Hey everyone, welcome to season 2 of reversing climate change. We are doing that podcasting. Now, in launching a patreon, you can find it at patreon.com slash Nori podcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Nori knots are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club. Get special access to Nori
events. Go take a look at patreon.com Nori podcast for what we're offering and in that Spirit of being lean and that start of Of way that, you know, we like to do this list of goodies is subject to change and we'd very much like your feedback. Is there something that you'd really like to see? But it isn't listed here. Honest, feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to
you. You can send an email to podcast that Nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter, which you can find at nor e.com. Subscribe, and thank you so much for listening to another season of reversing climate change. Hello and welcome to the reversing climate change podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon today, I have with me dr. Leah, Stokes assistant, professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara Leah. Thanks for being here. Oh, thanks so much for having me on indeed.
One of the things I like to do and look for is one interesting books, get published and then I get to make your publicist job easier because I just reach out to them and say, hey, I like this book. I think it will be very cool if you sent me a copy and I could read it and then interview this person and they typically take the bait and it appears that your people have taken. In the bait to. So thank you for for coming here, to talk about your new
book. Short-circuiting, policy interest groups and the battle over clean energy, and climate policy in the American states. There's a lot there Leah. I'm excited to dig into so much of this political science stuff, that we have not really given the full shrift to yet. Yeah, that's great. Now, my title is super long because I had to put all the words on the cover it appears. So who who made you have such a gigantic subtitle I made?
And when you're an academic, you get to make the decision. So yep. It's descriptive. So I suppose that works well. Broadly how did you conceive the book? What are you trying to cover and convey and to whom are you trying to convey it? Who is your audience? Who are you? Trying to reach with it? Yeah totally. So I started this book back in 2013 and I wanted to understand what was happening with clean energy and climate laws. A lot of the action was At the state level.
So that's what the book tends to focus on. But of course, there are also Federal policies that are complementary, so I started to do interviews in various States. And what I quickly discovered was that there were attacks playing out against clean energy and I wanted to understand more about that. So, the book relies on interviews, archives data, from things like the Energy Information Administration and I also Did a survey of state legislators and their staff while I was writing this book.
So some of the information comes from that too. So yeah. The intended audience I would say is professionals working on clean energy and climate policy as well as of course, academics interested in climate policy. But I also think that the general public who has really woken up to the climate crisis over the past two years or so.
I think. That people who want to understand these issues in more detail, will get a lot out of reading the book and some people who I know who are reading it, who aren't experts in anyway or working on these topics. They've told me that it's very accessible to. So I think it has the potential to have wide readership and I encourage people to pick up a copy and check it out. Great, I hope you do. There are links in the show notes if you would like to do so Leah, I have a difficult
relationship with policy. I care about ideas, I care about how government works. I care about the place that I live in, you know, basic human stuff for the most part. But I find the political process and policy very frustrating. A lot of the time I feel like by the time policy is finished being made and is in law. Not only does it change through that entire process but then also how it is administered. And applied is also may be different from it was intended.
Sometimes I just find the process kind of discouraging and opaque and hard to follow and hard to participate in how much of that is a cop-out. What is there like a different way? I should see it. That might make me feel less alienated by the process.
Yeah, well I think that what you're experiencing is pretty common and I talked about that a lot in the book policy is difficult to follow, and in part it's intentionally that way I developed this idea called the fog of enactment which is basically the point that, you know, laws can be really complicated, and it can be difficult to understand what's happening. While it's happening. Nancy Pelosi years ago, And I think it was the Affordable Care
Act was being passed. She said, you know, we need to get people to understand these issues away from, you know, the difficulty of the legislative process. I don't remember the exact quote, but it's in my book and people attacked her for that. But what she was really saying, was that interest groups politicize things, they make things more complicated than they are. They hide certain things, or they highlight other things and so policy can be really difficult to follow.
However, it is the really critical thing for solving climate change. In my view, I view climate change as an Institutional political problem right now with the coronavirus crisis, you know, all of us are staying home. We've made massive changes to our lifestyle and yet emissions are going to fall maybe four or five percent this year, that's it.
So, I think what people need to understand is that the big levers of change, our policy to get companies like Electric utilities, fossil fuel corporations to change their behavior, and that is how we can transform. Energy System and actually make progress and we're going to definitely get into what are the roles of these various groups and what should individuals do and how much sleep should they be losing versus focusing on more institutional change later
in the show? But I think maybe to give a nice Baseline for the audience. What exactly makes a good policy. We've had people on before, like we had Bryan Caplan, who's an economist. He likes the keyhole approach 4 from anything. So, a carbon tax is pretty narrow. Right. It doesn't have a lot included in that and compare that to something much more comprehensive, like the green New Deal, which tries to do
quite a lot. There are definitely trade-offs in these various approaches and it also depends on what is being legislated over like maybe. Maybe a green New Deal is appropriate for something like climate change, but a keyhole solution might be better for some other sort set of problem that we're trying to create policy around. How do we determine? What is a good policy and what to strive for? And when Yeah. Well, I'm a big fan of clean electricity standards.
