#1827 Deep Cuts: Exxon Knew - The History Behind the Case to Make Polluters Pay

0:00Sin City, Get Ready! Cancon West, presented by Dead Air. It's Boulder Wifele and Pistol Club this October 22nd through 24th, just outside Las Vegas. It's two full days of unlimited, fully-suppressed shooting, and ammunition is free with ticket purchase. Cast hundreds of firearms and suppressors, from giants like Maxim Defense, Sieg and Rugged, challenge the bros head-to-head, or shoot all day long for just 50 bucks a day or 85 for both. Unlimited ammo, unlimited suppressors, lock in your tickets right now at cancon-event.com. Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left podcast. Today we trace the Exxon new story through a decade of our own archive, because that history is what the Supreme Court is weighing in Suncorv Boulder in their first case this term. Exxon scientists confirmed the climate science in the early 80s and the company chose to manufacture doubt. Communities like Boulder County have paid ever since, and the question before the Supreme Court

1:01is whether any lawsuit like this will be allowed to go to trial. For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 55 minutes today, spanning episodes from the past decade include, what a day, on the media, counter-spin, democracy now, the Tom Hurtman program, and downstream. Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections. Section A, the industry's playbook, Section B, Trump's rollback, and the legal fight to stop it, Section C, Suncorv Boulder, and the accountability fight, and Section D, nationalize it, and now onto the show. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear arguments in a case involving a lawsuit by Boulder County Colorado against Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy. Before we get to the Supreme Court case, what is Boulder County suing these companies for? All across the United States, from Maine to Hawaii, dozens of state and local governments are right now

2:05suing major oil and gas companies, like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, for deceiving the public about their fossil fuel products role in the climate crisis, to hold them accountable for that deception, and to make them pay for the associated damages that they caused. So the arguments in these cases are a lot like the lawsuits against tobacco companies or opioid manufacturers. These companies knew they were selling a harmful product. They lied to protect their profits, and now communities like Boulder are saying they need to be held accountable and pay for the damages that their deception has caused. And for Boulder, this question of who should pay for climate damages is not theoretical. In 2021, part of Boulder County was hit by the Marshall Fire, who is the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, more than a thousand homes are destroyed. And Boulder's lawsuit, which was filed in 2018, specifically names the increased

3:06risk of wildfires is one of the things the county needs to pay for and protect residents against going forward. So I wanted to ask, because you made a comparison that was really interesting to me, the comparison to lawsuits made against big tobacco and lawsuits made against Purdue Farma and opioid manufacturers. Both of those entities, there's very a very clear paper trail where both said our products are not harmful. What is Boulder, Colorado arguing is the similar element here. What did oil companies tell us that wasn't true? So thanks to whistleblowers, journalists, congressional investigations, we have a well-documented body of evidence that shows that companies like Exxon, new decades ago, as early as the 1970s, that in the words of one internal industry document, if we didn't stop using fossil fuels, it could lead to potentially catastrophic events. But what did the companies do with this information? We also have internal

4:08industry documents showing that they decided that rather than warn the public about the problem and help to steer the nation toward a safer, cleaner energy future, instead they decided to lie to deceive the public, to spread misinformation. And in doing so, they stole decades of time when we could have been doing more on climate change. And now communities like Boulder are paying the price for that deception. Now the reason this case is going before the Supreme Court is not because of Boulder County, it's because of the oil companies. Why are the oil companies arguing the Supreme Court needs to intervene here? As you might imagine, big oil companies are terrified of standing trial in these cases. They've argued in their own Supreme Court briefs that they're facing massive monetary liability in these lawsuits and they are if they're really held accountable to stop deceiving the public and pay for the damages that they've caused, they're staring at billions and billions of dollars in liability. The oil companies claim that by trying to make

5:11these companies pay for local climate damages, these communities are somehow trying to actually set national climate policy and that these cases are therefore preemptive by federal law. Of course, Boulder's lawsuit is trying to do no such thing. And a growing number of courts, including the Colorado Supreme Court, that have looked at this issue, have rejected big oil arguments. So given the makeup of the Supreme Court, which is pretty conservative right now, is there any reason to think they won't just side with the energy companies in this case? You know, obviously a lot of people here are cases going to the Supreme Court and it raises alarm bills. But again, the US Supreme Court has turned down many previous requests to take up one of these lawsuits as they're making their way through the lower courts as they're heading to trial. And the justices sat on the petition in this case for several months. And when they finally agreed to take the case, we got a hint at what might have been going on between closed doors.

6:11And that was that the justices added a second question, which was, do we, the Supreme Court, even have jurisdiction, meaning the authority to hear this case right now at this time, before there's a final judgment? So there are really signs that the justices internally might have doubts that they should even be weighing in on this issue yet. But on that core issue of are these cases preempted by federal law? Look, every state Supreme Court to rule on this to date, including the Colorado Supreme Court has said, no, these cases are squarely about holding companies accountable for deceptive conduct. And that communities like Boulder should be allowed to proceed toward discovery and trial. Last spring, the Wall Street Journal reported on a meeting President Trump had with oil and gas executives at the White House. What have those executives been lobbying for from the Trump administration? Yeah. So I think what's really telling is that Wall Street Journal story said one of the top concerns oil executives brought directly to President Trump in person were lawsuits exactly like boulders. So a month after that meeting where they asked President

7:17Trump, can you help us fight these lawsuits? Trump issued an executive order. He directed Attorney General Bondi to take all appropriate action to try to stop these lawsuits. The Justice Department actually sued two states, Michigan and Hawaii, that had said, we're going to file our own lawsuits against big oil companies. And the case against Michigan has been dismissed, but the one against Hawaii is still pending. And perhaps the most consequential thing that Trump administration has done to date to help bail out big oil was to tell the Supreme Court again in an uninvited brief or rare thing you should take up this boulder case. Oil companies are also working with Republican members in Congress to create legislation that would shield them from lawsuits that hold them responsible for environmental damage. What do we know about those efforts? Yeah, it's true. They are so terrified of facing any kind of accountability. They're not content to just make their case in court and take their chances. They're actually going around the courts directly lobbying Congress for what's called the liability waiver. This would be essentially immunity from any laws or lawsuits that could hold

8:20them accountable. The biggest oil lobbying group said that killing these types of lawsuits is their top priority for 2026. And a House Republican, Harriet Hageman from Wyoming, has said she's working with colleagues in the House and Senate to introduce a bill that would shield oil companies from having to face any type of legal liability. It's been interesting because you would think, and you know, when Trump came back into office, you kind of had this idea like this is going to be boom times for the oil and gas industry. He's going to open up drilling in a host of environmental refuges. There's going to be big oil and big gas are going to be the beneficiaries of this administration. And that hasn't really been true to the extent that I think a lot of oil companies probably expected in 2024. And now we're in the midst of a war with a wrong that is pushing gas prices up because even with domestic production, there's only so much that the United States can do if the straight-of-formos is closed. But I think the wider thing I think everyone should be thinking about is why are we so reliant on oil? It seems like to me a worthwhile

9:26opportunity to be thinking rethinking our relationship with big oil. Amen. And in fact, the reason we're still so reliant on oil and gas is because decades ago, big oil saw the writing on the wall, hey, if we don't do something, there's going to be growing demands to transition to cleaner energy. And so what do they do? They launch this unprecedented consequential massive deception campaign to spread climate denial and disinformation and stall the clean energy transition, which if we had been further along right now without those decades of lies from oil and gas companies, you know, we would not be perhaps in as big a mess as we are today. Now climate damages are costing the United States somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars a year. And all those costs right now are falling on taxpayers while the companies that knowingly caused the problem lie about it and continue to deceive the public, right? They pretend, hey, we're actually part of the energy transition where they're not. They're still doubling down on fossil fuels. And if big oil isn't

10:26held accountable for that, it's going to continue to be communities and taxpayers that continue to pay all the cost of climate damages. This may be a bit of a shock. For a decade in the 70s and 80s, Exxon was at the forefront of scientific research on climate change and its own scientists were sounding alarms. There was no questioning that the atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing, that atmospheric carbon dioxide was going to change the climate in some fashion. The question was how fast, how much and what kind of impacts would it have? That was Edward Garvey, a former Exxon climate researcher, in a video produced by Frontline with the Pulitzer Prize-winning website Inside Climate News. This week, that website launched a series documenting Exxon's white hat scientific research,

11:29and then its sudden shift toward trivializing the growing scientific consensus on climate change. Neil Labanerjee, one of the reporters who produced this series for Inside Climate News, describes her aha moment. One day on a list serve, I got a transcript of a congressional hearing from 1979 that was about climate change. And I thought, oh, you know, it's in the surprising, so just on a lark, maybe because I was procrastinating or something, I looked up Exxon to see if anybody from Exxon was there. And then I found the name of a man. His name was Henry Shaw. Shaw was leading the company's early efforts into carbon dioxide research. Before learning about him, Inside Climate News believed that the earliest Exxon had looked at the effects of CO2 was in the 1980s. And that was the sort of thread that Star-Turne Raveled is. As I started to Google Henry, I found a study that had been done about Exxon outfitting a super tanker with equipment to measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the ocean and in the atmosphere along the super tankers

12:31route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf. And the paper came out in 1982, but the work had been done in the late 70s. We started to pull together names, start to look at places where documents might be archives and so on. And that's how it all came together. How far back does the company's interest in CO2 build up go? There is a scientist named Jim Black, who made a report to Exxon's management committee in July 1977. And the management committee is the top leadership of the company. And he told them about the prevailing science at the time about carbon dioxide that scientists think it's mainly from the combustion of fossil fuels. And if it keeps up at this rate, it will lead to warming of the planet. And that could have very grave consequences for human society, things like drought and floods and so on. To put that in perspective, it wasn't until 1988 that James Hanson of NASA alerted the world in testimony before Congress about the serious

13:33ness of this issue. So Exxon. Right. You know, we were stunned. There's this public Exxon that we know from 1990 onwards sort of skeptical about, you know, how certain the science is calling for delays. And yet the documents that we've seen and the people we've talked to describe a company were the approach to carbon dioxide and climate change was very neutral, very measured. When one reads Jim Black's text and you can do it on our website because we've uploaded that document to our first story, it's like any other scientist of the day. And while the company didn't at the time issue press releases and write in its annual reports about its gathering suspicions and fears about CO2, it also wasn't operating in secret. Its scientists were publishing peer reviewed papers publicly. Right. I think a lot of people want to make this appear to be an energy industry parallel of what happened in the tobacco industry. I'm not sure how far that parallel goes because Exxon at the time

14:37that this research was being done did not suppress any of this. That was actually part of their strategy. They understood that farther down the road, if the science was accurate, which, you know, they thought it would be that there would be limits placed on emissions from fossil fuels. So their strategy at that time was that we want to have say in what those limits look like. We want to be taken seriously. And the best way to do that is to do peer reviewed, irreproachable science. And so they backed conferences on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. They published in peer review papers. They, in fact, ended up shelving a major natural gas project, which is still mothball today because the natural gas was mixed in with a lot of carbon dioxide. And they can find a way to get rid of the carbon dioxide and they weren't going to vent it into the atmosphere. This project off of the coast of Indonesia came at a time when they actually were concerned that supplies were running dangerously low and they still opted not to pursue the Indonesian project

15:43on CO2 grounds. It's hard to imagine we're speaking from a major oil company. I know. And then something changed. The documentary evidence and interviews we have so far only extent to 1986. And part of the reason is that Exxon was involved in major layoffs through the 80s because the oil price sank. And a lot of the scientists who were involved in climate research either left or were let go by the mid 80s. And then in 1989, the global climate coalition is formed by fossil fuel companies. And Exxon is one of the leading figures in this effort. So something happened between 86 and 89 and we don't have that information. What we can surmise though is that there was a change in management and the management through the 70s and mid 80s had been looking at alternatives to crude oil. Some of them were carbon based like tar sands but some of them were not. And then

16:43you had management come in that were more focused on the core business and thought that Exxon should stick to oil. That was people like Lee Raymond who went on to become chairman of Exxon. And Lee Raymond notoriously argued against the Kyoto Protocol and prevailed with the argument that well he said quote let's agree there's a lot we really don't know about how climate will change in the 21st century and beyond. Which I guess is nominally true. There is a lot we don't know. But by the time he uttered those words there was absolute scientific consensus that the temperatures were going up that ice was melting that sea levels were rising and so forth. Yes. What Exxon did from the late 80s onward was that they hammered away at the uncertainty around various aspects of climate science. And they did not partake in arguments that a lot of deniers use such as you know it's natural cycle or sunspots or anything like that. But instead they just kept saying you know the

17:45science is too uncertain for us to make enormous and possibly very expensive shifts in the economy. So the uncertainty became this break on climate action. The interesting thing is that in the late 70s early 80s Exxon scientists saw uncertainty as perfectly normal in evolving science and as an opportunity for research they actually rebutted climate models that showed that climate change would not be as bad as the prevailing models predicted. And then Exxon basically decided to take an entirely different path and that's why we call the series the road not taken. If they had stayed on that road things might be a bit different now but they didn't. Real quick if any of these sound familiar there's something you can do right now craving something sweet after every meal hungry again an hour after you eat. Weight won't budge no matter how disciplined you are. These are all signs that your body isn't producing enough GLP1 the hormone

18:50that keeps you full and supports weight loss. The good news, BiomeGLP1 booster helps you increase its natural production. So you can quiet the food noise and enjoy smoother weight management when following a healthy lifestyle. Head to biome.help slash GLP1 and use code podcasts to get 15% off. We know that it's not just Exxon or Imperial in Canada. We know that other oil companies did research but there's a reason to focus on Exxon because they were kind of an industry leader. It wasn't just that they did some research. They really did ambitious research. That's absolutely right and what these documents are revealing to us is imagine where the world would be if Exxon had continued to pursue that research and embrace its own scientific understanding of climate change decades ago. But as we know rather than doing that they pivoted and

19:53takenistically against the science and started funding decades of denial and deception individuals and think tanks that they were pumping money in to to confuse the public and policymakers about the importance of addressing climate change. And here's where the documents couldn't have them more exposed. Exxon of course was a founding member of what was called the Global Climate Coalition created in 1989 and the Global Climate Coalition at the same time as they're giving a backgrounder to politicians and the media that says the role of greenhouse gas is in climate change is not well understood. At the same time they have an internal memo saying the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect is well established and cannot be denied. So I guess what that kind of moves me on to is the power of uncertainty when it comes to making regulations. I mean of course we can see that the industry is trying to sow uncertainty but what about the part of regulators

20:56why were they so convinced by it? Well yeah I mean you referenced the the amount of misinformation that started to percolate out of groups like the Global Climate Coalition and that particular memo you mentioned was written by the Global Climate Coalition. So you definitely show the beginnings and that was the late 80s carried forward until the present you know decades of groups like the Global Climate Coalition that have attempted to look like third party experts or credible sources of information that were in fact knowingly spreading misinformation and creating doubt and that again goes in parallel with the tactics of the tobacco industry in evading accountability for its own a deadly product and knowledge of cancer and other health effects from its products which was to sow doubt that they knew that they could evade accountability or at least delay regulatory and public scrutiny by suggesting that there was doubt about the science.

