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Alex Wise
This week on Sea Change Radio, more of our discussion with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier. In this part of the conversation, we talk about the importance of a political campaign’s so-called “ground game,” look at the predictive value of early voting numbers, and examine whether Donald Trump would actually have steamrolled Joe Biden as so many were assuming. Then, we take a peek back at our 2019 interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin to learn a thing or two about leadership.
There’s a lot riding on the upcoming presidential election: reproductive freedom, climate change, healthcare, Supreme Court appointments, just to name a few. But no matter what issue is at the top of your list, the decision that Americans will be making over the next six weeks will have a lasting effect for decades to come. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier about the presidential election. In the first half of our two-part discussion, we look beyond the polls, as Bonier explains other elements that measure voter intensity, examine the lingering impact of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and dig into voter registration data in key states like Pennsylvania and Florida.
Narrator| 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Tom Bonier (TB) | 00:17 – In any given moment, most Americans aren’t worried about their right to an abortion, but if you ask them what question is a deal breaker for them, that’s just not negotiable. It’s number one by far.
Narrator | 00:32 – There’s a lot riding on the upcoming presidential election: reproductive freedom, climate change, healthcare, Supreme Court appointments, just to name a few. But no matter what issue is at the top of your list, the decision that Americans will be making over the next six weeks will have a lasting effect for decades to come. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier about the presidential election. In the first half of our two-part discussion, we look beyond the polls, as Bonier explains other elements that measure voter intensity, examine the lingering impact of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and dig into voter registration data in key states like Pennsylvania and Florida.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:33 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tom Bonier. Tom is a democratic strategist and data analyst, and he’s with the Tara Group and TargetSmart. Tom, welcome to Sea Change. Radio,
Tom Bonier (TB) | 01:46 – It’s great to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:47 – I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time. I’ve followed your work for many years. I know that being liberal in 2024 means constantly being afraid, but I find your words to be reassuring in these very murky times. The data that you work with is pointing in encouraging ways for you. Why can that dispel some of the fears that so many liberals are feeling since 2016, really…
Tom Bonier (TB) | 02:15 – Yeah. And, and, and I’ll include myself in the we all of that. I think if, if you don’t have some amount of fear, uh, given the stakes, you probably aren’t paying close enough attention. But as you said, for me, I find solace in data and that goes above and beyond polling. I think most people focus on polling, and as we know, polling, is not always the most reliable indicator of which way the political winds might be blowing. And so what I tend to focus on is more individual level data that focuses on actions people are taking. So that’s generally new voter registrations. It’s election result, in the lead up to an election that might be primary election results. It could be special elections. And then, you know, the other sort of campaign-related information, how they’re raising money. The numbers of activists and volunteers we’re just looking for signs of energy and enthusiasm. We know that the one big part of the equation, of determining who’s likely to win an election, is turnout to state the obvious. It’s turnout and persuasion polls give us a pretty good sense of persuasion and all of that other data gives us a much clearer sense of engagement and turnout.
AW | 03:32 – But as you’ve said, polls don’t tell us who’s going to vote, and you call it measures of intensity. Why don’t you spell that out for our listeners if you can.
TB | 03:42 – Yeah, and so to even just to drill down on that point, that polls don’t tell us, uh, who’s going to vote. We’re in this period in the election where almost every poll is applying what they call a likely voter screen or a likely voter model. And really all that is, is the pollster’s best estimate. I was going to say guess, but I’ll be charitable and say estimate of what the electorate’s going to look like. And that’s really hard, uh, to get right, because you have to really nail the turnout in terms of women versus men, older versus younger by race, ethnicity, party, uh, ID ideology. There’s a lot of things you have to get right? It’s hard. And so what’s the best place to look for that? Well, it’s, it’s data that frankly, the pollsters don’t have access to. And so, um, you know, again, that’s where it gets to the sort of individual actions that people are taking – whether it’s voting, registering to vote, going out and working for a campaign donating. And so, you know, especially in, in the context of this year and in the 2022 elections, we’ve had some analysis that’s been a bit against the grain. And the reason is because we’ve been looking at data that others haven’t been. And in this case in this year, it’s just seeing voter registration numbers that frankly paint a more positive picture for Democrats than the polls do.
AW | 05:10 – And that goes back to your work in 2022 as well, where so many were calling for a red wave and your data didn’t point to that. Why don’t you unpack that if you can?
TB | 05:20 – Yeah. So, you know, you think about that election, one of the things that’s, this is not revolutionary, but um, when we look at any election, we want to view it in the context of prior elections, knowing that there’s no perfect parallel. No two elections are exactly alike, but they establish sort of boundaries, uh, that you can plot any given election or the data you’re seeing within those boundaries. And so we had two red wave elections not long before 2010 and 2014 as midterm red wave elections where Republicans did very well. We know what they look like, we see what voter registration looks like, we see what turnout looks like in special elections in primaries. So you’re right, while the polling, to some extent was suggesting a red wave election, certainly almost universally the punditry was, was predicting a red wave election.
AW | 06:11 – Because that was just what everyone expected happens then every time there’s a midterm.
TB | 06:17 – Exactly.
AW | 06:18 – It’s the party that’s not in power gets to just whip everybody’s butt.
TB | 06:22 – Exactly. Yeah. They use the term, a lot of these media, political data analysts use the term fundamentals as sort of a catchall, nebulous notion that can throw in anything that they think probably is impactful. And, and so yeah, to your point in this case it was, well, historically the party who’s not in the White House just does really well in those midterm elections. So they said, well, of course it’s going to happen. Because it always happens. And we looked at the data and we said, well, look, Democrats are out registering Republicans. And this was, this was all post dos, right? I mean, in my mind.
AW | 06:59 – When was that? Like May of 2022?
TB | 07:01 – It was leaked in May, uh, and then it actually was handed down June 24th, 2022.
AW | 07:07 – And, and what, what were you seeing in trend wise from the registration state by state that really kind of stood out to you, Tom?
TB | 07:15 – Well, what stood out to me was primarily gender gaps, gender and age. And there really was this sort of pre and post Dobbs moment in politics. So we were still very much in that. I think a lot of folks haven’t internalized yet, which is, uh, everything changed. Everything changed, and you saw it in the data. Best example I can give you, the first test of the post Dobbs landscape was a primary election they had in Kansas, or it was on the August ballot. So time, not many people are going to vote, right? Um, it was sort of handpicked by anti-abortion rights, uh, forces to be favorable to them, uh, to put this constitutional amendment on the ballot to remove abortion rights protections from the Kansas constitution. And we looked at the voter registration data between Dobbs and their voter registration deadline. So it’s three week period, and we found that 70% of the new registrants were women. That to me, was the first and clearest possible sign that the landscape had absolutely changed, number one. And then number two to your broader question, that this is not what a red wave election looks like. You don’t see 70% of new registrants. It’s really weird to see, uh, the gender gaps and new voter registrations be much above 52 or 53% one way or another. When you see it, 70%, it tells you this is different. We don’t have a precedent for this, but if you’re expecting a red wave election, you’re almost certainly going to be wrong.
AW | 08:50 – Now, let’s fast forward to 2024 when we’re not seeing that same kind of outlier from historical patterns. In terms of voter registration, there’s enthusiasm and the Democrats have been registering more voters than Republicans, but there are, uh, abortion is on some very important swing state ballots as well, namely Florida and Arizona. And we don’t really know how that’s going to affect the race for the White House. But those people who registered in 2022 are probably going to vote again. One could assume correct.
TB | 09:27 – Yes. The only reason I hesitate on that, because historically the best predictor of someone voting is them having voted before. And if you voted in a lower turnout election, you are almost certain to vote in a subsequent higher turnout election. So the midterm elections in 2022 are lower turnout than the presidential, uh, elections, which are really the peak of the turnout cycle. The only reason I hesitate is because that same example I mentioned in Kansas, we saw this surge of women registering to vote, especially younger women, like women under the age of 25. They actually voted in that August election at a really unreal turnout rate, that a higher turnout rate than all men, regardless of age in Kansas, that hasn’t happened before. Probably won’t happen again. But many of them actually didn’t come back out in November for the November election because abortion wasn’t on the ballot and because there they weren’t, and this is my sense of this, that the campaigns and Democrats in general weren’t able to draw a connection between how would be, how would a vote in this governor’s race have any impact on abortion rights? They’d already voted on it. And so I think until Vice President Harris took over at the top of the ticket this year, I think you were seeing some of that effect still kind of lingering for Democrats because we actually saw lower registration and intensity numbers among these same groups up until July 21st when the candidate change happened. So, you know, up to that point I look at and say, well, sure, the states that you mentioned, Florida and Arizona, I would expect to see much higher turnout from Democrats in general, especially from women and younger women. But in other states, question is, will they draw that connection? But what we’re seeing in the data now suggests that there’s sort of just this national organic across the board intensity and enthusiasm connected to Vice President Harris’s candidacy that I believe is an extension of this Dobbs effect. It’s people now drawing the connection project 2025 is likely a big part of that too, the Republican plan that would implement a national federal abortion ban. But there’s a lot going on in this, for sure.
(Music Break) | 11:53
AW | 12:51 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to democratic strategist Tom Bonier. And we saw in the debate, Tom, when Kamala Harris really turned the entire momentum of that contest was when she started speaking about abortion. She spoke from the heart, she used concrete examples, and I just read that approximately a third of women in this country have had an abortion. And that’s not an insignificant number, especially when you consider that if you’re the mother of somebody, you might not have had that abortion, but your daughter had that abortion. You want her to be safe. So there’s a huge percentage of people who are directly affected by this issue. So how does that play into your measures of intensity? That’s a tough thing to kind of derive. We have ground game, we have campaigning, you have all these other things that are not part of the polls, but how do you put them into your methodology?
TB | 13:47 -First of all, you’re right. In watching the debate, I certainly agree where there was, it was early on in the debate and was very much a turning point because at that, up to that point, the vice president seemed a little bit, almost too rehearsed and was seemingly reciting talking points. And then to have that opportunity very early on to do what we haven’t seen anyone really do yet, which is confront the architect of the Dobbs decision to his face and to, and to confront him with the reality, because he has been trying very actively to sell this idea that Dobbs was actually a good thing and that people like it.
AW | 14:24 – Everybody wanted it, he said
TB | 14:25 – Yeah,
AW | 15:20 – And I imagine afterwards when Taylor Swift used that link as well.
TB | 15:25 – That was the big spike
AW | 17:30 – And, and I agree that data that about a abortion, where does it rank on your list of priorities? Uh, I have an unscientific theory on why they might ask that. If you do door to door canvassing, one of the first things you do is you’re trying to warm up the person you’re talking to, and you say you want to listen. So you say, what, what’s important to you? You know, you try to That’s right. Let them be in control of the conversation. So that’s a canvasser who’s trying to influence your opinion and warm up to, but a pollster has to do the same thing if they want a recipient to cooperate with them. Does that make sense?
TB | 18:06 – No, that absolutely does make sense. And I had the opportunity to sit on a discussion panel at the Reproductive Freedom for All Conference, a few days ago. And, and I sat with two genius women pollsters, who have done a lot of great work on this. One of them is the one who raised the notion that I mentioned a moment ago in terms of, in terms of abortion rights being a, a deal breaker and asking it that way. The other, uh, pollster mentioned a really interesting framework, that I had not heard before, which is if you asked women specifically what was the most important issue for them, they would answer it the same way that you just said it. It’s like, just sort of a warmup. And you’re gonna, if you ask if money is important to you, people are going to say, yes, money is important to them. Uh, but if you reframe the question and said, what issue do you think is most important to women? Bri large, it was by far the number one issue because there’s this sense of association and something bigger there and looking out for others, and that maybe that individual personally is not immediately that moment worried, or it’s not their top number one issue that they’re thinking about this afternoon. How can I get an abortion? But when you talk about women in general, yeah, it’s number one.
AW | 19:23 – And I think the media tends to put that issue into a little box, which is unfortunate. I think Tim Walz has been very effective making this a more universal issue. Men are affected by abortion rights as well, and we care about personal freedom, and we care about the opposite sex, or we should care about the opposite sex just as much as our own. So it’s, it’s silly in a lot of ways that we push men out of the equation when it comes to this issue.
TB | 19:53 -There are so many different ways that voters approach this issue, which is I think why you’ve seen such a strong reaction going back to that Kansas election as the first post Dobbs, uh, ballot initiative or constitutional amendment vote. What I was struck by among, you know, many things in the data was that we estimate that about 30% of registered Republicans in Kansas voted against the amendment. Well, the no vote was the pro-abortion rights position. And, to me, that reinforces your point, that there are so many, it, for many, it’s just an issue of personal freedom and discomfort with the federal government coming in and this case, the Supreme Court coming in and taking away a freedom that has existed for half a century at that point.
AW | 20:41 – And it exists in almost every other country.
TB | 20:44 – Absolutely. It is an economic issue. It’s an issue that resonates with many people in many different ways. And that’s why, you know, again, in Florida, which has become in some ways more challenging for Democrats in recent election cycles, um, it’s the reason why the, the Abortion Rights amendment there, the pro-abortion rights position is expected to clear well over 60% of the vote. So the same theory playing out in different ways. We’re seeing all of the data pointed in one direction since the Dobbs decision.
AW | 21:23 – And speaking of Florida, there’s also this cannabis legalization amendment on the ballot in Florida as well, and those are deep pocketed interests. Do you think that could account for a a percent or two in not aligning with what the polling data shows there, which is a lean to the red? I think Florida’s much more of a tossup than the polling indicates.
TB | 21:47 – I agree. I couldn’t agree more. We saw this exact ballot combination last year in Ohio where they had an abortion rights amendment and a cannabis legalization, and actually the cannabis amendment outperformed in actual votes. The abortion Rights Amendment, it was by less than a percent, it was a fraction of a percent, but it actually ran slightly ahead. You get, you know, one group that has become slightly more problematic for Democrats, uh, in, in the last three to four years is younger white men. And the cannabis issue is one where, um, you know, they’re very much aligned with Democrats on that position. And I, you know, it, it, it’s not the most partisan issue. You’ve seen Donald Trump try to hedge his bets on that and say he supports it just like he did with the Abortion Rights Amendment, where originally he said he would be voting one way in Florida, and then he changed his mind a few days later and said he’d be voting the other way. But I do believe that particular combination of amendments being on the ballot is about as powerful as you can get in terms of reshaping the electorate in unexpected ways.
(Music Break) | 23:52
AW | 24:13 – This is Alex Wise on Seat Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Democratic strategist Tom Bonier. Tom, maybe you can decipher for me a piece that I saw on CNN Harry Enten was doing this piece about voter registration in Pennsylvania, and the math didn’t add up to me. I’m not a data scientist. You are. He was explaining how Democrats are not piling on the new voter registration the way they had been in 2020. There was a positive 500,000 or so Democratic Edge in 2020, and now it was like 128,000. If my memory serves me correct. Republicans have made up huge ground, is what he was saying, but there was a lot more to that story, I think. And was he pushing the horse race of all of this? What have you seen in Pennsylvania in terms of voter registration and why was that CNN piece deceptive?
TB | 25:05 – Yeah, and he certainly was pushing the horse race, and he’s not alone. There are a lot of people that have been sharing this analysis, and it’s not just in Pennsylvania. People have been talking out in North Carolina, Florida elsewhere, and it’s based on a deeply flawed analysis. The simplest way I can put it, and then I’ll explain a little bit more length, is they’re missing the unaffiliated voters, uh, in this analysis. And here’s the, the, the, the, the simple way that describe the trend. We’ve seen what has happened to the Republican party under Donald Trump. It has become this cult of personality. And so if you are a Trump supporter, you are going to register as a Republican, period. It’s a loyalty thing. Whereas on the Democratic side, there’s not that same sort of notion. It doesn’t mean that they’re less loyal or less avid supporters of the top of the ticket. But when you look at Gen Z, especially, so the youngest chunk of the electorate.
AW | 26:07 – That’s age 18 to 30?
TB | 26:08 – Yeah. About that.
AW | 26:10 – They like to think of themselves as much more open-minded.
TB | 26:12 – Yes, open-minded, independent in a lot of ways. They are. And what we’ve seen is when you look, when you ask them the question, uh, with which party do you identify Democrat or Republican, they overwhelmingly say, independent. We’re independent. But when you look at how they vote, they overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates. And you know, I think every generation you have that to some extent. You just have that more with Gen Z. And so what’s being framed as a great increase in Republican registrations isn’t, I actually just looked at this just before our conversation. Uh, I looked at this in North Carolina because someone had mentioned this and said, well, Republicans are really gaining in registrations over the last four years. Well, four years ago in North Carolina, Republicans were 30% of all registered voters. Now they’re 29.8%
Narrator | 27:58 – Tune in next week to the second half of our discussion with Tom Bonier.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Lettuce, Bob Marley and The Whalers and Eric Clapton. To read a transcript of this show, go to Sea Change Radio dot com stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others, and tune in to see Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
If you live in a hilly city (like I do), riding a bike for a quick errand can be an arduous proposition – at least that was true until the advent of electric assist. E-bikes now comprise a healthy 5% share of the bicycle market in the U.S. And as many new owners are discovering, e-bikes can offer a viable transportation alternative, reducing or even eliminating the need for a car. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with e-bike executive Bill Klehm to get a snapshot of the industry, hear where he believes e-bikes are heading, and learn about his company’s unique distribution model.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Bill Klehm (BK) | 00:20 – I do think that the ride share investment that’s now being doubled on is going to drive up the adoption of e-bikes, because more people will be trying them. You know, IBM in 1973 talked about this whole notion of the seven times rule. You don’t truly change until you’ve experienced and can do something seven times. So with that, the more times we can create these experiences, the more opportunities we have to touch a customer and to have them consider our product.
Narrator | 00:52 – If you live in a hilly city (like I do), riding a bike for a quick errand can be an arduous proposition – at least that was true until the advent of electric assist. E-bikes now comprise a healthy 5% share of the bicycle market in the U.S. And as many new owners are discovering, e-bikes can offer a viable transportation alternative, reducing or even eliminating the need for a car. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with e-bike executive Bill Klehm to get a snapshot of the industry, hear where he believes e-bikes are heading, and learn about his company’s unique distribution model.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:37 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Bill Clem. Bill is the CEO of e Bliss Global Bill. Welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Bill Klehm (BK) | 01:47 – Well, thank you very much for having me. Um, wonderful opportunity to kind of talk about one of my major passions, and that’s e mobility and e-bikes. So thank you.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:57 – Pleasure to have you on the show. So maybe you can give us a backdrop on the industry and where eBliss Global’s model fits in all of this.
BK | 02:06 – So, in 2016, there was 60,000 e-bikes sold in the US this year, by all stretches of the imagination, it’s gonna be about 2.5 million. Keeping in mind that Toyota sells about 1.8 to 1.9 million cars. So e-bike industry in the United States has no, has now crossed over to a mass market product. Um, and it is now what I call a market segment of one. So that means that different channels of distribution, different product segments are starting to emerge. And what we, what we’ve done is taken a clean sheet approach to the industry. So in 2003, I started a company and made transmissions. So I made transmissions for the bike and e-bike industry, largely in Europe. So I got to sit around the campfire and watch Europe go from basically nothing to four or 5 million e-bikes a year over the period that I was, I was there with selling product. And so we decided to take a different approach to the US as we see the US taking a similar approach now to Europe in that e-bikes are becoming a fundamental piece of transportation, not just a toy. So one of our taglines is we are, we are transforming toys into transportation. So our, our approach is to take a and redesign the entire experience. So products are interesting, but what products do is create an experience for the consumer. And that experience, in our opinion, for a mass market product means one of no compromises. So customers who are buying these products today aren’t really interested. They aren’t in cyclist enthusiasts, they aren’t people who like chains. They aren’t people who like derailers. They aren’t people who like maintenance. They want to like the experience of riding an e-bike and or a bike. And so we’ve designed our bikes to be as maintenance free as possible. We’ve redesigned the system. We put a VIN on all of our bikes. We trace all manufacturing issues. There’s 73,000 component manufacturers around the world of e-bike components. There’s 73 manufacturers of e-bikes in the us. What we do differently than almost everybody that I’m, I’m aware of, um, is, is I believe that we design and manufacture bikes for consumers to enjoy. And that is to enjoy for a long time. So the majority of maintenance that’s required on our bikes are brake pads and tires. We don’t have chains, we don’t have derailers. Everything is sealed. We put, like I said, a VIN on all of our bikes and trace all manufacturing. Our bikes are UL listed. So that’s our, our approach is we wanted to create an experience for a customer that is an experience where the ownership experience is one that does not have compromises. So that’s, that is our approach to the industry today.
AW | 05:03 – And your distribution model is interesting. You, you’ve been piggybacking on, you mentioned Toyota, there are car companies that are selling Always Bikes as well.
BK | 05:15 – So we have, so we have several channels of distribution. So one, we sell a private label, um, group of bikes to a, to a company called Tomberlin that makes, um, very nice low speed vehicles. So neighborhood electric vehicles, um, we’ve private labeled with them. They were our kind of our launch partner so we could get the products right, the supply chain nailed down control distribution. And then what we decided to do is we decided to launch with automotive dealerships. So there are 17,000 automotive dealerships in the United States. Last year they did $1.2 trillion of revenue. The US auto dealer market is the largest distribution system on the planet for tra for selling transportation equipment. They’re the healthiest, um, every single vehicle in the last 150 years save Tesla has been sold to a car dealership. So they already have all the customers. And what we’ve done is we’ve created a line of bikes that kind of look, feel, behave like a car. They’ve got a vin, um, you know, we, we manage maintenance. We, we, we make these things as trouble free as possible from an engineering standpoint. And then we believe that auto dealers, um, we believe auto dealers are very attracted to this. We’ve got dealers in Hawaii, we’ve got dealers in Los Angeles, we’ve got dealers in Michigan, got dealers in New York. We’re rolling out dealers across the United States as we speak and we’ve had an amazing welcome by the 17,000 auto dealers in America.
AW | 06:48 – And so how would a prospective customer at an auto dealer come to buy one of your bikes?
BK | 06:57 – Sure, absolutely. So there’s, there’s, there’s four primary channels right inside the auto dealer. One is the dealership employees. There’s 1.8 million dealership employees that work at car dealers. So the first thing that we do is we make the dealership employees owners.
AW | 07:12 – And they’re usually pretty good salespeople.
BK | 07:15 – You know, they’ve sold a few things in their lives, right? But we believe strongly that auto dealer personnel can’t sell something they don’t experience and don’t live they live cars. Um, but what they really are beginning to live are transportation solutions. By the way, just as an aside, there’s 119 million solo rides in a car every day with 30 million of those, or less than one mile. So one of our mantras is we want to own the one mile ride. And that mantra works really well with the car dealers because they understand this whole model, right? Car consumers, you know, they’re, they’re a little bit tired of getting in a car, driving in a traffic jam for a mile. So what we want to do is to help them own the mile. So our job is to provide the auto dealers with a set of solutions that they can sell to their customers as a part of their customer’s garage, right? We call it a hybrid garage. We believe that the garage of the future is going to, is going to have an internal combustion engine vehicle. It’s going to have some form of an electric vehicle, and then it’s going to have some form of urban mobility or e mobility. And that’s where we believe we fit in. So as a car dealer, what you really want to do is to sell them a package of transportation equipment so that the consumer can then satisfy all of their needs to get from point A to point B.
AW | 08:38 – You mentioned the vehicle, uh, actually before I ask that question, so you brought up Tesla as one of the exceptions to the dealer model. I, I’ve been to a Tesla dealer and was very surprised by the experience in that their salespeople are not car people. Like if you were a 20 year veteran of selling cars at Chevy, I don’t think you would necessarily be able to just slide right into that job at Tesla. It seemed like these people selling the car were just there to as almost like a, it was almost like an Apple genius bar. They were there to just connect people to their phone, to the app, to the car. They were just like, any questions they had, they were like, oh, it’s in the app. It’s, it’s all in the app.
BK | 09:56 – Well, again, you know, so whether there going to be 16 million cars sold in the US new 35, 40 million used cars, 106 hundred 86 million people with cars in the us. So Tesla is still a drop in the ocean. It’s a great drop, right? So, don’t get me wrong, I’m, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk and the effort that he’s put in to redesign the industry. Um, but I do think, you know, car dealers have the most capital of any distribution system, a $880 billion on their balance sheet. But the other thing that’s happened to car dealers in the US is their margins have been squeezed, right? The average car dealer makes $716 on a new vehicle. The average vehicle is $50,000. So how many businesses would you start to take $50,000 and make 715? Not many. So we believe giving an attractive margin on a 3000, $3,000 on average e-bike, um, we believe that that’s a, uh, we believe there’s a fantastic opportunity. So one, we target the employees. Two, we look for opportunities to bundle an e-bike on a new vehicle purchase. So typically a pickup owner, a Bronco, a Ram truck owner.
AW | 11:14 – Oh, where they could throw the bike into the car easily without a rack?
BK | 11:18 – Or you sell them a rack and a, and a and a couple bikes. Again, you’re not going to sell a ton of them, but you know, but it’s 17 million new vehicles sold. You don’t need to sell an awful lot of them to kind of create a tipping point. Mm-hmm,
AW | 12:32 – But they all have a phone.
BK | 12:33 – They all have a phone, and you know what? And they all ride share and they all scooter share and lots of them are buying e-bikes. So we think that, so that’s another segment that we offer for the dealers to be able to now, so one of my comments to a car dealer is, do you want to be the first person to sell that young person a vehicle? because when they are going to buy a car and they eventually will, don’t you want to be the person that sold them their first vehicle? And, and that pitch has gone over very successfully. Again, one, the product needs to be unquestionable, needs to be low maintenance. Two, it needs to be intuitive because the, the consumer itself, they don’t want to figure out derailers and chain rings and gears. They don’t want any of that stuff. They don’t want noises. They want a experience, right? They want somebody to engineer a product to create an experience. And that’s what we do, right? It’s never what you say to people, it’s how you make them feel. It’s never what the product is built for. It’s how the product makes you feel as a consumer. And our product, we believe is one of the best ones in the marketplace because it makes you feel fun. So that’s important.
(Music Break)
AW | 14:43 – This is Alex Wise on Sea. Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Bill Clem, he’s the chairman and CEO of e Bliss Global. So Bill, you mentioned earlier about targeting these auto dealer employees. Can you expand on that? Do you give them bikes or just a big discount? How do you target them?
BK | 15:03 – So, you know, we make it easy for the dealers to, to have the employees join. You know, si similar to when I worked at Ford, I worked at Ford Motor Company for a long time. Love the company, love the industry. But one of the things that we did very successfully is we offered friends and family of the company, um, discounts called a plan B Plan X plan. So very similarly, we offer for the dealership employees an introductory offer for a sub-segment of that dealership employee base, because we want them to be owners. We want them to be able to communicate the experience of riding and experiencing our product to a consumer. Nothing will sell the genuineness of who you are if you are coming from the experience of the product itself. So we think that that’s a, we think that that’s a hugely important step.
AW | 15:51 – When somebody’s thinking of buying a bike, why would they want to buy an e-bike versus a regular bike, for example, in San Francisco, it’s very appealing with the hills to be able to kind of flatten the world.
BK | 16:05 – So e-bikes are, you know, so what 20% of the US population has a bike or an e-bike of some kind in their garage. Whether they’ve ridden it or not is another question. But there’s lots of bikes and e-bikes out there. I call them analog bikes versus digital bikes. The e-bikes are the digital bikes. Um, I think one e-bikes, um, have captured the imagination of the consumer because they give the consumer the confidence that this bike is, you know, they can just take off, right? It’s just, it gives them a little bit more, uh, they’re, they’re not intimidated by the hill. Your San Francisco example is a great one, right? They aren’t intimidated by that hill. So the average E-bike rider rides 30 to 50% longer than the average analog bike rider. They get about the same amount of exercise because they ride longer. And the e-bike gives them confidence. It’s kind of that bridge between a motorcycle and a bicycle is what the e-bike is, right? So non-Dept. of Transportation (DOT) approved doesn’t have a license, doesn’t have all that stuff. So those things that consumers see that as a nice interim step.
AW | 17:09 – And also you don’t necessarily have to prepare for a workout with an e-bike. When I first moved to San Francisco, I lived on the top of a hill, a big hill, a San Francisco hill, like a mountain, basically
BK | 17:52 – So again, you’ve, you’ve done a great job of laying out the case for an e-bike. So the biggest, the biggest hurdle for e-bikes is trial. So if customers, I can’t even tell you how many consumers that we’ve done ride and drive events, and they’ve said the same thing. I’ve been looking at these, I didn’t know what a good one was. I see these things ranging from, you know, $200, $700 to $7,000. What’s for me? So they don’t, they, a lot of times they don’t have somebody to talk to about that. And then quite frankly, the other thing is they haven’t been made, it hasn’t been made easy to test drive the product. And trial is, this is a trial based market. If you, if you are at all in the market for a, for an e-bike and you try one of our bikes, it’s an experience, right? I talk about the feeling, right? The design guys for my bikes, you know, their, so their requirement is the drive train has to feel like it has to feel like the hand of God is pushing you along, right? So that’s, so that’s, that’s the requirement of the design of the system that we’ve created.
AW | 19:03 – And the lowest hanging fruit for this trial system is this rental network that exists. Lyft is doubling down on, on their investment in this. And I know Uber’s also made big investments in this space. I remember the thing that introduced my wife to e-bikes was we rented a, a Lyft bike and she drove it around the city and was just over the moon about it. It was like, I remember her saying, everything’s downhill. Why don’t you expand on, on the opportunity that these rental bikes afford?
BK | 19:37 – So one, let me reframe your wife’s comment. Your wife felt confident in that bike to flatten the hills and to have, and to create an experience that she wanted to enjoy. She could see the experience she got on the bike and that experience connected with her. We do think that rental, rental and ride share bikes and these kinds of things, this definitely opens the door. Lyft I think, I’m not sitting in the boardroom, I’m not making financial decisions, but Mike can only assume that they look at the trends of what’s happening in the marketplace. The second thing I think they’re looking at is the safety factor. These scooters with the small little wheels on streets, and they, they, they aren’t all that safe, right? So consumers wiped out, and lots of them in Austin, Texas, I can tell you where I live, you know, the emergency rooms on Saturday and Sunday night have a long line of people that have spilled out on those small wheeled scooters. E-bikes are definitely safer than those are. So I do think that the, the ride share investment that’s now being doubled on is going to drive up the adoption of e-bikes because more people will be trying them. You know, IBM in 1973 talked about this whole notion of the seven times rule. You don’t truly change until you’ve experienced and can do something seven times. So with that, the more times we can create these experiences, the more opportunities we have to touch a customer and to have them consider our product.
AW | 21:10 – You mentioned the addition of a VIN number on your bikes. Why have traditional bikes not included them? And, and I’m assuming that the advantage of this is reducing property crime or what, why is this important?
BK | 21:25 – For sure. So one, the 17 characters of a VIN on an automobile are used for several things. One, it’s a unique identifier on the vehicle itself. So you track, you track everything on that car, what was in that car. So there’s a decoder that will tell you what came in that car based on that vin, we do the same thing. So one, where do the, where do those parts come from? One of the largest problems in the e-bike industry in the US today is getting replacement parts with 73,000 component manufacturers in Asia and around the world, getting components is hard. So we put full traceability on every part we make, right? We know every component. We know the operators that touch those bikes. We know what was put together. We have a recording from the bike being taken out of the box and the inventory of parts to the bike being assembled and dropped to the customer. We use that VIN as an anchor point to do that. So when I was setting up the company I went to go see in China, happens to be a very large bike manufacturer, e-bike maker, huge. And when I made the pitch on what we were planning on doing, he said to me, well, why are you putting a VIN on this? This isn’t a car. And when we walked out of the room, I turned to my team and said, okay, we’re not going to go with this guy because they don’t understand the market. They don’t understand what consumers are wanting. Consumers want traceability, they want accountability of the manufacturer. Um, they want to know that the manufacturer thought enough about them as a consumer to trace and track everything associated with that product. I call it a vehicle. So with that vehicle, you know, we take the time to trace all of those elements so that we can manage that customer’s experience. How in the world can you manage a relationship, you know, an extended relationship over time with a consumer if you don’t know how to be able to get consumers the parts and you don’t know what the failures are going to be of those parts and you don’t have all of that stuff in a database where you can talk to customers about it.
AW | 23:26 – I think one of the challenges that customers face in choosing e-bikes, and, and I would imagine one of the challenges you’re speaking about in terms of maintenance is that the industry in terms of service has really bifurcated itself into analog and digital bikes. There’s a lot of shops who won’t touch an e-bike and vice versa. I remember test driving a Van Moof, which was like a closed loop system, beautiful bikes, very affordable and like, but it was very tech oriented. It everything connected with your phone. But one of the reasons I didn’t buy one was they said, all service is free, but you have to bring it to one of our Van Moof dealers. And to me that seemed like a, if you were out in the middle of nowhere and your bike breaks down, you want to bring it into a local bike shop and have them fix it. Like, I was like, well, how many Van Moof dealers are around? They were like, there’s like two or three in northern California that didn’t seem like that was going to be super convenient if I was stuck on the side of the road somewhere. So you, you mentioned that your bikes are, they’re not just an electrified traditional bike. So how would a consumer deal with getting stuck on the side of the road and being able to come into any bike shop and getting somebody to help them out?
BK | 24:51 – So we believe one that you design and engineer an experience. So all of our bikes go through a full battery of testing. Typically when a manufacturer puts a bike through a test, one test is done per bike. We take one bike and put it through all the tests. So we want to test the entire bike to complete failure. So that’s a, that’s an automotive technique in which the systems and subsystems are tested and validated. So one, we know when the bike’s going to fail and that’s engineered in. So to your point, this is not a bicycle that you put electric components on it. This bike is specifically designed to go through a consumer’s lifetime and experience and should only have to replace brake pads and tires for the usable. So we have a three year bumper to, I call a bumper to bumper tip to tail warranty. Um, again, maintenance of brake pads and tires aren’t covered, but pretty much everything else is lifetime on the frame.
AW | 25:44 – But if you pop a tire, you can go into a regular bike shop.
BK | 25:47 – With a tire, you go into a bike shop and get your tire patched, right? So again, it’s it, most bike shops will do non-electrical components on replacements like tires, right? Tires are the number one thing that fails. If I can come up with a pop proof tire that’s affordable and has a good experience, I’m going to tell you we will have one. And if I can come up with a way to break the bike without having brake pads, we’ll do that as well. So we think that is what consumers want. Remember we flipped over from 60,000 to 2 million e-bikes. The customers who are buying those, they’re not mountain bikers, right? They’re not going to change their chain ring and they’re not, they’re not going to do any of that stuff and they’re not going to tolerate having to do it. They want an experience.
AW | 26:31 – They don’t have their own toolkit that they’re traveling around with like a, a cycling enthusiast.
BK | 26:37 – Yeah. And, and so, so again, that is, so that channel of distribution is a car dealer. So we’re not going to sell E-mountain bikes because those are very technical sales. I love them, but that’s not going to be our market. Our market is the commuter. The second market that we have is cargo and delivery. So cargo and delivery vehicles and replacing those vehicles, cargo and delivery bikes. That’s a, that’s our second segment that we’re going to be approaching here this year. Um, and again, all those fleet vehicles who deliver today, they’re all sold through car dealers. So those same fleets, those same dealerships are calling on those same fleets to sell them now a cargo bike versus a, versus a regular versus a regular cargo van, um, for various usage cases. Back to your other question. So the dealer’s responsible for taking care of the customer. We’ve got a logistics network for service and things like that. Some of our dealers already have service vans that they have on the road today to do remote service, which is a huge trend in automotive. Wonderful thing. They can also sell, deliver and service e-bikes. So again, it just, it allows the dealer, he’s driving the vehicle out anyways. Why not improve the revenue per minute while the dealership employee is running around?
AW | 27:54 – Bill Klehm is the CEO and chairman of eBliss Global. Bill, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
BK | 28:00 – Thank you very much. Enjoyed it.
Narrator | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Moby, Harry Manx and Kevin Breit. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
As election season kicks into high gear, it can be a challenge to talk about anything else but the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. This week on Sea Change Radio, we succumb to that temptation as we turn to the second half of our discussion with political analyst Jared Yates Sexton. Then, we dig into the archives to hear from Lauren Kim, a born-again Christian environmentalist who volunteers for an organization called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Jared Yates Sexton (JYS) | 00:16 – I don’t think anyone should give him any space to discuss anything. And quite frankly, I think by giving him the trappings of interviews and space on networks or whatever, it normalizes something that is inherently abnormal and dangerous.
Narrator | 00:33 – As election season kicks into high gear, it can be a challenge to talk about anything else but the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. This week on Sea Change Radio, we succumb to that temptation as we turn to the second half of our discussion with political analyst Jared Yates Sexton. Then, we dig into the archives to hear from Lauren Kim, a born-again Christian environmentalist who volunteers for an organization called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:20 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Jared Yates Sexton. Jared is a political analyst and he is the host of the Muck Rake podcast. And his online writings can be read at dispatches from a collapsing state. Jared, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Jared Yates Sexton (JYS) | 01:33 – Hey, Alex, it’s great to see you.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 – So, we were talking about trying to get local elections higher on people’s radar. Some of the things I would add to the points that you’ve made in addition to caring about your school board elections and all these other smaller elections than the President, it’s important to think about politics in a less abstract way. If we can think about how it affects not just yourself personally. I, I’m privileged and I will be okay if Donald Trump gets elected. I’m horrified by the prospect of it, not for my own fortune, but for the fortune of the world and, and the people who can’t afford to have him be in charge. And we feed into that in, in our media questions like, politician, A, how are you gonna please black voters in Georgia by giving them things that black voters in Georgia care about? What, why, why do we have to slice and dice our issues into demographics that way?
JYS | 02:33 – Well, I, want to make a few points because you’ve brought up, uh, a lot of good, important issues that I think we need to get into. First things first, I’m a white dude who used to live in Georgia. I don’t live in Georgia anymore. My wellbeing and my family’s wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of black people in Georgia. And what I have been taught, and this is a larger thing, I want to point out, we’re in a political crisis. We’re in a democratic crisis. We’re also in a spiritual crisis. We’re also in a mental health crisis. And here’s the reason why, since the 1980s, we have been absolutely bombarded and abused by this idea that the only thing that matters in the world is what you get and whether or not you are able to have wealth and comfort and safety, right? And, and by the way, it’s been used against us completely. It’s alienated us from each other. Everyone says, oh, it’s social media, it’s tv, it’s whatever. No, it’s not. Those things have built off of a larger idea, which is that neoliberalism tells us, you are alone. You are in danger. Take care of yourself. Right?
AW | 03:38 – Tax cuts has been one of the most obvious go-to things for the Republican party for 50 years. It’s like you care about taxes being lower, right? And then let’s just feed into that beast for decades.
JYS | 03:51 – And look what’s happened. And I want to be honest about this because this is like a deeper part of the politics that has become very obvious to me for a while. The idea that we are alone, that only your safety matters and other people are out to get you. Which by the way, conspiracists, the Far rights conspiracies is built off of this. But that conspiracy is throughout America, right? Those people over there are evil and they’re trying to take what is mine, right? That paranoia, this is a symptom of mental unwellness. We have been abused as people, as a culture, as a nation. We have been abused to the point where it’s like, well, you know what? I’m just going to take care of me, and like I’ll just, hopefully I’ll, I’ll keep it at the door, right? Which you notice, it’s like they are, the, the, the GOP is talking about everything from like disappearing gay and trans people to like, you know, taking away voting rights or whatever. And you keep hearing these things. It’s like, “Hey, we really want gay and trans people to be okay, but maybe that’s a little too extreme to talk about.” Maybe, that’s just what happens in authoritarian cycles. You sacrifice people because you’re trying to protect yourself, and it grows and grows and grows and grows. What we have to do as individuals is heal from the abuse that’s been heaped on us. And do not get me wrong, the abuse from the GOP has been overt, but from the system, which is, you’ll take what you get and you’ll like it, right? Like, you, you just be happy that you have the rights that are remaining. That idea is meant to tamp down expectations. It’s meant to keep us from working with one another. It’s meant to keep small d Democratic movements from growing in order to defeat this thing. We have to heal from that and recognize at long last that we’re all interconnected. If any group is being oppressed, if any group is being hurt, if any group is having the rights trampled on it is not isolated. It’s spreads throughout the interconnected body and it hurts everybody. A system is like an ecosystem. And what has happened now is that the inequality that has been there, it has thrown everything out of balance. It’s like having a, a, an aquarium where like, you know, the, the pH levels get outta balance and all of a sudden algae starts growing and fish, fish start dying. And that causes another thing. We’re connected in a way that we’ve been told that we aren’t, and it should be obvious at this point, but it’s not obvious to some people because they have been so abused and their worldview has been so soured and poisoned that it has led to this thing growing worse and worse and worse.
AW | 06:25 – Let’s shift gears for a moment to the media. You mentioned earlier how one of the examples from this week that the media kind of shifted the goalposts a little bit in that Dana Bash interview in CNN, where they asked Kamala Harris if she would consider putting a Republican in her cabinet. And she said, yes. And I read your tweets responding to that, saying you would never hear a journalist asked Trump whether he’d consider putting Democrats in his cabinet. So why do we always demand that Democrats move to the center? But Republicans can just be Republicans, they have to go farther and farther, right? That seems to be their M.O. from their party is like play to the base. You never have to placate the center.
JYS | 07:14 – So let me ask you a question, Alex. I’m going to give you a hypothetical. Do you, do you like sports at all?
AW | 07:18 – Love it. Yes. I’m a huge Boston sports fan.
JYS | 07:21 – Boston sports, okay, let’s go back. I’m sorry to bring up a hard memory. Let’s bring up Mookie Betts, okay?
AW | 07:27 – Yeah, that’s painful.
JYS | 07:28 – Okay. Mookie Bets is a fantastic baseball player who left for Los Angeles, where they paid him a lot more money. So let’s say that this player, we’ll just use a generic player, let’s say this player. It’s being reported on in the news and in the articles about the negotiations, the news media is asking the player…
AW | 07:47 – “Aren’t you under contract?”
JYS | 07:49 – Yeah. “Why don’t you accept a little less money?”
AW | 07:51 – “You’re making $30 million a year. Isn’t that enough?”
JYS | 07:53 – Yeah. “Aren’t you happy with what you have? Like, are you ungrateful?” And meanwhile, when they ask the, the, the team, they’re like, Hey, are you giving this all you’ve got? And they’re like, yeah. And they’re like, okay, great. What would you infer from the media’s stance in that negotiation?
AW | 08:10 – That they are more beholden to the owners than the players?
JYS | 08:15 – That is exactly 100% right? And so what is happening in this is that our media, and by the way, one of the, the smartest things the Republican Party and Donald Trump have ever done is christening our media as being leftist, right? They’re so left. No, they’re not. They’re centrist. Corporatist. The only thing that our media wants, and by the way, it’s owned by your Jeff Bezos’s. It’s owned by your NBC giant corporate conglomerates. They will talk a little bit about things that seem liberal or whatever, but meanwhile, what they care about is keeping the status quo in which the money keeps moving from the working in the middle class to the wealthiest people.
AW | 08:56 – I think it’s a little more nuanced than that in that I think a lot of the journalists are liberal leaning, but their marching orders are to get clicks and to get viewers.
JYS | 09:06 – So within that, and I’m glad you brought this up, because that is a nuance that needs to be talked about. The larger corporate ideology is to keep the status quo in which corporations and the wealthy continue to get more and more wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile, who are the journalists, the journalist. And by the way, you don’t get paid anything as a journalist anymore. It’s, you don’t get paid. It just don’t, you basically get underpaid. And who do you go and get? Who can afford to live in New York City and Washington DC on a small salary.
AW | 09:38 – Privileged people who have rich parents, generally.
JYS | 09:40 – Privileged people who have we wealthy parents. And by the way, Alex, it’s so weird. All of these people who are in the media now are the sons and daughters of people who used to work in the media, right? So basically these people, and by the way, some of them are really good journalists, some of them have a lot of integrity. But guess what, it’s almost impossible for a person who came from wealth and privilege and access to then look in the mirror and say, the system that created me and gave me this power is wrong. So like from the very top, the corporate media has this ideology, the people underneath them, they have their own stories and they interact over and over and over again. And the problem is, with this country, and this, I think a nice little bow on this. Our understanding of class mentalities is gone. We do not understand classes in this country. We do not understand economic persuasions and how they affect us.
AW | 10:35 – When you were at the convention in Chicago, how many times did you hear the middle class? I didn’t hear much about the poor. They was all about the middle class, because everyone considers themselves middle class.
JYS | 10:45 – And that is very, very notable for a specific reason. The Democratic party has become the party of the middle class.
AW | 10:51 – But the middle class is basically 90% of America in terms of self-identification, right? I think people who own $5 million homes in San Francisco consider themselves middle class.
JYS | 11:01 – So this is one of the weirder things about this, this moment that people don’t really want to wrestle with. The Democratic Party represents the middle class professional managerial people, people who went to college and are now middle managers. They managed logistics, content creation, you name it. They also have a bunch of like, sort of corporate tie-ins that, you know, fund a lot of their things. The Republican party has become the party, uh, and, and by the way, they’ve, they’ve captured, you know, a large part of middle America by creating a faux populistic base that by the way, is completely designed and directed by the people who screwed those people over in the first place. And now blames people of color and vulnerable communities and women, and you name it, they’re enemies.
AW | 11:43 – And immigrants.
JYS | 11:44 – And immigrants, and then small business owners, what used to be called burgers, who were people who used to have a lot of political power, who used to run cities and states and don’t anymore. Because larger corporations are the ones who sort of, you know, are at this next strata of wealth.
AW | 12:01 – And those burgers were the ones who led to things like prohibition and they led to women voting and they led to unions.
JYS | 12:09 – Like these were powerhouses.
AW | 12:10 – These were the smaller voices that actually added up to incredibly powerful voices.
JYS | 12:17 – Exactly. And that isn’t to say that they’re not wealthy. And I want to remind people how many January 6th Insurrectionists flew to Washington DC on private jets. They have an incredible amount of wealth, but they feel alienated from the Elon Musks of the world who have their own private space agencies, right? Meanwhile, there’s an army of right wing libertarian, just anti-democratic donors who basically run the Republican party and create project 2025 and all these other things. They’ve been undermining education, they’ve been undermining, uh, science, you name it. So what has happened is that things are so weird. It’s like looking at a gerrymandered map, you know what I mean? Where like the lines just don’t make sense. And so our politics doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore, which has discouraged people, which has made representation so hard and what has happened. You don’t hear people talking about working class people anymore.
AW | 14:55 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to political analyst, Jared Yates Sexton. So Jared, can you take an educated media member who’s gone to journalism school or has worked their way up from a local newspaper to become a, a columnist for the New York Times or whatever it might be. That person did not grow up thinking, okay, I’m going to have to interview Donald Trump as a potential presidential candidate. Let’s say you got Donald Trump to come on the Muckrake podcast. I think this would be a great idea for him, by the way. But let’s say he comes on next week. How do you prepare for something like that? What questions would you ask him?
JYS | 15:35 – I would not afford him the dignity of asking him a question. If he managed to get on Zoom or on a phone call, I would demean him. I would call him out for being a small, petty, pathetic man. I don’t think anyone should give him any space to discuss anything. And quite frankly, I think by giving him the trappings of interviews and space on networks or whatever, it normalizes something that is inherently abnormal and dangerous. So what I would do is I would be very respectful talking to his handlers, and I would have him for about 10 seconds. And I would spend that time by talking to him the way that somebody has always needed to talk to him.
AW | 16:13 – I would do something similar, but I would go after his inherited wealth much more. The fact that he’s never really made any money and that he’s, he inherited tons of money, hasn’t built on that and yet is considers himself a a, a great businessman. I I, because I think that would just get under his skin. That’s what I would want to do is get him mad.
JYS | 16:33 – I wrote about this back in 2016 and 2017 after the election, one of the biggest mistakes that the Democratic party has made is that they have portrayed him as a complete and utter loser. Right? Somebody who has just failed and had so many bankruptcies, guess who else has declared bankruptcies? Everybody in my family, everybody in my family has like declared bankruptcy at some point.
AW | 16:57 – But they didn’t inherit $400 million.
JYS | 16:59 –
AW | 17:23 – To me, that sounded almost like normalizing him like Mitt Romney. ’cause that was the argument against Mitt Romney.
JYS | 17:28 – And it worked out okay.
AW | 17:30 – Well, sure. But I think that Mitt Romney is a much saner actor in American politics than Donald Trump, right?
JYS | 17:37 – I think the way that you square that circle is this, you point out the fact that Donald Trump has lost and been a bigger failure than almost anybody. And look how the system held him up, right? You need to talk about the fact that we have a system that is designed once you are a white wealthy man to never, ever, ever let you fail. To the point of actually suffering, which for the record is the lesson. We need to learn from what has happened from all of his legal problems, which is you cannot take a powerful, wealthy white man and actually hold him accountable or else the whole house of cards falls apart. But the Democratic Party can’t make that argument right now. Alright?
AW | 18:13 – How about this? You frame it as “Donald,” because he hates being called Donald, “Donald, you inherited all this money. You’ve been able to own a USFL football team, you own casinos. You’ve done all these amazing things. You’ve been a TV star, you got to be president of the United States, and yet you’re constantly bitching and moaning. You’re never happy.”
JYS | 18:33 – So that is one of the larger things because Donald Trump and Elon Musk have done us an invaluable service, which is that they have made a point that wealth and power at the level that they have. It’s not about accumulating wealth and power, it’s about the fact that they are hollow, ugly, unhappy people. I find Donald Trump endlessly fascinating because he is a Shakespearean tragic character. Like this is a person who is not well, who has gone through their entire lives absolutely miserable. He didn’t even want to be president. He still doesn’t really want to be president.
AW | 19:09 – Except to stay out of prison.
JYS | 19:11 – Well, I I don’t think he can go to prison at this point. I think it’s because it’s like, it’s like the old idea. I know it’s not true. It’s the old idea that the great white shark can’t stop swimming. Like there’s a hole inside of these people that cannot be filled. And it doesn’t matter how much wealth, how many toys, how much power, how much fame, like it is a giant sucking hole. And it should be, it’s, it’s almost like, you know, it, it should be a warning sign to the rest of us that this entire thing, what we’re told, we’re supposed to want, what we’re told, we’re supposed to strive for, that it’s empty and it’s rotting and it’s poisonous. And that is something I would like to say to Donald Trump to his face.
AW | 19:49 – Well, I’m looking forward to him coming on the Muckrake Podcast. If it’s going to happen, you got to let us know.
JYS | 19:56 – If it does, I’ll let you know, but I, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
AW | 19:59 – Jared Yates Sexton, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JYS | 20:03 – Thank you, Alex.
AW | 20:19 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lauren Kim. Lauren is the financial secretary and a steering committee member for YECA – Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. Lauren, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Lauren Kim (LK) | 20:32 – Hi, thank you so much, Alex, for having me.
AW | 20:34 – Very interested to hear more about YECA. Why don’t you first explain the mission of your organization, if you will?
Lauren Kim (LK) | 20:42 – Yeah, absolutely. The mission of YECA, we exist to equip, empower, and catalyze young Christians to love God and our neighbors. And we do this through climate action in both in churches and communities. And we do this to create a more just and equitable and loving world. And I think we can sum up our entire mission statement through Micah six eight, which is do justice. So justice as an act, love, mercy, and walk humbly with our God. So we’re a faith-based organization. We’re nonprofit and we do creation care.
AW | 21:21 – What does that mean, creation care?
LK | 21:24 -So creation care is, in simple words, is environmentalism, but I think we differ from other environmental organizations because our motivation. So a lot of environmental orgs, they revolve around, um, scientists or people who are passionate about a certain issue, um, or tribal rights or something along those lines. Our interests and the reason why we care about the environment is because of Jesus and because he came down, we take the Bible seriously and in order to love our neighbors and be be obedient to the word, we try to advocate for climate action and care for the environment, um, because we’re mandated to and it helps people around us.
AW | 22:12 – So give us some examples of some of the climate action that your organization is involved in. How, how do you try to affect change directly?
LK | 22:21 – Yeah, so we actually have three pillars for our work, and we base everything around these three pillars. Um, so these three pillars are empowering, equipping, and accountability. So empowering. We want to empower young Christians, this generation to take action and advocate together. And we actually have a college fellows program, which we, where we train dozens of students across the country from various colleges, um, to be more effective advocates, and we help guide them, um, with a project on their, on their campus. So currently we have a cohort. We have a cohort every single year, and we have students from Notre Dame to Arizona State University. And they take on projects like aeroponics research, which is really cool to creating a sustainability committee on grounds to recycle or have compost on their schools. The second thing that we do is equipping young Christians to engage with their church communities. Church communities are a great place to have a conversation about creation care and we have various fellows programs. We have community fellows and climate fellows programs where we train people interested on how to talk about it, how to write about it, and to support them with whatever project or interest that they have in mind so they can best equip their communities. And then lastly, we hold political leaders accountable directly. Um, and we want them to enact like ambitious climate policy. So our national organizer will put out statements on whatever’s out there. Right now we have direct action. We’ll go to dc we’ll have fly-ins, we’ll bird dog, we’ll get up and talk to politicians. We’ll testify at the EPA, that’s something that I’ve done before. And we also believe in making disciples of disciples. And that means instead of directly being there and doing the work, equip others to advocate. So we sponsor students to go to CO, which is the Christian Climate Observers Program, and these Christians will be trained at COP and go to COP 28 or whatever conference is out there to talk about Christians who care about the environment.
AW | 24:55 – So the term evangelical Christianity, it gets folded in with fundamentalist Christianity quite a bit in people’s minds. Why don’t you explain how evangelical Christianity differs from fundamentalism and, and why the distinction is important when we talk about climate change and environmentalism.
LK | 25:16 – I’m actually really glad that you brought this up because I think every time I say I am part of YACA and I talk about being evangelical and caring about the environment, I think people get it twisted a lot because they, the word evangelical has become such a hot red button issue and it’s become so politicized. Let me start with the, the definition of evangelical. So the NAE, the National Association of Evangelicals, they define being evangelical as someone who takes the Bible seriously. They believe in the word of Jesus Christ. And it’s important for that person to encourage non-Christians to trust in Jesus and have faith in him as his savior. So two parts, believing in the Bible as the word, and then it’s important to them to tell others about it. So that’s what evangelical means. Fundamentalism is a movement within religion. So it can, there are fundamentalists Christians, there are fundamentalists Muslims and fundamentalists Hindus, and that basically means someone who is religious and they take their text literally. And the difference between someone who, and someone can be a fun fundamentalist evangelical or be evangelical and not fundamentalist, um, depends on what that person is. I would say overall, in my experience, um, a lot of evangelical churches that I’ve been into, they take the Bible seriously, but not literally. It’s important to take the texts meaningfully, but not but important to place scripture in context.
AW | 27:03 – So you’re not advocating for stoning people for adultery, et cetera.
LK | 27:07 – Yeah, I think it’s important to, like when you read a text, a lot of biblical texts are very scary at first or kind of throw you off, but you have to read it in the context of when it was written and by who it was written by. And I think that distinction is really important when talking about it because I think a lot of people when they think of evangelical, they think of someone who takes text literally and are way too legalistic about it. And that is different from who, what the definition of evangelical is in itself. Sure, there are evangelicals who are fundamentalists and they’re fundamentalists who aren’t evangelical. I don’t think those two terms are like mutual.
AW | 27:52 – The organization is Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, YECA. Lauren Kim, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
LK | 28:01 – All right, thank you so much, Alex.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to See Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Freddie Hubbard and Sharon Van Etten. To read a transcript of this show, go to see change radio.com stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others, and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability for Sea Change Radio. I’m Alex Wise.
So far this election season has been pretty dramatic, with candidate switch-ups, surges in fundraising and volunteerism, and a growing list of criminal charges laid against one of the candidates for president. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to political analyst Jared Yates Sexton about the state of the hotly contested race for the White House. We get his takeaways from the recent Democratic National Convention, look at the turnout disparity between older adults and youth voters, and discuss how to get all voters in this country more engaged in down-ballot races.
As kids, many of us read “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury and thought, “man, this book banning and burning stuff is terrible.” Apparently, though, not everyone felt the same. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to filmmaker Arthur Bradford about his most recent documentary for MSNBC Films entitled “To Be Destroyed,” which takes viewers inside efforts to ban books from a public high school in Rapid City, South Dakota. The film follows author and literacy advocate Dave Eggers, as he travels to the school district where his novel, “The Circle,” was pulled from shelves along with four other titles. Bradford tells us about why this topic felt so important to him, gives us a glimpse behind the making of the film, and discusses how the documentary reveals some larger truths about right-wing crusaders in this country.
Narrator| 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Arthur Bradford (AB) | 00:21 – I asked him about this notion that teachers were indoctrinating students, and he said, I, I don’t have time to indoctrinate students. And if I had that ability, I would use it to get students to turn their work in on time and to wear deodorant every day.
Narrator | 00:36 – As kids, many of us read “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury and thought, “man, this book banning and burning stuff is terrible.” Apparently, though, not everyone felt the same. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to filmmaker Arthur Bradford about his most recent documentary for MSNBC Films entitled “To Be Destroyed,” which takes viewers inside efforts to ban books from a public high school in Rapid City, South Dakota. The film follows author and literacy advocate Dave Eggers, as he travels to the school district where his novel, “The Circle,” was pulled from shelves along with four other titles. Bradford tells us about why this topic felt so important to him, gives us a glimpse behind the making of the film, and discusses how the documentary reveals some larger truths about right-wing crusaders in this country.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:50 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Arthur Bradford. He’s a documentary filmmaker and his latest film is “To Be Destroyed.” Arthur, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Arthur Bradford (AB) | 02:02 – Thanks, Alex. It’s good to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:05 – So I should tell listeners that Arthur and I are friends from high school, and I haven’t seen him since his debut film. How’s your news? First, tell our listeners what how’s Your News was all about. I thought it was terrific.
AB | 02:18 – Yeah, that was like over 20 years ago that that film came out. I had been working at a summer camp for people with disabilities and uh, I was teaching a video class there and we started doing these news programs, and one of the segments that kind of took off was having some of the campers, people with disabilities do man-on-the-street interviews. And so this movie, “How’s Your News?” was a feature documentary where we took five of the more outgoing people with disabilities from the camp and we drove across the country, uh, and they would interview people all along the way.
AW | 02:56 – And at the, at the screening that I saw of this, they were all in attendance as well, along with Francis Ford Coppola. It was a really cool event. And the kids, who are now adults, were very engaging and I highly recommend that film to folks. Can people rent it on Amazon still?
AB | 03:14 – It’s kind of hard to find, like there’s also different versions of it. So after we did that, you can find it on YouTube, honestly, that’s probably the best way. But we did a feature length film of it that was on HBO and then, years later, we also did, we started going to political conventions. So in 2008 we went to, um, no, 2004 we went to the political conventions. And then we did a short-lived series for MTV called How’s Your News? which is probably really hard to find, but if you look it up on YouTube, you could find it.
AW | 03:53 – Well, let’s turn to “To Be Destroyed,” which features Dave Eggers, a very well-known author and the founder of an important writing nonprofit called 8 26 Valencia.
AB | 04:07 – Right
AW | 04:08 – Just down the street from me here in San Francisco. One of the first people in your documentary is talking to a school board and, and talking about how he was a refugee from the, the liberal Hellscape of, of California. So I’m talking to you from the Liberal Hellscape of California while you’re in the liberal hellscape of Oregon.
AB | 04:29 Yeah, I think he called it, I think he called it liberal wasteland to be fair.
AW | 04:32 – Liberal wasteland, I apologize. So why don’t you first give us an executive summary of the story of “To Be Destroyed?”
AB | 04:40 – Yeah, sure. So just to set the stage, I had known, I’ve known Dave for a long time, in fact, that that screening you were at was, he was the host of that. Anyways, I had been kind of bugging him to do a documentary about anything that he was up to because I just always find he, he’s always got interesting projects going. And, he sort of, out of the blue, he told me about this, what was happening in South Dakota, that his book, “The Circle” had been, um, put on a list of, there were five other books that got removed from the shelves. They had, they were part of the senior curriculum. They were optional reading. Seniors could read them and do a paper about them if they so choose. Um, this, this, uh, this outside group had identified the circle as an objectionable book. And so his book was removed from the shelves of the libraries and all the schools. And, uh, in, in a move that really like rubbed Dave the wrong way, they, the, the books were slated To, Be Destroyed, the school board, they didn’t want to like put them back out into the circulation, so they were just going to destroy them. And that really like upset Dave. And so he had made his book available to any students in Rapid City who wanted a free copy. He worked in conjunction with the local independent bookstore and said, just go to the bookstore. They’ll give you the book for free. So in that way, I think he distributed several hundred copies of his book in Rapid City that probably never would’ve, uh, gotten out there any in, in other circumstances. But then after that happened, the teachers in Rapid City, they invited Dave out to speak to, um, their classrooms. And that’s when I became involved. Dave said, Hey, I’m going out to Rapid City to talk with the students in the schools where my book was banned, and, um, we’re going to have a, like a meeting. And so I said, “Hey, that would be a great thing to film.” So I met him in Rapid City, and that’s how, that’s the start of this movie. It’s about what, what him talking to the students and the teachers in the place where his book was removed.
AW | 06:56 – And, and in terms of distribution, it was on MSNBC Films. Folks can also access it on YouTube. Is there any other way that you recommend people check it out, or is that the best way?
AB | 07:08 – Yeah, look it up on YouTube. It’s an MSNBC film, and, it was part of a series they have called The Turning Point. Um, and so it was broadcast on MSNBC, but the best way to see it is just look, find it on YouTube. And it’s a 30 minute documentary. And, I hope it’s like entertaining and also informative.
AW | 07:30 – It is. And, and I want to dive into some of these characters that you interviewed for the film. First, let’s talk about this older woman who she was kind of the, I forget the organization she was attached to, but she said this was like a global movement to stop Marxism and indoctrination of the L-G-B-T-Q agenda. Why don’t you first explain who this woman was and how she is able to affect change in her community?
AB | 08:01 -Yeah. Her name was Florence and what, what we had found, it’s a really interesting story, and I think, I think it’s a kind of story that has repeated itself in school districts all across America. I think it started during the pandemic. Parents, I think understandably had a lot of issues with the way their schools handled the pandemic, and they were upset with their local school boards, and a lot of school boards got completely overhauled, and there were opportunists, in that moment. And, they saw a chance to o overhaul the school board with people with an, an agenda beyond improving their response to the pandemic. And one of that, one of those was they really, Florence was part of this movement. There, there’s a lot of people in America who believe that there is like a left wing conspiracy to indoctrinate kids, and they’ve taken over our schools and they are, um, trying to teach, trying to convert them to be, uh, highly sexual, gender fluid and, and all, all of the, all of these evils that they want to protect their kids from. But I really wanted to talk to these people. I really wanted to understand, I wanted to talk most of all to the school board members who had voted to remove Dave’s book. Because like, like to be clear, Dave’s book, um, the circle is, it’s not, uh, it’s not a very controversial book, really. It’s, it’s about a tech dystopia has two short paragraphs with, of like really awkward sex scenes.
AW | 09:34 – And, and as Eggers explains, that’s kind of the point, is like, he wants these sex scenes to be reflective of what a, a crazy new tech world we live in. You know, like the, the stimulation reaches a certain number on this, the stimulation index or something, right?
AB | 09:49 -Yeah. The only way you could find them objectionable would be to read them completely out of context and think that they were required to be read by young children or something like that, which really wasn’t the case. It, um, and, uh, so any, anyways, to get back to Florence, she was a member of, she was someone who would just go to the school board meetings, which we did. We went to a couple school board meetings, and they were, they were, it was a pretty hot debate, like you’d have people getting up. A lot of times they were people not from the community. That was what was a little bit weird about it, is that they, a lot of the people who are shouting the loudest about the books that are being taught to kids in public schools are people who do not have children in the public schools. A lot of them don’t even have children themselves. Like Florence had no kids who were in the South Dakota public schools. I think she may have been a mother, but her kids were, she’s an older woman. And, um, but she, she just really believed that there was a, there was like a nefarious danger afoot in America and the teachers were indoctrinating kids, and they were, she used the word apostles. She said they were trying to convert apostles for their movement. And I think she really believed it. And I was interested in talking to her. I didn’t think she was a evil person at all. I thought she was a, well-meaning, if not like, pretty misinformed woman, you, any, I’m sure whoever’s listening to this podcast is like, aware. Like there’s, that, that’s just a thing that happens in America and media right now, is that trying to stoke fear. And so I think that happens a lot. And especially in, um, right now in, in rural communities in America, they, they see horrific videos of the Democrat cities, and they think that that is all coming their way and they need to protect, especially their children from it. And I, I think it, it’s unfortunate and, but I, I was curious about it. I wanted to know more because, and I thought, I thought Dave traveling from the liberal
(Music Break) | 13:19
AW | 14:00 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Arthur Bradford. His latest film for MSNBC is “To Be Destroyed.” So Arthur, you’re talking about this woman in the film, Florence, who is espousing some of her beliefs that I’ve heard echoed elsewhere, right? In the, you know, project 2025 about abolishing the Department of Education on a federal level. And that’s, this is not a woman who probably knows a lot about policy, but that has gotten into her brain is like, we need the states to decide that. But as we’ve seen when Roe v Wade gets overturned, we’re just going to go into our little bubbles and you can go to a red state and you can get your red content. And that seems to be the hope for them is like we can find these little oasis away from the gay agenda or the, the liberal wasteland of San Francisco and all of these things, the Marxism, I don’t think this woman, Florence has probably read a lot of Marx, I’m guessing
AB | 15:03 – Yeah, she does. She says it’s the Marxist agenda. I think that’s what she starts off saying. I, what I do want to say is like, I do think there’s like a legitimate discussion to be had about what books could, uh, are appropriate to teach in school. You know, I, I don’t, I think in this case, these were optional books that were, uh, for the senior curriculum, and I think the teachers were using good judgment about how they were taught. But I do, I don’t think it’s such a, I like, I think that, you know, as, as liberal progressives, um, sometimes we make a mistake by assuming that everybody who brings that up is, is doesn’t have, you know, that it’s not a legitimate discussion. Like I do think, I do think it’s like parents’ rights are a real thing. Like I don’t think there’s anything wrong with parents wanting to have a say about their kids’ education. And, I just think, I think the fact is most parents trust teachers. Like that’s the fact, like what was actually happening in Rapid City was a very small minority of parents were having an overreach about what the majority of the kids were, were learning. I do think parents’ rights are real. I just don’t think they’re, they’re the way that some of these people perceive them to be.
AW | 16:19 – And I think the students that you interviewed in To, Be, Destroyed make a much better case for being able to read whatever books they want than you or I could make. They distilled the issue quite well, if you can rehash some of the student responses to your questions.
AB | 16:38 – Right? Yeah, I found that, that they were the, the best spokespeople for this whole debate was that the students in Rapid City, um, Dave had invited, uh, some of them to speak. And so, and we did interviews with some of those students as well, and they spoke really eloquently about how, you know, they were old enough to, like, in South Dakota, a senior in high school is, is old enough to legally be married. And so why, how could, how could that student not be given access to a book in school that describes, you know, having sex or something? And I just seem like a very sensible thing.
AW | 17:15 – And the, the people that are pushing for those younger ages in marriage are the same people who are, who are pushing for these book bannings generally.
AB | 17:24 – Yeah. I, we worry sometimes like, it, I have two daughters who are in high school right now, and I, I, of course I worry about, you know, their experience and, and you know, I don’t want them to be exposed to something that is, that is, I don’t know, going to hurt them in any way. But I think that ultimately the other, the other group of people that were, I thought were really great spokespeople for this issue were the teachers themselves. You know, I think what I think was unfortunate is that the teachers were being demonized in this community. They were, they were being made out to be like these evil indoctrinated. And, um, and there’s this one teacher, uh, in the, uh, Sean Bradley, uh, who he has probably my favorite line in the film is like, I asked him about this notion that teachers were indoctrinating students. And he said, I, I don’t have time to indoctrinate students. And if I had that ability, I would use it to get students to turn their work in on time and to wear deodorant every day. Um, and I thought that was just a great line. It’s like, yeah, teachers don’t have that much, you know, I, they, it would be awesome if they did have that much influence over our kids, but they, it’s kids will do what they want, you know? They, they really will.
AW | 18:35 – Yes. Especially when we’re talking about high school students, they have the ability to think for themselves. And we both have daughters in high school, but I think we lose a lot of arguments to our daughters. They know what’s, what my daughter reads voraciously and is a good critical thinker. And I’m not worried about any book that she reads that will somehow damage her long term. Like if she doesn’t like the book, then I think that’s a learning, uh, life lesson in and of itself.
AB | 19:04 – Yeah. For me, my, I have my two daughters. I would love them to read any book, honestly. Like they, they spend a lot of time on their phone. And I think it’s sort of ironic that there’s all these arguments going on about books because the, the books are not the most influential media and our kids’ lives. They, it’s, it’s all they, they can, they can see much more objectionable content on their phones.
AW | 19:28 – Right. And you have a librarian on in the film as well who says, I just want kids to read. And she sounds almost exasperated by it, and you can understand like, she’s just trying to do her job, which is turn people onto the magic of reading,
AB | 19:43 – Right? Yeah, yeah. That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. That librarian, it was interesting because she, it was almost like she, we, we found out that like part of the, the, the sort of wedge the seed of this, of the issue, it had been the, the covid restrictions. But then also, um, this one family, I was a police, a policeman in, in Rapid City, was upset that his daughter was learning about, um, like, like she had been recommended a book in the library that had, uh, it was a graphic novel, um, about, um, and it had a, a depiction of the black, the Black Lives Matter protest. And, and it was just learning about it. May I imagine it probably did show them in a positive light. But, I think that father perceived that the school was teaching his daughter daughters who hate him, that that was, we have him, that he, it’s his speech that opens the film. And, and I, as a father, I can understand the distress that you would feel if your daughter came home from school and, and said that whatever I was doing was evil or something like that. But I think, you know, I think it’s a lot to place that upon this poor lib librarian who was just trying to get that student to read.
AW | 21:00 – I also think it’s not giving teenagers enough agency.
AB | 21:06 – Yeah.
AW | 21:07 – Like, I mean, if we were talking about a 6-year-old who comes back from first grade and says, you know, daddy, they say that, you know, police are bad and Black Lives Matter is about police brutality. And I could understand the, the sensitivity there, but this is a 17-year-old student who’s obviously, if they’ve been on their phones at all and are not banned from social media or the news or has any kind of access to the internet, they’ve heard of police brutality and things like the killing of George Floyd.
AB | 21:37 – Yeah, exactly. I think that’s, that’s exactly right. And I think, you know, sometimes I think the schools are getting blamed for, uh, parents’ distress over, um, you know, their inability to control what their kids are seeing online, you know, which I do, which I do think is an issue in America. I do think it’s a, I I don’t, I, I’m way more concerned about, um, my daughters the time they’re spending on, on social media than I am about any books they’re reading. I think the big force also behind this, this nationwide desire to kind of overhaul school boards, a big force in that is this, um, is this, uh, account libs of TikTok. Um, that I’m sure you probably heard of that, right?
AW | 22:22 – No, no, sorry.
AB | 22:23 – Oh, well, that’s an, that’s just a conservative run account. It’s also on Twitter, but it just, it just, uh, curates videos of, of liberals, especially they, they really love like getting, um, teachers, uh, who have TikTok accounts and, and are sort of ranting liberal teachers on TikTok ranting about gender and, and things like that. And it, they take stuff out of context and it just has caused – I think there’s, there’s like this fear of like this liberal takeover of our schools, um, I, that that’s just a real thing. And they’re trying to, they think they’re just pushing back on it.
(Music Break) | 23:04
AW | 24:02 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Arthur Bradford, his latest film for MSNBC is “To Be Destroyed.” So Arthur, the idea of books being destroyed is pretty unconscionable in 2024 to me.
AB | 24:21 – Yeah, I think, and, and you know what, the, what I’d like to say about like, what I like about this film and, and if you get a chance to watch it, is that it starts with that, that sort of like alarming fact of, of, of books being slated, To Be Destroyed in Rapid City, and this feeling like the, the teachers are kind of under assault there. Um, but then Dave goes to this town and then we revisit them, about six to eight months later. And, um, the community really had taken a stand, like that it didn’t really what the two, the, at this point now, that that same school board that voted to restrict those books, they almost all got voted out. They, they had been voted in with a very small number of votes. Like it was some, like an, like, it was something like, and I don’t know the exact figures, but it was just hundreds of people who had voted. And so the number of votes that they had had gotten to be in the school board were, was very low in the first place. And then they, once people started paying attention, they were voted out. And those, the, those books that were, those books were actually never destroyed. They, they, um, they were slated, but the community didn’t want that to happen. They didn’t want to be known as a community that burned books. And I think if you go to Rapid City now, you would find, um, an empowered sense amongst the teachers that they’re not, they’re not going to stand for that.
AW | 25:56 – And I think that’s a template that can be replicated and has been replicated elsewhere in similar situations. Talking about, you mentioned how Eggers this book, suddenly when you tell teens that they can’t read something, what are they going to want to do? They’re going to want to read the book. So it was probably great for his sales in Rapid City, right? I mean, he wasn’t selling the books, but he wanted people to read his book. And so I bet, there’s probably a higher percentage of people who’ve read “The Circle” by Dave Eggers in Rapid City than most towns in South Dakota. I’m venturing to guests and, and that that backfires everywhere, where you try to take over a, a school board and put in draconian puritanical policies, people are going to pay attention. They’re going to get voted out by people who actually are for the majority of this country that believes in freedom and, and the right to, to read whatever we want to read. Now, I’m not dismissing that these parents’ concerns are not legitimate, but I do think that the method of strong-arming people into limiting what their kids and other people’s kids can read is a very slippery slope.
AB | 27:10 – Yeah. And, and I think that most Americans, the fact is like most Americans are absolutely against it. You know, I think what, what, what you would hear that the argument from the other side I think you would hear is that these books are not being banned. They’re just being kept out of the schools. Um, but I think that I do agree. It’s just a slippery slope. I I don’t, I I think I, I, I honestly think if you could, if you could ever get the two sides in a room talking, you know, calmly and, and maybe in a mediated way, I think there’d be a lot of common ground. I, I, I really do. I don’t think it’s an unsolvable issue at all.
AW | 27:47 – Well, it’s films like yours that really help solve the issue in that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The film is “To Be Destroyed.” Arthur Bradford, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
AB | 28:00 – You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the David Grisman Quintet, Bo Diddley and Wilco. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
As the dog days of summer shorten, and our vacations wind down, we dig into the Sea Change Radio archives to revisit two climate-related conversations. First, we discuss the issue of a warming planet with Andrea Thompson, a science reporter and associate editor at Scientific American. We look at how people and policymakers are trying to cope with the rising temps and examine how different parts of the globe are being affected. Then, we speak to David Messina, the CEO of Rumin8, an Australian-based startup that is hoping to transform the cattle industry. The company’s main product is a lab-grown feed additive that is designed to significantly reduce methane emissions in ruminants like cattle and sheep. We discuss the problem that Rumin8 is trying to solve and talk about the company’s business strategy and hurdles it faces.
This article and podcast Andrea Thompson on Extreme Heat + David Messina of Rumin8 appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
For many of us, the holiday season presents an opportunity to spend some time thinking about people less fortunate than ourselves. This week on Sea Change Radio, we spotlight a story of hope, determination and redemption. Our guest is Christine Yoo the director and producer of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life which takes viewers into the San Quentin Prison Marathon and its 1000 Mile Club. We learn about the inspiration behind the film, discuss the challenges of long distance running behind bars, and look at what the film reveals about our prison system and the effect it has on millions.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Christine Yoo (CY) | 00:23 – There were a lot of people there with brothers or fathers or mothers in prison, or their kids in prison too. It’s a cycle that is self-perpetuating.
Narrator | 00:38 – For many of us, the holiday season presents an opportunity to spend some time thinking about people less fortunate than ourselves. This week on Sea Change Radio, we spotlight a story of hope, determination and redemption. Our guest is Christine Yoo the director and producer of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life which takes viewers into the San Quentin Prison Marathon and 1000 Mile Club. We learn about the inspiration behind the film, discuss the challenges of long distance running behind bars, and look at what the film reveals about our prison system and the effect it has on millions.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:38 – I am joined on Sea Change Radio by my high school classmate, Christine Yu. Chris is the director and producer of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life. Christine, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Christine Yoo (CY) | 01:51 – Hey Alex, how are you? Glad to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 – First, why don’t you give us a brief synopsis of 26.2 to Life, and then I want to dive into how you came about the project because it’s, it’s really a labor of love. It took six years, right?
Christine Yoo (CY) | 02:07 – Yeah, absolutely. Six long, very long years. So 26.2 to Life takes you inside the San Quentin Prison Marathon. And it explores the transformative power of running through the lens of the prisons running club, which is called the Thousand Mile Club. And within this club that is organized by these volunteers who are elite marathon runners that go into the prison throughout the year to coach a group of incarcerated men, they train so that every November they run a 26.2 mile marathon entirely behind the prison walls, 105 laps around this prison yard. But more than running the film really explores, uh, what, what led these men to the starting line at San Quentin and highlights their rehabilitative journeys to, to define themselves, you know, to be more than their crime.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:12 – So how did you get interested in this project and how did you decide which characters you were going to follow as, as, as the story unfolded in front of you?
CY | 03:24 – So, my relationship with the prison system started more than 20 years ago. Um, I had a friend who was also fellow Korean American who was wrongfully convicted, and he was sentenced to 271 years in California state prison. Um, it really impacted me a lot. Um, I knew his whole family and how devastating it was for them. And he was somebody that I felt basically could have been my brother. You know, we had like the same type of family vacations, you know, grew up very similarly. Our fathers went to the same school in Korea. Um, and so because of his incarceration, I really started to wonder, uh, what does that look like if you know you’re going to die in prison? I mean, what does that act? How do you actually carry out a life? You know, because people still need to find a way to live. So what does that really actually look like for people? Uh, and the, so I guess basically the opportunity to explore that question came to me in 2016. I woke up one morning and I saw this magazine article in GQ and it said, this San Quentin marathon. And it just immediately captured my imagination. I’m not a marathoner, but I am a runner. Um, and so I could see how people could gain a sense of freedom or a sense of wellbeing, uh, by running. So I immediately contacted the coach. I did an online research to find whatever I could find. I reached out to Coach Frank, who lives in Novato, California, Marin County, and basically drove up to meet him immediately and, uh, told him why I was interested in this topic. And originally I was going to do it as a regular motion picture, you know, because that was more my background. I had more of a narrative background. Um, but he told me I had competition as well. So Conde Nast had also approached him to do a motion picture. Um, and I thought for sure, you know, he was going to end up going with them. But I just kind of left him and I just said, look, you know, this is like a, a classic David and Goliath fight, but you know, they probably have 50 projects in development. I will, you know, devote myself to give all my concentration to this project. And, uh, you know, we all, we all know who won that fight in the end and I left back down to LA convinced that I am sure that I wasn’t going to get it. And then he called me up a week later and said that he wanted to go with me. And so I went into the prison for a half marathon event. That was like the first time I was going into San Quentin. And again, I was going to do this as a, like a regular movie. So I basically went in there with, uh, I got permission to go in there with a pad of paper and a, and a pencil.
AW | 06:36 – And then Was that with the help of Frank, or you had to go through the whole system independently?
CY | 06:42 – Yeah, so he got me gate cleared to go in with the volunteers to, to just observe a half marathon event. This was in 2016. So the minute I start walking down into the yard and they’re all gathering for the, you know, the start of the marathon, I mean, it felt very festive,
AW | 07:19 – Yeah. You get that feeling in the film, like people are really cheering each other on.
CY | 07:23 – Yeah. And I’m like, but wait, but we’re in a prison. You know, I mean, this is a really weird juxtaposition of feelings. And I wanted to explore that. And so then I just started talking with other guys, and over the course of the next few months I started talking with, uh, you know, of course different coaches and volunteers and guys who had been released. And I sort of just could not believe all of the things that I was hearing and seeing and felt that I needed to get outta the way and tell this, tell this story as a documentary. So that’s just kind of where it started.
AW | 08:00 – Yes. I, I thought it was very effective how you get into their stories a little later. But the first reminder that this isn’t just a fun feel good story is they’re starting a marathon, then all of a sudden there’s a, a lockdown or a yard down and, and also you’re doing an interview with somebody a few minutes later in the film and they’re like, oh wait, that’s an alarm. I have to sit down. And they’re like, it’s almost like a timeout for a, an elementary school kid or something like that. It felt so infantalizing to me that somebody I, I can understand the, the protocols that go into that, but it, it was a stark reminder that this is not just the YMCA’s annual turkey trot.
CY | 08:40 – Yeah, sure. And then, yeah, so when these alarms go off, and it could be for any reason, you know, any outbreak that might be going on in the prison or some medical alarm or something like that. And sort of what accentuates it even more is that as an outsider, as a free person, you have to remain standing, you know, so also that guards can see, uh, immediately who is a free person and who is incarcerated.
AW | 09:06 – Wow, I didn’t realize that.
CY | 09:08 – That’s also why you wear different clothing too when you go inside the prison. So like the guys, they were blue, the guards, they were green. The new people that come in wear orange. So there’s a lot of colors that are just completely off limits to you as an outsider when you go in. So, you know, we always kind of made it simple and I always told people to wear all black, but there’s always invariably someone on the crew who doesn’t quite get the memo and shows up in blue jeans. So I got accustomed to keeping, you know, an extra set of sweatpants in the car
Music Break | 09:54
AW | 10:37 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Christine Yu. She is the producer and director of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life. So Christine, let’s talk about some of these people, some of the stars of the film and their journeys and view how running and the Thousand Mile Club affected their outcomes.
CY | 11:01 – I knew just from my own personal experience with running how running can make someone feel better, um, how after you do it, you always feel better about yourself. But what I didn’t really realize then, what I know now was really the impact of the running community to make personal and social transformation. Uh, so a lot of these guys, you know, they would tell me over and over that they started to run because, you know, they just wanted to lose weight or, uh, you know, get, get in, get in better shape or just, uh, do something healthy. But what happens is, you know, a lot of these people in prison, obviously, I mean, they are considered society’s failures, you know, who haven’t accomplished a whole hell of a lot in life. So what happens is that when they complete their first five miles, suddenly they’ve actually done something that they’ve never been able to do before. So what happens? They get a lot of confidence. And with that confidence then that they can go out then and do it inspires them to get their finished getting their GED or reconnect with family members or, you know, it leads to a whole host of other positive activities that, which is, I believe the reason why that out of all of the release members of the club, there is a 0% recidivism rate. Compare that to the national average, which is 67%, you know, after five years,
AW | 12:36 – Even with violent criminals?
CY | 12:38 – Oh yeah. Mo most of the people in San Quentin that I, you know, that I interviewed and that were participating in the film are considered quote unquote violent felons. Right.
AW | 12:49 – No, I mean that 67% recidivism rate, I know that homicide is, is a much lower recidivism rate than people assume.
CY | 12:58 – Sure, yeah. I mean, a lot of times with lifers, recidivism rates can be very, very low overall, you know, few percentage points. But that’s also because more than not, lifers end up spending at least a decade behind bars. And there is a lot of data that shows that as people get older, they age out of crime. You know, I mean, you don’t do the same things you did when you were 18 or 19, right? I certainly don’t. Um, and, uh, but those are the acts of course, that people are imprisoned and held accountable for, or, you know, what the prison system has been set up to hold them accountable for. But like the natural aging process, you know, people, people do age out of those behaviors. So, but that is why also mandatory minimum sentencing, which, you know, came in, um, during the tough on crime era, which is what has caused this whole ballooning of, uh, and created mass incarceration as we know it.
AW | 13:59 – How did your perception of the prison system change from when your friend was imprisoned to going through this journey with these incarcerated individuals over the last six years of making the film?
CY | 14:14 – Well, I think when my friend was locked up, I mean, I felt really powerless to do anything. I was incredibly depressed. How do you actually, how does an individual deal and interact with the prison system? You, you know, what actually, what can one individual do? But that is really why I felt that the story of the Thousand Mile Club was incredibly empowering and felt that that’s really why it needed, needed to be seen and, and shared with, with more people. Uh, coach Frank Rona, uh, you know, the head coach, he began coaching at the club, uh, in 2005 and over a few years he started gathering a community of other runners who had come in to, um, help him coach. And over this time, I mean, now the club has been going, you know, on for 18 years. Uh, there is a whole community of people that has been created both inside that now has this ripple effect and continuity for people on the outside. Which again, I think that’s why that it contributes to the 0% recidivism rate. Um, and it really showed me what one person can do. ZHe didn’t go into this as any kind of social change maker or even a prison advocate in any way. I mean, he was always actually like a voting Republican, though, you know, criminal justice and, and prison issues is, is something that people on both sides of the aisle can a lot of times get behind for, for very different reasons. But it is an area of commonality. But, you know, I think just through his humanity, uh, he was able to, uh, bring people into this through his really sheer passion for running. Uh, and, um, you know, not only have the men been, uh, transformed, but I would say the volunteers have all been equally transformed by the experience. So it really was an empowering story for me to be able to really highlight the power of what one individual can do to create community and ultimately change. I mean, from the ground level up in the most real of ways.
Music Break | 16:44
AW | 17:45 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Christine Yu. She is the producer and director of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life. So Chris, let’s talk about race a little bit. In the film, you explain how the prison population is kind of self-segregating in some ways. There’s the Native American group, there’s the Latino group, there’s the, the white skinheads. How do you think the Running Club was a way to kind of bring people together within that population? And on a larger societal sense, what kind of conclusions can one draw about an activity, a community driven activity in any kind of non in-prison format?
CY | 18:27 – Well, first off, you know, prison by Nature is a highly segregated society. You know, that’s how they splinter off into groups and, and organize that way. I mean, people don’t have to stay out of their, stay within their race. That’s like an unspoken but actually spoken kind of rule of how it all operates. However, in a place like San Quentin where there are tons of, you know, different rehabilitative, um, programming available for people, um, within the groups there’s usually, um, mixed races. You know, so people from all different backgrounds, um, participate in these self-help groups and athletic programs. However, you know, a lot of athletic programs, similarly, there are, um, team sports. And so a lot of the team sports also break down into our self-segregated. Um, but I think the beauty of running is that it is an individualized sport. And so probably, I mean, out of the athletics, it is the most integrated club in the prison. Now, when people leave these clubs, leave these groups, they still go off and they are self-segregating. But in a place like San Quentin where again, there are so many programs, you do see a mix of races, you know, I also volunteer at the Media center. You know, that’s what I actually really loved again about the Thousand Mile Club, is that it really showed me that this is a group of people that have managed to transcend prison politics to, you know, be together in community. And I thought, wow, you know, if these guys can do it, you know, what’s going on with us out here in the free world? And San Quentin is, is unlike any other prison in the state of California, if not perhaps the world, you know, they call it the Harvard of Prisons,
AW | 20:30 – And not even thinking about the beautiful view that they get. I mean, it’s an amazing piece of property. And then there’s lots of programs like Ear Hustle is the most famous publication now, uh, from coming from this until 26.2 till life came out. But it seems like a very highly functional place as prisons go.
CY | 20:50 – Yeah, as prisons go. I mean, it’s literally right on the bay in the Bay Area. And so when you walk from the front gate to the Sally Port entrance into like the, into the prison facility itself, it’s about a quarter mile strip along the bay. And it’s probably one of the most beautiful walks.
AW | 21:13 – Yeah. No, it is, it’s kind of why, one of the reasons why I think Alcatraz is so iconic because it’s like, wow, these people are stuck on this island and they get and they have to just look longingly at this beautiful city.
CY | 21:27 – But on the other hand, you know, like a mile away, at least they get a view, a good point. And there are a lot of places, places they don’t at all, you know, I mean Mm-Hmm.
AW | 22:02 – But you give a glimpse into the cells and that’s a pretty good reminder that this is no Hilton.
CY | 22:09 – No, it’s no walk in the park. And that was very important for us to show because we do spend a lot of time out into the yard. And I did not want people to think that, Hey, these guys just get to like run around and, you know, spend all day running. You know, they do go back to the reality of being in four by nine cells and it’s two people. It’s uh, basically imagine you and another guy living in your bathroom.
AW | 22:38 – Yeah. It is just, it seemed very cramped. Even just watching it, it made me feel a little claustrophobic. I can’t imagine what it’s like. And this is not considering solitary as well.
Music Break | 22:53
AW | 23:26 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. And I’m speaking to Christine Yu. Her new film is 26.2 to Life. Do you think that their participation in the Thousand Mile Club, the ones who whose sentences were commuted, do you think it it accelerated their release?
CY | 23:43 – You know, when people take up the sport of, of long distance running, traces of it end up going into all different areas of their life, you know, so the benefits are decreased anger, better sleep, teaching discipline and time management, learning to take on challenges, knowing that you can complete a goal a, a task. You know, there’s a phrase that you hear in prison a lot called people say hurt people, hurt people. because it’s a cycle of violence that perpetuates itself. You very quickly realize that most people are in prison because of systemic poverty, systemic racism, you know, usually people don’t have access to good education, have unstable family environments, drug addiction and drug addiction, you know, and they’re all interrelated. And a lot of that, again, has to do with, um, multi-generational incarceration. There was a lot of people there with brothers or fathers or mothers in prison, or their kids in prison too. It’s a cycle that is self-perpetuating. So, you know, a lot of people who are in San, Quentin are there to rehabilitate themselves, to strive for more, to strive for better for themselves. So they’re trying to break that cycle of violence for themselves and find new, a new way of life, you know, express through running. because you know, they, they’ll tell me, you know, the minute that you start running, suddenly you start caring about what you eat, what you put in your body. You don’t want to do drugs,
AW | 27:53 – The film is 26.2 to Life. Christine Yoo, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
CY | 28:00 – Thank you Alex for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Bill Withers, Bob Marley and Chuck Berry. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site. Or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Christine Yoo: 26.2 To Life (Re-Broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Most of us have never been there but according to a quick Google search, some of the things you might see at the bottom of the ocean include sea spiders, tube worms, and something called a blob sculpin. Add to that list: heavy equipment for mining rare earth minerals like cobalt and manganese. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, about deep-sea mining. We learn about this segment of the extraction industry, consider the environmental hazards, and examine why it’s largely unnecessary. We also take a look at the promise of growing rare minerals like perovskites in laboratories, and discuss the recent Sunnylands Climate Agreement between the U.S. and China.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Daniel Kammen (DK) | 00:25 – Cobalt as mined today, either in the Congo, where most, most of it comes from, or um, from the seabed, is hugely problematic and damaging.
Narrator | 00:37 – Most of us have never been there but according to a quick Google search, some of the things you might see at the bottom of the ocean include sea spiders, tube worms, and something called a blob sculpin. Add to that list: heavy equipment for mining rare earth minerals like cobalt and manganese. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, about deep-sea mining. We learn about this segment of the extraction industry, consider the environmental hazards, and examine why it’s largely unnecessary. We also take a look at the promise of growing rare minerals like perovskites in laboratories, and discuss the recent Sunnylands Climate Agreement between the U.S. and China.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:46 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Daniel Kammen. He is a Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley, and a former science envoy for President Obama. Dan, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Daniel Kammen (DK) | 01:57 – Thanks for having me back on. I really appreciate it.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:00 – Always a pleasure. I wanted you to summarize the white paper that you presented at COP 28 in Dubai. It was entitled, “Next Generation EV Batteries Eliminate the Need for Deep-Sea Mining.” So first, what is deep-sea mining and what’s the problem that it presents?
Daniel Kammen (DK) | 02:19 – So, deep-seabed mining is in my view, kind of one of the scariest crossover issues between the old energy economy and the new energy economy. And by that what I mean is that we’ve known about seabed mining for a long time. In fact, Howard Hughes was, one of the many ways he was famous was he constructed a boat, the Glomar Explorer that was ostensibly supposed to be harvesting these nodules of rare earth metals, manganese, cobalt, a variety of things from the sea floor. And they’re about the size of tennis balls or softballs. They grow very slowly, um, at low temperature and, and, and high pressure and he had this boat that was designed to go do that. But in fact, we now know decades later that the Glomar Explorer was actually a CIA front and it was a front to go and try to pull a sunken Russian submarine off the bottom of the ocean.
AW | 03:15 – This was not in the white paper, but this is very interesting
DK | 03:18 – It is very interesting. That’s right. So, so this is an example of deep-seabed harvesting being a front for essentially cold war. So we’ve known about there are these nodules on the ocean bed floor. They grow a fraction of a millimeter a year in size. They accumulate these, these materials. And the issue that intersects with the new energy economy is that with the rise of the need for materials for solar panels and in particular batteries for electric vehicles, a number of companies have been launched. They have names like the Metals Company, impossible Metals, and others arguing that we should be harvesting these materials from the seabed floor and we should be doing this because of our green consciousness, because we need these materials for the green energy economy. We need to get off fossil fuels. And so there is this weird dialogue going on where companies that are basically trying to strip the seabed floor the least understood, the least explored environment on earth. And arguably we know more about the dark side of the moon than the bottom of the ocean. Amazingly, they are, they, they’re saying we need them to harvest these materials. And while it’s true, we need materials, um, we hear about lithium and cobalt all the time. But, um, manganese and, um, germanium, other materials are important as well for the clean energy economy. What we don’t need is to destroy ecosystems to get them. And there are many reasons for that. While the demand for these rare earth materials, and by the way, they’re no longer, they’re, they’re neither rare nor earth, they happen to be metals on, um, you know, whether we mine them from the seabed floor or whether we mine them from traditional mines, or actually people are not talking about going to asteroids to get them in large numbers. These materials are important. However, we waste so much material today. We do not recycle. We are not doing a very thoughtful job at all in looking at lower impact materials to be the hubs of our batteries for our electric vehicles and elsewhere. And so that’s the backstory. Um, the one other element is that there is a organization based in Kingston, Jamaica called the International Seabed Authority. There self-appointed mission is to manage seabed resources. But unfortunately what they have proven to be now several years running is essentially a yes shop that is approving seabed mining permits whenever a country or a company tries to push for it. And so we have a really unfortunate sequence of events to quote Lemony Snicket, where a company is using the cover of Green Energy to promote something which is almost certainly hugely destructive in terms of strip mining. This very fragile ecosystem producing plumes of dust that falls back on the ocean floor that affects carbon sequestration. It affects very, very vulnerable deep water ecosystems including those so-called black smokers. Those things you see on National Geographic where we have these deep-sea hydrothermal vents covered with unusual life forms. All of those are at risk if we basically give permits for companies to put huge vacuum cleaners several kilometers down on the ocean floor and suck up all these materials. So the argument is one, do we need it? And this paper I’ll describe in a second, highlights the fact that we do not need it for several reasons. And two, how are we licensing a global collective resource, the international seabed waters for the profit of a few companies when in fact, A, we don’t need it. And B, the damage to ecosystems and the damage to the ocean is likely to be horrific.
AW | 07:21 – So from a business standpoint, can you maybe summarize the evolution of both deep-sea and land mining and how evolved those companies are in terms of market cap and, and the alternative to deep-sea mining is viable? Maybe you can kind of give us an idea of how viable that is.
DK | 07:39 – Right. So the companies that are proposing we do this strip mining of the ocean floor are new companies. They’re trying to leverage and take advantage of some of the oil and gas deep-seabed exploration and mining technologies. And they are cl they are touting a market in the billions of dollars, but very high capital costs because mining the ocean floor is not simple. It’s also out of sight, out of mine. So they know if they get permits, they will likely be able to go ahead for a long way before we discover what the damages have been. And that’s the deep-seabed angle. The other angle, of course, is traditional mining. And the claim from these new companies is, look, traditional mining is bad for human rights. We know that’s the case in many parts of the world, including Congo, which is a key source of cobalt. In fact, 70% of the world’s cobalt currently comes from the Congo. I’ve been down in some of those mines. There are issues of child labor, there’s environmental damages. And so traditional mining is, no, nothing delightful, but it’s an area where there is investment today. And it’s in also an area where better oversight, better certification, like we do for many products, um, like we’ve done for coffee and wine and various things, could play a not ideal, but a better role.
AW | 08:56 – Because it’s right there in front of us. At least it’s not as obscured as the dark side of the moon, let’s say.
DK | 09:01 – That is correct. Right. And so the paper that we released and that I spoke extensively on at the COP 28, the conference of the parties, the climate meeting in Dubai in uh, December, essentially said, look, there’s many aspects of this. One is to say we would like to see better certification of efforts to look at the Sea floor. In fact, what we called for was a moratorium on all exploration. And we now have 34 countries, including France and Germany and Mexico and many others saying we are not gonna permit deep-seabed mining and we call for a global moratorium. So that’s a good start. Um, but what we did in the paper was try to highlight the fact that this is not a environmentalist doom and gloom story where we’re saying, yes, we want clean energy, but no, we don’t want you to go get the materials for it. Far from it, what we highlighted in the paper was one interesting technological change, which five years ago was laboratory chemistry. And today is a key feature of battery technology and that is the current world leading battery technology for electric vehicles, for our cell phones, for our laptops is so-called lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries have lithium in them by name. Uh, they also have cobalt in them. And cobalt is exceedingly problematic for environmental and human rights reasons. In fact, it’s probably the worst conflict material on the planet today surpassing Leonardo DiCaprio’s blood diamond and other, you know, key stories in the past. So cobalt is in the crosshairs. What’s interesting about this new material lithium phosphate is that it does not involve cobalt. So it still involves lithium. Um, and lithium looked like it was a challenge supply side 10 years ago. Now with a little bit of exploration, we’ve discovered there’s lots of lithium in lots of places, not just in China and Bolivia, but in California, salt and Sea, in inland aquifers, et cetera, et cetera. So lithium was a crisis material. Now that crisis has gone away, but cobalt is, and what’s interesting about the pathway from laboratory chemistry of making better batteries without cobalt, these lithium phosphate batteries, is that over the last five years, lithium phosphate has gone from just a few percent of the world battery market to almost 20% led by companies like VW and Tesla that have announced the end of the use of cobalt and a switch over to lithium phosphate. And so in the article we really highlighted how little effort it took to come up with a sus a much more sustainable human rights and environmentally positive choice that didn’t just idle and sit around in research laboratories looking for a market. It was in fact very quickly up, uh, taken up so that now roughly 20% of the market is, is moved over to lithium pho phosphate. And we would like to see efforts like this becoming the lens through which we look at things like deep-sea mining to say, Hey, we don’t need that particular source of cobalt from the Sea floor. There’s not enough of it to matter and these other alternatives are cheaper and they’re better for what we all claim to want to do. And that is to make the energy transition a just transition where we don’t just go from hydrocarbon and fossil fuels to clean energy, but we do so in a way that supports human rights, environmental rights. And that argument as taking off. I mean, I got tons and tons of requests for comments for press events and we again, we’re seeing major electric vehicle manufacturers making that switch today.
(Music Break) | 13:07
AW | 13:38 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Dan Camon. He is a Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley. So Dan, we were talking about these deep-sea mining materials, these minerals. You mentioned how lithium ion batteries became less scarce and less of an environmental disaster over the last few years. Is it possible that that could also happen with cobalt or we have to find alternatives to it?
DK | 14:03 – No, I, I don’t think so. I think actually the point of our paper is that it didn’t take much research, both chemistry laboratory work and materials marketing for electric vehicles to recognize that if cobalt is the real problem element of today, that we can switch away from it with already known battery materials and actually lithium phosphate batteries, while they have a little less charge capacity, so energy storage capacity than lithium ion, they have other benefits in terms of their life cycle, the lack of this kind of heating overheating issue that we’ve seen, um, in lithium ion batteries, which is why you’re not supposed to put them into your luggage, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think there is a really positive path here.
AW | 14:48 – But is there a chance that cobalt all of a sudden becomes less scarce, I guess is the question?
DK | 14:54 – There is a chance, but, but the point is that cobalt as mined today, either in the Congo where most of it comes from or um, from the seabed, is hugely problematic and damaging. And so we might discover large supplies of cobalt elsewhere, such as in the mining tailings, meaning the waste materials from copper and other mines that has not yet been discovered. But what’s interesting is that it does not appear that cobalt is likely to be needed at all because the switch to other materials, phosphate phosphorus is very common. Lithium has gone from scarce to common. So there are much more sustainable materials available that give us essentially the same battery performance. And so there are certain materials like lithium where 10 years ago people thought this was going to be the true bottleneck with only China and Bolivia really having a significant supply. But we’ve now seen because of the interest in lithium, there’s been a real push to find in other places Chile just nationalized their lithium mines because they wanted to have higher quality oversight than they thought the companies could do. And in particular, phosphate is very common material. We use it for fertilizers, we access it in a whole variety of both mineral and bio waste areas. And so here’s an opportunity to solve a crisis before it happens in the sense that we do not need to grow massively the, the market for cobalt beyond where it is today. We can actually substitute it out of our supply chains and work towards what I would call this just transition, where we don’t want to abandon countries like the Congo. I work extensively there, but we want to work with them to access the materials that we do need, but in a way that respects both the environment and human rights. And as of right now, cobalt does not meet those criteria, whereas phosphorus, uh, phosphate does.
AW | 17:00 – So are there other angles we could approach this problem with Dan?
DK | 17:04 – Yeah, so there’s, there’s two routes. One is to find non-conflict sources of cobalt, and the other is to substitute away from cobalt. So far finding non-conflict sources of cobalt has not proven successful, largely because cobalt mining in the Congo is such big business and it’s big business where the US and China are competing. And so there’s a geopolitical angle and neither side wants to back away and sort of give the cobalt market to the other. So we could be harvesting cobalt from recycled materials, old cell phones, old electronics, et cetera, et cetera. Or we could be finding other sources. And so far we’ve not been successful in finding other sources of cobalt. However, the good news is that we are finding through the use of lithium phosphate, it may be actually easier to simply cut cobalt out of the supply chains almost entirely. For me, the challenge is no longer the material science. We know that works. We have big companies like VW and Tesla doing. So the real issue to me is that one does not want to abandon the Congo and say, well, you are a source of conflict materials, therefore we won’t work with you. The real issue is how can we assist mining and other efforts in these challenging parts of the world so that we pay a attention and maybe even a premium for non-conflict materials. Probably not cobalt, we probably don’t need it, but there’s other materials, germanium, tellurium, other things that are likely to be found in the same mines. And the question is, can we mine these with a much closer eye on human environmental rights than in the past?
AW | 18:49 – You mentioned blood diamonds earlier. I know that one of the emerging trends in the diamond industry are lab grown diamonds. Do you see a future where some of these battery materials can be grown in labs?
DK | 19:03 – I do. In fact, there’s a wonderful direct analogy and that is that one of the fastest evolving areas of solar cell technology is a material called a perovskites. And a perovskite is an entirely artificial material. So the only perovskite that exist today are manufactured in laboratories. We have a laboratory here at UC Berkeley, it’s called the Molecular Foundry. It’s a joint between uc, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And they can, they can manufacture perovskites. And so the interesting, you know, probably Nobel Prize worthy chemistry is can we come up with materials perovskites that are good solar technologies that themselves are only made up from relatively simple materials, lithium and other carbon, other light materials that are relatively easy to manufacture. And that would be an equivalent of going from conflict or blood diamonds to doing these lab grown. Because after all, a diamond is just pressurized carbon. You can actually make diamond in a little machine in your hand. It’s basically a little anvil. You turn a screw just with your hand pressure. It focuses that, um, that pressure down in a very small area and you can create tiny little diamonds yourself. And so there is an interesting example and the analogy between going to lab grown diamonds and these perovskites is actually a very direct analogy,
(Music Break) | 20:32
AW | 21:28 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Daniel Kammen. He is a Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley. So Dan, why don’t you give us the feedback that you received. We’ve kind of heard what your mission was to change hearts and minds over there. Was it mission accomplished? Give us your feeling on this issue and how it was received in Dubai.
DK | 21:50 – So I think with all environmental conflicts, you never feel like you’ve actually fully succeeded. You feel like the, the reward for good work is just ongoing vigilance. And so in the case of trying to work with manufacturers and researchers around the transition away from cobalt in batteries that we do need, one of the really heartening features is that since the climate meeting in December, um, we’ve seen a number of companies, some very significant like VW and now it appears Toyota saying they are going to move away from lithium ion, which involves cobalt to lithium phosphate, which does not. And I have no idea to what degree our report or press interviews or basic lab science played a role. But I’d like to think that that package of thinking that says we can be intentional about the materials we choose and one of our metrics can, and in my own personal view, should be based around the environmental and the human rights, higher quality materials. And so I, I think this report played a role. There’s a lot more work to go and I think that we’re going to find there’s other materials coming where we’re going to discover other sorts of challenges and that this is a recipe for thinking sustainability more than it is like a one-shot victory.
AW | 23:11 -You were asked by grist to grade COP and you gave it an incomplete because you said that the US-China Sunnylands agreement could reset the international climate investment and progress effort. Why don’t you explain what the Sunnylands agreement is and why it gives you hope?
DK | 23:28 – So the process of the US and China thinking hard about climate issues actually has a significant backstory. It goes back before the COP 21 meeting in Paris. And it came out of a really important dialogue between President Xi and President Obama when they agreed to a deal in 2014 that I would say opened the way for the positive outcomes of COP 21 in Paris. And that agreement was that the US and China should each reduce their emissions. China agreed to become carbon neutral in 2060, which in my view is significantly too late. And the US agreed to become carbon neutral at some point, but to dramatically cut emissions by a third by 2030. Even though we’ve gone from President Obama to Mr. Trump and now to President Biden, we have had a process where the US through the drop in price for clean energy, this new inflation reduction act are actually doing fairly well. Not as well as I would like, but the US is making significant progress. China too is making progress. China is the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries for electric vehicles. But China has not moved their carbon neutrality date forward. It still remains 2060, whereas President Biden has committed the US to a 2045 date. And that is in fact where we need these numbers to be. So all of that’s backstory to a meeting that was held between the chief US Climate negotiator, special presidential envoy for climate or spec. John Carey, my former boss at the State Department when I was signed envoy, and he was Secretary of State and Xi Jhu, his Chinese counterpart in November in central California at a very cleverly located place called Sunnylands. I think they worked hard to find that they came up with an agreement that the US and China need to work together. We have our differences around human rights and Uyghurs and around the wording and the Inflation Reduction Act. But the US and China agreed to again, work together. And the core of the agreement was that the globe should triple the amount of renewable energy installed by 2030. Right now, China is close to being on pace for that the US is not, and much of the rest of the world is quite far away. In fact, my lab just sent off a paper last week quantifying that China is actually closest to meeting this target, but no one’s really on pace for it. Now, if the Sunny Lands agreement is made serious, meaning the US and China put money into not only their own decarbonization at home like the US has done in the Inflation reduction Act, but I think more importantly the US and China work together to finance decarbonization in Africa, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, something we both could do that would be monumental. And what was exciting to me was the Sunnylands agreement was announced just a week before the Climate Conference in Dubai. They announced in San Francisco at the Asia Pacific Summit. But what was disappointing to me was that neither President Xi nor President Biden showed up at Dubai to say at COP 28, this is our new North Star, this is our new direction and we’re going to make it happen. Both of them decided that they had done enough. They met in person in San Francisco that was non-trivial. Um, but you know, leaders around the world need to know that the two biggest economies and the two biggest oil and gas consumers are on the same page in terms of advancing this agenda. And that message did not happen. That’s why I gave in particular the US and incomplete because I think we said the right words, but now we have to follow through and I think we will. Um, we do have a bit of an election coming up this year, which is going to be fairly important in this regard. But I believe that if democracy wins in November, 2024 in the US that climate will also be a winner.
AW | 27:54 – Daniel Kammen is a professor of energy at uc, Berkeley. Dan, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
DK | 28:01 – Oh, it’s my pleasure to be on. Thank you so much.
AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Pink Floyd, Ella Fitzgerald and Talking Heads. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
For Sci-Fi buffs, a future infused with AI may evoke unsettling images of HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In truth, the evolving technology of artificial intelligence may well be taking over, but not quite how the filmmakers envisioned it. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Andrew Winston, a sustainability strategist and bestselling author, about what AI means for the climate. We look at how AI can help various key sectors of the global economy become more efficient, examine the dilemma of AI’s seemingly insatiable energy needs, and discuss its potential to contribute to a carbon-free future.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Andrew Winston | 00:17 – It is just, we don’t really have time to work it through and double emissions and then come back down like, we’re out of time on climate. So how do we make sure we’re adding this without creating another big problem?
Narrator | 00:32 – For Sci-Fi buffs, a future infused with AI may evoke unsettling images of HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In truth, the evolving technology of artificial intelligence may well be taking over, but not quite how the filmmakers envisioned it. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Andrew Winston, a sustainability strategist and bestselling author, about what AI means for the climate. We look at how AI can help various key sectors of the global economy become more efficient, examine the dilemma of AI’s seemingly insatiable energy needs, and discuss its potential to contribute to a carbon-free future.
Alex Wise | 01:32 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Andrew Winston. Andrew is a sustainability strategist and a bestselling author. Andrew, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Andrew Winston | 01:42 – It’s good to be here.
Alex Wise | 01:44 – So you contribute regularly to MIT Sloan’s Management Review. Yep. And you have a recent piece on artificial intelligence ai, and it’s entitled, will AI Help or Hurt Sustainability? Yes. People either talk about AI as either the end of humanity as we know it, or this wonderful life changing technology, or they just completely tune it out and don’t want to know anything about it. What does that mean? So first, why don’t you explain what AI is on the most basic level, and then we can dive into the sustainability conundrum.
Andrew Winston | 02:24 – Well, first it’s a interesting question. What is AI? So there’s a long piece in MIT technology review recently called What is AI? And it’s a long article that basically comes to the conclusion of nobody really knows, and people use the phrase in many, many different ways. The way that author described it was, AI is a set of technologies that make computers do things that are thought to require intelligence when done by people. So it just means there’s things happening. It seems to be thinking even though at this point it really isn’t and seems to do kind of magical things, right? So the, the, the everyday interaction that we have with it, which is growing by the way, if people use, have used chat GPTs, you can, you can make it do fun things like write a poem about, you know, mid medieval times. But I use it to look at my writing and say, Hey, what’s a summary of this? Or What would you title this? Or, what are five things I should think about in this topic? And it’s just a really good partner, but it’s clearly getting embedded into companies of all stripes in every sector, and the hype about it and what it’s going to do for companies and potentially for, you know, our biggest challenges and, and the planet, the hype’s really big, but it’s unclear yet what’s living up to the hype. And, and there’s some downsides which we, which we can go into. But look, I think it’s a really big deal. I think it’s, it’s one of those technologies, when I first started playing with it, um, I had that same feeling like when I first Googled, or I first bought something on Amazon of, oh, this is different, right? And this is different. This is not like a tool like word and spell check that helps you write a little better. This is something of a totally different nature, and I don’t think we’re really ready for it. And it has serious impacts for our sustainability agenda. And that’s, that’s where of course, I’m most concerned.
Alex Wise | 04:11 – Well, it seems like the marketplace is already ready for it in a lot of ways. Just driving on 1 0 1 freeway here in San Francisco, you see a lot of AI billboards that are designed for CTOs, and you look at NVIDIA’s stock price, it’s like surpassed Apple. And most people wouldn’t even, aren’t even sure how to pronounce the company’s name. So this is a, a chip manufacturer, and that’s the future success of AI is kind of built into that market price, I think in many ways.
Andrew Winston | 04:43 – Yeah, they make the chips that most of the data centers and AI constructs, I guess, are, are using. So it’s made them incredibly valuable. Look, the scale of this is, is hard to get your, your head around and, and it’s growing so fast and changing so quickly. Like most of the problems that, you know, you probably cover and that we talk about in sustainability, they’re, they’re moving quicker than you think. And they’re hard to, they’re hard to get your head around and they’re, and they’re hard to understand how fast they’re moving. You know, the scale is really big. So it’s be getting embedded everywhere, right? We’re seeing it in all sorts of ways that we hadn’t before. It’s just appearing on your computer and helping you do stuff. It’s in different apps. It’s, you know, you’re probably talking to an AI chat bot when you do customer service chats with most companies. It’s just arising everywhere. And I think we’re barreling ahead. You’re in the region where the barreling forward in tech is, is the name of the game, right? That’s what you do in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Without probably enough pausing on what it all means and what it does to us. There’s definitely people worried about it, but that’s not, it’s not slowing, right? There’s nothing really slowing it down. Companies are investing just gobs of money in bringing it into their business without really knowing what it’s going to do for them. It’s, it’s a fascinating time.
Alex Wise | 05:59 – It’s such a large palette to work with. We probably should skip over some of the non-environmental ramifications of ai, like deep fakes and the political issues and the police state. These are all important societal topics I suggest listeners educate themselves on. But for, for the purpose of this conversation, let’s stick to sustainability. I mentioned at the outset the AI conundrum. So why don’t you spell out this conundrum first, why don’t you explain some of the pros that you outline in your MIT Sloan piece in terms of sustainability and efficiencies, and then we can look at the problems with energy usage.
Andrew Winston | 06:39 – Yep. So look, the list of ways, in theory, AI is going to help us, you know, do our jobs better and help solve the big sustainability problems. The list is as long as the list of sustainability problems, I mean, everybody is claiming there’s going to be benefits because in essence, it, it can help find, um, better ways of doing things efficiencies, better than, than in theory we humans can. So everything from the built environment, you think, think about like building controls and ai, finding more patterns in cooling and heating and helping reduce the use of energy in the building, in managing the grid, which is going to be one of the most complicated and is growing to be one of the most complicated issues really, that, that humanity has to deal with, which is a grid with millions or billions of things drawing power, tens of thousands of giant solar and wind plants, and then millions of solar panels on people’s homes and trying to manage that flow back and forth. I think AI is going to turn out to be really critical.
Alex Wise | 07:38 – People might have like a nest or something like that on their homes, which is a smart technology for thermostat. Now, if you can kind of extrapolate that to the grid that you’re talking about, how are grid operators going to be able to use smart technology or AI in a way that they weren’t able to a decade ago?
Andrew Winston | 07:59 – Well, I, I think what’s changed fundamentally and is changing fast on the grid is that the grid was primarily, you know, everybody plugs in their stuff. They’ve got multiple devices in their home and there’s power plants, right? And there was a balancing of that load that people are doing at, at power plants and have been doing for decades. And there’s a certain, you know, ability to kind of ratchet up and turn up and down the power generation. What’s changing now is as we put up more and more solar panels, um, on people’s homes, for example, the homes are now producing power too. It’s a much more complicated grid. There’s many more sites of power production when it was really just, you know, in my region there’s a big coal plant further up in our county. There’s a nuclear plant in, in the region. Um, there’s hydro coming from Canada, there’s only so many, right? But now I have solar on my roof and there’s 40 different panels and they’re all generating different amounts of power. And so it’s incredibly complicated. And for, for a person or a group to manage is difficult, right? Because the, the grid is all about kind of balancing load, so you don’t have brownouts and blackouts, and there’s going to be more and more need to control how much power is coming from things. So even cars themselves are going to be these roaming batteries. As we get more and more millions of electric vehicles, they’re not just going to draw power. They’re increasingly going to be providing it. You know, if they’re parked in the garage during the day, they’re not going anywhere. They might be able to fill in some gaps in, in the load and then hold power, as mobile batteries, millions of them. So it’s really, it, it’s just much more complicated, right?And so they claim the utility world that AI is, is really one of the big solutions. I’m, you know, I’m not a programmer, I’m not an AI guy. It’s, it’s actually really hard to get very specific examples beyond kind of the general design of what I’ve just said is companies are talking a lot, but trying to get really specific examples is hard. ’cause I think it’s very blurry. What, what AI is versus analysis that a pro, you know, that a company programmer or someone does on their own. It’s, it’s this weird hybrid of the things we do and the things that, you know, a computer would naturally do. It’s something in between. And we should say there’s, in my understanding, kind of two or three different kinds of AI people talk about generative ai and there’s regular kind of regular, I mean, the stuff going on in things like buildings and, and grids. And I was going to say also like food and agriculture, um, there’s something called precision, precision agriculture that’s been building for years, which is, you know, taking satellite data and weather patterns and figuring out wind to water or dropping just the right amount of water or fertilizer, you know, square meter by square meter, like that’s already been happening as, you know, tractors and things become basically roaming giant computers. But now AI can help manage that real time. All of these things are kind of analytical ai, the stuff that gets all the flashy, you know, attention is, is the chat GPT. And, and you mentioned before like misinformation and DeepFakes and all that, those are a little different. They’re these large language models. They’re doing something kind of different than the analytics going on in companies that I think are just better, faster, more enhanced versions of the kind of analysis that you would do in a company or hire consultants to do. And take a look at your data and figure out the best way this can be much faster, much more real time can adjust, um, and, and often finds patterns that humans didn’t see and seizes it in a, in a different way. So the look, the potential’s huge, it is, right? We have fundamentally inefficient systems. We still lose so much energy in our grid. The food system has 30, 40% waste. We throw out 30 or 40%. So if there’s better ways to reduce spoilage to to fill trucks better, so the transportation is shorter, all of that we’re going to save, right? We’re going to save embedded carbon and water. And these are huge benefits. But, you know, there’s these huge benefits. And also on the social side, there’s a lot of, um, things that can help with, uh, you know, drug discovery and health and, and finding pa health patterns, lots of things to help wellbeing. But the, the downside of the conundrum is that the energy draw of AI is growing just unbelievably fast. And that is just driving a stake through all of the carbon goals and, and projections from the big tech companies that were trying to go to net zero and have been buying more renewables than anyone in the world. I mean, to the bottom line is both Microsoft and Google announced that their emissions are way up.
(Music Break)| 12:37
Alex Wise | 13:27 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Andrew Winston, he’s a sustainability strategist and bestselling author. So Andrew, we were talking about the hope that AI offers in terms of sustainability and, and fighting climate change. But you also mentioned this tremendous energy suck that these data centers are creating. And I remember being pitched by a VC maybe a decade ago at Sea Change Radio about a, a chip company that was in their portfolio that they considered a green technology because it was more energy efficient. And I kind of rolled my eyes, I was like, come on, that’s not a green technology. That’s just, you know, you’re trying to make a better chip. But as this technology becomes more and more present in our lives that energy consumption is looming over everything. Why don’t you expand if you can.
Andrew Winston | 14:19 – So there’s two big draws. One is just the training of ai. So, uh, you know, a new technology, a new product like chatGPT is trained by looking at patterns of language and understanding, you know, the flow of language. What chatGPT does is actually just with enormously complex mathematical models, it knows what’s the most likely next word in a typical sentence. It’s not actually thinking, it’s just creating sentences in the most logical mode. And the way they trained it was reading pretty much everything and like a significant portion of the internet went into it. So just imagine the power of processing enormous sums. And so each new creation, the next level of chatGPT, the other AI products, there’s a training timeframe that takes enormous energy. There’s entire data centers being built just to train. And then on an ongoing basis, every time you plug into chatGPT or you say make a picture of a dog playing poker or whatever, it’s drawing more energy. It’s doing more thinking. It’s, it’s more energy than just, you know, a simple Google search. And so we’re seeing now the projections of growth and data centers are, are profound. The International Energy Agency says we’re probably going to double data center demand in the next couple years. And that’s a lot, right? These, there’s a, a big energy draw already. Now, what the tech companies and data center companies say is that, you know, we’ve seen this before. We’ve seen massive growth in technology and we get more efficient all the time. So it’s not going to increase energy as much as, as people say, you know, in the 2010s I think data center size traffic went up, like sixfold and energy was basically flat. Because they just got more and more efficient. I don’t know if that’s going to hold this time. The AI is again, like kind of a different order of magnitude than just having more websites and having more data centers to kind of grow with the digital economy, it’s something different and it draws an enormous amount of power. So you now have concerns that major utilities that they can’t keep up and that could affect just grid reliability, right? At a time where we’re already seeing weather induced grid reliability problems. So it adds a whole new level and unfortunately it’s taken the big tech companies again, off their targets. They were on their way to net zero and now their emissions are growing again. And it’s pretty much entirely because of AI.
Alex Wise | 16:40 – So we know Moore’s Law, where it’s been kind of the, the holy grail of the industry to just continually increase computing power. It doubles every year, I think is Moore’s law basically. But at what point do we stop trying to increase the capacity and the speed and really focus on that efficiency as the holy grail?
Andrew Winston | 16:59 – Yeah, I mean to me, this is the core question really is, you know, in my, in the article you saw, I kind of laid out the pros and cons, but the, the next real question is what are we using it for? One thing I’ve heard that just sounds rings really true is, so they’re saying the data centers are going to get more and more efficient like Nvidia that you mentioned, put out a chip that I think used half as much energy for the same amount of processing. The problem is if you’re building one of these big data centers to train in AI and there’s efficiencies in it and the chip moves faster for the same amount of energy, you’re not going to cut the energy, you’re just going to make it a more powerful AI.
Alex Wise | 17:34 – Right? You’re just, you’re going to, you’re going to train more things right there. It’s a never-ending thirst almost.
Andrew Winston | 17:40 – And that’s what concerns me is the growth isn’t going to just get efficient. They’re going to use that efficiency to do more. And, and we hope that we can point that in the right way. But I, I’m working on this right now, kind of really asking, trying to find stories in companies. How are you really using this? How are you thinking about how you use it? Because it is a drain on resources to do this. We, the, the idea of the cloud was one of the greater marketing kind of ideas maybe in history to call technology the cloud. Like it’s just so light when data centers and servers, they’re real products, you have to manufacture them. There’s tons of energy, you know, digitizing the world does save a lot, but it also has a footprint. So the question to me is how do we, how do we use it and how do we prioritize? And, and the example that’s in my head is that just kind of an individual use, like I said, I’ll use chat GPT to help me edit, help me think through something I’m writing for a while I was starting to use, um, Bing and Dolly, which is another chat GPT product, which does art, you, you set, you know, you give it a, a statement and, and it makes a picture. And I was doing that for, to make a picture for blogs that I wrote, you know, just to have an image. And I realized, is this a good use? Like I, there’s stock photos that, that I can use that are people that someone took, a person took a picture and I can either pay royalties or, or they’ve put it up for stock and not use all this energy to make a, you know, made up picture. And, and so I feel like we got to start asking those, those questions of our own use of it. And I think at the, at the company level, I don’t think that’s really happening. They’re just barreling forward to try to stay competitive and use it wherever they can. And it is a real question right now, are all those benefits that are promised going to outpace just how much resource, resource and energy it takes to, to run it?
Alex Wise | 19:26 – You’ve mentioned how data centers are supposed to be doubling in capacity and energy usage in the not so distant future. But maybe you can dive in a little deeper and explain, put the energy usage into context if you can. You do this in the piece very effectively.
Andrew Winston | 19:43 – I mean, I’m borrowing from the International Energy Agency and others that the way they describe the scale was that it will double the needs of, of electricity for the grid for just from data centers just in the next couple years. And in total that will equal like Japan’s total consumption. You know, we’re getting up to a scale here where it’s a large pretty energy, you know, intense country level scale for this. And so you saw recently a bunch of utilities and some are, are probably padding their numbers like, like utilities do. But they, you know, Georgia Power in the US in Georgia obviously has said that, you know, its plan was to add I think 0.4 gigawatts of, of energy that was kind of its plan by 2030. And then all of a sudden it said actually we need 6.6 gigawatts, you know, we need 15, 20 times more additional power because of this draw. Some say they’re using that so they can go build some more natural gas plants and the things they really know how to build.
Alex Wise | 20:40 – And try to skirt regulators and things like that. Right?
Andrew Winston | 20:43 – Right. And, and you know, they can raise their rates, but if they’re even partially right, it’s a lot, right? Like I, you know, the, the, the numbers of how much it wants to add just in that one kind of region would be building the world’s largest solar farm, three nuclear reactors and a few other things. And you’d still wouldn’t hit that number. So it’s big.
Alex Wise | 21:04 – And that’s just for Georgia.
Andrew Winston | 21:06 – And this is just Georgia and their region. And it’s hard to cite and build a power plant, right? You got to have community support, you got to have the, the paperwork. Like, it’s not easy. So I, I think I’ve heard concern from companies just about the grid, just, you know, what’s going to happen with the grid as this keeps drawing and drawing as it grows so fast? Like are, are there going to have to be priorities? And the tech companies, they want, they expect to have always on, right? They need power 24 7 all the time so that when you search, you can find what you want. And if they’re hosting companies, um, that doesn’t go down. So there’s going to be these tensions. Um, and it’s, what what’s really worrisome is I was, I was pretty sure and the numbers look good, that we would hit peak, um, energy use or peak emissions globally soon. And now I’m not as sure, right? We were heading down huge shift to electric vehicles around the world, you know, a huge amount of building of renewable power. All of that is still happening, but this is now kind of a monkey wrench in, in the middle of it where we were generally about to peak and maybe start heading down and, and I’m not sure that’s going to happen now. Because this is the new shiny object, the new technology. And look, it’s exciting. I get it. It does stuff I’ve never, never seen before. It’s just we don’t really have time to work it through and double emissions and then come back down like, we’re out of time on climate. So how do we make sure we’re adding this without creating another big problem?
Alex Wise | 22:36 – Sticking with the Georgia Power example you give, and I know that it’s, we should take it with a grain of salt as you mentioned, but how does a huge utility get blindsided like that in terms of, oh yeah, we need 15 to 20 times what we had just projected and how much of that, what they were pointing to was tech-based? What was the excuse for their miscalculation?
Andrew Winston | 22:59 – Well, look, I think the story, at least as I understand it, is that the difference is pretty much this demand for AI and data sets. Remember chat CPT launched 20 months ago, like the very end of 2022, and it was the fastest adopted product in history. A hundred million people were using it within a month or two faster than TikTok, faster than Facebook. So it, it literally has come from nowhere. I mean, you get that Moore’s law thing of a doubling, the doubling of processing power every 18 months, 24 months, whatever it is. You, you hit these tipping points on things, on technologies when you’re done. And that’s the thing with ex with, you know, exponential growth, it’s really hard for us to see, see, and I think Georgia Power and, and all the projections from tech companies changed because it’s really hard to, to really internalize and deal with exponential change. We’re even in the tech world, we’re just not wired for it. I think as humans we kind of see things linearly and even in the tech world where they’ve been expecting this doubling, sometimes you don’t realize the ramifications, right? Sometimes you’re blockbuster and you don’t realize that streaming movies is going to go from taking hours to taking minutes and you don’t make it, right. So I think this is very equivalent all of a sudden there’s this capability that wasn’t there both for us as individuals to use and for companies to use and we’re using it and it’s just drawing demand, you know, really, really quickly. So I, I, I guess I don’t really blame them all, like, it just, it came upon us pretty fast. I think ChatGPT even surprised a lot in the AI tech world, just how good it was and how good it is, right? There’s more coming quickly.
Alex Wise | 24:41 – And I think more useful than people surmised in the beginning.
Andrew Winston | 24:45 – Yeah. I think I am trying to use it more and more just to try to see, I just think it’s going to be hard to do your job without some element of, of AI in most jobs in the near future. Just like anybody in a kind of knowledge worker, office worker, they know how to use Word or Excel or, you know, there’s, there’s just kind of the basics. This is similar, but you know, as I said, it just has so much more capability. I think, you know, we don’t know yet what it’s going to do to our jobs and how much it will enhance and how much it will replace.
Alex Wise | 25:16 – And from a policymakers standpoint, you can see the conundrum that they have. If you’re a politician, are you going to embrace AI technology and green light tax breaks for data centers the way we see all over the country. I just read a piece on ProPublica about how Washington State is giving tax breaks to these data centers that are using enormous amounts of energy. Do you want to seem like you are trying to keep progress from happening as a policymaker? Do you want to seem out of touch with technology? No, of course not. So it seems like they’re putting this position where they almost have to politically embrace this or they look like a fuddy-duddy.
Andrew Winston | 25:59 – Yeah, I mean, look, I I risk sounding like a luddite or anti-tech and bringing up these concerns. I’m not the only one obviously, and I’m, I’m very much pro technology. I do think the potential is enormous and we should be using it to make the world a lot more efficient. And the competition you’re describing between governments, it’s at the geopolitical level, right? The US is concerned about who’s going to own ai. Is it, is it China? And then state by state attracting companies, you know, everyone wants to, the communities may not as much, but the states want to build these things because there’s a lot of construction jobs at first. They don’t create a lot of ongoing jobs like a data center doesn’t have a ton of people working at it, right? This is another element of this new digital age where there’s just not as many people per dollar or production in a digital world. And, and this is a big concern, right? What is everyone going to do for a living if, if this starts to be able to do everything for us? And you end up, even though we’re talking about the, the biophysical environmental side on the social side, where you end up on this is talking about universal basic income. And I’m amazed to see all these big tech billionaires have been talking about it for years. They’re recognizing the, the chance that these technologies eliminate so many jobs that we need some kind of safety net for people in the world. That everyone gets a little bit, everyone gets maybe enough to eat or shelter so that if there’s not as many jobs, people can still survive and thrive. I mean, these are have huge ramifications for how society works and it’s not in our nature in the US to do that kind of distribution of wealth, right? We’re the least likely of the developed country. So I don’t know where that leaves us if there’s fewer and fewer jobs. In theory, it sounds great. Maybe people have more leisure time, but only if they have enough to live on.
Alex Wise | 27:48 – Well, in this world of encroaching artificial intelligence, it’s always a pleasure to speak to someone with great human intelligence like yourself. Andrew Winston, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Andrew Winston | 28:00 – Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Sidewinder and David Bowie. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This week on Sea Change Radio we speak to Lisa Song of ProPublica about her recent work spotlighting efforts by the plastics industry to make its fossil fuel-based products seem benign. We examine how plastic recycling falls short in many areas, look at the problems surrounding a relatively new plastic recycling process called pyrolysis, and then discuss her trip to Ottawa, Canada where she attended a UN conference which purported to be plastic-free.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Lisa Song (LS) | 00:28 – The first big lesson is just that pyrolysis is very inefficient. If you start out with a hundred pounds of plastic waste that you feed into the pyrolysis process, by the end, only 15 or 20 pounds of that original trash becomes a new plastic product.
Narrator | 00:50 – This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Lisa Song of ProPublica about her recent work, spotlighting efforts by the plastics industry to make its fossil fuel-based products seem benign. We examine how plastic recycling falls short in many areas, look at the problem surrounding a relatively new plastic recycling process called Pyrolysis, and then discuss her trip to Ottawa, Canada where she attended a UN conference, which purported to be plastic-free.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:37 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lisa Song. Lisa is a reporter at ProPublica. Lisa, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Lisa Song (LS) | 01:45 – Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:47 – Always a pleasure to have you on the show. You’ve been doing some important work in the plastic space. Recently covered a quote unquote plastic free conference up in Ottawa, Canada. And then you’ve written a really well researched piece called Selling a Mirage about the problems with plastic recycling. Why don’t we first start with that, this new pyrolysis technology, which ExxonMobil has called the circularity of plastic. I like that. Why is plastic not as circular as ExxonMobil might want it to seem?
Lisa Song (LS) | 02:24 – Yeah, so the story I wrote was about a particular form of chemical recycling and chemical recycling, or what the industry likes to call advanced recycling is this whole collection of ways to recycle hard to recycle plastic. And the most popular form of chemical recycling is called pyrolysis. And so that’s what my story was about. Pyrolysis basically means you take a bunch of plastic trash and you heat it up at very high temperatures until you break all of the chemical bonds and you end up with the molecular building blocks of plastic, and then you use those to make new plastic. So the plastics industry has been marketing pyrolysis and chemical recycling for a while now, and they’re really touting it as this kind of miracle cure because with pyrolysis, you can recycle things like plastic bags and a lot of food packaging and, and think of the sort of flimsy plastic that we use every day in, in packaging or, um, to, uh, as containers for, um, crackers and chips and cookies that you buy from the grocery store. Those kinds of things. You can’t really recycle in your regular blue recycling bin. And pyrolysis is supposed to be the solution to that.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:47 – And it’s kind of the holy grail for plastic recyclers. I can imagine. Where you wouldn’t want to be as beholden to dividing up all the plastics is that one of the advantages is that on paper you would be able to take a milk jug or a plastic detergent container and then some plastic wrap, and then throw it all into a big bin and melt it down, and then voila, you’ve got a whole new substrate to work with. Is that the basic concept?
LS | 04:18 – Yeah. So one of the ways that it’s been marketed is that pyrolysis can take a bunch of the messy, dirty mixed plastic waste that you can’t recycle normally, and it will turn it all into brand new pristine plastic that’s so clean. You could use it as food packaging. Um, that’s one of the biggest selling points of pyrolysis.
AW | 04:41 – And one of the downsides of this pyrolysis technology is that gas is released in the heating process, right?
LS | 04:48 – Yeah. So as it turns out, pyrolysis is a very energy intensive process, and it’s also quite polluting. The overall environmental footprint of pyrolysis is quite a bit larger than the environmental effects of, uh, just regular, um, traditional plastic recycling. And one of the things that I found is that even though there is so much advertising about pyrolysis and how wonderful chemical recycling is, there’s actually very, very little new plastic being made through Pyrolysis. So the reason I got into this story was because I had seen a press release from ExxonMobil and a couple of other companies where they were advertising these plastic cups that had been made through pyrolysis Yes, fruit cups. Think of the little like cups filled with diced fruit, and then you’d, you know, put it in your lunchbox and bring it to eat, um, at work or at school or something that, that those were the products that were being made and marketed. And when I saw that press release, it was the first time I had seen evidence of a real consumer product made through pyrolysis. So I had all kinds of questions. I contacted Exxon and the other two companies and really tried to ask them, you know, tell me all about how you made these fruit cups. How many did you make? Can I go to my grocery store and buy them? Can I go to my local target and buy them? How do I get my hands on these? And I really just got very few answers to any of my questions. It ended up being this product that was still shrouded in mystery, and as far as I could tell, I couldn’t find it anywhere at my local store or any kind of shopping center. And that’s what really got me interested in trying to learn as much as I could about pyrolysis.
AW | 06:37 – And it seems like a lot of regulators and policy makers have bought into the idea without knowing as much as, let’s say you’ve learned just in your limited time spent researching this subject, half of all US states have eased air pollution rules for the pyrolysis process. That’s kind of remarkable to me.
LS | 06:57 – Yeah. What is interesting is that there are only a few active pyrolysis facilities in the US and there are some more that are active in Europe, and many of these facilities have gotten various kinds of government grants or subsidies or funding or in order to support this industry and its growth. So there’s this kind of strange contradiction where on the one hand, there’s not a lot of pyrolysis actually happening. It is a very technical, difficult and very expensive process. But on the other hand, the industry is pushing for all kinds of regulatory changes to make this particular technology easier to do and easier to support as new facilities are being proposed or built.
AW | 07:45 – And getting back to the fruit cup for a second, you went down this rabbit hole. Why don’t you take us through this process? First Printpack, that’s the company that uses pyrolysis. Sorry, were they the PR company or was that the company that produced the cup itself?
LS | 08:02 – So the way it worked was ExxonMobil basically made the plastic through pyrolysis print cup, then made the physical cups using that plastic Yes, Printpack. A separate company made the actual cups. And then a third company, Pacific Coast producers supplied the fruit that went into these fruit cups.
AW | 08:24 – So there were three companies that worked together that produced this fruit cup package. You went down this rabbit hole with this fruit cup, which was produced by this consortium using, they claim 30% recycled plastic, 30% ISCC plus certified circular, a mass balance free attribution. But you then talk to experts in the field to try to understand what that really means. Why don’t you break it down for us?
LS | 08:55 – So I basically came away from this story with several big lessons. Um, the first big lesson is just that pyrolysis is very inefficient. If you start out with a hundred pounds of plastic waste that you feed into the pyrolysis process, by the end, only 15 or 20 pounds of that original trash becomes a new plastic product. Maybe in some of the fancier, newer forms of pyrolysis, you may get 30 pounds, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of the plastic you feed in doesn’t actually become new plastic. So that’s the first lesson I learned about pyrolysis. The second lesson I learned is that when you make a plastic product like a fruit cup or, or a toy, or you know, a butter container or something out of pyrolysis, what you get at the end only contains very little recycled plastic just because of how the process works. You end up with something that has maybe 2% recycled content or 5%, but what the industry has done is they’re using this sort of mathematical shuffling process that’s called mass balance. And through mass balance, they can take something that has only 2% recycled plastic, and they’re able to market that as 20 or 30% recycled content. Let’s put aside the 15 to 20% thing for now. That’s just an efficiency thing, right? Most of the plastic you put in is not going to become new plastic. Let’s put that aside for now. If you’re just focused on recycled content, what happens is when you make new plastic out of pyrolysis, what you end up with is something that physically only contains maybe 2% or 5% recycled plastic. That’s just how the process works. But the industry can use something called mass balance. And through mass balance, they’re able to market the final product as 20% or 30% recycled. And this sort of weird math that they’re using called Mass Balance, what they’re saying is they’re basically inflating the recycled ness of the final product. And it, it’s kind of a complicated mathematical thing. And in my story, I end up explaining it through these diagrams and pictures and, um, animation, and you really kind of have to see it visually to understand how mass balance works.
AW | 11:32 – It takes a lot more sleight of hand than, let’s say, 2% milk.
LS | 11:37 – Sure, yeah. It is a kind of sleight of hand. And what ends up happening is at the end of the day, no matter what you think about mass balance, it’s hard to argue that it’s transparent for the consumer, right? If you are a regular person at the grocery store and you decide to buy like a juice bottle or a tub of butter, you know, all you’re going to see on the label if you, if, if that container is made through pyrolysis is a term like 30%, you know, certified recycled or 30% certified circular material. And when you see something like that, you automatically think, oh, this must mean that this thing contains 30% recycled plastic. As a consumer, you’re not going to go look at the fine print of what certified circular means, or the text might lead you to additional wording that talks about mass balance. You’re not going to stand there in the grocery store and Google what mass balance means. Right? And that’s, that’s really the, the, the heart of the problem is that it’s a very opaque process. It’s a very technical terminology, and the average consumer has no hope of understanding that when they see a label that says 30% certified circular, it actually means it physically contains just a few percent recycled content.
(Music Break) | 12:36
AW | 13:36 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lisa Song, she’s a reporter for ProPublica. So Lisa, speaking about the labels that claim X percent recyclable plastic on it, the obvious conclusion one might reach is that, okay, you just need to look for something that’s a hundred percent recycled plastic, but it’s not so simple, is it?
LS | 14:01 – Yeah. So with mass balance, you can actually claim that your product is a hundred percent recycled, even if physically it only contains a few percent. That’s one of the things mass balance allows you to do. Um, what you end up doing is you take a small percentage, like let’s say you make a hundred pounds of butter containers, you would take only a portion of those a hundred pounds of butter containers and label each of those as a hundred percent recycled. That’s sort of one of the mathematical fungible things that mass balance allows you to do.
AW | 14:39 – The person who came up with this mass balance, how could they defend it being an honest depiction of the percentage of recyclable materials make their case for it?
LS | 14:49 – Yeah, their case, their case is that the reason why mass balance happens is because the way pyrolysis works is you end up making a bunch of pyrolysis oil out of recycled plastic. So you take plastic through the pyrolysis process and you end up with this, um, oily substance called pyrolysis naptha, and naptha is kind of one of the building blocks of plastic.
AW | 15:15 – And is that different from nurdles?
LS | 15:17 – It’s different from nurdles. Yeah. It’s different from nurdles. Nurdles are physical like beads. Naptha is a liquid, it’s like an oily, oily liquid. Regular plastic, non-recycled plastic is made from regular fossil fuel naptha. So you take crude oil, you process it, turn it into naptha, and then you turn that naptha into a plastic product. The way you make new plastic from Pyrolysis is you end up with pyrolysis naptha, which is basically recycled material, and then you have regular naptha, which is non recycled crude oil naptha, and you have to mix them together. You’re not, because of the way the technology works and because of the various, uh, contaminants that are in the pyrolysis naptha, you can’t make a plastic cup out of a hundred percent pyrolysis naptha. You have to dilute that pyrolysis naptha with a ton of fossil fuel naptha. That’s why at the end of the day, the products you make only contain, you know, maybe 5% or 2% recycled content because you are making that plastic cup out of a batch of, you know, 95% fossil fuel naptha and 5% pyrolysis naptha. Now, what the industry is saying is that, you know, if I put in, uh, a hundred pounds of pyrolysis naptha at the beginning of the process, I should be able to assign a hundred pounds of plastic product at the end as recycled, even if the items only have 5% recycled content in them. And so it becomes this sort of mathematical paper accounting, and that’s essentially what mass balance is.
AW | 17:05 – So let’s get away from the fudgy math, because the bottom line is that it’s not what it claims to be, but even if pyrolysis were completely on the up and up and it didn’t have any polluting gases emitting from its process, if, if it was everything the industry had dreamed of, and it was coming true, right now we’re looking at the vast, vast majority of plastic recycling is happening at waste management level. I imagine they’re not using a lot of pyrolysis. Correct?
LS | 17:37 – Right. None of your municipal, you know, when your plastic bin outside, where you throw in your soda bottles, when that gets hauled away by the truck and taken to a regular recycling center, your regular recycling center is not doing pyrolysis. Pyrolysis involves very expensive fancy equipment that is used by refineries and other petrochemical facilities. And so what, in order to do the complete pyrolysis process and turn what you make into a new product, you end up using the very facilities and equipment that you find at petrochemical facilities. And so that’s why there are only a few places in the country that are actively using Pyrolysis to turn plastic trash into new plastic products.
AW | 18:29 – And is there a movement from waste management side of things to try to upgrade facilities to incorporate pyrolysis into their processes? Or, or not? Is this strictly going to be from packaging companies like an ExxonMobil working on it with a company like Print Pack to come up with these niche items like a fruit pack? Or is this something that you could see scaling?