I'm a big fan of standards across the board. I think with climate change, what we need to do is set the rules of the road. We have to say look this industry has to meet these benchmarks to has to clean up by these dates and you know, that's where we've seen a lot of the progress. It isn't just by trying to send Market signals. It Is by setting rules and requirements by deadlines. So I'm a big fan of what I Call the standards Investments and Equity approach or Justice
approach. So I think we got to set standards for electricity for buildings for transportation and if we do that actually, that's about 70% of the problem in the United States, 70. So that gets us a huge part of the problem done. And the way we can do that is by having our federal government invest money into it.
A lot of the Democratic primary was a debate about how much money is going to be spent by various, Candidates and I think a lot of people can feel like climate changes is overwhelming and possible issue, but sometimes I think about how we've never really even tried to solve it and if we put money on the table and actually tried to solve it and set standards and rules, we could make a lot of progress.
This is really the Inslee approach and the people who wrote those ideas are now started a new organization called The Evergreen Alliance which I'm an advisor to. And I really think that their approach is brilliant and then See we need to have. We think about Justice, right? We know that historic pollution has pushed the burden onto black and brown communities. Disproportionately, we can't do
that with the solutions as well. Meaning that kerbin prices while they're really great and they would shut down coal, which I strongly support. They're also a regressive policy that raises the cost of people's energy bills and can be politicized fairly easily. So I tend to favor Nerds over those kinds of market-based mechanisms. But, look, I'll take any climate policy, you want a carbon price, and that's what we can get done. Let's get that done.
Because right now, what we're seeing is that the federal government is spending what 4 or 5 trillion dollars on this crisis and no money is going towards clean energy. If anything there are big concerns that money is going to go towards bailing out. The fossil fuel industry. So we've got to get some stuff done on climate change in 2021.
This is well, past overdue. I Brought appropriate Nuance to all that and you definitely don't want a yellow jacket situation coming about as a result of a carbon tax. And yeah, I can see how that would be quite regressive to and we've talked about standards and we typically refer to them as
performance standards. If we are exactly talking about the same thing, but we had David Roberts on recently and one of our colleagues who is an economist, all in Donnelly, big fans of, you know setting like basically how like got out of gasoline saying You must reduce the lead content of gasoline by X percent every year And it doesn't matter how you do that. That's up to you to determine. Is that what you mean by setting
standards like people? Yes. Okay. So you're not, you're not by Fiat saying, like, every little thing that must be done, you're saying, get to this goal, figure it out. Yeah, exactly. That's what a renewable portfolio standard is that is the policy that my book really focuses on. And when we think about the progress, we've actually made in cleaning up our electricity system. Renewable portfolio.
Standards. Have done an enormous amount of the work combined with Investments that being the investment tax credit and the Production tax credit, that's Federal money basically. So I think we need to set standards not just for electricity and a couple States but for electricity in all 50 states and then we got to combine that with standards on electric vehicles. You know, how many electric vehicles are we supposed to try to be getting out by certain years?
These are things like zero emission, vehicles have policies and then we got to do it on buildings to we got to say, you know the Inslee team has talked about retrofitting 4% of the building stock every year. So, it would take 25 years to turn over the building stock. So, you know, we know we have to do things to keep warming to safe levels, not that one degree Celsius, which is what we've already warm.
The planet is a safe level, but if we assume one point five degrees Celsius is what we're going to try to do. Guess what we can't build any new fossil fuel infrastructure and we need our government to set the rules of the road to say, here's the glidepath down. Here's what we need to be doing every year to keep on. Back with what's necessary.
Yeah, I tend to be favorable towards that standards approach because it seems to take what I like best about Market approaches which is that they're, they're flexible, you can rely on individual initiative and companies to get creative and to figuring out how to actually meet these standards without just determining everything ex ante and maybe that doesn't work for all players. Or maybe it's there's some favoritism towards some but not
others. I think, I think that's a pretty smart way to go. One of the things you mentioned here, Leah. You keep referring to, where In Washington. So, we watch with Jay Inslee, is up to, what is the role? Do you think for States versus the federal government right now? It seems like State, specially, California, and Washington, and others. New York other places, try to try to be leaders in developing policies.
In this Laboratories of democracy smaller-scale, subsidiarity Federalist kind of model, but they're clearly times when that's an adequate or you have a race to the bottom kind of scenario, or just doesn't really work, but then the federal government setting policy across the board. Seems like that's a little too. Maybe it doesn't fit every state as well as it could. What are the trade-offs? And how do we know which one to apply?
And when well, I think that we have been experimenting with a decentralized federalist approach to climate policy for about 30 years. And we can see very clearly. The limits of that we're behind on cleaning up our electricity system, we're behind on reducing our emissions. We've had States work together through things like Reggie, the regional greenhouse gas initiative and the Northeast, you know, we've I've had California try to Pioneer.