21:59So they created their own institutes that sounded credible they created their own science that undermined what was known in the in the peer-reviewed literature in the health community about the impacts and the oil companies followed that playbook you know to a tee and used the same sort of tactics to suggest that oh well we're not sure yet you know let's study this further let's take time before regulatory action addresses this problem so it's essentially the exact same tactic and regulators and certainly policymakers bought it right unfortunately and that led us to the situation we're in where climate change is having very real impacts now you know we're seeing them presently and the delay that was caused by this deceptive campaign by exxon and the Global Climate Coalition and other major oil companies is a real reason why we haven't addressed this aggressively. Right and it is depressing the degree to which government deferred to industry but it's also

23:00explicable to the extent that government often rely on industry for the science that they use to determine regulations you referred to kind of the standard line and if folks have been reading any reporting on this they will know that it really doesn't matter who the industry spokesperson is in every news story you will read really an almost identical kind of almost steppered like line which will be to say it's not credible or it's preposterous to suggest that exxon reached definitive conclusions decades before the world's experts and while climate science was in an early stage of development and then went out of their way to hide those conclusions from the public it's funny that they say oh godly we're not experts how could we have figured it out before the world's experts when in fact they were really doing the kind of science that you would need to come to conclusions about this it was incredible science it really was I mean their monitoring equipment their modeling it was spectacular and it actually was well some of it was passed on to

24:07government agencies you know who then picked up what they could given their limited budgets but exxon light years ahead on this issue for sure and so it is telling now that their media spokespeople they have a two-pronged strategy number one is to suggest that there was uncertainty and we didn't know and number two is to attack the messenger any journalist that writes a story about this is immediately attacked harassed their editors or harassed I was frankly shocked at the end heganistic and hostile response that I received and doing due diligence reaching out to exxon for comment on these documents in this story Alan Jeffers their media spokesperson immediately attacked me and in my outlet and suggested we're not credible and you know this is outrageous well how can you do this reporting so you know they're very aggressive and we've seen that over decades you know exxon's always been among the more prickly when it comes to media covering their activities

25:07and so I think that's an important for a lesson for other journalists looking at this okay a company or an industry intentionally sowing doubt you know about a potentially catastrophic threat when they in fact know that there is little or no doubt and then as the timeline shows us as the reality as the science becomes clearer their denial gets bigger you know and bigger and bigger that implies maybe sociopathy you know I mean maybe moral turpitude it's a reason certainly that many people want to support a death penalty for corporations but what's the criminal violation here besides misleading advertising what is the grounds that people are using to go after exxon here that's a wonderful question it's obviously reached the level of interest we've now have New York and California led the way with their attorneys general announcing investigations into exxon's knowledge and what that might mean in terms of accountability

26:11for misleading the public and lawmakers and then now there's 17 other states that have announced that they're looking into it and then the US Virgin Islands has announced actions against at least two of those sort of front groups or operative organizations that were spreading misinformation so we are now in a situation where accountability work is being done I'm not an expert in the legal background on that but I know that those attorneys general and others are looking into sort of similar fraud and other actions that were taken against the tobacco companies for similar deception in applying those legal structures to the oil industry to see whether or not there could be some point at which exxon and others knowledge of this problem and subsequent deception was fraudulent and led us to this disastrous climate situation we're in it sort of speaks to the weakness of our legal apparatus that we have to go through kind of FTC fraud charges to talk about you know willfully

27:15withholding from the public information that could prevent catastrophe and one of the things that your work has brought up is that there were then as there are no doubt now people inside industry saying the same thing you referred to the chemical engineer from imperial oil years ago that was HR a Holland who was talking about harms and who also said you know this has to be regulated industry isn't going to do this voluntarily part of the tragedy is all the folks even within the industry who tried to change its course and who were just unsuccessful in doing so exactly was interesting as well that the company itself and one of the memos referred to its CO2 pollution as anti social behavior and this was decades ago I mean they knew the engineers knew that this was a problem and not only was it directly threatening their bottom line the ability to continue to sell oil and to continue with their business model which has been extremely oil centric as opposed to energy centric which might be a solution to this problem they knew it

28:19was big deal they knew that pollution was bad that same memo that I referenced earlier that there is no doubt memo it says technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases and this was again 1980 but removal of only 50 percent of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation and that was just talking about CO2 pollution from power plants but again you see their immediate concern is this is going to cost us money we don't want to spend the money to do this right we just want to delay accountability and and continue to do what we're doing and that was what led them to the idea of deception instead of owning the science and and doing the right thing what happened at the accident meetings the same thing that's happened at every accident meetings

29:20since 1990 there have now been upwards of 70 shareholder resolutions put forward to do something about climate change and most of them incredibly mild merely give us a report about what you plan to somehow do some data do some direction with climate change every single one of them has been voted down that's why you know the Rockefellers whose family founded the Darn Company divested all their stock and and gave up but in trying to change that way a year or so ago and instead joined this huge growing movement to demand real change and I'll note that one very good piece of good news yesterday well Exxon was stonewalling and and and continuing its time-honored traditions uh university Massachusetts became the largest public university system to divest from all fossil fuels which was a very uh powerful moment indeed in this

30:27big campaign um I should add to that it's not just Exxon though Exxon because as Anna says we now know that they knew everything about climate change that there's a sort of particular a particular horror in their story but earlier this week at very annual meeting the CEO of Shell said explained that we didn't want to switch to renewables too quickly because that would quote imperil the dividends unquote um we're living in a world as you know I knew that's basically sliding out of control 2016 is crashing every record we've ever had for a high temperature we're losing vast swaths of coral reef we've got unprecedentedly large early season fires burning in the boreal north and this guy thinks the thing that's in peril is his dividends that should tell you what you need to know and Bill McIvin could you say something about the progress that the

31:30divestment movement has made and why you think divestment is likely to be a more successful strategy with Exxon and getting them to change their climate policy well I think that the real point of the divestment movement has been to kind of withdraw social license from these fossil fuel companies and thereby reduce their political power the reason we haven't gotten anywhere on climate change for the 40 years that we've known about it is precisely because these guys wield so much political power I mean look Exxon knew perfectly well that what Anna's grandfather was saying was correct they set to work climate proofing all their own drilling rigs and other installations to account for the sea level rise they now knew was coming but at the same time they set up this vast framework with others of climate denial and deceit and disinformation and they continue to

32:32hand out a campaign checks to precisely the politicians that make sure nothing ever happens on these issues so the point at this point is to use this divestment movement as a vehicle to get that across and it is working it's not just or even mainly that there've been it became the biggest divestment movement ever I think at this point you know we're closing in on on four trillion dollars worth of portfolios and endowments that have divested the point is that it's taken the basic message the message that we have five times as much carbon in our reserves then any scientists thinks we could possibly burn and it's gotten that through you know three or four years ago that was people like me writing in you know Rolling Stone now it's the head of the World Bank the head of the IMF the governor of the Bank of England speaking to the world's insurance industry at Voids of London that message is getting through everywhere except Exxon and it's elk yesterday

33:37Mr. Tillerson was boasting about how the company was going out and making new finds of oil in new places around the world we have five times as much carbon in our reserves already as we can burn the idea that we should celebrate the exploration for new hydrocarbons at this point goes past irony into some dark place that I don't really have a name for the 60,000 people were ordered to evacuate from Spokane, Washington just a little north of us here we've got a million acres of forest land that's on fire right now in Oregon France, Italy, Greece, Spain are all on fire right now it's got to be happening in Russia and

34:37China we're just not getting the reports and next summer or this winter our time it'll happen in this other hemisphere what we're seeing is the the drying out of the planet as a result of climate change and and apparently the one of the biggest factors that's really whacking us that nobody was anticipating are these heat dumps they're basically high pressure systems with clear air that just sit there and then let the sunlight through no clouds let the summer because it's a high pressure system let the sunlight through and boom you know it just dries everything out turns it tender dry and then you know the smallest spark and you've got a wildfire and the heat dumps are happening for the same reason that the bomb cyclones were 15 years ago when I was in Washington DC we had the first bomb cyclone as a brand new phrase what the hell is this it's these wild winter storms that just stay in one place and just pound on you and get insanely cold and why was that was because Arctic air was drooling down past or through or the jet stream was pushing

35:42the jet stream down to the point where instead of being you know the jet stream normally running around northern Canada it was drooling all the way down to Texas and bringing freezing temperatures with it and freezing pipes and everything else well that same phenomena again because the jet stream has been weakened is causing these heat dumps to stand in place for long periods of time because the jet stream is what historically has been moving weather around the planet and the jet stream is produced by the difference the temperature differential between the Arctic cold and the mid latitude heat and when that differential is a big number when there's a big difference between those two temperatures when it's really cold up north and it's warmer in the center then you've got a healthy jet stream but what's happened is because the Arctic is warming six times faster than than we are here this differential has collapsed and the jet stream is no longer this strong powerful river of air you know it had 60,000 feet that it used to be

36:44and it's now just this kind of wandering slowly moving thing that drools around and you end up with these heat dumps. Trump is insisting that hundreds of wildfires burning across the United States Canada and Europe are all the result of people not grooming their forests properly you're not raking the forests I mean the guy's an idiot right now well he's not an idiot he's a he's a tool of the fossil fuel industry which gave him millions hundreds of millions of dollars and helped him get elected but the world weather attribution is a consortium of scientists they say the extreme drought the drought conditions the humidity the wind all the stuff that is fanning these forest fires and we've got it here yesterday here in in Portland the sun was orange you couldn't breathe here there are five big lies that are being used on a fairly regular basis by mostly Republicans to justify the theft of our public lands the public lands in Teddy Roosevelt set aside other

37:44presidents have as well Obama set aside I believe was bears years and already Trump has taken a bite out of that and so let's just review these lies Ryan Bussey is writing about this on his sub-stack Ryan Bussey R-Y-A-N-D-B-U-S-S-E dot sub-stack dot com number one national monument designations were forced on us by DC bureaucrats with no public comment this is a lie the if just last month for example Mike Lee the right wing guy out of Utah the Republican Senator marched out this old lie saying that it's happening under the 1906 antiquities act after Trump rolled back monument designations for three million acres in bears ears and grand staircase escalant national monuments the reality is that more the 2.7 million comments were gathered before this decision was made including statements from more than 300 Native American tribes conservation groups religious groups

38:45many of them in Utah so Mike Lee is just lying about his own two and about his own constituents line number two got a drill baby drill in America because we need energy independence Ryan Zinke has been pushing this he was Trump's first interior secretary before he was fired for corruption and he started lying back in 2017 when he was the secretary he said today I took a action to sign a series of directors of put America on track to achieve the president's vision for energy independence well we reached energy independence during the Obama administration we don't need that line number three logger to use it Montana Steve Daines you know the the Republican Senator from Montana is wearing this one out he repeatedly cites this to push for a sixfold increase in logging on federal lands in Montana last year and what happened well the skillet fire erupted in Montana on land that had been logged logged land is basically dead land and it's covered with you know the remnants of the trees and

39:50they catch on fire really easily so logging is not going to make your forests resistant to fire line number four you are locked out of your land by the elitists no one can hunt fisher grays livestock on national monuments or wilderness study areas no that's a lie uh you know we we subsidize hunting fishing uh this is one Donald Trump said this just last week he said you can't go hunting you can't go fishing you can't do anything you can virtually not even walk on it he's talking about Utah back countries but I talk about public lands it's a lie thankfully the New York Times called him on it they said but recreation has been allowed in bear's ears since president of Barack Obama designated the monument in 2016 see it's he took three million acres away from it to give to his donors his drilling and mining donors and logging donors and he said he's doing it because you can't use that they won't let you oh it's a lie it's just a complete lie line number five oil companies mining companies and grazers pay

40:51their fair share to profits from our public lands actually no under the big beautiful bill oil companies pay 12 and a half percent royalties on public land but on private land they typically pay about 25 percent royalties so your and my tax dollars are subsidizing the oil companies by giving them cheap cheap cheap oil grazers get a 95 percent discount on public lands compared to private lands and the kicker is mining since it's governed by the general mining active 1872 the people who are mining stuff out of public lands they don't have to pay the government therefore us a single penny it's time to nationalize the fossil fuel industry now I know the moment you say nationalize

41:52everybody thinks oh my god Venezuela Iran people don't think much about Norway and all the you know the the one time that a Democrat actually said this out loud was back in 20 2008 and it was during a hearing where the fossil fuel executives the CEOs were refusing to answer questions and Maxine Waters representative Maxine Waters a black woman with power something republicans eight and fear more than anything else they can imagine Maxine Waters basically came right out and said if you don't start giving me straight answers we're going to start talking about nationalizing your industry she used the word socialize but you know same thing and of course Fox News went nuts they melted down in fact there's a link to it offer it in the in the in the op-ed at harbangerport.com but Fox News and all those all those on the right and frankly Democrats who freaked out when Maxine Waters said this are either unaware of or completely ignoring the long

42:58history in this country of nationalizing industries that work against the national interest during a time of crisis and if you don't think that this is a time of crisis this climate crisis well I've got a tornado to sell you or the fact that hey it's April 11th and it's snowed in Portland Oregon there's an inch of snow on the ground outside right now let's probably down to a half inch it's starting to melt but you know it's never happened before last year it was 116 degrees for three days in a row here that's never happened before either we're getting Phoenix weather alternating with North Pole weather I mean it's just so you know if you don't think that we're in a climate crisis you you're not paying attention and in large part this crisis has been brought about by the fact that the fossil fuel industry for over 40 years has been lying to us about the impact of their product on this crisis and funding organizations that are out there lying about climate change and denying climate change and funding politicians I mean you know look

44:06Joe Biden had a plan and the Democrats had a plan to spend a half a trillion dollars 500 billion dollars on greening the American economy that really would have taken a good bite out of climate change it would have reduced our carbon emissions substantial in this country over the next five or ten years and it was defeated it passed the house it was defeated by every Republican in the United States Senate plus Joe Manchin who's taking money from the fossil fuel industry in fact is the single largest recipient of fossil fuel industry money in the United States Senate this is an industry that is calling out for nationalization I mean 40 years ago literally 40 years ago Jimmy Carter this was 1979 to 43 years ago actually Jimmy Carter declared a national crisis and he said you know he was going to propose legislation to create quote this nation's first solar bank which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000 you've heard me play the clip over and over and

45:11again and he also Jimmy Carter the part that's not in the clip that I that I play for you so frequently is he also wanted to create a program to sell bonds essentially like war bonds FDR did this during World War II he created a a non-profit a government agency that sold government bonds in other words you could loan money to the federal government essentially sold in today's dollars you know billions of dollars worth of a government bonds to fund an effort to to to invent synthetic rubber this was during World War II because we were running out of rubber for tires for jet fighter jets and it worked and FDR did that and and so Jimmy Carter said just as a similar synthetic rubber rubber corporation helped us win World War II so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war he proposed this in 79 and you know it all came crashing down 42 years ago this coming January when the fossil fuel

46:12industries candidate Ronald Reagan replaced Carter in the White House killed the solar bank and bond program and even took Carter's solar panels off the roof of the White House so if there was ever an industry that merited nationalization right now it's the fossil fuel industry but what's the history of this during the crisis of World War I president Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country's railroads our phone companies and our telegraph operators he also nationalized the radio networks and all the radio stations in this country they were returned to private ownership after the war but he had nationalized them during the war during World War II Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing he nationalized the airplane manufacturers he nationalized several gun manufacturers he nationalized over 3,300 mines in the United States he nationalized the nation's railroads he nationalized dozens of oil companies western electric company the Hues tool company good your tire and rubber and even Montgomery Ward along with 17 foreign

47:17companies doing business in the United States after FDR died Harry Truman came along finish the war he also nationalized the meat packing industry across the country and the Manana Manana hang of however he said Manana and Gahela railroad company the nation's steel mills and hundreds of rail companies nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over although it did take until 1965 to reprioritize all of them then came Richard Nixon in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad Richard Nixon oversaw the nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into a new government entity that was called the national rail passenger corporation today we call it Amtrak Richard Nixon did that in 74 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail this is this I believe this is under Jerry Ford it's called the consolidated rail corporation we called it Conrail and it absorbed dozens of failing rail companies this was

48:19nationalization and they were government held until 1987 when it was privatized that privatizing Conrail was the third largest IPO or the actually at the time it was the largest IPO in American history in 1984 the continental Illinois bank and trust company was in a crisis and Ronald Reagan nationalized it he bought an 80% ownership to share in the company it wasn't privatized until 1991 by George Herbert Walker Bush and was bought by Bank of America in 94 also in the 80s after Reagan recklessly deregulated the savings and loan industry we saw SNL's crash all across the country as the guys running them made off with billions of dollars in their own private money bins and so Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency it was called the resolution trust corporation and they nationalized 747 of America's savings and loans assets over 400 billion dollars they

49:23helped were held as nationalized companies from 1987 until 1995 when they were reprivatized then that's that was Reagan and George W Bush when when he was handed the White House by five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court the nation's airline security was entirely in private hands after 9-11 you know Bush said okay that's it and he nationalized airline security across the United States he put the entire industry out of business he didn't bother buying these companies up a nationalizing him he just shut them down and replace them with what we call the TSA today the transportation security administration he also nationalized the nation's airlines because they were in a crisis after 9-11 the air he created this thing called the air transportation stabilization board that ended up holding seven and a half million shares of US airways 18 million shares of America West Airlines three and a half million shares of frontier airlines one and a half million

50:23shares of Trans Air 2.38 million shares of World Airways the Bush administration nationalized it you know in George W Bush administration again nationalized the two largest mortgage lenders in the United States you know when the crash happened in 2008 they we nationalized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae they nationalized 77% share in AIG 36% share in city group 73% share and and forced out GM's president who was just doing a terrible job Obama came into office and he nationalized GM and Chrysler so I mean there's a long history of this for one fifth of what we paid to give tax cuts to billionaires we could we could take over these three large oil companies and then just run them you know run them well but stop all their funding of climate denial and start their you know they're seriously attending to the process of figuring out how to

51:26how to shift themselves from being oil companies to being energy companies I mean this is not rocket science I realize people are freaking out about the politics of it oh my god you're gonna call you know they're gonna call the Democrats socialist every president since eyes and how like going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson has done this during times of crisis and this is a crisis right now we're living through a pretty important significant weather event in Britain I live on the south coast I think it last rained in Port Smith on June the 26th it might not rain again to logus the fifth which is about 40 days yes why has that happened

