So one of the most useful things that Jung did, I think, was to work on this idea of the integration of the shadow, because he was really interested in the idea of evil. What do you do with the part of you that's aggressive and potentially malevolent? You just crush it, that's the super ego response in some sense. Do you just put it behind you, so to speak? Is that a possibility or do you admit to its existence and bring it into the game.
You're listening to carbon Brose.
I'm Daniel Penny and I'm Amy Westervelt.
And that's our old friend doctor Jordan Peterson speaking in twenty eighteen to a young man about integrating the so called shadow self. Integration is one of Peterson's favorite concepts. It's borrowed from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and it's the idea that through a series of direct confrontations with our darkest fears and desires, we can come to accept and even channel that side of our personalities in a constructive way.
Hear about shadow work from manosphere types when they want to defend the idea of masculine aggression.
You should be able to do things that you wouldn't do That's like the definition of a genuinely moral person. They could do it, but they don't, and that's not cowardice. And so you burn off the things that get in the way of that integration. It's a forest fire that allows for new growth, because if you burn something off, you might think, well, there's nothing left. It's like, that's not true. If it's dead wood, then you have room for new growth.
I love that he's using a forest fire as a metaphor here, especially given all the climate denial doctor Peterson petal.
Yeah, I included that bit on purpose. Not gonna lie. But on this fourth and final episode of Carbon Bros. We're thinking about integration a little more broadly. The question we're trying to ask is how do we bring men back into the climate movement. How do we shift the terms of a climate conversation from energy dominance in macho climate denial.
Or technofixes and planetary escape to something else. Because the Earth is getting warmer every year, We've already passed one point five degrees celsius, and with all limits on oil and gas touling lifted. Now the Department of Energy putting out reports that climate change isn't a big thread after all, and this all out of salt that the Trump administration is making on the EPA. We're definitely on track to
hit three degrees of warming by twenty one hundred. If we're leaving men to get suckered by gender grifters and climate disinformation, we are not going to fix things anytime soon.
So how do we integrate the shadow, the manisphere and all the angst and toxicity represents Because ignoring it didn't work in twenty twenty four, and it's not going to work in twenty twenty six or twenty twenty eight, assuming we still have elections. Then is there a place for a different kind of masculinity in the climate movement? That's what we're talking about on this episode of Carbon Bros.
Again and again.
The biggest issue we kept coming up against in our research for this show is that men feel an intense social pressure to provide and when faced with the choice between the economy and a Liverpool planet, a lot of guys are choosing their jobs or just feel like they have to choose their jobs. This is the essence of breadwinner masculinity, and it's especially true among energy workers who are overwhelmingly white and male.
I believe the tyiffs are a good thing.
I mean, it's actually going to help our industry out.
Todata is going to bring jobs back to America, and what comes with American jobs is energy.
President Trump, I just would like to personally thank you for what you do for the coal industry and what you're doing to make our everyday lives better.
President Trump, from the bottom of our hearts, truly thank you for everything you have done for the coal industry and for the hard working blue collar American person. We are truly better off today than we were under the last administration.
These are clips of coal miners the Trump administration brought to the White House recently. They've got these strange looks on their faces, almost like hostages reading off que cards.
Trump was following a similar playbook in twenty seventeen to the one that he is following now. Back then it was blaming Obama era regulations for keeping fossil fuel workers out of jobs. Now it's blaming Biden's climate policy. It's an old trick the Republicans have been using since the Reagan era to divide the working class.
These frenzies of.
Deregulation, of course, don't actually bring back the jobs.
In fact, they're just cutting more jobs now.
Yeah, even though the oil and gas industry is making record profits, it's actually shrinking its workforce because of automation. And the coal industry in the US has been declining for decades because coal is a more expensive source of energy compared to solar and natural gas. The cause of all of this isn't Washington or blue haired trans climate protesters. It's bosses and bottom lines. But the solutions Democrats have offered so far have sucked pretty hard.
Anybody who can go down three hundred to three thousand feet in the mind, sure, and how can learn how to program as well?
Give me a break.
Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program.
For God's sake, learn to code.
Not surprisingly, most of these computer science retraining programs have been a bust, and telling fossil fuel workers that we're just going to have to switch to an entirely different career reveals a really deep ignorance about life on the ground for these guys and their families and the communities that they live in.
At the end of episode three, we heard from Mike Levian. He's a social scientist at Johns Hopkins who studies the oil and gas industries and their push for carbon capture in Louisiana, And toward the end of our conversation, I asked him about this problem, how to win over men who think their interests are with the fossil fuel status quo.
You know, it's a problem.
I thought a lot of that.