Its own approach and partner with other states and Canadian provinces to make progress and we're just not moving fast enough. The reality is that Advocates have been trying since the 1990s to get a clean electricity standard through Congress and Electric utilities fossil fuel companies. They've just fought them every step of the way and we've never managed to enact one. People may not remember this, but the waxman-markey bill included a clean electricity standard.
It wasn't just Sort of cap and trade program, which is what it is. So well known for today, the clean electricity standard was twenty percent Renewables by 2020 and of course, now we're in 2020 and we're not at that and there was some technical things where you could count efficiency or other things towards it but you know, that would have set a standard for every single state across the country.
And we need that because right now, we've got places like West Virginia that are only getting five percent of their electricity. TriCity from clean energy sources. I think Delaware and Ohio are at like two or three percent renewable energy and Florida, which you may remember is a sunny Place, very impacted by climate change. There are fifteen percent clean energy. So we can't have all these
laggards across the country. We need everybody to be moving along, not just the leaders, like Washington, State and California. New York as you mentioned, we need a federal policy to Sure, that states across the country are making progress, should that follow the same sort of Standards model? Do you think that the federal government should set that and then States should find their ways to comply with that? Is that the best way to do it?
Yeah, I do think so. I mean, in many ways, the clean power plan which was built off of the Clean Air Act and the requirement to regulate CO2 as a pollutant because the endangerment finding because because of that court case between Massachusetts and the EPA, you know, that was a I'll see that applied across the country that set targets for
everybody. And the clean power plan was actually quite flexible and that some states had to do more other states had to do less based on where they were at at the beginning of the policy. But then States could figure out exactly how they wanted to go about doing it. So I could imagine that you set a standard at the federal level. And that states can Pioneer their own approaches and
programs to getting it done. You could, for example, put a price on carbon in some places and that would, as I Drive coal out of the electricity system, pretty darn quickly. So that is an approach that a state could use to meet a
standard. Or you could have renewable portfolio, standard style approach, where you using renewable energy certificates, which again has a sort of market-based mechanism to it. So we've got to get the work done and the fact is that doing this work will create a lot of jobs and we're at a moment where so many people have lost their jobs. So we need to be And ourselves, can the federal government be steering the ship. What do we want the 21st century to look like in the United
States? We're at a moment now where we can choose to go in a New Direction and actually clean up our Energy System and protect Americans from climate impacts that are already, you know, on our Shores. Where do you think it makes sense for policy to be very detailed and more detailed than a standards approach. Are there places where things should be specified ex ante?
In great detail, just in law. Yeah, I mean a standard is specifying targets and timetables and I think that's the critical thing with climate change. We don't have infinite time if you think about other kinds of public policies, you know, if we don't fix some kind of problem, it's not great. But you know, we can go and fix it later on. Oftentimes that isn't the case with climate change as we accelerate warming, as we start to push to higher higher levels of Temperature increases.
We know that changes can be irreversible if we lose coral, reefs, for example, you know, if we start to lose some of the Arctic permafrost, these things are not easy to reverse, and, or really possible to reverse. And so, I think that climate change requires a clear roadmap, it requires our government to say to polluting Industries. Hey, you got to get on top of this problem and you've got to be cutting emissions by this amount. Out by this date, that's really
what. The one point five degree report that the ipcc published in 2018 was all about, it was saying here's what you got to do to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And we know from people like Steven Davis that that means no new fossil fuel infrastructure can be built. So I think that standards can actually be quite detailed in terms of setting a direction for policy and making sure that the decisions that get made across.
All different parts of society are moving in the right direction when it comes to reducing emissions. You're a political scientist. So clearly, you like to geek out on policy but not all of us are in that world. So tightly. So what do you imagine people who are either acting as individuals, or in Civil Society or businesses? What are the roles for them? And how should they be thinking about climate policy?
Well, I think that a big challenge that we saw with the waxman-markey bill back in 2009, was that there was not enough public support behind the bill Theta Scotch pull of very well-known and excellent scholar at Harvard University wrote a white paper looking at the failure of that bill. And once she concluded was that, there was not enough public activism and support to try to get that bill passed.
So right now, what we're Being is that the climate movement is growing and that groups like sunrise or zero hour. These are youth climate movements Friday's for future. That's gratitude Birds organization. You know, these groups are starting to raise the salience of these issues. And that is so important for politicians because I've done some research, which I write about in the book, with Chiefs of Staff and legislative directors and Congress, as well as state legislators and their
staff. And I asked all of these, Different groups, you know? What do you think the public thinks about climate policy? Do you think they liked it? What do you think? The public thinks about these clean energy targets? Do you think they want them? And what I find is that these politicians and their staff are consistently under estimating, support for climate policy. They think that the public doesn't care or they think that the public doesn't want them to act on climate change and that's
just not true. If you go on the Yale project on climate change, Communications website. You can see these maps that my colleague at the University of California. Santa Barbara, has been making with them for years, which down scales public opinion on climate policy to every congressional district across the country.
