, diplomacy, psychological attacks, information warfare. The new culture war hypothesis is that the culture war is domestic hybrid war. I've called it the no Name Revolution since twenty seventeen.
Right now, where we.
Are is four light years from the nearest star. There is no way to get to the speed of light or even close. We are marooned in our solar system with only two habitable rocks that aren't the Earth, and that's with a lot of work. We cannot stay with all of us on one planet, with one atmosphere, with people this crazy and tools this powerful.
The thing that I find interesting about them from a climate perspective is that they have almost the opposite opinion as all the client deniers, where like they very much believe that climate change is happening and they're freaked out about it, and it's part of the drive to leave the planet. Build bunkers, invest heavily in like AI twenty four hour surveillance so they can deal with the uprisings that are coming.
Yeah, it is. I mean, it's it's for sure of politics of escapism, and it's for sure a lifeboat politics, and it's for sure never waste a good crisis sort of situation for those guys I think, I mean, right, yeah, right, Like Elon Musk, he's most famous for like renewable energy technologies,
you know, like what are we doing? Yeah, But the way that they're reacting to that, of course, is that they really just do believe themselves, like categorically in terms of even onto logically just as a separate species of human from the rest of us. I guess totally, yeah, totally, yeah, they are totally fine generally with lee everybody behind. And I'm not sure what else is the goal?
Yeah.
If if not that, like I don't understand why, for instance, like if that is not true, Elon Musk isn't using his fucking huge brain to create a really good healthcare system or something else, because like it, I mean, to me, it is just a rebirth of the turn of the century super conservative and fucked up progressive politics from like the late eighteen hundreds of this sort of like the
elite should rule everybody. We're going to like have a sort of eugenics program and sterilize that dumb people and then like the species will have a higher level of fitness. And we're obsessed with IQ and like that's it, and it's just that's what it is. The idea that there is some there's some virtue attached to this dimension of this of the fuck current far right movement or mega coalition in the US is like absurd to me. Yeah,
I was just writing a paper. I'd say that I'm writing a fucking blog post about this, but about a transition in societies that has happened since the beginning of Western civilization. I mean Aristotle was writing about exactly this, you know, two thousand years ago, of the transition of in any society, when the selection of elites shifts from the virtuous to the wealthy. That is a degeneration that happens in every society and it leads to the downfalls
of societies. And these people aren't virtuous, They just like believe themselves to be better than everybody else. And it's a function of wealth. And there's a lot I would say logics within American culture, going back to social Darwinism that sort of translate wealth into virtue and it's very sensible. Like people love Elon Musk in the US. You know,
he's an extremely successful, popular celebrity. And if it were true that in American culture we didn't think that wealth meant to virtue, that he would not be popular because there's nothing appealing about this person, right, Yeah, virtuous in any sense of the term, even if he believes himself to be part of like Western civilization in some meaningful way, no figure of virtue in whatever you think of Western civilization in the past. I would look at this guy
and be like, this is a virtuous person. He's just a wealthy guy, yeah, who, like you know, to his credit, does believe in climate change, does think it's a big thing, but is using this crisis in order to escape his responsibility along with the rest of sort of the right wing elite I think today.
Yeah, okay, So I wanted to ask about the arguments against climate action being made by religious and particularly Catholic groups in the US. I don't know if that's something that you can speak to.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think the question in the US right now of Catholicism, I think is like super under addressed currently. Yeah, Like in the US, you know, a prototypically Protestant, individualistic, rugged individualism, bootstrapsy sort of country that literally, like one hundred years ago was targeting Catholics with terrorist groups like the KKK. And the first American president who was Catholic, JFK, was assassinated, you know, and
Biden was the second Catholic president. And you know, we have JD. Vance now who's very outward about his Catholicism.
He and Leonard Leo like in the background.
CEO huge amounts of dark money. Yeah, huge amounts of dark money. And it's sort of unthinkable one hundred years ago in the United States, and yet here we are with Catholic power increasing in the United States. The first American pope in Rome is like a massive deal in
the religious history of the United States. And so I'm of two minds with the sort of Catholic orientation towards climate change, in part because the last pope, I think with led out to c and hosted huge climate conferences at the Vatican, had a lot to say about climate change. And I think right now it's not entirely clear what direction that will go in. As power is changing in Rome and conservative Catholic power is ascendant in the United States.
And you know, I actually spent the past like living in Spain. I've become semi obsessed with Catholicism. Yeah, because isn't.
That really the origin of Opus day is from Spain? Right Yeah?
Yeah, Oh my god, Yeah totally. And there's a book that was written kind of recently about the collapse of Opista in Spain and the ascent of Opustay in the United States. Right the recent sort of like dark money Leonard Leo Catholic Information Center in DC sort of vibe. The president of the Heritage Foundation right now is a former president of Wyoming Catholic College. There's a lot there
that I think is actually pretty under addressed. I think when it comes to climate change, I think the questions become weirder or something because on the one hand, my understanding especially the United States, but I think more globally, alongside this rise of this concept of national conservatism, this sort of drive towards national sovereignty and against global sovereignty. But you know, that translates into everything from cynicism around the UN to international aid, as we see with the
destruction of USAID. What's interesting about that is that from like a more Protestant perspective that is fundamentally skeptical towards massive structures of global power. You know. That was the whole point of Protestantism, was the protest right, the global over of the Catholic Church. Yeah, so like that makes sense to me, this sort of isolationist, paleo conservative we don't want to meddle in other people's shit, and we
don't want them to meddle in ours. That feels more aligned with this traditional climate skepticism, which is just like, screw the UN, screw cop Why are we paying for on one hand climate adaptation in Peru and on the other hand funding wars wherever? But now with the sort of ascendant power of Catholicism in the US, which Catholicism is a global concept. It is imperial, it does have
a global imagination. It is not against anything in particular, you know, So it almost complicates the picture and makes I think, especially in the United States, this is not true in European countries. But like the rise of Catholicism and isolationism in the US simultaneously, and how that manifests both in politics in general but climate change in particular, feels like a new turn, I guess, and one that feels to me less coherent than the you know, more Protestant. Yeah,
screw the Catholic Church, screw any global solidarity. We're just doing our own thing. I have my own relationship to God, like I have my church. We believe whatever, you know.