My mom's family is off from a small Bayou and Louisiana Cajun shrimpers, and my grandpa's generation, the second generation, didn't see much of a future in shrimping, and they all to a person work in an industry, whether machinists and fabrication shops, or they're working in shipyards or welders, or doing something in an ancillary industry related to oil
and gas, jowing or petrochemical. Because I think that, you know, on the coast, people think we have these sort of backward looking coal miners and conservative guys who work out on oil drilling rigs who are our opponents in dealing with climate change, and if they could lead this whole thing, I mean, that would be amazing.
Of course, there is this huge.
Problem, you know, which is just that their current interests are completely aligned with the perpetuation of these industries because they depend on it for their livelihoods.
So how do we get these guys to join the climate movement if their interests are so opposed to climate change and their identities as men are tied up in fossil fuel work.
I think this is where like thinking about this material program, but not just the material program, but kind of the cultural politics which we could kind of challenge the hegemony of fossil fuel industries without throwing lots of blue collar workers, you know, out of their jobs with certain nothing for them, and emboldening a reaction and throwing them into strengthening the
right counter movement against climate actions. Your question about gender is an interesting one, right, because you might be right that there's a toxic masculinity that is involved in people's
identification with work in the fossil fuel industry. And so are we going to denounce people for being for that or are we going to tap into or pivot from it in a way by saying like, there is a job here, or there is a program here that is recognizing the sacrifice that you made right by working for all these years and risking black lung and risking occupational disease and all these other things.
Yeah, there's been a lot of talk and some actual, real genuine efforts over the years about a just transition. And when people talk about that, they mean everything from making sure energy is affordable for people to taking care of energy workers. But the idea of gender affirming jobs for energy workers is something kind of interesting in this economy.
It also wasn't just that it had to be a gender affirming job, but that any kind of wage replacement program that would be initiated would have to be marketed and kind of conveyed in such a way that it's not seen as welfare, welfare handout or exactly. You know that, Like we accept the idea of veterans benefits, but many people reject the idea of welfare for those who are out of work. But those two, those two things are
actually like pretty much the same. We've just decided that people who've served in the military get special social privileges because of the job that they had. However, we deal with all of the people, mostly men, who will inevitably be put out of work by the switch to renewables, we have to find a way to show that they're not being forgotten and that they're not looked down upon. Even if I hate oil, which I do, I still respect the people who put their lives in danger to drill it.
Yeah, definitely.
None of these folks are responsible for decisions being made in the c suite or you know, keeping oil going longer than it needs to be. They're guilty of nothing but like wanting a stable job and being able to like support their families.
Yeah, it's it's capitalism. And of course the fossil fuel industry jumps at every chance to remind people that real men work the rigs and will all be screwed if those jobs go away. But that doesn't actually make any of the concern less real. And in fact, a recent Equimundo survey found that men are actually feeling more anxious about being a good provider than ever because, not surprisingly, the labor market is more precarious than ever.
Yep, exactly, surprise, surprise. Everyone is feeling the pinch more, and men have this additional layer of having this social expectation that they are providers and that they're you know, breadwinners and all of that stuff. This Aquamando report and survey was really really interesting. I was surprised by a few of the stats that they found, so I reached out to the researchers who led that effort, doctor Tavishi Gupta and Caroline Hayes, to talk more about it.
So, men who are in what we have called on others in our field have called it the man box, right, And so this idea that when you are following these very stereotypical, rigid norms of masculinity, you're in the man box. Those men tend to be the ones who are actually
denying climate change. And from what we understand, this idea of sort of this very manliness of eating red meat and driving these gas guzzling trucks, etc. It's a sort of heuristic of what it means to be this very typical man box man as opposed to soy boys are beta males who eat things like plant based diets or something like that.
When we're thinking about you know, as she talked about the man box and norms around masculinity, you have things like hyper individualism, You have things like resource accumulation in order to be the provider.
And this idea of economic stress, right, which is linked to their kind of identity as a provider has been so prominent as a finding for us, and it's consistent.
Taking those to the extreme and wealth extraction and resource accumulation. You can see the direct link between, you know, the consequences for our environment when when that sort of you know, globalized on a mass scale.
When we think about the harmful aspects of masculinity, it is things like being dominant, self reliant, being very tough and on of all of that is in complete juxtaposition right to what you need to be to be actually concerned about the climate and the environment, which requires care and compassion and a desire to think about public good. Compassion is something that we have seen in our work in terms of how we say men sort of we actually come from a starting point that men are careers,
that we want men to be careers. We want men to be caring in all their relationships, not just when they have children, but to partners, to their elderly parents, to themselves. Right, and then with that comes the idea that you care for your community, you care for your planet. So we have been trying to work on several solutions that promotes caring masculinity as the core solution for this planet.
