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 Donald Trump told Vegas rally goers, I don't care about you. I just want your vote. We have such a great show for you today. Pro Public is Justin Elliot stops by to tell us about the absolutely shocking news that Donald Trump's campaign has bumped up the salaries for employees where witnesses in his trials.
That we'll talk to.
Jeff Goodell about his new book, The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
But we're here now, that's right, Welcome back, Rick Wilson.
Lully, John Fast delighted as always to join you.
We check in every week so we can chart each other's dysfunction and also this political craziness. Sure, explain to me what you think happened this week? There was this guilty verdict. I actually think it's more meaningful than the polls show because there's so much pulling that shows people believe it to be just and true.
It is a real thing.
Yeah, people should not be living in this fantasy world that this didn't happen. It happened, and it's actually meaningful. I can tell you we have come out of some focus groups this week that we're gonna release some data on shortly. I gotta tell you, I know why Trump is so it's banging off the walls. I know why Trump is bouncing off the damn the damn ceiling. His people are not stupid, and they recognize this is much
worse than they think. The biggest group of people that needs to hear this are mainstream media folks.
Yeah, who think, oh, it's all baked to a cake. Everybody knows that about Trump. Uh huh.
This is much much, much, much much more consequential. People do not understand how bad.
This is for him.
So can you explain.
Women, independents, they are coming out of these we're seeing it out of the numbers that they believe the case was justly decided. They don't believe any of the conspiracy garbage.
Right, and now we see broadly in polls it's like abortion. People believe this case was rightly decided, that he definitely did something corrupt, and also that women should have rights of their own bodily autonomy.
Yeah.
And by the way, that continues to be an interesting buzz. Underneath all of the materials that we're seeing, there is a sense and a feeling that the noise he's tried to make around all this is actually making it a little bit worse, if that makes sense, that his method of defending himself has made it more credible that he did everything that the jury determined that he did. And two other points of this this popped up in some
of the research. As I said, I didn't expect this, but these are two good points in both of which I found sort of interestingly optimistic. The way he behaved towards Stormy Daniels in the court actually penetrated with the lot of voters, which you would have never had me say that unless I've seen the data just now. But they reflected that. In how Trump treats women overall, Egene, Carol, Stormy grab them by the pussy. All these things are
a consolidated view of Trump. They play into what people believe Donald Trump is and does, and so that piece of data. Also, I'm just going to declare this right here and now, the assertion that Donald Trump has flipped black voters completely is profoundly ft from what we've just seen in several swing states. It's not just wrong, it's
not just academically wrong. It's profoundly wrong. Trump's going to get the same basic numbers that any Republican gets of black voters in the end of the day, seven to eight percent.
That's it. Now, does that mean the Biden campaign shouldn't be out there? They can assauce, Yeah.
They need to do it every day, but the panic attack needs to stop about that, and confidence in that would help a lot.
One of the things that happened this week was that Byron Donald's.
Oh yeah, Jim Crow, Byron was not that bad.
It kept American families together. I mean, that's like Hitler had some good ideas.
That is exactly like Hitler had some good ideas. It is absolute fucking lunacy.
It's so wrong. I was sort of shocked when I heard it.
Listen a lot of people that have tried to make Byron Donalds the new Fetch and fetch happening for Byron Donalds. Fetch is not happening for Byron Donald's. This is a guy who went from a kind of a hot property to people thinking, is he high on his own supply? This was a bad day for them. I mean, they shouldn't pretend that Byron Donald's quote unquote owned the libs or won something on Fox News. This was a real screw up. This was ugly and stupid.
Do you think that, when you were just talking before about this idea that Trump is actually hurting himself with this verdict and the way he's behaving after it. Do you think that some of that is this idea that when you do something bad and you're like own those libs are owned, that you're actually making it worse.
I think a lot of the time, the idea of quote unquote owning the libs, the idea of being transgressive for the sake of transgression, is it gets tired in the end. It gets boring in the end, and a lot of people like the showmanship of the lib owning world. At some point it just loses its juice, It loses its desirability of the amount of emotional investment people want to put into it anymore.
Trump did announce eight potential VP candidates. He put Ben Carson on there.
I just want to say to all of your listeners, Molly all the folks out there that tune into us every week for our moment of glory. Yes, that list with some horseshit.
Oh interesting, say more.
That list is bullshit, writ large. He is playing the apprentice game right now, there's going to be a surprise contestant who might get the rows or whatever.
The fuck?
I maybe mixing my bullshit reality show metaphors, but that list was horseshit interesting. The idea that you're going to end up with some of the people on that list is beyond ridiculous, beyond absurd.
Right, But you think he's got someone else that he just didn't put him live.