So yeah, yeah, in general, I feel like the Protestant focus on an individual relationship with God is sort of a huge underpinning of hyperindividualism in the US in general, which seems like such a huge problem amidst all the things. Yeah, such an underpinning of so much of this stuff is this idea that all that matters is like me and my family in our direct relationship with God.
You know, and that maps on what's weird right now, is that that maps onto our politics, you know, pretty well, like Protestantism. Protestanism is the majority Christian religion in most of Red America, and it's just the opposite in most of Blue America. Catholicism is the majority form of Christianity in the Northeast and the Midwest and parts of California, and so alignment with certain kinds of power, certain imaginations of global solidarity and capitalism, it sort of makes sense.
But to understand exactly how certain figures thread that needle, like JD. Van So, I find absolutely fascinating. I think if you read too much into the way that he threads that needle, like a lot of people in the sort of Trump orbit, like the logical falls apart, right, it's not coherent.
Yeah, anyway, kind of relatedly, certainly, not unrelatedly. I wanted to ask you about how and why climate got pulled into great replacement theory. Oh yeah, what happened there?
I have a lot of thoughts, for sure. One of my papers right now that I'm writing is about intra Republican polarization on climate change, not between the parties but within the parties over the past thirty years. And what you see when you look at the right over the past since climate change became a thing that was important to people and controversial, is that from the beginning it's a question of sovereignty. It's not a question of the science.
For the main distinction within the right, you know, not between the right and left. You know that does have these sort of anti science denial sort of things. But the really salient, durable aspect of the climate question at least in the United States and in Europe also increasingly
is a question of sovereignty. National sovereignty. It projects so cleanly onto questions of the global versus the national in ways that other things do not, and a lot of those What I see in my research is that a lot of those same policy frames, sort of like public projections of the question that was really underlying a lot of the right wing versus conservative discontent about climate change for about twenty years, really translated itself into the immigration
question now in mega politics, which is to me, the main policy problem in the imagination of the American right today. It's really the thing that holds the whole coalition together. If there was not an invasion on the southern border, there would be no maga politics, do you know what I mean? Like it's not there isn't any other policy imagination.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the way that I think about this is that the question of national sovereignty is very important to right wing politics globally and took American right wing politics today, although it wasn't literally twenty years ago. Climate change sort of like I think, was an almost laboratory for these policy framings, sort of like how do you tie sovereignty to policy questions. Throughout the nineties, this was true of
the paleocons, the paleo conservatives in the United States. It kind of disappeared during Bush when we all did our sort of flag waving nine to eleven stuff for a while, emerged again with the Tea Party and really sort of
gain power in MAGA. And the role of the Great Replacement theory in that politics is to suggest that there is some elite cabal, vaguely Jewish but global, that is causing this or is exerting agency in driving this loss of national sovereignty, this poisoning at the southern border, this dilution of whatever wasp Protestant thing that people imagine the United States. It's to have been or to be, which is, you know, only half true at any point in history.
But it's a way to translate the realities of a global capitalist economy which necessarily just looks for cheap labor and moves people around and tries to like, you know, get the most for the cheapest possible thing, and that means like importing a ton of cheap labor from wherever
the hell you want to. It translates that into a more legible story for the average person to understand that there is some person or people or cabal that is intentionally doing this kind of thing as opposed to the rights for me more true, which is just the sort of diffuse agency of actors within a giant system of capitalism that like, of course like brings you know, cheap quasi enslaved brown people into the United States to do
cheap as whole point. So it makes a better story out of a reality that's too complex really to tell to a general public. And it's really powerful. It works like it works everywhere. That's whether we like it or not. It's a story that has salience and explains something that I think is real, which a lot of us, you know, whatever academics might not want to address, is real into a legible story for the average person.
I mean, I feel like that's a lot of the explanation.
Behind the backlash to trans people to just like this, looking for someone to pin the.
Pains of lead stage capitalism on other than the capital is I guess, you know, yeah, yeah.
I feel like that issue. It's funny that I mean, it's not funny, but the climate and trans issues have become increasingly entangled. I think it's a really interesting and telling reality for sure.
Yeah, okay, what is accelerationism? Why has it been embraced by some far right actors?