LS | 18:53 – I mean, I don’t know about scaling, because you can always scale things if you pour enough money into it, right? If the industry pours even more money into it, if they are successful in getting increasing amounts of government subsidies and support, then sure, they could scale things faster than what’s happening now. Um, but one of the things I did for my article is I talked to an analyst, someone who looks at Global Energy Trends, and based on his estimates in the next three years or so, at a very optimistic scenario, the world could replace 0.2% of the new plastic that we make each year with products made through Pyrolysis. So 0.2%. Yes. Steve Jenkins is the analyst who I quote in my story, and he estimates that, you know, at best, 0.2% of the new plastic we make could be made through Pyrolysis, and that’s taking into account all of the pyrolysis manufacturing capacity globally.
AW | 19:57 – Yes. Let me read to you your quote, what Steve Jenkins is saying – he’s the VP of Chemicals consulting at Wood McKenzie, an energy and resources analytics firm. He says, “the laws of nature and the laws of physics are trying to stop you.” He’s not a fan. It sounds like he has not bought into the idea that this holy grail has emerged from the plastics industry.
LS | 20:23 – I don’t want to speak for him. I think that it was clear from my interviews that he sees the difference between, he sees the gap between the very optimistic marketing of chemical recycling that is happening versus the physical reality and the difficulties of doing pyrolysis at a large scale. Again, like I said, pyrolysis is something that, you know, from beginning to end, takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of money, and it’s just physically difficult to do. Um, you know, you’re not going to like start a pyrolysis facility in your garage. I, I mean, what I found repeatedly was that the products I found made through Pyrolysis were produced as part of some sort of small-scale pilot scale, you know, experimental, uh, proof of concept batch, right? So there are some slightly larger pyrolysis facilities operating in Europe, but for the most part, there’s just very little stuff being made through pyrolysis. In my eight months or so reporting this story on and off, it took me something like eight months before I finally physically got to hold a plastic product made through pyrolysis. And this was at an exhibit at the UN Plastics Treaty Conference that I went to in Ottawa in April. And I saw this product, it was like a package of baked beans from Heinz. And these beans were being showcased at an exhibit that was from this plastics industry group. And they had put the beans there as an example of food packaging made through pyrolysis. And when I finally got to see this product, you know, I was so excited that I took photos right away and sent them to my editor and said, oh my gosh. I finally saw something made through pyrolysis. And then I looked it up and realized that again, the bean packages had been made as part of a small-scale batch of products. And when I looked at the package itself, it showed that the beads had expired.
(Music Break) | 22:42
AW | 23:20 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lisa Song. She’s a reporter for ProPublica. So Lisa, tell us a little bit more about this plastic free conference that you went to. It was supposed to be a plastic free meeting, but that was the impetus for the conference itself. Maybe give us more insight into what it accomplished and what it was trying to accomplish.
LS | 23:44 – Sure. So the, the meeting was part of a series of negotiations for a global treaty to end plastic pollution. Something like 170 countries are involved in these UN treaty negotiations. And, uh, when I went to the Ottawa conference, you know, it was, um, I believe the fourth, um, big conference, um, out of, um, five that are scheduled. So these negotiations have been going on for two years already. And similar to the annual UN Climate Treaty conferences, these are supposed to be for plastic instead. And so you had delegates, um, and government representatives from 170 countries all at this Ottawa Center. The conference itself was supposed to be plastic free, so when you sign up for the conference, they tell you, bring a reusable water bottle because we’re not going to sell disposable plastic bottles of water there. They tell you to bring your own lanyard with one of those transparent sleeves to hold your name tag because they’re not going to hand out new name tags there. And so I arrived at this conference, you know, all prepared, like with my metal reusable water bottle and everything, and when you get there, you realize that the cafe where they sell food, everything is packaged in paper or, you know, uh, bamboo or, uh, like aluminum for example. So, so the cafe there is itself plastic free, but then you realize that there’s a lot of plastic industry representatives at the conference.
AW | 25:22 – They set up a nearby exhibit at a hotel, right, called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, which sounds great, but it is not so great.
LS | 25:31 – The plastic industry sent a lot of their representatives to the conference. And when I say plastics industry, I mean people from the fossil fuel industry, people from the chemicals industry, and people from the companies that make plastic products. Um, the, the plastics industry is sort of this big consortium of many, many different interests. Um, many industrial interests, um, and their interests overlap quite a bit. The main, the biggest question of this UN treaty is will there be a mandate to reduce global production of plastic? What science and research has shown us increasingly in recent years is that the only way to meaningfully stop plastic pollution is to make less plastic in the first place. But what the industry wants is they want the focus to be on waste management, meaning, uh, recycling, uh, various forms of recycling because they really don’t want to be forced to make less plastic. So when I was at the conference, next door to the conference center was a hotel where I saw a lot of ads, like big billboard ads paid for by the plastic industry. Uh, there was a plastic industry sponsored truck that kept driving by the conference center. Um, and the size of the truck were plastered with billboards that were pro plastic. A lot of these advertisements basically were about very exaggerated situations. They were hinting that, you know, if the UN treaty ends up forcing us to reduce plastic production, that it would be so extreme. We would run out of hospital supplies that are made from plastic or, you know, we would run out of plastic food packaging. And that way all of your food from the grocery store would go bad really quickly and it would lead to increased food waste. These ads were just very exaggerated because we don’t even know if the countries are going to agree to reduce plastic production, that that’s actually something nobody knows right now if they’re seriously considering it or not. So for these ads to insinuate that we would have so little plastic people would die because of a lack of hospital supplies, was just a really shocking thing to see.
AW | 27:56 – Lisa Song from ProPublica. Thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
LS | 28:01 – Thanks for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the Budos Band and Gorillaz. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
No matter what your current stance may be on the upcoming presidential election, the past few weeks of debate debacles and failed assassination attempts have definitely demonstrated that unforeseen events can happen. We still have several months between now and November, during which time the plot may continue to twist and turn. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with John Stoehr of The Editorial Board to get his insights into the calls for Democrats to replace President Biden on the ticket. In this free-flowing conversation, we unpack the problem with what Stoehr describes as a “customer service approach” to politics, learn why he believes third parties are a scam, and question polling data that have so many undecided voters in an election between two well-known quantities.
The environmental movement has made something clear: For the health of the planet, humans need to stop using so much fossil fuel. Period. Many efforts to reduce fossil fuel use focus on consumer behavior — CAFE standards, electric vehicle subsidies, and the like are designed to lessen demand for these polluting fuels. Meanwhile, billions upon billions of dollars are being invested right now in new fossil fuel extraction projects across the globe. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with one of the environmental leaders working to stem the supply side of the equation. Today we are speaking with Tzeporah Berman of Stand.earth, and the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, about the work she and her colleagues are doing to keep fossil fuels in the ground. We examine the current state of pipeline projects in North America, discuss how fossil fuel companies are dealing with slimming profit margins, and look at how changing market realities are affecting the business.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Tzeporah Berman (TB) | 00:16 – We are going to need to stop expanding fossil fuels and fossil fuel infrastructure and wind it down if we’re gonna keep the earth safe, because we can argue all we want about the solutions to climate change. But the atmosphere doesn’t negotiate.
Narrator | 00:35 – The environmental movement has made something clear: For the health of the planet, humans need to stop using so much fossil fuel. Period. Many efforts to reduce fossil fuel use focus on consumer behavior — CAFE standards, electric vehicle subsidies, and the like are designed to lessen demand for these polluting fuels. Meanwhile, billions upon billions of dollars are being invested right now in new fossil fuel extraction projects across the globe. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with one of the environmental leaders working to stem the supply side of the equation. Today we are speaking with Tzeporah Berman of Stand.earth, and the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, about the work she and her colleagues are doing to keep fossil fuels in the ground. We examine the current state of pipeline projects in North America, discuss how fossil fuel companies are dealing with slimming profit margins, and look at how changing market realities are affecting the business.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tzeporah Berman. She’s the chairperson of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. And the International program director for Stand.Earth Tzeporah. Welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Tzeporah Berman (TB) | 02:06 – Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:07 – So, when we spoke to you last five years ago, you were purely working for Stand.Earth, but you, you’ve also expanded your role and started this fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty organization. Why don’t you explain what it is and also catch us up with some of the work you’ve been doing at Stand.Earth, if you can.
TB | 02:27 – Sure. The Fossil Fuel Treaty actually grew out of the work that I was doing at Stand.Earth. I think like many people in North America, I spent a bunch of years trying to understand, uh, how to stop, uh, new pipelines and oil drilling and fracking that is expanding in North America. And every time we stopped a pipeline, the oil industry proposed a new one somewhere else. You know, this is one of the most powerful industries on earth. And stopping one pipeline or stopping one oil or coil project, given the extent of the climate impacts of the oil and gas industry, really isn’t good enough. And it felt like some terrible game of whack-a-mole. You know, we do all this work, we do all these legal challenges and work in communities to, to support communities and their opposition to these, to these big pieces of infrastructure to try and convince our governments to use the money for cleaner, safer infrastructure. And we’d often win. I mean, I think of the six pipeline campaigns I worked on, we won four of them. And then the industry would propose another one. And it, it, it started me thinking on what, what are we doing to align fossil fuel production and infrastructure of fossil fuels with our climate goals? You know, we hear a lot about climate policy, about reducing the demand for fossil fuels or the pollution and emissions from fossil fuels. But then we hear about all these new projects growing and more and more pipelines growing. And so I started doing research and what I realized really shocked me, I realized that for 30 years we’ve been negotiating emissions, who gets to pollute and how much, but meanwhile, almost behind our backs, the industry has been growing fossil fuel infrastructure and projects, and then we keep missing our climate targets and climate change gets worse, and we wonder why that’s happening. And so the fossil fuel treaty emerged out of a basic logic that what we build today will be what we use tomorrow. And every country right now wants to be the last barrel sold. I mean, every prime minister and president I meet with says, oh, of course we’re gonna be use less oil and gas in the future. And, and, and of course we need to phase out fossil fuels to, to meet our climate goals. But as long as we’re using oil and gas, our oil and gas should be what, what, what people use. And so we’re caught in this strange moment in history where every country wants to produce more, who is a producer, and we keep building more and more infrastructure, but then we say we’re gonna use less of it. And, and so at Stand.Earth, I had been working for years on the Tars Sands, which is a, you know, one of the largest industrial oil projects in the world. One of the largest industrial projects in the world in Canada, huge oil, oil development in Alberta. And, and trying to mitigate the environmental impacts of that oil development, trying to stop the government from building more pipelines and expanding it. And I took a look around and realized that whether you’re in the US and Texas and New Mexico, or whether you’re in Norway or, or in the Lafonte Islands or Argentina or Nigeria, we’re all battling the same logic. We’re all battling actually the same companies and some of the same investors. And if we’re going to ensure a livable climate and manage climate change, we need to, uh, constrain and start to phase out in an equitable way how much fossil fuels we produce, not just how much we use. And, and so I started researching that and trying to develop it. And look, I’ll never forget the day that I searched the Paris Agreement for the words oil, gas, and coal and fossil fuels. And I found out that they don’t even exist in the world’s climate agreement because fossil fuel production is being invisible. And, and so I started knitting all these pieces together and reaching out to academics and diplomats from around the world and, and other organizations. And right around that time, I was awarded the Climate Breakthrough Award, which is given to a couple people a year to create new global breakthrough climate strategies. And with that money, I started building the campaign for the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty. And within a year it had gotten so big that we had to spin it out of Stand.Earth, which is the organization I was working at and still work with. And now, fossil Fuel Treaty is a standalone global initiative that has support from over 2000 organizations in, in 180 countries and has a growing, um, support from scientists and Nobel laureates and now countries themselves. 13 countries have endorsed the fossil fuel treaty, and we’re starting to build a block of nations that wants a, a, a standalone treaty that will be compatible with the Paris Agreement.
AW | 07:32 – And is the elevator pitch to signatories to the treaty that this is going to be an add-on to the Paris Agreement? Or maybe if you can give us what the value proposition is for potential signatories to the treaty and and what should attract them to it?
TB | 07:50 – The fact is, unless we are able to constrain the production of fossil fuels in line with Paris goals, we won’t meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. And right now, we have no mechanisms for international cooperation to constrain that production because climate policy and international agreements are complicated. But what’s not complicated is that 86% of the emissions trapped in our atmosphere come from three things, oil, gas, and coal. And we don’t currently have any agreements between countries on who gets to produce and how much. And if production is limited because we have a global climate carbon budget and we’re trying to meet the Paris goals, then we need to ensure that who gets to produce is a result of fairness and equity. And if we don’t have a fossil fuel treaty, then that doesn’t happen. Because there’s no justice baked into the marketplace. And right now the market gets to decide how much is produced and who gets to produce. So I think the value proposition to countries is that by negotiating a fossil fuel treaty, they can negotiate agreements between themselves that will relieve the barriers to new fossil fuel development, trade agreements, tax agreements, debt relief. Because most countries, even if they want to stop expanding fossil fuels, they can’t because they’re drilling for more oil like Ecuador in the heart of the rainforest just to feed their debt. Or in Malaysia they’re digging up more coal because their fossil fuel exports right now are 70% of their GDP. They don’t really have a lot of options. And, and so for, especially for countries in the global south, if they’re going to stop expanding fossil fuel production, then, then they’re going to need some international agreements to help them transition to a cleaner and safer economy. And so for a lot of countries, especially in the global south, when they start to realize that they’re very interested. And I think our biggest win on the fossil fuel treaty came at Dubai last year when Columbia joined Columbia is the fifth largest coal exporter in the world. And President Petro stood on the main stage of the United Nations and said, every day we make the problem worse. And we can’t stop unless we have support, unless we have cooperation between countries, because we all have to stop expanding fossil fuel production and use, and we need to cooperate to do that.
(Music Break) | 10:25
AW | 11:06 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Tzeporah Berman. She’s the chairperson of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. So Tzeporah, what I think is really appealing about your organization is that you’re looking at it from a bigger perspective. Many consumers, many people use their consciousness when it comes to fossil fuels. It’s very single-minded and, and short term, generally and personal, whether they’re buying an electric vehicle, they’re, they’re getting solar panels put on their rooftops. But you and your colleagues are looking at it from the other side of things, from the infrastructure side of things. You mentioned pipelines. That’s something that a lot of people think, oh, well, the Keystone XL Pipeline has been nipped in the bud and there’s less of a threat now regarding pipelines. But actually there’s over 11,000 kilometers being built this year and many more kilometers proposed to being built. W why is that so alarming?
TB | 12:14 – It is alarming because we need to be building infrastructure that will serve us tomorrow. And, and, and in future years, when you build a multi-billion dollar pipeline, you don’t build it to move oil over the next couple of years. It’s, you build it to move oil for the next 30 or 50 years. And, and we know from the science that it is the burning and, and using of oil, gas, and coal that is causing climate change. And, and from the International Energy Agency to the Intergovernment Panel on climate change, even the, the, you know, security commissions around the world, the Pentagon have acknowledged that we are going to need to stop expanding fossil fuels and fossil fuel infrastructure and wind it down if we’re gonna keep the earth safe. Because we can argue all we want about the solutions to climate change. But the atmosphere doesn’t negotiate. This is physics and carbon gets trapped in our atmosphere and creates a sweltering blanket that’s smothering the earth and creates the fires and the storms and the floods and the extreme weather and unnatural disasters that we are seeing every day now and that are killing people every day. And that only gets worse with every ton of carbon that we put into the atmosphere. The good news is that we have solutions. We have solutions at scale. The International Energy Agency estimates that we could cut fossil fuel use and production by 50% today with existing technologies, and it could be put in place for that 50% cut by 2030. So that’s not very long from now. And, and we can, we can actually replace almost all of our uses of fossil fuels now with existing technology. I mean, there are some obvious things that we can’t, right, aviation, but aviation’s 2% of global emissions. So, so we have the technology today to replace fossil fuels and in a way that is cheaper, renewable energy at scale is now cheaper than fossil fuels in every country around the world. And, and so why aren’t we doing it? We are not doing it because we keep building, the industry keeps building more and more of the infrastructure and then we get dependent on it. It’s really expensive, so it needs to pay off. And so governments are convinced to continue using it. So we have to, to really focus on, on, on building, uh, uh, what we need for a cleaner and safer future in and, and instead the UN production gap report shows that we’re on track to produce 110% more oil, gas, and coal by 2030 than we can ever use and keep the planet below two degrees. So we’re literally digging up stuff that if we burn it, it will burn us even though cleaner and safer technologies exist. And I think that’s in part because people haven’t been thinking about systems. They haven’t been thinking about infrastructure. We’ve been only thinking about our personal use. And when you think about your personal use of fossil fuels and climate change, it kind of makes you feel guilty and you don’t know what to do. ’cause most people, unless you’re super wealthy, don’t have the option of just putting solar panels on their house and buying a Tesla. And so they feel guilty and they turn away from the issues. This isn’t by mistake. If you look at the strategies of the oil industry that are now becoming very clear in all of these lawsuits around the world, this was a plan. The personal carbon footprint was an idea created by BP 20 years ago. ’cause they wanted us to feel responsible for the use of fossil fuels. They wanted to put the onus on us and not the onus on them for creating a product that they knew was killing us. It’s not dissimilar to what happened with tobacco or newly on some of these toxic chemicals. Fossil fuels are the greatest cause of premature death on the planet. Not just because of heat waves and floods and fires, but because air pollution due to fossil fuels kills more people prematurely than any other thing on earth. 8 million people last year died just from air pollution alone due to fossil fuels. The rise in childhood asthma around the world is, is is unprecedented in in human history. These are toxic products.
AW | 16:55 – So give us a, a peek behind the scenes, if you will, of how a pipeline gets green lit today. What would be appealing to policymakers is that, is it that we’ve already dug this oil up and we’re going to be digging more up. It is just more efficient to be delivering it by these pipelines than to be shipping it around by oil tankers where you could have an oil spill, or it takes a tremendous amount of fossil fuels to move these big heavy boats around the world. Is that the pitch or, or is there more to it?
TB | 17:28 – No, because even with pipelines, you still end up with the oil and gas on ships. Do you know 40% of the world’s shipping is just to move fossil fuels around the planet? If we actually start, start reducing how much fossil fuels we use and produce, we actually, there’s a, a, a huge knock on effect of how much energy we need, which is actually really fascinating. But no, the, the case for the pipelines is not actually just about moving the product. The case for the pipelines is about expanding that country’s piece of the pie. Like in, in, in Canada when the, when, when Keystone was proposed, tr Mountain, Northern Gateway Energy East, every time it was framed around a national interest, we all have to come together and, and build this piece of infrastructure because if we can move more oil out of Alberta, which is landlocked, then, then we can, um, expand the size of the tar sands and pump out more oil. So the, so pipelines are designed to facilitate the expansion of that fossil fuel, uh, uh, reserve. And, and so the argument is that, you know, we can make more money, whether it’s oil from the tar sands or fracked gas to LNG facilities. It’s the, the argument is these pipelines are necessary for economic prosperity.
AW | 18:56 – And that was one of the arguments that we heard with Keystone XL Pipeline, that it was going to create all these jobs. But these jobs seem fairly fleeting. These aren’t long-term jobs once the pipeline’s built.
TB | 19:10 – No, they’re very temporary. The jobs are very temporary. They’re just for the, the time of the, of the pipeline construction. But of course, there are also jobs in either the, uh, in the fracking and in the, the, the oil drilling end. Um, and there, you know, we, we shouldn’t be denying that, that the movement of those fossil fuels, the sale of that oil and gas does create, um, short term economic revenue. The fossil fuel industry is the most profitable industry on the planet. The IMF now estimates that the oil and gas industry has made $2 billion a day every day for the last 50 years. And so there’s a lot of profit to be had. However, what we do know now is that it comes at an incredible cost that, that every ton of carbon that is, that is being trapped in the atmosphere, is causing billions of dollars in fire damage, in flood damage, in lethal heat, et cetera. And we also know that, um, because renewables are now cheaper, and we’ve had breakthroughs in technology like electric vehicles, which are skyrocketing, more and more countries are now setting dates to ban the fossil fuel car. We have 90 countries that have now have policies to move entirely to electric fleets. That demand for oil and gas is softening and set to decline steeply over the next decade. So, so a lot of those new oil infrastructure projects that are, you know, are projected to produce a lot more than the demand that we have. And so part of what the fossil fuel treaty is saying is, hold on. We have to align production with demand. Like if demand is set to go down, why are we producing more and more of it? Well, a lot of people don’t realize is we already have enough oil, gas, and coal on the surface of the planet or under construction today to, to use while we transition to a completely renewable and electrified economy. In fact, we have so much already that if we use it all, it’ll take us well past two degrees of warming. So we’re, we’re literally digging up stuff that we can’t use if we want a, a livable planet, which, you know, you, you would think having a livable planet would be an incentive. Uh, but it’s, it’s almost like it’s too big for most people to grasp. So I think the argument is economic, but I think it’s short term because if demand does go down as fast as people are saying it’s going to go down, you’re going to be left with a lot of billion dollar stranded assets that the, the oil, if oil demand goes down, especially in places like the Permian Basin and the tar sands in Canada, we’re gonna see a lot less oil flowing because it’s more expensive to produce that oil. And in, in a lot of cases, it’s a heavier carbon content oil. And so likely the first places that will lose demand.
(Music Break) | 22:19
AW | 23:10 – This is Alex Wise on Sea, Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Tzeporah Berman from the Fossil Fuel, Non-Proliferation Treaty and Stand.Earth. So Tzeporah talking about these pipelines and infrastructure in general, what can be done to reverse this process? We know that when companies try to build on fragile ecosystems or where there’s indigenous land rights, these companies can encounter barriers. But what other barriers can organizations like yours put up to dismantle and reverse this process of infrastructure growth?
TB | 23:47 – Well, you know, first of all, we have to support decision makers, um, when they’re trying to build the good stuff. You know, we have a terrible tendency, I think, in the environmental movement to be super critical of, of the bad stuff. Um, and then also to be at best wishy-washy about the good stuff. You know, we talk a lot wind windmills and solar farms and you know, we talk a lot about, you know, a future that is clean and safe, windmills and butterflies. Well, getting there is not easy. First of all, we have to acknowledge that we have to support retraining efforts and, and union efforts towards a just transition. We have to make sure that no one’s left behind. And when our government proposes windmills or solar farms or geothermal or um, uh, high density, um, uh, buildings that are, uh, free of gas hookups and electrified in, in, in cities new big public transit proposals, we have to get behind them. They need the political space to do the right thing. And, and, and so I I, I think besides just, um, trying to stop the bad projects, we have to, we have to vote, uh, for, uh, decision makers who are going to prioritize climate and our health and our safety. And, and we have to be very vocal against any new fossil fuel projects and infrastructure and very vocal in support of, of infrastructure, uh, that is cleaner and safer on the pipelines themselves. There’s a lot of tools in our, in our toolbox because most of these fossil fuel projects now are on very thin ice, very thin financial margins. So anything you can do to increase the costs and delay a project could kill it. We have a mantra within the pipeline movement delays are your friend.
AW | 25:49 – Are those thin margins a new reality? Or has that been in existence for decades?
TB | 25:56 – Well, look, these projects have always been fragile in that they’re susceptible to the changes in the marketplace. So if price goes down, they’re fragile, they’re very boom and bust. But I think, the newer reality is that investors can see that there’s not as much space left for new fossil fuel infrastructure because of climate policy, but also because of demand destruction that there’s, that they’re seeing as a result of EVs taking off and more governments constraining the use of fossil fuels, especially gas to for, for heating and buildings.
AW | 26:35 – Do you think the proliferation of ESG investing is a variable in this as well? That they’re not gonna have a piece of that pie?
TB | 26:43 – Oh, for sure. I mean, especially with European banks, we’ve seen a number of European banks actually say, we will not invest in new oil and gas infrastructure. HSBC, I think Paribas has done something similar. So, and insurance companies, a number of insurance companies in Europe also saying that, you know, I wish, the big banks in, in North America, RBC and Citibank would join that growing group of banks from Europe. Because the fact is that they’re investing in the wrong direction and they’re ignoring the science. And this is one of those moments in history that requires leadership. And it’s not easy because sometimes it’s ahead of where the mass public is. We are all dependent on fossil fuels, and it’s sometimes hard to make, to connect the dots between the wildfires, sleeping, sweeping California right now, or the heat wave killing people in Las Vegas and the, and the use of fossil fuels. And so it, I think it requires all of us, whether you work in finance and in business or in or in government, to step out, out front, because this is moving very quickly.
AW | 27:58 – Tzeporah Berman, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
TB | 28:02 – Thanks so much for having me.
AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Queen and David Bowie, the Pretenders and Bing Ji Ling. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
Although indigenous people are responsible for a significant proportion of sustainable land stewardship across the planet, they are often overlooked and seldom invited to the table when policy decisions are made. This week on Sea Change Radio, we are pleased to welcome indigenous economist Rebecca Adamson to discuss her pioneering work in the sustainable development space. We examine the tribal investment model she helped create, look at how increasing transparency in natural resource extraction can better protect indigenous communities, and talk about the impact she has made as a board member for both nonprofits and corporate America.
Gallup poll data show that for the past forty years, majorities of Americans consistently perceive crime to be worse “this year” than the previous year, irrespective of the tremendous downward plunge in both property and violent crime during that same period. This week on Sea Change Radio, the second part of our discussion with former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. In this episode, we examine why “tough on crime” legislation can have such deleterious outcomes, talk about the problems with recall elections, and look at the work Boudin has embarked on at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Then, we dig into the Sea Change Radio archives to revisit a portion of our previous conversation with Kevin Ortiz, a San Franciscan who learned firsthand how hard it can be to extricate oneself from legal entanglements.
If you look at the data, you’ll probably notice that traditional incarceration-focused criminal justice approaches are both extremely expensive and terribly ineffective. But, defying logic, they continue to be fairly popular. And when bold thinkers try to advance more sensible approaches, they sometimes get knocked down. In 2020, just days after Chesa Boudin’s narrow election to become San Francisco’s District Attorney (running on a platform of progressive reform), deep-pocketed out-of-state interests began the process of recalling him. The recall was successful, and in July of 2022 Boudin was unseated. His replacement, appointed by Mayor London Breed, was a member of his own prosecutorial team, Brooke Jenkins, who happened to have been one of the local leaders of the recall campaign. This week on Sea Change Radio, we welcome Chesa Boudin to the show for the first part of a two-part, far-ranging conversation to discuss his unique childhood with two incarcerated parents, evidenced-based approaches to criminal justice, and the bitter fight that nipped his promising tenure in the bud.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Chesa Boudin (CB) | 00:19 – You can always, in any jurisdiction across the country, find some category of crime that in some period of time has gone up or has gone down. It’s simply not an honest or effective way to think about either public safety or the role of prosecutors.
Narrator | 00:36 – If you look at the data, you’ll probably notice that traditional incarceration-focused criminal justice approaches are both extremely expensive and terribly ineffective. But, defying logic, they continue to be fairly popular. And when bold thinkers try to advance more sensible approaches, they sometimes get knocked down. In 2020, just days after Chesa Boudin’s narrow election to become San Francisco’s District Attorney (running on a platform of progressive reform), deep-pocketed out-of-state interests began the process of recalling him. The recall was successful, and in July of 2022 Boudin was unseated. His replacement, appointed by Mayor London Breed, was a member of his own prosecutorial team, Brooke Jenkins, who happened to have been one of the local leaders of the recall campaign. This week on Sea Change Radio, we welcome Chesa Boudin to the show for the first part of a two-part, far-ranging conversation to discuss his unique childhood with two incarcerated parents, evidenced-based approaches to criminal justice, and the bitter fight that nipped his promising tenure in the bud.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:45 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Chesa Boudin. He is the executive director of the Criminal Law and Justice Center at the University of California Berkeley Law School. He’s also the former district attorney of San Francisco. Chesa, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Chesa Boudin (CB) | 02:18 – Great to be here with you.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:20 – Why don’t you first tell us about… how did your parents being incarcerated affect your path into criminal law?
Chesa Boudin (CB) | 02:28 – My parents were both arrested when I was 14 months old, and though I don’t remember that day, or even when the judge sentenced my mother to 20 years to life, or when the judge sentenced my father to 75 years to life, my earliest memories as a child are waiting in lines to go through steel gates and metal detectors just to be able to see my parents, just to be able to give them hugs. I visited my parents in jails and prisons all across New York state over decades. My mom served 22 years before she was released. My father served 40 years before he was released. And so, you know, that experience was really a defining part of my childhood. Um, it’s something that separated me from the other kids in my school, something that gave me a connection to a part of the American experience that I might not otherwise have had any awareness about, which is racism, which is mass incarceration, which is the failings of our approach to public safety. And so, from a very early age, I was interested in thinking about how we could do a better job keeping our communities safe, a more effective job holding people who commit crimes accountable, um, how we could, uh, more efficiently marshal tax dollars to advance safety and justice. And it was that lived experience in part that led me to go to law school, and that led me to want to become a criminal lawyer after law school.
AW | 03:48 – And what led you to become a prosecutor? You would think, listening to your story, that the more obvious path would be criminal defense, but you chose to go on the prosecutorial side of things. Why?
CB | 04:01 – Well, to be sure my instinct was the same as your question suggests. Coming out of law school, I did choose to become a public defender. And after a couple of federal court clerkships, my first job as a practitioner was at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. And I spent years there handling individual client matters, defending people accused of crimes, and seeing professionally what I had experienced personally throughout my life, which was the real failure of our system to do justice or to meaningfully intervene in ways that protect and advance safety. It was that experience together with my lived experience that led me in 2019 to decide to run for San Francisco District Attorney. Now, it was really three very specific things in that moment that led me to run. The first one was San Francisco’s, uh, incumbent district attorney at the time announced that he was not seeking reelection in late 2018. That meant that the election in 2019 was going to be the first open election for district attorney in over a century. Seems kind of shocking, but most of the time when there’s a race for district attorney all across this country, there’s an incumbent who’s running for reelection or the outgoing incumbent has left in the middle of their term and allowed someone, usually of their choice to be appointed to replace them in San Francisco. That wasn’t going to happen. He was leaving at the end of his term, and that meant it was going to be a free and open democratic election for the first time in over a century.
AW | 05:37 – Was it also the first time that there’d be ranked choice voting?
CB | 05:40 – There was ranked choice voting in San Francisco prior to that.
AW | 05:42 – But it was a ranked choice voting election?
CB | 05:44 – Absolutely right. Yeah. Most San Francisco County races are ranked choice. And what that means is voters. It’s also called instant runoff. It means that voters can choose not just their first choice, but their first, second, third, as many as there are candidates on the ballot. It’s a great way for jurisdictions to avoid the cost of runoff elections or primary and then general. And it’s also a great way to give voters the ability to choose their first choice candidate, even if that person is not expected to win. So imagine, for example, for national listeners in 2000 when, um, Bush beat Gore, and a lot of people said, well, all those folks in Florida who voted for Ralph Nader gave the election to Bush. Well, imagine with ranked choice people who wanted to vote for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2020 in, excuse me, in 2000, but who also didn’t want their ballots to essentially be thrown away. You could vote for Nader as your first choice, or Ross Perot or whoever it is, and then you could put your second choice or your third choice as the person who is leading in the polls or in contention to win. And that’s a way to show your preferences and still have your vote be counted in one of the final two candidates, uh, final outcome. So yes, San Francisco uses rank choice. That wasn’t really a consideration for me, though it certainly did end up being a factor in how the election was decided.
AW | 07:06 – It was very close
CB | 07:07 – Very close, and we’ll get to that in a moment. The second thing that’s important about my decision to run was that, um, there was a national criminal justice reform movement that was building strength throughout the early two thousands. And in the late 20 teens, a part of that movement, um, that emerged, was known as the progressive prosecutor movement. We saw people running and winning the Office of District Attorney all across the country on platforms that for the first time in history were not just focused on being so-called tough on crime or locking people up for longer, but rather that also recognize we can advance safety and justice through decarceration, through police accountability, through alternatives to incarceration, through investing in victim services. Um, and I was inspired by not only that movement, but by its successes. Uh, not just the idea, but the fact that it was actually taking hold. People were winning races, they were following through on their campaign promises. Um, and the third thing was more personal, which was that over the years of my time as a public defender, I started doing more and more work, not just for individual clients, but also around policy, um, impact litigation, um, launching new units within the public defender budget advocacy. And I realized that I was, uh, drawn to work that could have a system-wide impact, not only impact individual clients. And I realized that it was a more natural fit to do that work in an office where you were making policy and not just a public defender where you’re representing clients
AW | 08:39 – Now. If you can explain what you were trying to do as District Attorney and how that carries over now into your work at the Criminal Law and Justice Center at Cal.
CB | 08:48 – My three core promises to voters on the campaign trail were reduce over-reliance on incarceration. In other words, expand alternatives to incarceration, particularly for low level offenses. And second, um, reinvest some of the savings from decarceration into meaningful victim services and third, enforce laws equally so that we’re not only prosecuting and jailing poor people of color, but that we’re also enforcing laws when they’re violated by police or politicians or, uh, billionaires in corporate boardrooms. Those were the three core promises, and we tried to do that in a number of different ways, which I’m happy to talk about in as much depth as you’d like. Um, all of that carries over into the work we’re doing at Berkeley in the sense that we are continuing to look at these same challenges, problems, and opportunities, uh, in the criminal legal system. Now we’re doing it, um, through a very different lens than that of an elected official or a head prosecutor. Now we’re doing it through the lens of research, education and advocacy.
AW | 09:53 – And when you were elected, you wrote a little bit of a wave of other similarly minded progressive district attorneys around the country, or at the state at least. I’m trying to remember some, but it, it became a narrative of sorts. But then there was this backlash on the heels of the pandemic culminating in your recall. What do you see though on the horizon? Like, we’ve kind of come full circle. Are we going to continue on this path of a fear-based lens, or can we go with evidence-based practices?
CB | 10:25 – The progressive prosecutor movement has had really tremendous success at the polls and also in terms of our policies. and I hope we’ll have time to talk more about that because I’d love to explain what is really counterintuitive to many people who read the news. I mean, there, there’s a narrative out there that the progressive prosecutor movement is failing, is being voted out of office, et cetera. There’s no question that it is and has been under relentless attack from the far right. Um, but it continues to be popular with voters, particularly in urban jurisdictions. Now. I think it’s absolutely predictable that this movement, particularly given how successful it’s been, was going to face fierce resistance. The wealthy real estate interests, the police unions, many other deeply entrenched, uh, political interests, the Chamber of Commerce, travel bureaus, hotel lobbies, they do not want to see reform in this space.
AW | 11:24 – And it’s easy to twist it based on anecdotal thinking, right?
CB | 11:28 – Absolutely. In any big city in America, there’s always going to, there’s always crime. Every day there’s crime.
AW | 11:33 – So you can say “Hey, this person over here got hurt. It’s your fault.”
CB | 11:35 It’s your fault. That, and that’s exactly what we see. We see, uh, these folks with really kind of easy access and control of media narratives, blaming progressive prosecutors in criminal justice reform in general, for any crime that occurs, crime occurs in red states, it occurs in red jurisdictions, it occurs in jurisdictions with very traditional prosecutors, but nobody blames them when the same crimes occur. So there’s a total double standard and again, it’s predictable. It’s not a surprise, I think it’s important to remember when we look at these issues and the arc of, of history and social movements that change and progress are never linear. There’s always resistance, there’s always fear, there’s always backsliding and yet we do move forward. So imagine for a second, being a abolitionist in the 1840s who was fighting to abolish slavery in the 1840s, it would’ve felt lonely. You would’ve felt embattled. It, it, it might’ve felt like the task ahead of you was impossible, insurmountable and yet just 20 short years later, 25 short years later, slavery was abolished. Now, there were many people, including people of conscience, decent liberal minded people who in the 1850s and even, early 1860s, felt like it was impossible to imagine a world without slavery. Felt like maybe we could make marginal improvements to how slaves were treated, or maybe we could create more opportunities for next generation of slaves.
AW | 13:10 – It was so deeply rooted. This was not something like the Vietnam War. This was something that was multiple centuries. So like their grandparents never even knew anything else but slavery.
CB | 13:20 – It was foundational. Exactly right. It was a foundational part of American culture, of the economy, of people’s identity. And so for those few courageous visionary folks who were fighting against slavery as early as the 1840s and earlier, of course some, it, it was a difficult time. They were called crazy by many. They were, they were called radicals by many, even people who tended to agree in principle with their moral framework.
AW | 13:46 – And then when you think about the economic disruption of something like that, the success of the American Industrial Revolution was largely on the backs of this horrible practice.
CB | 13:56 – Slave labor. Exactly. And so, I use that analogy because not, not because I think prisoners are slaves or because I’m saying it’s a one-to-one comparison, but it’s important to remember that in American history, big changes, system changes take time. And when we’re in that process, even when we’re close to making major breakthroughs, there will always be folks who simply lack the creativity or who are scared of what those kinds of changes will mean for their economic interests, for their social status, for their identity. And we see that today. We see that in the resistance of, uh, uh, correctional officer unions of police unions, of many of the private corporations that benefited from slave labor in the, uh, 18 hundreds and that benefit from prison labor. Today, we see it as well, of course, in many of the economic interests that benefit from gentrification. The real estate industry, for example, major drivers of, uh, recalls against progressive prosecutors of, uh, ballot initiatives to ratchet up, uh, criminalization of poverty because, uh, real estate, lobbyists and real estate agents benefit tremendously from whitewashing neighborhoods in big cities and from gentrification.
(Music Break) | 15:18
AW | 16:06 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Chesa Boudin. He is the executive director of the Criminal Law and Justice Center at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, and he’s the former district attorney of San Francisco. Chesa, the balance that a district attorney has to walk in trying to prove that they are not only tough on crime and that they care about all citizens, but also want to do the right thing in terms of what works. We are so rooted. You talk about the, the problems with slavery, that we are so rooted in a punishment oriented lens that if you do wrong, you need to pay for it. And the solution that we’ve come up with for centuries is, is jail prison. But putting people in jail actually increases their criminal genic risk. We know that. But what can be done to get us back on track towards intelligent prosecution? Why can’t we do something different? Talk about the challenges facing, trying to really change that dynamic.
CB | 17:06 – I want to make two points. One is a fundamental difference between being a public defender or most other kinds of lawyer and being a prosecutor, is that most lawyers and certainly public defenders defense attorneys have a client, and their clear ethical obligation is to zealously advocate for that individual client. Prosecutors, by contrast, represent the people of their jurisdiction, the people of the state of California, the people of the city and county of San Francisco, et cetera. And the ethical obligation is to advance justice. And that’s a more complicated ethical role for lawyers to play. You don’t only represent the victim of a crime if you’re a prosecutor, you also technically represent the person you’re prosecuting. You represent everybody. People who don’t even know about this crime. You have a ethical obligation to advance justice in the cases that you prosecute and the way that you prosecute them. And that is both a humbling power and also one that is easily manipulated by powerful interests. And so the second point I want to make is that while prosecutors are elected in most jurisdictions in this country, and therefore serve all of the people who elected them, and, and even those who voted against them, right? They serve all of the people in their jurisdiction as a practical matter, as is so often the case with the big money and the powerful lobbies in American politics, certain special interest groups like police unions, like chambers of commerce, like real estate lobbyists, can easily capture the attention and priorities of elected district attorneys and lead them to do work that advocates for and advances the interest of those powerful wealthy lobbies and not the vast majority of working people in their jurisdictions. And that’s a real risk from the standpoint of advancing justice and public policy, as well as trust and integrity of the justice system.
AW | 19:06 – And fear sells. And when you get money behind these fear-based movements, it can be a very sian task to try to overcome that. The cherry-picking of data crime data is one that I remember trying to wrap my mind around during your recall, especially during a pandemic. This is something that people don’t really understand and it can work for and against a district attorney politically.
CB | 19:35 – The reality is that we live in a, in a moment in history where data and facts and evidence are highly politicized. And we see folks like Donald Trump normalizing the absolute wholesale rejection of scientific consensus in favor of how people feel and we see folks cherry, as you said, cherry picking and moving the goalposts and redefining what data we care about and how we, uh, evaluate it. Um, simply because it doesn’t, you know, point in the direction that, that we like politically, it’s really problematic and we see it as much as anywhere, perhaps more than anywhere else in the context of, of conversations about public safety and, and, and criminal justice. It is absolutely true and undisputed that crime rates fluctuate. They go up, they go down, and it sometimes in, in the same jurisdiction, you might have one crime rate go up and another one go down. And sometimes if you narrow in on one neighborhood, you might see crime surging. Well, in the neighborhood next door, crime is falling. It is for that reason that it’s so easy for people to exploit for political purposes, changes in crime trends. And they did that in San Francisco with me. They would send mail to voters across the city saying, burglaries are up by 150% in this one neighborhood. And of course, depending on what start date and end date you look at, depending on what your lens of comparison is, how much you zoom into a specific neighborhood, what specific category of crime, you can always, in any jurisdiction across the country find some category of crime that in some period of time has gone up or has gone down. It’s simply not an honest or effective way to think about either public safety or the role of prosecutors. What the academic consensus tells us is, first of all, nothing prosecutors can do in the short term, will affect crime trends in the long term. There are things that prosecutors do that may affect crime trends, um, but only in the long term and never in ways that are more powerful or that can override other overarching factors such as the economy such as effective or ineffective policing, such as, uh, some of the things that we know may have had a very significant role in crime trends like Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion or like the elimination of lead paint from toys and daycare centers all across America.
AW | 22:02 – Yeah. You see violent crime rates plummeting when you can remove lead from a neighborhood, or on the flip side, you see something. Was it Proposition F that just passed here in San Francisco, which was I think a, a kind of the logical conclusion in some ways of what many on the left here in San Francisco feared from your recall, which was, it was a mandatory testing, it still hasn’t been implemented, and it sounded completely not San Franciscan in any way in spirit, but London Breed pushed it through the mayor and it was a war on drugs tactic where if you failed a drug test, you wouldn’t be eligible for certain social services.
CB | 22:42 -Yeah. Basically, conditioning welfare on not testing dirty for drugs, right?
AW | 22:47 – So you’re going to affect the crime rate that way, is what I was thinking.
CB | 22:49 – You’re going to drive crime up because what you’re going to do is you’re going to take people who have substance use dependency and instead of giving them treatment, which is very hard to get in this city. And treatment on demand is something I’ve been calling for years, especially. Yeah. People are dying every day. I mean, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco has closed down the, uh, supervised consumption centers that were saving lives. She has increased criminal enforcement against people who are simply using drugs while at the same time refusing to build out treatment centers. Um, that is a recipe that predictably has led to a dramatic increase in fatal overdoses. Um, and on top of all that, now she has backed this proposition you described, which is going to condition welfare on people not having any drugs whatsoever in their urine. I, I would love to see all of the fat cats in City Hall in San Francisco get their urine drug tested and see which ones of them are consuming drugs and condition their salary on testing clean, because the reality is there’s a total double standard. The people in Silicon Valley and in City Hall who are pushing these war on drugs 2.0 policies across San Francisco and beyond, are themselves violating the law with impunity.
AW | 24:03 – It’s kind of like the crack versus powder cocaine legislation in the eighties. Exactly. It’s just a war on the most vulnerable in our society.
CB | 24:11 – With devastating consequences for people living at the margins. Devastating, and in ways that then increase crime.
AW | 24:16 – Talking about the anecdotal thinking as opposed to looking at things from a, a wider perspective. First day I knocked on doors for your recall, not far from my neighbor…
CB | 24:26 – Against my recall, hopefully!
AW | 24:27 – Against your recall, yes. I remember knocking on a neighbor’s door, I spoke to a woman who was like, “I’m a lawyer and I’m Asian. So obviously I’m for him being recalled.” So explain a little bit how the Asian community became a little split and there was this vein that worked against you because of, was there a hate crime that happened? I’m a little vague on the history of this.
CB | 24:52 – Yeah. I mean, largely it was invented, and divide and conquer tactics are tried and true. And that’s exactly what they did here, um, in San Francisco. And they did it based largely on fiction. Um, you know, we did more and I’m so proud of our record on advancing language access for the Asian American community on fighting against hate crimes, targeting Asian Americans and others. But there was a tremendously effective conquer disinformation campaign that, promoted fear in the Asian American community. And San and San Francisco has a larger Chinese American, population as a percentage than any other city in America except for Honolulu. So it is a very important part of the, the electorate. It’s a very important part of the community that I was serving as district attorney. And I was proud to have the endorsement of every major Chinese American or organization and newspaper in the city because the folks who looked at what we were doing dramatically expanding the number of Chinese speaking victim advocates, um, launching Bay Area task forces to investigate and prosecute hate crimes going on Chinese language radio on a monthly basis to answer questions directly from the Chinese speaking community and so much more that we did, um, to increase access and inclusion for this community. But what happened was, in a city with this many Chinese Americans, of course, there are crimes every day, sadly, where Chinese Americans are victims of crime. And they managed to get the press to cover each and every one of those cases. As though it was the first time in San Francisco history where there had been crime committed against Asian Americans, it simply wasn’t true. Crime was not going up against Asian Americans. We were to be fair living in a moment where thanks largely to Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric and his efforts to blame Covid and the pandemic on China and on Chinese Americans. We were living in a moment when white supremacy and white supremacy targeting not only Chinese Americans, but Asian Americans in general, Jews, African Americans hate crimes, hate speech was on the rise. Trump had empowered and unleashed white supremacists to feel like they could speak their minds and act on their hateful views. That was a challenge we were confronting in San Francisco. As across the country, there was a mass shooting targeting Asian American women in massage parlors in the Atlanta area. Nobody blamed the district attorney for that. We recognized that it was a sickness, it was a serious problem. But in San Francisco, it was weaponized against criminal justice reform in a way that was very powerful and very effective. And immediately after the new district attorney was put in office, there was a backstepping of that rhetoric. Nobody blames the current district attorney when crimes are committed against Asian Americans. And in fact, for all of the attacks that I and my administration suffered saying we should have charged specific crimes as hate crimes, not a single hate crime allegation was added to a single criminal case after I was removed from office.
Narrator | 27:57 – Tune in next week to hear the second part of our discussion with San Francisco’s former district attorney Chesa Boudin. You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Fela Kuti and Junior Murvin. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Former San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin, Pt. 1 appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Generally speaking, the exclusive guiding principle for corporate success seems to be making obscene amounts of money. But what if corporations recognized that a truly valuable return goes beyond wealth accumulation to include positive impacts on the environment and society? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Bruce Piasecki, an expert in the social impact investing space whose new book is entitled, Wealth and Climate Competitiveness. We learn about Piasecki’s personal journey, find out why he believes one corporation, Trane Technologies, is doing the right things, and examine what he means by climate competitiveness.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Bruce Piasecki (BP) | 00:21 – What my work has always been about is the art of competitive frugality. That those who learn how to do more with less waste, less prejudice, less bias, are actually agile enough to see advantage before others capitalize on it.
Narrator | 00:42 – Generally speaking, the exclusive guiding principle for corporate success seems to be making obscene amounts of money. But what if corporations recognized that a truly valuable return goes beyond wealth accumulation to include positive impacts on the environment and society? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Bruce Piasecki, an expert in the social impact investing space whose new book is entitled, “Wealth and Climate Competitiveness.” We learn about Piasecki’s personal journey, find out why he believes one corporation, Trane Technologies, is doing the right things, and examine what he means by climate competitiveness.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:40 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Bruce Piasecki. He is a book writer of the New York Times bestseller, “Doing More With Less,” and he also is the co-founder of the Creative Force Foundation. His latest book is “Wealth and Climate Competitiveness.” Bruce, welcome to See Change Radio.
Bruce Piasecki (BP) | 02:01 – Very glad to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:03 – I want to dive into one of the case studies within your book, “Wealth and Climate Competitiveness.” But first, why don’t you give us the basic thesis for the book. You’re quite prolific, but I want to know the genesis of, or the inspiration behind the book, if you can, just in more of a general terms.
Bruce Piasecki (BP) | 02:22 – To be supportive, it represents a sea change in me,
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:33 – And how does climate competitiveness play a role in that brainchild as well.
BP | 03:39 – When I found myself working in seven person teams in 22 nations in Africa, of all things for Walmart, I started scratching my head. I had already worked for Toyota in helping them bring the hybrid powertrain and invent it here in North America. So I always was interested in doing more with less. I was always, uh, having been lucky enough to have been born poor and having climbed a series of social ladders by the time I was 25, I was shocked that some of the world’s biggest, most impactful firms, Walmart and Toyota being two of many hired us for change management. They knew that they were hitting a stone wall. It’s not really about what people like Paul Polman talk about in prior interviews with you. It’s not a big pivot that Andrew Winston talks about. It’s incremental change from within so that I was hired to enter the corporate mansion as a competitive person, go up the elevators of prejudice to the top, whereas working for CEOs and also CFOs and general counsels and essentially to bring the view of the outside world inside. So “Wealth and Climate Competitiveness” is a book where I’m showing that you cannot be competitive in a world of 8 billion people unless you learn how to bring the outside views of the women’s movement unless you’re outsmart the prejudices that sustainability and the environmental movement have has helped people see. But those people, uh, are normally like where I came from. We’re outside of the mansion, we’re not in the corporate mansion. We might be in the neighborhood, but we’re more in the muck of the every day. And so my new book is about the narrative that will enable us to bring the outside trends and insights that we need to conquer the climate crisis inside.
AW | 05:37 – And you talk about getting off the petrochemical treadmill companies being able to do that, ones that are agile enough and prescient enough to make that transition. Why don’t you expand, if you can, on that idea of, of getting off the treadmill.
BP | 05:53 – I actually in the book talk about how when Spindletop was hit in Texas and the black gold started coming out, it changed the essence of civics so that people before 120 years ago before the distortions of the petrochemical treadmill were basically in smaller social settings where they understood the rate of consumption and they understood the role of a range of people in solving social problems. But that oil made some and many so wealth wealthy that it created a distortion where we began to think of the capitalist as a bird of prey that would fly over hundreds of square miles and then strike with no regard and strike horror and dread and change in people’s lives. And so my notebook talks about a narrative based on the 700 year old tale of Robinhood and his merry pranksters. And I believe that the ESG investment movement as evident in some of your interviews, is a movement where every time someone clicks a shift from the greed and the endless gold of the petrochemical treadmill towards environment, social or government, that is being a Mary prankster, you’re a part of the Robinhood tradition of taking from the rich and giving to those who are needed. So, you know, Robinhood is a tale, invented in England 700 years ago that I studied in the book as something that morphed through small changes until it got into modern Hollywood. But it is a compelling new narrative that I think many of us are doing. It is an example of “good trouble” where you make capitalism, not speculative capitalism, but social response capitalism.
AW | 07:50 – And how do the writings of Henry David Thoreau play a part in this capitalistic viewpoint? The commons and corporate greed don’t necessarily have to be completely bifurcated, it seems like.
BP | 08:04 – Correct. I think of them in my book and in my management practice as osmotic. It’s two circles that are now, now intermixed like, um, the activities within a cell. I, I guess I would say that I’d like people to know after 22 books that I finally figured out how to wr write a closer to a Henry David Thoreau type passage. It’s not heavy chapters, it’s passages. And I do think it’s based on an honest assessment of human behavior. So Henry David Thoreau is a big player in this book for a couple of reasons. The the, the first is when he writes civil disobedience, he is already educated as an elite. He is already known by Ralph Walter Emerson. He is already what we would call a rich kid, but he decides to teach us as that an informed minority of the well-educated and the rich can actually have resistant power. And so in civil disobedience, he talks about, of course, 19th century industrialism where it was important for people like the textile girls or others, uh, protestors to essentially stick their hands in the mills to prevent capitalist injustice. But I think, uh, Henry David’s Thoreau sensibility in Walden is one in which we learn what is enough by retreating from the excess of the petrochemical treadmill.
(Music Break) | 09:45
AW | 10:41 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Bruce Piasecki. His latest book is Wealth and Climate Competitiveness. So Bruce, you mentioned earlier an archived Sea Change Radio interview with consultant Andrew Winston talking about Unilever and the ability that that company’s had to pivot, still stay profitable while quote unquote doing the right thing and being well governed relatively. You decide to focus on a, another company that doesn’t get as much publicity in the corporate social responsibility ESG Space train technologies. Why don’t you give us a little backstory on Trane Technologies and then explain what sets them apart from their competitors?
BP | 11:30 – So I first got intimate in the corporate mansion of Trane when they hired me to bring 35 companies inside their mansion to hold several days of benchmarking discussions. And they had already participated for 10 years before in my leadership workshops twice a year. So we were intimate before they brought our company’s down to them. Now by chance, when I was down there six years ago, they were splitting off of Ingersoll Rand, which was the 110 year old first corporate mansion and became a separate entity under the stock market. Now that entity in the six years of my case study in my new book has increased in stock value 406%. And so you have to ask yourself, Alex, I’m a capitalist. I invest in stock. You have to ask how did they create that future? How did they adapt to the changes in the market? And as an industrial, you know, one of the, you know, s and p 500, while the s and p 500 doubled in value those six years, what is it about Trane that enabled to grow in stock value?
AW | 12:45 – Let me interrupt you real quickly before you, we get into their current stock. Let’s go back even to the beginnings of, of the company as Ingersoll ran back in the mid-19th century, correct?
BP | 12:57 – Correct. So Ingersoll-Rand was primarily heavy tool making. And what happens we train is they do three fundamental industrial things. One is they’re involved in the cooling and the refrigeration of buildings and food transport. So for my client, Walmart, they ship more food than anyone in the front of the Walmart truck. They build the refrigeration system. They also in malls, you know, when we’re in shopping in a mall or when we’re in a, um, a movie theater, they’re the ones that are doing the analytics and the technology to reduce the amount of CFCs per refrigerant. Then finally, they also work on directly on food waste. So it’s building science, food, transportation, and by good fortune. So, you know, you have to always look at the luck of the market. They were the best to transport the visor high temperature vaccine during the pandemic. So as a stock analyst, I was trying to figure out how much of their four times in value 406 actually was a result of the pandemic and how much of it was a shift. And I decided it was all climate competitiveness that they have developed their strategies in those three business SEC segments based on the world trend of climate and about the need for efficiency. So I decided to write about them. Unilever is essentially one of the world’s largest railroad train type capitalists. They have 300 different brands of which the most fashionable and progressive is Ben and Jerry’s, right? But they actually have 300 other types of things where each is run separately and profitably, but it’s really 300 different entities. But they’re primarily a consumer product. They’re not industrial heavy like Trane. So in my book Wealth and Climate Competitiveness, I wanted to write about an industrial heavy that is normally inescapably attached to petrochemical treadmill and how they changed.
AW | 15:11 – So let’s just focus on the refrigerant side of things with Trane Technologies and I for our listeners, it’s T-R-A-N-E, not T-R-A-I-N. So they are doing a more environmentally sound version of what Fon used to be fairly ubiquitous in the seventies and eighties. And then after the Montreal Protocol, there was a lot of work done from the environmental side of things, governments, policy makers trying to eliminate these CFCs from tearing a hole in the ozone. Did train embrace this new technology quicker than their competitors? Or if you could isolate one or two areas that they were able to, uh, maximize with this emerging technology, how were they able to continue to grow a business that had had a fairly rocky recent history in the public’s mindset?
BP | 16:09 – Well said, I love your question and that’s why I wrote a book across three and a half years, and it’s one of seven case studies in wealth and climate. It is true that Freon was first, uh, regulated, through the Montreal Protocol. And one of my books after that regulation, uh, talked about the emergence of the eye clock, which is the industry cooperative for ozone layer protection founded by the 54 major atmospheric polluters that led to the popping of the holes in the ozone layer. Now, most of those companies, those 53 other companies operated in the normal way of an industrial consortium, the least common denominator. They changed less rapidly than Trane because Trane invested $500 million in advance of tax law changes or regulatory changes and were able to make inventions in chloral floral hydrocarbon emissions in the refrigerate refrigeration before it became law or regulation. So they do have some of an early innovator advantage, but what’s fundamentally interesting about them, Alex, is they say in the book is the way they attract human talent and the way they shift in midstream. So actually their way ahead of their competitors because of the 50,000 engineers that they have allowed or aligned around the world to understand the dynamics of money, people and rules regarding atmospheric harm. So climate change is the larger boogeyman that’s much bigger than ozone layer protection. And that’s why I chose them because they’re making changes both in the transportation of food, the transportation of all refrigerated vaccines, and also just in the basics of CFC reduction.
AW | 18:13 – While I read your analysis, I couldn’t help but also wonder about the spinoff from Ingersoll Rand that Trane Technologies and its former company did six years ago. So looking at this split, I I was wondering how much was just window dressing that this was like the environmentally sound piece of the business and they spun off from an industrial giant like Ingersoll Rand that was doing business as usual, or was it both companies? They were climate hawks from the get go.
BP | 18:47 – I think Ingersoll-Rand is a still a solid industrial player in a competitive market, but they’re not as dramatically exemplar of what I was trying to get at. I think that one of the things that I wanted to get at in focusing first on Trane was how they brought the outside world inside. Scott Tew, a managing partner of Trane, a man that I’ve worked on and off with for 15 years, um, brought in leading academics, leading investors, leading scholars, leading corporates, about 12 of them three times a year to their headquarters to interact with their chairman, CEO and three vice senior vice presidents. So Scott Tew’s job as a managing partner was not just to create new product, but actually to, to create what I’m calling, bringing the outside inside. And um, there’s a lawyer in my firm who did that at Kimberly Clark about 15 years ago, other firms like Herman-Miller, the furniture giant, that’s, they’ve done it – BP did it, but less effectively. So in the long run I believe that Trane is exemplar because they know shifts in world trends before their competitors. They’re already hearing it about it from these outside experts that they very carefully select. So let me give you two personalities that they selected and have brought in with great reliable pay and to these are people who are not beholden to the chairman or the CEO, they’re outside of the mansion. One is Terry Yosie, who used to run the World Environment Council for 10 years in Washington. So the whole world would come and apply to his staff to win awards for environmental progress. So Terry is one of the judges of the outside world that’s coming inside to train. Another is, um, I worked with her at Merck and Walgreens, Cathy Sierra. Cathy Sierra, I don’t remember her exact pedigree, Alex, but it was corporate and it was knowledgeable and it’s expert and independent. So just like an auditor financially has to be independent and knowledgeable. What trained it is it picked 12 outsiders that were independent and knowledgeable to kick ’em in the butt to be better than they normally would be. And that’s what I wanted to feature in my book because I think it’s a very powerful technique.
(Music Break) | 21:25
AW | 22:13 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Bruce Piasecki. His latest book is “Wealth and Climate Competitiveness.” So Bruce, switching gears a little bit, you have a sub-chapter in your book early on called the Distortions Prejudices Create, and you talk a little bit about our images of capitalism and robber barons. Maybe you can unpack that for us.
BP | 22:37 – So the first of the five prejudice I deal with in the book is this image of where did the robber baron come from? And I believe it’s based on the largest and the surplus wealth of the petrochemical treadmill. So from the robber barons, I then talk in the book about birds of prey because speculative capitalists are even a more vicious and rapid form of robber baron. So I talk about those two prejudices, but as I’m talking about them, Alex, I’m also talking about what they led to our bias about social movements. So when you go into the, the elevator to get to the shaft of these 18 CEOs I worked with, and this is across 40 years of general experience, I’m summing up in general, those that make it up the corporate mansion, they have been traditionally in disregard of social movements. They view social movements as the byproduct of socialists or people who don’t really understand competition. And what my work has always been about is the art of competitive frugality. That those who learn how to do more with less waste, less prejudice, less bias, are actually agile enough, like a train to see advantage before others capitalize on it. And that’s what’s so fascinating. It’s not venture capital, it’s not speculative capitalism, it’s a new form of movement. Social response, capitalism is almost antithetical to the American way of thinking.
AW | 24:13 – This growth mindset, this constant need for growth.
BP | 24:17 – Correct. So take for example, my friend Chris Coulter is an empiricist like me, and he just spoke with me at Standard & Poors earlier this week to 55 global companies. And he brought up the evidence, he asked the question of 31 nations, what is your perception of the need to shift to a green economy? You know, somewhat needed, not very much, not needed at all in places like Indonesia and Brazil and India and Nigeria. 99 to 97% of the populace that Chris Coulter’s teams surveyed said it is a very important need to shift to this off the petrochemical treadmill. To my surprise, in the uk, France, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and the USA, we were the most reluctant. And I think that’s because we’re the most prejudiced in our entrenched positions. We’re so used to not asking the question, what is enough? So 19% of the people surveyed by Chris Coulter’s Globes skin said the green shift is not needed at all. That’s horrible because in these other parts of the world, Singapore, South Korea, Peru, Mexico, it’s less than two out of a hundred people. Here we have 19 people out of a hundred totally resistant to investing in a superior way. Even though you can make more money now in renewable energy, you can make more money in a Toyota powertrain. The general assumption of those who haven’t asked capitalists the question of what is enough, they’re in a grand delusion. They’re in a spiral of self confirmation. And that’s what my new book is about.
AW | 26:05 – And similarly, you could just see that reflected in the governments that you were just talking about, where a Scandinavian policy maker will embrace the global Happiness index while the US is entrenched firmly in the idea of GNP, just constant growth and, and they’re ultimately at odds with each other when we look at what’s happening to the planet.
BP | 26:27 – That’s a brilliant comment, Alex. And what I think is the only way to outsmart those in power that will remain in power for a while is to give them new ways to make money. And so my work has always been about finding something that’s informative, persuasive, and delightful. So if you think of Ben Franklin 300 years ago, he did everything I’m talking about in today’s world of 8 billion people, when he is bringing his paper to his print shop, he’s tired of walking through the mud. So he convinced the government to build sidewalks. As he is getting older, he is tired of squinting. So he invents the bifocal when he is tired of buying all of his books, right? He happens to create the concept of the public library. Most of the time he ate vegetarian like my wife of 47 years because he was frugal, not because he thought it was healthy, he didn’t know the science back then. So to make a long story short, when I’m preaching as the new narrative in some ways is a classical argument. As you hinted at before, there have been selfish problem, problem makers laughing their way into dominance. But there has always been an emergent or progressive part of any culture that has found more frugal ways to do things.
AW | 27:50 – Well, it’s a fascinating topic. The book is terrific, “Wealth and Climate Competitiveness.” I really appreciate your insights, Bruce. Bruce Piasecki, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
BP | 28:01 – Thank you, Alex.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Five Alarm Funk, Louis Jordan, and the North Mississippi All Stars. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Bruce Piasecki on Climate Competitiveness and Trane Technologies appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Roman Polanski’s classic 1974 film, “Chinatown,” which laid out a fictional account of California’s north-south water wars, turned out to be quite prescient. This week on Sea Change Radio, we welcome Katie Licari of Afro LA, who breaks down the ongoing tale of Los Angeles water and the impact this never-ending thirst has had on two very rural regions of California – Inyo and Mono Counties. We learn about the colonialist history of LA water rights and look at the monopolistic grip the LA Department of Water & Power holds over these counties.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Katie Licari (KL) | 00:20 – DWP has changed the rules where you can’t transfer the leases more than once. If Mike Allen wanted to sell his business, the next person would have to walk away and bulldoze that business to the ground, without any chance of recouping their cost.
Narrator | 00:40 – Roman Polanski’s classic 1974 film Chinatown, which laid out a fictional account of California’s North South Water Wars, turned out to be quite prescient this week on Sea Change Radio. We welcome Katie Licari of Afro LA, who breaks down the ongoing tale of Los Angeles Water and the impact this never-ending thirst has had on two very rural regions of California Inyo and mono counties. We learn about the colonialist history of LA water rights and look at the monopolistic grip, the LA Department of Water and power holds over these counties. I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Katie Licari. Katie is a reporter for Afro LA. Katie, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Katie Licari (KL) | 01:47 – Hello. Happy to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:49 – So you are in the midst of writing a multi-piece series for Afro LA, which is being syndicated on other platforms as well, like The Guardian about Los Angeles’s “local” water politics, which are occurring around 300 miles away from Los Angeles. Why don’t you explain the situation that exists in Inyo County and then what drew you to this project?
Katie Licari (KL) | 02:18 – I would love to. So essentially, Los Angeles gets its water from a handful of sources. They get their water from Metropolitan Water District, which provides water from the Colorado River and the state water project up north. And then, uh, they all, and most of Southern California does get their water from metropolitan. That includes Orange County, Riverside County, San Diego County as well. But Los Angeles is very unique in that it also gets water from the Eastern Sierra, which is, up in Inyo and Mono County specifically. So water that falls to the west of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, you know, kind of by like Sequoia National Park, Yosemite, that area goes into the state water project, and then all of Southern California gets use of that. But anything that falls to the east of the Sierras becomes the property of Los Angeles. And how Los Angeles secured those water rights was in the early 19 hundreds. They bought 90% of the privately available land in Inyo county, and 30% about 30% of the land in Mono County.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:30 – It took a lot of foresight, if you think about it, this is over a century ago, and Los Angeles was not like some huge metropolis. But this was a brainchild of Mulholland, is that right?
KL | 03:41 – Yes. This was a brainchild of Mulholland. A lot of Los Angeles boosters, including the o or sorry, the Chandler family from the famously known as owning my previous employer, the Los Angeles Times, helped boost the need for this aqueduct to compete with San Francisco, which was also looking for its own water source. They ended up damning up part of Yosemite National Park, the Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir, in order to gain their water. But through these land deals, Los Angeles was able to beat San Francisco to the punch for water availability and was able to grow more rapidly as a result.
AW | 04:22 – So I interrupted your chronology that you were laying out. Why don’t you go on, sorry.
KL | 04:27 – So, effectively, these land holdings, you know, that they bought up in the early 19 hundreds have made them the de facto landlords for entire communities in the Eastern Sierra. And so in the past, there has been, you know, periods of great relationships with the city of Los Angeles and also, you know, really particularly awful relationships with the city of Los Angeles in regards to just land holdings. Uh, so in 2015, you know, during the last drought, the 2011 to 2016 drought, Los Angeles changed a lot of their lease terms, which have really ruined people’s economic livelihoods. And that was the first part of the investigation that we did. But also because they were not renewing leases, it was causing other problems for county infrastructure as well, which, uh, was released today on Tuesday, June 4th.
AW | 05:26 – So the second part of my question, what drew you to covering this piece? You’re in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area and you love drinking water, I assume. What are some of the other things that drew you to this as a journalist?
KL | 05:41 – Okay. I am not a rural person. You know, that is not my lived experience. I grew up in, you know, southern California, in a suburban, you know, area. I like to describe it as one freeway exit from Disneyland
AW | 07:36 – Now that you’ve laid out the reality of this odd ownership situation from a Los Angeles basically owning another county to a large degree, what’s the controversy here, essentially, Katie?
KL | 07:51 – Yeah. So the controversy is that Los Angeles essentially has monopolistic power over their lessees. You can’t really go anywhere else if you own a business or even a backyard in the Owens Valley. Um, DWP does own a lot of people’s backyards as well, and they can dictate, you know, the lease or take away your lease, um, if, you know, if you don’t abide by, uh, the lease terms. And it’s not like you can just move because Los Angeles owns all of the land along the cities. So you really would have to move way out into the sticks.
AW | 08:35 – Is that because the Department of Water and power in Los Angeles won’t extend additional leases to other people? Let’s say this Mike Allen that you profile in the first part of your series, he, he doesn’t own the land beneath him. So he is like, I can’t retire. I can’t sell my property. What am I supposed to do? So in this scenario that you’re explaining where he can’t move somewhere else, what is the monopolistic reality of A DWP in this situation? Spell for a Mike Allen. Why can’t he just get another property from DWP?
KL | 09:09 – You know, all these leases, you know, they treat the leases kind of similarly in that, you know, if you have to, that the lease terms are like the same kind of onerous lease terms regardless of who you are but they made, they changed a lot of rules on lessees in the past 10 years. And that’s actually specifically why Mike Allen can’t retire. Um, in the past you could transfer leases kind of acted like mortgages where they would just transfer, and it wasn’t really that big of a deal. But around 10 years ago, uh, DWP decided that you couldn’t transfer leases anymore. And because of a different lease term, if, uh, you can’t like, sell your business or, you know, to surrender your lease, it would mean that you would have to bulldoze your business to the ground. And that is if, if you wanted to surrender your lease, and that’s the choice that Mike Allen, uh, you know, is facing. If he can’t sell his business and the reason he can’t sell his business is because his lease, you know, will not transfer a second time. This might be a little complicated, but I think the best way to to explain this is, uh, if you were trying to sell your business to somebody else, you would own, uh, you know, all your inventory and everything. And in the past, you know, you would just come to a, a set amount of money for the inventory and the value of, you know, whatever goodwill business that you had, your clients and whatnot. And the lease would just try transfer essentially automatically, you know, with a credit check in a few days. Now, DWP has changed the rules where you can’t transfer the leases more than once. So because Mike Allen, if Mike Allen wanted to sell his business, the next person would have to walk away and bulldoze that business to the ground, uh, without any chance of recouping their cost.
(Music Break) | 11:41
AW | 12:47 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Katie Licari. She’s a reporter for Afro LA. So Katie, when we’re talking about this Inyo County relationship with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, DWP, you mentioned how DWP changed its rules around a decade ago. How were things before that? What was the situation if, if you owned a piece of property 20, 30 years ago? Is it just these, this recent change from the last decade? Or has this been a difficult place to be a business owner for the last a hundred years?
KL | 13:25 – Yeah, so these properties were bought up in the 1920s, uh, to prevent economic collapse in the valley. And it was seen as a good thing at the time. And the business owners with the ability to transfer leases, kind of similar to how you would transfer a deed to a property or a house. There were still some issues, but they were far, far less. Um, one, uh, county supervisor during a public meeting said that, you know, this would be the, if, if the one time assignment policy had passed and applied to businesses, this would be the biggest economic, um, effect that has hit the Owens Valley since Los Angeles purchased properties in the 1920s.
AW | 14:12 – And let’s give our listeners around the country a little bit better idea of this county. It’s spectacular in terms of, it goes from the highest point in the continental United States, Mount Whitney to the lowest point in Death Valley. And then there’s also, it’s very sparsely populated. You said it’s only around 20,000 people living in this county, is that correct?
KL | 14:34 – Yeah, the last census had it at about 18,000. It is beautiful and just filled with natural resources, um, well, most importantly, water. One thing that I really thought was interesting about the story was the, uh, what is it? It’s a different take on colonialism, you know, where you have resource rich areas that are providing for less resource rich neighborhoods or not neighborhoods, areas through political power.
AW | 15:12 – And it’s similar to the arguments of colonialists. You can see people connecting the dots in a similar way, saying the ends justify the means where you have 10 million people in Los Angeles who need water, and there’s only 18,000 people there in, and they’re just an unfortunate byproduct of a situation where we need to supply water to these booming metropolis like Los Angeles.
KL | 15:39 – You know, you kind of hit it a little bit, spot on. Um, at the time when this was happening in the early 19 hundreds, um, I’m forgetting which, uh, federal agency it was, but they allowed this to happen for the most, it was the most water for the bi for the highest need, and the higher need was the city of Los Angeles’s growth and Development. I believe that was the Bureau of Land Management, but I’m not sure we deviated a little bit. So I’m just gonna get back to like, just describing this county a little bit. It, it’s also home to Death Valley National Park. Um, it’s home to so many natural resources. Um, the Sierra Nevada it borders, uh, Sequoia National Park, Kings Canyon National Park. Um, it’s just south of Yosemite, but it’s not, you know, it’s not actually part of Yosemite. It has some of the tallest trees on earth, you know, on the Sequoia National Park side. And it has the oldest trees, the oldest known trees on earth, um, in the Indian National Forest, uh, which, uh, I think are, they’re the brittle cone pine trees. And the methuselah tree actually is there. Um, so it just, it’s, it’s incredibly, it, it’s an incredibly important habitat as well. Um, and the Paiute who are the indigenous population have lived there for tens of thousands of years. And, you know, they, you know, have explained how important this fragile ecosystem is.
AW | 17:05 – Where do the re legal wrangling stand right now, and what kind of resources do the residents of Inyo County have at their disposal to try to strip away some of the monopolistic nature of the nature The relationship right now with DWP, the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles.
KL | 17:25 – They don’t have a lot, if I’m just going to be honest, in Mono County, there aren’t any protections. And in your county, there are a few protections. There was the Charles Brown Act, which was passed in the 1940s. The Charles Brown Act allows for certain protections. If the city of Los Angeles can’t just sell your property, you know, to the highest bidder or whatever, they have to, if they choose to sell the property, the 10, the tenant has the right of first refusal to purchase that property. Also, leases, uh, must be, you know, they lessees have the right of first refusal for new, uh, for new leases. So they can’t just say, Hey, we’re leasing your property to somebody else. You actually have a guaranteed right to a renewal how timely that renewal is. There is no, you know, language in that for a timely renewal, but this at at least allows, you know, some stability within the region. And so if you’re a Mono County lessee, you have less stability than INO County. Ino County also has, uh, the long-term water agreement, which requires the city of LA to provide water to, uh, certain environmental projects, uh, provide water to the ranchers to stabilize the economy and to provide enough water for people to live so they have to provide water to the town water systems as well. And, um, so those are really the protections. And then the last protection is the court system, but that’s kind of, that’s kind of a mixed bag. Uh, sometimes, you know, litigation that led to the long-term water agreement, which protects in new county, took over 20 years. And, at the last time, the city and the county, or the city of Los Angeles and the county went to court, the county lost on appeal. So the court system, you know, is an imperfect system, but that is really the best avenue. And then the last thing is, the voters of Los Angeles could change this. Why don’t you explain? Yes. So the LA City Charter makes sure that you can’t sell property back without water rights without the two thirds approval of the, of the citizens of Los Angeles. So the citizens of Los Angeles could actually vote to give land back to the communities in the Owens Valley, and that is something that could happen, but it would have to be, you know, a prop, a referendum type of situation.
(Music Break) | 20:23
AW | 21:21 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Katie Licari. She is a reporter for Afro LA. So Katie, what about the role of state legislators in this whole process? I know anybody who’s driven in some of the more rural parts of California has seen a lot of these signs from angry ranchers and farmers who are, are complaining about not getting enough water saying, you know, Gavin Newsom created this mess. Or, this is Nancy Pelosi’s fault. How much of the blame should rest on the state legislators? What kind of power do they have in this situation?
KL | 21:58 – They don’t have a lot. This is, this is the city of Los Angeles’s problem. What they could do is enforce the Charles Brown Act. Um, but, and you know, there, it, you know, I’ve, I’ve gotten some legislative analysis reports, you know, that say that the Charles Brown Act is still in effect because again, this is a law from the 1940s, but it, it really isn’t being as enforced as it could be. But that’s really the only thing the state legislature could do.
AW | 22:27 – One of the things I read in your piece was there’s environmental groups are working with local ranchers to try to help them use less water.
KL | 22:39 – Kind of a weird thing about the story is like the ranchers are kind of, they’re not fully environmentalists.
AW | 22:46 – Sure.
KL | 22:47 – But they are environmental stewards of the land.
AW | 22:51 – So what are the rights of these ranchers? What, what kind of water rights do they have, Katie?
KL | 22:59 – Yeah. So, originally, prior to the long-term water agreement, they kind of had, it was a feast or famine mindset. So you either got a ton of water or no water. In 1968, Los Angeles dewatered, half the valley, half the land water, but guaranteed at least four acre feet of water to each rancher on the remaining irrigated pasture land. And then in the preparation for the, uh, second LA aqueduct in the 19 seven that opened in the 1970s, uh, L-A-D-W-P went and they dewatered about half the half the ranch land in the valley. And this caused massive dust issues in town. This led to the water agreement, which guarantees four acre feet of water per irrigated acre. And Los Angeles has to keep irrigating those AC acres. So that is, uh, something, it costs the city of la, uh, like 30 to $40 million per year to offset those irrigated acres through purchases from Metropolitan Water District.
(Music Break) | 24:21
Narrator 2 | 25:08 – To listen to Sea Change Radio, anytime any place, just subscribe to our free podcast. Simply follow the link from SeaChangeRadio.com or search for us in the iTunes podcast directory.
AW | 25:21 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Katie Licari. She is a reporter for Afro LA And then in your most recent piece, you’re mentioning not just the water, but infrastructure like airport repair, which is essential in a, a very sparsely populated large county like Ino County. Why don’t you expand on that if you can?
KL | 25:45 – Yeah. I had never thought about rural airports. You know, you, you don’t really think about non-commercial airports, you know, airports or something that get you from, you know, Los Angeles to, I don’t know, Houston, but not like rural airports are so critical to communities. Uh, the Lone Pine Airport, uh, for example, uh, serves as the search and rescue hub for Mount Whitney and for Death Valley. So if somebody needs help, like medical assistance or a rescue from e from either Death Valley National Park or Mount Whitney, you know, which is, you know, one of the most traversed mountains in, uh, in California, that has to run through the Lone Pine Airport. And so that is critical infrastructure also, um, because of how remote Inyo County is, uh, the, the air ambulance, you know, if anything has to be, you know, you need any kind of specialist care or anything, you have to fly that to Los Angeles or to Reno.
AW | 26:57 – And also firefighting, I imagine. Yes.
KL | 26:59 – And firefighting, yes, firefighting for the Eastern Sierra also runs out of the Independence Airport. And if those, uh, you know, if that critical infrastructure can’t be maintained, uh, which you already are seeing at both the Lone Pine and Independence airports, um, and independence, they’re fixing cracks in the runway with cold mix asphalt by hand right now. Um, and at Lone Pine, uh, they’ve already had, they’ve had to, uh, what is it, end Air Ambulance Services at night until they can get a lease long enough to put them, uh, to allow them to put on, um, lighting at night, uh, you know, runway to repair runway lighting at night.
AW | 27:48 – I highly recommend our, our listeners, check back with Afro LA for the next two installments of, of your series. Katie, Katie Licari, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
KL | 27:59 – Thank you so much.
Narrator| 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Fela Kuti, Dire Straits, John Cleary and Eric Bibb. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others, and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Los Angeles: The Thirstiest County in the West appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
With summer heat fast-approaching, it’s a good reminder that the planet’s oceans are warming fast too. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Elizabeth Alberts, a senior staff reporter at Mongabay about coral bleaching. We discuss how coral bleaching affects marine life, learn about bleaching events, and look at the various ways that coral reefs react to warming sea temperatures. Then, we re-visit part of our 2023 conversation with Jeff Stoike, of Blue Action Lab, as he describes his organization’s efforts to protect fragile aquatic environments.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Elizabeth Alberts (EA) | 00:16 – It’s a ray of hope. So maybe something can be done with using this coral or figuring out, you know, what makes this coral special. Like what are the elements of this coral that, that make it so resistant to heat?
Narrator | 00:30 – With summer heat fast approaching, it’s a good reminder that the planets oceans are warming fast too. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Elizabeth Alberts, a senior staff reporter at Monga Bay about Coral Bleaching. We discuss how Coral Bleaching affects marine life, learn about bleaching events, and look at the various ways that coral reefs react to warming sea temperatures. Then we revisit our 2023 conversation with Jeff Stoike of Blue Action Lab as he describes his organization’s efforts to protect fragile aquatic environments.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:18 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Elizabeth Alberts. Elizabeth is a senior staff writer at Mongabay and works on their ocean desk. Elizabeth, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Elizabeth Alberts (EA) | 01:30 – Thank You. Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:31 – So we’re talking to you from outside of Brussels, Belgium, is that correct?
Elizabeth Alberts (EA) | 01:35 Yes.
AW | 01:37 – So you don’t have a lot of coral reefs close to Belgium, but it’s one of the issues that you’ve been covering quite effectively for Mongabay. I’d like to discuss this piece that you wrote last month entitled “Global Coral Bleaching now underway looks set to be largest on record.” It seems like this is the new normal, kind of like breaking heat records. We’re going to see a lot of these type of stories, unfortunately. What are some of the areas that you, as a science reporter are looking at to see where the needle is moving and, and what are some of the big events that environmentalists should be looking at when they analyze the coral reef system In our, in our oceans?
EA | 02:22 – Well, we should just be looking at ocean heat, uh, I mean ocean heating and see temperature rise and Coral Bleaching is just a result of, of these, this rise in global temperatures, which has been, you know, it’s, it’s it’s sea temperatures have been going up every year. This year there is a dynamic with, or there has been since last year with a, with the El Nino climate pattern, and it’s causing all sorts of fluctuations and just crazy temperatures. So what’s happening now is the fourth Global Coral Bleaching event. And, um, yeah, it’s not looking good. I mean, you can look at the NOAA bleaching alerts there, and, and you’ll, you’ll see a lot of the, the really dark red, uh, they have different levels for the type of bleaching, uh, or, or not the bleaching. It actually measures the, the seat, um, the temperature of, of the sea. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that bleaching is happening there, but there’s usually it means there’s a very strong likelihood that bleaching is happening there. And then if you look at another tool called the Allen Coral Atlas, they use another way of measuring Coral Bleaching, which is measuring whiteness. And if you look at these maps, the reason I’m talking about this is because if you look at these maps now, it’s just everywhere. It’s absolutely everywhere. There aren’t a lot of, well, there are some places that are, are not being affected for, for, for various reasons. Perhaps there’s upwelling, which is, is cooling, uh, you know, bringing cool water to, to the corals. But in many places in the world it is, it’s, it’s very bad. So it’s, it’s happening, um, in the Great Barrier Reef, as many people probably know that that bleaching event has, has gotten a lot of coverage, but it’s happening off the coast of Brazil. Um, I was just looking at what’s happening in the Maldives, um, that hasn’t gotten a lot of, um, coverage, but there’s bleaching happening there, you know, big tourist spot. Um, there, there’s, there’s bleaching happening in Thailand. It’s, it’s, it’s very concerning.
AW | 04:23 – And when you mention the fourth bleaching event, walk us through how scientists categorize that. Define a bleaching event if you can.
EA | 04:30 – I think it’s just, it’s the amount that that, that the bleaches, how much of the world is being affected. And so the third global Coral Bleaching event took place between, uh, 2014 and 2017. So yeah, they can go on for, for several years.
AW | 04:46 – So then they ease, like, so from 2017 till let’s say 2020 or something, there was a little bit of easing in this pattern.
EA | 04:55 – Yeah. So, so they have some relief. I was just, uh, looking at the Maldives and what’s happening there, and there’s a local scientist he was writing on, on, on x, uh, the social media platform X, and he was saying that, yeah, the, the, the reefs there really suffered during the last global Coral Bleaching event, and they had been able to recover. They were, they were somewhat resilient, but now they’ve just caught their breath, you know, now they’re being hit again, very, very hard. And scientists were, were, were, you know, raising the alarm about, about the Coral Bleaching and the Maldives in, in, in April. And if you look on the, um, satellite data, it, it’s, it’s still happening. So it’s, so far there hasn’t been a lot of relief. And, and you know, it, it’s, there’s, there’s so much bleaching going on, but you know, sometimes there isn’t a lot of, there isn’t a lot of reporting on it. And, and part of that is because, you know, you can look at the satellite DA data, you can look at the, um, you know, what Noah says with, with sea temperature, um, the likelihood of bleaching happening or, um, the, the, if there’s, if there’s whiteness, but really scientists, from my understanding, and I’m not a scientist, but I think you really have to get into the water and, and, and check, you know, like what, what is actually going on Is, is the satellite data telling us the, the, the correct story? So, um, it, it takes time, you know, to, to get people in the water, to get scientists there, to do the, the surveys. There’s a lot happening, but very little is actually getting very little information is actually getting out to the public about what is going on.
AW | 06:30 – So explain if you can, how the bleaching of coral affects us affects so many creatures in a, in a very large ecosystem. When I say large ecosystem, we may think of just this one little band of tropical waters, but the ocean is very much connected. So it’s not just the ecosystem in let’s say, the great barrier reef, is it?
EA | 06:54 – Well, they, you know, if corals are, are unhealthy and, and, and they’re bleaching and they’re getting close to dying or, or they have died, then all of the animals that depend on those corals, they might go somewhere else or, or, or die. And that affects, uh, seafood. For instance, if you eat seafood, um, maybe your, the fish are, you know, are, are not going to be doing so well. And this is going to really affect people who are dependent on, on seafood as a source of nutrition or dependent on fishing for, um, for their livelihood. It’s going to affect people who depend on tourism to, for their livelihood. You know, who’s going to, well, I think people still go, but you know, it, it’s, are people gonna be less likely to wanna swim with a bunch of dying or, or dead reef? So it’s, uh, it, it’s, we can be very far away from it, but it’s, it affects all of us. It, it’s all connected.
AW | 07:54 – And when we say bleaching, it’s different than the chemical bleach, they’re being overheated, is that correct?
EA | 08:02 – Yeah, so they’re, they’re experiencing heat stress, and they have this life sustaining algae called zanelli that they basically, when they get so stressed from the heat, they expel it. And usually, you know, there are many different types of corals and a lot of corals are very vibrant in color, but when they expel this, this algae, it’s a lot of them turn, you know, they turn white. So that’s why, that’s why we call them bleaching. I call it bleaching. So, uh, and, and a coral doesn’t necessarily die when it bleaches. Sometimes it can come back, you know, but if the bleaching is very, goes on for too long, meaning like if, if the sea temperatures do not go down, uh, after a certain amount of time, then they will likely die.
AW | 08:50 – So the explanation of this algae is a defense mechanism, and it, it’s a danger sign, a huge red flag for the coral, but it doesn’t necessarily spell their end.
EA | 09:01 – Yeah, yeah. They can, they can bounce back. I mean, it’s, uh, the ocean can be, and it’s all, its organisms can be very resilient if, if we give them a chance and, and, um, yeah. But if, if they’re experiencing ongoing stress for a long period of time, then they’re that chance of being able to bounce back very much lessons.
(Music Break) | 09:30
AW | 10:38 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Elizabeth Alberts of Mongabay. So Elizabeth, we’re talking about global coral bleaching issues. What are some of the solutions that you’ve heard from scientists and other people in your coverage of this topic?
EA | 10:54 – Well, the main solution is bringing down global emissions. You know, just cutting our, you know, bringing down, um, yeah, stopping our uses of greenhouse gases, isn’t it? So that will, that will help a lot
AW | 12:31 – And on a more granular level, have you run into any more localized solutions that could preserve a smaller space? Let’s say a well-funded nature preserve is experiencing a coral bleaching event. If no expenses are spared, what kind of solutions can they come up with that can kick the, can down the road, let’s say?
EA | 12:55 – Well, I think scientists are still trying to figure that out. I mean, there is coral restoration and that that is a way to, to try to restore what, what has been lost.
AW | 13:04 – And how, how does that work? What does coral restoration… is that just a general concept or is that a specific methodology?
EA | 13:12 – Well, I think there are different ways of doing it, and I haven’t written too much about coral restoration itself, but from what I understand is that, well, for instance, this, this is one way of doing it. They might, um, take, take pieces of coral and, um, or, or for instance, heat, re heat res resistant corals, um, ones that seem to be faring better in terms of, um, you know, higher temperatures. And they might try to breed that coral or, or, um, cross-breed it with another coral that has another positive genetic trait, and they will likely do that in the lab or, or, or some kind of, you know, on land somewhere. And then they will grow it to a point where I think they call it out planting, where they, they will plant it onto the, onto, onto a reef or onto a rock and, and, and hope that it will grow. It’s definitely controversial. There are people who are very adamant that coral restoration is the way to go, and it is what is going to save our coral reefs. But, um, other scientists are, are, are not as optimistic about the chances of it working because a lot of these projects are at a very, very small scale. And to be able to scale it up is, it would be quite a feat and, and to be able to do this in time, that, that’s not to say there are, I know people are trying and, and there are a lot of efforts and a lot of funding is being put into this. And, and, and from a personal point of view, I, I sincerely hope that these efforts work and that it can be a viable solution.
AW | 14:45 – But on a global scale, it’s, it really comes down to lowering sea temperatures, which is not something that one little science project is going to be able to do.
EA | 14:54 – Yeah. Well, there are, you know, people are, scientists are really looking at these heat re just resistant corals like in the gulf of aba in, you know, off the coast of Jordan, you know, some of these corals, they, they, they do, they thrive when the temperatures go up. You know, other corals might just die or, or, you know, just be completely stressed out. But they seem to be doing really well.
AW | 15:17 – I was just in Egypt, and I have a friend who was just raving about the coral in the Red Sea, and I was a diver in my teens and got to see a great barrier reef in Australia and, and dived in Belize. And I know that those reefs are a shell of what they once were in terms of their color and, and natural beauty.
EA | 15:39 – Yeah, it’s, it’s true. I, I haven’t been to, uh, dived off the coast of Jordan, but I, yeah, I’ve, I’ve dived in the Red Sea as well, and, and they do seem, it does seem very healthy there. Um, I haven’t been back in, what, six years, so I don’t know if things have changed, but it’s a ray of hope, so maybe something can be done with using this coral or figuring out, you know, what makes this coral special. Like what are the elements of this coral that, that make it so resistant to, to heat. But I do think that everyone is, is still kind of scrambling to, to figure this out and I, I, I do hope that we are able to figure it out in time.
AW | 16:16 – She’s a senior staff reporter at Mongabay, Elizabeth Alberts. Elizabeth, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
EA | 16:24 – Yeah, thank you.
(Music Break) | 16:28
AW | 17:11 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by the co-founder of the Blue Action Lab, Jeff Stoike. Jeff, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Jeff Stoike (JS) | 17:19 – It’s great to be here, Alex, thanks so much for having me and giving me an opportunity to share our Blue Action Lab story.
AW | 17:26 – Why don’t you first explain the mission of Blue Action Lab. Give us an idea of the organization’s genesis and what problems you’re trying to solve.
JS | 17:36 – Sure, sure. Well, we have multiple missions because we have multiple entities that sort of work under our umbrella of the Blue Action Lab. And in short, it’s to promote the sustainable blue economy now that term itself has various definitions, but in effect we’re looking to promote sustainability, ie climate resilience and climate mitigation through the ocean, and in doing so, protect the communities and ecologies. That live in and around the ocean rely on the ocean as a source of food and as a tremendous element in the global climate equation.
AW | 18:26 – So when the green economy applies to oceanic pursuits, we call it the blue economy. Is that fair to say?
JS | 18:33 -That is a fair assertion, yes.
AW | 18:36 – Okay, before we dive into some of the work that the Blue Action Lab is involved in, I’d like to take a step back and why don’t you tell us a little bit of your personal journey in, into where we are now. You, you are a cancer survivor and you’ve been all over some very interesting places around the world. So why don’t you kind of give us a quick recap of, of what you’ve done last decade or so.
JS | 19:02 – Sounds good. Well, going back a little bit further than the last decade, I’m a California native, born and raised in San Diego with, with the love of the ocean sort of built into my formative years and then went upstate to university at UC Berkeley and there I think really had some strong social and environmental values instilled in me and such that immediately after graduating, went to the Middle East and had my first real experience in environmental projects in sustainable development, as it’s now called. Working with a Goldman Environmental prize winner in based in Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula. Her name is Doctor Leila Escandar and these really innovative social environmental sustainability projects with respect to marginalized populations in Egypt and the Sinai around solid waste management. And so I saw how this work could really be done thought about how I could bring that back to my home environment, did some community development work in the Bay Area, San Francisco, Bayview/Hunters Point. Really, some of these communities that have been environmentally dispossessed and economically dispossessed trying to reverse that. That phenomenon did some sustainable agricultural projects in the southeast started a sustainable AG network in the state of Georgia and then fell backwards into graduate school, got a Masters degree in ecology at the University of Georgia, and through that ended up really getting into food and farming in Latin America. Starting in Panama, working with the Globe Indigenous Group on the border of Costa Rica, looking at their agroforestry traditions and how we’re getting incorporated into large scale sort of multinational development plans and then got my PhD at the what is now called the Yale School of the Environment working in Brazil, again looking at high diversity, native species, forest restoration in the Atlantic Forest on the coast there – sort of the cousin to the Amazon – about a very heavily-populated area. Lots of subsistence farmers and then after finishing graduate school did a did a tour of duty in a jungle of a different sort. Washington, DC spent some time at the Urban Institute developing climate, philanthropy and place-based impact investing initiatives there and then did a stint at the State Department, working in the Office of Foreign Assistance Resources. Looking at how our $40 billion foreign assistance budget flows out into the world and to what effect and and how to optimize that and it was in DC that I got what I thought was just burnt out. But it turns out I was much, much sicker than that spent a year in the hospital, found out. I had been diagnosed with leukemia and so spent the bulk of 2018. Fighting for my life and after which I’m I moved back to the home state of California, started my family and took a little bit of time off to figure out where I was going to take my experience, take my value set how it could best be applied, you know, really had a new lease on life and while taking a few months to just sort of surf and contemplate these questions. I had a really impactful conversation with a grad school colleague that had just started his coral reef restoration company in the Bahamas. And I thought, hmm, interesting. Don’t know much about the Bahamas. Certainly don’t know much about Grand Bahama, where he had landed and as I learned more and we exchanged some ideas some of what I had developed in the waves off the coast of Ventura, I decided to head down to to Grand Bahama and it was February of 2020 to meet with my former grad school colleague and his business partner. That had actually brought him down, landed him and his coral reef restoration company on the island of Grand Bahama. And this gentleman’s name is Rupert Hayward. He’s very central to this story. He’s a fifth generation Bahamian, and he’s been wanting to take his family business, which is the Grand Bahama Port Authority, and use it as a vehicle for not just supporting Grand Bahama, especially in the wake of what was the most devastating hurricane in the history of the island, at least modern history of the island, Hurricane Dorian in 2019, he was looking to bring companies down to rebuild the island but also put the island, on a new development trajectory. Right, not just go back to business as usual. Oil and gas and cruise lines and but to diversify the economy and to use the resources of the island infrastructure wise commercially and and in terms of natural resources use the island as a responsible, living laboratory for what we hope would be the innovations and industries and ultimately economies of the future of the 21st century have built on regeneration, built on restoration, built on resilience. So it was in February 2020, as I said that I wound up on Grand Bahama and not only saw my friend’s coral reef restoration company Coral Vita, but met with Rupert and discussed this. This larger idea of how to really use the island after Hurricane Durian after that major wake-up call as an engine for industries that really soften what is often seen as a conflict between economic development and environmental sustainability.
AW | 24:53 – And so what’s your model? Are you a consulting company? How do you get paid?
JS | 24:58 – Well, our model as I think one must be in times like these, a bit flexible. We originally started as a nonprofit that was, uh, working with foundations. UNDP was a grantor for us.
AW | 25:13 – Wait, what, what is UNDP? I don’t think most people know.
JS | 25:16 – Oh, the United Nations development program. Sorry, I actually have a strong aversion to just throwing acronyms around, so forgive me for that. Yes, the United Nations Development Program gave us an early stage grant. To help us develop a socioeconomic impact assessment for the Blue Action Lab model. What would a sustainability economy on Grand Bahama look like on Grand Bahama, but also what sort of an impact could it have for other low lying island nations, other vulnerable coastal areas? So we originally started our nonprofit with sort of a membership model that would allow companies to come down and take advantage of the underutilized resources on the island, provided that they embodied the values of a regenerative economy or resiliency economy as as we described it, and that was all fine and good. We were chugging along, maybe on-boarding five companies a year, but not really having the impact that we hoped to. At least at the scale that we had hoped to, that we think that the urgency of of global climate change really requires. And so we had a fateful conversation about a year and a half in with a gentleman named George Northcott at an outfit called Founders Factory, based in London. George is actually now in New York, but his company is based in London, where they’re very interested in moving into sustainability and moving into climate. They are basically a venture firm. They’ve got offices in 15 countries but have not really worked in climate and sustainability. And they saw us as an incredible partner on the ground. We’re doing just that. And so we were looking for a commercial model. They were looking founders, factory was looking to get into climate and sustainability issues. And so we, we created this marriage of our two entities, created a joint venture just over a year ago. If I’ve got the dates correct where we decided to launch a formal accelerator program. With all of the embedded benefits of the Blue Action Lab. A world class port in Grand Bahama, a free trade zone where we can stimulate and accelerate the kinds of companies that we think will meet the mission of the Blue Action Lab and meet the challenge of climate change. We have a very strong partnership with the Grand Bahama Port Authority and the Bahamian government, and we have tremendous natural resources that can be accessed. In the name of research and innovation for environmental and social sustainability.
AW | 27:53 – He’s the co-founder of Blue Action Labs, Jeff Stoic. Jeff, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JS | 28:00 – Quite a pleasure. Thank you.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to See Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Freddie Hubbard, Joe Simon, and Harry Belafonte. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site. Or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Warming Sea Temps and Coral Bleaching appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Globally suicide accounts for about 20% of all gun-related deaths. But in the United States, the country with the highest per-capita civilian gun ownership, over 60% of deaths from firearms are suicides. What accounts for this disparity? And why do efforts at gun reform continue to fail in this country? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with an attorney leading the charge for smarter, saner gun laws in the U.S. Robyn Thomas is the Executive Director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. We take a look at trends over the past few years, examine disputes over the interpretation of the Second Amendment, and discuss the persistent political standstill which seems immune to tragedy.
Narrator 0:02 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Robyn Thomas 0:17 Look at the average family or community in Texas. They’re not so concerned about having access to assault weapons what they’d rather have is their children safe at school. And if the messaging is done right in a way that people understand this isn’t a choice between all or nothing. This isn’t about, can you have guns or no guns? It’s about can we implement the kinds of common sense regulations that will make our children safer and doesn’t change people’s ability to go hunting or sports shooting or whatever it is, that’s really important to them.
Narrator 0:47 Globally, suicide accounts for about 20% of all gun related deaths. But in the United States, the country with the highest per capita civilian gun ownership, over 60% of deaths from firearms are suicides. what accounts for this disparity? And why do efforts at gun reform continue to fail in this country? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with an attorney leading the charge for smarter saner gun laws in the US. Robyn Thomas is the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. We take a look at trends over the past few years, examined disputes over the interpretation of the Second Amendment and discuss the persistent political standstill, which seems immune to tragedy.
Alex Wise 1:57 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend Robyn Thomas. She is the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Robyn, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Robyn Thomas 2:06 Thank you so much for having me, Alex.
Alex Wise 2:08 So explain what the mission of the Giffords Law Center is, and maybe the evolution of the organization. It’s a fairly newly dubbed nonprofit, correct?
Robyn Thomas 2:19 Yeah, the origin story goes back about 28 years, in early July of 1993, there was a mass shooting at a law firm in downtown San Francisco, the law firm of pet and Martin. And following that tragedy, the legal community in the city of San Francisco, many of whom had lost friends and colleagues decided to get together and do something about gun violence. So they formed what was then called the legal community against violence. And the mission was to corral and inspire the involvement of the legal community in the United States to help and to support the movement to reduce and prevent gun violence. Initially, they focused on what was then a federal assault weapon ban, which they succeeded in helping to pass in 1994, unfortunately, that sunset, and expired in 2004, and was not renewed, but they did have early success in accomplishing what they set out to do. And once they accomplish that, they turn their attention mostly to California laws, and then eventually to other national laws to try and create a model here in California, of what comprehensive thoughtful gun regulation could look like. I’ll skip over some of the early work that they did in the successes they had, California has the strongest gun laws in the country, in large part due to the work that was done by the organization over the last now almost 30 years. And it really has created a model that other states have then stepped up to rapidly try and replicate and and adopt. Later on as there were opportunities. Other states will look to California for inspiration. So we rebranded as the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and in about 20 I want to say mark and Gabby formed, sorry, Senator Mark Kelly, and former representative Gabby Giffords formed in about 2012. So Gabby was as many people listening will remember, there was an attempted assassination against her at a Congress on your corner event in jail on January 8 2011. She spent most of the next year in very intensive surgery and recovery and, you know, rehab just developing again hurt the ability to walk and sort of function. And in late 2012, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened December 14 2012. And following that event, Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords decided to launch an organization to try and do something about gun violence on the premise that, you know, Gabby had a unique voice and was a unique ambassador for the issue based on her experience. So that was in 20. 13 and I met Mark Kelly at an event I should say, Senator Mark Kelly, although he wasn’t the senator then at an event for gun violence, soon after that, so it was maybe in about 2014. And we decided that, because they were mostly focused on politics, their highest talents and skills and knowledge and connections in the world really had to do with their desire to move the politics of this issue to make it the case that politicians could lead on this issue that, you know, for many, many years, this was a very third rail issue politically, and those that spoke out in favor of gun policy reform often drew the wrath of the NRA, who would go target them basically, and made it very hard to convince politicians to be champions on this issue. So Mark and Gaby set out to change that dynamic to basically ensure that we could find champions on this issue that they would get supported publicly that they would get financial support that they would have an incentive to speak up on this issue. And in doing so to balance the scales a bit, and make it an issue that politicians could vote their conscience on, instead of voting out of fear of being lobbied against by the NRA. So they were doing a lot of political work. And we had already by then, for more than 20 years, been the lead national leading policy experts on gun policy reform. So what we did was we partnered, and we started to work together on a variety of projects, we would do the legal and policy and analysis, you know, domestic violence and guns, and it would have a set of policy solutions that went along with it. And they would take these reports, and then take them out and use them to educate legislators to push for change to use the might of their voice and their sort of lobbying and political weight to try and make things happen based on our recommendations. And it was very successful, it was kind of a perfect collaboration.
Alex Wise 6:54 Is gun violence up in the last 18 months? And if so, what does the Giffords Law Center attribute that to – what are we seeing that is moving the needle?
Robyn Thomas 7:04 So when you see the last 18 months, we’re talking about basically in the time of COVID, gun violence over the last three years has been steadily increasing. So it was down it was very, very high in the in the 80s. And early 90s. It took a pretty significant reduction, it was down to about 30 is still far too many, but down to about 3030 to 33,000 deaths a year more than 100,000 shootings for quite some time, it was sort of stayed pretty steady. And in the last few years, it’s gone up quite a bit. We were up to about 38,000 shootings last year or so. Or not shootings, deaths, which led which translated into about 120,000 shootings, those numbers are up. And interestingly, mass shootings were down not down in the smaller numbers. But the high fatality mass shootings, actually were down in the last 18 months. Not surprisingly, because of COVID. there just weren’t a lot of mass gatherings, which is often unfortunately, where that happens. The reason why gun violence was significantly up in the last two years has to do with a few things, I think, mostly COVID related. One is suicide. So the largest portion of gun deaths in America is actually suicides to about two thirds. So with something like COVID, where people are isolated where they’re facing a lot greater stress, we know mental health issues were exacerbated by COVID for so many people, and because suicide is an impulsive act, and when guns are present, extremely lethal, we saw an increase there also saw an increase in domestic violence incidents, many of them unfortunately, which lead to fatalities. So with predominantly women, who are the victims of this stuck at home, not able to get the help they need or the support, they need to maybe leave an abusive situation we saw an increase in domestic violence fatalities. Same thing with children and accidents. You had children who would normally be at school all day, home all day stuck in the house with I think it’s about 2 million homes which have loaded unsecured weapons with children in the home. So there was a greater increase of accidents with children. We are seeing an increase now in community violence, shootings, you know, the community violence work, which really focuses on the population, young men of color make up about 6% of the population and represent about 50% of homicides, the best, most effective way of tackling that issue. And that kind of gun violence is through community based violence intervention programs like ceasefire in Oakland and advanced peace and other cities here in California. And some people know about, you know, other types of programs Cure Violence, there’s all these different models of Violence Intervention. Well, a lot of them rely upon street outreach workers to get involved in the community and help with these interventions. And in a time of COVID, many of these programs weren’t able to operate. So we also saw an increase in community violence. So really, while mass shootings are the ones that get the the news that get the coverage that people know about. And remember, that makes up a tiny, tiny percentage of that number of shootings and math and deaths. And all of the other areas outside of mass shootings were up quite a bit the last 18 months.
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Alex Wise 11:10 this is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Robyn Thomas. She’s the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. So Robyn, let’s turn to the political sphere and look at guns in the us right now in terms of policy, focusing on background checks, it looks for a little while before the election of Joe Biden that Republicans may be a little more flexible in terms of background checks, there was a little bit of momentum before the election, can you kind of catch us up to where things have gone on both sides of the aisle and your hopes for some kind of federal action on background checks that’s significant and satisfies you and your colleagues at the Gifford center.
Robyn Thomas 12:00 So we’ve been optimistic about background checks for a while now, mostly because 92% of the American public supports universal background checks, we kind of half joke, you can’t get 92% of Americans to agree on anything, not even ice cream and puppies. And yet we agree on this. So our assumption was okay, if 92% of Americans want this, obviously, it’s going to happen. We actually did get it passed HR-8 got through the House in 2018, I believe.
Alex Wise 12:30 And what exactly is HR-8, sorry,
Robyn Thomas 12:33 HR-8 is the bipartisan background checks act. And it basically fills the gaps because now you have a background check required on the sale of a gun if you buy it from a federally licensed firearms dealer. But if you buy a gun online, if you buy a gun at a private sale or at a gun show from a licensed dealer, then there’s no background check required by federal law. So about 21 states give or take have passed state laws that fill some of that they either require a background check on online sales or gun shows or in California, we cry, we require a background check on every sale and transfer of a gun. So there’s been some movement to fill that gap but not at the federal level. So what HR eight would do would be to require all gun sales to be you know, conducted with a background check. Now there are exceptions for for family, immediate family members or loans for hunting, things that you know, I think are important to gun owners that it not be sort of overly cumbersome. But really it would capture almost all of the unregulated sales now going on without background checks. So we got through the house, it passed the House resoundingly with bipartisan support, I believe there were eight Republicans who voted for that bill. So it got through, and then it went over to the Senate side, and proceeded to languish there. And we believe that once the senate came back with the majority now it’s 5050 split. But really, it’s a majority, and very strong support from President Biden, that this is something that we could get done. And we’ve been aggressively talking about how important this is as a way to make progress. And I actually testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee in 2019, around this bill, and then I testified in front of the senate again this year in march around this bill and other legislation. And unfortunately, it hasn’t even been brought to a vote and it still sits there in the Senate. I would like to believe we have 50 votes for it at least because it is something that is so popularly supported. But with filibuster rules. 50 votes isn’t enough right now. So you really do need to get closer to 60 in order to get much accomplished on legislation like this. So it is sitting there and we are optimistic that first of all, it can be bipartisan in the same way that it was in the house, and that it’s something we have to continue pushing for because it is something the American people really care about. I mean when when they So people coming out from voting in the last election, gun violence was at the top of the list, it was one of the top three issues that people were most concerned about. So we know this has become a voting issue for people. And that in many places, if legislators don’t stand up on this, they face consequences.
Alex Wise 15:17 And at the crux of the issue is the second amendment. It’s an age old discussion. We have a Supreme Court that is six to three conservative right now. So it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any progressive change from the judicial branch on that count. What are kind of are your greatest fears for what the court can do to kind of reverse some of the work that you and your colleagues do and on the flip side, what are some of the ways that we can work around this court? And it’s very narrow interpretation of the Second Amendment and as a kind of a sidebar that maybe you can kind of clarify your organization’s reading of the Second Amendment.
Robyn Thomas 16:00 Yeah, you can’t talk about guns without talking about the Second Amendment, which reads for people who don’t know, a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed for many years for 200 years or more after the founding of our country. courts, pretty much unanimously held that the Second Amendment doesn’t involve a private right to gun ownership. It involves a militia related, right, basically what we call a collective right. And it was never accepted as a valid response to prohibiting gun regulation. Well, in 2008, the Supreme Court took up a case called Heller, Heller versus DC, and it was a challenge to Washington DC is almost complete ban on private gun ownership, which have been in place for about 30 years. And unfortunately, for the first time in history, the Supreme Court held that you do in fact, have a private right to own a firearm. And that decision was very, very narrow, it said, you have a private right to own a handgun in your home for self defense, which is what was prohibited by DC law. It was frustrating because it really was a complete overturning of precedent without actually acknowledging that it made out as if this was always the case when it was for the first time identified in 2008. It was upsetting, and we knew it was going to lead to an avalanche of litigation against gun laws across the country, which it did. But it was a very narrow, narrow decision, it did not answer a lot of questions about what else the Second Amendment does or doesn’t do. In fact, Scalia penned the opinion. And he actually wrote about how the decision was not intended to cast out on other long standing prohibitions and, you know, public safety issues. Since then there’s only been one other Second Amendment case taken up by the court and I serpo, which was a case in New York, your Gosh, year or two ago, COVID time, but essentially challenged a law in New York City having to do with your ability to transport guns in your car. It was basically mooted by the court on procedural grounds. So nothing came out of that the court has a case right now. So the court has a case that’s being heard on November 3, also in New York City case. And then we’ll be probably the decision out sometime in the spring, usually it comes out the very last week of term. So the end of June. So you will be seeing a Supreme Court decision on gun policy next June. We are very afraid of this case, because of the court makeup. And what this case does is it challenges concealed carry permitting. So in New York City has a very restrictive concealed carry permitting system, you have to be able to show good cause, why you need to carry a loaded concealed weapon in public to get a permit in New York City. And in order to get it you have to be someone who I don’t know, carries a lot of cash and jewelry around at night or has had, you know, your life threatened or something that really explains why you might need this weapon. And they’re very rarely granted these these permits in New York City. And for anyone who spent any time in Time Square. You know why? It’s just simply not something that would make sense in a city like that. Well, that permitting system has been challenged. It’s up to the Supreme Court. And we’re concerned that this decision could affect concealed carry permitting. And really the broader question of what is your second amendment right outside the home? That is not something the Court has said anything about now, we believe the court can issue a really narrow opinion here, which really focuses on New York City’s law, and how that law might not withstand scrutiny. But some minor adjustments might be good enough. But it could be a broad opinion, which would really call into question concealed carry permitting systems across the country and many states don’t even have them anymore. It’s been targeted by the gun lobby to really do what they could to weaken permitting. In many states. You don’t even need a permit at all to carry a loaded concealed weapon in public. So we are nervous about this court. It’s an issue we’ve been concerned about. We’re certainly concerned about other I mean, there’s so little federal regulation on the books, so We’re really talking about state regulation states, like California have all kinds of really innovative and effective regulations that the gun lobby is. I mean, there’s so many lawsuits moving through the federal courts in California challenging all of our gun laws, because they’re just hoping and waiting for a chance to get these laws in front of the court. And it could be anything. It could be regulations on assault weapons, it could which are completely prohibited in the state of California or large capacity, ammunition magazines or safe storage laws or any number of other regulations that are very effective at reducing and preventing gun violence is why California has one of the lowest gun death rates in the country.
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Alex Wise 21:44 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Robyn Thomas. She’s the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. So I know the Gifford center, you’re not an arm of the Democratic Party. You’re not politically affiliated, and yet, this issue of gun violence has become so blue and red. What can unmoored the Republican Party from its current recalcitrance? Is it the money of the gun lobby? Is it the base and its interpretation of the second amendment that people who like guns will vote for republicans Generally, we always have a sandy hook type event and think, well, this is they can’t possibly not move now. But they never move. Is there any hope that some issue or some election will conform the winds of change in this country?
Robyn Thomas 22:36 I am actually happy to say the winds are changing. So I think back to your comment about what is it that holds such sway? Yes, it’s money. Yes, it’s they’re very, very active single issue base. And it’s also, you know, this belief that there isn’t a strong enough voice on the other side. And that has really changed dramatically in the last 10 years. I mean, I have seen radical change on this issue since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, not just in terms of the 300 laws we’ve helped pass at the state level since since that tragedy, but also at terms of the number of political candidates willing to champion this issue in their campaigns. I mean, 10 years ago, you’d be hard pressed to find candidates who would talk about gun policy in their campaign, because it didn’t earn them enough friends, and it made them a lot of enemies. And that has changed. I mean, I can even say, from a personal perspective. You know, when I would tell people what I do before Sandy Hook, they just sort of roll their eyes and after Sandy Hook, people would do teary eyed and be hugging me because they were so upset about what’s happening in this country. So there really was, I think, a pretty big shift after Sandy Hook, and again, after Parkland, and after some of these other sort of horrific public shootings, where it sort of creates an awakening. You know, the big difference I think on this is sort of those, those collar counties, all of these places where you have, you know, suburban seats, which may be red and maybe blue, but seem to be trending toward an issue towards this issue. So you know, say in like, you know, suburban Texas, you have districts that have like always voted red or have always voted for candidates who have a certain conservative position. And that’s changing a lot. I mean, part of its the demographics, but part of it is also on this issue, that you know, the soccer moms care now, whatever their political affiliation, this is something their kid having a lockdown drill at school is more important to them than a lot of other issues that they’re that they’re thinking about when they vote, and it is creating a shift. So I think, you know, we’re seeing we endorse something like 300 candidates the gifford’s arm of the organization in the last cycle, and I think more than 200 of them 250 of them one, including President Biden, who has been very assertive on this issue. There’s never been a president who ran for office on his on the platform. He And one has been outstanding and his administration, you know, they haven’t been able to do as much as we hoped. But certainly they seem to be listening. And that’s a lot more than we can say for, you know, almost any previous administration.
Alex Wise 25:13 And you mentioned Texas, Robyn, I can’t help but think that a state like Texas, which is so long been considered, deeply read, which is now we realize much more in play. And it could be a real test for how strong gun rights are in red America, we see the El Paso shooting, and then former congressman Beto O’Rourke came out with a strong denouncement of Texas, his current gun laws. And when he ran for Senate, he fell short against Ted Cruz, but he took what many considered to be a third rail position, if you will. If he does run for governor against Abbott, it’d be interesting to see if that could actually flip conventional wisdom on its head.
Robyn Thomas 26:03 Yeah, I mean, one of the things I love about Beto is that he seems to really speak his truth. You know, when he states his position on something like guns, I don’t feel like he’s standing there carefully calibrating what he knows, someone told him after focus group testing, he needs to say in order to get X number of votes, he’s actually wrote, he seems to me from what I can gather watching him that he’s actually speaking from the heart that this is something that he believes in. And I think it would be fascinating if he were to win the governor spot, because I think for the most part, people agree with him. I mean, you know whether he won or didn’t win against Cruz because of that issue or another as was hard to say. Cruz obviously has a lot of name recognition and has been in power a long time. But I think the people in Texas for the most part, the average Texan is comfortable with swith, some amount of gun regulation that’s not in place. Now, like I said, if you look at the average family or community in Texas, they’re not so concerned about having access to assault weapons, what they’d rather have is their children safe at school. And if the messaging is done, right, in a way that people understand this isn’t a choice between all or nothing. This isn’t about, can you have guns or no guns, it’s about can we implement the kinds of common sense regulations that will make our children safer and doesn’t change people’s ability to go hunting or sport shooting, or whatever it is, that’s really important to them. It’s about regulations that help us keep guns out of the hands of the most dangerous people. And that helps us keep the most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous people. So for me, it’s always a question about where can we meet in the middle? You know, Texas isn’t going to have laws, maybe like California, at least not anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take steps there to make it a safer place. And I think that’s what people are clamoring for.
Alex Wise 27:52 She’s the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Robyn Thomas. Robyn, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Robyn Thomas 28:01 Thanks for having me, Alex. It’s been great.
Narrator 28:17 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our Intro Music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by The Clash, Nouvelle Vague and The Breeders, check out our website at seachangeradio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Immune To Tragedy: Gun Regulations in America (Re-Broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our discussion with Middle East expert Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. In this episode, we talk about some of the problems presented by certain trigger words when discussing Israel and Palestine and look at the handling of recent campus protests by police and college administrators. Then, we revisit part of our 2022 conversation with Prof. Cole to examine environmental and energy-related issues in the Fertile Crescent.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Juan Cole (JC) | 00:19 – I don’t see how anybody can investigate what’s been going on in the Palestinian West Bank since 1967 and not come to the conclusion that this is an, is an apartheid arrangement.
Narrator | 00:33 – This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our discussion with Middle East expert Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. In this episode, we talk about some of the problems presented by certain trigger words when discussing Israel and Palestine and look at the handling of recent campus protests by police and college administrators. Then we revisit part of our 2022 conversation with Professor Cole to examine environmental and energy related issues in the Fertile Crescent.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:05 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Juan Cole. Juan is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. Juan, welcome back to Sea Change. Radio.
Juan Cole (JC) | 01:26 – Thank you so much.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:27 – Let’s talk about the language for a second, because I think there are these trigger words like anti-Semitism and genocide, and Zionism, which can be in the eye of the beholder used either as a cudgel, a pejorative, but also a compliment. There’s a lot of wiggle room within these words, and I think they’re, they’re lightning rods for a lot of misunderstanding. For example, what you just said, if somebody is protesting what’s happening in Gaza, does that make them anti-Semitic, some people would say, yes. You talk about Trump. There’s that refuge that they constantly seek in victimization, right? He’s always the victim when he’s in court. He wants to be a martyr, even though he’s, he’s led one of the most privileged lives anyone can possibly consider. Antisemitism is also, it’s used to be victims when there’s not necessarily anybody being victimized in this sense, except that you happen to be Jewish and you disagree with me. It’s difficult because I want to respect the people who have had to deal with a lot more antisemitism than me, for example. But I can’t help but draw some parallels with the MAGA victimization and some of American Jewish people who are very quick to assign this term to people. And on the flip side, I think genocide is a trigger word, like apartheid was, it’s not necessarily inaccurate, but it’s a trigger word because people think, “oh, well, genocide is.. that’s the holocaust. That’s not war.” It definitely can incite, escalate the rhetoric, I think sometimes unfairly and to a level that I think is counterproductive.
Juan Cole (JC) | 03:17 – You’re right, these words, are not used in the same way by everybody. And the differences in nuance can cause problems. There are people who would say that Zionism is a settler colonial ideology. And if you identify as a Zionist and you’re identifying with, with a historic wrong, I think for a lot of American Jews who say they’re Zionists, what they mean is they’re proud of Albert Einstein, and they’re proud of the accomplishments of, of the Jewish people by saying they’re Zionists. They don’t mean that Itamar Ben-Gvir is allowed to invade a Palestinian’s property in the West Bank and usurp it.
AW | 04:00 – I think it’s such a hard word to generalize. I just have family members, for example, who might think they’re Zionists because they think that Israel has a right to exist versus somebody who thinks that Israel has a right to the whole region, or that American Jews have an obligation to go back and live in Israel. There’s a wide spectrum of that definition.
JC | 04:22 – Yes. It doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody. And, uh, you know, I’m a historian, so I I’m trying to be, uh, sensitive to nuance, but, you know, you get out there on social media or you’re in a campus protest, it’s not a place of nuance. Uh, and, uh, with regard to, uh, charges of apartheid and, uh, genocide, uh, frankly, these are legal matters. Uh, and, uh, uh, there’s a, a technical legal definition of, of these things. Uh, in international humanitarian law, I advise everybody just to go to the Rome statute. It’s online, it’s easily Googleable. Uh, and it’s kind of a summation of international humanitarian law that was drew on the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention and so forth. And it was finalized between 1998 and 2002, and about 124 countries have signed onto it. It became the charter for the International Criminal Court. So it has a section on apartheid. It has a section on genocide. Go and see what it says. Uh, so some people who get offended that, the current, Gaza campaign conducted by the Netanyahu government, uh, has been characterized by South Africa as a form of genocide. Don’t know what the word means in that context, because they, the South Africa brought this action at the international Court of Justice, which is the court that was set up at the United Nations to adjudicate disputes among member nations. And it has a very specific set of meanings. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to kill millions of people. A genocide can be conducted by killing a relatively small number of people has to do with why you killed them, how you killed them, if you kill them because of who they are. That’s genocide. Likewise with apartheid, it’s not that everything has to be exactly as it was in South Africa. Apartheid has become a term of art in law, and there are some actions that a government takes, uh, disadvantaging people because of their race, uh, that that constitute a crime of apartheid. I don’t think, I don’t see how anybody can investigate what’s been going on in the Palestinian West banks since 1967 and not come to the conclusion that this is an, is an apartheid arrangement.
AW | 07:00 – It’s not inaccurate, but it becomes inflammatory because of the lack of curiosity, let’s say, or, or not being educated on the topic.
JC | 07:09 – Yeah. And as you said before, there’s a lot of tribalism, uh, so on all sides. So, um, there are, uh, Jewish Americans who’ve grown up with a vision of Israel as a place that can do no wrong. It is the most moral army in the world, according to them. And, and I mean, frankly, they say silly things, and it becomes a form of ego inflation. They invest a lot of their, their own being in it. It’s a form of nationalism. You see Americans who do this, they won’t, won’t accept any criticism of anything the US government does.
AW | 07:48 – I think Trump has kind of changed that calculus for a lot of Americans.
JC | 07:52 – Yes, exactly. Well, it’s nothing peculiar to Jewish Americans devoted to Israel, but it’s, it’s a wrong way of thinking, and it, it gets you into intellectual trouble. My country, right or wrong, uh, was a, uh, a saying that, uh, was put forward by an American, admiral, I believe, in the mid 19th century, and which was rebuked, uh, by, right thinking, members of America’s, political establishment. We have to critique, uh, what our government does. There was a famous exchange by, I can’t remember who it was. It was a senator who called Ollie North, to testify before Congress. And North was one of those who thought that, you know, if the president does it, that it’s, it’s by de facto legal as, as Nixon said, and, whatever you have to do what you have to do for the United States. And so he was, Oliver North was taking money from Khomeini in Iran, selling them, illegally, selling them weapons in the Iran-Iraq War, and taking that money and giving it to right wing death squads in Central America, all off the books and, and explicitly beyond what Congress had authorized. And he was defending it. He defended what he did, and it was clearly unconstitutional. And if Senator said, you know, in the United States, critiquing the government is a good thing. It’s, it’s the foundation of our nation. So we have to be able to critique Netanyahu’s government. We have to be able to critique, uh, the US government. We have to be able to critique Joe Biden and, and Donald Trump. And if we don’t, then, then we end up with the Soviet Union. You know, we end up with gulags and, uh, and, and totalitarianism. And I don’t know why anybody would want that. And certainly, I can’t understand why Jews would want that, because that doesn’t lead in a good direction for minorities.
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AW | 10:48 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Juan Cole. He’s a professor of history at the University of Michigan. So as an academic, how do you feel when you see video of the professor in Emory University being pushed to the ground by the police and, and elsewhere? I mean, and it makes my blood boil, but I’m not a colleague of hers – you are.
JC | 11:10 – At Washington University in St. Louis also, there was an incident where a professor had ribs broken. Well, I mean, I mean, I think that it’s police brutality and it’s overreaction. I am an army brat, and I grew up in a family where my father was in the service. And I don’t approve of using insulting words for police. I respect our police but some of them are bullies who happen to get into uniform. Some of them are prone to overreacting. And, I think, that’s why you don’t call them if somebody is used to dealing with bank robbers who, who, who might be armed and might hurt you. And so the first thing you want to do is get them on the ground and, and make sure they’re not armed. That’s not the kind of person that you want to call on a college protest, because those are not dangerous situations. And, they shouldn’t be dealt with by police.
AW | 12:23 – You can see a, a whiplash effect against these rich college kids where you have the police force coming in with a carte blanche to bash some heads could be dangerous.
JC | 12:34 – Well, this is not new. I mean, we, we saw those kinds of fissures in the Vietnam War when a lot of police were angry at young people for not supporting the war and couldn’t see that it was a kind of genocide. You know, the United States probably killed between two and 5 million innocent civilians in Vietnam. And the police were, were angry that they were protesting against their own government. Ao, and that, you know, the class comes into it. But nowadays, in, in American University, and you talk elite universities, there are very substantial number of scholarship students. There are working class kids on that campus, and some of them are involved in these demonstrations as well. So if anybody thinks it’s just a matter of a elite, spoiled children, acting out, that would not be accurate, and it wouldn’t be fair to the students. So I think in some instances there has been police brutality and, and, and the police who undertook it should be blamed. They should be investigated. They’re acting, not as law enforcement, but as bullies. But I don’t think that’s typical of police. And I think the real problem is that the police have been put in an impossible situation that they’ve been called to deploy the tools that they have, against people against whom those tools are not appropriate. You should never call the police in, on a nonviolent, non-disruptive event. And, and even the definition of disruption is open for debate because I think protests is inevitably to some extent disruptive. But I don’t know of any of these protests that have prevented, people from learning or from, from taking their classes. And, I think, that the charges of, of such things are in every case that I know about overblown.
AW | 14:33 – So how does this play out, Juan, on campuses around the country? Most colleges are looking at commencement on the very near horizon. Do these protests peter out during the summer, or do you think they, they resume assuming that the aggression is still occurring come late August? Do we see a resumption of these protests around the country?
JC | 14:55 – Well, I can confidently predict that all the campuses in the country will be empty…
AW | 15:00 –
JC | 15:01 – …Within a, within, within about a month, right?
AW | 17:40 – Juan Cole, thank you so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JC | 17:43 – Thanks for having me, Alex.
(Music Break) | 18:54
(2022 Interview) AW | 18:57 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Juan Cole. Juan is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and a longtime blogger informed comment is his website. Juan, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
JC | 19:11 – Thanks so much.
AW | 19:13 – You wrote recently, you’ve dived into giving us a, a glimpse of the various Middle Eastern countries and how they’re being affected by climate change. Why don’t we start with this region in Iran, Abadan and what they are encountering right now in terms of heat?
JC | 19:33 – There have been new records set in, in Abadan in, in southwestern Iran this summer with the temperatures getting up to 122 Fahrenheit. These are dangerous temperatures that we’re seeing in the region.
AW | 19:50 – And talk about their water usage in Iran’s decade long drought and how it’s affecting not just Abadan but the entire country.
JC | 20:00 – Yes. Well, Iran really only has one big river system and ag, and again, it’s in the, uh, southwest of the country, the Karu River, and its tributaries and the former government of Iran under the Shah, the King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was overthrown in 1979. But while he was in power, he initiated a lot of dam works in hopes of, uh, creating, uh, artificial lakes that would yield irrigation possibilities, but then also to make hydroelectricity. Uh, and these monumental projects were pursued by the Shah, without much consultation with local people or much understanding of local conditions. And, and so some of the water now has been diverted to a big agricultural use, uh, and, um, that has hurt Iraq, uh, where, where the water used to flow into from Iran. And now, uh, there’s this, uh, long, long term drought that we’re seeing that’s similar to the mega drought that we’re having in our American, uh, Southwest. And so major bodies of water like the Zayanderud, the major river that goes through the city of Isfahan have dried up that that river over which there is a historic ridge from the 16 hundreds does not exist at the moment. And farmers are not being able to irrigate, uh, as they used to from these, uh, streams and have demonstrated against the regime. So the government clearly is not dealing very well, uh, with, uh, with the drought. And it really threatens Iranian agriculture threatens people’s livelihoods, uh, food sources, and it has geopolitical implications because Iraq is furious that it’s not getting the water from the Iran anymore.
AW | 22:04 – Yes. I want to dive into that in a second and turn to Iraq, but just staying with Iran for a minute, what are the geopolitical consequences of this drought and possible agricultural shortfall in terms of embargoes and how western countries might approach negotiating with Iran moving forward? How dependent is Iran on foreign imports, for example?
JC | 22:32 – Yes. Well, Iran imports a lot of food. And, uh, most modern countries can no longer feed themselves. Uh, they’re, they’re part of a globalized, trade in commodities like, uh, grain, the US sanctions, which are very severe, they, they were called by Trump. The maximum pressure campaign have had a horribly effect on the lives of everyday people. But those sanctions don’t target, uh, food imports or medicine, medicine imports. The sanctions do weaken the earning power of people in Iran. And so there may be medicines they can’t afford as a result of the sanctions. And there may be certain kinds of food that they can’t afford, but, uh, the, the sanctions themselves don’t, don’t target that sector. I, I think the, the bigger political fallout from, uh, the drought and, and what I see as the Iranian government’s lack of ability to address it with, uh, engineering, uh, and administration, is that the rural sector could turn against the Iranian government. And the rural sector has been a pillar of this government. So, that’s bad news for Tehran.
AW | 23:49 – So let’s turn to Iraq for a moment, if you will. You, you wrote not that long ago on informed comment, uh, post titled 19 years ago, America really wanted Iraq’s Basra for its oil, which is now making it uninhabitable. Why don’t you explain, for those who aren’t familiar with Basra, this, this vital oil producing region and what it’s facing with climate change.
JC | 24:17 – Iraq’s major oil fields are in the south of the country around, uh, the, uh, riverine port of Basra. Uh, and, um, uh, those oil fields had been under us sanction after the Gulf War, uh, because Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, uh, and was illegal in international law. And the US and the un put sanctions on Iran’s oil exports as on Iraq’s ex oil exports as a result. It’s my thesis that one of the reasons for the Iraq war was not so much that Bush and Cheney wanted to steal Iraq’s Petroleum. I think they just wanted to open it up for exploitation and allow American oil majors to get in there. And they couldn’t, uh, under the sanctions regime. And as long as Saddam Hussein was in power, I think there was very little likelihood that the Congress would take off those sanctions. And so I think it occurred to, uh, Dick Cheney in particular that were they to overthrow Saddam Hussein and have a new government, then the sanctions would go away and the oil would be available for exploitation, which is what happened. And Iraq is a major oil producer now and export 4 billion, 4 million barrels a day, which is quite substantial.
AW | 25:50 – It’s a good opportunity for us to turn to desalinization efforts in the region. This leads to some unintended consequences with the handling of the, the, the byproduct of these plants. And, and I’m curious if this sludge that gets created by desal is affecting these river deltas that you’re talking about with Iraq and Iran at all.
JC | 26:18 – Yeah, not, not so much the river deltas, but the, the Persian Gulf itself, which is a big important body of water and very polluted with, you know, oil tankers have spilled into it, and, uh, uh, uh, all kinds of runoff is there from agriculture and, and, and chemical plants. But yes, uh, the, the current technology that, uh, is being largely being used for desalinization has, uh, uh, an environmental flaw, uh, which is that, uh, the, the way that the water is de, you know, desalinize is, it’s, it’s taken up from the ocean and, and distilled, uh, and, um, uh, the, the, that creates clean water, uh, when you recover the vapor. But then what’s left behind is the salt and the heavy metals and, and the more toxic, uh, elements in the water, and then they dump that back into the ocean. And if you do that consistently after a while, you create a dead zone, uh, where fish cannot live. Uh, and dead zones are very common throughout the world. There’s a big dead zone off of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s just from agricultural runoff. But, uh, but the desalinization plants, uh, also have this problem. Uh, and I believe it’s one of the reasons that, uh, when a desalinization plant was proposed for Huntington Beach, the population voted against it because they, they depend on their beach for tourism, and they don’t want a dead zone.
AW | 27:47 – Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and people can read his blog Informed Comment at JuanCole.com. Juan, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JC | 28:01 – It’s great being here.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the New Orleans Klezmer All-stars, Bob Marley & the Wailers and Radiohead. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Juan Cole: Israel, Gaza and Campus Protests, Part II appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Pro-Palestinian student protests are erupting on college campuses all over the country, often resulting in aggressive responses from local law enforcement. This week on Sea Change Radio, the first half of our two-part discussion with noted Michigan University history professor and Middle East scholar, Juan Cole. We look at the Israeli attacks on Gaza, discuss the unrest it has caused on campuses around this country, and examine how the right-wing parties in both the US and Israel are trying to leverage the conflict to their own benefit.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Juan Cole (JC) | 00:19 – So they’re weaponizing their position in Congress to attack, uh, the university presidents, and also they’re in some ways in cahoots then with some of these very wealthy donors who are also donors to their campaigns, to use their political position to curb freedom of speech for Americans.
Narrator | 00:40 – Pro-Palestinian student protests are erupting on college campuses all over the country, often resulting in aggressive responses from local law enforcement. This week on Sea Change Radio, the first half of our two-part discussion with noted Michigan University history professor and Middle East scholar, Juan Cole. We look at the Israeli attacks on Gaza, discuss the unrest it has caused on campuses around this country, and examine how the right-wing parties in both the US and Israel are trying to leverage the conflict to their own benefit.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:25 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Juan Cole. Juan is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. Juan, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Juan Cole (JC) | 01:36 – Thank you so much.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:38 – I’ve really wanted to speak to you for quite some time. I wanted to get your perspective on the college protests that are stemming from the Israeli Hamas conflict. First, why don’t you, if you can summarize these college protests and, and it’s a tough question because there’s a wide range of not only the scope of these protests, but on the clampdowns from campus to campus, but maybe for people who haven’t really been following in that closely, kind of fill them in on what’s been happening around the country in the last month or so.
Juan Cole (JC) | 02:11 – The protests are a response by these undergraduates, mainly undergraduates, to the ongoing Israeli military campaign against Gaza. I think the young people on campus are, are living this war in a way that their elders are not. They’ve seen the war unfold daily on their phones. They see the horrible clips of wounded, civilians, displaced people, health problems, uh, that have been imposed by the war, on TikTok, on, uh, on Instagram and, and so forth. They follow news clips on BBC and so forth. And the elders don’t, I mean CNN and other major US cable news outfits, you couldn’t accuse them of ignoring the war, but they haven’t covered it intensively. I watch a lot of cable news, and as far as I can tell these days, it’s all about Trump’s trials and these inside the beltway panels that discuss things endlessly, you don’t see very much news from the front.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:22 – It’s expensive to cover. It’s a lot cheaper to just have a panel of people talking about Trump.
JC | 03:27 – It’s for their bottom line. Also, you know, the, the corporate news is selling advertising. I mean, it’s selling us toilet paper and fast food. And you have to wonder whether scenes of, uh, wounded babies covered in flies from Gaza is, is actually going to, uh, is help their bottom line. And, uh, I think there are a lot of reasons for which they simply haven’t covered this, uh, story in any intensive way. And of course, they can’t with their own reporters. And that’s another, uh, problem for them is, is a news organization. You get caught, you know, sometimes if you depend on somebody else’s feed, if they are engaging in fraud or exaggeration, then, then if you, if you carry it, then you get the accusation that you’re not reliable. And so, they’d have to use stringers from Gaza. People inside Gaza. It’d have to be people that they trusted. Occasionally they’ve done this, and of course, a lot of news organizations do this. Agence-France Press has stringers inside Gaza, Al Jazeera, of course, as well. But, I think the big corporate news in the United States is a little afraid to go that direction. And they can’t send their own people in very often. Occasionally, they have been able to, if you consume your news from what we used to call mainstream media, then you probably haven’t heard very much of what’s gone on in Gaza. Young people, on the other hand, have lived it, and they’re upset. I mean, it should be underlined that the Israeli government that’s in charge of this campaign is not an ordinary government. Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud Party, who’s the Prime Minister, brought into the government in order to come back to power in late 2022, the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis. I mean, we have to be frank about this. I know it’s offensive to some people to say this, but at Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, these are not ordinary Israeli politicians. Ben-Gvir is a convicted racialist and inciter and terrorist. I mean, these people would not be allowed into the United States under the rules of the State Department, up until a few years ago, which, marked the Kahanist trend as a terrorist organization.
AW | 05:59 – So, whether or not Netanyahu is the devil himself, he’s made a deal with the devil in order to come back into power in a couple of years ago. Is that a, a fair characterization?
JC | 06:10 – I think Netanyahu is a man with very few principles, and some people have said he is pragmatic. You can deal with him, and that may all be true. But in order to have, you know, 64 seats in, in 120, seat parliament, he’s brought in these flamethrowers, who openly talk about destroying Gaza, finishing the job, ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, moving them out someplace else. Who are themselves illegal settlers in the West Bank on Palestinian private property that they have stolen, and who encourage other people to engage in this theft and, and to attack ordinary everyday Palestinians in their towns and hamlets in the West Bank. Ben-Gvir gave out guns in large numbers, recently, I think in hopes of encouraging this kind of violence because Palestinians in the West Bank, are not armed. And so it’s not an ordinary situation. And the rules of engagement that have been, discovered by investigative journalists in Israel, by Israeli journalists Abraham Valat, plus 972 Mag, have discovered that they have set the rules of engagement so that they will accept 15 to 20 innocent non-combatant lives being taken for every Hamas militant that they’re able to kill.
AW | 07:52 – So that calculus is something that young people on campuses are aware of much more than the average American citizen, you’d say?
JC | 08:00 – I would say that they, they are aware that the rules of engagement that Israel is deploying in Gaza are unprecedented for a western civilized society that they’re just accepting enormous numbers of non-combatant deaths of children, women. It’s estimated 70% of the deaths have been children and women, and a fair number of the remaining, you know, or non-combatant men, old people and so forth.
AW | 08:29 – I do remember reading, I don’t have the stat in front of me, but over the last century, the idea of war has turned much more from soldier fighting soldier to one power killing lots of civilians. I think the, I don’t remember the ratios, but it used to be like more like one-to-one soldier to soldier in like World War I. But a hundred years later, I think it’s like 20 to one civilian to, yeah, to soldier death. It’s turned into a very different idea than thousands of years of warfare between trained military civilians are the new casualties in modern warfare, unfortunately.
JC | 09:09 – That’s true, and you see it with the Russians in Ukraine. We saw it with the Americans in Iraq. But here’s the thing, the, the American rules of engagement, uh, however much you want to criticize the Pentagon and so forth, were such, if there was a sniper on a building in Mosul from Isel, and you wanted to take him out by hitting the building, you had to be sure there was no civilian family in that building. The US Air Force will not call in a strike on a building when they know that there’s a civilian family in that building, that that’s against the US rules of engagement. And what, what this government of Netanyahu and Ben Gavi and Morich have done, have, have said that take the shot.
AW | 09:58 – The ends justify the means.
JC | 10:00 – The ends justify the means. If you can hit that militant and you kill seven members of an a civilian family, just you have to do it. And that’s different from NATO rules of engagement. That’s all I’m saying is, is it, it’s not that innocent civilians get killed in, in those wars too, uh, that, that NATO countries have fought. But, uh, but this, this, uh, open embrace of a rules of engagement that allows for so many civilian deaths is, um, unusual, let us say.
AW | 10:37 – And it’s pretty unconscionable that we have a stomach for it, particularly in the age of social media, where these things are in plain sight.
JC | 10:45 – Well, that’s why the kids, I shouldn’t call them kids, they’re the young adults on, on campus are making encampments and occupying buildings and protesting, because the US government hasn’t done its job. Joe Biden gets the same information as I get in his morning briefings, actually much better information and much more detailed. And, uh, his aides are leaking to the press that he sees these civilian deaths every day. And he says, okay. And it’s not acceptable to the young people, you know, they’re not old and jaded. They’re not cynical. They think that that’s not the way that the US government should be behaving. They should be telling Netanya and Morich and, and Ben-Gvir, no, you can’t do that. Uh, and, and it’s in the power of the United States to tell them no, their ammunition is coming on a daily basis from the United States.
(Music Break) | 11:41
AW | 12:19 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan’s History Department. My first question we kind of glossed over, and we will get to that again, I do want to go campus by campus a little bit if we can, and see the different reactions. But I can’t help but think back to all of these different student protests throughout the years with Vietnam, South Africa, to a lesser degree, the Iraq War, Civil Rights issues. Almost always, there’s conflict with the campus police or local authorities. We saw Kent State, but I can’t recall a time where we look back and see that the students were on the wrong side of history.
JC | 13:02 – That’s right. These campus protests are, are manifestations, I think, of a strong moral stance, in the face of a unsatisfactory status quo. But I would say that this round is different in the sense that the university administrations have been much more willing to call in the police. Then in the past, the Hamilton building in Columbia University was occupied for three weeks, back in the eighties by anti-apartheid protestors.
AW | 13:38 And in the sixties too, right?
JC | 13:40 – Yeah, and the university didn’t do anything. Well, in the sixties they did…
AW | 13:43 – But they were occupying it for a long time before they, they cracked down.
JC | 13:46 – Yeah, that’s right. So the, the, the Columbia University decision to call in a highly militarized police force, uh, and, and, uh, make these arrests, uh, this is, um, I think a little unusual. It’s not that it’s unprecedented, but the willingness to, to resort to the police, has been more widespread, has taken less time. And, you know, the universities and the police have changed. Uh, George W. Bush militarized, uh, the us uh, domestic police, he put in a program that, you know, leftover Pentagon equipment, started going to police departments. You guys, you get these guys dressed up like they’re, their special forces in Iraq, Kevlar, and, uh, all kinds of, uh, armor and weaponry, and behaving as though the students are terrorists, uh, which they’re not whatever, Eric Adams may allege, these were just students. And the fact that they’re demonstrating about the Gaza War does not mean that they’re Hamas, uh, supporters or sympathizers. Actually, I can’t, I don’t know any Hamas sympathizers or supporters, and I’m in the Middle East studies field. It’s a pretty ugly organization from any liberal or leftist point of view. They’re protesting about the dead children, that that’s why they’re protesting. It has nothing to do with politics.
AW | 15:23 – Juan, we were talking about the militarization of these police forces. I can’t help but think that the arming of these law enforcement officials who are not trained to be Seal forces or Army Rangers, giving them this kind of equipment, shields them from harm and also emboldens them to do more damage than they would otherwise. Not just, not just the guns, but the Kevlar and the protection. It dehumanizes not only them, but the people that they’re supposed to be “harnessing,” let’s say.
JC | 15:56 – Yes. I mean, I think it, it encourages the police to think about, uh, domestic, um, uh, protestors as terrorists, and to deploy the, the diction and the techniques of the war on terror on them. Uh, and it, it separates them from the community. You’ve got an army armored vehicle going down the road in, in, instead of a police car. This is not going to, you know, it is not going to help with community policing. And that’s why, you know, with the Black Lives Matter movement and there’s been a turn towards protestors demanding, defunding the police which President Biden is scathing about and, and rejects. But, you know, there have been places, which have decided to use the police differently. It’s not that you don’t need police. I mean, if you have bank robberies, you need police. But, why would you send the police to a domestic disturbance?
AW | 17:07 – Has there been violence breaking out before the police entered the scene in any of these campuses around the country, Juan?
JC | 17:13 – No. Well, occasionally, there was, violence at UCLA, but it was, a kind of, mob of pro-Israel supporters that attacked the students and from coming from off campus. But there, there is no reason to call police. Uh, I saw an anecdote that Hannah Arendt the great Jewish German thinker, was at the New School for Social Research in New York at part of her career. And there was a demonstration, and the administrators and faculty were consulting what to do about it. And she said in German, she said, “don’t ever call the police.” So as somebody who had lived through the horrors of the interwar period, she knew what she was talking about. And I think that should be the slogan for, for any university administrator. These demonstrations and, and encampments and protests have almost never actually interfered with the functioning of the university. I’m at the University of Michigan. We have an encampment on the quad, which, you know, is, where the students for a democratic society organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s. It’s got a long and storied history of, of being a place for protests there. There’s, those students at that encampment are, are not bothering anybody and there’s no reason for them to have the police called on them.
