Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Ron DeSantis, Pact President, resigned the day after his debate with Gavin Newsom. We have such an interesting show today. The Daily Beast Kelly Wilde tells us about why the Seth Rich and Pizzagate conspiracy theories
have resurfaced again. And then we'll talk to the Environmental Defense Funds Fred Krupp about the big news this weekend of an agreement that will help hold oil and gas companies accountable for methane leaks. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson. Welcome back to Fast Politics, your friend and mine whatever, Rick Wilson.
Hi up, Rick Wilson, and thanks for joining us today on Fast Politics.
So let's talk about that debate last night, Ron dez Santis versus Gavin Newsom.
Go.
I have to say this, I tweeted earlier in the day there was absolutely no reason to watch this debate and it's a rare thing. I'm just gonna admit it, though I was so wrong.
I feel like we have the Rick Wilson dirty talk here. He's like, when you get.
To a certain level of political acumen, Rick Wilson, is kenna control himself?
Continue?
It's true. I believed that last night would just be a nothing burger, like a you know, a wet fart and a hurricane. But it turned out that we learned three important things last night. Ron DeSantis' consultants and staff hate him. They hate him with the fire of a billion suns.
So are you saying that Jeff row is not really ultimately on team DeSantis?
I am saying that every person who receives a paycheck from him last night must have been howling with laughter watching him get his ass beat like a rinted mule. I mean, this guy got whipped up and down the stage by Gavin Newsom. And it's not because Gavin's politics are more appealing. It's because Gavin Newsom knows how to stand on a stage and debate somebody. You could have flipped their ideological polarities one hundred percent and Ron Sanda still would have had his ass whipped, just beat so
bad he couldn't sit for a week. It was embarrassing, it was painful. You could even watch Sean Hannity's like facial tics a few times where he knew his conservative champion, Ron de Sentius was getting his head cut off and kicked around like a soccer ball. Oh my god, it was humiliating. I can't put too fine a point on the fact that there were people who believed that Rond de Santis was a good debater when this primary start.
Much like people who believe that the earth is hollow and the interiors is filled with plant people, much like people who believe that they hear the universe whispering to them to tell them to do things. This guy was so bad last night, I mean so catastrophically, unbelievably shit to your bad that if I had normal human emotions, I might have felt a moment of pity for him.
No, I did not feel pity for him, But then again, I also do not have normal human emotions.
Added to his catalog, and my video editors, of course captured at all his catalog of weird tongue movements.
Yes, yes, yes, a lot of weird.
His smile is like the smile of a serial killer. He's eyeing up a girl for a skin suit. Yeah, yeah, it's gonna sew out of her flesh. I mean, it just was so goddamn horrible. It was painful.
Yeah, horrible, horrible, horrible.
If people think this is the guy who's going to beat Donald Trump in a Republican primary, I mean, what the hot fuck?
I think it's over.
I mean, don't you feel like this was the end of Ron DeSantis' national political career.
The only thing that's left of Rowdisantus's campaign is a carcass that political vultures are picking over right now. That was a debate of such disastrous proportions that ending the campaign is a mercy killing. I literally could not tell you what we were watching. We got hold from the generalized that we were watching it on DVR, and it was almost like a movie version of the inept horrible conservative candidate getting his ass whipped by a slick rival. I mean, yeah, well man, I.
Mean just incredible.
And what struck me the most was there really were things to be learned and gleaned from Gavin Newsom's debating style. For example, he really did sort of go in there like Sean Hannity.
I've never seen a moderator.
Be more biased in my life like Sean Hannity would ask a question. It would be like, Gavin, why is there so much crime in California? Why is California a burning houhole that people are desperately trying to leave?
Why of living in v the day?
Right?
And he would come and you'd be like, well, that's not really And I mean, I don't know if you watched the beginning of the debate, but so Sean Hannity spent about three minutes talking, but it felt like twenty talking about how these questions are going to be fact based, which I guess was like unlike everything else on Fox News. By the way, they were not fact based, but they were like some of them had charts, yes, poop charts.
Poop charts. Well that was later when someone decided. The thing I love about DeSantis is that he kept coming up with these anecdotes. He was like, I met this woman so obviously a donor. She had to take off her jewelry before she went shopping. And I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm sure she was a donor, right, she has to have been a Republican donor who was like wearing lunch diamonds and she takes them off when she goes to the grocery store because she puts them in the safe.