Yeah, explain so. I often get these these terms mixed up in sort of the sociology of religion. But you know, there is an idea within a lot of evangelical for it has been you know, since since the past one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years, that this idea of the second Coming of Jesus is upon us, that the apocalypse
is coming, it's around the corner. This pre millenarian thought that this here, this tangible world that US Protestant evangelicals can feel and since is not the real thing, and that soon this will all burn and I knew sort of heavenly world will be upon us. And that's a sort of a politics that's fueled American evangelical thought for
hundreds of years. And the way that it projects out of climate politics is just like, okay, here's all these leftist libs who are like trying to stop the apocalypse, which is you know, climate change or some nuclear thing happening, and we actually believe that it is moral and ethical and just to accelerate that process, to accelerate the sort of destruction of the of the immoral wasteland of late stage capitalism in order to bring about more quickly the
Golden Age. The odd thing about accelerationism is it has Protestant backing in the sort of pre millinary and thought, but it also resonates with a lot of thoughts and sort of mythic structures within like Hindu thought and South
Asian and Eastern ideas of cyclicality. And the way that you'll see this manifest in pop culture is, you know, it doesn't register as important to many people, but you'll hear Joe Rogan talk about the Cali Yuga and these sort of ideas of like Hindu cyclicality, the Caliyuga being the age we're in, the dark age that can only be we can only get to the Golden Age completing
the cycle through complete destruction of civilization. Wow and both, I mean so it manifests both in these sort of Hindu logics, it manifests in Protestant pre millenarian logics, and it's the sort of worshiping of the apocalypse and the idea that we can't actually get ourselves out of this that there are bigger forces, whether they're you know, wich gods are in control of that, I'm not entirely sure.
And this was a structure of Greek thought too, but it's very common, but that we don't have we human son of control over this, so all we can do is sort of accelerate the cycle, get the apocalypse to come faster, and as a result reinstate you know, an ordered golden age. But that's like the charitable interpretation of accelerationism.
It manifests obviously in like dumb ass ways too, where there's just like far right lunatics on their computers who are like, I'm just gonna go kill a ton of people or shut down a server warehouse, which you know, say what you will, Like, I would rather people be shutting down server warehouses than shooting school children. So yeah, yeah,
more power to them. But yeah, the idea of acceleration is generally just to accelerate the destruction of society, whether that be cyclical in the Hindu sense or linear in the Christian sense.
Okay, I this is such an uplifting conversation. I know, I know, it's really it's just interesting to me because it's like, Okay, everyone is is pinpointing the same set of things that are wrong, but like the causes and solutions are so wildly divergent.
It's very interesting. Hey, I've got to say, I mean that gives me hope though in a weird way. Yeah, it's like to know that these people, I think in the most charitable version, are like identifying late stage capitalism and trying to make sense of it. Yeah, I'm like sympathetic that, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, like you said, the visions are just the visions for after are so divergent. Yeah.
Yeah, you know, there's like all those memes that are like men will do blah blah blah to avoid going to therapy. I feel like, yeah, it's like capitalists will do anything to avoid just like reducing consumption. It's really not that bad, guys, Yeah.
I know, totally totally. Yeah.
It's like, wow, like we've said, how much money on figuring out how to terriform mars instead of just reducing a tiny you know what I mean?
Yes, for sure, for sure. I mean yeah, technological progress, man, that's that's the only real ideology. So it's the thing we all agree on.
Yeah, yeah, to turn that ship. Yeah, it's really yeah, it's interesting.
Okay, so I should say really quick, this is something I just doesn't aside in the I think that is very true in the US, like being in Spain and living there, I'm sure this might be true in Coastrika too, Like yeah, like people don't worship technological progress in the same way even in Western Europe that they do in the US. It's like a really American thing.
Or like the accumulation of stuff anywhere near as much at all. It's very just like actually, yeah, here it's much more like and I got this vibe in Spain as well. It's like the whole point is to have like time to hang out with people, time to hang out with people you enjoy. That's the goal of life. It's not yeah, making money or coming up with the
coolest new technological innovation or whatever. And like I'm not saying that there's no good that's ever come of like that drive in the US, because there definitely has been. But yeah, it's just a very different goal than a lot of the rest of the world has.
Dude, I have such double consciousness around this living in Spain because I'm like, I like intellectually understand like I'm a lunatic American who works too hard and like I should be better at enjoying free time. And then I like live my life and I'm like, why the hell are all these people just hanging out all day? I like walk through this town I live, and I'm like, what the fuck are all these people even doing? And like I'm watching myself like be a dumbass, you know,
and I'm like, actually, actually get out of this. It's great.
I have the same thing because like in Costa Rica, it's just like it's Costrinka's did a very good job of like putting a very bougie coat of paint on being a Central American country. But like the reality is like you are not. There is no multitasking. You are getting one test done a day, ma'am. And that is it's like so hard for me to accept that. Okay, I just have one more question for you, and that
is around. I have been seeing this very persistent idea amongst a lot of climate people that goes roughly, oh, the more people experience climate disasters, the more they will
get behind acting on climate. And then I say, oh, you, sweet summer child, because really, like most of the evidence we have points in exactly the opposite direction that like, actually, you know, people, people are not their best selves when they are facing multiple directions on those to their lives, and like, in fact, it tends to drive people towards
the far right or authoritarianism or things like that. So yeah, I just kind of wanted to get your take on that, like what the research actually shows in terms of how climate impacts fuel extremism.
My understanding of where that research is at is it's just really mixed and pretty context dependent. There's wars all over the world now, and there's climate dimensions to that. But I think there's this within this research, within this conversation about like, well there will be more extreme weather and everyone will like get on board with what the
UN says. I think is to misunderstand how human nature works, or at least how I understand human nature to work, which is that I'm not entirely sold that in moments of crisis, like a global imaginary will just appear. I think that's a thing that sort of Western developmental ideas like to assume is true. But in crisis, people turn inward a lot of the time. I mean, there is
obviously evidence to the contrary. And my understanding is that in crisis, people are very sympathetic and issues of identity disappear. There's all these interviews, this beautiful study by these professors at Columbia about people's opinions immediately following the nine eleven attacks, and you would think that people would be quite angry towards like Middle Eastern and Arab people, but it was
actually just the opposite happened. New Yorkers were immediately after the attacks super like, yeah, really sympathetic and hoping that this didn't lead to some bigger conflict, and it actually sparked sympathies across these identity boundaries that were ostensibly at play totally.