When men care, they have better mental health, they have better relationships, they have you know, they're happier overall when they care for themselves.
Care is definitely at the core of the shift, and you'll hear this keyword from a lot of the folks in this episode. One of the things I've been thinking about is society of like the girl dad, When kind of macho guys have daughters and realize that women are people too thinking.
About having a daughter, my mind went to some dark places. Dude, I don't want to I don't want to come across like.
Oh woke hoole, But like, dude, women.
Have it hard.
I'll take it. I'll take it fine.
Logan, Paul, I'm glad you realize women have feelings.
So I thought, you know, there must be guys who go through something similar when it comes to the climate crisis. Like, being a dad isn't going to get you to believe in the existence of climate change, but it might increase how much you care about it, because now you're thinking about the future of your child and the world they're going.
To live in totally.
And actually we know that it impacts some people's thinking around whether not to even have kids.
So to understand the Climate Dads, I spoke to Jason Sandman. He's a community organizer and co founder of a group called Climate Dads. Jason, Welcome to carbon Bros.
It is so nice to be here. Thank you for the time to share my perspective.
And you're are you calling from a garage right now? You're getting your car repaired?
Yeah?
Yeah.
With federal tax rebates for electric vehicles closing pretty soon, my wife and I decided to purchase one, and we are at the dealership. They're redoing the software and updating it, and so we will be taking this conversation while I'm here at the dealership. As a parent, you're always multitasking.
This is a perfect microcosm. So could you just tell the audience a little bit about what climate Dads is and who you are.
Yeah.
So, Climate ads has really started from just like two guys, two dads with two sons about the same age, who both realized that they had some of the same concerns about raising a child during this time.
Having a child is like this Eureka moment. You're like, Wow, I'm not only responsible for myself, I'm responsible for another human being.
Forever until I died.
So you start to think about, like, what does that mean, how can I support and uplift them? What challenges are they going to face? And you get in it da at least questions you're like, oh, maybe this climate change thing imflects us.
Let's talk about this specific dadliness of it. Often it's moms or women in general who take more initiative in terms of the family. You know, you could say green lifestyle or things like composting, or even in advocacy, putting their identity as a mom first.
We were way behind the mom's clean air force, mom's doing this, mature x gram was doing that. It's even for decades, and I think I can say this in those countryfrcial dance.
We got some catching up to do.
It's not the burden of the mom to carry this stuff, and so we just wanted to like part of climate dads really is just to like change that stigma.
And so it was like, let's lead by example.
Let's go get solar panels on our house and then say like, hey, we can do this together, and here's how dads can be a part of it. Let's start bringing our kids hiking or camping together and let them see the natural world and take the lead on that.
So often the right is able to pit climate and environmental concerns against job growth, against wages, for sure, and that makes a lot of men in particular say, you know, okay, maybe climate change is real, maybe it's not, but I got to worry about how much gas costs.
In a way, Climate Dads was kind of a convener and almost a facilitator. Initially locally, here's what's going on the local utility, here's how they're providing rebates, or here's a contractor that's doing this kind of work.
Give them a call.
And then we just kind of found out through random unsolicited messages from a dad in Tempe, Arizona, or our grandfather and uncle in Australia. Was like, hey, I'm kind of think about starting a chapter of Climate Dad's out here. What are you guys working on? Can we incorporate together?
The twenty twenty four election in many ways was seen as kind of the toxic masculine of the election, powered by this kind of male grievance culture in addition to a lot of fossil fuel money. How do we just win some of those guys back.
If you really want to get these fathers on board, It's not a responsibility of any one person. Think about how you can, maybe at the microscale at your house just kind of work on that and lead by example or your family, work on yourself, and then maybe maybe that's an example of HOBA, Like, oh, I feel pretty confident here.
I did some things that looks kind of good. And you reach out to like.
You're Reddit, You're I've read it, or to like your Facebook group, or to like, you know, your local church group, or like whoever you're whip, Like, hey, this kind of matters to me. Sambila is the matter of anybody else. Let's talk about it, talk about it, let's get together.
This whole conversation actually really reminds me of one of the first episodes of this show called hot Take, that I used to do with Mary Hegler.
I was a listener, you were a.
Nice you were a hotcake.