I think he's got somebody else, or I think he looks at that list and says, fuck these idiots.
See. I think this list is people that he wants to help him.
Yeah, sure, that's definitely part of it.
Rubio is very helpful to him with Hispanic voters. JD. Vance is this sort of intellectual maga though that's oxymoron right right, But you know Tim Scott, he thinks maybe I get it helps him with five vote, Stephanic will do it, will die for him.
Stephonic would literally if he said, Elise, I need you to take your Doug outside and show me your you're Christy Nome. I need you to take the dog out to the gravel pit and kill it. I need it now, Yeah, and she'd do it.
And Tom Cotton. The one on this list that I think is a real possibility is Doug Burgham.
I think Doug Burgham may well be a possibility. Look, I think the broad list is horseship. But Doug Burgham is saying things to Donald Trump in the order of whatever you need, I will do. And Doug Burgham doesn't feel too Trump as risky.
Jadie Vance could a fallow him, right.
Jd Vance could rat fuck him a hard and he knows that, by the.
Way, and Rubio too. He wants somebody who is zero.
Listen.
I can tell you from direct knowledge, Marco Rubio the minute he got into that office would spend every second of every day finding a way to fuck Trump.
Yeah, which would be awesome. That would be the one bright spot in the hole.
It would be great.
Yeah, But it would also he would he would never have absolutely never pick Rubio. Rubio has criticized him, and you can't do that in Trump world. That's not allowed.
Well, also Rubio's from Florida, right, I mean he'd have to give up his sentence.
You right, that somebody would have to move or whatever. It's Look, it's a bullshit thing. But I will say that Marco is such an absolute snake of all snakes that even Trump knows that Mark or Rubio. Think about this, Marco Rubio's political mentor. The man who made Marco Rubio's career, the guy who put Mark or Rubio in the House speakership in Florida, the guy who did everything for Marco Rubio that no other politician could do was Jeb Bush, right, And Mark or Rubio rat fucked Jeb Bush so hard.
And Jeb's not a guy that goes out and seeks revenge, right, But he would fuck Trump. It's such a millisecond. He would be working the phone with the Washington Post and the New York Times every day. He'd be calling Maggie at two o'clock in the morning instead of Trump calling her at one, going hey, listen, I note, Well, he must have said something crazy.
I you know, you should come to me first, right.
I just know this fucking guy, and he will he will absolutely rat fuck them to death.
Yes, that seems very likely. But you know what, Trump just because he's publishing this list doesn't mean that this is the list, which I think is really absolutely What I do think is interesting about Doug Bergham is that he actually is pretty smart and is sort of not like he appears as a zero to Trump, but in some ways, I mean, he's more of a sort of more educated Mike Pans but who knows.
Yes, I think that's right. Look, yeah, I don't underestimate Burgham's intelligence. The guy actually did build a legitimately successful business. He's not stupid. He's not a traditional political thinker, right, which is not Look, I don't think that's the worst thing in the world, right, But I will say this, It also doesn't end up giving you a deeper understanding of Doug Bergham if you observe him in this in this campaign, you don't really know who the guy was
except as a sort of cipher. I suspect he's actually been running for VP all along.
Yes, for sure, I mean there's Roe Kaiser SoSE stuff here going on. Oh sure, stay tuned. So one of the stories this week that has gotten me absolutely so itchy is this story that San Francisco has now welcomed Donald Trump because David Sacks had an event. David Sachs is a venture capitalist and he's also sucks.
Yeah.
His companies include Doucheco, flaming Ahole, dot net, and.
Like all wealthy men, his dream is to be famous. So he has a podcast.
Yes, he has a pod cast. And if you ever want to amuse yourself for hours on end, David Sachs at one point considered himself to be a world class poker player. If you ever want to have a great laugh, go watch David Sachs play poker against actual poker players on YouTube. Because you realize this is a guy who, as a tech bro type, like PayPal alumni, tech bro type, believes that his skills in some narrow sector of technology transfer to everything else. Yeah, and that's a very common
thing in Silicon Valley. By the way, don't you.
Don't mistake me.
If you woke up Elon Musk out of a sound sleep and said, hey, what do you know about rat biology? He would pretend to be the greatest rat biologist in all history. But Sax is neo. He brokeer some of these people to come in and let let's not you know, for ourselves. San Francisco may be a liberal city governance wise, but there's a massive amount of tech bro douche nozzle types who really are in intrigued by things like authoritarianism, intrigued by things like I'm just going to say it,
by the return of the monarchy. It's weird, but a lot of the alt right thinking kind of emerge from some of these Silicon Valley post libertarian weirdos.