I presume that you know the average DeSantis, Florida donor is she's gonna walk the Harry Winston up in the safe before she goes to publics in the afternoon. Right, she's sick of the iguanas falling on her diamonds.
It's unbelievable that I thought was amazing.
And then he tried to do this gotcha with Newsom about Newsom's in laws moving to Florida. That was like, clearly when they were debate prepping, he was like, and then I'm going to drop the Newsom in laws thing. And again it was so badly done that I don't think it landed.
Did he really have.
A conversation with Newsom's in laws where they were like, we're moving to Florida?
Of course not. Here's the real thing about debate prep, and I've done debate prep at every level conceivable. If you have a great opposition research hit, you better vet the shit out of it, right, you better know it's exactly what you think it is, and you'd better be able to deliver it without seeming like you're tea going to no I will know I will deploy binger.
Incredible stuff.
God, I'd love to play cards with this fucker because he.
The other thing that I thought was really interesting that we kept seeing d Santis do was that you could tell he was like very angry, and he'd be like, he's lying, this is a lie, it's all lies, and then.
He'd laugh he's lying, he's lying.
Sean, Yeah, Sean, yeah.
No.
Look, I'm almost bored saying to people for the last year plus two years, almost Ron DeSantis is an overpriced political stock. He's not good at the work. This is not a man with the natural airs and graces of politics. This is not a man who understands how to communicate with people, or connect with people, or to even walk
down a street without having dogs howl at it. This is not the guy who comes across as normal and the idea that you've got Sean Hannity trying to put the paddles on the chest to this guy's debate performance last night. The only thing more absurd about it is the Dassanna's spin coming out of it, where they were saying, yes, Dessanus is obviously now the front runner the presidential campaign. No, here's how insulting I think it probably was in Trump's mind.
He probably like gave up watching it after about after about fifteen minutes, right, because it was just that bad. Also, the picture Fox released of the two of them, it looked like they were about the kids.
Oh no, I didn't see that Fox.
Really supposed to post. I haven't seen it. Look up the Fox poster of the two they looked like it was the cover of like a Harlequin romance novel from the seventies. It was like, now kiss me, you thrubbing brutes.
But here's the like the fifty four billion dollar question, is de Santis so bad?
Or is Newsome so good?
It's de Santus is so bad. Kevin is fine as a debater, right, He's not top tier interesting, He's not a Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.
I thought he was Bill Clinton last night. So tell me why he's not Bill Clinton, because here's why I thought he was Bill Clinton.
And again, I don't know.
Maybe this is my forty five year old housewife for a not to be sexist and also deeply misogynistic about myself. But the thing I was struck by with Newsom, which I thought was a singular talent and I could be wrong, was that he took every single Fox News talking point.
He's actually become very focused on doing that, right.
Yeah, So Sean Hannity, he was like, crime, it's a real problem. And then all of a sudden, we're here and Newsom is talking about gun safety and gun violence and mass shootings, and you're like, wait a second, isn't that a sort of singular talent or am I just like he's cute?
Well, you bifer kate the question first. Gavin has become very adept at turning the Fox bullshit back on itself.
Yeah.
Pete Buddha Jeddge also has become very adept at doing that. It bothers the Fox audience, which is why they only have them on an extremely limited quarity. Right again, Gavin was a fine debater, capable debater, marshalled his facts nicely. But this is like, you know, you're in a house with kind of a musty, mildery room and you walk into another room and there's a giant polo horse maneuver.
The first room smells pretty good in comparison, So it is partly that you were watching a decent to good debater take on probably the worst political communicator in the twenty twenty four cycle.
Watching that reminded me of watching what President Bartlett did for liberals on Westling. Yes, like the whole way that character was written as like liberal porn in that era. This was modern day liberal porn. I felt like they engineered it to do it. As somebody watches a million debates,
I actually have to say I disagree. I think that was top tier performance for the audience he was trying to impress, which is primary voters who Gavin Newsom's debate bait was all about telling primary voters I should be next to mine?
What about DeSantis?
The Charlie Criss debate was the worst debate performance I think I have ever caught, maybe aside from Scott Brown versus Elizabeth Poor, maybe the only one worse.
Yeah, okay, so there you go, And when do you think about it?