There was actually so much like warm and fuzzy community building.
Yes, yeah, for sure at some time. Yeah yeah, So immediately in the wake of those sorts of things. I mean, you see this with natural disasters all the time. But what natural disasters do not in the short run, I mean,
in the short run that is true. In the long run, what natural disasters do is they just like fuck up communities so like, and when people are struggling just to survive, they turn inward like it's not like there's the immediate crisis situation with any of these, you know, climate driven natural disasters, whether it be a hurricane or tornado or lightning storm like whatever. But like the destruction of community is hard, whether it's war or natural disaster, and it's
hard to recover in a lot of times. You know, if if we don't have sort of systems to support communities, FEMA, for instance, is getting gutted. Like we're not doing USAID anymore. In the long term, when people are hurting, they really have to turn inward and survive. And I'm not entirely sure when the human animal is in survival mode. There's a whole lot of evidence to suggest that, like we're our best selves. I mean, when I don't eat lunch, I turn into an asshole and so like right exactly.
Like we have a word for being hungry and angry at the same time.
Yeah, And so the idea of like instability, and I think we're seeing this is that what global instability and insecurity does is it turns pre existing organisms, whether they be biological or social, inward, and I think we're seeing that in the form of national conservatism and the sort of resurgence of national counterintuitive national nationalism in a moment when our national systems are also being destroyed in some ways, which doesn't make a whole of sense, you know. Yeah,
and so I just don't totally get why. I don't know on how, especially the way the climate change has been pitched to the general public over the past thirty years, that in any way, in moments of insecurity, people would be more willing to extend sympathies towards global organizations like the UN or sort of international agreements between countries based on good faith to set aside resources in order to support the collective good. I wish that was the case.
I guess I just might have a little bit more of a pessimistic view towards the human animal than some people. I mean, if people want to do big climate change work at an international level in a moment of crisis, it's just going to take a lot of authoritarianism. So
that's the trade off. You can either have dout intervention that mandates things of people in crisis, but to assume that people are going to become more sympathetic towards climate efforts instituted by people they don't know from a disadvantage in a moment of crisis, I think doesn't make a whole lot of I would say common sense to me. And there's also obviously the problem of like hurricane is
a hurricane, Like is it did climate change affect it? Yeah? Probably, but like it fu So it's not like, oh, here's a climate narrative coming at you. It's like, no, Like my house is underwater, so.
Right, right. I've also seen some stuff around right when groups kind of seizing on those moments to have boots on the ground and be like helping people out and kind of endearing themselves to people and seizing local power in those moments too. Yeah, But like, I guess there's
an opportunity there for climate people as well. Malcolm Harris wrote this book that came out I think earlier this year, and one of the things that he talked about being a possible, you know, action item for climate people was to create like community disaster councils that basically like mutual aid networks that activate in times of disaster.
I think that's incredible. I just like, to be honest with that kind of stuff. I have no idea what it has anything to do with climate change, Like, I just don't It's like it appears to me similar to like missionary work when people from a church go down to like Costa Rica after hurt me.
And yes, it's sort of like help people. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sort of like sympathetic to that because like they're helping people even though they're like maybe evangelizing a little bit. But that feels like what that climate thing would be if people, if climate researchers were to do like mutual aid work. That's just basically to me missionary work.
It's missionary work, it is, yeah, exactly, But I think that was I think actually like I'm kind of into that, Yeah, do that because otherwise the people that are going to do it are either evangelicals or right wing militia exactly.
Yeah. I think I think maybe like missionaries, you might like the people who are doing that just might need to distance themselves a little bit from their evangelical goals, you know, and just sort of like often.
Yeah, just help again. That was Jesse Bryant at Yale University. He contributed to a chapter in a new book from the folks at the Climate Social Science Network called Climate Obstruction a Global Survey. I highly recommend this book for folks who are looking to get a handle on all the various forces working to obstruct climate action today. Coming up after the break, what far right climate obstruction looks like elsewhere in the world, particularly in the UK and Europe.
Stay with us and we're back. Joining me now is Dieter Ploe, researcher and lecturer at University Cassel in Germany. Dieter and I had spoken before, back when I was working on a story about the Atlas Network, a global network of right wing think tanks that Dieter has spent a lot of time researching. We touched on that research here as well, and a whole lot more. Okay, so tell me about the wise use concept. Can you kind of define what that is and tell me what the wise use movement is?
Sure?
Basically, when we looked at the history of the climate opposition opposition to environment movement, we were struck by the fact that already in the nineteen seventies eighties, the corporate opposition and the conservative opposition to environmental activism had started to come up with counter narratives, counter concepts.
To the need to upgrade environmental regulation and against the
regulatory activism of the federal government. In the United States, starting basically with the founding of EPA and the early legislation in the nineteen seventies, the conservative movement basically responded that this is all intrusion from the federal government and that the local people know much better how to deal with the environment and perfectly capable of making wise use of the environmental resources, basically protect the environment in accordance
to the ways in which they interact with nature, use nature, and so the wise use concept was a deliberate concept to place local wisdom and knowledge against what was regarded as unnecessary and intrusive regulation from the federal government.
It seems very prevalent right now as well. So I wonder you're seeing it have a resurgence or if it just never went away, if the same groups are pushing it still. What's happening with that?