52:29in all probability I know okay yeah this is when people say well you know it happened once in 1896 yes yeah and you can never say climate change causes one particular event but if you remove yourself from all of that I mean it's a basic physics and we're putting a lot more energy into the atmosphere and if you do that you change climate you change weather patterns and we've been knowingly doing this for a long time I mean this is nothing new so if you go back to Fourier working on in 1827 or a unis foot in 1849 and tindle in the early 1850s and at the end of 1800s there's nothing particularly new I think some people think that this new thing or climate science it's just physics it's just chemistry it's biology it's what we've been doing post enlightenment and people who work on climate change for 150 or more years and so we have a really good understanding which improves as time goes on of how the science underpinning the climate and the weather works and we're putting we know

53:31we're putting a lot more heat into the atmosphere so there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere and that means we get a lot more unpredictable sort of weather patterns and extreme climate situations which is what we're witnessing already witnessing around the globe but I think it's worth pointing out a lot of people refer to this as the new normal this is a it's really misunderstands where we are this is not a new normal on average this is the least extreme weather that I you and anyone else listening to this will ever live through it's going to get worse and worse every single year until we stop burning fossil fuels not produce burning fossil fuels stop burning fossil fuels so celebrate this as our least extreme weather year that we're going to live through it's going to get worse we'll reflect back on the the inclement and chilly days of 32 degrees in London yes no before we were growing mangoes and bananas but to be just to be clear we I mean weather is what happens on top of a long-term climate signal so we might still get a you know a cold winter next

54:33summer could be chopped back to what we've typically used to but on average we are definitely seeing this significant trend now at a global level can you put some numbers in terms of you said right the top of the answer we're putting lots of energy into the atmosphere yeah so can you put some numbers on that well in terms of CO2 emissions yeah two emissions right okay it's per million etc yeah okay so the reason we're how we're warming the climate primarily how we're warming the climate is we're significantly increasing the amount of calm dioxide but also other greenhouse gases from agriculture and so forth and and and and industry we're increasing those in the atmosphere and for those who like to play around with numbers since the industrial revolution we without the industrial revolution before we started burning fossil fuels we were at the unit we use as parts per million and we were at about 280 parts per million of calm dioxide and now we're at about 430 parts per million that's happened almost overnight and I think what's also important there if you if you were to plot out the last 10,000 years or so which is the time when human

55:36societies really flourished if you like so it's when modern society has really developed during that time we've had an incredibly stable stable climate and temperature and calm dioxide level so hardly any fluctuation at all about 20 parts per million fluctuation in 10,000 years overnight imagine 10,000 years any that little plot you put 1850 was when we started burning fossil fuels between there and now which would be basically a straight line up and we've gone from 280 to 430 parts per million and the physics tells us the scientists I was mentioning before the physics tells us as we put more calm dioxide in the atmosphere we track more warmth in the atmosphere and I say other greenhouse gases as well and and so that's that's what we're doing we've we've increased this blanket if you like of calm dioxide and other greenhouse gases the concentration of it that's trapping in trapping in more warmth and until we actually stop burning fossil fuels and pumping the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere until we stop the levels of meat consumption because that has a major greenhouse gas implication in terms of methane primarily until we stop those things or

56:41they stop fossil fuels and significantly reduce meat consumption then the temperature will just keep going up the parts per million will keep going up and we'll get warmer and warmer and warmer and methane is a greenhouse gas another very very powerful greenhouse gas it doesn't last so long in the atmosphere no one here as long as carbon dioxide and but it's very powerful so in the short term it's actually much more powerful per molecule than carbon dioxide and but it doesn't last as long but if you're talking about this we'll probably come on to this later if you're talking about the the agreements that we have about what temperatures we want to hold below because we think above that it's too dangerous then methane plays a really important part in that time frame because now those temperatures we're reaching already so the short term is so important from a climate perspective so methane methane emissions need to dramatically reduce and we need to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions which is basically fossil fuels and methane obviously as you said comes from animal agriculture but also it's a big part of fracking which is one of the arguments that you're asking. It does come again. Yeah there's a lot of it from fracking from the oil and gas industry more generally from

57:42I mean also from coal as well so the oil industry has a lot of methane it puts a lot of methane emissions into the atmosphere fracking is particularly bad amongst the fossil fuels but also a lot of methane that is produced naturally and as you warm up the climate you increase the amount of what you might call natural production of methane so you know so there are other issues as you warm up the you know the peat and the and the tundra in Russia and so forth you're going to see large quantities very very large quantities of methane increasingly put into the atmosphere and also as you heat up the oceans the oceans have found more carbon dioxide in them than the atmosphere as you warm the ocean it's just again oh level physics will tell you that you can't hold as much carbon dioxide in it and in the oceans and they will start putting that into the atmosphere so at the moment the oceans are a really important carbon dioxide sink but that is looking that we're getting towards the point where they could turn for me a sink to a source of carbon dioxide yeah which is almost too disturbing to contemplate. So there are people at Nigel Farage or the median reform voter and I hope they're watching this and they'd be saying these people are

58:45catastrophists but what you're saying is if we get to two degrees or three degrees and this is very well documented there is a very decent chance of this cascade of feedbacks where methane is emitted from Siberia, methane hydrate from the world's oceans and all of the sudden from four to five to six. Well certainly significant increases in temperature and I mean I wouldn't say when you get to some scientists saying that's we think that's occurring already so we're starting to see there's some thought that we might be seeing early die back in some parts of the Amazon possibly in some parts of Congo but the data is really poor in the Congo. So we start to see certain sort of collapses of key sink structures around the planet which are really really important for keeping the balance. So we're starting to see that now and some scientists think we've probably crossed some of those what people refer to as tipping points and non-linearity is in our fancy climate language but tipping points we've started to cross those now. What the problem with this is that those sizes is very clear on the causes for all of this. The actual exact time frames are always

59:51you mustn't put too much precision on the course and so some scientists think we're just getting to that point now as others think it'll be it's a few more years away but by an eye it's none of us disagreeing we are putting this energy in the atmosphere which is going to have which is going to bring about these natural sets of feedbacks which in the end make whatever we do almost irrelevant the system will move to a new equilibrium it might move to a new equilibrium that we're not in and probably we'd damn it better without it since that respects and we've caused at least in post-in-lightenment we've caused a lot of climate issues but also broad ecological issues. We haven't found a way yet post-in-lightenment of lies, populations of humans living in any sort of harmony with this sort of the natural processes of the planet and we are deeply reliant on those natural processes we're destroying our own home. We've just heard clips starting with what a day tracing how oil companies terrified of

1:00:54billions in liability for decades of climate deception are fighting the lawsuits that would make them not taxpayers pay for climate damage. On the media in 2015 recounted how exon scientists Jim Black warned the company's top leadership in 1977 that fossil fuels would warm the planet 11 years before NASA's famous testimony to Congress. Countriespin in 2016 described how exon helped bankroll the global climate coalition which told lawmakers and reporters the science was unsettled while its own internal memo admitted it cannot be denied. Democracy now in 2016 made the case that divestment nearing $4 trillion in 2016 works by stripping fossil fuel companies of the public standing and political power that blocked climate action for 40 years. The Hartman report in 2026 laid out five falsehoods Republicans use to justify seizing public lands. Tom Hartman in 2022 also cited a century of nationalizations

1:01:56from the railroads under Wilson to Jim under Obama as precedent for taking over the oil giants and turning them into clean energy producers. And downstream in 2026 rejected the new normal framing warning that this is the least extreme weather will ever live through and it will worsen every year until we stop burning fossil fuels. And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper dive sections. We can only make this show with your support and that includes following us on all the platforms you use. Check out our link in bio right in the show notes for every place to follow us and every way to support us including one-time donations. If you get value out of the show and want to make sure we can keep going while getting delivered ad free to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestofalift.com slash support. There's a link in the show notes through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And here's a voice message we received after our last climate episode. Hey Jay and the rest of the best of the left team it's Truman. I'm leaving

1:03:04this voice message in response to the most recent episode titled Worse on Purpose about the climate crisis and all of the consequences it's already having. In the episode talked about the Spokane wildfires and I actually have a first hand, well maybe second hand count of the wildfires. The reason I say second hand is because I wasn't actually in Spokane. I was in Glacier National Park on a hiking trip which for those who don't know is very close to Spokane. It's up in Northwestern Montana. So when we were flying in we actually didn't know they were happening the wildfires. So when we came in we were very surprised that the sky was orange, very smoky, couldn't really see anything. So when we touched down definitely noticed that they smelled bad, like walking into a room where people were smoking cigarettes. And it only got worse as we went

1:04:08outside and it became hard to breathe. It was irritating for the eyes, nose, lungs. It was, yeah not a great experience. And I feel very bad for the workers on the tarmac or the car rental people who had to breathe that in pretty much all day. And it was the worst air quality index I think you can get. So probably some long-term health impacts from that. So not great. It actually had been my first time experiencing a wildfire. I don't live anywhere near where they usually happen. So it's kind of been an abstract idea for me until recently. Still a great example of how climate change and related disasters can really affect everyone. Not just the people who have their homes burned down although of course they experienced the worst of it. But anyways, thank you for all that you do.

1:05:09Keep up the good work. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thanks for that message, Truman. I actually know exactly what he's talking about because just over 10 years ago I took part in a trip to Glacier National Park as part of a climate hike fundraiser event that listeners of this very podcast helped fund when we landed in Calispell. We also did not know to expect that we would be descending into a cloud of smoke that stayed with us for the five days we were there. That absolutely put climate change even more in the front of our minds than it already was for that event. I've been asking some prompt questions on recent episodes to spark discussion, both here and on social platforms. But as I tried to think about potential questions for today's topic, nothing specific felt right and maybe even tone deaf. So I thought it would be more fitting to just ask the open question. If there's anything you'd like to share about your experience with global warming, either from direct impact or from your time spent trying to fight against it,

1:06:14give us your thoughts. There's a good chance many of you have anger and grief related to our collective inaction to avert the climate crisis and those who actively tried to burn an action. It's good and healthy to get that out and share it. It's also good to hear those kinds of things from others. We're all in this together, but we all too often experience and process the changes in the world individually. So if you'd like to share, record a voice message or email us through our linking bio in the show notes. Today in lieu of a commentary, I have a bit more behind the scenes information for you, which is helping to give me more time to work behind the scenes. What I wanted to tell you about today is about today's episode and about how some of the work we've been doing over the past few months helped it come into being. This episode is the second edition of what we're referring to as a Deep Cuts episode, registered trademark. In the past, we've put out episodes that we call remixes, but they tends to be lightly modified versions of relatively recent episodes that

1:07:17had come out in the past few years or possibly a combination of material from a couple of episodes remixed into one. The Deep Cuts episodes are really a new format and require a completely different approach. As part of the long-term reimagining of Best Up Left that I've been doing since the spring of this year, I came up with an idea to make better use of our now 20-year archive of news and progressive commentary. It's hard to wrap your mind around just how much data and information is contained in 20 years of podcast episodes. But I've always known from the beginning that the process of putting this show together week after week was slowly building something that simply couldn't exist otherwise. I knew it was a waste to not make good use of our archive material, so I took time over the past few months with the help of our Swiss Army knife producer Ben to build a data system to accompany the audio archive. For years now, we've been transcribing the podcast, but we've now gone back and begun transcribing all of the archives back to the beginning as

1:08:21well. Those transcripts, along with all of the information in the episode notes, have allowed us to create a sort of card catalog for the entire archive, indexing the topics we've covered, the sources we've used, and much more. It's only with the use of this sort of data-rich card catalog that we were able to pull this episode together on the relatively narrow topic of Exxon's climate research and cover-up, sourcing clips from episodes we produced over the course of more than a decade without it being an enormous and lengthy research project. So the result to you ends up being a little bit invisible because it's hard to know exactly what kind of work goes into the show, but the resulting deep-dive episodes we're now able to create are something that is literally only possible for us to do with our archive and our newly organized data. I don't think anyone else in the world is capable of producing the kind of podcast episode you are listening to right now, and not to overstate our importance. It's worth noting that we've begun to be able to

1:09:24do these episodes, which excel at providing deep contextual information about current events, right at a moment when the people attempting to bury the past and install their own bizarre version of history are at full force. In addition to all that, I've mentioned recently that I've been focusing my energies behind the scenes on relaunching our social media strategy, and I'm happy to say that the machine has been slowly coming to life. If you want to find everywhere to follow us, simply go to the link in bio that we always include in our show notes, which will take you to a full list of platforms where you can connect with us. That's also where you'll find links to support us financially as we continue to struggle our way through this year after losing a large percentage of our ad dollars starting back in the spring. And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today. First up, section A, the Industries Playbook, followed by section B, Trump's Rollback and the Legal Fight to Stop It, section C, Suncore V Boulder, and the Accountability Fight, and section D,

1:10:26Nationalize It. Back in 1946, a group of industry executives, now keep in mind, 1940, exactly this is even before I was born, and I'm an old fart. 1946, they formed a panel, this is a bunch of fossil fuel executives called the Smoke and Fumes Committee. But the Center for Environmental, excuse me, the Center for International Environmental Law, C-I-E-L, writes, and I quote, but the research was not meant to be a public service, rather was used by the committee to promote public skepticism of environmental science and environmental regulations, the industry considered hasty, costly, and potentially unnecessary. You get this in 1946. By the mid-1950s, the very latest climate change was one of those issues. Initially, the Smoke and Fumes Committee of the fossil fuel industry executives was looking

1:11:30at things like asthma and cancer. But by the 1950s, they realized climate change was part of this. There was a research paper that was presented to the American Petroleum Institute, the API, the Trade Association for the Fossil Fuel Industry, or at least for the oil part of it. By Stanford Research Institute, in 1968, this is how long these guys have known this stuff. This report, which was given to the American Petroleum Institute in 1968, just been released, says, and I quote, significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climate change. If the earth's temperature increases significantly, you didn't mind this was 1968. If this, if the earth's temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur, including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis. There seems to be

1:12:34no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. What did these people know? When did they know it? What did they do about it? What they knew in the 1950s and 60s was the climate change was a very real probability as an outcome of burning more fossil fuels. They knew this. They knew it would be destructive. They knew it, and they knew it then. What did they do about it? Well, they started funding climate denial think tanks. They started lobbying members of Congress. They started putting out disinformation over at the Havine post, the associate editor of Havpo Hawaii, writes in 1968 a pair of scientists, this is basically the same story. Wrote a report for the American Petroleum Institute. They warned man is now engaged in a vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the earth,

1:13:37one that may be the cause of serious worldwide environmental changes. This was 1968. We've seen this movie before. We saw this with the tobacco industry, which kills a half a million Americans every year. I'm right up until 1998 as I recall was the year I think the tobacco settlement was going you know, happened. They were merrily going along their way, say, oh, there's no, so you know, no, definitely no clear correlation, no proven scientific link between our product, between cigarettes and cancer. You can't prove that nicotine is addictive. You had the five, six, seven, I forget the number of the senior, the CEOs of the tobacco industry test five before Congress. They all lied under oath. No consequences. They're rich white guys, but they all lied under oath. By the way, is that what they got Bill Clinton for? They impeached him for lying under oath. In any case, these guys were billionaire or multi-millionaire executives in the tobacco industry.