Right, they're pretty stupid. I mean, what is kind of amazing is like these are these people. I mean Elon Musk is a great example. Again, you can argue what stage he took over Tesla, you can argue whether or not he's a scientist, but he did in fact do some smart investing if nothing else. Sure, and he was able to parlay government subsidies into becoming the richest man
in the world, which is not nothing. But he's really done terribly when it comes to squandering money on X sucking up to some of the scariest autocrats in the Republican Party. I have this theory that you need to have one person who tells you the truth. Sure, and if you're a billionaire like that, you don't have one person who tells you the truth.
No, everyone who talks to Elon Musk in his circle every day tells him you are the smartest, richest, most handsome man in the world. Everyone else is stupid. You are magical and your twelve feet tall, and women desire you, men want to be and look. You and I both have known enough very wealthy people that that is a very addictive thing to have in front of them.
That is a very powerful drug.
Right, But in the end it leads to making terrible decisions. I mean, I'm trying to remember who it was. One of those tech guys was saying that, you know, maybe Biden would lose the primary to Dean Phillips because Dean Phillips was a bold new voice.
That was Bill Ackman.
That's one of my favorite tweets. Thank you for reminding me about that.
Happy to poke the button me.
A moment of joy if nothing else.
Yes, go on, And I say this a lot.
People who are very good at something like to believe they're very good at everything.
Right.
That's a sign of maturity when you know that you're good at one thing, but you're not good at even scaling up certain things right. But I'll give you an example, Molly. I am a fairly experienced pilot. I've flown a lot of hours. I've flowed a bunch of different airplanes. But me flying a beachcraft bearing around is one thing. But if you sat me in the seat of an F thirty five fighter plane, could I take off? Could I fly around? Probably? Am I going to drill into the
ground like a fucking idiot? Almost certainly so these guys who say, well, I've managed a tech company, therefore I understand how to run the entire economy for Donald Trump? No, maybe that ain't it?
That?
Ain't it? Chief right?
Exactly exactly, and it is a certain hubris. Yes, incredible. It does strike me that they really are not as good at this as they think they are.
They're really not. And to be clear, an awful lot of these tech people, these are guys who, no matter how rich they get, they still come from this sort of background of difficult interpersonal skills because they were not raised to be people who were great at fraternity parties. You were good in the room of talking to girls.
All of it, like their weirdness and their diffidence sometimes and arrogance others the in cell streak is strong with many of these people, it's very difficult for them to overcome that weird goofy college tech bro thing, and so I find that to be a real causal factor in.
A lot of this.
Thank you, Rick Wilson.
I'm delighted as always, Molly.
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Justin Elliott is a reporter at pro Public Company.
Hey, good to be here.
Tell me how you guys got going on this?
Yeah, it's interesting. You know.
We were looking at some staffers of the Trump campaign, just kind of doing preliminary research, trying to understand who was running the campaign, and started to notice that a lot of people who work on the campaign are also people that have found themselves as witnesses in the various cases against Trump, the criminal cases, and so this struck us as potentially interesting, and then we sort of widen the scope of our research and started noticing that there
were other people at for example, the Trump Organization is business and the company that runs social Trump Media, who were also witnesses. So turned out to be a fairly large set of people who actually had money in one form or another flowing to them who are witnesses and the Trump cases, and so that seemed interesting to us, so we started kind of understand.
What going on and what did you find?
What we found is that there's at least nine people who are witnesses in the Trump cases who have had financial benefits flow to them from Trump, in many cases
sort of unusual or unexplained financial benefits. So to give a couple examples, there's a staff around the campaign named Boris Epstein who was also heavily involved in the events after the twenty twenty election, is a witness in the election interference cases against Trump, and we found that right after those indictments, he saw his pay from the campaign basically double from around twenty six thousand a month on average to over fifty thousand.
Dollars a month on average.
I think that's around seven hundred thousand dollars a year, so a salary that a lot of people would be pretty happy.
Yeah, so you found these pay bombs, and they were sort of timed right after people didn't testify.
Time that at a variety of sort of sensitive moments in these various investigations. Obviously there's a lot of acts here. But you know, in another case, and this is one that actually came up in the Hushmunny trial last month, the Trump organization gave what seems to be a pretty unusual severance package to Alan Weisselberg, longtime CFO, two million dollars in the heart of the investigations that Weisselberg was somebody that was clearly going to be a witness inner
had knowledge of. And this wasn't two million dollars paid all at once. It was two million dollars paid in installments over two years, with a non disparagement clause attached to it.
Alan Weisselberg is being paid to go to jail and also not testify. I know you're not on the opinion side that you're astral journalist, but one might extrapolate that he is being paid for something.