Oh yeah, I think it's a key trope in the kind of opposition to federal government or central government intervention. And basically, you know, we came across this reading Andrew Rohlds book The Green Backlash, which is from nineteen ninety six, so quite a while ago, and it was in fact
striking how much of the present climate obstruction. Climate opposition discourse is preceded by the controversies and the mobilization against the environmental policy making in the nineteen seventies eighties, and how many of the themes that are very very important in the present constellation have been basically developed against the establishment of the very first generation of environmental regulatory politics. And it's all framed sort of like local versus central government.
And there's presently a stronger revival of such sentiments now basically framed as opposition to global governance. So the national government has held to be better prepared to deal with these challenges than any sort of like of global governance. So in a way, yes, continuity and certain forms of mutations we can see.
Okay, let's talk about the Atlas Network and their role in climate obstruction, because as I'm sure you know, they've really been trying to claim that they have done no such thing.
Yeah, that's basically since the takeover of a response ability at the central headquarters at the Atlas Network by Bratt Lipps, after the period in which Alejandro Chamwen, the Argentinian who headed the Atlas Network after the founders Anthony Fisher's death in nineteen eighty nine roughly until the global financial crisis, and then I mean stayed basically a part of the leadership, but Brett Lips took over, and I think that Lips in a way was moving ATLAS network, the central headquarters,
was moving it away from climate politics because Shamwuen was quite a bit involved and quite a bit more supportive of the climate obstruction climate denial efforts of Artland and the international conferences. ATLAS was co sponsoring the Heartland Conferences a few times, and there's very clear indications that ATLAS were closely involved in climate politics also the headquarters itself.
Of course, it is not like a major organization compared to some of its members' partners like Calo Institute or Heartland Institute or the Heritage Foundation or other partners in Europe South Africa. So basically the move of Red Lips to Declear strong distance, we're not involved, we're not funded by oil companies. It all relates to the backlash the New Liberals and the firms, corporations and business associations that funded and were involved in outright climate denial with heart Land.
Conferences and so on.
So of course there was a lot of backlash against Exonmobile in particular, and I think that was basically considered a tricky thing from the perspective also of the think tanks that were involved, that they much like the corporations, right to distance a little bit the general purpose of the free market movement from the specific politics of climate denial and climate obstruction. So they changed the name also
to from Atlasic Research Foundation to a network. So now we have an organization, the Umbrella Organization, which is Adlas Network, and Brett Libs will say, we're not getting any funding from the oil company, and that sounds like the Atlas Network as a whole, which has like five hundred organizations,
doesn't get any funding from the oil company. The one thing may be right, Atlas Network as the Umbrella organization, may not get money from Excell Mobile, but many of these think things for sure get money from oil and fossil sources. And so it's a kind of a nice play they have there where they can legitimately maybe say we don't as Alas Network the Umbrella organization, and then it sounds like it's the network as a whole, which
is obviously not true. But even Alas Network the Umbrella Organization would have to declare openly where it's funding comes from and how much money they get from donors trust, which is actually of course then covering up money that comes from possibly oil companies other fossil groups.
So I mean, even.
Strong claim we are not getting money from fossil sources is basically impossible to verify or falsify as long as they don't clarify the funding sources from these dark money machines. But of course, the Atlas Network as a whole, with its large membership, has been home to many think tanks in many countries that were absolutely part and parcel of
the climate denial and climate obstruction movement. US organizations like Cato Institute, like the Heartland Institute, like the Independent Institute, Heritage Foundation, they're all very involved in spreading a climate
denial and other misinformation. Canadians Phrase Institute, the Frontiers and European organizations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Global Warning Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute, the Austrian Economic Center in Austria, in Africa, in South Africa, the Freedom Foundation
and so on. So forcing Yeah, So basically we found in our research that about half of the ADDAS Network partner organizations do publish content on climate and a small number of thing tanks, maybe no more than twelve to fifteen think tanks are basically publishing a lot of material, and many of them were closely involved in the climate denial movement, which has morphed into a broader range of climate denial and other obstruction messages.
Actually, one of the things that I found really interesting last time I was there that I had not realized that Atlas was involved in setting up the Donors Trust for the Cooke Guys.
Well Red Lips, the head of the Address Network the Umbrella Organization is on the board of the Donors Trust,
and not exactly sure how the arrangements are. But there's one of the interesting findings with regard to finance where where most of the information we have is from the United States, unfortunately, because most of the other countries are way less open with regard to source material that can be studied and for the US, therefore, we know quite a bit about the philanthropic funding of think tanks and
the inter relationships between think tanks and foundations. And it's quite interesting indeed that big funders of ATLAS network, I mean the Templeton Foundation, which is the biggest funder of the Umbrella organization. Atlas Network is also heavily funding another ady Think tanks of the Atlas Network, both in the US and abroad, so they have an open access database
where you can actually trace the funding. So we know that they fund six organizations that are part of the Atlas Network in Europe, indeed part of the European Epicenter network, like the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Institute of Bruno Leoni in Italy, which is sort of like the Expert organization in Europe, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute, which is a very successful big thing tank in the Baltics, and
the German Brometoise Institute and CPUs in Denmark. So it's very interesting that Templeton not only is the largest funder by far of the Umbrella Organization, but also a funder of quite a large number of Atlas Network members in Europe, in Latin America and elsewhere. And other big foundations are more focused on the US but also have interlockx with European I think thanks like the Bradley Foundation as people sitting on the board of the Institute of Economic Affairs,
and they also mobilize some of the funding there. So yeah, no surprise that the arrangements to cover up some of the funding sources from corporations. We see that has been manufactured with the help of the experts the Atlas network because they know what they need and they can help the com needs to basically cover their traces.