1:14:40We've seen this with the tobacco industry. We've seen this with the pesticide industry. We're seeing this now with the herbicide and the fungicide industry. I got to do stories about that to share with you as we continue through this program. We've seen this before. Industry doesn't give a rat's ass about anything except the bottom line. And it's gotten a whole lot worse since Reagan changed the tax code so that CEOs are heavily incentivized to buy back, you know, to have their corporation buy back will stock to jack up their own executive compensation. Many people know about the story of tobacco now and what they didn't really realize, what we didn't realize before we wrote this book was that the same strategies and tactics were being applied on climate change and other issues. So the overall strategy is what we call

1:15:43doubt monitoring. These folks sell doubt. And that title comes from a very famous, we could say, infamous tobacco industry memo in which one industry executive said in his own words, doubt is our product. So the idea is sell doubt, manufacture doubt, create doubt in order to make people think that the science isn't really certain. Because if the science weren't clear, then it might be rational for us to say, well look, why should we change our whole economy in order to fix climate change if it's not really real? Why should we give up smoking? We like smoking, why should we give it up if we don't know that it's actually dangerous? So if you can create doubt, you can persuade people that we don't really know there's a problem and therefore we don't have to do anything about it. So the goal is to prevent action. So that's the overall strategy. And then the tactics include a variety of things including some that you just said. A key tactic is to bring out supposed experts, sometimes they're real scientists, but more often they're not actually even

1:16:43scientists, but they basically play scientists on TV. People who pretend to be experts who challenge the scientific information to create the impression of a scientific debate. Sometimes these people are actually scientists, but they don't have training and credibility and expertise in the particular area. But journalists in the public, we fall for this because we see these people, they're scientists, we think, oh, well, that's a famous scientist. And what we don't realize is that actually this person has never done research and is not an expert in the actual topic that he is talking about. And I say he, because there's also a strange gender element of this story, that it's almost always men. And that's an interesting and complicated question why that is that we did not see address in the book, but we could talk about it if you're interested. Yeah, I mean, one other specific area I'd love to touch on first is the idea. And this is a common thread between the arguments that were made around tobacco. And what we're seeing now with climate change is taking the approach of freedom and business freedom and economic freedom, right? There was a

1:17:47very strong movement when the tobacco data started coming in and telling us, listen, smoking is just bad. And second hand smoke is bad. Restaurants and bars were sort of coalesced with the idea that, hey, we're all going to lose business if all of a sudden you can't smoke in our locations. And there was this catalyzing of the economic freedom movement. I need the freedom to do what I want to do with my business. We're also seeing that with climate change in the fossil fuel industry. Exactly. So this is a crucial point. And this was a large part of what we tried to explain in the book. So another strategy is to make the argument that if we act on these problems, if we act to control climate change, if we act to protect people from the harms of tobacco, that this is a threat to our personal freedom. And it's not just a threat to our freedom as individuals, but it's a threat to democracy, to the freedom of our country as a whole. And this is a really crucial part of the argument because it's used by the tobacco industry and now by the fossil

1:18:52fuel industry to try to make common cause with other allies, other people who might not otherwise necessarily have any vested interest in defending tobacco or fossil fuels. So as you mentioned, the restaurant industry is a good example. In the case of fossil fuel industry, they make common cause with singtains, some of whom are initially independent, initially have nothing to do with fossil fuels. And this was the story we told in our book of one particular thing, Tanka George C. Marshall Institute, which was originally created for issues that had absolutely nothing to do with climate change, had to do with national security. But these folks are deeply anti-communist. They worry that government intervention and marketplace will be a threat to freedom. And so they make common cause with Exxon Mobil, who funds them heavily in the 1990s and other regulated industries. And they begin to make this argument that any regulation, any regulation at all, even a really reasonable one light trying to protect flight attendants from secondhand smoke, for example, or to protect

1:19:53children from the harms of secondhand smoke, they fight these regulations. And so you have a common cause being made with, on the one hand, industries that haven't explicit vested economic interest in selling their product. And then other people who have a kind of what we could say, more principled argument, we may or may not agree with it, but it's not necessarily pure economic. There's a political argument too. And these two come together. And this helps to explain why it's so powerful, because many Americans who might otherwise be suspicious of the tobacco industry and realize obviously they're trying to make money or suspicious of Exxon Mobil, realize obviously they're trying to make money. But now it gets mingled with this argument about personal freedom that many of us are pretty sympathetic to. And so it begins to sound more reasonable than if we simply said, yes, I'm selling a product that's killing you or I'm selling a product that's going to destroy the climate and kill and displace millions of people.

1:20:57The basic thing is that they know these fossil fuel corporations who don't want us to get down and solve climate change to start implementing real energy policy that cuts out fossil fuels basically. They know that science is the engine that drives policy along. If we are not certain about whether the Hudson River is polluted, we won't do anything about it. If we're not certain that climate change is caused by fossil fuel burning, we won't do anything about it. So they've funded their own echo chamber. They've cultivated people who will say things that the companies themselves can't be caught dead saying. And Willie soon is a perfect example of this. He and his ally there at the Harbits Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Sally Balliunis who retired suddenly

1:21:59in 2009. For years, they've denied ozone, they go zone hold, they've denied climate change. They say it's caused by sunspots or variations in the sun. The warming we're seeing today is caused by something else. And Exxon funded them, the Koch Foundation funded them, American Patrol Institute, Southern Company, a huge utility based in Georgia, all funded Willie soon to put this counter narrative out that the science is uncertain or that there are other things to explain the warming that we're experiencing. Talk to us a little bit about let's stick with Willie soon because it's just a good example of microcosm of so much of what's going on. Willie soon, a solar physicist as you mentioned at the Harbits Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he claims all of the different things you talked about including changes in temperature do do merely to to sunspots, the sun, just sort of the the natural cyclical reality of the sun. How is he funded specifically? In other

1:23:01words, we might have this idea in our heads that someone comes to him and says, listen Willie, we need you to say these things, here's some money, but that's not really the way it actually happened. Now in fact, it's more complicated that he actually believes what he's saying, it's not like he, they are literally manufacturing doubt or they are you know finding a scientist and say go lie for us. They have found scientists that think climate change isn't real and then they have given them a megaphone and they've given them funding. This, if you go back to a document that was leaked in 1998, they're now I'm getting some echo, I'm sorry. Good on your end? Yeah, we're fine. Oh, apologize. So in 1998, there was a document that was leaked to the New York Times that showed a multi-million dollar plan to funnel money from industry trade associations through front groups to basically media-trained scientists and give them venues to talk to insert uncertainty into the

1:24:04dialogue and they explicitly say victory will be achieved when media legislators, even science teachers believe there is uncertainty. Willie soon was a direct conduit where they sent money straight to his institution to pay for his research and the payback was Willie soon publishing peer-reviewed literature in the scientific journals that would you know generate some uncertainty. So it's a it's sort of a feeder system that they developed a network of front groups being libertarian, anti-environmental, anti-regulatory organizations and trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute. They run money through those groups and they prop up the scientist in the public dialogue. So there would be it would be sort of too obvious if they just say, hey, we want you to say these things that you may not believe. The the smarter way to go about it is

1:25:06fine. If only this tiny percentage share our views, let's exclusively fund those and make them prominent and known. That's exactly right. And what's fantastic about this new exon investigation that's rolled out over the past couple of months through a group called Inside Climate News and online news source on climate change and a group at Columbia School of Journalism working with the L.A. Times. They both have revealed old exon documents showing that exon knew much more about climate science than we previously knew they did. And then they went on to fund people like Willie soon. In one case, there's a document from the mid 90s where mobile oil scientists are being are briefing the entire industrial coalition, the global climate coalition, which was this front group set up to block the Kyoto Protocol and block the UN process that's happening right now in Paris. They had a whole coalition to stop that. Their own scientists said arguments like Willie soon sunspots arguments that

1:26:12there's a divergence in the temperature record. They basically knocked down each of those arguments and they really don't hold water to explain the warming that we're seeing. And then they didn't include that in the final draft that went public of that document. So this private conversation inside the industrial block, they knew these arguments didn't hold water. Exon goes on to promote those same arguments in years subsequent. Let me ask you a little bit, and we're speaking with Davies director of the Climate Investigation Center. Increasingly, we are seeing from the sort of the usual suspect, the talking point touted that hey, everything's fine as far as ice melt that we now see more ice than ever in the Arctic, for example. Have you investigated that? What's going on with that? The resurgence of that talking point that we're hearing lately? Well, first of all, it's one of the biggest calamities. The meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet

1:27:14and West Antarctic ice sheets. If they proceed as they are right now, we are in for a lot more sea level rise. It's where most of the ice that's above sea level on earth is being stored right now. If they all, if all that melts, we get like 30 feet of sea level rise. It's a big deal. So cities like New York, Miami, Philadelphia, others are buried. So that's the reason that they don't want that to be true or don't want that, the uptake of that risk to be seen in the public dialogue. The resurgence is because it's getting worse and also because there is increased press attention to it. And so the counter narrative is rising up. And talk a little bit about where they claim to have science on their side. They claim to say, hey, if we just look at the volume of this ice, we have actually seen an increase. And of course, what they would like to see follow from that is if there's more ice, clearly things aren't warming,

1:28:19everything's fine. Look in the other direction. That's right. And there is no evidence that that is occurring in the north in Antarctica. There was a study just a little while ago that showed more snowfall than they had previously measured in other parts of Antarctica that were adding ice incrementally. But the scientists concluded it wouldn't balance out the ice that's being lost off of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is really the biggest chunk that's falling into the ocean on a regular basis. So ice is a big question. You could call it an uncertainty, but all the news is bad. So it's not a, you know, the best way to think about this is the, the deniers characterize it as a house of cards argument that if one piece of the scientific puzzle is missing, everything everything falls away. It's not true. The better way to look at it is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And yes, in all science, there is continuing exploration and fine point certainty. But the bigger

1:29:26the picture gets, you sort of know the picture before you've done the puzzle is the way to look at it. You know, this is a picture of a pretty grim scene. Adding the other pieces are not going to make that scene into some beautiful sunrise. So the argument that we are missing information and that's a reason not to act is completely destructive. You realize when you watch enough Fox News that the part of the business model of Fox, part of the actual brilliance, and I say that fully like thinking it's brilliant of Roger L's is, you know, television news journalism is really expensive to produce because you have to go out and you have to find information, you have to create information, to send reports, you have to do all this reporting. Fox is interesting because part of their model is like we don't do that a lot.

1:30:28What we do is just stick to people in the studio and they yell at each other for a while. And that's, it's actually a brilliant profit model, right? It's much cheaper to stick to people in a studio. You got to send them a car, you got to set up a mic, whatever, but you basically have two people yell at each other. So I started saying, where did these lies come from? Who it lies? You know, we often talk about zombie lies. So in the zombie apocalypse, there's going to be a patient zero. I started saying, who's the patient zero of these lies? And I started tracing them back. And over and over and over again, I found that there was a group of individuals who for profit, both financial and ideological were at the center of creating lie after lie after lie you hear in the media. And I'm very cautious in the book about what I define as a lie. A lie has to be something that is provably false. It can't just be it's not a disagree. It's not that they're conservative and they're wrong. It's something that's provably false. And over and over and over again, I found the same pattern of a group of people who invent a lie, who profit from it commercially and ideologically.

1:31:32And actually those two things are intertwined. And you know, following this pattern of disseminating false information, Ari Ravenhoff is my guest here and the book that has come out is lies incorporated the world of post truth politics. If you're just tuning into this show and you'd like to hear the whole thing, you can find all of it online at in deepradio.com. Let's talk about cognitive bias. And I want to address the people who are listing who might hear what you're saying about Fox and say as we established your liberal, I'm liberal progressive. But they can say, look, it's cognitive bias. You listen to Fox. You think you have the statistics in your favor that this is true. You think you can look up facts that say this is true. But what you're discussing is this mirrored world where everyone has a handle on their own facts. Well, that's exactly what I mean by post truth. We've entered a world where liberals and conservatives, we don't just disagree on issues, right? We disagree on the actual facts. And this is this is actually an important political development and

1:32:33one that is highly toxic because if I leave today and on the way back to San Francisco, God forbid, we get into a car accident, right? And lawsuit goes to court. The judge will say before the trial begins, here are the stipulated facts you were driving. You were driving in this car. You were driving this car in the cars. Hate each other. Now we'll decide who's at fault for set accident, right? But in a court, there are stipulated facts. In political debates, we have entered a world where progressives believe one thing. Conservatives believe another. And the basis of facts in an argument are so separated that you can't debate. Think about the debate about climate change, right? It's not a debate to say, I think the earth is warming and somebody else says, no, it's not. And another person says, no, the earth is cooling. That's a debate about reading a thermometer. That's not a policy debate. And we've left, we've left that arena and it's it's intentional. In the book, I directly quote one of the members of Liza Incorporated, one of the most notorious ones, his name is Richard Berman. And Richard Berman is a is is honestly, I say

1:33:34this about very few people, I actually truly believe him to be a sociopath. Um, wait, if I can interject, the first thing you say is Richard Berman is a liar. Yeah, that's how you open the book. And Richard Berman, think about like an industry that you would classify as not a good group of people to back off fast food. You name it. He is like the guy behind it. Sugar. He's worked for them in the late 90s. He ran a campaign against mothers against drunk driving to classify them as evil. He's run campaigns to claim that pregnant women should eat more fish because mercury is totally cool. I'm not and I wish I were joking about this, but he gave a presentation to a group of oil executives and energy executives. And it was a really telling presentation. He gets up on stage and he says, he says, here's the thing. My job is not to win. My job is to get us to a status quote because if the status quo, everything stays the same. So my job is to muddy the arguments

1:34:35and take us to a status quo. Because if we're if we keep ourselves the same, we win. That's what that's the exact model of the tobacco industry. That's the exact model of the asbestos industry. That's the exact model of all these industries that desperately we're trying to hold on to financial power. Well, frankly, in the case of tobacco killing people. Well, in fact, there's something in the book that I was surprised to read. And it really it countered what I've always believed to be true. I always thought that this idea of countering facts for your own gain was necessarily the gain of money. Yes, not necessarily about getting rich or staying rich or keeping your industry bringing in a steady income. But you say that's not necessarily. Well, for industries, it is. Right. But you think about the people involved in I can't credit myself with this. Naomi Oreski, who's a brilliant Harvard professor actually sent me in this direction. She wrote a brilliant book about this called Merchants of Doubt, which I heavily recommend the book. There's also a movie. You can watch the movie if you don't want to see if you want to read the book. But essentially she looked at the climate denial industry. And she looked at the scientists involved.

1:35:40Then we often think and I thought this they sold out for the money, right? Those scientists who were in the climate denial movement, the tobacco scientists, she looked at both them. By the way, a lot of those scientists are the same scientists, same guys actually. And she said, oh, those guys are just in it for the money. Turns out not true. They were in it for ideological reasons. If you if you look at what they said, what they wrote, what you're like, what does tobacco and climate have to do with each other? Well, these scientists were cold warriors. They were people who grew up a lot in terms of science, developing satellites and missiles and other things for the defense industry. And they really truly believed what they were doing was saving the world from communism. That was there. That's what they thought they were doing. And they were mission driven. And they came to believe that any regulatory encroachment was a step towards communism. And therefore, any regulatory encroachment needed to be battled back. And you see actually this terminology flying around the climate denial world where, and this isn't something when progressives here,

1:36:42this they're like, really, you know what? A lot of the climate denial world calls environmentalists now. They call them watermelons because you're green on the outside and red on the inside. And it comes from that that you see that channel through. So you see these scientists. Now, the money's nice. Let's let's be clear. It's not that they don't like the money. They like the money. You see one of the early tobacco scientists. This is interesting. Why did he become a tobacco? This guy was a noted noted scientist, National Academy of Sciences, etc. College President. Why did he get involved with the tobacco industry? Well, he was a he was a eugenicist. And he firmly believed that all human maladies were related to genetics. And if tobacco caused cancer, then genetics didn't cause cancer and his whole life's work was out the window. So he spent time with the tobacco industry trying to prove that lung cancer was a genetic cause. Now, obviously we know we know the facts of situation is they they contribute, right?

1:37:45There are people George Burns can smoke tillies in his 90s and be totally fine. And other people are much more susceptible to cancer. There is a genetic factor, obviously. But he did it because he at the time he believed this was questioning his wife's life's work. Now, did he like the money? Of course he liked the money. Did he like the ability that he had to hand out all these huge grants from the tobacco industry to other scientists? Of course he did. But it was about ideology. And it's kind of that linkage money plus ideology is kind of the sweet spot here. Next section B, Trump's rollback and the legal fight to stop it. This is almost like Walmart coming in and basically saying like you guys, you know, we're going to bigfoot you in this town. We're going to squash the competitors. And in terms of our suppliers, you're going to liver die based upon whether or not you meet our

1:38:45terms. It feels that way to me, Sam. I'm jumping the gun a little bit, but this is what I see. This is what I see. Everybody who's walking into the Trump administration. Literally everybody, we could go down the list. Well, let's go down that list because I wonder like how does what is the interplay? If this is, I mean, you know, and we can look at guys like a pruit, right? Who's in there at the head of EPA. That's an obvious one, right? This is a climate change denier who's going to be the head of the EPA and his code. The co-chair of his reelect campaign, I think, in 2014 was Harold Hamm, who is a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, Harold Hamm is the CEO of continental. He was supposedly the pick for energy secretary before he said no. And if you don't know continental resources is the largest. Actually, it's the second largest fracker in the Balkan in North Dakota and Harold Hamm controls that company. And who did he pick to, to head up energy? Well, he picked the oops guy, Rick Perry. And he's, you know, from Texas,

1:39:49nothing but an oil lover. I mean, we could, we could go down the list. So there's, let me see how many more I can just think of on the top of my head. You talked about pruit at the EPA. Zinky, who's the interior secretary is, is a big fan of, of drilling for coal and oil on public lands. He's the head of the interior department. I mean, you get Gary Cohn, who's coming in as the council of national, of economic advisors. He's, he, they talk about him like he's a, a, a, a, a, a, Goldman Sachs guy. And he is. He's president of Goldman Sachs. But many people don't know that he cut his teeth on the New York market. And that's where I was trading oil. He's an oil guy. The secretary of the army coming in as Vinny Viola. This is the secretary of the army. He cut his teeth standing right next to me in the, in the gasoline pits at the New York market luncheon. He's an oil trader. Carter Page, who's their big guy in, in, in Russia, who's part of their economic, their, their, their economic, their foreign policy group in the election. He, he started, he was in

1:40:50Russia for, for years, working as a consultant to Gazprom and started his own hedge fund called Global Energy Capital. I mean, you can go down the list one after the other of guys who have not small connections, but the, the, the head of commerce, um, um, um, Ross, right. Ross. One of his, he runs a hedge fund. One of his largest, um, um, investments is with Exco resources. It's a natural gas company in the United States. And it's been a lousy investment form. He'd love a chance to help make that a winner, as opposed to a loser. So Carl Ipan is part, you know, he's, he's, he's got huge investments in, in, in, an offshore company called Transotion. And with copper mines in Indonesia. I mean, he just, you can't get away from it. It's all resources everywhere you look. And so what is the relationship between, um, opening up all the lands? I mean, you're actually drilling more in this country. What is the relationship between that and the potential

1:41:56glut that it produces with our international relations? I mean, how, you know, because it seems, I mean, to someone like me who's not as well educated about this at all, it seems like those are, there's a little bit of tension there, right? I mean, if we're going to keep producing extraordinary amounts of, of oil domestically, um, how does that, uh, implicate our relations with Russia or with Saudi Arabia? What not? Okay. Well, look, from my perspective and from most oil analysts perspective, well, I wouldn't say most, but here's the point. This has been an outlier the last two years. Low energy prices, low natural resource prices, low copper prices, um, has been a real outlier. In general, since the turn of the century, we've been seeing a steady rise in the costs of natural resources. And most people, me particularly, but most people think that this has just been a bump in the road caused by various other financial factors.