Yeah, and this is something that Eric Trump actually was asked about this on the stand in the civil fraud trial last year and claimed that his dad had nothing to do with it. Maybe he didn't even know about it, but what the facts are is that, yeah, Alan Weisberg was given two million dollars paid in installments over the course of two years. I think it's actually still being paid at with this non asparishment club hot take.
Would you go to jail for two million dollars?
I would not go to rip peers for probably any amount of money, piste when I read about how that place is thro un.
And you guys have done some really good reporting about wrikers too, And I don't want to laugh, because there are a lot of people who are being treated really poorly by this criminal justice completely, but none of them have the last name of Trump. So explain to us what this sort of looks like. So Epstein is actually still working for Trump World and is a pretty central figure, right.
Yeah, And he's a really interesting case because you know, as I mentioned, he was very deeply involved in the effort to assemble false electors after Toy twenty election, to the point where he actually was just indicted himself in the Arizona case, but in Trump's cases, he appeared before the Georgia Grand Jurity. He was interviewed by the FEDS on what became the Federal Special Council election interference case.
And he, you know, as I mentioned, his pay went from twenty six thousand a month to fifty three thousand a month. The campaign says that sort of duties ramped up. It's not totally clear what he does every day. They describe it as ordinating the legal defense efforts, coordinating all lawyers. And Epstein is a lawyer, but as far as we could tell, he's never done any criminal defense work. I believe he did some kind of investment banking, financial transaction stuff.
So not exactly a natural choice to coordinate an complex white collar defense case or set of cases.
And he's not behind the desk anywhere. I mean, it's not like we're seeing him do this.
I think he showed up to the hush money trial at least a couple of times in.
The galley, not as behind the table advising him.
No, he is not acting as an attorney for Trump. He's a campaign staffer who's what they say is coordinating the work of the lawyers. I mean, the other striking thing about this is that you think you would think that you know, your pay doubles to something like seven hundred thousand dollars a year, that that's your only job.
But actually he's technically a contractor, and we found that a couple months after the pay increase, he took on an additional side job working for an unrelated financial services company with the title of managing director. He's also still working for some other campaigns unrelated to Trump, so he's not even devoting all his time to the Trump campaign despite getting the stricks.
So he's making seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a part time job.
He might contest that it's part time, but I guess what I would say strictly hwigs.
What we know is he has other jobs.
It's possibly he's working more than forty hours away.
Oh well, that's something. Talk to me about some of the other characters in this story.
Sure.
So another interesting figure actually is one of the people that's running the campaign, a Florida political operative named Susie Wilds. She's usually described as the de facto campaign manager, and she ended up becoming a witness in the classified documents case because you know, according to the allegations, at least she was one of the people that Trump actually showed
some of these classified documents too. She didn't have any security clearance, so that's actually part of the classified document case.
She ended up becoming a.
Witness in that, and we're able to see through the campaign and finance disclosure records that the same month that Trump was indicted in that case in which she's a witness, there's a balloon payment from the highest ever payment had gotten in a single month from the campaign, seventy five thousand dollars. The campaign told us that this was actually paying for several months of work, but there's no way to kind of confirm that independently. So she got a
raise and there was this billian payment. And then also interesting, her adult daughter was hired by the campaign, Caroline Wilds, in a high paying position. I think she's the fourth highest paid person of the campaign right now. And this is somebody that has sort of been around Trump world, although she was most recently in the news what Trump was in the White House, because she actually had to leave one of her jobs, reportedly because she didn't pass
a background check. She'd had some financial problems, and I think DUIs in her past. So the context here, by the way, is like actual witness tempering is a federal crime. Now, to be clear, what you need to prove that crime is first of all, that some benefit was given to a witness or there was some sort of penalty. But the difficult part to prove is the intent part. You know, prosters would have to prove that Trump was intending to
influence their testimony. We talked to a bunch of white collar fencillers who said this is sometimes hard to prove. Although interestingly, both Roger Stone and Paul Manislor, both former Trump campaigns, were each separately convicted of federal winnesssemmery charges in their criminal cases a few years ago, so it's not impossible to yeah, as.
A benefic share of nepotism. Myself, I hate to set all in the weeds about it, but it does strike me as you know, hiring the daughter when she couldn't pass the background check, making her the fourth highest paid person in the campaign. And there does seem to be a fair amount of squandering of donor dollars.
Here, right, I mean, at the very least, even if there's no crime here and we're not reporting that there was, we're kind of laying out it seems like a pretty
striking pattern. But this is the type of thing that if these cases actually do ever end up going to trial, the remaining cases, which are the federal and state election interference cases, the by documents case, these are facts that could become very relevant if these people end up on the stand when they're being cross examined or questioned by prosecutors,
you know, because it can speak to their credibility. If you're getting a paycheck from the defendant in a case, that's something that's obviously relevant.