AW | 18:48 – From an administrative standpoint, it’s a very complicated situation for them. Just contrasting Columbia with Brown University, I saw that Brown just went along with the demands of the protestors and decided to divest from companies that are benefiting from this conflict. And on the flip side, you see Columbia bringing in SWAT teams to handle this dissent. I can’t help but think that some of this stemmed from the early blow back against the president, I think of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, where they were threatened by large donors. One guy in particular in Pennsylvania, I don’t remember his name, but he, he had given a hundred million dollars, or he was, he had pledged a hundred million dollars, and then he was threatening to not give the entirety of that donation if the president was not unseated. So we see the kind of another bargain that these very well-funded elite institutions have made this grand bargain where you’re going to be begging for gifts constantly, you’re going to be beholden to some of these larger donors, and it’s a difficult calculation for them, but it goes along with having a 30 something billion dollars endowment like Columbia.
JC | 20:04 – Well, I think that’s right, and, and I think there’s a trend even in state universities, towards, trying to build up endowments, by accepting, or soliciting large gifts from alumni, uh, people who have graduated from the institution and have gone on to do well in the world. Uh, and I think from the point of view of the college administrators, they’re not thinking that donating money to build a chemistry building or whatever, would turn into political influence on the part of the donors about the administration of the university’s affairs. But it does and we’ve seen that increasingly. The other thing to say is that, uh, the, the MAGA wing of the Republican party, is frustrated, by its inability to make any inroads, in universities and has targeted universities. MAGA is not about critical thinking and it’s a kind of movement where you have to believe 12 impossible things before breakfast. And the universities are not about that program. And so, the Congress, people like Elise Stefanik, who’s auditioning for Trump’s vice president, have decided to attack the universities. Now, in Congress, the Republican House of Representatives, has this difficulty that constitutionally, they can’t just pass laws about what people can say, uh, would violate the First Amendment, but, uh, what they’ve done in the past, and what they’re doing now is to put pressure of various sorts on, civil society organizations or businesses to then police speech. Uh, and so if they can threaten the universities with a cutoff of federal funds, for instance, uh, which they have, uh, they hope to be able to make the University’s institute regulations, that then would curb the kind of speech that they don’t like and we’ve seen this happen at the state level in Florida and Texas and elsewhere, trying to outlaw the teaching of, the history of slavery in this country, for instance, on the grounds that it would be, it would hurt the feelings of the white students, uh, uh, to know what their ancestors did. So they’re weaponizing their position in Congress to attack, uh, the university presidents, and also they in some ways in cahoots then with some of these very wealthy donors who are also donors to their campaigns, to use their political position to curb freedom of speech for Americans.
(Music Break) | 22:50
AW | 23:52 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Juan Cole, he’s a professor of history at the University of Michigan. So Juan, you just mentioned the MAGA Trump element to this Israeli Hamas conflict. I couldn’t help but think when we see some of these police battalions entering encampments on college campuses, that these people are apparently supposed to be there to be protecting the Jewish students. In some odd framing of this issue, I don’t think that’s usually the case. And knowing how the MAGA wing has kind of treated the Israeli Jewish issue over the last, actually way before Trump, if we look at it from John Hagee, the element where, as long as Israel is occupied by Jews, when the rapture comes, then everything’s going to be fine for us. It’s a very selfish concept. Doesn’t really align with the teachings of Christ from what I’m familiar with. But, so when Trump says things like, no Jews should vote for Democrats, I think he said, like, “How can Jews remain Democrats?” and calling, Netanyahu is “your” Prime Minister, it feels very craven, and the escalation of violence in these campuses seems to be viewed by the MAGA wing as another opportunity, very craven, and I think people should see through it. But unfortunately, there’s a lot of deep-seated beliefs and tribalism that that goes into the general public’s opinions when it comes to this very hot button issue.
JC | 25:31 – Yes. Well, the idea of Elise Stefanik is a protector of Jewish Americans is darkly comic. She actually used campaign ads in her last campaign, which, used the dog whistle of, of the great replacement theory, uh, which is a, a horrible conspiracy theory that was thought up by, uh, French, ex-Nazis in, in the post-World War II period. That, uh, why do we have all of these immigrants coming in? Well, it’s because the Jewish businessmen want them for their cheap labor, because white people’s labor is expensive. And the Jewish business owners don’t want to pay white people there a living wage. And so they’re going to replace the white people with all of these immigrants who will work, uh, for cheap, very, very, uh, cheap wages and, uh, and then build up the wealth and power of, this, uh, Jewish cabal. It is a family show. I don’t wanna use expletives, but it’s a horrible set of notions. And, Sefanik, her campaign referred to it, you know, it wasn’t maybe put out front and center in a explicit way with neon lights, but that’s the tenor of the, uh, of the argument that she was making was a great replacement theory, uh, uh, advertisement. And, it was, you know, it got, it got Jews killed at the, at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was, it was over this crazy conspiracy theory that those people were shot down. So, for them to say that these, uh, college students who are upset about civilian deaths in Gaza are engaging in a form of antisemitism is, is just bass ackwards. It’s these MAGA guys who are engaging in antisemitism. The, the undergraduates are not saying anything about Jews at all. In fact, a significant proportion of the protests are being spearheaded by Jewish Voices for Peace, who are Jews, who feel that it’s unacceptable what the Netanyahu government is doing in Gaza.
Narrator | 28:00 – Tune in next week for the second half of our discussion with Professor Juan Cole. You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by The Meters, Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready and The Clash. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Juan Cole: Israel, Gaza and Campus Protests, Part I appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
How do you think your life would be different if you had spent your first five years as an adult incarcerated? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Kevin Ortiz, a progressive political activist in San Francisco whose life was very nearly derailed by a run-in with the police when he was 19 years old. We hear Kevin’s story, learn how the nonprofit SF Pretrial helped him out, and get some first-hand insight into a legal system that is tilted against young men of color. Then, we hear an excerpt from our 2022 discussion with San Francisco Public Defender Peter Calloway.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Kevin Ortiz | 00:14 – No system’s perfect, right? But if we’re going to look at the overall successes of people being able to get connected, and through SF Pretrial, able to come out of it with secure jobs, housing, drug rehabilitative services, and then social emotional supports, right? And then being able to go back into being successful citizens, then that’s a model that we should be actually continuing to expand funding for and not underfunding it or cutting funding to it.
Narrator | 00:40 – How do you think your life would be different if you had spent your first five years as an adult incarcerated? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Kevin Ortiz, a progressive political activist in San Francisco whose life was very nearly derailed by a run-in with the police when he was 19 years old. We hear Kevin’s story, learn how the nonprofit SF Pretrial helped him out, and get some first-hand insight into a legal system that is tilted against young men of color. Then, we hear an excerpt from our 2022 discussion with San Francisco Public Defender Peter Calloway.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:30 – I’m joined on Sea Change Radio by Kevin Ortiz. Kevin is the president of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club. Kevin, welcome to Sea. Change Radio.
Kevin Ortiz (KO) | 01:42 – Hey, thanks for having me on.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:44 – Why don’t you start us off, Kevin, by giving us your backstory and how you encountered legal troubles as a younger man.
Kevin Ortiz (KO) | 01:53 – Yeah, definitely. So maybe diving a little bit backwards, um, so I, I just turned 30 when I was 19 years old. I was in a much different place than I’m at now, and so I, you know, was kind of in the party scene drinking a lot more than I should have been. I think, you know, at the time I was also doing drugs, and so it was a different kind of lifestyle that I was living to where I currently am. And so I went out to a club event when I was like 19. I think I was 19 and a half when the incident happened. And so, you know, on 22nd admission for an 18 plus event at that time. And, um, you know, I stumbled out of the bar, right? And, you know, intoxicated, being underage, um, there was already a situation that was going on at that time. And so, you know, I kind of stumbled into it as I was trying to jaywalk across the street. Police stopped me, immediately arrested me because they had so seen that I was intoxicated. And from there I got slammed on the back of a police car. And, um, at that time, you know, I had a little bit of a motor mouth
AW | 03:31 – And you were initially just arrested for jaywalking?
KO | 03:34 – Jaywalking. And at that time, then they saw that I was already at that time basically intoxicated. Right. So they basically arrested me, from that time. Right. Um, you know, and then they found out I was underage. So it basically justified the warrant, right? Or not the warrant, the, the arrest. But, you know, I at that time basically ended up getting a pretty big case. I was talking a lot of mess to the police, you know, at that time they basically ended up hitting me with nine different charges, right. Resisting arrest, and, you know, kind of throwing the whole book at it. Right? And so I ended up getting connected to SF Pretrial. It was my first offense, and it would be my only offense, but I was looking at something like, you know, potentially five years in prison time.
AW | 04:17 – Based on public intoxication or because it, it elevated to resisting arrest?
KO | 04:22 – Resisting arrest. Yeah. So there was like three different charges of resisting arrest.
AW | 04:26 – And how long were you in jail before you connected with SF Pretrial?
KO | 04:32 – So I was in jail for about a week. And so, you know, I ended up, you know, getting released pretty early on after a week because, uh, you know, I had not had any, uh, previous, like, charges right at the timing was really rough because I was supposed to start a job the, the Monday after, right. And the incident happened on a Thursday, right? So I missed that job interview. And so at that time, you know, I ended up going through the first court case. They, they ended up seeing me on the Monday after that Thursday incident basically went down. So I spent the weekend in jail, and then I was released the following week after that.
AW | 05:03 – And so you missed out on that job opportunity?
KO | 05:05 – I did, yep. And I had just recently transitioned from a, like a retail job into doing more of a sales job at that time. So it was a little bit of a tumultuous time in my life because, you know, I, I didn’t have a job. I was facing, you know, multiple charges and, you know, I was, you know, dealing with a substance abuse problem. And so I had, you know, family support, right? But it’s also tough navigating the legal system for the first time, right? And so getting connected, uh, through the public defender’s office, who recommended that we should do, uh, pretrial, right? Because there was no previous issues, um, at that time, right? And so I, I got connected with Pretrial, um, and I think it honestly, uh, really changed my life and also, um, really redirected me into a much different place than where I was at.
AW | 05:52 – So why don’t you explain what SF Pretrial is and how it helped you in terms of your pretrial process?
KO | 05:59 – Yep. So, you know, normally when you’re like going through a case, you’ll, you’ll get arraigned, right? You’ll, you know, um, a judge will basically, Hey, you know, here are the sentences, right? Like the, the people versus, you know, me as the defendant, right? And so the district attorney is bringing cases forward. The judge is basically weighing in about, you know, what is the validity of these cases, kind of going back and forth. And, you know, I will say that I think I could have fought it all the way to trial, and I, I would’ve been okay. Um, but it’s also looking at something like, is this the best approach, right? To go through a major legal fight that could have more risk in the long run, right? Um, even though, you know, like there was pixelated photos from me, um, you know, like my eyes being swollen red from being hit in the face, uh, by the police, right? Um, it was one of those things where it’s like, is this the best approach on this or is this something that, you know, I could look at, you know, like we could take the path of least resistance, right? And so my public defender had, you know, talked to me at that time about, let’s look into SF Pretrial, um, we can get you the help and support that, you know, like, you know, um, you know, that might be needed at that time. And so SF Pretrial, basically, they connect folks with the resources that they need prior to going to a trial, right? And so, you know, depending on, you know, they’ll come up with kind of a comprehensive, you know, individualized plan based off the individual that’s facing it, right? So for certain folks it might be drug services, right? Like, and so, you know, being able to get connected that way. For me, I, I think I was recommended at the time, 12 weeks of group therapy. And so, um, you know, for privacy sake, I’ll, I’ll mention it was like, you know, I got connected with a group therapist by the name of Terry, right? Um, and so, and Terry, I think, you know, I would go in every Tuesday I’d, I go and we’d basically just talk, we talked about our issues that were going on at that time, you know, what, um, you know, what things we were struggling with on the individual level, right? So getting a lot of the social emotional support. Um, and so for me it was tough because you have an open pending case and you’re not really allowed to apply. Like when you’re doing a background check, um, you’ll have a pending case that pops up on that, right? And so it was, I, at that time, I was struggling because even though I wanted to apply for, you know, high level tech jobs to do sales and things like that, because at that time I was doing a lot of sales work, I, I was getting a lot of those entry barriers because of the fact that I couldn’t pass a, a background check. And so it was a really tough time, but I was still doing kind of like the outside street sales and before making that actual transition to corporate sales. Um, and so pretrial was helpful in the sense of being able to get me to understand kind of like my awareness about where things were, like being really like, you know, tough, right? Uh, in the sense of why was I drinking so much? Why was I going out partying so much? Right? Um, you know, why is it that, you know, like, you know what, what things I’m struggling with, right? So the individual like therapy, I think really helped out a lot, um, because there was the group therapy, but also the individual therapy.
AW | 08:56 – And all of these services were free? And you happen to be introduced to SF Pretrial by your public defender, as you mentioned, but prosecutors also would potentially, or the sheriff’s department, there’s many different wings that SF Pretrial partners with in order to, to introduce people into the system. Is that right?
KO | 09:20 – Think of pretrial as a prerequisite of catching folks in a way that we, if we can, it’s, I see it in a lot of ways as being a preventative model, right? If you catch someone once, um, before they go into a full, kind of like the incarceral system, right? And being caught up into the full legal, all the issues that come with being connected with the legal system for the first time, right? It’s one of those things where like, if they’re able to catch you and help support you, then, you know, the, you know, it really, I think prevents a lot of other issues from being able to spring out later on. Right? And so I think, the recidivism rate for, um, as of pretrial is actually pretty low comparatively to other programs that are around.
(Music Break) | 10:14
AW | 11:11 – This is Alex Wise on Sea. Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Kevin Ortiz. Kevin is the president of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club. So Kevin, you were talking about wending your way through the legal system and how SF Pretrial supported your therapy and, and got you some of the social and emotional support that helped you out. Now, walk our listeners through the legal proceedings, if you can. What was the outcome of your case?
KO | 11:39 – So after I completed my, I think 12 weeks of, um, you know, like required group therapy and then doing individual therapy on the side as well too, I ended up, um, you know, having my, my case fully dr opped. And so it was completely, um, you know, it was basically the, they dropped charges. Um, and, you know, everyone, I, I was able to walk away without having anything on my record, right? But having been exposed to the legal system of having to, you know, go through, you know, issues of potentially if you miss court, right? And then now you have a bench warden having to connect with folks, right? Um, you know, to make sure that there wasn’t anything that was outstanding or, you know, having the case that was delayed because this wasn’t a short-term process. This was like a two-and-a-half-year process right. From basically 19 and a half to, um, you know, right around 21. And so, um, it was a long kind of process to really have to navigate with the help of my public defender, but also SF Pretrial as a partner.
AW | 12:35 – So you, you were only incarcerated for that one week. You never had to go to prison?
KO | 12:42 – Yeah. Never went to prison.
AW | 12:43 – And so after that week until they dropped the case, that was a two and a half year period?
KO | 12:48 – Yep. With an open pending case.
AW | 12:50 – And is that standard, or was that particularly long?
KO | 12:54 – I mean, it’s, it’s a pretty long process in general. I mean, and it’s hard to say, depending on each case is unique in their own ways, right? Um, but you know, a lot of folks do experience that, right? Where it’s a, it’s a long time to actually deal with something that’s that open, right? Um, and you know, the opportunity, the access to opportunities becomes very limited, right? Because if you are working in a professional, like kind of setting a job where a background check is one of the main things, even though you might, might not have been convicted of something, right? Um, because the fact that you have something still pending on there, it still bars you from being able to access normal opportunities.
AW | 13:30 – If you can talk a little bit about your relationship with the public defender. We’ve had public defenders on this program before, and the work they do is very important. It’s admirable, but we also hear them talk about how they’re completely overburdened with large caseloads. What kind of interfacing did you do with that public defender and, uh, I’m assuming they were critical in having your case dropped?
KO | 13:55 – Yeah, I mean, I think luckily for me, my first public defender, um, I, he’s, I would what I would consider a pit bull. And I had two public defenders during my case, right?
AW | 14:05 – Who were they?
KO | 14:06 -Yali Correa-Levy. And then, Sylvia Lynch, Yali actually was a pretty strong litigation, um, you know, trial attorney, right? And so he was used to actually going into those cases, right? But, you know, it’s one of those things where it was his advice of if we can avoid something where we don’t have to go into it, right? That’s sometimes the path of least resistance is sometimes the better approach on it, right? And so, um, you know, I consider actually my public defenders like still like personal friends to this day, right? Um, and so, you know, still check in with them, have coffee with them. And so they, I really attribute them helping me navigate the legal system as really being able to change my life. Um, and so I went from being in, you know, in a system that, you know, potentially I could have been incarcerated for, for a while, right? That could have had, you know, things on my, like my record, right? That could have barred me from employment opportunities, right? To being able to become an activist and doing a lot of housing work, um, in like the Mission district negotiating with developers to becoming a youth organizer, to, you know, teaching young people how to organize in their own communities to working in, you know, some of the highest levels of government, um, as a congressional aid, um, you know, during a pandemic. Um, and, um, to now, you know, being able to actually, you know, work at, you know, uh, for nonprofit organizations to be able to do that while also being like a political activist, um, and the president of his own charter democratic club.
AW | 15:30 – After the process had played out, were you able to learn more about how it, things may have gone differently if you had been in a different city or a different state? How unique are SF Pretrial services, for example?
KO | 15:45 – I think it’s, it’s not something I’d heard about before actually experiencing, right? And, um, it is a truly unique model because like you do have like a case manager, right? That someone that checks in on you, um, you know, to make sure that, you know, you’re hitting all of your, um, your requirements, right? Depending on your individual case, li case, um, case plan, you know? And so, you know, you’re checking in with SF Pretrial to make sure that you’re getting your hours out of the way, right? And, uh, and to make sure that, you know, you’re getting your individual group or individual therapy, you know, um, taken care of as well as group therapy. Um, it was, you know, it was interesting because even after, um, you know, I completed SF Pretrial, there was a point in time where, um, I was going through a really rough time. My grandfather had just died. And so I actually ended up connecting back with, um, one of the therapists from SF Pretrial Terry. Um, and, you know, I was just able to connect with her, um, and, you know, she helped me for a while, you know, through that, right? So it’s one of those things where having those kind of like support systems in place, um, I think they’re really long reaching, right? And they can really change the trajectory of someone if they’re about to go down a, like a fork in the road, right? And being able to actually take ’em down a much more positive path versus, um, you know, being caught up in a system that could be really convoluted.
AW | 16:59 – So you mentioned how avoiding prison time and getting the case dropped really gave you the ability to do what you do now and, and community organizing and housing activism, et cetera, having to go through the incarceral system now, how does that inform your day-to-Day Life, and how do you use that to inspire others in, in their day-to-Day lives?
KO | 17:23 – I think for me, I, I take the lessons of pretrial knowing that having been in a system that you don’t, the moment that you’re connected to it, it becomes a lot easier to become in touchpoints with it, right? So there’d be times where, um, I remember an example of when I had an open pretrial case and Right. Um, you know, my, like, I had the open pending, you know, case, and I’m still working with Pretrial, and I was with a girlfriend and she was driving, and, um, you know, we got pulled over and then next thing you know, the cops are messing with me because I have an open case, right? Uh, and so it’s one of those things where, you know, being able to be aware of, you know, how the system, the moment that you’re kind of tagged by it, right, that it can really be able to drag you in very quickly, right? And so, like I, um, you know, I take these lessons in all of my activism, in my organizing knowing that, you know, that there’s, that there are better ways to do it that could be more cost effective, right? Um, and also time, like, um, like, um, so like, it’s one of those things that informs kind of like my day-to-Day, like activism, because I know how quickly things can change.
AW | 18:31 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Kevin Ortiz. He is the president of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club. So Kevin, having gone through this process, I imagine you’ve learned a little bit more about the benefits of restorative justice and these preventative measures, like the ones that you got help with via SF Pretrial. So there was this pushback about defund the police a year or two ago, and that kind of backfired on progressives a lot because, for a variety of reasons, but it did expose the idea that there are some very bloated police budgets out there, and that, that seems to be where most of our resources go. If you were setting policy for a city, I imagine it would go quite different. Why don’t you kind of expound on that if you can?
KO | 19:25 – I think I would look at, you know, I think there is a role, um, that we need to look at in terms of enforcement, right? In terms of, you know, we all want public safety right now. We’re in a time where there’s a lot of news about, you know, crime that’s rampant and, you know, um, police not having enough resources, right? And I think, you know, if we’re to equip, you know, we’re able to fully staff our departments, right? That’s one thing, right? But I think we also shouldn’t be underfunding things that we know that are proven solutions, right?
AW | 19:54 – Yeah. SF Pretrial’s been around since 1976. This is not just like some new, uh, beta tested organization. It’s, it’s tried and true and, and has had real effects. Sorry to interrupt, go on.
KO | 20:05 – No, and it’s, uh, it’s tried. It is true. It’s, um, and it’s effective, right? Because the moment that someone gets going into the pretrial system, no, no system’s perfect, right? But if we’re gonna look at the overall successes of people being able to get connected and through SF, Pretrial able to come out of it with, you know, secure jobs, housing, drug rehabilitative services, and then social emotional supports, right? And then being able to go back into being, you know, successful citizens, then that’s a model that we should be actually continuing to expand funding for and not underfunding it or cutting funding to it.
AW | 20:38 – Kevin Ortiz, thank you so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
KO | 20:41 – Thank you.
AW | 20:56 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Peter Calloway. Peter is a public defender in San Francisco. Peter, welcome to Sea Change. Radio.
Peter Calloway (PC) | 21:04 – Alex, thank you so much. Happy to be here. I guess I should note that I am speaking to you today, you know, in my personal capacity, not as a representative of my office, but again, thanks for inviting me on.
AW | 21:16 -First, why don’t you explain to our listeners what a public defender does and what motivates attorneys to become public defenders?
Peter Calloway (PC) | 21:25 – So, you know, a public defender is a lawyer who is appointed by the court to represent somebody who’s been accused of a crime that could conceivably result in them being jailed and who cannot afford to hire their own attorney. They’ve existed, you know, essentially since the middle of the last century. I won’t go into the origins necessarily, but the main point is, you know, there are attorneys, there are defense attorneys, and among the defense attorneys, there are public defenders. And a lot of people who, who choose to become public defenders are doing it, you know, because they feel sort of a, a connection to the sort of disenfranchised, right? People who have been in various ways, you know, harmed by our society, cast aside, and, you know, sometimes see it as something, something of a calling. And that’s true for me. That’s sort of what drew me to this work. And in the last, I’d say maybe 10 years or so, as the country has sort of began to, to sort of awaken to what has become known as, as sort of mass incarceration or the, the human caging crisis, I think a lot more people have been drawn to public defense as a sort of part of a, you know, a new civil rights movement.
AW | 22:57 – It’s very much in line with the ideals of this country, and that everybody has a right to an attorney and a and a trial, and you’re innocent before proven guilty. That’s, that was not always the case in, and it’s still not the case in many, many countries, correct?
PC | 23:13 – The sort of lofty principles that, you know, are inscribed in the marble edifices in which this sort of system is conducted, say things like equal justice under law. The reality on the ground, of course, is, is anything but that, right? So if you ask 10 public defenders their reasons for, for, for being a public defender, you’ll get some of the same reasons, but you’ll have some different ones too, right? And some people are really motivated by those principles of justice and equality and fairness, and the, the fact that there are, you know, constitutional principles that are, that are sort of being defended when we’re in, in court, right? The right to a fair trial and the right to an attorney. Some people are motivated by, again, like sort of civil, a civil rights rationale, you know, um, the fact that if you are a person of color, particularly a, a black person in this country, you know, you’re more likely to be harmed by this system at every single step, right? More likely to be accused of crime, more likely to be stopped by the police, more likely to be searched, even though you’re less likely to be found with contraband than a white person would be. You’re, you’re more likely to be sentenced more harshly after being more likely to be convicted. It’s, it’s really disgraceful. And these statistics are true in San Francisco as well. I think there’s a fairly recent report that says, I believe the, the new statistic is someone who’s black is, is 10 times more likely to be stopped by the police, you know, despite being three to 5% of the population, the jail is more than 50% black. It’s pretty, you know, pretty shocking stuff. And again, that extends across the country, right? And it’s not just about race, right? It’s also about poverty, mental illness. We cage in this country around 2.2 million people on any given day, 500,000 or so, of those are people who are caged prior to being convicted of any crime, usually because they can’t afford to pay some money bail to secure their release. There’s another four and a half million or so on probation or parole, right? So where the state continues to exercise some constraint on their freedom, that can often be pretty extreme in, in, in the sense that a probation officer, a parole officer, can show up unannounced and search you, search your home, force you to take a drug test. And if they don’t like what they see, even if it’s what’s called a technical violation and you haven’t been accused of committing some new crime, they can take you back to jail or prison. Jail or prison is so harmful that the effects on life expectancy of people who are incarcerated are so extreme that they’ve actually reduced the overall life expectancy of, of the United States. So, again, really shocking stuff. This is what motivates a lot of people to be become public defenders.
AW | 26:32 – So as a public defender in this city, the size of San Francisco, Peter, you work with people who have crimes perpetrated against them and perpetrate them. And the idea that you would be, quote unquote soft on crime, I think is pretty preposterous. And as you mentioned, but we can’t be offended if we want to change hearts and minds, can we?
PC | 26:52 – Oh, no, certainly not. And I don’t, I, I really don’t let it bother me. I was actually somewhat pleased by the, the extent to which the responses to this thread, you know, which were, which were numerous, right? Um, you can’t prosecute or jail or imprison your way out of a mental health or poverty or trauma crisis. Almost all of the people who commit crimes as defined, right? By, again, by society, setting aside that whole conversation about who gets to call what crime, but almost everybody who, who, who, who is accused of crime, has been a victim themselves, right? It is frustrating that there are a lot of people who are really, really vocal about what they’ve identified as problems in this city and beyond it, who have not spent the time to sort of interrogate whether the things that they want to do in response to that are likely to make the problem better or worse.
AW | 27:57 – Peter Calloway, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
PC | 28:01 – Thank you, Alex.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Manu Dibango and Betty Lavette. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast The Journey of Kevin Ortiz: From Punishment to Politics appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Election season is still a few months away, but the scent of it is already on the wind. There is a lot at stake in the presidential election, of course, but that’s not the only issue for voters in November. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine to get a deeper understanding of the importance of the many down-ballot races on which Americans will be casting votes this fall. We examine state Supreme Court elections in Arizona and North Carolina, and discuss how abortion may affect various swing state races in places like Florida.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Daniel Nichanian (DN) | 00:15 – Trump named the federal justices that overturned Roe. And then the Governor DeSantis signed the law that is now at issue in Florida. So the dots very much connect to Republicans who are already, you know, being put on a defensive on these issues. Whether that actually translates into the presidential race being more competitive, that might be a stretch. We’ll see.
Narrator | 00:39 – Election season is still a few months away, but the scent of it is already on the wind. There is a lot at stake in the presidential election, of course, but that’s not the only issue for voters in November. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine to get a deeper understanding of the importance of the many down-ballot races on which Americans will be casting votes this fall. We examine state Supreme Court elections in Arizona and North Carolina, and discuss how abortion may affect various swing state races in places like Florida.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:30 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Daniel Nichanian. He’s the founder and editor of Bolts Magazine. Daniel, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Daniel Nichanian (DN) | 01:41 – It’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:43 – So, when we first spoke, you were just launching Bolts. Before we dive into all the, the nuts and bolts of this upcoming election, tell us what the mission of the organization is and how it’s been evolving since we last spoke a couple years ago.
Daniel Nichanian (DN) | 01:59 -Um, yeah, so it’s, it’s really great to be back after a few years of having Bolts in the world. Now, Bolts… the idea behind Bolts is that for a lot of the big issues that people are interested in or care about, the federal government, just as a very small slice of what’s important, of what’s happening, it’s very important to be aware of the ways in which counties, municipalities, state are also very, very important when it comes to matters linked to civil rights, voting rights, and, and so on. And, and what Bolts does is on the themes we cover, which are really focused on criminal justice on one hand and, and vote voting rights on the other, um, we, we really pay, pay attention to what’s happening around the country at these levels, at the local level, at the municipal level, at the county level, at the state level. And we try to connect the dots for people because, you know, there’s, uh, a lot of states, a lot of cities, a lot of towns in, around, around the country. And, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. And it’s been great, you know, there’s been a lot of interest, um, in the past few years at what’s happening with prosecutors, with judges, with sheriffs, with election officials, uh, and the laws that are changing in blue states and red states that are sort of going in in different ways. And it’s been great to have this platform to cover all of these issues.
AW | 03:19 – And when somebody watches cable news on election night, that’s maybe the first time that they’ll look at down-ballot races for the year or for the cycle. I think it’s really important to be a part of the Democratic process 24 7, and that’s what Bolts is designed to do.
DN | 03:39 – Yeah, and I think sometimes it may seem esoteric, uh, or it’s, you know, not as important as the presidential race. And really, it’s not a matter here of arguing what’s more or less important, but again, it’s the idea, like for this, it’s the same reasons people care about the presidential race, right? They should be caring also. But the other thing, then they should be more attention, you know, just as one example that I’m sure we’ll, we’ll get more chance to talk about, when the Arizona Supreme Court just very recently upheld an abortion ban. These are offices that are on the ballot at the state level, judges are elected, you know, and, and, and, and, and yet, and yet that is not part of the, part of what we think about when we think of elections. Like the, the question of how, you know, a lot of people care deeply about abortion and the US Supreme Court, which obviously is extremely important and part of the presidential race debate, but also, also very important to think about how the state level, how in each of your states, um, as you listen to the various state governments, the various state institutions are playing very important roles in shaping every day what is happening. And, and very often, if you will, if we specifically talking about elections, these are elections that aren’t even contested like very often. No, no one’s even, no one even funds to run for these offices. So very often the, the person who occupies them and is playing such important roles is just, just the person who filed for office. I mean, literally we’re talking about.
AW | 04:57 – Just dealing with the paperwork, right?
DN | 04:59 – I mean, no, there, there’s a lot of reasons why different offices are uncontested, which maybe go beyond this conversation, but if you look it’s just striking, like I cover a lot of DAs and prosecutor races, which again, are important for abortion, let alone other issues. And the majority of races systematically, the majority are uncontested. So, you know, the conversation stops prior to even starting. Like there isn’t even a debate. There isn’t even an opportunity for people to come in. But then there are a lot of races where there are opportunities, there are interesting things happening, and, and it’s very important to pay attention to them.
AW | 05:29 – I think the Arizona Supreme Court is a perfect jumping off point because Arizona is going to be one of the more critical swing states for the presidential election. It seems to be now ground zero for the abortion debate. And then there’s also the issue of the Supreme Court there, which you mentioned. You wrote a piece earlier in April entitled Your State-by-State Guide to the 2024 Supreme Court elections, and it goes across 33 states high courts and dives into them. So Arizona’s kind of ground zero of the abortion debate, and then their Supreme Court is obviously having a major impact on the national debate, and many of the members are up for election this fall. Why don’t we start with your Supreme Court guide with Arizona, if you can?
DN | 06:24 -That’s a great question, in part because when a ruling like this comes down at the state level, people’s minds don’t, don’t often go to asking who are these people and are they elected? Because at the federal level, obviously there are no elections for the US Supreme Court, right? So maybe our mind, like, you know, obviously we understand that the presidential election matters, but our mind doesn’t exactly immediately go to whether these people are elected. But at the state level, they often are. And, um, Arizona has what’s called a retention election, um, which, which some states do, some states don’t, which means that, uh, an election for judge isn’t an election between different candidates. It’s just a yes or no election as to whether a judge should be, should, should be allowed to stay on the court when their term ends. And very often a retention election doesn’t get a lot of attention. It is very rare that a judge is controversial enough in a high-profile way enough for there to be some kind of organizing or movement around, not around the retention election. because there’s, again, there’s no s there’s no actual opposition on a ballot, but that, you know, of, of all decisions, uh, decision that upholds, uh, an abortion ban on nearly all abortions, which is what the court just did in Arizona, is one that has gotten that kind of attention. And two of the judges on the court are up for retention this year. Both of them voted to uphold the abortion ban earlier in April. So that decision was four to two. You know, you can do the map easily. So of the four justices who voted to uphold the ban two are up for retention. Um, so, you know, if in a world where they were replaced by people who wanted strike down the abortion ban, that four two would’ve been two four.
AW | 08:08 – So in a retention election, when you say replaced, right, the voters don’t really have a choice to replace candidate A with candidate B, it’s just do you like candidate A or not? So how does that play out usually?
DN | 08:22 – Yeah, that, that, that’s a great question. So you’re right that that’s what a retention is, which I think is a big reason why. I mean, it is one of the reasons why retention elections haven’t, don’t typically get, uh, a lot of, uh, organizing around it because it’s so indirect. In Arizona, specifically, the governor right now is, uh, the Democrat who is trying to stop the abortion ban from going into effect. And if there were to be, the judges were to not be retained in November, that could create two openings on the court for that governor to fail. It gets complicated, Alex, because in, um, in Arizona, governors don’t have full authority to choose whomever they want. So there’s constraint on their choice. So it’s not, again, quite as direct, but you can bet that at the very least, the governor would do what she can with the new authority she has to, to take into account. In the same way as, you know, any, any democrat or Republican governor thinks about those issues to take this into issue, into account. In fact, I will add, um, and, and maybe some people who are listening to this will remember that approximately, uh, seven, eight years ago, there was a Republican governor in Arizona controlling a republic. It was a Republicans run state government. And what did Republicans do? They were on, they, they were not happy with, um, the court. So they expanded the court, they packed to the court, they expanded the court from, from five to seven members, I believe. And they made it a little easier for the governor to get what he wanted. And that shifted the court to the right. We hear a lot about whether the court should be extended at the federal level. Well, in Arizona, Republicans did it. They expended the court, got, got conservatives in the court. And, you know, and it led to where it led a few weeks ago. The, the conditions are there, at least for in Arizona, for there to be a very unusual amount of focus around the judge elections.
(Music Break) | 10:23
AW | 11:04 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Daniel Nichanian from Bolts Magazine. So Daniel, as you mentioned, that these parties know which way an elected or potentially elected judge may lean, the problem is that a lot of citizens don’t really know much about these candidates. I mean, just when you see the turnout rates in off election years in terms of the presidential cycle, that gives you an indication that there’s fairly deep apathy amongst the electorate, which leads to a cycle of very high retention rates. One would imagine reelecting, these judges tends to be a fa to comp plea of, of sorts, doesn’t it?
DN | 11:49 – In most cases, yes. It’s, what’s very interesting about the Supreme Court election is that they’re very important everywhere. You know, we, we, again, we’re talking about the fate of abortion in a state can come down to it, and there are other states we could talk about where that’s really come down to the state court. But it so depends on the state. Like in Wisconsin, it’s like the state where Supreme Court election is as important as anything else in terms of the amount of money it gets and so on. But then in other states that even, even in swing states, like I’m thinking of off the top of my hand of Oregon and Georgia, where it’s exceedingly rare to even have a contested election where people just incumbents just, just run unopposed cycle after cycle, where the positions of the justices ha hasn’t been, discussed in the same way there’s a number of factors going to into that. But the, but depending on where you are, you might have a very different connection, understanding, awareness of your state court and, uh, different, different types of conversations around it. So that’s really interesting. And, and very much a, a state-by-state debate or situation.
AW | 12:52 – It reveals a lot about how there’s just not a lot of information, data-driven information for voters on these very important issues of how we’re going to proceed with our law enforcement.
DN | 13:05 – Yeah, I mean, that’s important to think about all the ways in which these judge elections, you know, matter greatly. I think that you’re, what makes it difficult is it’s just very hard to find, very hard to find not just information about important rulings in, in many places, but also sort of consistent, consistent analysis of how a certain judge might have ruled along the years at the federal level. Again, if the coalitions between the considered justice and, and the liberal justices are, are well understood, you know, if, if we got a news alert now that a justice had decided to, to step aside or retire, we would also of immediately understand the implications of, of that decision. You know, who, who gets to appointed. We would know how that might shape the, the federal court, but that’s very hard to reproduce at the state level. And, and some of it’s for good reasons, say state law is, is very esoteric in some cases. But, but especially with the, the federal, the federal court system becoming quite conservative in recent years at the top level and, and down, a lot of people are trying to look at their state court systems to think about what are there other because the state court system and the federal court system are, are, are quite divided. Like there is a, like, it’s possible to get a lawsuit, to file a lawsuit in, in state court and have it be won on state grounds without the federal court system like intervening because it’s not been decided on the basis of federal law and federal constitutions. So lot of progressives especially are trying to look at, at state courts and state constitutions and, and create different, a avenues of lawsuits that they could win on issues like death penalty, like, like abortion access and, and so on. So that’s been very interesting. And, so there, there’s really kind of also a new awareness of the fault lines around, around this courts that I think is borrowing a playbook from, from, from the right in some ways. Like the, uh, a very high profile example of a retention election becoming a, a thing, um, in, in, in my lifetime, which is pretty rare, is, um, in Iowa, just to, to go to, to go back in time for a moment, um, no, there, there have been almost never a case of, of state court justices fa facing controversial retention elections until the court decided to legalize gay marriage in the two thousands, I think 2006 or, uh, you know, around, around that time. And then in the, in the, uh, a few years later, conservatives managed to organize to oust a lot of the justices who had taken part in that decision. And, and that was very rare. And I think that sort of playbook has existed, but it’s quite difficult to find examples I think of that. And that playbook has also existed in California a long time ago against justices who had, uh, taken part in decisions that were perceived as too in favor of people who were in prison or incarcerated people. That’s usually the playbook that’s been used in these state elections. A “soft on crime” judge who was perceived to be an anti-death penalty in the eighties – who was not retained. It’s rare, but those are the kind of things that have happened. And now we’re seeing sort of a different way of approaching these elections where something like an abortion ban is, is what’s at issue or decisions of that nature. Voting rights decisions sometimes are at issue. So it’s a change in who is trying to pay attention to these on what grounds.
AW | 16:37 – So Daniel, you mentioned how voting rights are also affected by these Supreme Court elections. North Carolina is a perfect template for any concerned citizen to learn more about. Why don’t you explain what’s happened in the last couple of years in North Carolina and how this could be a wakeup call for a lot of those who want to continue having free and fair elections?
DN | 17:02 – Well, what’s interesting about the court in North Carolina is that it provides such a, such a strong example of why these institutions matter, because it’s flipped in 2022 and we, there’s a, there’s a, there’s sort of a contrast before the before and after. That’s that, that’s pretty striking. So the, the court, um, in um, 20 in before 2022 was under a Democratic majority. And the, and, and the court system, um, had issued a number of decisions that was important on voting rights and racial justice actually, and other, other issues that, that are, that, that are adjacent on voting rights. For instance, it had struck down gerrymandered maps that Republicans had proposed in, in North Carolina. There was a state level decision. It didn’t have to do with the federal constitution, didn’t have to do with the US Supreme Court. It was something that the state court was doing. And in 2022, the court actually flipped to the right. There were such close elections in both 2020 and 2022 for the Supreme Court in North Carolina, um, that that produced, uh, a, uh, that, that produced the Republican majority after 2022. What one of the elections was won, the Chief Justice of North Canada was a democrat lost by I around 400 votes, 400 votes across the entire state. So it was really coming under very thin margins. But the result was, uh, a Republican court after 2022. And the Republican court very quickly signaled it was not interested in the precedence that the prior court was setting. So it, it blessed the gerrymanders, the Republican gerrymanders that had gone through, which, which has significantly strengthened the hands of Republicans in the state and is going to basically lock in Republican majority for the rest of the 2020s, um, in the state. It has also issued other decisions like it reversed a lower court decision that had allowed, um, a lot of people in North Carolina to vote because they were on probation and parole. They were, uh, outside of prison, but North Carolina does not allow them to vote. A court had given them to right to vote and the state Supreme Court took that right back. So, you know, there’s just a lot of examples in North Carolina of what, what difference it makes, who controls these court, that Democrats are in a bit of a hole now, they’re, they’re now down five two and they’re actually the only seat on the ballot there this year is a, a Democratic seat. A civil rights attorney who was named to the court by Governor Cooper there, who’s a democrat, is running for a full term. And so Democrats cannot take the court back in 2024, but it would be a huge, huge hole for them if they fell down a six one hole because they, they have a path to taking back to court over the next two cycles, I believe if they keep this seat this year. And again, it’s never too early to think about like the, the people who care about who controls power in these states are, I promise you are thinking about this way in advance. So the maps in 2030, 2031, it seems like a long time away, but the, the, whether or not they’re going to be gerrymandered, you know, for the remainder of the two, of the 2030s for the 10 year period that’s starting in six years, that, that, that decision seems distant, but it’s actually going to be, it’s actually on the line in 2024. It’s on the line in 2026 in the state court elections. So it’s interesting because in North Carolina there is some attention around it. And, and we will see how, how it evolves.
(Music Break) | 20:49
AW | 21:32 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Daniel Nichanian from Bolts. So Daniel circling back to abortion, it seems like the Republican party after 40 years of, of making this a social wedge issue has gotten what it’s wanted technically. But now that the genie is out of the bottle and they can’t put it back in. When that Arizona ruling came out, you saw a lot of Republicans from Donald Trump to Kari Lake, all backpedaling, thinking, “well, you can just go somewhere else for an abortion
DN | 22:27 – It’s interesting to think about the fact that there’s now, like people like Trump and Kari Lake, as you said, who are rolling back their own support for abortion bans. But in some ways, it’s not just that the genie’s out of the bottle, it’s also that these things are locked in because for a, a huge, goal for conservatives for a long time was to put people in judges’ seat who were very clearly anti-abortion and had been vetted as entire abortion by the Federalist Society, by other, other places, conservatives, other pro other things that conservatives look at because they wanted anti-abortion judges. because it was very important to them because they had been burned by some appointments at the federal level. And those judges are now Georgia judges are, are of, have a very different, analysis or retention of electoral dynamics. You know, they, they’re, they’re typically more in, typically more insulated from elections or public opinion. And, you know, the, the judges that have been installed at the federal level for life, you know, at the state level for, for eight years, six years, 10 years, don’t necessarily care that like the Republican parties in November, outcomes depends on something because they’re ideologically very co com committed to the cause that was the whole point of the movement for 20, 30 years. So that’s what we’re seeing in Arizona, right? That’s what we’re seeing in Arizona right now where, where the 1864 law has come back be because of the State Supreme Court. One thing that’s going to be very important around the country this fall, is there going to be a lot of referendums on the ballot on abortion rights. Uh, right. So Arizona and Florida are two states with abortion bans and restrictions going into effect that are going to have referendums. The Florida ban is actually going to be extremely interesting and important to follow because it has a threshold of 60% to meet, which is, which is even if, uh, abortion rights, uh, have passed almost systematically when they’ve been on the ballot. Um, 60% is, is a high threshold. So the Florida is going to be a tough campaign for referendum organizers, but a very important one, obviously it’s a humongous state, right, with, with a lot of people whose, whose rights are going to be at stake.
AW | 24:28 – And a state that’s also kind of started to lean more consistently Red. Do you think it could be back in play for Joe Biden?
DN | 24:35 – The question of whether abortion rights, uh, can make a difference at the presidential and president’s race? It is tough. I think we, we have a lot of examples of voters being very willing to split their votes between referendums and presidential races in the ways that I think if you’re like very, if you’re, maybe if you maybe are, uh, sooner of this interview, it might be a little, uh, odd because it’s like the presidential race is so marked by like, you know, like how can people on the same day vote to increase the minimum wage and vote for Republican for president, but that that’s, you know, we see that over and over again. The dots connect that in Florida, Trump named the federal justices that overturned Roe and then the Governor DeSantis signed the law that is now at issue in Florida. So the dots very much connect to Republicans who are already, you know, being put on a defensive on these issues. Whether that actually translates into the President race being more competitive, that might be a stretch. We’ll, we’ll see.
AW | 25:37 – But also it’s just as much of a question of turnout really. Like, will abortion create more interest than just a normal presidential election? Will it get people to the voting booths?
DN | 25:49 – Yeah, I think in the 2022 midterms, we definitely saw that right? Where it’s hard to attribute things to one could do to one cause. But, uh, but democrats were expected to do a lot worse than, than the 2022 elections. And a big reason they didn’t, what was the importance of abortion? Who it drove to the polls and, and the importance of the issue of reproductive rights, uh, that a lot of people cared, obviously a lot about. So, and that’s, there’re going to be similar, um, debates conversations, um, in, in 2024. And also there’s going to be a lot of evidence that a lot of the candidates, like Kari Lake who are now trying to take a compromise or try trying to present a position that they present as a compromise position are actually, uh, have a lot of things on the record on video as saying very, very, very different things just a few years ago. And that is going to be in ads, you know, in the fall. And that’s going to also play a role in these campaigns. I mean, no matter how red or blue estate seems to be right, like a, a razor thin election can make such huge differences. It’s sort of crazy to think in 2018 when Ron DeSantis won for the first time, he won by 0.4%, right? So it’s, you know, even if a state has leaned red, uh, since then, it’s such a tight state and the amount of policies, laws that Republicans have passed due to that tiny, tiny, tiny win in a way that has also made it easier for, for them to win next time, right? The what one of the laws they pass is to make it more difficult for people with felony convictions to vote to, to roll back constitution, amendment that voters passed. Like there, there’s so many things Republicans have done just on the basis that 0.4% victory, that it’s important to remember like the smallest election when can actually produce huge contrast and differences.
AW | 27:40 – Well, and Florida is, was, ground zero for that example in 2002 with Bush v Gore. So I highly recommend our listeners check out Bolts Magazine, Daniel Nichanian, and I hope we can have you back in the fall to pull back some more of the curtains of our democratic process. Daniel, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
DN | 28:01 – Thanks for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Antibalas, The O’Jays, and Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Down-Ballot Politics With Daniel Nichanian of Bolts appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
When it comes to energy transitions, marine vessels tend to get overlooked, even though they are some of the worst polluters of our oceans and air. The heavy duty diesel fuel used by most ships presents serious problems for the planet. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Maria Gallucci, a Senior Reporter at Canary Media, who describes efforts being made to transform boats and ships into zero emission marine fleets. We look at a project to electrify tugboats in San Diego, a cutting-edge hydrogen ferry about to launch in San Francisco, and innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the international cargo shipping space.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Maria Gallucci (MG) | 00:17 – When we think about the effect that these vessels have, yes, they are certainly contributing to climate change in a very real way. They’re also directly spewing pollution into these communities as well.
Narrator | 00:30 – When it comes to energy transitions, marine vessels tend to get overlooked, even though they are some of the worst polluters of our oceans and air. The heavy duty diesel fuel used by most ships presents serious problems for the planet. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Maria Gallucci, a Senior Reporter at Canary Media, who describes efforts being made to transform boats and ships into zero emission marine fleets. We look at a project to electrify tugboats in San Diego, a cutting-edge hydrogen ferry about to launch in San Francisco, and innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the international cargo shipping space.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:30 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Maria Gallucci. Maria is a senior reporter for Canary Media. Maria, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Maria Gallucci (MG) | 01:43 – Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:45 – Why don’t you first tell us about Canary Media. You just recently celebrated your third anniversary, correct?
Maria Gallucci (MG) | 01:51 – Yes, we did. So, Canary Media is a nonprofit newsroom covering the clean energy transition. We are a fully independent outlet, and we focus primarily on the United States, but kind of hoping to expand globally because obviously this is an issue that affects everywhere.
AW | 02:07 – When we think about energy transitions, we’re often thinking about getting an electric vehicle or making a change to our electric grid. But one of the more global issues is ocean transport. And you’ve written a few pieces on how maritime vessels are trying to electrify. Why don’t you first kind of give us an overview of some of the industry’s problems that they’re facing and, and what the solutions could be on the horizon?
MG | 02:36 – Sure. So globally, the International Shipping Sector accounts for about 3% of greenhouse gas emissions every year. That includes cargo ships, harbor crafts, and all types of vessels that serve this massive multi-trillion dollar industry. And there are kind of many ways to go about tackling the problem of, one of which is, is developing greener fuels to go in these cargo ships. Another is electrifying, uh, especially the smaller vessels like tugboats and ferries. Still complicated and expensive to do, but, uh, we’re starting to see a lot of progress on harbor craft and particular that operate close to ports close to communities. And so it’s not just a solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also kind of these toxic air pollutants that concentrate in communities.
AW | 03:28 – So these harbor craft, let’s focus on those a little bit more. It makes a lot of sense. These are kind of the low hanging fruit for transitioning to electrification, right? You can recharge them pretty frequently because they’re not out to Sea for two or three days.
MG | 03:43 – Exactly. Uh, ferries especially, and even tugboats, they kind of have a home base. They’ll go out, they’ll do the run, they’ll come back, and so they can recharge, whereas right, a, a cargo ship could be sailing for weeks, uh, or longer, uh, kind of crossing the oceans. So that’s more complicated than something that sort of is, is always going to be at point A or point B.
AW | 04:06 – Maybe the holy grail is to someday transition these heavy long distance shipping fleets away from the heavy diesel that they use to electrified boats. But in the meantime, let’s talk about tug boats, which are surprising sources of quite a lot of pollution, particularly when you consider that they’re usually operating close to land. If you can back up a little bit and tell us a little bit about the history of the tugboat industry and how it’s been moving up till now. That might give us a little better perspective on, on the next phase in terms of electrification.
MG | 04:43 – Sure. So right, in the United States, there’s about, 6,000 tugboats nationwide. These vessels account for about a quarter of, uh, greenhouse gas emissions from the US maritime fleet alone. That’s roughly the equivalent of driving 1.3 million cars in a year. So pretty significant. And, um, in California, which is obviously a, a major hub of shipping imports and exports, that state has about 230 tug boats, and these represent a disproportionate share of the air pollution in the state or air pollution among the commercial harbor craft. So just looking at California’s numbers, tug boats represent about 7% of the total harbor craft fleet, but they represent 19% of particular mat at 2.5 emissions. And these, uh, increase the risk of cancer in people. And this 7% of tugboats is responsible for 23% of total NOx emissions, which can damage people’s lungs and trigger asthma symptoms. So even though there are fewer tugboats, they represent a much bigger share of these nasty toxic emissions that harm people’s health. And that’s because of the, the diesel that they’re using and sort of the inefficient engines that they’re burning it with.
AW | 06:04 – And is that disproportionality also reflected in water pollution, or is it more of a airborne emissions are the, are the real problem when it comes to tugboats?
MG | 06:16 – To be honest, I actually don’t have a a, a clear answer for the water pollution as to whether tugboats certainly do contribute water pollution. They leak diesel, they, you know, spill trash. Um, but I don’t know exactly if it’s disproportionately worse as it is with air pollution.
AW | 06:36 – Right. The reason I asked is that I was thinking of these cruise ships that go into some of the more fragile harbors around the world. You’ll hear about them going into fjords, and then these very pristine waters will end up having oil slicks and fish die offs, et cetera, because of these very large boats, it seems like the ocean is infinite, but these heavy diesel fuels have a real direct impact on, on the coastlines that they come across.
MG | 07:03 – Definitely. And, and the fact that these vessels are so concentrated in such a small area. So even though the ocean is vast, all of this pollution, all of these emissions are happening in a concentrated area where, um, they interact with each other and there’s sort of this effect that happens, these cumulative effects that happen by being in a port or a harbor instead of sort of out in the middle of nowhere where, um, it kind of can spread out, be more diffuse.
AW | 07:32 – So let’s talk about San Diego’s EWolf project, if you can. It’s, it’s pretty exciting and hopefully a template for transitioning tugboat fleets around the country. What is the EWolf project, Mariam?
MG | 07:45 – Sure. So EWolf is the first all electric tugboat in the United States and one of only a few in the world. It recently arrived, uh, at the port of San Diego, and it should be, uh, set to start operating in the coming weeks. EWolf uses, batteries to power its electric motors and charges its batteries. It plugs in at a shoreside station in San Diego, that was built specifically for the project. It was EWolf has been several years in the making. Um, it was an initiative of Crowley, which is the company that owns and operates the vessel, the Port of San Diego, the Environmental Protection Agency, and kind of assorted regional authorities in California and around San Diego County. Uh, the support of the project.
AW | 08:35 – And what are some of the hurdles that an electric boat needs to leap over? What are the biggest drawbacks? Is it the battery, is it the power charging, etc?
MG | 08:47 – It’s probably a combination of all of those. With any vessel in particular, weight is the biggest issue, and batteries are heavy. And so say for a tugboat that really needs to, to kind of rev up and down have a lot of power, it needs this, these bursts of energy. And to get that using batteries requires a lot of weight, which affects its ability to do the job. So it’s really a balancing act between, um, the weight of the batteries and how much power they deliver. And the other part of the equation is the charging equipment. So in general, ports tend to be, you know, they’re, they’re literally at the end of the grid. They’re on the waterfront. There might not be sufficient electrical infrastructure to supply all of this power that they need. You know, we’re talking about in the e wolf’s case, the EWolf has a 6.2 megawatt hour battery system, and so it needs about that much, you know, to, to recharge. And so in order to have an electric tugboat or an electric vessel, you need to compliment that with charging infrastructure, um, building batteries on land, pulling directly from the grid, uh, whatever you can do to supply the power without kind of overburdening the infrastructure that’s there.
AW | 10:04 – And is there a solar element as well in terms of the recharging?
MG | 10:08 – Yeah, so with the EWolf project, they built what’s called a micro grid. So this system draws power from San Diego Gas and Electric’s power grid. It can also store it in a three megawatt hour battery system, and it also has a canopy of solar panels over top of it. So the solar’s charging the batteries, it can draw from the grid, and that allows the tugboat to be able to charge whenever it needs to charge. And it also allows for that charging to happen, uh, without stressing out the grid, especially if everybody is turning on their air conditionings at the same time, or for whatever reason, there’s a huge power surge on the main grid, the tugboat can kind of do its own thing without adding that sort of surge of demand.
(Music Break) | 11:03
AW | 12:16 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Maria. Gallucci Maria is a senior reporter for Canary Media. So Maria, we’re talking about this EWolf project, this, this electric tugboat that’s setting sail in San Diego. Are there other similar projects that you’re aware of? What, what’s the competitive landscape look like for the electric tugboat market moving forward?
MG | 12:43 – I’m aware of at least a one or two other electric tug boats, uh, that are launching in New Zealand, actually, but I believe it’s a relatively new space. I think where we’ve seen a lot of electrification in vessels happen has been with passenger ferries. One part of that is the fact that people ride on passenger ferries, sort of the general public interacts with ferries a lot more than they do with these working tugboats. And so there’s kind of more public pressure and exposure to clean these up first.
AW | 13:13 – I would imagine also that these public ferries are public boats so that there’s no private industry that’s already made an investment into their diesel boat. And then asking them to give up that investment and switch to an electric is, is very difficult in like the tugboat industry, let’s say, where a private company might own a fleet of non-electric boats, and now you’re asking them to switch to these very expensive boats, that that transition won’t be easy, I imagine, or certainly not as easy as as something like a government mandate with ferries, right?
MG | 13:48 – Exactly. And that’s, well, a big reason why you’re starting to see the shift happen in California specifically is because the state has adopted regulations around harbor craft emissions. So requiring, um, ports or vessel operators to switch to cleaner technologies, be it, you know, all electric or some version of a, a less polluting, uh, engine or, or technology for these vessels.
AW | 14:14 – So in San Francisco, there’s a hydrogen powered ferry system. How far along is it, and maybe you can contrast that technology from what you were describing with the battery powered tugboat.
MG | 14:26 – So the battery powered tugboat is just that, it’s all batteries and electric motors. The hydrogen ferry in San Francisco called the Sea Change.
AW | 14:35 – It’s called the Sea change, huh?
MG | 14:37 – Yeah. Aptly named
AW | 14:40 Go on, sorry.
MG | 14:44 – No, no, that’s all right. So, uh, fuel cells work like batteries except that they are using hydrogen to, um, produce electrical energy that drives the motors. Uh, Sea change has been several years in the making. It is in San Francisco. Um, I’m not quite sure the exact status. I know that they are the sort of, the owners and operators are waiting to get all of the requirements that they need because this is a new type of technology, a first of a kind for, um, for the country certainly and for San Francisco. So there are a lot of extra layers of, of regulations that go into making sure everything’s good to go. I mean, in any situation, but especially when you’re dealing with passengers, I think there’s an, uh, sort of an enhanced layer of making sure nothing goes wrong.
AW | 15:29 – And would the fueling be comparable to hydrogen powered vehicles that we see, especially in fleet vehicles? Would fueling up these ferries be similar to just fueling up a hydrogen car, or is it a more elaborate process?
MG | 15:45 – It’s fundamentally similar, and that is sort of one of the advantages, um, that at least proponents of hydrogen ferries and cars say, is that it’s more akin to fueling up your gas car, your diesel truck, uh, your, you’re putting a nozzle into the tank and refueling in that way. Versus with a charger, you have to wait potentially hours, um, to, to recharge a battery. The Sea Change, the hydrogen ferry in San Francisco has fuel cells. It also has storage tanks, which it keeps on board. So it is bringing its own fuel with it in that way, just as it might, you know, um, tanks of diesel fuel and that allows it to travel up to 300 nautical miles at speeds as fast as 15 knots, which is kind of similar to the capabilities of diesel-powered vessels. So in that way, it’s kind of able to operate relatively similarly to sort of the existing, existing ferry technology.
AW | 16:47 – So are there other ferries that are using hydrogen power around the country or the globe that you’re aware of? And are there also some battery-powered ferries that we can kind of compare the performance and the problems that need to be overcome with both of these concurrent technologies that are unfolding?
MG | 17:07 – So, as far as I understand, Sea change is the first hydrogen powered ferry in the United States. There are others in the, around the world. Uh, Norway especially has been leading on all types of, uh, sort of zero emission technology for, for maritime, uh, including ferries and other types of vessels, because they have a huge amount of public money to invest in these projects, but also because it is such a maritime culture traveling from, from these fjords, you know, that’s how people get around. So there’s a real need to reduce pollution from those vessels. Um, in the United States, we are starting to see more electric ferries. Washington state is, uh, working to convert some of its fleet. San Francisco actually the same, uh, uh, uh, public agency that is bringing on the hydrogen ferries, also working on battery powered ferries. And that technology, my sense is that battery ferries are gaining momentum, uh, are gaining more momentum than hydrogen fuel cell ferries. That’s not to say that we won’t see more of the hydrogen, but I think, um, the same way that’s happening on, on the road is the more you have of something, the costs come down, timelines come down, people understand the technology better. And so I think that’s slowly starting to happen with, uh, battery powered ferries in particular.
AW | 18:32 – So turning back to these tugboats for a second, if we can, we, we kind of discussed how the transition could be challenging in the face of private industry and, and it’s less public facing in general than ferries, but, um, how, how do, how do people that you, um, well, um, how should, how will policymakers approach putting in incentives and, and helping to usher along this transition from, um, uh, diesel powered tugboat fleets to an electric fleet in your estimation?
MG | 19:14 – Well, one of the sort of clearest example of this at the federal level is the Inflation reduction Act, uh, which Congress passed in 2022. That includes, well, includes hundreds of billions of dollars for clean energy investment. Among those are $3 billion just for cleaning up ports. And, uh, some of that funding, uh, is, could be used for zero emission vessels and other types of infrastructure like cranes and forklifts and other kind of heavy duty diesel burning equipment that also contribute to port pollution. So that’s a, a very clear example. The EPA has other funds that is pulling from to reduce diesel emissions in particular. And so, especially with ports and these types of harbor crafts, I think, um, there’s a lot of overlap between investments for reducing carbon emissions, but also public support for just clean air in general with, uh, reducing diesel pollution.
(Music Break) | 20:17
AW | 21:59 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Maria Gallucci Maria is a senior reporter for Canary Media. At the outset of our conversation, Maria, you gave us some information about how tugboats affect climate change, their disproportionate share compared to other vessels. How do ferries stack up in terms of their emissions? Are they bad polluters as well?
MG | 22:26 – They are, and for similar reasons, um, because they typically have these older diesel engines. Um, so looking again at California, uh, ferries represent 2% of commercial harbor craft, but they contribute 11% of particulate matter, 2.5 pollution and 15% of NOx emissions. So they have a much higher share of pollution than they do actual number of vessels, very similar to tug boats. And these, again, are operating very close to shore, very close to communities. Another kind of interesting stat for the entire country is that about 39 million Americans live in close proximity to ports. The majority of those people, uh, are lower income or people of color. And this is, uh, these are stats from the, uh, EPA. So really when we think about the effect that these vessels have, yes, they are certainly contributing to climate change in a very real way. They’re also directly spewing pollution into these communities as well.
AW | 23:29 – And for the passengers, is that a problem? I know that there’s been studies that show that people who work on cruise ships tend to have a higher rate of asthma and other airborne illnesses. I can’t imagine it’s good to be sitting right next to a, a motor of an old polluting diesel ferry if that’s part of your daily commute, let’s say, or the employees who work on these boats.
MG | 23:53 – Right? Yes, that, that’s a very good point. I would say that the, the risk is probably much higher for the people who work on the boats in terms of the health impacts, it’s obviously not a good thing, but I think it really depends on how much exposure a person has a little bit in the morning, a little bit in the evening, uh, is kind of different than having these sort of emissions accumulate above a community day in, day out.
AW | 24:21 – Unless there’s some epidemiological study that’s looking at the impact of ferries on employees or, or the, the local communities. It’s tough to pinpoint, but one can imagine that it’s, it’s a lot better when it’s a zero emissions boat that we’re looking at rather than these heavy diesel fuel emitters.
MG | 24:39 – Exactly. And the mission’s, um, obviously a big thing, but noise as well. Um, these zero emission vessels are generally much, much quieter, uh, which is more pleasant for the passengers, and for the workers. Um, although an interesting sort of, um, uh, fact, what I learned talking, uh, to folks on the e tugboat story, the EWolf is that crews on tugboats use noise as, as cues to understand what the vessel is doing. And so in the absence of noise, they’re having to relearn or kind of learn new ways of understanding, uh, the direction or, or sort of the function that the tugboat is doing, because they can no longer depend on sort of the groan of the diesel engine to tell them.
AW | 25:24 – We’re not all going to be riding on electric ferries anytime too soon. It sounds like it’s going to be a slow rollout over the next decade or so, one would imagine. Is that fair to say?
MG | 25:34 – I think that’s fair. And I would say that the main barrier is not the technology itself, um, because we know that battery powered, uh, tugboats and ferries, uh, can work and hydrogen fuel cell ferries, uh, sort of from a technology standpoint. So the biggest challenge will be, um, the cost of building the vessels, and then even more so perhaps will be the cost and the time involved with building up the charging infrastructure or building up the hydrogen supply infrastructure. Sort of everything you need to keep these vessels running is right now a very big bottleneck that will need to be solved over time to speed up the rollout.
AW | 26:15 – What does the future hold for international shipping and travel? Are there solutions on the horizon for electrified vessels that can travel long distances, Maria?
MG | 26:27 – The future for large cargo ships and other types of vessels is a lot less clear. Um, there are, I think certainly we will see batteries incorporated into these vessels, and, and that’s already happening today. Hundreds of, of vessels, uh, large vessels use batteries, um, but not necessarily for sort of their main source of propulsion. It’s more to, to kind of power the lights and the equipment on the vessel. Um, a lot of, there’s sort of a lot of momentum around, uh, what are called kind of future fuels. So it could potentially be ammonia, uh, or hydrogen ideally produced using renewable energy. Um, these fuels are possible to make, but they’re extremely expensive, extremely energy intensive, and no place really has the infrastructure to supply them. So, uh, but I, I think there’s general consensus that to clean up large cargo ships, you’ll need a cleaner fuel. Because again, like I was talking about at the, uh, earlier part of the segment, the weight from the batteries is a big problem and it’s an even bigger problem when you’re on a, you know, 300 plus foot long cargo ship carrying cargo, uh, carrying containers, carrying cars, all these things. So there’s a lot of progress and a lot of momentum, but I don’t think that there’s sort of a real, um, agreement or clear picture yet of what, you know, the future cargo ship will look like.
AW | 27:53 – Maria Gallucci is a senior reporter for Canary Media Maria, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
MG | 28:00 Thank you. It’s been fun.
AW | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Lettuce, Elvis Costello and Crosby Stills & Nash. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Maria Gallucci: Zero Emission Marine Vessels appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
California is famous for its picturesque sunsets, year-round mild weather, excellent surf, and largely progressive politics, including forward-thinking greenhouse emission policies. This week on Sea Change Radio, however, we learn about a less pleasant claim to fame for the golden state. Today we’re speaking with two scientists from Johns Hopkins University who are working to uncover the mysteries behind a dangerous greenhouse gas: sulfuryl fluoride. One such mystery is why so much of this harmful atmospheric compound originates from Southern California. Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller walk us through changes in termite-eradication practices, how termites are not all alike, and what needs to happen in the nation’s most populous state and elsewhere to solve the problem.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Dylan Gaeta | 00:20 – These sort of policies mandate emissions reductions of greenhouse gases across the board, but in all of these cases, sulfuryl fluoride isn’t included in that list of greenhouse gases that require emissions reductions. So in, in that sense, it’s sort of slipping through the cracks or under the radar, and are greenhouse gas emissions accounting.
Narrator | 00:40 – California is famous for its picturesque sunsets, year-round mild weather, excellent surf, and largely progressive politics, including forward-thinking greenhouse emission policies. This week on Sea Change Radio, however, we learn about a less pleasant claim to fame for the golden state. Today we’re speaking with two scientists from Johns Hopkins University who are working to uncover the mysteries behind a dangerous greenhouse gas: sulfuryl fluoride. One such mystery is why so much of this harmful atmospheric compound originates from Southern California. Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller walk us through changes in termite-eradication practices, how termites are not all alike, and what needs to happen in the nation’s most populous state and elsewhere to solve the problem.
Alex Wise | 01:35 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller Dylan is a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins School of Environmental Engineering, and Scot is an assistant professor there. Scot, Dylan – welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Dylan Gaeta | 01:57 – Yeah, thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks. It’s great to be here.
Alex Wise | 02:01 – So, Dylan, you are the lead on this study that is just getting published entitled, California Dominates US Emissions of the Pesticide and Potent Greenhouse Gas, sulfuryl fluoride. Explain the genesis of your research and why people should be aware of this.
Dylan Gaeta | 02:23 – I hadn’t heard of sulfuryl fluoride until I, until I came to Hopkins and started my PhD here. And this was around 2020 and I started working with Scot. And so Scot had been in contact with a colleague from the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratories, who was sort of at the end of his career and had started looking at this gas around 2015. NOAA started, no, no, global Monitoring Laboratory started making these measurements and sort of pass it on to Scot as to say like, well, I’m out of time to, to look at this myself, but maybe this would be a good, um, topic to look into further. And so, so I, um, we started digging into where the SC is emitted in the world and like what, what, what it’s used for, um, how it’s been accumulating in the global atmosphere. Um, and when we started looking at those measurements, we sort of found, um, a sort of striking lack of information about the global distribution of this gas and where it’s being used and what it’s being used for and where, how much is being emitted in different parts of the world. And so what we did in our research study is that we, we used atmospheric measurements that were collected by our colleagues over at the, the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory. And we started and we used those atmospheric measurements to, to sort of back trace where the emissions of this gas were coming from. Um, and when we did that, we found that a pretty striking majority of the, of the US emissions of this gas were coming from the state of California. And we didn’t see a whole lot of evidence for emissions of this gas happening outside of California, which is sort of unusual for, for most greenhouse gases where you can imagine they’re a little bit more, the emission sources are spread a little bit more evenly throughout where people live. But in this case, we, we saw big hotspot over California and especially southern California.
Scot Miller | 03:58 – I’ll jump in and add something as well. I grew up in the state of North Dakota, which is, you know, a cold frozen state that doesn’t have too many termites running around. And I moved out to California in year 2015 about the same time that NOAA was starting to collect these measurements of sulfuryl fluoride. And when I lived out there, I had about a seven-mile commute on a bicycle to get to work every day. And I would, you know, bike through these residential neighborhoods in the San Francisco area Bay area and see what looked like giant circus tents over the top of houses. And, and being from North Dakota, I had never seen that before. And I, housemate at the time happened to be from Sacramento, and I was talking to her and she said, “Oh, you haven’t seen that before. You don’t know what that is?” And I said, “Well, no, I don’t.” She said, “You know, that’s, that’s termite fumigation.” And it’s, it’s a pretty common thing that you see around the state of California. And you, we just don’t have that back in the state of North Dakota. And so I was talking to our colleague, uh, Ben Miller at NOAA, and you know, he mentioned about how he had started, uh, observing this gas sulfuryl fluoride, um, that’s u the primary gas that’s used for termite fumigation. And I thought, “Huh, well, it’s interesting to take a look at it because it’s, it’s something we definitely see here in the state of California” – see the use of this gas in California, but that I hadn’t ever seen before I moved here. And then lo and behold, when we, you know, dug in and look at emissions patterns and tried to estimate where these emissions were coming from, all the data that we have seems to be pointing like you might guess at California.
Alex Wise | 05:33 – Dylan, maybe you can explain how you were able to investigate and isolate this gas in your study and walk us through your research method a little bit, if you can.
Dylan Gaeta | 05:44 – It wasn’t until about 2009 when sulfuryl fluoride was actually identified as a long-lived greenhouse gas. So I think prior to 2009, most people had thought about this topic, had sort of assumed that sulfuryl fluoride only persists in the atmosphere for a short amount of time. And so since it’s short, since it was presumed to be so short-lived, um, its global warming effect was, was thought to be pretty small. Um, but one of our colleagues, Jens Mühle, who’s a co-author on the study, published a paper in 2009 showing that it actually sulfuryl fluoride in the atmosphere has breaks down really slowly. So it reacts really slowly with all the gases in our atmosphere that we, that we had previously thought might, might scrub this from the atmosphere. And it turns out to be the ocean that that takes up most of this gas. And that that process of the ocean taking up sulfuryl fluoride happens really slowly and sort of in the app with the absence of an efficient removal mechanism from the atmosphere. It, um, the, the, the gas persists after being emitted for something like 40 years in the atmosphere. And over that 40-year lifetime, since the gas is a greenhouse gas, um, it has the ability to trap heat and send it back down to earth over a much longer time period. And so because of that, it has a larger global warming potential than what we originally thought when we started using the gas.
Alex Wise | 07:02 – So is it the gas itself which is surprisingly harmful, or is it the fact that it’s in much larger quantities than previously thought?
Dylan Gaeta | 07:13 – So, so it was the lifetime that, that, that sort of, um, was the surprise. So, so, um, scientists from a gauge, the advanced global atmospheric gases experiment had been measuring sulfur flight in our, in our global atmosphere at different places at, um, places around the world, um, since I think it was around 2004 or 2003 was the first time this was measured in the air. Um, and then the scientists also went back and took measurements of archived flask samples, air flask samples that had been stored all the way back to 1978 and had found sulfuryl fluoride levels and those flasks as well, but saw this increasing trend where over the span of about 50 years from the late seventies to today, we saw, we’ve seen about a tenfold increase in our, in the, in our atmosphere. So now current concentrations are, are around something like three parts per trillion. So three out of every trillion air molecules in our atmosphere are solu fluoride.
Alex Wise | 08:08 – Now, is there a direct correlation between sulfuryl fluoride emissions and termite control? Can we, can we pinpoint that specific practice as the red flag, so to speak? Or is it, was that just, another log on the fire?
Dylan Gaeta | 08:37 – So just to back up this, this sulfur flight is also like an entirely anthropogenically produced compound. So there’s no not, there’s no significant natural sources of the cast.
Alex Wise | 08:54 – Maybe walk us through the history of how long has it been in, in production and how has the EPA classified it up till now?
Dylan Gaeta | 09:04 – Yeah. So, so the gas was first starting to be produced by Dow Chemical, and I believe this was like the late fifties. Um, but starting off the, the quantities that were produced were relatively small because we had other replacement FME, we had other alternative FME against that were used for fumigating termites and other bugs and pests that we were worried about, um, both within structures and also like agricultural. But I guess it was around the late eighties, early nineties when, when scientists started to identify, um, methyl bromide as one of, one of the major contributors to the ozone depletion. And so under the Montreal protocol, countries around the world signed an agreement to phase out the use of methyl bromide. Um, and so in the United States that that deadline to phase out methyl bromide was around 2005. And so as methyl bromide was phased out, um, people started to look for alternative fum against, and sulfuryl fluoride sort of came onto the scene as, as the preferred effective replacement for methyl bromide. So it doesn’t deplete the ozone layer, which is really what we were looking for at the time was a, was a fumigant gas that doesn’t deplete the ozone layer. Um, so we started using sulfuryl fluoride and then sort of later found out that it’s actually a pretty potent greenhouse gas. Um, so it doesn’t have the same ozone depleting effects, which is great, but it does have a contribution to planetary heating as well.
(Music Break | 10:39
Alex Wise | 11:34 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller of Johns Hopkins. So Scot, maybe you can put into context what Dylan was just telling us about the history of sulfuryl fluoride.
Scot Miller | 11:48 – Yeah, so the gas that was previously used was called methyl bromide. And you know, one thing Dylan highlighted is that the, the old gas that we used to use methyl bromide was an ozone depleting substance, but not only did it deplete the ozone layer, but also had some pretty terrible health impacts as well. Um, it’s a known carcinogen, it causes cancer, um, and was shown to cause um, developmental and neurological delays in children. And so this gas is certainly something that we do not want to be using anymore methyl bromide. And so as bad as sulfuryl fluoride is as a potent greenhouse gas, it does replace a chemical that was far, far worse for the environment, both for the ozone layer and for people’s health.
Alex Wise | 12:32 – So give us an idea of how much your study is projecting that sulfuryl fluoride contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and what the curbing of this and regulation of this gas could do to improve the situation, Dylan.
Dylan Gaeta | 12:51 – There, there’s been some work through the IPCC or the, the intergovernmental panel on climate change that that’s characterized sulfuryl fluoride levels in the atmosphere. And I think the IPCC reports have, I think, done a good job of sort of putting the impact of sulfuryl fluoride in context with all the other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. In terms of policy around sulfuryl fluoride, it’s an interesting case because unlike most of the other greenhouse gases that are included under the accounting protocols, either like it for national greenhouse gas inventories or state level greenhouse gas inventories, sulfuryl fluoride is not included in any of them. So if you think of sort of like landmark climate change legislation, like, like under the United Nations or, um, in California, there’s the, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. These sort of policies mandate emissions reductions of greenhouse gases across the board, but in all of these cases, sulfuryl fluoride isn’t included in that list of greenhouse gases that require emissions reductions. So in, in that sense, it’s sort of slipping through the cracks or under the radar in our greenhouse gas emissions accounting.
AW | 13:55 – Let’s focus on California a little bit more. You mentioned California’s regulations. You write that California’s the only state that keeps a public record of statewide sulfuryl fluoride use, but California also seems to be the biggest problem spot for its emission. How did you hit upon California as being this bright spot in the map? And give us an idea of how bright it is and how California is an anomaly from the other states of, in the US for example.
Dylan Gaeta | 14:29 – Yeah, so those findings largely came from the atmospheric measurements that we were working with. And so these measurements come from the NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, which is, um, you can think of as a collection of tall tower sites, so like tall, um, radio towers that have air flask samples collected at the top of them, so like high up in the atmosphere. And also there’s been a variety of aircraft campaigns that also collect aircraft or collect air flask samples. Um, and all of these, these air flask measurements are collected by the No Global Monitoring laboratory and then brought back to Boulder, Colorado, where all of these air flasks and the contents of these air flasks are measured on a, on a high precision instrument that tells us how much of all the gases in, in the air are in these air flasks. And so we have the, we have this picture of, um, sulfuryl fluoride levels at different tower sites and different aircraft, um, sample sites all over the, all over North America. And when we look at those measurements, we sort of see sort of like a two-sided story where the measurements that are collected in California see these really large enhancements or big spikes and the amount of sulfuryl fluoride in the air. And then if you look at the, the, the atmospheric measurements that were taken outside of California, we see re we really don’t see much evidence of sulfuryl fluoride emissions happening nearby. So, you know, if you’re, if you’re looking at tower sites in, um, North Dakota for example, you measure just about the same as you would over at the Pacific Ocean. But, um, if you look at the atmospheric measurements of sulfuryl fluoride that were collected in California, for example, there’s, um, tower sites in the Los Angeles basin and also up on Mount Wilson, um, which is right up in Pasadena, right above, um, Cal, uh, Los Angeles. You see, you see really large enhancements of sulfuryl fluoride, which indicates that there, there are emissions happening nearby.
Alex Wise | 16:25 – So Scot, when someone hears the, the story of sulfuryl fluoride and its replacement of methyl bromide in the pesticide supply chain to a policymaker, it could sound like a, a frustrating game of whack-a-mole. You know, you think you have something like methyl bromide done away with and you found this alternative that doesn’t cause problems to the ozone, but sure enough, it’s also a, a dangerous greenhouse gas. How do you hope that policymakers approach a finding like this, and what does it mean for studying other greenhouse gases?
Scot Miller | 17:08 – You know, in terms of policy recommendations, I make the argument that it’s just really important for us to understand what our greenhouse gas emissions are. Um, and you know, that sounds like a really simple question in some ways. You know, like every time you get in your car and you turn on the car and drive down the street, you’re emitting greenhouse gases. Or when we flip the light switch on, a lot of our electricity comes from, um, you know, fossil fuels that are emitting greenhouse gases, but then there are a lot of gases or some gases like sulfuryl fluoride that are much more challenging to track, right? So one thing we talked about before is that the state of California keeps track of how much sulfuryl fluoride is being used, but other states don’t necessarily keep track of of that kind of information. You know, I think if we have a better idea of the big picture of what different types of emissions are, then different political entities, whether it be the state of California or whether it be the federal government in the US can have a more accurate picture and come up with a more informed strategy as to how to reduce emissions going forward.
Alex Wise | 18:12 – And Dylan, have you and your colleagues drawn any conclusions about whether California is producing more sulfuryl fluoride or is it just measuring more sulfuryl fluoride when Scot was referring to North Dakota not having a lot of termites versus the problems that persist in California? I, is it purely just a termite issue or is it more that there’s technology in place to measure it?
Dylan Gaeta | 18:40 – Yeah, so the atmospheric measurements that we worked with have, you know, there are measurements taken all over North America and um, in most of those sites we don’t see any, or we see very infrequent or very few evidence. We, we see very little evidence of those emissions happening. Um, so part part of the reason that, that we have such clarity about what’s happening in California is that we have sort of a higher density of measurements available in California. So I think there, I want to say there’s maybe like five or six measurement sites that are greenhouse gas monitoring sites in California, whereas some other states don’t have any within that state. So, um, I think a state that also point to is the state of Florida. So part of the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratories Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Network, um, doesn’t include a station in Florida, partly because these, um, these monitoring sites are really expensive and, and, and take a lot of human power to operate. And so it’s, um, you know, these are expense, like collecting these measurements is sort of like an expensive and time intensive operation that, that we just don’t have the resources to put these, these sensors or these measurement, um, capabilities all over the place with does high density as we would like to, but we see the atmospheric side of what’s happening in a lot of the country and we don’t see evidence for emissions happening at the, in those regions.
Alex Wise | 20:01 So, Scot, why California? What is your guess into why California stands out in terms of being an emitter of this gas?
Scot Miller | 20:10 – Yeah, so this gas is mostly used as a, a pesticide for fumigation. And the biggest thing that it’s used for typically is for fumigating against termites. And you know, obviously there are a lot of areas in the United States that simply just don’t have termites. Like from the far frigid north of North Dakota where I grew up, um, there aren’t a lot of termites there. And so, um, you know, fumigation isn’t really an issue or a problem. Um, but then as you get further south, obviously you see termites in places like Maryland, you know, where Dylan and I both live and in California. But California really has this unique problem. Um, the state has a particular species of termite that lives there called the Western dry wood termite. And this termite is unique relative to some other termite species that we see in the United States because it actually lives inside of buildings or structures like it might form colonies within the rafters of your house or within your office building, for example. Whereas a lot of the termites that we see over here on the east coast of the US are subterranean termites. And so those termites typically form nests in the ground. And so the way that you treat a termite in Maryland is often very different from the way that you treat a termite in California. Um, in Maryland you can put out, you know, bait traps where the termites will grab the bait and then take it back to their, you know, colonies in the ground. Whereas in California, you know, if these colonies are really up in the rafters of your house, the only way to get rid of them is to put a big tent around it and fi get it with sulfuryl fluoride. And so I think that kind of helps explain why, you know, you see all these circus tents in the state of California and all this sulfuryl fluoride use. Um, but why you don’t necessarily see things like this happening
(Music Break) | 22:38
Alex Wise | 23:05 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller of Johns Hopkins. If we can take a step back and give layman an idea into how many greenhouse gases have been isolated by the scientific community and how scientists are slowly but surely trying to do studies like this for each and every one of these gases. What kind of scale are we talking about? We always hear about methane and carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, et cetera, but I’m sure there’s a lot more that I’m not aware of. How, how does, are, are there still ones that are being discovered on an annual basis or is this, is there a finite number of greenhouse gases and we just have to dive deep into each one of them?
Dylan Gaeta | 23:51 – Yeah, so I think we have a pretty good handle on what the composition or like what greenhouse gases there are in our atmosphere. And, and there have been some efforts both from, from NOAA and from different atmospheric monitoring groups or measurement groups that, um, have keep that keep track of and measure these, the composition of our atmosphere at different places on the surface of the earth. And I think we have good handles on, you know, what’s in our atmosphere in terms of long lived species, and it’s really the long lived species that, that are concerned when it comes to, to, um, being, uh, greenhouse gases. Um, but I think the, the part that we don’t have as, as good of a handle on as we would like is, is the emission sources of these gases. You know, the question of where and how much these gases are being emitted.
Alex Wise | 24:37 – Can you give us an idea of the number?
Dylan Gaeta | 24:39 – I wanna say there’s, there’s less than a hundred.
Alex Wise | 24:42 – Okay. So it, it’s a definite number. It’s not a ian task to try to isolate and study each and every one of these thoroughly.
Dylan Gaeta | 24:50 – Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s not like we’re taking new measurements and finding new greenhouse gases every time we look at air samples. But, but rather it’s, it’s, we’ve seen some of these compounds still show up in measurements and we’ve, for a while I think Sulfuryl flight was one of those questions where we kind of kicked the can down the road for, for a few years over trying to understand where exactly it’s coming from. We’ve just have been more so, or not we personally, but, um, scientists have been more so concerned with just keeping track of how much is it’s growing in the atmosphere and how fast it’s growing. And so sort of like the, the, the part of our work that, that we focus on is to take those measurements of, of, of sulfuryl fluid in the atmosphere and use them to, to shine some light on like where the emissions are actually coming from. So like what the sources are. So if you think of like a bathtub analogy rather than like trying to measure how much is in the bathtub, we’re actually looking at, at the flow rate of water into the bathtub.
Alex Wise | 25:45 – So what’s the solution in your mind? Is it banning sulfuryl fluoride or are there ways to mitigate its effects?
Dylan Gaeta | 25:54 – Yeah, so I, I think there’s a few options on the table that, that California or the US or or the world as a whole could, could consider in terms of ways to mitigate our sulfuryl fluoride emissions. Um, and they don’t necessarily have to be a ban or a, or a restriction or a new phase out. Um, so one, one possibility that we mention in our, in our study, um, so this, this practice of, of structural fumigation where you cover a house with an airtight tent and then pump it full of sulfuryl fluoride, um, typically after that happens, after the fume again, has wiped out all the, all the termites, that tent is opened and vent straight to the atmosphere. And so, so that’s the problematic practice, um, is that instead of recapturing our sulur fluoride after use, it’s vented straight to the atmosphere. And so, so one solution that, that, that we, that we hint at, um, is, is the idea of recapturing that gas and, and destroying it before it can enter the atmosphere. So it, it’s a, it’s a step that could be added to the fumigation process. Um, it’s one that would likely add some cost and time to the fumigation process, but it would also save, um, it would save sulfur flood emissions from entering the atmosphere. And also with that in mind, also save on some greenhouse gas emissions.
Alex Wise | 27:10 – What are the best ways to keep track of it now that you’ve been getting your hands into the process of trying to measure this greenhouse gas Dylan?
Dylan Gaeta | 27:20 – Yeah, so I think sulfuryl fluoride is, now that it’s been identified as along with greenhouse gas, I think the, the important next step is to include sulfuryl fluoride emissions in greenhouse gas accounting protocols like in the state of California, at the US level and also nationally that, um, we can have a handle on like how much greenhouse gas, how much of this gas is being emitted by different entities. Um, because until we have that information, it it’s, it’s harder to design policies that re that reduce emissions.
Alex Wise | 27:49 – Scot Miller and Dylan Gaeta, thank you so much for being my guests on Sea Change Radio.
Scot Miller | 27:54 – Thanks again. It’s been, uh, great being here and it’s, it’s fun to chat about the science that we’re working on.
Dylan Gaeta | 27:59 – Yeah, thanks for having us. It’s, it’s been nice chatting.
Narrator | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Fog Swamp, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman and Tupac. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com Stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast California Termites and the Atmosphere appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Legacy students, applicants whose families attended the school, comprised 36 percent of Harvard’s class of 2022. Notably, 77% of students admitted to Harvard via legacy preference are white. These days, however, the practice of giving legacy applicants a competitive edge over their peers in college admission decisions has come under fire. Last week on Sea Change Radio, we spoke with Law Professor John Brittain, from the University of the District of Columbia, who made the case for ending legacy preference in college admissions, asserting that it preserves wealth, power, and privilege. This week, we speak to Rod Graham, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University, who offers a contrasting perspective. Graham explains why he believes that legacy preference admissions should just be considered another factor that admissions officers should be free to consider, similar to how they may weigh an applicant’s geography, race, athletic prowess, and other factors.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Rod Graham (RG) | 00:19 – So we have what looks like a meritocracy because those kids earned their way there by doing the things to get there. But the people who went to the Ivy League schools in the seventies and eighties are sending their kids to Ivy League schools now, who will then send their kids to Ivy League schools later.
Narrator | 00:38 – Legacy students, applicants whose families attended the school, comprised 36 percent of Harvard’s class of 2022. Notably, 77% of students admitted to Harvard via legacy preference are white. These days, however, the practice of giving legacy applicants a competitive edge over their peers in college admission decisions has come under fire. Last week on Sea Change Radio, we spoke with Law Professor John Brittain, from the University of the District of Columbia, who made the case for ending legacy preference in college admissions, asserting that it preserves wealth, power, and privilege. This week, we speak to Rod Graham, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University, who offers a contrasting perspective. Graham explains why he believes that legacy preference admissions should just be considered another factor that admissions officers should be free to consider, similar to how they may weigh an applicant’s geography, race, athletic prowess, and other factors.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Rod Graham. He is a sociology professor at Old Dominion University. Rod, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Rod Graham (RG) | 02:12 – Hey, Alex. It’s nice to be back.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:14 – I’ve missed you, my friend. And I wanted to discuss a piece that you wrote on your medium site. It was entitled, why I Support Legacy Admissions in Universities Instead of Me summarizing it. Why don’t I first let you have the podium and explain the thinking behind this piece?
Rod Graham (RG) | 02:34 – Yeah, sure. Well, I, I think that institutions, uh, particularly educational institutions should have some leeway in building the student body that they think fits their mission. Um, it’s not absolute, but some leeway, right? So if it, if it is the case that, an institution says, look, you know, there are reasons why we need to have legacy admissions. I’m for that. It’s the same reason actually why I’m for affirmative action, or I think in the piece, uh, that you mentioned, the example I gave was my university, which doesn’t have to worry about legacy admissions really, uh, or affirmative action or any of those things. But we do have a large military, uh, presence in the community, and it’s in our best interest to, in effect, have preferences for, uh, military affiliate affiliated people, veterans or active or even their, their family members. And so I think it’s a good idea within reason for an institution to have military preferences, affirmative action, and then also legacy, uh, preferences.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:45 – So, let’s dive into the example you give with your, your university. It’s a public university, but it has military affiliation as you mentioned. So Old, Dominion, you think benefits from having legacy preference in admissions because it keeps military families going to the school. I’m trying to understand how it benefits it.
RG | 04:06 – Okay. So unlike a college like, Harvard that would have their own reasons, we are always trying to get students. And, if we have a pool of potential students in our community, then it benefits us to try and attract those students. So if we give benefits to them in some way, and I think in the piece I mentioned that there’s indirect benefits and direct benefits, actually, I should say preferences, indirect preferences and direct preferences. So, uh, the indirect preference would be to invest resources in attracting that demographic, which we certainly do at our university, we have something akin to a DEI program, which people may find weird in this context, but it’s the same function. We want to make our university welcome to military personnel. So we have a military, I don’t know, department or something. They have counselors for military, it’s not a military department, but, but we have, uh, administrators who work directly with, uh, people who are affiliated with the military, uh, to help them in the transition. So that’s resources that we are spending. That’s an indirect preference because we don’t do that for everyone, right? Just some, right. And then a direct preference would be the, the ones that most people talk about, which is saying, okay, we’re gonna give you a bump because you have that certain characteristic. I am not entirely sure if our university does that. I think we do, but I’m not sure.
AW | 05:30 – But you write that the school gives a preference to community college graduates.
RG | 05:35 – That’s another example. Yeah.
AW | 05:36 – Yeah. And if they decide they want to give to community college from North Carolina, then they can. But right now it’s just Virginia community volleges.
RG | 05:45 – Yeah. That’s another example of how it benefits us. We, we have a lot of, as most states do have a lot of community colleges, and we want to get those students to, if they want to come and get a four year, uh, degree, we want to make it easier for them, them, so we, we automatically accept them. If you’re from Virginia and you finish a two year, um, degree, we don’t do that for the neighboring state. So that is a kind of preference as well. And, and the point of, of bringing up those examples is because I think often the, in the national narrative, everything is driven by what occurs at like 10 schools. You know, there are 20 or so Ivy League schools, and we say, well, gosh, you know, you got to get into Harvard if you want to be a Supreme Court justice or be something like that. So everyone’s fighting to get there. And so we are concerned about, things not being meritocratic at that particular, at those collection of schools, but we have to think more broadly that these institutions, you know, we we’re trying to get students, we’re embedded in communities, you know, we’ve got a mission that we’re trying to achieve. And so we need to be able to build the cohort that we think best allows us to achieve our goals.
AW | 06:52 – We’re talking about Old Dominion being a military school and wanting to have more preferences. And I’m, and in your piece, you talk about Native American universities and Yeshiva University wanting to have more preferences, but the way I’m thinking of it is there’s a distinction between preferences and legacy admissions in terms of the goal, which I think is we share, which is trying to do away with the preservation of privilege. So how would Old Dominion benefit from specifically legacy admissions? Not just preference, let’s just think of legacy admissions. So let’s say I, I went to Old Dominion and now my daughter wants to go there. Why would it benefit your school that she has a an inside track on getting into your school? Because I went there.
RG | 07:38 – Okay, I want to broaden it out, and then I’ll come back into Old Dominion if you don’t, if you don’t mind. Sure. The way that I think about our higher ed system is that it’s not a one size fits, fits all thing. And so different institutions with different histories in different parts of the country, different needs will benefit more or less from whatever preferences or admissions or what, what have you. So, some universities may be cash strapped or they’re trying to build, a community or whatever it is that they’re trying to do. And so they, they want to build this connection with families or something. And so maybe they say maybe someone who went to that university says, all right, you know, I went to the University of State U. or whatnot. And so now I know that my son can also go, you know, this is our university. We have some connection with that university. I can see that as a benefit to a school if they’re trying to build that kind of connection. But that wouldn’t be for all schools. Like some schools would not want to do that. So with Old, Dominion University, I’m not entirely sure we would benefit that much from legacy admissions. We benefit from military admissions maybe, but not, not legacy, right? So it all depends on the place. If you are at an Ivy League University, um, they’re not cast strapped, obviously. But you know, they have a lot of people who graduated from there who, um, could still be donors, and are donors, and you want to build that connection. Well, I went to, I went to Yale, and you know, now I’m, you know, the CEO of this company, and I want to get back to Yale, and I know my son is going to go there. I’m a Yale guy, right? So I, I can see the benefit in some institutions having legacy admissions. Now it has to be articulated.
AW | 09:27 – Isn’t that preserving privilege then? If you are, if you’re the CEO of a company and you want your son to go there and you give a lot of money, or just like Charles Kushner gave tons of money to Harvard and Jared Kushner, who was underqualified to get into Harvard, he got to go to Harvard and then gets to claim he’s a Harvard graduate and, and is able to be among the elite in terms of his educational status. That’s a preservation of, of privilege definitionally, isn’t it?
RG | 09:55 – Well, unfortunately, in a way, yes. But think of it this way. You’ve got a cohort of let’s make a good round number 100 students, and that university says, okay, everyone has to be qualified. So, so there’s a di d distant distinction between being the most qualified and being qualified. So all, uh, even all AA students are qualified, like they meet the minimum requirements to be at the university, even if they don’t have the highest SAT scores. So I, so we got to, you know, so I, I would, I would hope that Jared Kushner at least qualified for the university he went to. Um, so, so that’s a, that’s one thing. Um, so yes, but you’ve got a hundred. So let’s say you’ve got those, that cohort of 100, you can say, alright, maybe 10% of that 10 students will accept from legacies. Another 10 students we’re going to bring in from AA and then another 10 athletes and whatnot. And then the rest will be just simply there based on their SAT scores, this, this type of thing. So I mean, I can I sort of see it in that holistic way?
AW | 10:58 – Well, I was surprised to learn that this was a uniquely American institution. Now, I always thought of great Brittain being this blue blood aristocratic, legacy oriented educational system. But in England, France, all over Europe, this practice has been banned. There’s no legacy preference allowed in their institutions. So we think of this as the American dream, and everybody has an equal chance. But I mean, even in, in the military, let’s go back to Old Dominion. I mean, if you’re an officer who went to Old Dominion, and your son wants to go to Old Dominion, you get preference over somebody who could ultimately use the military as a real springboard to success in this country. An immigrant who goes into the military can be fast tracked for citizenship, can reap the benefits of military service, but that person may not get into Old Dominion because there’s just so many spots available. And the Supreme Court has already ruled now that affirmative action is not going to be the, the law of the land, and we won’t be able to use race as a preference in our system. But we can still perversely use wealth as a proxy for winnowing out who we want in our school if we’re an admissions officer.
RG | 12:17 – Well, you know, the example you gave, um, to me is, well, let’s say a student, you know, doesn’t get into Old Dominion University, because, um, they were one of the unlucky ones, um, who, you know, got, you know, their slot was taken, I guess we can call it that by someone who is in the military. I, that, that will of course not happen with, we we’re talking kind of, you know, just give an example here, but let’s just say…
AW | 12:45 – Right, but you want more qualified students. You don’t want just more students.
RG | 12:51 – Right, right. We want more qualified students. Yeah, that, that’s true. And o only some universities have this hyper competitive thing going on. It’s just like maybe the top 50 schools, most schools are like, look, um, if you have the SAT scores and you’ve got the, the grades and whatnot, um, then there’ll probably a spot be a spot for you. It’s, it’s highly unlikely, uh, that if you’re qualified, so, so that student can go somewhere else. And, and I don’t mean for that to be callous, but we have a constellation of, of institutions that you can choose from. So in, in my world, if you don’t get into Old Dominion because all right, fine. This school, for whatever reason, their mission, their history, whatnot, they tend to cater to, you know, people from Virginia and they tend to cater to military folks and whatnot. Okay, fine, I’ll go to VCU. Like, that to me would be the, I mean, that’s not ideal. Maybe the person lives in the cities. He, they, they want go to Dominion, but, but the idea is that you have, you should have options. And it’s not a cookie cutter type thing. So one school does one thing a little differently than the other.
(Music Break) | 14:02
AW | 14:41 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to sociology, professor Rod Graham. So Rod, let’s turn to another example of a conversation that I had with a high school classmate of mine. We basically agreed that legacy admissions preference is wrong, but they thought that there should be an exception for HBCUs, historically, black colleges and universities. I disagree on that because I think these slots are limited, and your preserving privilege, that term legacy almost has privilege baked right into it, doesn’t it? How do you feel about HBCUs having this option?
RG | 15:18 – I, I think if the faculty and the administrators at Harvard think that it’s in their best interest to…
AW | 15:24 – Howard.
RG | 15:25 – I’m sorry, Howard. Yes, yes, yes. because we’re talking about the HBCUs. Yeah. Yeah. Then I would be fine with that, if they can articulate why. I mean, they may say, look, all right, we want our grandfather. We want to, we, we, we want to see in our football stands, right? Um, a grandfather, a father and a son, all there with Howard jerseys on, they’ve all gone to Howard. You know, this is the Howard family, and, uh, we know that we can get, uh, money for this new, we get donations and money for this new building, whatnot, because this is the Howard family. I can totally see that. I also understand, though, that I’m in the minority here. I mean, most Americans, you know, they, uh, I, I think so I also believe in meritocracy, but I think my understanding of our higher ed system is different than other folks. And that leads me to this conclusion. And quite frankly, I don’t think, I mean, if you look at how much family income and, um, and SAT or a CT scores are related, it kind of benefits people who are wealthy to say, look, I’m in there because of merit
AW | 16:40 – So Rod, I think you are ascribing a little too much faith in the admissions officers doing the right thing. While I’m a little more suspect of them, I think that they will take the old boys network and let in their friends, if given that choice.
RG | 16:57 – They might, I would like it if, if universities could articulate the reasons and make it public to everyone to know, okay, in each cohort, this is the percentage of people that we’re accepting qualified students now that were accepted based on these things. So, okay, athletes, I mean, what’s that? I mean, I, you know, the, the slippery slope argument is too easy to make, but I mean, to be truly logically consistent, what about athletes?
AW | 17:24 – But that’s, again, that’s where you’re lumping in preference with legacy admissions. Uh, uh, that’s a whole different discussion each time. And like you ask in your own piece, you say, and as you say, as a sidebar, why do we not have any Supreme Court justices who graduated from the University of Alabama Law School? Why are they all from Yale and Harvard? That, that was my argument in the first place, is that these elite schools are the gateways to, uh, to power and wealth in our country. And to allow that to be perpetuated generationally, that’s the slippery slope. Getting to athletics, you see how that gets exploited in the USC cheating scandal and things where people carved out little false athletic achievements for their kid who wasn’t a fencer. So there’s, there’s ways of beating the system if you have money,
RG | 18:16 – Preferences and admissions, right? We’re, we’re using two different words maybe to talk about two different things. I see the preference as leading to an admission, meaning, okay, if a qualified person is also, um, uh, an alum, a son or daughter of an alumnus, then, then they get a preference. I, I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of, okay, you went to the school, or I’m sorry, your parents went to the school. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what your grades are or whatnot, you just automatically get in. I mean, maybe that’s something that some universities do when universities that are still doing in, in some way a kind of racial preference. I guess they’re not anymore, maybe, but there’s a, a box that the person checks. I’m Native American
AW | 19:18 – Except racial preference and athletics are not generationally perpetuated in terms of wealth. There’s a difference between athletics being generational and your name, just your name and who you are, your family. I mean, that seems antithetical to American values to me, is that who, who you are and what your name is, should be able to give you access to these keys of power.
RG | 19:47 – It is, you are right.
AW | 19:49 – Great, appreciate you being against that Sea Change Radio,
RG | 19:53 – No, you’re right. I mean, I think, I think most Americans are, uh, really value meritocracy and, and they don’t want, you know, um, this sort of, your parent was a, a royal, and so now you’re a royal, and so you get to rule the world type thing. I mean, yeah, no, I agree.
AW | 20:08 – No, we laugh, but that’s really what that comes back to. And that’s why I was surprised that England doesn’t have this in their higher education system.
RG | 20:16 – Yeah, I wasn’t aware of that.
AW | 20:18 – No one does really.
RG | 20:19 – Well, I mean, the thing about, so there’s a, there’s a book that maybe actually the title, the person that, you had this conversation with.
AW | 20:30 – John Brittain.
RG | 20:31 – Yes. The, the title on on your page says The Myth of Meritocracy. Mm-Hmm.
AW | 21:53 – The first quotas were because there were too many Jewish students who were getting into these schools, and they didn’t want to have the children of immigrants who are succeeding on a disproportionate level. They didn’t want them to rock the boat, so to speak.
RG | 22:08 – That’s right. That’s right. And so we went to a situation where, okay, you know what, you work hard, you can go to those top universities, and for a while that worked, but because of the competition at those top universities, it requires a lot of investment. Those, those universities were not as competitive before the seventies and eighties. So, so now we’re in a, in a situation, uh, where there’s so much competition to get into those universities, parents have to invest a lot in their children cultivating their skills and abilities and their SAT scores and their extracurriculars, all that stuff to get into those universities. So, so that son of a shoemaker is not getting into Harvard anymore, or it’s very, uh, rare. So we have what looks like a meritocracy, because those kids earned their way there by doing the things to get there. But the people who went to the Ivy League schools in the seventies and eighties are sending their kids to Ivy League schools now, who will then send their kids to Ivy League schools later.
AW | 23:12 – It’s not like England has no stratification. I mean, that’s why I was surprised to hear that they obviously have a very, you know, they have the House of Lords right there in the name of it, right. In their, in their parliamentary system. But the people who are determining who gets into these schools are, let’s say, doing their best to try to evaluate students for what they are. They can only go by a certain set of inputs and variables, SAT scores, grades. But there’s, there’s a lot of wiggle room in all of that. But the most explicitly bald faced one that kind of has roots in a royal system is the legacy preference. That’s why I think it, it stands out from these other preferences that you’re lumping together. I think it’s different. So we’re trying to eliminate some of those variables, and I think eliminating the legacy preference could help level the playing field in a way that would be much more profound than people think.
RG | 24:08 – We’ll see, I hope that happens. I’m not entirely sure. I think, um, we’ll see, I mean, I’m going to remain hopeful for that.
AW | 24:18 – And it’s not going away in private universities anytime soon, unfortunately, to me, I don’t think, I mean, we’re just talking about public universities,
RG | 24:25 – Which is also a distinction that needs to be made public versus private.
AW | 24:29 – Right. And a lot of these public schools are doing a lot to cater to out-of-state students. I saw something on like University of Arizona, whereas Arizona State, I don’t want to mix the two up, but they were building these separate apartments that were just for out-of-state students that were like, these really nice dorms. These are like way beyond what I thought of as a college dorm when I was in college. But this is because they get three, four times the tuition from an out-of-state student, as they do from an in-state student. So they’re, they’re really trying to draw students from around the country to attend and pay top dollar for the public university education that they’re offering.
RG | 25:08 – It’s an indirect preference. It’s not a direct one, but it’s an indirect, they’re, they could have invested that money in another demographic or something else, but they chose to do that because it’s in their best interest to do so. Yeah. I actually agree with you on something. I’m lumping the preferences, all the preferences together from the institution’s point of view. Um, but, it is the case that, that it, when you give a preference to, uh, a female who’s trying to get into a STEM grad program or something, uh, which I’m sure occurs or you give a preference to Native Americans in Oklahoma or something, I don’t know if that does occur, but it really should. Um, you are helping maybe a disadvantaged demographic, either historically or by number or power or, or something. Whereas when you give a preference to, uh, someone of a wealthy family or a legacy, they don’t have a disadvantage. So from the, from the student’s point of view or even the parents, there is a difference. Uh, so that I, I, I agree with from the institution’s point of view, though, those preferences are just to me, um, um, perform the same function of building a cohort, um, or helping them financially in the case of Arizona State or what, what, whatever the reason is that they have, they have a reason for having those preferences that benefits them. So, uh, so maybe that’s a distinction we should, we should make too.
AW | 26:34 – Yes. And, and, and you working at a public university that is struggling with trying to get full enrollment and be financially sound, I can see that informing your opinion. I respect it. I just, I don’t really see how the legacy preference specifically would aid in what Old Dominion need university really needs to succeed in, in its goals. I don’t think that’s the key. And I don’t think it would be the key to a Harvard or a Middlebury either. Ultimately, I think, I think it’s a pernicious practice which needs to be unbundled from the word preference and thought of in a separate tranche.
RG | 27:20 – I see. Well, I mean, I, I think that most Americans actually agree with you and would find what I’m saying to be a bit, a bit odd, but, uh,
AW | 27:49 – Well, I understand your piece much better now, and I always enjoy the conversation. Rod Graham is a sociology professor at Old Dominion University. Rod, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
RG | 28:01 – Thanks for having me, Alex.
AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Trombone Shorty and Alan Toussaint. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Rod Graham: The Case For Legacy Preference in College Admissions appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Longtime listeners know that Sea Change Radio is not a debate format – we do not generally provide a platform for climate change deniers or other purveyors of disinformation. But when it comes to certain topics, we do believe there is room for spirited discourse. Next week’s guest will argue in favor of preserving legacy preferences in college admissions. In preparation for that conversation, and to provide context and a counterpoint, this week we are dipping into the Sea Change Radio archives to revisit our 2017 discussion with Prof. John Brittain.
The official subject matter of Sea Change Radio is environmental sustainability. This week, however, we are deviating from that to talk about a topic that we believe is inextricably linked to sustainability: stratification in education. We are talking with law professor, civil rights advocate, and educational diversity expert, Prof. John C. Brittain, about educational practices that perpetuate social, racial, and socioeconomic exclusiveness. Elite private schools were once restricted to wealthy white young men. Since the 1960s we have seen some progress at these schools – they all admit women, most have scholarship programs to make room for the non-wealthy, and they generally boast of need-blind admissions practices. But there is one hidden practice, often overlooked, which runs counter to all of that progress: the practice of legacy admissions. That is, giving preference to applicants who have a family connection to the school. The majority of elite educational institutions in this country do this. For example, in 2017, a full 41% of Harvard’s incoming freshman were legacies. Logic tells us that generation after generation, this sort of admission preference can’t be doing much for these schools’ demographic diversity. Professor Brittain and host Alex Wise discuss how legacy admission practices serve as affirmative action for the privileged, the irony that the practice thrives in the United States which holds itself up as a model meritocracy and how schools’ justifications for the ongoing use of legacy preferences don’t hold up to a reasoned analysis.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
John Brittain (JB) | 00:17 – At many elite post-secondary educational institutions, applicants with an alumni parent are accepted at two to three times the rate of those without leading one commentator to label legacy preference as the biggest affirmative action program and American higher education.
Narrator (2024)| 00:41 Longtime listeners know that Sea Change Radio is not a debate format. We don’t generally provide a platform for climate change deniers or other purveyors of disinformation, but when it comes to certain topics, we do believe there’s room for spirited discourse. Next week’s guest will argue in favor of preserving legacy preferences in college admissions in preparation for that conversation and to provide context and a counterpoint, this week we’re dipping into the Sea Change Radio archives to revisit our discussion with Professor John Brittain.
Narrator (2017) | 01:18 – The official subject matter of Sea Change Radio is environmental sustainability. This week, however, we’re deviating from that to talk about a topic that we believe is inextricably linked to sustainability stratification in education. We’re talking with law professor, civil rights advocate, and educational diversity expert John Brittain about educational practices that perpetuate social, racial and socioeconomic exclusiveness. Elite private schools were once restricted to wealthy white young men. Since the 1960s, we’ve seen some progress at these schools. They all admit women most have scholarship programs to make room for the non wealthy, and they generally boast of need blind admissions practices. But there is one hidden practice often overlooked, which runs counter to all of that progress, the practice of legacy admissions that is giving preference to applicants who have a family connection to the school. The majority of elite educational institutions in this country do this. For example, in 2017, a full 41% of Harvard’s incoming freshmen were legacies. Logic tells us that generation after generation, this sort of admission preference can’t be doing much for these school’s. Demographic diversity. Professor Brittain and I discuss how legacy admission practices serve as affirmative action for the privileged, the irony that the practice thrives in the United States, which holds itself up as a model meritocracy and how schools justifications for the ongoing use of legacy preferences don’t hold up to a reasoned analysis.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:10 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Professor John Brittain. He is a professor of law at the University of District Columbia. John, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
John Brittain (JB) | 03:21 – Good day to you too.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:22 – So as a caveat, I’ve known Professor Brittain since, uh, my childhood, and I I wanted to have him on because he’s an expert in educational issues pertaining to diversity, affirmative action, and legacy admissions. So, John, let me give our listeners a, a brief summary of, of your work. You are a attorney in the deep South in Mississippi in the late sixties, early seventies working for civil rights legislation. You have been a professor of law since 1977, I think you were the first African American professor of law at the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford, and you played a big role in the development of the Magnet School program in Hartford, Connecticut. It’s profiled in a radio piece on this American life entitled The Problem We All Live With. We’ll link to that on Sea Change Radio. So from your experience helping create this magnet school system in Hartford, can you give us an idea of why diversity is such an essential component to education?
John Brittain (JB) | 04:33 – Throughout education in K through 12 grades and in higher education too, the sociological and educational research shows that a diverse group of students as measured by social and economic status, race, ethnicity, and language offers a distinct advantage both for children of color as well as for Caucasian children. In learning the measures of the advantages of a diverse school of education includes higher aspirations on behalf of particularly the children of color, the two greater goals in life. Another advantage of school diversity for children of color is that it provides access to them with much more harmonious settings and integrated workplaces and integrated housing and in pursuing the advantages of integrated settings throughout life. Of course, everyone wants to know that do children of color also benefit from a diverse school setting rather than, and overwhelmingly a one race, mostly African American and Latino, often compounded by high percentages of children who come from poverty in terms of their academic success. And the results show that children who attend more diverse schools do better in achievement than children who remain, particularly in non-white one race schools. That’s the evidence that school diversity is a proven method of assigning students to schools and of raising achievement.
AW | 06:48 – In both white and African American populations, right?
JB | 06:53 – The Caucasian children do not suffer in high school graduation rates and in college admission rates, and overwhelmingly one race white schools the way that children of color are often disadvantaged by attending, especially the dual segregation based upon race or on language and on poverty. However, the children who are white in diverse settings go on to a far better opportunity to live within the growing diverse world and this nation. Two, to interact with less bias, less prejudice, less fear, and more common acceptance and comradery with children of different races. And the question that hasn’t been answered but asked is whether Caucasians who dominate in the field of management and in business can continue to succeed having been raised and largely a homogenous white community, and yet go to work in an often very racially and ethnically diverse community or responsible for business success by customers and by service providers who often represent a much more diverse world. That is what concerns persons who are white in training their children for a domestic and internationally global diverse world.
AW | 08:56 – So in other words, if you were coming out of an elite university that wasn’t diverse in 1960 and you are white, it might not really affect you that greatly when you got to the workplace. Anybody who’s seen like mad men, it’s all white men who are in executive positions. As that reality has shifted, so has the reality of what defines elite education. Is that fair to say?
JB | 09:23 – Yes. It’s also fair to say for an example, using a Supreme Court decision, a dealing with racial diversity and higher education, especially through using means in a careful manner, but not in any kind of quota, not in any kind of direct manner race and ethnicity. That in this, uh, case known as the University of Michigan cases around 2000 and uh, three, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the, uh, university mission law school’s policy where race was just used in a very careful way in one factor. But the significant part about preparing Caucasians for their role in higher achievement in the workplace is that corporate America filed a friend of a court brief saying that diversity was essential not only in working to better and together in the workplace, but also being able to produce products and services in a diverse world.
AW | 10:30 – So instead of diving into the, the arguments for and against affirmative action and the effects of affirmative action, let, let’s fast forward to something a little hidden secret that people tend to overlook within the greater question of diversity in education. And that’s legacy preferences, not only in college admissions, but in prep school boarding, school admissions. It’s something that I took for granted growing up in the northeast. I thought this was just par for the course that if you knew somebody who went to that school, they could help you get into that school. And that was, that was the reality. I assume that was the case everywhere, but it’s, it’s a practice that’s largely been done away with in most developed nations. Why don’t you explain your interest in it in the beginnings of it. Maybe take us to Texas a and m in the early two thousands and what Robert Gates, who was, was he president of the university at that time, what he encountered when legacy preference was put on his plate?
JB | 11:32 – I backed into the subject known as legacy preferences. I say I backed into it because I had been both a public policy advocate for school diversity, particularly in K through 12 education, but also in higher education. And I’d also been, shall we say, a tactical advocate using strategy and persuasion. One method of persuasion is to point out inconsistencies. So I use legacy preference as a tactic to expose the contradictions for those who pose using some kind of special measures to gain a leg up to emissions into higher education. Let me just read a chapter from my book. Legacy Preferences are for the Rich In 2004, the Communist Blasted America for its frequent departures from the meritocratic idea of our founding fathers, despite their vision of a society that embodies the spirit of meritocracy, where all people are judged not on their progenitor, but upon their individual abilities. The economists upon modern Americans frequently overlook departures from that idea. The editors noted the biggest insult to meritocracy is found in the country’s top universities. These institutions which control access to the country’s most impressive jobs consider themselves far above Washington and its grubby ball system, yet they continue to operate a system of legacy preferences. Affirmative action for children of alumni at many elite postsecondary educational institutions, applicants with an alumni parent are accepted at two to three times the rate of those without leading one commentator to label legacy preference as the biggest affirmative action program in American higher education. That is the subject and the contradiction and the contrast between affirmative action for racial language, minorities and affirmative action for the children of alumni parents at an institution.
AW | 13:48 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. I’m speaking to Professor John Brittain. He is a professor at the University of the District of Columbia, David Clark School of Law. So I had a discussion with a friend of mine who went to Dartmouth. And Dartmouth, you note in your book accepted in 2008, 164 children of alumni, the highest total in five years, which is 13% of its applicants. That’s relatively small compared to some similar schools in that same year, 2008, you note that Middlebury College, the acceptance rate for legacies was 50%. And Bowdoin College, it was around 40%. My friend had said, well, how will these schools make money if they prohibit legacy admissions being put into play as one of the factors in accepting students without having any real knowledge in it? I said, well, I think that these very well-funded schools will have a little bit of wiggle room to adapt. They have enormous endowments and they need to change their business model. But after reading some of your work, I realized that it doesn’t necessarily even affect it in the short term, does it in terms of the endowment and the, and the money that these schools bring in. Why don’t you explain?
JB | 15:12 – The false argument is that if select schools in their legacy program, they will lose alumni development or donations. The statement lacks empirical data in support of it, and the method that compared that argument looked at schools that had abandoned or lowered their percentage of legacy admits, and they found no corresponding decrease in what universities call development. But the average person calls it a raising cash donations. In one particular instance, I was involved when I was the dean of the Texas Southern University Law School in Houston with, as you mentioned earlier, Texas a and m. We all know that a and m is a proud institution and like such institutions, it has myths and traditions that embody and invoke the pride. But my work, along with two other co-authors and researchers for a very somewhat controversial op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, the major paper in Houston that at Texas a and M1 of its most important traditions is what is called the myth of merit. And that academic environment, and especially admissions decisions are based solely on individual merit.
AW | 16:56 – This need blind admissions, right?
JB | 16:59 – Need blind admissions is one form of, um, academic merit. But the most focused method and statistics that admissions look at on so-called merit are the applicants grade point average. And depending upon the level of admission to education, their admission tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test or other kinds of tests to, uh, determine who is most likely to succeed. And the, uh, episode arose when Robert Gates, who, uh, later became the Secretary of Defense, and he called himself the Secretary of War as original secretaries of defense were called when the nation was at war. And in some sense, gates faced a question. And the paradox that he faced is that when he came to the school during a period of time in which the courts had banned affirmative action in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi in a certain circuit of the federal courts, and the Supreme Court later reversed that in these Michigan cases I earlier mentioned, and Texas could resume using affirmative action in a careful way that the Supreme Court describe. There are two major kind of flagship universities in Texas. One is the University of Texas at Austin, and the other is Texas…
AW | 18:41 – Both public, right?
JB | 18:43 – Both public universities, which is kind of infrequent for these legacy programs. But when Gates announced that he would not resume affirmative action at Texas a and m, although he had very low minority admissions at that time of both African Americans and Latinos, but he pledged to do everything he could to raise admissions by, uh, recruiting and by, uh, other inducements, but by none of the factors looking at admissions in terms of, uh, any special measures. And at the time he made that announcement, he didn’t realize because he was relatively new, that he had a major deep and wide legacy preference program for a school when it was all male up until the sixties and then became co-ed. And they had a legacy preference that was wider and deeper than most, most legacy preference and say that if you are the child of a graduate, you’ll get extra points to get in. And by the way, in some schools, the legacy preference results and more children entering admission with legacy preference than children who admit whose parents didn’t graduate from school. But even if they students who didn’t graduate from the school whose parents didn’t graduate from school, the proportion of legacy preferences are always the highest and even higher than racial and ethnic affirmative action preferences of special admissions in the schools. But any event, when Gates, the president announced that he was not going to resume the, uh, state affirmative action programs at Texas a and m, although the University of Texas at Austin, indeed the legislature had passed legislation authorizing affirmative action he was going to resist. And that set off a firestorm of contradiction. And that’s how I got in it to be able to tease, to prick the conscience of how can you say you don’t want any special measures for racial and language children, yet you have these special measures for your legacy. And after a lot of criticism from the paper, from the legislative leaders, from many others, gates bit the bullet, and he ended the legacy preference at Texas a and m, much to a roar, much to a protest, much to disagreement with his decision at that time.
AW | 21:30 – When affirmative action efforts are blocked by usually conservative political voices. Right now the Trump administration is talking about trying to stop affirmative action in the courts. How does legacy preference legislation get affected by that? Is there a correlation in your view?
JB | 21:50 – No. Legacy preference is the, uh, biggest contradiction in admissions preferences using special measures for racial and language minorities who were often excluded in the past and still underrepresented today to increase diversity for the educational and the social value is scrutinized, but it’s still legal and it’s still permitted, although there’s a chilling effect for, uh, universities with the kind of political opposition to it. And yet preferences for legacies based solely upon the inheritance by their parents is overlooked as if it, there’s nothing wrong with it, and it should continue without any kind of scrutiny.
AW | 22:42 – Yes, you’re right that the legacy preference system is quote, affirmative action for the children of alumni. So it’s a different form of affirmative action in terms of that correlation. We have a perfect example right now in the White House.
JB | 22:56 – I’ll give you it even more than the president himself. I’m going to go to his son-in-law. I read from the, uh, September edition of, uh, vanity Fair Magazine. There is a classic example of the legacy preference, and I’m, uh, reading that quote in a book, the Price of Admissions, Daniel Golden uses Jared Kushner as an example of how colleges operate. Jar got whatever grades he got in high school, but it wasn’t jar that mattered when his application went to Harvard. It was Charlie, his father, in 1998, when Jared was attending the fish school and starting to look at colleges, his father had pledged 2.5 million to Harvard to be paid in annual installments of $250,000. There is no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. A former official at this fresh school told Goldie, I might add parenthetically, this fresh school is a very select school. His GPA to continue did not warrant it. His SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure there was no way this was going to happen. Then lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were, at the time, other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not. In this way, Kushner set up his son. Charlie was telling the world that’s his father, something about himself, connections, clout. Any idiot can get a genius into Harvard. It takes a mocker. I think that’s a Jewish type of word to get a middling white kid admitted.
AW | 24:40 – I won’t be grading your Yiddish accent there, but that was not your finest work (laugh).
JB | 24:44 –
AW | 25:00 – And as we laugh about Yiddish accents, there’s actually a direct correlation between the holistic approach to admissions that we’re talking about with Jared Kushner and it’s antecedent, sorry, in the, the influx of Jews that came into elite schools in their twenties before the Great Depression, right?
JB | 25:21 – And the efforts by Harvard doing a very dark day in which they tried to exclude and to limit the number of Jews gaining admissions to the university. So their history and admissions, including up to now with, uh, Asians, has not been as good as its educational reputation.
AW | 25:43 – And that that holistic approach is kind of veiled, deep rooted racism. And to call it anything else is kind of, uh, silly. They call it character as a qualifier, which we think of as anybody who goes through the high school process of trying to get into the best schools, is trying to build up their resume and work on their essays and go for these interviews. And all of that is pretty much thrown out the window in most other countries. And that this, uh, holistic approach really negates a lot of the need blind admissions efforts, doesn’t it?
JB | 26:17 – That’s correct. And there is one other little secret behind, uh, my whole efforts and approach, and it came out with some backlash to, uh, my chapter in this book about affirmative action for the rich and legacy, uh, preferences. And that is many allies in the civil rights movement in law and in other disciplines are graduates of select schools. And they didn’t want to see whether their brethren such as I a, challenging this because they thought it might dry up some of the overwhelming support that graduates and indeed many select institutions from Harvard to Yale have strongly supported civil rights issues in the past.
AW | 27:12 – I wanted to quote something in, Richard Berg’s introduction to a book, which where your chapter affirmative action for the rich and legacy preferences is included. Colin Berg writes, according to political scientist Thomas Dye in 2011, 54% of America’s top corporate leaders and 42% of its government leaders are graduates of just 12 institutions. I think that’s pretty stunning and it, it kind of gives you a, a, a, a sneak peek into why these elite universities continue and perpetuate the myth of meritocracy in this country.
JB | 27:49 – In many ways, that’s what it is. It is the myth of meritocracy.
AW | 27:53 – Professor John Brittain is a professor at the University of District Columbia’s School of Law. John, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JB | 28:01 – Thank you for having me, Alex.
Narrator| 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Fela Kuti. Check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast, visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibbin, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast The Myth of Meritocracy Revisited: John Brittain on Legacy Preference (2017) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
According to Reuters, electric vehicle sales leapt 50% in the US in 2023, and are expected to grow by another 30% in 2024. But driving around your city or town, you’ll probably still see a lot more gas stations than electric charging stations. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn the ins and outs of electric vehicle infrastructure from Nicole Voudren, an engineer, educator and consultant in the EV charging space. We look at how private industry, public utilities, and governmental agencies are all converging in this new vital area of the economy to help Americans transition away from internal combustion engine vehicles and get electrified. Voudren talks about the Tesla supercharging network, free, ad-based charging initiatives like Volta, and other ways that technologies are improving to help allay the range anxiety that many EV owners experience.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Nicole Voudren (NV) | 00:15 – The industry’s a bit of a wild west right now, and we need lots of talent to get where we need to go.
Narrator | 00:25 – According to Reuters, electric vehicle sales leapt 50% in the US in 2023, and are expected to grow by another 30% in 2024. But driving around your city or town, you’ll probably still see a lot more gas stations than electric charging stations. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn the ins and outs of electric vehicle infrastructure from Nicole Voudren, an engineer, educator and consultant in the EV charging space. We look at how private industry, public utilities, and governmental agencies are all converging in this new vital area of the economy to help Americans transition away from internal combustion engine vehicles and get electrified. Voudren talks about the Tesla supercharging network, free, ad-based charging initiatives like Volta, and other ways that technologies are improving to help allay the range anxiety that many EV owners experience.
Alex Wise (AW) |1:30 – I’m joined now in Sea, Change Radio by Nicole Voudren. She’s an engineer who provides education about EVs electric vehicles and the EV charging industry. She also works at a startup called Better Together Brain Trust. That’s BT two Energy, which focuses on turnkey EV charging assessments and installation. Nicole, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Nicole Voudren (NV) | 01:55 – Excellent. Thank you so much, Alex. I’m delighted to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:58 – Well, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. We’ve done many pieces over the years about electric vehicles, and as a subset of that, we often talk about the infrastructure and the charging and range anxiety and some of these elements. But since the last time we did a piece on EVs, I became an electric vehicle owner. So I have a new perspective on the ins and outs of what it takes to drive around and what it means to be an electric vehicle owner these days in terms of charging. So what are some of the, the most exciting projects that listeners should be aware of in terms of populating this vast road network that we have in the United States with the ability to power an entire country that could someday run on electricity?
NV | 02:51 – I think the most exciting is the, the funding coming through from various sources. You know, the federal government is all in on the electrification of transportation, and they’re providing, uh, significant grants and funding to states and localities. The local utilities, at least in the northeast where I live, and I know across the United States, are very supportive of EV charging infrastructure deployment and have various funding mechanisms for the capital expense. Because when you are changing from the current fueling infrastructure that we have to an electrified fueling infrastructure, there are a lot of industries that are at play. You have the transportation, the automotive, commercial real estate, utilities, um, you have private businesses, et cetera. So it can get very complicated. It can get very expensive, but the good news is that there is funding out there to support the deployment of the infrastructure, but also to support the adoption of electric vehicles.
AW | 04:06 – And what are the biggest barriers for deploying an EV charging station in general?
NV | 04:13 – The biggest hurdles we’re seeing for the DC fast deployment is availability of power. A lot of homes and businesses do not have sufficient power to provide the charging at the, you know, the 125 KW level. Definitely not any homes I’m aware of have that space or capacity in their electrical panel, right?
AW | 04:35 – Even getting the level two can be an overhaul. Like in my home, for example, I have to do the trickle charging.
NV | 04:42 – Level one trickle charging through a standard 120 volt outlet.
AW | 04:46 – For somebody who doesn’t drive a ton, it, it works in terms of topping off from let’s say 60% and getting back up to 80% overnight. It can work for that, but it’s not taking you from 20 to 80% overnight. You need level two for that, right?
NV | 05:01 – And what the charging level folks need, both, you know, private businesses and, and homeowners and, and multi-unit dwelling renters, that sort of thing. It’s really dependent upon your dwell time and how long you’re parking in that space. But yeah, so the power availability is basically one of the largest hurdles to the deployment. But also capital availability. Who’s paying for this electrical construction? Because you need to get the power from its source, whether it’s, you know, the utility supporting and going straight from a utility transformer or if it’s coming from the building power, which is fed from the utility somewhere along, uh, along the way. And to get it to where the chargers are typically requires trenching, which needs heavy equipment, doesn’t always, but it can. And there’s a lot of costs incurred to upgrade the power to bring the power to the charger to pay for the charger.
AW | 06:00 – So I just recently heard that Ford EV owners can now or will soon be able to tap into the Tesla Supercharging network. Why don’t you talk a little bit about the niche that Tesla has carved out for itself and how that can hopefully expand the whole pie eventually in terms of EV charging capability for the country. It’s an impressive network.
NV | 06:25 – Yes, it is the largest network as an EV driver and EV evangelist and advocate. I have always had the best charging experience at Tesla branded chargers in the Tesla network. And a lot of that is due to them being industry leaders in this space and just ahead of others in the deployment of their network. Last year, Ford announced that they were going to start using Tesla’s charge port, which is called the N-A-C-S North American Charging Standard, or also known as the Tesla standard. And it started a Sea change, if you will, where all the other original equipment manufacturers, the automobile manufacturers started to follow suit. And now Ford owners, Ford EV owners are able to use an adapter to use the Tesla network just like Tesla owners can. Um, slowly but surely, other vehicles will have their own ability to use an adapter, and the vehicle manufacturers are retooling how they manufacture the vehicles. So that way the max port, the Tesla port will be native to the vehicle when it’s manufactured, and adapters won’t need to be used in perpetuity.
AW | 07:56 – And what’s the financial value proposition for Tesla allowing Ford owners to start using their charging network?
NV | 08:05 – Well, Tesla to this point, has really had a hold over the EV adoption and, you know, EV the share of EV vehicles. And now that more and more manufacturers are getting on board, if Tesla didn’t tap into that market, they were potentially losing market share, but also losing potential revenue through their supercharger network. And I think it’s a very smart business of them to allow other vehicle manufacturers to not only use their charge port, but to access their networks. It allows them to offer different subscription-based charging memberships, and of course, they’re going to likely charge non Tesla owners a higher rate than Tesla owners just to kind of, you know, give people that inspiration to purchase Tesla over another vehicle.
(Music Break) | 09:00
AW | 10:08 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Nicole Voudren, she’s an engineer and an expert on EV charging. So Nicole, one of the biggest barriers to creating, a level three EV charging unit or station would be electricity. Let’s, let’s get behind some of the financials and some of the companies that are making big investments as well as the government in terms of becoming the new gas stations. There’s a lot of money to be made in this space.
NV | 10:40 – Yes, absolutely. There’s, there’s a lot of money to be made and there’s a lot of funding flowing, as I had mentioned before, with different grants and utility programs and all of that. No, I don’t believe any one company has the answer, but collectively we will find the path to these goals together. And you’ll see lots of fossil fuel, traditionally fossil fuel companies in this space because they understand fueling whether it’s a fossil fuel going into a vehicle or it’s electrons and electricity fueling the vehicle. So, you know, bp, British Petroleum is in the space, Shell is in this space. They’re acquiring different companies and partnering with different companies to maintain their market share in fueling and fueling infrastructure.
AW | 11:37 – So let’s take Shell for example. They’ve invested in the Volta system, which is a free ad-based network. I don’t know if it’s national, but we have it here in California and there’s I think maybe 50 stations around San Francisco, which sounds good, but when you consider how many thousands of electric vehicles are out there, they’re almost never available because they’re basically giving away gas. It’s free electricity, you can just charge it for free as opposed to a Tesla supercharging station where they charge you, let’s say 35 cents per kilowatt. And at home it’s around half that generally. What do you guess is shell’s long-term goal in, in purchasing a company like Volta? I don’t really understand the business, like of Volta. I haven’t even noticed the ads while I’m using their units. They’re not in your face at all. But there must be a longer term play here than just advertising, I’m assuming.
NV | 12:34 – Yes, absolutely. So Shell did acquire Volta. They also acquired Green Lots, which is a different EV charging network. So I, I think Shell is looking to other folks in the EV space to help them build a business model and gain a foothold in EV charging. They understand fueling in the retail piece of it, but they didn’t necessarily understand the behavior of EV drivers and the fueling needs and how they may differ from a traditional internal combustion engine vehicle. So they have acquired Volta, my understanding, there’s about 3000 public stations in the Volta network. It’s growing very slowly post-acquisition with Shell. I love it. I think it’s a great business model because it is free. The ads are not gaudy or to your point, just, you know, overly distracting as opposed to when I’m, I’m feeling at a gas station and I have the gas pump yelling at me. It was a very savvy move by Shell. And we are starting to see the utilizations that are necessary for profitable EV charging as a business, not just as a loss leader or as a, you know, a nice to have or an amenity. And we’re, we’re only going to see utilization and AV adoption and deployment of the charging infrastructure and networks increase.
AW | 14:10 – And what about the utilities? Are there any laws prohibiting them from creating their own brands of charging stations? Like for example, we have Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E, here in Northern California, most of California, I haven’t seen any PG&E chargers. Are those going to be coming? Where are the utility companies going to be angling to maximize their profits from this new network that’s being created?
NV | 14:39 – It’s determined state by state, by the public utility commissions or Department of Public Utilities, whether the utilities are able to own and operate charging stations. So for instance, in Massachusetts, the utilities are not allowed to own and operate the charging stations. But in New York City, I’m aware of a curbside charging pilot that ConEd is doing with the city, uh, and the Department of Transportation in New York. Those are a partnership of those different entities deploying curbside charging stations. So it really depends on what state you’re in. They are likely best suited in most places because they know where the power is available. And otherwise you need to interface with the utility program to find where power is available, where it can be pulled from to build out the, the charging infrastructure.
AW | 15:36 – So how, how does the pie get divided up? Generally, if the public utility doesn’t own the charging station, do they still get a majority of the profits from let’s say a $25 charge, or is it really the charging station that’s making most of the money off of that consumer, Nicole?
NV | 15:54 – Looking at different charge point operators, those are the folks who own and operate charging stations that may not necessarily be like the property manager of the multi-unit dwelling or, you know, the retailer that you’re parking and plugging into. Traditionally, my understanding is that their margin, their profit is about 20 to 30%, and that you’re paying your utility bill from the revenue that you’re pulling in from that, and you’re trying to offset the capital cost of doing the install and then trying to get a little bit of a margin on top of that. Now, you also can have parking fees built into your charging stations. You can have dwell time, uh, penalties if you’re plugged in beyond your vehicle being at your full state of charge. There’s lots of other mechanisms to make revenue besides just kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour. Some states do require explicit signage regarding fueling Vermont comes to mind in particular where you need to be very explicit what fees are going to be charged to consumers when they park and charge at your stations. Whereas Massachusetts, it’s only petroleum-based fueling that requires that type of signage. So I think we’ll start seeing more nationwide standards regarding that sort of thing, so that way consumers can have transparency into what they’re paying for, because otherwise there are so many fees that can just get tacked on besides kilowatt hours.
(Music Break) | 17:38
AW | 18:16 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Nicole Voudren, who is an EV charging expert. Nicole. Let’s now turn to the government’s role in all of this. At the outset of our conversation, you said that was probably the most exciting element of transforming our network is that there’s big government dollars being put towards these efforts. How has the rollout gone? I know that there was an announcement like a year before the IRA, but that has amped up even more the, the government spending. How, how will those monies be distributed and what’s like a best case scenario for this rollout from a government perspective?
NV | 18:58 – Yes. So there was the infrastructure investment and jobs Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure deal. I believe that’s what you’re referencing, right?
AW | 19:08 – That was like late 2022, early 2023 right before the IRA, right?
NV | 19:14 – Yeah, exactly. And the current administration has a goal of 500,000 EV chargers, uh, to be deployed, I believe at 2030 is that date of that goal. And to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles, reduce emissions and all the fun benefits of, of this type of, uh, endeavor. And they funding is $7.5 billion and it’s broken up between two different programs. There’s the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, also known as NEVI, which is $5 billion over the next five years. Well, once it was announced. So we are seeing NEVI funding and NEVI deployed EV chargers happening now on a state by state basis. They’re starting to trickle onto the market and become available. What’s happens is that NEVI had very particular requirements for charging stations and the deployment to qualify for NEVI funding and with the…
AW | 20:31 – The Tesla network.
NV | 20:33 – Yeah, with the Tesla port change, it’s affected some of those requirements. So now the administration is going to the industry with an RFI looking for feedback from the industry on how to be responsive to what has changed since NEVI has been, uh, you know, sent out there. There is also the charging and fueling infrastructure grant program that is the other two and a half billion dollars from the IIJA.
AW | 21:03 – When we’re trying to find spaces for the, these charging units, are they going to be alongside gas stations as well or replacing gas stations? Just in terms of the actual footprint of these stations, or, I know the Tesla network seems to be independent of gas stations, but it would seem like we have this vast array of gas stations around the country that, as you mentioned, the fossil fuel pumping stations for the last century have put a lot of, of, of capital into developing these points of purchase. Can there be synergies and economies of scale there?
NV | 21:37 – There absolutely can be. We are seeing charging stations deployed that are co-located with existing fueling infrastructure, but we’re also seeing it independent of it. NEVI requires it to be within one mile of a national corridor. And, uh, so they’re going to be co-located with lanes of travel and interstates and in highways for the charging and fueling infrastructure program. It’s a different, different formula for the competitive grant, um, to kind of fill in those, the gaps of where charging deserts might be. And you know, we were, we were chatting before, what are the barriers to charging deployment, but there’s also barriers to EV adoption and this federal funding is trying to accommodate. One of the key barriers to EV adoption is range anxiety and range anxiety is when people are concerned that they’re not gonna be able to get from where they are to where they need to go without having easy access to a charging station. At this point, with the adoption rates of electric vehicles that we’re seeing, it’s not enough that there’s one or two charging stations along your route that you can use. You need to know that it is fully functional and has good uptime and reliability. You need to know whether it’s currently occupied by somebody else. So there’s just a lot of considerations to be made as these programs are being deployed and the funding is flowing.
AW | 23:13 – And of course, once the technology improves in terms of fast charging, we’ll see a lot less of, of an issue about vacancies at a charging station. Does it have to come from the vehicle itself or is it the charging station that will decrease the charging time from, let’s say 20, 30 minutes to two or three minutes?
NV | 23:34 – Both play into each other. There are a lot of vehicles right now that are not capable of accepting fast charging speeds. So if I were to take a Chevy Volta and try and charge at a 350 kw electric charging station, it’s not going to accept the full 350 kw because the onboard charger won’t let it. And that in turn affects the amount of time it takes me to get from the state of charge I’m at to the state of charge I want to be. So there’s an education that has to happen when people purchase or rent electric vehicles about what that vehicle is capable of doing. The size of the battery and the state of charge of the battery dictates the, uh, the charging time and speed. Also, the warmth of the battery warmer batteries, if they’re precondition, will be able to accept the charging better. And some vehicles just automatically do that. When you set your navigation to a charging station, it starts to prepare. But not all of them, I think, can anticipate that.
AW | 24:48 – Does that make a big difference in terms of charging time? I’m curious about that.
NV | 24:52 – I haven’t read the studies on the battery chemistry, but it makes enough of a difference that the best practice is to precondition your battery before you go to a DC fast station. That being said, I think that the overarching idea is that DC fast charging and level three charging is going to be very, very necessary. And it is, but the majority of EV charging is going to be happening where you’re parking your car overnight. So it’s going to be a lower level of charging and it’s going to, you know, take time to, to fill that battery because it has the time to fill that battery. We’re, we’re going to need to change our behavior myself, especially because when I drive my ice vehicle, my internal combustion engine vehicle, I’m running on fumes. My gas light is on, it’s yelling at me to stop and refuel. We will not be able to drive electric vehicles the same way. We will be starting full in the morning, and hopefully there will be more and more solutions deployed for folks who are garage orphans and, you know, they don’t have a deeded spot or they don’t have the privilege or luxury to install a charger in their garage. And that’s where, you know, public level twos and even, you know, workplace charging will come in handy and then hopefully just use, uh, mostly DC fast for when you’re traveling long range or you need a fast top up.
AW | 26:28 – So, as an educator in the space, Nicole, maybe you can give us an idea of what kind of students are getting into this space. Is it mostly people from the constructions area or electricians who, who’s pivoting to becoming experts in EV charging?
NV | 26:45 – Generally, what I’m finding the majority of folks entering the EV charging space are already in an adjacent space. You know, the majority of companies out there that are, you know, competitors slash peers of BT two are in the energy efficiency space. They’ve done work for the utilities and have existing relationships there. They have a customer base they might have done lighting retrofits for, and now they have this additional service offering. They already have electricians on staff or as a subcontractor. So it’s just, you know, taking a business model that’s already worked for them and just kind of changing it a little bit for this space. As for who is seeking out education, it’s those companies wanting to hire more qualified people to build out that business model, or it’s people that see the funding that is coming and wanting to dive in with both feed and not knowing where to begin because the industry’s a bit of a wild west right now, and we need lots of talent to get where we need to go.
AW | 27:57 – Nicole Voudren, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
NV | 28:01 – It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Moby, Delaney & Bonnie and Albert Collins. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Nicole Voudren: Charged Up For EVs appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
What comes to mind when you hear the words “crime” and “safety?” For many, these words evoke images of poor people stealing things, or police enforcing laws to suppress street crime. Our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that there’s a whole set of crimes that have been intentionally omitted from the messaging we get and that, for many, “police” and “safety” are far from synonymous. This week we speak with Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. A former public defender and the author of “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System,” Karakatsanis believes that much of our country’s perspective on crime and policing has been shaped by “copaganda,” the swaying of public opinion for the benefit of law enforcement. We look at the corrosive societal effects of historic and current police practices, examine how and why these wrongheaded approaches persist, and discuss the complicity of journalists and policymakers who fall for and then perpetuate the American mythology of crime and safety.
00:01 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:20 Alec Karakatsanis (AK) – If you everyday on the news see a story of someone shoplifting from a pharmacy but you never hear a story about that pharmacy stealing from its own workers, then you’re going to think that the shoplifting is a more of a problem than wage theft. Even though the exactly the opposite is true. And there are different kinds of problems, right? And there are different kinds of solutions.
00:00:44 Narrator – What comes to mind when you hear the words “crime” and “safety?” For many, these words evoke images of poor people stealing things, or police enforcing laws to suppress street crime. Our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that there’s a whole set of crimes that have been intentionally omitted from the messaging we get and that, for many, “police” and “safety” are far from synonymous. This week we speak with Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. A former public defender and the author of “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System,” Karakatsanis believes that much of our country’s perspective on crime and policing has been shaped by “copaganda,” the swaying of public opinion for the benefit of law enforcement. We look at the corrosive societal effects of historic and current police practices, examine how and why these wrongheaded approaches persist, and discuss the complicity of journalists and policymakers who fall for and then perpetuate the American mythology of crime and safety.
02:05 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Alec Karakatsanis. He is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. Alec, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:14 Alec Karakatsanis (AK) – Thank you for having me.
02:16 AW So you have a newsletter entitled Copaganda, Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter. Why don’t you define copaganda for us?
02:24 AK – I think there are a lot of ways to understand what copaganda is, so I don’t purport to have the definitive understanding of the term, but essentially what it reflects is the way in which a very special kind of propaganda is weaponized by powerful interests in government, in the corporate world and the media. To change the way we think about public safety, change that we think about the criminal punishment bureaucracy and the way we think about police, prosecutors, judges, courts, jails, prisons, probation officers, and I think it really serves 3 main roles. Rule #1: copaganda tends to narrow our conception of safety and what safety means to a very small subset of the many different kinds of threats that there are to public safety. So for example, copaganda and the media tends to focus on low level criminal activity, typically by the poor, and to ignore large scale. Criminal activity by more powerful interests like wage theft, right? Which is an estimated $50 billion a year. Problem in which companies take money from relatively low wage workers and that it dwarfs by several orders of magnitude – all sorts of robbery combined and all burglary, shoplifting, larceny. All the typical property crimes you hear about in in the media combined. And then there’s another example. Would be tax evasion, right? You very rarely have Daily News stories about all of the tax evasion going on, even though tax evasion steals about a trillion dollars. A year from the public and that is 60 to 70 times depending on how you estimate all other police reported property crime combined. Similarly, you know copaganda wants people to be very afraid of other types of more serious crime. There are many, many, many orders of magnitude more articles about shootings and murders in the United States than there are about deaths from air pollution. Even though air pollution kills five times more people in the US than all homicides combined, and so. One sort of feature of copaganda is that it narrows our conception of safety and the second sort of feature of copaganda is that it constantly wants us, having narrowed that conception of safety, it constantly wants people to believe that the narrow range of police reported crimes is constantly rising, right? And that’s what we call crime waves, crime surges, etc. And the reason for that is the third sort of major feature of propaganda, which is that it constantly pushes a pro-carceral pro-repression, pro-control types of solutions to those problems. So for example, copaganda links things like shootings, homicides, retail, theft, all of the crimes that it sort of disproportionately focuses our attention on. It links those things to things like police, prosecutors, and jails. And this is particularly and profoundly disturbing, because all of the empirical scientific evidence suggests that crime in our society is far more linked to structural features like poverty, inequality, lack of access to mental health care, medical treatment, housing, early childhood education, etc. Toxins and pollution. All of these things. So significantly so copaganda just circling back around is really an umbrella description that describes a number of different practices. The bottom line of which is getting people in our society to not focus on structural issues like inequality and issues that really affect people? Health safety survival well-being far more and to focus instead on things that can be used to increase the size and power of the sort of mechanisms of state repression.