So we had done a couple of episodes early on talking about how the climate movement needed to be more intersectional and just open up space for new leaders, new voices, and we were really surprised to get a lot of emails from climate concerned white guys who were like, I totally agree with this, but also I care about climate, and this sounds to me like you don't want me in that movement, which I found really interesting because I was like, Wow, there's this really entrenched idea that like
you're either leading the movement and you're not in it, and there's no space in between. So we did a whole up about all the things you can do in between those things, and it feels to me like Jason's kind of figured out an option for that.
Yeah, the people who have the most power in the climate movement in terms of being heads of organizations or involved in policy are men. But the everyday faces of the climate movement have become so feminized that then when men are interested in participating, they feel this sense of like, well, is this even for me?
Yeah, it's really interesting. It's a whole interesting dynamic.
And that's such a mistake, right, So we gotta fix that, and I think I think Jason is offering one way out of that trap.
Right.
But important to note that these are middle.
Aged guys for the most part, and it's great that Jason and the other dads are getting together to swap notes on heat pumps and bike lanes and all that stuff, and it does change how we perceive climates a feminine or masculine issue. But there's still this question of the young guys, right, the dudes we started with in episode one of the series, who swung for Trump because he appealed to their most growish instincts.
Yes, there are a lot of right wing fitness and martial arts influencers out there denying the reality of climate change, but it's a bit harder to find the lefty version. However, I did find him amy and his name is Colin Davis. Now I'm not saying Colin is the left Joe Rogan.
We don't endorse the idea of trying to build one, but he is a charismatic fitness coach and former wrestler who comes out against the Andrew Tate types in his posts, and he's been quite as spoken about climate and it really gave me a moment of hope amidst so much to spare.
I do personal training and coaching full time. I guess I do social media full time now. I mean, in the last three months, Instagram has become like a job. Previous to that, it was still just an app on my phone. So this is a this is a very new world for me, like content creation for things that I really care about and not just using it as like, oh, marketing for my personal training. And all of the advice that I got from other coaches and people in the
business was like, yeah, just don't talk about politics. Just be a political whatever you want to.
I don't know how you can be a political right now.
And then as soon as I started being open about my politics and essentially talking shit, my following blew up. And I've had the opportunity to meet a ton of other leftists, gym goers and people that I am politically aligned with that also are in the fitness space, and it's been incredible, because, yeah, I think it feels isolating for a lot of guys that are left leaning and still traditionally masculine to be like where do who do
I get in with? You know, like, and so yeah, I'm trying to fill that gap a little bit at least online.
All right, I'm intrigued.
Colin has a silent majority theory of the case, which is basically that the loudest right wing fitness and manosphere voices don't represent the views of their audience. But because they mostly go unchallenged, they win by default.
That's fascinating actually, because I have that same theory for climate deniers in general.
Like there's this huge perception in media that.
There's way more climate deniers than there actually are, because they're the people who take the time to like write angry letters or actually call newsrooms.
How does bodybuilding or strength training like how does that or combat sports even, like how do those things fit into a left spinning point of view or a vision?
I mean personally, they fit because it gives me autonomy. Like I feel very capable in my body, and I feel very capable that I can protect people that I love and protect myself when.
I need it.
You can get strong and then also stand up to other strong people that are trying to put your friends down. Grappling cultures like jiu jitsu and wrestling are very progressive gems. Most of the time, there's like two or three guys that you're like, oh, fucking the cop is here, right, and then you got to go roll with the cop.
But then you get to go beat up a cop.
Like it's just like the loudest voices of all of these subcultures are the ones that are right leaning.
I want to talk about climate. You post a lot about like saving public land, and you do a lot of kind of like outdoor content, And I'm interested in the fact that so many men don't seem to believe in or care about the climate.
I love the outdoors, like I grew up as a boy scout and like in nature, and like I spend a ton of my free time hiking and swimming on state parks and national parks, and like I that is a massive resource that I think is like the only thing that matters at some point, Like none of these other issues matter if we.
Have a failing climate.
Right.
And then for men, I've been.
Having a lot of these conversations about like what's the problem with young men or men in general. And the thing that I keep boiling down to is like empathy and apathy. Right, so many men just don't care, like at all about anything. That's like their baseline existence is just like eh, whatever, Like I'm gonna work this job, I'm.
Gonna do this thing.
It's all bullshit, Like I'm just living my life as I'm supposed to as a man, Like I'm gonna provide I'm gonna check all the boxes, and they.
Have no connection to the world around them.
They have no genuine passions or interests, and it makes it really hard to care about like using a plastic bag at the grocery store or not if you could care less if you're dead or alive. Again, a larger problem like seeing empathy as weakness or as like feminine or whatever, like is a big problem that a lot of guys have where they feel like they can't care because you're a bitch if you care, like I don't.