I think it becomes more interesting.
We were told by lawyers if if you got unexplained raises or special treatment in either direction of books.
So people like Borisch, Epstein, Susie Wilds, who else is sort of benefiting from this well timed raise.
Yeah, there's another campaign staffer named Margot Martin who was at the New York hush money case fairly frequently. Martin was another person who became a witness in the classified documents case because allegedly she was in the room when Trump showed off what he described I believe on tape as a secret military document.
I remember, Wow, you said, I empty classified this anymore because I'm not president anymore. Right, There was something like that.
Yeah, And he also, I believe, described it as secret and highly confidential.
Yes, I think that's right, and I gotta love it.
And so she was called before the grand jury as a witness in that case. A few months before that she got it, was given a job on Trump campaign and was given a twenty percent pay raise from her previous job working for a kind of Trump affiliated political committee. So not as dramatic as the Epstein case, but still something that seems relevant. I mean, I think the maybe the most striking one in terms of the amount of money involves Dan Scavino.
Oh, a character from Season one, Yeah, tell us Dancecavino. He started as a caddy, right.
He's known Trump, I think since he was a teenager as a caddie. And the kind of funny Trump line that we quoted in our story is Trump once called Scavino the most powerful man in politics because he had the keys to Trump's social media accounts, he could posed for Trump.
So he's obviously a.
Long time paid and associate of Trump. He was with Trump in the final weeks of his presidency again the whole period of tried to overtry the election, and then January sixth, he was subpoenaed by the January sixth Committee,
and for a while he was fighting that subpoena. He did ultimately appear, but in between the time when he was subpoena and he appeared, he was given a consulting deal by True Social, the company behind Truth's Social, that was worth two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year.
He was also given board seat on the company, and then, most interestingly, although the timing on this is not really clear, he was given a four million dollar what they call promisory noe, which is something that ultimately became shares of the company, but four million dollars worth of shares of the company. And we asked Trump Media group what this was for, and they didn't engage with us. I think it's been reported he had some role in kind of
coming up with the idea True Social. Details in that not totally clear to me, But he is a witness who was given four million dollars by Trump Media.
That seems like a lot of money to me. It is, it feels like a lot. This isn't illegal per se, but it certainly looks pretty sketchy our law enforcement looking into this at all. I mean it difertly feels like a kind of mobby situation here, right, We.
Don't know if law enforcements looking into it. I will say it actually could be illegal. I mean, if it turns out that Trump or somebody around him was doing this with a provable intention to influence testimony, so legal. For example, Roger Stone, who in an unrelated case several
years ago, got actually convicted of witness tamperring. He was sending text to a witness making references to The Godfather Part two, telling him to do what a character in that movie did, who was who appears before Congress and lies about organized crime. If you're texting people making references to somebody that is known for lying as a witness,
you know, you can be convicted of witness tampering. The Trump campaign did actually engage with us, said that it was false that they were doing anything you know, that could be regarded as tampering, although they also said something that I found interesting, which is that they say that Trump himself is really just not evolved in the decision making around promotions, salary increases, bonuses. They argued that Trump
doesn't even know what people are being paid. We don't really have any way to back check that at this point. But if that is true, it's an incredible departure from how Trump ran his business for many years. He was well known for, you know, wanting to approve any expense over a thousand dollars or something like that. Like really the guy that was getting in the weeds of the finances.
So the campaign's saying that when it comes to the campaign, Trump basically doesn't know anything about it, at least how staff are being paid. It doesn't have any role making those decisions.
Yeah, people have used this defense for him before, right, because we saw this in the Stormy Daniel's trial.
Yeah, although I will say, I mean one of their piece of context here is we sort of in the story go through the recent history of incidents where there were mist allegations that Trump or people around him were trying to influence witnesses. And I think one striking example was Trump himself on truth Social last year did a post in which he explicitly told a Georgia politician who had been called before the Georgia grand jury to not
appear before the grand jury. This is not my interpretation, this is like explicitly the post says this politician has been called before the Grand Jury.
He shouldn't appear.
It's not a wild idea that Trump would get involved in trying to influence potential witnesses.
Done it.
This is what he does. Thank you so much for joining us. This was really really great.
Thanks so much.
Jeff Goodell is the author of The Heat Will Kill You First Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Jeff.
Padaw Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
So the book is called The Heat Will Kill You First Life and Death on a Scorch Planet. You had a brilliant op ed in the New York Times. Talk to me about your central thesis here.