06:23 AW – So I’ve heard you compare the knowledge that we have about what works and what doesn’t really work in in terms of justice and fighting crime and making a parallel with climate denialism. We know the science is there, but we keep putting our heads or collective heads in the sand from a policy standpoint, how can we pivot from convincing politicians that they need to project being tough on crime and instead pivot to being smart on crime.
06:59 AK – I think it’s important to even push back on those labels.
07:03 AW – Well, how do we shed that label? Because it’s not evidence-based. How do we switch to an evidence- based system exactly?
07:09 AK – I mean, if one were being, you know, tough on crime, one would actually be, you know, making sure people have safe places to live, and that that children had really incredibly high quality education. And after school, music, theater and art programs, and mental health treatment. And universal medical care. Those would be things that that the research and evidence from around the world and in the US actually shows are connected to reducing the kinds of things that our society calls. Crimes and they also have incredible ancillary benefits. Reducing all forms of premature death and trauma and and whatnot. And so I think the critical question for us becomes, how do we build political power to ensure that these conversations are happening in a different way? Because I think it’s very important to understand that it’s not an accident. That the discussion is so divorced from reality and it’s a similar story with climate change itself, right? It’s not an accident that there was an orchestrated and organized and very expensive movement too. Make sure that people were very ill informed about sort of the incredible threats to the global climate in to our survival as a species and. It’s the same as true with the way crime and safety are covered. There are very powerful people with a lot of influence. So for example, you know just in San Francisco alone we learned recently there are nine full-time cops and many, many more sort of part time cops whose full job is sort of public manipulation of information. They even have a full time videographer. To take propaganda videos of the San Francisco police in Los Angeles, it’s even worse, right? There’s 42 full time staff at the Sheriff’s Office and 25 full time staff at the LAPD all doing propaganda work for the COPS and the broader industry is even more expensive, right? There are numerous multibillion dollar year. Industry is tide to the criminal punishment bureaucracy. Whether it’s weapons manufacturers, surveillance manufacturers, the people that make. All the handcuffs and Tasers and body cams. And then you’ve got all the private prisons and you’ve got all the medical care which has been privatized in prisons and the prison telecom industry which is a multi billion dollar year company. All of these interests have very sophisticated and very effective public relations and media and lobbying arms, and they’re constantly trying. To get us to think that being tough on crime is associated with things that actually increase their own profits.
09:44 AW – And there’s a political opportunity for some of these copagandists – I hadn’t really been aware of, of the opportunities that are presented to somebody who might be toeing the police forces line here in San Francisco. We just elected Matt Haney to the State Assembly from he was a very progressive supervisor in the Tenderloin District. And he got relaced, by London Breed, the mayor, with Matt Dorsey, who’s basically been a PR guy for the police. The San Francisco Police Department. So there’s political fruits to be plucked as well for people involved in this. It’s not just a financial incentive, there’s power at play as well.
00:10:27 AK – absolutely. I mean, he was making almost $300,000 a year as the top propaganda officer for the San Francisco Police Department and he was rewarded very well by the Mayor of San Francisco, putting him on the Board of Supervisors.
10:42 (music break)
11:44 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the executive Director of Civil Rights Corps, Alec Karakatsanis. So while we’re on the topic of looking at the police departments themselves, you have a piece in your newsletter entitled “Questions to Ask Police Chiefs,” and I think it’s great. These are like hypothetical questions that the media should be asking public officials and police – the chief of police, why do you choose not to arrest bosses for wage theft, but you choose to arrest poor people for shoplifting? Why do you think about 90% of the people arrested by your department are too poor to afford an attorney? Why do you choose to arrest people for drug possession as the plurality of your arrests instead of going one by one? How would we want…Can we dream of a day when we’ll get these kind of answers that we would hope and expect from these people who we’re entrusting with our public safety? Or are we always going to get these answers that are a little infuriating to you and me?
12:46 AK One of the most remarkable features of our current media landscape and our current political landscape. In most localities around the country that I’ve observed. Every single one of them that I’ve observed to be honest is that there’s almost no scrutiny of what the police actually do by journalists or by politicians who are supposed to be providing some kind of oversight and as a result the public has virtually no clue what the police actually do, and the reality is that police only spend 4% of their time nationwide on what they themselves call violent. The vast bulk of what they do is responding to non criminal phone calls. Often sort of mental health type incidents or incidences involving low level poverty. Or arresting people for very minor offenses like traffic things or shoplifting, or one of the most frequent arrests is trespassing and one of the most common arrests in the entire United States is driving on a suspended license. When your license has been suspended for owing debt, there are 11 million people who don’t have a license functioning right now only because they owe debt. And that’s a very common. Arrest the same is true of marijuana possession, etc. I could go on and on, but the vast bulk of what police do is that and you have to understand. Police only arrest some people for some crimes, although they call themselves law enforcement, they really only enforce some laws against some people. It’s not like the police are going undercover and uncovering all the examples of tax evasion, and it’s like they’re going undercover and uncovering all of the examples of police brutality. Right, they’re only choosing to put investigative resources into some situations. And as I note in the news. You can go with hundreds of different examples across society. You know why is it that police are deliberately choosing to spend scarce resources on drug arrests and not testing rape kits? It’s because the police have prioritized drugs because they’re highly profitable for police departments and overtime pay and grant funding, etc. And that’s just a deliberate policy choice that police have made, and then the questions also are meant to highlight that much of what police do is merely a political choice. It’s a political choice, for example, to send the police patrol into a poor neighborhood looking for drugs rather than to a rich boarding school where there are rampant use of drugs or to a university campus where there’s all kinds of underage drinking and drug use, etc. It’s a choice that police make not to investigate even, or let alone enforce criminal laws in those settings, and the same is true with. All manner of other laws we’re about to see the most significant rise in criminalization in this country. In modern history with the criminalization of various forms of reproductive healthcare, and you’re about to start seeing tens of thousands of police officers across the country enforcing bans on abortion and various forms of contraception, et cetera. And so my newsletter was meant to provide a road map for interested people in the public and the media and politicians to start asking police about what their current practices are. Or explaining some of the patterns in terms of the fact that almost everyone they arrest is poor etc. But also to explain some of their future plans in terms of things like reproductive rights etc.
16:24 AW – Well, why don’t you explain a little bit about the mission of your organization for a second step back and give us the history of it, why you formed it and where you hope it goes.
16:35 AK – We do a lot of different things. The core of our work is extremely high quality lawyering and other forms of advocacy that are designed to challenge systemic injustices in the criminal legal system in this country. We started working on systemic injustices. Is the cash bail system or the rise of modern debtors prisons across the country where millions of people are jailed every single year? In this country right now, as we’re talking solely because they can’t make a cash payment and solely because their families can’t make a cash payment. There are millions of children that are separated from their parents every single. Here, just because they can’t make a cash payment and so we I think we we gained a lot of attention for our rigorous constitutional civil rights cases all around the country. Challenging this notion we actually represented. Mr. Kenneth Humphrey, out of uh in a case out of San Francisco, and that I argued in the California Supreme Court last year and that we won, which struck down the money bail system as we know it in California. And that work is incredibly difficult work. Some of these systems are so entrenched the attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs that surround them, let alone the financial incentives that perpetuate them, are so deeply ingrained that many of the people who work in the system are really desensitized to them. Everyday brutality that they inflict, we also have done a tremendous amount of prosecutor and police misconduct work. All over the country, drawing attention to the sort of rampant nature of abuses throughout the metastasized criminal punishment bureaucracy. And then I think, really. Our work has in recent years evolved to also include an incredible policy and narrative component that tries to help experts around the country directly impacted people, crime survivors and others develop and vision out responses to violence and harm in their communities in ways that are actually more consistent with the scientific evidence and that are not tide to increasing the size and power of the punishment. Bureaucracy because these government bureaucracies are actually incredibly ineffective at keeping people. Safe and free from trauma. And so we’ve been trying as we challenge these systems to also help people talk about what a different more effective, safer system might look like.
19:19 AW – So you mentioned trying to carve out narratives. I wanted to spend the remainder of our time if we can dig deeper into that you mentioned how there are some parallels with ignoring climate science. We’ve been able to in my lifetime, change the narrative somewhat in terms of the death penalty. People know a lot more about it in in our much better educated than when I was a child, when it was much more of a reactive voting bloc. But we know now through decades of advocates and legal scholars like yourself, educating the public that. It doesn’t work. It simply doesn’t work, and it doesn’t cut down crime and it actually it has an insidious effect on our society. The death penalty, with the defund the police campaign that that phrase was pounced upon by the right wing and it I think has been an unfortunate reaction to what is a well-meaning effort. How can we kind of shift the narrative away from the defund the police and more into raising awareness in a more productive way?
20:24 AK – Well, I think that the defund the police movement was deliberately mischaracterized by people who have a vested interest in preserving a very violent but also very ineffective system, and so I think it’s very important to understand that that the movement was so viciously attacked and so comprehensively attacked, precisely because for the first time in modern history it provided a really easily understandable demand that we stop investing so much time, money and other forms of human resources into this system which actually makes us less safe, but that is enormously profitable for some people. And I think in any more nuanced conversation, I think the critical points to make are. If you care about safety. And if you care about evidence. Then what you’ll want to do is support policies that reduce our societies investments in the mechanisms of state surveillance and state violence and state control. Obviously when I say state surveillance states violence and state control, I’m also talking about the ways in which a lot of those systems have been privatized for profit. In partnership with. State, but you want to divest from those systems and invest in the things that the evidence actually shows. Make a difference in our communities and this is not rocket science. We have very, very clear evidence and very very clear ideas of the kinds of short, medium and long term investments. In children, in families, in communities that actually make a difference and so. When people say defund the police, it’s a little bit incomplete and misleading because what people are actually talking about are our society needs to create systems of care and needs to enable communities to create systems of care for themselves that actually meet the problems in those communities. And that is why the rise of a new generation of mutual aid groups across the country is so exciting communities figuring out how to meet their needs outside the boundaries of the kind of carceral systems that the state provides, particularly in many of these communities where the state has totally and utterly divested from them it is. They did through a variety of predatory practices and redlining, etc. Really, communities that have been completely abandoned in many respects, and so it’s exciting to watch a new movement of people trying to help those communities in their own communities figure out how to meet their needs without resorting to a state that has literally abandoned them.
23:16 (Music Break)
24:18 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the executive Director of Civil Rights Corps, Alec Karakatsanis. Honestly, it seems to me that a lot of the problems stem from anecdotal thinking, and anecdotal thinking does not lead to good policy in general. But how do we effectively pivot the public away from only absorbing anecdotes and to think through a larger lens?
24:46 AK – That’s a very important question and I don’t purport again to have the complete answer, but I can give you some thoughts and I think anecdotes and stories are so powerful, right? That’s how human beings connect to each other. It’s what makes people so interested in literature and TV and movies, right stories are very powerful. It’s why politicians tell so many anecdotal stories. But with that power comes a great responsibility not to use anecdotes to lead and the sort of anecdotal use of individual crime stories has been used brilliantly by very powerful nefarious actors seeking to make significant profits, to distort our understanding of the things that cause us harm if you everyday on the news see a story of someone shoplifting from a from a pharmacy but you never hear a story about that pharmacy stealing from its own workers, then you’re going to think that the shoplifting is a more of a problem than wage theft. Even though the exactly the opposite is true. And there are different kinds of problems, right? And there are different. Kinds of solutions.
25:58 AW – We think of crime as petty theft and not something behind the scenes when it’s right in our face. That’s kind of what we’ve been trained since we were.
26:06 AK – Absolutely, and we’re also trained to think that the response to someone stealing diapers or deodorant or food.We’ve represented lots of people over the years who have been arrested for stealing basic necessities of life from a grocery store or pharmacy – we’ve been trained that their response is to punish them and not to ask the question “why are there?” Why do we live in a society where we even need to lock up the deodorant in a drug store? And if you think about all of these problems as crime and not as sort of the underlying factors that lead to the kind of desperation that leads to that kind of an incident, then you’re always going to be missing the real solutions, and you’re not going to be promoting stories and narratives that have an opportunity. So for example, you could tell an equally powerful narrative about about the person life story that brought them to the moment where they had to steal vitamins from a grocery store like Michael Riggs who was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison in California for stealing a bottle of vitamins from a grocery store. And that story could be told as a. Uh, you know occurring in a criminal who had a prior set of convictions. Who was stealing again, right? And you could tell the story in that way and use the anecdote to sort of talk about how the need to punish repeat offenders. Or you could tell that story as a human being who became addicted to drugs after his child died. And a drowning accident and ended up needing to steal vitamins from a grocery store.
27:38 AW – But the problem isn’t the anecdote itself then.
27:41 AK – Exactly, it’s how people are using anecdotes.
27:45 AW – Terrific. Well, I highly recommend people follow Alec on Twitter and check out his newsletter, the Copaganda newsletter. He’s the executive director of Civil Rights Corps, Alec Karakatsanis. Alec, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:00 AK – Thank you so much for having me.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Quantic, Elvis Costello and Nat King Cole. Check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others, and tune into Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast “To Serve & Protect” Whom? Alec Karakatsanis on Copaganda (re-broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
While you’re shoveling snow out of the driveway this week, you may not want to hear about extreme heat – but then again, maybe you do! This week on Sea Change Radio, we discuss the issue of a warming planet with Andrea Thompson, a science reporter and associate editor at Scientific American. We look at how people and policymakers are trying to cope with the rising temps, examine how different parts of the globe are being affected, and talk about the challenges of presenting this important information to the public in a fresh, engaging manner.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Andrea Thompson (AT) | 00:19 – How much we decide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by and how quickly we do it is going to greatly affect what kind of summers we have 20, 30 years from now. You know, like what summers my 3-year-old is going to see when he’s my age. And it’s something that we, we are very much in control on. We get to set the standard for what that’s going to be in the future. And the decisions we make now will affect that.
Narrator | 00:50 – While you’re shoveling snow out of the driveway this week, you may not want to hear about extreme heat – but then again, maybe you do! This week on Sea Change Radio, we discuss the issue of a warming planet with Andrea Thompson, a science reporter and associate editor at Scientific American. We look at how people and policymakers are trying to cope with the rising temps, examine how different parts of the globe are being affected, and talk about the challenges of presenting this important information to the public in a fresh, engaging manner.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Andrea Thompson. She is an associate editor at Scientific American. Andrea, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Andrea Thompson (AT) | 01:52 – Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:54 – So, looking at the work you’ve done the last few years at Scientific American, it seems like there’s a lot of focus on something that we all are very concerned about, which is extreme heat. Why don’t we dive into some of these stories, unpack them for our listeners, and, and give them a better idea of where we are and where we’re headed and what we can do about it?
Andrea Thompson (AT) | 02:20 – Absolutely. Yeah. So I think, you know, kind of the
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:39 – And we, here we are in the midst of winter and there’s headlines. I’m sure we can sniff them out of record cold temperatures in Norway or Alaska or wherever, but that does not necessarily correlate to the planet not warming. So why don’t you, if you can pop some of those myths for our listeners who, who may have gotten some disinformation about how if it’s cold outside the planet’s not actually warming.
Andrea Thompson (AT) | 04:12 – Absolutely. So the existence of climate change doesn’t mean that winter doesn’t happen anymore. Um, it does sort of change the complexion of winter, um, depending on where you are. So, you know, winter is partly happens because of earth orbit and tilt. Um, and that’s not changing with climate change, but we are seeing that winter is the fastest warming season of all the seasons. Um, so when you look out over many, many years and over whole the whole season, it is, there’s a very, very clear warming signal. Um, and the way that that, you know, plays out week to week season to winter to winter, year to year, um, can be different. You know, you can still have a cold winter or cold snaps during the winter with, with climate change. Um, and there are even some with, in terms of snow, that’s actually kind of a weird complex thing. Um, for example, in the Great Lakes, they, if you’re in a place that sees lake effect snow, you could potentially see more of it for a while because warming means that those lakes don’t really ice over as fast. Um, and so when you do have cold winds coming down from Canada, you have the open water and then you get the lake effect snow. So they can actually see more lake effect snow and later into the season than they typically did in the past, which can seem a little counterintuitive, but…
AW | 05:38 – So that’s, that precipitation is then a function of the warming.
AT | 05:42 – Yeah, exactly.
AW | 05:44 – So you get a lot of snow that, and, and there’s a blizzard that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s colder outside, it’s just we feel it more in our face because it’s snow.
AT | 05:55 – Yeah, exactly. And you know, places that got snow in the past will still get snow to some extent in the future depending on where they are. Um, and depending on how much we warm. But we are seeing also the, across the northern hemisphere that snow cover has been going down, um, with forming, which is about what you’d expect. You know, anytime you look on a more local level, the data always gets a lot noisier. It’s much easier to look over a broad scale. But we also do see that, you know, winter’s overall warmer and you know, we are more likely to have these weird sort of warm spells like just happen across the, the middle of the country. Chicago and places in Iowa got right around 80 degrees in February, which is pretty wild. And we actually, I’m in Brooklyn and yesterday was, I think we got up to somewhere in the 60, right around 60, which is pretty unusually high for us for February. You know, it’s not something that was impossible in the past, but is much more likely with warming because you’re are have a baseline of those higher temperatures.
AW | 07:04 – And you mentioned how the Earth’s tilt its axis affects the difference in temperatures between the northern and southern hemisphere. Obviously it’s the summer, late summer in southern hemisphere. Have we seen some anomalous weather patterns that are troubling in let’s say Australia?
AT | 07:23 – Yeah, so they’ve definitely had some heat in Australia. They’ve had drought, they’ve had wildfires. They’ve actually had that in parts of South America too. Um, wildfires have actually been, um, particularly notable in a couple places. Columbia has seen, I think it was about 500 fires in January or more than, um, which is far more than they would typically see in that month. And part of that, uh, you know, is linked to warmer weather and drier weather. And there have been some what are called attribution studies, so where they kind of specifically look for the fingerprints of climate change and particular events, um, and have found that climate change is may playing a role in the drought that’s sort of in the, the Amazon basin and sort of the wider area around that. Um, and there have also been some wildfires down in Chile that were actually deadly. Um, and there’s big concerns over wildfires in the Amazon because it’s one of the worst droughts ever recorded there. Um, and it’s possible that El Nino, which is happening right now, is also playing some role there. It’s, especially its effects are especially strong in South America because it is a phenomenon that happens in the, um, in the eastern tropical Pacific. So that’s right off the west coast of South America. But you know, it’s clear that climate change is the bulk of what’s causing what we’re seeing globally and, and there.
(Music Break) | 09:08
AW | 09:44 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Andrea Thompson, she’s an associate editor at Scientific American. So Andrea, we were talking about the southern hemisphere. Let’s turn to the northern one that has the most landmass, that has the most people, and as a result we get a lot more news during our summer about extreme heat. This last summer you wrote about how half the world’s population faced extreme heat for at least 30 days in 2023 in, in the summer. This is not going to change. How are people starting to adapt and how are policy makers trying to help their populace survive and thrive in the midst of this new reality?
AT | 10:31 – Yeah, that’s an interesting question and one that varies a lot from place to place. There is a growing movement, I don’t know if you would call it a movement, but more places are hiring what are called sort of heat health officers, or you maybe you call them “heat czars.”
AW | 10:48 The opposite of the Heat Miser, sorry, could not help myself.
AT | 10:50
AW | 12:51 – We always hear about these record highs and we’re almost greedy for these numbers. Like it hit 136 in Abu Dhabi, but like try sleeping in Abu Dhabi that night when it was 110. That’s not so simple either, especially if your air conditioning is either on the fritz or non-existent.
AT | 13:11 – Yeah, exactly. And so I think that’s something that, you know, people are trying to get the message about more. And, you know, what can people do? Like if you don’t have air conditioning, what are some strategies? And a lot of that is staying hydrated, finding shade, you know, looking for places like cooling centers, being aware of what some of the symptoms of heat illness and heat stress are. Um, and that’s particularly important when you’re talking about people who spend a lot of time outdoors, especially, uh, construction workers or people who work in agriculture where you’re really in the sun a lot and you’re doing very, um, intensive work. And there is, you know, a growing movement among, in some of the worker spaces, so unions or other organizations of labor, um, to put more worker protections in place because there currently aren’t really rigorous OSHA standards. So they have been working on getting more rigorous standards in place at the federal level for a long time and it just isn’t coming out. A few cities, I can’t remember which, but a couple in Texas and Miami have been looking at setting their own, um, standards. Oh, I think it’s Miami-Dade County, not Miami, the city, um, to set their own ordinances for, you know, every so many hours workers should get a 10 minute water and shade break or something like that. Um, and state governments, um, particularly in those two states, Florida and Texas, um, have pushed back on that. They’re both republican led, um, states, both the legislature and the, um, and the, uh, governors and for business reasons have said, no, we don’t want that because you’ll have a patchwork of of requirements that’s going to be confusing for businesses to follow. Um, but it seems a bit perverse to tell people you can’t set safety requirements for people who have to deal with extreme heat. So that’s kind of playing out right now.
AW | 15:22 – Sorry to interrupt, but what are some of the arguments or that are put forth by these Republican legislatures that are prohibiting policy to try to give people relief from this extreme heat, essentially?
AT | 15:35 – Yeah, so the main one is that, is that, well if Miami-Dade has this ordinance and you know, another county in Florida has another ordinance, and then Duval, which is where Jacksonville is, has another one, you know, that’s going to be really confusing for businesses who have to, you know, have different standards for different places. Most of it’s on economic. They say, uh, like in Florida, they say it’s going to cost the state economy too much and that it’s more important is more beneficial to workers to have a strong economy and lots of jobs than these protections. Healthcare advocates will point to that there are have been deaths, um, among workers in these sectors and that the current voluntary protections are insufficient, that there need to be more rigorous standards in place to make sure people get the relief they need. And this is only going to become more and more of a problem.
AW | 16:34 – And as a science reporter, how do you continue to find fresh angles to report this annual rite of passage? You, you have an obligation to your readers to continue to make them aware of this. And, and I feel that way at Sea Change Radio as well. But maybe you can kind of give us a little insight into your process and how you try to report this issue with a fresh perspective, so people don’t tune it out.
AT | 17:07 – Yeah, that is one of the key challenges of covering this area, and I think it’s something that every climate reporter contends with. So some of it is,in the case of 2023, setting the record and sort of within that we had July was the hottest month ever recorded. September set a monthly record by the most that’s ever been recorded. So sometimes I use those, um, records to sort of help explain aspects of the climate system or put into perspective if we also at Scientific American have a really great graphics team that is helpful in terms of, uh, conveying sometimes the information in that graphical form, which can really help sort of present it in a way that I think can be more immediately impactful because you can just look at the picture and get it. But I do also, I do a lot of, um, you know, talking to climate scientists, watching what they say, you know, and talk about on social media, looking at studies, um, and just sort of saying like, oh, they made a point that I haven’t really thought about or that was, you know, I think really helpful. And probably the best example of that, um, was somewhere before last when Gina Raimondo Secretary of Commerce, um, made a comment in regards to some of the heat from that summer, which was also pretty notable, um, that, you know, this summer is very hot, but it’s effectively going to be the coolest of the rest of our lives. And that really struck me as such a, a good way to sort of take a thing that was happening now and put it in the longer term context because everyone that summer was talking about, oh my God, it’s been so hot, this is awful. It’s awful. And it’s, you know, it’s important. It’s not every summer is going to be hotter than the last because you still have year to year variability. And that’s one thing that I think often confuses, um, makes it confusing to talk about climate change. But a summer like this last year or, or the summer before that 20 or 30 years from now is going to be an average summer. It’s not going to be something that’s going to be exceptional like it is now. And sort of helping people understand that what we’re living right now is very much even when it’s extreme, and then kind of an outlier is a glimpse of what we’re going to see more in the future. But also making the point that to what degree that is the case is very much within our control. How much we decide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by and how quickly we do it is going to greatly affect what kind of summers we have 20, 30 years from now. You know, like what summers my, my 3-year-old is going to see when he’s my age
(Music Break) | 20:17
AW | 21:10 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Andrea Thompson, she’s an associate editor at Scientific American. So Andrea, we’re talking about how you cover extreme heat issues, also you’re a storyteller. Maybe give us a glimpse into some of the stories that have touched you, people who’ve been affected by the changing climate.
AT | 21:32 – Yeah, so one of the really affecting stories I wrote was on an attribution study looking at drought in the horn of Africa. So that’s Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, that area. And it was specifically focused on drought, but heat is a major component of drought. So, you know, precipitation is one side, heat is another. You set the stage for drought often by having less rain than normal, but when you have height, heat, um, acting with that, it tends to dry out soils and crops and things, um, more than would be the case. And this looked at a particular drought that’s been happening over a couple years in that Horn of Africa region. And it was combination of five seasons of, of failed rains in a particular season, you know, combined with heat. And they found that climate change played a really clear role in this and that was hugely impactful to the people in that area who often are subsistence farmers or keep livestock. People were forced to migrate to other regions in search of water or, you know, for pasture, for their livestock or just to find food. And I think that is, you know, helpful to keep in mind. It’s for, for many of us in the US obviously not for everyone, heat is perhaps more of a nuisance, um, than anything, but in some areas, and for some populations, you know, it, it’s a matter of survival. and, and sort of making that clear and realizing the effect that it has on so many people across the world, you know, millions. And that’s just one example and it has, the groups that are sort of already most vulnerable to a lot of things, young children, older people, people who are poor, who, you know, may not have money for things like air conditioning, people who have pre-existing health conditions like, um, maybe heart disease or, lung ailments like asthma, are more vulnerable to extreme heat than, you know, an average sort of healthy adults and that makes it really hard, um, you know, to when you have these already vulnerable groups being hit even more by these, these climate changes and heat isn’t the only climate change that can affect a lot of these populations more. But recognizing that, that for a lot of us where it’s just, “oh, this is uncomfortable,” it is really dangerous and deadly for a lot of people.
AW | 24:32 – And human nature tends to be able to compartmentalize and, and to read a story about somebody in Kenya or Yemen being affected by extreme heat and, and be sympathetic, but not truly empathetic, not being able to, to really relate to it, which is why I thought the wildfire smoke stories that we’ve been seeing over the last five to 10 years are our can, can really resonate with a major metropolis, uh, or, or, or urban populations on a mass scale. I mean, in San Francisco we had, you know, the sky was basically the, the sun was obscured by mass from smoke, from wildfires. And, and I know last summer New York got hit with, with Canadian wildfire smoke. And so it, it, it becomes, it becomes real for people and it’s not just a nuisance, it’s, it’s, we all are in this together. And I think when those kind of, they’re unfortunate episodes, but I think they, there’s a silver lining behind them in that it can wake people up.
AT | 25:45 – Yeah. And I think that happens with a lot of, um, climate related extremes and disasters. Um, you know, when Katrina happened, I remember at the time, and I wasn’t yet a reporter, um, I had just finished
AT | 26:55 – You know, if you took, um, those same weather patterns and stripped out the climate change signal, you wouldn’t have seen those extremes. Uh, that’s, you know,
AW | 27:53 – She’s an associate editor at Scientific American, Andrea Thompson. Andrea, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
AT | 28:01 – Yeah, thanks for having me.
AW | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the New Mastersounds, Mr. Sad Head and James Brown. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Andrea Thompson: Battling Extreme Heat Fatigue appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Denver, Colorado’s majestic mountains, green space, and reputation as an ecologically advanced city draw people into this growing metropolis. But there are some unwanted byproducts that result from the influx of humanity, for example air pollution and gentrification. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Raksha Vasudevan, a freelance journalist and contributing editor to High Country News about the transition of Denver from a remote Rocky Mountain town to a booming metropolis. We learn about the city’s industrial history, discuss how its transportation system has evolved, and look at the paradoxes and unintended consequences of major green infrastructure projects.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Raksha Vasudevan (RV) | 00:26 – It really is like an unfortunate paradox of, of more people moving you here and of the city growing, is that there’s more traffic jams, of course, to get to the mountains. And there are two highways that run through GES. So the people living in that area and people living adjacent to many highways absorb sort of the costs of people trying to access green space, but they don’t really get to enjoy any of the benefits.
Narrator | 00:54 – Denver, Colorado’s majestic mountains green space and reputation as an ecologically advanced city draw people into this growing metropolis. But there are some unwanted byproducts that result from the influx of humanity, for example, air pollution and gentrification. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Raksha Vasudevan, a freelance journalist and contributing editor to High Country News about the transition of Denver from a remote Rocky Mountain town to a booming metropolis. We learn about the city’s industrial history, discuss how its transportation system has evolved, and look at the paradoxes and unintended consequences of major green infrastructure projects.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:00 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Raksha Vasudevan. She is a freelance journalist and contributing editor at High Country News Raksha. Welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Raksha Vasudevan (RV) | 02:08 – Thank you so much for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:11 – So you have a piece in the December High Country News, or it’s, it’s, it was published December 1st, 2023 entitled North Denver’s Green Space Paradox. And I thought it was a good launching point for a larger discussion about Denver and the environmental issues facing the entire mountain West. You focus on this Globeville Elyria-Swansea or GES community in North Denver. But why don’t you first give us a little bit of a history of this region, because you provide that quite well in the piece.
RV | 02:47 – Yeah. So this particular community in Denver, but Denver as a whole, one of the reasons for its founding and its growth was because it served as an important link in the Transcontinental Railroad. So it was kind of this frontier town in the west, and of course, when that railroad was built, it displaced the original inhabitants of the area, which was the indigenous people who lived here. But the railroad and the stop in Denver specifically opened a lot of opportunities for Denver. It became more than just a place to pick up your mail on the way out to California. It really became a city in its own right. And soon after the Transcontinental Railroad was built through Denver, um, there were also many iron and ore smelters that were built in the area because of the proximity to the railroad and to, to mines across the country.
AW | 03:47 – This is like in the Reconstruction Era, like 1870 to 1890 era, I’m guessing.
RV | 03:53 – Yeah, around then, exactly. And so that attracted a lot of new people to this area, especially eastern European immigrants, to come work at these smelters. And eventually it also led to a livestock center and a livestock marketplace, um, which is still around, there’s still an annual livestock show in Denver, but it basically became like this hub for agriculture for, um, smelters and iron processing. And you can still see that in the city. You can still go down to the real yards. The arena where the livestock show takes place is not very far away, but of course that also has implications for the type of people, the demographics of people who live in the area, and of course for the environment as well, because these smelters produced a lot of waste that is still contaminating much of the soil.
AW | 04:51 – Now let’s fast forward to the 20th and 21st century development. Denver is an exploding metropolitan area, but it wasn’t always like that. It it had many decades of slow and steady growth, correct?
RV | 05:04 – Yeah, that’s right. I think, the recent boom that we see now is, well, certainly there’s a burgeoning tech industry. There’s an oil and gas industry that’s been around for a while. And all of that has meant that some of the earlier inhabitants of Denver have been pushed out. Gentrification is certainly an issue here. So following the, the smelters that I mentioned and the livestock show, there were also a bunch of meat processing plants that, that popped up here in like the early 19 hundreds. And so a lot of immigrants, especially from Mexico and Latin America, settled here and specifically in GES, but across Denver to work at these plants. And their families have stayed here for generations, but because there’s all these new waves of people moving to the area, they are slowly but surely being pushed further and further to the edges of the city.
AW | 06:10 – So let’s focus a little bit now on this Globeville Elyria-Swansea, the GES area that you write about in High Country News. Let me share with our listeners how you define the green space paradox – “in what’s known as the Green Space paradox, residents who historically lacked access to parks are the most likely to be displaced by rising housing costs once the greenery finally arrives.” So the greenery is finally arriving to this area, but it’s not necessarily such a good thing for everyone, is it?
RV | 06:44 – Yeah, exactly. So Globeville Elyria-Swansea, because the neighborhood grew up around all this industry, the smelters, the meat processing plants, and the people who worked there were the ones who also lived in the area. It’s never had a lot of greenery but now because of a few different developments, um, you know, politically and in terms of infrastructure, physical infrastructure, it is getting more green space. There’s there’s some new parks there. There have been a lot of efforts to plant more trees in the area and to keep those trees alive. But the potential downside is that, you know, one of the things that people look for when they’re thinking about moving to a new neighborhood or to a new city is usually people want to live in an area where there’s more green space where they can go to a park with their family or where they can enjoy some shade, especially as Denver summers get hotter in an era of climate change. And so one consequence of this new green space, or this added green space, is rising rents in Globeville Elyria-Swansea and also rising property taxes. It has, it has had one of the highest increases of property taxes, of any neighborhood in Denver. So that means even if you’re a longtime resident and you’ve lived there, or your family has lived there for generations and you own your home, increases in property values can still drive you out if you can’t afford to pay those huge increases, which is the case for a lot of retired people on fixed incomes. And then of course, yes, rents are, are also skyrocketing in that area because at least in part because of this green space.
AW | 08:32 – Yes. And you cite this woman, Yadira Sanchez, she’s kind of the protagonist of your, of your story. And she first moved to this area Globeville in 2005. So in 20 years during that period, Denver’s median home price rose from 246,000 to 649,000. That’s quite a leap. And then from 2018 to 2020 alone, just in that period, Globeville’s property taxes increased by 44% the highest of any Denver neighborhood. So the money has been flowing into the region in terms of big infrastructure efforts. It sounds like somebody who’s been living in fairly polluted areas in the shadow of smokestacks or the smelters and, and you have the Purina pet food factory there not the best air in the, in the area at all. Some of these efforts sound terrific. They’re covering up these freeways, putting playgrounds on top and, and biking paths and, and, and the like. But the cost is gentrification essentially. And that’s a complicated issue for the most vulnerable populations, right?
RV | 09:49 – Yeah, it is a very complicated issue, because of course, the people who live in this area also want these amenities, right? Like of course they want more green space. And Yadira Sanchez, who you just mentioned in particular, I mean, she’s a very passionate about trees and she actually works part-time as a tree planter in the neighborhood. And one of the things that she really desires is to see, um, you know, more greenery in, um, you know, on her streets and in the parks where her three kids have played growing up. So of course, people who live there, they want these amenities, but they also want to be able to stay to enjoy them aand we’ve seen this in other cities too, like Dallas for example, built a highway cover park similar to what’s, what, what has just been built in global Elyria-Swansea, and it led to like skyrocketing rents. So the new amenities can have a hidden cost if they’re built in areas that have not had access to these amenities for, for a long time. And if also, if there aren’t really like supportive measures to make sure that the residents of that area get to stay in that area, like, you know, if there’s no measure to make sure that people can afford these sort of explosive property taxes, even, even though they haven’t had a change in income, if there’s no measures to support that, then people are going to be displaced.
(Music Break) | 11:29
AW | 12:20 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Raksha Vasudevan. She is a freelance journalist and contributing editor at High Country News. So Raksha, we’re talking about this one region of North Denver, but maybe you can give listeners who aren’t really familiar with environmental policy and consumer habits and how, and the intersection of those habits in, in a metropolitan area such as Denver, you’re a Denver resident. There a paradox within the people who live there. I, I think it’s fair to say in that a lot of people move to this area because they love nature, but more and more people moving there means that there’s less nature and there’s less clean air and clean water, and then all the complications that come with, with an influx of humanity.
RV | 13:11 – Yeah, you put your finger on it. Exactly. And it, and it really is. The other paradox I think of, of green space here, kind of a second green space paradox is, you know, one of the reasons why Denver has such seen such incredible growth is because people are moving here for access to the mountains access to green space. But the consequence of that is not just displacing people who are here and living here earlier and sometimes for generations, but it also means, um, just a lot more construction and what they call impermeable surface area. So I don’t think we were able to include this in the article, but there was this, there have been studies that show that Denver’s proportion of impermeable surface area is one of the highest in the country. An impermeable surface area is basically like concrete asphalt, anything where the water can’t be absorbed. So, usually as there’s new construction, and you have more buildings, it usually means impermeable surface area goes up. So even New York City has more impermeable surface area as a percentage of the total city space than Denver. So I think it really shows that both politically and in terms of a residual effect of more people moving here, it means that even the little green space that was here in the city has really shrunk. So for people who don’t have the resources, like the money or the leisure time to drive one or two hours to the mountains to enjoy a hike, it means they’re even less able than before to enjoy green space within the city, which we all know is really important for mental and physical health. So yeah, it, it really is like an unfortunate paradox of more people moving here and of the city growing is that there’s more traffic jams, of course, to like get to, um, to get to the mountains. And there are two highways that run through GES. So the people living in that area and, you know, people living adjacent to many highways absorb sort of the, the costs of people trying to access green space, but they don’t really get to enjoy any of the benefits.
AW | 15:48 – And in terms of transportation, public transportation is relatively good in Denver, and yet it’s a car culture very much so. You kind of need a four-wheel drive to get into the mountains, so you see a ton of trucks and SUVs. Denver has come a long way though from its nadir in terms of its air pollution. I think that was in the mid-90s, perhaps, maybe even earlier. But I was surprised when I learned 30, 40 years ago that it had some of the worst air in the country that’s improved. What were some of the efforts from policymakers that cleaned up the air?
RV | 16:29 – From what I know, I do think, yeah, Denver has made some significant in investments in public transport. There is now a light rail that you can take from the airport all the way to the tech center, which is like way down south of the city. So I think that certainly was one measure…
AW | 16:51 – But I should interject that this airport is so far away from the rest of the city, so it’s kind of crazy. Like if you live on the west side of Denver, getting to DIA is a major event.
RV | 17:02 – But at least you can take the train there instead of having, you know, to drive 40 minutes. Although many people still do that. I think they’ve also, there have been more efforts to like expand bike lanes, throughout the city. I know also like part of it, um, was, you know, they have really tried to regulate some of the biggest polluters here. So another major polluter in Globeville Elyria-Swansea, is, uh, Suncor Refinery, which for decades was releasing emissions that were way over the limits and never really facing any consequences for it. But I think over the past few years, the city and state have really come down, come down hard on them. Of course, there’s also been a transition away from coal. There was also a coal plant in the area, which is thankfully no longer operational.
AW | 17:57 – So the electric grid has cleaned up quite a bit in, in its transition away from coal. Is it mostly natural gas or are renewables now a significant part of the energy portfolio in the region as well?
RV | 18:10 – I think it’s still mostly natural gas, but of course renewable is, is growing. There has been a lot of growth in, in solar especially, and of course electric vehicles. They’ve also, just recently, there have been a lot of efforts by the state of Colorado to offer incentives for people to buy electric vehicles. They’ve also capped the emissions that trucks can produce and have incentivized also electric trucks, which are a major polluter as you can imagine.
AW | 18:48 – You mean fossil fuel trucks are a major polluter, so they’re trying to eliminate the gas powered large vehicles?
RV | 18:54 – You’re exactly right, yeah. I mean, we’re still not, you know, anywhere close to California in that realm, but I think it has been, it has been growing. There’s also been a lot of cleanups like by the EPA to remediate Superfund sites. I mean, this was cont contributing more to soil pollution than air pollution perhaps. Um, but yeah, I, I think Denver, um, has made Denver and Colorado have made a lot of strides in trying to reduce air pollution, but they’re still over act, there’s still over recommended EPA limits. Like we’re still not, I still wouldn’t consider us like a leader in the country, um, for that reason, but it’s certainly better than 30 or 40 years ago, like you said.
(Music Break) | 19:48
AW | 20:31 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Raksha Vasudevan. She is a freelance journalist and contributing editor at High Country News. So Raksha, let’s turn back to the North Denver’s green space paradox piece that you wrote. What kind of lessons did you take away from researching it in terms of the resources that the lower income populations have at their disposal? When these green space infrastructure projects come to their neighborhood, should they welcome it or should they be protesting? Can they be incorporated more into be collaborators with these efforts instead of just bystanders?
RV | 21:15 – Yeah. One of the entities that I talk about in this piece, um, that I think could be a model for other communities to build on is the GES Coalition, the Global Elyria-Swansea Coalition. It started off as a group of residents who were either being displaced by a highway that was being reconstructed, um, in their area or just, you know, people who were concerned about rising rent. And they’ve really come together over the past few years to sort of present a united voice to the city and the state and demand what they believe is due to them. And so one of the results of that effort was they received $2 million from the city as part of, as part of this highway reconstruction, to build new housing in the area for people who are displaced. And they’ve since formed a land trust, um, that specifically tries to build homes for low, low-income residents from that area that allows them to stay in that area despite whatever’s going on in the housing market at large. So I hope there’s a way for communities to not just provide input or feedback on these sort of infrastructure projects, which of course they should do, but also take some power into their own hands and work with, in this case, the Colorado Department of Transportation to help some of the affected residents cope with the impacts of this reconstruction. Like they knew people were going to be displaced. And so they kind of were proactive about helping these displaced residents find new housing. And they’re also engaged in efforts with the city to, to get some of the land from the National Livestock Show expansion sort of back into community hands. So I think there’s a way that’s not necessarily super confrontational because that doesn’t always work to work with these infrastructure projects that allows for some compromise, I suppose.
AW | 23:31 – I thought it was interesting in the piece how you, you talk about the history of Denver being kind of a, a way to connect people from the east coast to the west coast and then from their meat processing. It’s always been kind of a, a hub. It, it started off as a way station, but then you ask Yadira Sanchez why she’s not going to this, uh, event to inaugurate some piece of the park. And she’s like, I’m not a fan of the park. It doesn’t connect to anything. What did she mean and what should be the goal for policy makers in connecting points A to B when they imagine a green space renewal project like this one in GES?
RV | 24:12 – Yeah, you’re, you’re right that Denver sort of always has been this connector city, like both in terms of, of the railway, but also highways. So both I-25 and I-70 and probably other highways run through the city, but I-25 and I 70, both run through Globeville, Elyria-Swansea. And in sort of the early 2000s there was a part of I-70 that runs through Globeville Elyria-Swansea that has a viaduct. And the viaduct was literally crumbling, like giant pieces of concrete were falling off and like hitting or almost hitting people. So the Colorado Department of Transportation had to knock down the viaduct and rebuild. And so they launched this long consultation process about how they should do that. And so what the residents of Globeville Elyria-Swansea who have lived with this highway for generations, what they wanted was they wanted the highway rerouted, like out of their neighborhood. They wanted it rerouted north of the city, but of course, Adams County, which is where it would’ve been rerouted, opposed that idea. And so that was shut down. So what they, what CDOT officials decided to do instead with public input, was to knock down the viaduct sink that portion of the highway underground for about 800 feet and build a cover on top that in that included a park. And so the park opened last winter, sorry, winter of 2022. And, there was like an inauguration for the park. And so the text or the message that you’re referring to from Yadira, where she said, I’m not attending this inauguration because it doesn’t connect anything, was, referencing that, that inauguration. And the reason she felt that way is because, and many residents felt that way, is that no one, none of the residents that I spoke to at least asked for this park. They kind of felt like it was pushed on them, um, as sort of a political maneuver in order to keep the highway in the neighborhood. But it was certainly that the park was certainly being touted as sort of reconnecting two highways that were historically divided by I-70, because now you can just walk, you know, from one side of the highway to another and it’s actually kind of a pleasant walk. You can’t really hear the highway underneath. Whereas before you had to go under the viaduct and, you know, risk being hit by crumbling concrete. But nonetheless, you know, people didn’t feel like they really wanted this park. They wanted the highway out of the neighborhood. So in terms of policy lessons for planners, I don’t really know, to be honest, because nobody wants a highway in their neighborhood.
AW | 27:57 – Raksha Vasudevan, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
RV | 28:02 – Thank you.
AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by lettuce Joe Walsh and Doc Watson. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Raksha Vasudevan: Rocky Mountain Ways appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Sometimes it seems as though Democrats are more determined to “fall in love” than to win elections. Lately I’ve been hearing, from both pundits and friends, that Joe Biden is simply too old to run for reelection. This week on Sea Change Radio, we hear from John Stoehr, the Editor and Founder of The Editorial Board, to get his insights into the 2024 presidential election. We look at some of the calls from media members like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver for Biden to step aside, discuss how Republicans are taking a much bigger leap of faith by re-nominating Donald Trump, and counter some of the critics with practical arguments for why the Democrats might want to stick with Joe Biden as their nominee in August.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
John Stoehr (JS) | 00:17 – We already have a consensus candidate. Joe Biden was the consensus candidate of 2020. He is the consensus candidate Now as the incumbent. You don’t need to ditch the consensus candidate to come up with another consensus candidate. It doesn’t make any sense.
Narrator | 00:35 – Sometimes it seems as though Democrats are more determined to “fall in love” than to win elections. Lately I’ve been hearing, from both pundits and friends, that Joe Biden is simply too old to run for reelection. This week on Sea Change Radio, we hear from John Stoehr, the Editor and Founder of The Editorial Board, to get his insights into the 2024 presidential election. We look at some of the calls from media members like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver for Biden to step aside, discuss how Republicans are taking a much bigger leap of faith by re-nominating Donald Trump, and counter some of the critics with practical arguments for why the Democrats might want to stick with Joe Biden as their nominee in August.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:28 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Storr. He is the editor and founder of The Editorial Board. John, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
John Stoehr (JS) | 01:42 – Thanks for having me back. Alex.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:44 – Always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. You wrote a piece that was a perfect response to the many people who’ve spoken to me over the last few months, clutching their pearls. Very concerned that Joe Biden is not going to be the nominee, or needs to not be the nominee. Many variations on this, and this all came to a head recently when Ezra Klein wrote an op-Ed for the New York Times, as well as putting it on his podcast, a special monologue where he laid out his plan for Joe Biden to step aside, be a hero, do the right thing, and, and let somebody else run against Donald Trump. You wrote a piece in The Editorial Board entitled Critics Calling on Biden to Drop Out are not thinking it through. So let’s go down this path together and make a collective case for these people who want to discuss the possibility of Joe Biden Stepping Aside.
JS | 02:44 – Right. So we’re to begin with this, um, I think it’s one. Okay. So we begin with why are people worried? Right? And people are worried because, uh, there are many polls, poll after poll that suggest that Biden is quote unquote losing or trailing to Donald Trump.
AW | 03:07 – And similar polls, I don’t know how they phrase them, phrase the questions, but often say, is Joe Biden too old for president? And 86% will say “Yes,” et cetera.
JS | 03:19 – Yes. Right. And so let’s take, let’s take those two questions. Here’s what we do know is that these two questions seem to be related. Uh, so people seem to say that Biden’s too old, and so therefore he shouldn’t run for president, or he’s too old and that’s why he’s trailing Donald Trump. However, those two questions are not empirically linked because they can’t be. It’s a leap of logic.
AW | 03:40 – Yes. Explain that a little bit more. You break that down in your piece quite well.
JS | 03:44 – Yeah. I mean, it’s just a matter, it is a difference between causation and correlation. You know, you know, if X leads to Y well that’s causation. But if X implies y, that’s correlation. That means that what we do know is that these two things seem to be related and common sense says that they are right. And, and all that, put all that together. And people are very worried, especially people who care about democracy, who have good intentions, who want freedom and opportunity for as many people as possible, so on and so forth, right? So this worry, I would take it to be well intended. However, these things are not empirically linked. And in fact, what I have written in previous pieces for The Editorial Board, is that we will probably see a flip of some kind coming up shortly as more and more people that as people who don’t pay attention to politics, start paying attention to politics. And is specifically the fact that, uh, Donald Trump will be the Republican party’s nominee. I think there’s a kind of disbelief right now among a whole bunch of people, people who do not pay attention to politics, and in fact have stopped paying attention to politics because Donald Trump is no longer the President.
AW | 04:56 – And Joe Biden has been a reassuring presence in the Oval Office.
JS | 05:02 – Exactly. He’s been, at the very least a competent administrator
AW | 06:17 – And, and he’s not facing 91 felony counts.
JS | 06:21 – Yeah. We haven’t even brought up all that stuff. Right. You know, that said, what I’m just saying is an assumption, right? It’s an assumption that will, the evidence will bear itself out. However, everybody else who’s making the argument that Joe Biden should drop out is basing their arguments on assumptions too,
AW | 07:23 – They’re three years apart in age, they could have been in high school at the same time together.
JS | 07:27 – I mean, they’re not that, right? They’re not much different. And, and, you know, here’s what, here’s really, let me just cut to the chase here and just say that here’s what most people, so let’s just say that Biden’s age is a problem, let’s say, okay, let’s assume that it is, assume it’s always going to be a problem. And maybe that’s true, even if it is a problem. Is that a reason enough for Biden to drop out? My argument is hell no, that’s not a good enough reason. And there’s a very simple reason for saying that, and that is that everyone assumes that if Biden drops out, the Democratic party will peacefully come together without disorder, without chaos, have an argument, a debate, and pick a, a suitable nominee who’s going to be strong enough and have enough party union, unity and so on to beat Donald Trump. That my friend, is a staggering assumption that, that the party could produce a strong enough candidate.
AW | 08:35 – I couldn’t agree more. And, and just to be clear for our listeners, when Joe Biden was running in 2020, he was not my primary candidate of choice. I thought he was not up to the task. But he’s proven me wrong, and I think he’s been an excellent president, and I think he has the wind at his back. In all the typical numbers that we look for in terms of a strong economy, jobs, inflation is down, the inflation reduction act is popular, consumer confidence is up. And also he’s, he has the, the strength of the incumbency behind him as well. But all the discussions that I’ve had with people, one person in particular, a friend of mine from Japan, we’ve been having this discussion for six months now, and every time I go to it, I say, “well, who do you got? Who, who’s your candidate then?” And he’ll just evade that part of the question. And that seemed to be part of the equation that Ezra Klein glossed over too, that like, we’ll get to the convention and Democrats will figure it out and democracy will work itself out. I’m like, are you talking about having a two-month campaign with a new, showing a new face? Maybe it’s Kamala Harris, maybe it’s JB Pritzker. Maybe it’s Gavin Newsom. But those people haven’t gone through the rigorous process of vetting and also don’t have the name recognition as the president of the United States
JS | 10:07 – So for the, because this is radio and nobody can see me nodding my head, I’m going to say, as Alex was going through all of that, I just kept nodding my head over and over and over again, because what Alex is saying is so commonsensical, it is so blindingly obvious, all those, that all those things are true. All those things are assets. All those things are reasons for sticking by this horse,
AW | 10:48 – Or boring.
JS | 10:49 – Yeah. I mean, I don’t mean to sound cynical when I say this, but the most important factor for those of us who are involved in journalism is attention. How do we get attention in All of this can be done in a well-meaning honest, caring ways, right? Like, but we do need to get attention because we do need to make money and have humble, modest livelihoods. So the last thing we want to do is talk about the president today, the way we talked about him yesterday and the day and the week before, and the week before, and the week before.
AW | 11:20 – You need fresh, hot takes.
JS | 11:23 – Yes, we need fresh, hot takes, right? And so even if he had a 99% chance of victory, we will be looking for that 1%
(Music Break) | 12:04
AW | 12:56 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to John Stoehr. He’s the editor and founder of The Editorial Board. So John, we’re talking about the case against Joe Biden running again in 2024. Ezra Klein had said he should be a hero and, and drop out. I, I kept thinking when I heard that, that turn of phrase that, you know, who’s thought of as being a hero in our pantheon of presidents in terms of older or ailing presidents, Franklin Deano Roosevelt, who ran for a fourth term when he was really incapacitated, won. And then when he died in office, Harry Truman took over and Harry Truman got reelected. And Franklin Deano Roosevelt is not looked at as some selfish, egotistical guy because he ran for the fourth term he’s looked at as one of the great American heroes.
JS | 13:50 – I mean, you ran for a fourth term because we were in the middle of a war.
AW | 13:53 – Right? But the case could have been made by Ezra Klein in 1944. Yes. That he should be a hero and step aside for the good of the country. I’m sure there were articles being written back then like that, but he didn’t, and he still thought of as a hero is my point.
JS | 14:08 – Somebody somewhere made exactly that argument. I have no doubt about that. But going, so you mentioned earlier Klein’s argument about, and how he touches on the convention, and I think this, this is an crucial part that people are not understanding about his argument or about anybody who says Biden should drop out.AW | 14:29 – Before you critique it, why don’t you recap what his argument is about the convention?
JS | 14:33 – Oh, in, in a nutshell, he says that, well, if, if Biden drops out, and then he gives a whole bunch of arguments about how, how and why that should happen, what do you do then? Well, how do you and how you got to pick a new nominee, how do you do that? You do it at the convention.
AW | 14:46 – In August after all the primaries have occurred, and Joe Biden has won 99.9% of all the delegates because the voting’s already started too. That’s the other thing where there’s dissonance as well.
JS | 15:01 – Yeah. And the Democratic voters are making their preferences very, very clear. They want Biden
AW | 15:56 – You know it would be chaos. Right? I remember when my brother sent me the Klein article, I read it and I was like, Klein talks about this convention being a good solution. I was like, last time that happened was 1968. I remember Richard Nixon winning pretty resoundingly then. So that didn’t really work out so well. So that’s what we’re looking at as our template for success.
JS | 16:16 – Yeah. Again, for this is radio. People can’t see me right now just throwing out my hands. Like this is so obvious. But Alex just said
AW | 17:43 – So we’re nodding in agreement and we’re finding it blindingly obvious, but I also think we agree that this is very dangerous and this meme is being exploited by, well-meaning people, one of the reasons that Joe Biden was elected was because he was a calm in the Trump storm. And I think he remains that. But now that they keep injecting his age into that debate, sadly, it’s puncturing that armor of calm in the storm. Sorry for mixing metaphors.
JS | 18:15 – Well,
AW | 20:32 – That’s not nothing.
JS | 20:34 – No, it’s not nothing. And it’s empirical data that we can, we can, you can be like, yes, this is, this is real. Right? This is not polling, polling is really, you know, hypothetical. So just to be, just be clear, neither of us is a poll guy. I mean, I don’t claim to be a poll person, but the people who do pay attention to polls are noting there’s a di there’s a, a dissonance between actual election results and polling. I mean, just take the, the special election in New York, uh, last week, uh, the one to replace George Santos after he was expelled from Congress. I mean, the polls were, polls were showing that, you know, the Republican candidate was ahead, so on and so forth. And then the Democrat pulls out an eight point, uh, victory. So, I mean, there it is. I mean, and he, and he, and by the way, he was, he was definitely like, Roe is important. We need to get back to protecting women’s bodily autonomy and, and reproductive rights, et cetera. And then he was also, by the way, he was, he was a, a hawk on the border in ways that the Republican was not credible anymore than the Republican wasn’t credible because, because of what’s happening in the us uh, house, I don’t want to get into the weeds there, but it, it’s becoming clearer, uh, that the Democrats are, are getting more credibility with respect to the border than, than Republicans are because the Democrats are saying, we have, there’s a problem and we have a solution. Whereas the Republicans are like, yeah, there’s a problem, but we don’t want to solve it.
(Music Break) | 22:13
AW | 23:07 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to John Stoehr, the founder of The, Editorial Board. So John, I can’t help but think that Democrats are trying to fall in love rather than trying to win that they are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Far too often. And this is a perfect example with wanting to have Joe Biden step aside for some candidate X.
JS | 23:32 – Yeah. And, and that will be the case until, as I was saying earlier, until it becomes clearer to most people, most of the time that Donald Trump will be the nominee for the Republican party. And once he that’s clear, then that then there will be a choice. Right now, there’s just judging Biden based on whether he is too old or not. Well then once it’s a choice, then people are like, oh, well maybe he is too old, but so what?
AW | 23:56 – If we’re going to talk about the other side of things. All the polling that I’ve seen, and I know we’ve dismissed polling that we don’t like, but I think that it’s, it’s relevant when you look at the polling of Republicans and Independences asking, would you think of Donald Trump in less favorable terms? If he were to be convicted of a crime, he’s going to be convicted of a crime and he’s going to be on trial for the next God knows how long. So this guy might be too old, but this guy should be going to prison.
JS | 24:26 –
AW | 24:52 – A rapist.
JS | 24:53 – Who is proven to be a rapist. Exactly. Right. And he owes hundreds of millions of dollars in a context in which he’s playing footsy with the Russian government.
AW | 25:05 – We have to consider the risk that Republicans are taking.
JS | 25:09 – Right? I mean, and very you, very few. That’s, I think that’s starting, that conversation is starting to take place among the Ezra Klines of the world. Is that like, oh, well, we’ve been talking about risk with the Democrats full, well,
AW | 25:59 – I agree. And to be clear, John and I are not saying that Joe Biden is about to win 400 electoral votes. We’re in a very tight, bifurcated political country right now. So even when we think back to the 2012 election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, I remember thinking Romney did not have a great chance, but the odds maker still had him at like 35, 40% chance of, of winning. And that scared the bejesus outta me. And if somebody said, you know, there’s 40% chance of rain tomorrow, there’s a good chance you’re going to want to bring an umbrella. So we’re not thinking that this is a slam dunk by any means. It’s going to be close and people should get out there and volunteer, knock on doors, register voters, talk to people. There’s no perfect candidate out there. And Joe Biden is the best candidate, though, is I think what we conclude.
JS | 26:55 – Okay, so one last point about that, and, and that is that there is a whole bunch, there are a bunch of Democrats, who would say it shouldn’t be close, Biden should be winning by a mile. This should and should and should and shouldn’t, should. All this should and shouldn’t. I don’t know why anybody’s saying that. We, we live in this reality. A lot of people like Donald Trump, a lot of people in this democracy don’t like democracy. I mean, that’s just a fact. And this has been a fact since the founding of the Republic. Okay? That’s just the way it is. And, and, and we need to like alter shift our expectations about what we think America should be toward what America really is. And what America really is, is a contest right now between two very different candidates who have an equal chance of, let’s just say an equal chance of winning. And the, and the, and the what’s going to determine things is like you said, normal, everyday partisan politics, get out the vote, raising hell, raising your voice, et cetera, et cetera. That’s what’s going to make the difference. I don’t know why people have these expectations.
AW | 27:57 – John Stoehr, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JS | 28:01 – You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me back.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by O’Donnel Levy, Gil Scott-Heron and Pete Townsend. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast John Stoehr: Betting On Biden appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives to revisit a couple of discussions with sustainability innovators whose ideas never took full flight but can continue to inspire us nonetheless. First, we hear from Dara O’Rourke, the CEO of Good Guide, a really great idea for improving product transparency for consumers which sadly shut down in 2020. Then, we speak with Corwin Hardham, the CEO of solar kite company Makani Power, who tragically passed away in 2012 at the age of 38, only one year after this Sea Change Radio interview.
This article and podcast Standing On The Shoulders of Giants: Dara O’Rourke and Corwin Hardham appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
The transition from fossil fuels to a cleaner energy future is perhaps the most important human adaptation of our lifetime. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Chris Nelder about his mission to take a deep dive into energy, on a fortnightly basis, as the host of the Energy Transition Show podcast. We discuss his travels as a digital nomad, look at some of the energy stories he’s been covering, and get into a larger conversation about what needs to happen to see this transition through.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Chris Nelder (CN) | 00:15 – The more I’ve studied this stuff, the more it has become clear to me that there’s no technical or economic reason why we shouldn’t do the energy transition or why it can’t work. We have the technology, it’s very affordable. In most cases, it’s far cheaper than remaining on the existing fossil fuel systems that we use. It’s cheaper than nuclear for sure. So there’s really no reason why we can’t or shouldn’t do it, except for politics.
Narrator | 00:45 – The transition from fossil fuels to a cleaner energy future is perhaps the most important human adaptation of our lifetime. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Chris Nelder about his mission to take a deep dive into energy, on a fortnightly basis, as the host of the Energy Transition Show podcast. We discuss his travels as a digital nomad, look at some of the energy stories he’s been covering, and get into a larger conversation about what needs to happen to see this transition through.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Chris Nelder. Chris is the host of the Energy Transition Show podcast. Chris, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Chris Nelder (CN) | 01:44 – Thanks very much.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:45 – So, tell us about the Energy Transition Show. I’d like to know more about how you got into it and what problems you’re trying to solve through it.
Chris Nelder (CN) | 01:56 – Well, my partner, Justin Richie, pitched me on doing this show and, we’ve been doing the show for about eight and a half years now. And the whole concept of it really was to create the kind of energy podcast that I wanted to listen to because I was really disappointed with what I felt like was just sort of shallow, poorly structured, poorly researched content that was available in, in a lot of the other podcasts. And I’m a geek, I’m a serious energy geek, and I’ve been studying energy intensely full-time for the better part of 20 years. And so I wanted to make a show that was for people like me that really want to geek out on, the details and really understand sort of the complex, thorny issues involved in the energy transition. And, and there’s a lot of them. Policy is complex. The technologies are complex. The way that these changes that we’re experiencing through the energy transition affects the world, are very complex and so I want to do a show about all those things and with the intention of really motivating other people to participate in the energy transition however they can.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:02 – When somebody who is not very familiar with the term energy transition asks you what your show is about and what, what does that mean energy transition, how do you define that to them?
CN | 03:13 – I mean, the simplest way of putting it, I think is, um, getting off of fossil fuels and, and moving over to, uh, renewables as a way of powering the world and all the, all the different purposes we have for energy. Of course, it’s more complex than that. There are various kinds of what people call clean energy solutions that aren’t necessarily based on renewables. But as time goes on in the energy transition progresses, it’s becoming more clear. I think that really what we’re talking about is a switch to renewables. Primarily it’s about eliminating carbon emissions. It’s about transforming our society in that way so that we can address the problem of climate change.
AW | 03:50 – And you have taken your show on the road recently. You’ve been a digital nomad, so to speak. Why don’t you explain where your travels have taken you and how you’ve been able to translate that into a different perspective for your listeners?
CN | 04:05 – Yeah. About two and a half years ago when I was still in Boulder, Colorado, I had just completed about five and a half years of working at the Rocky Mountain Institute, RMI. And, I put all my stuff in storage and, uh, I haven’t seen it since
AW | 07:34 – Looking at it from a bigger policy perspective, were you able to kind of glean which countries are making that energy transition in a way that’s in line with your philosophy versus others where they’re kind of lagging? For example, I was just in Italy over the summer, and yes, they’ve been innovators in the vehicular space since the advent of the automobile. And Italy has an amazing history with vehicle manufacturing. And then they also were pretty early to the game in many cars, but they are not really well prepared right now to transition over to electric vehicles in Italy. It, it was quite a contrast from, let’s say Norway. I found that pretty interesting. But as an American, have you had similar thoughts where you’ve gone over to a country and been like, wow, they used their hot water in a completely different way and in, in the showers, let’s say.
CN | 08:29
(Music Break) | 11:22
AW | 12:12 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to the host of the Energy Transition Show, Chris Nelder. So Chris, as an environmentalist who’s been doing all this traveling, how have you been trying to reduce your carbon footprint? I know that’s a challenge.
CN | 12:29 – Yeah, I mean, to me, the most important thing that I can do is to tell these stories, uh, to get out there and meet people and tell the stories, uh, and, and share that knowledge, uh, across the world. So that’s, that’s the first and most important priority. Um, I’m not going to let, uh, my own personal carbon footprint impede that as a priority, but, uh, to the extent that I can, of course I do try to minimize my, uh, emissions. Um, so, uh, for example, when I went to, uh, Costa Rica, uh, last year, I’m sorry, in, in 2022, um, basically, you know, my carbon footprint consisted of a flight there and a flight back, and that’s it. Like, I didn’t drive, I didn’t even really take, um, a taxi much at all, or, or, uh, rent a quad, which a lot of people do or anything like that. I was just sort of on foot. I feel like during the months I was in Costa Rica, I probably had the lowest carbon footprint I’ve ever had in my life.
AW | 14:20 – And what are some of the takeaways that you have taken from this travel that you think would be relevant to environmentalists or listeners to the energy transition show? Where are the lessons to be learned?
CN | 14:34 – As I travel around, I notice things that are different, of course, than they are back home. One of the things that, uh, as I was just mentioning was just the availability of trains and the underground. You know, in London and in Paris, uh, their, the metro system is just phenomenal. Uh, it gets you anywhere you need to go, uh, in either city, you know, usually pretty quickly, you know, in sort of a 15 to 30 minute sort of a timeframe, you can get kind of anywhere you need to go, at least as far as the central part of the city goes. And, it’s fantastic and not only that, you get in a, a lot of walking, uh, when you’re, when you’re traveling around the city that way, because, uh, usually there’s, you know, a five or 10 minute walk from one uh, tube station to your destination or, or whatever and so I was getting in a lot more walking, um, which was amazing. I loved the exercise and just the fact that it was just sort of, you know, casual exercise, right? It’s, it wasn’t like I was going to the gym, it was just sort of, you know, 15 to minutes to half an hour or sometimes an hour or more of just walking a day. It was just sort of there. It was great for my health. It was great for my fitness. I lost some weight. I really enjoyed that, that casual ability to get around on foot, um, and on the, on the, on the underground. And I really wish that that existed in the us. Um, you know, it does in New York City, obviously, um, and, uh, to a lesser extent. And, like San Francisco, Chicago, some of the bigger cities, Boston. But, I really think the US needs to do a lot of work, uh, to get to the kind of, uh, routine availability of rail service, light rail, and also, you know, sort of like longer distance rail, in the US. I think that’s really got to be a major priority for us. And, and once you go to another country and you live there for a while where they have that kind of service, you realize how brilliant and utterly superior it is in every way to the way that we get around in the us. Um, and then as far as, um, you know, building standards go is something else that really, uh, came through to me. Um, Europe is full of old buildings that leak heat like crazy, and it’s a wildly inefficient, um, built environment, uh, and they have a lot of work to do on that, of course we do in the US as as well. But we don’t have buildings that are hundreds of years old,
(Music Break) | 18:41
AW | 19:40 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to the host of the Energy Transition Show, Chris Nelder. So Chris, let’s turn back to energy transitions. On the whole, looking at it globally, what gives you optimism and where are you continually looking at things with a little more of a glass half empty lens?
CN | 20:04 –
AW | 23:37 – And on the flip side, we’re seeing that, like I mentioned in Italy, where somebody might come into the country with their electric vehicle and not really find adequate charging stations. That seems to be the big infrastructure failure right now with the transition to EVs in Italy. According to a friend of mine who lives there, he says they just don’t have a lot of charging stations available.
CN | 23:58 – No, that’s right. But that’s actually a different set of problems. That’s, that’s the problem of how does this new technology of the energy transition get deployed and take market share. Um, and there’s a, a chicken and egg problem there, right? Where people have to buy EVs and buy, get the charging infrastructure going at the same time.
AW | 24:17 – Yeah, I guess I saw the commonality through the market because you’re talking about like gas stations at some point just discover that it’s not worth their time to stay open to cater to a limited audience. And at some point it’s going to make a lot more sense to, to cater to these electric vehicle owners. Right? Now, some countries have not really gotten on board, or some states here in the US you see adoption rates at such a, a, a wide variance.
CN | 24:43 – Yeah, that’s right. There’s a whole class of problems for the new technologies that are trying to gain market share. And then there’s a whole ‘nother set of problems for the technologies that have to give up market share and get phased out. And there, there are different problems, right? I mean, the, the problems that face the technologies that are getting phased out, a lot of them are going to ultimately boil down to problems of fairness, problems of equity, right? The, the first parts of the country to really have adequate, robust EV charging infrastructure, especially public EV charging infrastructure for people that can’t plug in at home are going to be the wealthy parts of the us. And we’ve got lots of data to show that that’s the case. So the people that are going to be probably the last to adopt an EV, the people that are going to need access to a gas station still after everybody else has an EV are the disadvantaged communities, right? And so how do we avoid leaving them stranded without a place to refuel their car because they can’t afford to buy an EV As that set of technologies gets phased out, I’ll give you another example of these kind of mid transition problems. Um, as more and more of our energy system goes to renewables, uh, especially with grid power, we’re going to have less and less need for natural gas networks, right? And so at some point, it’s going to be very difficult to maintain the existing transmission and distribution pipelines for the natural gas system, and nobody’s going to want to pay for it after a lot of the population isn’t using it anymore. But those who still need it, those who don’t have solar, who haven’t got a fully electric house, who maybe aren’t quite at a place where they can replace all their own appliances, right, are going to still need access to that network even as it becomes less and less economic to run it. And there’s a whole ‘nother set of downstream problems that evolve from that, right? Like, how do we make sure that when we get to 2050 and we’ve gotta be at net zero and the oil and gas industry has to shrink to a, a tiny fraction of its existing size, that there’s still enough people who actually know that business that can operate refineries, that can keep the flow of fuels that some people still need going, even after generations of young people have already decided, yeah, I’m not going into the fossil fuel business, it’s a dead end, right? I wanna be on the winning side of the energy transition. So we’ve got a whole series of very complex, thorny problems that we have to start working our way through. They’re, they’re geopolitical problems, they’re equity problems, they’re political problems. They have to do with who stands to win and who stands to lose, who’s going to make money, who’s going to lose money. And, all of this stuff is going to take some very deliberate effort to work it out what the good solutions are. And we’re going to need very competent and thoughtful leaders who can work their way through that, that set of problems. And, um, it’s, it’s not going to be easy. But at the same time, I do think it’s inevitable. I really cannot make a strong argument for why we should not or could not, or will not continue to proceed with the energy transition until it’s finished.
AW | 27:54 – He’s the host of the Energy Transition Show podcast, Chris Nelder. Chris, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
CN | 28:01 – You’re very welcome. Thank you, Alex.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by The Meters, George Harrison and Fog Swamp. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site – or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Chris Nelder on Energy Transitions appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Whether it be standardized testing, grades, extracurricular activities or personal essays, the question of how to level the playing field in education is quite a challenge. This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a deep dive into higher education admissions and inequities in this country with Jacob Vigdor, a Professor of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. We discuss the flawed measures we use to evaluate teenage pupils and ask what the goals should actually be for college admissions officers? Are we looking for students to get good grades and make a lot of money, or become leaders in their communities and help spark thoughtful debate among their peers? We examine the shortcomings of standardized testing and grades, explore admissions systems at most “elite” schools, and try to come up with some solutions to the problem.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Jacob Vigdor (JV) | 00:23 – If you ask the question, could an elite college find the students who have the academic foundation to be successful at their institution without standardized test scores? The answer is an unambiguous resounding yes.
Narrator | 00:42 – Whether it be standardized testing grades, extracurricular activities, or personal essays, the question of how to level the playing field in education is quite a challenge. This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a deep dive into higher education, admissions and inequities in this country with Jacob Vigdor, a professor of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. We discussed the flawed measures we use to evaluate teenage pupils and ask what the goals should actually be for college admissions officers. Are we looking for students to get good grades and make a lot of money, or become leaders in their communities and help spark thoughtful debate among their peers? We examine the shortcomings of standardized testing and grades, explore admission systems at most, quote unquote elite schools, and try to come up with some solutions to the problem.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Jacob Vigdor. He is a professor of public policy and governance at the University of Washington. Jake, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Jacob Vigdor (JV) | 02:05 – Thanks for having me. Alex. Great to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:08 – It’s a pleasure to talk to you. I read a Twitter thread of yours that addressed an article by New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, saying that colleges have been missing standardized testing, and that there’s strong evidence that it’s actually a, a very good predictor of grades and performance in college, and that colleges don’t know what to do now that universities have decided not to make it a requirement in the application process or at least many universities. I, I don’t know if that’s an accurate summary, but why don’t you expand on Leonhardt’s piece and then explain where he kind of cherry picked, if you will, the statistics to fit his narrative.
Jacob Vigdor (JV) | 02:54 – Sure. Yeah. So the way I, I’d summarize the argument is, you know, the SAT is a predictor of how a student is going to do in college. And really the, the biggest concern is that there are certain students out there who maybe they’re going to a rural high school, maybe they don’t have access to the same kinds of resources. So, you know, they might be going to a high school that doesn’t offer a whole lot of AP courses. They might be going to a high school where the counselors don’t know how to write good recommendation letters for elite colleges. And so these are students that are at risk of falling off the radar screen of the admissions officers at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, wherever. But the SAT score is something that could, that could flag them as a student with real potential. So the idea being that maybe you’re looking at an application, it doesn’t have a test score on it, you can see that the student did pretty well, but didn’t take the same kind of rigorous courses that they offer at elite prep schools. Doesn’t have a very well written letter of recommendation from a teacher or a counselor, and you just wish you knew. Is this a person who got a perfect 1600 on their SAT? Is this a person who got maybe a, a 1200 or an 1100? And if you had that information and the information was good, you might admit the student, but you’re kind of nervous about that student, so you’re not going to admit them. And so the basic tenor of the article was, gee, wouldn’t it be great if these colleges had access to the SAT score? But they’re test optional, and so they don’t necessarily,
AW | 04:31 – And keep in mind that there was years of research and data that went into making the SAT an optional feature of the admissions process that sure, we know it’s a proxy for inequity in many ways.
JV | 04:44 – Well, the trouble with college admissions is that just about everything that colleges use is subject to concerns about equity. So take something like the essay that students write for admissions. So some students write the essay without a whole lot of help because their parents aren’t necessarily college educated because the resources they have in their community to help them aren’t that great. And at an elite high school, they’re going to start working out on that essay months and months before it’s due. It’s going to go through draft after draft, it’s going to be reviewed by professional editors. It’s going to be a well-polished thing. So you, if you have the resources, you can make every part of your application look better. The SAT is indeed another one of those elements of the application where if you’ve got the resources, you can do test prep, you can sign up for a course that will promise to raise your scores, um, you have access to a lot of test taking strategies that aren’t necessarily available in a lower income community that is a concern. So how do we level the playing field? So, so the, the argument in favor of the SAT is, yeah, you know, it’s not necessarily the fairest thing that if you have money, you know, you can get a better score, but in spite of that, it may be more fair than all these other things where money also gives you an advantage. So it may be one of those things where, you know, money gives you a little bit less of an advantage than say, your extracurricular activities, which is something else that colleges will consider, Hey, if you got money, you know, you can sign your kid up for, you know, polo, get them tennis lessons, all these things that, that give them this advantage, uh, that a child in a lower income family is just not gonna have.
AW | 06:30 – And we saw that in the, I’m calling it the USC cheating scandal, but it wasn’t just USC, but in Southern California, there were a lot of high profile parents and their kids who were fraudulently manipulating the system where they were a coxswain of a crew team or a fencing team, and they’d get athletic scholarships to these arcane, generally privileged sports that somebody in an inner city high school might not have access to.
JV | 07:00 – Yeah. Well, of course in that, in that particular scandal, sometimes the, the, the child in question wasn’t an athlete at all. They just took a picture of them, um, you know, with a tennis racket in their hand. And, and you, you, you come up with this false narrative about someone being a tennis player.
AW | 07:16 – So you explained it on Twitter in a pretty technical, statistical analysis of where Leonhardt’s take is off kilter. If you can put that into layman’s terms for our listeners, that would be terrific.
JV | 07:28 – Sure. Yeah. So, so basically, um, let me start by, by talking about the way we want to think about this question. So the question is, how much of a difference does it make to have access to a student’s SAT score? Does it allow you to get a much better picture of how they’re going to perform as a college student than if you read their admissions file without it? Now, let’s think about what’s in that admissions file. At most elite colleges, an admissions file is going to include a high school transcript, which includes not just what your grades were, but what courses did you take? Did you take rigorous courses? Did you, did you, you know, take the hardest courses that your high school has to offer. It’s going to include an admissions essay that is going to give an, an image of, you know, what is it that makes this student tick? It’s going to include recommendation letters, um, you know, from, from teachers who might say things along the lines of, well, I’ve been teaching for 20 years and this is one of the top two or three students I’ve ever taught. Um, with access to all that information, how much more accurate would the picture be if you had the SAT score? And so that’s what we really want to know. And so what made this particular, uh, column by Leonhardt Misleading was, that’s not the evidence that was depicted. The evidence that was depicted was a graph showing that, hey, SAT scores by themselves are pretty good predictors of how a student is going to perform in college. Okay, great. Um, that’s, that’s good to know. However, the question isn’t, are SATs a good predictor all by themselves? The question is, do SATs add information that we couldn’t get through all this other stuff that we already know about the applicant, what courses they took in high school, how they did in those courses, what their teachers think about them, what they say about themselves and their essay, what do they do in their spare time? So the argument that I made on my thread was, well, if you think about it, the way that you should think about it, the SAT yeah, you know, it gives, it does improve the quality of the picture to some extent, but not dramatically. You can already come up with a pretty good idea of whether an applicant has what it takes to be successful at an elite college on the basis of all the other information in their file. The SAT only refines that picture a little bit.
(Music Break) | 10:20
AW | 11:11 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Jacob Vigdor. He’s a professor of public policy and governance at the University of Washington. So Jake, we think about grades as being a better predictor, but I can’t help but think that those are also very prone to inequity issues, thinking of implicit bias from teachers when we know that suspension rates of African American boys are higher, for example. So they would have a bigger challenge to get a better grade when they’re getting suspended at higher rates, for instance. And each school and teacher tends to have its own little philosophy about grades. So are grades a better predictor than SATs?
JV | 11:53 – They are not. And so this is another point that Leonhardt was trying to make, is that, well, if you, if you just sort of have a horse race between SAT score and high school grades, the SAT is a better predictor of how a student is going to perform in college than their high school grades are. And that has to do with a lot of the reasons that you mentioned. Um, the high school GPA of a student doesn’t account for what types of classes they took. Did they take AP classes? Did they take more vocational classes? Doesn’t account for that.
AW | 12:28 – Don’t they sometimes have weighted GPAs?
JV | 12:30 – Some high schools might have weighted GPAs, you know, but that varies. And depending on what high school you go to, there might be some high schools where the teachers are pretty lax about grading. There might be other high schools where it’s really tough to get a 4.0. And so, you know, you, you might have gone to, um, a, a high, a public high school in Appalachia, and you might’ve gotten a 4.0. Uh, because in that rural high poverty community, you’re one of the best students that your teachers have ever seen. And the question is, well, I mean, you, you might’ve been, you might’ve been a star in your rural community, but how will you fare when we put you on an elite college campus? And the concern is that that student who did really well in their high school just doesn’t have the, the, the foundation that they need to perform well in college. Uh, that that’s the concern anyway.
AW | 13:26 – And I guess at the root of the question is, are we trying to predict performance when we’re looking at accepting students into any kind of academic program? Uh, I know in graduate school, they take into account a lot more of what a person might be adding to group study and to classroom participation that that student’s background. Sure. That student could have worked for 10 years before they went back to school. That person may not have had a great GPA, but if they were at the top of their field in a certain area, they’re going to be contributing in deep meaningful ways into the education of their peers.
JV | 14:04 – Yeah. The dirty little secret in all of this is that the number of students who have what it takes to be academically successful at an elite college is actually pretty large. So if you look closely at the evidence that Leonhardt put together for, for his column, it noted that, okay, there’s a difference in what you predict for a student with a 1600 SAT score versus a 1200 SAT score. And, and, and the notion being that, well, if you’re a 1200 SAT score kind of student, I mean, you know, you may not be cut out for the Ivy League. Well, here’s the thing. Leonhardt’s data shows that if you admit a student to one of these elite colleges with a 1200 SAT, you predict that they’re going to have a GPA of about a little bit over three. So they’re going to have basically a B average. That’s not bad. I mean, to graduate from an elite college with a B average, I mean, who, who thinks of that as, as being a failure?
AW | 15:06 – And that person who gets a B could be, let’s say, a leader in their community. They could be the editor of the school, newspaper, whatever it might be, while that person who gets a 1600 on their SATs and gets all A’s is just living in their dorm room, cranking out good work. So does that mean that that 1600 SAT student has contributed to that school being more elite or not?
JV | 15:30 – Yeah. You know, so, so for most of these colleges, um, you need at least a c average or 2.0 to stay out of academic trouble. So, so basically we’re saying that all these students, whether they’re the 1600 or the 1200, they have what it takes to meet the academic standards of the institution. And so then when we think about what should the priorities be, this is where the value struggle is. So do these institutions want to just go with the kids with the highest test scores, even though those kids might all be sort of from affluent suburban families where, you know, they’re going to get their elite degree and they’re going to go to Wall Street and be investment bankers and, and make money off a, uh, trying to do better deals than the next investment banker down the hall? Or do we want to be reaching out to people whose ambition is not to go to Wall Street, but it’s to go back to their community and be a doctor there to go back to their community and provide legal services there? Who do we want to have access to this education? The notion that some of these students can’t really cut at these colleges at false, all the students that we’re talking about here have what it takes to be academically successful. And it is really, as you said, a question of what does this institution want to prioritize? What kind of people do you want to have access and the benefit of the resources that you have?
Music Break | 17:18
AW | 17:54 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Jacob Vigdor. He is a professor of public policy and governance at the University of Washington. So Jake, you were just talking about reframing the college admission quandary. It’s not necessarily which student is going to be more successful in class. We don’t necessarily want to have a predictor of success in the classroom as much as who do we want to have access to these resources that these fabulous universities have created? You mentioned three bullet points in your Twitter thread that I think we’re dead on. You’re saying if you really want to change the fundamental landscape of education, uh, I’m just paraphrasing you, you want to eliminate the advantages that large donors have that legacy admissions have, which is being outlawed in the global North except for the US generally. I don’t know of any other countries that have legacy admissions and also athletic scholarships. I, I don’t know how you frame it, but the emphasis on sports in admissions is that there’s so much money in these college sports. It’s a, it’s a real question of whether or not this is good for a campus or not. Am I accurately paraphrasing your thoughts here? Why don’t you expand if you can?
JV | 19:09 – Yeah, no, absolutely. You just name three things that give advantages to, to kids that come from wealthy families. If their parents went to an elite college, they get an advantage at admissions at most institutions. Um, if their parents have the capacity to potentially donate a large sum to a university, that gives them an advantage. And then, you know, when, when it comes to athletics, I, you know, I am actually the, the father of a couple of high school athletes, and I’ve, I’ve seen enough of, of high school athletics to see that if you have a kid and you want your kid to be competitive for, say, division one NCAA athletics, it helps if you have a lot of money to invest in your kid because your kid is going to need to go to the elite summer camps where they provide extra training and instruction so that, that your kid can be the elite soccer goalie or the elite golfer. So that is yet another thing where most of the time for most of the athletic scholarships that we see out there, uh, the advantage is to the families that have the money that they can use to invest in the progress of their child as an athlete.
AW | 20:19 – Now, the conundrum with this piece of the discussion is there’s two types of equity. We’re talking about equity for wealthy families, getting a leg up by a student being a terrific golfer, let’s say. But then there’s also sport by sport equity. Many would argue that if a football team or a basketball team is bringing in lots of revenue to a university, then that’s good for the university. And also they’re giving lots of underprivileged athletes a chance to get in an elite education. So there’s inequity within the sports as well. And you’re saying that some of the less popular sports in terms of TV revenue throw off the balance of college admissions with fencing or golf or whatever it might be. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to do away with these sports, right? What would be the solution then?
JV | 21:11 – Well, you know, you could have these sports, I mean, you could have the fencing and the golf and the tennis, but you could just sort of say, look, there’s no separate admission standard for athletes at a lot of universities. The idea is, okay, if you are a recruited athlete, this is, this is the, you know, the, the scandal that we were talking about a little while ago. This is all about the notion that, hey, if you’re a recruited athlete, there’s a separate door for you. There’s separate standards. Okay? You could have a situation where you continue to have the sports teams. Um, but the idea would be, all right, there’s an admissions process and, and the, the, the folks in the admissions office are not gonna have the information about whether you’re an athlete or not. Okay. What does that mean? Um, it, it means that, you know, the fencing team might not be as good, the tennis team might not be as good. Uh, but when you get right down to it, you know, this, this notion that, hey, the athletics program is something that brings in money to, to the university at most universities, athletics doesn’t make money. Athletics is in, in a lot of universities, athletics is a drain on the academic budget of the institution because it costs a lot of money and it doesn’t necessarily bring a lot of revenue in. There’s not necessarily a whole lot of people paying top dollar for tickets to go see Ivy League fencing matches.
AW | 22:31 – And even in the really successful programs, a lot of that money gets separated. Sure. So Alabama has pro level equipment for its football team and its stadium and everything. Sure. But that trickle down effect into the academics is far from a guarantee.
JV | 22:48 – And the, the thing you got to bear in mind is that the money in college football and basketball is TV revenue, and that’s where it comes from. So you got a lot of networks paying top dollar for Alabama football games. There are no networks paying top dollar for Princeton football games, Ivy League athletics, the athletics at the elite colleges that we’re talking about, with the possible exception to Stanford, right. Which is part of a major conference. Ivy League athletics, no, they’re not going to get top dollar money deals. There’s not a whole lot of revenue for the institutions with a lot of these sports.
AW | 23:28 – But the Ivy League students don’t get athletic scholarships. They get preference. And so that’s not necessarily working either.
JV | 23:34 – Yeah. That’s the thing is that there, there is a separate admission standard effectively for a lot of these recruited athletes. And that’s, that’s what in introduces the equity problems in legacy admissions.
AW | 23:45 – I had a discussion with a friend who we were talking about, Jared Kushner, he wasn’t really qualified to get into Harvard, but I think Charles Kushner’s father had given lots of money, and so they let him in. And that’s kind of a combination of both the donor privilege element that you were discussing as well as the legacy preference. And my friend said, you know, that money that Harvard received from Charles Kushner was able to do a lot more good than if they had just let some high achieving student from Appalachia get in. I thought that was wrong on many levels, but I wish I could have had you there to argue my case for me at the time. What would you have said to my friend when he made that case? Where is the specious logic there?
JV | 24:32 – So the thing is, is that if, if you had these big donors that were making big gifts for financial aid, that would be one thing. Uh, but in most cases, so, so the, the average big dollar donor is not giving an institution money and saying, Hey, do whatever you want with this. Actually use it specifically for financial aid. Typically, your donors are coming in and saying, I want my name on your brand new state-of-the-Art Top Line Recreation Center. I want my name on your brand new state-of-the-art Chemistry Lab. I want to help you build facilities. I want something with my name on it. Occasionally you’ll get a donor that says, Hey, I want to fund a scholarship, and I want that scholarship to be specifically for someone from a high poverty community. But a lot of the time when you were talking about these big dollar donations to elite institutions, they come with strings attached. And the strings say, you have to use this money for what I want you to spend it on, and I want you to spend it on facilities. I want you to spend it on hiring elite academics to be on your faculty. I don’t necessarily want you to take my money and, and turn around and give it to some poor family.
AW | 25:50 – So, summing things up, let’s get back to the SAT predicament for a moment. What do you think should be done about standardized testing? Should it be included across the board, or do you think this hybrid system that we have right now, where some schools use it, some schools don’t, students don’t know whether they should be studying for it in preparation for the SAT, they, they don’t know what school they might be looking at. They don’t know if the school is going to be looking for SATs, et cetera. It’s kind of the wild west right now.
JV | 26:20 – If you ask the question, could an elite college find the students who have the academic foundation to be successful at their institution without standardized test scores? The answer is an unambiguous resounding yes. They, when you think about the information that is in a college application, without the SAT scores, you have what you need. Because when you get right down to it, it’s much harder to get into these institutions than than to get good grades at the, in, at these institutions. I mean, we’ve had grade inflation, et cetera. So basically you take one of these students where the test scores look kind of low, you know, maybe it’s just a 1200 SAT, and yeah, that student is still gonna be fine. They’re going to be at virtually no risk of running into academic problems at the institution. So the SAT is really not necessary. The, it’s, it is something that causes a lot of stress for students. It’s something that students have to pay for. You know, the, the, the, the entity that would really profit from the reintroduction of standardized testing requirements is the organizations that write the tests and the organizations that the collect the money from applicants who are paying for the tests. So there’s some, uh, money to be made off of standardized testing, but it doesn’t really help students and it doesn’t really help institutions.
AW | 27:52 – Jacob Vigdor is a professor of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. Jake, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JV | 28:01 – You bet, Alex. Thanks for having me.
AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Tower of Power, Sam Cooke and Jamiroquai. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Jacob Vigdor: College Admissions Quandries appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Most of us have never been there but according to a quick Google search, some of the things you might see at the bottom of the ocean include sea spiders, tube worms, and something called a blob sculpin. Add to that list: heavy equipment for mining rare earth minerals like cobalt and manganese. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, about deep-sea mining. We learn about this segment of the extraction industry, consider the environmental hazards, and examine why it’s largely unnecessary. We also take a look at the promise of growing rare minerals like perovskites in laboratories, and discuss the recent Sunnylands Climate Agreement between the U.S. and China.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Daniel Kammen (DK) | 00:25 – Cobalt as mined today, either in the Congo, where most, most of it comes from, or um, from the seabed, is hugely problematic and damaging.
Narrator | 00:37 – Most of us have never been there but according to a quick Google search, some of the things you might see at the bottom of the ocean include sea spiders, tube worms, and something called a blob sculpin. Add to that list: heavy equipment for mining rare earth minerals like cobalt and manganese. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, about deep-sea mining. We learn about this segment of the extraction industry, consider the environmental hazards, and examine why it’s largely unnecessary. We also take a look at the promise of growing rare minerals like perovskites in laboratories, and discuss the recent Sunnylands Climate Agreement between the U.S. and China.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:46 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Daniel Kammen. He is a Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley, and a former science envoy for President Obama. Dan, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Daniel Kammen (DK) | 01:57 – Thanks for having me back on. I really appreciate it.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:00 – Always a pleasure. I wanted you to summarize the white paper that you presented at COP 28 in Dubai. It was entitled, “Next Generation EV Batteries Eliminate the Need for Deep-Sea Mining.” So first, what is deep-sea mining and what’s the problem that it presents?
Daniel Kammen (DK) | 02:19 – So, deep-seabed mining is in my view, kind of one of the scariest crossover issues between the old energy economy and the new energy economy. And by that what I mean is that we’ve known about seabed mining for a long time. In fact, Howard Hughes was, one of the many ways he was famous was he constructed a boat, the Glomar Explorer that was ostensibly supposed to be harvesting these nodules of rare earth metals, manganese, cobalt, a variety of things from the sea floor. And they’re about the size of tennis balls or softballs. They grow very slowly, um, at low temperature and, and, and high pressure and he had this boat that was designed to go do that. But in fact, we now know decades later that the Glomar Explorer was actually a CIA front and it was a front to go and try to pull a sunken Russian submarine off the bottom of the ocean.
AW | 03:15 – This was not in the white paper, but this is very interesting
DK | 03:18 – It is very interesting. That’s right. So, so this is an example of deep-seabed harvesting being a front for essentially cold war. So we’ve known about there are these nodules on the ocean bed floor. They grow a fraction of a millimeter a year in size. They accumulate these, these materials. And the issue that intersects with the new energy economy is that with the rise of the need for materials for solar panels and in particular batteries for electric vehicles, a number of companies have been launched. They have names like the Metals Company, impossible Metals, and others arguing that we should be harvesting these materials from the seabed floor and we should be doing this because of our green consciousness, because we need these materials for the green energy economy. We need to get off fossil fuels. And so there is this weird dialogue going on where companies that are basically trying to strip the seabed floor the least understood, the least explored environment on earth. And arguably we know more about the dark side of the moon than the bottom of the ocean. Amazingly, they are, they, they’re saying we need them to harvest these materials. And while it’s true, we need materials, um, we hear about lithium and cobalt all the time. But, um, manganese and, um, germanium, other materials are important as well for the clean energy economy. What we don’t need is to destroy ecosystems to get them. And there are many reasons for that. While the demand for these rare earth materials, and by the way, they’re no longer, they’re, they’re neither rare nor earth, they happen to be metals on, um, you know, whether we mine them from the seabed floor or whether we mine them from traditional mines, or actually people are not talking about going to asteroids to get them in large numbers. These materials are important. However, we waste so much material today. We do not recycle. We are not doing a very thoughtful job at all in looking at lower impact materials to be the hubs of our batteries for our electric vehicles and elsewhere. And so that’s the backstory. Um, the one other element is that there is a organization based in Kingston, Jamaica called the International Seabed Authority. There self-appointed mission is to manage seabed resources. But unfortunately what they have proven to be now several years running is essentially a yes shop that is approving seabed mining permits whenever a country or a company tries to push for it. And so we have a really unfortunate sequence of events to quote Lemony Snicket, where a company is using the cover of Green Energy to promote something which is almost certainly hugely destructive in terms of strip mining. This very fragile ecosystem producing plumes of dust that falls back on the ocean floor that affects carbon sequestration. It affects very, very vulnerable deep water ecosystems including those so-called black smokers. Those things you see on National Geographic where we have these deep-sea hydrothermal vents covered with unusual life forms. All of those are at risk if we basically give permits for companies to put huge vacuum cleaners several kilometers down on the ocean floor and suck up all these materials. So the argument is one, do we need it? And this paper I’ll describe in a second, highlights the fact that we do not need it for several reasons. And two, how are we licensing a global collective resource, the international seabed waters for the profit of a few companies when in fact, A, we don’t need it. And B, the damage to ecosystems and the damage to the ocean is likely to be horrific.
AW | 07:21 – So from a business standpoint, can you maybe summarize the evolution of both deep-sea and land mining and how evolved those companies are in terms of market cap and, and the alternative to deep-sea mining is viable? Maybe you can kind of give us an idea of how viable that is.
DK | 07:39 – Right. So the companies that are proposing we do this strip mining of the ocean floor are new companies. They’re trying to leverage and take advantage of some of the oil and gas deep-seabed exploration and mining technologies. And they are cl they are touting a market in the billions of dollars, but very high capital costs because mining the ocean floor is not simple. It’s also out of sight, out of mine. So they know if they get permits, they will likely be able to go ahead for a long way before we discover what the damages have been. And that’s the deep-seabed angle. The other angle, of course, is traditional mining. And the claim from these new companies is, look, traditional mining is bad for human rights. We know that’s the case in many parts of the world, including Congo, which is a key source of cobalt. In fact, 70% of the world’s cobalt currently comes from the Congo. I’ve been down in some of those mines. There are issues of child labor, there’s environmental damages. And so traditional mining is, no, nothing delightful, but it’s an area where there is investment today. And it’s in also an area where better oversight, better certification, like we do for many products, um, like we’ve done for coffee and wine and various things, could play a not ideal, but a better role.
AW | 08:56 – Because it’s right there in front of us. At least it’s not as obscured as the dark side of the moon, let’s say.
DK | 09:01 – That is correct. Right. And so the paper that we released and that I spoke extensively on at the COP 28, the conference of the parties, the climate meeting in Dubai in uh, December, essentially said, look, there’s many aspects of this. One is to say we would like to see better certification of efforts to look at the Sea floor. In fact, what we called for was a moratorium on all exploration. And we now have 34 countries, including France and Germany and Mexico and many others saying we are not gonna permit deep-seabed mining and we call for a global moratorium. So that’s a good start. Um, but what we did in the paper was try to highlight the fact that this is not a environmentalist doom and gloom story where we’re saying, yes, we want clean energy, but no, we don’t want you to go get the materials for it. Far from it, what we highlighted in the paper was one interesting technological change, which five years ago was laboratory chemistry. And today is a key feature of battery technology and that is the current world leading battery technology for electric vehicles, for our cell phones, for our laptops is so-called lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries have lithium in them by name. Uh, they also have cobalt in them. And cobalt is exceedingly problematic for environmental and human rights reasons. In fact, it’s probably the worst conflict material on the planet today surpassing Leonardo DiCaprio’s blood diamond and other, you know, key stories in the past. So cobalt is in the crosshairs. What’s interesting about this new material lithium phosphate is that it does not involve cobalt. So it still involves lithium. Um, and lithium looked like it was a challenge supply side 10 years ago. Now with a little bit of exploration, we’ve discovered there’s lots of lithium in lots of places, not just in China and Bolivia, but in California, salt and Sea, in inland aquifers, et cetera, et cetera. So lithium was a crisis material. Now that crisis has gone away, but cobalt is, and what’s interesting about the pathway from laboratory chemistry of making better batteries without cobalt, these lithium phosphate batteries, is that over the last five years, lithium phosphate has gone from just a few percent of the world battery market to almost 20% led by companies like VW and Tesla that have announced the end of the use of cobalt and a switch over to lithium phosphate. And so in the article we really highlighted how little effort it took to come up with a sus a much more sustainable human rights and environmentally positive choice that didn’t just idle and sit around in research laboratories looking for a market. It was in fact very quickly up, uh, taken up so that now roughly 20% of the market is, is moved over to lithium pho phosphate. And we would like to see efforts like this becoming the lens through which we look at things like deep-sea mining to say, Hey, we don’t need that particular source of cobalt from the Sea floor. There’s not enough of it to matter and these other alternatives are cheaper and they’re better for what we all claim to want to do. And that is to make the energy transition a just transition where we don’t just go from hydrocarbon and fossil fuels to clean energy, but we do so in a way that supports human rights, environmental rights. And that argument as taking off. I mean, I got tons and tons of requests for comments for press events and we again, we’re seeing major electric vehicle manufacturers making that switch today.
(Music Break) | 13:07
AW | 13:38 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Dan Camon. He is a Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley. So Dan, we were talking about these deep-sea mining materials, these minerals. You mentioned how lithium ion batteries became less scarce and less of an environmental disaster over the last few years. Is it possible that that could also happen with cobalt or we have to find alternatives to it?
DK | 14:03 – No, I, I don’t think so. I think actually the point of our paper is that it didn’t take much research, both chemistry laboratory work and materials marketing for electric vehicles to recognize that if cobalt is the real problem element of today, that we can switch away from it with already known battery materials and actually lithium phosphate batteries, while they have a little less charge capacity, so energy storage capacity than lithium ion, they have other benefits in terms of their life cycle, the lack of this kind of heating overheating issue that we’ve seen, um, in lithium ion batteries, which is why you’re not supposed to put them into your luggage, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think there is a really positive path here.
AW | 14:48 – But is there a chance that cobalt all of a sudden becomes less scarce, I guess is the question?
DK | 14:54 – There is a chance, but, but the point is that cobalt as mined today, either in the Congo where most of it comes from or um, from the seabed, is hugely problematic and damaging. And so we might discover large supplies of cobalt elsewhere, such as in the mining tailings, meaning the waste materials from copper and other mines that has not yet been discovered. But what’s interesting is that it does not appear that cobalt is likely to be needed at all because the switch to other materials, phosphate phosphorus is very common. Lithium has gone from scarce to common. So there are much more sustainable materials available that give us essentially the same battery performance. And so there are certain materials like lithium where 10 years ago people thought this was going to be the true bottleneck with only China and Bolivia really having a significant supply. But we’ve now seen because of the interest in lithium, there’s been a real push to find in other places Chile just nationalized their lithium mines because they wanted to have higher quality oversight than they thought the companies could do. And in particular, phosphate is very common material. We use it for fertilizers, we access it in a whole variety of both mineral and bio waste areas. And so here’s an opportunity to solve a crisis before it happens in the sense that we do not need to grow massively the, the market for cobalt beyond where it is today. We can actually substitute it out of our supply chains and work towards what I would call this just transition, where we don’t want to abandon countries like the Congo. I work extensively there, but we want to work with them to access the materials that we do need, but in a way that respects both the environment and human rights. And as of right now, cobalt does not meet those criteria, whereas phosphorus, uh, phosphate does.
AW | 17:00 – So are there other angles we could approach this problem with Dan?
DK | 17:04 – Yeah, so there’s, there’s two routes. One is to find non-conflict sources of cobalt, and the other is to substitute away from cobalt. So far finding non-conflict sources of cobalt has not proven successful, largely because cobalt mining in the Congo is such big business and it’s big business where the US and China are competing. And so there’s a geopolitical angle and neither side wants to back away and sort of give the cobalt market to the other. So we could be harvesting cobalt from recycled materials, old cell phones, old electronics, et cetera, et cetera. Or we could be finding other sources. And so far we’ve not been successful in finding other sources of cobalt. However, the good news is that we are finding through the use of lithium phosphate, it may be actually easier to simply cut cobalt out of the supply chains almost entirely. For me, the challenge is no longer the material science. We know that works. We have big companies like VW and Tesla doing. So the real issue to me is that one does not want to abandon the Congo and say, well, you are a source of conflict materials, therefore we won’t work with you. The real issue is how can we assist mining and other efforts in these challenging parts of the world so that we pay a attention and maybe even a premium for non-conflict materials. Probably not cobalt, we probably don’t need it, but there’s other materials, germanium, tellurium, other things that are likely to be found in the same mines. And the question is, can we mine these with a much closer eye on human environmental rights than in the past?
AW | 18:49 – You mentioned blood diamonds earlier. I know that one of the emerging trends in the diamond industry are lab grown diamonds. Do you see a future where some of these battery materials can be grown in labs?
DK | 19:03 – I do. In fact, there’s a wonderful direct analogy and that is that one of the fastest evolving areas of solar cell technology is a material called a perovskites. And a perovskite is an entirely artificial material. So the only perovskite that exist today are manufactured in laboratories. We have a laboratory here at UC Berkeley, it’s called the Molecular Foundry. It’s a joint between uc, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And they can, they can manufacture perovskites. And so the interesting, you know, probably Nobel Prize worthy chemistry is can we come up with materials perovskites that are good solar technologies that themselves are only made up from relatively simple materials, lithium and other carbon, other light materials that are relatively easy to manufacture. And that would be an equivalent of going from conflict or blood diamonds to doing these lab grown. Because after all, a diamond is just pressurized carbon. You can actually make diamond in a little machine in your hand. It’s basically a little anvil. You turn a screw just with your hand pressure. It focuses that, um, that pressure down in a very small area and you can create tiny little diamonds yourself. And so there is an interesting example and the analogy between going to lab grown diamonds and these perovskites is actually a very direct analogy,
(Music Break) | 20:32
AW | 21:28 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Daniel Kammen. He is a Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley. So Dan, why don’t you give us the feedback that you received. We’ve kind of heard what your mission was to change hearts and minds over there. Was it mission accomplished? Give us your feeling on this issue and how it was received in Dubai.
DK | 21:50 – So I think with all environmental conflicts, you never feel like you’ve actually fully succeeded. You feel like the, the reward for good work is just ongoing vigilance. And so in the case of trying to work with manufacturers and researchers around the transition away from cobalt in batteries that we do need, one of the really heartening features is that since the climate meeting in December, um, we’ve seen a number of companies, some very significant like VW and now it appears Toyota saying they are going to move away from lithium ion, which involves cobalt to lithium phosphate, which does not. And I have no idea to what degree our report or press interviews or basic lab science played a role. But I’d like to think that that package of thinking that says we can be intentional about the materials we choose and one of our metrics can, and in my own personal view, should be based around the environmental and the human rights, higher quality materials. And so I, I think this report played a role. There’s a lot more work to go and I think that we’re going to find there’s other materials coming where we’re going to discover other sorts of challenges and that this is a recipe for thinking sustainability more than it is like a one-shot victory.
AW | 23:11 -You were asked by grist to grade COP and you gave it an incomplete because you said that the US-China Sunnylands agreement could reset the international climate investment and progress effort. Why don’t you explain what the Sunnylands agreement is and why it gives you hope?
DK | 23:28 – So the process of the US and China thinking hard about climate issues actually has a significant backstory. It goes back before the COP 21 meeting in Paris. And it came out of a really important dialogue between President Xi and President Obama when they agreed to a deal in 2014 that I would say opened the way for the positive outcomes of COP 21 in Paris. And that agreement was that the US and China should each reduce their emissions. China agreed to become carbon neutral in 2060, which in my view is significantly too late. And the US agreed to become carbon neutral at some point, but to dramatically cut emissions by a third by 2030. Even though we’ve gone from President Obama to Mr. Trump and now to President Biden, we have had a process where the US through the drop in price for clean energy, this new inflation reduction act are actually doing fairly well. Not as well as I would like, but the US is making significant progress. China too is making progress. China is the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries for electric vehicles. But China has not moved their carbon neutrality date forward. It still remains 2060, whereas President Biden has committed the US to a 2045 date. And that is in fact where we need these numbers to be. So all of that’s backstory to a meeting that was held between the chief US Climate negotiator, special presidential envoy for climate or spec. John Carey, my former boss at the State Department when I was signed envoy, and he was Secretary of State and Xi Jhu, his Chinese counterpart in November in central California at a very cleverly located place called Sunnylands. I think they worked hard to find that they came up with an agreement that the US and China need to work together. We have our differences around human rights and Uyghurs and around the wording and the Inflation Reduction Act. But the US and China agreed to again, work together. And the core of the agreement was that the globe should triple the amount of renewable energy installed by 2030. Right now, China is close to being on pace for that the US is not, and much of the rest of the world is quite far away. In fact, my lab just sent off a paper last week quantifying that China is actually closest to meeting this target, but no one’s really on pace for it. Now, if the Sunny Lands agreement is made serious, meaning the US and China put money into not only their own decarbonization at home like the US has done in the Inflation reduction Act, but I think more importantly the US and China work together to finance decarbonization in Africa, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, something we both could do that would be monumental. And what was exciting to me was the Sunnylands agreement was announced just a week before the Climate Conference in Dubai. They announced in San Francisco at the Asia Pacific Summit. But what was disappointing to me was that neither President Xi nor President Biden showed up at Dubai to say at COP 28, this is our new North Star, this is our new direction and we’re going to make it happen. Both of them decided that they had done enough. They met in person in San Francisco that was non-trivial. Um, but you know, leaders around the world need to know that the two biggest economies and the two biggest oil and gas consumers are on the same page in terms of advancing this agenda. And that message did not happen. That’s why I gave in particular the US and incomplete because I think we said the right words, but now we have to follow through and I think we will. Um, we do have a bit of an election coming up this year, which is going to be fairly important in this regard. But I believe that if democracy wins in November, 2024 in the US that climate will also be a winner.
AW | 27:54 – Daniel Kammen is a professor of energy at uc, Berkeley. Dan, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
DK | 28:01 – Oh, it’s my pleasure to be on. Thank you so much.
AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Pink Floyd, Ella Fitzgerald and Talking Heads. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Daniel Kammen: The Perils of Deep-Sea Mining appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
The self-proclaimed “greatest country on earth” is in an unfathomable position. Heavily favored to win the Republican Party’s nomination for president is a man found guilty of rape and fraud in civil courts and facing nearly 100 felony counts in criminal proceedings. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Darren Samuelsohn, a longtime Washington reporter from The Messenger who will give us a useful overview of the 44th President’s various and sundry legal wranglings. We sort through the labyrinthian timelines of the cases, discuss how these trials paradoxically seem to solidify Trump’s support among Republicans, and look at how the complex web of a former president’s criminality has stretched all three branches of the United States Government paper thin.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Darren Samuelsohn (DS) | 00:14 – Where do these criminal trials factor into people’s attentions? The political discourse in the, in the general election campaign, I mean, we never experienced anything like this as a country before.
Narrator | 00:27 – The self-proclaimed “greatest country on earth” is in an unfathomable position. Heavily favored to win the Republican Party’s nomination for president is a man found guilty of rape and fraud in civil courts and facing nearly 100 felony counts in criminal proceedings. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Darren Samuelsohn, a longtime Washington reporter from The Messenger who will give us a useful overview of the 44th President’s various and sundry legal wranglings. We sort through the labyrinthian timelines of the cases, discuss how these trials paradoxically seem to solidify Trump’s support among Republicans, and look at how the complex web of a former president’s criminality has stretched all three branches of the United States Government paper thin.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:25 I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Darren Samuelsohn. He is a senior editor at The Messenger. Darren, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Darren Samuelsohn (DS) | 01:37 – Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:38 – It’s a pleasure to have you covering the 44th President’s legal machinations as a political junkie. I’m sure you didn’t see yourself 10, 15 years ago being up in the weeds trying to understand many, many legal terms, and that’s an expert like yourself. You can imagine how consumers of media are confused. And so that’s why I wanted to have you on to try to break down some of Trump’s legal troubles right now. And just trying to track the Trump criminal cases. We have the federal election interference case. We have the Georgia election interference case. We have the classified documents case, and then the hush money case. These are the criminal cases. And then there’s also the civil case with E. Jean Carroll. And is there another one that I’m forgetting?
Darren Samuelsohn (DS) | 02:29 – There’s definitely one other big one. That’s the civil trial in New York City, uh, where Trump’s company is on the line, right? Uh, with, uh, you know, a trial that took place, basically the last quarter of 2023 was occupied by Donald Trump showing up in court, day in and day out in, in Manhattan. Uh, where soon gonna have that case kicked to the judge where he’ll be issuing his ruling. Uh, there are appeals ongoing as well, so this is not gonna be over anytime soon.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:54 -So that’s six cases, right?
DS | 02:56 – That’s at least six. And there’s, there, there are other civil cases also, uh, that are happening. And then myriad tangential things to everything that we just discussed, because now the United States Supreme Court is involved on a ton of really big, high profile, big questions that connect directly to everything that you just laid out there. So, I mean, to your original point, Donald Trump, yeah, he’s testing the system to no end, and it’s happening every day. It’s been that way ever since. He, you know, took the escalator down, uh, and announced his run for president in 2015. So, I mean, this has been building and building and building over, over many, many years, going back. And I’ve been covering this basically since, since then. If not, you know, earlier than that. I mean, you know, while Trump was president, that was the big question was would this ever get to Trump? And covering, you know, covering Manafort or covering Roger Stone, you know, that was always, the stories were always like, well, how can this lead to federal prosecutors going after Donald Trump or state prosecutors going after Trump with a huge question that was looming that goes all the way back to Watergate, which is, can a sitting president of the United States be criminally charged? And that, you know, obviously in the clin, excuse me, in the Nixon, uh, in Nixon case, it never quite reached that point because he resigned, uh, amidst impeachment hearings and the writing on the wall that he was going to be toast as president. And then, you know, the next time we really truly see this, I guess it’s, it happens again in the Reagan administration on Iran Contra, and then, um, comes back again during Clinton, uh, with Paula Jones and, and Monica Lewinsky. Um, but again, Donald Trump truly, you know, becomes the first post president to face all of these criminal charges that we’re talking about now. And, I guess I have a unique background covering the civil cases and then the first go around of criminal cases involving Trump’s people that here we sit now and, and yeah, it’s a ton. It’s way, way, way more than what I was dealing with when I was at Politico covering the Mueller investigation. I mean, as you point out, there’s just a lot of material happening on any given day and it requires a lot of windows on my screen open at all times to be seeing what’s happening because, yeah, it’s hard to keep track of all this stuff. We’ve got a pretty good system in place to do that.
AW | 05:06 – So let’s start with a federal election interference case, which is one of the two criminal cases that Special Counsel Jack Smith is overseeing along with the classified documents case. Give us a quick executive summary of the federal election interference case, if you can Darren.
DS | 05:24 – Absolutely. Sure. So the federal election interference case brought last summer charges only Donald Trump with, uh, basically, uh, obstruction of the 2020 election. Forgive me, I’m blanking right now on exactly the, the specific crimes, but there’s, there’s a whole host accounts against him. There are several unindicted co-conspirators, people who Trump is accused of working with Rudy Giuliani as widely seen as one. John Eastman is another, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark. Um, a lot of the names that overlap with the Georgia State charges that are also playing out. What’s most important, I guess, about the, the federal case is it’s the one that is slated for trial, earliest currently in March of this year. So less than two months from now, is, is the current schedule for that trial. That’s the one taking place in Washington, DC in front of a jury of Washington DC residents. Trump’s lawyers have already acknowledged they expect him to be convicted in this case. So in some respects, it’s really a question of whether this trial even happens. It sure looks like it will happen. There are some hurdles right now that we are dealing, that we’re watching play out in terms of when the case will actually get to trial. That is literally what’s going on right now before the US Court of Appeals, where there’s this big question of presidential immunity, which Trump is using as a claim to try and knock this case out before it can even go to trial. This is a question that could very well get to the United States Supreme Court. And in fact, Jack Smith already asked the United States Supreme Court to take the case, and the Supreme Court said, “No, follow the proper process,” which is to go through the United States Court of Appeals here in Washington first. And we just had oral arguments on this. This is the arguments where Trump’s lawyers were, were pressed to, to say whether Trump could even be charged if he had ordered up his seal Team six to assassinate a political rival. And, Trump’s lawyers said, yeah, if it’s a presidential act, that would be okay, as well as selling pardons was another hypothetical that they, that they tossed at Trump’s lawyers. And, and likewise, Trump’s lawyers argued that he could, this similar argument to what Trump was saying way back in the 2016 campaign, albeit a little bit less on the legal front, but when he was saying he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, this claim is one that he’s been making over and over, that he’s immune from crimes when he is president. And the way this looks though is, is, uh, the Court of appeals and the Supreme Court are probably going to say, no, that’s not right, Donald Trump, you do not have absolute immunity, uh, as president. They will cite most likely a very important Supreme Court case from the Nixon, uh, era, uh, when Nixon was trying to shield the, the White House tapes from the impeachment investigators back then and the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision against Richard Nixon, which ultimately, you know, helps propel him toward resignation. Says, no, President Nixon, you cannot be using executive privilege to, to, to keep the, uh, the tapes from the Watergate. Prosecutors. Very likely we’re going to hear the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeals might be the final say on this. Uh, no, that will kick it back to Judge Chutkan, who is the federal judge overseeing this trial. And then away we go. It might not happen in March, like it’s currently scheduled. It might happen in April or May, depending on how much more time these this particular fight draws out. But it’s likely we’re going to see a trial for Donald Trump. And that’s why it’s so important. It’s, it seems like it’s the one trial, uh, that we most likely will have. And if, and if it doesn’t happen, then one of these other cases that we’re talking about, most likely, the, the New York case, the Stormy Daniels hush money case, which is a state case, which is also scheduled for the end of March of this year, is sitting there waiting. And, and basically it’s kind of like running the option in football. One of these two cases is going to happen. It’s a question of whether, you know, it’ll be this, this federal case will happen, or if not, I think then the Stormy Daniels, uh, New York case will then take, will go at in March. And it’s, this is a question of like resources. Like Donald Trump can’t be in two places at one time. He’s a criminal defendant. And so that’s why you’ve got these four cases, they’re all sort of lined up here in 2024. And again, it’s a matter of which case will occupy Donald Trump’s time in the month of March, which of course overlaps with all of the primary voting when he is very likely to be, uh, cementing his role as the Republican nominee for president. And this is why Trump’s legal strategy has been so intertwined politically with his legal strategy to delay these cases and slow this whole process down as much as he possibly can. And the point there is to, again, try and slow walk any of these steps that we’re talking about so that he, you know, if he’s elected president on November 4th, 5th of 2024 immediately begins the transition from Joe Biden to, to Donald Trump. And every indication is that he brings in a justice department that, you know, not only makes these cases, the federal cases, let’s be importantly clear about that the federal cases, the two cases would, would vanish all manner of political, uh, turmoil would come from doing that. Or if again, if he doesn’t think that constitutionally that is valid, he could even take office, step down for a moment, let his vice president step in, who could then pardon himself, pardon Trump as president, then Trump could come back as president. It’s a West wing scenario, if there ever was one in terms of the television show.
AW | 10:43 – Or more like the Kremlin, when Putin overrode that law that prohibited him for running for a third term or something, he was like, “Oh, I’ll just be vice president for four years!” And then he took over again. One sees Trump running basically to get out of jail. “I don’t want to go to prison, so I want to be president.”
DS | 11:05 – Yeah, it’s absolutely part and parcel. I mean, he’s running for president. I mean, in some respects, the cases are helping him dramatically. I mean, he has cemented his role as the Republican nominee. He’s been raising money by his court off of his court appearances. I mean, you look at the campaign emails that come out day in and day out, that that are, you know, sent to his followers. They are asking for money to help with his legal defense, to defend him against, uh, the Biden administration. Def defend him against his opponent. I mean, again his lawyers were arguing in court as recently as, uh, just the last couple of days in federal appeals court, um, on the immunity question. You know, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re raising the prospect that this is going to lead to tit for tat recriminations. And again, Trump is talking openly about prosecuting Joe Biden, uh, Barack Obama, you know, all manner of people if he comes back into office. Not to mention, you know, the Jack Smiths of the world, the people who are currently prosecuting or investigating him, Trump is vowing to go ahead and go after those folks. Um, which, you know, there are all manner of difficult challenges in trying to pull that off, uh, in terms of actually getting judges to agree. That said, you can really ruin someone’s life by just causing an investigation of them or, uh, you know, bringing charges against them. So yeah, this is like where we are in terms of politics in 2024. It’s important to note, you know, to bring up the two state cases, the New York case and the Georgia case, uh, as president of the United States. Trump can’t pardon himself from those cases. He can’t order his Justice Department to shut those cases down because those are state driven cases. In the event of a conviction in New York, it’s unlikely Trump will see jail time is what you often hear on the hush money case, and even if he was convicted in a New York case, but then again, it’s up to the judge to decide what to do there in terms of a penalty. And then in Georgia, same thing, uh, you know, convicted there. He would be, again, facing j facing jail time in state penitentiary in Georgia. However, if he’s elected president, it’s important to note there is something called the supremacy clause, the United States Constitution, which likely would become a very, we would all become very familiar with that in terms of, uh, legal, uh, expertise. Trump’s lawyers have already invoked it to say that, you know, if Trump is the duly elected president of the United States, uh, that overrides anything else. And so if the voters have decided to make Trump president, uh, that would almost what the argument would be that Trump would suspend or try and get the Georgia Courts to suspend that case for the duration of time while he’s a president, which means that after he is president, you know, assuming his term ended in, in January, 2029, we haven’t seen a change to the Constitution that allows Trump to serve a third term or fourth term or a fifth term, that, you know, he might have to, in 2029, report to, uh, a Georgia penitentiary if he had been convicted at that point,
(Music Break) | 14:03
AW | 14:55 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Darren Samuelsohn. He is a senior editor at The Messenger. So Darren going through Trump’s trials, I think it’s pretty stunning that his political fortunes seem to go up during these trials when he’s not even pretending that he didn’t do these things.
DS | 15:16 – Again, the Republican base can win Donald Trump the nomination for the presidency. It does not win in the general election. And that’s where, again, so often in American history and American politics, you win the nomination by playing to the, to the base of your party, and then you have to tack back to the middle in order to, to capture those, uh, you know, the general election voters who actually can win you, uh, a presidential election. And obviously Donald Trump was successful in 2016 and finding, uh, a lot of voters who didn’t, who didn’t vote and who didn’t turn out. Um, in states that traditionally have gone democratic, uh, industrial heartland states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, uh, all states that then Joe Biden would flip back in 2020, uh, into the Democrats column. And so, you know, that is really what I think we will we’ll be watching closely is like, where do these criminal trials factor into, you know, people’s attentions, the political discourse in the, in the general election campaign. I mean, we never experienced anything like this as a country before. And does that turn people off? Does that excite people to come out, you know, in the, I mean, you’re going to hear from the Biden campaign over and over, you know, this is about democracy and protecting democracy, um, which was a winning line in 2020 that they were able to use to, to secure the presidency.
AW | 16:30 – Are they all scheduled to be coming to trial in 2024 Darren?
DS | 16:35 – Yeah, so the answer to that is, I mean, check back with me every week because it’s constantly changing. I mean, if standing here right now, you know, you know, the moment that you and I are talking, there are three criminal trials on the books scheduled, and that’s, as a legal reporter editor, you have to be very careful to just talk about what’s on the books that’s scheduled. Three cases are scheduled, the fourth one, and those three are again, the, the criminal trial in DC March 4th, scheduled to begin. Then March 24th, fifth, sixth is when the Stormy Daniels New York case is scheduled to begin. I believe May 20th is when the Alene Cannon Florida case is scheduled to begin. And then the last one, the Georgia case is currently, there’s a proposal to schedule it for August of this year in Georgia. That’s a proposal from Fannie Willis that the judge has yet to rule on. Um, let’s just take those at their face value for a second. And I say that because I don’t think all four will happen. I think maybe one of these four will ultimately happen.
AW | 17:33 – Before the election?
DS | 17:34 – Yes, before the election. I think that the, again, the, I think that Jack Smith case will happen before the election. The, the, the Washington DC case on 2020 will happen before the election.
AW | 17:44 – You mentioned the Aileen Cannon case, even though that is also a Jack Smith case, the classified documents in Mar-a-Lago, which seems like a pretty cut and dried case, but as you and I are both thinking of it as the Alene Cannon case, because this is a judge who seemed pretty underqualified when she got to the federal bench and seems by all indications to be in the bag for Trump. And that seems to be his best bet is that this judge is going to come through for him, which, you know, we were talking about, we’ve never seen anything like this in the political realm, having a presidential candidate be mired in so many legal cases, concomitantly, but it’s also really tests our legal system when we, when we’re starting to think about who’s calling the strikes and balls, whether these people are legitimately placed in their roles or whether they have a, apolitical agenda. It’s stressing all three branches of our government simultaneously.
DS | 18:43 – Yeah. Stressing all three branches, stressing, you know, the, the fourth estate as well, for sure. I mean, I would say on Alien can, I mean, she is the judge overseeing the case. She’s not the one who gets to decide whether Trump is guilty or, or not guilty, though she could, don’t get me wrong, she could rule on Trump’s motions to dismiss and dismiss the case of, and if she did that Trump, excuse me, Jack Smith, I’m sure would appeal to the 11th Circuit US Court of Appeals, which overruled, don’t rem don’t forget, uh, Aileen Cannon in an earlier Mar-a-Lago, the special master situation that she set up at the end of last year after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, uh, to get the documents, that they have now since charged Trump with mishandling. So Judge Can, has come in for a lot of incoming fire for, for handling of that case. And now obviously on a number of pretrial motions and, and how she’s even reprimanded Jack Smith on, on a number of occasions for things. You know, the big question there is when will that trial actually take place? I mean, if, let’s just kind of again, think through if the March trial gets pushed back a little bit in D.C.
AW | 19:44 The federal election interference case that’s supposed to take place on March 4th, is that what you’re referring to?
DS | 19:49 – Correct. That’s the one I’m referring to. Sorry, yeah. Sometimes I go into shorthand, but yeah, March 4th, that case will probably be delayed by a couple of weeks, months, maybe because of the appeals process playing out right now on this pretrial question. But once that trial gets put on the books, I think that one will again, take precedent over the, the Eileen Cannon case, which is also already in, in some degree of uncertainty, because it gets tricky here, but we’re dealing with classified documents that the federal government that Trump is charged with taking the federal government may not want those introduced as evidence in the course of the trial because of, um, the classified nature of those materials. And there’s a whole…
AW | 20:28 – Long redaction process.
DS | 20:30 – Correct. Yeah. So enough to say that it’s such a complicated case with so much complicated evidence that, again, Judge Cannon doesn’t get to make the, the ultimate verdict. It’s the jury in South Florida that will decide if Trump’s guilty or innocent. And I think that just, there’s so much related to the classified nature of these materials and the back and forth, not to mention, uh, there’s been a lot of infighting. The cases currently in, in all respects is on sort of a, a lot of, uh, it’s sort of on hold right now, uh, for a variety of reasons. And there’s a big hearing coming up on, I believe it’s March 1st before Judge Cannon, and that’s when she’s going to announce when the trial will really happen. So that’s why I also will say like, check back in March 1st because we’ll learn from Cannon at that point, whether she’s going to go ahead. And by then, we’ll also know, hopefully from the Supreme Court and the appeals court, what’s going on in that Washington DC federal case, because if they move that case back a little bit, we know that that case is going to take about two months to present in terms of the prosecution and the defense. And you just have to, again, remember, you can’t have Trump on two trials in two places at one time. So Canon will adjust her schedule based on that, which means she probably pushes her case back to some period in the, in the summer, which then starts to overlap really directly with the campaign season at a level where you could see Canon saying, okay, we move this case to after the election.
AW | 21:49 – That’s just the federal criminal cases. So let’s start with the civil case. So the E. Jean Carroll rape case, that’s already been decided, right? It’s just a question of how much money he has to pay her or is, or, or, or is he appealing that
DS | 22:06 – So this is E. Jean Carroll trial starts on Tuesday, the 16th of January. This is his second defamation case. He was already found guilty of defamation once and then found, I can’t remember the dollar figure that was attached to it, but he’s already been ordered to pay her. He went out and continued to defame her after that.
AW | 22:24 – Oh, so they have another trial just on him doubling down on the defamation?
DS | 22:28 Correct. Okay.
AW | 22:49 – And then the New York fraud case?
DS | 22:51 – New York fraud case, uh, I mean, he’s already been found guilty there, so it’s not really a question of, um, will he be found guilty or not. It’s already happened. The judge found that way before the trial even started, which has kind of, uh, been interesting, and it’s really a matter of, again, how much will he be penalized and will he be banned from, uh, uh, business in New York forevermore, which is, you know, that goes right to the heart of what Donald Trump is all about. It’s, you know, it’s how he became who he became is, is his New York real estate business marketing, excuse me, uh, branding, empire golf courses, all the, all of it. So if he loses all of that in New York, obviously, uh, get ready for a long appeal process that will, that it’s already playing out. I mean, he’s already appealed, um, that earlier judge’s ruling. So the question there is just how much money, um, and is he banned? Does he get a sort of a New York death penalty for business purposes in Manhattan?
AW | 23:41 – And then moving on to the criminal cases, the, the Stormy Daniels hush money case seems to be the least harsh in terms of if he were found guilty, the penalties don’t seem as dire. Is that a fair characterization?
DS | 23:56 – That is a fair characterization. Yeah. I mean this is now bringing us back to 2015, 2016, which is kind of fascinating. This was a, a, a case that was investigated by the feds, and then they ultimately decided not to bring charges against Trump who was a, a sitting president while they were doing their investigation. So remember this, again, there’s a Justice Department protocols that say they can’t indict a sitting president while they’re in office. And so that’s why they remember they in, they did go ahead and indict Michael Cohen, who then flipped and pled guilty and testified against Trump, which is ultimately what propelled the Manhattan DA here to bring the charges against Trump all these years later. And hard to know. I mean, I think Manhattan jury, I mean, it just takes one person to, to hang that jury. And, um, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s going to be a very interesting, contentious case. And Trump will, you know, Trump has supporters in New York for sure. Interestingly though, I mean, remember going back to the Gene Carroll first defamation trial. I remember as they were talking through who the jurors were, there were some Trump fans on that jury who still voted, and found him guilty. So, you know, it again, depends on who the people are on that jury, which I’m sure is going to be a, a huge focus of Trump’s world, his legal team to, you know, try and find some Trump supporters to, for their, for their sake, get on that jury.
AW | 25:10 – And then we’ve kind of covered the classified documents and federal election interference case, but which one of those two do you think has more of a likelihood of finding Trump guilty?
DS | 25:22 – I mean, I’ll quote, you know, sources close to Trump world who told us and we reported, you know, two, three months ago, they’re expecting conviction and that they think their best chances at the Supreme Court
AW | 25:31 – In both cases.
DS | 25:32 – No, that’s just the Jack Smith. I’m sorry, that’s just the election interference case. I mean, I think the legal commentators of the world flipping to the Mar-a-Lago case say that one is a slam dunk as well. Conviction. But I’ll point out, and we have a, we published a story on this at, in the messenger, I want to say right after the, the charges were brought in, uh, the summer South. Florida’s an interesting place. It’s my hometown where I grew up and know very well. And, and they have a history of, of finding, uh, of acquitting, uh, public figures, um, whether it be sports stars, um, Miami Dolphin wide receiver, mark Duper, uh, overcame, I believe federal charges and, and was acquitted. Um, after his, uh, after a, a criminal case played out there, Jack Smith did decide to take the case down there. There was a big question of whether he would be charged Trump in Florida or Washington and Trump’s people were making clear arguments that it needed to be down in Florida, knowing full well they’d be in front of a jury, that would be a little bit better for them. It’s a question of whether it’s a Miami jury versus a Palm Beach jury.
AW | 26:32 I’ve been incorrectly calling it four federal criminal cases, but this Georgia election interference case is a state criminal case, and the confusing part is that there are other people who are…Out of the 18 indictments, there are people who’ve been trying to change locale, trying to move it to federal court, but that keeps getting shot down, right?
DS | 26:55 – Yeah. So basically two of the, actually I think it’s four or five of the defendants, um, are all in the moment trying to force the case into federal court and their portions of the federal case into federal court. And so far they have not had success. Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, is the one who has pushed this the furthest. He’s gotten it to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and three judge panel there, including, um, I believe one or two Trump appointees, uh, rejected him on that. I might be wrong on the Trump appointees part, but, um, it was a three judge panel in, in Atlanta said, no, this case needs to happen in state court. Um, Meadows is currently trying to take it up to the full panel of the 11th circuit, which would be in front of all of the judges of the 11th circuit. He could win there. It’s really hard to know just straight up.
AW | 27:44 – Well, you obviously have your hands full, and I appreciate you taking the time to walk us through all this and I hope you can come back later in the year as the election heats up and we can talk more about the political ramifications of all these cases, Darren Samuelsohn of The Messenger. Thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
DS | 28:01 – It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and The Clash. To read a transcript of this show, go to Sea ChangeRadio.com stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Darren Samuelsohn: Untangling Trump’s Trials appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
COP28, or the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, took place recently in the United Arab Emirates. With representation from nearly every country in the world, COP28 is the most important annual climate summit in the world. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk with Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News who went to Dubai to cover the conference. We discuss the goals of the summit, talk about the irony of holding an environmental conference in one of the world’s largest oil producing countries, and look at some of the key takeaways from COP28.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Bob Berwyn (BB) | 00:19 – These are serious people who politically represent island nations, and they’re saying, “you know, I’m not gonna sign my own death warrant.”
Narrator | 00:29 – COP 28 or the 28th meeting of the conference of the parties to the United Nations Climate Change Conference took place recently in the United Arab Emirates with representation from nearly every country in the world. COP 28 is the most important annual climate summit in the world. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk with Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News, who went to Dubai to cover the conference. We discussed the goals of the summit, talk about the irony of holding an environmental conference in one of the world’s largest oil producing countries, and look at some of the key takeaways from COP 28.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:37 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Bob Berwyn. Bob is a reporter at Inside Climate News. Bob, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Bob Berwyn (BB) | 01:46 – Hi, Alex. Thanks for having me, and it’s nice to be back.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:49 – I wanted to have you on again because you just got back from the COP 28 Climate Summit in Dubai, and I wanted to get your reactions to what it was like being there, and then break down some of the policies that were discussed as well. Why don’t you first walk us through what it’s like to go to a climate summit in one of the capitals of the fossil fuel industry?
BB | 02:13 – Yeah, so it’s the annual conference of parties under the United Nations framework on Climate Change Convention, which is not a phrase that really rolls off the tongue very easily. It’s really a bunch of jargon, and we’ve come to to call them cops. And this was the 28th COP and was held in Dubai from November 30th to December 12th, and as you said, in the heart of fossil fuel country. And it’s a very interesting and actually disconcerting juxtaposition of concepts, you know, on the one hand of trying to address a climate crisis that’s, that’s, uh, caused by burning fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas, primarily, I think 80% or close to 90% of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s heating the planet comes from burning fossil fuels. And so it’s clearly at the heart of the problem, yet it’s never been mentioned officially in a, in a COP document specifically by the term fossil fuels.
AW | 03:21 – Yes. How did that duck under previous 27 cops, without mentioning the phrase fossil fuels?
BB | 03:27 – Well, it’s because the, the oil barons and the carbon cowboys have had a big important seed at the table all along. It turns out. Um, but Dubai itself is just, you know, really a, a sort of a symbol of the, of the excess of this fossil fueled extreme capitalism that’s based on consumption, that’s actually driving the problem. That’s what’s causing this incredible surge of greenhouse gas emissions. 50% of all greenhouse gases in the air have been emitted since the first COP, um, you know, as compared to 50% in the 150 years before that. So, wait a minute, what’s going on here? Um, and, and you have a chief executive of a, of a major oil company as the sort of the presiding officer over the, over the proceedings, you know, and you walk down the street, you could rent Maseratis by the hour, and the lights are on all the time. It’s like Las Vegas on steroids. So, interesting choice for location.
AW | 04:40 – And what’s it like talking to some fellow environmental journalists, environmentalists, all these important leaders in the space are also not blind to what’s going on around them. Was there some kind of group dissonance, or were people acutely aware of what was going on?
BB | 04:58 – I think the people who were actually negotiating the technical diplomatic language stay really narrowly focused on climate. They were asked questions about, uh, things like, well, is what’s going on in Gaza, a distraction from the, from the climate talks? A high-level German diplomat was asked that question at a press conference and she said, no, we really stick to climate and, you know, that’s what we’re here to talk about and it doesn’t distract us. And somebody else asked the same question about the, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, whether that’s hindering or, you know, and again, the answer was it doesn’t really play out in these rooms, but it is part of the context of the, in the greater background. And there have been ongoing conflicts in the world also since the COP talks started, uh, at the beginning this year. You know, I, I heard people say, wow, with this new conflict, it’s going to make it harder than ever. So I look back at a list of wars, thanks Wikipedia, going back to 1990, and there’s been conflicts in the world every year and during that span that the cops have been going on, including in Europe and the Balkans, you know, for, so I’m not sure that this year is any different. We always think like, oh man, the crisis is worse. And, you know, and, and what that shows to me is that these two things are also related. I don’t think you’re ever going to find a, a real true just climate solution in a world that’s constantly at war that can’t share the resources that are there. How are you going to, you know, find a totally collaborative path on, on climate in a world like that? I don’t know. I don’t think you can.
AW | 06:51 – I’m sure Dubai put on an amazing spread for the guests who are attending the conference, and it was very comfortable. And, and you’re, you’re including the oil industry, so to speak, in, in the discussions, which is good on one hand, but it must really obscure some of the more urgent calls for climate action.
BB | 07:15 – I would say that it does. And, you know, to go back to your sort of initial comment about the setting, Dubai is also a place that is staffed by people from, it’s a service economy primarily, and then oil and gas as, as well, you know, that’s their primary, primary economic activity. And it’s staffed by people from Bangladesh and Pakistan, people who told me they want to go home, but they can’t because their village was wiped out by a flood caused or worsened by global warming from the emissions from the country that they’re now working in. You know, so climate refugees are working in this country that’s producing all these climate killing gases, and they rely on those people. That’s, that’s one of the reasons that people are talking increasingly, even at COP, at least among civil society, talking about the climate crisis in a colonial con uh, context, you know? And, uh, and that goes for looking forward too, when you, when you read about things like deals where a rich country buys several thousand square miles of forest in a poor African country and calls them carbon credits, that allows them to keep polluting, to keep burning fossil fuels that pollute because they’re protecting this forest that they bought and keeping the locals out, that kind of makes you question the whole thing too. Right?
AW | 08:53 – Absolutely. And I know, know, it’s an adjacent country in Qatar, but the, uh, world Cup was there recently, and I remember reading a lot of dreadful stories about these stadiums were being built by slave labor where they were bringing people in from very poor countries, keeping their passports, forcing them to live in, in subhuman conditions. And it was appalling. But, you know, it was one of those ends justifying the means where they had these beautiful stadiums and could sports wash their activities. And the COP 28 kind of reminded me of that in a lesser scale, but it is a form of greenwashing. I think you’ll agree.
BB | 09:33 – Yeah, it is. And I haven’t heard any similar allegations about Dubai, just, just to be clear. But at the same time, you know, my taxi driver who took me to the airport when I left, you know, has been working there for two years, and he said, well, they’re, they’re, they’re not letting me bring my family, and I only get to see my two daughters like twice a year. He was from Pakistan. And he said, it’s because they just want the workers, you know, they don’t want, they don’t want to have to provide housing for families of the workers. It’s just messed up. And to go back to something you said earlier about, you know, does this distract, I mean, there are a lot of people at COP who are there because they deeply believe that they can do something to save lives, to help people. And I saw and felt a lot of, a lot of emotion, and I saw a lot of tears. I talked to people who were crying when I talked to him, and I cried while I was there too. You know, people for whom the talks there are, are life and death, you know, it’s like, what’s going to happen to my country? What’s going to, what am I going to tell my daughter about what happened here and how it affects our future and where you live? And if you’ll still be even able to live here when you, when you’re as old as I am, it was deeply emotional at times. You know, I came across a table sponsored by the International Red Crescent and Red Cross, and they had built a table out of, um, things that were collected from climate disasters, uh, in different places in the world, wildfires and floods. And I looked at some of these things and I saw like a burned, you know, a burned piece of a tree. And I’m like, “wow, what if that’s from Colorado and was a fire that, you know, affected somebody that I knew?” And then there was a little, uh, sort of a plastic kid sandal that was stuck on the table too. And I thought about the man from the man from Pakistan who told me about, you know, experiencing those, those floods last year driven by global warming. And as I was looking at these bits and pieces, I, it, it really, you know, I, I felt, I felt really sad and, and it, at the same time, it made me determined to try and figure out, do these talks matter? Does anything happen here that you know is going to help us in any way? It also made me realize too, that, you know, the people who put this together obviously, probably felt a lot of what I felt, and they wanted to find a way to show it, and they put a lot of effort into it and showed it to a lot of, you know, to a lot of people from all over the world. So hopefully maybe somebody quote important, saw it and was touched by it a little bit in the same way that I was, you know, and that altogether when you, when you have things like that, that you can move ahead and make some change. And overall you could say, uh, this is, it’s maybe not the best metric, but some science reporter, I’ll use it. Before the Paris Climate Agreement scientists were saying, we were on, on a schedule to warm about, you know, four to five degrees Celsius, which is almost unimaginable. And now we’re on a, on a track to go between 2.7 and 3. Those are truly the best scientific estimates based on what we know right now about emissions, about how emissions will change in the future. And so, is that a coincidence or have these global efforts made a difference to bend that arc of projected warming? I can’t answer the question a hundred percent, but I try to ask myself that before I totally dismiss this global effort, which definitely needs reform and needs much more scrutiny and criticism than it gets right now, in my opinion.
(Music Break) | 13:45
AW | 14:45 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Bob Berwyn from Inside Climate News. So Bob, the COP 28 summit that you covered in Dubai, there’s probably a lot of listeners who aren’t really that familiar with COP 28, 27, the first one back in 1995. Why don’t we catch listeners up a little bit to what policies were discussed, and if you could give a, an executive summary of what the parties decided upon, that would be terrific.
BB | 15:19 – An Olympics meets Roman Circus vibe is, is sort of the impression in something that I wrote in my notebook as I was, you know, in the Central Plaza area. And, um, the, uh, the annual talks really, uh, you know, the highlight of this whole series of talks was the Paris Agreement, where the world set a goal for itself to limit global warming. And since then, the focus has been on implementing these promises that individual countries have made. And this year was the first year that what, that they did what was required by the Paris Agreement starting this year, which is a global stock, take a checkup, a climate checkup, where are we at on track to meeting these goals of the Paris Agreement?
AW | 16:05 – And the Paris Agreement was 2015, is that right?
BB | 16:07 – Correct. That was 2015. It basically says the parties will do, that’s the 198 countries that signed it, you know, will, will offer individual plans to make sure we meet this common goal and countries can adjust those plans. And if we find we’re off track, we will try and ratchet them up. And each country has to account for its own national circumstances. It’s all very voluntary. So the, the stock take was the technical, one of the main technical focuses of this conference. And it showed, as was already indicated by reports ahead of time that we’re still short. As I said, the goal is to limit global warming to well under two degrees as close to 1.5 degrees as possible. Well, we’re already at 1.3 as of right now, so we’re getting really close. And the projected warming is to, to go to somewhere close to three. So we’re still well off track. Everybody knew that going in the, the idea of this meeting COP 28, that also was to say to countries, by the time you come back to the next COP, have a new plan that’s more in tune with getting us to the skull of global warming. That was the technical focus of, of this particular COP. And then the tone was that right from the beginning, they were going to actually mention fossil fuels directly for the first time. And, uh, more than a hundred countries ahead of time we’re calling for a fossil fuel phase out, some sort of language that would suggest that. So that was being reported on a lot. And as this conference proceeds, they put out various iterations or new drafts of what will be the closing statement and decisions of the conference. And a key thing was is this phrase fossil fuel phase out going to be in the document.
AW | 18:13 – And I know you’re a big animal lover, and wildlife conservation has not really been a big focus of the COP conferences in the past, but was this year a little different?
BB | 18:27 – It was a little, it was a little different. Yeah. There was incremental progress in that area too. It shouldn’t be left out because it’s also in these original founding documents of the COP process where, you know, simultaneously to the climate COP, the Rio Convention in 1992 at the Earth Summit or 1990 also created the Biodiversity Convention, which hasn’t met quite as often, so there’s only been 15 of the biodiversity cops. And the last one was just a few months ago, and there was big progress made there on, again, on setting global targets of preserving wildlife and ecosystems and so on. So I think that brought, you know, a little more focus to it at COP 28 in Dubai. And there were a lot of interesting sessions on how climate and, nature preservation and restoration go together and how it’s really, and the Paris Agreement acknowledges this very specifically as well, that we, we can’t solve the climate crisis without taking nature into account. We need healthy forests and oceans and field ecosystems, wetlands, rivers. When Rita reminded me, he said, “Bob, you left rivers out of your story.” He’s a river advocate. You know, so they need to be included too.
AW | 19:57 – Yes, you cite Oswald Schmitz, a Yale Ecology professor in your December 14th Inside Climate News piece, and Schmitz says that “wildlife conservation is a key to mitigating climate change.” So to not have it be at least discussed in the conference is a disservice.