I don't want to be this weak guy that's like, oh, oh you care about the straws, patronizing like making fun of you for caring. And I think once more men realize, like, once that happens, you can go, yeah, I do care, you don't like what the fuck?
Like, what do you?
You're making fun of me for caring? Turning it around like and almost like bullying people into empathy.
It's been the strategy that I've found works best.
But that does require a certain level of confidence and ability to reflect in real time. Yeah, and the level of security in your own self that I think most men don't have.
And I think I have the very specific advantage.
Also being like muscular and jacked, and like grew up fighting and wrestling, and so in these male dominated spaces, they are forced to listen to me because of all of these things that they find respectable, which is dumb, Like my ability to lift weights and punch someone in the face has no bearing on who I am as a person, right, but like those qualities are immediately disarming.
Okay, So other than relying on personal charisma, how do we win these guys back?
Yeah, you can't do it with riz alone.
I think first and foremost, they have to feel like things are actually going to change, right. They can't be bothered to care about the world when like my life is falling apart financially. If I don't have a job, and I don't have a house, and I can't afford food, I don't give a buck if the rainforest or on fire is what I think the most of the mindset is. If I've had conversations like Democrat people that are like, how do we get young men back to Democrats?
I'm like, you're not. We need to go farther left. The solution is not to go back to liberalism.
The solution is to move the needle way farther back to like actual, real progressive socialist policies that will help people, you know, like jobs programs and work programs and housing programs, like all of that will get people on board with whatever social and climate issues you want to attach with it.
I loved that.
Imagine trying to run a focus group for the DNC with this guy. Not the message you want to bring back to your bosses. But Colin did have some I think, really good strategic advice as well as more big picture thinking.
Every podcast talks about fucking jiujitsu and bow hunting and whatever like.
But yeah, there's like again this lack.
Of a political messaging from the left that it's all either preachy and inherently political and like putting it down your throat, or it's not political at all, like fully outside of politics, as just like, yeah, I have these politics, but I'm not going to talk about it because I don't want to lose money.
And then you have the Right where they kind of blend it together.
I think that mix of being political but not beating people over the head with like hey you have to agree with me, you have to do this. These are all the problems in the world and then offerings people some form of action, right, Like, I think young men, especially they need to feel like they have a sense of agency and like control and like importance in whatever movement they're part of, and establishment dims have given them
none of that. And I think if there was an alternative on the left of being like, yeah, like you can be strong, and like you can be important, and like you can tell fascists to go fuck themselves, and like you can go punch Nazis, like that kind of leftism appeals to a lot of men.
The problem was that this type of leftist had his throat slit by establishment Dems in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, remember the Bernie bro rip ip. Indeed, yes, a lot of those guys ended up voting for Trump because at least it wasn't more of the same bullshit. If Dems want those guys back, which they should since winning elections is kind of the point, they can't blame these ex Bernie bros For getting suckered by Trump's populism.
People got conned, and they're they're coming to terms with the fact that they got conned. It's been very difficult, I think for a lot of people to accept them back and be like, hey, like I was right. I'm not going to tell you I told you so, but like do we agree now? Can you like put this silliness aside and like come try to actually build a better world because.
A lot of these a lot of these men.
They're starting to come to terms with the fact that like, oh, like he doesn't care, like he doesn't care about me. These people don't care about me. Democrats don't care about me, Republicans don't care about me, and there's this like wash of like where do they go?
This actually reminds me of something that happened since we started taping this season, which is that strategy memo that the DNC had put together that got leaked to someone. I'm sure it was like purposely sent re border because it was so dumb. They're really mulling this question of like how do we win these guys back and like what appeals to them and this, that and the other, and I'm like, uh, you guys could just like hand that over to the progress of your party who were
already winning them before. But something interesting has been happening just in the last couple months. A really big something. The Manosphere has started to kind of change its tune.
A little bit.
People that are like, they'll DM me, like you see what you see?
What your boy doing? You voted for this? I'm like, I voted for none of this.
You're doing the exact opposite of everything.
I voted for.
That was Andrew Schultz, host of the Manosphere Jason podcast Flagrant. You heard his voice in episode one saying.
I'm being one hundred percent series when I cannot think of a single, one reason. I cannot think of one single reason why global warming is bad?
Is Schulz an idiot who has no real grasp of politics, science or much else for that matter. I'll let you answer that for yourself. But he's not that different from a lot of the guys who swung to the right in recent years. Those same dudes Colin was talking about a minute ago, and his recent public rebuke of Trump and his confusion about why the promises of the far right have not come true? Can teach us something really important.
