Hello, and welcome back to Drill. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today we are continuing making our way through the book Climate Obstruction, a Global Survey. And good news, this book is now officially out and available for free download. We'll stick a link in the show notes and on the website. Today I am joined by Jen Schneider at Boise State University and Gregory Trencher from Kyoto University to talk about the coal, utilities,
and transportation industries. So we talked last time about the fossil fuel industry and the role that it has played in obstructing climate policy at the global level, but it's not the only industry that is working to do that, and today we're going to dig into three more. All three of these industries have mounted efforts to stop governments from regulating emissions or transitioning to cleaner energy, and a lot of times they kind of dovetail with each other.
So coal, for example, and railroad companies often lobby together because in some ways the railroad industry has been heavily dependent on coal and vice versa. We're going to dig into those intersections and what the strategies from these industries look like and how they differ from the fossil fuel industry's approach. In today's episode, I learned a lot, and I hope you will too. So you wrote in the chapter about why you ended up looking at coal, transportation,
and utilities together. But I was wondering reading it if you were always looking at them together, or if the research sort of led in that direction.
I wish I had an exciting answer for that, but I actually you've always focused on the coal industry, and I think Greg has written quite a bit about coal as well, but also transportation. I think you could write a whole chapter just on coal. I think that would
be fascinating. But the editors asked us to connect them, and I think the I think the argument really was that when you think about coal and transport and others, you know, like the steel industry or railroad, they're very, very connected in terms of the way things flow globally, so pretty hard to talk about the coal industry without also talking about the trains that carry coal, for example. So coal's futures are connected to the railroad's futures, and so I think it made sense, sort of from a
logical perspective to think about them as connected. And then as we were writing Greg, it just became clearer and clearer that so many of them were kind of borrowing ideas from each other, or had some of them had shared kind of front groups or shared strategies for speaking about climate changer climate policy.
I agree, yeah, And I think if you went looking for the links across these sectors, all these industries, you would find them. But I think it's just like a habit of all lot of researchers to sort of focus on particular silos. So I think there's a lot of people that sort of identify themselves as core researchers and they don't really sort of do research on the transportation industry.
I myself have been doing research and transportation and call separately, but we've had very few occasions, I think, to look at these from that more of a macro picture.
So I think the chapter provided this.
I was actually like, wow, I never thought of these things as being linked, but there were so many connections between all of them, even just the thing about trains and call. It's like, of course, I've thought about that a little bit, but I don't know. The railroad industry always sort of gets a pass on this stuff because we think it's just like romantic train travel and not you know, chemicals and.
Yeah, until there's an accident or something, and then people will pay attention to things like that.
Yeah, this is a struggle for any book, but especially climate right now. How much do you feel like the research has changed, even just in the last six months, especially around cole Not that it was dying before, as you point out, but even more so it seems like it's it's come roaring back. How much is the landscape
changing in which these tactics are being deployed. Well, I can maybe speak in the US context, So I think in the United States, the challenge for scholars is that on the one hand, there might be federal rhetoric or executive actions that point towards say the president's values or the new administration's values. But then there's reality, a lot of which I think is determined by industry and by
economic trends. So, for example, I think during the first Trump administration, President Trump really argued that he was going to bring the coal industry back, that it would come roaring back. That was part of the sort of make America great again promise. The coal industry was facing such serious economic headwinds that that just wasn't going to be possible.
So I think you can see new investments in things like the coal industry or movements away from electric cars sort of in terms of the rhetoric, will industry, you know, sort of spin on a dime and match that. It certainly takes its cues from those political winds that are blowing. But I think it takes a.
Lot longer for us to see actual infrastructure change in the long term because those those systems are really big and complicated.
Yeah, So it has anything changed over the last six months, I would say that probably no, especially like I think if we're thinking about like the direction of decarbonization or let's say less best interests or something like this. So to give you an example, in that automobile industry, over the probably past two or so years, around the world, we're seeing a lot of car makers making quite ambitious
targets to increase the production and the sales of evs. So, you know, companies like the BM Group the day in the group in Japan, we had like our big companies to Honda awake in these pledges and what we've seen actually is a bit of a skating back of these pledges and the scating back series to be happen for a few reasons.