BB | 20:17 – Yeah. It’s been discussed on and off, but you know, the people who’ve been focusing on this think that it should be much higher on the agenda and they want, for example, they would like to see a sort of a, what’s called a, in, in the un parlance, a working group formed to, to actually set, you know, more specific targets and bring it up higher and get countries to make specific commitments. You know, they’d like to see more actual action on it. So they did manage to get it placed higher in these documents, and that can bring prominence, you know, again, it’s a very obscure parliamentary procedure. You make incremental progress. It took 30 years to get fossil fuels mentioned. I think it’s really good. So some of the sessions at COP 28 talked about it in the context of rewilding too, and bringing back keystone species that can have sort of cascading effects that have a, a climate benefit by what Schmitz calls reanimating, the carbon cycle, the biological carbon cycle. And, they also talked about this in the context of, of indigenous knowledge and indigenous land management. And, you know, really trying to not just see nature as a, as a commodity or as a carbon tool, a carbon management tool, but as something that is sort of ex, you know, fundamental to our existence that we depend on this to live and to try and get people to think about nature in a, in a different way, you know? So I think elevating it in, in, in a, in a, at a COP can, can help move us to that place a little bit incrementally. It’s a lot more important what happens on the ground in individual countries and, you know, in communities. And, you know, it’s one thing for a COP to say, yeah, we need to get people more aware that nature’s important in the climate. What that means is like making sure that there’s environmental and ecological literacy taught from an early age in schools, from, you know, from kindergarten up through every layer of education. You know, that ecosystems, healthy ecosystems in a healthy climate are the basis of our existence. And if we destroy those things, it’s grim. It’s going to be grim. We will be living in bubbles or caves.
AW | 22:52 – Circling back to the fossil fuel phase out language, I wanted to read a quote from a, a, a piece that you had shared on your Twitter feed from Genevieve Gunter of the New Republic. The piece was entitled The Secret Weapon of Climate Negotiations Language. I guess that’s the subtitle. The title was COP Out. She writes that moving forward, journalists and citizens as well should recognize that oil and gas producers increasingly sound like climate advocates, using the same words and phrases that call for the end of the fossil fuel era. This is their new greenwashing strategy. What is she talking about there in terms of the specific phase out language that is open to criticism?
BB | 23:36 – Well, the language that we ended up with in, in the document refers to a transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. And so this fossil fuel era, end of the fossil fuel era language may be a nod to, um, something else that I’ve seen, Genevieve post about is this idea that the, some of the fossil companies think that they’re going to transition to doing more, you know, stuff with plastic and, you know, and using the fossil fuels for that. And, you know, honestly, there are some countries there that are not there in good faith, you know, and it’s time to do more name and names, you know, so Saudi Arabia really jumps out. There was a report that came out just the head of this COP, you know, that just showed how they’ve been stonewalling this thing the whole time. And they have every intention of being, of selling the last drop of oil on the planet that will ever be sold. And it needs to be said. And there are many other petro-states that have played similar roles in different magnitudes over the years, including the United States. And the United States is the biggest single producer of fossil fuels right now on the planet by far 40% more than the next two countries, which are China and Russia. So we’re producing more on a daily basis, 40% more than either China or Russia. So, um, you know, it’s one thing for, you know, the mainstream media to, to say Kerry supported this fossil fuel phase out language. But I think at the same time, you have to recognize that there’s, there are no specific plans to slow down fossil fuel production to phase out fossil fuels in the US right now,
AW | 25:33 – In that same piece, Gunter sites Ad Knock, which is the United Arab, Emirates state oil company, which is definitely not moving away from oil and gas, and they may drill a full 42% more than it’s currently drilling overall by 2030 according to independent analysts. Mm-Hmm.
BB | 26:10 – Yeah. And I’ll just want to circle back these groups that represent, you know, environmental groups like the big ones that you know about Sierra Club and, you know, indigenous communities all over the world. And, and they were the ones that were really struck by this when this fossil, you know, more direct fossil fuel phase out language was removed because Phase Out wasn’t used. It was changed to transition away from in energy systems. So that’s quite different.
AW | 26:44 – Absolutely.
BB | 26:45 – And these are serious people who politically represent island nations, and they’re saying, you know, I’m not going to sign my own death warrant, you know, and some of those countries apparently were not in the room when the, this COP accepted this final document by under their rules, it’s a consensus based acceptance. They don’t have any voting procedures. And so it ended on a really sour note, but there’s been so much sort of greenwashing of the results since then that that kind of goes under, just like these people islands are going under it. That’s why I’m highlighting them and trying to elevate their voices again, because, you know, I was standing next to them when they were crying and, and, and I was crying myself because they’re talking about their country’s basically disappearing because of Sea level rise, and they know that this COP didn’t really make a significant change to that trajectory of history. And that’s just the sad, sad truth.
AW | 27:47 – Well, it makes me optimistic that good people like yourself are covering these events, at the very least. So thank you for doing that.
BB | 27:55 – You’re welcome.
AW | 27:56 – Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News. Thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
BB | 28:01 – Yeah, thanks for having me.
Narrator | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Elvis Presley and Jackson Browne. To read a transcript of this show, go to Sea Change Radio dot com stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News on COP28 appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
In the first decade of this century many of us learned that the threshold for keeping our planet healthy was 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Advocates like those at 350.org emphasized the need to adopt practices to help the earth stay below that number. Well, unfortunately, we earthlings have blown through that limit and are presently looking at 419 parts per million. But that doesn’t mean the idea of lowering our carbon emissions is moribund. And there are still organizations like 350.org keeping the dream alive. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Namrata Chowdhary, the Head of Public Engagement at 350.org. We learn more about the organization’s roots, examine some of the fights they’ve taken on, and discuss how they’re planning to evolve. We also talk about the corporatization of some larger environmental organizations and dive into the issues surrounding fossil fuel divestiture.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:15 Namrata Chowdhary (NC) – Yes, in the Global North we need to acknowledge that there’s a gap in how we people the climate movement, and at the same time, we need to acknowledge that and environmentalism has held different forms in different parts of the world for decades longer.
00:33 Narrator – In the first decade of this century many of us learned that the threshold for keeping our planet healthy was 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Advocates like those at 350.org emphasized the need to adopt practices to help the earth stay below that number. Well, unfortunately, we earthlings have blown through that limit and are presently looking at 419 parts per million. But that doesn’t mean the idea of lowering our carbon emissions is moribund. And there are still organizations like 350.org keeping the dream alive. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Namrata Chowdhary, the Head of Public Engagement at 350.org. We learn more about the organization’s roots, examine some of the fights they’ve taken on, and discuss how they’re planning to evolve. We also talk about the corporatization of some larger environmental organizations and dive into the issues surrounding fossil fuel divestiture.
01:43 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Namrata Chowdhary. She is the head of public engagement at 350.org. Namrata, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:54 Namrata Chowdhary (NC) – Thank you ever so much, it’s a pleasure to be here.
01:56 Alex Wise (AW) – Pleasure to have you. You are coming to us from London, is that correct?
02:00 NC – That is correct. On a grey, cold day one wouldn’t believe it’s spring.
02:06 AW – First, why don’t you give us a bit of a background for our listeners who are not familiar with the mission of your organization and give us a little bit of the history and then we’ll catch up listeners on how the organization has evolved over the years.
02:21 NC – What a beautiful invitation to share about the history of an organization that I’ve long admired before I became part of it. 350.org was founded in 2008 by Bill McKibben, whom you’ve had on your show before, and a group of university friends who were his students at the time, and it’s named after – we are named after – the safe limits of 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. And that’s what we’re hoping to – or determined to, I should say – determined to get the earth back towards. We need to bring ourselves back to 350 parts of one million. The roots of 350 are very firmly in the activist sphere. It started with youth activists and today still we draw our primary strength from the young activists at the front lines, many of whom are at the front lines of the climate crisis and all of whom are committed to doing their part to changing the narrative of fossil fuels as the only way to bring energy to us. And are determined to do what they can to secure a more positive, uplifting, safe future for all. That’s what 350 is today, and I’m so, so proud to be a part of the public engagement team, particularly because it’s through our audiences that we drive the change that we are committed to making.
03:41 AW – One of the real events that put 350.org on the map were the protest to the Keystone XL pipeline, it really kind of set a fire to the movement and really catapulted the organization into the international one that it is today. Why don’t you explain the importance of misbehaving and doing what may not be expected by polite society, but why it’s so important to you and your colleagues?
04:16 NC – Activism is really important in driving change right? And as the saying goes, history is seldom made well. The saying actually says seldom made by well-behaved women. But I think we can extend that almost to anyone, right? Well-behaved people seldom make the kind of change that results in history. And in in a fair history being written, we need to be taking action, taking direct action, as it were. For the principles that we believe in. That said, 350 is core strengths also rests in organizing community right and creating a sense of community linking up with partners and centering the work. The activism that we do rooting that quite deeply in the communities with whom we work, for whom we are championing. Climate justice and with whom we are built. Going to build this future that we all dream of together. So there is a distinct difference in how 350 operates. And you know not. It’s for us. It’s much more than just. It’s also about committing to finding, finding the answers together in the communities that we work with.
05:27 AW – Yes. So after the Keystone XL pipeline got on, a lot of peoples radars, 350 moved on to the divestiture campaign, working to alert. People about some of the institutions that they loved and supported and how they were in bed, essentially with the fossil fuel companies through passive and sometimes active investment. So why don’t you explain how the divestiture campaign has operated up till now and what we can expect from it moving forward, Namrata?
06:01 NC – One of the smartest things that those who were historically affiliated with 350.org, one of the smartest thing that the organization did was to understand that in order to change the dominant narrative about the fossil fuel industry. We had to do two things. One was revoke the social license right and make it make it obvious that so that fossil fuels are causing more harm than they bring good by way of the power that they provide. The second and again this was a very clever, very strategic choice to make was to dismantle the pillars that support the fossil fuel industry, a key one, is finance. If you take away the money, you inevitably bring the industry down in a way that’s much more impactful and much more long lasting than addressing one problem at a time.
06:51 AW – And so now you’re going beyond just alerting people that, let’s say, Stanford or Harvard is investing in fossil fuels, and hopefully those organizations are pulling back those investments. But now, trying to look at solutions, instead of investing in the wrong things, let’s get them investing in the right things. What is that piece of the divestiture puzzle, the Reinvestment Act, if you will, how is that going to play a role in 350.org’s strategy moving?
07:25 NC – Well, like I was saying, Alex, when we think about what keeps industry ticking over money is one of the primary drivers, isn’t it? And so we’ve quite successfully, dare I say, been addressing the big investments that prop up the fossil fuel industry. We’ve had several, several important wins with financial institutions. Beginning to recognize the role that they are complicit in climate change, that they are complicit in the kind of injustices that the fossil fuel industry is wreaking across the world. Now is a chance for us to start to use that same energy and to in fact address the same financial institutions, many of whom have now started to see the role that they play towards climate justice. And it’s our chance to turn that investment, turn, turn all of that financial capital. Towards the urgent pressing need for the entire planet, which is to start funding more renewable energy instead and to start an entire change of how our societies are power. And we’re going to do this not just through the financial institutions, but we’re also going to be doing it by addressing policy change. We’re going to be doing it by organizing in communities and championing renewable energy solutions. We’re also going to be doing this by looking at iconic projects where we might be able to set up community centered renewables. In a way that ignites that movement across different parts of the world. So we are drawing all of our strengths that we have built over the past several years, leveraging our expertise in working with finance, working with the fossil fuel industry in ways that challenge them in ways that get them to recognize the role that they play in climate change, but also in the many injustices that are experienced by the communities where they operate. So it’s about now weaving the new, more hopeful story and about creating a better future for a long time, civil society used to dream of the phrase another world is possible, I’m sure you’ve heard it before. This year, with 350 getting together and starting to recognize that this power now is within our reach, it’s not just within our reach, but it’s within the remits of our responsibility. We’re now saying another world is ours to make. And we’re committed to doing that work as well. We’re committed to doing the work and you know, breaking down the barriers to renewables, energy, we’re committed to driving policy change. We’re committed to championing solutions where we see them. We’re committed to working with communities that will want to set up their own renewable energy. And so it’s, you know, things like this that make us feel very confident that this other world that we have long dreamed of is within our reach and ours to make?
10:22 (music break)
11:44 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Namrata Chowdhury. She is the head of public engagement at 350.org. So Namrata looking at 350.org’s website, I see a lot of campaigns that are focused on fighting coal. It’s one of the original fights that 350’s been engaged in. You’re in England, I’m concerned. And I think many other environmentalists are concerned about the non coal, non traditional fossil fuels that are now being burned in Europe and are seemingly going under the radar. A lot of it’s because of their designation. I’m thinking namely of peat and wood pellets. And burning peat and wood pellets seem to be as dangerous, if not more dangerous than coal, and that they’re almost these Trojan horses. They’ve been designated as biofuels, and they sound all renewable. Wood is, according to some definitions, it is a renewable resource. Trees can regrow. Sure, it might take 100 years for these forests to regrow, but hey, technically renewable. So what is 350.org doing to raise awareness about these Trojan Horse fuels?
13:02 NC – Well, This is why we need to be very particular about what alternatives we are actually embracing. You know, when we think about turning to alternative sources of energy, we need to be very, very clear not to fall into traps like the ones you’re describing. We need to be thinking much more broadly about the impact of whatever fuel we are using. And quite frankly, technology has advanced so much right now that it seems ridiculous that we should be falling back into those traps and still looking to burning wood pellets or peat, or even the other. The other one that surprises me each time I hear it described as part of the greener fuel economy. Is natural gas.
13:45 AW – Yes, a lot of people like to use that as a “bridge fuel,” but thinking about wood pellets, you’re in England where there is a tradition of coal mining, but the coal was being mined because they burned all their forests back in, like the 1700s or so, right?
14:03 NC – Indeed, and how long will we keep, stay sticking on that destructive treadmill where we keep going from one level to the next level of saying, OK, we’ve burnt this one down, where do we turn next and what can we destroy next? And to think of these projects or you know these kinds of industries as renewable or green or is such short-sighted vision? And we’re fooling no one but ourselves. If we start to describe these as solutions to the climate crisis, and we start to think of these as the better alternative, and particularly devilish when you think that the actual alternatives are within reach, you know, the technology for solar, the technology for wind is stronger than it has ever been before – cheaper than it has ever been, more accessible can be set up in microsystems can be community-centered. You know, the benefits are endless. And yet we continue to look at solutions in this way that we’re only going to go one level away from the dirtiest and the most harmful, and then congratulate ourselves. And that’s the kind of thing that we’re looking to change in our campaigning in the next phase of our work. And we’re very clear: centering justice when we think about campaigning for an alternative and that’s really important as well. Because when you think about the climate movement and even when you talk about Keystone, Alex, and you talk about the work that has been achieved in Keystone, it isn’t 350 alone that has done that. It is in partnership with indigenous communities, often led by him. Indigenous communities and we are very humble in the role that we have played in campaigns like Keystone because it’s really about bringing our strengths and our audiences and the activists that are, you know, working alongside us in service of the wider movement. That can only really succeed if it is led by and owned by those that are literally rooted in the communities most impacted by these projects. And so that’s that to me holds the key also to the future when we think about the campaigns that350.org will be leading in the next phase, we will definitely be working with. With the communities in partnership with local groups and looking to find solutions that are truly justice oriented that are not the Band-Aid as it’s called over the harm that fossil fuel industries have wreaked for years on the planet.
16:34 AW – Yes, it definitely requires something other than business as usual, and it seems that 350.org approaches its business in a refreshing new way. Why don’t you highlight some of the ways that 350 is set apart from big conservation and big environmental groups that may have a different way of seeing how they operate?
16:58 NC – So alexijoined350.org in 2021, right and when I joined the organization or even when I was in the recruitment process, one of my questions back to the panel that were interviewing me was “what’s the size of the organization? What’s the size of your staff?” And I was really surprised when they said it’s 150 people because the kind of impact that I had witnessed 350 make from the outside. And so the kind of impact that I had seen 350 make and the kind of visibility it enjoys, I genuinely thought it was a much larger team behind it. And to me, that’s part of the compelling beauty of 350. The fact that it’s a small core team. And it’s so central to how 350 works that its power rests not in that small core team, not just in that small core team of 150 people. But in the concentric circles arranged around that heart of core of core staff. Now that I’m part of the core staff, I recognize and I’m appreciate that beauty even more because I know how much work is put into cultivating those relationships and nurturing them and winner. And close. So just to give you a sense of and to give your listeners a sense of how 350 is powered, I’d like us to imagine a set of concentric circles right at its very heart. Are these 150 to 160 core staff. These are people directly employed by 3:50. The next ring outside of that is the strategic affiliates. So these are groups like 350 Australia or three, 350 Altera that are licensed to use the 350 name, but they’re not staff. And then one ring, one ring further back are our affiliates that are not registered as such but have a looser connection with us, so like 350 Philippines for instance. They don’t receive funding from us, but they participate in many of our campaigns. And then even wider out are the local groups. So this is like the whole network of local groups, which could be formed anything between 5 to 300 people in a particular geography that are participating for a specific reason or a specific event and become part of the 350 family by virtue of joining our campaigns and contributing long term to the change that we’re hoping to make, by cultivating relationships across all four of these circles, and making deep connections. We’re really investing in building a movement in a global movement that’s going to drive this kind of change that we dream and hold dear to ourselves. So much power comes from all. Four of those circles.
19:53 (Music break)
20:45 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Namrata Chowdhury. She is the head of public engagement at 350.org. So Namrata your pay scale is a little different also than the big conservation organizations. They’re I think your highest paid executive makes under $150,000 a year. Everybody’s getting paid in a similar band which I think is important. Yes, indeed. And it’s it’s so important to 3:50 to be the kind of organization that represents the values that we want to see in the movement, right, that we want to see in the climate justice movement. One fact I’m very proud of is the pay equity across 350. We have a ratio lowest paid to highest paid.
21:32 NC – Of one is to three, so there isn’t a single person on the team that earns less than 1/3 of what the highest paid members of the team make. It’s something we are very proud of diversity as well. I’m part of the change that 350 committed to making when I was recruited and I went through the recruitment process alongside several others. It was very, it was very clear this was part of an intentional change in leadership that 350.org was making – making a choice to invest in more leaders from the Global South with lived and learned experience of campaigning in the Global South on issues that affect community is people of color people that have a much more diverse perspective on climate justice and that that was a again a strategic choice that 350’s governance was making in investing in a truly global organization and building this up into the kind of organization that was capable of leading a global movement participating. In the global climate justice movement and holding its own with power and pride to do the part, that 350, with its tremendous global strength, is able to do.
22:44 AW – Yes, you hear a lot of valid criticism against the environmental movement because of its generally white roots and white faces, and these are the faces of colonialism going back into these areas that have been terrorized by colonialism for centuries.
23:03 NC – And there are two ways of looking at this narrative, Alex. One is indeed, as you’re pointing out, the white roots of the environmental movement. And at the same time, that’s from the perspective of the global N having grown up in India and having participated in several campaigns while I was still a teenager. And those campaigns have been running for, you know, generations before protecting forests. The Chipko movement, which, which is something that I grew up with, is the tree huggers, those are the original tree huggers, that originated in India so many decades ago and so this is the kind of humility, dare I say, with which we need to approach both sides of the narrative. Yes, in the Global North, we need to acknowledge that there’s a gap in in how we people, the climate movement, and at the same time, we need to acknowledge that and one mentalism has held different forms in different parts of the world for decades longer. People have indigenous communities in Brazil, for example, have defended the Amazonia long before white activists. Started to recognize the value of the Amazon and the value of the Amazon. In ecological terms, and so this is the kind of dynamic that’s at play in the global environment movement. When we think about how we reference the need for greater diversity, the need for diverse perspectives. We must acknowledge that those perspectives are rooted in a history that’s as deep, if not longer, and deeper than the more recent environmentalism that that is in popular parlance in the Global North to use the frame you suggested by using the word colonialism. It’s like recognizing that several societies in colonized nations had extremely sound principles of governance before they got taken over by the colonials. And then, after the colonizers left, they had to rebuild their societies around new structures of governance. But to now look at those same countries and think of them as, you know, having fresh democracies and so on, it kind of negates the history that came pre-colonialism. And that’s the kind of dynamic that, I mean we ought to apply even when it comes to protecting land. Looking after the environment or, you know, thinking more broadly about the role of humanity with the we, the planet we live on, and that in many cultures, in many societies has existed long before environmentalism even. Became a thing.
25:49 AW – Yes, I just went to the Goldman Prize award and six recipients who are…one of the common themes is they’re generally don’t have resources, don’t have money, and they don’t have power. They’re going up against these behemoths of industry and coming out on top, and it’s a very inspiring story, but it’s all too rare.
26:12 NC – Indeed, I I think you draw a great parallel between colonizers and the environmental movement in that context, because if we’ve fought oppression of one kind, and we’ve organized and we’ve found strengths to overthrow the shackles of colonialism, as it were. We can draw inspiration and strength from that history, we certainly can, but that’s not to say that those who haven’t experienced that or don’t have that history cannot draw strength from other elements of organizing and community strength in their own geographies as well, right. And for us at 350 it’s the answer lies in community. The strength lies in bringing together people who all share the same commitment the same. Values and finding the strength together to start working towards that future that we want to. World and championing it, challenging. What’s standing in our way, bringing down the barriers, all of those things are dependent on unlocking the agency of the people that we work with. So yes, to your inspiring idea of how societies that have broken through colonial past. And are recreating strength and structure. Definitely we’ve got a lot to learn from those societies. And I think we’ve got a lot to learn from more stable economies as well. We’ve got strengths there. We’ve got privilege that lends itself beautifully to being in service of the global movement and we need both. We need both sides of the story for us to really build this other world that we dream of.
27:52 AW – She’s the head of public engagement at 350.org, Namrata Chowdhary. Namrata, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:00 NC – Thank you ever so much, Alex, it’s been a pleasure.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Wes Montgomery, Etta James and Curtis Mayfield. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Namrata Chowdhary: Three (50) Is A Magic Number (re-broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Did you know that India accounts for about one-third of the world’s one billion head of cattle? Last week on Sea Change Radio, we spoke to the head of Rumin8, a startup that’s working to reduce methane emissions from cattle. This week, we take a more academic approach to the cow burp problem – our guest is Dr. Joseph McFadden, a professor of cattle biology at Cornell University. We learn more about the science of enteric fermentation in ruminants, examine the various technological solutions aiming to reduce these methane emissions, and discuss the hurdles that the feed additive industry faces, and why they are particularly challenging in countries like India.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:32 Joseph McFadden (JM) – We just need to have more investment, more investment in scientific research, to answer the tough questions when it comes to these feed additives, there’s going to be a lot of high demand for various clinical trials to improve their efficacy and safety. And I see that improving, but I don’t think we’re anywhere where we need to be with the current funding climate – it’s going to have to improve.
00:55 Narrator – Did you know that India accounts for about one-third of the world’s one billion head of cattle? Last week on Sea Change Radio, we spoke to the head of Rumin8, a startup that’s working to reduce methane emissions from cattle. This week, we take a more academic approach to the cow burp problem – our guest is Dr. Joseph McFadden, a professor of cattle biology at Cornell University. We learn more about the science of enteric fermentation in ruminants, examine the various technological solutions aiming to reduce these methane emissions, and discuss the hurdles that the feed additive industry faces, and why they are particularly challenging in countries like India.
01:56 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Doctor Joseph McFadden. He is a professor of dairy cattle biology at Cornell University. Joe, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:06 Joseph McFadden (JM) – Thanks for the invitation to talk.
02:08 Alex Wise (AW) – For the last decade or so, we’ve heard a lot about the dangers of methane emissions from cattle, and there’s people like yourself who are studying this phenomenon. Are some of the technological breakthroughs that have made you hopeful that we’re going to be able to mitigate some of these methane emissions moving?
02:29 JM – So you know, there’s a lot of interest right now in developing different technologies that can reduce enteric methane emissions. You know what I find particularly interesting is that these technologies have some efficacy already proven, meaning that depending on the type of perhaps feed additive that’s being fed to cows. We might be able to see reductions anywhere from 10:00, but maybe 80%. Unfortunately, you know we’re a little bit early in the research process to really determine if any of these sort of technologies are real solutions, right? And so, as a scientific community, we’re trying to sort of take a step back for a moment and really make sure that our perspective is holistic. And in that we not only have effective solutions that reduce methane emissions from livestock, but also that these solutions are safe, safe for the animal, and it doesn’t really modify meat or milk composition. So it’s still safe for human consumption. And we also want to make sure that any potential technology is profitable for the farmer in order to ensure its adoption.
03:36 AW – I asked for some of the solutions first, but why don’t you give us kind of a a broader scope of the problems that we’re trying to solve?
03:44 JM – So you know, methane emissions represents about it’s a high priority in terms of research, simply because agriculture contributes a large percentage of methane emissions from human derived activities. And, you know, one, if you sort of dive even deeper within agriculture. Methane that comes from ruminants livestock is particularly of high priority because ruminates produce a lot of methane in terms of the solutions. You know there’s different ideas being discussed. The first one would be feed additives, right, so different dietary ingredients that could either modify the room and environment, which is the stomach of the cow, or directly inhibit enzymes of methanogenesis. And so we typically define these as the feed additive category. The second sort of perhaps more long-term idea would be developed different types of biotechnologies, such as vaccines, that could really reduce methane emissions over the long term and also require less human animal interaction other strategies being talked about breeding strategies, so how do you develop a cow that just, you know, produces less methane, you know, so you can do this through genetic selection, but this takes many generations and is something that’s not going to happen immediately. So those are sort of the three types of solutions that people are talking about now. You know, you could probably take this a step back even further and say, what have we done over the last 50 years to help solve this problem? And I would argue that the enhancement of production. Efficiency has really been a major player in reducing methane intensity across the world, and I think this is more relevant in the United States and Europe than perhaps developing countries.
05:48 AW – In an ideal situation, how could this scale globally? You know, we talk about changing our fleets with vehicles, let’s say going from a gas powered vehicle to an electric vehicle and that’s going to take time. This is also not just something that you can snap your fingers and say we have a new way of feeding cattle that will reduce methane. Drastically, even if we had that silver bullet technology figured out today, it would still take years to really overhaul and scale wouldn’t it?
06:16 JM – Absolutely. I mean I think we get overly optimistic when you hear something in the news like we just discovered the solution that reduces methane 80% and we get really excited and I think they’re, you know, most people, most consumers are going to say, oh, we don’t need to worry about this anymore and that is far from the truth. The reality is, is that there’s a wide array of livestock production systems across the world. So we’re typically familiar with the systems that are around us, but I will give you an example. If you look at the United States and you know we’re typically, we now see you know cattle that are, you know grouped together and different sized farms. You know, you might have a one hundred cow farm, maybe a one thousand cow farm. They’re the way those animals are managed, sort of more managed as a group. There’s greater efficiency. And we can these farmers that manage those farms can afford perhaps, you know, technologies that directly inhibit methane. But then you look at developing countries or countries with emerging economies. And I have a particular interest in India. We have some projects sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund that. Sort of. Focus on India and the reason why is there’s a country that has 300 million cattle and buffaloes managed by 75 million smallholder farmers. You know when you compare that to the United States, where we have about 9 million dairy cows managed by about 40,000 farmers. So the big difference there. And in India, you’ve got a farmer that manages one or two animals, and they’re managing that animal for their personal nutrition and the nutrition of their family and some income. But how do you develop technologies that can reach 75 million smallholder farmers that have, you know, very little income to support those types of maybe? Novel technologies that we’re talking about, that’s a real challenge. And so as the scientific community, especially of the last year, we sort of think that there’s sort of two broad strokes sort of solutions here. One, let’s keep focused on these feed additives or vaccines or, you know, strategies that are going to perhaps yield new technologies that that farmers can actually pay for. We’ll do that here in Europe and in the United States, but in countries that are have very starkly different production system like India, let’s just focus on enhancing efficiency. It’s not to say like a feed additive might not have application in India, we just think that to get the rapid gains that we need in methane reduction, we’re really going to have to focus on enhancing efficiency, especially in South Asia and Africa.
08:58 AW – And these studies that show the reduction in emissions from 10 to 80% that you’re referring to, can we glean anything in terms of the difference between corn-fed feedlots CAFOs versus a grass-fed cattle? Is there some kind of variance within those two?
09:17 JM – There is, especially when we talk about adaptation to those additives, and so they’re typically what you’ll see. A robust response, especially with some of these direct inhibitors and methanogenesis, you’ll see a robust response in the first few weeks after you first start feeding it and some of the new data that’s coming out suggests that after several weeks or perhaps into months, you start to see some adaptation by the room and environment and by the bugs. And so and then that adaptation phase and what we’ve discovered is that animals that are fed higher starch diets, diets that would be have a higher grain content, the reduction stays lower longer. OK, as you feed more fiber in the diet, which would come from grasses or forages. You know, in that particular scenario, either the efficacy is a little bit lower or their ability to adapt occurs more rapidly. I think one thing that we also over generalize is percent efficacy. You might see a number in the in the news that says, oh, 30% reduction and you think that’s the state. That’s the same no matter the diet, no matter the animal. That is not true. There’s plenty of data to suggest that that percent can be highly influenced, especially by the diet that the animal consumes and that’s basically the fiber and starch content or the amount of, you know, forage or grain in the diet.
10:44 (Music Break)
11:15 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Dr. Joseph McFadden. He’s a professor of dairy cattle biology at Cornell University. So Joe, we spoke to the Managing Director of Rumin8, which is one of the players in these new emerging feed additives for cattle that is promising to reduce methane. What is the competitive landscape from your perspective and what additives give you most hope that we’ll be able to take a bite out of the not insignificant emissions from cattle?
11:50 JM – So right now from my perspective, it’s it’s a chase, it’s a, it’s a mad race to solutions, right. And I I don’t think I’ve ever met more startups than I have in the last year. So to give you a sense of the energy and optimism and financial support there is right now to focus on this problem, so ruminate is a great example of a company that you know they have a product that they’re, you know, trying to develop that’s based on bromoform. So Bromoform would be the sort of active ingredient in seaweed. And so typically when we talk about seaweed or bromoform they typically the conversations are often similar and they work very. They have very high potency, meaning that you know they can dramatically reduce methane emissions substantially, and some reports suggest 60-80%, you know, so it’s it’s very promising but this and that type of product is very unique as compared to other types of feed additives called room and modifiers. This separate category of feed additives are typically plant based compounds that are genuinely recognized as being safe, are grass listed as what we call it in the industry and so the sort of the regulatory approval process and the ability to get a room and modifier a plant based compound into the diet of an animal, it’s going to happen a lot faster. But unfortunately room and modifiers. Have a lower efficacy, maybe it’s only five, 10-15% and so there’s a lot of excitement about bromoform and seaweed simply because it’s something so unique and it has a very robust effect.
13:40 AW – So how does bromoform differ from seaweed and nori that we might eat in Japanese cuisine, let’s say, and what is the challenge to grow it in scale and then distribute it accordingly?
13:54 JM – So seaweed and bromoform both have very unique challenges that they’re going to have to, you know, the manufacturers are going to have to contend with. On the seaweed side, you have cultivation as being a major challenge and what I mean is, is that the type of seaweed that is proven effective is a red seaweed. So good species of disparity, asparagopsis taxiformis, and a lot of these red species like tropical kind of environments. And so you’re really not going to find this off the coast of Maine or something. Colder climates and so yes, one way you could potentially source seaweed is, you know, by in the oceans, you know, wild environments, but you know then you have to think about, well, how are you going to process that. So you even get it across the world to where maybe the cattle are and so you have to think about, you know, not just shipment. And you have to think about drying it down because seaweed is pretty wet and heavy. So there’s a carbon footprint associated with all that that we need to be aware of. Also, when you take seaweed from the ocean, it’s composition can be very unique. It can be could be influenced by stage of growth of the plant. It can be influenced by the species, the season of harvest, and so then you don’t really have a consistent product to sell to farmers and that that makes it challenging. And so there’s been a lot of interest to try to cultivate this using land based scenarios which gives you better control but I’m concerned about the scalability of that to feed a billion cattle – that’s about 1 billion cattle on the planet. And you also have to think about again the carbon footprint that goes into that kind of production system. So on the other side, you have bromoform. Bromoform is just the active ingredient and you’re like, well, OK, it’s actually quite easy to get Brahma Farm itself as a compound. But a bromoform has some major regulatory hurdles. The seaweed also has to contend with but bromoform by the FDA right now. Unless something changes which people are talking about would be considered as a drug, right? And so whenever you have to. Test something that’s considered as a drug that requires A substantial amount of investment and time in order to prove that it is not only effective, but safe, safe for the animal, and safe for, you know, the human in terms of the milk and meat that they consume. So see, we just going to have to contend with that as well, but in scenarios. Like in California, they have already started to feed seaweed to dairy cattle. Now they can feed that seaweed. Because it’s recognized as being, you know, safe to feed the seaweed. But to get a methane sort of mitigation sort of claim, it would have to go through the FDA.And right now, one of the concerns is as a scientific community is we we have to have a very stringent FDA regulatory process. There’s no question about that. But we also don’t have a lot of time. Here either and so we want to make sure we figure out ways to streamline this process, but still be safe about. Yeah, I also say there’s things to think about with Bromoform is that, and this is what’s unique about ruminate, you know, Bromoform works really well, but there’s some shelf stability issues, meaning that if you had a thing of bromoform on your shelf, which nobody does but, you know, just imagine. They have a very short shelf life. It doesn’t last forever, right? And so they figured out ways or testing ways to extend its shelf life, and that’s going to be really important. If they want to see that technology become viable.
17:39 AW – Especially in some of those developing countries that you were talking about earlier?
17:43 JM – Absolutely right. And I think you know, we if farmers are going to pay for technology, you’re going to want to have the substantial reduction, but you have to have a consistency in the response, right. And so the other thing we don’t know, we keep in mind whether it be seaweed or bromo for we know so little about either one. To be frank, I mean, there’s just a small number of studies we’re talking, probably, you know, 10 studies globally. You know really that are, you know, intensive, controlled. So we’re just at the beginning of our understanding of what these potential feed additives or drugs, you know, could potentially do so, you know, early evidence suggests, though, that like for seaweed, you know, seaweed has what’s called an ash content. That is the, you know, the vitamins and minerals that are in it, it’s it’s highly unique in its composition. So there’s not only bromoform. But there’s a lot of, like iodine, for example. And you know some iodine. It’s a good thing. But some of times you have to make sure that you don’t have foods that are overly enriched in iodine and some of the data suggests that some of the milk can have very high iodine concentrations and callus that are fed seaweed. The other one that people might talk about. Would be the Bromoform itself is that it has the potential to be carcinogenic if at a really high level, and that the food or water that we consume. But I want to really be sure that the people listening understand that a lot of these issues can be overcome by ensuring that the feeding level is low enough that you get the efficacy that you need, but also the you know the lack of the enrichment of these residues in the meat and milk that we consume. I think that’s achievable.
19:49 (Music Break)
20:35 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Doctor Joseph McFadden. He’s a professor of dairy cattle biology at Cornell University, and it’s kind of a chicken and an egg scenario in terms of scale. Let me read this quote from you in inside Climate News, where you say “farmers are only going to adopt these technologies if they enhance their profitability.” So do you see these methane reducing additives, enhancing farmer’s profitability, Joe?
21:02 JM – Yeah, I don’t study labeling that much, but I envision that eventually there’s going to be some sort of label that talks about, you know, the carbon footprint of how of these different types of foods that farmers produce, right. And I think consumers are going to be more interested in that information and likely influence their decision in terms of what foods they purchase. In terms of the profitability question and as a scientist, we. I want to ensure that, you know, in terms of the technologies that I study. I want to make sure that if there’s added benefit in terms of improved animal health nutrient digestibility, you know, enhanced efficiency of making milk, those are things that could encourage farmers to adopt that technology over something that doesn’t have those impacts. So with seaweed and bromoform, there’s a lot of potential excitement because if you can decrease methane that much, let’s say 80%, then what can the cow do differently with that energy that typically would have been lost. And so for those that don’t know the terms of that energy that the cow consumes in their diet, about 6 to 7% of it is lost as methane. It could be higher than that, perhaps 12% in some certain scenarios. So the question is, if you’re going to shut down methane that much, then how come or can the cow convert that extra energy to helps, you know, have better health or, you know, helper perhaps produce more milk with, you know, be more efficient. So those are things that we’re thinking about.
22:46 AW – And what’s the range of additive prices for a cattle farmer? I imagine that’s a tough question, but just give us an idea about like, how much does this bump up a farmer’s cost in general using feed additives in general, not just these seaweed ones.
23:02 JM – Yeah, in terms of per cow per day, you want these to be in in the pennies. OK, you want you want pennies to be the price. Let’s say you were able to scale up seaweed. Considering the current seaweed supply and how we source seaweed, there was some estimate of $24 per day per cow, which would which would never happen.
23:19 AW – That’s completely untenable, huh?
23:20 JM – Yeah, completely. So you’ve got to get the price, way, way down or you know something else that’s being explored is carbon credits. And so I know Nestle has starting to think about this and take action on this. And there’s a product called Aglin. Ruminant Aglin is a product that’s grass-listed. That means it’s generally recognized as being safe. It involves plant based essential oils, right? So these are compounds like granule acetate and there’s data that suggests that they can inhibit methane emissions by by about 7:00 to 10%. OK. And there’s also some benefits on performance. So in that particular case, farmers, they adopt A technology they can receive some carbon credit payments for using that technology. So that’s just really that we’re really just at the beginning of that possibility, but I envision and more of that will come in the pipeline, but it also comes with another challenge and that challenge is how do you actually measure and confirm or validate whatever word you want to use if these technologies are working on these, you know individual farms and individual cows that are being fed those treatments. I don’t call them treatments that call them additives. I’m a scientist. I sound like a scientist.
24:35 AW – You’re a scientist who works with farmers and how receptive to this idea are farmers and how aware in your experience our farmers aware of the problem of methane emissions in their product?
24:49 JM – So it depends on the farmer you talk to that I was going to say in terms of the United States farmer, you know the United States farmer is very up to date in terms of the best practices, they have a they have a I would call an innate drive to be efficient, to be economical and they, you know, contrary to what some people might believe, they really want healthy animals and that ensures that they stay profitable, right and so when you talk to a farmer about methane, you know, I think there’s a bit of excitement, but there’s also a lot of confusion and hesitancy. I had a privilege to talk to a few farmers in northern New York and lately, and they’ll ask you some questions about some various feed additives. And there’s just so many questions and uncertainty because they have so few funds to invest. And you know, different ingredients to their diets are, you know, they have a lot of decisions to make. So they have to put the money in the right place and they want to make sure that there’s a lot of scientific support, a lot of the farmers in the United States do follow, you know, with their nutritionists and veterinarians sort of recommend it, which rely on the science. But they also want to see these products tested out in commercial fields, commercial farms and so there’s a lot of commercial farm testing that’s happening. I’d argue like both the you talked to a farmer, I was in Gujarat, which is Western India and you know there’s no concern there. I think I think they’re concerned about feeding their family and that’s priority #1. So I think we have to have that sort of perspective going into this.
26:33 AW – So with our climate pledges in mind, Joe, where would you like to see our priorities placed so that we can get to those goals over the next decade? We don’t have that much time.
26:44 JM – No. You know, the methane pledge sort of stipulates that we have to have a 30% reduction by 20-30 and that’s going to that is very aggressive considering the wide array of production systems across the world. And I think we have to be extremely careful in terms of our science and we have to be extremely careful about how we communicate our science to the world and that communication is so important because we want to make sure that the scientific community generates the information and allows consumers to make an informed decision because. Consumers have a lot of power here in terms of influencing our trajectory and whether or not you know a potential technology becomes adopted or not. They really do have that power and so I think we just need to have more investment, more investment in scientific research to to answer the tough questions when it comes to these feed additives, there’s going to be a lot of high demand for various clinical trials to improve their efficacy and safety. And I see that improving. But I don’t think we’re anywhere where we need to be with the current funding climate, it’s going to have to improve.
27:53 AW – Joseph McFadden is a professor of dairy cattle biology at Cornell University. Joe, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:04 JM – Thank you.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Willie Bobo, the Seldom Herd, and Bing Crosby. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Joseph McFadden: A Cattle Biologist Explains Feed Additives (re-broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
A study from 2022 found that people who identified as non-religious or atheist were more likely to identify as pro-environment, as compared with religious people who tended to be “less committed to the environment.” Many of us environmentalists may not look to churches as natural sites for allies. But perhaps we should look a little closer. This week on Sea Change Radio, we are speaking with Lauren Kim, an evangelical Christian and recent college graduate, who volunteers for an organization called YECA – Young Evangelical Christians for Climate Action. We talk about the mission of her organization, learn about a faith-based form of environmentalism known as “creation care,” and discuss a new generation of evangelicals converting their brethren to help protect the planet.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Lauren Kim (LK) | 00:20 – Regardless if someone leans more conservatively or more liberally, wherever they are on the spectrum, climate change is something that matters for them. And we’re seeing this trend more and more with people who would label themselves as conservative. And under the age of 30.
Narrator | 00:37 – A study from 2022 found that people who identified as non-religious or atheist were more likely to identify as pro-environment, as compared with religious people who tended to be “less committed to the environment.” Many of us environmentalists may not look to churches as natural sites for allies. But perhaps we should look a little closer. This week on Sea Change Radio, we are speaking with Lauren Kim, an evangelical Christian and recent college graduate, who volunteers for an organization called YECA – Young Evangelical Christians for Climate Action. We talk about the mission of her organization, learn about a faith-based form of environmentalism known as “creation care,” and discuss a new generation of evangelicals converting their brethren to help protect the planet.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:39 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lauren Kim. Lauren is the financial secretary and a steering committee member for YECA Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. Lauren, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Lauren Kim (LK)| 01:52 – Hi. Thank you so much, Alex, for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 – Very interested to hear more about YECA. Why don’t you first explain the mission of your organization, if you will?
Lauren Kim (LK) | 02:02 – Yeah, absolutely. The mission of YECA, we exist to equip, empower, and catalyze young Christians to love God and our neighbors. And we do this through climate action in both in churches and communities. And we do this to create a more just and equitable and loving world. And I think we can sum up our entire mission statement through Micah’s six, eight, which is do justice. So justice as an act, love, mercy, and walk humbly with our God. So we’re a faith-based organization. We’re a nonprofit and we do creation care.
Alex Wise (AW) | 02:42 – What does that mean, “Creation care?”
LK | 02:44 – So creation care is, in simple words, is environmentalism, but I think we differ from other environmental organizations because our motivation. So a lot of environmental orgs, they revolve around, scientists or people who are passionate about a certain issue, um, or tribal rights or something along those lines. Our interests and the reason why we care about the environment is because of Jesus and because he came down, we take the Bible seriously and in order to love our neighbors and be obedient to the word, we try to advocate for climate action and care for the environment, um, because we’re mandated to and it helps people around us.
AW | 03:32 – So give us some examples of some of the climate action that your organization is involved in. How, how do you try to affect change directly?
LK | 03:41 – Yeah, so we actually have three pillars for our work and we base everything around these three pillars. Um, so these three pillars are empowering, equipping, and accountability. So empowering. We want to empower young Christians, this generation to take action and advocate together. And we actually have a college fellows program, which we, where we train dozens of students across the country from various colleges, um, to be more effective advocates and we help guide them, um, with a project on their, on their campus. Um, so currently we have a cohort. We have a cohort every single year, and we have students from Notre Dame to Arizona State University. And they take on projects like aeroponics research, which is really cool to creating a sustainability committee on grounds to recycle or, um, have compost on their schools. The second thing that we do is equipping young Christians to engage with their church communities. Church communities are a great place to have a conversation about creation care and we have various fellows programs. We have community fellows and climate fellows programs where we do it. Um, we train people interested on how to talk about it, how to write about it, and to support them, um, with whatever project or interest that they have in mind so they can best equip their communities. And then lastly, we hold political leaders accountable directly and we want them to enact like ambitious climate policy. So we’ll our national organizer will put out statements on whatever’s out there. Right now we have direct action. We’ll go to dc, we’ll have fly-ins, we’ll bird dog, we’ll get up and talk to politicians, um, will testify at the EPA. That’s something that I’ve done before. Um, and we also believe in, um, making disciples of disciples. So, and that means, um, instead of directly being there and doing the work, equip others to advocate. So we sponsor students to go to COP, which is the Christian Climate Observers Program. And these Christians will be trained at COP and go to COP 28 or whatever conference is out there to talk about Christians who care about the environment.
AW | 06:26 – So explain how you got involved in the organization. You’re a young woman just starting out on your career. This is not your full-time job, but maybe you can kind of walk us through your personal journey over the last few years and how you were able to find YECA.
LK | 06:44 – Wow. So to get to the beginning of the journey, I have to go way back.
AW | 06:49 – Well, you’re pretty young, so I don’t think we have to go that far back.
LK | 06:52 – You’re right. So way back for me is middle school. So I was saved in middle school. Um, I believe that Christ is my savior since I was like 13 or so. And I’ve had like a deep love for God’s word and what it means to serve others. And I’ve, at the same time, I’ve always had this love and appreciation for the environment as well. I grew up in Massachusetts and in Middlesex where I grew up, transcendental writers are a big thing. And I remember just like visiting all the historical, um, places and just really resonating with their writing. I’ve always felt this deep connection, something very spiritual about going into the woods and walking and being alone in nature. And I really didn’t think that my love for nature and my own personal faith was anything that connected. It just didn’t seem like it was anything that blended at all until I went to college. So when I went to college, I actually had to take this class called God in Nature. Um, so I took this class, uh, my first semester of first year and it was this class about how different theologians thought about nature in America, so religion’s in America, and we had this topic called Creation Care. That was the first time that I ever thought about my faith and my love for the environment together. And it was just a really amazing time. And I told my professor like, this is so cool. I’ve been finding myself doing research outside of class, like how can I get more involved? And she actually sponsored me for an independent research project. And that gap between my first and second semester of first year, I actually went on this trip to go to Idaho and study with this pastor who spent his entire career, um, preaching creation care. And I just went to his ranch in Idaho. I emailed him, I found his email on the internet and he said, come, come over to his ranch. And I did it and I wrote this entire research project and then afterwards I was like, this is really amazing, I want to be involved still. And I emailed Tri Robinson, that was the pastor I stayed with again. And I asked him like, how can I stay more involved? And he pointed me to the direction of YECA and he said, this is a great organization. Um, I know they, they’re doing a lot of great work and it’s full filled with young people like you, um, who are also Christian and interested in the same thing. So the rest is history. I’ve been involved with YECA for four, four and a half years now. I’ve served in YECA in a variety of capacities. I started off as a project manager and then I was a college fellow and then now I’m on the steering committee.
(Music Break) | 10:05
AW | 11:18 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lauren Kim from YECA Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. So the term evangelical Christianity, it gets folded in with fundamentalist Christianity quite a bit in people’s minds. Why don’t you explain how evangelical Christianity differs from fundamentalism and, and why the distinction is important when we talk about climate change and environmentalism.
LK | 11:47 – I’m actually really glad that you brought this up because I think every time I say I am part of YECA and I talk about being evangelical and caring about the environment, I think people get it twisted a lot because they, the word evangelical has become such a hot red button issue and it’s become so politicized. Let me start with the, the definition of evangelical. So the NAE, the National Association of Evangelicals, they define being evangelical as someone who takes the Bible seriously. Um, they believe in the word of Jesus Christ and it’s important for that person to encourage non-Christians to trust in Jesus and have faith in him as his savior. So two parts, um, believing in the Bible as the word, and then it’s important to them to tell others about him. Um, so that’s what evangelical means. Fundamentalism is a movement within religion. So it can, there are fundamentalists Christians, there are fundamentalists Muslims and fundamentalists Hindus and that basically means someone who is religious and they take their text literally. And the difference between someone who and someone can be a fun fundamentalist evangelical or be evangelical and not fundamentalist, um, depends on what that person is. I would say overall, in my experience, um, a lot of evangelical churches that I’ve been to, they take the Bible seriously, but not literally. It’s important to take the texts meaningfully, but not but important to place scripture in context.
AW | 13:34 – So you’re not advocating for stoning people for adultery, et cetera.
LK | 13:38 – Yeah, I think it’s important to, like when you read a text, a lot of biblical texts are very scary at first or kind of throw you off, but you have to read it in the context of when it was written and by who it was written by. And I’ve been a part of many different, um, denominations volunteering or being a part of their church from like evangelical friends church to an assembly of God’s church. And in those spaces they’ve all really cared about, um, putting scripture into context. And I think that distinction is really important when talking about it because I think a lot of people when they think of evangelical, they think of someone who takes text, um, literally and are way too legalistic about it. And that is different from who, what the definition of evangelical is in itself. Sure. There are evangelicals who are fundamentalists and they’re fundamentalists who aren’t evangelical. I don’t think those two terms are like mutual.
AW | 14:42 – That’s why I found Mike Johnson, who’s the new Speaker of the House, a republican who was asked, what do you believe on X, Y or Z – I forget what the question was – and he said, all the answers you need to know are in this book. To me, it sounded like his interpretation of the Bible superseded his duty to the Constitution and in a lot of ways that like his laws were the Bible. I don’t know if you heard that, but that seems to differ a little bit from what you’re talking about.
LK | 15:09 – Yeah, it, I didn’t hear about this instance and it, it does seem to differ from what we’re talking about a little bit.
AW | 15:15 – Sure. But the evangelical community has been a largely very conservative voting bloc. So explain how YECA is trying to activate the evangelical community to start thinking about clean air and clean water when it votes. Because that hasn’t always been the case in the last three or four decades, has it?
LK | 15:39 – Yeah, I would agree with you. I think that as a voting block, data shows that evangelicals overall seem to be the most conservative. But if you break it down, people who proclaim to be evangelical and are conservative when you break it down by those who are church, it’s the least church population. But I think going back there isn’t really a denial or acceptance binary. Are you familiar with the Yale six Americas?
AW | 16:07 – No, no. Please explain.
LK | 16:08 – Okay. So Yale University, they have a global warming six Americas breakdown. And it’s a scale from people who are absolutely dismissive of climate change and global warming that’s happening to people who are alarmed by it. So there isn’t a denial or acceptance binary. Most, um, people are within that spectrum. So they could be concerned about it, they could be maybe cautious about it. And that’s why we, at YECA, we mobilize people who are willing to take action and especially younger, the younger generations, younger Christians like me who are willing to talk about climate change, global warming. And then we hope to encourage older folks on their journey to move towards more action. Maybe they were previously in a place of caution or they were in a place of being disengaged. Studies show that dismissive is actually the smallest group within those six categories. And we don’t actually need everyone on the dis who are dismissive on board to create meaningful change. And we don’t really focus our efforts there. We focus on like the Christians who do action right now and who are alarmed by what’s happening in the world.
AW | 17:25 – And how do you identify those people?
LK | 17:29 – A lot of times they’ll come to us or they’ll just be within our network. So again, like making disciples of disciples, like we have a network of people who are Christian and they’re telling other Christians about what it means to be voting with the climate in mind. And when they talk about climate change to their community groups, they’re making more people aware about what’s happening in the world and how to vote and how to be more obedient to God’s word when it comes to voting and being aware of the environment.
(Music Break) | 18:05
AW | 18:37 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lauren Kim from YECA Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. It would seem that a very effective way to get your word out to a lot of disciples would be through church leadership at in various churches. Have you created partnerships, alliances with leading evangelical pastors, speakers, et cetera?
LK | 19:00 – Yes and no. So some of our senior advisors are actually pastors. So people who lead a congregation, um, been through, been through divinity school, but we don’t have a formal program in place where we’re reaching out to leaders.
AW | 19:18 – But I just think of somebody who’s on television addressing their congregation. Have you been able to kind of inject some YECA doctrine into some of these wider reaching thought leaders in, in the evangelical community?
LK | 19:33 – I think that depends by like project to project. So a lot of what YECA does is we support people on their individual projects and what they’re doing to implement in their own communities. So for me personally, I am doing a letter campaign. So I write to different churches that I’ve been to. So I’ve graduated college last year and in between my years of college I’ve done summer internships at in different cities. And when I’ve been in those different places, I would find a church and I would go there for a summer. So I had that relationship with that church. And what I’m doing right now is writing a letter to that church, to that church pastor, that church leadership and talking to them about like what I do and building a relationship with them through these letters and asking them if they have any questions about climate, climate change, creation care and just building that relationship first. A lot of the work that we do, however, is with Christians who already are on board and want to do action with climate change.
AW | 20:41 – So we’ve already discussed how the evangelical community tends to be a pretty conservative block in terms of its voting, but I remember as a child hearing that word conservative and conservation in the same breath. When did the two diverge? When the conservative meant that they’re more interested in jobs or industry than nature and the environment? It seems like those two things have bifurcated in the conservative movement over the last five or six decades.
LK | 21:13 – I certainly can’t speak on behalf of an entire voting block or speak about that group of voters, but what I can say is I think a misconception is that a lot of evangelicals are conservative. And again, like we can go back to the data about like how conservative evangelicals are the most unchurched and that isn’t really our focus group when it comes to the people we engaged with.
AW | 21:39 – I meant to ask you about that. Actually, let me interrupt just for a second. What, what did you mean by unchurched? I don’t really know what that means.
LK | 21:45 – So a lot of people will be Christian and name only. Like if they have to check off a box, they’ll say they’re Christian. When we say like someone is unchurched, it means that they don’t go to church regularly. So they’re not like taking in the word. And there’s a big difference between someone who labels themself as a Christian, but you don’t really see the fruits of the spirit in their action. And those aren’t really the populations that we really engage with that often. We, we focus on people who do take their faith seriously, um, and they know what they’re talking about when it comes to like the Bible. And within that population of people who do take their faith seriously, we work with those who are on board and want to do action about climate change. A lot of people in my generation, Christian and non-Christians alike, are really involved and care a lot about climate change and environmentalism. And regardless if someone leans more conservatively or more liberally, wherever they’re on the spectrum, climate change is something that matters for them. And we’re seeing this trend more and more with people who would label themselves as conservative and under the age of 30 being concerned about climate change in a way that maybe their grandparents didn’t.
(Music Break) | 23:39
AW | 24:01 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lauren Kim from YECA Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. Putting your YECA hat aside and let’s just talk about somebody who’s a evangelical Christian who believes in climate action like yourself, and yet they go to a church where the word is preached in a different way that environmentalism and climate change is, is not part of that vocabulary. How would you, how does a churchgoer who believes in what their pastor is trying to tell them, how do they digest what’s coming from the pulpit and steer it into something more productive for the environment? When, when their pastor is a climate change denier, do they leave that church or do they try to convince others that this pastor might not have, uh, you know, the Earth’s best interest at heart? How would you suggest somebody, a church goer handle a situation like that? Because it happens quite a bit. I bet, right? There’s like you’re talking about YECA is trying to get more low hanging fruit, people who believe in climate change and and the word of God. But what if they’re going to a church which does not preach that?
LK | 25:15 – Well, taking my YECA hat off and just speaking as like what I would do as a person, if I had a friend who was going to a church that maybe environmental and creation care was not really in their vocabulary, I always say like, come from a place of good intention and like have a conversation that’s spirit led with that church leadership. And I would tell that friend to really step into a room with a pastor or whoever’s an elder at that church, and then talk about why caring for creation is important to them and why it should be important for them too. Because at the end of the day, like Creation Care is a pro-life value. And as pro-life, Christians, our mission demands that we defended life in every way and take out the whole like abortion argument. Like, let’s put that aside for a second. At the end of the day, Christians should be pro-life and we should protect life and the policies out there that pollute the earth and put microplastics into small children and cause horrible destruction in communities that is antithetical to the heart of God. And I think having those kind of conversations where you’re building bridges is far more productive than like leaving a church or condemning a pastor or turning your back on your church. I think it’s important to talk about like what your fundamental values are and where God is in all of that.
AW | 26:49 – As we go into the holiday season and people are gathering with family to celebrate Christmas, why should Christians care about the environment? What would your message be to them Lauren?
LK | 27:01 – So Psalms 24.1 clearly states that the earth is the Lord’s. So the earth, this environment is God’s property. It’s his ranch, his garden, his guest house, and we’re all guests in his house. And if we love the Lord and respect his creation, why would we as guests disrupt and trash his house? So I think the biggest form of love, respect towards our creator would be taking, taking care of his creation. And that’s actually one of our first mandates. If you believe Genesis to be true, when God calls Adam to be a steward of this planet, that mandate still runs through us today and we are still being called to be stewards of this environment.
AW | 27:52 – The organization is Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. YECA, Lauren Kim, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea. Change Radio.
LK | 28:01 – All right, thank you so much Alex.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Lizz Wright, Chet Atkins, and Eric Clapton. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Lauren Kim: Young Evangelicals for Climate Action appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
For many of us, the holiday season presents an opportunity to spend some time thinking about people less fortunate than ourselves. This week on Sea Change Radio, we spotlight a story of hope, determination and redemption. Our guest is Christine Yoo the director and producer of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life which takes viewers into the San Quentin Prison Marathon and its 1000 Mile Club. We learn about the inspiration behind the film, discuss the challenges of long distance running behind bars, and look at what the film reveals about our prison system and the effect it has on millions.
Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Christine Yoo (CY) | 00:23 – There were a lot of people there with brothers or fathers or mothers in prison, or their kids in prison too. It’s a cycle that is self-perpetuating.
Narrator | 00:38 – For many of us, the holiday season presents an opportunity to spend some time thinking about people less fortunate than ourselves. This week on Sea Change Radio, we spotlight a story of hope, determination and redemption. Our guest is Christine Yoo the director and producer of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life which takes viewers into the San Quentin Prison Marathon and 1000 Mile Club. We learn about the inspiration behind the film, discuss the challenges of long distance running behind bars, and look at what the film reveals about our prison system and the effect it has on millions.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:38 – I am joined on Sea Change Radio by my high school classmate, Christine Yu. Chris is the director and producer of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life. Christine, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Christine Yoo (CY) | 01:51 – Hey Alex, how are you? Glad to be here.
Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 – First, why don’t you give us a brief synopsis of 26.2 to Life, and then I want to dive into how you came about the project because it’s, it’s really a labor of love. It took six years, right?
Christine Yoo (CY) | 02:07 – Yeah, absolutely. Six long, very long years. So 26.2 to Life takes you inside the San Quentin Prison Marathon. And it explores the transformative power of running through the lens of the prisons running club, which is called the Thousand Mile Club. And within this club that is organized by these volunteers who are elite marathon runners that go into the prison throughout the year to coach a group of incarcerated men, they train so that every November they run a 26.2 mile marathon entirely behind the prison walls, 105 laps around this prison yard. But more than running the film really explores, uh, what, what led these men to the starting line at San Quentin and highlights their rehabilitative journeys to, to define themselves, you know, to be more than their crime.
Alex Wise (AW) | 03:12 – So how did you get interested in this project and how did you decide which characters you were going to follow as, as, as the story unfolded in front of you?
CY | 03:24 – So, my relationship with the prison system started more than 20 years ago. Um, I had a friend who was also fellow Korean American who was wrongfully convicted, and he was sentenced to 271 years in California state prison. Um, it really impacted me a lot. Um, I knew his whole family and how devastating it was for them. And he was somebody that I felt basically could have been my brother. You know, we had like the same type of family vacations, you know, grew up very similarly. Our fathers went to the same school in Korea. Um, and so because of his incarceration, I really started to wonder, uh, what does that look like if you know you’re going to die in prison? I mean, what does that act? How do you actually carry out a life? You know, because people still need to find a way to live. So what does that really actually look like for people? Uh, and the, so I guess basically the opportunity to explore that question came to me in 2016. I woke up one morning and I saw this magazine article in GQ and it said, this San Quentin marathon. And it just immediately captured my imagination. I’m not a marathoner, but I am a runner. Um, and so I could see how people could gain a sense of freedom or a sense of wellbeing, uh, by running. So I immediately contacted the coach. I did an online research to find whatever I could find. I reached out to Coach Frank, who lives in Novato, California, Marin County, and basically drove up to meet him immediately and, uh, told him why I was interested in this topic. And originally I was going to do it as a regular motion picture, you know, because that was more my background. I had more of a narrative background. Um, but he told me I had competition as well. So Conde Nast had also approached him to do a motion picture. Um, and I thought for sure, you know, he was going to end up going with them. But I just kind of left him and I just said, look, you know, this is like a, a classic David and Goliath fight, but you know, they probably have 50 projects in development. I will, you know, devote myself to give all my concentration to this project. And, uh, you know, we all, we all know who won that fight in the end and I left back down to LA convinced that I am sure that I wasn’t going to get it. And then he called me up a week later and said that he wanted to go with me. And so I went into the prison for a half marathon event. That was like the first time I was going into San Quentin. And again, I was going to do this as a, like a regular movie. So I basically went in there with, uh, I got permission to go in there with a pad of paper and a, and a pencil.
AW | 06:36 – And then Was that with the help of Frank, or you had to go through the whole system independently?
CY | 06:42 – Yeah, so he got me gate cleared to go in with the volunteers to, to just observe a half marathon event. This was in 2016. So the minute I start walking down into the yard and they’re all gathering for the, you know, the start of the marathon, I mean, it felt very festive,
AW | 07:19 – Yeah. You get that feeling in the film, like people are really cheering each other on.
CY | 07:23 – Yeah. And I’m like, but wait, but we’re in a prison. You know, I mean, this is a really weird juxtaposition of feelings. And I wanted to explore that. And so then I just started talking with other guys, and over the course of the next few months I started talking with, uh, you know, of course different coaches and volunteers and guys who had been released. And I sort of just could not believe all of the things that I was hearing and seeing and felt that I needed to get outta the way and tell this, tell this story as a documentary. So that’s just kind of where it started.
AW | 08:00 – Yes. I, I thought it was very effective how you get into their stories a little later. But the first reminder that this isn’t just a fun feel good story is they’re starting a marathon, then all of a sudden there’s a, a lockdown or a yard down and, and also you’re doing an interview with somebody a few minutes later in the film and they’re like, oh wait, that’s an alarm. I have to sit down. And they’re like, it’s almost like a timeout for a, an elementary school kid or something like that. It felt so infantalizing to me that somebody I, I can understand the, the protocols that go into that, but it, it was a stark reminder that this is not just the YMCA’s annual turkey trot.
CY | 08:40 – Yeah, sure. And then, yeah, so when these alarms go off, and it could be for any reason, you know, any outbreak that might be going on in the prison or some medical alarm or something like that. And sort of what accentuates it even more is that as an outsider, as a free person, you have to remain standing, you know, so also that guards can see, uh, immediately who is a free person and who is incarcerated.
AW | 09:06 – Wow, I didn’t realize that.
CY | 09:08 – That’s also why you wear different clothing too when you go inside the prison. So like the guys, they were blue, the guards, they were green. The new people that come in wear orange. So there’s a lot of colors that are just completely off limits to you as an outsider when you go in. So, you know, we always kind of made it simple and I always told people to wear all black, but there’s always invariably someone on the crew who doesn’t quite get the memo and shows up in blue jeans. So I got accustomed to keeping, you know, an extra set of sweatpants in the car
Music Break | 09:54
AW | 10:37 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Christine Yu. She is the producer and director of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life. So Christine, let’s talk about some of these people, some of the stars of the film and their journeys and view how running and the Thousand Mile Club affected their outcomes.
CY | 11:01 – I knew just from my own personal experience with running how running can make someone feel better, um, how after you do it, you always feel better about yourself. But what I didn’t really realize then, what I know now was really the impact of the running community to make personal and social transformation. Uh, so a lot of these guys, you know, they would tell me over and over that they started to run because, you know, they just wanted to lose weight or, uh, you know, get, get in, get in better shape or just, uh, do something healthy. But what happens is, you know, a lot of these people in prison, obviously, I mean, they are considered society’s failures, you know, who haven’t accomplished a whole hell of a lot in life. So what happens is that when they complete their first five miles, suddenly they’ve actually done something that they’ve never been able to do before. So what happens? They get a lot of confidence. And with that confidence then that they can go out then and do it inspires them to get their finished getting their GED or reconnect with family members or, you know, it leads to a whole host of other positive activities that, which is, I believe the reason why that out of all of the release members of the club, there is a 0% recidivism rate. Compare that to the national average, which is 67%, you know, after five years,
AW | 12:36 – Even with violent criminals?
CY | 12:38 – Oh yeah. Mo most of the people in San Quentin that I, you know, that I interviewed and that were participating in the film are considered quote unquote violent felons. Right.
AW | 12:49 – No, I mean that 67% recidivism rate, I know that homicide is, is a much lower recidivism rate than people assume.
CY | 12:58 – Sure, yeah. I mean, a lot of times with lifers, recidivism rates can be very, very low overall, you know, few percentage points. But that’s also because more than not, lifers end up spending at least a decade behind bars. And there is a lot of data that shows that as people get older, they age out of crime. You know, I mean, you don’t do the same things you did when you were 18 or 19, right? I certainly don’t. Um, and, uh, but those are the acts of course, that people are imprisoned and held accountable for, or, you know, what the prison system has been set up to hold them accountable for. But like the natural aging process, you know, people, people do age out of those behaviors. So, but that is why also mandatory minimum sentencing, which, you know, came in, um, during the tough on crime era, which is what has caused this whole ballooning of, uh, and created mass incarceration as we know it.
AW | 13:59 – How did your perception of the prison system change from when your friend was imprisoned to going through this journey with these incarcerated individuals over the last six years of making the film?
CY | 14:14 – Well, I think when my friend was locked up, I mean, I felt really powerless to do anything. I was incredibly depressed. How do you actually, how does an individual deal and interact with the prison system? You, you know, what actually, what can one individual do? But that is really why I felt that the story of the Thousand Mile Club was incredibly empowering and felt that that’s really why it needed, needed to be seen and, and shared with, with more people. Uh, coach Frank Rona, uh, you know, the head coach, he began coaching at the club, uh, in 2005 and over a few years he started gathering a community of other runners who had come in to, um, help him coach. And over this time, I mean, now the club has been going, you know, on for 18 years. Uh, there is a whole community of people that has been created both inside that now has this ripple effect and continuity for people on the outside. Which again, I think that’s why that it contributes to the 0% recidivism rate. Um, and it really showed me what one person can do. ZHe didn’t go into this as any kind of social change maker or even a prison advocate in any way. I mean, he was always actually like a voting Republican, though, you know, criminal justice and, and prison issues is, is something that people on both sides of the aisle can a lot of times get behind for, for very different reasons. But it is an area of commonality. But, you know, I think just through his humanity, uh, he was able to, uh, bring people into this through his really sheer passion for running. Uh, and, um, you know, not only have the men been, uh, transformed, but I would say the volunteers have all been equally transformed by the experience. So it really was an empowering story for me to be able to really highlight the power of what one individual can do to create community and ultimately change. I mean, from the ground level up in the most real of ways.
Music Break | 16:44
AW | 17:45 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Christine Yu. She is the producer and director of the new documentary film 26.2 to Life. So Chris, let’s talk about race a little bit. In the film, you explain how the prison population is kind of self-segregating in some ways. There’s the Native American group, there’s the Latino group, there’s the, the white skinheads. How do you think the Running Club was a way to kind of bring people together within that population? And on a larger societal sense, what kind of conclusions can one draw about an activity, a community driven activity in any kind of non in-prison format?
CY | 18:27 – Well, first off, you know, prison by Nature is a highly segregated society. You know, that’s how they splinter off into groups and, and organize that way. I mean, people don’t have to stay out of their, stay within their race. That’s like an unspoken but actually spoken kind of rule of how it all operates. However, in a place like San Quentin where there are tons of, you know, different rehabilitative, um, programming available for people, um, within the groups there’s usually, um, mixed races. You know, so people from all different backgrounds, um, participate in these self-help groups and athletic programs. However, you know, a lot of athletic programs, similarly, there are, um, team sports. And so a lot of the team sports also break down into our self-segregated. Um, but I think the beauty of running is that it is an individualized sport. And so probably, I mean, out of the athletics, it is the most integrated club in the prison. Now, when people leave these clubs, leave these groups, they still go off and they are self-segregating. But in a place like San Quentin where again, there are so many programs, you do see a mix of races, you know, I also volunteer at the Media center. You know, that’s what I actually really loved again about the Thousand Mile Club, is that it really showed me that this is a group of people that have managed to transcend prison politics to, you know, be together in community. And I thought, wow, you know, if these guys can do it, you know, what’s going on with us out here in the free world? And San Quentin is, is unlike any other prison in the state of California, if not perhaps the world, you know, they call it the Harvard of Prisons,
AW | 20:30 – And not even thinking about the beautiful view that they get. I mean, it’s an amazing piece of property. And then there’s lots of programs like Ear Hustle is the most famous publication now, uh, from coming from this until 26.2 till life came out. But it seems like a very highly functional place as prisons go.
CY | 20:50 – Yeah, as prisons go. I mean, it’s literally right on the bay in the Bay Area. And so when you walk from the front gate to the Sally Port entrance into like the, into the prison facility itself, it’s about a quarter mile strip along the bay. And it’s probably one of the most beautiful walks.
AW | 21:13 – Yeah. No, it is, it’s kind of why, one of the reasons why I think Alcatraz is so iconic because it’s like, wow, these people are stuck on this island and they get and they have to just look longingly at this beautiful city.
CY | 21:27 – But on the other hand, you know, like a mile away, at least they get a view, a good point. And there are a lot of places, places they don’t at all, you know, I mean Mm-Hmm.
AW | 22:02 – But you give a glimpse into the cells and that’s a pretty good reminder that this is no Hilton.
CY | 22:09 – No, it’s no walk in the park. And that was very important for us to show because we do spend a lot of time out into the yard. And I did not want people to think that, Hey, these guys just get to like run around and, you know, spend all day running. You know, they do go back to the reality of being in four by nine cells and it’s two people. It’s uh, basically imagine you and another guy living in your bathroom.
AW | 22:38 – Yeah. It is just, it seemed very cramped. Even just watching it, it made me feel a little claustrophobic. I can’t imagine what it’s like. And this is not considering solitary as well.
Music Break | 22:53
AW | 23:26 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. And I’m speaking to Christine Yu. Her new film is 26.2 to Life. Do you think that their participation in the Thousand Mile Club, the ones who whose sentences were commuted, do you think it it accelerated their release?
CY | 23:43 – You know, when people take up the sport of, of long distance running, traces of it end up going into all different areas of their life, you know, so the benefits are decreased anger, better sleep, teaching discipline and time management, learning to take on challenges, knowing that you can complete a goal a, a task. You know, there’s a phrase that you hear in prison a lot called people say hurt people, hurt people. because it’s a cycle of violence that perpetuates itself. You very quickly realize that most people are in prison because of systemic poverty, systemic racism, you know, usually people don’t have access to good education, have unstable family environments, drug addiction and drug addiction, you know, and they’re all interrelated. And a lot of that, again, has to do with, um, multi-generational incarceration. There was a lot of people there with brothers or fathers or mothers in prison, or their kids in prison too. It’s a cycle that is self-perpetuating. So, you know, a lot of people who are in San, Quentin are there to rehabilitate themselves, to strive for more, to strive for better for themselves. So they’re trying to break that cycle of violence for themselves and find new, a new way of life, you know, express through running. because you know, they, they’ll tell me, you know, the minute that you start running, suddenly you start caring about what you eat, what you put in your body. You don’t want to do drugs,
AW | 27:53 – The film is 26.2 to Life. Christine Yoo, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
CY | 28:00 – Thank you Alex for having me.
Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Bill Withers, Bob Marley and Chuck Berry. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site. Or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Christine Yoo: 26.2 To Life appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Did you know that over 100,000 tennis balls are used in an average grand slam tournament? And unfortunately, they cannot be recycled. Given the plethora of tennis matches played across the globe in an average year, we are talking about roughly 330 million tennis balls going into landfills annually. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Associated Press reporter, James Martinez, an avid tennis fan and player, who serves up some insight into tennis ball manufacturing, this waste issue, and some of the creative efforts to help solve the problem – and show the planet a little love.
Narrator 00:02 - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
James Martinez (JM) 00:18 - You can't win every match. You're, you're not, not always gonna play your best, but you do get a sense of satisfaction out of opening a new can of tennis balls. It's like a fresh start, and it's one of the great experiences of, of tennis, but there is a, there is a dark side.
Narrator 00:45 - Did you know that over a hundred thousand tennis balls are used in an average Grand Slam tournament? And unfortunately, they cannot be recycled given the plethora of tennis matches played across the globe in an average year. We're talking about roughly 330 million tennis balls going into landfills annually this week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Associated Press reporter James Martinez, an avid tennis fan and player who serves up some insight into tennis ball manufacturing, this waste issue and some of the creative efforts to help solve the problem and show the planet a little love.
Alex Wise (AW) 01:54 - I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by James Martinez. He's the Breaking News Investigations Editor for the Associated Press. He's also taught investigative journalism at Princeton University. James, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
James Martinez (JM) 02:07 - Thank you for, uh, for having me.
Alex Wise (AW) 02:09 - I should have also mentioned that you're a huge tennis fan and player, and you cover the US Open for the ap. The US Open just happened and you had an interesting piece that I wanted to discuss with you entitled “Tennis Ball Wasteland: Game Grapples with a Fuzzy Yellow Recycling Problem.” I never really thought about tennis balls being such a problem, but they are. Why don't you expand?
James Martinez (JM) 02:34 - Well, they are, and that's one of the, uh, the things that I, uh, look into when I cover the US Open. I'm not necessarily focused on the matches. We have sports writers who are very good at that. I kind of try to focus on, uh, the things that are going on outside the lines that maybe you haven't thought about before. And one of them is this recycling problem that, uh, tennis has with its balls. And nearly all of the 330 million tennis balls made worldwide each year eventually get chucked in the garbage, uh, with most ending up in landfills, uh, where they can take more than 400 years to decompose. And that's all because tennis balls, uh, by the very nature, are complex objects that are extremely hard to recycle, and the industry has yet to develop a ball to make that easier. And what's more, tennis balls are one of these objects that are very complicated to make. And there's a, a whole process in the factory. It's a 26-step process to make a tennis ball, and yet they are thrown away very quickly. Uh, so this whole thing is a, a conundrum for tennis coming against the backdrop of the recent US Open.
Alex Wise (AW) 03:58 - Yes. I was surprised that in the article you mentioned that a grand slam tournament goes through a hundred thousand balls. That's stunning.
James Martinez (JM) 04:05 - It is. And you don't think about it because when you watch on television, you see the big stars play Kovich, uh, Carlos Alcaraz, and it's say, oh, well this is just a, these are just a few matches. How can they go through this many balls? But you have to consider that the US Open is actually a three-wee...
If you’ve happened to tune in to MSNBC or CNN on a day when a massive hurricane is not pummeling a coastal region, you might think that the only major news in this country concerns the many legal issues facing a certain former president of the United States. But, according to this week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, John Stoehr, there are plenty of other pressing political issues worth analyzing. First, we examine the recent mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, including what it tells us about the white supremacy movement and how the right-wing actually benefits politically from these events. Then, we discuss whether the reversal of Roe v. Wade has placated Republicans or if it has just paved the way for restricting other basic freedoms like contraception. And yes, we still manage to sneak in a few minutes to talk about the upcoming trials of the 45th president.
Narrator 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
John Stoehr (JS) 00:20 – I think our rhetoric would be much healthier if we dropped the whole idea of America being a special place, because we’re not that different from other democracies. And we’d know this if we, if we paid attention to other democracies, but, you know, Americans typically don’t.
Narrator 00:34 – If you’ve happened to tune into MSNBC or CNN on a day when a massive hurricane is not pummeling a coastal region, you might think that the only major news in this country concerns the many legal issues facing a certain former president of the United States. But according to this week’s guest on Sea Change Radio John Stoehr, there are plenty of other pressing political issues worth analyzing. First, we examine the recent mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, including what it tells us about the white supremacy movement and how the right wing actually benefits politically from these events. Then we discuss whether the reversal of Roe v Wade has placated Republicans, or if it has just paved the way for restricting other basic freedoms like contraception. And yes, we still manage to sneak in a few minutes to talk about the upcoming trials of the 45th President. I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Stoehr. He is the founder of the editorial board. People should go to editorial board.com to check it out. John, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
John Stoehr (JS) 01:57 – Thanks for having me again, Alex.
Alex Wise (AW) 01:58 – Always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. So first I feel like we should probably give the latest mass shooting its due. The Jacksonville massacre was ugly, as they all are, but the politics of this one were unavoidable because it happened right in the state where Ron DeSantis is running for president and, and it had race and guns and pretty much all the terrible stuff that were faced with, with a, the candidacy of a DeSantis. So anybody who hasn’t been following it, give us a little summary of it and your analysis if you can.
John Stoehr (JS) 02:38 – Sure. Well, uh, on August 26th, a 21 year old white supremacist entered a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, Florida, and, uh, he shot three black people to death before shooting himself to death. Um, he, uh, was armed with a semi-automatic rifle, an AR 15, and a semi-automatic pistol, a Glock, uh, that he had purchased legally, uh, even though he was involved in domestic violence incident in 2016. And he was involuntarily committed, uh, for a mental health examination. The year following, um, basically my, my thesis is that, um, this shooter, whose name I don’t use, um, because I don’t want to glorify him, uh, is part of what I think of as the Republican Party’s para paramilitary wing. These are people who are reacting to liberal values and democratic politics in that they believe liberal values and democratic politics are a threat to their way of life. Um, I tend to think of these, uh, and another piece in the editorial board, I describe him as one of what, one of what’s called the chosen people. And I don’t mean Jews, I mean what Thomas Jefferson called the chosen people. And that is a, what was at the time there, a white rural majority, uh, people in small towns and small places, farmers and so on, who were considered the most authentic of Americans, the most American of Americans. And, um, these are people who basically controlled the country all the way up until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, uh, which empowered everybody else to have a say in American democracy. And at that point, and I quote a historian here, uh, these most authentic of Americans no longer were considered the most American, and then they’ve been angry ever since. So I think this guy is one of those people. And, um, he demonstrated that by massacring three black people.
Alex Wise (AW) 04:53 – And on the, the other side of the coin, not the actual shooter, but the conservative wing of this country, part of your thesis is that they benefit from these acts of violence in a counterintuitive way. Like we would think, oh, well, these guys like Ron DeSantis have been pushing guns, and then people go and use these guns and act violently. We would think that, uh, somebody like a Ron DeSantis would have political blood on their hands, so to speak. But you had a different take. I think it was, it was quite astute.
JS 05:25 – Well, he, he does have political blood on his hands. I don’t, I don’t think there’s any doubt about
AW 05:29 – No, no, but you’re saying that they actually are able to turn this into a positive for them in some way, which I hadn’t really thought of. Why don’t you expand?
JS 05:38 – Okay. So when we usually, when we think about gun rights and gun control, we’re thinking on an individual level. And the Republicans always make sure that we, our focus stays on an individual level so that they always seem to be standing up for the individual’s right to bear arms. Right. But if you think of, um, if you think of, you could pull back and think of, of the issue in a more societal level there, according to one source, there has been 476 as of right now, uh, mass shootings in this country since the beginning of this year. Um, if you think about it, that’s, um, that’s, that’s one really good way of, um, keeping people scared and keeping people afraid, um, keeping them quiet. Even. Um, there, there in a lot of, a lot of countries, um, that, you know, Americans don’t pay attention to other countries, but in some other countries you have political parties that, um, forge informal, indirect ties with basically the, that society’s very worst. People
AW 07:17 – What countries are you thinking of?
JS 07:20 – I’m thinking of, of, uh, of Jamaica actually is one country I’ve recently been to where that is the, the, apparently the dynamic now, I’m no expert in Jamaica. This is just something I was, I was Ed educated about when I got there. And, um, you could, you could say the Republican Party does something similar to this, basically, like, they, they, they make informal relations with, with vigilantes, with people who feel like everything has gone to hell and, and the law and politics, and nobody can trust anybody anymore. And they need to take matters into their own hands. They need to take the law into their own hands. They need to seek justice on their own. You see what I’m saying?
AW 07:58 Because the democratic system is broken. So just going out and campaigning or doing door-to-door campaigning or just voting, that’s not enough. You need to, and you see a lot of that rhetoric on television with Republican leaders talking about just little murmurings of civil war and having to take matters into our own hands. That kind of messaging.
JS 08:20 – Absolutely. Taking things into your own hands. And, you know, these are the very worst people you can think of because they, they don’t have any, they’ve either given up on, on, on society and generally, or democracy generally, and they, uh, are willing to hurt people. Right. Um, and they’re willing to hurt people for what they believe is a good cause. Right. And it’s a good, and, and the reason they even think it’s a good cause is because the, the Republicans have established enough, have set out, sent out enough lies and propaganda in order to rationalize the very worst behavior among these very worst people.
AW 08:56 – And let’s turn to the race element of it. You write on the editorial board, the threat of mass death can establish a climate of fear and loathing that silences dissent among people who endure the greatest burdens placed on them by the orders of white power. If censorship can’t be done legitimately, it can be by sanctioning otherwise illegitimate behavior. So you talk about this white power element in the same article that you, you mentioned how Ron DeSantis has kind of equated, he’s not alone, but anti woke really means anti-black.
JS 09:30 – Mm-hmm, anti-woke means anti-black. I mean that they’ve established that is enough and anti and an and woke, by the way, remember where woke comes from, it’s a reaction to the political gains that were made democratically in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer. That’s where woke comes from. That’s right. And so we, what we’re saying is the anti anti woke is anti George Floyd, you know, there, it’s really that. But, you know, because news tends to be, news tends to be, uh, disseminated in bits and pieces. We forget that this larger context, you know, and, and the Republicans benefit from that, those bits and pieces where normal people who have other things to do than pay attention to politics, don’t have the time to put all these pieces together,
JS 10:22 – Normal people figure things out. Um, so yeah, I mean, anti woke is annotated black. And the, and, um, you know, there, there’s a reason I say in that same piece that, that what I, I re I I recount the scene that happened in last weekend, uh, sorry, a couple weekends ago, uh, when DeSantis arrived at a candlelight vigil for those three black murder victims. And, uh, he went and he went there and he basically did everything he could not to bring up the real cause for the murder, which was, which is racism. He called the, the killer or scumbag and, and, and so on,
AW 11:02 – And guns. You can’t also talk about guns being the problem with this shooting, which is absurd, but
JS 11:08 – Right. He, he got booed viciously booed. And what’s important, I think in that scene, the, the, the way I talk about it in my piece is that the booing is democratic politics, right? That’s democratic politics. That’s people raising hell when they see something is wrong, right? But DeSantis represents the opposite force, which I think is anti-political politics. It’s getting people in a democracy to stop acting democratically what his, his biggest goal, who he, he which he can never achieve, is getting all those people to shut up. You can’t do that. They’re never going to shut up. But he, but anti-political politics is never going to stop either. The, the more people keep raising hell, the more other people want them to shut up. And this is a dynamic that we keep living with. And the, and the sad outcome is that people die.
(Music Break) 12:14
AW 12:59 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to John Stoehr, he’s the founder of The Editorial Board. When you’re talking about guns and gun ownership, I can’t help but think about American exceptionalism. And the in-group is thinking that yes, guns are dangerous in the home, but I’m an exception because I’m a good gun owner. That thought process is not that dissimilar from the thought process that you hear on the right talking about Donald Trump undergoing some kind of a witch hunt, because this should not happen in this country. We’re, we’re exceptional. But that specialness of the ingroup is such a dangerous one. And, and it has a real domino effect on our body politic.
JS 13:43 – Oh, yeah, sure.
AW 13:44 – And Democrats do it too. It’s like the greatest country on earth should not suffer this. We just always say that as it’s pablum.
JS 13:51 – Yeah, it is pablum. So, I mean, what does that mean that we’re the best and so on? Take that to its, take that farther and farther out, and what does that, what are we really saying? What we’re saying is that God chose us, right? We don’t need democratic politics. We don’t need to argue with each other. We don’t need to compromise. We don’t need to bargain, we don’t need to do anything like that. God is on our side, so therefore we can kill you. I mean, that, that, that’s what that, that means. So you take that all the way to the end, and that means that we, that we as human beings are no longer human beings, and we don’t need to live, operate on a human level. What we can do is access godly heights in order to vaporize the opposition, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, that, that kind of rhetoric is dangerous and it has led in history to very, very bad outcomes. I don’t think we’re going to, ever, in the United States, we’re ever going to, I mean, who knows? Nobody knows the future, but I don’t see like a holocaust level kind of thing. And I know that’s often referred to, but it’s, I, I think, but I think the more we refer to these holocaust level tragedies, I think the less we see what’s actually going on, which is a slow motion kind of guerilla warfare that’s going on. I mean, 400, 476 mass shootings, you know, there’s a root to that. And the root is that some people are having a problem and they believe that they can turn to a gun to solve their problems. They can turn to violence. Right? And we have a society that enables that, right? We have a whole political organization that, that’s one of their main tenets is that, you know, a man should have, has a right to defend himself against whatever, whatever evil. You just pick an evil out of thin air, and he has a right to defend himself. And so that’s a very dangerous place to be. And I think, and well, we’re seeing it except that we don’t see it. That’s, that’s, that’s the problem, is that we kind of have this pretend this make believe level of thinking where all this mass death that we’re seeing isn’t really happening, or it is, it doesn’t make us less exceptional, you know, because it’s actually, we are less exceptional. I think our rhetoric would be much healthier if we dropped the whole idea of America being a special place, because we’re not that different from other democracies. And we’d know this if we, if we paid attention to other democracies, but you know, Americans typically don’t.
AW 16:19 – So another part of illiberal politics that’s being played out on a daily basis, and we’ll see it more and more running up to the 2024 election, is the role of abortion in this country. You would think that after the Democrats had a healthy midterm in 2022, that Republicans might shy away from abortion, but no, as you write, they’re pivoting to birth control. They can’t quit anti-abortion politics in your words.
JS 16:53 – No. And they, and they, and they aren’t really making that pivot either. I’ll, I’ll explain that. Once the, uh, Republican rhetoric started equating abortion with murder, there was no turning back. You’re not going to, I mean, how do you turn back from that? I mean, and they had, and they went that far in order to put a fire under, uh, six right-wing Supreme Court justices, and to have them turn that, turn that whole thing around.
AW 17:17 – So is it a winning strategy to just constantly be the puritanical party that’s trying to enforce, you know, 17th century values on a 21st century world?
JS 17:30 – Well, I not, I do not pretend to foresee the future. So with, is it a winning strategy? I don’t know. I don’t think so, or I, I can’t imagine that most people, most of the time are going to get behind that kind of thing, especially in a presidential election, you know, where majorities matter, even in senate races, I think, you know, the Republicans are going to have a hard time. We, we know that they are going to have a hard time because they’re running away from it. Or at least they’re trying to have, have things both ways on the one they’re speaking out of both sides of their mouths. In other words, on the one side, they’re speaking to their people and they’re like, no, don’t worry, we’re still anti-abortion. Don’t, don’t, no worries. And on the other side, they’re like, no, we’re not, we’re not that much anti-abortion. We’re actually pro birth control. Or it’s either that or they’re saying, uh, nevermind the anti-abortion politics. Pay more attention to the transphobia. And those, those scary people who want kids to have sex change sex changes. And the groomers and the pedophiles pay attention to that. You know, they’re either fearmongering or soft balling, uh, in order to distract from where they, where, where they are, which is anti-abortion politics. The problem with anti-abortion politics is that it’s unpopular
AW 19:18 – I couldn’t help but think that the new moderate position staked out by the Republicans was expounded upon by Nikki Haley in the g o p debate, where she was saying like, we shouldn’t be executing women who get abortions. Like, and that was like, wow, okay, “She’s pretty, pretty moderate.”
JS 19:38 – Moderate (laughs)
AW 19:38 – Like this is like the new middle ground. Sorry, go on.
JS 19:42 – Right,
AW 22:07 – It also led to complacency on the left where we say, well, that’s, they’re not going to take it away.
JS 22:12 – They’re not going to take it away. They don’t really mean what they say. There’s all kinds of ways of rationalizing away what they really intended to do. Right? But now that Roe is gone, now people are, people are like, wait a minute. We’ve just had 50 years of, of in which we took the right to an abortion for granted. And now that, that, that those 50 years are gone, that’s not acceptable. So even in, that’s why you’re seeing polls now that even in states, uh, even in states where, uh, abortion is largely banned or banned altogether, you have an increase in support in abortion rights. You know, because people didn’t really expect any of this to happen until it happened. I call it the great reversal.
(Music Break) 22:57
AW 23:48 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to John Stoehr. He’s the founder and the editor of the editorial board. So John, we’ve gone almost this entire conversation without talking about Donald Trump’s legal woes, and I don’t want to get into the legal angles of all the different cases, but if you spent an hour or two watching cable news, you would think that’s the only news in the world is that there’s a possibility of Donald Trump going to prison without breaking down each case. What’s your big takeaway from that?
JS 24:19 – What does it mean when more and more of these prosecutors step forward? It means this man has less and less political power, right? They smelled blood and they went after him, right? So the more he’s com accused of crimes, the less support he seems to be getting. And the more Republican, specifically Republican voters seem to be looking for options. His life depends on winning this presidential campaign.
AW 24:57 – “Vote for me, or I’ll go to jail.”
JS 24:59 – Yeah. “Vote for me or go to jail.” I mean, maybe I’m being naive in saying this, but I just think most people, most of the time, and, and I’m talking about like respectable property, owning law abiding people, middle class people, they’re not going to want to hear about, constantly hear about the 2020 election or constantly hear about his steal, stealing of government secrets and stuff. They’re just, they’re going to start tuning all that out because they have concerns of their own that they want elected officials to take care of, right? I mean, Trump basically is saying, he, he’s running a basically a campaign of revenge, right? Saying, vote for me and I’ll take, and I’ll obliterate the enemy.
AW 25:43 – But he’s also saying he’d obliterate democracy, which is, it’s so much more overt than it was in 2016 when he was running. I think the downside is so much more terrifying to clear-eyed people. That’s one of the reasons why we’re so obsessed with seeing him being prosecuted, is that there’s this hope that they can keep him off the ballot. But I don’t think that’s realistic. I think it’s just going to be our own pound of flesh that we get to extract from this terrible man. If he does go to prison for his misdeeds, I think it’ll be gravy after he, he loses the election without jinxing anything there.
JS 26:22 – I’ll knock on some wood for you,
AW 26:40 – And he’ll get millions and millions of votes.
JS 26:41 – From prison. Yeah. It’s still going to be a problem. And it’s still have to, it’s still going to be a political problem that has to be solved politically. It just, there’s no, there’s no way around that. I, I see a lot of Democrats doing these days with Jack Smith and Fannie Willis and, uh, Alvin brag up in Manhattan. I see a, them doing what to them, what they did with Mueller, the Mueller report. Yeah, the whole, like, Mueller’s going to save us. Mueller’s not never saved us. You know, what saved us was normal, partisan democratic politics. That’s what saved us, you know? And it’s going to save us again, just the struggle, the work, put in the work, put in the struggle, do what needs to be done and hope for the best. I mean, that’s, that’s not to say that that damage won’t be done. Lots of damage is going to be done. We’re already seeing it. Jacksonville was an instance of damage being done. That guy was, as I said, he was, he was one of the chosen. And those, the chosen is the, exactly the Trump’s people. America is their birthright. They have a right to boss everybody else around and anybody else who complains about it only deserves annihilation. And I think most people, most of the time are just tired of that.
AW 27:52 – John Stoehr is the editor of The Editorial Board. People can go to editorial board.com and subscribe. John, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JS 28:01 – Thank you, Alex.
AW 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Herbie Hancock, Johnny Cash, and David Byrne. To read a transcript of this show, go to seachangeradio.com to stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio. I’m Alex Wise.
This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to environmental reporter Neel Dhanesha of Heatmap to learn about his new media startup, discuss the landmark climate case Held v. Montana and take a look at the lesser prairie chicken and why the plight of this dancing bird is no laughing matter.
In discussions about climate change we talk a lot about carbon dioxide, and with good reason. But did you know that per molecule, methane actually traps more atmospheric heat than CO2? This week on Sea Change Radio, we are speaking with Jon Goldstein of the Environment Defense Fund to learn about the fight to regulate and reduce methane emissions. We look at data from his organization’s recent nationwide survey on oil and gas-related emissions, discuss potential benefits from the methane provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, and get an update on efforts to address leakage from old, abandoned oil wells.
They say charity is a virtue, but sometimes it's a little more complicated. The donor advised fund or DAF, has been a financial instrument for charitable giving in the United States for nearly a century - it's a useful tool for wealthy individuals to make philanthropic donations. But as the inequality gap continues to expand in this country, the DAF has come under increased scrutiny as people push for transparency within the moneyed class. In 2018 the New York Times published a piece asserting that donor advised funds are being exploited by high net worth individuals as a way to shelter them from capital gains taxes. And more recently, this week's guest on Sea Change Radio, Alex Kotch, wrote a piece for Optout and The New Republic examining the role of DAF fiduciary sponsors, particularly big investment firms like Fidelity, Vanguard, and Schwab. We discuss this article, learn more about DAFs, and explore the question of who should be held accountable when a donor advised fund facilitates donations to red-flagged hate groups.
This week on Sea Change Radio we dig into the archives to first speak with author and Bloomberg Opinion columnist Adam Minter about the world of autonomous vehicles. We examine the impact autonomous vehicles might have on rural America, look at an appealing test program in a sparsely populated area of Minnesota, and explore how the elimination of drivers might assist those who cannot – or should not – be driving. Then, we hear from automotive journalist, Jim Motavalli to discuss the puzzling decision by General Motors to shelve the Chevy Bolt, get some recommendations on new EV automakers and models, and talk about America’s ongoing fascination with big old gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs.
If you were a kid in the 1970s, you undoubtedly were at least a little terrified of going into the ocean – a fear placed squarely in your subconscious by the Jaws movies. But, according to the International Shark Attack File, there are only around 72 unprovoked shark attacks around the world per year, a relatively small amount given the many sleepless nights and swimming phobias arising from a fear of sharks. The far scarier reality is that the much-demonized shark has long been under attack itself from its greatest predator: us. Humans kill well over 100 million sharks in any given year. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Mongabay reporter, Philip Jacobson, to learn about the illegal shark-finning practices of one Chinese-based fishing company, why he believes this practice is far from unique, and what efforts are being taken to save this important apex predator.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:22 Philip Jacobson (PJ) – You know one of the policies that are put in place to combat shark finning. It’s not necessarily banning the trade, but you tell boats, OK, you can’t just keep the fin and throw the body away you have to keep the whole shark.
00:37 Alex Wise (AW) – If you were a kid in the 1970s, you undoubtedly were at least a little terrified of going into the ocean – a fear placed squarely in your subconscious by the Jaws movies. But, according to the International Shark Attack File, there are only around 72 unprovoked shark attacks around the world per year, a relatively small amount given the many sleepless nights and swimming phobias arising from a fear of sharks. The far scarier reality is that the much-demonized shark has long been under attack itself from its greatest predator: us. Humans kill well over 100 million sharks in any given year. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Mongabay reporter, Philip Jacobson, to learn about the illegal shark-finning practices of one Chinese-based fishing company, why he believes this practice is far from unique, and what efforts are being taken to save this important apex predator.
01:48 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Philip Jacobson. He is a journalist for Mongabay and he’s based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Phil, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:57 Philip Jacobson (PJ) – Hi Alex, thanks for having me on the show, it’s great to be here.
02:00 AW – Well, it’s a pleasure to have you been reading your work? You’ve done a lot of investigative work into the shark finning practice that is running rampant across the Asian seafood marketplace. First, why don’t you explain why sharks are being hunted and why the sharkfin has become this, almost an outlier in how we process seafood. This is not like just catching tuna. It seems very wasteful and a dangerous precedent.
02:33 PJ – Sure, so shark fins are eaten as part of shark fin soup, which is a delicacy in parts of Asia, especially East Asia. It’s been a pretty big industry for the past several decades, especially as China’s middle class kind of exploded grew a lot in 80s nineties, 2000s, and that created a lot of new demand for shark fins. Soup used to be served at weddings. Plot and official functions in China. So there’s been some effort to kind of crack down on it in recent years by the Chinese government. They’ve banned it at official government functions, for example. Just because you know of the trouble that sharks are in from a conservation perspective, many shark populations going extinct because of the demands, especially for their fins. Nowadays, sharks are being hunted more and more for their meat, which is also eaten, but I guess that’s another story – I published recently with Manga Bay focused on a shark finning operation that was taking place across the fleet of a a major tuna fishing company, a Chinese company.
03:51 AW – Yes, and I I wanted to ask you about that because in the in the piece you ...
Did you know that India accounts for about one-third of the world's one billion head of cattle? Last week on Sea Change Radio, we spoke to the head of Rumin8, a startup that's working to reduce methane emissions from cattle. This week, we take a more academic approach to the cow burp problem - our guest is Dr. Joseph McFadden, a professor of cattle biology at Cornell University. We learn more about the science of enteric fermentation in ruminants, examine the various technological solutions aiming to reduce these methane emissions, and discuss the hurdles that the feed additive industry faces, and why they are particularly challenging in countries like India.
00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:32 Joseph McFadden (JM) - We just need to have more investment, more investment in scientific research, to answer the tough questions when it comes to these feed additives, there's going to be a lot of high demand for various clinical trials to improve their efficacy and safety. And I see that improving, but I don't think we're anywhere where we need to be with the current funding climate - it's going to have to improve.
00:55 Narrator - Did you know that India accounts for about one-third of the world's one billion head of cattle? Last week on Sea Change Radio, we spoke to the head of Rumin8, a startup that's working to reduce methane emissions from cattle. This week, we take a more academic approach to the cow burp problem - our guest is Dr. Joseph McFadden, a professor of cattle biology at Cornell University. We learn more about the science of enteric fermentation in ruminants, examine the various technological solutions aiming to reduce these methane emissions, and discuss the hurdles that the feed additive industry faces, and why they are particularly challenging in countries like India.
01:56 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Doctor Joseph McFadden. He is a professor of dairy cattle biology at Cornell University. Joe, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:06 Joseph McFadden (JM) - Thanks for the invitation to talk.
02:08 Alex Wise (AW) - For the last decade or so, we've heard a lot about the dangers of methane emissions from cattle, and there's people like yourself who are studying this phenomenon. Are some of the technological breakthroughs that have made you hopeful that we're going to be able to mitigate some of these methane emissions moving?
02:29 JM - So you know, there's a lot of interest right now in developing different technologies that can reduce enteric methane emissions. You know what I find particularly interesting is that these technologies have some efficacy already proven, meaning that depending on the type of perhaps feed additive that's being fed to cows. We might be able to see reductions anywhere from 10:00, but maybe 80%. Unfortunately, you know we're a little bit early in the research process to really determine if any of these sort of technologies are real solutions, right? And so, as a scientific community, we're trying to sort of take a step back for a moment and really make sure that our perspective is holistic. And in that we not only have effective solutions that reduce methane emissions from livestock, but also that these solutions are safe, safe for the animal, and it doesn't really modify meat or milk composition. So it's still safe for human consumption. And we also want to make sure that any potential technology is profitable for the farmer in order to ensure its adoption.
03:36 AW - I asked for some of the solutions first, but why don't you give us kind of a a broader scope of the problems that we're trying to solve?
03:44 JM - So you know, methane emissions represents about it's a high priority in terms of research, simply because agriculture contributes a large percentage of methane emissions from human derived activities. And, you know, one,
When we think about greenhouse gas emissions, automobiles, airplanes, and power plants usually figure more prominently than livestock. The methane produced by cow belching, however, is one of the biggest sources of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, there are some innovations on the horizon that are promising to help reduce the damage of these gassy cows. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to David Messina, the Managing Director of Rumin8, an Australian-based startup that is hoping to transform the cattle industry. The company's main product is a lab-grown feed additive that is designed to significantly reduce methane emissions in ruminants like cattle and sheep. We discuss the problem that Rumin8 is trying to solve, talk about the company's business strategy and hurdles it faces, and take a look at the competitive landscape in the growing feed additive space.
00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:19 David Messina (DM) - But I think it'll become standardized. You know, if we achieve and the industry achieves what we want, then it'll become just a standard. It'll be a negative for products that aren't being produced in a climate friendly way within 5 to 10 years.
00:35 Narrator - When we think about greenhouse gas emissions, automobiles, airplanes, and power plants usually figure more prominently than livestock. The methane produced by cow belching, however, is one of the biggest sources of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Fortunately, there are some innovations on the horizon that are promising to help reduce the damage of these gassy cows. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to David Messina, the Managing Director of Rumin8, an Australian-based startup that is hoping to transform the cattle industry. The company's main product is a lab-grown feed additive that is designed to significantly reduce methane emissions in ruminants like cattle and sheep. We discuss the problem that Rumin8 is trying to solve, talk about the company's business strategy and hurdles it faces, and take a look at the competitive landscape in the growing feed additive space.
01:46 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by David Messina. He is the managing director of Rumin8. David, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:54 David Messina (DM) - Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
01:57 Alex Wise (AW) - So explain for our listeners the problem Rumin8 is trying to solve what is your technology and how are you trying to change the world.
02:06 David Messina (DM) - We're going after one of the biggest problems in climate at the moment, and that is methane emissions from cattle. It accounts just for that one single issue from 1.2 billion cows, about 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions. We have products that reduce those emissions by a fairly complex process that happens in the stomach or in the rumen of the animal, and we're seeing some really exciting results.
02:35 AW - So we've heard a lot about seaweed being the kind of this new silver bullet that can reduce methane emissions through a cow's burps being reduced by this additive, but I've also read that growing this amount of seaweed might not be scalable, so ruminate is trying to solve that problem by doing it chemically is.
02:56 DM - Correct, yes, it is the exact same bio active that is found in the seaweed. We actually take that product, we manufacture it and we stabilize it in our laboratory and then we produce a product in a in a pharmaceutical manufacturing process. So instead of having to grow the organic product. All the seaweed we're actually able to manufacture and stabilize our product, which means like any factory, you can scale it up very quickly and the faster you can scale it and the easier it is to scale, the cheaper the product is.
03:32 AW - And I realize you're in in testing, but what kind of percentage are we talking about as an additive in ter...
The new generation of veggie burgers do taste more like meat than their sawdust-leaning predecessors. And most agree that plant-based meat alternatives are a step in the right direction, considering the hefty impact that cattle have on the environment. But the Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meats of the world come with their own not-so-insignificant carbon challenges. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with environmental reporter Nithin Coca about his research for Vox.com on the impact of these popular plant-based meats on agricultural supply chains around the globe. We talk about the rapid growth of the market sector, take a look at how it affects the coconut oil and cacao butter industries, and, while we are at it, get a snapshot of lab grown meats, as well.
00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:18 Nithin Coca (NC) - There's a reason it was included in the European Union's recent deforestation regulations. One of the six commodities included in that is cacao, because of the deforestation risk presented.
00:30 Narrator - The new generation of veggie burgers do taste more like meat than their sawdust-leaning predecessors. And most agree that plant-based meat alternatives are a step in the right direction, considering the hefty impact that cattle have on the environment. But the Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meats of the world come with their own not-so-insignificant carbon challenges. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with environmental reporter Nithin Coca about his research for Vox.com on the impact of these popular plant-based meats on agricultural supply chains around the globe. We talk about the rapid growth of the market sector, take a look at how it affects the coconut oil and cacao butter industries, and, while we are at it, get a snapshot of lab grown meats, as well.
01:49 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Nithin Coca. He's a freelance environmental journalist based in Japan. Nithin, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
01:58 Nithin Coca (NC) - It's great to be here again.
01:59 Alex Wise (AW) - So you just submitted a piece for vox.com entitled plant burgers are way better for the planet than beef. But these two ingredients threaten tropical ecosystems, so I wanted to dive into these two ingredients in a deeper way. You really uncover the problems that go into coconut and cacao. Why don't you start at the beginning in terms of these veggie burgers, these plant-based meats and how the industry has evolved over the last few years?
02:32 NC - Happy to. So I remember when I first heard about plant based meat, I think it was at an event like five or six years ago and there was like a big marketing push by these companies, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, to come to these environmental and journalism conferences and kind of push this as a more sustainable alternative to normal agriculture. And it was, I think, when I was in in 2019, I was doing several reporting on coconut in Southeast Asia, looking at kind of issues that farmers are facing. And my editor at the publication at the time asked me to, like, look into what are the key companies that are using coconut oil? And I came across the fact that there are key ingredient in both beyond and Impossible Burgers and I thought that was super interesting because they're basically shifting to sourcing an ingredient that only grows in the tropics and only grows in regions where there's high levels of biodiversity and forests and I was concerned, like if plant based meat grows to the scale they want to because, you know, look at the projections, they want to expand by 10 to 20 times in just five or ten years. To rapidly displaced animal meat and hopefully and transform our food system to one that they argue is more sustainable. If that's the case, there's going to be a lot more coconut oil. And, as is covered later cacao butter is an ingredient in Beyond products.
In the 1990s, I recall my grandfather remarking upon the new ubiquity of plastic water bottles, "When did everybody get so thirsty all of a sudden?" Indeed, plastic bottles have been proliferating at an exponential rate since the 1970s - the US alone is responsible for tens of billions of single-use plastic bottle waste every year. This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a look at the bottled water industry through the eyes of a relatively small but innovative player in the space. CEO and co-founder of FloWater, Rich "Raz" Razgaitis, joins us to tell us about his company's product, its mission to help curb America's seemingly bottomless thirst for single-use plastic bottles, and the ways the bottled water industry is similar to Big Tobacco.
00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:20 Rich Razgaitis (RR) - The solution is create a product so that bottled water is not a necessity in 99% of the cases, and that's what we're focused on is building a new platform and a new way of water that eliminates the need for single use packaged water.
00:36 Narrator - In the 1990s, I recall my grandfather remarking upon the new ubiquity of plastic water bottles, "When did everybody get so thirsty all of a sudden?" Indeed, plastic bottles have been proliferating at an exponential rate since the 1970s - the US alone is responsible for tens of billions of single-use plastic bottle waste every year. This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a look at the bottled water industry through the eyes of a relatively small but innovative player in the space. CEO and co-founder of FloWater, Rich "Raz" Razgaitis, joins us to tell us about his company's product, its mission to help curb America's seemingly bottomless thirst for single-use plastic bottles, and the ways the bottled water industry is similar to Big Tobacco.
01:43 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Rich “Raz” Razgaitis. He is the CEO and Co-founder of FloWater. Raz, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:52 Rich Razgaitis (RR) - Thanks so much. Great to be here, Alex. Appreciate you having me on the show.
01:55 Alex Wise (AW) - So FloWater is a pretty cool idea. Tell us what the company makes, how FloWater Works, and what your company's mission.
02:04 Rich Razgaitis (RR) - So FloWater is a company that's fundamentally focused on changing the way that we think of water and specifically drinking water. And that basically is everything from how water is treated, transported and consumed. So if you look at the big problem that we see in the market that we're solving for single use plastic water bottles. The reason that people are using single use plastic water bottles and I'm sure we'll talk about some of the stats and the impact of that later. But the reason that people are using them is primarily because they don't like what's coming out of their tap water and we don't have a problem in the US called if I could only find a faucet, we have a problem called. I really don't like what's coming out of the faucet or I don't trust it. And So what FloWater is is a solution to that. And what we're doing is we're building a set of water products that tap into, no pun intended, but you will end up being amazed at how many water puns there are by the end of this podcast that we, we kind of take for granted and don't realize, but what FloWater does is taps into any available water line and takes regular tap water and turns it into the world's best tasting, best drinking, best hydrating water kind of on demand like a beer tap in a way, but with water through this very powerful purification system. So we build these FloWater devices right now, we've got FloWater refill stations that. Out in primarily the B2B sector. And then we also have other products that are FloWater, faucet filters and someday FloWater countertop units, both of which will be or are available for the consumer home. So kind of in essence,
For some time now, ecologists and environmentalists have been promoting life-cycle analyses - calculations of the environmental impact of a product, from the sourcing of materials all the way through to its disposal. While this is still a valid expenditure of effort, our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that we may need to re-focus more narrowly on the carbon generated at the front-end of an article's life: its production, transportation, delivery, and installation. He asserts that these "upfront carbon" emissions are the more urgent and immediate concerns, and we simply don't have time to focus on the rest of the product's life. This week we welcome back to the show author, environmental journalist, and design expert Lloyd Alter, to discuss his upcoming book, The Story of Upfront Carbon. We learn about the birth of the term, discuss why it's a useful lens for making consumer decisions, and go down a carbon emissions rabbit hole on products like iPhones, electric vehicles, and e-bikes.
The novelist David Foster Wallace once said, “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with author Chuck Collins about his debut novel which centers on Big Oil and climate change. We talk about how he has channeled a life of privilege into a quest to raise awareness about wealth inequality, discuss what it was like to co-author with Bill Gates, Sr. a book advocating for taxing the rich, and explore the unique manner in which fiction reveals truth.
00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:31 Chuck Collins (CC) - You know, I do think we need images, we need visions of what it begins to look like to get our act together.
00:42 Narrator - The novelist David Foster Wallace once said, “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with author Chuck Collins about his debut novel which centers on Big Oil and climate change. We talk about how he has channeled a life of privilege into a quest to raise awareness about wealth inequality, discuss what it was like to co-author with Bill Gates, Sr. a book advocating for taxing the rich, and explore the unique manner in which fiction reveals truth.
01:23 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Chuck Collins. Chuck is the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits inequality.org, and he's also an author and his debut novel is entitled “Altar to an Erupting Sun.” Chuck, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:45 Chuck Collins (CC) - Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
01:48 Alex Wise (AW) - Why don't you first tell us what motivated you to take a break from a lot of these more real-world issues? You're a prolific writer in the non-fiction world and you cover a lot of inequality issues. What inspired you to dip your toe into the fiction waters here with “Altar to an Erupting Sun?”
02:12 Chuck Collins (CC) - I have written a number of other books and I look back on some of the earlier ones and I sort of feel bad about what I inflicted upon my readers because they're they're kind of boring and what I enjoy reading and what I often delve into his story, whether it's good nonfiction, narrative or fiction I found fiction is kind of an entry point, a gateway into a topic, and so in this case I was interested in exploring sort of how is it we face this impossible news of sort of the ecological crisis we're living through, and how does a community face it? And what's a vision for how we might turn the corner toward survivability. And that that seemed to lend itself to fiction. So, and I just had this story and some characters kind of knocking on my inner door. So I felt a desire to write it as a as a fictional story which gave me a lot of freedom to envision the possibilities for the future.
03:14 Alex Wise (AW) - So you have an interesting back story and they always say that you're supposed to write what you know, and this seems to have an autobiographical bent to it “Altar to an Erupting Sun.” Why don't you give us a little bit of the back story of Chuck Collins?
03:31 CC - Well, you're right. You can only really write what you know. And I have drawn on my life experiences. But there's quite a bit I sort of had to research and develop that that I didn't live through, but that the experience of my main character, Rae Kelleher, was one of being formed. By social movements that she was part of, she also grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in the West, she grew up working class. I grew up privileged, but that, that's a difference. But she was very early on, involved in the clamshell lines, which was a movement to try to keep a nuclear power plant from being built in New England. She was involved in going to Central America in the 1980s, like a lot of thousands of people,
An unusual by-product of the global pandemic was that a lot more people ended up becoming gardeners - one study estimated that over 18 million Americans discovered gardening while spending more time at home. This week on Sea Change Radio, we revisit our 2020 discussion with author and sustainability expert Paul Wheaton about his book, Building A Better World In Your Backyard. Wheaton provides us with some innovative ideas on gardening and permaculture while outlining the many benefits of Hugelkultur techniques. We also look at some home efficiency solutions, including warming up our bodies rather than the air in our homes, and the advantages of using a rocket mass heater.
When you visit the World Wildlife Fund's list of critically endangered species, the first animals named are large, beloved mammals like the African Forest Elephant and the Eastern Lowland Gorilla. While these majestic creatures tug at our heartstrings, there are also a lot of smaller, more unsung organisms that are in grave risk of extinction, like the lowly freshwater mussel. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to environmental writer, John Platt, the editor of The Revelator to talk about some of the less glamorous animals that have recently been declared extinct or are on the brink of extinction. First, we take a deep dive into the plight of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a regal swamp-dwelling bird whose demise may or may not have been premature. Then we discuss why Hawaii is referred to by some naturalists as the extinction capital of the world, and look at the ethical quandaries presented by the emerging field of resurrection biology, also known as de-extinction.
00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:18 John Platt (JP) - The domino effect happens all the time throughout the ecosystem and that's why we're facing major declines right now because it's just a bit of attrition as one thing falls, another falls right behind it.
00:32 Narrator - When you visit the World Wildlife Fund's list of critically endangered species, the first animals named are large, beloved mammals like the African Forest Elephant and the Eastern Lowland Gorilla. While these majestic creatures tug at our heartstrings, there are also a lot of smaller, more unsung organisms that are in grave risk of extinction, like the lowly freshwater mussel. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to environmental writer, John Platt, the editor of The Revelator to talk about some of the less glamorous animals that have recently been declared extinct or are on the brink of extinction. First, we take a deep dive into the plight of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a regal swamp-dwelling bird whose demise may or may not have been premature. Then we discuss why Hawaii is referred to by some naturalists as the extinction capital of the world, and look at the ethical quandaries presented by the emerging field of resurrection biology, also known as de-extinction.
01:50 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Platt. John is the editor of the Revelator. John, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:57 John Platt (JP) - Glad to be here.
02:00 AW - So for folks who didn't hear our first interview on Sea Change Radio, why don't you explain the mission of your work at the Revelator, chronicling extinction events and wildlife in general?
02:14 John Platt (JP) - Sure, the Revelator is an independent, editorially independent news and commentary site. We're published by the Center for Biological Diversity, and we cover a lot of the things you'd expect from an environmental site, endangered species, climate change, environmental justice. We try to tell stories that aren't being told in other places and try to give bigger context and get a bigger picture story. Not a little news story about a study that's going to come and go in five seconds, but stuff that's going to have a long life and stuff that's going to influence people who are very educated and aware of environmental issues, who are very passionate about it and active in it, people who are activists, scientists, legislators, people who can use the information we publish to make a difference.
02:59 Alex Wise (AW) - And it's not as sexy as the people who cover a specific endangered species going off into the most remote parts of the world to do the real legwork into trying to track these animals. But I think equally important is the work that you do which is trying to be like a central database for all of these species that are on the brink of extinction or extinct, but also carving narratives and trying to tell a story about each indivi...
According to the International Energy Agency, over 14 million electric vehicles, or EVs, are expected to be sold globally in 2023. If this is accurate, EVs would account for about 18 percent of total car sales for the year, a 35 percent increase over 2022. The EV revolution is upon us, and here to help Sea Change Radio listeners decide where to plug-in is automotive journalist, Jim Motavalli. We discuss the puzzling decision by General Motors to shelve the Chevy Bolt, get some recommendations on new EV automakers and models, and examine America’s ongoing fascination with big old gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs.
Back in the 16th century, when England began to run out of trees, it started burning coal. And by 1700, most Brits were using coal as their main source of fuel. But then coal became scarce. To come full circle, today England is burning large amounts of wood again – much of it in the form of wood pellets from the US. Wood has somehow been designated as a renewable energy source since the Kyoto Protocol in 1992 and the repercussions have been devastating. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to journalist Justin Catanoso, a journalism professor at Wake Forest University, about the dangers of this latest transition to a fuel source which is leading to deforestation and pollution. We learn about the wood pellet industry, manufacturing giant Enviva, and the wide-ranging problems caused by burning trees.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability.
00:22 Justin Catanoso (JC) – If more countries just did that one thing, if they shifted their definition of woody biomass from renewable to not renewable and you can make that a caveat because the fact of the matter is woody biomass is in time frames that aren’t relative, that aren’t salient in this particular climate crisis.
00:47 Narrator – Back in the 16th century, when England began to run out of trees, it started burning coal. And by 1700, most Brits were using coal as their main source of fuel. But then coal became scarce. To come full circle, today England is burning large amounts of wood again – much of it in the form of wood pellets from the US. Wood has somehow been designated as a renewable energy source since the Kyoto Protocol in 1992 and the repercussions have been devastating. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to journalist Justin Catanoso, a journalism professor at Wake Forest University, about the dangers of this latest transition to a fuel source which is leading to deforestation and pollution. We learn about the wood pellet industry, manufacturing giant Enviva, and the wide-ranging problems caused by burning trees.
02:00 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Justin Catanoso. He is an environmental journalist and a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University. Justin, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:12 Justin Catanoso (JC) – Thanks, Alex, thanks for having me on.
02:14 Alex Wise (AW) – So you have a piece up on Mongabay entitled “The Netherlands to Stop Paying Subsidies to Untruthful Biomass Firms. This is centering around wood pellets and this is a fuel that you’ve covered extensively. Why is this move by the Netherlands important?
02:35 Justin Catanoso (JC) – Well, let’s talk first about where the move came from. I’ve been a journalist a really long time, Alex, and we hope our reporting has impact and often you never get to see it. But I had a story post on Mongabay a month ago in which I had my own observations of the harvesting of wood for wood pellets by the world’s largest maker of wood pellets, Enviva. But the real important aspect of that story was the very first whistleblower from inside the biomass industry. This was a high-ranking employee at 2 plants at Enviva in the state of North Carolina, which is where you’re reaching me right now and he worked for Enviva for more than two years. He was in charge of all the machines that turned wood and wood chips into wood pellets. He was the maintenance leader and this is the first guy to ever go public from inside the industry, basically calling out Enviva on its environmental credentials on its claims of being environmentally friendly, climate friendly, and a sustainable renewable source of bioenergy.
03:51 AW – So let’s take a step back and explain to our listeners what these wood pellets are – kind of give us a range of the biomass that we’ve heard that that’s a very kind of gentle, generous term biomass. It sounds great, and it sounds like you’re burning your compost pile in the back, but on the other end of the spectrum it can be quite nefarious.
04:13 JC – So I mean, you’re right, there is a range of bioenergy like we grow a lot of corn to go into to go into gasoline. Soy gets turned into bioenergy. There are lots of crops that are grown to be turned into bioenergy. But woody biomass is what we’re talking about. And folks may know it from their backyard grills from wood stoves that they might have as a secondary heat source in a cabin or a small house at that sort of consumer scale is not that bad. This wood generally comes from wood waste stuff that lumber yards are discarding and treetops and limbs and things like that. That’s what goes into sort of small scale consumer. Wood pellets that you would buy in £50 bags at a Home Depot or a Lowe’s or something like that. But what we’re talking about over the last 10 to 12 years was the rise of industrial scale wood burning for energy. And it’s replacing coal. And so in the state of North Carolina where Enviva has four plants. They’re not putting wood pellets in the £50 bags, they’re putting it on to freighter ships. They’ve got a designated port in Wilmington, NC and they shipped 2.6 million metric tons of wood pellets just from North Carolina to the European Union and the United Kingdom to be burned instead of coal in formerly, coal-fired power plants, so that’s what we’re talking about. And this is coming largely from native forests. It’s coming some from residue, but mostly from whole trees that are being harvested on private property throughout eastern North Carolina, southern Virginia and the Deep South.
06:07 AW – Now, besides the fact that wood smoke is pretty bad for human lungs and not good for trying to reduce our carbon emissions, the Netherlands and others who are blowing the whistle on this practice. The problem isn’t just these virgin forests, so are there examples of sound wood pellet manufacturing that’s not using virgin forests as its feedstock, Justin?
06:36 JC – So it’s a fair question and in vivo on their website actually says and defines. And I write about this in my story, where I feature the whistleblower. They say there’s good biomass and there’s bad biomass. Good biomass is residue, it’s lumber waste, it’s tree tops and limbs. It’s the stuff that’s sitting on the forest floor – It’s not whole trees. It’s not hardwoods. And bad biomass contributes to deforestation, harms biodiverse habitats, things like that.
07:11 AW – And you said that this has really kind of blossomed as an industry in the last decade 10 to 12 years. It seems kind of unfathomable in a lot of ways that it would, as we’re getting off of coal, and we’re trying to wean ourselves off of these bad fuels. It seems like wood is taking us further back than what we were doing in in the industrial revolution, in our burning of coal.
07:35 JC – There are lots of scientists that say exactly that Alex and this began in 1997 with the Kyoto Protocol as they were sort of defining what renewable energy was. They said hydro is renewable, solar is renewable, wind is renewable. And biomass is renewable. The thing that they said in 1997 and what they were thinking, is that, cut a tree. Plant a tree. Trees regrow and therefore this is a renewable energy source. Now it took a while before the industry saw this as an opportunity, but it really kind of coincided at a time when the European Union and the United Kingdom was mandating that its energy production wean itself off coal and so they’ve got. Essentially this fixed cost of all these coal-fired power plants, and it’s expensive to build all the windmills and all the solar installations that you would need to replace the energy that you’re getting from coal. And here’s the Kyoto Protocol with a policy saying, well, you can burn wood. And that would be a renewable energy resource, and they actually went a step further and said it’s not only renewable, it should be considered carbon neutral, which means that countries that burn wood do not have to claim the emissions at the smokestack. This gets a little complicated, but the emissions are actually supposed to be counted in the country where the wood is collected. It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because one reason is the United States is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol, but we’re the number one producer of wood pellets in the World so this loophole has been created for an industry to flourish and for countries unfortunately to be expedient rather than accurate. And in how they manage the renewable energy supply. So this is all legal. It’s all aboveboard, but Germany essentially is replacing wood for coal. And in the process generating more emissions than if they kept burning coal and the reason for that is that wood pellets are not as energy dense as coal. So you have to burn more wood to come up with the same amount of energy than if you were burning coal, but on paper, all of this, is allegedly a good thing. In reality, the science suggests that we’re destroying forests. We’re reducing our carbon sinks and we’re increasing carbon emissions at the very time when we need to. Be reducing them.
10:15 AW – And the Netherlands is trying to change this reality, what does this mean? Can Dutch lawmakers be a spark, if you will, to affect change in how nations view these wood pellets, Justin.
10:33 JC – It’s too early to say, but there are two big things that happened last month that I reported on. One was in the Netherlands and the other one was in Australia. Now that what happened in Australia may even be more significant than what happened in the Netherlands. So let me just take the Netherlands first. So essentially, the House of Representatives in the Netherlands passed a motion that compels the Dutch Government. To ensure that wood pellets that they use and they import hundreds of thousands of tons of wood pellets a year, but wood pellets that they import from outside from really any source, that it be certified – that it be inspected and certified that is not contributing to deforestation is not harming biodiversity and is not reducing tree cover and sort of having a worse impact on climate change. That’s a significant development by one country. Will that spread to other individual EU countries that are burning biomass? We’ll see. There are lots of countries that not only depend on biomass. Further energy, Belgium being one, Italy being another Germany, Denmark. They all burn a lot of wood pellets, but then you’ve got countries in the EU, in Eastern Europe, Latvia, Estonia, Romania and then in Scandinavia you’ve got Finland and Sweden, which are producing wood pellets. They’ve got forests, they’ve got forests to cut down, so in those governments you probably aren’t going to see a lot of movement, but there’s a liberal streak in the Netherlands, and there’s also a virulent anti biomass movement that has turned the public almost wholeheartedly against biomass burning in that particular country, so we’ll see if that spreads. But what happened in Australia is also significant, because what they did in mid-december was that they by definition. Said that, woody biomass cannot be considered a renewable energy source that if you produce import or use woody biomass to generate energy, you will not get renewable energy certificates. This is significant for one reason. There is no biomass industry to speak of in Australia. They were knocking on the door. There were four plants that were getting ready to transition. This essentially that rule change that that definition change essentially keeps the biomass industry from getting a foothold in Australia. Yeah, but it also puts a G20 country at odds with the definition that is followed by the European Union and the United Kingdom, and that is, in the United Kingdom and the European Union, that woody biomass is a renewable energy source and that it can be burned in instead of coal, and that you can get renewable energy credit for it and subsidized this stuff to the tune of billions of EUR or billions of pounds a year, which is what they’re doing right now. I don’t know how these two first world countries can exist, can coexist with this difference of definition.
13:58 (music break)
14:53 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to journalist Justin Catanoso. So you mentioned, Justin, that you’re in North Carolina and Enviva has four plants there and is exporting just tons of wood pellets cut down from forest is that all from North Carolina or that would being sourced from all over North America?
15:16 JC – No, it’s just from North Carolina. So these plants you know this is a. This is a a profitable industry Enviva went over a billion dollars in revenue in in 2021. It was their best year ever. They’ve been a public company since 2015. They’ve been around as a company for over 10 years.
15:32 AW – This is their primary product?
15:34 JC – This is their only product.
15:35 AW – So they’re not making paper or anything like that?
15:38 JC – No, all they do is make wood pellets and they’re the world’s largest producer of wood pellets they produce. 6 million metric tons of wood pellets a year right now, with plans as they stated a year ago to go to 13 million metric tons, all coming from the Southeastern United States. Within five years, all coming essentially from native forests or most of it coming from native forests. So their sourcing areas tend to be 50 miles within the plant itself. It’s costly to have these trees knocked down. It’s costly to have them either chipped on site and then trucked to their to their plants.
Or have the the the tree trunks themselves trucked so they’re not bringing in wood from all over North America. They’re getting it from a 50 mile radius, and the significance of that is is that we’re losing. Our tree cover at a fairly rapid. The rate in eastern North Carolina I I cite a study in my story a month ago where I featured the whistleblower from the Southern Environmental Law Center that says the harvest area within 3 overlapping plants in eastern North Carolina and southern Virginia by Enviva is contributing to a net force. Loss of 6% a year or about 4600 acres of woodland a year. We’re losing above and beyond any regrowth or replanting that’s taking on. It’s fairly significant.
17:04 AW – How are they able to just? Devastate our forests like this.
17:08 JC – So there’s a reason why Enviva is only collecting wood in the southeast. 90% of wooded land in the southeast is in private hands. Enviva doesn’t cut down a single tree. Enviva outsources that to logging companies and trucking company.
17:25 AW – They’re almost like the waste management company for the wood industry.
17:29 JC – Exactly, but they basically say this is how many tons of fiber and that’s what they call it fiber. We need a day to keep our plants humming so we need our contracts in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and increasingly, Japan and South Korea. The loggers are knocking on doors. And basically saying look, it looks to me like you’ve got 1000 acres of land here. You’re paying taxes on all this land. I’ll give you this much money to if you’ll let me have 10 to 15% of your trees. And now Enviva doesn’t get all of that. I need to be clear about that Enviva is correct in that it’s not taking all of the trees. They get, they get knocked down on a cut site. The largest trees, the straightest trees. Those are being those are being prepared to go to sawmills, but I went in in early November. I went to a cut site. It was 52 acres. It was in the town of Edenton. Which is right on the coast and This site is owned by the town of Edenton and they contracted with the logging company to have the whole site cleared. Because that’s going to be an industrial development and what I saw on that site was big logs being set aside to go to sawmills and then the rest was being chipped and sent to an Enviva pellet plant about 35 miles away. When I talked to the the logger in charge of that cut block. I asked him what you know what percentage was going to Enviva and he said about half. And that’s generally what they’re taking at these different cut sites wherever they’re harvesting wood in in East Eastern North Carolina, or the five plants that they have in the Deep South in Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana.
19:19 AW – Are they hiding the fact that these are virgin trees, sometimes being cut down in native forests?
19:25 JC – So these are the questions that are difficult to get at quite frankly, and it’s why this is such a challenging story to cover. Enviva says rightfully so that they’re not taking all the wood from that site, they’re actually just taking what’s deemed low value wood, low value wood to them are smaller trees, cooka trees. Trees that lumber mills don’t want because they can’t be turned into board feet. OK, the fact of the matter is birds, animals, insects don’t really care whether trees are straight or crooked like these biodiverse habitats rely on trees of all kinds. In eastern North Carolina, which is subject to some of the most ferocious storms that we have on the East Coast, intact forests are our front line of defense against climate change and climate driven calamities. And we’re losing 4600 acres of woodland a year in just three harvest areas in eastern North Carolina. In Virginia now, only half of that wood is going to Enviva, but Enviva is increasing the demand for that wood. So the question becomes, and it’s one that I can’t answer that 52 acre cut block if Enviva wasn’t taking half of that wood, would it have been profitable for that logging company to even say, yeah, we’ll we’ll clear that lot. If it had to leave half of the trees on the site, or if they had to go in there and selectively log, which is really expensive. So when Eniva is pushing the demand for wood at a time in eastern North Carolina, where the demand for wood is actually dropping off because there’s not as much demand for paper, there’s not as much demand for fluff. There’s not as much demand for these sort of low grade paper products. There’s still big demand for lumber, but that takes bigger trees.
21:14 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to journalist Justin Catanoso. He’s also a journalism professor at Wake Forest University. So can existing coal plants be easily outfitted to burn biomass? How have grids adopted this new fuel so readily, I mean you, you hear about some of these plants can take years and years to build, but there must be a work around here, right?
21:43 JC – Correct – I mean, this is what’s made by woody mass so popular. Quite frankly because it is inexpensive for countries to meet their energy needs without having to build new energy installations. I don’t know what the retrofit is, but I don’t think it’s that difficult. You’re simply dumping a different source. Into your hoppers in terms of what you’re burning, instead of burning coal, you’re burning wood and that investment that you’ve put into that power. Plant gets to be used and you have the added benefit. Again, according to policy, completely legal of not having to count those emissions. So even though your emissions are expanding in the real world and to nature on paper, as you as you report back to the UN, you can say, “look, we’ve reduced our carbon emissions by X percentage because we’re using this renewable energy source.” Alex, in the European Union 60% of renewable energy comes from burning wood. 60%.
22:45 AW – When we look at the woody biomass industry. These wood pellets, they’re mostly being used for fueling electrical grids, correct? These are big issues on a government level, so it can be a little more despairing because of that.
23:04 JC – This is up to policymakers I. I mean, you know there are NGO’s that are fighting this around the world literally and there are sources of mine in Japan in South Korea. In a host of countries in the European Union in the UK, in British Columbia and in the Southeastern United States, including the Dogwood Alliance is 1, which is one of the bigger names fighting biomass. It’s based right here in North Carolina, you know, their their goals and and they’re making a lot of progress in this is turning public opinion against this energy source as they come. Understand the impact that it’s having on the environment and that it’s not having the emissions reduction impact that it it claims to and, and this becomes sort of an associated impact where you hope that public opinion will drive policymakers to change. Here in North Carolina it is our policy to treat the manufacturing of wood pellets like the manufacturing of anything else that we do in the state, whether it’s textiles or furniture or tobacco, and so it’s regulated like any other manufacturing industry. However, by policy we’ve also stated. Governor Cooper has stated in his renewable energy plan that North Carolina will never burn wood pellets for energy. Even though we are producing more wood pellets in North Carolina, pretty much anybody else. But he’s not going to bat in the legislature to say we need to clamp down on this industry because they are taking away our tree cover in eastern North Carolina. These plants operate in four of the poorest counties in North Carolina. They happen to be majority African American. They are poor. They go in and they build $100 million plant without asking for any economic incentives. They immediately become the largest taxpayer, if not one of the largest taxpayers in the county. They give a little bit of money to the schools to the EMS, to you know the recreation leagues and they become a good citizen. They employ anywhere from 50 to 100 people. The pollution that they that they create is a problem. The noise pollution is a problem. The truck traffic is a is a problem. The dust that comes out of these plants within a several mile radius of the plant. But they put up with it because it’s sort of an economic bonus to communities that don’t have any economic development.
25:29 AW – So let’s assume that Enviva is telling the truth and that they’re not harvesting native forest for this. Is that enough, Justin?
25:39 JC – So you know if if we if we take them at their word and and what they said to me when I was doing my story is that they are not contributing to deforestation, that forests are actually growing back faster than they are cutting them down. Now I’ve got independent research that that undermines that, but let’s just take them at their word that they are sustainable, and they are not contributing to biodiversity loss, or they’re not contributing to deforestation. Is this OK? You’ve got to look at the emissions, Alex. The Paris Agreement is all about reducing carbon emissions first and foremost second. It’s about preserving forests and stopping or slowing down, deforestation, whatever, wherever it occurs. But if we just look at emit what burning biomass does not do is reduce emissions, and there are countless studies that have demonstrated this you can’t solve. The climate crisis by burning something else. If more countries just did that one thing, if they shifted their definition of woody buy a mass from renewable to not renewable and and you can make that a caveat because the fact of the matter is woody biomass is renewable. In time frames that aren’t relative that aren’t salient in this particular climate crisis, so the study that gets cited the most is by a scientist at MIT named John Sternum, and he estimates that when you clear cut a lot, and if you replant it, it takes 44 years to 100 years. For the trees that you’ve taken off that lot and turned into smoke. For those new trees that you planted to pull that smoke to pull that carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.
27:25 AW – Technically renewable, but a really long time, until it renews.
27:29 JC – Exactly, we don’t have that kind of time in this climate crisis. You know, the United Nations tells us we basically have until 2030 to dramatically decarbonize the major economies of the world. If we’re going to have a shot at slowing what appears to be an inexorable rate. Of global warming that we are experiencing right now, and as you’re experiencing in California right now, with these climate driven rain storms that you just don’t see very often.
27:57 AW – Justin Catanoso thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 JC – Alex, it’s been pleasure. Thank you.
28:17 AW – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Horace Silver and Hank Williams. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com. To stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Wood Pellets: The New Coal (re-broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
They say home is where the heart is, and it’s also where our story begins today. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk to two people doing their best to make everyone’s home a happy one. First, we speak to architect Adam Woltag to discuss how sustainability factors into newly constructed buildings. We learn about a high-end luxury apartment building in Honolulu that is incorporating some cutting-edge technologies to conserve both power and water, examine how consumer demand for environmentally conscientious buildings continues to increase, and look at how this correlates to office spaces as well. Then, we dig into the archives and speak to Shamus Roller, the Executive Director of the National Housing Law Project, about housing challenges, evictions, and homelessness.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:23 Adam Woltag – You have all of these, these wonderful companies here in the Bay Area that are pushing hard and achieving higher standards and putting that out there to attract the same community that wants to be a part of and support that effort to be more sustainable and work in more sustainable environments.
00:41 Narrator – They say home is where the heart is, and it’s also where our story begins today. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk to two people doing their best to make everyone’s home a happy one. First, we speak to architect Adam Woltag to discuss how sustainability factors into newly constructed buildings. We learn about a high-end luxury apartment building in Honolulu that is incorporating some cutting-edge technologies to conserve both power and water, examine how consumer demand for environmentally conscientious buildings continues to increase, and look at how this correlates to office spaces as well. Then, we dig into the archives and speak to Shamus Roller, the Executive Director of the National Housing Law Project, about housing challenges, evictions, and homelessness.
01:40 Alex Wise – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Adam Walter Tag. He is a design partner at WRNS Studio. Adam, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:50 Adam Woltag – Hey, good to be here. So we recently had an architect on Sea Change Radio from Gensler talking about the opportunities to transform some of these slumbering downtown areas and and re outfit office space into into residential space.
02:11 Alex Wise – I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about. How sustainability has changed the way you do your work, how clients are now looking at things through a different lens. Why don’t we first start on the residential space. You’re working on a high end residential condominium in Hawaii right now in, in, in Oahu. Why don’t you explain? The impetus behind that and how sustainability is informing your work.
02:40 Adam Woltag – Oh, absolutely. Well, I mean first and foremost WRNS say, I mean sustainability is something that we bring to every single project. We’ve been doing that for many, many years. It’s part of how we work. Doesn’t matter if it’s a luxury product or if it’s a school or an office building, it’s something that’s just how we work. It’s kind of in our DNA, you know. And when we started the practice, it was just a part of what we wanted to do. We saw the challenges facing us as a community, as a city, as a global community about climate change. And so that really we saw that as architects, we could really contribute to benefiting, you know these challenges by designing buildings that were very efficient. You know that actually helped improve the health and Wellness of their inhabitants, but also started to think about sustainability from a broader context. So, you know, looking at the project you’re referencing in Honolulu? It’s called Alia. It is a condominium near downtown Honolulu, in an area called Kaka’ako. And we are approached by the Kobayashi group of local development company to design their next luxury mixed-use product. And they wanted it to be the most sustainable residential high rise in Honolulu. So when we heard that, we jumped at the opportunity and said yes, absolutely. We’d love to kind of think about what that means in Honolulu and how WNS could can contribute again to this, this effort to try to make buildings more efficient and more sustainable.
04:05 Alex Wise – So when you walk us through some of the features that this property how a newly designed luxury building might be designed today with sustainability in mind than if you had been designing it in 1980?
04:31 Adam Woltag – So you know the team got together when I say the team, it was developers and engineers and architects got together to really try to get our heads around the concept of what luxury could mean here, right? It’s not the same in every single location. It’s not the same for every market. We got together and had a really rich conversation about what luxury could mean here in Honolulu and what we arrived at was. And this goes in a way to kind of create identity for this project, but where we arrived at was an idea that luxury here was not about an object, right. And it wasn’t about a brand name and it wasn’t about the veneer of something the veneer of surfaces and object. What we wanted to really highlight and amplify was the idea that luxury was really about opportunities and experiences and choices and offerings that that was going to define the concept of luxury here for Alia and Kaka’ako.So that really kind of folded into a building that offered a lot of wonderful amenities. For the residents, lots of different types of experiences for them to have places for them to gather as families, spaces to be outside spaces, to connect with the community. So the building is very, very rich with that from a sustainability perspective, sustainability guided the design decisions from the very beginning of the project. How could design decisions, everything about this project all bend towards creating a more sustainable building for the residents, but also for the community around. You know that surrounds this this develop. And how that folds into a a wonderful feeling of health and Wellness and vitality for the for the residents that live here.
06:03 Alex Wise – Just comparing it to an urban renewal project that we hear about trying to revitalize urban areas with a community-based perspective and architects wanting people to be outside and similar stuff that you’re talking about. But then now we’re talking about multi $1,000,000 luxury suites – kind of compare and contrast how this building might look compared to, let’s say, something that’s been popping up in South Beach in San Francisco, let’s say.
06:35 Adam Woltag – So one of the things we did from the very beginning was really try to understand the nature of place of this place and what that means is understanding how this this incredibly rich neighborhood is going to be evolving and transforming, you know, over the next few years understanding that the climate, the specific aspects of climate here, wind patterns, sun pattern, you know, rain patterns, and how we could take advantage of those right to help create a more sustainable building, and then also thinking culturally about how people residents in the community might use this building, all of those informed some early design decisions. So I’ll go into some specifics maybe about the tower itself, you know, so the building is you know overall it’s over 1,000,000 square feet. It’s the tower itself is topside at about 400 feet. There are over 450 units in this building mixed-use forty of those units are are reserved for reserved housing for more lower income housing, as well as market and luxury units. So it’s a very mixed-use project when we are laying out the tower and the orientation of the tower. One of the first things we did is rotate that power so that it actually leans into the primary wind direction. And what that does is it maximizes the amount of opportunity for these units in the in the tower to passively cool right to basically take advantage of those winds right to cool the unit. So they’re not relying on air conditioning all the time. As you were saying, maybe you know a glass box here. No, these you know, the idea here is that these units would be able to take advantage of of the trade winds to help cool and comfort the interior space. And then the facade, the, the the faces of the building that were exposed to sunlight most of the time, it’s Hawaii. It’s a very high aspect ratio there. We projected balconies or lanais and we were very, very careful about how those lanais leaned out, because what that does is it creates A shading pattern across the facade. And it also draws residents outside to be outside and to engage in the outdoors, which we think is a wonderful benefit to living in a high rise luxury. And minimum many of the ones you see are just glass boxes and here we didn’t want to go down that route. We really wanted to open the building up. We wanted to give residents the opportunity to be outside and in so doing, we found this reciprocal benefit that those lines actually cooled the tower and helped us reduce our dependency on on air conditioning.
09:10 Alex Wise – And Hawaii is paradise in terms of its weather, but how much foresight have you put into how that perfection may be altered in the future with climate change?
09:23 Adam Woltag – Hawaii is one of the most remote landmasses on the planet, right? It’s sitting there in the middle of the Pacific. So all the resources there are very precious. We’ve got to be very careful about how we use them. That goes to, you know, fresh water and building materials as well as energy. And so one of the things that we’re very, very proud of with Alia is that our team of engineers and obviously with the support of our client, we relly push this to create a very efficient building and right now we are an all-electric building. We feel really, really proud that we are able to engineer building that is all electric and actually produces vast amounts of electricity on site to help reduce the demand. For electricity from the grid, so the building is producing a lot of its own energy that’s clean energy, which we think is great, which has a fantastic impact on our carbon footprint. So we’re trying to reduce the impact of the of the resources in Hawaii when it comes to potable water, clean water. Hawaii has a limited supply and one of the things another one of the things we’re most proud of this project is that we are able to recycle and reuse. A lot of the gray water that’s generated on site and that in turn reduces our demand for potable water.
10:44 Alex Wise – How do you do that? I’ve been interested in how the Saudis, let’s say, have incorporated a dual sanitation system. I always find it very wasteful that we’re taking potable water and peeing and pooping into it.
10:57 Adam Woltag – And flushing it down the toilet.
11:01 Alex Wise – I mean in California where we are, we’re even more right now. We had a very rainy season, but when we’re at the height of our drought season, I’m even more keenly aware of this inefficiency. How do you address it as an architect?.
00:11:21 Adam Woltag – I know it’s a funny concept, isn’t it? We take our the cleanest water and we use it to do the dirtiest thing. What we have in our gray water system here in Alia, where we’re basically collecting the water from sinks from washing machines and from showers. And we’re collecting all of that water in the building, and then we’re cleaning. It goes through filtration system and cleans it to, you know, one of the highest levels we can get in-state and then we reuse that water for irrigation, which you know, reduces our potable demand. We also use it to support our mechanical system. It goes into our cooling tower and reduces the need for that type of water. And that overall, I mean is saving millions of gallons of water a year of you know, so we’re not drawing from the aquifer, we’re not drawing from the potable water, the limited potable water resources in Honolulu, we’re actually reusing that water twice. So we’re very, very proud to be one of the first high-rise projects in Honolulu that can accomplish that.