Okay. Relatedly, let's talk about the mont Pelerin Society for a mine. Can I have you define what that is and explain its role in incubating or bringing a lot of these think tank guys together.
Sure.
Well, it's quite important to know that the origins really of the think tank strategy of the so called free market movement, which basically is the neoliberal movement, which was founded post World War two by Fritish August van Hayek the likes of Germany Is Rutger and Americans from the Chicago School and from other places, was founded in nineteen forty seven in Switzerland in Montpelura, which is a small location on top.
Of the Lake of Geneva.
And basically when Anthony Fisher, the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs as entrepreneur friend of British Augustphon Hiak, when he asked Hyak for it twice. He wanted to go into politics, and Hike advised him not to go
into politics and to instead invest in intellectual resources. In fact, the founding of a think tank than Fisher actually started the Institute of Economic Affairs, and together with business friends in many countries, he was closely involved in starting this new liberal think tank movement up the Phraser Institute in Canada, Peru's Institute for Democracy, by this of De Soto in Australia.
He was very very global immediately, and then in nineteen eighty one Fisher was organizing the Atlas Network to have more help in coordinating and growing the network. So the inspiration to go for the think tank strategy came from Haiek based on his reading of the political conflicts in society and the need to have a long, long range strategy and intellectual warfare, so to speak. And since then every leader of the Other's network has been a member
of the more Pera society. So this network of academics, business people, media people, some politicians and think tank professionals, that's really the core membership of the more Pera society that meets globally and coordinates and learns globally, discusses the challenges that neoliberalism faces and develops strategies, and they don't become active themselves as the more pera society. It's basically a self image of an academic society more than of
ant organization. And they basically lean on think tanks, many of which have been founded by more per society member or see more perent society members helping to run them
on their boards. So the think tank are basically, in a way the organizational capacity where more para society people intervene in media, in political consulting, in all kinds of policy errors, including, of course what they perceive as a challenge for less regulated markets, the intense regulation coming from environmental regulatory politics and climate politics.
Now, have you walked me through some of the key discourses of delay that these think tanks use and kind of spread around.
Sure, I mean discourse of delay. Of course, complement in the early period of climate opposition movement activities was really climate denihilism. So basically, as as soon as the signs consolidated, there was this concerted effort to undermine the scientific basis by erecting organizations like Heartland and the non Governmental Panel on Climate Change that they organized to publish publications against the IPCC and so on and so force. And so we see that in the two thousands we have really
the the growth of a climate denial movement. But that was never all that happened in these neoliberal conservative circles, because quite a large.
Part of the neoliberal universe.
Is not denying climate science nor its unthropogenic causes. It's rather taking issue with the climate policy, so like objecting to state regulation, to all kinds of policy tools that they regard as wrong and problematic or counter productive, and
so advocate instead market solutions. So one of the specialties that have emerged in the context of the outless network is free market so called free market environmentalism, which basically is a counter narrative to state regulation, very much along the lines of the old vice use movement, basically asking for the privatization of nature so that the owners of the forests, of the rivers of the air can basically
be in charge of taking care of it. So the radical proposal of radical free market environmentalism means essentially everything will be fine as soon as we really completely deregulate and privatize nature, so that the owners of the resources
can be in charge. And then of course a much milder, much more mainstream version is the pricing of nature, so that involves of course state capacities, and that's basically the carbon pricing mechanisms we have, the emissions trading mechanisms we have that have been proposed by economists to be a better tool than regulations that outlaw certain emissions or regulate the quantities quantities in other ways, basically suggesting that relying
on market mechanisms will improve environmental governance, which you know, in theory is an interesting model, but in practice in many ways has so far failed to materialize. And in fact, in the United States, where many of these things were first proposed, as soon as become relevant and would mean that corporations would actually be charged, then there was actually everywhere in the world. As soon as market mechanisms are turning out to be somewhat effective, they're usually opposed by
the actors that are supposed to support market mechanisms. So it's unclear to what extent the market mechanisms that are part of the legitimate discourse of climate policy make me very much a part of even the mainstream IPCC discourse. Basically, the shift in a policy instrument in the Paris Treaty has been all moving more towards market mechanisms. But we don't see really that this development has actually been really effective.
So serious economists and serious climate policy concerned people must ask themselves, of course, to what extent is this really a reliable method and to what extent is it actually leading us into a dead end road, Because as soon as carbon pricing becomes very expensive, we usually get set back because people protest the high prices because they cannot afford it. So it's basically frequently failing to take into
account the redistribution that is then going on. And usually under conditions of austerity, which we had most of the time over the past decade, people are simply very short of money, and social week classes are very quick to rebel against the price increases if there's no compensation available.
So there's an interesting problematic But the whole field of climate policy opposition basically has become fairly broad, ranging from climate denial through policy skepticism, where basically policy instruments are debated and policy measures are debated, and then we have other counter proposals we don't need to do mitigation because technology will in the future solve this problem again with the help of economists who use the discounting methods, suggesting
that ten years from now certain measures are much cheaper, so we should delay them because they can be much
more efficiently in an economic sense employed later. And so many of these elements simply lead to not take decisive action with regard to climate mitigation now and are basically employed to derail processes that have been set up and suggest they are better alternatives, although basically the argument is more or less simply hiding the fact that one wants to block rather than to improve climate governance.