Because if you've been listening to this show, you might be thinking things are pretty hopeless, that men are a lost cause, and if there's going to be a future at all, it's female but the recent flip flopping of Schultz and is bros like Rogan and Theo vonn shows just how fragile Trump's masculine coalition really is.
My name is Abdulahl said, I am running for Senate in Michigan.
Oh man, I was so excited to hear that you got to talk to Abdula alsayed, Yeah.
I mean from mom Donnie in New York to Sayed in Michigan to Bernie's sold out oligarchs tour. It's not like the left doesn't know how to appeal to young men. It's just that the DNC is terrified of letting those guys do the talking. And no surprise that the folks I just mentioned are all unequivocal about the need to act on climate too, right alongside income inequality and labor rights.
Because once again, for the folks in the back, it's all connected exactly.
Here's el said, pulling it all together perfectly.
One of the things that has become overwhelming, I think for most of us is that it just shouldn't be this hard to get by in the ridges's most powerful country in the world. You shouldn't have to worry about the quality of air you breathether the water that you drink, or whether or not you can go see a doctor, or whether or not you can afford your groceries, are walking your community without being victimized by a neighbor or
the state itself. All of these things come back to one central issue, which is that we've allowed corporations and would be allgarchs to dominate too much of our lives in the ways that they can use their money and their power to buy politics and buy politicians that allow them to rig the system for them.
Many attribute the failure of Kamala Harris's race to an inability to connect with men. But I'm curious, you know how you're thinking about winning back this demograt effic.
I just think we have a clear message that can be bold, fun and willing to take on the status quo of who wrote the rules in the first place, and I think that we need to lean into that. The problem is that the majority of the Democratic Party cannot because there is nothing transgressive about asking the corporate pack to write you a check to uphold the status quote that they wrote. Because we're not willing to do
anything structural. We've leaned in on this whole social conversation, and so we end up sounding like a nineties era sociology textbook. And every time you hear the word masculinity among people on the left, it's usually it usually comes with that toxic trope. Now, if there's not another option about a non toxic masculinity, then at some point you're basically condemning a whole group of people. And you know, if you don't offer them anything, why is it surprising
that they're going to go in a different direction. I want to talk about what masculinity is that doesn't feel.
Shitty, and what is that masculinity? Dear sir.
The zeitgeist has been sickly said that because all masculinity is toxic, ergo, we're going to get rid of all masculinity. And I think we missed the opportunity to say, actually, the masculinity I grew up with was one where you are someone who takes the risk first, but you always you always eat last, in the sense that you protect resources and you protect for the people who have to come first. And that part of it I think we've
lost because we've basically labeled all masculinity is toxic. I would much more have wanted to be able to say, actually, no, this is extremely selfish behavior, and it's small and it's petty, and it's unbecoming of the way that I understand masculinity.
It's unmanly to be this way, right, And I think in a lot of cultures if you said that, you would be making a very very powerful argument, right, And a lot of folks would say no, no, no. It's my duty to people who don't have the same strength or capacity that I do to make sure that I'm doing the things to protect them right in this society.
And so let's talk about what masculin means. Does it mean that you punch down at people you perceive to be weaker than you, or does it mean that you are a promoter and protector and empower of other people, that you can do that in a way where you can live in a society where everybody's got a great shot at things, and you can still enjoy doing the things that you know bros enjoy doing, which I enjoy doing all the time. And I come at this honestly like I'm not. A lot of democrats are like, well,
let's pretend like we like working out. You're like, well, if you don't like working out. Don't work out, Like just be who you are, number one. But you know, I say this is as a as a guy who grew up, you know, doing the traditional bro things, who still enjoys doing these things.
What are those brow things? If you don't mind my asking, I mean, like.
I played football in high school. I kept in my wrestling team and lacross team and my football team. I played lacrosse in college.
I work out.
I'm mountain bike Like those are like things that bro code. But like, let's be clear, some of the like gnarliest lifters I've ever seen in the gym are women, like including my own wife, who you know, deadlifts one point five x body weight for reps. Like I'm just like, that's incredible.
Hell yeah, I love it.
But he did point out that it's been tough to connect the climate crisis to the rest of it, or really that it's been tough to communicate that connection.
One of the hard parts of the climate crisis is that it's like a really challenging problem to clearly connect cause and effect. And that's because it exists because of a whole system of energy production in which any of our participation is really actually quite small, but exists at a level that's higher than us, which is the level of the factory that burns stuff that comes out of the ground to heat and provide energy for our homes.