Every count, you can look up your own and what you'll find is that in 90% of the places, there's huge support for climate action, but our politicians and their staff do not know this. So, one thing that the public has to do is make that message clearer and what we find in our research paper is that the more politicians in their staff are meeting with lobbyists from the American petroleum Institute or taking money from the fossil fuel industry. The worst job they do at
understanding public support. So we need to be holding our politicians, accountable, and not allow them to become captured by the fossil fuel industry and forget that the public wants climate action and wants to leave a habitable planet for Future Generations, so I think talking about climate change, writing to your politicians boating, raising it
as an issue in public debates. Those are all really powerful things that people can be doing because we need people to understand that there is massive widespread support for acting on the climate crisis. Yeah, that was surprising. We had chain Skeleton on recently from political climate and Julia Piper. And Shane was saying when he worked in a congressional office, that actually, they don't get that money. Any letters that are not form letters and they read them and take them.
Seriously, you can actually have some degree of influence by writing serious letters, 100%. I'm doing some additional research building off of that work on this exact topic and I would really encourage people to reach out to their politicians and make sure that they know that they care about climate change. That's not just your federal politicians, although that's really crucial.
It's also State politicians local politicians, hold people's feet to the fire and make sure they know that Public wants action, we're zeroing in now on. I want us to get to some sort of case study and sort of break this down a little bit. But one more thing to set the stage for that is I have a question. I always like to ask is about utilities, utilities are typically governed.
Now, as monopolies, where they're granted, some sort of exclusive right to provision power for a certain geographical area and wasn't wondering like is this necessary when might it no longer be necessary and then if it is, why should a monopoly that has legal status? As a monopoly, why should they be allowed to influence the political process? I don't understand how exactly that works. Sort of hurts my brain to think about. Yeah. Well that's something I get into
extensively in my book. So in the early 20th century private utilities were just getting established. Electricity was a new commodity and there were business leader, Samuel insull being the most famous and well-known who realized that in order to make a profit they would Need to build large plants because the first kilowatt-hour of electricity sells really expensive, but if you can sell more, you get economies of scale. So they wanted to get a lot of
customers. They could build a big plant and spread those costs across lots of people. Now, in order to do that, they needed to have exclusive franchise rights basically a monopoly because otherwise they would be competing with one another over the same service territory. And so what Samuel insull did was that he Just other people in the industry to support this
idea of monopolies. And then they went and got state legislators to pass laws that put electricity in the state jurisdiction rather than the local jurisdiction and created public utility commission's. So this is written a lot in Richard, Hirsch's book, power loss, or really excellent history of this topic. And it's also, of course written about in my book, but he's the sort of primary source on it and it was a deal, right? It's kind of a fast.
Bargain. You said, hey, you get to be a monopoly and in return, you have to be regulated by a Public Utility Commission. This is the kind of thing that Elizabeth Warren is always talking about, right? We need corporations to be regulated, but especially when corporations are monopolies. There are some really thorny
ethical questions. If you get electricity from Monopoly, I do, for example, from Southern California, Edison. I can't choose to buy my electricity from another company and if Southern, California Edison, decides to oppose clean energy or to create fake groups and pretend that the public opposes clean energy, you know? I can't exit. I can't say I'd like to go take my money elsewhere and this is exactly what's been happening in Arizona with Arizona, public service.
This is a monopoly utility that operates in Phoenix and they've spent, you know, fifty million dollars over the last decade, capturing their regulator influencing elections at their Peter blocking clean electricity standards from being passed into law through a ballot initiative. This is very unethical behavior and Arizona, public service is the company that sells the electricity. You can't choose to buy somewhere else. So I think you're right.
There are really thorny questions around Citizens United and corporations, right to use political spending as a form of free speech when those corporations are monopolies. And so I'm very critical Uncle of utilities as monopolies right now and all the ways that they have, you know, been abusing the system because of the citizens united decision to Broadway's to take this one. Do you think a more decentralized bottom-up approach with micro grids and household
solar and stuff like that? Do you think that might make centralized provision and utility provision of power unnecessary? And then I guess, as a related question, could you just have multiple providers of power inside of the same? Geographical area, competing. People always like to point and say, the only argument I typically here this is in popular circles, not, in academic circles. So I'm sure there's more
sophisticated arguments. But people say, do you really want there to be multiple power lines going to everything? Mike? I'm sure they would cut some sort of deal and figure it out there like there's incentives to do. So anyways, what do you make of that whole dog's breakfast? I just served you. Yeah, so on the second Point, that's kind of retail competition in the electricity system and it does exist in a
few places. Isis, including Texas being the really well-known example or cot is the system. They're the interesting thing is that not a lot of people change their electricity service provider just because they're given an opportunity to do that. You know, I think the bigger issue is not getting rid of monopolies. If I were to start the system from scratch today, I wouldn't design it to have electricity companies be privatized and monopolies, I certainly wouldn't.