12:20 (Music Break)
13:35 Alex Wise – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Adam Woltag. He is a design partner at WRNS Studio. So Adam, speaking of ways that you’re trying to reduce the carbon footprint and the water waste in your buildings, let’s look at the commercial side of things. We’ve been talking about this residential building that is under construction in in Honolulu, how different are things now from your perspective in terms of the percentage of electric grid and water usage that go into a commercial property? This is something that, like a lot of, yes, a homeowner might be keenly aware of what their water bill or electricity bill is. But when somebody goes into an office, their brain kind of is in a different compartment, but obviously the earth doesn’t care about what your perspective might be on it. You’re still using those resources.
14:32 Adam Woltag – Right. It’s a great question, you know. But it all does start from just an awareness as you were kind of saying whether you’re a homeowner or you, you work for a company and you go into the office every day. You’re still engaging the built environment, right? And we’re all trying to be careful with those resources. And what we’ve found in a lot of the commercial clients that we work with because of the encouragement of a lot of the local cities, especially in the Bay Area that are pushing and pushing, you know, businesses to be more efficient that our clients are asking us to design very, very sustainable environments, right? And they see that in a number, a benefit to them in a number of ways. One, they’re creating healthy environments for their staff. And trust me, it’s competitive out there. And if you own a business and you can create a very sustainable environment for your workers, people that come there, you’re going to get a lot of interest. It’s really beneficial to them. They’re also seeing benefits when it comes to certain tax credits that comes to them so that they’re seeing that benefit come back to them in terms of productivity, people want to be at work, they’re healthier there, right? By creating these environments and they’re also seeing it come back in terms of the bottom line because they’re starting to be able to develop more square footage in certain cases. If they develop greener buildings. So there’s lots of incentives out there for commercial developers to do the right thing and invest in in green infrastructure. And we’re thrilled as a firm that we’ve been able to design these environments for some of the most cutting-edge Bay Area companies out there.
16:11 Alex Wise – I know that you’re not involved really in the marketing of these buildings, but you see how they’re being marketed differently. Maybe give listeners an idea how sustainability is incorporated in that marketing material differently than it may have a a couple decades ago, and I don’t just mean marketing, also on the flip side, the demand from consumers.
00:16:33 Adam Woltag – Oh absolutely and we’ve seen here in the Bay Area a lot. Especially in the workplace where people want to walk the walk. And what they want are they want to live a life, they want to spend their money on things that they believe in that that kind of aligned with their values. And if they’re buying things that are supporting the green economy on their own in their personal lives, they want to work for companies that are also conscious as well in doing and doing the same thing. And so we’ve seen some of our clients advertise, you know, that advertiser market to the workforce that you know their buildings are, for example, I’ll throw a benchmark number out there – LEED certified, LEED Platinum building, net zero energy buildings, carbon neutral buildings. And so you know, you have all of these, these wonderful companies here in the Bay Area that are pushing hard and achieving higher standard. And putting that out there to attract the same community that wants to be a part of and support that effort to be more sustainable and work in more sustainable environments.
17:45 Alex Wise – What innovations are on the horizon from a design and architectural standpoint that excite you?
17:52 Adam Woltag – You know, I’ll speak for myself, I think right now I’m most excited to see technologies and systems coming, you know, coming available that reduce carbon. They’re addressing the carbon problem that we have and right now, we’re having conversations with cement companies about how to reduce the, you know, cement has a lot of huge carbon footprint and right now there’s some really cutting edge technologies out there that look really, really viable to kind of really hit the market in a much more significant way here shortly that will reduce the carbon impact of concrete that would be fantastic, right?
18:30 Alex Wise – We did a piece on concrete. I don’t know if this is taken off, but we did a piece on how they’re using bio-mimicry they’re using. What a lobster does in nature, with their shells to kind of reduce that. The tremendous amount of heat that goes into producing concrete.
18:45 Adam Woltag – On so, no, but that that’s really that. That’s super exciting because we use concrete every single day it’s our biggest building material. But also looking at some of the new technologies around wood construction and seeing heavy timber. I’m a, you know, a a very viable option for many kinds of markets, whether it’s, you know, commercial or educational or residential markets now.
19:07 Alex Wise – What does that mean exactly? What is heavy timber?
19:10 Adam Woltag – Heavy timber is a category in building where you’re using lumber. You’re building up sections of wood into structural members, you’re laminating them, gluing together that have incredible structural capabilities.
19:24 Alex Wise – And that’s different from the way we used to use wood in what way?
19:27 Adam Woltag – It’s different in the sense that it actually goes back to kind of the earliest ways we used to build when we only used wood, right? You use these very large members, and you would use it in a very kind of efficient way. We’ve moved away from that in a lot of ways and use metal and steel in these composite systems that that really don’t have a good carbon footprint but wood is a renewable resource. So if we can incorporate more wood construction in our buildings, we’re using renewable resources. We’re reducing the dependency on concrete and steel which have higher. carbon footprints, obviously, and we’re creating really beautiful and healthy spaces to be in so that’s a very exciting system. These systems are coming out right now, you’ll see CLT, DLT, you’ll see a lot of these kind of acronyms out there for these lumber systems that are wonderful to use. The other ones that have kind of been out there, but maybe are being used a little bit more, I’m going to say with more impact now are some of these building management systems. You can control your building remotely, right? Whether it’s a house or it’s an entire campus, it can, you know, at any moment in time, you can understand what’s happening every outlet. Every light fixture, every ceiling fan you can understand how it’s being used. So once you get to that point where you understand that you can really start to conserve and tune the building for its most optimal use. And as these systems get more and more efficient and easier to use, I think more and more people will like. It’s like the nest system you might have at home where you can kind of tune your home to when you want it to be a certain temperature, how you want it to function. These are on a larger scale for some of these larger buildings. It’s very, very exciting.
21:04 Alex Wise – And that kind of speaks to my question about fine tuning in the future, that Aliyah building as the climate might change down the road in Hawaii, where you’re talking about exactly.
21:15 Adam Woltag – Yeah, it gives us all flexibility and choices. And I think at the end of the day, that’s. What we that’s what we all want.
21:20 Alex Wise – He’s a design partner at WRNS studio, Adam Woltag. Adam, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
21:27 Adam Woltag – Thank you so much. That was great.
21:43 Alex Wise – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend and neighbor Shamus Roller. He’s the executive director of the National Housing Law Project. Shamus, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
21:54 Shamus Roller – Great to be here with you, Alex.
21:56 Alex Wise – So explain the mission of your organization, the National Housing Law project.
22:01 Shamus Roller – We’re a national legal and advocacy support center, so we help legal aid attorneys and other advocates around the country do housing law protect tenants protect low income homeowners and then we do a fair amount of advocacy at the federal level around housing.
22:16 Alex Wise – What stimulated your interest in in the issue of housing?
22:20 Shamus Roller – Well, I started my career working on doing direct outreach with homeless youth and adults. And so I was doing work on the streets helping people find access to services, get basic first aid. So I really understood kind of how you end up being homeless and what are the barriers to getting off the streets. What are the things that happen to people that that result in them being homeless? And so I really wanted to think about how do you, how do you deal with the upstream problems? And I went to law school and I’ve been working on housing for my entire career.
22:49 Alex Wise – Before we dive into some of the solutions, let’s outline some of the problems that you and your colleagues at the National Housing Law project handle on a daily basis. First, let’s talk about evictions, because I imagine that is a pretty big palette to work with right there.
23:06 Shamus Roller – Yeah, that’s been a lot of COVID, in particular in the last 18 months of my life has been thinking about how do evictions play into the COVID pandemic that we’re in right now. So there’s quite a bit of very good data at this point, showing that the higher levels of eviction to your community have the higher level of COVID transmission you have because the result of eviction is almost always that you move into substandard housing or you move into doubled up options where you’re around more people where there’s higher likelihood of transmission of COVID and the longer term effects of evictions can be homelessness as well for part of the population. So I’ve been working so much on how emergency rental assistance works. Some of the federal funding programs that are helping people prevent evictions to pay back the rent that they owe to their landlords and to stay housed in this difficult time.
23:59 Alex Wise – And one thing that I don’t think a lot of people think of is the trickle down effect of an eviction in a community. Maybe speak to the exponential effect that kicking one family out of 1 unit has on many, many people around that same neighborhood. We think of it as a just, ohh, that person couldn’t afford it, so they’re gone, but it’s not so simple, is it?
24:23 Shamus Roller – It’s not so simple I think. First, it’s important to think about that people getting kicked out for not that much money, right, which is that oftentimes an eviction is over less than $1000 across the country. In many cases, that’s the majority of evictions and many jurisdictions. So it’s a small amount of money, but that eviction, if you know the most the demographic factor. That most likely predicts that you’re going to be evicted is that you have small children. And so that means that your kids are going to have to find a new school system. Often it means that you’re going to live in an overcrowded condition. You’re going to move in with family or friends. Their higher rates of suicide, higher mental health related issues after evictions, COVID is so clearly demonstrated that link between between eviction and poor health. And so what we’re doing is spinning a family kind of into this time of uncertainty, of instability for that eviction. And I guess my public policy urge is that fixing that problem is pretty inexpensive in comparison to other public policy interventions that we do that we can protect the stability of families and of individuals by stopping evictions, which is this moment that that creates huge instability in their lives.
25:40 Alex Wise – How can federal lawmakers or or people in charge of government assistance programs on a state level as well? How can they work with the most needy and vulnerable populations better to try to communicate and allow them to kind of budget some of these potential people credits and assistance programs? It must be hard to access them, especially when a lot of them don’t have access to the Internet.
26:05 Shamus Roller – So the biggest housing program at the national level is the Housing Choice Voucher program, previously called the Section 8 voucher program. And that program serves about 1/4 of the people nationally who are eligible for it. And in big cities in particular, the waiting list to get a voucher can be 10 years.
26:26 Alex Wise – So obviously the idea for renters of this voucher is a popular one too popular. Should we just subsidize it more or is it different way to skin this? I mean, if I were to offer you up like, how are we going to solve the housing problem in the United States?
26:42 Shamus Roller – I mean, one is the federal government’s got to be a bigger player, the vouchers is one way or other. Federal subsidies around housing programs. And two, you got to undermine the challenges around getting housing built at the local level and the sort of racist zoning practices that we have across the country has got to be part of this three. You’ve got to reform landlord tenant law so it protects renters a little bit better than it does right now. It’s got to be a piece of how that works in practice. But I think really it’s from the federal government standpoint, money is a huge piece because the budget was so much higher in the 70s, you know, accounting for inflation and you know, we’re underfunding these programs as such a dramatic extent. When you look at a lot of Western Europe where there’s not really a problem with homelessness because they know, you know, like we do in this country, that homelessness is very expensive, it’s much more expensive to leave somebody on the streets than it is to find. But we just pay for it out of 10 different pockets, a little bit from healthcare, a little bit from social services, you know a little bit from the state, a little bit from local government, a little bit in policing that we don’t really take into consideration how expensive that that end outcome really is for us.
27:54 Alex Wise – Shamus Roller is the executive director of the National Housing Law Project. Shamus, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:03 Shamus Roller – Thanks, Alex.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the Brecker Brothers and Don Ho. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Adam Woltag: Designing Sustainable Spaces appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
The passage of time has generally moved us in the direction of increased dignity and rights for members of the LGBTQ community in this country, with marriage equality officially recognized in 2015. But since then, the US Supreme Court has taken a sharp turn to the right, and we are now looking at the erosion of some hard-fought gains. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Sasha Buchert, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal about the many angles from which the right wing is attacking America’s LGBTQ community. We look at the battle to maintain fundamental human rights, talk about the struggles that transgender children are facing in states like Florida and Iowa, and examine the impact that uniformed LGBTQ personnel are making in the military, nearly a decade into achieving the right-to-serve openly. We also distinguish high-leverage legal issues from provocative but less substantive culture war misdirects.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:20 Sasha Buchert (SB) – The litigation that’s been put forward in Texas seeking to prohibit people from accessing mifepristone, you know in the court embracing stigma over science, in my opinion, there.
00:33 Narrator – The passage of time has generally moved us in the direction of increased dignity and rights for members of the LGBTQ community in this country, with marriage equality officially recognized in 2015. But since then, the US Supreme Court has taken a sharp turn to the right, and we are now looking at the erosion of some hard-fought gains. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Sasha Buchert, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal about the many angles from which the right wing is attacking America’s LGBTQ community. We look at the battle to maintain fundamental human rights, talk about the struggles that transgender children are facing in states like Florida and Iowa, and examine the impact that uniformed LGBTQ personnel are making in the military, nearly a decade into achieving the right-to-serve openly. We also distinguish high-leverage legal issues from provocative but less substantive culture war misdirects.
01:49 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Sasha Buchert. She is a senior attorney at Lambda Legal. Sasha, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:00 Sasha Buchert (SB) – Thanks, Alex. Thanks so much for having me on your program.
02:02 Alex Wise (AW) – So we had the executive director of Lambda Legal, Kevin Jennings, on Sea Change Radio. He did a good job of kind of recapping where we were at the time in terms of LGBTQ rights and things have are obviously fluid. We have a very active right wing that is making hay wherever they can to try to escalate and divide people based on what seem like pretty set law at this point. Why don’t you give us a recap of what’s happened on your front in terms of the cases you’re keeping an eye on in in the last 18 months? The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs abortion case and the concurring opinion by Clarence Thomas really seemed to open the door for further restrictions of rights within the LGBTQ community. Contraception, same sex marriage, etc.
02:58 SB – Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. I think it’s helpful in my opinion, just to think back a little bit further to the Trump administration and the attacks that we saw on the federal front, the attacks that we’re seeing on the state level, you know, certainly isn’t new. You know, we’ve seen an uptick every year and the number of bills that are being filed, but it’s really skyrocketed in the last year or two for sure. Yeah, I think that the Trump administration, the far right, was, really was activated, during that time and with the Biden administration coming in and moving quickly to, you know, address some of the real damage that we saw in the federal level, that was really a welcome, relief that had by doing things like resending the ban on open transgender military service and some of the healthcare. But I think that also polarized and galvanized the far right to pursue discrimination wherever they can, in my opinion. And they really seized the moment there and move to the statehouses to try to inflict the harassment and discrimination that they couldn’t do at the federal level targeting vulnerable communities and you know, and I think that that’s been supercharged to my opinion, as you said by the Dobbs decision that was issued just last year. It feels like it’s been in place for 20 years in some ways, but and there’s been. Massive harm that’s been done across the board. But I think there are some serious parallels, not just the clear language and the decision itself, you know, calling for, you know, the Court, to revisit cases involving LGBTQ folks and contraceptive care and privacy, that that alone is troubling enough, but I think that one of the biggest concerns that in just talking about that in particular that decision and the impact it’s had on the state attacks that we’re seeing is that the court in the decision throughout echoed what I would call a rallying cry from the far right with, you know, regard to the marriage equality fight, which is this demand that the majority trample the civil and human rights protections for vulnerable communities and impose a majoritarian rule and eliminate the backstop of the Supreme Court basically and throughout the adopts decision the Supreme Court repeats this motif that these kinds of decisions should be decided at the state level. And that’s troubling because, we’re not just talking about, general public welfare decisions about the appropriate age for alcohol consumption or things that have traditionally been decided by the states. Talking about constitutional fundamental rights that if they aren’t protected at the Supreme Court, states are going to do what they’re doing, they’re going to run rampant and you know, unfortunately we’ve seen this from, the civil rights movement going back to the 60s that, and personally, you know the way that the a lot of states you know run their business is that you know it’s a if given the opportunity they’re going to seize it and they’re going to impose a majoritarian, you know, terror on, you know, the vulnerable few. And I think that there’s also something to be said about the growing polarization in the country overall, you know there for a lot of years there were split houses that you know the Senate could be democratic and the House could be Republican and that was the case for in in a lot of it was a case in a lot of states. But I think for the first time ever, there’s only two states now that have opposite parties running different houses in the legislature. So I think there’s this just growing polarization that’s led to, you know, some of the growing partisan sponsored agenda, but I think another thing that just has to be tacked on to this discussion is the, you know, the impact that partisan gerrymandering has had on these issues gives the folks that are pushing a lot of this anti LGBTQ and particularly anti trans legislation aren’t appealing to moderate Americans anymore. You know, they’re appealing only to the folks that are the farthest on the right that they need to appeal to, to win their primary, to move forward in their election and you know that’s got serious human cost that we’ve already seen in this process. So it’s a really difficult time.
07:26 AW – And why don’t you take a step back also and explain to the listeners who missed Kevin Jennings on the show, the mission of Lambda Legal and then obviously your resources are limited. You can’t fight every fight. Where does Lambda legal view the real constitutional threats beyond the clickbait?
07:45 SB – Yeah. So land legal is the country’s largest and longest historical legal organization working to advance the rights of LGBTQ folks and people living with HIV. We were founded in 1973 and we are celebrating our 50th anniversary, you know, and we’ve, you know, been working on seminal cases such as you know, the Lawrence V Texas, you know decision was litigated by Lambda Legal bragged and V Abbott was litigated by Lambda Legal. We were involved with the Obergefell v. Hodges litigation. You know, the list is, goes on and on and on, into even in our most current wins that we’ve had in the courts addressing things like access to identity documents for trans folks access to healthcare protections for people living with HIV, the decriminalization of people living with HIV. So it’s just it, it goes across the board, for sure. So I’m just very proud to work for Lambda legal. I’m going to miss things, and responding to your question about how we are viewing, you know the threats and how to respond to the threats and what we’re seeing being passed in the in the state legislatures, in particular the strategy from the far right. It’s clearly been, and this has been mirrored on the federal level, you know, with the changeover in the House of Representatives to go after sports. They’ve pulled sports, you know, and they want to prohibit it involves, you know, policies that ban trans kids from playing sports consistent with their gender identity, you know, which means banning them from playing altogether, and they feel like this is something that’s, you know, something that can pry apart trans people from the rest of the LGBTQ movement and to, you know, really seize upon, you know, peoples insecurity about sports. And you know that everybody is concerned about their kid and the trophy and they feel like this is a real winner and they want to start with this, and they did last year, they passed a number of these laws throughout the country.
09:38 AW – It seems like such an antiquated argument. I remember as a kid in the 70s, the Renee Richards debate that was like 1975 or seven or something like that. And it’s like here we are 45 years later and it’s like it’s water cooler conversation again on cable news.
09:55 SB – Yeah, it’s kind of unbelievable, especially given the fact that trans kids are less than they’re 1.4% of the US population. So statistically, it’s not even possible then for them to dominate sports and, as a person who participates in sports myself, I’m always sad to see the low, low numbers of trans kids that are actually participating and there have been inclusive policies in places like Washington State and California for going on 20 years now where kids have been able to participate in consistent with their gender identity. And the sky hasn’t fallen, you know, and this it’s one of the things that actually drives me out of my tree the most in doing this work is that the folks on the far right, they seize upon this lack of familiarity that people have with trans people. And they really try to make it sound like this is some new dangerous thing. And if you allow trans kids to… it’s just going to they’re these super athletes that are just going to take over every sport possible. And by the way, you know the legislators that are sponsoring this legislation over and over again, there’s a great AP article about this. Can’t name one trans athlete in their state. They can’t name one. And most of the time, there’s a handful of trans kids that are, like, 10 in Utah, out of 68,000 kids that are participating, you know, so it’s just the my main point here is just that there have been policies that have in place forever and these threats that are always, you know, they’re used to scare people and fear monger, just have not proven to be the case.
11:34 (Music Break)
12:52 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Sasha Buchert. She is a senior attorney at Lambda Legal. So Sasha, we were talking about trans rights in sports, would that be considered a a key strategic front for Lambda legal to fight on or is it more of a misdirection by the right, where they’re just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks in the culture.
13:18 SB – I mean, I think that is certainly their strategy is to is to you know, get a foot in the door and try to create a space for discrimination. If you can demonize and dehumanize A segment of the population in one way that opens the door to dehumanize and demonize them and discriminate against them across the board. And I think that that is certainly their strategy. Our response to that has been no, we’re not going to let you get a foot in the door, you know, and we stood up and we were fighting that, you know, we won a huge victory in a challenge that was brought in West Virginia fighting back against one of those bills and you know, the court issued a really powerful injunction stopping the law from going to going into effect, you know, while the litigation proceeds, you know, unfortunately the same judge after a year and a half of stopping the law from going into effect, you know, let it go into effect for this one trans girl that just wanted to play cross, it was wanted to run with her team. And we appealed to the 4th Circuit and, you know, received a favorable decision so that she could try out and dissipate, but the state of West Virginia felt like it was so important to prevent this 14-year old girl from running cross country that they appealed to the Supreme Court. You know who denied it? Thankfully so, Becky can run with and this is what’s really important. You know what’s at stake here is that this.. it’s not just a political strategic discussion, I think what gets lost sometimes is the impact on real kids. A judge that was appointed by the Trump administration and an Idaho decision that enjoined their ban on sports kids on, on kids from playing sports, clarified that when you when you push forward these policies, you know the impact it has is that you’re banning them all together because as every trans kid I’ve ever talked to that wants to play sports, as communicated to me, you know, if these bands go into effect, they’re just not going to play and that the harm that has the irreparable long term harm. As you know, is just awful. It means that they’re not going to be able to bond with their peers. They’re not going to gain all those things that kids learn, you know, through sports discipline and stick to itiveness learn, teamwork, leadership, all those things just gone for those kids because of a handful of legislators, legislators that are trying to appease their far right base.
15:35 AW – And not every 14 year old wants to be Rosa Parks, right? They don’t necessarily want to go through a legal fight like Becky did.
15:41 SB – Oh yeah, no, and especially given current climate, you know where you know the, you know, unfortunately, all of the these television shows, you know, these news shows that, you know, they just really seize upon this in the language has just gotten so aggressive towards trans people. They’re talking about eradicating trans people, you know, and those messages trickle down to kids in school and and parents are frankly terrified and families are terrified in states where you know, they’ve really gone after trans people in ways that I’ve never seen in my lifetime. And it’s just a really, really frightening moment.
16:19 AW – What are some of the other fronts that Lambda legal is keeping an eye on where they think they need to be strategic in in fighting back?
16:27 SB – One of the most concerning threats that we’re seeing now are the attempts to prohibit trans folks from especially trans kids from obtaining healthcare to treat gender dysphoria. They’ve really gone out of their way to embrace stigma over science. And it’s not just with regard to the healthcare that trans folks needs it’s also you. Know the litigation that’s been, you know, put forward in Texas seeking to prohibit people from accessing mifepristone in the court. Embracing stigma over science, in my opinion, there.
17:02 AW – I can’t remember the state, but aren’t there some if you dive into the details, there’s some pretty horrific pieces of legislation that are trying to be set forward where there’s a actual like, gender inspection and things that that a child should not have to do.
17:16 SB – Yeah, yeah. I mean, that really goes to the sports ban legislation that we’re seeing and a lot of them do contain these genital verification procedures. And again, the point needs to be made, and this isn’t why these bills shouldn’t go forward. You know, I mean, it’s part of it, but I think that what people forget is the impact this will have. Heightened scrutiny that will be placed upon any kid that doesn’t fit gender stereotypes. You know, if your kid happens to not look like what the stereotype of a girl should look like, you know the other team has the right to impose this law to inspect genitals. If they have questions, it just really feeds into you know a lot of the distrust and gender verification.
18:02 AW – Just that term, gender verification seems so screwed up.
18:05 SB – And there’s a great New York Times article about this. This isn’t new. This goes back like, you know, 50-60 years, you know where they were, you know, where there was a ton of scrutiny. And it’s just, it’s just an awful, awful process. So yeah, it definitely is concerning. But the, you know, going back to the healthcare, you know, question, you know, a lot of these states, like Texas, for example, started to investigate parents who were providing care for their kids to treat gender dysphoria because they put forward all of these junk science arguments that are completely debunked and Lambda legal and ACLU stepped into the breach and, you know, filed lawsuits that prevented that from happening. But we’re starting to see, you know, similar legislation being introduced in places like Florida that still is seeking to try to strip care and eliminate. And it’s so ridiculous because the same care that we’re talking about that is provided for, you know, kids seeking care for gender dysphoria is the same exact treatment that’s provided to other kids for other conditions, so they talk about how dangerous this care is, but they’re not trying to ban it for anybody but for trans kids, so it’s just deeply concerning.
19:11 AW – And in terms of Obergfell being under threat, we thought that was settled law, but a lot of us thought Roe v. Wade was settled law long ago. So the Pandora’s box has been opened by this activist Supreme Court, and it’s pretty scary for a lot of Americans. How does Lambda Legal view the idea of it being settled law or not, like are there some cases that you’re keeping an eye on that that listeners should be aware of as they go through the dockets?
19:41 SB – Yeah, I think that it’s important to unpack a little bit about what the Dobbs decision says, and it’s just important to reinforce that their reasoning for overturning Roe V Wade in large part was this argument that only the rights that the court views is rooted in history and tradition are protected under the Constitution.
20:09 AW – Like slavery?
20:13 SB – (laughs) Check, women can’t vote. So you know, that’s deeply problematic reasoning, obviously. And there are and it’s riddled with exceptions that we don’t need to go into here. But the reasoning is not sound by any means, and I think it will be looked at, viewed at and history. As we view, you know, Plessy V Ferguson and other, you know, horrific decisions, but it is, you know, this argument that basically does away with a lot of the reasoning that grounds the Lawrence v. Texas decision, the decision that struck down, you know, laws that prohibit intimacy, you know, among same sex couples and Obergefell v Hodges, the fundamental right of same sex couples to marry. Yes, the Congress did break its logjam and move forward and pass legislation this year that would protect marriages to some degree, but if a hostile state take Iowa, for example, which introduced legislation this year, decided to, you know, move a case up to the Supreme Court challenging that decision, you know, they could undermine Obergefell v Hodges in a really dangerous way by overturning it, which would allow states to refuse to, you know, advance, you know, same-sex recognition within that state, it would still be recognized because the federal legislation that passed. But, I think the heightened animus that we’re seeing towards the LGBTQ community, you know, of course, trans people and non-binary people are experiencing the brunt of this. But I think that you can start to see that that’s not enough fascism as an endless appetite for rolling back human rights. And I feel like it won’t end with non-binary/trans rights. We’re already starting to see that you know with the attacks on drag queens.
22:09 AW – So that was one of my next questions is this is getting a lot of press in in Florida. It seems completely ridiculous on so many fronts and unenforceable. But is it a real legal threat, or is it more clickbaity? To me it sounds so out of bounds legally that there isn’t sound footing, but I’m not a lawyer.
22:33 SB – No, I mean you’re right, it’s first, it’s like it’s the most if we have to compare and comparisons are odious. But if we have to compare, I would say it’s the most constitutionally suspect of them all. It’s a clear infringement on 1st amendment principles, but it’s hard for me to say that with a straight face. And thinking about some of the folks that you know, we as an organization opposed that were folks that were up for judicial nominees in the last administration who had no made no effort to hide their views about LGBTQ folks and civil rights and human rights generally, and I think we’ve seen some of the fallout from, you know, the folks that have been confirmed and placed in in lifetime appointments on the bench. So you know, it’s hard to say how courts will come down on some of these issues, but. It does demonstrate, though, that this is this is not the end. This is the beginning, I think for a lot of these folks. And it’s just so important that, you know, we continue to fight.
23:38 (Music Break)
24:27 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Sasha Buchert. She is a senior attorney at Lambda Legal. I know Lambda Legal is a nonpartisan organization, but looking at it through a more hopeful lens, if we can for a second, all of this hateful legislation that’s getting pushed forward in in multiple states. It seems like political suicide from a strategic standpoint, if I were a Republican strategist and I was trying to gain a foothold in a younger demographic of a younger slice of the American electorate, I don’t have the polling data in front of me, but I don’t really see the end game for them, except it seems very short sighted.
25:14 SB – I mean, it’s hard to speak in generalizations like this, but you know, for, you know, the party who you know was focused on, you know, denying elections and after January 6th, it’s just hard for me, see them doing anything but appealing to, you know, the folks that are on the farthest, you know, branch of the right wing tree. And I completely agree with you that you know the numbers you know of youth who are supportive of LGBTQ people is, very, very high and, we will see that games, if not, in the next 10 to 20 years, certainly after that. And it’s just sad to witness, you know, this the harm and damage that’s going to be done, you know, during the interim. But I do feel like they’re going to have to, you know, make those decisions at some point, for sure.
26:04 AW – And lastly I wanted to touch on one issue in the culture wars that we heard a lot more about in the 80s and 90s, which was gays in the military that was like this issue and you’re of openly transgender marine as somebody who has served their country, what’s the status right now, legally, and is that under threat? Are things moving in the right direction on that front with the Biden administration in place?
26:36 SB – Yeah, absolutely. You know, the Biden administration came in and, you know, did away with that nonsense, you know? So what folks had been serving just talking about the open trans service. I mean, just having, you know, the right to serve doesn’t mean that you don’t experience discrimination, but it certainly is reassuring to those families that you know, they can continue to do their jobs. Have to look over, look over their shoulder, and trans folks in particular have been serving since 2015 now, so they’re almost going on 10 years, I’d love to say there’s no threat.
27:07 AW – And the military has not self-destructed in that period I assume?
27:11 SB – (Laughs) And this is exactly the hypothetical you know, thing that drives me nuts. It’s just so ridiculous there’s like this what if…Look, you’ve got boots on the ground – actual real statistics and all of these folks. All that’s happened is these folks are serving with valor and distinction. So yeah, it’s just it’s just ridiculous. But I can’t say there is no threat. You know, if the administration changes and it’s someone who has expressed, great. If it’s the folks that are leading the ticket on the far right now, yeah, I certainly do believe that. So they might come in and try to do something similar to what we saw in the last administration.
27:55 AW – Sasha Buchert is a staff attorney at Lambda Legal. Sasha, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 SB – Thanks so much.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Donna Summer, Anastasia Sheverenko & INGA and Sylvester. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Sasha Buchert of Lambda Legal: The Case For LGBTQ Equality appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
In the first decade of this century many of us learned that the threshold for keeping our planet healthy was 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Advocates like those at 350.org emphasized the need to adopt practices to help the earth stay below that number. Well, unfortunately, we earthlings have blown through that limit and are presently looking at 419 parts per million. But that doesn’t mean the idea of lowering our carbon emissions is moribund. And there are still organizations like 350.org keeping the dream alive. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Namrata Chowdhary, the Head of Public Engagement at 350.org. We learn more about the organization’s roots, examine some of the fights they’ve taken on, and discuss how they’re planning to evolve. We also talk about the corporatization of some larger environmental organizations and dive into the issues surrounding fossil fuel divestiture.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:15 Namrata Chowdhary (NC) – Yes, in the Global North we need to acknowledge that there’s a gap in how we people the climate movement, and at the same time, we need to acknowledge that and environmentalism has held different forms in different parts of the world for decades longer.
00:33 Narrator – In the first decade of this century many of us learned that the threshold for keeping our planet healthy was 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Advocates like those at 350.org emphasized the need to adopt practices to help the earth stay below that number. Well, unfortunately, we earthlings have blown through that limit and are presently looking at 419 parts per million. But that doesn’t mean the idea of lowering our carbon emissions is moribund. And there are still organizations like 350.org keeping the dream alive. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Namrata Chowdhary, the Head of Public Engagement at 350.org. We learn more about the organization’s roots, examine some of the fights they’ve taken on, and discuss how they’re planning to evolve. We also talk about the corporatization of some larger environmental organizations and dive into the issues surrounding fossil fuel divestiture.
01:43 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Namrata Chowdhary. She is the head of public engagement at 350.org. Namrata, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:54 Namrata Chowdhary (NC) – Thank you ever so much, it’s a pleasure to be here.
01:56 Alex Wise (AW) – Pleasure to have you. You are coming to us from London, is that correct?
02:00 NC – That is correct. On a grey, cold day one wouldn’t believe it’s spring.
02:06 AW – First, why don’t you give us a bit of a background for our listeners who are not familiar with the mission of your organization and give us a little bit of the history and then we’ll catch up listeners on how the organization has evolved over the years.
02:21 NC – What a beautiful invitation to share about the history of an organization that I’ve long admired before I became part of it. 350.org was founded in 2008 by Bill McKibben, whom you’ve had on your show before, and a group of university friends who were his students at the time, and it’s named after – we are named after – the safe limits of 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. And that’s what we’re hoping to – or determined to, I should say – determined to get the earth back towards. We need to bring ourselves back to 350 parts of one million. The roots of 350 are very firmly in the activist sphere. It started with youth activists and today still we draw our primary strength from the young activists at the front lines, many of whom are at the front lines of the climate crisis and all of whom are committed to doing their part to changing the narrative of fossil fuels as the only way to bring energy to us. And are determined to do what they can to secure a more positive, uplifting, safe future for all. That’s what 350 is today, and I’m so, so proud to be a part of the public engagement team, particularly because it’s through our audiences that we drive the change that we are committed to making.
03:41 AW – One of the real events that put 350.org on the map were the protest to the Keystone XL pipeline, it really kind of set a fire to the movement and really catapulted the organization into the international one that it is today. Why don’t you explain the importance of misbehaving and doing what may not be expected by polite society, but why it’s so important to you and your colleagues?
04:16 NC – Activism is really important in driving change right? And as the saying goes, history is seldom made well. The saying actually says seldom made by well-behaved women. But I think we can extend that almost to anyone, right? Well-behaved people seldom make the kind of change that results in history. And in in a fair history being written, we need to be taking action, taking direct action, as it were. For the principles that we believe in. That said, 350 is core strengths also rests in organizing community right and creating a sense of community linking up with partners and centering the work. The activism that we do rooting that quite deeply in the communities with whom we work, for whom we are championing. Climate justice and with whom we are built. Going to build this future that we all dream of together. So there is a distinct difference in how 350 operates. And you know not. It’s for us. It’s much more than just. It’s also about committing to finding, finding the answers together in the communities that we work with.
05:27 AW – Yes. So after the Keystone XL pipeline got on, a lot of peoples radars, 350 moved on to the divestiture campaign, working to alert. People about some of the institutions that they loved and supported and how they were in bed, essentially with the fossil fuel companies through passive and sometimes active investment. So why don’t you explain how the divestiture campaign has operated up till now and what we can expect from it moving forward, Namrata?
06:01 NC – One of the smartest things that those who were historically affiliated with 350.org, one of the smartest thing that the organization did was to understand that in order to change the dominant narrative about the fossil fuel industry. We had to do two things. One was revoke the social license right and make it make it obvious that so that fossil fuels are causing more harm than they bring good by way of the power that they provide. The second and again this was a very clever, very strategic choice to make was to dismantle the pillars that support the fossil fuel industry, a key one, is finance. If you take away the money, you inevitably bring the industry down in a way that’s much more impactful and much more long lasting than addressing one problem at a time.
06:51 AW – And so now you’re going beyond just alerting people that, let’s say, Stanford or Harvard is investing in fossil fuels, and hopefully those organizations are pulling back those investments. But now, trying to look at solutions, instead of investing in the wrong things, let’s get them investing in the right things. What is that piece of the divestiture puzzle, the Reinvestment Act, if you will, how is that going to play a role in 350.org’s strategy moving?
07:25 NC – Well, like I was saying, Alex, when we think about what keeps industry ticking over money is one of the primary drivers, isn’t it? And so we’ve quite successfully, dare I say, been addressing the big investments that prop up the fossil fuel industry. We’ve had several, several important wins with financial institutions. Beginning to recognize the role that they are complicit in climate change, that they are complicit in the kind of injustices that the fossil fuel industry is wreaking across the world. Now is a chance for us to start to use that same energy and to in fact address the same financial institutions, many of whom have now started to see the role that they play towards climate justice. And it’s our chance to turn that investment, turn, turn all of that financial capital. Towards the urgent pressing need for the entire planet, which is to start funding more renewable energy instead and to start an entire change of how our societies are power. And we’re going to do this not just through the financial institutions, but we’re also going to be doing it by addressing policy change. We’re going to be doing it by organizing in communities and championing renewable energy solutions. We’re also going to be doing this by looking at iconic projects where we might be able to set up community centered renewables. In a way that ignites that movement across different parts of the world. So we are drawing all of our strengths that we have built over the past several years, leveraging our expertise in working with finance, working with the fossil fuel industry in ways that challenge them in ways that get them to recognize the role that they play in climate change, but also in the many injustices that are experienced by the communities where they operate. So it’s about now weaving the new, more hopeful story and about creating a better future for a long time, civil society used to dream of the phrase another world is possible, I’m sure you’ve heard it before. This year, with 350 getting together and starting to recognize that this power now is within our reach, it’s not just within our reach, but it’s within the remits of our responsibility. We’re now saying another world is ours to make. And we’re committed to doing that work as well. We’re committed to doing the work and you know, breaking down the barriers to renewables, energy, we’re committed to driving policy change. We’re committed to championing solutions where we see them. We’re committed to working with communities that will want to set up their own renewable energy. And so it’s, you know, things like this that make us feel very confident that this other world that we have long dreamed of is within our reach and ours to make?
10:22 (music break)
11:44 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Namrata Chowdhury. She is the head of public engagement at 350.org. So Namrata looking at 350.org’s website, I see a lot of campaigns that are focused on fighting coal. It’s one of the original fights that 350’s been engaged in. You’re in England, I’m concerned. And I think many other environmentalists are concerned about the non coal, non traditional fossil fuels that are now being burned in Europe and are seemingly going under the radar. A lot of it’s because of their designation. I’m thinking namely of peat and wood pellets. And burning peat and wood pellets seem to be as dangerous, if not more dangerous than coal, and that they’re almost these Trojan horses. They’ve been designated as biofuels, and they sound all renewable. Wood is, according to some definitions, it is a renewable resource. Trees can regrow. Sure, it might take 100 years for these forests to regrow, but hey, technically renewable. So what is 350.org doing to raise awareness about these Trojan Horse fuels?
13:02 NC – Well, This is why we need to be very particular about what alternatives we are actually embracing. You know, when we think about turning to alternative sources of energy, we need to be very, very clear not to fall into traps like the ones you’re describing. We need to be thinking much more broadly about the impact of whatever fuel we are using. And quite frankly, technology has advanced so much right now that it seems ridiculous that we should be falling back into those traps and still looking to burning wood pellets or peat, or even the other. The other one that surprises me each time I hear it described as part of the greener fuel economy. Is natural gas.
13:45 AW – Yes, a lot of people like to use that as a “bridge fuel,” but thinking about wood pellets, you’re in England where there is a tradition of coal mining, but the coal was being mined because they burned all their forests back in, like the 1700s or so, right?
14:03 NC – Indeed, and how long will we keep, stay sticking on that destructive treadmill where we keep going from one level to the next level of saying, OK, we’ve burnt this one down, where do we turn next and what can we destroy next? And to think of these projects or you know these kinds of industries as renewable or green or is such short-sighted vision? And we’re fooling no one but ourselves. If we start to describe these as solutions to the climate crisis, and we start to think of these as the better alternative, and particularly devilish when you think that the actual alternatives are within reach, you know, the technology for solar, the technology for wind is stronger than it has ever been before – cheaper than it has ever been, more accessible can be set up in microsystems can be community-centered. You know, the benefits are endless. And yet we continue to look at solutions in this way that we’re only going to go one level away from the dirtiest and the most harmful, and then congratulate ourselves. And that’s the kind of thing that we’re looking to change in our campaigning in the next phase of our work. And we’re very clear: centering justice when we think about campaigning for an alternative and that’s really important as well. Because when you think about the climate movement and even when you talk about Keystone, Alex, and you talk about the work that has been achieved in Keystone, it isn’t 350 alone that has done that. It is in partnership with indigenous communities, often led by him. Indigenous communities and we are very humble in the role that we have played in campaigns like Keystone because it’s really about bringing our strengths and our audiences and the activists that are, you know, working alongside us in service of the wider movement. That can only really succeed if it is led by and owned by those that are literally rooted in the communities most impacted by these projects. And so that’s that to me holds the key also to the future when we think about the campaigns that350.org will be leading in the next phase, we will definitely be working with. With the communities in partnership with local groups and looking to find solutions that are truly justice oriented that are not the Band-Aid as it’s called over the harm that fossil fuel industries have wreaked for years on the planet.
16:34 AW – Yes, it definitely requires something other than business as usual, and it seems that 350.org approaches its business in a refreshing new way. Why don’t you highlight some of the ways that 350 is set apart from big conservation and big environmental groups that may have a different way of seeing how they operate?
16:58 NC – So alexijoined350.org in 2021, right and when I joined the organization or even when I was in the recruitment process, one of my questions back to the panel that were interviewing me was “what’s the size of the organization? What’s the size of your staff?” And I was really surprised when they said it’s 150 people because the kind of impact that I had witnessed 350 make from the outside. And so the kind of impact that I had seen 350 make and the kind of visibility it enjoys, I genuinely thought it was a much larger team behind it. And to me, that’s part of the compelling beauty of 350. The fact that it’s a small core team. And it’s so central to how 350 works that its power rests not in that small core team, not just in that small core team of 150 people. But in the concentric circles arranged around that heart of core of core staff. Now that I’m part of the core staff, I recognize and I’m appreciate that beauty even more because I know how much work is put into cultivating those relationships and nurturing them and winner. And close. So just to give you a sense of and to give your listeners a sense of how 350 is powered, I’d like us to imagine a set of concentric circles right at its very heart. Are these 150 to 160 core staff. These are people directly employed by 3:50. The next ring outside of that is the strategic affiliates. So these are groups like 350 Australia or three, 350 Altera that are licensed to use the 350 name, but they’re not staff. And then one ring, one ring further back are our affiliates that are not registered as such but have a looser connection with us, so like 350 Philippines for instance. They don’t receive funding from us, but they participate in many of our campaigns. And then even wider out are the local groups. So this is like the whole network of local groups, which could be formed anything between 5 to 300 people in a particular geography that are participating for a specific reason or a specific event and become part of the 350 family by virtue of joining our campaigns and contributing long term to the change that we’re hoping to make, by cultivating relationships across all four of these circles, and making deep connections. We’re really investing in building a movement in a global movement that’s going to drive this kind of change that we dream and hold dear to ourselves. So much power comes from all. Four of those circles.
19:53 (Music break)
20:45 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Namrata Chowdhury. She is the head of public engagement at 350.org. So Namrata your pay scale is a little different also than the big conservation organizations. They’re I think your highest paid executive makes under $150,000 a year. Everybody’s getting paid in a similar band which I think is important. Yes, indeed. And it’s it’s so important to 3:50 to be the kind of organization that represents the values that we want to see in the movement, right, that we want to see in the climate justice movement. One fact I’m very proud of is the pay equity across 350. We have a ratio lowest paid to highest paid.
21:32 NC – Of one is to three, so there isn’t a single person on the team that earns less than 1/3 of what the highest paid members of the team make. It’s something we are very proud of diversity as well. I’m part of the change that 350 committed to making when I was recruited and I went through the recruitment process alongside several others. It was very, it was very clear this was part of an intentional change in leadership that 350.org was making – making a choice to invest in more leaders from the Global South with lived and learned experience of campaigning in the Global South on issues that affect community is people of color people that have a much more diverse perspective on climate justice and that that was a again a strategic choice that 350’s governance was making in investing in a truly global organization and building this up into the kind of organization that was capable of leading a global movement participating. In the global climate justice movement and holding its own with power and pride to do the part, that 350, with its tremendous global strength, is able to do.
22:44 AW – Yes, you hear a lot of valid criticism against the environmental movement because of its generally white roots and white faces, and these are the faces of colonialism going back into these areas that have been terrorized by colonialism for centuries.
23:03 NC – And there are two ways of looking at this narrative, Alex. One is indeed, as you’re pointing out, the white roots of the environmental movement. And at the same time, that’s from the perspective of the global N having grown up in India and having participated in several campaigns while I was still a teenager. And those campaigns have been running for, you know, generations before protecting forests. The Chipko movement, which, which is something that I grew up with, is the tree huggers, those are the original tree huggers, that originated in India so many decades ago and so this is the kind of humility, dare I say, with which we need to approach both sides of the narrative. Yes, in the Global North, we need to acknowledge that there’s a gap in in how we people, the climate movement, and at the same time, we need to acknowledge that and one mentalism has held different forms in different parts of the world for decades longer. People have indigenous communities in Brazil, for example, have defended the Amazonia long before white activists. Started to recognize the value of the Amazon and the value of the Amazon. In ecological terms, and so this is the kind of dynamic that’s at play in the global environment movement. When we think about how we reference the need for greater diversity, the need for diverse perspectives. We must acknowledge that those perspectives are rooted in a history that’s as deep, if not longer, and deeper than the more recent environmentalism that that is in popular parlance in the Global North to use the frame you suggested by using the word colonialism. It’s like recognizing that several societies in colonized nations had extremely sound principles of governance before they got taken over by the colonials. And then, after the colonizers left, they had to rebuild their societies around new structures of governance. But to now look at those same countries and think of them as, you know, having fresh democracies and so on, it kind of negates the history that came pre-colonialism. And that’s the kind of dynamic that, I mean we ought to apply even when it comes to protecting land. Looking after the environment or, you know, thinking more broadly about the role of humanity with the we, the planet we live on, and that in many cultures, in many societies has existed long before environmentalism even. Became a thing.
25:49 AW – Yes, I just went to the Goldman Prize award and six recipients who are…one of the common themes is they’re generally don’t have resources, don’t have money, and they don’t have power. They’re going up against these behemoths of industry and coming out on top, and it’s a very inspiring story, but it’s all too rare.
26:12 NC – Indeed, I I think you draw a great parallel between colonizers and the environmental movement in that context, because if we’ve fought oppression of one kind, and we’ve organized and we’ve found strengths to overthrow the shackles of colonialism, as it were. We can draw inspiration and strength from that history, we certainly can, but that’s not to say that those who haven’t experienced that or don’t have that history cannot draw strength from other elements of organizing and community strength in their own geographies as well, right. And for us at 350 it’s the answer lies in community. The strength lies in bringing together people who all share the same commitment the same. Values and finding the strength together to start working towards that future that we want to. World and championing it, challenging. What’s standing in our way, bringing down the barriers, all of those things are dependent on unlocking the agency of the people that we work with. So yes, to your inspiring idea of how societies that have broken through colonial past. And are recreating strength and structure. Definitely we’ve got a lot to learn from those societies. And I think we’ve got a lot to learn from more stable economies as well. We’ve got strengths there. We’ve got privilege that lends itself beautifully to being in service of the global movement and we need both. We need both sides of the story for us to really build this other world that we dream of.
27:52 AW – She’s the head of public engagement at 350.org, Namrata Chowdhary. Namrata, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:00 NC – Thank you ever so much, Alex, it’s been a pleasure.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Wes Montgomery, Etta James and Curtis Mayfield. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Namrata Chowdhary: Three (50) Is A Magic Number appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Backed by some of the world’s wealthiest people like Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, the Protecting our Planet (POP) campaign has a mission to ensure the protection of 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Mongabay reporter Daniel Pye to learn more about this bold initiative. We check in on the progress of the group two years into its launch, look deeper into its finances, and discuss the realistic expectations for what POP might be able to accomplish.
This article and podcast Daniel Pye on the Protecting Our Planet Challenge appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Long time Sea Change Radio listeners know a thing or two about the challenges of being both a seafood lover and an environmentalist. It’s hard to keep track of which seafoods are sustainable and which involve practices that cause egregious harm to ecosystems and humans alike — so much so that places like the Monterey Bay Aquarium have created handy guides for shopping and ordering at restaurants. Fortunately, there are people dedicated to finding ways to get protein without depleting the planet’s oceans, like our guest today on Sea Change Radio. This week we speak with Shannon Cosentino-Roush, the Chief Strategy Officer of Finless Foods, a start-up that makes a plant-based alternative tuna product and is awaiting federal approval for its cell-based seafood product. We learn about the ins and outs of the alternative seafood industry, look at the exploding popularity of poké bowls, and examine the frontier of cell-based protein manufacturing.
This article and podcast Finless Foods: A Different Kettle of Fish appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
They say a leopard doesn’t change its spots, but last week, North Carolina state representative Tricia Cotham switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, suddenly shifting the balance of power in the Tar Heel state. With Cotham’s assistance, Republicans in the general assembly now have enough votes to override any vetoes by the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Our guest on Sea Change Radio is Rob Schofield, the Editor of NC Newsline, who will give us the inside scoop on Cotham’s spot-changing move to the GOP, lay out what it could mean for North Carolinians, and explore some other recent under-the-radar results from the 2022 midterms.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:14 Rob Schofield (RS) – It would be a truly remarkable spectacle to see Representative Cotham vote for something like that after having so publicly staked out her position, diametrically opposed for so much of her career. There would be…It would be a remarkable, remarkable scene, and we’ll it’s going to be an interesting few months here.
00:34 Narrator – They say a leopard doesn’t change its spots, but last week, North Carolina state representative Tricia Cotham switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, suddenly shifting the balance of power in the Tar Heel state. With Cotham’s assistance, Republicans in the general assembly now have enough votes to override any vetoes by the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Our guest on Sea Change Radio is Rob Schofield, the Editor of NC Newsline, who will give us the inside scoop on Cotham’s spot-changing move to the GOP, lay out what it could mean for North Carolinians, and explore some other recent under-the-radar results from the 2022 midterms.
00:01:36 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Rob Schofield. Rob is the editor of NC NewsLine, formerly known as NC Policy Watch, there in North Carolina. Rob, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:49 Rob Schofield (RS) – Alex, it’s great to be back with you.
01:51 Alex Wise (AW) – So we had you on before the midterms and you explained what was at stake in North Carolina and things have changed very dramatically in the last week because of the. Changing of parties by one, Tricia Cotham, somebody nobody had heard of outside of North Carolina until last week and it’s really sent reverberations throughout the state, and it’s going to have an effect on millions of people. Why don’t you catch us up on what happened in the midterms and then get us to where we are last week, with Tricia Cotham’s party switch.
02:30 RS – Yeah. Well, the important thing to remember about North Carolina’s General Assembly is that it remain egregiously gerrymandered, we are a 50/50 state thanks to the to the courts, there was a a required redrawing of our congressional districts and lo and behold, of the 14 seats we have in Congress, seven are Republicans, 7 are Democrats. Because the maps were drawn in a a semi fair fashion. Unfortunately, that was not the case with the legislative maps, and as a result, Republicans, after the midterm elections picked up a few seats, which got them ohh so close to veto proof majorities. Super majorities. We have a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, but the Republicans since 2018 have been a little short of being able to override his vetoes as a result of the midterm elections. The Senate became veto proof. It went 30 Republicans to 20 Democrats. It takes a 3/5 vote to override a veto. Here, the House was one vote short, 71 to 49120 seats in the State House. And so there was lots of talk right from the get go that there was a, you know that there would be members who could be peeled off perhaps on individual votes. There are Democrats who are known to favor gun rights, Democrats who are not strong abortion rights supporters, so there was already a a deep concern in the state that there would be a possibility that the Republicans would be able to get back to overriding gubernatorial vetoes and they and there have been a lot of them over a lot of hot button issues over the last few years. But this was a little out of the blue. They had a lawmaker who, right after the election, a woman by the name of Tricia Cotham, a Democrat from the Charlotte area, who at one point was married early in her career to the state, to the chair of the Democratic Party in the state, and talked openly on the floor of the house in a previous term that she served about abortion and abortion she had obtained. She was strongly pro-choice. Her campaign, even this term, talked about featured Joe Biden on the website. It was it was a strongly democratic district. She won 59% of the vote. She was returning to the legislature after being away for several years as a lobbyist. But immediately we heard rumblings that she was making overtures to the Republicans, looking for perhaps to find some common ground. And lo and behold, there she was, escorting being in the escort committee for the members who would walk the new speaker of the House onto the floor of the House, early in the session, the Republican speaker. And she was rewarded immediately with a Co-chairmanship, Co-chair of a particular committee. So everybody was clearly the Democrats were a little nervous about that. “What’s going on, Tricia, our longtime friend and colleague? What’s going on with you?“ And one thing led to another until last week, she announced that she was actually going to leave the Democratic Party, become Republican and give the Republicans a 72 to 48 majority in the in the House, which would presume probably if she were to remain loyal to the Republicans and vote with him on hotly contested votes, make it possible to override the vetoes of the democratic governor.
05:42 AW -. And what will that mean in terms of some of the more regressive policies in terms of education, women’s right to choose etc? I know that the Republicans are now goading trans and gay people wherever possible. What are some of the things on the docket that scare you the most?
06:03 RS – Yeah, I think those are areas that people all have concerns. Interestingly enough, just today as we record this, our Governor Cooper, ever the optimist, was tweeting out statements to the effect well, she still has the ability to stop really bad legislation and I suppose that’s true. It’s really not clear here how far she’s gone. What kinds of commitments she may have made to the Republican leadership? I think some people found it notable that after the announcement, she posed for a picture in front of the well of the State House with a coterie of conservative Christian pastors, which was a little surprising. It remains very much something that’s in motion, we’re not quite clear yet how it’s going to all pan out. And as I said, there were already rumors even before this happened that there would be Democrats who might abandon the governor on some other measures. They’ve already done that this session we had a long standing law in North Carolina that required sheriffs actually to perform a background check. Before you could buy a handgun in our state, it was called the pistol permit system is 100 years old and Republicans had voted to repeal it. The governor had vetoed it this session. They voted to repeal it, and a handful of Democrats went along with repealing it. So literally, just hours after one of the most horrific recent shootings in Nashville, TN, our legislature repealed the handgun background check law. So it’s very much something in motion. We’re not quite clear how it’s going to play out, but I think the Republicans have made it a top priority of this session to pursue their culture war agenda on issues like choice, LGBTQ rights. Privatization of public schools election law, you know, sort of buying into the crazy conspiracies about election laws. All those things seem to be, you know, that much closer to becoming law.
07:58 Alex Wise (AW) – And you mentioned how she was a Charlotte based Democrat with deep roots in the party in the Democratic Party. I would have been less surprised if it had been somebody from rural North Carolina knowing the strength of the evangelical vote in those regions. But Charlotte is a very cosmopolitan part of the state. And how is this going to play with her constituents? Is she going to be able to get re-elected? It seems like a very short sighted move by representative Cotham.
08:32 Rob Schofield (RS) – It certainly does at first blush. Her mother is a progressive Democrat County Commissioner and Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located. You know, there were some weird signs during her time as a lobbyist over the last several years in which she had taken on some clients that were in the sort of pro school privatization, charter schools, where some of her clients, she had had some pretty sketchy clients in that realm and some weird relationships that sort of struck people as you know, what’s going on? So it wasn’t like this came, I think for most people completely out of the blue. I think for her constituents, it mostly has. There’s been a tremendous amount of anger in the district calls for her resignation. Mission statements accusing her of a betrayal of her the people who elected her, as I said, with close to 60% of the vote in a solidly democratic district, she now seems to have a very tight relationship with the speaker of the House, and the Republicans seem intent on yet another round of gerrymandering this year and redistrict redraw. There are all kinds of rumors, perhaps in the past there were rumors that she was interested in running for statewide office, perhaps Superintendent of public schools. There are rumors now, perhaps of a congressional bid, some other kind of high power position. I think it’s safe to say that it would be very difficult for her to stay in office. With the district map that she represents now remained the same, but things are fluid in politics, and the next election is a ways off, so I guess she’s for now, content to approach it this way.
10:27 (Music Break)
11:18 AW – This is Alex Wise on Cchange radio and I’m speaking to Rob Schofield. He is the editor of North Carolina and News line NBC newsline.com. So Rob, hearing the hypothetical plans that Representative Cotham might have for, you know, running for state office or something like that, that any Republican who primaries her will be able to say, look, you were against all these things that we stand for as as Republicans, why would we vote for you? And then conversely, I think she’s persona non grata to half of the state right now. Any Democrat is sickened by seeing somebody just betray what they were running on. It seems like you run as a politician on these points, you get elected and then all of a sudden you pull the switcheroo that feels like a real betrayal to voters.
12:08 RS – Yeah, it’s not unprecedented. We’ve had other politicians do this in North Carolina in the past, although not, I’d say not as high profile of the situation. Yeah, it’s really interesting. One, she’s not really given any kind of interview. She’s spoken in public about it. She hasn’t really addressed where her principles lie, what her motivations are, what her political calculus is for her own career. So much of this seems to be about herself. She said one of her top motivations is that the Democrats in her caucus weren’t being kind to her and were angry about her flirtation with the Republican. So it does seem that her motivation was principally about her own personal situation and future. But you’re right, it it does seem a rather difficult to sort of chart how you work your way to a path of success politically. Going forward, I suppose again, you know it’s conceivable that a Republican district could be drawn for her to run for some office. And that the powers that be in the Republican Party would use their, you know, their authority to sort of clear the way. And sometimes people who are converts become the most passionate for the new causes that they’ve adopted, and we’ve all seen that phenomenon play out throughout history. Anything’s possible, but it does seem a very, you know, questionable future lies ahead for her. Of course, for the Republicans, they’re just happy to have the vote. And if she’s going to vote with them to override the governor, well, it’s, you know, they’ll just chalk it up as another win. The Republicans are in a very strong position in our state. Our courts have taken some steps in the past to sort of rein in the gerrymandering of the districts. But because Republicans also were successful in winning control of the state Supreme Court by very narrow statewide margins in the fall election, they are really in a position now where the courts pose very little threat. To their efforts to gerrymander the districts, and we expect, you know, an aggressive redrawing of legislative districts again this year or later this year, so maybe she just figures she’s gone over to the side that’s going to be in charge for a long time and she might as well be with the winner.
14:24 AW – Yes, I mean when we think about the historical precedents here, there’s just a long list of well-known politicians who’ve switched parties and I remember Jim Jeffords in Vermont like 20 something years ago. And Arlen Specter, I believe he switched to the Democratic Party. And then there was more political expediency when the South was changing. You saw Strom Thurmond and Richard Shelby used to be a Democrat, and we have KYrsten Sinema right now flirting with the Republican Party. She’s no longer a Democrat, she says she’s an Independent, but in my lifetime we haven’t had such a gap between the two parties. We’re in such polemical times it seems hard to be able to skip over to the other side when we’re so divided. That’s why it seems like such a head scratcher to me, although it’s happened historically.
15:20 RS – Yeah, we, we and interestingly, we had an incident here about 20 years ago where there was a split in the legislature where it was literally 59 to or 61 to 59 something like that. And the Democrats convinced a deeply conservative religious right Republican to switch parties and to become a Democrat, and it ended up leading to that, ultimately, that person’s indictment for criminal, for a payoff, and the speaker who was behind it later was served time in prison. There was a corruption angle to it.
15:54 AW – Actually, that was one of my questions is will we find out that there was something unseemly behind the scenes that sparked this switch by Trisha Cotham like it was there some financial incentive for her to do this? Because it doesn’t seem like politically expedient, as you said.
16:12 RS – No, I don’t know. I have no information about that. I suppose anything is possible. Hope that’s not the case. But you’re right, it’s what’s strange about this conversion is that so often, as you’ve noted, the conversions happen for people who have already sort of ideologically, we’re always sort of more aligned with the other party. And maybe they were just outliers in their own party for some time. She has been, at least in her past service in the General Assembly, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat – a person who got awards for her work on reproductive freedom and LGBTQ rights, and I think that’s, as I said, spoke openly on the floor of the House about having obtained an abortion and how that was nobody else’s business and it is just striking to see that this happen and for this individual and that one again senses that it remains a fluid situation and she may be sort of really just sort of going day-to-day and trying to, you know, figure it out from day-to-day as to what she’s going to do. And sometimes I think we see too much in the way of, you know, deeply thought out motives. And those people are just winging this stuff and they’re just, you know, emotional. And they make interesting choices that aren’t terribly well informed or or thought out, and this might be one of those.
17:33 AW – So you mentioned the abortion issue. Let’s drill down on that a little bit more deeply, Rob, now that the Dobbs decision is the law of the land and Roe has been repealed. What is a nightmare scenario for a woman who is facing an unwanted pregnancy now that the General Assembly has flipped and they can override Governor Cooper’s vetoes?
17:57 RS – Well, I mean, North Carolina, it’s not just North Carolina and North Carolina is actually a bit of a sanctuary state for the South, where people can actually get here from states like Tennessee and South Carolina and Georgia and other Florida, where abortion is much more greatly restricted. We have some restrictions here that are nonsensical. We have a 20 week ban that doesn’t really serve any useful purpose and that it’s causing indeed causing women to have to travel outside of North Carolina, but we know that when it comes to a basic, early term abortion, North Carolina remains a sanctuary state where people are coming to obtain abortions and it is obviously a right that hangs very much by a thread in this state. At this point, I think that the Republicans have made it clear that they intend to pass legislation restricting the right it’s I think it’s safe to say that they’ve had some trouble actually early in the session getting their act together on that. And there’s some division within the Republican Party as to how far. They want to go the they’ve talked about first trimester. They’re of course true believers in their caucus who have introduced legislation to say that abortion is murder. I think the expectation if anybody had to bet is that there’ll be some sort of very significant restriction that will make it much, much harder. But maybe not a complete Tennessee like total ban, but it would be a truly remarkable spectacle to see Representative Cotham vote for something like that after having so publicly staked out her position, diametrically opposed for so much of her career, there would be a remarkable, remarkable scene, and we’ll it’s going to be an interesting few months here. Our legislature came in in January. They would typically go at least in some theory, try to wrap up the session in June and get out of here in July. But in recent years, the Republicans have kind of just been hanging around Raleigh a lot. They don’t go away for very long. So things could happen just about anytime going forward.
20:05 (Music Break)
20:58 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Rob Schofield. He is the editor of NC Newsline. So Rob, a lot of us were watching the balance of power play out in the Senate in the midterms, and things did not go well for the Democrats in North Carolina statewide. But why don’t you give us a recap of the elections that we may have missed while we were watching very tight races in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, etc.
21:31 RS – Yeah, I mean, North Carolina remains a very closely divided state. As I’ve noted, we have a Democratic governor who’s won reelection pretty handily in 2020. But in the 2022 midterms, as is so often. Case the things the election tilted to the party out of power in the White House. This was true in North Carolina, although as I noted, because the of the way the maps were drawn in our congressional districts, our House, U.S. House districts. Democrats actually picked up seats and went from being down 8 to 5 to with the addition of a new district thanks to the census and reapportionment. Now it’s split 77, but in the Senate race we had Richard Burr, a retiring sort of Country Club Republican who had had some ethical problems late in his career. Never a real firebrand. Actually voted to impeach Donald Trump at one point. He was one of the few Republicans who went that way. Burr was retiring and the Republicans were Donald Trump. Very early on endorsed a sort of obscure. Member of Congress who’d been in for a couple of terms. He’s a gun shop owner who like to do his TV ads with a gun in his holster, tucked in his, you know, his belt, a guy named Ted Budd. And he ran against an African American woman named Cheri Beasley, who had been the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court and actually lost her reelection to the Supreme Court by 400 votes in 2020. A very formidable candidate. But you know it was a tough uphill battle for her, and so bud ultimately prevailed. And it’s been a real turn to the right. As I say, Burr was a conservative Republican, but very much a sort of old-fashioned Country Club guy. Not a true believer in the Trump brand.
23:16 AW – More like a blue blood old school Republican?
00:23:19 RS – Yeah, I think that’s a fair assessment.
00:23:21 AW – But Budd is part of the new generation of the Ron DeSantis mold of Republicans?
00:23:26 RS – Seems that way. Interestingly enough, the now now senior state senator, a US Senator by the name of Thom Tillis, not really a true Trump believer. He’s crossed Trump a couple of times early in his tenure, although he’s usually quickly retreats into the shadows when called out on it by the Trump wing. He has actually expressed some interest, we’ve heard, of running for governor in the state like a lot of people who find Washington sort of a tough place to hang out in politics. But he faces the challenge that we have a true fire breathing. Lieutenant governor who’s very well known. And interestingly enough, an African American Republican who has already basically made it plain that he wants to run for governor in 2024.
24:13 AW – And who’s that again?
00:24:14 RS – This is a fellow by the name of Mark Robinson. Mark actually is a classic accidental politician, a person who, really. Much of a job, or had much of even a career of any kind, but had the good fortune to give a pro gun rant at a Greensboro City Council meeting that went viral, which got him enough name recognition to help him win a crowded race in the Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor. In 2020, that had a zillion candidates in the primary. He eked out a victory and then similarly won a statewide election for Lieutenant governor. Over a rather uninspired Democrat and is all of a sudden the most the highest elected Republican in North Carolina state government. And he is a true frightening character who regularly espouses anti-Semitic views, who is an avowed homophobe who is far right. He makes sometimes Donald Trump look like sort of a liberal. So he will be an interesting character that if the Republicans actually nominate him for governor in two years or in one year next year.
25:26 AW – And the Republicans picked up some seats in the state Supreme Court as well during the midterms, didn’t they? Why don’t you give us a brief summary of those elections? It’s kind of strange to me that people vote for.
25:39 RS – Supreme Court?
25:40 AW – Or a judge when they don’t know any. I mean, they’re supposed to be apolitical positions, but that’s tradition.
25:48 RS – Yeah, North Carolinians have always elected their judges. Interestingly, in the late latter part of the last century and early part of this century, when the Democrats still controlled things, they made several moves in that were really encouraging. They actually moved to make sure that all these races were nonpartisan and actually pass laws to provide for public funding for judicial campaigns made it possible for candidates who made a, you know, minimal demonstration of viability as a candidate to get public funding, it was a couple of very progressive changes when Republicans got back in, they immediately repealed all that stuff, made all the races partisan they they’ve made the calculation that it’s better to be a Republican running for a judge than a Democrat, and it’s generally worked that way for them in the last few elections, the Democrats had managed to hold on to a four to three majority in the state Supreme Court. But one justice had to retire in the recent at the end of her term in 2022, another justice was running for reelection. They were the only two that happened to be up in the 2022 election, and the Republicans narrowly won both races. So they went from being down four to three to up five to two, and that’s going to be the case for several years now, because these are eight-year terms, so the Democrats are out of power in the state Supreme Court and that has provided just another important backstop for the Republicans in the General Assembly, who had seen some of their actions receive, you know, critical review by the state Supreme Court with Democratic majority. Unfortunately, our courts have become sort of as divisive, divided politically as our legislatures and congressional maps these days. And so, it’s pretty much playing out that way in the courts right now.
27:43 AW – Well, I appreciate the deep dive into the Tar Heel states politics. It is a bellwether state for any political observer. He is the editor of NC Newsline. Rob Schofield. Rob, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:00 RS – Alex, always a pleasure, man. Take care.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by The Who, The Marcus King Band and The California Honeydrops. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
In Yiddish there’s a term, “a bitterer gelekhter,” which basically captures the idea of laughing through the tears. There are some situations that are so absurdly grim that, instead of crying, you just gotta laugh. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with author and humorist Andrew Boyd about his new book, “I Want A Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor.” We examine what Boyd means by “a better catastrophe,” look at how the pandemic may have paved the way for Biden’s climate bill, and discuss the nature of gallows humor and how it can be used to heal rather than divide.
This article and podcast Laughing through Tears: Andrew Boyd on Better Catastrophes appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Remember office buildings? They were places people used to go in order to work. Since the pandemic, though, vast numbers of office spaces have been abandoned. Have you ever found yourself musing, “it’s a shame they can’t do something with all of these empty buildings?” This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio has put a lot of thought into that very quandary. Holly Arnold, an architect with Gensler, a global architectural, design and planning firm, joins us to discuss the conversion of commercial real estate buildings into residential housing units. We look at what it takes to transform office space into living space, the opportunities it presents for the underhoused and those experiencing homelessness, and the complications and challenges involved in transforming the face of financial districts around the planet.
This article and podcast Holly Arnold: Converting Offices To Homes appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
What do vaccines, climate change, evolution, and the moon landing all have in common? Short answer, science! The longer, sometimes more disagreeable answer is that many of us have a whacky neighbor who doesn’t believe in at least one of those things. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to author Lee McIntyre, whose latest book is entitled How To Talk To A Science Denier. In our wide-ranging conversation, we try to unearth some commonalities among people who latch onto conspiracy theories and eschew scientific evidence. From climate science to 5G technology, what makes people suspicious of science and what’s the most effective way to help change their minds?
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:25 Lee McIntyre (LM) – Radical transformation can happen in a fairly short period of time. If we’re talking to one another, and we can break down the wall of distrust that I think is the absolute key doesn’t always work, but I think it’s the only thing that will work if anything can.
00:44 Narrator – What do vaccines, climate change, evolution, and the moon landing all have in common? Short answer, science! The longer, sometimes more disagreeable answer is that many of us have a whacky neighbor who doesn’t believe in at least one of those things. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to author Lee McIntyre, whose latest book is entitled “How To Talk To A Science Denier.” In our wide-ranging conversation, we try to unearth some commonalities among people who latch onto conspiracy theories and eschew scientific evidence. From climate science to 5G technology, what makes people suspicious of science and what’s the most effective way to help change their minds?
01:40 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lee McIntyre. Lee is an author of 16 books. His last book is entitled “How to Talk to a Science Denier.” He is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Lee, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:59 Lee McIntyre (LM) – Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
02:02 Alex Wise (AW) – Since you teach the history of science and you’re an expert in this field, why don’t you give us a brief snapshot of the history of climate change denialism? If you can, over the last few decades.
02:14 LM – One of the most important things to note is that deniers are selective. You can be a denier on one topic, but not on another, and in fact, I call them cafeteria deniers or cafeteria skeptics. So while things may be getting a little bit better, maybe on climate change, the goalposts have changed. We’ve got more deniers now about vaccines. Flat Earth is making a comeback. I mean, it’s just, you know, it’s it’s awful. So for climate, here’s the problem with climate denial. They followed the blueprint from the tobacco strategy from the 1950s that Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway wrote about so well in their book “Merchants of Doubt.” That blueprint was just sort of expertly done by the fossil fuel companies to, you know, create doubt as long as they possibly could. And you know, to fund the, you know the think tanks and others who were doubting it, you know, to put some money behind it. And what’s happened is that, you know, if somebody’s goal is to get people to believe a falsehood. Raising doubt is enough, but once an issue becomes politicized, then you don’t just want to raise doubt. You want to create a kind of an us versus them. You want to create distrust. You know the people on the other side are the enemy.
03:40 AW – And “they just don’t get it. We get it.”
03:44 LM – That’s right.
03:45 AW – “We’re hip to what’s actually going on.”
03:47 LM – That’s right. And so it’s not at that point, it’s not about facts anymore. It’s about which team you’re on. And so once the climate debate got politicized in that way, then things got really bad. Now you remember that moment, not that many years ago, when there was the commercial with who was it? Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi, who were sitting on the couch talking about climate change? I forget. It was about the year 2000, maybe a little bit.
04:22 AW – I don’t remember this, sorry.
04:24 LM – But there was a moment of almost something close to my partisanship. And then it got politicized. And that made it worse and worse for a very long time. And meanwhile, the fossil fuel companies are profiting. And the difference, as you point out there, I think you said it a second ago, is that the goal posts change you know because you can only deny even if it’s not a factual debate anymore, it’s political. One facts have some relevance and you can only deny them for so long. So what happens? Well, the goalposts change. At first the climate deniers’ goal was to say, “well, it isn’t happening.” And then once there’s enough evidence to show that it’s happening, “well, it’s happening, but we’re not the cause of it.” Then eventually there’s enough data to show no, we really are the cause of it. The next move they’re going to make is “we can’t do anything about it.” Or when you show them that there is something to do about it, then it will be “well, but there’s not enough time. “ Or, “Well, there is time, but it’s too expensive.” So you know, there’s always some reason which of course makes you skeptical of the idea that are they actually denying or even more subtle thing. Did they just not care? I mean, this was something I ran into in writing my book because there’s this idea that people don’t think that climate change is real. They’re deniers of the fact. But it’s almost it’s a weird thing these days that it’s almost more acceptable to be a denier than to be somebody who says I don’t care. I’ll be dead by then and I think that’s where actually a lot of people are. They know climate change is real. They know we can do something about it. They know there’s time. But they don’t care. That’s the trouble.
06:13 AW – Any kind of propaganda needs a very susceptible demographic, and who’s more susceptible than children. So what part of this is a failure of education ultimately, Lee?
06:26 LM – The ignition point is fear. If you can get somebody to be afraid, it doesn’t matter what age they are, you know you can spark kind of whatever belief you want because people, people are not as critical of what they’re hearing. If it’s, you know, when they’re afraid. You’re right that the long game can be too…and you think of kids, you think of education when You think about something like that, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to work in that way, right? It can just be that you change the norms in society where people, for instance, no longer expect public officials to tell the truth. Or they become convinced that every that all journalism is biased. All you know, those sorts of things have a way of making everybody more cynical. You know, making everybody feel that they, they don’t really know who to trust. And here’s the problem with that. In that environment, there’s no such thing as blame or accountability, which is kind of why autocrats love propaganda and disinformation so much, right? Because if you can create a situation in which there’s no truth. Then or that that everybody’s biased or everybody’s a liar. Then you know why hold me accountable. So I think I, I mean, I think the long game that you’re talking about here is a long game for hearts and minds of everyone in the service of political power. It’s not just that you’re going to get, you know, true believer that if you can get to them young, you can have true believers for life. It’s that if you can get enough people to believe the lie, then it doesn’t even matter if there’s an opposition because you can dominate their reality. If you’ve got enough political power, I mean, this is something I learned from Jason Stanley who wrote this wonderful book “How Propaganda Works.” The goal of propaganda is not to convince you, it’s to show you who’s boss. That’s the really scary part.
08:56 (Music Break)
09:45 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Lee McIntyre. He’s an author and a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. His new book is “How to Talk to a Science Denier.” And your upcoming book, Lee, is called “On Disinformation.” We were just talking about education and the seedlings of propaganda, if you will. It’s easy to just dismiss demographically say oh, it’s red versus blue, right versus left. And I tend to fall into that trap too often, but let’s break down the demographics of science denialism, if you can. It’s not so simple. It’s not just race, gender, socioeconomic, etc.
10:31 LM – It’s not. I mean, if boy, if I have the secret sauce to answer that question, would that be wonderful? I mean, I I’m not even aware of polling data which breaks it down in that way. Based on my experience, my anecdotal experience going out and talking to deniers, talking to climate deniers, talking to flat Earthers, talking to anti-vaxxers. You cannot tell. I mean, yes, once something has been politicized, then you know the red blue can sort of predict it and you know the funny part, you have people changing teams too. You have Marin County, California, which used to be a hotbed of anti-vaxx and also quite a liberal place, you know, a lot of Democrats in Marin County. But now if you go back post COVID, there was a story in the New York Times about about this. A lot of a lot of them have given up their anti VAX police because they don’t want anybody to confuse. Them with the conservative. Because I think that the politicization. Of anti VAX. Is now stronger. That’s the one that predicts it.
11:41 AW – So you’re saying that since the right wing has latched on to the anti VAX mantle, the marine moms who identify as liberal and Democrats may have had some skepticism early on, but they’ve decided to kind of switch back to accepting vaccines because the right wing has, yes, sullied that message. For them.
12:02 LM – That is exactly what I’m saying, and some of the early anti vacs was not about COVID cause COVID wasn’t around, it was about you know the MMR vaccine or, you know, other vaccines and such. Look, this this exists elsewhere too. In the environmental movement.
12:20 AW – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was one of the biggest environmental attorneys in the country, had a big national stage on a radio show and became one of the…
12:31 LM – The Disinformation Dozen.”
12:33 AW – One of the “Disinformation Dozen, unfortunately.
12:36 LM – Absolutely. He he is no the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 65% of the anti VAX propaganda on Twitter was spread by 12 people, one of whom was him.
12:47 AW – Yeah, it’s really it’s sad to see that transformation. So what are some of the common characteristics then of science deniers? Like if we can’t pin it on party affiliation necessarily, can we look at it as a uniquely American thing either? No, we can’t, right?
13:05 LM – And now it exists in other places too. I mean, look, the United States is probably #1 for for most types of science denial. But you know, then you get these weird anomalies, like the last survey I saw, Turkey was number one on evolution denial. Even more so than the United States.
13:26 AW – What is that attributed to?
13:28 LM – I don’t know. I didn’t delve into that one. This was this may have changed, but it’s not that science now is bipartisan, or that it’s equal. Most science denial these days comes from the right most denial about climate change, about vaccines, about evolution comes from the right. So I’m not saying that it’s that there are no correlations here, or that it’s, you know, impossible to predict based on, you know, various demographic data. The thing that I find fascinating is that you know you do have people who don’t fall into, you know, whatever the predicted demographic is, who are deniers. And sometimes they’re deniers about different sorts of things, and that’s really what makes me so interested in it, because it’s not just about one thing, and I’ve often wondered, is it just we all have the same cognitive biases, but some of us fall for these things. And some of us don’t and some of us fall for them about. One topic, but not on another part one chapter in my book is about genetically modified organisms. Because I was trying to test the hypothesis that a friend of mine made where he said, you know, that virtually all you know the the majority of science and all came from the right. And I thought, well, what about GMO’s? You know, it’s it started to investigate this because, you know, that just seemed like a, you know, there’s vaccines. Before COVID, but no, that’s not quite as sexy as you know, is this still, something where you get to know on both sides? Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to really investigate that one as much as I wanted to because COVID intervened and I was at that point in my research.
15:28 AW – Well, I’ve had a decent amount of conversations with GMO deniers and….
15:31 LM – And what have you found?
15:32 AW – Well, one of my friends who’s a nutritionist I talked to about this – and this was when it was first kind of springing up – and she really just seemed to not have a lot of science behind her. She was just like, “yeah, they’re just really bad.” That was basically all she could say was, “yeah, they’re just really bad.” I was like, “well, you know. I’m scared of them too. I had a a very small child when this when the GMO scare really kind of hit. But I also had read stuff by Stewart Brand talking about how the GM revolution had eliminated starvation in some ways. So yeah, we can peel it back and and it’s not so it’s not so black and white, is the point. Science needs to be dictating how we think about it.
16:21 LM – We need some science in there and the the truth is, if you look at the scientific studies on the very narrow question of whether GMO foods are safe to eat. The answer is that there is no study which has ever shown that there was a danger to eating GMO foods. Now I want to immediately separate that out from the question of pesticides, because one of the first things people talk about in this debate is, well, but what about Monsanto? And they’re creating GMO products so that they can. Take more pesticide on their crops. Pesticides are dangerous, right? I understand. You don’t want pesticides in your food. But what in the world does that have to do with the other kinds of GMOs, as a class that are not to allow more pesticides, an example being golden rice, which I think is what you were just referring to, where, you know, golden rice is a way not only to improve. But to keep people from getting vitamin A deficiency and going blind. Yet the anti-GMO organizations have pretty much stopped the widespread adoption of golden rice. Now, is this denial, is it something else? It seems to me that when people are making judgments about empirical topics, it has to be based on the science. And you know, that’s why I included the chapter in GMO’s and what I did. It’s funny, Alex, you mentioned you talking to your friend. That’s what I did. I was going. I was originally going to, you know, go out to Whole Foods and start to talk to people about GMO’s. Well, then the pandemic came. Now I wasn’t going to go to Whole Foods and talk to people about GMO’s. But I called some of my friends who shop, you know, seem like maybe they shop at Whole Foods, you know? They’re liberals. They fit the stereotype that I was looking for. You know what would happen? And I really learned a lot about the dangers of stereotyping what somebody’s beliefs are based on demographics. You can’t tell.
18:34 AW – You can understand why a Monsanto, if they’re involved in the GMO trade, may not engender a lot of goodwill from decades of misinformation when it comes to…
18:47 LM – And Agent Orange and DDT and all the other stuff they did.
18:51 AW – Right. So when they come out with a thing promoting GMOs, you can see why somebody might look at it with a skeptical eye. And that’s a good thing. But we still need to be able to parse out good science from bad science.
19:06 LM – That’s correct. And the really interesting thing to me about that is what happens when you get the cross references? You know the things that don’t line up with what somebody else’s ideological beliefs are. The example I’m thinking of here is nuclear power. You know, if somebody is very interested in what we can do about climate change, why are they not in favor of nuclear power? And there’s supposed to be a big debate right now. One of my friends that I talked about, GMOs, said there’s a big debate right now in the green movement over what our attitude should be toward nuclear power. Because if the idea is well, it’s not safe. It can never be safe. Uh, you know, I just don’t trust it. Well, isn’t that kind of what the anti-vaxxers are saying and you know you don’t want to use that type of. So, and I mean I haven’t delved into this, that wasn’t part of the book, but I mean something I got interested in.
20:13 AW – Well, a lot of it is the fear of the unknown, though.
20:16 LM – It’s fear of the unknown.
20:16 AW – And Stewart Brand gets into this in that same book about GMOs, where he talks about the precautionary principle, where we are more afraid of the potential of something really bad happening than the reality so people are more afraid of a nuclear reactor meltdown in their neighborhoods, then actually, breathing in coal fumes from a coal-fired plant which we know is making millions of people sick around the globe, but people are more comfortable with coal than nuclear. If you look at some of the surveys, this was from 1015 years ago, of course. I think that mentality may have shifted.
20:53 LM – You’re right and as I was saying before, fear can be part of this and it’s hard at the beginning when you know when something new comes along. You don’t know much about it. Where do you get your information? What are the reliable sources, and if everybody that you know is talking about something, then it kind of seems like, well, maybe there’s something to this maybe there’s a problem here that I should know about when 5G first came out, I started to get nervous about this and because I mean, how precautionary principle. OK, you know, how could this be good for me, right? Could I avoid it? I have to get a vaccine for measles because getting measles is worse. But I don’t have to use 5G or live anywhere. If I you know why, why shouldn’t I just use a precautionary principle and avoid it? So I went out and I bought myself a little Faraday cage because where it’s my main source of 5G, it was the damn router under my desk. And so I’m sitting there at my desk all day with 5G blasts. And I thought, well, let me put the, you know, the cover on the router and my wife would complain, “what’s the matter with the Internet?” Well, I’ve got a wired connection, so there was nothing matter with the Internet but anywhere else in the house was a problem. And then the more time went on, I kind of somebody I would forget to put the cover on the router and then I would realize, you know, I’m sitting here writing a book on science. And I’m saying an incantation over my router every day. Let me start to check the science on this. And there wasn’t any. 5G had been very well studied and you know, as with anything in science, you you can’t prove it. You don’t know with 100% certainty, but I eventually took that off.
22:55 AW – And the irony is that you spent more time probably figuring out how to protect yourself from the 5G wireless router in your house than it took you to learn a little bit more about the science, right?
23:09 LM – Yeah. And I and I took more of a risk in my car driving to the, you know, Walmart to to buy it the router than I did from the 5G that I was covering up. So it’s hard. Anybody can be a science denier about any given topic.
24:15 (Music Break)
24:32 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Lee McIntyre. He’s an author and a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. So the name of your book is “How to Talk to a Science Denier.” Why don’t you tell us how to talk to a science denier, Lee? Let’s say you go to a home of a friend of yours who’s an anti-vaxxer and you know that everybody else at the dinner table is also anti-vaxx. They’re really convinced that these people need to get their vaccinations for their own safety. Forget if it’s COVID or whatever. But what is the methodology that you would apply to win them over and and to get them to embrace science instead of science denialism?
25:17 LM – It’s hard. You should not go in with the expectation of changing their mind. Remember that the book is called How to Talk to a Science Denier, not how to convince or persuade one. But the route is the same because to talk to somebody, you have to be willing to listen to them and to get them to listen to you. Because remember that this is not just about facts, it’s about trust, and especially if they’ve heard disinformation. They don’t trust you. You’re not on the same team. You don’t have the same beliefs. The way to proceed is to be calm, to be respectful, to be patient. If you can have a calm, respectful, patient conversation in person, you can usually make some sort of progress, maybe not toward changing their mind to give up their beliefs on the spot, which rarely happens, but to trust you. And once they trust you and you, maybe you have more than one conversation. Then it can happen. And I pursue many examples in my book – of people overcoming the trust barrier and then changing their mind, that’s in fact, I think the key, it’s not about facts. It’s about trust.
26:38 AW – And it has to be their own idea, ultimately, right? It can’t be that, “OK, you’ve convinced me.” It’s like, “you know what? I’ve changed my mind.” You have to have that self-determination.
26:48 LM – That’s right. Yeah, people tend not to say “you win, I changed my mind,” but if they trust you, they let their guard down and they will hear facts. Maybe that will later allow them to ruminate on it and change their mind. I direct you to the story about Jim Bridenstine, the Republican member of Congress. Who was the most hard headed climate denier. There was gave a speech in Congress about it. Then Trump appointed him head of NASA, which, you know, does all this climate research. And Jim Bridenstine changed his mind within a few weeks? Because he began to meet the scientists and trust them. Radical transformation can happen in a fairly short period of time. If we’re talking to one another, and we can breakdown the wall of distrust that I think is the absolute key doesn’t always work, but I think it’s the only thing that will work if anything can.
27:55 AW – The book is called “How to Talk to a Science Denier.” Lee McIntyre. Lee, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:02 LM – Thanks very much.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the Average White Band, Men At Work and Black Sabbath. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Gravity is also a theory: Lee McIntyre on Science Denial appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives and hear first from Sachu Constantine, the Executive Director of Vote Solar, a policy advocacy organization committed to expanding access to affordable solar energy. Constantine provides an update on net metering legislation in California, gives us a glimpse into what’s happening in the community solar space, and looks at hurdles to solar that the Trump Administration mounted. Then, we speak with Oli Mittermeier, the CEO and Co-founder of CIT Clinics to get a glimpse of his company’s innovative approach to ketamine treatment for depression, bipolar, and PTSD.
Narrator – This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives and hear first from Sachu Constantine, the Executive Director of Vote Solar, a policy advocacy organization committed to expanding access to affordable solar energy. Constantine provides an update on net metering legislation in California, gives us a glimpse into what’s happening in the community solar space, and looks at hurdles to solar that the Trump Administration mounted. Then, we speak with Oli Mittermeier, the CEO and Co-founder of CIT Clinics to get a glimpse of his company’s innovative approach to ketamine treatment for depression, bipolar, and PTSD.
Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Sachu Constantine. He is the executive director of vote Solar, Sachu Constantine. Sachu, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Sachu Constantine (SC) – Thanks, Alex.
SC – Great to be with you.
AW – So we’ve had your predecessor on Adam Browning several times talking about the work that Vote Solar does. But now that you’ve taken over as Executive Director, why don’t you remind our listeners the mission of your organization?
SC – Thanks for the opportunity to come on. Adam has been a mentor and a real leader in our space and I’m, I’m really honored to be sitting in this seat at Vote Solar. Vote Solar is a 20-year-old nonprofit advocacy organization.
SC – We have worked at the state level to make solar a mainstream energy choice to really improve. The value proposition for customers, for communities, for the country around solar, and quite frankly, we’ve been incredibly successful at that under Adam’s leadership and now under my transition leadership, we are making solar unaffordable. Ubiquitous choice that customers and utilities and communities can all make, and that has been our goal. All along, climate change has been a north star. We are expanding our mission to talk about energy choices, energy burden and energy justice, and I think it’s really important to our final vision, which is a strong, robust, resilient energy economy powered by renewables like solar and wind that is available and useful and helpful to everyone in the country.
AW – And on a day-to-day basis, what pies are you getting your fingers dipped into in in terms of policymaking?
SC – Yeah, that’s a great question. Vote Solar’s bread and butter has always been working at the state level, working at Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs). Those commissions which decide how utilities get to run, get to earn profit, get to deploy resources. So we act as expert witnesses in proceedings around net metering or integrated resource planning or portfolio planning or transmission planning at those state levels we also are actively involved with legislative campaigns around clean energy bills, of course, state legislatures have a big impact. We’ve seen it recently in Illinois, which I hope we can talk about, and certainly in California with legislative leadership and regulatory leadership, that’s where Vote Solar operates. We maintain a staff of real experts in the important fields. On energy and rates and now, as we said, energy, justice and justice partnerships. These are our skill sets and we deploy them where decisions are being made at the state and regional level.
AW – So you mentioned energy justice and that’s something that we’ve hit upon in the past, but I’d like to dig more into it. We think about 1/3 of the country rents their homes and for the first decade plus of the solar boom. Those renters were largely left out of the equation. What’s changed for those renters in in the last five years?
SC – Sure, and you’re speaking to a big problem, a historical problem. It’s an agency problem. Who gets to decide about their energy choices? Renters don’t often have that choice if you live in a multi-family building or if your business is in a multi-tenant mall right, you don’t have the agency to to choose solar, let alone the financial resources. So several things have changed and they’ve been part of the discussion from the get go from let’s let’s take 2007 as a starting point. When the California Solar Initiative started, we had elements in that incentive program for multifamily buildings. We had specific carve outs for low income. Or income qualified residential multifamily buildings, but it was a very small portion of it and we were working out how did you provide this value to them? So one thing that’s happened is that those early efforts have become more and more sophisticated. We do have more virtual net metering available to renters. We do have programs that are designed specifically to get landlords to think about the value proposition of solar, to put solar on their buildings or subscribe to communities. Solar, so that the renters living in those buildings can still benefit from the solar economy. So that’s that’s one thing that’s happening. That’s kind of a natural progression. We need to do more of that. We need to see more community solar, and in fact, the Inflation Reduction Act that just passed has several provisions that will help advance community solar. Market community solar is the idea that OK, I can’t put solar on my roof, but I can have solar in my community or somewhere in in the surrounding grid. I can have a solar field and individuals can subscribe to the output of that solar field, so it’s like they’re having a virtual solar plant on their home. It just happens to be in a field somewhere on a school, on a government building, and they can get good value out of that. We’ve seen attempts to do that in many, many states, California, Colorado. Add solar gardens. Florida has a program for that through FPL and Duke, we’ve seen community solar in many, many other states, so that’s one thing that’s going to help renters and that’s really important. But I want to differentiate that idea, which is a justice question, from this new centering on energy justice that I mentioned. You mentioned that 1/3 of people in the country are renters. Well, a huge percentage of the country. As you know, from 10% to as many as 40% in regions also are people who face an energy burden, an energy burden where a significant portion of their income is spent on energy and utilities. They have trouble paying their bills. They’re at risk for cut offs. They are the ones who are receiving often the worst service or maybe the first to lose power in a storm or an outage or other grid event so that. Energy burden and energy vulnerability, the injustice of the system that we have built so far falls on them, so we’re centering on them. Meeting their needs will actually help us meet the needs of the larger grid it is also true that many of those same communities, low-income communities, rental housing districts within cities or poorer agricultural communities. They are the ones that suffer the most from fossil fueled climate change. They are the ones who face the first burdens, the first impacts, and so we want to make sure that those communities, their needs are centered. And I will tell you, from our point of view, this is both a justice question. This is the right thing to do, but it’s also. So been incredibly powerful for us in building political coalitions at in places like Illinois where we just passed monumental pivotal climate change policy with the climate and Equitable JOBS Act. In Illinois, before the Inflation Reduction Act, it was the biggest thing going in the country. It’s still really important, but it passed because of a coalition with energy partners and the strength of that coalition is really important as we negotiate towards our North Star of a clean, resilient world powered 100% by clean energy.
AW – So, in terms of defining community solar, would somebody who checks the box from their utility, maybe paying a little bit more for PG&E in San Francisco, let’s say, and they’re getting solar from PG needs grid, although they don’t have rooftop solar. Would they be considered part of community solar when we’re divvying up that pie or not?
SC – Yes, absolutely. That is a that is a form of community solar. That is, you know, they had these deep green and really deep green options for, for utility supply. And you’re right, they often came at a premium. Well, that’s not what we want. Because as an individual solar owner and I have solar on my roof, I’m actually saving money. And there’s no reason why a renter should be forced to pay a premium for this very low cost source of energy. So again what we’re seeing is that these community solar programs and you described one that was that was prevalent certainly for a while, they’re evolving into better deals where you can, you can sign up for a community solar program, get that offset against your energy bill, and it should be actually saving you money. Not at a premium, because solar is in fact, the lowest cost energy resource out there now we know there are, there are transmission and distribution system costs and those all need to be accounted for. But really, what we want to see community solar evolved to is where if you can’t put solar on your roof, or if you can’t afford all of those upfront costs, you can still subscribe to a clean energy solar community solar program and get your energy in the same way that I as an individual solar owner get to that. That’s the goal and we are seeing programs like that. Develop, there will be an array. This is this is not a one-size-fits-all. There going to be many different iterations of this somewhere you have huge solar plants that are what we would traditionally think of as a utility solar plant and a portion of that is subscribed to these kinds of individual customer programs.
(Music Break)
AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the Executive Director of Vote Solar, Sach Constantine. So Sachu, maybe you can highlight how policy makes such a difference when we’re talking about penetration rates of solar. We did a piece, we had Tim Dickinson, the journalist from Rolling Stone who did a piece on Florida and their laws that were prohibiting the panels from being leased. You had to buy them, which made it very expensive upfront costs. So the Sunshine State, Florida, which I think had the second best solar profile in the country was like right in the middle of the pack in terms of penetration rates. I think it’s been shifted since we did that piece several years ago. But maybe you can kind of give us a rundown of how important policy impacts the work that you’re trying to do in in trying to make solar more ubiquitous.
SC – Sure, and you know the Sunshine State that the great irony of that is never, never lost on me. It always fascinates me that the state of Florida has been so difficult to get solar in place, and it does highlight what affect policy can have, very often with a technology like this startup phase technology 20 years ago. Policy is the push or the seed that helps this new startup grow and let’s you know, quick history lesson. Every mass energy market has started with policy supports. We have decided we’ve made a policy to lay pipelines, to lay transmission lines across the country. We decided to do that when we when we started to electrify homes. And just a a quick note, some of the first electrified homes in this country were built as. Income subsidized housing. They were built as public housing, where we incorporated some of these modern conveniences like indoor plumbing and electricity. That quickly became a mass general market phenomenon.
AW – And that’s mandated in a lot of places now, right?
SC – That is correct. We’re seeing, we’re seeing now once again that if you build public housing, some of these best, most modern practices are being required and in fact the the California Building Code is now really pushing us towards a solar ready state where all new construction has to have solar on it. Those kinds of policy supports, those pushes are really important for an early phase disruptive technology like solar, but it’s also important that to acknowledge that policy can be a real barrier. When you have protective policies in place that protect a utility monopoly, and this new technology is threatening that monopoly, we need to address those barriers. We need to get those barriers out of the way to a reasonable extent. Of course, the utilities play an important role, and they need to they need to be protected in that role. But they shouldn’t be able to force a customer to buy that panel just to be connected to the grid. They shouldn’t be able to force punitive charges onto customers just because they want to choose solar as their energy choice. So to the extent that policy can can help, that’s great and we want to see incentive programs, good, good net metering policy. We want to see interconnection policies, we want to see industrial support for solar and all of the related technologies, including storage and wind, and we also want to get rid of those policies which allow you to deflate the demand for solar to much broader, much more sophisticated policy interaction across all of these fields, permitting interconnection compensation rates, building codes. And as you’ve seen recently, of course, it even matters what our import export policies are. Those can have a profound effect as well.
AW – So there are still homeowner’s associations that will prohibit the use of rooftop solar? That seems pretty insane.
SC – I think insane is the right word. It’s certainly an overstep on the part of those HOAs.
AW – And is it legal?
SC – In court, they’re losing. We see them losing. It is, it may or may not be, quote legal, but it is certainly unjust.
AW -So Sachu, what are some of the other barriers to entry for most rooftop solar potential owners or users?
SC – We need to streamline permitting. We need to streamline the decision to go solar. I just want just as an example, in other countries in Australia and Germany and Japan, industrialized countries, high wages, pretty high property values, they’re installing solar at 1/2 to 1/3 the cost that we’re installing, so we need to simplify in order to bring the total cost down. That is absolute and we can do that. We can do that through better permitting processes, better customer acquisition and better interconnection policies, but we will always run up against the issue that. When you buy a solar panel and you buy all the equipment that goes with that solar panel, including, including a battery. You are buying 25 years of energy. You’re putting all the money down right now. If you’re buying it, you’re putting the money down now for 25 years of energy, a stream of payments that we would normally spread out over 25 years. That in and of itself is a difficult. So we’ve had many tools to help with that. We’ve had incentive programs and they’ve worked, they’ve they’ve brought the cost of solar down. They’ve really made it acceptable in many, in many ways given the stamp of the government to it as a safe, well performing technology. The industry has done a lot to improve their efficiency. All that’s great, but things like the ITC, the 30% tax rebate that you can get for buying that energy forward right now. It helps the country, helps our clean energy goals. So you’re getting a reduction in the first cost and it’s simple. You buy the solar or you get that 30% ITC that is a huge part of making this more accessible. Now still we’re going to have people who don’t have access to the financial to the capital to put the money down, who don’t have good credit ratings, who have many other burdens that they need to pay for. We need to figure out ways to finance that so we are seeing green banks and programs directed at low income communities, investment community investment funds coming out of the IRA and other places. That are going to help with those first costs because that’s the hard thing. That’s why leasing and other financing options that the industry has put forward and try to develop. That’s why they’re so important, these solutions are there in front of us, we just have to decide to make them. It is a hard decision. You’re buying an asset that’s going to be on your home or certainly you know in your set of assets for 20 to 25 years. And I think we need to acknowledge that by simplifying wherever we can, making it as clear as we can what the value proposition will be and really sticking to that, you know, we can’t go around changing the value proposition willy nilly.
AW – He’s the Executive Director of Vote Solar. People can go to votesolar.org to learn more and support the efforts of his organization. Sachu Constantine, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
SC – Thank you, Alex. Great to be with you.
18:49 (Music break)
19:20 Alex Wise – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Oli Mittermeier. He is the CEO and Co-founder of CIT Clinics that stands for combination infusion therapy. Oli, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Oli Mittermeier Thank you Alex. Great to be here.
Alex Wise You specialize in ketamine therapy treatment and I wanted to learn a little bit more about that. Explain a little bit of the history of it and where it is now and then what you see is the future for this treatment.
Oli Mittermeier Yeah, so Ketamine is an old drug. It’s been around since the 60s. Was used extensively by soldiers in Vietnam. It’s an analgesic, meaning it takes away pain. It doesn’t affect core brainstem functions, which is what makes it unique. So you can give someone a ton of ketamine. They will continue. Breathing their blood pressure will change slightly, but it’s super safe. Right so then, in the early 2000s, frankly just by sheer coincidence, some folks started realizing that Ketamine seemed to have a really positive effect on certain patients that were coming to the emergency room and struggling with suicidal ideations you know? So they had probably injured themselves. Had some kind of a you know trauma and they were given ketamine to take away the pain to perform whatever procedures. And then they found that those patients that had received Academy and a huge percentage of them reported a dramatic reduction or even cessation of suicidal ideations for days. You know, after ketamine, so some folks at the Yale School of Medicine said, well, Gee, we there’s clearly something going on here with ketamine. And mental health. Let’s explore this and so they designed some studies and they would give patients a sub anesthetic dose of ketamine. So usually when you go into the OR and you’re getting ketamine you’re given a dose that has you pass through this what we call sort of the psychedelic window really, really quickly. Right, so you feel kind of funny for a little bit, a little loopy, and then you’re out. So we keep patients in that window so they’re conscious. They’re awake, they know what’s happening, but they’re having all of these amazing effects from the Academy, and so their pain is reduced. They feel this sense of wholeness and and you know, connection. So classic psychedelic experiences, and so the folks at Yale. Study, then they realized that even after one single dose of a sub anesthetic, dose or treatment of cat. I mean around 63% of study participants reported feeling dramatically better in terms of their depression. Their anxiety just sort of their general mood, and so that started us. You know? I mean to think about that was those, you know, 20 plus years ago. So here we are now doing this routinely. On a daily basis, giving patients of all ages all walks of life you know our youngest patients are 15. Our oldest are in their late 70s. Many of them come in saying I’ve tried everything, you know I’ve been on antidepressants my entire life. SSRI’s, benzos, anxiolytics, all kinds of meds and nothing is working and then you throw COVID into the mix and you have this massive spike of humans that are just really struggling and they don’t know where to go and so that’s where we come into the picture with some pretty novel approaches.
Alex Wise And why don’t you run through some of the disorders, illnesses, etc. That ketamine has proven to be efficacious.
Oli Mittermeier Everyone that comes into our clinic is struggling with both mental pain as well as physical pain. Like when was the last time you met someone who was deeply depressed but felt physically amazing? Doesn’t happen or someone who was struggling with you know chronic physical pain but said oh, other than that, I’m great, I’m you know, I feel mentally. Just on top of my game. And so we realized early on that really what we’re dealing with here is a complex series of, you know, when we talk about depression or anxiety or PTSD, you’re talking about a complex series of struggles that people are having that then manifest behaviorally, right? So you’re feeling really shut down. You feel lethargic, you feel antisocial, and you’re in chronic emotional and physical pain, so enter combination infusion therapy, which is something that we developed where we said, well, let’s treat brain chemistry with ketamine. Let’s treat a body chemistry with high doses of vitamin C and various vitamin B complexes. Compounds like glutathione. And sometimes even add and then let’s wrap that whole in clinic physical treatment with a really hands on compassionate, engaging behavioral program. Meaning you’ve got to help people shift and do things differently so that they begin to acquire. The behaviors that they need to feel well over the long run. And that’s what you do for patients.
Alex Wise You’re not a physician, but your background is then the mindfulness space. Why don’t you kind of explain what your role is for a patient? Walk us through what it might be like for a new patient to work with you.
Oli Mittermeier Yeah, so my two Co-founders – Adam Tible and Mark Danforth – they started doing this very early on. We’re talking 6 to 8 years ago and back then the focus was very what I would call biomedical, meaning the studies showed that if you give patients a certain amount of ketamine. Patients that are struggling with depression or anxiety, a significant percentage of them begin to feel better, especially if you do a series of ketamine infusions. Now when I entered the picture and started working with them, I actually had just come off of my own experience as a patient struggling with depression and anxiety as well and it was pretty bad for a period of time and I noticed that when I went in for treatments at this clinic again, it was very clinical. You know there’s a lot of fluorescent lights. There were beeping machines there. Or if I almost felt like I was in a dentist office. And so when I conveyed that to Mark and Adam, I said hey you guys, if we’re going to do this the way to do this properly is you have to really honor the fact that this is psychedelic medicine. So this, yes, there’s a certain neurochemical effect that the ketamine activates. But equally important to this whole process is. The environment it’s set in setting. How do you hold patients? How do you guide them through this? Process and in that sense I’ve discovered you know, being a long time mindfulness practitioner and even teacher the dissociative aspects of ketamine are almost like mindfulness in a bottle. And so what I mean with that is you can pretty reliably guide someone who’s a novice. Let’s say in the mindfulness space. You can guide them through an experience while they’re on ketamine, and you can point certain things out to them that help them feel like really get from the inside out that I’m not my thoughts, I’m not my emotions, I’m not my sensations. There’s me that is untouched by all of that. However, I identify myself the voice in my head. My consciousness is much bigger than that, and the reason that’s so profound is when you’re struggling with depression or anxiety really. What’s going on is every time you think something or feel something your mind attaches to it. And then down the rabbit hole you go right, it activates more sad thoughts. Those sad thoughts in turn have a physiological effect on you, you know, sort of a depressive sensory experience, and that in turn just validates what your mind is thinking, which is, oh, this is hopeless. I’m depressed. I’m never going to get out of it. And around the loop. Go soak it. I mean especially the way we do it when we guide patients in the clinic. Through this process, a big part of the guiding has to do with helping them see and notice first-hand the vastness of the space that exists between their consciousness and then these sad thoughts or these. These depressive sensations that they have in their body, and that first-hand experience is magical. That’s the beginning of the healing journey.
Alex Wise He’s the CEO and Co-founder of CIT clinics, Oli Mittermeier. Oli, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Oli Mittermeier My pleasure, thanks for being interested in what we do.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Cadillac Jones, Jonathan Edwards and Milk & Sugar. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Vote Solar + Ketamine Therapy appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
If you tend to get annoyed when you hear pundits criticize politicians for “politicizing” an inherently political issue, then this week’s show may be right up your alley. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to John Stoehr, frequent guest of the show and editor of independent news outlet, The Editorial Board as we examine some of his recent thought-provoking pieces on race, equity and inclusion. We delve into the political nature of “depoliticizing” the fight for racial equity, look at the Right’s obsession with “woke-ism” and what it really means, and talk about some of the people who have been publicly shunned and commercially shut-down lately, from Roald Dahl to Scott Adams, and what this says about free speech and the marketplace.
This article and podcast John Stoehr: What the Right Gets Wrong on Race appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Many perceive philanthropy to be the exclusive domain of the super wealthy. Those people are apparently unaware of the efforts of this week’s guest on Sea Change Radio. Giving circles are a way for people of more modest means to give philanthropically – these are smaller groups of individuals who collectively allocate resources to what they deem as worthy charitable organizations and community projects. Today we are speaking with Tyeshia “Ty” Wilson, the Director of Engagement at a nonprofit called Philanthropy Together whose mission is to advance charitable giving that is people-centered and equitable. We learn all about giving circles, how her organization facilitates them, and the importance of Black-led collective giving.
This article and podcast Philanthropy Together’s Tyeshia Wilson appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
As the winter chill of February continues to prickle the skin, the warm tides of the Bahamas may sound particularly appealing. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with someone working to preserve the Bahamas’ pristine ocean ecosystem. Our guest today is the co-founder of Blue Action Lab, Jeff Stoike, who is with us to describe his organization’s efforts to protect fragile aquatic environments, discuss the legacy of colonization in the Bahamas, and talk about the new blue economy.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:25 JS – How do we address these issues? It’s really for us about stakeholder engagement and nothing works in the Bahamas and I dare say the work that I did in Panama, Brazil or anywhere else, even in the Middle East, nothing works if you don’t have buy in from the community.
00:43 Narrator – As the winter chill of February continues to prickle the skin, the warm tides of the Bahamas may sound particularly appealing. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with someone working to preserve the Bahamas’ pristine ocean ecosystem. Our guest today is the co-founder of Blue Action Lab, Jeff Stoike, who is with us to describe his organization’s efforts to protect fragile aquatic environments, discuss the legacy of colonization in the Bahamas, and talk about the new blue economy.
01:38 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by the co-founder of the Blue Action Lab, Jeff Stoike. Jeff, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:46 Jeff Stoike (JS) – It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me and giving me an opportunity to share our Blue Action Lab story.
01:52 AW – Why don’t you first explain the mission of Blue Action Lab? Give us an idea of the organization’s genesis and what problems you’re trying to solve.
02:03 JS – Sure, sure. Well, we have multiple missions because we have multiple entities that sort of work under our umbrella of the Blue Action Lab. And in short, it’s to promote the sustainable blue economy now that term itself has various definitions, but in effect we’re looking to promote sustainability, ie climate resilience and climate mitigation through the ocean, and in doing so, protect the communities and ecologies. That live in and around the ocean rely on the ocean as a source of food and as a tremendous element in the global climate equation.
02:52 AW – So when the green economy applies to oceanic pursuits, we call it the blue economy. Is that fair to say?
03:00 JS – That is a fair assertion, yes.
03:02 AW – OK, before we dive into some of the work that the Blue Action Lab is involved in it, I’d like to take a step back and why don’t you tell us a little bit of your personal journey in into where we are now, you are a cancer survivor and you’ve been all over some very interesting places around the world. So why don’t you kind of give us a quick recap of of what you’ve done the last 8-10 years or so.
03:29 JS – Sounds good. Well, going back a little bit further than the last decade, I’m a California native, born and raised in San Diego with, with the love of the ocean sort of built into my formative years and then went upstate to university at UC Berkeley and there I think really had some strong social and environmental values instilled in me and such that immediately after graduating, went to the Middle East and had my first real experience in environmental projects in sustainable development, as it’s now called. Working with a Goldman Environmental prize winner in based in Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula. Her name is Doctor Leila Escandar and these really innovative social environmental sustainability projects with respect to marginalized populations in Egypt and the Sinai around solid waste management. And so I saw how this work could really be done thought about how I could bring that back to my home environment, did some community development work in the Bay Area, San Francisco, Bayview/Hunters Point. Really, some of these communities that have been environmentally dispossessed and economically dispossessed trying to reverse that. That phenomenon did some sustainable agricultural projects in the southeast started a sustainable AG network in the state of Georgia and then fell backwards into graduate school, got a Masters degree in ecology at the University of Georgia, and through that ended up really getting into food and farming in Latin America. Starting in Panama, working with the Globe Indigenous Group on the border of Costa Rica, looking at their agroforestry traditions and how we’re getting incorporated into large scale sort of multinational development plans and then got my PhD at the what is now called the Yale School of the Environment working in Brazil, again looking at high diversity, native species, forest restoration in the Atlantic Forest on the coast there – sort of the cousin to the Amazon – about a very heavily-populated area. Lots of subsistence farmers and then after finishing graduate school did a did a tour of duty in a jungle of a different sort. Washington, DC spent some time at the Urban Institute developing climate, philanthropy and place-based impact investing initiatives there and then did a stint at the State Department, working in the Office of Foreign Assistance Resources. Looking at how our $40 billion foreign assistance budget flows out into the world and to what effect and and how to optimize that and it was in DC that I got what I thought was just burnt out. But it turns out I was much, much sicker than that spent a year in the hospital, found out. I had been diagnosed with leukemia and so spent the bulk of 2018. Fighting for my life and after which I’m I moved back to the home state of California, started my family and took a little bit of time off to figure out where I was going to take my experience, take my value set how it could best be applied, you know, really had a new lease on life and while taking a few months to just sort of surf and contemplate these questions. I had a really impactful conversation with a grad school colleague that had just started his coral reef restoration company in the Bahamas. And I thought, hmm, interesting. Don’t know much about the Bahamas. Certainly don’t know much about Grand Bahama, where he had landed and as I learned more and we exchanged some ideas some of what I had developed in the waves off the coast of Ventura, I decided to head down to to Grand Bahama and it was February of 2020 to meet with my former grad school colleague and his business partner. That had actually brought him down, landed him and his coral reef restoration company on the island of Grand Bahama. And this gentleman’s name is Rupert Hayward. He’s very central to this story. He’s a fifth generation Bahamian, and he’s been wanting to take his family business, which is the Grand Bahama Port Authority, and use it as a vehicle for not just supporting Grand Bahama, especially in the wake of what was the most devastating hurricane in the history of the island, at least modern history of the island, Hurricane Dorian in 2019, he was looking to bring companies down to rebuild the island but also put the island, on a new development trajectory. Right, not just go back to business as usual. Oil and gas and cruise lines and but to diversify the economy and to use the resources of the island infrastructure wise commercially and and in terms of natural resources use the island as a responsible, living laboratory for what we hope would be the innovations and industries and ultimately economies of the future of the 21st century have built on regeneration, built on restoration, built on resilience. So it was in February 2020, as I said that I wound up on Grand Bahama and not only saw my friend’s coral reef restoration company Coral Vita, but met with Rupert and discussed this. This larger idea of how to really use the island after Hurricane Durian after that major wake-up call as an engine for industries that really soften what is often seen as a conflict between economic development and environmental sustainability.
09:20 AW – And so what’s your model? Are you a consulting company? How do you get paid?
09:25 JS – Well, our model as I think one must be in times like these a bit flexible, we originally started as a nonprofit that was working with foundations. UNDP was a grantor for us.
09:40 AW – Wait, what does UNDP stand for? I don’t think most people know that one.
09:43 JS – Oh, the United Nations development program. Sorry, I actually have a strong aversion to just throwing acronyms around, so forgive me for that. Yes, the United Nations Development Program gave us an early stage grant. To help us develop a socioeconomic impact assessment for the Blue Action Lab model. What would a sustainability economy on Grand Bahama look like on Grand Bahama, but also what sort of an impact could it have for other low lying island nations, other vulnerable coastal areas? So we originally started our nonprofit with sort of a membership model that would allow companies to come down and take advantage of the underutilized resources on the island, provided that they embodied the values of a regenerative economy or resiliency economy as as we described it, and that was all fine and good. We were chugging along, maybe on-boarding five companies a year, but not really having the impact that we hoped to. At least at the scale that we had hoped to, that we think that the urgency of of global climate change really requires. And so we had a fateful conversation about a year and a half in with a gentleman named George Northcott at an outfit called Founders Factory, based in London. George is actually now in New York, but his company is based in London, where they’re very interested in moving into sustainability and moving into climate. They are basically a venture firm. They’ve got offices in 15 countries but have not really worked in climate and sustainability. And they saw us as an incredible partner on the ground. We’re doing just that. And so we were looking for a commercial model. They were looking founders, factory was looking to get into climate and sustainability issues. And so we, we created this marriage of our two entities, created a joint venture just over a year ago. If I’ve got the dates correct where we decided to launch a formal accelerator program. With all of the embedded benefits of the Blue Action Lab. A world class port in Grand Bahama, a free trade zone where we can stimulate and accelerate the kinds of companies that we think will meet the mission of the Blue Action Lab and meet the challenge of climate change. We have a very strong partnership with the Grand Bahama Port Authority and the Bahamian government, and we have tremendous natural resources that can be accessed. In the name of research and innovation for environmental and social sustainability.
12:33 (Music Break)
13:44 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the Co-founder of Blue Action Labs, Jeff Stoike. So Jeff, we’re talking about Grand Bahama and the work that your organization is engaged in there. What are some of the biggest challenges? Serving and raising awareness of the ecosystem there and it’s very fragile coral reef structure.
14:07 JS – Sure, sure. And just to be clear, coral reefs are a a central part of of the work that we do, but our only one component, I mean we’re working across various verticals. We’re really taking a sort of whole of society approach, a systemic approach to the issues of climate mitigation and climate. And so, I mean, we’re working in areas of renewable energy. We’re working on tidal and wave and Gulf Stream derived renewable energy. We’re working in aquaculture and mariculture. We’re working in coastal carbon capture and ocean alkalinity enhancement. We’re working in green shipping and reducing the environmental footprint. And climate footprint of one of the most polluting industries in the history of mankind, the shipping industry. And we’re even working on desalinating water issues. So coral reefs and coral restoration, especially with a acidifying and warming ocean, is a vital component of this sort of fabric. This matrix of of efforts of ours and was, I should mention, sort of the pioneering effort the 1st. Real work that the Blue Action Lab did even before it was called the Blue Action Lab. Was to support Coral Vita and Coral Vita is now the largest coral reef restoration company in the world. They were the inaugural Earth Shot prize winner, the prize given out by Prince William and Princess Kate. So really considered a premier entity worldwide in the field of coral reef restoration. And that’s after I should note that’s after having their coral reef farm washed away into the ocean by Hurricane Dorian, so they had just had a ribbon cutting a couple months prior to Hurricane Dorian, literally watched their restoration tanks get washed into the ocean, and they’ve built themselves back. You know what a story of resilience now on Earth, shot prize winner and looking at national level contracts in the Middle East and in Latin America. So quite a quite an impressive story for Coral Vita, and I think quite a testament to what the Blue Action Lab is doing and can do. But you asked about the real challenges one is lack of patient capital by patient capital, I mean investors that are willing to either concede on traditional investment returns, not looking for to make so much money on their money, but also willing to wait because the impact investment is getting stronger, getting more robust, and is promising greater returns, but it takes a little bit longer, especially in the field of climate where you’re talking about infrastructure. You’re not just talking about software as a service, right? The thing that has underpinned Silicon Valley’s tremendous growth over the past decade.
17:08 AW – So give us an example of climate impact investing. Would a potential investor know that this is a climate oriented investment solely or is it more just an innovation that is also good for the climate?
17:21 JS – Right. It is a difficult question to answer because the field is both nascent and moving so quickly, right? So I think what’s important is that everybody talks about sustainability metrics. Well, that works fine and good. But in and of itself is a is a simplifying practice right? You’re reducing a very complex system or endeavor to an objective set of metrics that can be checked off, and that is inherently a little bit tricky, right? I think it’s an important practice because it provides some sort of guidance, but I think ultimately it boils down to processes of real, robust due diligence on the front. End so you. Know we’re we’ve got multiple calls and investment committee reviews and looking in the data rooms of these companies that are coming through really robust due diligence on the front end of working with a company and promoting an innovative and a very robust impact assessment on the back end, making sure that there’s a research apparatus built in around any particular innovation that you’re working with and now that’s not easy to do. I admit, right, So what everyone asks us. Well, who are your experts in renewable energy and in aquaculture and in coastal carbon capture. And it’s going to vary we are we do not have a university’s research apparatus behind us. We need to use our network of experts at various research institutions and bring them on board for the particular companies and innovations that we’re working on, so. It’s a little bit of an unsatisfying answer that there’s not a sort of quick and easy. Checklist that you can point to for something that is considered impact, innovation or sustainability innovation, but it’s really about building the mechanism of research and diligence and impact assessment around your investment and your your input.
19:25 AW – So a lot of the work that you’ve done has been in these ecosystems that have been challenged by the onslaught of colonization. And one of the issues that a lot of the philanthropy space focuses on is decolonizing that wealth decoupling or unbundling, the legacy of colonization from some of these. Countries now your partner, Rupert Hayward, I assume, is the grandson of Jack Hayward, who’s his big industrialist. And you said that they own like the Port Authority of the Bahamas. So how is Rupert and how are Blue Action Lab kind of squaring that legacy of industrialization and colonization in an island like Grand Bahamas? How are you squaring that legacy with moving forward and trying to clean up a lot of the mess that the industrialists? And the age of industrialization and colonization created in places like the Grand Bahamas.
20:23 JS – That’s a tremendous question that we confront every day, so I’m really glad that you asked. And I don’t want to speak for Rupert. He would be a fantastic subsequent guest for your show.
20:39 AW – I’m assuming he was the grandson of Sir Jack Hayward. Is that true?
20:43 JS – You’re right, you’re right.
20:44 AW – OK.
20:44 JS – Yes, and and Jack was responsible for the establishment of of the free trade zone and the Hawksbill Creek Agreement that that established the Port Authority. Well, certainly one of these Titans of industry and and Rupert and myself and the team that we’ve assembled, we are acutely aware. The not only the sort of undesirable legacy of colonialism and industry worldwide, like you said, I’ve got a PhD that looked at the ravages of development in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, and so I’m acutely aware of that. And the question that I grapple with every day is how can you use whatever historical privilege or positions of power or levers that you might have at your disposal, or that your business partner in this case might have at his or her disposal to then correct any wrongs that have been done and put a business or an island or a nation on a trajectory that is more salutary for all of the citizens, especially those that have perhaps been disenfranchised historically, and so this is something that is very front and Center for the work that we do. I recognize Rupert as someone who is one of these scions of industry, but is not looking to just take the money and run. Enrich himself, he says first and foremost I am a Bahamian. He speaks with a British accent because he was schooled back in England. But he lives in the Bahamas. He’s raising his children on Grand Bahama, he wants to see his grandchildren frolic on the beach in Grand Bahama and enjoy the environment and the culture that has been, that has informed his worldview. But again, just to be careful not to speak for him too, too much. How do we address these issues? It’s really for us about stakeholders. Engagement and nothing works in the Bahamas and I dare say the work that I did in Panama, Brazil or anywhere else, even in the Middle East, nothing works if you don’t have buy in from the community, everybody thinks you, oh government has all of the power.Well, that’s true insofar as they have buy-in from their votership and that is the community. That those are the people, the families that we engage with every day on multiple levels. One is through our nonprofit work that we retain. We are still doing ecosystem restoration, community development, workforce training and environmental education through our nonprofit arm. And as we as we develop this for profit, this commercial. Model that everyone kept asking us for as we were chugging along as a nonprofit, and we’re we’re launching with Founders Factory. We want to make sure that we’re working closely with the University of the Bahamas, we’re working closely with Waterkeepers and other key nonprofits on the island to build a pipeline of Bahamian talent, because there’s a tremendous brain drain in the Bahamas as there is in other developing nations. As soon as there’s real talent recognized or someone has an opportunity to make real money, they will follow the money, they will go to the US or Europe or elsewhere. And so we’re trying to reverse that. How do we create value chains and economies on island? That not just retain Bahamians, particularly Afro Bahamians, but support them, support their communities and support the environments in which they live. And so we’re looking at internship programs we’re looking at having a pipeline from the Bahamas to have apprenticeship programs? And keeping these questions really front and center going forward, making sure that we’re not glossing over any of the history that comes with colonial, I mean the Bahamas has a very strong colonial legacy. We saw that when William and Kate traveled through the Caribbean as part of their Commonwealth tour, right? They received quite a rocky welcome. And so as we’re going forward and conducting our stakeholder engagement meetings, making sure that there really is buy in from the community. That representative voices are heard and built into our program. Coming it’s not only the right thing to do, but in our own self-interest as an organization, we know that no real momentum will last if there’s not buy in from the community and on that note, there’s a project that we’re very excited about working with Florida Atlantic University. We haven’t launched it yet but, working to restore conch populations in the Bahamas, the conch are an iconic species for Bahamians and other Caribbeans. It’s on the Bahamian flag. It’s what you might call a cultural keystone species. And the conf is basically a big sea snail, big mollusk and and we’re working with Meghan Davis, who is considered the world expert on the queen conch. She’s based at Florida Atlantic University and has entered what she now calls her “legacy years” where she really wants to get all of this research that she’s done on the health and ecology of conchs out into the world, put it into practice. And so we are working with Meghan Davis and a funder called Builders Vision. To start a conch hatchery where we’re effectively raising juvenile conch and then using them to restore marine protected areas and to give them to members of the conch fishing community, which is effectively going out into the ocean on a skiff and and looking for conch and bringing it back onto land, giving those conquerors an opportunity to grow out, juvenile conch to mature size and either eat it themselves. Sell it to market or sell it to government or nonprofits that are doing conch restoration in these marine protected areas. So this is not only something that’s culturally very important for the Bahamian population, but also for, as we talked about communities that historically have have been economically marginalized. Conch is a critical what we call a blue food right of a subsistence in some cases, but a vital component of the diet of Bahamian communities and that’s derived from the ocean. So that’s a project that’s very near and dear to my heart because of how important it is to the communities that are themselves important to our project.
27:55 AW – He’s the co-founder of Blue Action Labs, Jeff Stoike. Jeff, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 JS – Quite a pleasure. Thank you.
28:17 AW – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Bob Marley and The Wailers and David Rudder to read a transcript of this show. Go to seachangeradio.com stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives there to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Jeff Stoike: Blue Action Lab appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Many followers of the highly publicized Adnan Syed case were delighted to see an innocent man set free after over two decades behind bars. But the case also highlighted some troubling aspects of American justice, or in Syed’s case, injustice. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University and an innocence advocate. His new book, Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison, takes an in-depth look at how difficult it is for wrongful convictions to be overturned in this country. We examine the Syed case, learn about the plight of Harry Miller, and expose an ineffective system that tilts the scales against the most vulnerable.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:17 Daniel Medwed (DW) – And I think if we have more empathy for criminal defendants, we realize they could be our brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers or kids. I think it will lead to a much better system.
00:29 Narrator – Many followers of the highly publicized Adnan Syed case were delighted to see an innocent man set free after over two decades behind bars. But the case also highlighted some troubling aspects of American justice, or in Syed’s case, injustice. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University and an innocence advocate. His new book, “Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison,” takes an in-depth look at how difficult it is for wrongful convictions to be overturned in this country. We examine the Syed case, learn about the plight of Harry Miller, and expose an ineffective system that tilts the scales against the most vulnerable.
01:32 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend Daniel Medwed. Dan is a professor at Northeastern University’s School of Law. Dan, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:43 Daniel Medwed (DW) – Alex, it’s so great to see you and thanks for having me on your fascinating radio program. I appreciate it.
01:49 Alex Wise (AW) – Well, it’s a pleasure to speak to you about the work that you do. You have a new book out called “Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison,” and looking through a lot of your work through the last couple decades, it seems like a natural progression from a lot of the work that you have done in terms of prosecutorial misconduct, the issues surrounding prisoners and parole. Why don’t you explain the subtitle of this book, why the innocent can’t get out of prison? That could be the most frustrating part of our legal system.
02:25 DW – I think that’s fair to say, Alex. And so here’s what led to this book in many ways. I ran a small Innocence Project in Brooklyn, NY for about four years, becoming a full time academic. And time and time again, prisoners would write to us and they’d say, I’m innocent, I’m innocent, I’m innocent. And here’s this witness who can help prove it. And we’d go meet the witness. And maybe we’d have them sign an affidavit and we’d find other evidence of innocence. And then we think, OK, we have this evidence. Surely a prosecutor or a judge is going to listen to us. And if they find the evidence compelling enough, surely they’ll do the right thing and reverse the conviction and maybe give us a new trial. But repeatedly we were stymied. And part of the reason was cultural, that prosecutors didn’t want to admit it. Mistake, but part of the reason was really procedural, that the appellate and post conviction system really isn’t set up to course correct. After that presumption of innocence disappears through a conviction, there’s this firm presumption of guilt, and you can raise legal issues. But it’s really hard to raise new factual issues and present newly discovered evidence to courts. So that’s what sort of precipitated this project. We know why innocent people get convicted. Eyewitness miss ID, false confessions, police and prosecutorial misconduct, junk forensic evidence. That’s been well documented. It’s in the newspapers almost every day. What people seem to have less of a grasp on is why these procedural technicalities keep people in. And even though a lot of people seem to think in the popular imagination, the technicalities help free people.
03:59 AW – Yes, how would we define a technicality, like would new DNA evidence that exonerates a convicted felon, would that be considered a technicality? To me, that seems like that’s just new evidence.
04:11 DW – That’s just new evidence. You’re exactly right. And so a technicality would be something. Like there was a misspelling misspelling in your charging papers and therefore you should. Get you know. Released that doesn’t happen in part because there’s this doctrine on appeal that’s called the harmless error doctrine. It’s not enough to just show that something bad happened at your trial, that you were convicted and there were some errors. Down below, you have to show that those errors were not harmless, that they somehow affected the outcome. And in lots of these cases, Alex, what happens is appellate courts will look at the conviction and they’ll say, well, the prosecutor shouldn’t have said that during closing argument or the judge shouldn’t have made that ruling. But look at all of this other evidence of guilt, it’s overwhelming. So the errors down below are just harmless, no harm, no foul, right? And we’ll just out keep the conviction on the books. So it’s very hard to get out on a technicality and what’s surprising to me and this is part of my book and part of my research. You mentioned DNA evidence. You know, I think a lot of people, reasonable people, would think, hey, if there’s a person in prison. And there’s biological evidence remaining from the crime scene. And that evidence could be tested and put to rest any nagging question about guilt or innocence. That should be an easy thing to do, right? Like, it costs a couple $100? Like, let’s just test, you know, the seminal fluid from a rape kit or the blood spatter from a crime scene. But and even though every state has a law that provides for post conviction DNA testing. There are all these ticky tack procedural rules that make it hard to get. That you have to file your request within a certain number of years after your appeal, and sometimes you just don’t have the wherewithal to do that. You also have to show that you have a strong innocence claim, that this biological evidence, if it exculpated you, would actually prove your innocence. Like there are all these procedural prerequisites to even get a right to test biological evidence in your case. It’s amazing, frankly.
06:12 AW – Yes, I think a lot of people who are listening to this have followed the Adnan Syed case which on one hand, it’s, you know, it’s terrific that they were able to correct a wrong, but what really stood out to me was how long it took in light of all the resources that Adnan Syed had at his disposal of a hit podcast and HBO documentary. Like all these, I’m sure there are a lot of pro bono attorneys and nonprofits who are rallying to his cause. So it was a high profile case to say the least. And yet it took years and years for this to happen for him to be released from.
06:52 DW – You’re exactly right. I mean, in many ways, the Sayed case is a unicorn, right? And I think some people look at cases like that and they’ll say, hey, innocent people maybe have to be patient, but they’re always freed in the end. I look at that case. I look at that case, and I say exactly what you said, Alex. This guy had resources and certainly. Advantages that most prisoners don’t have. Most prisoners don’t have Sarah Koenig and the serial podcast in their corner, you know Rabia and all these other fantastic lawyers and HBO and the attention of the nation on their case. And even then, as you point out, it took 23 years for him to be released, and so just this week. Prosecutors announced that they’re not retrying him, which is great. So he’s not going to be retried. He’s not going back to prison, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s been declared innocent. He’ll still have to fight for compensation in Maryland. And another piece of this that I think is really interesting, the serial podcast. And correct me if I’m wrong Alex, I think it was 2014 that they did that. It was nine years ago.
07:57 AW – Yeah, that was a while ago it.
07:59 DW – Was a while ago, so like even after that podcast elevated side case and put the spotlight on it, it took another nine years and even then, apparently. The back story here is the reason why the case was overturned is under Maryland law, because Syed was convicted as a juvenile, he had a right to be resentenced because basically you can’t be sentenced to life without the possibility. Parole if you were convicted as a juvenile based on some Supreme Court precedent. So his lawyer just like asked the prosecutors, hey, we’re going to have to re sentence him eventually. Why don’t you look in the file and they looked in the file and they found all this evidence pointing to other suspects, so. It wasn’t even a direct hit of the serial podcast. Or the attention of HBO. It was sort of an indirect, fortuitous break that the prosecutors looked in the file and found this evidence. This is a long way of saying, Alex, that these cases are not. Emblematic they are rare, and they suggest that they that these cases are just the tip of a much larger iceberg that we can’t identify.
09:06 (Music Break)
09:50 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to a professor of law at Northeastern University, Daniel Medwed. So Dan, I want to turn to some of the other stories in your new book, Barred. But first let’s give us an executive summary of your view of where the systemic problems lie. There’s so many, but give us some of the the top line issues. If you could wave a magic wand and repair this system, where would your efforts be focused?
10:25 DW – Oh, that’s such a good question. So let me just outline three of them. So the first is that we have an unfounded faith in our adversary system. We believe that through this fight between the defense lawyer and the prosecution. Combat at trial, the truth will prevail. The problem with that is it’s predicated on the idea that it’s a fair fight, right? That the defense has the same resources as the prosecution and nothing could be further from the truth. Prosecutors have the advantage of the police as investigators defense lawyers don’t write so they have all this power, and so the first suggestion would be to even the playing field a little bit more. For instance, by requiring prosecutors to disclose more evidence to the defense before trial, second reform relates to the entire institution of the prosecutor. To begin with, we live in a system where trials are really a vanishing species. More than 95% of cases are resolved through plea bargains and we as a society kind of have this outsized perception of the role of the trial because you see a trial of, you know, OJ Simpson going back for years or Derek Chauvin just from last year. And we think trials happen all the time.
11:35 AW – And explain the incentives that prosecutors and defense attorneys have in plea bargaining. There’s a financial incentive to avoid trials, which are expensive, but there’s more to it, I imagine.
11:47 DW – You’re exactly right, Alex. So there are financial and practical incentives, so let’s just think that the system as a whole is strapped for cash. Defenders aren’t well paid. Prosecutors aren’t well paid, which means that your caseload is enormous. So you’re a prosecutor, you have tons of cases. You know that the way to be perceived as effective in your office is to have a high conviction. That’s for better or for worse. I think it’s for worse. That’s sort of the coin of the prosecutorial realm getting convictions. You’re a defense lawyer and you’re just engaged in triage. You’re just trying to keep your head above water. So both sides have an incentive to resolve a case through a plea bargain so that they can move on to the next case on the docket. And the way they can rationalize it is this. The prosecutor can say I’m giving the person a discount. I’m offering the person three years when they’re facing 10 years to save us time. So it’s kind of a win for the defendant and it’s a win for us and the victim doesn’t have to testify. Defense lawyers can look at that same deal, and they’ll say “hey, I’m getting a good bargain for my client.” My client could go to trial and risk going away for 10 years, but I’m getting him three so I’ll count that as a win, even though it’s not an acquittal, it’s a conviction. It’s a win. So and even judges Alex benefit from this because their docket is is completely overburdened as well and judges are often evaluated based on their disposition rate. Their despo rate is is called their rate of disposing of cases quickly. So everyone has an incentive, financial and practical, to sort of wrap up these cases in a bow and sort of put them as I I use this analogy in the book a lot, you know, to put it on the conveyor belt on the assembly line, and only later you kind of check it for major errors and then it’s dispatched to the annals of case law. The second piece of it is really about prosecutorial power. Prosecutors have the power to offer a plea and to decide what what is contained in that offer. That’s tremendous power ’cause if you have a system that results in 95% plea bargains and you have one side sort of having unilateral control over whether to even initiate the process. In other words, prosecutors don’t have to make a plea offer. They can take a case to trial. It’s totally up to them. Judges don’t have any authority to, like, demand that they plead out a case. So they have all that power. And because of the discrepancy in the plea offer itself versus your post trial sentence, that difference between being offered three now and being offered 10 later, it means that prosecutors can easily coerce innocent people into taking the deal.
14:29 AW – Also, the incarceration system varies so greatly state by state. And if I’m here in California and I’m facing a 10 year plea, there’s a decent chance that I would actually only do three years and maybe go to a fire camp after a year or two of processing as opposed to, if I was looking at the same crime and I don’t know Mississippi, I imagine it would be looking at being behind bars a lot longer.
14:57 DW – You’re absolutely right.
14:59 AW – And how does that go into an attorney’s calculus?
15:02 DW – You know, that’s a really important question, Alex. I think it depends on how skillful the attorney is and how aware the attorney is of the system. But I think you’re right. You take California as an example. I think if lawyers in California are aware of the fact that a 10 year sentence isn’t really a 10 year sentence because of the way you are credited for good time served and how you might actually get transferred to a fire camp. Or something that that will be part of the lawyers advice that’s given to the client. So the way the ethical rules work in this regard is, defense lawyers, here’s something known as client centered advocacy. It’s always the client decision, so the role of the lawyer is just to provide the best information to her client so that the client can ultimately decide whether to take the deal. You know, in that situation one would hope that the lawyer is informed enough to basically say “10 years isn’t 10 years,” because that would be a form of client centered advocacy. But my fear is sort of the opposite, which is because of these incentives that even defense lawyers have, to resolve these cases quickly, there’s an old saying in the courts, “meet ‘em and plead ‘em.” There are a lot of cases where you actually meet your client on the day they plead guilty. Like, it’s appalling, right? Because of these incentives, I I often worry that defense lawyers kind of push. Down the throats of their clients.
16:23 AW – And if there’s no connection between the client and the attorney. Until you’re at the court, you can see a lack of empathy from the from the attorneys standpoint, right? Like, this is just another number to me. I don’t have any real human connection to this case.
16:40 DW – You’re absolutely right. And in fact that’s one of my closing sentiments in this book which is I talk about all these legal reforms, sort of micro, micro level reforms to make the appellate and post conviction process more equitable and then I have a few macro level reforms like innocence commissions in every state and progressive prosecutors. But then at the end I say, well, you know, systems are only as good as the people who are involved with them, and maybe the only way to really improve things is to sort of improve the human actors who have power. In the system, and that’s all about empathy, as you point out, Alex. It’s like and part of the goal in this book is to personalize these stories. We talked earlier about Adnan Syed. That’s a real person. I think one of the reasons why that case gained such traction was that serial humanized him and humanized his story so that people kind of identified with him and were rooting for him. And I think if we have more empathy for criminal defendants, we realize they could be our brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers or kids. I think it will lead to a much better system that that’s my goal, too.
18:00 (Music Break)
18:58 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Daniel Medwed. He’s a law professor at Northeastern University. Could we take a step back even further and look at the systemic issues that have evolved over the last 30-40 years, I’m think? Taking the politicization of “tough on crime” legislation where politicians are put in a position where if they don’t take these draconian stance, is their pilloried for being soft on crime or weak or they are almost advocating for anarchy, the moral majority, has taken control a little bit over the right wing of this country and since we were in high school has really shifted things. And I’m not saying that things weren’t worse in the 50s and 60s for defendants, I’m sure. But I can’t help but think that the bigger system problems. This attitude, the tough on crime stance and also the advent of and popularity of 24 hour cable news being a part of that where there’s. This fear where I I was just reading an example of crime rates and public perceptions of crime rates are that it goes up every year and over this and it’s gone. It’s only gone up like 7 times over the last 30 years, and yet every year people think that it’s worse and worse and worse, and that can only be because so much of the bad news is highlighted on their television screens.
20:24 DW – That’s such an important point. I think you’re right. So the combination of tough on crime which became you know, dates back to really Nixon in that era but really became popular in the 80s and 90s, coupled with the 24 hour media cycle and clickbait, I think you’re right, has created this sort of perfect storm where the case is that people talk about are the outliers, you know, the serial killers or the serial rapists. And you know, especially heinous and violent. And that creates a perception that is divorced from reality. But of course, perception becomes one reality, that crime is everywhere, crime is rampant, and that the good guys, the police and prosecutors are outmanned and overwhelmed. That’s not the reality, right? Violent crime doesn’t go up, as you point out, consistently. It ebbs and flows for a variety of reasons. The political affiliation and values of your local District Attorney that doesn’t necessarily correlate directly with your perception of, you know, rises in criminal activity. I saw some study that talked about how, you know, crime rates have gone up recently in a Republican dominated districts actually you know, so there’s sort of this counter intuitive. Idea that being tough on crime.
21:38 DW – And will reduce your crime rate. So one thing that’s happening that’s positive just to throw like a little bit of lightness into this or or you know optimism.
21:47 AW – And solutions.
21:49 DW – And solutions, right and I know you’re in San Francisco, Alex, so this might be a little bit of a sore spot with with Chesa Boudin, but the growth of the progressive prosecution movement since 2014. It’s really associated with the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2014. And the sort of related rise of progressive prosecutors, prosecutors who take the objective of being ministers of justice very seriously and not just prosecuting people and imprisoning them, has resulted in really interesting prosecutors taking the helm in a number of cities with some very positive results. So here in Boston, where I am and where you grew up, Alex, we have had a progressive prosecutor named Rachel Rollins, who’s now our use attorney and she implemented a number of pretty controversial policies about declining to prosecute certain low level crimes and various other things a lot of data suggests. That those policies lead to a reduction of crime under her watch, even though her opponents have said, oh, violent crime is on the rise, and so on. So one positive thing is this progressive prosecution movement, though, and This is why I alluded to what’s happening in San Francisco. There is that blowback, a conservative blowback. To the progressive prosecution movement, which at least with Chesa Boudin resulted in him being recalled, you know, earlier this year.
23:12 AW – So, Speaking of the Black Lives Matter movement, why don’t you give us a snapshot of Harry Miller who was convicted wrongfully in Salt Lake City when he wasn’t even in Salt Lake City.
23:27 DW – Yeah, let me, I’ll go into this. It’s really appalling, Alex. So here’s what happened. In 2000, a white woman was robbed in a 7-11. Someone took $50.00 from her and she described the perpetrator as a black man in his 20s. OK, there were no suspects for a long time until a couple of years later, there she is walking down the street and she sees a black man in Salt Lake City. Yes, uh, a 47 year old black man named Harry Miller, she says “That’s the guy!” And the clerk from the 711 then sees him and says, I remember him. He frequented the store. He was a patron back in 2000. So I think the black population of Salt Lake City is something like 2.6%. I looked this up right? It’s very, very small and that could cut both ways. If it’s a really small population, you think that people might be better able to identify across races because there aren’t so many people of other races. They might stand out more, right?
24:30 AW – But then there’s more implicit bias, probably.
24:33 DW – There’s more implicit bias. Because you’re not familiar with people of other races, you might be more prone to mistakes. It’s known as cross racial misidentification, and it’s a real problem in the criminal justice system. So Harry Miller is accused of this robbery. Now get this, Alex, this is what’s amazing, he says “Well, you know what, I didn’t do it because I was in Louisiana in 2000. By the way, Harry Miller was in Salt Lake City to visit his brother. He didn’t live in Salt Lake City. He was just visiting, OK? He said “back in 2000, I was in Louisiana. And you know what, I remember that I was in Louisiana during the time of that crime because I had just had a stroke and I was housebound. I was in bed. I needed round the clock medical attention. So, I mean, I wasn’t in Salt Lake City. I was in my friggin’ bed in Louisiana.”
25:23 AW – And he had receipts to show this.
25:25 DW – He had a nurse who came forward to say I saw Harry Miller in Louisiana in his bed when I was tending to him the day before the robbery in Salt Lake City. But this is where things get absolutely Orwellian.
25:39 AW – Harry Miller got to get out of bed and fly to Salt Lake City to steal $50.00 from a woman in 7-11, according to the prosecutors. Thank you.
25:46 DW – You know what? You’re laughing. That’s what they argued. Wow, because Harry Miller didn’t have any proof of his whereabouts on the actual day of the crime. The prosecutor’s theory was exactly that he got on a plane Louisiana, went to Salt Lake City, robbed a woman of 50 bucks and then got back on a plane that night ’cause he was seen in Louisiana the next day. OK, that was their theory. So case goes to trial, believe it or not, they take this case to trial. And Harry Miller testifies, I was in Louisiana. Time, but the defense lawyer didn’t call other alibi witnesses from Louisiana. There were all these people from his hometown who could say he was there, but the lawyer didn’t bother to get him out there. So Harry Miller was convicted, and he was sentenced to five years to life in prison in Utah a few years later. A group I was involved with called the Rocky Mountain Innocent Center, which investigates and litigates these cases, sort of worked to overturn the case and after 4 1/2 years in prison he was freed because eventually people realized this was an absurd case, but he still spent 4 1/2 years behind bars in Utah under those facts. And he then sought wrongful conviction compensation. You know you spent 4 1/2 years doing hard time in Utah when you were housebound in Louisiana at the time of the crime. You know one would think you should be entitled to a lot of damage award a huge damage award. He got $124,000 in change. That’s it. Under the Utah law, that was. Basically the maximum that he could get for his suffering. So I think that’s a really harrowing cautionary tale about not just how easy it can be to get convicted. And a lot of it, of course, it’s easy if you happen to be a person of color. Some of the statistics suggest that black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than white people. So it’s easy to get convicted on the front end, and contrary to popular opinion, it’s very difficult to get out on the back end. Even when you have lawyers. Fighting for you and are pointing out the absurdity of the case.
