David Wallace Wells & Will Rollins

on climate change. But first we have Will Rollins, who is running for the forty first district in California, and he's going to talk to us about his newly announced run for Congress. There. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Will Rollins.

He recently voted to make it harder for our women in uniform to get access to reproductive care. So he's somebody who I think is just really out of step with what people imagine as Southern California and what Southern California really is. So I think that's going to, you know, manifest itself when he loses next year. I think a.

And I think Governor Schwarzenegger was talking about this twenty years ago when he said Republicans were dying at the box office and needed to moderate on a whole host of issues, and rather than heeding his advice, they have gone as far to the right as possible. And I think it's pretty remarkable to see people like and Calvert think that they can and continue to win reelection by telling tens of thousands of his own constituents in the LGBTQ community, for example, that we don't deserve to eat

when we get older. With his vote this week to defund senior meals for LGBT people, it's remarkable that they think this is a winning political strategy.

I mean ended up being the only challenger in the state of California to win independence as a Democrat and did the best of any House challenger compared to President Biden's performance in twenty twenty by House district. And so I had a lot of members of Congress reach out to me after the election and tell me their stories of running in a midterm and narrowly losing and coming back and winning it in the presidential year with higher turnout. And so I think that I did not have a

choice to run again. I think all Americans who care about our democracy and freedom have to step up to the plate and do everything that each of us has in our own individual power to make sure that this Republic continues to stand and that we continue to be the leader of the free world.

because the House Republicans are completely insane. If Democrats win back the House, there could be more climate legislation and more of the kind of things like the child tax credit and more of this sort of nuts and balts legislation that the American people really really like.

for all of us. So I think that it's not again, really not just about making sure the planet survives, which of course is our first concern, but making sure our economy grows and that we continue to compete with countries like China which want to create the.

conservative parts of the state. You know, Canyon Lake, for examples, in my district where my partner and I used to live, one of the most republican cities in California. No matter whether you've got an R or a D behind your last name, if you believe in banning members of Congress from trading stocks, if you believe in a lifetime ban on lobbying, if you believe that corporate pack contributions should

be made illegal. Again, that's a process based type of populism that I think more of us need to be talking about, because our government cannot function if corruption can continues to seep into the halls of Congress. And you look at again, somebody like my opponent, whose net worth has gone up by twenty million dollars since he first took office in ninety two, in part by using earmarks for personal benefit, which has been widely reported not just by the liberal press, but also by Fox News, by

the National Review, the Orange County Register. These are not liberal bastions that covered some of his own self dealing. People are hungry for, I think, reforms that apply to Congress writ large, regardless of party, because they know that gridlock can't really be overcome until we have a government that works for working families.

lost by about four points. And so when you look at the ability to overperform in that climate, and I think, you know, I always joke, I don't know whether it means that I'm a good candidate or calvert as an exceptionally bad candidate, whatever.

whom endorsed our campaign in the last cycle. And I think we need more Democratic candidates to aggressively court the pro democracy, average Republican voters who are still out there because the electives may not be, but their voters are, and we absolutely can can win them.

its own zip codes so packages can be delivered. And a local assemblymen representative got up and said, you know, I'd really like it if everybody can support my bill to make sure that teachers out LGBT kids to their parents and the entire group of not you know, this is a Chamber of COMMERCEOVT in Orco, not a pretigu progressive area. But everybody just kind of looked around at each other, like, why is this person so obsessed with culture war issues when we've got just a practical issue

in our district that needs to be resolved. And I think that there are a lot of moderate Republicans, and I'm friends with a lot of them. I mean, I again started, I spent started my career off with Schwarzenegger and had a family that really was split around the dinner table, where you could have substantive disagreements with a sense of humor without it feeling existential. And I think that so many of us are craving a return to

that kind of community. I believe that it's incumbent on people like me running and really all of us who have Republican family and friends to try to engage.

he felt that they had been too woke. And you know, this is not what the government's job is, not to punish businesses that they don't like. And we see this again and again in the House too. You know, they're trying to fight against clean energy because they really just are afraid of progress.