But that is the system that we have today. And so it's a little difficult to just Magically you know change it. What I'd rather do is have better regulation of these corporations and have limits on their ability to do political lobbying, you know, have them be more like basic service providers that are heavily regulated. And the problem is that public utility commission's that are supposed to be. Their Regulators are often captured.
So we have to find a way to get those systems to be less captured, a lot of Advocates, have focused on changing the ownership structure as a solution to that. And in the conclusion of my book, I have a section on that. For those interested, I'm not a huge fan of the idea that if you change your private utility to a municipal utility or some other public entity that will magically solve the problem.
And that's because if you look at the Municipal Utilities and public electricity providers, there are sometimes pretty bad to the Tennessee. Valley Authority is written about in Russell Gold's book, a superpower, which is excellent. Need and it does not come across. Well, this is a federal Power Authority, you know, the same could be said for some Municipal Utilities and for Rural Electric co-ops. So I don't think it's just the ownership structure that it's the critical variable.
But I do support people running campaigns to put pressure on private utilities and if part of those campaigns are to say, well, we're going to make our own electricity system and exit. I think that's a good way to put pressure. The other thing I will say is that passing intervener compensation Programs is a really promising way forward. This is a policy that exists in California. It might actually exist in Washington state or I think it's Oregon. It's only in about three states
across the country. What it does is it allows groups that are intervening in regulatory proceedings at public utility commission's to be paid for their time. So if you are going to try to talk about consumer rights and make sure that electricity bills aren't being jacked up by monopolies. You can be paid for that if you're going Go and talk about how we need to keep the air clean and reduce our carbon emissions.
You can get paid for that. And so, a big reason why California is so successful is because that policy has paid Advocates to show up and advocate in the public interest Monopoly. Utilities are always paid to show up because they get to recoup all their costs in the regulatory process. So, I do think that we have to be thinking about Public Utility Commission reforms and make sure that Monopoly utilities are not capturing. The political system, maybe that means we have to try to break up
private utilities. I just think that that is going to be a really difficult thing to do. Because in the places where it's been tried like in Colorado and Minnesota with Excel, it's been a long battle that hasn't gone anywhere. So you know, it's a thorny and difficult issue but if people are interested in that my book does talk about that in some detail.
Your book is very detailed and there are a number of case studies or if you if you really want to dig in there's a lot of room for you to do so in a Kind of way man. Some of this stuff seems improperly suited to activism. So I'm gonna say this neutrally, although you could take it in a bad way if you, if you had that mood about you listener, but I think activism encourages a sort of simplification, right?
Like the ideal is the picket sign some sentiment or policy change that fits on their vote for, or against X thing. I'm angry about why thing Etc, but then like the exact policy changes that are necessary to reform, something like pu Seas. Seems really detail-oriented in the worst kind of way. Like I think I'm fairly smart and I'm daunted by it and so and I, my attention is slipping trying to absorb all the relevant information to even make an informed choice.
So is this is this even like the best place for democracy to be practiced or how do you make it easier so that people could do it effectively? Well, that's why an intervener Compensation Program is so great. I totally agree that, you know, you and I are not going to be
full-time. Advocates to try to reform, But utility commission's, there are some groups doing that as I mentioned, but it's unlikely and so we need to have people representing Us in the system and they need to be paid for their time because otherwise Advocates are going to struggle to find enough money to go do the work that they need to do, they're going to have to, you know, raise money from
membership. They're going to have to go to foundations and utilities can just collect monthly payments from people who need to use electricity in their homes and put some of that money into lobbying. So we need the system to make sure that money is being provided for Advocates on our behalf. We do not all need to be people intervening and Public, Utility Commission, hearings. What you can do, if you want to is you can join organizations that do this work.
The Sierra Club is really important. There Beyond coal campaign has been crucial to shutting down, coal plants across the country and intervening and puc proceedings 350 has fantastic chapters as well. And then there are Local groups on a state-by-state basis. The utility reform Network in California being one that comes to mind. So maybe learn about who is advocating on about electricity and become a member.
Give them five. Ten bucks a month and you know what's cool about it intervener Compensation Program. It happens automatically for all people in the state. So for example, in California, it's about 17 cents a person a year to pay for this program and it returns back to electricity rate. As hundreds of millions of dollars a year. So when independent reviews of that program have happened, it's been shown that it's really a
wonderful investment. So we need policies that automatically create better outcomes for people. So that yeah, not everybody has to be a full time, you know utility Advocate or know all the details about these things. So my book is really about pointing out the problem. It doesn't mean that everybody has to be a full-time Advocate on this and I'm sure most of your listeners.