Jesse. Charlie crist at that point was a spent force in Florida politics. He's tired, he's exhausted, he doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up. Finally, right exactly, and when you saw him put DeSantis on complete blue screen lockdown, Ron, are you going to stay here? And serve the people of Florida as you're promising to do, or you're going to run for president, and Santa's was like, oh, clank, client,
it's just a thing of beauty. As the kids would say, Charlie Chriss brought NPC energy and still.
Wont I don't know what that means.
NPC is non playable character in the video and game.
Yes, he did bring NPC energy, but why is a non player case it's something to use. Why is a non playable character better than a playable character.
It's worse, it's worse. They have no personality. You forget them immediately. That's Charlie christ He's the most forgettable person.
It's worse. Yeah, it makes it. It makes it worse that Rond de Santas was beaten. This is like Ronda Stantus could have debated a toaster oven last night and still lost.
Yeah, that is a good point, but it is interesting. I did really think to myself, like, we should have more debates, We should be watching this kind of thing more because ultimately, even though it is just like a pseudo event like polls, like press conferences, it's manufactured for our amusement and it's not a natural, organic data point. It still is really a way of thinking about things that we just don't do that much in American media.
Discuss Well, I have a piece coming on next week about this. It's like debates at one point really served a purpose of showing you who the people running for president were, right. It was one of the few ways that people got to look at the character in the modern era, got to look at the character and the ideals and the skills of a political candidate. It was a job interview, and you stood on the stage with a bunch of other people and you gave a job interview.
Last night was like the scene in Step Brothers where they show up in the office wearing weird tuxedos and are completely awkward, right, and it just you can't imagine the level of disaster at this sky pos for his own campaign. And frankly, look, DeSantis did this because he's absolutely desperate for anything to change the dynamic of the presidential climate for other than Donald Trump dropping dead of a cardiac arrest. The dynamic is not changing, right, sorry, Ron Well.
I also think the thing that was very striking to me at which I thought was kind of incredible, was Newsom said when you can drop out.
Well, I also like to when Newsom said to him, I'm going to endor the doorstep in a couple of weeks, You're going to endorse thought Weld.
Right, I mean no, I mean it was. There were just a lot of really good lines in there. So Rick Wilson, thank you for joining us. I hope you'll come back.
Well jung fast, there you go.
Kelly Wile is a journalist of the Daily Beast and author of the amazing newsletter Mom Left But Kelly Wile, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me.
Here's the sentence I would like to have never had to say. When Elon must started tweeting about Pizzagates, that's when you know, as celebrity or billionaire has really started to go off the rails. Is when they start to embrace Pizzagate. We need the TLDR on what the fuck pizzagate is. Give us the twenty minute history in about two minutes.
Okay, good, because no one wants to listen to this for twenty minutes.
It is way more than your brain cells deserve.
Basically, Pizzagate is a resuscitation of a whole bunch of old conspiracy tropes, But this basically accuses prominent democrats of trafficking children either for sex and or like drinking their blood, and they're trafficking them through pizzerias.
And it's charts with the pizzeria that was owned by the husband of David Brown exactly.
So they really homed in on this DC pizzeria that had literally never done anything wrong.
Comet Ping Pong is the pizza there good?
I have straight up never been.
I do want to take a like a conspiracy tour, maybe like ed at the UFO restaurant in Roswell or something, get some pizza comet ping Pong. But in essence, a whole bunch of nutjubs on the Internet got really worked up about non existent child trafficking in me by the way, non existent basement of this pizzeria.
There's no basement, and.
It got whipped into such a fever pitch that a gunman went into the pizzeria, which is really popular with children.
And their parents.
He went in there at lunchtime, started firing off rounds because he was gonna, you know, save the children, and that should have quelled the entire thing forever. To his credit, she did go looking, didn't find trafficking, did manage to shoot, you know, an ar a couple times in a crowded restaurant, but unfortunately that did not put it to rest for some of the Internet's most colorful characters.
How did Elon get involved in this again?
So? Elon has always been like kind of a conspiracy dabbler. You know, he loves really lukewarm memes, really lukewarm conspiracy theories. So he's always getting to things like two to five
years late. Just over the past like a couple of weeks or so, he's been not just engaging with conspiracy and Pizzagate influencers, because he's done that a lot in the past, but actually promoting this kind of thing, tweeting out like an office meme, like a meme of Michael Scott from the office, like endorsing the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. I mean, these are things that a few years ago, if somebody did that, that would just be like, Okay,
well you're considered a crank for life. And Elon's doing it and he's got thousands of Blue Check fans being like, yeah, sir, that's awesome, that's so epic.