One, I think there's a.
Lot of concern about how ferocious China is as a competitor to these Western car companies. Probably over the last year we've seen a shift towards protectionism. These companies actually now lobbying the governments asking for like trade US to protect them. This is something that I guess you could
almost call it like a dirty rule of it. Western countries were criticizing China for doing this ten years ago to protect their ev industry, and now we're sort of borrowing this tactic to protect our incumbent industries that are still focused on internal combustion engines. So this is one particular example that just shows you that even some of the program that we thought was occurring is kind of
encountering some pretty stiff turbulence right now. And then I think another characteristic of all these industries is what we call path dependency. We also have this very similar term called locking, and basically these industries are reflecting these structures,
and the structures are political. They're also consist of infrastructure, capital, workers, people, technologies, especially in the case of internal combustion engines and aviation engines and plants, and so these change very slowly, and there's a lot of linkages across these very complex systems, and so we would never expect these to sort of
change radically in sort of six months. That sort of I think flies in the face of theory of path dependency and with locking with sort of we expect rapid change to come from these people coming from the outside. So Tesla has been very symbolic of this, and now we have BYD from China that's sort of characterizing this ability to change very rapidly. These are kind of traditional industries we would never really expect rapid change to come from.
That makes sense. Can I have you guys each and maybe to be this up, but I want to have you walk through and give some concrete examples of some of the rhetorical tactics in action. Climate denial is an easy one, but where are you still seeing people use kind of old school climate denial as a tactic?
Yeah? I think that was one of maybe the most interesting things that came out of working on this chapter was that I think there was a belief for a while, maybe for a minute, after the first Trump administration that maybe climate denial was going away, right, that maybe there was a sense that, Okay, you know, the bad George W.
Bush years when.
Climate denial was in its heyday are over, and there's large public consensus now, and we're seeing all of these major weather events things to people on the ground are starting to believe in climate change, and denial doesn't make sense anymore.
I think we learned.
Pretty quick that that was not true, and that climate denial would exist alongside all of these other strategies which say, Okay, climate change is happening, and so there's this cognitive dissonance that was happening where Okay, on the one hand, we're going to deny climate change or deny that it's a severe as scientist say, and on the other hand, okay, if it is happening, well then we can certainly, you know,
innovate our way out of it. So I think that was an interesting piece that sort of emerged from the chapter around climate denial. I will say, you know, it's just really complicated with the social media landscape too, to say that, yeah, any sort of trend has gone away, because I think we have a very conspiratorial culture in a lot of pockets of the web and climate denial. Certainly it continues to thrive in those pockets.
Yeah, it's weird to see some of the really old versions coming back. I've seen a total resurgence of the like CO two is good for plants one.
Yeah, the yeah, or the or the deep state is now but you know, messing with our weather to cause these major stores, and that's what's happening, you know. So there's a really interesting, i think evolution of those early climate denial ur arguments we saw.
We have this idea of like denying the physical science, you know, so we can see that CT is actually good sort of tile or it's not coming from humans. But another tactic that's also tapping the science is to
question the solutions. And so electric vehicles have been widely sort of promoted by governance, by stakeholders and across the world, and so we see certain companies actually saying, well, in the context of Japan, we have large auto makers saying that evs are actually not as good planet as other solutions.
And so there's quite a lot of science showing us that ev is are superior to other drive chains, especially gasoline vehicles, and so it's interesting that these solutions are now being sort of tackled by these companies from a so called like research that's tied their own studies about should show their own grafts, saying that, look, if you look at it from this perspective, the two benefits are
actually superior. For in the case of Japan's hybrid vehicles, hybrid vehicles only have limited decarbonization potential according to for example, IPCC, whereas the major car companies over here very systematically denied the environmental benefits of electric vehicles to justify their further emphasis on hybrids as a dec urbanization pathway.