27:52 AW – Well, the book is called “Barred.” He’s a professor of law at Northeastern University, Daniel Medwed. Dan, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 DW – My pleasure, Alex. Thanks a lot.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the meters, Richie Havens and Bruce Springsteen. Check out our website at seachangeradio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others. And tune into Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
Frequent Sea Change Radio listeners have known for a while about the drawbacks of gas stoves – it turns out they’re considerably worse for both the environment and human health as compared to their electric countertop counterparts. Recent statements from the Consumer Product Safety Commission concerning the possible regulation of gas kitchen appliances have unleashed a sudden chorus of cries for rebellion. It’s not just restauranteurs and chefs who are worried about changing their cooking style, there’s a segment from the more cantankerous crevices of the American political underbelly getting pretty hot under the collar over this one – we’ll call them the gassy right. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with ProPublica reporter, Lisa Song, to discuss how gas ranges have become part of the culture wars, learn about induction cooking technology, and hear about her own experience as a renter in New York City with an old, leaky gas appliance.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:22 Lisa Song – Asthma, definitely childhood asthma in particular, there’s a lot of studies showing kids in less affluent neighborhoods are often suffering a lot more from asthma, and that’s due to a combination of issues. A lot of times those homes are near highways and factories and, you know, refineries and other giant sources of air pollution. So those kids and families are already breathing in on equal, you know, large amounts of air pollutants, and then in addition to all of that, the cooking they do indoors is exacerbating their asthma. Further with this nitrogen dioxide.
01:00 Narrator – Frequent Sea Change Radio listeners have known for a while about the drawbacks of gas stoves – it turns out they’re considerably worse for both the environment and human health as compared to their electric countertop counterparts. Recent statements from the Consumer Product Safety Commission concerning the possible regulation of gas kitchen appliances have unleashed a sudden chorus of cries for rebellion. It’s not just restauranteurs and chefs who are worried about changing their cooking style, there’s a segment from the more cantankerous crevices of the American political underbelly getting pretty hot under the collar over this one – we’ll call them the gassy right. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with ProPublica reporter, Lisa Song, to discuss how gas ranges have become part of the culture wars, learn about induction cooking technology, and hear about her own experience as a renter in New York City with an old, leaky gas appliance.
02:16 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lisa Song she is a reporter for ProPublica she covers the environment Lisa, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
02:24 Lisa Song (LS) – Thanks for having me.
02:26 AW – So you have a piece from January 23rd entitled what to know about the risks of gas stoves and appliances. And we’ll, we’ll link to that on seachangeradio.com this Pro Publica piece that you wrote. It spoke to me because it seemed like we were in the same boat as renters who have grown up cooking on gas stoves. I think a lot of Americans are kind of turning on the stove with a new curiosity and maybe even a fear. Why don’t you walk us through first your personal experience that you just had? Most recently, not just with your own gas stove, but researching this.
03:06 LS – Yeah, so for years I had been vaguely following the news of various local efforts to ban gas stoves in future construction and buildings and that kind of thing. It was never a topic I’d written about, I just followed it kind of in the background and then last fall when I was baking. One day I suddenly noticed this very distinct rotten egg odor which told me that my stove was leaking and as a climate reporter I knew this was a problem. I was also worried about a possible explosive risk and start thinking back to various studies that had come out about air pollution risks as well so I ended up borrowing a gas leak detector from a friend. So once I borrowed the recorder and turned on my oven, the recorder basically lit up and told me that I had a giant methane leak from the oven. And the detector said that the leak was so large I should ventilate the area immediately and move to a safe location. So I ended up taking a video of what this detector shows. And then sending the video plus a photo of the user manual for the detector to my landlord. And that was enough to convince my landlord to switch out my oven for a different oven.
04:27 AW – But a gas stove nonetheless.
04:29 LS – Yes, yes, the replacement was also a gas stove. I’m pretty sure everyone in my apartment building has a gas stove range, but the good thing is, once the new stove was installed, I checked it again with the same methane detector and this time there was still a very small leak, but it was, you know, way better. Than the last stove. So for me that was a win.
04:52 AW – So we’ve had Eric Lebel on Sea Change Radio last year. He’s at the forefront of researching gas leaks and the connection with appliances. You spoke to him for your piece, correct?
05:02 LS Yes, yes.
05:17 AW – So we’ve had him on and listeners can go back and listen to that February 2022 interview we did with Eric, but I wanted to update listeners on what’s been happening on the gas stove front. It’s become politically charged. How did this kind of just occur all of a sudden we we’ve known that gas emits harmful pollutants into the air. Gas stoves are not the healthiest system, but why now? Why did it just become kind of at the forefront of the culture wars Lisa?
05:35 LS – Yeah, so back in December. I believe someone from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Mentioned that they would consider regulating gas stoves and even said they would consider a potential ban, and I think it was the word ban that really turned the issue into a national debate. Suddenly everyone was writing about it. People were speculating wildly, and some people really thought that it meant the government was coming to take away their gas stoves, which was something that was never on the table. Nobody’s going to come into your house and remove. Your gas stoves, even the talk of a proposed ban meant that they might consider at some point phasing out gas stoves for future purchase and things like that. You know, years down the line. The Commission has since softened their language and stepped back from really using the word ban, but it was that one news item that really put this into the national spotlight. Before that, a lot of people had been following this issue, but it was mostly people who were climate activists or public health. Advocates and others in that space and now suddenly this became headline news, TV news and everyone. It seemed, had an.
06:50 AW – Is the fear that landlords have legitimate in that eventually they may have to incur major costs to replace gas stoves in their tenants units with, let’s say the latest more expensive induction stoves?
07:05 LS – Yeah, I mean in the case of my landlord, I’m sure that they did not want the risks, both health and safety and financial and liability of what might happen if if the explosive risk actually resulted in an explosion, right? That was a pretty obvious. This big leak with a with a major life threatening risk there, so it was obviously in their best interest to get rid of that giant problem. There are going to be various rebates and things like that from the government to help people reduce the cost of purchasing a new electric stove. Or a new induction stove. I am not aware of any local legislation that would force current landlords to replace all of their stoves. From what I understand, the the kind of local legislation is just mostly about targeting future bans on putting gas stoves into new housing construct.
08:03 AW – And what kind of pushback is being funded by the fossil fuel industry that you can surmise? I mean, this is a very deep pocketed industry, and when one of their flagship products in terms of home appliances is under attack, I can see them fighting back with a vengeance. Is that an element with political atmosphere, or the politicization of this? Because you had mentioned how the consumer protection word ban kind of set a lot of people on edge and you, you’d see things like, I think Ronnie Jackson, the who’s like a I don’t know if he’s a congressman, but he’s a Texas Doctor Who used to be a White House doctor. He was like “you can take my gas stove from my cold, dead hands” and that became kind of a meme, almost. It’s like you’re not taking my gas stove and I I like cooking with gas, but I also like breathing clean air.
08:57 LS – There’s been a lot of great reporting locally around various local bands and how during the time of debating those proposals, there’s been funded lobbying from the gas industry to try to tell people to vote against the ban one reporter who’s written about this extensively on a national level is Rebecca Leber. She’s done some really great stories. Really, tracing decades of industry funded advertising and how they are linking, how they’re advertising links, gas stoves to healthy cooking, and good kitchens and kind of makes it impossible to imagine cooking in any other way. In more recent years. Her reporting has shown that they’re funding influencers on social media like Instagram and TikTok to do posts about how much they enjoy cooking on their gas stove.
09:51 AW – And you mentioned in your ProPublica piece. How cooking with gas was like this very deliberate early influencer campaign from the 1930s where they would get like Bob Hope to incorporate gas jokes into his routine, et cetera. I had no idea about that.
10:10 LS – Yeah, that was really interesting. That was from one of Rebecca Leber’s pieces where she reported on how the gas industry really embraced the term cooking with gas, and that’s just something that’s a colloquial phrase now, and we all sort of know what it means when we use it in everyday conversation. And clearly as her reporting shows, it was something they they helped to further popularize.
10:33 AW – So Lisa, let’s turn to induction oven technology. It’s very promising and I don’t know why people are necessarily so reticent to embrace it. It’s very different than the old electric coil stove tops that. People may have first encountered in the 70s and 80s. Why don’t you walk us through induction cooking technology where it is some of the elements that listeners should be aware of?
11:01 LS – Yeah, so induction stoves have become more popular in the US recently, and induction technology uses Electro magnets to heat up food. It can feel a little bit weird cooking on it for the first time – I actually bought myself an induction hot plate last summer because during the heat waves I just did not want to cook with an actual fire in my kitchen. It was already so hot and humid and one of the first things I noticed about the hot plate. Is that it didn’t get that hot? You know if I put my hand right next to where the hot surface? Is I didn’t burn myself so it just felt cooler to use it in the summer there. There can definitely be a bit of a learning curve to learning how to use an induction stove. There are various settings and you can learn to kind of cater your cooking using temperature or certain other settings. And it is something that I think can take a little bit getting used to, but there are now. Also, funnily enough, people who are influencers touting the benefits of induction stoves on social media as well. And certain chefs have gotten into that. But I’ve also read that for public health reasons, there are some commercial kitchens that are switching to induction stoves as a way to reduce risks of heat exhaustion and heat stroke during the summer, because those large kitchens can just get so hot when there are a lot of natural gas flame cooking going on in the summer.
12:34 AW – I hadn’t even considered that from a professional chefs standpoint. That’s gotta be a little bit of a real wrinkle. They’re going to have to kind of relearn a lot of their dishes and a lot of their timing that has to be kind of recalibrated with an induction oven, I imagine.
12:52 LS – Yeah, I mean, I do think that most of the people I’m aware of who have switched to induction stoves and ovens are folks who are aware of the health. And the climate impacts of gas stoves. And that is really what’s pushing them to switch to induction. And some of those people you know, have been able to take advantage of state rebates to help them make that switch, but it does. It does cost money to switch to an induction stove. One of the guides that I linked to in my article shows that it can cost more than twice as much to get an induction stove compared to a natural gas stove, but again, that’s where some of those rebates can come in and cut down on the costs.
13:46 (Music break)
14:29 AW – This is Alex Wise on sea change radio and I’m speaking to ProPublica reporter Lisa Song. So you mentioned how your induction burner that you got the hot plate keeps your kitchen a little cooler. Just to clarify, the plate itself is not as hot as like a gas stove top, but the food would be just as hot. And when you think about the time that it takes, let’s say to boil a pot of water, let’s say it takes 10 minutes on your gas stove top versus 3 minutes. I would imagine it’s a lot more efficient to boil water 3 minutes in 3 minutes than 10 minutes in terms of the ambient temperature in your kitchen.
15:06 LS – Yes, yes it definitely makes that difference and you know, as a New Yorker, I’m in a an apartment where I don’t have a window in my kitchen and my kitchen is the farthest away from my wall air conditioning unit. So again, the kitchen just tended to be the hottest part of my apartment every summer, and anything I could do to cool it down was a big relief.
15:27 AW And do you have a ventilation hood over your oven? Your stove?
15:31 LS – Yes, yes, I do have a ventilation hood and as I was reporting out this story and doing research, I made sure to check to see that it vented outside and from what I can tell and having described what I could see of my ventilation hood to some of the experts I interviewed, we concluded that it is a good vent that vents to the outside. So these days when I do use my oven for anything, I always turn on my hood.
15:58 AW – And the pots and pans that one would use with an induction oven have to be magnetic, why don’t you walk us through what that could possibly mean? And for people who are looking to make the switch, would it also include having to overhaul all of your pots and pans, Lisa.
16:17 LS – Right, so that is something you can do something called a magnet test where you should take a something like a refrigerator magnet or a strong magnet and see if it sticks to the bottom of your pots and pans if it sticks then that pot should work with your induction induction stove. If it falls off and doesn’t stick, then you have to buy a new pot or pan that works with the Electro magnets on the induction stove. Me, personally, I was lucky. I only found one pot that I had to replace. Because it didn’t work on the induction stove.
16:53 AW – So Lisa, can you address some of the studies that you found connecting the dots for gas stoves, asthma, respiratory issues and greenhouse gas emissions? I know the one that got a lot of press was this 13% rate increase of of asthma. With gas stoves I I’m messing this up, but that seemed like a little hazy that study, but it was an easy number to remember. It became kind of a common talking point, but there’s a lot of other studies that back up the basic underlying idea, which seems pretty clear.
17:31 LS – Yeah, so my story was divided into several section, each highlighting a different type of risk from gas stoves and the first one was just the main component of natural gas is methane, and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, and there was a study that analyzed a bunch of gas stoves in California in residential homes. And they found that there were big methane leaks and actually more than 3/4 of the leaks came from stoves that were actually turned off at the time, so you didn’t even need to turn on the device for methane to be leaking out. And you know when they added up the leak rates and extrapolated them across the country, it would be the equivalent of the greenhouse gas emissions for half a million cars. Yeah it was interesting and I I think that study got a lot of press when it came out at the time. The next risk for methane is just that large methane leaks can cause explosions. This is obviously the thing that drove me to actually write my story because I was smelling so much gas in my house. It was definitely a safety risk and the best advice here from experts is if you are smelling that very distinctive rotten odor smell, a rotten egg odor. Then you should leave your building and call your gas company. That odor actually comes from a chemical that gas companies add to the natural gas. In order to help warn you of largely. And then another risk that I wrote about is nitrogen dioxide, which is the gas that causes asthma. There have been a lot of studies connecting childhood asthma to nitrogen dioxide in the home, and a lot of other studies showing that homes with gas stoves have higher concentrations of nitrogen dioxide what’s really interesting here is that the EPA actually has national air quality standards for nitrogen dioxide outdoors, but those standards don’t apply to indoor air, even though in homes with gas stoves. There’s enough nitrogen dioxide in the air that it would fail and exceed those outdoor air quality standards.
19:52 AW – And we’ve seen some controlled studies recently right near you in the Bronx with public housing and some of the air quality issues there that’s pretty stark. Why don’t you recap that for us if you can?
20:05 LS – Yeah, there was just a really great story published by the city where they talked about. There was a program in the Bronx for public housing residents and it was a pilot program across 20 different apartments where the households traded in their gas stoves for electric induction stove. And once that was done, they studied the air quality in those homes and found that there was a 35% decrease in nitrogen dioxide and a more than 40% difference in concentrations of carbon monoxide, which is another indoor air pollutant, and the timing of this study is just. Really interesting because it came out right as the nation was really interested in this gas stove debate and it was on everybody’s minds. And I also think it’s really great that they did this study for public housing residents because the socioeconomic, inequality angle of this is really important.
21:03 AW – When you look at epidemiological studies of asthma, there’s a real correlation to socioeconomic issues, correct?
21:11 LS – Yeah, asthma definitely is childhood asthma in particular. There’s a lot of studies showing kids in less affluent neighborhoods are often suffering a lot more from asthma, and that’s due to a combination of issues. A lot of times those homes are near highways and factories. And, you know, refineries and other giant sources of air pollution, so those kids and families are already breathing in unequal. You know, large amounts of air pollutants, and then in addition to all of that, the cooking they do indoors is exacerbating their asthma further with this nitrogen dioxide. And there’s a lot of concern that as more people are able to trade in their gas stoves for electric or induction that because it can cost a lot of money to buy a new induction stove that those benefits will go primarily to more affluent households. And so I think this particular study where they were targeting the switch to people in public housing is is really important, and there’s a lot of public health advocates that want many more programs like this to make sure that those who can least afford buying their own new stove can get those benefits. So in addition, I have heard of some families who end up using their stoves, or particularly their ovens as a source of heat, particularly if they if maybe their regular heater, isn’t working very well in the winter, you know you need to stay warm and sometimes using the stove as a way of doing that, and that of course would just release additional nitrogen dioxide and make the air quality even worse inside that home.
22:54 (Music Break)
23:33 AW -This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to ProPublica reporter Lisa Song. So you told us your story with your landlord and you got your stove replaced with another gas stove. But what if somebody is ready to make the induction leap and they’re a renter. What can they do to kind of inspire or instigate a change from their landlord to an induction stove? And then also for homeowners, what kind of rebates can we see down the road that can take a bite out of that upfront cost of switching to induction cooking, Lisa?
24:14 LS – Yeah, so I think the biggest kind of rebate you can see is there will be consumer rebates coming out of the Inflation Reduction Act, and I linked to a couple of those guides in my story. Those will allow anyone, there are certain limits for income to get different kinds of rebates for replacing gas appliances with electric or induction of appliances. Some states, like Massachusetts, also have their own separate rebate programs and then in terms of landlords, I’m not aware of any local legislation that would really force landlords to switch away from gas if their tenants request it. I’m not aware of anything that targeted, but again, it might be the sort of thing where the landlord might be swayed by some of these arguments relating to health and safety. Or if you can’t get your landlord to switch things out, one of the easiest things you can do in our guide we we talk about just certain steps that people can take, and one of the easiest things you can do is open a window to improve ventilation when you’re cooking in your kitchen and also to turn on your range hood the turn on the hood above your stove, assuming it’s one of those range hoods that vents to the outside and we have a have a little guide on how you can figure out whether your hood does that. If your hood is one of those that. Hence, to the outside you should turn it on every single time you cook on your stove, even if you’re just boil. Water the other thing we mentioned is you can buy yourself an induction hot plate. I got myself one and it is only one burner but I do use it a lot and try to use it whenever I can instead of my normal burners.
26:09 AW – So why don’t you break down some of the chemicals that are present in gas stoves?
26:15 LS – Yeah, so the three specific toxins we talk about in the story are methane, nitrogen dioxide and benzene, and the benzene leaks come from a really well publicized study that came out recently where researchers analyzed gas samples from residential kitchens and found that nearly all of them contained benzene, so there were benzene leaks basically everywhere they looked, and the way benzene got into the gas is that raw natural gas is mostly methane, but contains a lot of other chemicals like benzene and gas companies will strip out the impurities before they pipe the processed gas to your home, but they can’t eliminate or they don’t eliminate all traces of the toxins. So there are small traces of benzene in the natural gas and that leak was what these researchers detected. And because benzene is a really powerful carcinogen, this was a study that got a lot of press, and I personally know of someone who switched out their gas stove for an electric or induction stove because they read about this benzene study in particular.
27:31 AW – And that’s benzene – benzene exposure can lead to leukemia, for example.
27:37 LS – Yes, yes that that is the main risk of benzene. It is a carcinogen that can cause leukemia. It’s one of the most well known carcinogens. There have been studies and knowledge about workplace benzene carcinogen risk, since at least the 1950s.
27:55 AW – She’s a reporter for ProPublica, Lisa Song. Lisa, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 LS – Thanks for having me.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by George Benson, Robert Cray and John Mooney. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com. To stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Lisa Song: Hard Pass on The Gas appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
If you were a kid in the 1970s, you undoubtedly were at least a little terrified of going into the ocean – a fear placed squarely in your subconscious by the Jaws movies. But, according to the International Shark Attack File, there are only around 72 unprovoked shark attacks around the world per year, a relatively small amount given the many sleepless nights and swimming phobias arising from a fear of sharks. The far scarier reality is that the much-demonized shark has long been under attack itself from its greatest predator: us. Humans kill well over 100 million sharks in any given year. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Mongabay reporter, Philip Jacobson, to learn about the illegal shark-finning practices of one Chinese-based fishing company, why he believes this practice is far from unique, and what efforts are being taken to save this important apex predator.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:22 Philip Jacobson (PJ) – You know one of the policies that are put in place to combat shark finning. It’s not necessarily banning the trade, but you tell boats, OK, you can’t just keep the fin and throw the body away you have to keep the whole shark.
00:37 Alex Wise (AW) – If you were a kid in the 1970s, you undoubtedly were at least a little terrified of going into the ocean – a fear placed squarely in your subconscious by the Jaws movies. But, according to the International Shark Attack File, there are only around 72 unprovoked shark attacks around the world per year, a relatively small amount given the many sleepless nights and swimming phobias arising from a fear of sharks. The far scarier reality is that the much-demonized shark has long been under attack itself from its greatest predator: us. Humans kill well over 100 million sharks in any given year. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Mongabay reporter, Philip Jacobson, to learn about the illegal shark-finning practices of one Chinese-based fishing company, why he believes this practice is far from unique, and what efforts are being taken to save this important apex predator.
01:48 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Philip Jacobson. He is a journalist for Mongabay and he’s based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Phil, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:57 Philip Jacobson (PJ) – Hi Alex, thanks for having me on the show, it’s great to be here.
02:00 AW – Well, it’s a pleasure to have you been reading your work? You’ve done a lot of investigative work into the shark finning practice that is running rampant across the Asian seafood marketplace. First, why don’t you explain why sharks are being hunted and why the sharkfin has become this, almost an outlier in how we process seafood. This is not like just catching tuna. It seems very wasteful and a dangerous precedent.
02:33 PJ – Sure, so shark fins are eaten as part of shark fin soup, which is a delicacy in parts of Asia, especially East Asia. It’s been a pretty big industry for the past several decades, especially as China’s middle class kind of exploded grew a lot in 80s nineties, 2000s, and that created a lot of new demand for shark fins. Soup used to be served at weddings. Plot and official functions in China. So there’s been some effort to kind of crack down on it in recent years by the Chinese government. They’ve banned it at official government functions, for example. Just because you know of the trouble that sharks are in from a conservation perspective, many shark populations going extinct because of the demands, especially for their fins. Nowadays, sharks are being hunted more and more for their meat, which is also eaten, but I guess that’s another story – I published recently with Manga Bay focused on a shark finning operation that was taking place across the fleet of a a major tuna fishing company, a Chinese company.
03:51 AW – Yes, and I I wanted to ask you about that because in the in the piece you say how this Dalian Ocean Fishing fleet, it’s 35 boats that are doing long line fishing, ostensibly for tuna, but are actually as your investigation uncovers, or reveals that they’re actually dipping their hooks into both waters. They’re fishing, not only for tuna, but also for shark, but just chopping off the fins and then wasting 9095% of the shark and throwing those carcasses away. So I wasn’t sure. The meat is used at some point in the industry, but this Dalian Ocean fishing company is not or is that an industry practice to just throw away most of the fish?
04:40 PJ – No, that’s right. Shark finning as you described, which is when you slice off the fins and discard the rest of the body. That’s illegal pretty much anywhere pretty much everywhere, although it it does happen. But yeah, this company Dalian Ocean Fishing it presents itself to the world as a tuna company. It’s claimed to be China’s biggest supplier of sashimi grade tuna to Japan. It was founded about 20 years ago at a time where Chinas’s distant water fishing industry was really taking off distant water, fishing in the high seas, which is like international waters. So yeah, so this company Dalian Ocean fishing, they present themselves as a tuna fishing company. But what we found from talking to lots of their former workers was that their boats were also deliberately. Catching really huge numbers of shark in the Pacific Atlantic, Indian Oceans and not only were they catching the shark, they were they. Were fanning the sharks so. Just taking the fins and throwing the body overboard.
05:56 AW – And that’s a fairly egregious practice on, in and of itself, but that’s not industry standard in terms of shark fishing to are there some shark fishing operations that don’t just fin, they’re actually harvesting the meat as well?
06:10 PJ – Yeah, yeah there are. It’s not illegal to catch sharks necessarily. You know it happens all over the world, but it is illegal to fence sharks pretty much everywhere. So yeah, there’s a there’s a huge shark meat trade and and you can legally harvest fins if you take the whole body. But the reason why some captains do Fin sharks is because they have the fins are the most. Valuable part of the shark.
06:35 AW – By far, right?
06:36 PJ – By far yeah, yeah, and the boats have limited storage space. So by just taking the fins they can take more fins and kind of maximize their profits, which can be important in the fishing industry because the margins can often be really thin.
06:53 AW – When you talk about this Dalian Ocean Fishing Company being at the forefront of high grade tuna, I mean, that’s a huge profit margin as well. I’m surprised that that’s not enough, but anybody who’s been to a very high end sushi place, or if you’ve been to like ski market in Tokyo. You realize how incredibly valuable high grade tuna is.
07:19 PJ – Yeah, it’s true. It’s a good point and that was one of the questions that was raised by our reporting was who was really organizing this illegal shark operation? And there’s a question of kind of how high up in the company’s corporate hierarchy. The impetus for this scheme goes. So was it just the captains who were doing this on their own, or you know, or were the executives kind of in on it? That’s an unanswered question here, although. The reporting does indicate that there was at least some measure of organization among the captains themselves. And you can tell that by the fact that they were moving the sacks of dried shark fit from one boat to another at sea, and presumably so that a boat that was heading back to shore to mainland China could bring the fence back on behalf of the other captains, and presumably they would. Be sold there on land.
08:24 AW – So you talk about in the piece which will link to it Sea Change Radio. How many sharks are killed a year? I think it’s in the over 100 million, is that correct?
08:34 PJ – Yeah, scientists say that humans kill around 100 million sharks per year, and I’ve even talked to people who say that that could be a huge under.
08:44 AW – And when I was a child in the 70s, Jaws was the big movie and we had really there was a decade plus era of demonizing sharks. My generation was very afraid of them when we went into the ocean. I remember thinking as like a 9 or 10 year old well, why don’t they just kill all the sharks? Can you explain why the devastation of an apex predator? Why it has such a harsh impact on an entire ecosystem? Why it’s not just sharks that are being affected when we kill sharks?
09:17 PJ – Sure, yes, as you say sharks are they are an apex predator so they eat certain kinds of animals that then eat another kind of animal that they need another kind of animal that they need another kind of animal, and on and on and on in this incredibly complex web of interactions, and you know, if you take out one link in that chain. Then it throws the whole system. Out of whack so, for example, if there is a certain kind of fish and there’s you know a school of these fish, sharks will prey on the fish that they can catch and the ones that they’ll prey on will tend to be the weakest ones. So they’re kind of culling the weaker ones, which may be weaker for genetic reasons and then that will keep the fish population stronger because the weakest members of the school are we’ll kind of get eaten, and but it’s actually good for the fish because it keeps their keeps their numbers stronger.
10:23 (Music Break)
11:35 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to journalist Philip Jacobson, so Phil, it sounded to me from the article that some of these deckhands didn’t necessarily know that the shark finning practice was illegal, that they realized something was up when their photos were being confiscated. Is that accurate?
11:56 PJ – Yeah, so when we talked to these guys and we were asking them all about the labor conditions and the fishing operation and we learned that they were, you know, catching huge numbers of sharks and finning these sharks. Yeah many of them said that their senior officers would take their phones like before they went to shore at the end of the journey, which could last for a year – they could be at sea for two years. Yeah, the foreman would take their phone and you know either you know. Instruct the Indonesian deckhand to kind of go through and show them the photos and delete the ones that showed you know shark fins or you know, catching whales or something like that. Or the captain would just switch the language to Chinese and reformat the phone himself. So that was pretty consistent. We heard that from something like five or six men from five or six different boats that that was happening, and that’s been known to happen more broadly as well. But still some some photos did make it off. Some men were able to save some photos and we published some of those in our.
13:04 AW – And you also have photos that Greenpeace and other NGOs. Took have taken. These practices from afar, another boat could see that this, I mean some of these sharks are massive and you could see them just being pulled up on the side of a boat.
13:22 PJ – It’s true, yeah, Greenpeace, I think it was in September 2019 that they kind of went on just kind of an expedition in the Atlantic Ocean. Just looking. Or boats that were catching sharks. And they published all these photos online and it just so happened that one of the boats they kind of stumbled upon in the Atlantic Ocean was the long chain which belongs to Dalian Ocean Fishing. It’s one of the boats that we collected testimony from about their shark operation and as you can see in the green these photo the deck hands pulling a shark onto the onto the deck so it’s pretty likely that that shark was finned based on what we learned from talking to the men who actually worked on.
14:06 AW – How unique, in your opinion, are Dalian’s practices? If we went to similar competitors in terms of size and scope, would we find similar shark finning practices in your estimation?
14:21 PJ – Yeah, I think it’s unlikely to be unique you see in scattered media reports from here, here or there. Kind of quoting men who worked on you know, distant water fishing boats that shark finning. Does happen? So there was an NGO, the Environmental Justice Foundation. It’s based in London and they’ve put out a series of reports about different countries, distant water fishing fleets. They did one about Taiwan, one about South Korea, and their latest one was about China and the way. That they’ve put these reports together is they’ve tracked down men who worked on boats in these countries fishing fleets. So for their latest report. They interviewed, I think it was 116 Indonesians who worked on something like 80 or 90 Chinese fishing boats. If I’m not mistaken and they found that. 95% of the men had seen shark finning on their boats. So that’s just one indication of how rife, shark finning is, you know, in China’s fishing fleet now seeing shark finning on your boat doesn’t necessarily mean that you know your boat is your captain is engaging in like a deliberately catching shark and finning sharks on its massive industrial scale, which is what we found was happening on Dalian Ocean Fishing boats but to me I think it’s certainly it seems likely to me that it could be happening on other company’s fleets as well. The enforcement is really low. There are rules banning these things but the oversight is really poor, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
16:09 AW – So Phil, why don’t we talk about some of the practices and some of the solutions that are going into banning these shark finning practices and shark fishing in in general, not only the monitoring but trying to limit the type of gear. That boats can set sail with, et cetera.
16:32 PJ – So one of the findings from the investigation was that Dalian Ocean Fishings boats were using two types of fishing gear to deliberately catch sharks to intentionally target sharks. The gear is shark lines and wire leaders.
16:53 AW – And that’s different from like a tuna fish, right? Because these sharks have such incredible power in their bite, I imagine. So you need like wire.
17:00 PJ – Yeah, exactly so the wire leaders in a nutshell make it so that sharks can’t bite through the line. Because they have really sharp teeth. And then the shark lines. They’re shorter lines. They’re kind of designed to, so they’re hooks the baited hooks at the ends of them. Hang kind of closer to the surface where sharks tend to swim. So Dalian Ocean Fishing was using both wire leaders and shark lines at the same time to catch shark, so that’s actually been prohibited in the western Pacific Ocean for a long time. 5-10 years but Dolly Ocean fishing was doing it anyway, so one solution could just be to enforce the existing rules better so there’s different ways you can do that. You can increase observer coverage on these boats. You know some of these boats have to carry a human observer like a guy that basically you know just lives on the boat and makes sure the boats are following the rules you know there’s rules for like, what percentage of a fleet is supposed to have an observer right now in the Western Pacific? That percentage is really, really low. It’s 5% there is conservation. It’s say it should be much, much higher than that. So could that observer pop around from boat to boat maybe and spend you know a week on each boat or that observer has to be kind of embedded for a long time?
18:23 AW – Seems like they would be able to figure out the practices after a week, let’s say.
18:28 PJ – I think they would have to have a different observer on each boat, although I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s done an observer kind of switching boats at sea, I haven’t heard of that happening.
18:38 AW – And these observers are from where they’re not from the company themselves, I imagine.
18:43 PJ – There’s definitely systems in place to kind of organize. You know the placing of observers on these boats. I think governments are involved in those and kind of coordinating those, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure how it works. I don’t think there’s like a company that supplies observers. I think the company, I think the fishing company is the one who pays the observers, but you know you don’t even have to have a human observer. You could put cameras on these boats.
19:09 AW – And show the lines that are being used or whatever.
19:11 PJ – Yeah, they show the lines they’d show if the sharks are being finned.Then they just could see things you know for captains beating up a crew member. I mean, I think if you just put the what I’ve been told is that the idea is if you put the camera on the boat you know to deterrent to bad practices. So yeah, so observers. I mean that’s I guess. To go back to the gear point. You know that’s how you enforce existing rules. Everyone says that observers are the best way to do that, but then you know what kinds of rules could should be changed. So actually one thing that happened in the Western Pacific Ocean in December after this article came out, in fact. Was that the Kind of the multilateral organization that governs tuna fisheries in the Western Pacific Ocean agreed to ban wire leaders and shark lines outright, so prior to that boats in the Western Pacific were allowed to use one or the other of those fishing implements you could use a sharp line or a wire leader, Dalian Fishing was using both illegally, nobody was stopping it, but now they’ve changed the rules so that you can’t use either one, at least in like between 20 N and 20 S latitudes. You can’t use shark lines or wire leaders, so that basically makes it a lot harder for boats to intentionally target sharks. So you know, I mean, you know you want you want to save sharks. You want to stop shark finning – one way you could do that is by making it harder for boats to catch sharks in the first place.
20:56 (Music Break)
21:57 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to journalist Philip Jacobson. So Phil, you spoke earlier about how China has created prohibitions against shark fins soup being served at government functions, et cetera. How effective can that end of this chain monitoring. Can we save sharks by doing away with this delicacy? I mean we we’ve already talked about the fish banning, but what about the consumption side of things?
22:28 PJ – So yeah, so the Chinese Government, you know they ban serving shark fins soup, but government functions. And there’s been other measures taken and it it does seem like that’s made a really huge difference in reducing demand for sharkfin soup, there have also been public awareness campaigns in China especially and elsewhere. You know an advertisement on the side of a bus in Shanghai or a commercial with Yao Ming. You know the famous basketball player? I’m telling people not to eat shark fins soup for conservation reasons for animal cruelty reasons. So it seems like that’s been pretty effective. You know, there’s actually been a decline in the recorded imports of shark fin to China. Although the experts that I’ve talked to tell me that no one really knows exactly why those figures have declined. Is it because demand has actually gone down? Is it because countries around the world are getting more serious about cracking down on enforcing rules around shark finning? Or maybe it’s because maybe the shark fins still going into China, but it’s just happening below the radar. It’s being smuggled in so it doesn’t get detected by those import statistics, and you know, that’s certainly something that we saw with Dalian Ocean Fishing. One of our you know we actually talked to some Indonesian fishers who were on boats that seemed to have smuggled shark fins into China under the nose of of port authorities. So you know those shark fins would not have been picked up by the official statistics, you know. So that’s maybe another explanation for why. Those recorded imports have fallen, but you know, it’s not just the fins, it’s also the meat. As the shark meat trade has is really rising right now.
24:30 AW – Why is that?
24:31 PJ – Well, I don’t think people really understand it. It’s kind of an emerging thing. One reason could be. Restrictions on shark fin trade. One of the policies that are put in place to combat shark fin trade is it’s not necessarily banning the trade, but you tell boats, OK, you can’t just keep the fin and throw the body away you have to keep the whole shark and then you can sell the fin legally, you know you can export it to Hong Kong or do whatever you want. But you’ve also got to take the whole body so if you’re taking the shark meat, the shark meat does have value. People eat shark meat, you know, Brazil is actually a huge consumer of shark meat. There’s dishes in Europe that use shark meat, so that could be one reason why demand has increased. Maybe it just makes more sense for the boats to kind of bring it in.
25:24 AW – It sounds to me that that could help the shark population. In the end, the real dangerous practice is this wasteful shark finning where people can, where fishermen can bring in huge amounts of shark and throw most of it away and just keep the fin or is that naive?
25:43 PJ – It’s a good question.
25:45 AW – So there are people who think that maybe we can protect shark populations by eating shark meat?
25:52 PJ – I think it’s definitely more sustainable to take the whole shark as opposed to just going after the fins, and you know, killing just like enormous numbers of sharks to fill up your whole hold with just fins. Any fishery can be overfished. There’s tuna species that have been pretty badly overfished and those fish are being hunted for their whole bodies, so you know, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that the same thing can happen with sharks. There’s probably examples of shark populations here or there that have been pretty badly overfished. Just even with taking the whole shark, so I mean, the people I’ve talked to… some of them say that you know sharks can be could be fished sustainably. But the thing is, right now there’s not really any global management of shark populations, right? So tuna fisheries are managed. You have these multilateral organizations that govern tuna fisheries in different parts of the high seas. So there’s one for the western Pacific Ocean. There’s one for the eastern Pacific Ocean. There’s one for the Atlantic Ocean, and so if you want to fish for tuna in those oceans, you have to get the boat. Has to be licensed by the multilateral organization, the countries have quotas for how much they can take. But shark fishing is in most cases. So you know it’s kind of a free for all, and there’s no management. So experts that I’ve talked to say that there should be the same kind of management for sharks that there is for tuna. And whether that means these multilateral organizations governing tuna should be repurposed to deal with sharks? That’s maybe one way you could do it, or you know. I don’t know, maybe you can create a whole new organization for sharks. I guess that’s maybe less practical. But right now there’s kind of this vacuum of oversight around shark fishing and the people I talked to say that that’s really what needs to change.
27:57 AW – Philip Jacobson thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:00 PJ – Thanks a lot, it’s great to be here. I appreciate it.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by John Williams, Bobby Darin and M Ward. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com. To stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Philip Jacobson: The Fight To Stop Shark Finning appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
In his book, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People, Jared Yates Sexton writes that “The American Myth paints the process as divinely inspired and the result of a work of distinctly American genius, the Constitution itself an impeccable guide in all things and a means by which freedom and liberty might be bestowed upon every citizen.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with author and podcaster Jared Yates Sexton about his latest book, Midnight Kingdom, discuss the role of Christian Nationalism in the US, and look at the potential ascension of Ron DeSantis as the Republican heir apparent to Donald Trump.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:15 Jared Yates Sexton (JYS) – What is happening with Christian nationalism right now? You’re not taking rights away from women over their body. You’re fighting a holy war. You know, you’re literally battling Satan and those people who want rights over their bodies. They’re oppressing them to benefit them, so as a result it’s positive persecution. And what this does is it creates a story for the believer that makes them not feel bad about what they’re supporting.
00:44 Narrator – In his book, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People, Jared Yates Sexton writes that “The American Myth paints the process as divinely inspired and the result of a work of distinctly American genius, the Constitution itself an impeccable guide in all things and a means by which freedom and liberty might be bestowed upon every citizen.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with author and podcaster Jared Yates Sexton about his latest book, Midnight Kingdom, discuss the role of Christian Nationalism in the US, and look at the potential ascension of Ron DeSantis as the Republican heir apparent to Donald Trump.
01:40 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by author and podcaster Jared Yates Sexton. His new book is called the Midnight Kingdom and his podcast is The Muckrake. Jared, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
01:52 Jared Yates Sexton (JYS) – Hey, I’m so glad to be here.
01:54 Alex Wise (AW) – So your new book is coming out and I want you to first layout the thesis to that and then we’ll use that as kind of a launching point for discussing where we are right now in American politics.
02:08 Jared Yates Sexton (JYS) – So the Midnight Kingdom is my retelling of modern history and the reason I did this. I went back from ancient Rome, where state power merged with Christianity all the way to the present. Basically, to get an understanding of what is happening right now and also the cycles of history that keep replaying themselves. You know they are very, very understandable they are very discernible and unfortunately we don’t get taught history in like a very conducive way. We don’t get you know. Basically filled in on how power has protected itself, how it’s expanded itself, and as a result we find ourselves at this very strange moment where it seems like things are happening that we can’t explain we’re surrounded by conspiracy theories, authoritarian energies and all. We keep getting told is that you know no one really knows what’s going on or how could anybody have any idea what’s going on and in truth, like looking at these historic. It becomes very, very clear how we’ve arrived at this moment, but I think more importantly how we get out of this moment.
03:15 Alex Wise (AW) – There’s a lot to be scared about, obviously, in this big crazy world and if you look through history, there’s a lot of cycles that we just keep repeating and I want to get into some of those. But what are some of the things that are making you most hopeful as we look towards the future?
03:31 JYS – Yeah, you know, I’ll be honest. I know that in in my reporting and my analysis I’m a little bit of a doomsayer. I know that and I know that that is hard stuff, but the reason that I get into the things I do is because I truly do believe that a better future is possible. I think that we are going to get past this crisis and we’re going to be better for it. The problem is that there’s going to be a lot of tumult. There’s going to be a pretty big clash of ideas and civilizations. Pretty soon, but what is giving me hope? First of all, is the fact that so many people are now having conversations about how our status quo and our systems do not work because they don’t. They’re wired for the wealthy and the powerful in order to, you know, continue gaining wealth and power. The fact that we’re recognizing that is important. The fact that we’re pushing back against hereditary wealth and hereditary power. But also you know we’re seeing around America. We’re seeing these young people who are engaging in labor actions. And here’s the thing, Alex, they’re beating some of the most historically powerful corporations in the history of the world – they’re beating Amazon, they’re beating Starbucks, they’re beating Apple over and over and over again. This stuff is actually winning and it’s incredibly inspiring. We’re also seeing in China, which is one of the most technologically advanced societies that we’ve ever seen in terms of like authoritarianism, the people are pushing back against that Iran, one of the most controlling fundamentalist societies that we’ve ever seen. It is reeling simply because the women of the country have stood up and said no more, we’re done. With this we see in Russia an authoritarian dictator who of course has started a world changing war. His grip on power is slipping. I think that humanity is pushing back and I think humanity is going to win this fight. But again I think it’s going to be a little difficult going forward. But I remain really optimistic.
05:29 AW – Yes, I mean you could just take something like technology as an example of how you view it. You can look at a technology as a vehicle for change in either direction I guess is the point.
05:35 JYS – Yeah, and you know one of the things I found writing the book is that there are these apocal moments, right? There are these crossroads that people come to where you know it feels like the world is almost like cement, right? It is immovable. It’s going to be the same way forever. We’ve arrived at the end of history and then there are these other moments where the world is very malleable and there’s so much opportunity for change. Technology always plays a role in that and one of the things I discovered was you know something like the arrival of the printing press, right? You have a world changing technology that comes around. Meanwhile it allows Martin Luther to, you know, create the Reformation and that leads to the 30 years. War and basically you know the ending of the feudal state down the line. You look at the radio which was absolutely used for good in certain cases, but also was like at the backbone of the Nazi regime, right? You get into TV the same thing with propaganda. Now we’re at this moment where we have seen that the Internet can not only spread disinformation, it can inspire genocides. But I have to tell you, I feel the exact same way. I think that we have arrived at a point where our ability to communicate and our ability to gather information can be used for good. And I think looking at that. How we harness those technologies and how we move forward whether or not? By the way, we’re just expecting technology to be a savior, which is what always happens. We get promised constantly, right? Oh don’t worry, the next invention is going to solve climate change. It’s going to solve authoritarianism. Everything will be fine, artificial intelligence, whatever, we cannot be passive about it, and that’s part of the problem is that we have more or less been conditioned to be passive within this situation and we have to be more proactive. And I think what we’re watching again in the labor movements. But in these democratic movements, I think we’re starting to see people realize that they can’t be passive anymore. And that they can’t just let politics and the world pass them by.
07:45 AW – You talk about the media and how technologies played a role and yet you mentioned in the book how Napoleon exploited the media very effectively and and you use him as kind of a a template for the this great man of history idea. Why don’t you expand on that if you can?
08:05 JYS – Yeah, you know one of the ways that we’re told history. You know I always call it conventional history. And before I wrote this book, like I sort of had an outline of how history worked, and you know, and it based, it was based a lot on like Walter Benjamin would say like stereotypes, right? And you see someone like a Napoleon who Hegel of course had considered the great man of history or history has tried a horse, and you know, I didn’t realize and I didn’t know until I did the research that like Napoleon was able to create himself by using media. In fact, Napoleon Bonaparte was kind of a precursor to a Donald Trump, right? He read every press clipping about himself, you know, and like if he didn’t like it, he was going to write to you and tell you about it. And then of course he started like spinning these stories. Himself creating a popular myth of a Napoleon Bonaparte to the point where when the French Revolution eventually spiraled out of control, as they do sometimes Napoleon had created in himself a savior in waiting right, a French Messiah who is going to come in and set things right. And so what we learn is that these people throughout history, they’re able to make themselves into a part of history through like control over media and control over stories, right? You take someone like an Adolf Hitler – he was a media creation. This was an intentional thing by the Nazi Party to create in Adolf Hitler a potential savior. It was a media operation that was carried out before eventually he was able to come in and take advantage of something like the Great Depression and political turmoil. So what we learn is that these stories are incredibly powerful. These mythologies are incredibly powerful and as a result, the way that we interact with the world and the way we see the world is informed by the stories that we’re absorbing and the stories that we believe. Which by the way is I think what is going to define where we go next? What stories we’re telling, what stories we end up believing, and there are a lot of really poisonous stories out there right now that have a lot of dangerous effects. But we need to create these new stories and these new mythologies that can deliver us into what I think should be a better future.
10:26 (music break)
11:24 AW – This is Alex Wise in Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to author and podcaster Jared Yates Sexton. His new book is called the Midnight Kingdom: A history of power, paranoia and the coming crisis. So Jared, one of the common threads through your historical breakdown in the Midnight Kingdom is the misuse of religiosity. Give us some of the bullet points if you will and then bring us up to date with the Christian nationalist movement here in the US.
11:54 JYS – Yeah, so I was raised in an evangelical background where I was absolutely surrounded by so much paranoia, so many conspiracy theories. The idea at all times, Alex, was that I, personally, as a saved Christian was doing battle with like the actual devil constantly right? And by the way like the devil could show up in your house. Or he could get you through movies through music through your friends through popular culture, which by the way, for anybody listening. And they’re like that sounds like an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. You are not wrong, right? Like it’s the exact same things, but that’s like a lot of people like myself were raised in that environment. Well, it turns out that from the moment that Christianity was merged into state power with ancient Rome, there are these parts of Christianity that, when weaponized, are incredibly useful for oppression and incredibly useful for authoritarians.
12:47 AW – So you’re saying we can expand the family dynamic of using the devil for a parent to get what they want out of their kid, and then transmogrify that into a government using the same?
13:03 JYS – That’s a really perfect way of putting it. So one thing is apocalypticism, for instance, I was raised up in a church where basically every Sunday you only read from the Book of Revelation. You know you weren’t reading a lot about Jesus going out and helping lepers, and you know the prostitutes, right? You weren’t talking about those things. You were talking about a coming apocalypse that could happen at any given moment, right? And what’s even more, it meant that you were at war with evil. It meant that you were a participant in an invisible war, and everything that you did and everything that happened around you was part of that. Which meant that you know, as the government was, I don’t know. Moving forward civil rights, it was allowing you know, gay people more rights and protections. As women were being treated better, these were schemes by the devil to destroy the world right? So every single issue at every given moment was a life or death struggle if you didn’t oppress other people right? If you didn’t ensure that like those people were put in their place because they were evil, it wasn’t that they wanted more rights. It’s not that they wanted a better world, it was that they were part of a larger conspiracy.If you didn’t do something about it, the world could end it. It literally was capital G, Good, versus capital E, Evil. That apocalypticism of course we still see that today the second is the idea of what you would call holy persecution or positive persecution, and this was an idea that Saint Augustine. Came up with this is the idea that if you have God on your side right, if you are doing something on behalf of the Almighty power, you know in the heavens then there’s nothing you could do that was wrong. So you could persecute people who were not true believers, right? You could persecute people outside of the church because you were doing it out of love. Because you were doing it out of protection of the church, and so as a result it legitimized terrorizing people oppressing people, hurting people and and to go ahead and bring it forward to. Where we are now. What is happening with Christian nationalism right now? Which is again the merging of politics and state power along with the ideas of Christianity that I’m talking about here. In this case, you’re not taking rights away from women over their body. You’re fighting a holy war. You’re literally battling Satan. And those people who want rights over their bodies, well, you know you’re doing something in their own good. You know you’re doing, you’re you’re oppressing them to benefit them. So as a result, it’s positive persecution. And what this does is it creates a story for the believer that makes them not feel bad about what they’re supporting. They don’t feel bad about oppressing people because they have a story that tells them that not only is this necessary, but this is wholly. This is good. You are actually benefiting the universe. You’re benefiting your soul and you’re benefiting God and those aspects when they’re combined, I mean they they create everything from wars, coups, genocides, you name it.
16:02 AW – And when we saw the January 6th committee – the breaking down some of these characters who are storming the capitol, it speaks to what you’re talking about here in terms of these people really had tethered themselves to this idea of Trump in a divine sort of way. And they had given themselves, I mean, I think we all like to think that we are doing something for a greater good, but when you bring God into the mix then it becomes zealotry and things can get ugly very.
16:34 JYS – They really can, and I think January 6th is a really good example of this because more and more people we’re talking millions of people in the Republican Party now believe queue and on principles and don’t even know it’s queue. And on they don’t even have the label to attach to it, right? Christian nationalism is the exact same thing Trump is preaching. All this same stuff, they are also coming around to believing just like these paramilitary groups that maybe democracy needs to be done away with maybe violence is necessary in order to you know, square the circle in American. As a result, what we’re actually looking at here is who believes these stories, right? Who is it that is actually convinced by them and lives through them?
17:17 AW – Which is religion! What are the stories supposed to mean to you? And we can see that these stories from a Bible, a Jesus, who’s preaching peace and love can somehow be altered to fit an agenda, no matter how draconian it may be, and this has been through history, getting back to your book. You look at these rising authoritarian elements, but were you following the Demar Hamlin story at all? This Buffalo Bills player who had a heart attack on the field?
17:48 JYS – Yes
17:54 AW – This is a man who was near death on the field, but then modern medicine saved him. They knew what happened to him and they got him incredible help quickly and he’s OK now. But I saw people like Tony Dungy and ex coach who’s got a big platform and NBC has been associated with a lot of anti LGBTQ issues through the years and I forget the other reporter from like the USA TODAY. They just the message was echoed throughout the Internet that this proves that the power of prayer is that it works and I felt like that was such a wrong message and that this is not a time for you to be proselytizing or evangelizing, and it’s dismissive not only of modern medicine, but of non-believers. And yet it’s acceptable on mainstream platforms, which I find really head scratching and frustrating.
18:42 JYS – Well, the United States is really bizarre. I mean, the amount of people who still believe in supernatural beings and and supernatural forces. You know at play every day is, it’s incredible, but I will go ahead and I think this is an important thing to get into the psychological aspect of religion. And by the way, I want to make very clear what we’re talking about. Here it is weaponized. We’re talking about what I would actually refer to as heretical religion.
19:09 AW – So antithetical to the teachings of almost any religion.
19:13 JYS – Absolutely and the amazing thing is how these things are usable. I think we’re all aware of that, but what it does is it takes care of cognitive dissonance, right? Because so for instance. My family has similar situations, so if somebody you know I’ll even take Damar Hamlin out of it. Like if somebody in the family has like a massive heart attack. They will sit there and they’ll pray for the health of the person, right? If the person’s health improves, then the prayer helped. If the prayers didn’t work, it was God’s plan, right? And what it does is it creates sort of a a shortcut to get around sort of more complex problems, right? It takes the moral ambiguity of the world and sort of melts it down and turns it into something fungible, and I think that’s the really important thing in all. Of this, when we’re talking about life, death but also with politics and actual, very hard issues, right? Like complicated issues, what we do is is we take these stories and we can go ahead and package them. However we want to go ahead and prove whatever it is that we already believe. And it sort of again squares that circle. It is the quickest way to go ahead and take these morally ambiguous and or complicated ideas and to go ahead and just package them up and to move them out. And it’s a real problem that this is still how we view the world and how we’re still operating within the world.
21:24 (music break)
21:26 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to author and podcaster Jared Yates Sexton. His podcast is the Muckrake and his latest book is entitled The Midnight Kingdom, a History of Power, Paranoia and the Coming Crisis. So speaking of paranoia, let’s turn to Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, who has been dubbed by many as as the heir apparent to leading the Republican Party. I don’t see DeSantis as being analogous to Trump in that I don’t think he’s very charming or magnetic. If you’ve seen the guy speak, he’s obviously crafty. He’s not a dummy. He seems to have taken the meanness from Trump, and he decided that’s the brand. Will that sell on a national scale, in your opinion, Jared?
22:15 JYS – Whenever I talk about De Santis, there’s a couple of things I want to make very clear. One, he is a more competent, intelligent, disciplined person than Donald Trump. You know Trump one of the problems with Trump in terms of like getting things done. And by the way he you know everybody looks at like what Trump did is he was running for president and all of the antics or whatever. When he was elected president, he basically looked at the Heritage Foundation, which is a, you know, a conservative right wing think tank. They just handed him, you know, a list of things to do. He’s like, yeah, absolutely let’s do that.
22:48 AW – He didn’t care, he was not a political animal. DeSantis is obviously a political animal, so I think he’s more dangerous in many ways. I guess the question though is will it play outside of Florida? I mean when we look at his landslide victory in Florida, people are like “Oh well, he’s obviously very popular, but you know he ran against Charlie Crist, who was not a very formidable challenger, I thought.
23:11 JYS – So there’s two ways to look at him, So what concerns me is this one I am seeing a lot of so-called liberals and Never Trumpers who are absolutely flocking to Ron DeSantis. I’m seeing Democratic voters who are talking themselves into Ron DeSantis really, and I’ll tell you why, because he is disciplined and he is serious and a lot of the things that he’s doing authoritarian things. They’re either under the radar or there are a lot of liberals out there who are a little bit uncomfortable with things like trans and gay people, and they don’t like to admit it, right? This is one of the reasons why like Ronald Reagan was able to get the votes that he did like because a lot of people have espoused principles that aren’t really their principles they’re tired of “wokeness” or the “Left,” even though there is no left in the United States of America, and so I think actually, the closer that we get to what’s getting ready to happen. I think you’re going to see people cross over who would have been horrified to have been told they would vote for a Republican a few years ago, particularly if our economy crumbles. Which is looking more and more likely that we’re going to have some economic tremors in the next couple of years, which I think is going to possibly open things up for DeSantis. It’s worrisome, it’s really, really worrisome also to think about. There’s an aspect of DeSantis that I think and, I always hesitate to talk about this because I don’t want to give these people ideas – there is one missing component of this right wing authoritarian movement. We have Christian nationalism right? We have that libertarian streak in there. We have the paranoid streak in there. What we’re missing is militarism and DeSantis is a veteran and DeSantis likes to lean on that stuff whenever he’s making his videos or his fundraisers or any of those things. If we are looking at a potential second Cold War, this one with China, which by the way has already animated both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. You know it’s already leading to a change in policy. A change in how we fund things, how we’re moving forward. You add in militarism on that side. That’s a really dangerous. Cocktail and you’re exactly right. DeSantis is not as magnetic as Trump. He doesn’t have the charisma that Trump has as ugly as that charisma is, right?
25:24 AW – And certainly not as charismatic as a Reagan.
25:27 JYS – Exactly so you start adding in the elements of military. And America is a militaristic country and all of these problems that we’re talking about they can be, quote UN quote, solved through militarism. You know, even though they can’t be, I think that’s the missing component. I pray to God that that doesn’t end up coming online and it doesn’t end up combining with some sort of a DeSantis move, but I have to tell you that if it happens like, things are going to get really weird, really fast.
25:54 AW – Yes, he’s a worrisome character, no doubt, and I think if it’s not him, there’s somebody else who will emerge. And I’m no Nostradamus. I completely underestimated Donald Trump’s chances to ascend to the White House, but I just I tend to think of people wanting to feel good when they go to the ballot box. They can’t see them being purely motivated by hate in a mass way in this country. We’re just so heterogeneous that I can’t see us. All getting in lockstep to be against things which we’ve seen with DeSantis’s brand of authoritarianism.
26:30 JYS – So that’s part of it I think is I think that DeSantis’s message has been we’re tired of all of the fighting and all of the wokeness. And by the way, a lot of liberals are a lot of them. You know, we’ve seen this in the past couple of years where it’s like, oh the woke left is too far, cancel culture. There is an aspect to it where you know, I think Biden. Biden basically promised that he was going to get things back to normal and first of all I want to point something out normal before Donald Trump was not normal. It was not OK, it was still bad. Donald Trump was a symptom of the disease. He wasn’t the disease. The fear that I have is that DeSantis will offer order. I think in a way it can be the idea of oh, we can just return to normal, but it’s not going to be a return to normal because normal itself is is problematic. So I those are the fears I have. And DeSantis has gotten not just the support of the MAGA world, he’s gotten the support of the people who were never Trumpers. He’s gotten the support of like all of the donors who have just moved away from Trump and moved to him. I think that he is a really, really potent candidate for that party moving forward. But that being said. It’s almost impossible to predict this political environment anymore, you know. I mean, like this is just a wild moment.
27:54 AW – Well, I always appreciate your insights. Jared Yates Sexton, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
27:59 JYS – Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Problem Child, Monty Python, and The Blind Boys of Alabama. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com. To stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Jared Yates Sexton on American Democracy and Religion appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Back in the 16th century, when England began to run out of trees, it started burning coal. And by 1700, most Brits were using coal as their main source of fuel. But then coal became scarce. To come full circle, today England is burning large amounts of wood again – much of it in the form of wood pellets from the US. Wood has somehow been designated as a renewable energy source since the Kyoto Protocol in 1992 and the repercussions have been devastating. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to journalist Justin Catanoso, a journalism professor at Wake Forest University, about the dangers of this latest transition to a fuel source which is leading to deforestation and pollution. We learn about the wood pellet industry, manufacturing giant Enviva, and the wide-ranging problems caused by burning trees.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability.
00:22 Justin Catanoso (JC) – If more countries just did that one thing, if they shifted their definition of woody biomass from renewable to not renewable and you can make that a caveat because the fact of the matter is woody biomass is in time frames that aren’t relative, that aren’t salient in this particular climate crisis.
00:47 Narrator – Back in the 16th century, when England began to run out of trees, it started burning coal. And by 1700, most Brits were using coal as their main source of fuel. But then coal became scarce. To come full circle, today England is burning large amounts of wood again – much of it in the form of wood pellets from the US. Wood has somehow been designated as a renewable energy source since the Kyoto Protocol in 1992 and the repercussions have been devastating. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to journalist Justin Catanoso, a journalism professor at Wake Forest University, about the dangers of this latest transition to a fuel source which is leading to deforestation and pollution. We learn about the wood pellet industry, manufacturing giant Enviva, and the wide-ranging problems caused by burning trees.
02:00 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Justin Catanoso. He is an environmental journalist and a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University. Justin, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:12 Justin Catanoso (JC) – Thanks, Alex, thanks for having me on.
02:14 Alex Wise (AW) – So you have a piece up on Mongabay entitled “The Netherlands to Stop Paying Subsidies to Untruthful Biomass Firms. This is centering around wood pellets and this is a fuel that you’ve covered extensively. Why is this move by the Netherlands important?
02:35 Justin Catanoso (JC) – Well, let’s talk first about where the move came from. I’ve been a journalist a really long time, Alex, and we hope our reporting has impact and often you never get to see it. But I had a story post on Mongabay a month ago in which I had my own observations of the harvesting of wood for wood pellets by the world’s largest maker of wood pellets, Enviva. But the real important aspect of that story was the very first whistleblower from inside the biomass industry. This was a high-ranking employee at 2 plants at Enviva in the state of North Carolina, which is where you’re reaching me right now and he worked for Enviva for more than two years. He was in charge of all the machines that turned wood and wood chips into wood pellets. He was the maintenance leader and this is the first guy to ever go public from inside the industry, basically calling out Enviva on its environmental credentials on its claims of being environmentally friendly, climate friendly, and a sustainable renewable source of bioenergy.
03:51 AW – So let’s take a step back and explain to our listeners what these wood pellets are – kind of give us a range of the biomass that we’ve heard that that’s a very kind of gentle, generous term biomass. It sounds great, and it sounds like you’re burning your compost pile in the back, but on the other end of the spectrum it can be quite nefarious.
04:13 JC – So I mean, you’re right, there is a range of bioenergy like we grow a lot of corn to go into to go into gasoline. Soy gets turned into bioenergy. There are lots of crops that are grown to be turned into bioenergy. But woody biomass is what we’re talking about. And folks may know it from their backyard grills from wood stoves that they might have as a secondary heat source in a cabin or a small house at that sort of consumer scale is not that bad. This wood generally comes from wood waste stuff that lumber yards are discarding and treetops and limbs and things like that. That’s what goes into sort of small scale consumer. Wood pellets that you would buy in £50 bags at a Home Depot or a Lowe’s or something like that. But what we’re talking about over the last 10 to 12 years was the rise of industrial scale wood burning for energy. And it’s replacing coal. And so in the state of North Carolina where Enviva has four plants. They’re not putting wood pellets in the £50 bags, they’re putting it on to freighter ships. They’ve got a designated port in Wilmington, NC and they shipped 2.6 million metric tons of wood pellets just from North Carolina to the European Union and the United Kingdom to be burned instead of coal in formerly, coal-fired power plants, so that’s what we’re talking about. And this is coming largely from native forests. It’s coming some from residue, but mostly from whole trees that are being harvested on private property throughout eastern North Carolina, southern Virginia and the Deep South.
06:07 AW – Now, besides the fact that wood smoke is pretty bad for human lungs and not good for trying to reduce our carbon emissions, the Netherlands and others who are blowing the whistle on this practice. The problem isn’t just these virgin forests, so are there examples of sound wood pellet manufacturing that’s not using virgin forests as its feedstock, Justin?
06:36 JC – So it’s a fair question and in vivo on their website actually says and defines. And I write about this in my story, where I feature the whistleblower. They say there’s good biomass and there’s bad biomass. Good biomass is residue, it’s lumber waste, it’s tree tops and limbs. It’s the stuff that’s sitting on the forest floor – It’s not whole trees. It’s not hardwoods. And bad biomass contributes to deforestation, harms biodiverse habitats, things like that.
07:11 AW – And you said that this has really kind of blossomed as an industry in the last decade 10 to 12 years. It seems kind of unfathomable in a lot of ways that it would, as we’re getting off of coal, and we’re trying to wean ourselves off of these bad fuels. It seems like wood is taking us further back than what we were doing in in the industrial revolution, in our burning of coal.
07:35 JC – There are lots of scientists that say exactly that Alex and this began in 1997 with the Kyoto Protocol as they were sort of defining what renewable energy was. They said hydro is renewable, solar is renewable, wind is renewable. And biomass is renewable. The thing that they said in 1997 and what they were thinking, is that, cut a tree. Plant a tree. Trees regrow and therefore this is a renewable energy source. Now it took a while before the industry saw this as an opportunity, but it really kind of coincided at a time when the European Union and the United Kingdom was mandating that its energy production wean itself off coal and so they’ve got. Essentially this fixed cost of all these coal-fired power plants, and it’s expensive to build all the windmills and all the solar installations that you would need to replace the energy that you’re getting from coal. And here’s the Kyoto Protocol with a policy saying, well, you can burn wood. And that would be a renewable energy resource, and they actually went a step further and said it’s not only renewable, it should be considered carbon neutral, which means that countries that burn wood do not have to claim the emissions at the smokestack. This gets a little complicated, but the emissions are actually supposed to be counted in the country where the wood is collected. It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because one reason is the United States is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol, but we’re the number one producer of wood pellets in the World so this loophole has been created for an industry to flourish and for countries unfortunately to be expedient rather than accurate. And in how they manage the renewable energy supply. So this is all legal. It’s all aboveboard, but Germany essentially is replacing wood for coal. And in the process generating more emissions than if they kept burning coal and the reason for that is that wood pellets are not as energy dense as coal. So you have to burn more wood to come up with the same amount of energy than if you were burning coal, but on paper, all of this, is allegedly a good thing. In reality, the science suggests that we’re destroying forests. We’re reducing our carbon sinks and we’re increasing carbon emissions at the very time when we need to. Be reducing them.
10:15 AW – And the Netherlands is trying to change this reality, what does this mean? Can Dutch lawmakers be a spark, if you will, to affect change in how nations view these wood pellets, Justin.
10:33 JC – It’s too early to say, but there are two big things that happened last month that I reported on. One was in the Netherlands and the other one was in Australia. Now that what happened in Australia may even be more significant than what happened in the Netherlands. So let me just take the Netherlands first. So essentially, the House of Representatives in the Netherlands passed a motion that compels the Dutch Government. To ensure that wood pellets that they use and they import hundreds of thousands of tons of wood pellets a year, but wood pellets that they import from outside from really any source, that it be certified – that it be inspected and certified that is not contributing to deforestation is not harming biodiversity and is not reducing tree cover and sort of having a worse impact on climate change. That’s a significant development by one country. Will that spread to other individual EU countries that are burning biomass? We’ll see. There are lots of countries that not only depend on biomass. Further energy, Belgium being one, Italy being another Germany, Denmark. They all burn a lot of wood pellets, but then you’ve got countries in the EU, in Eastern Europe, Latvia, Estonia, Romania and then in Scandinavia you’ve got Finland and Sweden, which are producing wood pellets. They’ve got forests, they’ve got forests to cut down, so in those governments you probably aren’t going to see a lot of movement, but there’s a liberal streak in the Netherlands, and there’s also a virulent anti biomass movement that has turned the public almost wholeheartedly against biomass burning in that particular country, so we’ll see if that spreads. But what happened in Australia is also significant, because what they did in mid-december was that they by definition. Said that, woody biomass cannot be considered a renewable energy source that if you produce import or use woody biomass to generate energy, you will not get renewable energy certificates. This is significant for one reason. There is no biomass industry to speak of in Australia. They were knocking on the door. There were four plants that were getting ready to transition. This essentially that rule change that that definition change essentially keeps the biomass industry from getting a foothold in Australia. Yeah, but it also puts a G20 country at odds with the definition that is followed by the European Union and the United Kingdom, and that is, in the United Kingdom and the European Union, that woody biomass is a renewable energy source and that it can be burned in instead of coal, and that you can get renewable energy credit for it and subsidized this stuff to the tune of billions of EUR or billions of pounds a year, which is what they’re doing right now. I don’t know how these two first world countries can exist, can coexist with this difference of definition.
13:58 (music break)
14:53 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to journalist Justin Catanoso. So you mentioned, Justin, that you’re in North Carolina and Enviva has four plants there and is exporting just tons of wood pellets cut down from forest is that all from North Carolina or that would being sourced from all over North America?
15:16 JC – No, it’s just from North Carolina. So these plants you know this is a. This is a a profitable industry Enviva went over a billion dollars in revenue in in 2021. It was their best year ever. They’ve been a public company since 2015. They’ve been around as a company for over 10 years.
15:32 AW – This is their primary product?
15:34 JC – This is their only product.
15:35 AW – So they’re not making paper or anything like that?
15:38 JC – No, all they do is make wood pellets and they’re the world’s largest producer of wood pellets they produce. 6 million metric tons of wood pellets a year right now, with plans as they stated a year ago to go to 13 million metric tons, all coming from the Southeastern United States. Within five years, all coming essentially from native forests or most of it coming from native forests. So their sourcing areas tend to be 50 miles within the plant itself. It’s costly to have these trees knocked down. It’s costly to have them either chipped on site and then trucked to their to their plants.
Or have the the the tree trunks themselves trucked so they’re not bringing in wood from all over North America. They’re getting it from a 50 mile radius, and the significance of that is is that we’re losing. Our tree cover at a fairly rapid. The rate in eastern North Carolina I I cite a study in my story a month ago where I featured the whistleblower from the Southern Environmental Law Center that says the harvest area within 3 overlapping plants in eastern North Carolina and southern Virginia by Enviva is contributing to a net force. Loss of 6% a year or about 4600 acres of woodland a year. We’re losing above and beyond any regrowth or replanting that’s taking on. It’s fairly significant.
17:04 AW – How are they able to just? Devastate our forests like this.
17:08 JC – So there’s a reason why Enviva is only collecting wood in the southeast. 90% of wooded land in the southeast is in private hands. Enviva doesn’t cut down a single tree. Enviva outsources that to logging companies and trucking company.
17:25 AW – They’re almost like the waste management company for the wood industry.
17:29 JC – Exactly, but they basically say this is how many tons of fiber and that’s what they call it fiber. We need a day to keep our plants humming so we need our contracts in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and increasingly, Japan and South Korea. The loggers are knocking on doors. And basically saying look, it looks to me like you’ve got 1000 acres of land here. You’re paying taxes on all this land. I’ll give you this much money to if you’ll let me have 10 to 15% of your trees. And now Enviva doesn’t get all of that. I need to be clear about that Enviva is correct in that it’s not taking all of the trees. They get, they get knocked down on a cut site. The largest trees, the straightest trees. Those are being those are being prepared to go to sawmills, but I went in in early November. I went to a cut site. It was 52 acres. It was in the town of Edenton. Which is right on the coast and This site is owned by the town of Edenton and they contracted with the logging company to have the whole site cleared. Because that’s going to be an industrial development and what I saw on that site was big logs being set aside to go to sawmills and then the rest was being chipped and sent to an Enviva pellet plant about 35 miles away. When I talked to the the logger in charge of that cut block. I asked him what you know what percentage was going to Enviva and he said about half. And that’s generally what they’re taking at these different cut sites wherever they’re harvesting wood in in East Eastern North Carolina, or the five plants that they have in the Deep South in Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana.
19:19 AW – Are they hiding the fact that these are virgin trees, sometimes being cut down in native forests?
19:25 JC – So these are the questions that are difficult to get at quite frankly, and it’s why this is such a challenging story to cover. Enviva says rightfully so that they’re not taking all the wood from that site, they’re actually just taking what’s deemed low value wood, low value wood to them are smaller trees, cooka trees. Trees that lumber mills don’t want because they can’t be turned into board feet. OK, the fact of the matter is birds, animals, insects don’t really care whether trees are straight or crooked like these biodiverse habitats rely on trees of all kinds. In eastern North Carolina, which is subject to some of the most ferocious storms that we have on the East Coast, intact forests are our front line of defense against climate change and climate driven calamities. And we’re losing 4600 acres of woodland a year in just three harvest areas in eastern North Carolina. In Virginia now, only half of that wood is going to Enviva, but Enviva is increasing the demand for that wood. So the question becomes, and it’s one that I can’t answer that 52 acre cut block if Enviva wasn’t taking half of that wood, would it have been profitable for that logging company to even say, yeah, we’ll we’ll clear that lot. If it had to leave half of the trees on the site, or if they had to go in there and selectively log, which is really expensive. So when Eniva is pushing the demand for wood at a time in eastern North Carolina, where the demand for wood is actually dropping off because there’s not as much demand for paper, there’s not as much demand for fluff. There’s not as much demand for these sort of low grade paper products. There’s still big demand for lumber, but that takes bigger trees.
21:14 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to journalist Justin Catanoso. He’s also a journalism professor at Wake Forest University. So can existing coal plants be easily outfitted to burn biomass? How have grids adopted this new fuel so readily, I mean you, you hear about some of these plants can take years and years to build, but there must be a work around here, right?
21:43 JC – Correct – I mean, this is what’s made by woody mass so popular. Quite frankly because it is inexpensive for countries to meet their energy needs without having to build new energy installations. I don’t know what the retrofit is, but I don’t think it’s that difficult. You’re simply dumping a different source. Into your hoppers in terms of what you’re burning, instead of burning coal, you’re burning wood and that investment that you’ve put into that power. Plant gets to be used and you have the added benefit. Again, according to policy, completely legal of not having to count those emissions. So even though your emissions are expanding in the real world and to nature on paper, as you as you report back to the UN, you can say, “look, we’ve reduced our carbon emissions by X percentage because we’re using this renewable energy source.” Alex, in the European Union 60% of renewable energy comes from burning wood. 60%.
22:45 AW – When we look at the woody biomass industry. These wood pellets, they’re mostly being used for fueling electrical grids, correct? These are big issues on a government level, so it can be a little more despairing because of that.
23:04 JC – This is up to policymakers I. I mean, you know there are NGO’s that are fighting this around the world literally and there are sources of mine in Japan in South Korea. In a host of countries in the European Union in the UK, in British Columbia and in the Southeastern United States, including the Dogwood Alliance is 1, which is one of the bigger names fighting biomass. It’s based right here in North Carolina, you know, their their goals and and they’re making a lot of progress in this is turning public opinion against this energy source as they come. Understand the impact that it’s having on the environment and that it’s not having the emissions reduction impact that it it claims to and, and this becomes sort of an associated impact where you hope that public opinion will drive policymakers to change. Here in North Carolina it is our policy to treat the manufacturing of wood pellets like the manufacturing of anything else that we do in the state, whether it’s textiles or furniture or tobacco, and so it’s regulated like any other manufacturing industry. However, by policy we’ve also stated. Governor Cooper has stated in his renewable energy plan that North Carolina will never burn wood pellets for energy. Even though we are producing more wood pellets in North Carolina, pretty much anybody else. But he’s not going to bat in the legislature to say we need to clamp down on this industry because they are taking away our tree cover in eastern North Carolina. These plants operate in four of the poorest counties in North Carolina. They happen to be majority African American. They are poor. They go in and they build $100 million plant without asking for any economic incentives. They immediately become the largest taxpayer, if not one of the largest taxpayers in the county. They give a little bit of money to the schools to the EMS, to you know the recreation leagues and they become a good citizen. They employ anywhere from 50 to 100 people. The pollution that they that they create is a problem. The noise pollution is a problem. The truck traffic is a is a problem. The dust that comes out of these plants within a several mile radius of the plant. But they put up with it because it’s sort of an economic bonus to communities that don’t have any economic development.
25:29 AW – So let’s assume that Enviva is telling the truth and that they’re not harvesting native forest for this. Is that enough, Justin?
25:39 JC – So you know if if we if we take them at their word and and what they said to me when I was doing my story is that they are not contributing to deforestation, that forests are actually growing back faster than they are cutting them down. Now I’ve got independent research that that undermines that, but let’s just take them at their word that they are sustainable, and they are not contributing to biodiversity loss, or they’re not contributing to deforestation. Is this OK? You’ve got to look at the emissions, Alex. The Paris Agreement is all about reducing carbon emissions first and foremost second. It’s about preserving forests and stopping or slowing down, deforestation, whatever, wherever it occurs. But if we just look at emit what burning biomass does not do is reduce emissions, and there are countless studies that have demonstrated this you can’t solve. The climate crisis by burning something else. If more countries just did that one thing, if they shifted their definition of woody buy a mass from renewable to not renewable and and you can make that a caveat because the fact of the matter is woody biomass is renewable. In time frames that aren’t relative that aren’t salient in this particular climate crisis, so the study that gets cited the most is by a scientist at MIT named John Sternum, and he estimates that when you clear cut a lot, and if you replant it, it takes 44 years to 100 years. For the trees that you’ve taken off that lot and turned into smoke. For those new trees that you planted to pull that smoke to pull that carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.
27:25 AW – Technically renewable, but a really long time, until it renews.
27:29 JC – Exactly, we don’t have that kind of time in this climate crisis. You know, the United Nations tells us we basically have until 2030 to dramatically decarbonize the major economies of the world. If we’re going to have a shot at slowing what appears to be an inexorable rate. Of global warming that we are experiencing right now, and as you’re experiencing in California right now, with these climate driven rain storms that you just don’t see very often.
27:57 AW – Justin Catanoso thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 JC – Alex, it’s been pleasure. Thank you.
28:17 AW – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Horace Silver and Hank Williams. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com. To stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
Environmental, social and corporate governance, referred to as ESG, is a set of factors that conscientious capitalists use to identify worthy investments. For most of the movement’s relatively brief existence, ESG has fallen under the purview of sustainability experts. Recently, however, Wall Street appears to have embraced ESG with both arms – according to some estimates, last year over $41 trillion in global ESG assets were traded. This turn has liberals and environmentalists concerned that the definition of what qualifies as an ESG-friendly company may be watered-down. At the same time, prominent Republicans are decrying the use of ESG factors, claiming that it’s part of the “woke mob’s war on fossil fuels.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Rebecca Leber, a senior climate reporter at Vox. She unpacks the complex conservative position on the ESG movement and explains why she finds it so puzzling and troubling.
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Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood product. Yet, the industry is rife with problems, from human slavery to ecological devastation. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Daniel Russek, the founder and CEO of Atarraya, a Mexican-based company whose innovative shrimp farming solution is called Shrimpbox. Russek talks about the problematic practices plaguing the shrimp industry worldwide and gives us a peek into the Shrimpbox approach.
00:01 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:10 Daniel Russek (DR) – I really try not to eat shrimp if it doesn’t come from one of our farms or from a farm I trust. And I didn’t eat shrimp before starting this venture.
00:29 Narrator – Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood product, yet the industry is rife with problems from human slavery to ecological devastation. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak to Daniel Russek, the founder and CEO of Atarraya, a Mexican based company whose innovative shrimp farming solution is called Shrimpbox. Russek talks about the problematic practices plaguing the shrimp industry worldwide and gives us a peek into the Shrimpbox approach.
01:16 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Daniel Russek. Daniel is the CEO and founder of Atarraya and their product is called Shrimpbox. Daniel, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:27 Daniel Russek (DR ) – Hi Alex, happy to be here.
01:30 Alex Wise (AW) – So first, why don’t you explain the problem that a lot of consumers may not be aware of, which is the shrimping industry and then let’s dive into the solution that Shrimpbox your product is offering. So what is the problem with shrimp in general, Daniel?
01:47 DR – So I think that the first problem with shrimp is that the market cannot get enough of it. Basically, it’s the number one seafood product that in almost any country both weight, volume and value, most notably by value. For instance, Americans spend 70% more money on shrimp than on the 2nd place, which is salmon so and where you have when you have a market that cannot get enough of anything you have on the other side. People that are willing to do anything to get it right. So you have basically two options, which is one is wild catch but the problem with shrimp is that they don’t swim most of the time what they do is that they walk so they hang out on the on the seabed. And so the only way to get them is basically dragging that no, so you need to drag the bottom of the ocean, where something between 50 to 90% depending on who’s counting of the ocean life, lift, snow or the ocean biomass live.
02:52 AW – So the shrimp themselves might be wild caught, but then they may be catching some other extra stuff in these nets which are damaging the ecosystem?
03:01 DR – Yeah, the nice word for it is bycatch. So and basically shrimp wild catch is responsible for 50% of the global by catch and bycatch means yes, killing something for the benefit of no one from the ocean. So yeah, so that is that is the problem with traditional source, which is wild catch and wild catch numbers are not going anywhere. We’re not going to get another million kilograms from the ocean. So then shrimp farming was developed and it was developed in countries like Mexico and Ecuador that developed the technology early on. But then the problem is that basically, shrimp farms rely on a continuous water exchange with the ocean on a scale that is comparable to 1/2 a million people. For instance, the average shrimp farm in Mexico is considered to be 200 hectares or about 400 acres, and it has a continuous water exchange like 1/2 a million people city.
04:06 AW – Can you explain what you mean by water exchange?
04:08 DR – Yes, it’s basically so…Have you ever if you ever had a fish, a fish tank in your house? After some time if you get greedy and you put more fish more hobby fish there then they will start dying with their mouths to the surface. That’s because of erasure. No, that’s because of oxygen. So they basically take the oxygen through their gills. This is how they breathe, so but you put basically an air pump there and it’s in. Problem solved. No, at least with the with the decision, but the second problem is more important. At least that was what gave me problem with my mom when I had a fish tank in my house, which is the water gets green. Why does it get green? Because shrimp and fish they breathe through their gills, but they also metabolize. They get rid of the of nitrogen and. This is so they eat nitrogen in their protein and they get rid of it through their gills. So in the form of ammonium. So this ammonia start building up and the water gets green because ammonia is a fertilizer. So there are algae that are floating in the in the air and this algae makes the water column green. So shrimp farmers fish farmers. We don’t care if the water gets green. The problem is that after certain threshold after a certain concentration, the ammonia becomes toxic and this gives the shrimp or the fish something that is called the nitrogen syndrome. They cannot get rid of the of the of the ammonia and they die.
05:37 AW – So you need a healthy level of water exchange to keep whatever the marine life might be alive?
05:45 DR – That’s one strategy. Yes, that’s a traditional strategy dilution. So basically in the case of the kid, it has a toilet to flush the water, and in the case of shrimp farming, it’s basically the ocean that’s the ocean, so you are taking water from the ocean and discharging it at the same rate in order to keep your levels at the same. To keep your levels on the outflow. The problem is contamination. It’s pollution so and that water has organic matter. But also, shrimp farmers. I’m sad to say that some of them they use traditional shrimp farmers. They use pesticides, for instance because when they are filling their ponds. They are bringing in crustaceans, other kinds of crustaceans, so they have an insecticide to the water in order to kill the competition, because otherwise the feed conversion ratio goes up now, which is your most important cost so they have toxins to kill competition from shrimp. So then the result from these traditional shrimp farms can be dead zones in nearby ocean regions or inlets.
06:45 AW – And the main problem is that the surrounding areas can get toxified?
06:58 DR – It could be. Yes, exactly so the I don’t think that there is sufficient data on these on what was what has been the impact on the on the on the water outflows. I don’t know anybody that is that is researching this, but what is really known is that in order to get these easy access to water. Is the mangrove deforestation that that this has caused so instead of fighting or investing millions of dollars to create a structure that brings water from the open ocean, you’re located by a lagoon. So that’s what shrimp farming does, so mangrove forests are very efficient in terms of. Carbon carbon capture five times as efficient as any rainforest in the world. So in 50% of what we have lost in the world. In terms of mangrove forests, which are also nurseries for the ocean, have been devastated by the traditional shrimp industry.
07:56 AW – And what regions are these most prevalent in, both mangrove forests and shrimp farming?
08:03 DR – It’s a good question because so there are many crustaceans and there are many shrimp species in the world, but there is really only one that has been properly domesticated and by this I mean that you can get actually a selective breeding out of them so you can get the broodstock from the ocean. And you get the larvae and those library can become your boots like those are your F1F2F3 blah blah blah and after many generations you have selective breeding for the only species that this has been successfully made. And and there’s an industry around it. Is Pinellas Vannamei Pacific wide leg shrimp and the native area of these of these species is from the Sinaloa, from the Sinaloa coast, in in the West Coast of Mexico to Peru in the Pacific.
08:50 AW – These are different than the Southeast Asian farming species or are they the same?
08:55 DR – They are the same so basically this is the shrimp that has been adopted everywhere in the world to grow shrimp? So in places where you have work that are on these on these on this region on this tropical region you can get 3 cycles per year and in places where you’re outside of these of these temperatures you can get one cycle a year.
09:17 AW – So my father loves Ruby red shrimp. He lives in New Orleans. These are not the kind of species then that can be farmed?
09:25 DR – If they come from wild catch, most likely they are not, and if they are come from the coast from the Gulf Coast, yes, most likely they are not. So we have wild catch and now we have the problems we have shrimp farming traditional stream farming and now we know the the problem so but but I talked about the problem on the outflow of the water, so the problem on the outlook of the water is pollution and in in order to set the firms, you need to destroy habitat. But then on the in on the water, in on the inlet of the water. The problem is financial because then you get disease. So a typical shrimp firm doesn’t have any way to control the quality of their water, so disease come in to the, to the, to your pond, and you cannot control it. So then the question of this industry if you if you, if you own a farm, is not if but it’s when you’re going to have the existential threat of disease coming at your door and destroying 50 to 70% of your production on any given year.
10:25 AW – And then it becomes a cost benefit analysis of is, is it worth putting this harsher insecticide to kill whatever the disease might be, or cutting costs? Or it sounds like there could be a very slippery slope for a farmer to try to save their crop.
10:43 DR – Exactly and then so they start using antibiotics, which in reality I’ve been farming trim for 12 years and I don’t see any real benefit on antibiotics for shrimp farming.
10:54 AW – But that’s largely prophylactic.
10:56 DR – It’s prophylactic, exactly, and sometimes they use it as a reaction, but most of the disease that we are worried are viruses, so your antibiotic doesn’t have any use for it.
11:07 AW – And then we end up getting traces of that antibiotic in our diet that we’re not maybe counting on.
11:14 DR – Exactly know for sure you’re not, so the and actually, you can Google this and you can see scandals about this frequently. Yeah, that’s the problem.
11:30 (Music Break)
12:34 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Daniel Russek. Daniel is the CEO and founder of Atarraya and their product is Shrimpbox. So Daniel, you’ve laid out the shrimp industry’s issues. What is Shrimpbox doing to try to address some of the shortcomings that we’ve seen up until now?
12:55 DR – So Shrimpbox is a way to…it’s basically a technology to enable local, sustainable and affordable shrimp anywhere in the world. So it’s basically enables anybody to to grow shrimp in urban settings, in semi-urban settings. And the reason why it’s because of the and the most important technology advance of these is the 0 water discharge that is made in a replicable way in an accessible way, so that you don’t need pH D’s on your farm to run it. You basically rely on engineering. Software that encodes these biotech protocols that we have learned for 10 years. And uhm, yeah, in a remote monitoring from experts from human experts that are advising you in case something goes wrong.
13:54 AW – So explain the technology of Shrimpbox and why it’s different from its predecessors when you’re trying to explain this to a shrimp farmer. What are some of the selling points? When does the light go off for them and they say that’s exactly what I’m looking for.
14:10 DR – This is interesting because I’m considering about in my mind I have two farmers and the farmer that I care about is there would be a shrimp farmer in a country like the United States or places where you don’t have shrimp farming really so in the United States 95% of the shrimp that is consumed comes from abroad, so there is no industry in the United States. There is no shrimp farming industry in the other states so for that farmer or would be farmer the important thing is that this is a product that is very easy to market and we have worked for over 10 years in order to make this a reasonable investment. That will give you a good margin so that you can have a good return on your investment and you will have a great over infrastructure and support so that you can thrive so you’re not you’re not by yourself. You will have your baby shrimp, your postlarvae you have the inputs you have, the infrastructure, the maintenance. Monitoring and also if you needed to go to market right and we will partner with you so that you can be successful at race.
15:25 AW – I’m still trying to understand the scale and the technology itself and how it differs from traditional shrimp farms.
15:33 DR – The most important innovation in these are the most important difference is that we don’t need water discharge. We don’t need water exchange, so we can put these Shrimpbox in landlocked areas. We can use any water we can turn it into the chemical conditions that the shrimp needs. And we will read utilize that water many times over so you won’t need to spend a lot of money in creating the saltwater, but also in keeping the heat of that of that of that water. So and this we learned from. Basically we learn from nature because nature doesn’t have this option of disposing nutrients in something that is known nature and then they basically have these dilutional. So the way that nature works or treats this nitrogen imbalance is by creating a microbial community that captures these nitrogen and creates new protein. And this technology is called bioflow and this is basically how water bodies in the world. Uh, maintain its balance, its nutrient balance. So we developed this technology to be applicable to shrimp farming, so this technology is old or at least in theory it’s old, the understanding of microbial communities. It’s it’s old in this regard. But we applied it to shrimp farming. But then the cost of these biotech is complexity, so we turned these protocols into software.
17:17 AW – It can’t be added onto existing systems. You have to start fresh with a stand alone Shrimpbox system. Is that correct?
17:25 DR – Exactly exactly. So basically we have solved everything and the so basically the farm whatever you need in the firm is already in the Shrimpbox, so all the infrastructure is already, it’s there in this in this rain box and then it has sensors, and it has interactors that are connected to a cloud based so software that knows what to do and it’s basically orchestrating all of your production. But it’s also telling us what you need, when will you need feed? When will you need your baby shrimp and where you’re when your production will be ready to market.
17:59 AW – Looking at pictures of your Indianapolis facility, which I want you to describe a little bit later. It looks very futuristic, very high tech, but I can’t help but think that some subsistence shrimp farmer in Indonesia or Thailand. This would be not something that they would be able to afford. Is this going to be something that is scalable to all sorts around the world?
18:23 DR – So yeah, this is a great question. The biotech behind Shrimpbox it’s applicable to any farm and that would be that would be affordable to a traditional trim farmer as well, and the software would be also applicable to a traditional shrimp farmer for many years. We worked on this technology and our goal was to develop it so that traditional shrimp farmers would adopt these zero water exchange. Technology, then after the problem is technology adoption now if you have a good business and you’re making money and then it comes this guy that tells you oh, if you adopted this technology then you won’t destroy the oceans. You might listen, you might not. So the ones that I talked with didn’t listen. So this is why we invented this technology to basically not need to convince anyone in the traditional shrimp farming.
19:25 (Music Break)
20:16 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Daniel Russek. He is the CEO and founder of Atarraya. Their product is Shrimpbox. So Daniel, why don’t you take us on a virtual audio tour of the Indianapolis facility and explain how this might differ from a Siniloan or Chilean or Thai shrimp farm that somebody might have toured?
20:43 DR – Excellent so you are driving around Indianapolis, so the urban area of Indianapolis.
20:51 AW – Nowhere near the ocean.
20:53 DR – Nowhere near the ocean and you just see a warehouse and you and you think oh is there a shrimp farm here? OK, I’ll take a look. So you go and you will see something that looks like a cargo container that has 222 tanks, basically 2 levels. No one on top of each each other, and each of these cargo containers. It has a a control room with many different engines and pumps and sensors and interactors, and if you if you peek because it has Windows, you can actually see the shrimp you will see you will see, basically like a lagoon, no, so you will see water. That is either green or a little bit brown like a natural lagoon and you can just use one of your nets and you can drag shrimp just a little bit and you’ll see live stream. Living there no, and you will see 20 or 40 of these Shrimpboxes depend on when you visit us. Right now we have 5.
21:51 AW – And these boxes are like basically like a truck bed?
21:54 DR – Exactly, it’s a 40 foot HQ cargo container and the reason why it’s because this is the biggest thing that you can move around the world using the intermodal system. So these are program platforms that were manufactured in Mexico City and there are ready to use. So for instance in Indianapolis. We signed the lease in June. We put the first Shrimpbox in July. And our first harvest is going to be in November.
22:21 AW – Yeah, that was my next question is what’s the harvest time? So it’s just three or four months from start to finish? These things mature fast. I guess that’s maybe would lead this to be such a wildly popular product. Besides shrimp being tasty if it’s got a quick harvest time.
22:38 DR – Exactly and and the and the biomass is amazing because the shrimp they grow 10,000 times its size in these four months.
22:47 AW – Wow, does that differ from the wild?
22:51 DR – Well, it’s it’s about so….These are genetic, so this has been selective breeding, you know. So it’s it’s been through a process of selective breeding. It might be three times or four times as fast as the as a wild caught shrimp but through selection. Uh, not genetic engineering, but through selection so, but other than that it’s basically it’s the same animal.
23:17 AW – And I should have asked you this earlier, but what’s the price difference? Usually between wild caught and farmed shrimp, not the Shrimpbox product, but just traditionally in the last, you know, decade, what’s the cost to the farmer itself? Once you’ve kind of got your farm up and running, are your incremental costs comparable to the wild catch or is it actually cheaper? I’m curious how consumers are paying for shrimp versus how producers are paying for their setup costs.
23:47 DR – No, this is a very a very relevant question, because really the average price of the imported shrimp. It’s about if you if you Google. This would be $14 to $18 per kilogram. Now the cost of producing that same shrimp is around $3.5 per kilogram at the farm. So the average consumer is paying basically 75% on intermediation now. That is national intermediation in Mexico or Ecuador and also international intermediation in the United States so it can get to your city.
24:22 AW – So how does that compare versus the wild caught shrimp in terms of price? The main cost for Wild caught is diesel, right?
24:32 DR – So basically the fuel. I think it’s easier to compare this on a price point. And if you get the cheapest commodity, the cheapest frozen commodity, it would be farmed shrimp. And basically we’re talking about the same size, no, imagining that we’re considering the same size. The cheapest commodity would be farmed shrimp somewhere from Asia. No, probably India. And then the top line the most expensive steel commodity shrimp would be wild caught. From a US from an American ship, and the difference would be about 65%.
25:10 AW – And that’s because of Labor and environmental regulations. Or why would the American ship be more expensive versus, let’s say, the Indian ship?
25:19 DR – So here we’re talking about equilibrium prices, so I think it’s both, so it’s also a reflection of cost, but I think it’s also a reflection of what the market is giving value to? No, I think that having a domestic boat, uh, you you. I think that the market gives a little bit more trust to that it’s it has complied with some regulations or some environmental. I don’t know. You can ask the market but it’s really 65% the difference between the cheapest farmed one to the most expensive wild.
25:56 AW – So until a consumer, a Sea Change Radio listener can start sinking their teeth into the Shrimpbox shrimp. What should somebody who loves shrimp do what? What do you do when you go out to buy shrimp from a grocery store or at?
26:10 DR – A restaurant I really try not to eat shrimp. It’s if it doesn’t come from one of our farms or from a farmer I trust and I didn’t eat shrimp before starting this venture.
26:20 AW – You didn’t?
26:21 DR – No
26:21 AW – No, so this venture kind of made you realize that there is hope for people who love this form of protein, but its current state is not really unsustainable, but it’s distasteful in terms of so many different aspects of the industry.
26:39 DR – And literally, because also when you’re getting when you’re getting a shrimp, most of what you’re tasting is the preservatives potassium metabisulfite, for instance, which gives these like kind of salty. Uh, like it dries your mouth so that is not that is not the the flavor of shrimp that is the flavor of the of the preservative, and they need to use it because this is the only way that they can have it for three or five years frozen before you get it.
27:10 AW – So people should just not eat shrimp until they can get a Shrimpbox shrimp. In a best case scenario, when can we start seeing your product in our stores or at at restaurants on the horizon?
27:23 DR – So right now we are starting harvests in Indianapolis, so if you come by we’ll treat you, but this is of course for that area, but we are we’ll start harvesting with from other people farms more like on a commercial scale. We’ll have a a small industry by the end of 2023 that is our goal and we intend to capture 5% of the market with this technology by 2030.
27:53 AW – Well, good luck is a terrific idea, and you’ve taught us a lot about the shrimp industry. Daniel Russek, thank you so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 DR – Thank you very much, Alex.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Grant Green, Allen Toussaint, and Peter Green. Check out our website at seachangeradio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others, and tune into Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Shrimpbox: A Cleaner Approach To Seafood (re-broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Have you ever watched in amazement as a visually impaired person nimbly maneuvers their way through a crowded subway station? Well, some thoughtful innovations are being developed to enable people with low vision to navigate the world with greater ease. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to the founder and CEO of Waymap, Tom Pey, about his start-up company’s breakthrough navigation technology. We discuss his company’s product, look at some of the challenges that people with disabilities face, and touch upon the promise of autonomous vehicles for those without sight.
00:01 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:22 Tom Pey – So what this does is this hands back, and that’s why the phone itself becomes the instrument that is the accurate navigation device, because in your phone you now have the freedom to explore.
00:37 Narrator – Have you ever watched in amazement as a visually impaired person nimbly maneuvers their way through a crowded subway station? Well, some thoughtful innovations are being developed to enable people with low vision to navigate the world with greater ease. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to the founder and CEO of Waymap, Tom Pey, about his start-up company’s breakthrough navigation technology. We discuss his company’s product, look at some of the challenges that people with disabilities face, and touch upon the promise of autonomous vehicles for those without sight.
01:33 Alex Wise – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tom Pey. He is the CEO. Of Waymap. Tom, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:41 Tom Pey – Thank you for having me.
01:43 Alex Wise – So why don’t you tell us a little bit about the journey that you and your colleagues have had with Waymap, what the mission of the organization is and what problems you’re trying to solve with it?
01:55 Tom Pey – Basically we started out trying to solve a very simple problem and that was the seven blind young people in London. Said the most important thing to them to help them to change their lives for the better was to be able to get around London Underground like everyone else, and the reason for that was that they were young. They, uh, a couple of them had just been out on a date with a with a boyfriend or girlfriend and they had been taken around by these adults, strangers, sighted guides to help them to navigate the underground and it wasn’t very cool, so they thought, hey, you know, an app could stop, they could solve this for us. I had done some research on it previously, so I put my hand up and said look I’d solved that problem for you. You know, we applied to google.org and we got $1,000,000 grant and they told us to go out and change the world for blind people. And we carried out trials across the world with literally thousands of blind people asking them how we could solve their mobility problems. How could we help them to get around better, and as a result we wrote the world for standard for audio-based navigation for people who are blind or low vision that’s currently an American standard as well. And we’ve also written standard for pig with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And from that we developed our app through Waymap and we’re currently rolling it out in Washington DC.
03:30 Alex Wise – And so will it be a layer ultimately on Google Maps? Like, I’m thinking if I put in walking directions for me from point A to point B, how might it be different with the Waymap layer, let’s say?
03:45 Tom Pey – The difference is that first of all, it would be more accurate than Google Maps because it doesn’t rely solely on GPS. In fact, it doesn’t rely on signals at all if they’re not there. The second thing is that it works outdoors and indoors, and Google Maps currently doesn’t work indoors because it’s got it. It works off GP. And the other thing is that our app can take you. It can integrate all of your transport journeys, both indoors, outdoors, underground, Overground, and facilitate your getting to your office, in fact even to your desk.
04:26 Alex Wise – So how does it work if it’s not with GPS? Explain the technology if you can.
04:31 Tom Pey – So basically we, uh, we have a an algorithm that turns your phone into a into a very accurate navigation device. We do that by using the sensors on the phone and using a system of Bayesian statistical algorithm to work out the positioning of where you are. Once we know where you are, we are able to accurately count your steps and the velocity at which you’re walking. And we use that against a plot that against the known map, so in a map of the indoor or outdoor area. And because it’s probabilistic, there are very minute errors in every calculation, right? So in every for every step, we assign 5000 possible positions to for you might be, and we use this algorithm to pick the one that’s most accurate and because it would be very minute, uh, errors in that called drift. Every now and again will zero out those errors by using a principle of map matching, which means that we operate to up to 1 meter accuracy and 10 degree heading accuracy. It is probably the most advanced indoor and outdoor navigation system in the world. And the thing is also it works for people with disabilities as well as for people who don’t have disabilities.
06:09 Alex Wise – And where are you in terms of your company arc? Is it in beta right now or can people just access Waymap as an app right now on the Apple App Store, let’s say?
06:20 Tom Pey – As we speak right now, we’re in beta, but if you come back and we speak again towards the end of the year, we were very out there working in Washington DC so at the moment we are working very hard to integrate the bus and rail and paratransit systems of the OR in the Washington Metropolitan area, which is the, you know, the tri-state area of Washington. And after that, then we would be running it out in other cities.
06:50 Alex Wise – So, Tom, are there some other applications that you foresee for Waymap beyond what you’ve just described in terms of transportation needs for visually impaired people and those with intellectual disabilities?
07:03 Tom Pey – Yes and preventing features and for instance older adults who may have maybe anxiety in in going outdoors, but also it may be some short-term memory difficulty. But yes is the answer. So our next step would be then to bring the great outdoors indoor. Say we will be working with museums, with public buildings, with public spaces which you know, stadium, sports stadiums and for instance in in a museum environment, because we know where you are to within 1 meter and we know who you’re facing within 10 degrees. These you can plot the like you would plot, say, a trip around a big museum like the Smithsonian. Then you want to see 17 some exhibits, and then you want to go for a coffee to meet your friend. Well, you can plot the 17 exhibits in and when you’re facing them, we can download the API. Which would tell you what it is and give you a bit of a history about it. If you think, oh God, I really didn’t want to look at that, that’s boring. And you turn away it decides that you’ve finished and that you can walk on to your next one. So it’s and it’s similarly in retail. We will know if you’re in the coffee aisle or in the aisle where all the beer is and we will also be able to help you to choose your favorite kind of beer. It will be ready to come say next year towards the middle to end next year.
08:43 Alex Wise – So you could work with a retailer let’s and they could say, alright, well the Budweiser’s here and the Sam Adams is here and we’re going to point visually impaired customers to the correct beer so they don’t have to get any assistance from anybody in the shop?
09:02 Tom Pey – Basically we can get you to the we can get you to within 1 meter of your favorite beer and then you just we would just simply allow you to use your camera on your phone and just say there’s your John Adams beer and said great I’ll have. My wife, for instance, one of that horrible, one of the things she hates going to supermarket for two things that you know she’s not vision impaired or disabled and then so what you can do if you’re sighted and maybe it’s your first time into the supermarket or you just want to rush in and rush out, you just simply say I want to get some bread and I want to get some marmalade or something. And you just push that in and we get you to two places and it will allow you again. You select a brand that you want.
09:52 (Music break)
10:27 Alex Wise – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Tom Pey. He is the CEO of Waymap. So you’re a very advanced computer user, and I imagine you’ve been working with computers for many years. Maybe you can kind of give listeners an idea of some of the evolution, some of the big hurdles that have been accomplished in the last couple of decades to make the world more accessible for the visually impaired in terms of technology. What are some of the things that are near and dear to your heart in terms of technological breakthroughs?
11:03 Tom Pey – I mean, I could do none of this without a very simple program called Jaws. Well, it’s not a simple program, but it’s a program, a screen reader called Jaws. And it was designed by a person who had side problems and he wanted to be able to use a computer that that means that I can access all of the data in my computer. Anything that’s on the screen, my screen reader would read it to me. So I can do almost anything that I want to do on a computer. The only limitations is my ability to come to be able to navigate my way. The next thing was the iPhone. When it came out, it just revolutionized what blind people could do with.
11:51 Alex Wise – Like Siri and voice command?
11:54 Tom Pey – Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean it was counter intuitive, but at the time when they were designing the iPhone, Steve Jobs said, look, we need to design this so it can be used by blind people, because if blind people can use it, everyone will enjoy it, right? And so they brought that approach to doing the iPhone it was countering. You did that a blind person would be able to touch a screen and operated like a sighted person. But it did, and it really opened the world up to blind people ’cause now we could do outdoor navigation that we couldn’t really do before. As well as having access to on the goal, communications and so on. Yeah, so it does with the very the big things and then of course with the Americans with Disabilities Act are in the United Kingdom, the Disability Discrimination Act. The changes to the infrastructure, building infrastructure and the transport infrastructure to facilitate access for everybody may also have made a very big difference.
13:01 Alex Wise – And when you think of the global visually impaired population, I think it’s close, it’s, it’s nearing the population in the United States, it’s almost 300 million I believe, and those are people with impairments. I think completely blind is more like 40 something. Million for companies that didn’t think this through early on, this is actually a big breakthrough for them as well to be able to cater to a fairly significant customer base and I can imagine it could make their operations smoother when they can, you know, just explaining what you were talking about with a shopping in a store. Somebody looking for a beer or if they can get that on their own, as opposed to trying to get a shopkeeper to come select it for them, that helps on their labor front, let’s say.
13:47 Tom Pey – It does. 40% of the population of the United States has some form of disability and needs some form of additional assistance. OK, that’s the first thing. The second thing is that associated with disability is a is a reduction in the in the number of times that people go out alone. And increase in the number of times when people rely on family, friends and others to bring them out. So in other words a loss of disability, and arising from that is the diminution in one’s self esteem. And from that then arrives a lot of health problems that then have to be picked up in the economy. So it’s huge just being able to get out and as I said when I started to come to think about this as a possible opportunity of business. The problem I really wanted to solve wasn’t about freedom of movement. It was the freedom to explore. Because the thing that I lost was not freedom of movement because that was a right. Did somebody stick a white cane or a guide dog of my heart and said there you go, top right? It was my confidence, my myself, myself. Loss of freedom to explore the world because of the other difficulties that there weren’t being able to get around, like having to memorize routes or routes like having to, you know, memorize getting when the bus was coming, when the train was coming and so all of those things. That one could do naturally, I couldn’t do anymore. So what I what this does is this hands back and that’s why the form itself becomes the accurate navigation device. Because in your phone you now have the freedom to explore, and because you don’t have your, you don’t have to rely on your memory to do something. You have it, the memory is all in your phone and you can get on with the we’re just using your dog, your cane, your wheel chair, or whatever else you need to use.
15:57 Alex Wise – And it sounds like you were not born without sight. You lost sight later on in life?
16:03 Tom Pey – I lost sight at 39, so I was an extremely successful investment banker and I lost my sight and I have to say that it was cathartic and maybe because of my personality, I over dramatized it and I really went into a tailspin for four years and, uh, until a gentleman in in a charity came for me and told me that, you know, basically I was a waste of space and that what I needed to do was to it. You know, there were 150 blind children in disco who would never have had a job like mine, he would never, would never get to the countries that I went to read the food that I end, the money, get that end and so on and that I could carry on just being sorry for myself or I could do something to help them. And it took me 3 days to get over the insult, but I, you know, I went back and like and I actually shook hands with that man and he was the best friend ever. You know, there’s people who commit your life to change your life, and he cared. And ever since then, I’ve never looked back.
17:21 Alex Wise – It sounds like the technology can really kind of not only close the gap between the sighted and the visually impaired, but also those who are born without sight versus those who lose sight later on in life. Like yourself, I imagine somebody who becomes accustomed to the outside world and to technology at a very young age has an advantage over somebody who loses their sight in 39. Kind of like somebody who’s trying to learn a new language later in life if there’s more challenges.
17:52 Tom Pey – Yeah, they’re almost like 2 disabilities because my last charity that I ran was the Royal Society for Blind children and when you work with people who lost their sight in years. The big problem is not ability. The big problem is confidence and self-belief and motivation and actually just having the having the courage it encourages, uh, may be too complex. Of work but just having that oomph to live life on those terms and that can be quite scary unless you are supported through throughout your childhood and into your adolescent to be able to do that. And of course, because we learn 80% of what we learn, we learn through sight, you know, and bringing up a child is a difficult thing at the best. Sometimes, you know bringing up a blind child is really difficult, so unless that support is there for the family, then you get a different problem at the end. But nonetheless it ends up with the same outcome, which is reduction in going out, the onset of depression and anxiety and all of the things then that happened, it just happened for much longer because you were young.
19:20 (music break)
20:56 Alex Wise – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Tom Pey. He’s the CEO of Waymap. So Tom, we were talking about some of the technologies that have made life easier for the visually impaired and those with intellectual disabilities. We’ve done a lot of pieces on autonomous vehicles in Sea Change Radio and it’s almost a throwaway line for some people when they talk about it’s going to also make life a little easier for those who can’t drive for themselves. And from a political standpoint, we hear about, well, it’s going to wipe out all the taxi drivers or the drivers, but looking at it from your perspective, I can’t help but think this is a very exciting development, the idea that this playing field of driving maybe someday level in terms of computers driving us all around. Maybe walk us through your thought process of you following it.
21:52 Tom Pey – I mean, oddly enough, when you talk to people who’ve lost their sight roughly around the time I have and you say, what do you miss most? And you say driving. Yeah, you know I can’t drive and I can’t wait to get it. It’ll be driven around in a self-driving car and you know, just to kind of sit there, I kind of there’s you have me singing in an autonomous Porsche or something, but you know, maybe something less we would do. The point is that yes, autonomous vehicles are going to help lots of people. And yes, they’re going to bring about huge economic changes in the world and they’re going to bring about great changes in in society. So autonomous vehicles are going to bring about an enormous amount of social change in the world and they’re going to certainly have disabled people to get out more and they are going to help many people to get out more and yes, it’s, you know, as I said, it’s going to be economic upheaval for a while or a big change, but at all this happens, but you know, you’ve got a great organization there called Waymo in in in San Francisco. And one of the things that we would love to do is to work with Waymo, for instance, because using something like a Waymap app. And if we come, if we then say order a a self-driving and autonomous taxi or cab or a an autonomous vehicle that it will actually pull up within 1 meter. If you’re on GPS it could be 10 meters away in the opposite side of the road. So it might as well be on the moon.
23:31 Alex Wise – Right, they haven’t really smoothed out that wrinkled by any means, so they need another technology to connect the visually impaired to making sure that they can jump into the right taxi.
23:42 Tom Pey – One of the things that we will develop and we will develop that wheat autonomous vehicle driver is that, you know because these vehicles are electronic or electric they don’t make as much noise as a as a fossil fuel part car. You know, we by having the interaction between my mobile phone and the car, we can maybe add an additional layer of safety.
24:13 (Music break)
24:57 Alex Wise – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Tom Pey. He is the CEO of Waymap. Do you see any environmental benefits with Waymap? What are some of the ways that you think it could improve the environment?
25:12 Tom Pey – More people will use public transport. So let me give you a really simple example. Many, many years ago, and just kind of dates me in my age, I want to see the chief executive of the tractor transport, Transport for London buses. So and I said to him, you know what, why don’t you put in talking buses, you know, so you can make announcements that when people have arrived at their bus stop and so on and he said. Well, he said you’ve come at the right time because we’re changing over our guidance system. So we we do it. We I I know it’s not going to cost a ton extra, it actually put ridership up 8%. But and everybody that in the industry that we’re working in, the industry was saying, Oh no, it’s going to drive everybody mad because you’re just going to have these, this constant talking actually put ridership up 8%.
26:08 Alex Wise – I’m not surprised by that when I lived in Japan, when I first moved there, I didn’t read any Japanese and I was always frustrated that I when they didn’t make an announcement or I couldn’t hear the announcement of the next station. But I think that’s come around. This was in the early 90s, so I’ve had that experience even though I’ve had sight I. was illiterate, basically.
26:31 Tom Pey – And the same for visitors to say Washington or San Francisco or whatever you know that don’t are not able to read signs for whatever reason, maybe because it’s in English but the other thing is that in our in our trials. 87% of blind people said they would be more likely to use public transport as a result of having an app such as Waymap help them to get around? That’s an increase of 20% just from that disability alone.
27:06 Alex Wise – That’s incredible.
27:07 Tom Pey – You know, and so you can imagine the the amount of people that are going to go. From private transport, be private hire vehicles or private cars into the public transport system. Massive saving in in in greenhouse gases.
27:24 Alex Wise – So can people participate in the beta program now, or is that you’re just hoping it’ll be out to the public at the end of the year?
27:32 Tom Pey – If you live in Washington DC, please contact us www.wamapnav.com. And let us know that you would like to participate in the beta trials.We’d love to have you. Other than that, we will ask your local authorities or your transport authorities to take on Waymap and we come to the city near you.
27:58 Alex Wise – Tom Pey, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 Tom Pey – Thank you for having me.
28:16 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Mose Allison, Stevie Wonder, and Taj Mahal. Check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show. Or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, many others, and tune into Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Waymap CEO Tom Pey (re-broadcast) appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our two-part series examining the effective altruism movement and “longtermism.” We speak to philosopher Émile Torres to better understand the movement’s futurist vision and its shockingly callous view on climate change. Then we discuss how the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal and ensuing cryptocurrency collapse may end up affecting the future of philanthropy.
00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:19 Émile Torres (ET) – On the one hand, I think it’s good that we should look more carefully at the best ways to do the most good in the world. But on the other hand, it’s important for that focus to lead one to end up ignoring all of these kind of non-quantifiable positive effects that one can have. You know, engaging in well, what the effect of altruists would say, would describe probably as ineffective altruism.
00:45 Narrator – This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our two-part series examining the effective altruism movement and longtermism. We speak to philosopher Émile Torres to better understand the movement’s futurist vision and its shockingly callous view on climate change. Then we discuss how the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal and ensuing cryptocurrency collapse may end up affecting the future of philanthropy.
01:31 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Émile Torres. Émile is a doctoral candidate in philosophy. Their forthcoming book is entitled “Human Extinction, A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.” Émile, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
00:01:47 Émile Torres (ET) – Great to be here.Thanks for having me.
00:01:49 Alex Wise (AW) – So Émile, we spoke about effective altruism and long termism with Alexander Zaitchik recently. Alex kind of spelled out the basics and gave a recap of the connection between Sam Bankman-Fried and effective altruism and walked us through the history of it, but we didn’t really get a chance to explore as deeply as I would have wanted into the connection between that movement, long termism, effective altruism and climate change, and the environment, and also what it might mean for the future of philanthropy. So first, why don’t you explain your history with this idea, you’ve written quite extensively on it.
02:38 ET – Yeah, that’s right. You know the the term long termism was coined in 2017, but the idea you know goes back two decades or so. And so I mean, initially, as you know, the individual will McCaskill who coined the term noted in a A blog post where he talked about the coining of this term before you had the word long termism individuals in this space were generally just described as. People who focused on existential risk. So the the concept of existential risk is really central to the long term worldview, and this idea was introduced in 2002 by Nick Bostrom who’s a Swedish philosopher in who, in 20 in in 2005 founded the future of Humanity Institute, at which many of these. You know, leading long termism like Will McCaskill and Toby Ord have held positions? So basically the the idea of existential risk is any event that would prevent us from fulfilling our long term potential in the universe. 1,000,000 billions, trillions of years into the future. That may mean you know radically enhancing ourselves, radically transforming the human Organism so that we become some kind of, you know, superior. Machines as well as colonizing space and maximizing value within the what’s called the our our future light cone. The region of the universe that’s in principle accessible to us, and so an existential risk, once again is any event that would prevent us from achieving these vast and glorious ends, to quote Toby Ord. And so initially I came across this idea of existential risk, probably in the mid 2000s and found it very alarming because the individuals who were discussing existential risk. Acknowledged that a primary source of danger facing humanity in the 21st century arises from the development of certain advanced technologies, but those same individuals argued that it’s absolutely crucial that we develop these technologies. There’s only one way forward. The reason is that you need these technologies. The very technologies that will introduce unprecedented risks to humanity. You need them in order to fulfill our long term potential. We need to develop advanced, you know synthetic biology and biotechnology, molecular nanotechnology, artificial superintelligence and so on in order to, to, you know, to spread through the universe. And create, you know, literally astronomical amounts of value, perhaps to actually create you know this sort of techno utopian world. And so I found this to be very alarming initially, but I sort of changed my mind after reading some books about the impractical about the infeasibility of preventing the development of certain technologies. So it’s a kind of techno-determinist view that you know some of these extremely dangerous, so-called dual use technology. Are going to be developed by somebody at some point, and so if one accepts this kind of technical determinist view, then maybe the best thing to do is to join the team rather than try to resist. You know the because it’s just maybe a losing battle. You know working to prevent the development of these technologies. So that’s how I sort of ended up in the existential risk space and initially I mean I my my views evolved and I became very sympathetic with this sort of long term list picture of what humanity could become in the very you know, far future, yeah, so I ended up just writing a bunch of books on this. You know, publishing a lot of papers and it was only much more recently, really in 2019 or 2018-2019 that certain aspects of the long term ideology suddenly started to appear problematic or flawed, or potentially even quite dangerous. And so my views, you know there was sort of a 180 shift or pivot in terms of my ideological orientation. And that’s how I ended up being this, you know, one of the the more vocal critics out there.
07:04 AW – Well, you you’ve been able to look at both sides of the coin at least, so I think we’re getting a a clear-eyed picture. But before we dive into some of the examples that would raise eyebrows for listeners or might be some of the bullet points that you use, how does the longtermist define long term? We’re looking pretty long term like when a policymaker looks at short term versus long term risks or a CFO of a company talks about short term versus long term risks. They’re talking, you know, one or two years versus 10 to 30 years. But this is way out there and then also, maybe let’s define existential risks because we have a lot of them staring us right in the face right now, but sometimes the long term is view tends to make it more ephemeral.
07:59 ET – Yeah, absolutely. It’s true that what the long term ists are thinking of is the very long run future of humanity. 1,000,000 billions, trillions of years into the future. In fact the the the long term list view sort of crucially rests on a subfield of cosmology, which was really founded in 1969 by individual at the University of Cambridge named Martin Rees. Now he’s he’s has the title Lord Martin Rees. And then this field was developed in the 70s the field is called physical eschatology and this is the first sort of really rigorous look at the evolution of the entire cosmos, including, you know the future of our planet, the future of our solar system, and so on. And what the scientists discovered with these physical eschatologies found is that the universe could remain habitable for an extremely long amount of time, so Earth itself will will be, you know, sufficiently hospitable to complex living creatures like us, for you know, maybe 800 million years or a billion years, and at that point the sun is going to get more and more luminous, the surface of Earth will increase the temperature, that is, will increase significantly, the oceans will boil, and so on.
09:29 AW – And this was laid out before climate change concepts were popularized.
09:34 ET – Yeah, I mean so climate change, this was the connection between carbon dioxide and climate change. Was, you know, made all the way back to at least the early 20th century, but it kind of wasn’t until the the 1990s, the early 2000s, that a genuine consensus emerged, which is the view. Of course, you know 98, probably higher percentage of that of climate. Scientists agree that climate change is is real. It’s anthropogenic and it’s very dangerous. So yeah, I mean this was several decades before that these scientists physical eschatologies were figuring out the you know, the how long Earth were main habitable, how long our solar system will remain habitable and the universe itself, which is, it’s just an enormous number. It’s you know at least 10 to the 40 years into the future. That’s the point at which protons will decay, and that’s a hard limit on biological life. So it’s so basically the the the vision of long termism is crucially founded on these empirical results from science, so the longtermist idea it’s useful, actually, first of all, to distinguish between moderate long termism and radical long termism.
10:55 AW – Maybe you can if you could define those two. Let’s parse those out, please.
10:59 ET – Yeah, so I mean moderate longtermist says that ensuring that things go well in the very long term is a key priority of our time and radical long terms and changes that from the indefinite to the definite article if you will, in terms of grammar. So it’s ensuring that things go well in the very long term is the key moral priority. Of her time and basically the idea is that OK, so if if Earth is habitable for you know, maybe another billion years. The number of future earthlings future people on our planet could be absolutely enormous. Then if we colonize the solar system, you know we could live for even longer than a billion years. If we colonize the universe, we could exist for just you know, 10 to the 40 years, or perhaps even longer. Further, that’s just the temporal dimension. But of course we can spread out in space, further increasing the human population. So as a result, long term ISTS have estimated going all the way back to the early 2000s. Some of the first estimates of how many future people there could be, and then the idea is OK if what I want to do. Is to positively affect the greatest number of people possible, and if most people who exist exist in the very far future, maybe what I should be doing is looking at how my actions might influence them? Millions, billions, trillions or even just thousands of years from now. Rather than how my actions affect people who are contemporaries, you know who are, for example, suffering global poverty and so maybe the best way to maximize the impact, the goodness of your impact on the world is to focus on these very, very far future people, simply by virtue of the fact that there are so many more of them than there are people around today.
12:57 AW – So it’s a cold, calculating concept of saying, “these trillions of people that will exist you’re you’re going to be helping them, so you’re actually doing more good by focusing on the trillions in the future than the billions that exist now,” it’s that kind of calculus.
13:15 ET – That’s exactly right, yeah. So it’s not some people confuse long term is with with the claim that current people don’t matter. Future people do matter no on the long term is view. Everybody counts for one, everybody counts for the same. The thing is that there’s just so many people who could exist in the far future that that ends up being much more morally salient.
13:38 AW – It’s changing the rules so that the reality is exactly what you’re talking about is like we are not counting current poverty issues as much as future poverty issues. So the policy ends up effectively dismissing the current population for the sake of the future population.
13:56 ET – Yeah, that’s right. That, in practice, that is what is going to happen. I mean, some of the long term is leading long term is like Hilary Graves has been explicit that if you hold especially hold this radical long term as view, then alleviating global poverty almost certainly isn’t the best use of our finite resources everybody can agree that global poverty is very bad, but there are so many possible people in the distant future that simply, it’s just a numbers game.
14:42 (Music Break)
15:06 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to philosopher Émile Torres. Their forthcoming book is “Human Extinction, A history of the science and ethics of annihilation.” So Émile, speaking of annihilation, we’re looking at a pretty cataclysmic future with climate change. Why don’t you share your thoughts on the long term view of climate change and where it goes off the rails in your estimation?
15:34 ET – Yeah, I would say that it I’ve I’ve argued this in writing before that I think it’s impossible to read the long term literature and not come away with a rather rosy picture of the climate.
15:47 AW – They don’t deny it in any way, which is important to set forth, but they’re so techno determinist as you call it, that they’re convinced that silver bullets will come and will be fine, so let’s focus on some other stuff. Is that oversimplifying things?
16:04 ET – No, I think there’s three points to make. On the one hand, so it’s absolutely true that long term is, you know, they they, they’re not climate denialists. But oftentimes, if you look at what they write. They seem to have a view of climate change that doesn’t really align with what genuine climate experts believe, so you know, will McCaskill has written in his most recent book on long termism called what we have the future that you know global agriculture really isn’t going to be devastated by 15 degrees Celsius.
16:43 AW – Warming 15 degrees Celsius just to give our Fahrenheit loving listeners an idea. I mean, we’re talking about one or two degrees Celsius being a major game changer for life as we know it.
16:57 ET – Yep, 15, it’s really an astonishing number. I mean, I sent it to a bunch of experts and unsurprisingly every single one had the same response that that is outlandish and completely implausible. So yeah, there’s so there is a sense in which you know there there’s a kind of soft denialism about the potential for climate change to really have catastrophic consequences. In addition, there’s a there’s a deep faith that I think is really quite pervasive in the longtermist community, that technology will ultimately solve these problems. So for example, some of them have argued that the best response to climate change isn’t to reduce the human population, it’s to increase the human population. Therefore, we should be more worried about underpopulation than overpopulation, and the reason is that the more people you have, the more individuals there will be working on science, for example, research and development.
18:04 AW – Just that there will be enough monkeys to type out the perfect novel.
18:09 ET – Yeah yeah. So basically what you do is by increasing human population you accelerate the rate of progress and is if you and what’s going to solve the climate crisis ultimately be just it be you know more technological and scientific progress, quote UN quote, and so they they end up with this sort of counter intuitive fonts to the climate situation. So OK, we accept that climate change is actually happening, but what we think it should be done is people should have more kids raise their kids rights, increase the number of scientists out there, and then we’ll stumble upon you know, a efficacious solution, technological solution to the problem of climate change. And so I mean that that is also, you know, very controversial idea and the other you know bizarre, at least in my opinion, quite bizarre response to the climate situation is to argue that the reason we should stop burning fossil fuels right now. Is that we may need these fossil fuel reserves at some future point in time. So imagine that we burn up all of the fossil fuels that are, you know, available to us, or would be available to us and then industrial civilization collapses. If we want to rebuild industrial civilization. We may need to have you know oil, coal, gas, and so on to go through another industrial revolution. And the whole reason we’d want to go through another industrial revolution is, on their view, precisely because the goal is to fulfill our long term potential. Millions, billions, trillions of years from now, that means colonizing space, increasing the future human population immensely, maybe creating vast computer simulations in which digital people live. And if we don’t have industrial civilization, we probably won’t be able to do that, industrial civilization is a stepping stone to that. And so therefore they argue that we should you know there there’s superficial alignment between their suggestion that yes, we should stop burning fossil fuels immediately, and the climate scientists claim that we should stop doing that. But the reasons the underlying reasons are really radically different. And some would argue that their reasons are not particularly good reasons. I mean, essentially they’re arguing we should make the same mistakes again. I mean, we should, just, you know, pollute the planet once more.
20:37 AW – But let’s say let’s save some of the fossil fuels so that we can make those same mistakes again in 100 years or 1000 years.
20:45 ET – Yeah, yeah.
20:46 AW – The longtermism, effective altruism movement has really captured the imagination of a swath of the billionaire class and that has real effects on the way nonprofits look at the world, the way that all of us look at giving. Why don’t you connect the dots for us if you will, in terms of how you see the fallout from the Sam Bankman-Fried collapse, the cryptocurrency collapse the effect of altruism and long term views of a very long view of how we need to care about this planet and our people and the impact it’s having on today’s philanthropy space.
21:30 ET Yeah, so I’ve been, I guess a little concerned that the the long term list view is going to distract from cause areas or you know, charitable causes that I think are really much more important. Things like alleviating global poverty, you know, reducing animal suffering. You know, eliminating factory farming and so on. There are lots of causes that are more, you know, sort of near term, just to tie this back to what we were discussing before. I think climate justice is a huge issue and there are a bunch of scholars who started talking about climate reparations and of course there was the recent agreements from, I can’t remember how many nations around the world. Basically, taking the first step towards climate reparations, which to me seems very the idea, is very compelling. You know it’s just completely unfair that people in the global S are going to suffer the most as a result of climate change, even though they’re in many cases they’ve contributed almost nothing to the problem. So within the effective altruist community, the initial focus was global poverty and over the past 10 years many of the leading figures have shifted towards more long term causes and that means neglecting relatively speaking. It causes, like you know, global poverty and so on. I think the the, or I should say, Sam Bankman-Fried himself was an ardent, longtermist and you know, he explicitly said in the article that he’s just not worried personally about things like global poverty. What really matters to him is the very long term future of humanity. 1,000,000 billions, trillions of years into the future, and so that’s why he set up the FTX Future fund, which you know he funneled a lot of his fortune into. And that was really, you know, trying to to support research on long term issues, but with the collapse this sort of catastrophic collapse of FTX, it’s not just that funds for long termism have dried up in many cases at least. But also that I think long termism itself has suffered some pretty significant reputational data. And so my as a critic of long termism, my hope is that one of the consequences of the FTTX debacle is that attention will be refocused. On issues that I consider to be much more important than thinking about, you know the long term future of humanity and how many digital beings there could be within our future lightcone in fast computer. Simulations again, things like climate justice, climate reparations, global poverty, animal welfare and so I’m tentatively hopeful that you know longtermism will the force of longtermism will, I should say, the influence of long termism will weaken as a result of and consequently, you know individuals, even within the effective altruism community will then start focusing on global poverty and you know these more traditional issues a bit more.
25:12 AW – I also can’t help but think that the data-driven concepts that the EA movement sets forth the long term view is very data-driven that that can distract a lot of charitable giving from being more effective when it becomes overly data-driven because philanthropy is not just something that should be viewed on a spreadsheet and you can’t just balance sheet this away there. There’s an art form to it. You have to find organizations that align with your values or passions. Maybe you can speak to that?
25:48 ET – Yeah, sure I think the idea that we should want to maximize our impact is clearly good. Nobody wants to be, you know, giving to a charity where they’re just going to end up wasting a bunch of the money. Or yeah, to want to help as many people as much as possible, uh, so that’s that’s a good. The problem is that there is a very strong quantitative within this approach and as a result, there are. You know there are all sorts of possible effects of 1’s actions that just can’t really be quantified, and if you can’t be quantified, you can’t insert it into this. You know expected value calculation, which is what a lot of the effective altruists rely on heavily in as well as the long term is that’s how they end up saying, even if there’s a tiny probability of helping a huge number of people in the future. The expected value is still much greater, focusing on those far future people than on current people, and so you know, you could imagine you know helping you know an unknown person in your community. There are all sorts of consequences that are real but not quantifiable, so you know it might foster trust. Maybe helping somebody gives them a certain kind of hope that helps them through the next day and that just can’t be quantified. You can’t put that in, use that as a variable in some sort, so on the one hand, I think it’s good that we should look more carefully at the best ways to do the most good in the world, but on the other hand, it’s important for that focus to to lead one to end up ignoring all of these kind of non quantifiable positive effects that one can have, engaging in well what the effect of altruists would say would describe probably as ineffective altruism.
27:46 AW – Well, it’s a fascinating topic and I could keep talking to you for quite some time about it, and hopefully we can have you back when your book, “Human Extinction, A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation” comes out. Émile Torres, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:02 ET – Thanks a lot for having me, this is great.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by DJ Vadim and the B-52s. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune into Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Émile Torres: Effective Altruism + Longtermism Pt. 2 appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
What is a nurdle, you ask? Is it the latest variation on the popular New York Times puzzle, Wordle? No, not quite. Nurdles are the tiny little petroleum-based building blocks of the plastics industry. And they are literally everywhere. This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives and talk to Neel Dhanesha of Vox to learn about the role nurdles play in the half-trillion dollar global plastics industry and why they are a big problem for the environment. Then, we hear about a small, innovative company that is recycling all sorts of plastics and turning them into gravel. We speak to the founder and CEO, Sebastián Sajoux, about the technology and mission of his company, Arqlite.
00:01 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:22 Neel Dhanesha – There are best practices that people have come up with that could stop these nurdles from getting into the environment you know, and the problem is that none of the plastic companies have any incentive to clean them.
00:35 Narrator – What is a nurdle, you ask? Is it the latest variation on the popular New York Times puzzle, Wordle? No, not quite. Nurdles are the tiny little petroleum-based building blocks of the plastics industry. And they are literally everywhere. This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives and talk to Neel Dhanesha of Vox to learn about the role nurdles play in the half-trillion dollar global plastics industry and why they are a big problem for the environment. Then, we hear about a small, innovative company that is recycling all sorts of plastics and turning them into gravel. We speak to the founder and CEO, Nurdle about the technology and mission of his company, Arqlite.
01:41 Alex Wise – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Neel Dhanesha. He is a tech and climate reporter for Vox. Neel, welcome to Sea Change Radio. Neel, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:50 Neel Dhanesha – Thanks for having me.
01:51 Alex Wise – So you wrote a piece couple weeks ago, May 5th, that came out in Vox on nurdles and I had never heard this term before, but I’m sure I’ve seen them and I’m sure they’re in my life, as we speak. They’re everywhere. So first, what is a nurdle?
02:08 Neel Dhanesha – So a nurdle is a lentil-sized piece of pre-production plastic. It’s just usually this little white orb that’s produced in the trillions every year by petrochemical companies around the world. And then they’re used as essentially the building block of all plastic products. So they are melted down at factories and then put into casts or molds and that will pop, you know, a water bottle or a steering wheel, or a sewage pipe.
02:41 Alex Wise – And the name sounds like somebody just made it up like a widget. But do you have any etymology on the word nurdle? How long has this term been around?
02:52 Neel Dhanesha – That is a great question everyone I asked is being kind of confused by this. So Nurdle is not the proper name for these things. The real name for these things are preproduction plastic pallets, or resins is what the petrochemical industry calls them. But the word nurdle just seems to have come out of nowhere. When I looked into the into the etymology, one of the possible sources. Is the wave shaped gob toothpaste you see on oral care packaging? Colgate and GlaxoSmithKline actually went to court over this a few years ago. That was the word that they used for that little piece of toothpaste on packaging.
03:31 Alex Wise – They didn’t want to call it a thingamabob.
03:34 Neel Dhanesha – Yeah, exactly so they called it a nurdle and somehow that sound made its way over to these plastic pellets. And when you look at them, you can sort of see why they’re called nurdles. They’re like they’re weird little objects that you know you would sort of make up a nonsense word for because you don’t really know what else to call it, and I guess that’s sort of how it’s stuck.
04:00 Alex Wise – All right, so let’s talk about the dark side of these nurdles. They’re produced in the trillions, as you mentioned, and you would think that these beaded forms are fairly easy to transport and keep from seeping into the environment because they would just be used on an industrial level, to like meltdown as you mentioned, but that’s not the case. They really have kind of inserted themselves into far more flora and fauna than I’m sure their manufacturers intended.
04:26 Neel Dhanesha – That’s right, nurdles are escaping from the production process constantly and estimated, I believe, it’s 200,000 metric tons of nurdles are estimated or escaped into the environment every year. That adds up to about 10 trillion nurdles because they’re so light. There are only about 20 milligrams and like you said, manufacturers never intended for them to be in the environment. That’s not what they’re what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to end up at a factory somewhere, but manufacturers also don’t seem to care enough to stop them from getting into waterways, which is usually how they get into the environment. You know they’re spilling out in all kinds of ways. They could be spilling out of bags in transit. They could be falling out of rail cars out of shipping containers. They’re getting out there all the time.
05:19 Alex Wise – So we should mention that they’re made by petrochemicals. Why don’t you explain the building blocks of these nurdles, the building blocks themselves.
05:27 Neel Dhanesha – Yes, so the basic way that they’re made is that a company will take oil or natural gas and through a process called cracking, they’ll eventually turn it into something like ethylene, which you know they then will. Turn into a long spaghetti like tube of plastic which then they chop into thousands of tiny little pieces which turn into nurdles, and so all of these things are, you know, oil and gas byproducts which eventually, into the plastic products used every day.
06:10 Alex Wise – And are there any gradations of nurdles in terms of, when you mentioned drink bottles, you hear about plastics that are BPA free or something like that? Are there BPA free nurdles for example?
06:23 Neel Dhanesha – Yes, so you know all those things that you hear whether BPA free or BPH free, that’s dependent upon the composition of the nurdles themselves. Right, so all these nurdles come in, they’re made of different kinds of polymers, so they all look the same, but the actual composition of them can vary. You know, per instance or per manufacturer, so definitely there are different kinds of nurdles. If you want to get down into the nitty gritty of it, and one of my sources when I was reporting on this story actually analyzes different kinds of nurdles. He finds in the environment to see what they’re made of, and he’s trying to build a database of all these different kinds of nurdles so he’s been seeing these variations on the regular.
07:03 Alex Wise – And how do they differ from other microplastics notably like these microbeads that we heard a lot about being banned in? I think they were in shampoos and things like that back in the day.
00:07:14 Neel Dhanesha – – Yeah, that’s a good question, so I guess to begin with, microbeads are sort of, you know, they are. At the end, they probably made out of nurdles or something like them, but nurdles themselves from the beginning when their manufacturer, they are microplastics, because they’re less than 5 millimeters in diameter, and so to begin with there actually the second largest source of microplastics but especially, even despite like the nature of their existence, just from the beginning, they’re microplastics.
07:44 Alex Wise – So what’s the number one source of microplastics pollution? Is it these degraded, larger plastics?
07:51 Neel Dhanesha – The number one source of microplastics is actually tire dust, and that’s a whole other story. Which I did not get into in my story, but it’s definitely interesting. And then nurdles are the second largest source of microplastics, and when I say that the second largest source, part of it, is because so many of them are getting into the environment, but also because they do breakdown themselves over time, so they’re already small, and so they’re already microplastics, and then they breakdown even further. And they turn into even smaller piece of plastic that then, you know, make their way into things like our bloodstream. I think it’s important to remember that you know nurdles are all pre-production materials, most microplastics that we see nowadays are the result of consumer or many, many microplastics, I should say rather, are there’s also consumer materials or post production materials that have been, you know, being improperly disposed of and then broken down so you know I’m a water bottle, for example, could break down into smaller microplastics overtime. But this is that plastic before turns into that plastic, if that makes sense.
(Music Break)
09:36 Alex Wise – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Neel Dhanesha. He is a tech and climate reporter for Vox. So Neel, you were talking about how these nurdles these building blocks of the microplastic world or of the plastic world, how they begin as microplastics but they don’t degrade, they’re just there in the form that they were produced, and then they kind of escape from the manufacturing process. To me that that would signal that there’s more hope on the nurdle front that we can kind of harness this pollutant easier than some of the plastics that degrade. Is that an overly optimistic viewpoint, or is that realistic?
10:17 Neel Dhanesha – No, I think that’s totally realistic. I mean, you know at the end of the day the reason these things are escaping is because of, you know, gaps in the manufacturing process, right? Like and it’s always through really mundane little ways. You know they’re slipping around railcars. They’re falling out of cracks, literally. They’re falling out of cracks, or they’re like, you know, falling into drains somewhere at a factory. And there are best practices that people have come up with that could stop these nurdles from getting into the environment, you know. And the problem is that none of the plastic companies have any incentive to clean them up because it’s just cheaper to let them keep spilling than to install the barriers or the fixes that would need to be installed to stop. Them from leaking into the environment in the first place.
10:59 Alex Wise – What are some of the examples of better practices that could stop them from leaking?
11:04 Neel Dhanesha – I mean, these are so. Like I said, these are so mundane. So for example nurdles are blown into railcars using these pneumatic hose. And when they’re not properly attached to the rail car that can spill out around the edges of the hoses, and so one fix, just put a tray under the railcars loading area. That would catch the nurdles as they fall off, and then you can, you know, reuse those nurdles into the next loading of the railcar. Instead of letting them spill onto the ground and then getting washed away or blown away.
11:35 Alex Wise – So it’s just a toaster tray, basically under the railcar…
11:39 Neel Dhanesha – Yeah, something as simple as that. I mean, I guess it would be a large tray, but you know it’s a tray at the end of the day. Or you could put you know a mesh grill on a drain that would stay. Up the nerves from getting through and then someone would have to come through and empty the grill every now and then. But you know, it’s just a simple little fix here and there. Or the bags that are used to transport nurdles during shipping could be tough and so that they don’t split apart as easily so that you know the nurdles won’t escape.
12:05 Alex Wise – So you mentioned this 2020 New Orleans spill that you were investigating, Neel. What other major nurdle incidents have there been in terms of spills around the globe?
12:16 Neel Dhanesha – Yeah, I mean, last year in 2021 there was a major spill off the coast of tree Lanka when a tanker carrying millions or billions. It’s still kind of unknown these nurdles sank off the coast of Sri Lanka and it caused what the United Nations called the biggest plastic spill in history. And you know, if you look at the pictures from this spill, you just see these beaches coated in white nurdles and these really striking photos of people trying to clean them up and animals crawling across them and fish filled with nurdles and it kind of highlights how messy this whole thing is, they’re just so hard to clean up. And also there’s no control over these, whether internationally or locally in the United States. These things have gone entirely unregulated and no one knows who’s supposed to clean them up or has any control over stopping them from spilling in the first place.
13:15 Alex Wise – Neel Dhanesha, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
13:19 Neel Dhanesha – Thanks so much, Alex.
13:35 Alex Wise – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by the founder and CEO of Arqlite. Nurdle. Sebastián, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
13:43 Sebastián Sajoux – Hey Alex, thank you very much. Thanks for having me here.
13:47 Alex Wise – So we’ll get into the technology in a second, Sebastián, but first, what’s the mission of Arqlite?
13:53 Sebastián Sajoux – Well, our mission is to tackle plastic pollution. So we work on developing technologies to to achieve this. And we do it by partnering with bigger organizations, by industry leaders, but also with a society. I don’t know if you’re aware, but every time you drop a piece of plastic on the beam, half of that it’s still going to end up in a landfill or incineration on the worst case, you know, in the water Corps and contaminating the, the environment. So that 50% of plastics that no one wants, that’s our raw material. And our first product that it’s the one we’re producing here in California, it’s a smart gravel that replaces mineral and gravel in a variety of applications, right? We count on everyone, every everyone going out there and buying a bag of artists, smart gravel is automatically deviating all those pounds of plastics from the environment.
14:59 Alex Wise – And you have kind of a multi stage rollout plan for it. Why don’t you kind of explain? Right now you you’re going to be available for smaller consumer purchases, but it’s going to be ramping up to bigger construction scale soon, right?
15:14 Sebastián Sajoux – Yeah, totally. So when we started working on this solution, we were aiming for a large scale solution for a large scale problem. That’s why we got this idea of making gravel right so gravel has a great variety of applications and very different markets. from let’s say, starting from the from the bigger markets, you have concrete companies are interested in making light concrete, so they replace a mirror and gravel in the concrete mix by our gravel to get lighter materials and also the better insulated capacity of plastics in there, while also being able to offer green concrete to their customers. Then you have like midsize markets, like the for example, hydroponic growers that are using our gravel as a replacement of expanded clay, because it’s a great growth media for that for those systems. And then we also offer it on smaller bags or retail. It’s already on the big box retailers for small home gardening projects for also small hydroponics projects and also small contractors using the gravel. So you’ll see online on the big retailers and you can also see that you’d maybe you know on a on a big sandbox concrete practices on the road.
16:42 Alex Wise – Now let’s dive into the process of upcycling that Arqlite has developed, why don’t you kind of walk us through how it might work from somebody using a plastic container that gets rejected by their waste management company and how it might get into your company’s hands and how you utilize it.
17:05 Sebastián Sajoux – Yeah, sure. So we get the plastics from two main we have like two main streams one is both industrial That is manufacturers of different types of plastics that are in the, that there are non recyclable. And for that I could say, potato chips, bags, I don’t know cookies wrappers for, for energy bars, all those films that we see on on the products that we eat, for example every day, because they are they have several layers of different plastics that protect the you know the product for a longer time. So, they were really born on recyclable. So the more that say, even environmentally aware companies manufacturing these materials, they don’t want to send all this crap on the left over to a landfill, so they send it to us. And same thing happens on the post consumer side where we partner with MERS and with other recyclers that are picking the good plastics that have a commodity value, and then they have no other toys and sending those plastics to to the other the remaining plastics to to a landfill, right. So we do offer that as a service. So it’s pretty, pretty special, because we have a double revenue model where we charge for the solution. And we compete again, against a landfill. And we offer a price competitive option and a sustainable option at the end of the day. Once we just have to give you a general idea of what happens with those classes. When we when they get here. we classify them, we grind all the plastic, we clean them, we remove any leftovers of organics or any other contaminants that they may have. And then we heat them keep them really high temperatures to remove any other bacteria. So we sterilize the plastic. And at the end of the day, at the end of the process, you get this growl, which is sterilized and that assures that it will be long lasting, that you won’t Leach anything that it won’t break down into microplastics. And of course it is not easy with it took us five years to develop the technology. But now Yeah, we can tell that we turn trash into a long lasting sustainable product.
19:30 Alex Wise – And in terms of application is it is this gravel different than other gravel like can it not be used on in highways etc
19:39 Sebastián Sajoux – Well, the main difference is there are two main difference one is weight, right? This is very, very light. So compared to mineral gravel that is really heavy, we can offer that benefit. And that’s of course useful. If you’re looking for that if you want to do for example, like concrete, then you want to replace mineral gravel with our gravel. But if you are looking for, for example compressive strength, then you want to go for mineral gravel standard grow because there’s nothing you know, harder than that. So we offer flexibility, which is very much appreciated in civil engineering applications, lightweight and great insulation. So depending on the use you want to do for it, then for example, there’s fuel, just buying the gravel because as going to the store, grabbing, you know, a 50 liter or a big bag of gravel, it’s very heavy, it’s very difficult to transport to handle anyone to install, it’s dirty. And when you buy our smart gravel, you can carry a couple of bags and BOC three times lighter, it’s clean, and at the end of the day you’re helping the environment. So that’s kind of depending on on what you’re doing, how you will be able to benefit from it.
21:02 Alex Wise – And in terms of procuring the plastics, you mentioned how you can get like these films that might get thrown away otherwise how do you compete with like the landfills for these products?
21:23 Sebastián Sajoux – Well, first of all, in terms of economics, we charge less than a landfill. So that’s one of the main difference between our technologies and other technologies out there were very cost efficient, so doesn’t mean driver and also companies sending those plastics us besides maybe saving a penny they get access to incentives to subsidies or you know tax credits or other benefits that are associated with their with their industry because they are improving their sustainability metrics. So it’s, it’s a win, however you look at it.
22:11 (Music Break)
22:59 Alex Wise – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Sebastián Sajoux. He is the founder and CEO of Arqlite, people can go to Arqlite.com, to check it out. So the gravel itself can be used for what exactly is this something that people would put into their gardens or their driveways or what?
23:22 Sebastián Sajoux – Well just to mention a couple of applications when, if let’s say you you’re growing hydroponics with a hydroponic system, you use expanded clay as a growth media. So the plants will grab from the expanded clay and they will grow feeding from the water that runs through that expanded clay. If you replace that expanded clay, which is a traditional system with our gravel, then you’ll get a clean system because these gravel hours our gravel won’t break down into smaller parts are wandering and dust keeping all the systems clean. And on top of that, because it’s not porous. If you ever get like some type of pest in the in the water, you just remove it, wash it, and you can reuse it many times compared to expanded clay where you will need to just toss all the expanded clay and buy a new batch and install it again. So that’s for example hydroponics. And then home gardening, the most traditional use is to help avoid root rot, which is something very common among people that love gardening. And so you want if you set a layer of smart gravel at the bottom of your pots, then you will allow the water to drain more efficiently out of the pot and your plants will grow bigger and healthier. So that’s that’s for the most common home applications. reflection is shows with crackpots.