Right, So he rediscovers pizza game, he starts tweeting about it. This then sets up a sort of like the Pizzagate people get super psyched because this is all they've ever wanted.
Right, Exactly all these people want is attention, and I cannot tell you the degree to which they've like they've pursued it. I've had Pizzagate people like scroll through my Instagram to like comment on my wedding photos.
Be like Pizzagate is real.
It's like, so to get the richest man in the world endorsing your theory when previously you were like two and a half years deep on a random reporters Instagram, that's huge.
That is frime time.
Baby.
They're jumping for joy about this.
A lot of them are kind of re upping old Pizzagate content that was never taken seriously before, is not taken seriously now but can get a lot more eyeballs than it used to.
And that really is the sort of net net here is.
Again, we don't know what's happening in his head, but it certainly seems like he thinks this will be good for the brand, right.
I would never presume to know what's going on in Elon's head. It is a complete mystery to me, and I'd like to keep it that way. But he thinks of himself as a troll, and he does promote content that's provocative that's going to start arguments and often, you know,
arguments to his side's favor. And the right has been really invested in Pizzagate because it's sort of, you know, it's a way to push this trope about, oh, you can't trust the elites, and conveniently, in their narrative, the elites are you know, like college professors and I guess reporters rather than extremely rich people with huge media franchises. So it's a very politically salient thing to promote and it works to Elon's favor.
Explain to me exactly how seth Rich factors into all of this.
Yeah, So the seth Rich conspiracy theory came around the same time as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The commonality they have is just like seething, foaming at the mouth resentment for Hillary Clinton, just throwing anything in the wall to sea wall stick. Pizzagate suggested that she was involved in a child sex trafficking ring. Seth Rich basically, there was a young DNC staffer who was murdered in an apparent
robbery in DC. A whole bunch of figures on the right spun up this completely fake conspiracy theory suggesting that he had leaked DNC records to Wiki leaks. That wasn't true, But the right seized on this tragedy and seized on this young man's family and really made their lives hell for a long long time. And you know, I think the family was able to claw back the narrative in some respects very bravely going public honoring their son's name, and also, like Fox News, had to retract their stories
about the stuff because it was complete bogus. And yet years after the fath just like the resuscitation of Pizzagate, we're seeing a revival of Seth Rich conspiracy theories both on Twitter and elsewhere. You know, I mentioned there was a Fox News story on him that had to be pulled because it was complete bullshit. Well just the sweet Fox is revealed to have rehired the producer behind it, So we're seeing, you know, kind of a grace period
for getting called out in your bullshit. That's that's up, and they're just bringing back the classics.
Is this a conspiracy, Like, is he doing this just because he's sort of baffling through you know everything, or do you think he's doing this because he thinks it'll help Twitter traffic? And I mean, is he like doing the trumpy thing of like touching the third rail because you just have decided that that's all you have and let's just try that and see what happens.
I think it's a combination of those things.
I think Elon, just like Trump, is like pathologically compelled to touch the third rail. But I don't think he's doing it for Twitter's benefit. I think he's doing it because he's literally addicted to attention. You know, he needs that, he needs that dopamine, he needs his reactions and everything like that.
I don't think there's any way to argue that this is good for Twitter.
I mean, but it drives engagement.
To agree, Yeah, totally, But I mean there's just like engagement with whom I guess like they've brought back, you know, some far right figures on Twitter, but you look at the numbers and just they're plummeting. You and me are talking the night after Elon Musk went on stage at like a New York Times thing and said my advertisers
can go fuck themselves or something like that. I mean, this is not the brightest business mind running this company right now, and so I don't think like a Pizzagate post is ultimately going to drive engagement in a way that can be part of a company saving business plan, but it can definitely make him get the warm fuzzies for a little.
Bit, right right right? What does pizzagate that crew? Like, what are they doing right now? Where are they in this world?
Are they? How campaigning for Trump? Are they?