That's fascinating. Do you think that's tied into Japan's anti renewables bent a little bit too.
Yeah, So the renewables situation, I guess is a bit complex in Japan. I would say that now Japan is not really anti renewables. About maybe twenty ten to five years ago, there was definitely a lot of pushback from the major industry associations, which we do cover in a chapter, and they were sort of saying very strongly that Japan should not too quickly to trineables because this would have ecomic percussions and electricity will come too expensive, this would
push industry away, so Augus and them on. We see it's used by all these industries sort of persuade governments and not to nurse too quickly. To answer your question specifically, Japan today is making reasonable efforts towards renewables, and we're actually one of the world ladies in solar, so we make very rapid progress in solo. We're a legout in our wins and wind is I think one of these very important indicators of the energy transition. So we've got
a lot of work to do there. I think like the United States, the United States has a lot of onshore wing, but they don't have much offshore wins, which is it out the story, I.
Guess, yeah, and they're probably not going to get it anytimes.
It's perfect.
Yeah, Okay, what about corporate ventriloquism. Is there a specific example you can share of that that will help people kind of go oh yeah, okay, I see that all the time.
Yeah, So corporate ventriloquism is this idea that these industry groups, which is like a collection of different companies and you know front groups, they come together. They have a particular set of interests and corporate friend triloquism is the idea that they can throw their voice through these organizations that
they create that seem like their grassroots. So a grassroots organization, you know, like Communities for Coal something like that, and you go to the website for Communities for Coal and it looks as if this is something that people in you know, towns that rely on the coal industry have
created because they love coal so much. And so we see a lot of images with flags and with picnics and children and people in military uniforms, and the idea there is that there's a flattening between the community itself and the corporations that are benefiting from coal extraction. So it makes it seem as if if the industry dies, or if this company dies, or if this company is regulated,
our community too is going to die. And so it kind of creates this one to one relationship between the individual in the community and the company, and that is used to create this really anti regulatory sentiment.
Okay, I wanted to ask you guys both about these these three narratives to the apocalyptic consequences for industry, technological optimism, and fossil fuel solutionism and the right to develop and the energy poverty and like just picking one if there's like a I don't know, a story you've come across that really illustrates it, or like an ad you've seen that illustrates it.
Yeah, so very quickly, I think femal bring has become very prominent regarding government ady promotion policies. So we see across Europe, across Japan, across I guess the United States as well. There's lots of concerns being from automobile companies that the shift tubes electric vehicles is going to cause widespread unemployment. And Toyta in Japan has used some very strong languages that described things such as business model collapse.
And I think that they're probably being quite honest there because it is the shift evs, especially at the scale of like I say, one hundred percent eventually away from the dominating technologists today, which is internal combustion engine or hybrid variations. It's a completely different value Dad, it's a completely different production line. And so it is actually the
collapse of the current business law. So the question is can they do it, and can they do this in a way of that's you know, kind of minimize the damage here. But this brings us to the concerns for workers unemployment, and we see that this has constantly cited
as an excuse not to move too far. So I think the among gering often leads to this idea of painting this kind of impression for the public that the company is not opposing the direction of travel, not opposing a transition per se, but they're sort of arguing for a bit more time, you know, a bit more assistance. But we know that this is like a delay tactic.
So this is quite common. And I can't think of the actual number, but in Japan there's huge amounts of people were estimated to be working in the automobile industry. I think it was five million. It just sounds like really really huge, and I think to get that number you have to take people working in it the insurance sector that are probably selling insurance to like, you know, homes and.
Coffee shop down the street from Toyota's office.
Yeah, the coffee shops and you know it's next to the service says, you'd have to bring everyone into this like so called automobile industry. But they've used this number of I'm quite sure it's five minute consistently for several years and featured that on national television, in newspaper advertisements, and so basically the message to the government was, if you sort of push us too quickly towards batteries, then these five million people are economically at risk.