And then it happens on a time horizon that's not direct, in the sense that a lot of what we're experiencing now is a function of things that happen five to ten years ago. And then there's a lot of money being spent to push back on a clear understanding of cause and effects. And the problem with that is that people who want to actually solve the climate crisis too often fixate on emblems of that crisis that people have no actual connection to, so like for a long time
the emblem was like starving polar bears. But the thing we ignore is that every moment that we're releasing climate gases into the atmosphere, they're being sieved through the lungs of our children. So you can see not too far from where I am right now, images of kids playing in a playground with a smokestack right behind them. And we've failed that in large part because I hate to say it, for a lot of us who have the
privilege to be insulated from those smoke stacks. Right, The image was a polar bear over there rather than hey, look, this is about what our kids are feeling right now.
So right.
One of the things that I actually thought the Harris campaign did well, but climate folks actually totally criticized them for was focusing on clean air and clean water as opposed to talking about climate explicitly, as like a main thrust of their campaign. As you know, I follow all of these weird lone wolf anti climate operatives as like harbingers of you know, talking points to come.
And because of that, I know that these guys have been really.
Worried for actually a really long time that the climate movement will realize that regulating air pollution achieves basically the same ends as regulating greenhouse gas emissions. And it's a lot easier sell to the public to talk about clean air and dealing with air pollution and you know, asthma and all those kinds of things than it is to talk about the atmosphere.
Yeah.
I mean a lot of what I'll said said just seems like common sense. Why not connect this big, over abstract issue to the stuff people are dealing with every.
Day exactly exactly.
And there's something else you talked about that has come up a lot over the course of this season, the big elephant in the room. That's capitalism, or really the effect that capitalism has on men. In particular, the Equamundo people talked about shifting the focus to care, which seems like a good place to start, since we're probably not going to over overhaul the economic system in you know, a year or two.
And I think you know, when it comes to this question of care and economic change, it just seems like, yeah, if you don't care about people, if the party appears to have so little concern for the lives of most of its voters, it's not going to make for an appealing cell. Even if what the Manosphere cells is based on lies, for the most part, it articulates a legitimate grievance. When RFK gets up to talk about the you know, poisons in our food supply, yeah, he's not wrong.
Naomi Klein talked about that in her most recent book.
People have a sense that like they are being lied to and that the system is rigged, and like the Democrats approach has mostly been to kind of be like no, no, no, it's fine, whereas the Republicans, even though in many cases they are the ones that rigged that system in the first place, have been pretty good at like speaking to
the problems. People are dealing with their houses falling apart and they can't fix them, or they're working as hard as they've ever worked and doing worse than they've ever been and no one's.
Speaking to that. I'm like, yeah, that's the problem.
That's why people are so open to being told, Oh, it's feminists that are the problem, or it's these you know, elitist climate activists or whatever, right, because something is wrong and no one seems to be addressing it.
But we are, Oh we are, We're trying.
So we got to wrap this thing up. We've talked to a lot of people in this series. We've talked to researchers, polsters, scientists, government officials, techno evangelists, actual evangelists, activists, a leftist bodybuilder influencer, and a candidate for the US Senate.
We've been circling around the problem of masculinity and it's linked to climate denial. Meanwhile, the planet is still getting hotter, the fossil fuel industry is going wild, and the manosphere is just getting stronger and more influential, like one of those hurricanes. They've had to invent a new category four because five just doesn't cut it anymore.
So where do we go from here, Daniel? How do we fix it?
We're fucked? No, I'm joking, but we've got a long road ahead. The climate crisis isn't just a problem to be solved by science and technology, a better media strategy, policy tweaks, or even economics alone. Climate has become a cultural issue, a question of values, stories, and imagination rooted in our identities. So now the question is how to undo the way that masculinity and climate denial have been intertwined,
and how to build an alternative. And I'm sorry to say, Amy, there's no silver bullet.
This one secret check will get men to care about climate. Nope.
No, But I think we've got a few starting points. So here are three pitches that I have and let's see what you think of them.
Okay.
One.
Leading up to the twenty twenty four election, the left was so busy worrying about who was canceled that they abandoned the most influential digital media channels, which were all online. In the case of climate, it meant that deniers and skeptics owned the manosphere. And we saw back in episodes one and three, these comedian podcaster dudes are not experts. They're not qualified to challenge talking points crafted by the Heritage Foundation and laundered by Jordan Peterson.
But we are.
So Joe Rogan invite us on the pod debate me bro.
Actually, I have to say there was a period of time where I think a lot of climate people and leftists in general were like afraid to go on Joe Rogan or we're even like, oh, like if you debate
these guys, then you're like giving them a platform. I don't know how you felt about Charlie Kirk going to debate Cambridge University kids get At first, I was like, maybe they shouldn't have taken him so seriously, But actually, like I've been getting fat a steady diet of him getting owned by nineteen year olds, and.