I mean, you know, you've got that guy who looks like JFK who pretends to be he doesn't look like him, but he pretends to be the reincarnation of JFK Junior. Are they all in on RFK? I mean, this is not a huge group, but it's Trump's base.
It is Trump's and it remains Trump space. These are Trump people. These are not the Nikki Hayley voters. These are the people who are all in on this cult of personality. And you know, you ask where they now? Are they like campaigning for Trump? I don't see them so much really digging into the nuts and bolts of electoral politics where I see them is actually like in school board meetings.
The Moms for Liberty crew.
Right right, And I think there's actually, you know, I think there's something to be noted here about this Pizzagate panic about children and innocence and trafficking rising at a moment where there's a very savvy political effort to denonize LGBTQ people with this fear about you know, the gays are coming for your children, They're going to corrupt them sexually, and that's why we need to pull all the books
out of the library. So, you know, I think I think there's probably two fronts to this approach, and one is you know, the just outright explicitly Pizzagate stuff, and the other is you know, a much more respectable, accepted school board politics, which does have a lot of the same messaging and implication.
There are definitely members of Congress who are kind of cuan on adjacent. Talk to me about who they are and kind of what they look like.
Absolutely, you know a lot of new Congress members have got a lot of influence by either outright endorsing some of QAnon's central claims or winking at them. Most obviously is Marjorie Taylor Green, who has endorsed QAnon like very explicitly in old social media posts, and these days she'll say, oh,
you know, I was fooled, I was taken in. But she and a lot of the other folks who endorse this kind of thing never really deny the central allegations, which is this massive conspiracy against Trump and everyone who opposes Trump is part of a trafficking ring, and we're going to reclaim the country and really fascist terms. You know, all of our enemies are going to be thrown into gitmo.
You know, Marjorie Taylor Green, by virtue of like literally endorsing qune On at one point, is probably the vanguard of NETT. But honestly, I think one of its biggest promoters is Trump himself. You look at his truth social and he is just straight up posting like what do you call it, retreating people with qNaN stuff. You know, he's sharing image macros with himself and like a queue over the face. He's using the same language about you know, imprisoning his enemies and everything.
So it's like a few years ago, I would.
Have been I don't know, on Hilert for Congress members who maybe explicitly endorse qnon on Facebook before they were running. In these days, I'm like, I feel like the message of QAnon has pervaded the GOP so thoroughly that it's like a lot of this is de facto QAnon, right.
I mean a lot of this is them pretending to do whatever you think the base.
Likes, right, absolutely, And that's like, I think that's probably a real conundrum for Republicans. It's like a lot of them are fewer now, but you know, they maybe got into politics on the idea that I'm going to be a fiscal conservative and we need lower taxes, and their bases are like, yeah, that's cool. I actually heard that the superintendent is trafficking children out of the basement of the library and that's why we need to shut down
public schools. It's like, that's quite the base to have to pander to, and I think some politicians have taken that on board with their messaging.
Let's talk about your newsletter.
Yeah, So a couple months ago, I launched a newsletter called Mom Left. It's a new newsletter for moms on the left, and I've been using it to chronicle some of the kind of school board craziness that's been blowing up this past year and will certainly continue.
Over twenty twenty four.
Since I've become a mom, I've really noticed that there's an increased political emphasis on mothers and their role in politics. So, you know this is coming at a time when Mom's for Liberty is gating influence.
Can we talk about the recent Moms for Liberty scandal?
Oh, my goodness today, Yes.
The Florida Republican chair Christian Ziggler and his wife tell me who she is, what she is, and what the story there is.
Absolutely so.
Bridget Ziggler is sort of a Florida education mover and shaker. She was one of the founders of Moms for Liberty, this far right education group. She is no longer with the group, and they'll be like really picky. They're like, oh no, no, no, no, she's not with us now.
She created it.
She created it.
She's like on their founding documents and you can dig through her history. You know she tried previously before Moms for Liberty to get far right education groups off the ground. Her more recent educational history is that she has been working really in lockstep with the Desantiska from that, which in turn is very supportive of moms for liberty to push a hard write message in Florida school She was on i believe still is on the board of the
Saratoga Schools. She was on the board of if you recall, Ronda Santa's gotten this insane feud with Disney World and decided he had to have a board to oversee them. She's on that and her husband, Christian was very recently appointed chair of the Florida GOP.
Now what has just come out today is.