Mm hmm.
Yeah. It's such a convincing argument because they are just saying, like, we're just want to go slow and study a litill change. But in this very sensible way, it's hard to argue against. Okay, you mentioned workers, and I want to ask you both about unions because they show up in a like every part of this, and especially around how to bring unions on board, which you also talk about. But yeah, I'm curious what are some of the key ways that unions
are getting involved in obstruction? And then what are some ways that you've seen that you know, be sort of like turned into allies.
I'll speak primarily to the United States context, but I think it's been fascinating to watch unions kind of position themselves politically in relation to cole in particular, but also the railroads in that I suppose the assumption, the partisan assumption, might be that unions tend to be pro democratic or pro liberall right, that they're going to vote in favor of sort of workers' interests, and we've seen that that has not always been the case with the with the
coal industry in particular, so a lot of those unions have seen a threat to the industry from climate regulation or laws as a threat to their livelihoods, and so there's been an interesting pushback or in alignment in the United States context, particularly with the Trump administration, and they're sort of pro coal policies or their pro coal approach.
I think where that shifts at times is when it really comes down to the material realities of you know, conditions for workers and whether or not they're having the
protections they need and getting the jobs they need. We know that automation in the coal industry has led to a huge decline in the number of jobs that one can get in that industry, and so I think, you know, it's going to be very context specific, but those are the complications that I think workers in the unions that represent them are having to naviocate.
That's actually kind of a bloodspot my knowledge, but lots of researchers focus on this. So we worked with a very large team of authorsere and I kind of feel that, you know, we're getting a lot of the credits from their hard work with basically just had the pleasure of just accepting these intellectual treats, you know, and just and certainly the like in this particular way and polishing them.
And we did receive a lot of material that's like far too large to fit in where many pages were given to work with, but unions were cited by many of them. And one of the messages we did see was that our unions a lot of the time they are an obstructive force, but sometimes they're kind of being persuaded, and because their main concern is jobs, and so when they sort of see legitimate strategy so let's say, to create jobs, then they actually do come on board and
we see that. I think Germany is probably a great case where the unions have boys understood the coal industry in decline because of you know, climate change and because of these other economic forces they were renewals forgetting about climates becoming cheaper and more competitive that many contexts, and so they consider about their long term vitality and idea of the government sort of injecting large amounts of funds into these communities that provide these new jobs or retraining
and things. This actually is interesting for some of the people in these units. Units have actually changed positions and supportant green transition packages based upon the evidence that.
We receive well.
And I would just say, going back to the path dependency point that Greg made earlier, a lot of these unions have been in these industry groups for a long time, so they've been coordinating with and part of those front groups that are doing that corporate ventriloquism thing. And so I think, you know, you're locked into these relationships or these coordinated activities. It's pretty tough to peel off unless there are real incentives for doing that.
That's interesting, Okay. I want to ask you about the technological optimism and fossil fuel solutionism because this is the one place where I feel like it might be quite different from industry to industry.
Like I think it's hard for coal to be like technolop the way. I'm wrong. Oh, you'd be surprised.
Yeah, we do have this in Japan actually and Asia. Yeah. Wow.
So I think one of the solutions a lot of people are familiar with is carbon capture and.
Storage c cs of course, Yeah, but.
What's happened recently is that all across Asia, like countries acts Vietnam and Indonesia especially, but also countries like India China as well, we have these very young cold fight palp plants, and so if these countries were to be serious about transitioning towards renewables, we're going to have to write these off before the end of their economic lives. So we're going to end up with the so called
stranded asset. And not only that wells these countries are actually under a lot of stress to supply the power for their very rapidly growing populations and economies. So it's actually not easy for them to shut down, say a cold fire power plant which produces a massive amount of power and replace that with solar powers.
This is a very very difficult change, and so.