Our members of organizations, but support people who are trying to advocate, for example, to pass an intervener Compensation Program because then you won't have to think about this nearly as much. Alright? Yeah. Fair enough you mentioned a couple organizations like Beyond coal and three fifty.org which I learned about both of these from Planet of the humans. Have you seen that Leah? Unfortunately, I did watch that film. Yes, I do not recommend people
watch. It just kidding obviously we know about these the Sierra Club and 350 and Bill mckibben's been on the show and And yeah, okay so you just write a piece about this when we'll get back to the utilities and public policy stuff. But since this came up naturally because I had to make that joke, what happened in that movie? Yeah, so Michael Moore, who's a household name? Released a film on the 50th anniversary of Earth day.
Last week with his longtime producing, partner directing, it person named Jeff Gibbs, and from what I can tell from watching the film, this was sort of a side project that Jeff had for maybe the last It's a lot of very out of date, things about clean energy and I have the strong impression that they had a strong thesis going into the film and decided they were going to tell that story which was that clean energy is evil.
And climate activists are somehow corrupt and they are to blame for the climate crisis at one point. Jeff gives says environmentalist or driving us off a cliff for example and it didn't really matter that they found very little evidence to back up their claims. They had their thesis And they ran with it. And I just think that's really bad journalism, especially when there's so much more attention to climate change and people want to solve the problem to deliver this nihilistic.
Take two people that just immobilizes them is terrible. I think that this movie is going to get a lot of play. And the right-wing amongst climate deniers, it'll probably be pushed by fossil fuel companies and I don't think that Jeff Gibbs or Michael Moore. Did enough thinking about who exactly would be using their film? I And Michael Moore, literally endorsed Bernie Sanders on a
stage, a few months ago. Standing next to representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the champion of the green New Deal. I mean, Bernie Sanders is plan for president was 100% Renewables by 2030. What is Michael Moore thinking coming out with a film? That's as Renewables are all evil. I mean, it's just beyond irresponsible and quite incoherent to his supposed Progressive politics. And, you know, if you want A critique capitalism and say that growth is the problem that's
fine. In fact, Naomi Klein has done a very good job of that, but the film doesn't get into that at all it instead pushes population control, as the solution. When we know that actually wealthy people who are generally white in the developed world, have the lowest birth rates and they also have the largest carbon Footprints and its lack of brown. People living in poor countries who have very small Footprints who are In higher amounts of
children. And so, population control would not solve the climate crisis, and it's fairly racist. So I think the film is extremely problematic and I do not suggest people watch it, especially climate Advocates because it's very demoralizing. And disheartening, all of us, know that there are problems with renewable energy and we grapple with that in our work, but the film is not constructive, or trying to point out ways that we can improve. It's just a Doomer nihilistic film.
And so, I think Think if people watch it, they'll be kind of sad. Oh, man! Yeah, there's a couple of moments that were quite Grim. Yeah, you're not. Not wrong. There. There's So many angles of take, there is a germ of Truth in there. That, of course, the production of solar panels involves industrial processes that are not so great, but for all of them and also they spend a lot of the, the movie focus on the
downsides of biomass. But for all of these things, the details and the lifecycle analyses matter, quite a lot. Like there are good versions of those things. And there are very bad versions of those things, but you just said all of them are bad and ends up in this sort of anti civilization. Kind of primitive is screed
against everything. I know and I find it so bizarre initially my piece had a whole section which got cut about, you know, how could these filmmakers, who themselves they can only make their film, because the industrial era exist, right? Cameras. Computers cars to drive around in Planes to take, you know, they are only able to make this film because industrial society works and all of us benefit from industrial society.
Of course, there are negative externalities from any kind of industrial process, whether that's You know, lithium mining for batteries or Cobalt extraction, right? Or, you know, using fossil fuels to manufacture solar photovoltaics or, you know, using steel, which is a very carbon intensive process to make wind.
And yet those of us who actually want to solve problems are trying to Grapple with those things and find better Solutions. And exactly as you say, talk about the nuance and the life cycle analysis to say, under these conditions this is bad. And under those conditions, it's better than the alternative. Which by the way, is fossil fuels. It's crazy how little the film. Even talks about fossil fuels, there's nothing about the
climate denial. Campaign, there's nothing really about, you know, if we're not going to build Renewables, what are we going to power our societies based off of. So yeah, and especially on biomass biomass is a very complex topic. What people may not know is that the u.s. electricity system is only 2% fueled by a biomass? So it's not a really big slice of it and it's unlikely that biomass is going to grow to a huge level in the u.s. biomass can be done better. If it's done based on waste
streams near by a plant. Like if you have like a Pulp and Paper Mill or Timber facility and you're just using scraps, that's better. If you're cutting down forests to put wood pellets on tankers and ship them over to the EU which is something that's happening. That's really bad. But you wouldn't learn any of those facts from watching the film. You would learn them by looking at the work of environmental Advocates like, oh, I don't know.