That's not the Republican Party of the nineteen eighties. It's not the George W. Bush Republican Party, and a lot

of people are put off by it. And I think it's a testament to kind of the realignment that we've seen in districts like CAA forty one, where you have a group of people who are small government conservatives or even libertarians who don't think that the government should be dictating medical decisions for women, who don't think the government should be dictating medical decisions for parents and their kids. I mean, Ken Calvert's not a trained physician, he's not

a psychotherapist. I don't know why anybody would ever want to have to pick up their phone and call that guy for input before they make a decision about their own life and body. And I think that that kind

of a coalition. And also, you know, frankly, on gun rights, I think whether you're looking at parents who have little kids who are in school, or you've got folks worried about their grandparents going to the grocery store, some really basic common sense reforms that I've even had conversations with NRA members about that NRA members support, for example, red flag laws. I mean, I've got an opponent who doesn't believe that somebody who threatens to shoot up a school

should have a no sale order put in place. That's remarkable. I mean, that puts him in such a fringe element of our population that it's going to make him unelectable. And it's good news for me because I'm the one to run it against it.

every day. We had I think it was eighteen straight days in Phoenix where it was one hundred and twenty. In Miami, we've had you know, really scary heat and deseas up in the upper nineties, over one hundred for weeks on end. We've got these crazy sea surface temperature anomalies where we haven't seen ocean waters this hot presumably for millions of years. And around the Florida Keys the water is as hot as it is in a hot tub. It's like in a couple of places it's registered over

one hundred degrees in the ocean water. We've had these unbelievable off the charts Canadian fire season where they've had you know, many multiples of their recent average fires burn and we're nowhere near the end of that season and there's basically nothing we can do to stop those fires or stop them smoke from coming.

of roads is burned. Parts of Corfu. Sicily had its highest temperature reading ever yesterday and now they've got wildfires like right outside of Palermo. So you know, basically everywhere you look, you're seeing things that you never thought you'd see.

And just today a big study came out looking at in particular the heat waves in the US, China and Europe, which found that, you know, all of these things which best would have been like once in every two hundred and fifty year events and in some cases would have been totally impossible in a world without climate change, are now one in fifteen year events, one in five year events.

So it's you know, it's basically things that would have been impossible to imagine a generation ago are now so routine we don't even clock them as especially unusual these days.

we've had in the recent past. You know, heat wave that we've had in the US the last couple of weeks, while really horrifying, is not that different from the hea we had last year when also one hundred million Americans were under extreme he warnings. And so, you know, psychologically we adapt extremely quickly. You know, our politics is broken in all the ways that we know, and so we don't have a lot of you know, a lot of

leadership calling out this issue. Mostly we're just like letting states and localities deal with it themselves.

like fleeing our homes, it's normal. And that's not a great recipe for dealing with a rapidly changing environment, because even if what twenty twenty five looks like is not that different from twenty twenty three, if we tell ourselves that all of these incremental changes are perfectly acceptable, we're going to find ourselves in a completely different world a decade from now than the one we're living in today, When already we're living in a completely different world than

the world our parents and grandparents live down.

a million. I mean, it's amazing now looking kind of looking back quote unquote on the pandemic, how much the memory of that experience was like based in the first couple of months, and how much most of the duration of the you know, the last few years we spent just kind of like accepting quite large volumes of human death and learning or bringing ourselves to be irritated by the relatively minor intrusions of mitigation measures that you know, we were sort of asked to embrace, Like we just

we normalize that death rate so quickly. I mean, you know, I work at the Times that famously, The Times put a banner headline on, you know, across all the columns of the front page, when one hundred thousand Americans died. They literally listed the names of every American who had died at that point. And we've now, depending on how you want to account, we've seen at least eleven times

as many people has died at that point. Some measures are say as much as fifteen times as many Americans have died at that point, and we're just not doing anything like the kind of memorialization or reckoning with that beyond even that we are I think many of us looking back on the pandemic almost as though those deaths were inevitable and disconnected from our policy, and telling stories about the last few years that are primarily about the way that they interfered with our daily lives and not

about the fact that a million Americans died. And I think climate change is, you know, unfortunately already following a similar path, which is to say, we kind of take for granted some large amount of suffering, judge our response based on the disruptions tour to our life, and don't really focus on like the pretty grim impacts on the people who are suffering most.

in our right denial of climate than were before. But I think it's also a natural social outgrowth of living through extremes, which is like one response we all have, even those of us who are really alarmed in living through some of these events, is to say, well, we basically survived, and that's true, Like you know, it's not like eighty percent of Phoenix is dead because of those temperatures. Like most of Phoenix surviving. They are going to have

significant excess tests this summer, I would guess. But you know, even significant excess tests, you're still talking about something that in a city of several million people is functionally on the margins. And it's very easy, even kind of natural for those of us who are survivorship bias, but to survive those events and look back and say, Okay, well that may have seemed really scary, you know in prospect,

but in retrospect, we made it. And I think that's you know, we're likely to see a fair amount more of that, And I don't even think that it's entirely unhealthy or unreasonable. I do think that, like we can point to adaptations and innovations and social response to some of these really intense climate events and say, Okay, well, like that didn't totally devastate us in the way that

we might have expected. Human life will be damaged by these assaults from climate change going forward, but we may also be able to navigate them in a way that allows something like quote unquote normal life to continue. And in fact, probably we will find a way, even if that also involves normalizing say, you know, ten thousand deaths a year every summer in Phoenix.