Okay, you mentioned these three themes of philanthropic financial support within the political economy of climate obstruction, opacity, concentration, and heterogeneity. Can I have you explain wage of this is and how that translates to what we're seeing kind of around us right now.
Sure.
I mean, basically, the theme of philanthropy, of course, is so important because we have seen the share of income of tanks from philanthropies has been increasing over the past decades. I think partly because the pushback against corporations and the fear of corporations being involved in politics and getting exposed, so basically they have relied also on philanthropies to fund their strategies. So philanthropic funding for think tanks in climate
politics is simply becoming more important. The opacity relates to the fact that even if we have more transparency in US data with regard to how much philanthropies fund and about the income of think tanks, we can only account for about a quarter to a third of the total
of the outlasting tanks we looked at. A lot of the funding sources remain unclear, and a lot of the funding sources and among the philanthropies Donors Trust in other dark money machines that are basically not foundations from specific corporations from specific owners like the co Foundation or the Dunn Foundation or Bradley Foundation, basically Donors Trust and Dona's Capital Fund or money collection machines that collect money from different sources that don't have to be laid open and
redistribute to the final recipient. The Donors Trust and Dona's Capital Fund are the largest funders of the Atlas Network think tanks out of more than three thousand corporate foundations in the US, and yet the opacity theme is even much more important with regard to other world regions and countries, because no comparable openness to foundation funding and non for
profit income is available in other countries. So we have simply no data that compares to the US data, and that's of course a big drawback to study the right wing, the nearable right wing and other think tanks in Europe. In that America, we do have on the boards of think tanks we find corporate fundundations in Europe almost fifty compared to more than three hundred in the US and
like a good thirty in Latin America. So we have some clues about which foundations are involved in running and funding thing thanks, but we just have no scientific tool to investigate these amounts.
And these.
These channels of influence with concentration refers to the observation that a lot of the funding for say, the ATLAS members in the United States comes from a relatively small.
Group of foundations.
As I mentioned, in this one database, we have more than three thousand foundations, but just a very small share of these foundations account for like a very large share of the funding. So yes, there are plenty of foundations, but the real music is played by a small orchestra, and so we can say that about fifty two hundred corporate foundations are really the core group that is in charge of channeling money to organizations like the Atlas Network
thing tanks. And then the third category heterogeneity that basically I think referred to the wide range of organizations and strategies and perspectives funded by corporate foundations. So you would think that the philanthropic organization that funds climate denial funds climaty, now know, they also can fund quite different strategies and other thing tanks.
Activity They're very intersectional. These guys absolutely absolutely just on one horse. Yeah, when everyone was talking about Project twenty twenty five in the US, I was working on this spreadsheet to look at maybe one hundred and five organizations involved in that, and I was looking at all of them and their funders, and there's so much overlap amongst the funders and the staff, you know, so everyone's working for each other's think tank or on the board or whatever.
And one of the things that really jumped out was that, you know, when a lot of the anti abortion organizations in the US, as they started to be more successful, started to get into, you know, other issues because they
needed to keep the money coming in. They were all of a sudden pushing anti trans stuff or even some of them were getting into anti climate work as well, and it was like, well, I guess if you have a twenty million dollar a year budget and your issue is not going to be an issue for that much longer, you need to find new things to work on.
Interesting.
Basically, it's also necessary to understand that we are not looking usually at.
Single issue no alm.
Yeah, people who were driven by a worldview that can be and will be applied to literally each subject matter. And yes, there will be a fair amount of specialization on environmental climate issues, maybe on public health issues, on criminal justice issues, on gender issues. But I mean, it's very interesting to see that a number of organizations co sponsored hard and conferences on climate politics that were actually not involved in climate politics.
So we can look at this as members of a large.
Party where some parts of the party specialize have committees on special issues. But at the same time, I'm very happy that their party friends are taking care of other issues now. So it's basically the same principle as a political apparatus, which also needs to be involved in many, many different policy areas and subject matters, and nobody can do it all. But if need be, I mean, if there's a special need for campaigning, you can actually mobilize
many more people than the specialized people. I remember when the Free Trade for the America's conflict was on in North America, push trying to expand NAFTA to the whole of the Americas, and there was a lot of pushback from progressive organizations. For left wing organization Against the Americas raised an institute and worked on the issue for the time it needed until the subject was over, and then
they closed the mechanism again. So basically, many of these larger think tanks certainly have the capacity to shift resources like from one subject matter to another. And also of course the large thing tanks with multimillion dollar budgets, they push quite a number of different themes.
Yeah, okay, I want to ask you about how religious groups get in on this as well. So what are some of the key arguments that religious groups use against climate action.
Well, there are different arguments really. On the one hand, it's important to note that the neoliberal movement, the conservative movement always had like also their religious side to it. Now the ACT and the think tanks that are specifically like the ACT and Institute are specifically Catholic neoliberal think tank that has been founded in the US, in Latin America and Europe and other thing tanks that are actually
combining free trade and religious messages. So it's basically the link between a conservative social morality and the kind of patriarchal family ownership economic freedom model, which really is the economic freedom of the owner of the property. And so we see that many of the religious articulations with regard to climate policy and with regard in plicular to climate denials and climate obstruction are actually in this sphere of
links between the neoliberal movement and their religious partners. The Cornwall Initiative sort of like is a mobilization of was founded by ACT and Institute people and as part of the Atlas network, so its co part of the hardcore of the free market movement, but actually tries to cater specifically to the Catholic world and of course reacts in the Catholic world to the challenges of theology of generation and other progressive forces that articulate themselves in the Catholic universe.