Three fifty.org Sierra Club. Union of concerned scientists and RDC. All the organization that the film denigrates. Those are the groups actually doing work to highlight the ways that biomass can be done poorly and try to stop it. In the case is that it is being done poorly. Now I want to invite you on because this Nuance is so important for many things. The truth doesn't easily fit on a picket sign of these details.
Really do matter to get these issues right like Nori where a carbon removal Marketplace. There are versions of carbon removal that we think are distracting or versions of projects that use captured CO2, that amount to a sort of Promotional greenwash and as the sector grows, you're going to see more and more people that Co-op the language and the ideas of it and you really have to dig into some of the stuff for you don't know what you're getting. I think that's a fine.
If that was the message of the film and you're saying, well, some do pure elements of the environmental movement have glommed onto green energy. That anything that even looks like green energy, no matter if it's green watching or not is great. Then that's a bad version. Our mentalism but I don't think it's fair to paint so
universally with that. There are versions of environmentalism that are robust and clear thinking and fair in ways that I enjoy and I'm sure you support many of the same groups to. I mean, the film went, after the smartest most Grassroots parts of the movement, Bill McKibben is a brilliant, kind detailed hard-working journalists and activists. I mean his work is so beautifully written and he is used to being harassed by Bye.
Oh, I don't know. The fossil fuel industry in the timber industry, but to be harassed by a progressive filmmaker with a platform, like Michael Moore has is so immoral. And the reality is that bill McKibben wrote to the filmmakers and tried to clarify his views and they didn't even write back. They had no interest in engaging. And I just think that's immoral from a journalistic perspective. So I don't even really view this as a documentary because it's
not really about facts. It isn't about having a nuanced conversation about Solutions and their pitfalls, which Anybody who has worked in energy to, you know, if they'd taken my class, they would know, you know, this is my undergraduate class on energy, they would know that all energy systems have trade-offs that we have to try to minimize those trade-offs and, and yeah, I think the point that you make about carbon removal, so interesting because there are certain parts of the Progressive
Movement that are just knee-jerk against it and my attitude is we're at 400 15 parts per million. I live in California, we have droughts wildfires, I've had to evacuate my home more than one. Because of wildfires in the five years, I've lived here, you know, this is not a safe level of concentrations for me, and for many other people living in small island nations, for example. And so, how are we going to remove carbon from the
atmosphere? That's a big question and I don't think just storing it in Forest is enough because Forest fall down and they burn. So we need to be able to have space to have complex conversations about Technologies and how they get manipulated and some of their trade offs. But this film does not contribute productively To that
conversation. And I think Naomi Klein said it best, she had a tweet about it, you know, she wrote a book called this changes everything, which is a critique of capitalism and how it creates climate change. But she said, this film is not productive to advancing that conversation. If people want to have a conversation about, you know, wealth. Here's a thing that people might not know. There's something called the Kaya Identity, or I Pat, it's an
equation. Which shows you where emissions come from, it says impact environmental impact is a function of population affluence. And technology, and the film takes on population, which generally, as I've already pointed out, is not a great lever to pull for all the reasons I said. And then it says, technology is hopeless. So we can't pull that lever and it really leaves on this table. The idea of income inequality or the huge environmental
Footprints of the wealthy. You know, that's the work that Naomi Klein has done so it's not like we can't have complex conversations about those different levers to making change. It's just that this film. Was not at all interested in having a real informed conversation about those issues. Yeah, I was curious where he was hanging out because many of the things that he laments, their absence, I feel like I'm interacting with those arguments
on a regular basis. Many people I speak with these concerns trouble them, and there are many ins and outs to all of us. Yeah, I don't know. Like, the idea that most of these environmental movements are so tied up with capitalist organizations thinkers companies. But they're not doing anything productive. I feel like I see more more stuff critical of capitalism than anything else. But I don't know, maybe I'm not going to the right cocktail parties. It could be that to know.
And if, and if capitalism is the problem and fossil fuel corporations of the problem, how come the film never talks about corporations? It's so strange. Michael Moore has made a career criticizing corporations Roger and me, Bowling for Columbine, which went after gun manufacturers. For example, sicko, which goes against Operations involved in the health care industry. You know, why didn't he make a film going after Electric.
Utilities and fossil fuel companies who have lied about climate science for decades and have delayed progress. As I outlined in my book as Naomi oreskes, and Erik Conway. Outlined in their book merchants of doubt. I mean, look, the evidence is there for corporations being really terrible for the planet and instead of blaming corporations, they blame environmentalists and it's just
so wrong headed. You know, given how worked up you are and how intense this conversation is, we're guaranteeing that some of our listeners now have to check right now tragedy strikes and effect big time. I'm just warning people that it's not going to leave you in a good mental headspace. I'm sure your listeners know about all the trade-offs involved in clean energy and struggle with it. I do. But this is not going to provide any insight for you.