They have very strong interest in sort of maintaining these assets while decarbonizing. And that's open to the tour to these discussions about slow callder ammonia curve firing right being promoted very heavily by Japan, but also also by South Korea, and I guess possibly by some Chinese companies too. But this is an approach. Basically that involves producing ammonia, which
is basically an energy carriers. So we can obtain this from either dirty sources such as fossil fuels or from clean sources such as renewals, and it's very similar to hydrogen. So basically we bring this to a certain country and then in the case of emoia, we can burn this and we can actually replace a portion of that call, so we can for example at place ten or twenty percent, and then the idea is to move progressively up towards replacing call together and just having the same power station
in the future burning ammonia. And this is like the sort of solution that's been promised to stakehorese public to politicians. There's a lot of money being injected in this now. So this is definitely an unproven technology and Bloomberg New Energy Finance have looked to the economics. It just said, this doesn't make sense. Green Ammonia's is great. We should be using this being other industries, not in an industry
where we have other cheaper solutions such as renewkes. But ammonia COFID has been used, especially pushed by Japanese copies across with young assets.
Yeah, it's kind of a shell game, right, It's like, Okay, we're not clean right now, We're not you know, in alignment with climate goals right now, but if you invest in us and allow us to grow in ten years, we will we will be right. So it's always just it's like nuclear fusion. It's always just ten years away and we will get there.
The same with hydrogen carbon capture, all of these technologies. They're like, if you just build it, then it'll make it cheap enough for everyone that it'll it'll all work out in the end somehow.
Trust us. Amazing, Okay.
So then on the right to develop an energy poverty, I mean I see this one all the time from every polluting industry, but yeah, I'm curious for like some of the specific ways that it shows up in these industries. And then also what is your standard response against that, because I feel like it maybe shows up the most with coal, even more than other fossil fuels. Coal is the one that's like, oh, but we need it for cheap energy, So how does it show up and what's the response?
I mean, I really think it's sort of a co opting of liberal discourse. And then using that discourse against climate advocates. So, you know, I think a lot of environmental justice folks or climate change advocates would say that they really care about things like poverty and inequity. They care about the ways in which the global South have not been allowed to develop at the same rate or has been taken advantage of by the global North. And so you have the industry saying, oh, you care about
energy poverty. Well, guess what a good way to get a lot of folks in the Global South out of energy poverty is to allow them to burn coal really quickly. Or guess what you have folks in Europe who are experiencing transportation poverty, and the best way to alleviate that is to make sure that they have access to automobiles.
So Greg probably has some policy answers, But for me, as a rhetorician, I'm always thinking about ways in which that the opposition to polluting industries is turned back on itself so that it kind of takes the moral rug out from under them and allows the industry to say, actually, we're the moral ones. We're the ones who understand how to fix the world.
So this idea of you know, fossil vieus being critical for human well being, for keeping the lights on, for helping countries develop their economies. This pattern has been demonstrated throughout history, I mean unfortunately. So there's actually kind of a lot of truth or sort of this corresponds, I guess, with the development trajectory of land countries and countries like
China until now. So the question is should we'd be sort of alow in these countries to continue on this same path which is being shown to be so detrimental climate and to also air pullush and human health. And so what we sort of see is countries that are kind of cleaned up themselves and they sort of paint like, you know, for example, the exporting of coal as they're
doing other countries of favor. And so I remember being in Japan on YouTube seeing this throughly a collages of Tokyo Oh wow, ily dear, you know, and then I realized that this is an advertisement from the Australian Minerals Council,
which heavily represents Call. They're sort of saying that they're exporting Call to Japan and they're helping your client in Japan, and they're also promotes in their calls being cleaner than other sources called we're talking just about you know, black lumps carbon from the ground, right, and arguably we can see that one type is a little bit better than
another type. But that's more so from not a carbon perspective, it's more from a sulfur perspective, because sulfur is actually when it has had sulfur content, this contributes to very high leveled local air pollution, which is very tremendal to human health.
So Australia was sort of.