That the Zigglers are allegedly part I'm not sure the depths of each of their attachment to the other party.
They may be in a consensual thropple.
It seems like, yeah, there's some swinging going on there.
Yes, and there may be larger swinging. And we are not here to cast dispersions on where people's weird sexual piccadillos. But we are here to cast dispersions on domestic violence, which is what this foraid into.
Absolutely so.
So, we have a partly redacted criminal complaint from last month alleging sexual battery by Christian Ziggler. The woman in the complaint accuses him or you know, one of the unredacted portions. References rape, it references sexual assault. It doesn't appear the bridget Ziglar was present at the time of it. But I mean, damn right, and I.
Think more importantly beating women up.
You know that's not okay, Finish up with the newsletter, tell us rest the newsletter.
Yeah, this newsletter has been so fun to write because, you know, I'm realizing how much of American politics can actually be viewed through this lens of being a mom. You know, it comes down to local politics. As far as these school board battles going, they're getting more intense, They're becoming proxies for all kinds of American political dilemmas. And I'm also really interested in the economic nuts and bolts of it.
You know.
I know a lot of American families are struggling to make ends meet, and there are so many really interesting policy proposals that can make that easier for folks. It's just it's been an interesting project for me, kind of navigating this world as a mom, as someone who is maybe psychotically invested in politics, and seeing where those two things meet, and certainly following the course of that because I know it's only going to get crazier as we get into twenty twenty four.
Thank you so much, Cali.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Fred Krupp is the president of the Environmental Defense Fund. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Fred, delighted to be here about it.
There's a pretty.
Huge climate conference happening this week.
Talk to me about how that's relevant to what you do, and tell us a little bit about what it is you do well.
The Environmental Defense Fund has been working on climate change for decades now. It's the biggest thing we work on. It's almost all we work on.
Us.
If we don't.
Solve climate change, you know, we're all in deep trouble, even many of us underwater literally. So we have a crisis situation on our hands. We need urgent action, and the international COP process has been way too slow, and so you know, what we've been working on, of course for the last year is to try to make this COP twenty eight, which is now ongoing, super productive.
It's in Dubai, which again we've talked about that that is a little bit perhaps counterintuitive.
But I think that the point here is.
That you got to get oil companies involved in this, right.
Yeah, No, many people have looked at the process and these cops these meetings rotate around the world, so this year it was the Middle East turn to host it and the nation that was selected as an oil rich company the United Arab Emirates, and the chairman of the cops UP has been roundly criticized for not only being chairman of the cop but also the CEO of.
An oil company. We look at.
That situation back in January and decided to be a relentlessly pragmatic about it. It's up to the UAE who they appoint as chairman. We understand the criticism absolutely and at the same time look at it as an opportunity to take advantage of the fact that a doctor Sultan is very respected within the oil industry by other oil
company CEOs. And if we could get these companies that are putting so much methane pollution in the air to reach an agreement to dramatically cut that methane pollution, that would be a big win. Now, Molly, it doesn't solve climate change, it's just one of the things that needs to happen. But because methane is so you know, potent, which I'm happy to explain, if you'd like it's actually a big deal.
Let's not bury the lead.
Hear, you're the president of EDF and there's a big thing that you guys have announced last weekend. So explain to us what it is and why it's meaningful.
Well, on Saturday, doctor Sultan announced that forty nine leading oil companies, including nationally owned oil companies and international oil companies, have agreed to three key things. One is to reduce their methane emissions by what we calculate will be for many of these companies eighty or ninety percent. Two that they have agreed to do it within five years, not by some far away date by twenty fifty, but now.
And three that the soil companies have agreed to submit monitoring and test data to verify that they achieved this reduction to an independent third party agency. So that will be one level of accountability, not the only level. So that's the big news that happened Saturday into.
Us what methane is and what it does.
Yeah, why methane matters? Well, this has been a kind of a hidden secret, and most people who know a lot and care a lot about climate change think that it's all carbon dioxide, but in fact about a third of the global warming that we're experiencing right now is caused by methane. And when we look forward at the pollution that is now being put in the air, methane
from anthropogenic sources, human sources will business our economy. Methane put into the air, say in twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four, will warm the planet about as much as all the CO two from burning all the fossil fuels on the planet for the next decade. Now, the CO two is important because it keeps warming a planet for one hundred years, so it's going to be important for our great great great grandchildren. But in terms of the next ten is what you and I will see.