It's just going to leave you feeling demoralized. We'll see. I'm expecting. Now so we'll see how we only have a couple minutes left and I really wanted to do at least like one walkthrough of either a really successful or really unsuccessful case study from your book that you think listeners might be able to get a taste for what's inside the book and a really detailed kind of
way. Yeah, well I'd love to talk about Ohio. Last summer Ohio, rolled back, its renewable energy laws and Energy Efficiency laws and basically replace them with a Bail out, it's something that myself and David Roberts have both called the worst energy
policy in the nation. David Roberts wrote about it for Fox and I wrote a piece for the guardian and all the bloody details are in my book but basically in that state anti wind groups and the fossil fuel industry, Electric utilities worked for years to try to roll back the clean energy law and they eventually succeeded last year. And what's so crazy? Is that the Energy Efficiency policy in? Ohio was paying people It was saving lots of energy and it was totally like a, an investment
that pays itself back. I want to say five billion or something. I can't remember the number, but it's in my book and instead of supporting a policy like that or supporting a renewable energy law, when the state gets like three percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources today and has no plans really to scale that up. They instead decided to put a lot of money to a coal plants that lose money, every hour, pretty much that they operate.
There are a Couple coal plants, this is the 0 Vector plants and the Samus plants that are no longer economically viable, and Ohio has an electricity system, that's been restructured. So there's a market and there's Market signals, but rather than shut down those plants First Energy Solutions, which was in bankruptcy and is now called Energy Harbor as well as American Electric Power AEP, Ohio. They both lobbied very heavily. The state legislature to get a
bailout. And what's so interesting is there was a Race for the speaker of the house I believe. And they wanted to make sure that the right guy a shill for their industry would get the power so that he could make sure this was on the agenda. So not only did they back him in
his election. They also backed like 12 other people who they knew would vote for him so that he could take power over the chamber and then they quickly jammed through a bailout last summer and in my book, I calculate approximately how much money that is likely to be over the course of the time that that bailout exists and The law was very ambiguous. You can't figure it out from the law, but you can figure it out,
various other ways. And I asked to meet that it's probably five billion dollars going towards. Keeping these three coal plants open until 2040 likely, and that is just so, unethical air, pollution kills people, right now, coronavirus makes it more likely that you will die if you're living in polluted air because it affects your lungs. So does the virus. So it's just really a terrible energy policy and it's a tragic thing and People might not know.
Is that back in 2014? When they were trying to roll back? This policy the clean energy policy. These anti wind activists managed to get as part of a budget Bill a rider, which is a provision attached to a law that really has nothing to do with the law. And what they do is they change the setback rule for wind turbines, so that they had to be farther away from a property line. And that meant that basically no wind energy in Ohio could have been built with the existing plants.
And since that time, the wind energy industry has Been pretty much locked out of the state. You can't really build wind energy in Ohio right now and that policy has never been changed. So Ohio has a policy right now of subsidizing coal making it impossible to build wind energy and you know, has no plan really for how to deal with the climate crisis and is supporting air pollution and carbon emissions rather than supporting cleaning up our Energy System, wow.
So if you want to dig into all those grisly details your book is a very good place to do. So you would Give. Yeah, it's got all the details about what electric utilities and fossil fuel companies have been up to for the last few decades, and it's not good very succinct. They're nice. Nice little cap. The book is called short-circuiting policy with a
very long subtitle. I'll do it for you, Leo, just out of the goodness of my heart here, interest groups in a battle, over clean energy, and climate policy in the American states, but in some sort of yeah, yeah. I think it's, I think it's fine. I think it's descriptive as I said, I don't know why I'm picking on that. Sorry. But I sometimes laugh about it too. Yeah, that's great. Links in the show notes if you want to buy the book, that will be there. Dr. Leah Stokes.
Thanks so much for being here. We're glad to have you. Thank you so much for having me on and yeah to all your listeners working on clean energy, and climate policy. Stay in the fight. Your work is essential more more now than ever before and don't be disheartened. When the haters come calling and they will come calling Leo, you're on Twitter, a lot to what is your handle? Oh, I'm on Twitter, too much. It's Leah, Ellie. Aah Stokes, Leah, Stokes and yep.
I blast my opinions to the universe on a regular basis there, it's a brave ice. I kind of stay away from it. Personally, it has its upsides and its downsides. There are professional downside to not engaging but there are personal spiritual. There's a sanctuary of created. I don't want to pierce. Yeah, I know I've started taking Seeing my weekends off line off Twitter to just focus on gardening and reading books and sort of detoxing from it.
So yeah, you know, he can set boundaries around it, very wise, what. Great. And if you like the show, please write reviews on iTunes, or Stitcher a podcast. Tell your friends. And thank you so much for listening, but thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in apple podcast and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we're doing is
useful, interesting fun. Hopefully, all three, we certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nor e.com where there is a newsletter that's nor e.com. Subscribe, there's podcast. There's a whole bunch else or you can send us an email at podcast at nor e.com. We are also now on patreon at patreon.com slash Nori podcasts, if you'd like more content engagement and community and thank you so much for your support.