1:43:01And what has been a short-term overproduction, particularly in oil and gas here in the United States, but that fundamentally not only will change, but if you, if you know, if you gave me an hour, I can explain to you why it has to change. So prices that you're seeing now for gasoline, oil, natural gas, coal, even copper for sure, zinc, iron, all of these things, they're unnaturally low. And over the course of the next four or five years, you know, in my view, triple, all of them, triple. And, you know, again, if you had an hour, I could prove that to you. Now, most analysts don't go there because they can't go there. They, you know, they have an obligation to investors not to be wrong. So they can't make wild predictions. But if you talk to people who are inside, they know that these prices are unsustainable. They know that they're headed up. The only question is how fast and how far. So that's really where we are. We have a group of people inside the White House coming into the White House who understand that fundamental fact, that the

1:44:03prices that we're staring at for oil, gas, and other resources are unnaturally low and they won't stay that way. So this is basically, they're basically using our government as a huge buying opportunity. Yeah, it's looked, this is, this is a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, look, I'm working on a long, long, long, long piece, which I hope will be picked up by somebody. But it's called the Exxon Presidency. I mean, this is what this is going to be about. It's not going to be talked about. They'll talk, you know, then like you say, they'll talk about the PP jokes or whatever. No, they'll, you know, they'll talk about what, you know, whatever mistakes, you know, of, of, of, of, of, you know, had when she was, you whatever. But this is the, these are the big, big issues that will affect us and affect the world globally. Over the course of the next four years of Trump, it's about this, this, this damage, this impossible to turn back damage that will

1:45:06be done by this singular mobilization of resources. Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders, paving the way to destroy virtually all of Barack Obama's climate change and environmental actions and executive orders. Here are some of the biggest changes that Trump has in store for us. The first is paving the way to eliminate the Clean Power Plan. So it's difficult to overstate how important the Clean Power Plan is in terms of our commitment to reaching the goal set by the Paris Climate Accord, to taking responsibility for the future change in, in global temperatures. But here's what it is. The Clean Power Plan was a major EPA rule aiming to cut emissions from existing U.S. power plants 32% below 2005 levels by 2030.

1:46:15Now that is just a part of what's necessary for us to cut our total carbon emissions enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. But it's very important. It's a set of stringent requirements for existing power plants and they are going to do what they can to destroy it based on this executive order. The next is also important, changing carbon standards for new coal plants. So Obama had fairly stringent regulations on existing power plants and even more stringent ones on new coal-fired power plants. It basically made it economically unfeasible to create new coal power plants, which is important. And it helped over the past few years to phase out something like 15,000 megawatts of coal-powered electricity generation has gone away over the past couple of years. One of the things affecting that. Now again, they can't just immediately get rid of those, but they can drastically change the requirements, change definitions in a way getting rid of these regulations. The next is methane emissions regulations. One of the best things that Obama did for

1:47:20the environment was changing the abilities of companies to just simply release methane into the atmosphere. Now methane is smaller by volume in terms of how much we emit, but it's actually effect on global climate change is even stronger per unit volume. And so they're going to potentially destroy that, make it easier for companies to simply emit it. And we actually saw in California, not too long ago, a massive methane leak. And you can see the damage that it does almost in real time, basically. So here's a quote from one of the articles coming this in New York Times. Earlier this month, the EPA announced it was with strong a rule that required existing oil and gas well operators to provide information about methane emissions. So when you remove that rule, now they can emit all the methane they want and they don't have to tell you about it. So that's basically saying, have added Hoss. Yeah, okay. I didn't plan that.

1:48:23Isn't that amazing? This methane that we shouldn't even know. That's even more damaging than carbon. They're like, I don't want to know. I don't want to. Hey, are you making money? You made an extra five bucks? Who cares? Put all the methane you want to there. Yeah. The American people need don't need to know what we represent the American people. No, we represent companies. No, actually, you represent the American people. That's what you're supposed to do. Just to find out on our behalf. How do you know that information? Great for the company is bad for you. My recollection is that it's 86 times more damaging to the environment, but don't quote me on that. Look it up. Obama had set a goal of reducing methane emissions 40% below 2012 levels by 2025 and they were going to do different things to detect, plug leaks and all of that. God knows what's going to happen to that limit in the next few years. The next is changing the calculations of the social cost of carbon. So this is really interesting. It doesn't get talked about much, but back in 2009, Obama's White House gathered a dozen agencies together and tried to assign a dollar value to the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide, taking to account scientific

1:49:23modeling on the damage caused by aspects of global warming, such as droughts and floods. They settled on a central estimate of around $36 per ton in 2015, rising over time. It's expected that it's actually far more costly than that, but they were starting somewhere. They might well just get rid of that entirely, thanks to this new executive order by Donald Trump. Let me just jump in there too. I love that. I think that's a great idea because that's about the free market. I know Republicans go to the... No, you're corny capitalist. You just want to help these companies no matter how much it hurts everyone else. So if you create a product and it has a byproduct, you should pay for the cost of that byproduct. You should force the public to pay for that cost. You shouldn't pay the whole world to pay for that cost. We didn't profit off your product. You did. So you should bear the actual cost of your product. Yeah, exactly. So like let's say it's two neighbors real quick. One of them is making a lot of money from doing something to his property, but all of the junk from that, the pollution or whatever else goes into your house. And he's just

1:50:24I don't care. That's going to kill your kids or whatever it is. Well, then you should pay thousands of dollars to clean it up. But wait, I didn't make any money over. You're the one who made the money and you're making me pay the cost to the gifts. So what? And the corny capitalist that is the Republican Party come in and go, well, that guy gave me campaign donations and you didn't. So you suffer the cost and he takes all the profits. Yeah. That's not free market. It's also obviously not fair. If you make a product and it has a byproduct that costs a lot, you should pay that cost. Yeah. And in terms of pollution, like that's a metaphor, it's also literally what's happening right now. And they want to double down on that. Next, they want to eliminate the moratorium on federal coal leasing. There's huge areas of the US with coal reserves that had been being leased out to coal companies at basically far lower than market costs, subsidizing the cost of digging up this coal and burning it. Obama stopped all that. He's put a moratorium on it. For a period of a few years, we're not going to do it. Now, they're simply going to open that up. And that's one of the things that they can do basically today if they want. The next is investigating

1:51:29anything, anything that inhibits energy production. It is actually that broads. They want the everyone to do its organizations to look at every rule, every regulation in any way that could inhibit energy production of any kind. That's the sort of toddlerish language they're using. And what it actually means is inhibit the profits of our campaign contributors. Exactly. We will not allow it. We have to remove all of those inhibitors. Yeah. And then you guys are going to pay the cost, but hey, you never donated to Republicans, so that's your problem, not my problem. Exactly. Finally, two things that aren't in this, doesn't say whether they're going to remove themselves from the Paris climate, Paris climate accords, and they haven't yet categorically taken away the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions as an environmental pluten. Those are two of the big boys, and they might be coming. Okay. And finally, in this regard, let's just think this through for a second. As they explain in the beginning of every article that covers this, this is about as John laid out, emissions for

1:52:32rules for power plants, limits on methane leaks, mortarium on federal coal leasing, use of social cost of carbon, et cetera. Now, as you look at that entire list, does anyone think that the Republicans would ever make any of that stuff safer? And say, okay, now, corporations, you're going to have to pay a little bit more here because we don't want that poison in the air because it affects us all and it affects our children. Now, so let's do a balancing act here. Some of this stuff we're going to do less regulation. Some of this stuff we're going to do more regulation because we studied it. No one expects that if you do it, you're a fool. And of course, they never deliver that. All they ever do is less regulation, less cost on companies, more cost on you, every single time. And including this case, every single rule that they pass was for less safety, less protection of consumers, and for more maximizing profit for the corporations that donated to them. This is Trump's attempt to undermine climate policies, specifically Obama's climate policies,

1:53:53his regulations, and frankly, his legacy when it comes to his environmental legacy. But the entire performance yesterday was put forward as a way to bring coal jobs back, which as we discuss, yesterday ain't happening. Ain't gonna happen since the world is now moving on from coal. And not because of some kind of Obama war on coal. I wish we had such a war on coal, but because but because natural gas is cheaper and cleaner when it comes to power plants, coal cannot really compete on the free market. And the coal that is out there is increasingly mined by automation techniques that don't require as much manpower. And oh, yeah, then there's the renewable energy revolution in solar and wind that is resulting in hundreds of thousands of good jobs. And nonetheless, since this is the Fox News administration, essentially a presidential Fox News show in the

1:54:54guise of a president, you know, they're pretending that somehow Trump's signature is going to bring back coal mining. It's not. Here's a quick montage of the EPA's administrator Scott Pruitt, who hates the EPA, interior secretary Ryan Zinky, energy secretary Rick Perry, who had no idea what the energy department did. And finally, vice president Mike Pence speaking before Trump's announcement and and the signing of his so-called energy independence executive order yesterday at the ironically enough at the environmental protection agency. You know, our nation can't run on pixie dust and hope. In the last eight years, I can tell you the hallmark of a great president is one that takes decisive action. And that's exactly what our president did. The president with his signature on that executive

1:55:57order is going to set in motion government reforms designed to continue promoting clean air and water for the American people. Coal jobs are the best jobs. And for some of our communities, coal jobs are the only jobs. This is a great day for energy independence and a growing American economy because the war on coal is over. Oh, thank God. Thank God that war is over. Desi Doyne, coal jobs are the best jobs. Did you know that? And there are many, many more jobs in solar and wind. Oh, yeah. So I think the latest statistic that I saw based on Department of Energy is that renewable energy jobs outnumber fossil fuel jobs two to one. Oh, yeah. At least. And that's not because of regulations. It's because it's cheaper and it continues to fall in price even now being below coal in the cost of electricity generation. And people like it better. And it was amazing in

1:56:58that entire thing yesterday. Trump did not talk about did not use the words climate. I don't think at all. Certainly not global warming. Oh, he didn't. He didn't. I don't think he mentioned solar. He did not. I was the whole thing. He said nothing. None of them said anything. They kept talking about energy independence, but yet they cut out the growing sector of energy independence, which is homegrown wind and solar. Nonetheless, as we discussed yesterday, after seeing that entire fine affair and frankly, after seeing the rest of the ways that Trump has tried and failed to do stuff like his Muslim ban repealing and replacing the dreaded Obamacare, I got to say, I am somewhat less alarmed by what they are trying to do here because they are not very good at it. They are just not good. They don't know what they are doing. They think that the stuff they told them on Fox News is actually true is actually the way the world works. And they are learning piece by piece policy by policy that that is not the case. Also, I am a little bit less worried

1:58:03today because the folks who have been standing up against this administration. And whether it's the public or the courts, but here in particular, we have environmentalists and legal experts who suggest overturning these regulations that Trump is trying to do, these regulations that took years to put in place as based on existing legislation. And in some cases court orders going back years, that itself is going to take years and may end up preventing these regulations from being reversed. They may be stopped by the courts entirely. And by way of just one more example of the difficulty that the Trump administration is likely to face. In rolling back many of these regulations from the Obama era, and by the way, from before the Obama era, from the George W Bush era, frankly, Amanda Marcott over at Salon writes that the administration's claims about getting the EPA

1:59:03back to its core mission by rolling back regulations while at the same time again moving forward on energy production in the US is as Marcott describes it a bunch of nonsense. She writes, instead, the executive order is another example of the Trump administration's ignoring basic facts in service of a right-wing ideology rooted mostly in a blind irrational hatred of Obama. Unfortunately, for Trump, she says, undoing Obama's climate legacy will require more than a stroke of a pen. As Trump learned, when he signed a half-baked order meant to fulfill his Muslim travel ban promise, there were scores of lawyers at the ready for it to challenge his efforts. That's even more true when facing down environmental groups, she argues, to make things even harder for Trump, environmental lawyers are backed by a heavy amount of legal precedent that has established that the EPA is required to do its job, and that scientific evidence matters when it comes to environmental

2:00:09regulation, not just due to common sense, by the way, but it actually matters in a court of law. All this executive order does, she says, is instruct federal agencies to reconsider existing rules, while there is no doubt that Pruitt would love to, that Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator who hates the EPA, while there's no doubt that Pruitt would love to gut rules, design, to combat climate change, there are legal restraints on what he can do. And she gives one example here, a 1946 law requires courts to quote, hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions that are found to be arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law. Therefore, she quotes, yes, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, saying that Pruitt's justifications for rewriting Obama era rules must be, quote,

2:01:15reasonable, non-arbitrary, non-capricious explanations as to why the reams and reams of scientific material gathered by the EPA under Obama to justify these rules somehow no longer apply. Because the new president says so, that doesn't count. Yeah, that's not good enough. To understand what the endangerment finding is, we must take a step back to 2007, when a supreme court ruling changed how the US viewed pollution regulation. Good morning, and thank you all very much for being here today. Today's hearing will focus on the aftermath of the landmarks,

2:02:18supreme court decision in Massachusetts versus EPA, both within the Bush administration and within Congress. In 1998, in response to an inquiry by then Representative Tom Delay, the Clinton administration's environmental protection agency said that it believed that the Clean Air Act provided it with the authority to regulate carbon dioxide. One year later, a group of environmental and other advocacy organizations petitioned the EPA to use this authority to set greenhouse gas standards for cars. But it wasn't until 2003, when the Bush administration had already embarked on a course of denial, delay, and dismissal of the risk of climate change and the need to address it, that the EPA repudiated the Clinton administration's conclusion that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that could be regulated and denied the petition. That petition became the case known as Massachusetts

2:03:24versus EPA. The voice you're hearing is Edward Markey, a Democrat known for progressive policies and a leading voice on climate change in the US Congress, who served as the US representative for Massachusetts's seven congressional district from 1976 to 2013. In June 2007, two months after the Massachusetts's VEPA Supreme Court ruling, the House Select Committee held a hearing, led by Markey, exploring the ruling's implications. Until the 2007 ruling, the Bush administration continued to dismiss what by then was already undisputable scientific evidence of the dangers of carbon dioxide for human health and the planet, asserting that it lacked authority to regulate carbon dioxide and that voluntary regulations would be sufficient. This Supreme Court ruling changed that. In a 5-4 vote, the Justice's rule that under the plain meaning of the Clean Air Act, carbon dioxide is a pollutant. What that meant was that the EPA now had the duty to regulate this pollutant,

2:04:28as long as it could determine the emissions of carbon dioxide and danger public health and welfare. That decision was important because number one, it found that at least states have standing to sue when it comes to climate change issues. It found that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and it said that the EPA cannot decline to regulate base just on policy issues. There's a statutory duty to evaluate under a specific provision of the Clean Air Act. Weather Greenhouse gases cause or contribute pollution, which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or the welfare with respect to new motor vehicles. Basically, you had the Supreme Court back in 2007 telling the EPA, look, this is an air balloon. We've looked at the text of the Clean Air Act and carbon dioxide greenhouse gases or air