Well, my central thesis is that you know, extreme heat is like a bug zapper, that it can kill you very quickly, and most people don't understand that. And it's also, as I describe in the book, the sort of primary driver of kind of planetary chaos. When we think about climate change and we think about sea level rise and droughts and hurricanes and all that, all that stuff is sort of driven by rising heat levels. So the book
tries to look at heat on two levels. One what it does to your body, What those risks are and how it kills you, and the other is how it is creating this sort of climate chaos that we're all living through right now.
So you've written on climate for twenty plus years, right, I mean your first climate book was in two thousand, right, Acul, Like.
I've been writing about climate as long as climate has existed.
Talk to us about how thinking about climate has shifted over that period.
Well, that's an interesting question. So in the very beginning, you know, twenty five years ago, that's not the very beginning of the climate story. So I just have been aware of the risks of climate change for a long time. The idea that burning fossil fuels creates CO two that will warm the planet, you know, has been known for more than one hundred years. None of this is new science.
But you know, when I started writing about this, like more than twenty years ago, you know, it was basically this was in the kind of heyday of what was called the Greening Earth Society of the big oil companies telling you that, you know, more CO two was good for the planet. It would make trees grow and plants
grow faster, so why worry? And then it moors into this economic debate where if you believe in human progress and you want the betterment of human welfare around the world, people need energy, and the cheapest way to create energy was by burning fossil fuels. So even if we had climate change, you know, what's really important is getting cheap at energy people. And that was part of the debate
for a long time. And now, of course renewable energy, non fossil fuel energy is much cheaper than fossil fuel stuff, so that argument, the greening Earth society argument is out the window now. It become part of the kind of culture wars, right, It's become you know, if you're a real American, you burn fossil vuels. You know, it's become part of that conversation, and the science of it doesn't really matter anymore in the broader conversation.
It's funny because when the pandemic came, husband lapsed, academic was like, this is going to be it. Americans are going to see that scientists are right and that all of these Republicans who you know, have these fabulous views on science are just lying to them. A million deaths later are probably more plus plus that group never saw the In fact, they are trying to prosecute doctor Anthony Fauci.
Now, yeah, exactly, And I think that's a great analogy. And you know, when people ask me what do I worry about most when we think about kind of the superheated future that we're creating for ourselves, it's exactly that. It's the complete pigeonholing of science, the complete attack on the very kind of reality, shared reality that we have. And the pandemic was a great example of that. We're far less well prepared for the next one. We were
for that one, very well prepared for that. Yeah, there's a similar client of dynamic when we talked about climate and energy.
So one of the things I want to talk about is the thing that none of us probably could have seen in two thousand was that renewables would get so cheap they would actually maybe you could have seen it because you were totally read in on this, but I was twenty one. I want to brag about not being as old as my kids think I am. But renewables have become very, very cheap, And because they've become so cheap, this has made it harder and harder to message their destruction.
Am I correct? And they've sort of found a way anyway.
What do you mean message their destruction?
So the right hates renewables and it's terrified, But oil and gas companies need to make a case that renewables aren't as good as oil and gas, and they're having a harder and harder time making it. And now they've know they have this new thing. It's not either or, it's and right because the thinking is, let's just keep oil and gas around as long as we can, because eventually renewables are going to be so cheap oil and gas isnt going to be able to thrive.
Yes, absolutely, And you know I live in Austin, Texas. You know, it's the belly of the fossil fuel beast, and I spend a lot of time around oil and gas people that way, and into my own reporting, it's very clear that everybody who works in the oil and gas industry knows that they are the whale oil of our time. They know that their horizon is limited, that they are not going to be around in the same way that they have been to the last century in
the next few decades. So now there's this sort of end game going on that is very powerful and very dangerous. It's really about squeezing the last profits out of their reserves, squeezing the last profits out of their investments, and dragging out this inevitable transition as long as possible. Which you
might say, oh, well, what's the problem with that. So instead of getting off of fossil fuels in ten years, when we get off fossil fuels in thirty or forty years, Well, the problem with that is that's a differension between a kind of warming world that we can kind of manage, and that warming world that where we have all hell breaking loose, where we have inevitable collapses of ice sheets, where we have one hundred and thirty degree extreme heat waves,
where we have mass deaths from these heat waves, where we have changing disease patterns of malaria and all these kinds of vector board diseases. I mean, there's a kind of level of climate chaos that is inevitable if we continue burning fossil fuels for several more decades. So this really is a question of purgency and speed. And that's why this conversation right now is it's so important when we take about, you know, the kind of world we want.
To live in and I would add, we've already crossed the rubicon to things being pretty bad.
We have, although I would argue that there's no real rubicon.
Oh interesting, Yeah, those two degree projections or one degree or one and a half degree, even those projections are a radically different world.