It turns out methane. By cutting methane, we can have a really immediate impact and lower the temperatures that we would otherwise see, lower the ferocity of storms that will otherwise experience in this next decade. And so that's why methane is so important. And the oil and gas industry, unfortunately is the biggest industrial source on the planet of methane emissions.
So I want to talk about this a little more because I think it's really relevant and important. Can you explain to us how oil and gas companies release methane.
Sure, when the oil companies are taking oil and also natural gas out of the ground, the natural gas to be called natural gas, it has to be about ninety percent methane. That's basically what natural gas is. It's methane. But when they're taking it out of the ground and shipping it around and processing it amounds. Week before the Environmental Defense Fund began me measuring it, the oil companies said that.
Very little leaked.
Once we measured it, we found out that the amount that was being reported to EPA in the United States was off right. The companies actually leaked sixty percent zero percent more than they were reporting.
So you can't really trust And again I'm saying this, you don't have to agree with me, but I just need to sort of.
Net this out.
So basically, you can't really trust that the oil and gas companies are going to monitor themselves.
And we're not going to. That's why we also announced on Saturday, with tremendous support from Mike Bloomberg, a twenty five million dollar gift to forty million dollars in new money overall that Mike Bloomberg announced On Saturday, we announced an accountability partnership with the International Energy Agency and a UN body called the United Nations Environmental Programs, International Methane and Missions Observatory and DF We've got a new accountability
project and edf's part of that is we are launching a satellite next year that we'll be able to look at all the major eighty percent of the major oil and gas infrastructure on the planet multiple times every week, and we'll be able to see which companies are meeting their promises and which one of these aren't, and working with IMEO and the International Energy Agency IEA, we will be jointly holding them accountabil because you're absolutely right, many
things have been said by many different industries at these cops in the past that don't come true, and so we've built into this the first level of accountability that the companies have to submit their own tests for independent third party validation, and a second level of accountability with these other partners and including data from a satellite that called Methane SAT that the Environmental Defense Fund is launching
early next year. What we find out, Molly, every human being on the planet who has access to the Internet will be able to see a near real time what each of these companies are doing, what methane is being released all over the world. Because we're making this a data not available to just governments or just the companies, but governments, companies, and every human being who can access the Internet.
It feels like there's a failure on the part of climate activists, and again they have their hands fold but people don't really understand why methane is so dangerous.
But the note of it really is that.
Methane will heat the atmosphere much faster, over eighty times faster than CO two pound per pound, So it's tremendously potent, and more and more environmentalists do understand that, but it's true that not everyone does.
And it doesn't only come from the oil and gas industry, by the way, it also comes from coal moniting, it comes from landfills, and it comes from agriculture and cows. Cows are a big source.
Livestock is yeah.
But the cows are still only like twenty five percent, right, Most of it is oil and gas, coal, landfills.
Well, Actually, agriculture in total is about the same as the fossil fuel contribution, and so agriculture is important and the biggest part of agriculture is cows, so you know, people make jokes about it. It is the burps that from the cow's mouth that caused the biggest part of the problem by far. But there's something we can do about that too. In fact, one of the biggest dairy companies in the world, they pronounce it in France Dano.
In the United States we say DAN. They had reached an agreement which we announced the CEO of DAN on Nedup and nounce in January of this year that they are going to reduce from their fifty eight thousand arms that supply them with milk, they're going to reduce their methane emissions by thirty percent. Again, not by some far away date like twenty eight fifty, but by twenty thirty. And so that also will make a difference in the temperature's you and I experience in this next decade.
But I also think that this satellite will create accountability.
Right, Yes, the satellite is key to accountability. There are other methane satellites, but this is one that gives us a comprehensive total of methane emissions, an area wide total that is unique because it can see what we call diffuse emissions and a little technical maybe, but you know when we flew, when we use the same instrument in an airplane and we glew over the oil basins in the United States, we found that most of the methane emissions are from leaking seals on compressors or pipes that
have small leaks in them, or other chronic small leaks that together make up for the majority of.
Methane that's submitted.
In fact, in one basin called the U Winter Basin in Utah, eighty eight percent of the weeks from the oil and gas industry are from these diffuse sources. And the beauty of the satellite it it's the only satellite that we'll be able to measure that part of the total. And so when that's eighty eight percent of the totally, you know, this is a unique instrument with unique capabilities that really help us hold this industry accountable.