Arguing that their call is, you know, clean, cleaner than others competing on minerals out the here, and yet we're arguing that they're helping Japan and Avouced country keep it chink counts in running for example, the bullet train. So that was quite a surprise to see this happening in
the context of two develops countries and energy poverty. Yeah, this is a concept we here we discuss more so, I guess in developed countries setting, So you know, I guess the United States, Europe we have we know that it's true, we have people that are clearly in disadvantage positions and they're affected very strongly by the price of fossil fuels that could be, for example, for their heating, or that could be for their commuting, because especially as
you know, a lot of people with lower incomes, so kind of they've chosen to purchase houses with your prices, which is usually further away from the work, and so they have to commit further, which makes them more vulnerable to a price increases such as happened about one and
a half years ago with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Service energy poverty actually occurs in our United States, Australia, Japan, Europe, but we see that this is used as an excuse to sort of to make a transition, because there's always concerned that that's mobilized, that the energy transition will cost
these people more money. And then we sometimes see this used as an excuse to keep fossil fuel subsidies to help suppress fossil fuel prices, to help these people serve, you know, survive, which is of course a very really important thing we shouldn't forget. There is a need to sort of help them use less energy in the first place, and to help bring the structure away from which creates is probably in their first place.
So what's yournog well, and not to mention that they often bear desperate impacts of pollution from fossil fuels, so they're less able to sort of fight back against those things. They tend to have higher pollutant levels in the places where they live, less access to medical care. So those are the pieces that you don't hear as much about
in those energy poverty arguments. It's a particular slice of a moral argument that they want you to take away as opposed to a moralistic sure, a complicated issue.
Yeah. The thing that I always ask fossil fuel executives when they make this argument, because they do it over and over again, is what are you doing to get your coal to poor people? And then they're like, I'm sorry what They claim that this is going to solve it, but it's like, isn't it the fuel we've been using for the last hundred years? Why is it still a problem if that's the fix, you know, And they're like, no, that's a great question. We really got to start working
on that more. And we have a foundation and they're going to start working on that, and it's amazing. Anyway, Okay, I want to know from each of you, what was the most surprising thing that you found in this research or in pulling the chapter together. Maybe it was in other people's research coming in.
Maybe I can quickly give it a short answer there necessaria, I don't have that much knowledge, so I'm just responding to statements we're seeing in the period literature and from
our colleagues. But it seems to be the case that in certain countries and that global South, especially the activists that are sort of trying to drop the expansion of coal extractionism or you know, the construction of confied help plants or something, it seems to be especially common in call have found themselves to be targeted by it, for example, a local police force by political movements, and they've incurred things such as bullying, arrests, jail sentences, and there seems
to also be cases of terrible things like modes of renowned activists sort of being silenced physically forever. And so this concern it's a human rights issue, but it also creates tear and I think we can see this in the United States. Current administration has targeted very prominent, you know, academic institutions, trying to make an example out of them, which sort of sends a very strong signal to the weaker place that if you sort of do something similar,
you'll be next. And so this bullying tactic seems to exist, and it's probably it hasn't caught too much pension of people. Yeah, there's been I think putting in the United States, quite a few researchers that have been to Columbia and sort of you know, I've spoken to the affected communities and yeah,
this is quite a real phenomenon. And for searches that are in westerns of context, we're more predicted, we're not really exposed to this injustices in our firsthand we probably take less interest in them because we're looking more so, I guess at the issues that have a strong coalition
with what we observe in our countries. But there's a few people that sort of, you know, take the trouble to visit these countries and to talk to people, and it's quite disturbing the information that they've been home.
Yeah, Jen, what about you was sort of the most surprising learning working on this.
Maybe a related comment which is just we had an amazing team. I feel like we had Jason Amnios on the chapter. For example. It's probably the only scholar really working on maritime climate policy, which is an area I hadn't given much lot to it all.
I hadn't until there were like those news stories this year about the IMO.