Absolutely, And one of the big truths is that you know, the world that you know, you and I grew up in, the climate that you and I grew up in, is gone, and we are not going back to that climate. The question is how bad is it going to get into how different is it going to be in the future.
And I pushed back on the rubicon idea a little bit because this notion of a tipping point, it's like, oh, we're fine until we get to one point five C or through C or you know one translate that into fahrenheit three and a half de greece paraanhede of warming, and then all of a sudden, oh, the world collapses. You know, let's just go to the beach and party because we're all screwed. Right. There are certainly tipping point it's for particular ecosystems. There's a tipping point for the
West end Arctic ice sheet. There's a tipping point for the Amazon rainforest. There's a tipping point for the insurance industry in Florida, you know, but.
Yes, which has take exactly.
Yeah, So there's all these sort of baller tipping points. But the real truth is that you know, every ton of CO two that we keep out of the atmosphere, you know, reduces the warming a little bit, reduces the impacts a little bit. Everyone that we add makes it a little bit worse. There is no moment when we're just all fucked and we may as well just give up.
Right, And I think that case against nihilism is really important. The right and the oil companies and the people who want to sell you this want you to feel that it's a situation that's unfixable, or that it's a situation that you have no control over, and that is not true.
It's not And it's also just to continue this thought that it's also not true. What the oil companies the right are trying to sell right now is that yes, we even they would admit that, you know, renewable are you know, solar and wind and hydrogen and all these things are part of our future. But we can't go too fast because our economy is so fragile, and if we try to shift too soon, we're going to collapse our economy. Renewables aren't cheap enough yet, they're not ready enough.
We can't do it. Well, that's all bullshit. I mean, we have all of the technology we need to make this transition very quickly. Nobody's arguing that we like shut off all fossil fuels tomorrow. But you know, we can make this transition much much faster. And the scare tastics that the right and big oil and things are using now are all about this sort of economic doom that if we do this too fast, we're going to fuck everything up.
Right, And that's I mean, and you hear Trump they want to take away your cars, right right, that's an easy scare tactic. Can you explain to us where methane falls in this whole continuum of warming?
Sure, methane is you know, basically essentially the same as natural gas or fossil gas. You know, you asked me about how the discussion about climate energy has changed over time, and twenty years ago, the big bad fossil fuel was coal because it's the most carbon intense and for all intensive purposes. You know, we're not building more coal plants in America. Coal uses down globally, and it's down very fast in the Ued States.
Because it's so expensive.
It's so expensive and it's so hard to do. It's i cost so much money to build a coal pland and you have trains and mines. It's just like it's just also the nineteenth century. You know, you're crushing rocks to burn them, you know what I mean. It's just like it's so primitive. But so for a long time, there was this idea that, oh, we're going to shift from coal to gas, and the gas is the phrase
was bridged to the future. So there was this whole notion that, well, we'll replace these coal plants with gas and that'll be a big step forward, and then eventually we'll replace the gas plants with toler and wind and everything, and it'll the bias time for renewables to become cheap and enough and technologically sophisticated enough to run our world. Well,
that is bullshit. Also, the problem with gas and methane right now is that a lot of First of all, a lot of new research has shown that in fact, gas is not more climate safe than coal because methane or gas if it leaks out of pipelines or out of power plants, are out of drol heads or well heads. It's a forty times more potent gas than CO two, so the warming potential is huge, and there's a lot of leaks. They've just launched a bunch of satellites to
help detect these fleaks and they're enormous. So that's one thing. And the other thing is is infrastructure that's being built for these gas plants, which is something that Biden just recently alted the pause that permits for these liquified natural gas plants to ship this stuff overseas. They know that this step is going to be around for forty or fifty years, so it's like building in the next generation
of fossil fuel infrastructure. And the argument is, well, are we doing that because we know we have renewables, we know they're cheaper, we know that you know they don't have any of the kind of impacts that the gas has, So why are we wasting our time and money with this building this whole new gas infrasture.
Yeah?
Why, Well, because of political power. It's all apologic.
So let's talk about something that my husband is obsessed with He told me about it, and now it is like my top ten anxiety scenarios. Wet bulb heat. Explain to us about wet bulb heat because this is really fucking scary.