2:05:30pollutants, and there's this statutory duty to decide whether there's endangerment to the public health or welfare. Now, you need to go through a process. You need to go through a reasoned regulatory process to come up with a scientific justification for regulating or not these pollutants. And so that set into motion, the process for adjudicating or deciding the endangerment issue. The process under the Obama administration led in 2009 to what became known as the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. The EPA found that the current and projected concentrations of six well mixed greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the three most known carbon dioxide methane and nitrous oxide, threatened the public health and welfare of current and future generations. The EPA also found that the combined emissions of these greenhouse gases

2:06:31from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution that threatens public health and welfare. These findings per se did not directly translate into any requirement on industry or other entities, but they became a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles and other sectors. That became the legal foundation for most federal climate change regulation under the Clean Air Act. And there was a sort of a cascading impact, you know, you quickly get greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks. It led to a power plant carbon dioxide rule, the Clean Power Plant. It led to oil and methane regulations, and it led to some greenhouse gas permitting under the Clean Air Act, something called a tailoring rule. Interestingly, many of these programs, probably all of them have been challenged and some of them have been subject to some modification by courts. But what you saw was

2:07:35that the endangerment finding did create this cascading impact of regulation of climate change by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. So it was this foundational trigger that sort of continued over time to create new programs for regulating greenhouse gases. And I personally, as I look back at it, I think it was sort of groundbreaking because there was so much congressional stalemate over climate change legislation. And this was a way to break through that. And it's also something that I think was important in that the way the court decided mass of the EPA and then following in endangerment finding this became sort of a fixed statutory duty, really. And something that didn't just change with, you know, political change and political wins. It became part of the program as it were. And that was 20 years ago. I also think that had an impact on how the federal government

2:08:39viewed climate change and other administrative agencies, how they considered impacts of climate related risk. You saw different agencies incorporating that into their decision making process. And of course, there's been an impact on industry as they've complied with these programs and relied on these programs in terms of making changes in their business and production and so forth. So there's been, you know, it's been a pretty big impact. Trump shouldn't be seen in isolation that there's a whole series of right wing populist counter-revolutions going on around the planet and that they all have a really worrying environmental aspect. How much is Trump's anti-environmentalist policies? How much are those policies outliers of

2:09:47the Republican Party? Because I want to make sure that people understand that, I want to make sure that people understand if this is an aberration or if this is something systemic within the Republican Party. No, I think it's really something systemic. In fact, if you look at all the appointees who he's been lining up in the week and a half or so since I wrote my blog post for verse, so, you know, they just are such industry hacks and long time Republican tools that, you know, he's really putting in place the whole branch of the Republican Party, which is ideologically committed to climate denial and to furthering the interests of fossil capitalism. So why do you believe hopes in the market correcting for green energy? Why do you believe those hopes are misguided? Why can't the market correct for consumer demand assuming consumers demand being more green energy? And is the problem with the market not being able to correct itself because

2:10:47the consumers aren't demanding that green energy? Yeah, that's a complicated point. You know, just actually a day or two ago, there was a piece in the New York Times sort of saying, you know, that the market is driving things in the right way. And we kind of continue to see this perspective. And there are lots of important people with big voices, including former vice president Al Gore, who token these kinds of terms. And there is some reality to that, you know, I mean, because of the boom in fracking, right, the country is really a wash in gas and oil produced by fracking at the moment. And that surfeit of production is really responsible for making coal economically non-viable, right? So I mean, it's definitely true that on a kind of economic basis, coal is not competitive at the moment. But what I try and do in the piece that I

2:11:47posted on the verse of site is to say, first of all, the kind of assumption that there's some inherent direction is that market led is misplaced because we need to think about the market in global terms, right? I mean, it's a planet and kind of planetary climate emergency that we're looking at. And if we think about what's happening on a planetary level rather than just within the United States, and you can think about, for instance, countries like India where there's a real kind of perceived need to drive industrialization by intense coal production. And while at the moment, there is a kind of surfeit of liquid natural gas in the United States that makes coal non-competitive. And consequently, you can find people saying current energy sources are not that intensive, right? In terms of their greenhouse gas emissions, we've been shifting to less intensive forms of energy. And it's kind of objectively true that natural gas is less intensive than coal. Nonetheless,

2:12:54we have a lot of production of that methane is being produced. And you just have to be very careful about this kind of narrative, which Al Gore and other ecological modernizers have that the market is going to lead us in this wonderful direction. And therefore, we don't really need to worry about Trump, you know, that the Trump and whatever his administration and all the flunkies of the big oil corporations like Scott Pruer, who is nominated to be EPA administrator. And you know, we don't really need to worry about what any of them do because the underlying economic dynamics are driving us in this wonderful direction. And that needs to be challenged. And we need to be really clear about how we need to fight back politically. You know, whenever I post something about climate change online, Ashley, you can count on somebody saying that the real problem is overpopulation. In your opinion, what do people miss in their understanding of the challenges that this planet faces when they think that the real problem is overpopulation, not climate change?

2:13:57Oh my goodness, overpopulation. Well, you know, there have been currents, sort of mousuzian currents within the environmental movement in the past. But I think we really need to push back against that and see that, in fact, as part of precisely the kind of xenophobic anti-immigrant white supremacist racist movements that Trump unfortunately has really brought to prominence in national discourse and politics today. You know, it's about the distribution of resources rather than about any kind of specific amount of people, right? You know, we live still on a planet that has many resources. And if we steer with them and use them correctly, they could certainly support the number of people that we have. But you know, if we allow capitalism, which is the system, which is based on infinite expansion to kind of run rampant, then we're going to end up in serious hot water. And that, of course, is precisely what the Trump administration is proposing

2:15:01to do. You know, his pledges are all to take out every possible stop and allow fossil capitalism to develop as much as possible. So in my piece, I really argue that we have to keep fighting the kinds of fights that we saw unfolding in recent months that Standing Rock and over the last week actually. Now, the victory there has been so wonderful and so positive. It may be rolled back in a few months once Trump comes to office. But, you know, nonetheless, I think it's really important, politically and symbolically, that people are standing up to fossil capitalism and fighting against the creation of this infrastructure. And, you know, speaking of something like Standing Rock, you know, one of the things that Trump has talked about in his tweets and his platform is that this is going to be about energy independence and creating many jobs for Americans. So, first of all, it's not going to create a huge number of jobs, right? We're not getting back kind of deep coal mines that are going to employ hundreds of thousands of people in West Virginia.

2:16:05That technology has moved on and they're using mom and top removal there. So it employs relatively few people. But the idea of energy independence, which Trump is touting as part of his kind of populist nationalism, is also a complete fiction. You know, a lot of the pipelines that are being constructed are to ship natural gas and frack crude out of the country, right? Because we have too much production of that stuff here. So, big corporations want to shift the stuff and transport it internationally and take it to places like Europe. So they're putting people in direct danger all over the place and doing it not in any way to support energy independence as they call it of this country. One thing I've been thinking about just recently, I don't know if you've heard about this job, but there's this totally insane plan to build a pipeline right next to a nuclear power plant, one of the oldest nuclear power plants in the country, which is only 30 miles north

2:17:07of New York City. And they're going to put this pipeline within a couple of hundreds of feet of the nuclear power plant. And you couldn't think of a more insane plan if you tried. You know, I've been trying to figure out what explains climate change denialism. Do you think that Trump's climate change denialism allows him to give his supporters something other than bipartisan globalization to blame for their work and what they're working and living conditions? How much do you think dismissing climate change alleviates any conversation or criticism of globalization, of continuing economic growth as a driving policy force? I think that climate change denialism, I mean, I think Naomi, Naomi Klein really hits it, you know, nails it when she says that this is about having your pockets blind by the fossil fuel industry. The only thing I would add to that, you know, as I say, my blog piece, it's not like Donald Trump is stupid or bad at science, you know,

2:18:13he's getting paid very hand-simulian. Certainly if you look at people like Scott Kruehurt, he has been deeply enmeshed in the fossil fuel industry in 2014, the New York Times investigation in fact found that he was writing memorandums on letterhead that came directly from the fossil fuel industry. So they're basically just writing the legislation that he was trying to get past in Oklahoma that was, you know, pushing off attempts to regulate oil and gas. The only thing I would add to, you know, I mean, Klein's kind of analysis is just that a lot of that denialism, I think, picks up on the legacy of the Cold War, you know, and resonates with these fears, which people sometimes have of entities like the United Nations coming in and taking over and robbing us of democracy. So, you know, given the way in which democracy has been hollowed out in this country and taken over, you know, and eviscerated, I can see why those kinds of fears are real and why these

2:19:21kinds of clans might resonate. But of course they're totally in this place and the people who are really guiding democracy are the precisely the folks who Trump is bringing to Washington, right? He promised to drain the swamp of Washington. It's such an ironic metaphor because of course his policies are going to massively exacerbate climate change and including E-level rise. So he's he's actually bringing the swamp to DC in the most literal way as well as of course metaphorically by bringing fossil fuel corporations and allowing them to take over the government essentially. Now section C, Sun Corvay Boulder and the Accountability Fight. Can you give an audience some notion of how oil and gas industry has been deceptive to the public and especially it relates to the dangers of their products over the last decades?

2:20:25Sure, I'd be glad to. So these are the most interesting claims in this lawsuit, right? The claims that the fossil fuel defendants knowingly contributed to climate change while misleading the public about its impacts. These are allegations that they knowingly contributed to harms in Colorado through their production, promotion and marketing of fossil fuel products while actively misrepresenting or concealing the risks of those products. So the essential elements of this kind of a claim is that there has to be a false statement that is a statement that is deliberately or recklessly false assertion of fact. There has to be an intended deceive, right? The knowing falsehood has to be intended to deceive the recipient of the message and then there has to be reliance. The other party has to rely upon those misrepresentations when taking action. Now just to be clear, nobody has proven any of this, right? The issue before the Supreme Court is whether a Colorado court can hear

2:21:31these allegations that the company's violations of Colorado consumer protection law caused harms in Colorado. So right now we're dealing in the world of allegations rather than anything that has been proven, but there's a lot of evidence to support these allegations that the company's knowingly and intentionally engaged in deceptive conduct. Just some examples, some brief examples of the factual underpinnings of these allegations. In 1982, Exxon had internally concluded that and I'm going to quote here, there was a clear scientific consensus, unquote, regarding the climactic effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. So in 1982, Exxon was already talking about significant sea level rise, melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, severe disruptions to agriculture, and actually they predicted a 3.1 sea increase in global mean temperature by 2090, which is

2:22:37pretty much the track that we're on if we don't take events, we don't take action pretty soon. Six years later, in 1988, they nevertheless produced an internal memo outlining a company strategy for sowing confusion and emphasizing uncertainty. And I just want to emphasize how long ago that was. Ronald Reagan was president. East and West Germany were separate countries. In 1982, when Exxon's internal documents showed that climate change was occurring, that was the year that readers of the Lost Art 1.5 Academy Awards. In 1988, when Exxon created this internally wrote down this strategy to undercut the scientific consensus that they knew existed about climate change, I mean, that was the year that smoking was banned on domestic airline flights. And I mentioned that in particular because as Professor Naomi Arezki's is demonstrated in her really thoroughly

2:23:37research and fascinating book, Merchants of Doubt, the fossil fuel industry adopted a very similar strategy to that developed by the cigarette industry to manufacture uncertainty about a scientific consensus in order to stave off regulation. So that long ago is when the companies in turn, let her being sued in this case, had definitive evidence about the way that their products and conduct were harming the earth, its people, and ecosystems. And that long ago is when they adopted a strategy to mislead the public about the harms of their products. And I can give you many more examples, but in the interest of time, I'm not going to. But I just want to emphasize, so the lawsuit alleges that despite their own internal knowledge about a scientific consensus regarding the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, and they were using the word catastrophic internally,

2:24:44the defendants in this lawsuit adopted public communications intentionally designed to exaggerate uncertainty to downplay the severe harms caused by fossil fuels, and to expand fossil fuel production and to finance third parties to spread these messages while they were simultaneously also taking precautions to protect their own infrastructure from the impacts of climate change. You know, it's, I spent a lot of time in climate work, and it's always horrifying to learn something new that they knew about the 3.1C since the 1980s that just shocked me right there. I guess that's telling in my part, but you also, you mentioned again the intervie, not just internally, but using third parties to essentially mislead the public, but sounds not dissimilar to me, to instance, what has happened with the opioids. For instance,

2:25:49yeah, Monsanto is coming into the, sorry, Monsanto is not the exact one, but we can touch on that as well, with the opioid cases, for instance, using McKinsey as a way to spread that or the tobacco industry, or is anyone on this chat willing to talk a little more about that? So I don't want to go too far over my skis in terms of what I actually know, and I have not been following the opioid crisis except through the newspaper, haven't really been following the litigation very closely, but you know, this is a tried and true strategy to manipulate public opinion on a host of topics, right? Not only to spread one's own message, but to create or to co-opt what seemed like trusted third parties to amplify that message is a tactic that we've

2:26:50seen a lot, and it is a tactic that has resulted in the past and in other contexts in liability. So just to give a bit of background here, Boulder's lawsuit, which is filed in Colorado State Court in 2018, argues that Exxon and Suncorre concealed and misrepresented to the public what they knew about the damage burning fossil fuels would cause to the climate, and that the companies should pay for the resulting climate costs local governments now face. This is one of dozens of lawsuits across the United States brought by state and local governments and tribes that say oil companies deceived the

2:27:51public about their products, and the cases could make those companies pay billions of dollars in damages. A number of these cases are already in the pre-trial discovery process where the parties can get more evidence and documents to make their case. Boulder's has been allowed by the Colorado Supreme Court to start making its way toward trial, but Exxon and Suncorre have appealed that ruling up to the US Supreme Court and they want the case stopped. So I just want to note that while we likely won't have time to cover this today, the company's effort to get the Supreme Court to step in here is also part of a much wider set of strategies playing out right now by the industry and its allies, including the Trump administration and members of Congress to stop the cases for moving forward and even to obtain complete legal immunity for fossil fuel companies from climate

2:28:51lawsuits. I have a new explainer laying out all those strategies which cites a lot of Leslie's excellent reporting and would flag those broader efforts as an important realm for future coverage and future conversations if we don't get to it today. So there's lots to talk about, lots of nuance here to dig into. Lastly, just want to point out at the top that this case and others like it are really born out of the crucial investigative reporting from inside climate news Columbia journalism review and the LA Times a decade ago that first uncovered what Exxon scientists knew about climate change when they knew it and what they did with that knowledge. Since then a lot of additional journalistic investigations have been cited in these cases. Reporters are continuing to dig out more internal industry documents just this week. Jeff Dembecky at DeSmog put out a great investigation about Suncores role in spreading doubt

2:29:56about climate science. So I think journalism has a huge role to play in making this moment and the stakes here visible and understandable for readers and audiences right now. So first we're going to walk through the local costs of climate change in Colorado and what's that stake locally. Eshon to help us do that let's start with some context what are the types of climate costs and impacts that Colorado communities are facing right now. What should people outside of Colorado know about what the climate crisis looks like for communities across the state? Yeah thanks Emily. So this year was sort of an exceptionally bad drought year. You know if we're taking this year as an example of years moving forward which hopefully it's not as bad but Colorado had a record low snowpack this year and when that happens there's like a cascade of downstream

2:30:59impacts so not only did we have record low snowpack we also had kind of a scorching march and that resulted in record low stream flow across a lot of our you know rivers especially some that feed into the Colorado River and that resulted in you know actually like a physical supply crunch for a lot of mountain towns for like the availability of drinking water. It led to Colorado has a really complicated system the whole west does you know western water law and who gets water first. That led to a lot of things that haven't happened in many years like you know some farming and ranching operations getting called out of priority which means they didn't get all the water they were entitled to and it led to a lot of towns also kind of really considering you know how to get their drinking water. So drought this year was like a huge you know front of mind thing we don't have a great sense yet of what this year snowpack will be you know we're hoping that it's a lot better but it'll take a few seasons of amazing snowpack to kind of like get rid of those you know issues

2:32:01we face this year. So that's one so drought you know definitely top of mind wildfires that's been huge for the last few years you know since Boulder first filed its original complaint in 2018 we had the Marshall fire so that was at the end of 2021 and that fire kind of really changed how a lot of people in Colorado think about you know what a wildfire can look like it was a fast moving you know fire through grassland that eventually became the state's most destructive you know over a thousand structures destroyed very costly in terms of property damage and insurance payouts and so that impact and that you know kind of the threat of these fast moving fires that start in areas that are a little more rural but then transition to kind of urban blazes that's something that's kind of top of mind now. So that that's been happening in this this season we also had kind of a terrible wildfire season as well there were these huge blazes you know in Pueblo which is a little bit south Ure it's near Telluride and after a wildfire happens you often get a burn