It was like, I didn't even know this existed. This is fascinating exactly, and so he really helped us understand what was happening there, and then we could see connections to industries that I understand better, coal or utilities. But there's been so much work done on oil and gas, and I think so much public attention to oil and gas and then probably to cool next after that, but I think very little attention paid to the role of utilities, for example, and so so powerful in a lot of
national contexts in blocking climate policy. And then yeah, something as a sector that's as big as you know, shipping across the seas, that's having such a huge impact, and it's almost impossible to study because like, how do you get into those closed rooms where they're making a lot of policy, And there's so much movement back and forth between government regulatory bodies and the industry. Right, So just the opaqueness of a lot of all of this I
thought was pretty fascinating to think about. And yet these are huge contributors to carbonization and something that we would love to study more.
Yeah, fascinating. Okay, if there's anything else in the chapter that you want to make sure to draw attention to, now's your chance.
Well I would just go back. You ask me for an example on corporate and tril equism, and I would just the most prominent example I can think of was an information campaign that came out of a national front group called ACE American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy something like that. Yeah, And it was called the Faces of Coal, and so it was this website. Do you remember that saved me.
I had forgotten about it and then I saw it in your chapter and I was like, oh my god, I remember this.
Yes, yeah, it was. It was all of these like you know, hard working Americans who were quote unquote the Faces of Coal and who were meant to represent the community members who were speaking for and on behalf of coal. And it turned out they were all stock images. There were no real people. Just like you're saying, there was no real community organization that was speaking for coal. It
was the front group. I'm not saying that community members don't support the coal industry, of course, some do, but to sort of represent itself as speaking for the community, as coming from the community. I think that's probably the most classic example of corporate centril equism that we have in the US.
Yeah, a technic I would like to highlight exap litigation. I think for people a kind of living in Asia, just the idea of our company suing the government because they didn't like the environmental policy.
It's just shocking. I think this culturally wouldn't happen.
I mess there's a very very strong reason, but I think this is just part of life in the United States. But this there commun is a very prominent and visible way that companies trying to obstruct climate actions. Any particular incidences of litigation that sort of called your attention, Jen in the United States.
So yeah, how do you think about a specific example? But Amy U asked at the top of the interview, you know, has anything really changed in the last six months? And maybe that is something that we really see changing, which is that as the balance of powers erodes under this Trump administration, we're definitely seeing an alignment of administrative
agencies and court rulings. I think, so we're going to see a less ability for community groups, for example, to push back on companies acting in ways that they don't like. And I think more likely e companies being able to use the courts successfully to be back regulation and going all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court sort of allowing for deregulation to continue to happen.
So I think, you.
Know, history will tell how intense that's going to be in how long lasting. But I suspect that is going to be one of the lasting ricacies of this particular moment.
I guess maybe some people would be interested in, like, you know, what we can do about these problems and solutions the responses. And this is really difficult because unfortunately, when you look at I guess academics we specialize in sort of finding the problems in the world, at criticizing society and seeing, you know, here the problems, and then people say, okay, what do we do about this?
This is much more difficult.
It's not like we say, you know, we found A and B, therefore we have to do see But and it's important I think that we still train, you know, formulate strategies based upon this intelligence that we're sort of assembled here. So I think one of the most evident things is to sort of, you know, make these opaque
processes less opaque. And there seems to be this recurring pattern across the world of people in powerful positions in the industry enjoy very direct access to politicians, and they're able to very heavily influence the not necessarily the political process, but you know, the rulemaking process and policies, and people that are other society actors that are also stakeholders have less resources, therefore have less connections and have less influence
in this. So this is actually a problem that is prominent not only in the environmental space, but I guess in many areas. I'm sure it's also a problem like see edison. There must be many other industries where this is our concern. So how can we make these political
activities of companies more visible? And so I guess this leads to something quite radical, which is governments would sort of actually very actively and transparently communicate who they met and what they spoke about with the public for example. This is sort of I think, and as we stay well, but I think that unless we have something sort of radical like this, it's going to be very hard to
track these political lobbying activities. A lot of it's happening behind to closed stores, and so there have been discussions about this in Europe and I think efforts to make you love being more visible. But I think especially in contact like the United States, where lobbying and sometimes in political donations, sometimes political variation is visible, I guess in the case of Tesla and or Musk and sometimes you know, we can assume there's other very less visible donations happening.