Maybe you can educate me.
Can you point to me a great power that endorsed same sex marriage, not cohabitation, but marriage. It's in Mesopotamia as marriage as recond marriage existence last by the States, And how did that work out for them?
I blays have have be fine, it was an accepted normal society.
Okay, I still think it's.
Well, yeah, the debating union at Cambridge is really serious.
Yes, he kind of went on this whole tour of going to campuses and doing this like yeah, debate me, and like the more people who could actually like provide a very well reasoned case for why he's wrong, the better. Like it's actually really I think had the opposite of his intended effect.
The Cambridge kids that like.
You know, verbally beat him up the most, they've become like viral sensations.
It turns out Charlie Kirk is not the master debater he thought he was. Let's not leave it to Gavin Newsom to have like fake debates on his podcast with Charlie Kirk and other right wingers. Like we as journalists and you know, other people who are members of civil society, like we need to be pressing the case number two. If men are offered a choice between jobs and polar bears,
they choose jobs. But if we make the climate crisis concrete and specific to their lives and concerns, marketing grocery prices air that will poison your family, uninsurable homes. I think it's much easier to sell, and it's not hard to go from caring about your family to your community or neighborhood and maybe even eventually your planet. But we have to tie the health of the climate to our
lived reality. It's not about atmospheric CO two. The people who are talking about CO two, it's like, no, that is not the right tactic. It's about billionaires ripping up this planet for profit.
Like, I love you climate scientists never change, but like, also, it's completely ridiculous that anyone ever expected climate scientists to
be like the messaging masters of this problem. Part of that is a response to climate denial and to the fossil fuel industry's attacks on the climate movement and responding to that, people have gotten into this mindset of like I have to be super datab and not emotional in all of these things because they're reacting to this accusation that like their alarm is like yeah, no, charts and graphs and batteries are never going to do it.
Yeah, we need to change the conversation. Okay, Number three, masculinity isn't toxic, but domination is so. Despite what Andrew Tate may claim, most guys don't dream of becoming camgirl, epimps and cryptoscammers. They just want to provide a comfortable life for themselves and their families. The will to power and violence we've talked about on this show are not what defines a man, and in fact, the ideas of care or protection or duty can be just as powerful.
So the climate movement needs to embrace this messaging and the guys who can credibly embody it.
Yeah, I think that again, instead of amplifying all of like these aspects of masculinity, what a lot of people on the left and in the climate movement did was like, you know, browbeat the bad masculinity and kind of like paint a lot of it with the same brush. So of course that's gonna, you know, make people feel left out. You know, that is not saying don't talk about marginalize people, or don't talk about women's rights or trans rights or any of these things. It's just like we can talk
about it all. Like there's room in here for all of us. Everyone has got stuff going on in this system is bad for all of us.
So like Earth, we all live on Earth, exactly, we all have art.
You're gonna need to rely on your neighbors for help. You know you're gonna need to like have and build and maintain a community, so like, you know, we got to do it one way or the other, all.
Right, So I want to leave some room for our listeners to throw in their two cents. If you're not satisfied with our answers, good send us an email or a voice note with your own solutions for a special mailbag bonus episode of Carbon Bros. Tell us about your ideas, experiences, or criticisms of the show having to do with masculinity and the climate crisis.
We want to hear like, what did we miss, what did we leave out? What are you like, Oh, I can't believe they didn't talk about this?
And also where are their solutions that you've seen that you think we should be paying attention to. I feel like actually one of the things in the list of solutions is having more of these conversations.
Thank you to everyone who has come along for this ride. Carbon Bros. Has been a great experience to work on, and obviously we're doing it because we want people to listen to it and to enjoy it and also to take what they're learning or thinking about into their lives.
And we hope that this show has had some impact for you or has helped you reframe something or think more critically about this relationship, because you know, it's our contention that this is one of those key cultural problems that no one has really wanted to step on, and we need to address it.
Thanks for listening so far, Send us your emails, voicemails and snail mails, and we'll see you back here for a final bonus episode talking through all of your thoughts and questions in a few weeks time.
Carbon Bros.
Is an original series from Drilled and Non Toxic written by me Amy.
Westerveldt by me Daniel Penny.
Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoltz Austwick.
He also composed our theme song.
Check his stuff out.
Our engineer is Peter Duff. Fact checking by Shilpa Jindia.
Original artwork by Matthew Fleming.
Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project.
Marketing by Maggie Taylor. Check out the Non Toxic podcast.
For more on the manosphere, and go to Trill Media for more climate recording and to support our work.
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