2:33:03scar and that gets a lot of flooding afterwards. So there's just some of the things that you know happened this year that communities are taking account of you know I will say when the Boulder first filed their complaint you know they they had a report that came out around the same time and a very conservative estimate of like some of the cost of adaptation you know in a medium to high scenario climate impact put those costs at around 96 million to like a hundred and 57 million through 2050. So that was in 2018 and those numbers have almost certainly grown and they only you know encompass a fraction of those costs and one thing I want to say about Boulder real quick you know so that's where I live Boulder the city can feel very suburban at times you have these like beautiful mountains in the background but that's just one part of Boulder County Boulder County stretches into the foothills it abuts forest service land there's sub alpine lakes and it also goes into these kind of you know suburban areas with a lot of grassland as well. So Boulder County's climate impacts are actually pretty varied from more mountainous to more prairie like so that's

2:34:09those are just kind of a few examples I could I could go on and on about how our utilities are responding with those cost art but yeah this here was especially from water was a real wake-up call for a lot of people. In terms of the impacts the communities marginalized communities and communities generally already facing so in your opening Brian you already mentioned the extreme heat that the mid-Atlantic is facing and what you didn't tell us which I'm sure you're well aware of the nature of the heterogeneous nature of extreme heat so you mentioned a 90 something degree temperature and then the 105 degree real-fill if you're positioned in an urban heat island we know oftentimes those communities can be 10 15 degrees hotter so when your meteorologist comes on and says today in city x it's 87 degrees that's just one weather station reading 95 degrees 102 degrees we know if

2:35:16you're living in an area that's replete with impervious surface buildings highways etc your temperatures I say can be substantially a dozen or more degrees warmer so extreme heat is one one impact and I'll talk momentarily about how that gets imposed differently across racial and social economic communities think about the wildfire once locked that we've seen wildfires have existed probably since there have been forest that have been in existence but we're seeing same thing with super storms flooding the propensity of wildfires floods heat waves extreme heat these things are going to happen a lot more intensely and they're happening a lot more frequently or they can happen a lot more frequently as a consequence of climate change and then when you start to talk about the inordinate or disproportionate impacts that communities rationally marginalized community space like black American folks folks around the globe positioned across the global south let's think about that for a second so somebody in the call may be thinking man if it's 87 degrees

2:36:19everybody feels that the same you know we all feel 99 degrees the same except we don't as I said we know that the heat islands are disproportionately centered in racially marginalized communities at least in the US but then you also have to stack that or think about that within the context of overlapping pre-existing health conditions a lot of times at least in the US African-American communities or position next to idling facilities industry which causes asthma rates or other respiratory illness communities or other respiratory illness within these communities so if you look at that pre-existing health framework couple that with the inundation of particulate matter from a wildfire you're going to be in pretty bad shape same thing when you're talking about that mid-Atlantic heat wave if you're making $170,000 a year that $400 electricity bill is an inconvenience if you're living below the poverty line if you're living in a low income household you're going to have to make some serious decisions am I cooling my home this month or am I eating you know same thing in

2:37:22the winter time that increased propensity that to adjust the thermostat due to altering seasonal conditions so these aren't just geographic issues we know that these are economic issues and unfortunately on top of that we know that oftentimes racial historical racism has been a catalyst as to who's feeling the pain most intensely today segue on that what are the measures that local and states governments are being forced to take or at least trying to take to adapt to these changing circumstances and who ultimately is the who is left with the bill that's that's the real question so who's left with the bill I'll answer that you do anytime government unless there's a framework in place where you have type legislation um ultimately you're going to use the taxpayer going to pay these things at least from an economic standpoint from a human health standpoint just go back to what I said a minute or two ago those who are least able to afford to adapt to mobilize to migrate to maybe

2:38:27cooler areas or areas where they're not on the front lines of flooding or superstorms those people are going to pay the inordinate price but to go back to your initial question in terms of what are state and local governments doing we're seeing in the the the lapse of federal leadership and the rescinding of so much a provocative climate justice climate and environmental justice language and legislation or maybe not legislation but policy we're seeing state and local governments pick up the gaps gaps excuse me places like New York State uh its climate leadership and community protection act was a precursor to the Biden administration's justice 40 initiative um we see states like Maryland and California creating GIS tools to support uh in the the rescension or the pulling back of uh eJ screen which was a fabulous uh environmental justice tool on the uh federal level uh we see many states creating their own version of GIS uh support tools for local government

2:39:27and then within states and local governments specific sectors transportation sector agricultural sector you're seeing plans disseminate from those individual entities uh what is the climate action plan in relation to a state's forestry in relation to a state's transportation and mobilization uh strategies so you see in assortment of ways the states have really uh picked up the slack in this time of uh what I call the national lobotomy in terms of climate consciousness um but we know that states and local governments alone aren't enough we need strong um federal actors uh just to pick up the gaps where states just literally don't have the power uh to go about that business thank you um um Rob turning back a little bit more to the specifics of the suit the oil and gas industries made the argument that these laws should be preempted by federal law can you give an explanation of what preemption is um and why it may be desirable in some cases like how does preemption work? Sure preemption is a doctrine that it is derived

2:40:32from the US Constitution in a particular from a provision called the supremacy clause which basically says that federal law is the supreme law of the land if there's a conflict between state federal law federal law takes priority the supreme court is interpreted uh the supremacy clause to create different kinds of preemption one uh version of preemption is called field preemption in which basically congress by passing a statute decides that it wants a particular field of regulation to be entirely within the realm of the federal government and not to be supplemented in any matter by state or local regulation a second form of preemption is called conflict preemption where federal law would supersede state law if it is impossible to comply with both federal and state law at the same time or if implementation of state law would interfere with federal purposes is reflected in congressional statutes now sometimes preemption would be desirable

2:41:40imagine for example that one is thinking about regulation of electric outlets things that you plug your devices into and suppose that all 50 states had the authority to require different kinds of electrical outlets so that if you live in Maryland or Virginia and go on vacation to California and try and plug your uh iPhone into an outlet in California it might not work if California's version of regulation about Lex is different from Maryland's or Virginia's another example would be automobile manufacturing so there are very few situations in which congress has decided to preempt state environmental regulation there are a couple one of them involves regulation of emissions from motor vehicles cars trucks and buses and what congress decided when it passed the

2:42:44clear act was that it wanted to preempt state regulation of auto emissions with one exception the reason to preempt was that it didn't want auto manufacturers to have to manufacture a different line of cars that would then have to market in all 50 states that would create pretty chaotic results for the auto manufacturers the one exception is California which has a long history of regulating auto emissions and congress decided that it wanted to preserve California's ability to regulate more stringent within the federal government number one because of California's history leadership in the area number two because of the historic extreme pollution conditions in certain portions of California number three so the California could kind of serve as a laboratory of experimentation and if you try to do something the federal government was not doing and it worked well then the federal government could decide to adopt California's version of auto emission regulation yet another

2:43:50example occurs on the federal pesticides statue we are congress decided that it did not want to allow states to adopt different requirements for labels that would put on pesticides again if that were the case of all 50 states could adopt their own version of pesticide labeling pesticide manufacturers would have to develop product lines with different labels that it would then have to market each of the 50 states which would be kind of create chaotic and so congress said basically one label the one demanded by EPA states can't adopt anything that conflicts with those EPA requirements and finally section D nationalize it the Trump administration seems to be moving towards giving support to coal as an industry

2:44:56in the United States of course supporting the coal companies making them more profitable than they have been in the past cannot be explained in those terms because then it looks like what it is so instead great breast beating is happening about helping coal workers coal miners and they indeed have gotten the short end of the stick for many many decades and deserve support but of course as any thinking person would understand supporting the coal miners is different from supporting the coal mining companies what coal miners need is a healthy alternative a good job at decent income that would be less threatening to their health and welfare and that could be provided by local state or federal authorities if there were really the commitment to do that it is not necessary

2:45:59to support the coal company with profits in order to help the coal miner but that's a detail I won't go into at this moment what I want to do is deal with one of the arguments made about why we should continue to rely on coal particularly for generating electricity and I should remind everyone that about 40% of the world's electricity is produced by burning coal the problem with burning coal is that it is very bad for the atmosphere for the air for our lungs for our health for global warming you name it bad news we can and should switch to other forms of energy generation that do not have these bad consequences that would employ people that's really not a problem the solar energy

2:47:05industry in the United States today which only accounts for 1% of all electricity already employees more people than the coal business in the United States does so if you were actually concerned about jobs you would move more into solar energy for example then you do now because it would provide more jobs there than would be lost if solar replaced coal and the same is true for windend energy and so on in terms of jobs but the real reason again is health the health of the planet the health of the people who live on it well the argument is made coal is profitable and therefore it should be supported because it's profit the argument here seems to be for those who do

2:48:06the logic that profit is to be taken as a sign that something should be done in other words if something's profitable well then it justifies its existence if something is more profitable than something else you should do the more profitable business because somehow higher profit is taken to mean that something is more socially valued more socially useful etc and it is that argument I want to confront and to refute and the way to do that is really simple and I'm going to use coal as an example how do you calculate the profit of the coal business in the same way that you do any other business you look at the revenues what's earned when you sell coal and you subtract the costs of getting the coal out of the ground of processing it to whatever degree you have to

2:49:06and shipping it to the customer you subtract the costs the ones I mentioned from the revenue and you get the profit and that allows you to calculate what your rate of profit is what's wrong with this calculation well the answer is really quite simple in a capitalist system you are not required to count the actual costs of doing something like mining coal you're only required to count the costs you actually have to pay for as the coal company very simple example if mining coal in a community cut short the average lifespan of an adult coal miner say by four years compared to people who do other kinds of work you might as a society say well that's an enormous cost the cost

2:50:09of a shortened life those extra four years could have brought all kinds of pleasure to that person had he or she lived to their families who needed them they might have earned all kinds of income in that period all of that was lost all of that is a cost but it is not a cost in our capitalist system that the coal company has to cover and so the coal company doesn't count it as a cost well here's the punchline if you added to coal company costs the real costs that are a burden to the real people who do the coal mining who breathe the air that results from coal mining who suffer the climatic damage that flows from coal mining if the coal companies had to count those costs

2:51:13it would have eaten up all of their profits then they would have to admit that the coal business if you actually count all of its costs is a losing proposition please keep that in mind the next time anyone tells you that because any industry coal or anything else is profitable that that should be taken as proof or evidence that it's a worthwhile activity that it is something society wants or needs or benefits from the real question you always should ask what costs were counted and what costs were not counted because the not counted could change the conclusion 100 percent so

2:52:25markets are created by states they're product of state policy at different levels the United States it has all of these different market creating mechanisms and international institutions where the U.S. has a huge sway over things like trade policy that play out in informant and forums like the the world trade organization markets do not exist without states and that's the big lie that a lot of companies including the fossil fuel industry try to say fossil fuel companies in particular are hugely dependent on massive amounts of subsidies in the U.S. we pour roughly 20 billion dollars a year at the state and federal level into the fossil fuel industry directly and they cannot exist as they currently do without that support they just will not exist as much as 50 percent of oil developments are unprofitable without subsidies so it's not as if the markets are just doing their thing and the states have an obligation to intervene it's that the states are creating markets actively constantly they're co-creating them as some people who study this more deeply than I do would say so I think

2:53:27state policy is essential and I think one of the failures of the one of the successes of neoliberalism I would say isn't really limiting what we think states can and should do and so state policy can be a hugely beneficial thing in people's lives can be something which drives transformative changes but there's a deep deep pessimism about that including from Democrats including from very progressive Democrats about what the scope of the state is people have compared the American jobs plan to the New Deal which is laughable the New Deal for all of its flaws and contradictions really took a very expansive view of state power both in cracking down on corporate power making big moves around things like antitrust but also in just creating a welfare state virtually from scratch that's the scale of thing we need to do not just we need big investment not just that we need you know better regulations but that we actually have to have a conversation about how the state itself needs to change and respond to meet this crisis which requires the state to do things that has not

2:54:29number four we haven't euthanized one of the most powerful industries on earth in recent memory and that is the challenge at hand is to dismantle the fossil fuel industry and capitalism is very deeply bound up and that that's kind of more what I'm getting at the limits of this current policy regime we can call it the Biden policy regime but a big part of that is essentially bark and conservative judiciary at what point would the most effective intervention come is it changing this entire policy regime that's been built up over the decades yeah it demands a lot more creative thinking about what the state can do which I'm a nationalization here come on yeah it's with it we're not afraid yeah I think that's the type of thing that has to be on the table and I talk about it in the book nationalizing the fossil fuel industry which should be a pretty straightforward proposal so far as they have shown absolutely no willingness or interest in meeting this crisis and dramatically changing their business model they're just screwing people over firing

2:55:30tens of thousands of people raking in support from the US government things like public ownership of electric utilities which have been you know a part and parcel of all the same sorts of climate and aisle that the fossil fuel industry has participated in over the years a federal job guarantee which has been a historic demand of movements dating back decades was was core to the democratic parties platform until 1980 and is just off the table they did have hiring people directly as a foreign weird concept to quote unquote progressive policy makers unless it's hiring them to be in the military to go and grab oil for elsewhere right exactly the US military is the closest thing we have to a federal job guarantee those are a couple things that I draw on the back but the comparisons to FDR and LBJ are just so are really absurd so what are the real life impediments politically speaking I think we can all frame out the arguments that are going to be thrown out there against oh my gosh this is socialism don't take over the industry blah blah blah but just assuming a world where nobody

2:56:33cared because there was actually enough narrative work done to make the scope of the crisis clear to people involved it feels like the unspoken part of these conversations is the amount of money in terms of lobbying efforts and and bought and purchased influence that is going on on a bipartisan basis and what you talk a lot about in some of the early chapters and the degree to which so much of our legislation are rule making pago which is a Nancy Pelosi special is as significant a major obstacle to environmental reforms a lot of these other built in what was it EE one one blah blah the environmental rule that makes us so that you have to do a cost benefit analysis for any regulation so you have to show it has to be basically profitable it has to not hurt profit to do something that's socially beneficial is it not you can sprinkle a little bit of carcinogens along as I can prove to

2:57:36the value of producing this carcinogen is more valuable than the lives that are lost or harmed as a consequence which we all know is something that is very very difficult to measure and it's so deep the amount of fossil fuel money just sloshing around Washington and state capitals around the country is just immense there's so much money but it's not only that whenever a climate bill comes up that exon mobile and the American petroleum institute and all of these bad actors pour money into lobbying efforts into advertising campaigns and to fighting those measures themselves it's that they've done this work dating back 70 80 years and as a part of this bigger business conservative movement to really ensconce minority rule at every level of government including things like the mandate for leadership that the heritage foundation gave to Ronald Reagan in his like first week in office it's like thick book of policies that they wanted him to introduce and he took up two thirds of them he took up an enormous amount of what was essentially an organizing

2:58:40project can really fill its finds book and visible hands really makes this clear but there's this long thoroughgoing effort among the biggest companies in the United States to concretize the stuff until off so that even if public opinion shift even if we know the climate policy is popular we know that a green New Deal is popular and we have a political system which is really bad at translating public opinion into law into policy change and and that's not an easy you know problem to fix so US Senate is not an easy problem to fix I don't want to make it seem like dealing with climate change is easy but it really does root back to these very very anti-democratic institutions that surmount so many barriers to doing the bare minimum of what's needed

2:59:42so you do have to fight against the realistic perception that not incorrect perception that the government's ability to be effective has been neutered and also make the case that we can make it better and then it can work better than the private industry and Republicans are wily and they're very good at this I've heard you go back and forth about whether or not the word nationalization is accurate in terms of what has happened in the past namely in 2008 but do you have any thoughts from a messaging perspective if that's something we should take head on and say actually the government can do good things here all these historical precedents remember how much you love the Tennessee Valley Authority grandpa or you think given the sensitivity around that word we should just stealth do it and stealth advocate for it the way it was done in 2008 basically rapid and Obama and say your favorite guy did it let's try this again it's a crisis messaging is always tough and in reality your opponents are going to use the word anyways so it's it's not like you're going to be able to escape it with TVA I think that's a really good example and and that's a different case because

3:00:44we're talking about building an institution from scratch and and people do love that it's really funny as much as people the s word socialism and nationalization those things can be real hot button for some people but in polling and I think even just in general the actual socialist institutions we have meaning our state-owned enterprises and public utilities and stuff like that you don't see a whole lot of heat about that people really get heated about the welfare state and cultural issues I don't mean to demean those but whatever you know what people put in that bucket but people love the post office in Tennessee they love TVA in fact Obama tried to privatize TVA and it was state republicans that made it impossible for him to do that I don't know if they love Amtrak so much but well if Biden does maybe that can be the yeah to proud of him Joe loves that there's a soundtrack station named after Joe and people public utilities you can maybe some back and forth depending on how you feel about yours personally but public production doesn't really