This really is I think a barrier to moving to society towards these sustainability goals. And I would just like to say another thing that I think is a big challenge here is that there's also a need for government to toughen up, to be able to sort of identify these first in interest and to sort of not be afraid of confronting industry when it has to make a particular different decision, like for example, you know about the speed of moving away from fossil fuels or the need
to promote battery electrid vehicles. Unfortunately, what we're seeing is that in Europe among other countries, there seems to be the listen less capacity in government for them to sort of produce their own intelligence. They have to rely on industry and consultants for life, for example, modeling estimations about the effect of a certain policy. And so because there's less intellectual capacity in certain domains in governments, that means
they have to rely in industry. This opens the door also to versted interest from industry affecting the environment policy making process.
So this is a bit of a concern.
That this shift towards you're seeing more of a private step to savvy in the regulation of society in an organization of a state, this actually is opening the door to and invested interests coming potentially reinforcing Lupian.
Yeah, that revolving door problem, I think is really so bad.
I was going to ask you about that in relation to the solutions piece too that you mentioned in the chapter, about how there are some differences between these industries or maybe between groups within the same industry, and that those can be leveraged sometimes to weaken the position. Have you seen a good example of that recently? You talked about in the case of automotive, that the automakers that are better positioned to pivot to evs are better allies.
May shoot then.
But yeah, I'm curious if you've seen that dynamic in action in an example that you could point to where one of the industry groups has turned on the other and it's led to progress.
I don't have any specific examples of yeah, one sort of actor picking a fire with another, but we definitely say competition. I mean, that's one of the nice things about a democratic society a capitalist society. These companies at the end of the day, even though they might collaborate, sometimes they're still looking at for themselves. So whenever they see an opportunity to trip out their opponent or I guess to you know, create a lead, they do so.
Regarding the electric vehicle transition, there are differently I think differences like in temperature, in terms of like help actively
or how rapidly companies are pursuing that transition. So, for example, Nissan has been a case of a company that's produced electric vehicles, never at large scale, but that was the world's first mass producer of these vehicles, and so they took a very firm, like batricentric stance to electrification, whereas other companies chose like hybrids or hydrogen in the case of Japan, and then Volkswagen in Europe, of course, they had the dieselbed scandal that sort of pushed them to
do something clean, a good, but they pursued the battery's centric pathway, and that's so they use this as an excuse always to criticize the other competing technologies, which was hydrogen fuel cells. So these companies will sort of compete with each other in that respect. But what we seen, unfortunately is there also companies that have moved rapidly towards batteries. In Putt Volkswagen, A'm suffering from economic repercussions. This is
making a lot of people sort of nervous. It's a bit of a almost an incubating truth about this how energy transition, whereas speaking of literary vehicles is quite expensive and difficult, and these companies actually doing business model repercussions. And that's why markets like China, which I guess sound very large and there's just a huge demand for vehicles.
And also I guess they're just able to produce these batteries cheaper and they have a more of a control of the plage and they're able to do this in a profitable way, whereas the western car companies haven't been able to do this just yet so people like us
that research about obstruction. I guess we have to be careful not not falling into the basket of it's just everything's lack a white because a lot a lot of the sort of you know, the triggers for a lot of the rhetoric from these companies of genuine concerns.
We should be sensitive too.
But the thing is they weaponized, weaponized as a way just to slow the transition, And that's the concern. Maybe in the beginning there is a bit of your truth to some of these concerns.
Yeah, we see that in the anti renewable stuff too, write where communities have valid concerns, and I don't think it helps anyone to pretend that an industrial wind farm is like some bucolic, quaint little thing.
It won't be disruptive at all, it won't be noisy. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
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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.