Yeah, okay, So wet bulb heat is essentially a measure of heat and humidity combined. It's not so different than than sort of heat index. There's another level of flexiting this called the global wet bulb temperature, which takes into account the amount of sunlight and wind speed and things like that. But the idea is when we talk about temperature, you know, that's just the sort of ambient temperature in
the air. What really matters is what that temperature means to our bodies and how our bodies function in these
kinds of rising temperatures. And wet bulb temperature is an idea that was actually sort of discovered or figured out in the early twentieth century by some research groups who are looking at why coal miners who were deep underground were suffering from heat exhaustion and heat strokes, and they came to understand that humidity as a big impact on how we register temperature, because you know, think about it, the only way that our bodies can release heat is
by sweat. When it gets hot, we sweat, and that sweat takes the heat away from our bodies, dissipates it out, and that's how we cool off. It's we're kind of radiator system and that works at the air temperature is dry, and the more humid it gets, the more difficulty it is for that sweat to evaporate, and wet bulb temperature tries to give you a reading of that. So the higher the wet bulb temperature, the more humidity is in the air, the more difficulty you have evaporating the sweat.
And that's why everyone knows who's been. If you've been to Arizona and it's hundred degrees, it's very different than being in Miami when it's d degrees. The Pope or something like that. And the reason it's scary and dangerous is because there are relatively low levels of If you have a high wet bult temperature, which means the air temperature might only be in the eighties or nineties, but you have a high high eye levels of humidity, those
can be very very dangerous very quickly. And there's a threshold of around ninety five degrees wet bul temperature where even a healthy human outdoors, you know, for five or six hours will die. Our bodies will just overheat. It's like the turkey cooking levels for humans, you know. And parts of the world are approaching that now already, and you know, we're certainly heading in that direction. And in my book I talked about this idea of the Goldilog zone.
But all living things on Earth evolved a function in this certain threshold of temperature. And when we get to these wet bolt temperatures in the nineties, we are getting out of the Goldilock zone. And that's when we either get somewhere cooler quickly or we die. It's very shutforward.
See, Now, this is a really good thing to be anxious about.
Yes, it is a good thing to be anxious.
Not to pat myself on the back here, but this is actually a real fucking problem, and there are parts of this world where we're going to see this temperature soon.
Well, I'm really glad you say that this is a real fucking problem, because it really is. Because there's a lot of people who say, well, why are you worried about this? You have air conditioning, you know, you'll be okay, just crank it up a little bit more and just don't go outside when it's really oh and okay, great, that's fine maybe for you and for me on a
particular day. But the first of all, the op ed I wrote earlier this week in The Times talks about how places that are more dependent upon air conditioning, like Phoenix, where you have virtually one hundred percent air conditioning, are probably be vulnerable when you have a blackout, right, And you know, heat waves stress the grid because everybodystrom their air conditioning on and it makes the mechanics of the grid more fragile. Things like that. So blackouts are much
more likely during heat waves. And if you have a big blackout during a heat wave in a highly air conditioned city, you have mass deaths suddenly. I mean, this study that that I cided show thirteen more than thirteen thousand people dying in Phoenix within forty eight hours with a blackout during a high heat wave event. And so this idea of a heat wave that air conditioning is going to save us, it's like this sort of damicles hanging over ahead.
You know, you know, there are people day labors in Dubai who are going to die, maybe before the people in Phoenix, though not necessarily, right, but ultimately we're all going to die of this if it gets hot enough.
Yeah, I mean there are se one hundred and fifty million people on the planet who don't have access to electricity, much less air conditioning. Right. And also, we're not going to air condition the oceans, so you know, as they heat up, are already dying off in there that you know, we've had the fourth mass coral bleaching event this year.
We're not going to air condition the forests where you know, we have how their monkeys dropping out of trees, and then right now in Mexico because of extreme heat waves that are just dropping dead out of the forest. We're not going to air condition the fields where you know, their food crops grow, so we're gonna have crop failures, which is going to lead to political problems and all that.
So this is a much bigger problem than just something like well, just get a better air conditioner everything, you'll be fine.
Thank you, Jeff, just horrifying us.
Well, thanks for indulging in that order. Molly, no moment fuck.
I would like a moment of fuck.
Right, Well, is gentleman, this Moment of Fuckery is brought to you by Harlan Crow Sugar down Each to the stars. Look, Clarence Thomas has now been revealed to have accepted four million dollars in gifts, in perks and trips and visits to the Bohemian Grove. Not on, I said, Alex Jones's brain on a fact, four million dollars. He's the only member of the Supreme Court where there are five zeros after the numbers of these gifts. He is corrupt. He
has been corrupted. This is an obvious ethical violation. No other member of the Court is even in the ballpark of accepting this kind of billionaire largesse. And I'm sorry for people who are diehard Clearance Thomas stands. This guy is corrupt. And if this was again, if this was flip the script, if Katanji Brown Jackson was taking five hundred thousand dollars vacations with George Sorows, the Republicans would burn down Washington to the driver out of the court. This is my moment of fuckery.
Amazing, Thank you, Rick Wilson.
As always, the pleasure is mine.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.