3:01:47face the same kind of it doesn't really set off the right as much the rink and file right wingers they're upset about critical race theory and the trans of rights and stuff like that they're not really bang in the table for privatizing the postal service or something like that when it comes to taking over existing entities I do think there's at least a way to talk about it like you were hitting at where especially if they're in need of assistance so you could hit upon look if we're gonna give you taxpayer money you got to give the taxpayers a good deal or something like that we're gonna ask of you the same thing that a private finance or what ask of you private finance or is not giving you money equivalent to 30% of your equity stake with no voting rights so why does the public have to do that I think there's a reasonable way to draw an equivalence there and say look we're not gonna get ripped off we're gonna get the same deal that a private investor would get here and if you were in this kind of dire financial situation and you're about to collapse they would

3:02:51ask for a lot and they certainly would ask to be in the driver's seat I want to put a fine point on how possible this is because as I try to make these lists as I'm doing right now of common pushbacks from liberals it's that things that are obviously good but which haven't been very publicly considered by the politicians that they admire and they think up as hashtag good people they tend to do this kind of just world hypothesis thing where you try to make sense of that cognitive distance by saying well it must just not be possible it must be out of reach if a vomit and do it and he's a real bench it must just not be possible there's a part of your paper Johanna that talks about executive action what could be done right now what kind of moves could Joe Biden make in this moment that could start us along the right path that's a really good question I think that one there are ways for him to start constraining the industry and

3:03:54working to end subsidies that he has control over implementing when it's right import or export bands these things that are actually going to make the the fossil fuel industry cringe he has some power over stopping drilling and so that actually could potentially put them in a situation in which they're clamoring for that government receiver you know you're on it that's the opposite of what's happening I love it incentives right now for him to drill more and to subsidize more because people are paying so much at the pump but then that's where we can bring in some of the I think it's a combination of demand side and supply side so the supply is like okay we can't work with people at the pump what we need to do is ramp up our production of renewable energy as quickly as possible start transforming those systems as we're winding down the oil and gas industry so that we are no longer dependent on this volatile commodity oil and gas also we already have things like the strategic petroleum reserve that they have unleashed that Biden has

3:04:57the control over are there ways for us to actually extend that so that we're managing our oil and gas production in a way that actually is relevant to geopolitics and to climate goals as well the the first thing we have to confront when we think about inflation is energy prices now energy prices are in a special category because of the climate crisis in my view fossil fuel energy prices shouldn't be brought down they have to be brought up if anything in order for us to facilitate accelerate the transition out of fossil fuel dependency so what do we do when you have energy prices skyrocketing people's livelihoods are being significantly hurt should you lower

3:06:03fossil fuel energy prices the alternative has been presented in Congress a windfall profit tax that is you have energy prices remaining high but you tax the profits of the oil companies and you redistribute the revenue back to the American people so if we look at energy prices today even relative to pre-COVID relative to pre-COVID so we're not talking about the lockdown and on anything that had to do with that the average gasoline price today at $4.70 is about twice as high as it was pre-COVID so the oil companies are making gigantic monopolistic profits those profits need to be taxed away and if we did that every person in the country on average every person in the country would be getting about $125 so a family of four would be getting about $500 to cover their

3:07:07increased gasoline prices when we talk about the windfall profit tax which has been proposed in Congress and I strongly favor it does raise a broader question is if we're going to tax the so-called excess profits of oil companies how do we define excess profits under what circumstances should oil companies be making money when the way they make money is by destroying the planet so any profits by the oil companies in my view and any kind of logical framework should be recognizes excess profits because there shouldn't be any profits in which case the Federal Reserve could buy the assets of the oil companies just like they bought the assets of all other kinds of world street firms and deliver a nationalized oil industry that could then manage a green transition in an orderly fashion. So what companies should be nationalized the way the government took over a bankrupting general motors and near bankrupting Chrysler a number of years ago they

3:08:12owned the majority share of the stock so you would nationalize Exxon mobile Chevron Chronicle Phillips the three bigger ones tell us how that would work apart from the difficulties on Capitol Hill. Well again the simple model is exactly what the Fed did during the COVID crisis in general the Fed just bought financial assets they bought stocks they bought bonds owned by world street firms in this case they could just buy majority ownership of these three oil giants and you know I calculated this is from about a couple months ago it cost would probably be lower now given that the markets gone down but according to my calculations they could buy majority ownership for about four hundred billion dollars which is one tenth one tenth of what the Fed pumped into Wall Street in 18 months during the COVID crisis so this is not actually any kind of

3:09:15outrageous proposition as you just noted rough the government bought majority ownership of general motors Chrysler and AIG the insurance giant they bailed out Goldman Sachs 2008 2009 so this is certainly within the realm of feasibility and it's within the realm of the technical tools available from the Fed and then what would happen let's assume that the three big oil giants were nationalized there's still a lot of non-nationalized oil companies who can engage in frolics and detours how do you deal with that and basically two questions what would the government do once a nationalize it would be the owners of these three giant oil companies and how would it deal with the rest of the oil gas coal economy which is bent on maximizing short-term profits never mind the effect on climate disruption or anything else well I mean I didn't mean to set it as a

3:10:16principle that they should only buy the three giants I did that just by way of illustration yeah you could buy all the rest of the company the other companies are much smaller so that the federal government could nationalize the entire fossil fuel industry you know my calculation was the three giants at 400 billion you could do the whole shabang for less than 800 billion and so that I wasn't establishing that oh we just get rid of the three big ones and the others get to do it whatever they want the basic point being that once the government controls these giant fossil fuel companies then we can have an orderly transition in which yes we keep fossil fuel prices high the revenues from selling the fossil fuels would be transferred automatically back to the American people meanwhile at the same time they would be investing in accelerating the growth of the clean energy

3:11:19infrastructure you did you think of presidential bomb a speech on Monday here with you and climate summit fuel well you we have to decide are are these people stupid or are they just uninform are they badly advised I think that he really believes he's doing something you know he wants to have a legacy a legacy having done something in the climate problem but what he's proposing is totally ineffectual I mean there's some small things that are talked about here you know the fact that they may have a fund for investment invest more in in clean energies but these are these are minor things as long as fossil fuels are dirt cheap people will

3:12:22keep burning that way so why don't you talk dr. James Hansen about what you're endorsing a carbon tax what does it mean what does it look yeah it should be in across the board carbon fee and in a democracy it's going to it should the money should be given to the public just give an equal amount to every you collect the money from the fossil fuel companies the rate would go up over time but the money should be distributed 100% to the public an equal amount to every legal resident is a basket example of this well Alaska is giving fossil fuel money to the public and of course they like that so it's a sort of it it shows how much the public does like getting a monthly check but what this would do those people who do better than average in limiting their fossil fuel use would make money wealthy people people who fly around the world a lot and have big houses they would pay more in increased prices then they would get in their monthly dividend explain

3:13:25what you mean well because yeah we're we're giving all of the money you collect money from fossil fuel companies and he distributed equally to all residents so the one who does better than average in limiting his fossil fuel use will get more in the dividend then he pays an increased prices and how do you know what their fossil fuel use is well it's they don't have to nobody has to think about this they know they will just look at prices of course the the price at the pump is obvious and the electricity bill will be obvious this will this will move industry and businesses to develop no carbon and low carbon energies and products that use little fossil fuels in fact the economic study shows as United States after 10 years emissions would be reduced 30 percent because you've got the economy forcing you in the right direction but as long as you just leave fossil fuels cheap you're not going to fundamentally change things it's not only that fossil fuels are kept

3:14:29cheap the not only US government governs around the world stumps to dies yeah the fossil fuel industry far more yeah and any kind of renewables yeah well the that's right on a total basis per unit energy there and the subsidizing renewables more but that's okay though we shouldn't be subsidizing any of them let this carbon price rise that will favor renewables it will favor energy efficiency it will favor nuclear power the favor anything that is carbon free that's the way we should do it and that's the way conservatives would accept it this is a revenue neutral approach which does not make the government bigger and I've talked to some leading conservatives and who understand that this is not a hoax the climate change is not a hoax and they are willing to accept this concept of a revenue neutral carbon fee doctor James answer would you like to weigh in on the presidential election in the United States on the issue of climate change yeah well there's some nut cases who claim that it's

3:15:34all a hoax and that's absurd and I think most of the public recognizes that you may get a fraction of one party that is that likes that point of view but the majority of the public realizes that's non-sensible but I haven't seen any candidate liberal or conservative who is proposing what is actually needed and that's making the price of fossil fuels honest but not taking the money to make the government bigger instead give it to the public what about the democrats I was saying I haven't seen any politician democrat or republican who has proposed a revenue neutral carbon fee there's an organization citizens climate lobbying which has been doubling in size each year the last several years which is beginning to be heard in fact in democrats Bernie Sanders and Barbara boxer proposed a bill that was basically a fee and dividend except the government was going

3:16:39to take 40% of the money and that makes it it's not going to work I mean first of all conservatives are never going to accept that but that's makes it a tax and a tax depresses the economy a carbon fee and dividend actually spurs the economy because either is some income redistribution the low income people will tend to have a better chance to come out ahead in this case and they tend to spend the money when they get their dinner doctor James Hanson you talked about the potential collapse of the west act Antarctic I she what would that mean well that's and would mean several meters of sea level rise that's the biggest threat that climate change has in store for us because it would mean that all coastal cities would become dysfunctional and the economic consequences of that are in calculus and the number of refugees that you would have 100 million people in Bangladesh which most of them would be have to find some place to go so it's something

3:17:45it's hard to imagine how we can have a governable world if we let the Antarctic I she collapse the coastal cities for example in the United States of climate change is encouraged what would happen to well guess just look at on New York City for example if you had a sea level rise of several meters you cannot protect these cities it's not it's simply not practical for building high sea walls well for it therefore breathe small area you may be able to do that but then still that's when you get storms you'll get water overthrown over the sea walls it's just not practical we need to keep a sea level relatively stable or we have economic consequences that you do that by phasing down emissions rapidly at least a few percent per year and the only way that will happen is if we have a carbon fee because otherwise you know somebody's going to keep burning it is these countries

3:18:48you know saying okay we're going to reduce our emissions 30 percent but what does that do when the price remains cheap somebody else will burn it that just makes the price even cheaper if it's less deer so you have to make the fossil fuel price honest that's why today I'm making the largest investment ever 2.3 billion dollars to help communities across the country build infrastructure that's designed and withstand the full range of disasters we've been seen up to today extreme heat drought flooding hurricanes tornadoes right now there are millions of people suffering from extreme heat at home so my team is also working with the state to deploy $385 million right now for the first time states will be able to use federal funds

3:19:54to pay for air conditioners and homes set up community cooling centers in schools where people can get through these extreme heat crises not a single Republican in Congress stepped up to support my climate plan not one so let me be clear climate changes and emergency and in the coming weeks I'm going to use the power I have as president to turn these words in a formal official government actions through the appropriate proclamations executive orders and regulatory power that the president possesses when it comes to fighting climate change climate change I will not take no for an answer again jean sue president Biden use the term emergency five or six times during the speech but did not actually declare a national climate emergency it's significance yes so president Biden did not declare a climate emergency yesterday we absolutely need him to do

3:20:57that it is an incredible rallying cry if president Biden can actually articulate that we are in a climate emergency and unleash all the tools in his toolbox as the president to really combat the crisis in front of us the other part of the climate emergency declaration is that it signals to the entire world and Americans that president Biden is no longer going to have a confused or slow-woked climate policy that he is going to have an all hands-on-deck approach to the suffering that we are all experiencing right now across the world and jean could you outline what are the measures that Biden could take in the event that he does declare an emergency absolutely so the Biden administration if they declare a climate emergency actually unlocks additional emergency powers as well as ordinary powers to deal with the climate emergency some of the emergency powers are very powerful tools to turn off this bigot for fossil fuels one of them would be to reinstate

3:22:03our crude oil export ban which has allowed the fracking and explosion of oil in the Permian basin another is to actually stop offshore drilling right now that is happening in the ocean and finally another power would allow him to stop the hundreds of billions of dollars every year that private corporations like BlackRock like all of our private banks are sending abroad to build fossil fuel plants and poisoning in endangered communities there it's been an extraordinary few years for the climate justice movement i mean to be here in New York in the fall is very emotional for us because we were on the streets with almost half a million people in the people's climate march and and what that made that moment so extraordinary

3:23:04was the diversity and the connecting the dots feeling of the movement these days you have frontline communities whether on the front lines of fossil fuel extraction or on the front lines of pollution and you know marginalized communities we know that the the impacts of climate change and industrialization are racialized their people of economic without economic means are much more vulnerable and you see these communities coming together and connecting causes and naming the system at the heart of it it's happening around the world and that what's really exciting nowadays i think is that we're starting to see not just the know to the to these damaging projects and to this logic of extraction extraction of wealth as well as extraction of resources but we're seeing more and more of the yes so look at the divestment movement which is exploded in three years but it's not just the know to the fossil fuel stocks and bonds it's the yes in terms of redirecting and reinvesting that money in community cooperatives in in in renewable energy and we're seeing this and we see it throughout the film the communities on front on the front lines of the goles. Explain those communities that you cover.

3:24:06Well so we went so for instance we went to to northern Greece in the middle of this horrific economic assault you know of the austerity being imposed on Greece which is being used in as an excuse to open up all these new dirty projects they're talking about drilling for oil in the Aegean and Ionian Sea some of the most storied oceans in the history and there's this massive gold mine proposed and starting to be developed by Canadian company in a very beautiful area of northern Greece and there's this extraordinary community resistance to it people in a fairly conservative part of the world who are not activists who are not lefties who start to see what's being done in the name of this economic model and and and the exhibition with your previous book the shock doctrine the rise of disaster capitalism Naomi well I mean the truth is I see this book and this project as a sequel to to to the shock doctrine because you know that book begins and ends with her a can Katrina and you know that we are what we are seeing is what climate change looks like when

3:25:14you have an economic system that systematically fuels inequality ever wider inequality often along racial lines and we know what it looks like it looks like Katrina right I mean if you had money and you know resources you were able to get out of the city call your insurance company but if you needed a functional state you were out of luck first of all because the levies were neglected second of all because there was no evacuation there was you know the FEMA couldn't find the superdome for five days mean you know the story um but then what happened next right the the disaster capitalism complex as I called it in that book descends on the city to privatize the school system uh to get rid of public housing and replace it with condominiums uh you know to decide not to open charity hospital that serves the city's poor um so you know this book is an attempt to think about how do we respond to crisis collectively in a way that reduces inequality that builds

3:26:14a fair society that is democratic instead of this incredibly anti-democratic process that I described in the shock doctrine look you know climate change is the biggest shock of all it's hit us with shock after shock after shock whether it's a hurricane um you know whether it's the endless drought in California and you know Amy I was really you know it takes a lot to shock me because I've been immersed in this stuff for a long time but I didn't realize that a third of California's firefighters are prison inmates being paid uh two dollars uh um an hour to fight California's yeah and it for cal fire it's apparently half of the firefighters so this is incredibly dangerous work they're being paid two dollars an hour or and if they're not actively fighting fires some of them are being paid less than two dollars a day and it turns out that there are forces in California that are resisting prison reform measures that would lower California's prison population because they're worried about the impact of their firefighter supply this is what

3:27:16it looks like to try to deal with climate change within an economic context of what around the world is called neoliberalism relentless austerity which you know one of the impacts of relentless austerity is increased incarceration through you know locking up and locking out the people who are losing within this economic system so that's why we're calling for looking at the root causes of what's of what is driving climate change and and also using climate change as a catalyst to build a fair economic system and what we show in the film is that people are doing this very organically as they're fighting the fossil fuel projects they're fighting for energy democracy community controlled renewable energy that keeps resources in the community so they can pay for services

3:28:17that's going to be it for today be sure to check out our linking bio right in the show notes for all the ways to follow us on social platforms contact us and support everything best of left including membership and one-time donations the additional sections of the show included clips from the Hartman report the David Pakman show in deep with Angie Collaro the majority report the young Turks the broadcast climate court voices this is hell the Center for Progressive Reform covering climate now economic update bad faith the Ralph Nader radio hour and democracy now further details are in the show notes thanks everyone for listening thanks to Deon and Aaron for their production work for the show thanks to Ben our Swiss Army knife fixer behind the scenes and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member purchasing gift memberships or making one-time donations you'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with links to join our patreon and discord communities for free where you can also continue the discussion and don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I relaunch our social media strategy so coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of

3:29:21Washington DC my name is Jay and this has been the best of a left podcast coming to twice weekly things entirely to the members and donors to the show from best of a left calm So You