this spring. There were conservatives who are pushing that measure in the in the state legislature were pushed back by other conservatives who looked at the numbers and said, wait, if we limit renewable deployment, that means that energy prices are going to be higher, right, And this seems to me to be a really significant reversal from where we were just a few years ago, where you know, climate skeptical conservatives would say, well, we just need to let

the market decide. We can't distort the market by subst renewable energy, and they were kind of like there were free marketeers in the name of fossil energy. And now we're in a situation for a number of reasons, including the IRA, but also just natural market forces where renewables are a preferable alternative to fossil fuels, and you have fossil friendly conservatives now rallying against the force of the

free market. So they're basically trying to and in the way of what is naturally occurring in a place like Texas, where renewables are growing rapidly. Texas is the most renewable

rich state in the country. I believe they have twice as much solar capacity as they had on the grid even last year, and it's the reason they're not having blackouts at the moment, Like you said, I think the longer term story year is really interesting in the sense of how quickly and how fully those trajectories will at least neutralize climate as a partisan issue and maybe even

flip it or reverse it. Because in the year or so almost a year since the IRA was passed, we've had much much more clean energy investment in red states and red districts than we have in blue, blue states and blue districts. And you know, I think ultimately that

is going to have a political impact. I don't know how quickly, I don't know how significantly, but I do think it's already notable when you look at the midterms that you know, Republicans were just not running against the IRA, they were basically standing on the sidelines, not mentioning it.

And I think we're starting to see that sort of transformation of climate from a predictable, partisan, polarizing issue to one in which, you know, the truth is like the market is doing its thing, and most people, even on the right side of the aisle, are at least comfortable with it, if not applotting it out right.

something to that effect. So I wonder just how much conservatives will try to punish green energy just because they think it works for them.

that is happening. I don't mean to suggest that, like we're all in Kumbay Island and everybody on the life, but I also think, you know, it's significant to me that like Ron DeSantis, in building his presidential campig first of all, he's a missile is going down or whatever. He's not a sign of the future of the party. Even as he's building his presidential campaign. He's not screaming

about clean energy, No, he's not. He's screaming about issues and schools and to some extent, you know, COVID restrictions and lockdowns, although I think that's a loser for him too. But you know, in general, the Party as a whole, while they retain some amount of climate skepticism and they're not exactly about to like make AOC secretary of Energy or whatever, they are also not focused on energy issues and climate issues in the way that they were absolutely

focused on healthcare in the aftermath of Obamacare. And you have a massive bill that passed by the narrowest of margins last fall for the IRA, a huge bill, probably three or four times the size that the CBO estimated, because the legislators kind of tricked the CBO into making it seem like a smaller bill was And like the Republican response has been basically silenced, I mean, you know,

not totally silenced. There have been little burst protests here and there, but they're basically like, okay, fine, like let that become law. Let that become the law of the land. We're going to argue with you about all these totally trivial kind of virtual reality combats kinds of politics, and that's where that party is now. That's depressed. It's distressing,

it's horrible for the country in a million ways. But I think it also leaves whole areas of policy to be directed by those people who really care about making a difference, which is to say, primarily people on the left. It's not just climate policy, but climate is the best illustration of that right.

going on. It's absolutely true that there has been a propaganda campaign around the world, but maybe most conspicuously in the US, and it has had some effect on keeping us invested in connected in a way of life that is totally unsustainable. And this is not you know, we often think of this as a really long standing dynamic. As recently as twenty sixteen, the US was not exporting a single molecule of oil or gas. By twenty twenty two, the US was the largest exporter of each of those

in the entire world. So, you know, it's not just a matter of companies slowing action, although they do that too in certain areas. We've been dramatically expanding our footprint here, which is total indictment of US, and I think even more than the fossil fuel companies themselves, it's an indictment of the sort of the politicians who have enabled that to happen. You know, I think a lot about that famous appearance that Obama made towards the end of his presidency.

Maybe it was in the immediate aftermath when he left office in Texas, where he was bragging about making the US the world's largest producer of oil and gas and then instructed the audience, who are like all to soil

and gas men, to thank him in applot. And you know, I'm a fan of Obama's I have supported him as a president, But there's just a way in which we tell ourselves that we're on the right side of history and make such large compromises with the forces of the fossil fuel industry that we end up on the wrong side.