In sort of like a socially progressive manner, and you have also a very strong environmentalism in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis last before the present Pope, he was a huge activist in environmental policy issues, and that basically caused the Catholic Right and the Catholic conservatives to mobilize very actively against Pop francis encyclical and climate messages and trying to push back against this. You know, the Church should
keep out of these areas. Church should not be involved in these political issues like separating the spheres, and so some of the religious arguments that feed the obstruction movement is basically that climate science is part of the scientific world, which is not infallible. So they kind of turn the argument of religion versus science upside down in church, in religious belief, you have the full belief and that's where.
You trust, even if you obviously.
Don't know, whereas in science that's the sphere where you can't believe, where there is actually always needs to be debate. And that's an interesting argument where the religious belief is held to be superior to the scientific belief and is held to supply sort of like munition against the belief in climate science. Now they cannot be a believe in climate science because it's part of the rationalist world that
is not infallible. And other sort of like Catholic subsidiarity thinking, which is a very old concept used by the Catholic social teaching to object against centralized intervention in family affairs. So like the smallest entity of social life, the family should take care of itself and only in case of need should sort of be supported maybe by the local church, and even and if there's a natural catastrophe, maybe the local church can ask for help by the state, and
so on and so forth. So subsidiary is the thinking that the more local the self organization works as the better it is. And so it's basically it aligns very nicely with the kind of vice use concept and aligns very nicely with the objection against centralized government regulation and intervention.
Even if you can also.
Argue that in cases where the local cannot take care of policy issues, it's necessary that the higher levels of government need to be involved. So of course a policy issue like global warming, which is way beyond any local scale of politics, simply cannot be taken care of at the local level. So basically also these concepts like subsidiarity.
The Catholic right will use it as an argument against centralizing regulation, whereas the Catholic left will sort of like use it as a good example of how subsidiarity can also not be considered an objection against centralized policy making. So it's an contested concept essentially. But we see that subsidiarity arguments are part of the mobilization against climate action and align perfectly well with neoliberal arguments and with conservative arguments.
Yeah. Okay, So I keep seeing this belief amongst a lot of people in climate spaces that as people experience more climate impacts that they will of course get on board doing something about climate. But I think, especially with the spar right stuff. But I would say even some of the Applas stuff tells us is that that's definitely not guarantee. I'm curious what you think about the potential for climate impacts to actually sort of supercharge some of this thinking as opposed to defeating it.
Yeah.
Well, that's basically now, of course, our huge challenge. I mean, in the chapter of course, we talk about this broad spectrum of the right where neoliberalism as right wing liberalism is very closely overlapping with what Americans call conservatism, and can of course align with social conservatism, sometimes also with progressivism as with the Democratic Party and so on force and have an impact in the shifting the debate toward
economic reasoning rather than the whole spectrum of policy interventions
that we need to succeed in climate mitigation. And then, of course we have seen as a result of the multiple crises, both global warming and COVID financial crisis, we have seen this much more radical far right right rebellion expressed many times in right wing populist beliefs, where we get messages that go way beyond the traditional spectrum of free market conservatism and nearliberalism, which is in a way still engaged in this debate of how the world should
be governed and what types of governance and what scales
of governance should be employed. And in many areas the New Liberal movement was actually all in favor of global governance, for trade regulation, for property rights regulation, even for migration issues, because parts of the New Liberal movement are much more in favor of migration and so on, and so force remain to the stay more in favor like the Cook brothers, for example, compared to the Trump is But we see that the opposition against global governance in climate opened the
door to actually challenge global governance altogether. And what we see as the far right in the form of the right wing populist government and political lead figures like Trump, Relay, many others around the world. Now they converge on a new ideology that is actually partly opposed to neoliberalism as far as neoliberalism is global you know, globalists, so to speak.
And this new ideology is really national conservatism actually remove all these levels of global governance and move everything back
in the sphere of the national nation state. Then some of them are more radical, the libertarians they want more even more decentralization, and other far right groups would also probably radicalize the message and try to destabilize many of the political entities more and move us into the territory of this much more complex and complicated area where we have seen in many places the rise of similar ideologies, conspiracy theories like the great Replacement theory, where basically the
national conservatism lines in particular against foreign migration, and the far right has embraced the concept of ethnobluralism, so that yes, there are different ethnicities, but they better keep separated, each
in their place. And so there's a very interesting movement where I would say the global forming challenges have led to an approach that was definitely global, the whole process, the whole real process, Kyoto Protocol Paris, and led to a very ambitious agenda that has been stalled in the meantime, and the backlash against it converges on the rejection not only of the concrete policy goals, but actually against the whole politics of climate change, the global governance aspect, and
that's actually undermining, obviously the efforts to globally coordinate and negotiate solutions. And in that regard, the climate denial and climate obstruction movement was hugely successful, not only with the immediate impact they had, but now we see that the whole process is in danger of being derailed by the strength of the writing mobilization against global government.
That's it for this time, Thanks for listening. Next week we're digging into the psychology of misinformation why this stuff works so well. Come back for that. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can find more on this season, including transcripts and lots of related articles and background information on our website at drilled dot Media. You can also sign up for our newsletter there. One of these days, we're going to actually get it out
every week. Until then, it's an occasional newsletter with thoughts from me, new stories from the site and the rest of the team, and updates on what we're getting up to next. Our producers for this season are In Saltz Ostwick and Peter duff. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Forknown. Our cover art is done by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment Attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. The show was created, written, and
reported by me Amy Westervelt. Thanks for listening and see you next time.