Who are the oil companies that have made this pledge?
Forty nine companies have pledged to reduce their methane by what we calculate will be eighty to ninety percent, and they include the biggest oil companies in the world like Aramco and the second biggest oil company in the world, Exon. These two companies have been resistant to the idea of third party monitoring and verification, joining a UN organization called OGMP. These companies have only recently agreed to sign this pledge and ex agreed last week to this level of accountability.
So that's a breakthrough.
But in addition to those, the majority of these companies are nationally owned oil companies like the Nigeria National Oil Company and many many others, and those companies are actually responsible for producing the majority of oil and gas in the planet and a disproportionate amount of the methane emissions. So that's what makes this big step forward so good. But Molly, I have to say, because all of us know,
we have to move off of fossil fuels fast. We have to accelerate the move to clean energy, to solwar, to win power, geothermal and other sources of zero carbon enery energy, nuclear my view, needs to be on the table. It's got to be safe. It can have proliferation concerns.
We have to solve those challenges. But as we move as fast as we can to truly clean sources of energy in a way from fossil fuels, we're still driving gasoline powered cards for a while, heating homes for a while with fossil fuels, So for the next decade or so or more, while we try to stop using these fuels as much as we can, as fast as we can, making sure the methane doesn't continue to poison our planet
and cause these ferocious storms. That's critically important as we move away from fossil fuels, you have to do both.
How can people find out more about this.
Well, they can go to edf's website, which is simply EEDF dot org, and we have pages on both methane and methane SAT. You also sign up for our letter and we'll keep folks informed.
Thank you so much for joining us. This is really important.
Thank you, Molly.
The moment, Rick Wilson, you are a special fuckery gast.
Today's moment of fuckery here on Fast Politics, brought to you by Rick Wilson, is my absolutely favorite story that I've seen in months, weeks, maybe this year. In Florida, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, Christian.
Ze Brot Yere.
And his wife Bridget Ziegler. And here's folks, where it gets really delicious. She's the founder of Moms for Liberty.
Yes, perhaps you'll remember Moms for Libor day.
They were involved in a long running thrupple with another woman and apparently Christian decided that he was going to go in solo on her. And now there is a police investigation going on down there accusing him of sexual battery, rape, and illegally taping their sex acts. So it's always the
rule of the Republican Party. The more conservative and evangelical and hyper busy body they are about how other people are screwing, the more likely they are to have a closet full of gimpsuits, butt plugs, and a variety of other shady shit in their lives that absolutely puts the
lie to their Christian values. And Christian Ziegler is a guy who is always very quick to meet out in front on defending the Santis, attacking Disney, calling people pedophiles, all this shit, and yet somehow now he is an accused sexual assaulter, rapist and thropple officionado and bridget Ziegler of Moms for Liberty who really wants to save the children from the smut and the poor nog Griffe she's
recording herself having sex with a woman. So I got a couple of questions here at the discomfort level in Florida Republican politics right now is so stratospheric because I'll tell you a funny little secret. There are two things Tallahassee does better than anywhere else in the country. And I don't know why this is the case. And I caveat this by saying, I have not personally experienced either
of these things. But Tallahassee does swingers, orgies, and high quality cocaine better than anywhere else I've ever heard of. This place is a hive of scum and villainy. And this story is not over, and it's delicious and I'm going to eat it up every day.
Jesse Cannon by jug.
Fast Diva down.
George Santos has been expelled from Congress and he is spilling the tea.
What are you seeing here?
He has the origin story that every batman villain has, where he has decided that now that he has been removed from Congress, this hasn't happened in about twenty years, he is going to go after all of his former colleagues. Let me give you the list here, Jamal Bowman, Robert Menendez Junior, Nick Loloda, Brandon Williams, Mike Lawler, and he has reserved a little bit of special ire for the Republican congresswoman from Staten Island, Nicole Micketaco, calling her Nicole Mallio stock tips.
Should we bet you that he also tried to out her as a homosexual?
Did she's gay?
Well, we don't know that. It's George Santos. He's full of shit about everything anyway.
For Farragamo's shoes, Botox OnlyFans, ermavs, George Santos, I love that man.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
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