24:48 Alex Wise – So Sebastián, you were mentioning how you have different product offerings at a different scale level on the horizon? Are there any plans for your company to expand the range of plastics that can be recycled?
25:04 Sebastián Sajoux – So the crazy thing here is that we are already resizing every type of plastic. So that the the magic of the technologies that we can mix everything together and turn that into a new plastic polymer that we can mold into different things. So maybe the challenge is not adding new plastics, but adding new products to the to the products that we are offering. So because we’re already related in and working a lot with the construction industry, with landscapers in and architects and urban developers, we’re still we’re really working on new product for for those categories, like other fibers to be used for concrete blocks for emergency housing, and ready mix concrete. So you can make a light and eco friendly ready mix at home. So there are other things that we’re working in partnership with, with bigger companies that are leaders in the market.
26:08 Alex Wise – And can you kind of give us a snapshot of the competitive landscape? You have your own technology, but there are other companies that take plastic and use it for industrial purposes. Do you work directly with the waste management company or not?
26:25 Sebastián Sajoux – Well, yes, we work with them because the process begins with a with an analysis of the plastics available, the amount of plastic they have, how contaminated they are. So we do tailor a solution for them, and then work on a long term agreement so we can both get benefited from the relationship. And I would say that at this point, we are the only ones taking these unrecyclable or let’s say hard to recycle plastics and processing them at a rate of one ton per hour. And turning that into an efficient product for a massive market. So we have covered all the all the angles, because we have a good technology, we have a market that doesn’t generate any bottleneck for the product, which is sometimes something that affects great ideas, because then the market is maybe not ready for the final product, resulting of a great technology. And the other thing would be the low cost, because all other technologies out there, which are great, like really, really amazing, like the polymer ice and the plastics and, and other things like that, then they are still in a lab scale. And they’re very, very expensive. So it’s still you know, they’re a little bit green yet. And they are where we were five years ago when we started.
27:50 Alex Wise – He’s the CEO and founder of Arqlite and people can go to Arqlite.com to learn more. Sebastián Sajoux. Sebastián, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 Sebastián Sajoux – Thanks to you, Alex. It was a pleasure.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the Hot 8 Brass Band, Jefferson Airplane and Bob Dylan. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune into Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Nurdle Hurdles + Turning Plastic Into Gravel appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
As the news that thirty year-old cryptocurrency baron, Sam Bankman-Fried‘s, FTX empire suddenly collapsed, the residual effects reverberated in the spheres of business, politics and philanthropy. Bankman-Fried was one of the largest donors to and a huge proponent of effective altruism, a social and philosophical movement started by academics Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to author and journalist Alexander Zaitchik to learn more about the effective altruism movement and its offshoot known as “longtermism.” We discuss how longtermism sprung from effective altruism, how the downfall of Bankman-Fried might change the mega-philanthropy space moving forward, and how the movement all too often ignores the immediate threat of climate change.
00:01 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
00:25 Alexander Zaitchik (AZ) – Yes they have pretty strong recruitment at elite universities. Very ambitious people, but I don’t think it’s because those people are drawn to philanthropy so much as to the extent that I’ve had experience with them, it’s as much as anything, a veneer for ambition and it basically can offer sainthood to people who just want to make a lot of money.
00:52 Narrator – As the news that thirty year-old cryptocurrency baron, Sam Bankman-Fried’s, FTX empire suddenly collapsed, the residual effects reverberated in the spheres of business, politics and philanthropy. Bankman-Fried was one of the largest donors to and a huge proponent of effective altruism, a social and philosophical movement started by academics Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to author and journalist Alexander Zaitchik to learn more about the effective altruism movement and its offshoot known as “longtermism.” We discuss how longtermism sprung from effective altruism, how the downfall of Bankman-Fried might change the mega-philanthropy space moving forward, and how the movement all too often ignores the immediate threat of climate change.
02:02 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Alex Zaitchik. He is a journalist and author. His latest book is called “Owning the Sun. Alex, welcome to see change radio.
02:12 Alexander Zaitchik (AZ) – Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
02:14 Alex Wise (AW) – So you have a piece that was pretty prescient in the New Republic published in late October, entitled The Heavy Price of Longtermism, and I say it was a little prescient because this was before the Sam Bankman-Fried. FTX scandal really unfolded in full view, so you must have been working on this piece a little bit before that. I imagine why don’t you first kind of explain what longtermism means and why you decided to undertake this piece.
02:47 AZ – Well, longtermism is, as you hinted at a very popular parlor philosophy among Silicon Valley and adjacent new money. Billionaires Sam Bankman-Fried is one of many young tech billionaires who is lavishly funding this movement. Which is best described as an extension of another movement known as Effective Altruism which has about a decade long lineages, people might be more familiar with EA, but you can’t really talk about longtermism without talking about EA first.
03:24 AW – OK, so then why don’t we talk about effective altruism first?
03:27 AZ – Effective altruism was controversial is controversial as well, but it does sound very appealing at first. The idea is basically it was an attempt to rationalize and maximize the impact of philanthropic. Giving and it was an ethical system for organizing your life to maximize your ability to contribute to this efficient giving. Basically the idea was you should try to make as much money as possible and then donate a large portion of your income to EA approved nonprofits that can produce these outsized impacts by great simple interventions in under resourced areas like mosquito nets in Africa for example is a popular EA example.
04:15 AW – I read that example that you gave in the New Republic piece and I had just actually heard about mosquito nets from somebody and then researched it. And there’s an apocryphal tale there with that example, and so the quote was something to the effect of.. “it’s better to give $100 mosquito nets to these people in Africa, then give them $1000” but what happened with a lot of these mosquito nets was they were used as fishing nets by local fishermen. In some of these more fragile ecosystems in Kenya and Tanzania and sub-Saharan Africa. And because the mosquito nets were so fine. And they had such small holes. They had a lot of bycatch, very small fish that ended up dying and collapsing the whole fishery in each ecosystem. So these mosquito nets were really kind of an allegory for, you know, this paternalistic white knight colonial thing. We’ll give you all these mosquito nets and the mosquito Nets end up killing their livelihood.
05:20 AZ – Yeah, maybe that’s a good metaphor for the for the whole enterprise. Because the larger. Criticism of EA. The sort of most profound one, I think, is a structural one which was that by putting all of the emphasis on dollar value, you basically end up valorising people who can produce the most dollars and focusing very narrowly on giving as a metric to these philanthropy’s that have sort of single issue, focus and then, of course, what that means is you put no value at all into looking at the underlying causes of the issues you’re trying to address, i.e., poverty north-south India. Quality pollution, et cetera and the rap against EA was, it was letting a system off the hook that did not deserve to be let off the hook. And not only that, but making heroes of people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates who could launder their their billions through these philanthropic enterprises while also reinforcing. The system that’s reliably producing more suffering in poverty and in public health emerged. So there was a controversy around EA. The around effective altruism before longtermism emerged as its successor philosophy. I guess you could call it. Basically what happened was. Future generations was considered a subset concern of the effect of altruism. Movement, the idea was that whether someone is 10,000 miles away from you or 10 feet away from you, their suffering is of the same value their life is of the same value, and you can also project that temporarily so that somebody living 10,000 years into the future is worth as much as someone born or that someone alive at the present.
07:10 AW – And these philosophies were kind of set forth. We should mention by academics, right? William MacAskill and Toby Ord were kind of the the godfathers of the effective altruism movement. And then MacAskill has this book called what we owe the future, which sounds a little more like the the Bible of longtermism. Is that right? I haven’t read it.
07:29 AZ – Yeah, Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and William MacAskill were sort of the three faces of effective altruism, and there were other figures who we can get into who sort of took the the football and ran with it with long term. But basically what happened was this idea that future people matter became the emphasis of this other strain known as longtermism and slowly the value of those future people increased to the point where they were not equal to present day human beings in their suffering but greatly exceeded the value. Based on this notion of expected value, because the future could possibly be inhabited by hundreds of billions or trillions of people. Then you know 6 billion people today. Suddenly don’t matter so much and it basically inverted one of the core insights of effective altruism and dramatically changed its equalizing assumption that everyone suffering is equal. And once it did that, it opened the door to what critics say is a justification for not only ignoring suffering and injustice and pollution in the present, but justifying those things as necessary cost of enabling this future spacefaring civilization to take place. Because in order to reach that civilization we have to supercharge economic growth. That’s the key problem, I think that doesn’t get talked enough with people thinking longtermism is really about thinking about the future and it’s somehow dovetails with an environmental and ecological awareness. It’s actually an enemy of an ecological approach to politics because it requires economic growth be supercharged at all costs. It’s to ensure technological progress accelerates to the point where we can do all of these things that Elon Musk wants us to be doing in the next two or 300 years and Musk. By the way, it’s worth noting is a big fan of this book that you mentioned, which is the latest sort of mass audience facing Bible of longtermism called what we are the future. Musk said that, it was basically his own philosophy on paper.
09:57 AW – So you’ve outlined longtermism, defined effective altruism, kind of given us the original faces, the ideas behind it. But now connect the dots to the billionaire class that it’s embraced, Alex.
10:10 AZ – Right, well, they have been funded very, very well by the the sort of new tech elite I mentioned Dustin Moskowitz, the founder of Skype. Sam Bankman-Fried who you mentioned at the top. There’s a long list of these people who have been funding institutes and research agendas and books and papers, and it was their money that basically. Took effective altruism and made longtermism the dominant. Strain and concern. And it wasn’t about helping people who are equal on planet Earth in the present, but it suddenly became all about prioritizing people in the future, this sort of weird cosmic enlargement of what amounts to a kind of pro-life argument. You know, people who say the unborn are paramount in in the abortion debate. They’re basically saying billions of unborn people who it’s worth noting are not going to be human beings in the traditional sense, but they’re going to be disembodied AI intelligences. They are essentially trumping the suffering of homeless sapiens as we know them today because there will be so many of them and their ability to consume and produce pleasure will be so large. The value of all of that future pleasure is really the draw. Driving sort of organizing principle for these people, and that is something that you kind of have to be a billionaire to be obsessed with, or an intellectual on their payroll. It’s not something that most people understand how to think about the future. Most people think in terms of their grandchildren. They think of you know the IPCC. Reports that give us ten 20-30 years to make fundamental changes to ensure something like a hospitable planet for the next generation. This is what people think of as the long term for good reason. But when you’re, you know, building space bunkers in Mars and reading science fiction, and you’re able to indulge your ego and thinking. You can download your brain and maybe you’ll survive in 3030 thousand years or whatever time frame these people are thinking of. And it does go out. Hundreds and thousands of years, millions of years. This is the kind of politics that you end up with. And the fact that it’s been mainstreamed to the extent that it has is a testament to the funding behind it, and really nothing else because you take away the funding and it’s just it’s really just whack job stuff.
12:51 (Music Break)
13:53 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to author and journalist Alex Zaitchik. His latest book is owning the son of People, history of Monopoly medicine from aspirin to COVID-19 vaccines, and we’re discussing his piece for the New Republic dated October 24th – “The heavy price of longtermism.” So Alex, the idea of effective altruism I I mentioned that it sounds benign and if we remove the billionaire element of it, if we remove the longtermism element of some of these things and just look at the idea of people pledging to give more and to look into how they give and closer spend more time and devote more of yourself to giving and make that something you’re passionate about. I don’t think that has people upset.
14:42 AZ – I wouldn’t underplay the controversy around effective altruism because the cost of that focus, which you just described, which does sound good on its face, is a disregard for structural analysis systems critiques.
14:57 AW – Yes, it’s very data-driven, right?
14:59 AZ – It’s very data-driven, it’s very narrow. It’s very sort of technocratic. Top down these NGO’s will do their thing and the global S will be happy for it.
15:11 AW – But that’s the movement I think I I when I was explaining. I think the idea is benign. I think the movement is what you’re talking about, where it’s taken on this other, less benign area where it has to be technocratic.
15:24 AZ – Yeah, I mean, rationalizing philanthropy is fine as far as it goes. But if it comes at the cost of any larger thinking about the world or more profound thinking about why these problems are so persistent and getting worse in many cases, then I don’t know if that’s a good trade.
15:41 AW – No, no, I agree. And then when you look at how long termism sprung from this, you mentioned the IPCC report and the messaging that the climate movement has a problem with is that it seems so vague it seems so in the future. But longtermism takes this to a whole new level, doesn’t it?
15:59 AZ – Yeah, they basically are concerned with risks to humanity’s survival slash technological advancement if something ends up wiping out three billion people, especially if they happen to be poor and live in countries. Without a whole lot of chasity. That’s kind of a detail along the lines of Stalin’s comment about, you know, one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic that’s kind of how they view human history. It’s all about generating velocity for our conquest of the stars by our distant, digital descendants.
16:45 AW – And the ends justifying the means.
16:46 AZ – Very much so. This utilitarian movement and so was effective altruism, so is effective altruism, and they share that philosophical DNA if it’s good according to their values as they in their goals as they define them. If it furthers those goals, then it’s good by definition, even if that means in their own words. Dispatching with very traditional long held enlightenment standards of morality, and where that goes is some very very dark places. Where the effective altruists would say, look whether you’re in sub-Saharan Africa or suburban New Jersey, your life has an equal value. Longtermism does the exact opposite. And it says if you know all those people in sub-Saharan Africa have to die to ensure that these future people can not only live, but continue humanity’s acceleration. Into this kind of like permanent expansion growth state that they think is going to be possible because they have no understanding of physical limits or systems or basic biophysical laws.They just think it can just keep going on forever and ever first on Earth and then on other planets. Uhm, then yeah it is a recipe for basically being willing to sacrifice most of the people who are alive today because they can’t contribute to this project and in utilitarian terms, they’re not worth much. They’re not. They don’t have much value, and it’s this very slippery slope that these guys have laid before us, and they’re teaching in major universities. They’re in government, they’re running these big funding arms, although luckily not the FTX. Future Institute for Foundation. And anymore so that funding world is shrinking with with their most recent crypto collapse, which I guess is another good thing about that. And you know, I also, I just think it’s important to expose these guys for what they are because on the on its face. And if you know you just read these articles on Vox which are basically. Carrying water for for the long term missed funders. It can sound like it’s just thinking about the future and trying to protect, you know future generations, but it’s it’s really anything but it’s it’s a recipe for sacrificing anyone that could possibly remember you in in the sort of course of the three or four generations that we usually think about as as the future.
19:32 AW – Yes, I saw the movie don’t look up before I do anything about this longtermism. I didn’t actually enjoy the film very much, it seems so far fetched the character. I don’t know if you saw this, but like the Steve Jobs kind of character now it kind of connects in my mind as a more compelling parody.
19:50 AZ – You know, I haven’t actually made that connection, but I’m glad you mentioned it, because now that you do mention it that he would absolutely be one of these long term institute. Funding types, that’s him exactly.
20:02 AW – So I think we split hairs sometimes and we give the billionaire Class a little bit of leeway when we say, “well, they’re giving it all away,” and that was one of the things. That sounded so righteous about Sam Bankman freds perspective is this was a guy who was making tons of money but he was going to give it all away. But then I just heard he went broke. And he’s putting his @40 million penthouse in the Bahamas up for sale. So this is a guy who was giving it all away but he was living in a $40 million penthouse so these people who are talking about giving it away or not giving it away to the effect that they’re not going to live like modern emperors.
20:38 AZ – These claims are never what they seem. Bill Gates, his wealth has only grown since he started, quote UN quote, giving all of his money away, which has been basically a laundering operation for his funds. His reputation, his name, and the amassing of massive unparalleled political power in public health and and other areas, increasingly agriculture, which is something I’m starting to look into more, for now, after spending some time on his role in public health and in the pharmaceutical industry. I don’t think there’s anything modest about any of these people who make those claims when they, when they’re still worth 10s of billions of dollars and in control the commensurate power that comes with that.
21:23 (Music Break)
22:12 AW – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to author and journalist Alex Zaitchik. So Alex, if we can just stick to the climate change in the environment as a parallel to the long termism movement, we’ve had several guests on Sea Change Radio over the years talking about we need to have an end of growth. That growth is the problem. We need to have different metrics for measuring success as societies and governments and get rid of GDP and and focus on things like the Global Happiness Index. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that movement. That sounds almost too far fetched for a good water cooler conversation, but the messaging of longtermism is one that I think that from my conversations with people who understand it better than me, they tend to say “well, you got to watch this Ted talk or you have to read this book” and it requires a decent amount of investment to “get it.” I don’t think that is going to lead to a mass movement. It’s going to lead to an elite movement. Is that fair to say?
23:18 AZ – In terms of the growth issue and environmental. Limits and ecological limits of a closed system like planet Earth. I can save you a whole bunch of time on YouTube and tell you they don’t mention those things at all.
23:31 AW – They don’t even seem to be aware of them, right? It’s not just like these technological silver bullets that they want to perpetuate things.
23:37 AZ – No, they just dismissed it out of hand McAskill in his book says look to the extent climate change is real and he’s not climate denier. But he says, look, we could go 15 degrees higher and you know we’ll still be able to grow food somehow and the rich countries will adapt. And it’s not going to be an extinction threat.
23:53 AW – So he dismisses climate change.
23:55 AZ – Yeah, and nuclear war too because they think as long as enough of the wealthy countries can survive and continue to power technological advancement, it’s not really a disaster for them.
24:09 AZ – The real disaster would be some sort of equal steady state economy, in which there was World Peace and happiness. We weren’t completely devoted to economic growth and hyper technological change for then that would be the real disaster. It’s exactly backward from what most people think is the only way out of our current mess they want to basically, keep going down the same path only. To step on the gas and whatever the you know consequences of that are, it’s worth it. Slowing down and trying to rebuild the civilization along different lines and different values. That’s the one thing that they cannot allow because it risks the colonization of the Galaxy by these hyper intelligent growth obsessed super machines that they think are going to be all over the universe in 50,000 years because they had the foresight to make sure that they could happen and nobody else understood what had to be done, and nobody else had the fortitude to make the sacrifices that this requires.
25:26 AW -Sticking with the parallels of the climate change movement, I can’t help but think that similar to how we pooh-poohed some of the evangelists of global warming like Al Gore. I remember talking to a friend who was like, well, he’s flying around in private jets. His carbon footprint is enormous. “He’s a hypocrite.” A lot of people would say, “well, what’s the point? We’re all heating up the planet, and if Al Gore can take a private jet, then I I can buy a Ford F-150 and burn as much gas as I want.” Similarly, I see that being maybe a problem for philanthropy on a granular scale where somebody who isn’t a billionaire but should be considering giving more of their net worth away decides not to because you see the bad behavior that’s stemming from effective altruism or longtermism. This billionaire class that might be perverting a basic human good, will mega philanthropy, and its flaws, that you’re writing about in the New Republic. Will that inform basic, altruistic principles that we’re all taught that you know it’s better to give than to receive?
26:37 AZ – I mean, I would hope not. I mean I hope people would still, you know, want to contribute to a food kitchen. I don’t know if there’s too much of a connection between this sort of lofty futuristic academic complex and you know people doing community level things, which is where most people are at in terms. Of giving or you know, national environmental organizations. Or whatever.
26:59 AW – But aren’t there some people involved in effective altruism who aren’t millionaires?
27:04 AZ – If they’ve basically yes they have pretty strong recruitment in elite universities. Very ambitious people, but I don’t think it’s because those people are drawn to philanthropy so much as to the extent that I’ve had experience with them. It’s as much as anything a veneer for ambition, and it basically can offer sainthood to people who just want to make a lot of money. And it allows you to think that you’re not only ascending to the 1% in terms of career success and income, but you’re also one of the best people in the world, it’s a weird kind of double benediction and it offers a kind of absolution for a certain kind of ambitious college kid. So yeah, they speak directly to those people.
27:53 AW – He’s an author and journalist. His new book is called “Owning the Sun,” Alex Zaitchik. Alex, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
28:01 AZ – Any time, thanks for having me.
28:17 Narrator – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Vulfpeck, Anders Osborne, and Bob Dylan. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin. Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand and many others. And tune into Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Alexander Zaitchik on Effective Altruism + Longtermism appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
While much of the world turns its gaze to the first World Cup held in the Middle East, there was recently another important international gathering on the environmental front nearby. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Andrea Thompson of Scientific American to get a better understanding of what was discussed at the … Continue reading Andrea Thompson of Scientific American on COP 27 →
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This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives and take a look at two mineral-based innovations. First, we speak to Ian Power, an assistant professor at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who is working on a breakthrough in manufacturing a CO2-absorbing mineral called magnesite in a fraction of the time that it … Continue reading Ian Power + Brent Constantz: Don’t Take The Planet For Granite →
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With the right-leaning US Supreme Court poised to eliminate affirmative action in higher education around the country -- this seemed like an opportune moment to take stock of how effective affirmative action has been since President Kennedy instituted it in 1961. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Roderick Graham, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University to examine who will actually be affected by the seemingly inevitable change, what the right wing might do once affirmative action is gone, and how this decision may affect other selection preferences in college admissions.
00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:17 Rod Graham (RG) - We want to make sure that they get college degrees because they're going to go back to the communities they're going to raise good families. They're going to be our doctors, our firemen, this type of thing, and so we think it's in our best interest as a university and a community to target that population for that reason, and I think that's how we should do it.
00:36 Narrator - With the right-leaning US Supreme Court poised to eliminate affirmative action in higher education around the country - this seemed like an opportune moment to take stock of how effective affirmative action has been since President Kennedy instituted it in 1961. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Rod Graham, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University to examine who will actually be affected by the seemingly inevitable change, what the right wing might do once affirmative action is gone, and how this decision may affect other selection preferences in college admissions.
01:30 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Rod Graham. Rod is a professor at Old Dominion University and a sociologist and he's a contributor to The Editorial Board. Rod, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
01:43 Rod Graham (RG) - Hey, thanks for having me.
01:45 Alex Wise (AW) - So I wanted to have you on to talk about affirmative action. We have discussed affirmative action in different iterations previously on the show, but we're at a new breaking point in the American legal framework and the approach to affirmative action. If all predictions prove correct, the Supreme Court, this conservative-leaning court, is going to reverse 60 years of affirmative action legislation through this case brought by an organization at University of North Carolina and Harvard - Students for Fair Admissions. You wrote a piece for the Editorial Board entitled “Who needs affirmative Action when we have racism? Leveraging white power can produce the same results.” Walk us through. Your process of absorbing and how do you square this in your mind?
02:41 RG - Well, as it happens, like a year or two ago, I was reading this book. I think it's called “The Economics of Race.” It's from an economist at Columbia, Brendan O'Flaherty, and it was just an offhand piece in the book. He was talking about racial inequality and all this stuff and he said, well, I'm not going to talk about affirmative action too much because it doesn't really matter much because of the percentage of people and it just kind of stuck in my head and I said, you know without doing any calculations or looking at it. I was like, you know, he's kind of right, because there's a sort of misconception about how many people are impacted by affirmative action. In reality, it's only a small percentage of top schools where people are competing heavily. That's when you get the situation where you say. OK, this person has a racial background that we like or gender that we like and so then we will select that person over someone who may not have that background but has a higher density. So that's that's very few schools, and so in that piece I just kind of did some back of the napkin calculus. Where I looked at the top 50 schools in terms of their status, their prestige, I guess, and it's about 600,000.
Do you have environmental food guilt? There’s no actual definition for that (because we just made it up), but many of us definitely know how it feels: that regretful pang we get, knowing that much of the food we either eat or feed our pets is doing harm to the environment. This week on Sea … Continue reading Bugging Out: Anne Carlson of Jiminy’s + Chef Bun Lai →
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Do you have environmental food guilt? There's no actual definition for that (because we just made it up), but many of us definitely know how it feels: that regretful pang we get, knowing that much of the food we either eat or feed our pets is doing harm to the environment. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to two people cultivating alternative food sources in order to help the planet. First, the founder and CEO of Jiminy's, Anne Carlson, discusses how their company makes insect protein-based pet food. Then, we speak to acclaimed chef and sustainable food pioneer Bun Lai to learn about his vision for making both Mother Earth and her human inhabitants healthier by incorporating insects and invasive species into dining experiences.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:23 Bun Lai - Why not eat animals and plants that are abundant but underutilized and aim our destructive appetites at them rather than other species that were overfishing, for example.
00:38 Alex Wise - Do you have environmental food guilt? There's no actual definition for that (because we just made it up), but many of us definitely know how it feels: that regretful pang we get, knowing that much of the food we either eat or feed our pets is doing harm to the environment. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to two people cultivating alternative food sources in order to help the planet. First, the founder and CEO of Jiminy's, Anne Carlson, discusses how their company makes insect protein-based pet food. Then, we speak to acclaimed chef and sustainable food pioneer Bun Lai to learn about his vision for making both Mother Earth and her human inhabitants healthier by incorporating insects and invasive species into dining experiences.
01:48 Alex Wise - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by the founder and CEO of Jiminy’s and Carlson and welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:56 Anne Carlson - Thank you for having me here.
01:57 Alex Wise - So explain for our listeners what Jiminy’s offers consumers and the problem you're trying to address.
02:05 Anne Carlson - Jiminy’s is disrupting the pet industry. We're fighting climate change as we feed our pets. And how are we doing that? We're replacing traditional protein, so think cow or chicken with insect and plant protein, and so we're delivering sustainable dog food that's coupled with better nutrition. No compromises.
02:28 Alex Wise - And explain the process of sourcing insects. Where do you get your grubs and your crickets? How does that work?
02:37 Anne Carlson - Yeah, well they come from farms, so these are all farmed indoors and the great thing about farming insects is that it takes so much less land than any other type of protein source, and they're naturally swarming species, so they like to live together so it's extremely humane as well, and actually let me just give you an example. If you've got an acre of land and say you were to put cows on that acre of land at the end of a year, you'd have £192.00 of protein. If you put chickens on that land, you'd have £265. If you put crickets 65,000 pounds of protein, and if you put grubs, which is another type of insect we're working with over 1,000,000 pounds of protein at the end of the year.
03:33 Alex Wise - And who do you see as being your main consumer? I would imagine the low-hanging fruit would be vegetarians and vegans who are also pet lovers who feel torn about giving their dogs and cats animal protein when they're not buying it themselves.
03:47 Anne Carlson - Absolutely, that that's definitely part of the demographic, but it's also other families that are concerned about the environment, and they might be doing Meatless Mondays so they consider themselves, say, a flexitarian, but let's always remember, though, that our end consumer is the dog. And so with the other, the other type of pet parent, that's going to be buying the product. Is one that's got a problem.
Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood product. Yet, the industry is rife with problems, from human slavery to ecological devastation. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Daniel Russek, the founder and CEO of Atarraya, a Mexican-based company whose innovative shrimp farming solution is called Shrimpbox. Russek talks about the problematic practices plaguing the shrimp industry worldwide and gives us a peek into the Shrimpbox approach.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:10 Daniel Russek (DR) - I really try not to eat shrimp if it doesn't come from one of our farms or from a farm I trust. And I didn't eat shrimp before starting this venture.
00:29 Narrator - Shrimp is America's most popular seafood product, yet the industry is rife with problems from human slavery to ecological devastation. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak to Daniel Russek, the founder and CEO of Atarraya, a Mexican based company whose innovative shrimp farming solution is called Shrimpbox. Russek talks about the problematic practices plaguing the shrimp industry worldwide and gives us a peek into the Shrimpbox approach.
01:16 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Daniel Russek. Daniel is the CEO and founder of Atarraya and their product is called Shrimpbox. Daniel, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:27 Daniel Russek (DR ) - Hi Alex, happy to be here.
01:30 Alex Wise (AW) - So first, why don't you explain the problem that a lot of consumers may not be aware of, which is the shrimping industry and then let's dive into the solution that Shrimpbox your product is offering. So what is the problem with shrimp in general, Daniel?
01:47 DR - So I think that the first problem with shrimp is that the market cannot get enough of it. Basically, it's the number one seafood product that in almost any country both weight, volume and value, most notably by value. For instance, Americans spend 70% more money on shrimp than on the 2nd place, which is salmon so and where you have when you have a market that cannot get enough of anything you have on the other side. People that are willing to do anything to get it right. So you have basically two options, which is one is wild catch but the problem with shrimp is that they don't swim most of the time what they do is that they walk so they hang out on the on the seabed. And so the only way to get them is basically dragging that no, so you need to drag the bottom of the ocean, where something between 50 to 90% depending on who's counting of the ocean life, lift, snow or the ocean biomass live.
02:52 AW - So the shrimp themselves might be wild caught, but then they may be catching some other extra stuff in these nets which are damaging the ecosystem?
03:01 DR - Yeah, the nice word for it is bycatch. So and basically shrimp wild catch is responsible for 50% of the global by catch and bycatch means yes, killing something for the benefit of no one from the ocean. So yeah, so that is that is the problem with traditional source, which is wild catch and wild catch numbers are not going anywhere. We're not going to get another million kilograms from the ocean. So then shrimp farming was developed and it was developed in countries like Mexico and Ecuador that developed the technology early on. But then the problem is that basically, shrimp farms rely on a continuous water exchange with the ocean on a scale that is comparable to 1/2 a million people. For instance, the average shrimp farm in Mexico is considered to be 200 hectares or about 400 acres, and it has a continuous water exchange like 1/2 a million people city.
04:06 AW - Can you explain what you mean by water exchange?
04:08 DR - Yes, it's basically so…Have you ever if you ever had a fish, a fish tank in your house? After some time if you get greedy and you put more fish more hobby fish there then they will start dying with their mouths to the surface.
Shrimp is America’s most popular seafood product. Yet, the industry is rife with problems, from human slavery to ecological devastation. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Daniel Russek, the founder and CEO of Atarraya, a Mexican-based company whose innovative shrimp farming solution is called Shrimpbox. Russek talks about the problematic practices plaguing … Continue reading Shrimpbox: A Cleaner Approach To Seafood →
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Many followers of the highly publicized Adnan Syed case were delighted to see an innocent man set free after over two decades behind bars. But the case also highlighted some troubling aspects of American justice, or in Syed’s case, injustice. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Daniel Medwed, a law professor at … Continue reading Defenseless: Daniel Medwed on Incarcerated Innocents →
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With less than a month to go before the midterm elections, concerned citizens across the country are deciding which candidates to support through contributions of time, money and advocacy. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with longtime Democratic political consultant Robijn Van Giesen to gain insight into the closest Senate races - from Nevada and Ohio to Georgia and Wisconsin. We also look at the tight gubernatorial races in Texas and Georgia, along with Van Giesen’s own candidate, Kirsten Engel, who hopes to represent Arizona’s sixth congressional district. Hopefully this episode will inspire some of you to knock on doors, make phone calls, donate to candidates and get your friends on board.
The last time you went for a little walk around the neighborhood, did you take a few moments to drink in the natural beauty around you, even in the most unlikely of places, like a timid squirrel, a blossoming tree or a unique cloud formation or did you choose to zone out with a podcast, … Continue reading Mark Coleman on Mindfulness and Nature (re-broadcast) →
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When it comes to the Middle East and the environment, many of us think first about the area's role in petroleum production. But climate change is hitting this desert region hard - making it both a geopolitical and a literal hotbed. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, a noted blogger, and a Middle East expert. We discuss the struggle for clean air and water in the face of extreme heat in Iraq, Iran and Egypt and contrast it with record flooding currently affecting Pakistan. We also take a look at the negative environmental impacts of desalinization, a staple in desert nations and a solution many are calling for globally as fresh water becomes increasingly scarce.
00:00 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:21 Juan Cole - The rest of the world doesn't have a firm idea of how, how extensive and unusual this disaster is. I mean, in an ordinary information system, we should be looking at Pakistan and saying, Oh no, you know, the the climate emergency is here for real now and that's not, that's not a message I think we're getting from our media.
00:45 Narrator - When it comes to the Middle East and the environment, many of us think first about the area's role in petroleum production. But climate change is hitting this desert region hard - making it both a geopolitical and a literal hotbed. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, a noted blogger, and a Middle East expert. We discuss the struggle for clean air and water in the face of extreme heat in Iraq, Iran and Egypt and contrast it with record flooding currently affecting Pakistan. We also take a look at the negative environmental impacts of desalinization, a staple in desert nations and a solution many are calling for globally as fresh water becomes increasingly scarce.
01:48 Alex Wise - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Juan Cole. Juan is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and a long-time blogger - Informed Comment is his website. Juan, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:03 Juan Cole - Thanks so much.
02:04 Alex Wise - It's a pleasure to have you on the show. I've read your writings for so many years now. Now you wrote recently… you've dived into giving us a glimpse of the various Middle Eastern countries and how they're being affected by climate change. Why don't we start with this region in Iran, Abadan, and what they are encountering right now in terms of heat?
02:29 Juan Cole - There have been new records set in in Abadan in southwestern Iran this summer, with temperatures getting up to 122 Fahrenheit. These are dangerous temperatures that we're seeing in the region.
02:45 Alex Wise - And talk about their water usage in Iran's decade long drought and how it's affecting not just Abadan, but the entire country. Well, Iran really only has one big river system. And again, it's in the southwest of the country, the Karun River and its tributaries. And the former Government of Iran under the Shah, the King, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in 1979.
03:17 Juan Cole - But while he was in power, he initiated a lot of dam works in hopes of creating artificial lakes that would yield irrigation possibilities, but then also to make hydroelectricity, and these monumental projects were pursued by the Shah without much consultation with local people or much understanding of local conditions. And so some of the water now has been diverted to a big agricultural use and that has hurt Iraq, where the water used to flow into from Iran. And now there's this long, long term drought that we're seeing that's similar to the mega drought that we're having in our American Southwest. And so major bodies of water like the Zion Durood, the major river that goes through the city of Esfahan, have dried up that that river over which there is a historic bri...
Ice caps, or the apex of glaciers, are delicate things. As the earth warms, they respond by rapidly thawing into their oceanic homes. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak to journalist Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News to gain a deeper understanding of melting glaciers in Europe, the impact the melt is having on ecosystems, and what policymakers are doing to mitigate the effects.
Dipping one’s toe into a new pond can often mean getting accustomed to a whole new set of acronyms. Well, if you’re treading into the investment world for the first time, here’s one you should know – the ETF, or exchange-traded fund. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn about the ETF market from Jon … Continue reading Jon Maier: WTF Is An ETF? →
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About 24% of the US population resides in the West, a region already profoundly affected by climate change. In 2021 nearly 95% of the American West was characterized by drought conditions, and anyone who lives on this side of the country knows that wildfires and rolling blackouts are now the norm rather than the exception. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Los Angeles Times energy reporter, Sammy Roth, about this energy-hungry region. We get an in-depth look at a big wind power project in Wyoming, examine the increasing water needs of one of California’s agricultural regions, and get a glimpse into the latest LA Times energy-related project, Repowering the West.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:18 Sammy Roth (SR) - It's a little bit of a, you know, sort of go slow to go fast situation. There's a need to speed up the construction of renewable energy really dramatically to get the emissions reductions in greenhouse gases that we need. But if you just try to do that too fast without thinking through this stuff you're going to, you're going to get stopped in a lot of places.
00:37 Narrator - About 24% of the US population resides in the West, a region already profoundly affected by climate change. In 2021 nearly 95% of the American West was characterized by drought conditions, and anyone who lives on this side of the country knows that wildfires and rolling blackouts are now the norm rather than the exception. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Los Angeles Times energy reporter, Sammy Roth, about this energy-hungry region. We get an in-depth look at a big wind power project in Wyoming, examine the increasing water needs of one of California’s agricultural regions, and get a glimpse into the latest LA Times energy-related project, Repowering the West.
01:40 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Sammy Roth. He's an energy reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Sammy, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
01:48 Sammy Roth (SR) - Hey Alex, happy to be here.
01:50 AW - So you've been traveling quite a lot for your work with the LA Times, and you have a very bold project called Repowering the West. Why don't you explain the general concept to listeners as it moves forward?
02:08 SR - So the project we're calling it repowering the West. It's a series of stories about how the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is reshaping landscapes and ecosystems and rural communities in different parts of the western United States. And what are the benefits and the opportunities of that and what are their challenges and the roadblocks to that. So we're planning to do at least six stories in this series. And the first one that I reported out in in May, and it was just published recently by the Times, spent a week traveling across four states. So we started in Wyoming at the construction site of what's going to be the largest wind farm in the United States in southern Wyoming. And then we traveled across Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Nevada going along the route of the power line that's going to be built across 730 miles to get the electricity from this remote wind farm to Southern California where the where the energy is needed. So that was that was part one and several more parts to come.
03:08 AW - When you go on these on site projects, how are you able to carve a narrative out of looking at these big, seemingly impenetrable utility projects? It must be a challenge.
03:23 SR - It is a challenge and you know it gets easier when you've been doing this over a period of time, right? So I've been covering energy in the western United States for eight years and, you know, I've been to a lot of places like this before. In fact, this wind farm site in Wyoming I actually went to once before when I was at the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, I was there for the first time. Just about 6, gosh,
It is estimated that over 2.5 million homes are equipped with solar panels in the U.S. And the popularity of capturing the natural power of the sun to heat and cool our homes is on the rise - according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) solar panel installations have increased by 43% in just the past couple of years. This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio is Sachu Constantine, the Executive Director of Vote Solar, a policy advocacy organization committed to expanding access to affordable solar energy. Constantine provides an update on net metering legislation in California, gives us a glimpse into what's happening in the community solar space, and looks at hurdles to solar that the Trump Administration mounted.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:15 Sachu Constantine (SC) - We will always run up against the issue that when you buy a solar panel. And you buy all the equipment that goes with that solar panel including, including a battery you are buying 25 years of energy, that in and of itself is a difficult proposition.
00:32 Narrator - It is estimated that over 2.5 million homes are equipped with solar panels in the U.S. And the popularity of capturing the natural power of the sun to heat and cool our homes is on the rise - according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) solar panel installations have increased by 43% in just the past couple of years. This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio is Sachu Constantine, the Executive Director of Vote Solar, a policy advocacy organization committed to expanding access to affordable solar energy. Constantine provides an update on net metering legislation in California, gives us a glimpse into what's happening in the community solar space, and looks at hurdles to solar that the Trump Administration mounted.
01:26 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Sachu Constantine. He is the executive director of vote Solar, Sachu Constantine. Sachu, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:42 Sachu Constantine (SC) - Thanks, Alex.
01:43 SC - Great to be with you.
01:44 AW - So we've had your predecessor on Adam Browning several times talking about the work that Vote Solar does. But now that you've taken over as Executive Director, why don't you remind our listeners the mission of your organization?
01:58 SC - Thanks for the opportunity to come on. Adam has been a mentor and a real leader in our space and I'm, I'm really honored to be sitting in this seat at Vote Solar. Vote Solar is a 20 year old nonprofit advocacy organization.
02:10 SC - We have worked at the state level to make solar a mainstream energy choice to really improve. The value proposition for customers, for communities, for the country around solar, and quite frankly, we've been incredibly successful at that under Adam's leadership and now under my transition leadership, we are making solar unaffordable. Ubiquitous choice that customers and utilities and communities can all make, and that has been our goal. All along, climate change has been a north star. We are expanding our mission to talk about energy choices, energy burden and energy justice, and I think it's really important to our final vision, which is a strong, robust, resilient energy economy powered by renewables like solar and wind that is available and useful and helpful to everyone in the country.
03:04 AW - And on a day-to-day basis, what pies are you getting your fingers dipped into in in terms of policymaking?
03:10 SC - Yeah, that's a great question. Vote Solar's bread and butter has always been working at the state level, working at Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs). Those commissions which decide how utilities get to run, get to earn profit, get to deploy resources. So we act as expert witnesses in proceedings around net metering or integrated resource planning or portfolio planning or transmission planning at those state levels we al...
Have you ever watched in amazement as a visually impaired person nimbly maneuvers their way through a crowded subway station? Well, some thoughtful innovations are being developed to enable people with low vision to navigate the world with greater ease. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to the founder and CEO of Waymap, Tom Pey, about his start-up company’s breakthrough navigation technology. We discuss his company's product, look at some of the challenges that people with disabilities face, and touch upon the promise of autonomous vehicles for those without sight.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:22 Tom Pey - So what this does is this hands back, and that's why the phone itself becomes the instrument that is the accurate navigation device, because in your phone you now have the freedom to explore.
00:37 Narrator - Have you ever watched in amazement as a visually impaired person nimbly maneuvers their way through a crowded subway station? Well, some thoughtful innovations are being developed to enable people with low vision to navigate the world with greater ease. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to the founder and CEO of Waymap, Tom Pey, about his start-up company’s breakthrough navigation technology. We discuss his company's product, look at some of the challenges that people with disabilities face, and touch upon the promise of autonomous vehicles for those without sight.
01:33 Alex Wise - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tom Pey. He is the CEO. Of Waymap. Tom, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
01:41 Tom Pey - Thank you for having me.
01:43 Alex Wise - So why don't you tell us a little bit about the journey that you and your colleagues have had with Waymap, what the mission of the organization is and what problems you're trying to solve with it?
01:55 Tom Pey - Basically we started out trying to solve a very simple problem and that was the seven blind young people in London. Said the most important thing to them to help them to change their lives for the better was to be able to get around London Underground like everyone else, and the reason for that was that they were young. They, uh, a couple of them had just been out on a date with a with a boyfriend or girlfriend and they had been taken around by these adults, strangers, sighted guides to help them to navigate the underground and it wasn't very cool, so they thought, hey, you know, an app could stop, they could solve this for us. I had done some research on it previously, so I put my hand up and said look I'd solved that problem for you. You know, we applied to google.org and we got $1,000,000 grant and they told us to go out and change the world for blind people. And we carried out trials across the world with literally thousands of blind people asking them how we could solve their mobility problems. How could we help them to get around better, and as a result we wrote the world for standard for audio-based navigation for people who are blind or low vision that's currently an American standard as well. And we've also written standard for pig with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And from that we developed our app through Waymap and we're currently rolling it out in Washington DC.
03:30 Alex Wise - And so will it be a layer ultimately on Google Maps? Like, I'm thinking if I put in walking directions for me from point A to point B, how might it be different with the Waymap layer, let's say?
03:45 Tom Pey - The difference is that first of all, it would be more accurate than Google Maps because it doesn't rely solely on GPS. In fact, it doesn't rely on signals at all if they're not there. The second thing is that it works outdoors and indoors, and Google Maps currently doesn't work indoors because it's got it. It works off GP. And the other thing is that our app can take you. It can integrate all of your transport journeys, both indoors, outdoors,
Florida sort of defines the term “swing state.” The smallest of variables can push the outcome of Florida’s elections in one direction or another – in the year 2000 it was “hanging chads” and more recently it appeared it would be the re-enfranchisement of former felons. In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment 4, which … Continue reading Bianca Fortis on Florida’s Efforts to Disenfranchise Former Prisoners →
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What comes to mind when you hear the words "crime" and "safety?" For many, these words evoke images of poor people stealing things, or police enforcing laws to suppress street crime. Our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that there's a whole set of crimes that have been intentionally omitted from the messaging we get and that, for many, "police" and "safety" are far from synonymous. This week we speak with Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. A former public defender and the author of “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System,” Karakatsanis believes that much of our country’s perspective on crime and policing has been shaped by "copaganda," the swaying of public opinion for the benefit of law enforcement. We look at the corrosive societal effects of historic and current police practices, examine how and why these wrongheaded approaches persist, and discuss the complicity of journalists and policymakers who fall for and then perpetuate the American mythology of crime and safety.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:20 Alec Karakatsanis (AK) - If you everyday on the news see a story of someone shoplifting from a pharmacy but you never hear a story about that pharmacy stealing from its own workers, then you're going to think that the shoplifting is a more of a problem than wage theft. Even though the exactly the opposite is true. And there are different kinds of problems, right? And there are different kinds of solutions.
00:00:44 Narrator - What comes to mind when you hear the words "crime" and "safety?" For many, these words evoke images of poor people stealing things, or police enforcing laws to suppress street crime. Our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that there's a whole set of crimes that have been intentionally omitted from the messaging we get and that, for many, "police" and "safety" are far from synonymous. This week we speak with Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. A former public defender and the author of “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System,” Karakatsanis believes that much of our country’s perspective on crime and policing has been shaped by "copaganda," the swaying of public opinion for the benefit of law enforcement. We look at the corrosive societal effects of historic and current police practices, examine how and why these wrongheaded approaches persist, and discuss the complicity of journalists and policymakers who fall for and then perpetuate the American mythology of crime and safety.
02:05 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Alec Karakatsanis. He is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. Alec, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:14 Alec Karakatsanis (AK) - Thank you for having me.
02:16 AW So you have a newsletter entitled Copaganda, Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter. Why don't you define copaganda for us?
02:24 AK - I think there are a lot of ways to understand what copaganda is, so I don't purport to have the definitive understanding of the term, but essentially what it reflects is the way in which a very special kind of propaganda is weaponized by powerful interests in government, in the corporate world and the media. To change the way we think about public safety, change that we think about the criminal punishment bureaucracy and the way we think about police, prosecutors, judges, courts, jails, prisons, probation officers, and I think it really serves 3 main roles. Rule #1: copaganda tends to narrow our conception of safety and what safety means to a very small subset of the many different kinds of threats that there are to public safety. So for example, copaganda and the media tends to focus on low level criminal activity, typically by the poor, and to ignore large scale. Criminal activity by more powerful interests like wage ...
Are you weary of having to care about where headline-seeking Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema land on important topics? Well, according to this week's guest on Sea Change Radio, relief may be in sight. This week we speak with grassroots organizer and Democratic insider RL Miller to dig deeper into the politics, logistics and the climate impact of the Inflation Reduction Act. The president and founder of Climate Hawks Vote, Miller believes Manchin is starting to see his star fade as he watches more progressive Democratic Senate hopefuls making inroads - she believes this is a key impetus for his and Sinema's connection to this bill, and perhaps a sign of things to come. We also get a harrowing glimpse into Miller's first-hand experience with the California wildfires.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:16 RL Miller - We are 100 days out from a midterm election on N8 and we are in pretty good shape to hold the Senate and adds to the Senate Majority. And if we elect Mandela Barnes and John Fetterman and Cheri Beasley and a couple of other people, Joe Manchin loses his role as kingmaker of the United States Senate.
00:40 Narrator - Are you weary of having to care about where headline-seeking Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema land on important topics? Well, according to this week's guest on Sea Change Radio, relief may be in sight. This week we speak with grassroots organizer and Democratic insider RL Miller to dig deeper into the politics, logistics and the climate impact of the Inflation Reduction Act. The president and founder of Climate Hawks Vote, Miller believes Manchin is starting to see his star fade as he watches more progressive Democratic Senate hopefuls making inroads - she believes this is a key impetus for his and Sinema's connection to this bill, and perhaps a sign of things to come. We also get a harrowing glimpse into Miller's first-hand experience with the California wildfires.
01:39 Alex Wise - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by RL Miller. She is the founder and president of Climate Hawks vote and she is an elected member of the DNC and she served as the Chair Person of the California Democratic Party's Environmental Caucus for eight years. RL, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
02:00 RL Miller - Thanks so much for having me on.
02:02 Alex Wise - Well, it's a pleasure and very timely because follow you on Twitter. You're a very keen observer and we are in the midst of seeing some legislation (fingers crossed) pass this week through the Senate. It was called the Build Back Better bill. That's a mouthful. And now the new mouthful is the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. But before we dive into that, I want to learn a little bit more about the mission of Climate Hawks Vote and how your organization has tried to tackle the connection between fossil fuels and the political class.
02:42 RL Miller - I founded Climate Hawks vote in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated with Democratic politicians and Republican politicians. Republican politicians being in total denial of course. “Oh no, there's no such thing as climate change.” While Democratic politicians would pay lip service to it. Say that yes, of course it's very important. Oh, we need to do something by 2050. OK, we'll do something somewhere down the road and they would just keep on kicking the can down the road. Meanwhile, immigration demands attention. Right now, healthcare demands attention. Right now, gun violence right now, et cetera, et cetera. And so so many other priorities competing for democratic politicians attention. Nobody was doing anything about climate change now, and so I founded Climate Hawks vote with the idea of getting politicians to pay attention to the climate crisis. And by building a community of climate voters, people. Who would vote climate and nothing else. Much as the NRA is known for having a single minded constituency of 4 million people,
Anyone who paid attention to the ugly aftermath of the 2020 presidential election suddenly realized that a coterie of state-level bureaucrats had a whole lot more power than we ever imagined. And it was a huge wake up call for those who have chosen not to vote in past local elections. Elections matter, even small ones. This week on Sea Change Radio, we welcome political scientist and election expert Daniel Nichanian to discuss the importance of local elections in this country and how his new media venture, Bolts Magazine, intends to shine a brighter light on small, but increasingly vital races in all fifty states. We talk about the upcoming midterms, uncover arcane election laws in certain states and examine what’s on the ballot locally in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives and listen to two very different stories about consumption. First, we speak to global journalist Nithin Coca who has written a series of pieces for Mongabay.com about Indonesia’s alarming headfirst dive into the coal industry. We discuss the high-level corruption that allowed coal to take off in Indonesia, examine the lax regulatory standards that imperil workers while allowing the country to keep export prices low and learn about the environmental degradation that the Indonesian coal boom is causing. Then we revisit our conversation with Lara Gilmore, who along with her husband, chef and restaurateur Massimo Bottura, run the world-renowned Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. In addition to running a three-star Michelin restaurant, Bottura and Gilmore have created a unique template for feeding the needy through their nonprofit, Food For Soul. Based on the concept of the Italian refettorio, a place where monks gathered together to share their meals, Food For Soul has elevated the soup kitchen to a whole new level, cooking and serving delicious meals in warm, elegant environments.
00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:17 Lara Gilmore - I think that the most important thing is we realized that food for soul was not only a platform and a refettorio to be able to give a meal to someone in need, but also a teaching platform for people to understand how to cook better at home and waste less food.
00:36 Narrator - This week on Sea Change Radio, we dig into the archives and listen to two very different stories about consumption. First, we speak to global journalist Nithin Coca who has written a series of pieces for Mongabay.com about Indonesia’s alarming headfirst dive into the coal industry. We discuss the high-level corruption that allowed coal to take off in Indonesia, examine the lax regulatory standards that imperil workers while allowing the country to keep export prices low and learn about the environmental degradation that the Indonesian coal boom is causing. Then we revisit our conversation with Lara Gilmore, who along with her husband, chef and restaurateur Massimo Bottura, run the world-renowned Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. In addition to running a three-star Michelin restaurant, Bottura and Gilmore have created a unique template for feeding the needy through their nonprofit, Food For Soul. Based on the concept of the Italian refettorio, a place where monks gathered together to share their meals, Food For Soul has elevated the soup kitchen to a whole new level, cooking and serving delicious meals in warm, elegant environments.
2:09 Alex Wise - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by global journalist Nithin Coca. Nithin, welcome to Sea change Radio.
2:15 Nithin Coca - Oh great, great to be here.
2:16 Alex Wise So you have a few pieces in Mongabay that are quite interesting that I wanted to discuss with you about Indonesia and its coal industry. I was kind of surprised that Indonesia has flung itself with such force into coal, which so many of us think of as just a dying fuel. Why don't you first kind of give us a thumbnail sketch of of how this started? How did Indonesia kind of decide to go to what you call fossil fuels final frontier?
2:46 Nithin Coca - Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I think Indonesia has always been, I guess since independence and even before it got independence from the Dutch in the 1940s and 50s. Like always, a resource export country. And you know previous waves of exports were focused on like timber, spices, palm oil in the 90s, and then I guess around the turn of the century, Indonesia really started ramping up its production of coal. Basically, he went from being like almost a non player in global exports to being last year the number one exporter of thermal coal and it's been driven. Driven by the massive surge in demand in coal power generation in China,
Historian and philosopher Yuval Harari writes, "When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last." This week on Sea Change Radio, we discuss extinction with longtime journalist and founder of the environmental news site, The Revelator, John Platt. We look at efforts around the planet to save endangered plants and animals, explore the plight of smaller, often overlooked creatures, and examine the effects of war on fragile ecosystems.
00:01 Narrator: This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
00:13 John Platt: And then what happens if you lose a tiger from an ecosystem? Then you lose all the all the functions that it provided. Maybe small herbivores and they're going to go out of control and eat all the vegetation down. We've seen that in this country with when when Wolves died out the the deer took off. So I mean there are some species we may eventually only see in zoos, but I hope we can avoid that.
00:46 Narrator: In and philosopher Yuval Harari writes. “When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction. 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.” This week on Sea Change Radio we discuss extinction with longtime journalist and founder of the Environmental News site, the Revelator, John Platt. We look at efforts around the planet to save endangered plants and animals, explore the plight of smaller, often overlooked creatures and examine the effects of war on fragile ecosystems.
1:44 Alex Wise: I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Platt. John is the editor and founder of the Revelator. John, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
1:53 John Platt: Thank you very much.
1:55 Alex Wise: First, why don't you tell our listeners what the Revelator is - what your organization's mission is, and maybe a little bit on your background in the extinction space.
2:05 John Platt: Yeah, the Revelator is an environmental news and commentary site. We're published by the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a nonprofit devoted to environmental. Choose we're editorially independent from them, but we'd still tell a lot of the same types of subjective stories covering the extinction crisis, climate change, oceans, clean water and environmental justice and we're trying to tell stories that aren't being told in other places and really influence people who are super involved in the environment and care very deeply and passionately about this stuff. I've been an environmental journalist now for over 15 years. I've freelanced for 10 of that and I started writing about endangered species because I thought that was something that wasn't being covered in the general media. I was writing for Scientific American and a bunch of other places, and covered well over 1000 species. I kind of stopped counting once I hit 1000, and I've written more than a few species obituaries over the years, so it's been a big part of my life and it's something that I find infinitely interesting because there's so many interesting species to write about and so many interesting people researching and trying to save these incredible creatures.
3:20 Alex Wise: And you dive into the actual species that aren't necessarily covered by mainstream media, as often you'll see a snippet, maybe at the end of the PBS news hour about some panda made. Or the megafauna gets a lot more press, but we've done some pieces as of late that I thought were really interesting in terms of rats and moles and voles and how important they are in the food chain and in our environment in so many little cracks and corners these are not the sexiest animals, but they mean a lot to in the big picture, don't they?
It seems like these days every sentence that begins with "The Supreme Court..." finishes with truly appalling news -- another draconian ruling regarding privacy, guns, or basic, fundamental human rights. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to energy expert Alex Gilbert about a recent Supreme Court decision that many environmentalists were eyeing with dread. To Gilbert, though, things could have gone much, much worse in the West Virginia v. EPA case. We dive into the details of this ruling: its political ramifications, its practical implications, and what it suggests about this court's future environment-related decisions.
Narrator 00:01 This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.
Alex Gilbert (AG) 00:11 If I were to have created the scenarios of my expected outcomes in this case, this outcome is actually better than my best-case outcome. When you look at what could have been done here, the fact that they took a case, they probably shouldn't have taken anyways, that was a sign that a lot of people were thinking of very significant changes were coming to environmental law.
Narrator 00:34 It seems like these days every sentence that begins with "The Supreme Court..." finishes with truly appalling news -- another draconian ruling regarding privacy, guns, or basic, fundamental human rights. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to energy expert Alex Gilbert about a recent Supreme Court decision that many environmentalists were eyeing with dread. To Gilbert, though, things could have gone much, much worse in the West Virginia v. EPA case. We dive into the details of this ruling: its political ramifications, its practical implications, and what it suggests about this court's future environment-related decisions.
Alex Wise (AW) 1:33 I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Alex Gilbert. Alex is the Director of Space and Planetary Regulations at Zeno Power. Alex, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
AG 1:43 Thanks so much for having me Alex. I appreciate the opportunity to return.
AW 1:46 Yes, it's been a while since we've had you. You're an expert in the energy field. This new venture of yours that you're engaged in Zeno Power. Why don't you quickly explain what the director of Space and Planetary regulations at Zeno Power does?
AG 2:02 Yeah, so we are developing commercial radioisotope power sources. It's similar to a nuclear battery, is the best way to think about it and it's what NASA historically has used to power some of their deep space missions like the Apollo missions, the Mars Rovers, the Voyager missions, and NASA has their systems, but there's a commercial space sector growing right now, and so we're developing. Commercial space nuclear systems to help enable new applications in space as well as some things on Earth as well - areas that are very remote, hard to power that need just a little bit of power to really do cool things.
AW 2:36 And there hasn't been any Supreme Court rulings that have affected your business lately, but I know that the rest of the country and a lot of the world has been on tenterhooks as these devastating Supreme Court decisions just roll in one by one. The latest was in the environment and I wanted to discuss. That with you, West Virginia versus the EPA. The headlines were that the Supreme Court handcuffed the EPA and the reaction of most people was not because the Supreme Court has been so destructive on so many issues this term in particular. Your take on this ruling was a little more optimistic though. Is that fair to say?
AG 03:21 Yeah, I think there was a lot of concern in the energy and climate policy world about this case. The fact that they took this case in the 1st place, as I'll talk about is really weird. It deals with the regulation that's not moving forward, and normally courts don't do with that in considering the overall reactionary swing of the core and some of the cases that you've mentioned that have been very controversi...
Years of extreme drought have left the Colorado River at alarmingly low levels. Earlier this month, water management experts testified in front of a Senate energy and Natural Resources Committee that's seeking ways for the Western United States to drastically cut back water usage. With all the recent reporting on the issue, it's important to remember that this sad state of affairs has been a slow-moving disaster visible to all those willing to pay attention. This week on Sea Change Radio, we revisit our 2016 conversation with John Fleck, a water expert focused on the problems of the Colorado River and the author of “Water is For Fighting Over: And Other Myths About Water in the West.” We learn about the struggle over water rights in Arizona, discuss how Mexico and the US are cooperating over the Colorado River Delta and talk about the complexities of growing alfalfa in the desert.
Narrator 00:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise. You had these communities that were along this river that had always been a dry riverbed and they got to see their river come back.
John Fleck 00:29 It was a precedent that was so gratifying to all the people, including the water managers who you think of as the old water buffaloes who just want water for their city in their farm. It was so cool to see that water and it was such a moving experience where everybody was involved.
Narrator 00:45 Years of extreme drought have left the Colorado River at alarmingly low levels. Earlier this month, water management experts testified in front of a Senate energy and Natural Resources Committee that's seeking ways for the Western United States to drastically cut back water usage. With all the recent reporting on the issue, it's important to remember that this sad state of affairs has been a slow-moving disaster visible to all those willing to pay attention. This week on Sea Change Radio, we revisit our 2016 conversation with John Fleck, a water expert focused on the problems of the Colorado River and the author of “Water is For Fighting Over: And Other Myths About Water in the West.” We learn about the struggle over water rights in Arizona, discuss how Mexico and the US are cooperating over the Colorado River Delta and talk about the complexities of growing alfalfa in the desert.
Alex Wise 1:51 I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Fleck. He's an author and the director of the Water Resources program at the University of New Mexico. John welcome to Sea Change Radio.
John Fleck 2:01 Thanks so much for having me.
Alex Wise 2:03 So you're in arid New Mexico, where water is something that is not taken for granted and should not be. Give us a little background if you will on your latest book, “Water is For Fighting Over.”
John Fleck 2:15 Yeah, the full title is really important because it's a little bit of a bait and switch. The title is water is for fighting over and other myths of the of water in the West. And there's this old quote that's attributed to Mark Twain that in fact, he probably never said that whiskey is for drinking and water's for fighting over. But in the western United States, that quote is repeated and as believed by people that water is in a place like this, where it is scarce, is a source of conflict and you know, I believe that for a long time in my career as a journalist and only gradually over many, many years of covering water did I begin to realize that while we notice the places where there is conflict over water much more often, there are places where people learn to conserve and to collaborate and share the water and, and they really learn to avoid conflict. And I began to realize, as I have been working on this book for a long time. That the story I thought I was looking for which was a story of risk and conflict because of water scarcity was really something really different than that. What we have is these enormous. Success stories in places that have learned to co...
This week on Sea Change Radio, we celebrate the summer solstice to revel in our planet and talk music as we dig into the archives to revisit our discussions with two legendary rock musicians who also care deeply about environmental causes. First, we listen to our 2011 conversation with Bill Kreutzmann, the drummer for the … Continue reading Summer Solstice Celebration: Bill Kreutzmann + Chuck Leavell →
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Psychologist and pop culture icon of the 1960s, Timothy Leary, famously instructed San Francisco hippies to take psychedelic drugs in order to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” These days there’s a movement in psychology, also centered in Northern California, advancing the use of psychedelics, as well. But the agenda is less about dropping … Continue reading The Promise of Psychedelic Therapy →
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Yes, there will be millions of collective sighs as the deadliest pandemic in a century begins to abate and a more open summer kicks off. But summer also means the beginning of the wildfire season in the American West – a slew of deadly disasters lying in wait. Last year was the worst fire season … Continue reading Crystal Kolden: Prepping For Wildfire Season (re-broadcast) →
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The term "civil liberties" may connote different associations, depending on where you fall on the political spectrum. While some connect the term with the struggle for racial justice or reproductive freedom, for others it may evoke a belief in their right to bear arms. This week's guest on Sea Change Radio is John Stoehr, the founder and publisher of The Editorial Board. In the wake of the latest horrific rounds of gun violence in this country, Stoehr reflects on how America's lack of gun regulations reveals deeper societal flaws. He explains how the violent fervor surrounding so-called 2nd Amendment rights stems from a power structure rooted in white male dominance. He also connects the dots to the impending repeal of reproductive protections and xenophobic approaches to immigration.
What is a nurdle, you ask? Is it the latest variation on the popular New York Times puzzle, Wordle? No, not quite. Nurdles are the tiny little petroleum-based building blocks of the plastics industry. And they are literally everywhere. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Neel Dhanesha to learn about the role nurdles play in the half-trillion dollar global plastics industry and why they are a big problem for the environment. Then, we revisit part our discussion with Dan Austin, the founder of The 88Bikes Foundation.
"It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. The scale of recent changes are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe." These words of warning, read by today's guest on Sea Change Radio, Professor Bill Moomaw, are from the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC). This week we speak with Dr. Moomaw, a climate scientist and longtime faculty member at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, about the inner workings of the IPCC, on which he has served for many years. We talk about barriers preventing more expeditious responses to the looming threat of climate change, examine the flaws in some quick-fix proposals, and look at realistic paths toward keeping our planet habitable for centuries to come.
Narrator: This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability - I'm Alex Wise.
Bill Moomaw: "It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. The scale of recent changes are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe."
Narrator: These words of warning, read by today's guest on Sea Change Radio, Professor Bill Moomaw, are from the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC). This week we speak with Dr. Moomaw, a climate scientist and longtime faculty member at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, about the inner workings of the IPCC, on which he has served for many years. We talk about barriers preventing more expeditious responses to the looming threat of climate change, examine the flaws in some quick-fix proposals, and look at realistic paths toward keeping our planet habitable for centuries to come.
Alex Wise: I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Professor Bill Moomaw. He is a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University (my old school) and he's a climate scientist. Bill, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Bill Moomaw: Thank you for having me.
Alex Wise: So why don't you first explain your role that you've had in the I. P. C. C. we hear about these IPCC reports that come out every year with always more dreadful news want you first give us a summary of your involvement in that and maybe some of the challenges and some of the things that make you more hopeful being involved in this organization.
Bill Moomaw: All right well the intergovernmental panel on climate change was that created in and had his first meeting in nineteen eighty nine it was created by business name implies by governments. Governments said they needed more information about climate and this organization was founded his first report was in 1990 and it said "Gee, climate change is possible!" after there wasn't a whole lot of research actually at that time so they were able to put that together pretty quickly I joined in 1992. To begin working on the second report whichever came out in nineteen ninety six and then four others reports that came out a subsequent that. And as a as a lead author and defer to them of coordinating lead author meeting that I had to do a lot more work to get these various chapters and in and shape a scientist to review all of the written work reports scientific reports government reports industrial reports. And then they they provide a big synthesis of that information and news essay they sometimes find that there are differing perspectives and so the rule is you say here's option a and here's option be sometimes will make a judgment that there is more is it appears to be more science supporting option a but we always try to be very inclusive as a result these reports get long and they're getting longer and longer the one that just came out of in August of last year and through March of...
There are forces in the US that like to selectively bring up “states rights” from time to time – with the impending decision stripping the federal protections for access to safe abortion, this is one of those times. But most of us don’t methodically monitor what happens in states that are not our own. Wouldn’t … Continue reading States Newsroom: A Novel Approach To State-Level News →
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With around a billion dollars in annual revenue, The Nature Conservancy is the largest organization of its kind in America. Their stated mission is to “conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends” and they boldly claim to have “done more than anyone else to advance conservation around the world.” And yet, this … Continue reading David v. Goliath: Danna Smith + Leo Woodberry v. Big Conservation →
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More than 20 years ago, sociologist Barry Glassner wrote his bestseller The Culture of Fear, where he explains why Americans tend to be unreasonably afraid of things like crime, drugs, people of color, immigrants, teenagers, etc. He writes, “The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money … Continue reading SF Public Defender Peter Calloway Pt. 2: Recall Rubbish →
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In his astute and timeless book, How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff writes, “The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.” This statement is at least as true as it was in 1954 when it was first published. Among the subjects most prone … Continue reading SF Public Defender Peter Calloway Pt. 1: Crime And Moral Panic →
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously instilled optimism with his proclamation that, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He was speaking in relation to the long struggle for racial equity, but the words are also applicable to the advancement of civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and … Continue reading Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings on the Fight For Equal Rights (re-broadcast) →
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You may not have seen them running through your yard, but just wait. Feral pigs are everywhere and they’re a growing problem. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Susanne Rust, an environmental reporter from the Los Angeles Times. She talks about the millions – yes, millions of wild pigs roaming the countryside, … Continue reading Hog Wild: Susanne Rust on the Feral Pig Problem →
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According to a study conducted by Quantis International, footwear production is responsible for about 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or 1.4% of total global climate emissions. The negative impact of athletic footwear in particular includes problematic waste stream and labor practices, as well. So what can you do when you want to be responsible … Continue reading Jesse Tran: Coffee Waste Sneakers →
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America loves to blame the President when gas prices are high but the fact is the U.S. President has very little control over the price we pay at the pump. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to oil expert Daniel Dicker to discuss the politicization of gas prices, how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine … Continue reading Dan Dicker: A Basket Case Study of Oil →
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Imagine you go to graduate school for a bunch of years, conscientiously studying the nuanced interactions of the variables that underlie the globe’s climate. Then, as you publish findings that demonstrate what’s happening to our planet, you hear your work debated and unheeded by legislators across the country who couldn’t tell a stratospheric temperature profile … Continue reading Adam Sobel: A Climate Science Midlife Crisis →
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Historian T.J. Jackson Lears once said, “All history is the history of unintended consequences.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Ted Nordhaus, the Founder and Executive Director of The Breakthrough Institute, about when laws designed to protect the environment are misused in order to block efforts that would combat climate change. We look at … Continue reading Ted Nordhaus: What Are Environmental Protections Protecting? →
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War has suddenly returned to Europe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been swift, shocking, and devastating. In addition to killing thousands of civilians and soldiers, the incursion has rocked global financial markets and galvanized the West against Russia in ways not seen since the Cold War. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk … Continue reading Anne Clunan on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine →
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In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman wrote a controversial piece for the New York Times Magazine entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits.” During the ensuing “greed is good” era of runaway American capitalism, many a titan of industry has quoted these words to rationalize dubious business practices. With a planet … Continue reading Andrew Winston: The Case For Doing Business Differently →
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Back in 2016 the US Supreme Court established that the University of Texas could continue to consider race as a factor in admissions, in order to ensure a diverse student body. At that time Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared, “I don’t expect that we’re going to see another affirmative action case, at least in education.” … Continue reading Rod Graham: The Fight Over Affirmative Action →
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When momentum starts to build, people like to exclaim, “Now we’re cooking with gas!” Well, a recent study out of Stanford University might have us re-thinking that expression. The study found that methane leaking from stoves inside U.S. homes has the same climate impact as about half a million gasoline-powered cars and, furthermore, that these … Continue reading Eric Lebel: Cooking With Gas? →
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We hear a lot about solar and wind power, but a renewable source of clean energy that continues to be largely untapped is the ocean. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the annual energy potential of waves off the coasts of the United States is 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours, or the equivalent of about … Continue reading Andrea Copping: The Latest on Marine Energy Projects →
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An icon of 20th Century journalism, Walter Cronkite, once said, “The profession of journalism ought to be about telling people what they need to know – not what they want to know.” That quote was never more relevant than today. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with two reporters. First we talk about … Continue reading Global Investigative Journalism Network + Pandemic Plastic Use →
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People sometimes like to quote that Bible passage about “an eye for an eye” when justifying a punitive criminal justice system focused on retribution and vengeance. Others like to repeat a saying often attributed to Ghandi, that “an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we … Continue reading Celia Ouellette: The Business of Punishment in America (re-broadcast) →
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The Marshall Fire that swept through the Boulder, Colorado area in the last days of 2021 seemed to be an aberration – a destructive wildfire raging while just a few miles away, skiers took turns through Rocky Mountain powder. But as we are learning on a daily basis, climate change predictably creates unpredictable weather events. … Continue reading Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News on the New Normal →
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New iterations of the smartphone often focus on bells, whistles and other fancy features, when what we all really want for our devices are batteries that last longer. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with technology writer and battery expert Daniel Oberhaus about the latest developments in the energy storage space. We learn about the … Continue reading Daniel Oberhaus: Our Super-Charged Future (re-broadcast) →
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The next time you sip on a drink from a straw, you may want to think twice because humans are producing an inordinate amount of plastic waste on straws alone. Plastic straws are one of the leading contributors to ocean trash, they take up to 200 years to decompose and they can’t be recycled. Every … Continue reading The Last Straw: Mark Marinozzi + Romain Troublé (re-broadcast) →
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For environmentalists “agriculture” can be something of a dirty word, associated with other words such as, pesticides, water consumption, pollutants, and deforestation. Not all environmentalists have these negative associations, though. Some, like my guest today, are working to re-fashion agricultural practices so that they actually help to reverse environmental damage. This week on Sea Change Radio we are speaking with Joe Brewer, an American ex-pat living and working in the regenerative agriculture space in Colombia. We discuss his family’s journey to this small but vibrant farming community, the lessons he’s learned, and how those lessons can be scaled to bigger farms in the U.S.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Joe Brewer 0:16 Because it’s a small town, all of these people are friends. So the idea is for this money to support the network of these local people, to coordinate their projects with each other and to create new projects. And all the while be learning and sharing what we’re learning back to everyone in the world who cares to learn through our global network and through the different media outlets that we have to share our story.
Narrator 0:42 For environmentalists, agriculture can be something of a dirty word, associated with other words such as pesticides, water consumption, pollutants, and deforestation. Not all environmentalists have these negative associations though. Some, like my guest today are working to refashion agricultural practices so that they actually help to reverse environmental damage. This week on Sea Change Radio, we’re speaking with Joe Brewer, an American expat living and working in the regenerative agriculture space in Colombia. We discuss his family’s journey to this small but vibrant farming community, the lessons he’s learned, and how those lessons can be scaled to bigger farms in the US.
Alex Wise 1:48 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Joe Brewer. Joe is joining us from Barichara, Columbia. He is a complexity scientist and an environmentalist. Joe, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Joe Brewer 1:59 Thanks so much, Alex. It’s awesome to be here with you.
Alex Wise 2:03 So explain what you’re doing in Barichara, I you grew up on a chicken farm in Missouri, I believe and this is more than a stone’s throw away from there. Explain what you’re involved in what you’ve created in Barichara.
JB 2:16 Yes, maybe I’d start this way by saying just a little less than four years ago, something absolutely transformational happened, which is my wife and I had a child, we have a little daughter, who’s about to turn four. And she is a big reason why we are in Colombia now. And the story could be summarized like this. We my wife and I are both what we would call collapse aware, environmentally minded people who see the level of crisis that humanity is in the kinds of dangers on the horizon, and how big the mismatches between what needs to happen and what’s generally being done. And so we spent about a year through a set of work connections I had, we spent about a year living off grid, and a biodiversity hotspot, and a tropical rainforest in Costa Rica. And during that time, I was helping to envision a different way of creating local economic systems, so that the economies could be in harmony with their environment. And we are doing this by visiting projects in Costa Rica, and helping to build a planetary scale network of places where people were trying to do this. And that network is called the regenerative communities network, hosted by an organization based in Connecticut, called capital Institute. So I was on the team at Capital Institute, but living in a rainforest in Costa Rica. And for a variety of reasons, the place we were living was a bad match for raising a child. And after we left that place, we started looking for a community where there were other children, where there was a connection to things like bringing forests back to life, restoring rivers, protecting the native species and the local wildlife of a place. And to do it while there are other children around and doing it with other families. And that’s what really brought us to Barichara in Colombia. And just for those who probably have no idea where body char is, if you looked on a map of South America, you would see the Andes, this big mountain range is sort of making a straight line north, north to south. And there’s this kink in it near the top as you’re moving toward the equator, as the Andes sort of are going north and east and then they cut and go north and west. And there’s this kink in it. We’re right in the middle of that turn in the Andes, really close to Panama, really close to Venezuela, and we’re in a place that is technically called a tropical dry forest. Which just means that has a dry period and a wet period every year. And there are a whole bunch of ecological reasons why these places are important. But the long story short is that almost all of the types of plants and animals that are here do not exist anywhere else on Earth. More than seven out of every 10 plants and animals that are here only exist here. And the forest has been almost entirely destroyed half a century ago by agriculture, by crop farming, and then later by tobacco production. So we came to a place that is a destroyed landscape, in the process of becoming a desert, with a very urgent need to bring the forest back, and a small community of about 6000 people and a little mountain town called Barichara, where there happens to be a 10 year old community reforestation project in the middle of town, with two old women in their 70s named Camila and Vicki, who have been tirelessly planting trees in hard packed clay for more than a decade, to create a seed bank, a place where the seeds of these native trees are held, and having projects with elementary school and high school kids, and a number of families that are trying to raise their children learning this way of doing things. So how we came from Missouri, to the Northern Andes of Colombia, as we were looking for a community where our daughter could grow up thinking that it’s just normal that all of the adults bring forests back to life. This is just what they do. And so we’re here to help volunteer to create coordination and connect all of the projects that are here. And, you know, I’d love to dive deep into the culture and the history of this place, more than just the ecological part. And maybe we have some time to do that. But for the sake of the work, if you wanted to think of it that way, for us the work is how do we raise a child that is fit for the future that we know is coming when there is extreme climate change. And like we saw this year with the global pandemic, severe disruptions to the globalized economy. So the way that people are living now is not how they’re going to live in the future. Where can we go that is separate enough, forward thinking enough, and still has enough direct access with nature, that our child can grow up, bringing a forest back to life and just thinking it’s normal? And that’s, that’s really why we’re here. Why
AW 7:40 Why don’t you first start with the 9000 foot view on what the mission of Barichara is, in terms of the template you’re working from?
JB 7:51 Yeah, the really essential idea that everyone needs to understand is, they need to understand the strange word bio region, a biological region. And what a bio region is, is the entire environmental setting that a living thing can survive in. So if you’re a starfish, on the coast of Oregon, then your bio region is the intertidal zone, the gap, the distance between the low tide and the high tide, where there are title pools and other things, because the entire life system of the starfish is in that intertidal zone. For humans, a bio region is how to live in a territory, where the entire culture of the people, the way that they grow their food, the way that they make their clothing, the way they build their houses, every part of their lives, is in harmony with the larger landscape that they live in. And this way of connecting human culture, to ways of living, embedded within a landscape is how you create a bio region. This is a really important idea, because what we’re trying to do in Barichara is create a model, you know, a way of learning to create a bio regional economy that regenerates landscapes, so that as the people here, do all of those things, you know, they grow their food, they make their clothes, they build their houses, they raise their children, all of the things that they do, how can they do that in a way that is increasing the health of rivers, increasing the amount of biodiversity in a place? And over time, there’s more forest instead of less forest? This is the question. And this is a question for every place where humans live on Earth. So while we’re doing this here, in parallel, we’re building a global network, region to region for people who are trying to do this in the place that they live in. So let me give a couple examples of projects and Barichara that they’ll start to show you why this place has sort of like early mover advantage. One thing that’s here is there’s a, an indigenous history of doing things like taking a plant and making baskets. So there’s a kind of plant here that’s called fee K, in the local Spanish. And fake is in the same plant family as agave. And for those of you who are familiar, Agave is what tequila is made from.
AW 10:28 I’m quite familiar, I’ve become more familiar during the pandemic.
JB 10:32 Yeah, so. So if you know what the plant looks like, that’s got these long block broad, succulent leaves that kind of grow out of the ground. There’s a plant here and Central and South America called fig A, that has broad leaves that are about three feet long or four feet long. And it’s really fibrous, and you can make clothing and you can make baskets with it. So this is an example of a type of cultural knowledge that still exists here. And because this town is so beautiful in the mountains, there’s a lot of tourism. So the local people can make a living selling these baskets and these, these native kinds of clothing to the tourists when they come. So the culture has been preserved, even though globalization happened, and it’s a tourist. So one project would be how do we preserve this cultural knowledge of arts and crafts. And there’s a the Ministry of Culture for Colombia has established a school called Tai Yaris Tahlia, just as the Spanish word for workshop is a place where local people are supported to give workshops to share their cultural knowledge. And so people come here from all over Colombia to learn basket weaving. And that’s enables the basket Weaver’s to earn a living, making and selling baskets. So that’s an example of a local project that maintains the culture and could be part of this new economy. So that’s one example. Another project is a project called agua Santa. Agua Santa in Spanish is Spanish for holy water. Holy Water is a project where a group of Colombians who really care about restoring soils and bringing wellsprings you know when there’s a well of water just coming out of the ground, or bringing them back to life that they bought a piece of property in the middle of the agricultural area. Because this is rural countryside. Here, the village is 6000 people, and then a bunch of campesino farmers. So in the middle of that farmland, they bought some land and started a demonstration project and water retention, which is where they went into the natural flow of water, started creating permaculture projects to just bring the water back to life. And they’ve connected it to organic farming, and local produce that they can sell in the local marketplace. But they didn’t just do this on their own land. They also connected with 14 other farms, and created a cooperative business to sell coffee. Where the coffee is basically a type of what’s called agro forestry, agriculture. That’s done by building a forest. So you grow coffee trees, which are other kinds of trees. And they’ve taught these 14 Farms, how to grow diverse, agro forestry products, things like building materials, food products, and medicinal plants, while at the same time supporting themselves by selling coffee. And because they work as a network, when the coffee plants need to prune all their trees, they gather all of them and agua Santa is one project. And they do composting and build soil. And then the soil is taken back to all the 14 farms. So it’s a network of building soils for 14 farms that are doing agroforestry projects. And this is a model of food production. It’s a way of creating agriculture for an entire region. And about 70% of the food that is eaten in buddy China comes from this local agriculture. So this isn’t just on the side, you know, expensive organic, this is your typical produce that most people here eat. And this is a way of building soil while producing that food. So these are just a couple of examples. I could actually spend our entire conversation with more examples. There are so many of them here. But hopefully that’s already starts to paint a picture of what kinds of projects are here and how they make it possible to create this different kind of economy.
(Music Break) 14:43
AW This is Alex Wise and Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Joe Brewer. He’s an environmentalist and complex scientist in Barichara, Colombia. So Joe, you mentioned some of the projects that you’re working on in terms of water. I’ve read a little bit about what you and your colleagues have been doing to try to transform the sewage system there and the wastewater, why don’t you explain what you encountered when you arrived at body chatter and where it is now and where it’s heading in terms of the sewage systems?
JB 16:25 Yeah, let me start by giving a very quick politics lesson on Columbia, which is that it’s very well known that the institutions mostly don’t work. And there’s a lot of corruption, especially in local government. So we, well, we didn’t my family arrived a year ago. But in the 1990s, like 30 years ago, there was a mayor of Barichara, who was very corrupt, and he privatize the water supply. So he got money from the national government to build a water treatment plant. When they built the water treatment plant, they damaged the groundwater supply, which contaminated the wells that fed the water to all the houses in the town. And then they charge people money to buy water from this corrupt and ineffective water treatment program that they built. And one of the things that happened when they built this is that there’s a very important technical thing, which is to know the difference between grey water and black water. Black Water is the water you flush from your toilet that has feces and urine. Basically, you have to do some pretty serious processing to make it safe. grey water can be like when you take a shower, or when you wash your dishes, it might need to be processed a little bit. But for the most part, it’s not that dangerous. And grey water includes rainwater that falls on the roof might get dirty on your roof. So you still have to filter it before or boil it before you could drink it. Well, here’s the thing, the grey water system and the black water system run into the same pipes. So what that means is all the water that runs through Barichara runs into the same water for everyone flushing their toilets. And because there was a corrupt mayor in the past, even when a university came in with a big grant and said, we have the money to build the waste treatment system and fix your problem. The corrupt mayor said, No, I’ve got a nice little Ponzi scheme. Thank you very much. I want to keep making money off of my corrupt system, I want you guys to go away. What that means is the entire town of 6000 people and all of the tourists here, every time they flush their toilet, the water goes directly into the river, completely unprocessed at the bottom of the town. And then that water runs into a much bigger river called Rio Suarez that eventually runs into Rio Magdelena. So what it’s basically doing is polluting the next 1000 miles of rivers that runs between here and the Caribbean ocean to the north. And so we have an interesting situation that because of local corruption, and incompetence, all of the wastewater just gets literally flushed into the river without processing any of it. So it’s a pretty serious problem that we have to do. There’s a little history lesson in Colombian politics.
AW 19:17 Explain the logistics of what you and your colleagues have embarked on in Barichara, how its funded, how you’re planning on moving forward the vision for it, and you know, your five year plan, and maybe how listeners could get involved.
JB 19:34 Yeah, the first thing is that there are a lot of local organizations that are doing things. And so I don’t want to try to paint the picture that what I’m doing is the only game in town. I just want to name that because I’m new here. And this is a place that has a really long history of outsiders coming and hurting the local people and what’s called colonialism. This has happened for a long time and it drove the indigenous people to extinction. Here, I want to name that because what I’m doing is I’m trying to bring coordination and cooperation to the local projects. And so the part I’m doing is actually pretty small. But I think it’s very strategic. Even though the vision of what we’re doing is really big, almost everything being done is by these local projects that were here before we arrived. With that said, what we’re doing is we’re using crowdfunding to gather money with donations, to enable us to bring the projects together, to map out the territory, to provide money to create projects that the local projects that already exist, that they have to cooperate, to get the money to help them cooperate better. And we started a campaign on GoFundMe to start raising money for this. And one of the things that we’re trying to do that I think is really important, and maybe sort of, it may not be obvious why it’s so important, is we want to use some of this money to buy land that is owned by a nonprofit organization. And so we don’t want to buy all of the land, we’re not trying to raise millions of dollars and buy all of the land here. But we want to very strategically, when there’s a piece of land that is in danger, like people from outside are coming in and trying to divide this piece of land and 230 lots and sell a bunch of houses and cut down all the forest, could we buy that land, and create a community project. And can the community project serve everyone who lives here in the entire territory. So this way of having a budget that would allow us to buy and protect land, and then create reforestation projects is a really important piece of what this fund can do. And so we need the ability to work directly with the people who are funding us to participate in the learning process. So we all learn together. What that means is everything is completely transparent. Anyone who donates to this work, or as part of our global network, we have a global network called Earth regenerators with more than 2000 members that are participating in this process, that they could come and join us in the work and volunteer, they can partner with the organizations that they already have, or they can come as individuals, there’s a lot of flexibility about how we work together. Because we’re not ham streamed about how to use the money, because we’re required to report that the way we’re using the money is what we said we would do, which is that we asked for $10,000, we have a very clear line item of budget. And if we stray from that by any more than 5%, then the funder will not give us any more money. Well, that’s not a way to create new solutions to really complex problems. So what we’re doing is creating something called the Barichara regeneration fund, where people are donating money. And so far, the largest amount of money given to us is $250. And the smallest is $5. And we raised almost $6,000. And that started a little more than a week ago.
AW 23:14 And how many people do have on the ground working day to day there?
JB 23:19 Well, if you think about all of the projects that I alluded to, when I named a couple of them, if you start thinking about those projects, it’s probably around 50 people, but they’re not in the same organization. So it’s not that we have an organization with 50 people, it’s that we have a network of 50 people spread across 15 or 20 projects with different numbers of people in those projects. Because it’s a small town, all of these people are friends, this is a town you can walk from one end to another in 10 minutes. So you go down to buy groceries, you’re going to run into some of these people and just chat with each other on the street. So the idea is for this money to support the network of these local people, to coordinate their projects with each other and to create new projects. And all the while be learning and sharing what we’re learning back to everyone in the world who cares to learn through our global network and through the different media outlets that we have to share our story. And this includes people who want to come here as volunteers. So someone might say, I love to come and volunteer and just be in body char for three months. It sounds like a beautiful place to be, how can I get involved. And then we just have a conversation about what that person would want to do and what they really need in their lives right now and what we’re doing at the moment which projects are going on that they could be involved in. And we co create and this open dialogue by actively cooperating with each other in a transparent way.
AW 24:49 So if you went back to the states and started a another chicken farm in Missouri, let’s say What lessons do you hope to learn from the experience embodied? Maybe you can give examples on how an industrial farmer in the United States might be able to take some of the lessons that you’re learning and apply them to their business.
JB 25:13 Well, one place I would recommend farmers in the US to go is, there’s an organization based in Evanston, Illinois, called Iroquois Valley, it’s just Iroquois valley.com. And they’re set up as this strange thing called a real estate investment trust. And basically all that means is that they are able to bring money that can support farmers during the time when they’re transitioning the way that they farm. Because the problem that most farmers have is they have such a debt treadmill, that they’re constantly just running faster to stay in the same place. That if they try to change the model of what they do, they’re just going to go under and lose their farm. And so what Iroquois Valley does, and I think it’s a good lesson for farmers all across, especially in the Midwest, is to have support money. Well, what eloquent Iroquois Valley does, is they buy the land from the farmers, and then lease it back to the farmers with a very transparent agreement that says, we are going to carry the burden of debt for your land, so that you can take more risk and change your operations and spend a couple years learning how including to create different models of agriculture, that are not monoculture crops. So instead of just growing f1, hybrid corn, you might grow five crops or 10 crops, you might grow fruit nut trees, while also growing vegetables, for example. And this way of changing the process that depends on financial support is very much what we’re trying to emBarichara as well. If we can create a development fund for the entire territory, then we can bring some of that money to help local people to change their businesses, and manage the risk with them to make those risks easier to take. And that lesson that we’re learning here is the same lesson that Iroquois Valley is teaching to farmers in the Midwest. So I think this sort of thinking that we know we have to change what we’re doing. But how do we find the structures and the supports to help us to do it? That level of question is the same everywhere. The specific example of what Iroquois Valley is doing and what we do here, they do it differently than we do. But the lesson is still, how can we share the risk together so that we can co create and make a pathway that wouldn’t be possible without cooperation, that lessons the same? I think this way of thinking is how we can apply what we’re doing here to every place on earth.
AW 27:54 Well, we appreciate you giving us a little snapshot of your efforts there. Joe Brewer. Thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
JB 28:02 Thank you Alex. It’s lovely to be here.
Narrator 28:17 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by James Brown and Fog swamp, check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
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Come election season, some of us who live in solidly “blue” states like California or New York take our activist selves on the road to so-called “swing states,” where our door-knocking will make the most impact. One possible destination next Fall for energetic canvassers is North Carolina, one of the nation’s most “purple“ states. This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a deep dive into North Carolina politics with Rob Schofield, the Director of NC Policy Watch. We recap the last few elections in the state, learn about battles over the fundamental right to cast a ballot, and take a look at some of the candidates and races slated for upcoming election cycles. Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability, I’m Alex wise.
Rob Schofield 0:26 It is emblematic of just a long litany of legislation that’s going on for a decade in which Republicans have generally tried to make it harder to vote, particularly those classes of people that they perceive are likely to vote democratic. That means older citizens. That’s why we’ve had battles over voter ID people of color, immigrants, young people, all the people that they view as not necessarily being part of their natural constituency. If they can figure out a way to put up barriers, they do it.
Narrator 0:55 Come election season, some of us who live in solidly “blue” states like California or New York take our activist selves on the road to so-called “swing states,” where our door-knocking will make the most impact. One possible destination next Fall for energetic canvassers is North Carolina, one of the nation’s most “purple“ states. This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a deep dive into North Carolina politics with Rob Schofield, the Director of NC Policy Watch. We recap the last few elections in the state, learn about battles over the fundamental right to cast a ballot, and take a look at some of the candidates and races slated for upcoming election cycles.
Alex Wise 1:54 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Rob Schofield. Rob is the director of North Carolina policy watch NC policy watch calm Rob, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Rob Schofield 2:04 Hey, Alex, thanks so much for having me on.
Alex Wise 2:07 The political environment in your state is fascinating. And it’s one of the most purple states in the union right now and going to be focus for the 2022 election and the 2024 election, I think, why don’t we first take a step back, though and look at what happened in 2018 with the Mark Harris fiasco and kind of recap that for our listeners and explain why that’s was an important template for where we are now in terms of voter rights in the state.
Rob Schofield 2:37 Well, 2018 was symptomatic of this ongoing situation in which North Carolina is sort of a razor Razor’s Edge state. It’s a deeply purple state, actually, historically, as a result of historical trends still has more registered Democrats than Republicans. But it’s basically evenly divided certainly ideologically, like a lot of parts of the of the country. There’s a there’s a broad divide between urban and rural areas. The 2018 election was of course, one that featured a fairly formidable Blue Wave both nationally and here in North Carolina. We had, we’ve gone through just repeated court decisions and redrawing of our congressional and legislative maps and 2018. We were battling through another one of those but what happened was that we had an election in what was then the ninth district of North Carolina at the time, North Carolina had 13 seats in the house. And there was a an empty seat beak as a result of a of an incumbent Republican who had some corruption issues losing in the Republican primary guy by the name of Bob Pittenger actually lost to a sort of dark horse candidate who was a fundamentalist preacher by the name of Mark Harris. And Harris was an interesting character and he was running against a guy, a Democrat, a very formidable Democrat, actually a Democrat with a military record. And this is a district that runs across the southern tier of North Carolina. And Harris made league very early on in the campaign with forces within the Republican Party who he had been told, these are the people you need to talk to if you’re going to do well in southeastern North Carolina, including a very rural county with a very colorful and in some ways troubled history, a lot of racism called Bladen County, which is a very rural county in southeastern North Carolina Harris made a deal with a local Republican operative, who probably at one time had been a democratic operative guy by the name of McRae, Dallas, who was kind of a shady character and he ended up pursuing something very effectively a vote collection or vote harvesting scheme in which he would literally distribute and then collect absentee ballots pay for them. It was clearly in violation of North Carolina, North Carolina law, but frankly, it probably been going on for quite a while, and Dallas took it to a new level. Harris ended up winning the election by the narrowest of margins and that ultimately, that scandal once it came to light led to the election actually being overturned for corruption, which really hasn’t happened in many if any congressional elections in the United States. So it spoke both to the issue of how closely we divided we are ultimately a another Republican, was selected to run after Harris was forced to withdraw and then actually won in a special election over McCready. But it also speaks to this whole issue of voter fraud and the integrity of elections. And, you know, I think a lot of people were struck by the irony that here we have the party of Donald Trump, the party that makes incessant claims about supposed voter fraud polluting our politics, being the authors of the of the most egregious and most noteworthy example of voter fraud, and probably the only example of that kind of widespread voter fraud and a North Carolina election and decades. So it’s a it’s a remarkable story. It’s actually captured in a book called The vote collectors that was recently released by a pair of journalists who covered the story in 2018.
AW 6:05 So let’s fast forward two years from the 2018 election to what happened in North Carolina with both the Cal Cunningham Senate race, I guess we could call it the Thom Tillis Senate race, and the Trump Biden election there. What did you see as a keen observer of North Carolina electoral politics?
RS 6:25 Well, what I saw, of course, was and what we all knew was coming was that it was going to be the most expensive race in history that North Carolina would be, you know, literally inundated day and night, on every television channel and every means of communication really available to candidates with ads, touting their candidates, lots of dark money coming from unknown sources, all trying to elect their particular candidates. We knew that this was true, because we’re such a closely divided state. We knew this was going to be a very close election, it turned out to be that way. I believe that in the end, two things really worked to the to the detriment of the Democrats. One was that Senator Thom Tillis, who had been underwater in the polls, pretty much throughout his six year term in Washington, was running against what seemed like a very compelling democratic guy by the name of Cal Cunningham, who had been a state lawmaker. What had a significant military record, it’s a very compelling, attractive young candidate, he seemed poised to win. And literally a couple of weeks before Election Day, word leaked out, well probably was intentionally leaked out of a quote unquote, sex scandal involved, cutting him allegedly having an extramarital affair, apparently, indeed, having an extramarital relationship of some sort, which was just enough to do him in and probably have a huge effect on our country. If you look at the way the United States Senate is divided right now, the other thing that happened was that during the latter days of the pandemic, Democrats, I think responsibly took the position that it would be dangerous to send their people out to walk precincts to go door to door, it was a time Yeah, it’s hard to remember already because we didn’t have the vaccine Masks, we’re still sort of a, you know, a little unclear who wore masks and when a year ago at this time, or 13 months, so 14 months ago, and the Democrats really, I think lost out in that last few weeks of making a push in the election while the while the Trump Republicans, of course it was no holds barred, they went completely for it. They said there are people out there, the risks of COVID be damned, and you know, you could blast him for being irresponsible. When it came to winning an election. I think it made a real difference and it was probably enough between that and the Cunningham development and Trump being in the state repeatedly to sort of tip things in favor of the Republicans so that they were able to hold on to power and do very well in the 2020 election although most of the margins were very, very narrow.
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AW 9:56 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the director of North Carolina Policy Watch Rob Schofield. So Rob, you mentioned how Barack Obama won the state of North Carolina in 2008 against John McCain, but then narrowly lost to Mitt Romney in 2012. Let’s dive into the racial component of voting in the state. First, let’s just look at the difference between 2008 and 2012.
RS 10:22 Well, it’s clearly I mean, you can’t talk about elections in North Carolina without talking about race. It is. I mean, you know, you have to remember that 150 years ago, this state was a racial gulag. I mean, it’s a situation in which the repairs continue to this day, the vestiges and the reality of systemic racism continues to infect our society, as it really does everywhere in the United States, but especially so still in many parts of North Carolina. So race is an enormous issue. We have a significant African American population around one in five North Carolinians. Clearly enthusiasm about the Obama candidacy. And it’s a little hard to remember now 13 years later, what the world was like in 2008. But you know, it’s a different time, there was a there was just a really remarkable and unprecedented enthusiasm for the presidential ticket, I think amongst Democrats in both white and black in 2008, that we had not seen in North Carolina, in many, many years. 2012 was, you know, but even so, Obama only eked it out, he only won narrowly. And he only lost narrowly in 2012. It doesn’t, you know, it’s easy to draw big conclusions about what went wrong. And it’s but it’s sort of like, it’s like missing the last pass in a football game. You know, I mean, the game was even, I don’t know, it’s hard to draw any major conclusions. But I would say, you know, sure, the enthusiasm level in 2012 wasn’t quite as high as it was in 2008. And, you know, I mean, the 2010 election had been really a disastrous blowout for Democrats in which Republicans had really swept the swept things. And so I’m sure they continue to enjoy some momentum from that election and in 2012.
AW 12:05 It’s just when we look at what happened in Virginia, and how that’s gone, solidly blue over the last few elections in presidential elections, and then come track that to the promise that North Carolina showed for progressives after Obama took the state. I’ll be it narrowly in 2008. To then see Donald Trump win that state twice. What does it tell you Rob, what does it tell us about how Democrats and Republicans are viewing the state moving forward?
RS 12:35 Well, it remains a hotly contested state, I’d say, you know, what really distinguishes us from Virginia is we don’t have the DC suburbs. You know, we that mean? You can’t talk about Virginia politics without talking about the huge swath of Democrats who reside in Arlington and Alexandria and loud all those counties, just south of the of the District of Columbia, North Carolina has some growing urban areas, Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston Salem, there are some big growing urban areas, we don’t have any dominant, massive big city, you know, we’re a city or a state of medium sized cities. So I think that’s part of what distinguishes us from Virginia. I think, in some respects, we’re just we continue to be a few years behind Virginia when it comes making some of this progress in terms of the diversity of our population, the in migration that the you know, but you know, I’m sure you even see this in California, that when you drive into rural areas of North Carolina, you get outside the cities, there’s a passion, there’s a there is a deep seated passion for Trumpism that, you know, remains sort of mysterious, I think, to a lot of people of goodwill and who favor progress and moving society forward. A lot of is fear based, a lot of it is race based. A lot of it is just fear of change. These are such tumultuous times we inhabit. And you know, I’m sure that’s a phenomenon you see in really in rural parts of America everywhere. And so it’s just, it’s just something that ebbs and flows. And often the elections just turn on the turnout in, say, a moderate, more moderate suburban area and which way things break. And I think things continue to trend slowly in the direction of a more progressive leaning for North Carolina over time, but, you know, it’s a long, slow, torturous process. And the thing that’s happened in the meantime, is that because Republicans succeeded in capturing the legislature, they have gerrymandered the district’s to just amazing levels.
AW 14:33 So I wanted to ask you about that there are two bills right now in the North Carolina Senate and one in the house that are up for vote, or were up for vote in November. Maybe they’ve been voted on since I’ve read about them, but then we have Governor Roy Cooper who’s a Democrat. Can you first explain what these bills are? And the reality of them turning into law in the face of A potential veto from the Democratic governor.
RS 15:02 But we have since in the last few weeks, got a couple of vetoes. Here’s the there’s sort of two tracks going on in the battle for voting in North Carolina. One is you have this gerrymandering in which the districts have been redrawn in such a way that they’re completely rigged to elect Republicans in a 5050. State. They guarantee majorities in the General Assembly in the congressional delegation. Our State Supreme Court recently, which actually is four to three democratic recently sort of took control of those cases in announced a schedule for reviewing the gerrymandered maps put. candidacy sort of on hold, delayed the primary which had been scheduled for March because March has now been pushed back to me. So that’s the gerrymander. On the other end, there’s the battle over voting rights. When the Republicans took over at the beginning of the last decade. In 2013, they passed something called the monster voting law, which was ultimately struck down by a federal court, which announced that it had targeted African American voters with surgical precision in a way to suppress the vote of, of blacks, particularly blacks, and but people of color. And that battle has gone on back and forth. For the last eight years, Republicans tried to pass bills to make it harder to vote to make absentee ballot, harder to cast that they have to be in by election day. They can’t come in a few days afterwards. This was the subject of these bills that you allude to that had been debated here. In recent weeks, there was a bill that would have again, set a deadline for mailed absentee ballots that have to arrive by election day, or they were tossed out, that would have meant 1000s and 1000s of ballots wouldn’t have been counted in 2020, because there was a buffer given. Governor Cooper vetoed that bill, it remains over at the legislature for possible override, but I think the Democrats will hold it. There was another bill, same story, this one would have prohibited local boards of elections from taking outside funding to come in from grants and from foundations to help supplement the puny funds that they have right now to run elections.
AW 16:55 What is the argument – that there are partisan organizations that would then issue these grants?
RS 17:01 Yeah, sure. I mean, that’s the that’s the implication of all the the Republicans have taken the position that despite their success in North Carolina, they’ve continued to try and drive home the Trump message that, you know, elections are rigged in favor of Democrats, there’s massive voter fraud that Democrats are collecting, or committing, it’s probably, you know, voters of color, as always sort of underneath the surface as the implication of it.
AW 17:26 That’s really what this is about is is like these people shouldn’t they’re not fit to vote. So we need real Americans to be voting. When we look at it as progressives and we think this is crazy to them. They’re convinced that there’s shenanigans happening on the other side.
RS 17:43 Yeah, well, and of course, the irony here in North Carolina, as we alluded to, at the beginning of our conversation, is that they’re the ones who only people who’ve been proven to do this were Republicans in a rural area. But yes, for instance, in 2016, when we had a very closely contested gubernatorial race, and a Democrat actually ended up narrowly defeating the incumbent Republican that Republican a guy by the name of Pat McCrory, who’s now actually running for US Senate sought to contest the election sought to have a recount, sought to contest in particular the results in Durham County, which is, of course, one of the few minority, largely not necessarily majority black counties in our state, but has a very progressive County, a lot of African American elected officials. It’s perceived as being perhaps the most liberal county in the state. And here it was, that’s the one he selected that he decided there must be voter fraud going on in term County. So it’s sort of the same old story and that’s what this bill about limiting grants from nonprofits or from foundations to local admittedly underfunded boards of elections was about again, this bill passed with Republican majorities But Governor Cooper has recently vetoed it so the hope is that it will stay vetoed
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AW 19:49 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the director of North Carolina Policy Watch, Rob Schofield. So Rob, you just broke down the two North Carolina bills in the Senate that would put up barriers for people to vote in about the most basic terms, I can frame it. But there’s also a bill in the North Carolina House – House Bill 259. Want to explain what that’s all about, please?
RS 20:15 Well, this is again, this is sort of the latest in a long series of patterns. And before I get into it’s worth pointing out again that so called “monster voting law” that was passed back in 2013, did make some changes that remain on the books that have all sort of targeted the idea of making it harder to vote, for instance, give you a classic example. We used to have something called pre registration for teenagers, you can register pre register as a kid in high school, you can vote in mock elections and you’ll be automatically registered to vote when you turn 18.
AW 20:48 It’s probably a really good way to get kids engaged….
RS 20:51 Yes, they repealed that the Republicans repealed that. Obviously, their their fear was that you’d have more young people participating in the election, and that they would tend to vote democratic. So the vote the bill, but the bill you refer to as a bill that’s really sort of targeted at intimidating immigrants. It’s actually a bill that would make it easy to purge people from the pole from the voting rolls, if they had been excused from jury service in the past. And we had, with the implication being that people excused from jury service because perhaps they were non citizens. But we know for a fact that the record keeping on excusing people from jury service is notoriously inaccurate. There’s all kinds of plus there’s plenty of people who have been excused from jury service who then later on, get their citizenship get their their right to vote. There was no provision for that in the legislation, we actually had this bill before it was vetoed previously by the governor. There’s also a provision in the bill that would have made a lot of this information public, which we know for a fact that, you know, there’s a whole class of these ultra conservative sort of professional vote Intimidators, who would have targeted some of these people, many of them immigrants for intimidation, we know that they would have been had access to their names and addresses and birth dates and other personal information as a result of this bill. So, again, the governor has vetoed it in the past, it looks like it’s probably going to not make it through the session. But again, the real message here and since its story is that it is emblematic of just a long litany of legislation that’s going on for a decade in which Republicans have generally tried to make it harder to vote, particularly those classes of people that they perceive are likely to vote democratic. That means older citizens. That’s why we’ve had battles over photo voter ID, people of color, immigrants, young people, all the people that they view as not necessarily being part of their natural constituency, if they can figure out a way to put up barriers, they do it.
AW 22:46 Okay, so in the limited time we have left, I want to kind of do a speed round with you, Rob, if we can, and let me name a few Democratic politicians in North Carolina and you kind of give a quick, maybe explain who they are and, and you want to give your honest opinion about them feel free. So let’s start with the Attorney General Josh Stein, who I believe is running in 2024 for governor.
RS 23:14 That’s sort of the assumption with Stein. So we have a two term limit for governors in this state Roy Cooper has been elected twice. So he’ll be term limited out in 2024. He was the attorney general for many years before he became governor Josh Stein was one of his top assistants in the Attorney General’s Office headed the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s office. He comes from a family of civil rights attorneys, and advocates he is generally perceived as someone who will make that race in 2024. And I think is widely seen as a really sharp, committed, tough guy and I think a lot of progressives have a lot of hope for his candidacy.
AW 23:52 Okay, now, let’s hear what you have to say about Sherry Beasley, that’s ch E. Ri. She was the former chief justice of the state, right?
RS 24:00 Yeah. Well, we have a lot of elections in 2022. We don’t elect our statewide offices like Governor and all that but we will elect a US Senator Richard Burr has been a senator in North Carolina this he’ll have be completing his third term burns retiring. So it’s an open seat. There are two main Democrats competing Sherry Beasley is the I referred to her earlier she’s former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, an African American woman, very accomplished attorney, longtime judge who lost her election for a Supreme Court by 400 votes in 2020. She’s opposed by a guy named Jeff Jackson, who is a young up and coming state senator from Charlotte Mecklenburg area guy also with some impressive military background, but a very progressive guy should be a spirited primary. And then on the Republican side, we’ve got two main candidates. Donald Trump has announced that he’s endorsed a guy by the name of Ted Budd, who is a congressman who got elected a few years ago in a very crowded primary he eked out A small percentage of the vote. He’s a gun store owner by trade. So you can pretty much guess where he comes from politically.
AW 25:06 I would never have guessed that from his name.
RS 25:09 Yeah, yeah. He’s very loyal to Trump. That was a sort of surprise endorsement that Trump conferred upon him. And he’s opposed by Interestingly enough, this former governor, also former mayor of Charlotte, who once had a reputation as being a pretty moderate guy, but has done his best or worse, depending on your point of view to continually run to the right a guy by the name Pat McCrory. McCrory will be his main competition in that Senate race.
AW 25:36 So we have a couple of women Congress, people from North Carolina – Kathy Manning, and Deborah Ross. And then there’s an up and coming State Representative named Zack Ford-Hawkins. Why don’t you kind of give us a real quick snapshot on those three, if you can?
RS 25:53 Well, the future of all of them like a lot of North Carolina politicians very much up in the air right now, because we really don’t know how these districts are going to turn out. But right now Ross, and Manning our new members of Congress, who were elected in 2020, we temporarily had somewhat fairer maps maps that allowed five Democrats to win seats out of 13, contested races. We’re actually gaining a seat in 2022. So we’ll have 14 seats, but the districts remain up in the air as they’re drawn right now. It’d be hard for some of these people to advance but Deborah Ross is a brilliant attorney from the Raleigh area. Frank, a civil rights lawyer, Kathy Manning, also a really smart She’s an advocate and attorney from the Greensboro area and other one of our larger cities. Both were newly elected in 2020. very progressive, very promising members of Congress. I think it’s really up in the air, what’s going to happen with redistricting, I think there’s still hope that they’ll both be able to return but you know, a lot of seats are up in the air. Zach Hawkins is an example of a young up and coming state legislator, he’s from Durham, I reference Durham earlier, which is a very progressive city in our state. He’s a young African American state representative who I think people have a lot of hopes for. There are, you know, that’s been one of the downsides of Republican gerrymandering. They’ve been so successful in drawing maps that made it hard for Democrats to elect candidates that they’re just the pool is shallower here of promising young candidates working their way up through, for instance, the legislature but Hawkins is one person who is an exception to that there are others there are other promising young lawmakers are mentioned. Jeff Jackson is actually running for state for the US Senate as a state senator. So I mean, I think the future remains hopeful. It’s a state that continues to grow more diverse, lots of in migration, growing urban areas, shrinking rural areas, but it’s going to be a dogfight for the next decade. As the competing parties battle over control the legislature control the congressional delegation in the statewide offices.
AW 27:53 He’s the director of North Carolina Policy Watch, Rob Schofield. Rob, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
RS 28:00 It was my pleasure, Alex, thank you anytime. Good luck to you.
AW 28:03 Thanks
Narrator You’ve been listening to see change radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex wise. Additional music by Ben Webster, M. Ward and James Taylor, check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcasts. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Rob Schofield: Carolina In My Mind appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
It’s right in the Declaration of Independence that everyone is created equal. So why is an entire political party so scared of talking critically about race in this country? This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our discussion with John Stoehr of The Editorial Board centered around the latest Republican boogeyman, critical race theory. We look at the media’s role in creating something out of nothing, compare critical race theory to the debate over gun control, and examine how the hullabaloo about CRT is connected to the so-called “Big Lie” and why both pose a threat to our democracy. Then, we hear an excerpt from Editorial Board contributor Magdi Semrau on how Black voices are largely left out of public education debates in this country.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
John Stoehr 0:22 The whole expansion of guns everywhere the loosening of gun laws and stuff is a reaction to democracy, putting guns in the hands of people who will not be punished by the law but will be protected by the law, even as they commit crimes that would otherwise be crimes in order to maintain those hierarchies of power. If you can’t turn to democracy to get what you want, then you turn to your gun.
Narrator 0:49 It’s right in the Declaration of Independence that everyone is created equal. So why is an entire political party so scared of talking critically about race in this country? This week on Sea Change Radio, the second half of our discussion with John Stoehr of The Editorial Board centered around the latest Republican boogeyman, critical race theory. We look at the media’s role in creating something out of nothing, compare critical race theory to the debate over gun control, and examine how the hullabaloo about CRT is connected to the so-called “Big Lie” and why both pose a threat to our democracy. Then, we hear an excerpt from Editorial Board contributor Magdi Semrau on how Black voices are largely left out of public education debates in this country.
Alex Wise 1:47 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to the founder and editor of the editorial board, John Stoehr. So John, we were talking about the role of the press and you hit upon Fox News. But let’s turn to more mainstream news outlets if we can like the New York Times, how are they playing along with this critical race theory malarkey?
John Stoehr 2:10 The thing about the press corps is, first of all the big media companies are is really about six companies that own all the big, profitable media companies, as opposed to 50 years ago when there was 50, and more. And so when they speak with one voice, that’s a really big, loud voice. And the other thing that I’ve come to, sadly, realizes that fascism or being friendly to fascism is really profitable. I mean, the Fox News model is Case in point, it’s the most profitable cable news channel. And for there’s one reason for that, it’s because it foments anger, it taps into bigotries and prejudices that people already believe to be true. It smears the intentions of the of minority voices, etc. And even the New York Times is really catching on to this.
Alex Wise 3:03 But they do it in a coy kind of both-sides-ism way.
John Stoehr 3:06 Absolutely. It’s never ever. I mean, Fox News is actually pretty coy, but much less. Yeah, it sounds overt side, but the lucrative media properties, they also don’t want reform, they don’t want Democrats changing things, because the way things are right now is really good. You know, it’s really profitable. And at the same time, the Democrats in power, so the press corps has an incentive to elevate the part the voices from the party out of power. And so you put those in economic incentive plus this kind of like this notion of balance, put those two things together with the fact that the right wing media apparatus is global and scale put that all together. And the Democrats are basically like, can’t even get a word in edgewise. You barely even hear unless the President is talking. Nobody really knows what the Democrats are talking about, because they’re just so they’re shouted down. The volume is turned up so high on the on the on the right, it was hard to get a word in edgewise, even when the President is a Democrat. And that’s, that’s really bad for democracy. I’m saying because I’d like to be more hopeful for your listeners sake. But it’s hard to have hope when all the incentives point in the wrong in the opposite direction of democracy. You know, you think people who are tasked with informing the citizenry would be preferential to the truth, but they’re often not. They’re more interested in playing kind of word games, creating these political fictions that are good for ratings are good for subscriptions, but really don’t exist in this country.
Alex Wise 4:50 And I think one of the reasons these wedge issues are popular with the Republicans is that they can have their right wing media and right Wing talking points pretty much in lockstep, while the other side is discussing the nuances of it and is more divided about it. That’s any kind of calculus that a Republican political strategist makes nowadays, takes that reality into account is that the Democrats might have more people on their side, but they’re not in lockstep.
John Stoehr 5:23 Yeah, there’s like herding cats. I mean, liberals always disagree. And liberals value dissent. You know, they take they take disagreement in into account when they’re making decisions. Republicans never valued dissent, they crushed dissent.
Alex Wise 5:40 And that’s kind of what is at the core of this is like you’re dissenting from the very basis of what our country is, if you go against something like American not being the shining beacon on the hill.
John Stoehr 5:53 That’s right, right, you’re offering an alternative point of view. And that’s not an alternative. That’s not an alternative that’s tolerable. Right. In fact, it’s so bad that you seek to replace it with your own lies and propaganda. The Republicans are very good at telling us who they are, by way of their accusations. When they accuse teachers of trying to brainwash their students, what they’re telling us is that we are trying to brainwash students. And we want students to believe what we believe about this country, because what we believe is good for maintaining the hierarchies of power. In this country in which white men stand on top and rule with impunity. The whole idea of equality is very dangerous to the Republicans, because you would have to have everyone being accountable to the law. And that’s just not tolerable, right? You know, a white man should be able to shoot somebody just because he wants to, but a black man can’t do that. He’ll be convicted and sentenced. By the way, that’s what all those Stand Your Ground laws are about, you know, giving legal cover to white men to use violence when they feel it’s necessary, while punishing non white people, you know, the Supreme Court decision brown where it says separate but equal is not doesn’t exist, you can’t have a two tiered system of justice, a two tiered society. Well, the Conservatives always want that. The law protects me. But it punishes you. Right. That’s how a hierarchy of power is maintained. That’s why That’s why the Republican spots so hard to put three justices on the Supreme Court during Trump’s term is in order to enshrine that two tiered system of justice.
Alex Wise 7:46 So what can Democrats do to overcome this new social wedge issue is if you were a fewer strategist for a candidate in the South? How would you try to tackle this new beast?
John Stoehr 8:03 I have no idea! Ugh, I would be a very odd very bad strategist. You think about democracies, it’s not I don’t mean to characterize it like, like it’s a monolithic thing. It’s actually this messy, and multi dimensional, we’ll probably have less democracy on a national level and more democracy, ironically, at the state and local level, especially, like here in Connecticut, I’m in New Haven right now. And Connecticut lawmakers here, they’re going to use those federal dollars that are a consequence of the pandemic, and do the things that they’ve always wanted to do in the name of the common good. In states that don’t believe in the common good, like Texas, who knows, they probably won’t use that money. Or they’ll, you know, steal it or something. I don’t know. But they won’t they, they won’t be in the interest of the common good, because the common good is a dangerous concept to those who run states like Texas, Texas might be a bad example, most the same Mississippi or Alabama or something like that. Texas has a lot of big cities in it. So it’s kind of the exception. But going back to strategies, I think Democrats just have to speak their truth and speak their values and just be Democrats, small d Democrats.
Alex Wise 9:20 …And talking about Big E education,
John Stoehr 9:22 Big E education…
Alex Wise 9:24 And how Republicans have just fought tooth and nail to gut public education for decades.
John Stoehr 9:30 Yeah, I mean, Republicans want people to be consumers. Democrats want people to be citizens. There’s a huge difference between those two things. Republicans want people to go into debt to buy things. Because when they when people are in debt, and they’re buying things that they are more controllable. Republicans want people to be citizens who are free and can do what they want without being bogged down by You know, predatory lenders and, you know, check cashing scams and things like that, you know, the Democrats really are the party of freedom. But it’s never characterized that way. Because freedom is usually seen in terms of power, like what I can do to you. Right? That’s usually considered free, like I am free to do whatever I want to you with impunity with no consequences.
Alex Wise 10:29 ….which is kind of the antithesis of freedom.
John Stoehr 10:33 The antithesis of freedom, exactly. The Democrats are more into this, it doesn’t get enough play, that they’re more into Democratic responsibility. They’re more into like what we owe each other, as citizens, as individuals, what communities owe each other. That’s a much more nuanced and idealistic way of viewing a democracy. And something that can really get lost in the haze in the noise. Noise that it’s turned up to 11. On the Republican side, and the Democrats going back to strategy, I think they need to be small d Democrats. And they need to be small are Republicans meaning putting their values their sense of morality at the forefront of whatever campaign they’re doing? It’s far too easy to meet race baiting with, you know, some non partisan preference over, you know, gas mileage or some technical thing, right. I wish the Democrats would be full on anti racist, just taking it head on, and speaking their truths head on and making sure everyone knows where they stand. I think Black Democrats, they are the models to emulate. I think white Democrats are trying to thread this needle between you know, reasonable people and the racists, right, they’re always trying to figure out who you know, strike that balance, like gun control, gun control, you know, it’s just like, it’s so silly. It’s like, you know, there’s nothing noble about carrying a gun, you know, that doesn’t end it doesn’t make you a smarter person or a tougher person or a safer person or a safer person it just creates a climate of risk and danger and everybody who studies these things knows that but you know, you had these Democrats who are like well you know, I believe in hunting and you know, personal safety and things like that. It’s like come on just like go I would like to see them go all the way like Beto O’Rourke did last year where he was like you know, let’s just start taking people’s guns I’d love that I think that would be great
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Alex Wise 13:59 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to the founder and editor of the editorial board, John Stoehr. So talking about what controversial positions a progressive politician may or may not take. I think that just being definitive on what you believe, sways voters, even if they disagree with you. They at least don’t think you’re trying to pull one over them.
John Stoehr 14:26 Yeah, right. Right. Mostly and why wouldn’t you be suspicious of a politician? Right. You know, but when somebody is speaking truthfully to you, you tend to know it. Right? If especially like, I like the way Beto did it where he’s like speaking from the heart and people are just really understood. You know, like, even if I hate him, I know he’s, he’s telling me who he is. Right and that that goes a long way.
Alex Wise 14:48 And his community suffered with that El Paso shooting so he spoke with more passion then than usual and that was I think respected.
John Stoehr 14:58 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, his that case is a case in point of what Democrats should do. You know, that massacre happened because Trump was maligning cities for weeks prior to that point. And cities have played a key role in the, in the fascist ideology. You know, because cities are, where are diseased, there was a race mingling people of different races, having sex, you know, that kind of thing. And that’s a perversion of their preferred way of the word world being right. And so what do you do with a perversion? You kill it? Right? And that’s when that that shooter went to El Paso and started shooting people up that my preferred response to that would be Democrats saying, Look, we’re taking the guns away from the fascists, right? We can’t have these fascists walking around with guns, they’re going to kill people, you know, and the government has a duty to protect the citizenry. Right? That’s the way I would see it were to way too focused on guns equaling safety. And the Democrats? Well, again, they don’t speak with one voice. So I wish in some cases, they would just push more for for gun control, even to the extent that they malign the intentions of gun owners, you know, just there’s nothing noble about owning a gun, just say it, just like that.
Alex Wise 16:22 Yes, and one of the problems with the Democrats not having this one voice is also in the Monday morning quarterback analysis of an election loss or victory, they never have the same takeaways. So you know, Biden won, because he didn’t go too far to the left or you or you could say Biden won because he stuck to progressive values. If you’re going to try to build upon the Biden victory against Trump, you could have completely different targets for your next campaign, if you’re a different candidate trying to build on that, because the interpretation is there’s so many different needles to thread.
John Stoehr 16:58 Absolutely. You’ve noticed something perhaps, and some of your listeners have to that even though Biden and the Democrats are getting all this advice about, you know, moderating themselves, accommodating Republicans being more bipartisan, etc. Biden’s not doing that. He’s not bothering, you know, the only people he’s negotiating with or other Democrats. Right. And what that what does this difference tell you? It tells you that the the political assumptions of 20 years ago or even 40 years ago, they’re just not applying right now. Right?
Alex Wise 17:32 Well, with one glaring example, and that’s so far, we haven’t seen garland or anybody from Biden’s administration explicitly going after Trump.
John Stoehr 17:42 Well, yes, that I’m talking about more of normal politics. I mean, ethics, it’s an extraordinary thing to go after a former president…
Alex Wise 17:51 It kind of goes back to 1975 1976, where we kind of just let Nixon go, because you’re not supposed to be mean to your predecessor.
John Stoehr 18:01 And that will probably be the case this time too, unfortunately. But Biden is not doing like a he’s not pulling a Bill Clinton where he’s like sabotaging other Democrats in order to prove to Republicans that he’s not all bad, right. Biden’s not going to do that he’s not going to undermine the people who put him in office. You know, he’s not going to do a Sister Souljah moment, you know. And I think what this says is that they’re we’re going through a political transition period. I don’t know what the future is. And I’m not going to try to tell us what the future is. But I think what we’re going through right now is kind of this what I call like a regime change. From the 30s. To the 60s, you had the Democrats kind of prevailing or pretty much, you know, the FDR and the New Deal, Great Society, etc. And then from the 70s, from the 80s, through the 2010s. It was really like Reagan, right? Reagan is the where everybody is operating under the shadow of Reagan…
Alex Wise 18:59 St. Ronald Reagan. He is part of that kind of religious fervor of the beginnings of modern Republicanism in so many ways, right? Like, you can’t like Even Democrats kind of fall into that trap. And they’ll say, you know, I believe Republicans, I don’t think they’re bad people. They’re not the party of Trump. They’re the party of Ronald Reagan stuff. And I roll my eyes because I thought Ronald Reagan was a pretty terrible person.
John Stoehr 19:22 Yeah, he was. Although he could govern. We’re really since the since I would say, Barack Obama’s election. The paradigm started to shift. I think at that point, democracy showed the Republicans that they were in trouble, that democracy was going to ruin things for them if they let it keep going. And so that really, pretty much from that point onward, the Republican Republican started going to war with democracy itself. That’s when you saw you know, the Tea Party, or specifically like armed protests, you know, people Paul showing up with guns, the loosening of gun laws, the increase in shooting massacres. From that point onward. I still think those shooting massacres are a reflection of the larger political tensions going on. Even if it’s really just some crazy guy shooting people up, it’s still a reflection, I think of the larger politics. And we’re going into this new period where the Democrats are just, you know, not giving the Republicans the benefit of the doubt anymore, and they’re instead talking to each other. And whereas the Republicans are just a party of sabotage now.
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Alex Wise 21:40 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the founder and editor of the editorial board, John Stoehr, just thinking of the debate within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and just Democrats writ large over the last few months, it’s been a lot of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and the filibuster, Democrats aren’t even thinking too much about Mitch McConnell and what his cabal is trying to concoct, because we just we know their game already.
John Stoehr 22:10 Yeah. Right. Why would you negotiate with hostage takers? I mean, that’s, that’s the mentality.
Alex Wise 22:16 And we also just know what they’ve already kind of drawn their lines in the sand. There’s no more. Right. There’s no wiggle room there. So somebody like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. If they’re still going to be in the Democratic Party, are they going to come along with the Democratic Party’s platforms and policies or not? And that’s kind of been an ongoing debate for the first year of the Biden administration.
John Stoehr 22:39 Yeah, I actually find that spectrum. The you know, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all the way to Joe Manchin. I find that spectrum. You know, even though mansion is kind of annoying and infuriating. He’s still a part of the spectrum of legitimate politics. I would even include Mitt Romney in that spectrum, given that he voted to convict the former president. Yes, I agree. Right. You know, even though you hate Mitt Romney, at least he’s a loyal American.
Alex Wise 23:09 Right. That’s why I feared him more in the 2012 election against Obama. I overestimated him because I think I overestimated Republican voters. I thought that Romney was at least a bright guy and you know presentable and but he’s not the natural charmer.
John Stoehr 23:26 That’s right. So that spectrum of the way I put it with the Democrats is that even though mansion is maddening, whatever the Democrats come up with, you know, in terms of their their infrastructure bill, any any sort of legislation will probably be the best that a democracy can do as it’s being sabotaged by the other party. I mean, how well can you and I perform when somebody is trying to cut our knees out from under us? You can’t run a race when somebody is trying to you know, stop on your feet. So even if mansions infuriating, you have to think, well, you know, he’s just being infuriating in his own mansion, he kind of way, whereas well, even so that’s probably the best we can do. Given that what the Republicans are willing to do.
Alex Wise 24:13 And to connect this to our earlier discussion, I I like how you in your piece on critical race theory, connect the dots to the big lie and the activities we’re seeing right now, in terms of real threats to our democracy.
John Stoehr 24:30 I think listeners need to remember that democracy will continue to go on, you know, people will still vote they will still organize those still petition the government for redress of grievances, etc, etc. But there will be some people who won’t be able to do that as well. And on a national level, democracy is sliding back. And we need to be aware of that. At the same time, we have an issue of a Republican Party that as taking the side of political violence as a response to democratic action, small d democratic action, the whole expansion of guns everywhere, the loosening of gun laws and stuff is a reaction to democracy, putting guns in the hands of people who will not be punished by the law that will be protected by the law, even as they commit crimes that would otherwise be crimes in order to maintain those hierarchies of power. If you can’t turn to democracy to get what you want, then you turn to your gun. So there’s multi layers going on here, you’re going to have democracy continuing on, I’m still going to vote for that my mayor, my alderman, my governor, my represent state representative, you know, my senator, etc. But there will be another layer going on at the same time, that is trying to shrink democracy, and disenfranchise those who would most benefit from the expansion of democracy. And I think that’s the unfortunate truth. That’s what we’re facing right now, especially with the Supreme Court that is going to change law, such that democratic action will not be possible for some people to give you, for instance, the mayor turning the open, carry into a right. If that happens, then you’re going to see some people protesting police violence, and then another group of people who are armed to the teeth, counter protesting those people and that will be a situation in which violence will happen. It will be violence as a response to to democracy and free speech.
Alex Wise 26:42 And before we go, I wanted to just read a few lines from Magdi Semrau, who wrote a piece for the editorial board and titled, in the controversy over race and public education. Journalists can’t cover the story properly by amplifying white voices only. The fact that black people are so invisible from our public framing of the education debate shows just how intellectually impoverished the conversation is. They exist as objects of discussion in the imagination of white Americans, subject to debate, not people to listen to. This rendering of black Americans as invisible is perhaps an argument for teaching more about racism in society, not less. The GOP is waging a race war, we shouldn’t expect them to care about black kids. We should however, demand that the rest of us place black children within the scope of our conversation about education. Well, when you speak of Democrats as citizens and Republicans as consumers, not to sway our listeners, but if you’re going to be consumers this Christmas, and not just a citizen, you should consider subscribing to John’s Editorial Board. John Stoehr, thank you so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
John Stoehr 28:00 You’re very welcome. Thank you.
Narrator 28:16 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Chris Joss, JB Lenoir and Elvis Presley. Check out our website at Sea Change Radio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others and tune into Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast John Stoehr on Critical Race Theory Pt. 2 appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Have you noticed what’s got the far right-wing of American politics hot-and-bothered lately? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to John Stoehr, the founder and editor of The Editorial Board about the latest red herring issue from the Right – critical race theory – and how it’s affecting political races across the country. In the first half of this two part discussion, Stoehr helps explain how the topic gained traction, distinguishes fact from fiction, and connects critical race theory to a larger discussion about race and American exceptionalism.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
John Stoehr 0:22 If you have bigotry on your side slander and smear campaigns are usually very effective, because people will they’re already believing it. You’re just telling somebody something they already believe, if they already believe the Liberals are out here trying to make trouble in race relations, meaning give let people freedom and equality, then they’re communists, right? Or they’re socialists, or they’re troublemakers or just anything to smear their intentions.
Narrator 0:51 Have you noticed what’s got the far right wing of American politics hot and bothered lately? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to John Stoehr, the founder and editor of the Editorial Board about the latest red herring issue from the right – critical race theory – and how it’s affecting political races around the country. In the first half of this two part discussion, Stoehr helps explain how the topic gain traction, distinguishes fact from fiction, and connects critical race theory to a larger discussion about race and American exceptionalism.
Alex Wise 1:46 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Stoehr. He’s the founder and editor of the Editorial Board. John, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
John Stoehr 1:55 Thanks for having me back.
Alex Wise 1:56 Always a pleasure to speak to you, sir. So you’ve written a piece about critical race theory on the editorial board. And so have some of your colleagues, Rod Graham and Trent Nelson. They’re all slightly different takes on this hot button issue. First one, we summarize what the issue of critical race theory is to political debates going around in school boards and in the pundit class in America right now.
John Stoehr 2:26 Right. So the first thing you really need to understand about anything with the words critical race theory is that they are part of a backlash against the political gains made in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. George Floyd, as everyone knows, I hope is, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and he was his murder was recorded. And this murder is set off a chain reaction across the country, in institutions from K through 12, up through colleges, nonprofits, other democratic institutions, to kind of do some soul searching about what we’re doing that is contributing to the oppression of African Americans and other racial minorities. So that’s the proper context in which to understand this critical race theory thing. I guess the second thing you should know is that it’s not about education, even though the Republicans are insisting that it is about education
Alex Wise 3:26 Particularly K through 12 education, right?
John Stoehr 3:30 Especially K through 12. Exactly. It’s about education, to the extent that the focus of the political energy is school boards, and that’s really where the education angle stops. Otherwise, it’s really about a political fiction. Nobody in K through 12, teaches critical race theory. critical race theory is a theory that law students use to understand law and the history of law. I mean, really, you have to be an advanced, advanced Secondary School to even touch critical race theory. Otherwise, school kids are not touching this thing.
Alex Wise 4:08 As a side note, the 1619 project is worth mentioning because I think its publication or when it came to prominence, it posed a threat to conservatives around the country, maybe you can also mention how that plays a role.
John Stoehr 4:26 What right that goes back to the proper background context in which to understand the critical race theory angle, like it’s not only the murder of George Floyd, but also the explosive impact of that history project. And it was explosive because it told a counter narrative as to the origins of our country that is really reprehensible to some people in this country. Some people want to believe that America is the shining beacon, the city on the hill, a beacon of hope and liberty, etc. And without really even acknowledging a lot of the bad things that we have done in our history. That’s what Trent Nelson gets to quite a bit in his piece. So it’s not about education.
Alex Wise 5:10 But it is about race, isn’t it?
John Stoehr 5:12 Absolutely. What’s happened? So lots of K through 12 institutions are looking at themselves wondering, you know, are we contributing to the oppression and disenfranchisement of racial minorities in this country. The other thing that’s going on in the background is something that my contributor Rob Graham talked about, and that is, cultural is the other CRC culturally relevant teaching. This is a, a Teacher project, to address the fact that K through 12 is primarily populated by non whites, the majority of K through 12 students are non whites.
Alex Wise 5:55 And that’s a that’s a huge transformation from 20 years ago, where it was I think, 61% of public schools were white, and now it’s I think, 48 or 49%.
John Stoehr 6:06 That’s right. It’s a slim majority, but it’s a majority minority now, and are minority majority now. And with that, fact, being the case, teachers across the country, as well as scholars like like rod, some working in tandem, others working independently, but on the same issue, they came up with this program called culturally relevant teaching, which is basically the way I understand it is meeting kids where they are. And also kind of getting rid of some things that just weren’t relevant to the students have now, in the past, this is the way rod puts it in the past, it was functional, it was reasonable to, to teach kind of race blindness, like we were, we’re going to minimize our differences and heighten our similarities, and kind of just overlook issues of race. And broad says that works when you have a majority white population in K through 12. But it doesn’t work when you have a majority non white in K through 12. If you keep doing this kind of colorblindness with people who are always being reminded of their color, it’s kind of a form of gaslighting to these poor kids. And you just don’t want to do that you want so you change there. You change your tact. And that’s that’s where this idea of culturally relevant teaching comes in. Right likes to be funny to us. Like there’s there is a CRT itself, but it’s not critical race theory, it’s culturally relevant teaching.
Alex Wise 7:39 But as you point out, no one is teaching white children to hate themselves.
John Stoehr 7:44 No, no one, that what they are doing is asking, you know, are some people treated differently than others? That’s what my kid learns in school, when they have discussions about race. It’s about fairness, it’s about things that kids think is right and wrong, right? Nobody’s teaching a white kid like you’re wrong, because you’re white, or you’re bad, because you’re white. Nobody’s saying that. But that resonates quite a bit with people who are at first after George Floyd’s murder, and after the 1619 project came out a lot of white people are like, oh, yeah, we should really think about, you know, our own complicity in the perpetuation of white supremacy, etc, etc. But, you know, over time, they realize, oh, you know, I have to start thinking about myself as a white person, as somebody with race, as somebody who’s participating in a system that is rewarding me on account of my race, but punishing somebody else on account of theirs. And that’s for a lot of white people. That’s a painful process. painful because, one, they’re not used to it, too. They don’t want to go through that process. And so there’s a kind of this happens whenever there’s a liberal advancement, what I call respectable white people, which is like white people who care about their respectability with other white people. These people are, you know, at first, they’re like, oh, yeah, we should talk about race but there’s a time there’s a deadline, like after that, after a certain point, they’re tired of it and they want they start walking away from whatever previous, soft commitment they had before. This is how I interpret by the way, the Virginia elections. That state went to Biden, in 2020. And that state was part of a national coalition that was comprised of respectable white people and the energies around Black Lives Matter. And that coalition, you know, came together, it was the biggest one in history and I’d like to Joe Biden, well, the Republicans successfully split that coalition in Virginia, by what I think is exploiting the difference. comfort that a lot of white respectable white people have when it comes to thinking about their own race.
Alex Wise 10:07 And Glenn Youngkin was, even though he tried to kind of have it both ways in terms of distancing himself a little bit from Donald Trump, he took a page right out of Trump’s playbook in in the lies that he told about critical race theory in his race against Terry McAuliffe. You right, that critical race theory is kind of tied to Trump’s big lie about the election as well.
John Stoehr 10:35 Right? I mean, so the big lie is that Trump lost. And the big reason for that is because of fraud. Well, what Trump’s really saying is that a lot of non white people voted. And that’s not supposed to happen in this country. This is a white man’s country, these people shouldn’t vote, they did vote, and therefore it’s a fraud. That’s what he’s saying. Right?
Alex Wise 10:54 But then Youngkin takes it into another little place. Why don’t you explain?
John Stoehr 10:59 Right. So the other side of that is that Youngkin is appealing to people who believe that their country is being taken away from them. So just as the election was stolen from Trump, America has being stolen from people who, who are supposed to be the rightful owners of America, meaning white people, right? And so this, this is, this is an equal kind of fraud, right. And it always goes back to race, always. You can always find the if you just dig far enough, it always goes back to the friction between Democratic politics, which all is always attempting to flatten the hierarchies of power, and conservative politics, which is always trying to maintain the hierarchies of power. And when these two things come, work against each other. You get, sometimes you get violence. Republicans try to stay away from violence because violence makes them look bad. So they they talk in this kind of coded language the way young can did when he talks about banning critical race theory, what he’s really talking about is banning the politics that makes white people feel bad about themselves. That’s that’s really what he’s talking about.
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Alex Wise 13:14 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to the founder and editor of the editorial board, John Stoehr. So, John, we were talking about the Virginia race for governor that just saw Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe. What’s your analysis in the role of critical race theory in that election? Was it the central wedge issue which turned the tide or was there more to it, in your opinion?
John Stoehr 14:00 No, I think it was the central thing. Yeah, for sure. Remember, Terry McAuliffe won more votes than any democratic candidate ever. So what a young man have to do, he had to drive out the rural voters. And he did by by race baiting. I mean, that’s, that’s just what, what he did, and it worked it but he never called it that. Of course, he never called it you know, he just called education, you know. And the other things in the thing about this coded language is that people know what’s going on. Especially in the south, you know, the South is. I lived in the South for close to a decade and you when you live there long enough, you realize like race, you don’t really have to speak the words race for everyone to be conscious of race. It’s just it’s in the air. It’s in the water. It’s everywhere. So all you really have to do is hint and nudge and, and wink and people get what you’re talking about. Without you having to explicitly say what you’re talking about. So yeah, I think that, that that really did that really did make or break things for Youngkin. The The other thing too, you know, going back to the fact that most K through 12 students are, are non white now, you have to think about, okay, that’s the fact. So why, why push this this critical race theory thing when it first of all doesn’t exist? It’s not really about education, etc, etc. So if they’re pushing it in, and you see the fact that the most kids are non white in K through 12, what does that really mean? It really means that, even as for someone like Youngkin, is saying he’s going to ban this mode of thought, what he’s really doing is saying, I’m going to force non white people to believe my preference as to the history of this country. Do you see what I mean? Like, you know, credit, if, you know, kids, or are talking about race in class, their teachers are talking or using culturally relevant teaching to approach this new generation of students and meet them where they are? Well, that’s a problem for some conservatives. Remember, education in the United States is like, the most democratic public education in the United States is the most democratic institution, perhaps we have. It always tries to flatten those hierarchies of power, because it’s, it’s teaching kids or at least the goal is to teach kids to think for themselves, right. You know, if you’re a conservative, you don’t want that. You want them to think the way you think. Right? If you think America is the best, the most awesomest country ever and never did anything wrong. You want those people to think the same thing. Right.
Alex Wise 16:57 And it’s almost a religious fervor right there. There’s this in you, you mentioned how it’s almost harkening back to the McCarthyism. But it could also hearken back to any nation state where they’ve kind of conflated a god with a leader or an in this case, it’s the this ideal of Americanism with and the Judeo Christian ideals that the right has kind of tied to the founding of this country.
John Stoehr 17:28 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, this is God’s country, to the extent that God gave this country to my white men to ruin his name. I mean, and anyone, any institution or anything, or anyone that attempts to flatten the hierarchies of power, that were given by God is the enemy, and the enemy that needs to be crushed in some way. Of course, you can’t just like send an army out and crush, literally crush people in a democracy that won’t work. So you just you devise a coded system that will work that’s compatible with democracy, but seeks out to undermine it at the same time.
Alex Wise 18:12 And your contributor to the Editorial Board, Trent Nelson, wrote about this in his piece about American exceptionalism, maybe you can kind of summarize and expand on what Trent was writing about.
John Stoehr 18:26 So Trent’s peice is basically like, “look, the United States is like is no better, no worse than any other. Any other Western nation, right? We’ve done a lot of bad, we’ve done a lot of good, maybe more good than bad.” You know, you can make that argument. What the country is not is what the right wants us to think it is it is not the beacon this beacon of hope, and liberty. It is not it has not been a democracy for its for the duration of its history. It wasn’t it’s really been a democracy since about 1964. But of multiracial democracy, let’s say that since 1964, it was a it was a white person’s democracy.
Alex Wise 19:09 It wasn’t a truly representative democracy until 1984. And some might say it’s still not.
John Stoehr 19:14 And some may still say it’s not. And we’re certainly going in the direction of it not being that that way. That’s called democratic backsliding. So Trent goes back to the idea like that. We’ve done good things, we’ve done bad things, but there’s bad that can be done when we insist on replacing the truth of our history with some preferred interpretation of our history. And not just not just like a simple interpretation, but one that is rigid and dogmatic. Which is really what you get from the right the right wants, wants you to believe you know, this is the best country and if you don’t love it, you should leave it right. It will crush dissent. It will you know, it will see seek out ways to, to even censor you in the name of free speech, which is what all this ban on critical race theory is really is it’s a it’s an effort to censor people in the name of free speech. And it’s like the old saying, you know when fascism comes it will be it will come with a cross and wrapped in the flag I can’t remember the whole thing but it will always seem like the best thing but it’s really it’s really the worst thing and trends piece really is trying to say like a lot of this preferred myth mythmaking about American history seeks out to crush dissent. It seeks out to crush anyone who’s challenging, again, those hierarchies of power
Alex Wise 20:46 In a much more subtle and insidious way than you know, Nazi propaganda because it’s been centuries old in the making, in some ways.
John Stoehr 20:55 Oh, yeah. I mean, I wrote a piece today I’m writing a piece today about about how the Wright has used communism and socialism against liberals. It you know, liberals have never been communists, they’re liberals. They’re not communists. I mean, they liberals hate communists. But the right is often lumped liberals in with Communists in order to smear their objection, their intentions and their objectives. This week, look at it this way, the Republican Party has money. The Democrats have numbers. The Republicans because they have money, who can spend a ton of it on on propaganda, right. And, and they only have to aim for one or two audiences. Basically anybody who’s a bigot, anybody who’s like on the margins of bigotry, like those are the people that they can talk to. The Democratic Party has to be talks with multiple personalities and multiple voices. And it’s just like all it seems all over the place, because the Democratic Party is all over the place. It’s everything to everyone. And so therefore can never be can never have a singular, speak with one voice. And it’s just not possible for the most part for the Democrats to do that. The Republicans however, can write, they always have bigotry on their side. And so if you have bigotry on your side, slander and smear campaigns are usually very effective. Because people they’re already believing it, you’re just telling somebody something they already believe, if they already believe the Liberals are out here trying to make trouble in race relations, meaning give Black people freedom and equality. Then they’re the communists, right? Or they’re socialists or they’re troublemakers or just anything to smear their intentions.
Alex Wise 22:40 They’re just as bad as the minorities to white racist America. They’re the “other,” basically.
John Stoehr 22:47 They’re the other. Exactly right. And this has been going on for a long time. Interestingly, the whole communist accusation is still with us after all these even all these years after the Soviet Union fell and it still has a kind of emotional charge to it. And I don’t know why that is if some of your listeners have an opinion about that I’d like to know.
(Music Break)
Alex Wise 24:19 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the founder and editor of the Editorial Board John Stoehr. So if critical race theory is the next big wedge issue, the social wedge issue that Republicans can count on for elections to come you know they’ve had God’s guns and gays and in the god section can be issues like abortion and ridiculous red herring arguments like gender neutral bathrooms or whatever it might be, but something to try to stir the pot and to get people off of issues where they agree when you look at like how people support Joe Biden’s Paul sees versus supporting Joe Biden that candidate you see, there’s this real disconnect in that sense. And so the Republicans want to exploit that variance. So do you think that critical race theory has legs as a social wedge issue? Or is it maybe just going to be a short term thing that they can exploit in southern states?
John Stoehr 25:19 Will it always be hot in this in the South? I mean, that’s just the way it is. I wish I knew the answer to that. I think part of the answer if there is an answer, is determined by the Washington press corps. When I say that, I mean like legitimate respectable reporters who aren’t partisan or aligned with some partisan outlet.
Alex Wise 25:45 Speaking to that, has the press corps Mischaracterized and run with this critical race theory in an irresponsible way – not including Fox News and the like in the subset?
John Stoehr 25:59 Yeah, the answer is a resounding yes. Hugely irresponsible.
Alex Wise 26:05 What comes to mind?
John Stoehr 26:08 Well, well characterizing race baiting as an education issue. You know, for instance, I mean, that it’s not an education issue. An education issue is like, what kids and what curriculum you’re going to have, etc. It’s not about what Youngkin is proposing is a is a project of censorship, right. But it’s never characterized that way. Right. It’s characterized as an education issue. And meanwhile, the Republican lawmakers in Texas, North Carolina and Georgia are actually seeking out ways to censor teachers and censor ways of thinking all in the pretext of under the under the pretext of protecting free speech and protecting children from this Boogeyman. I mean, it’s really serious going back to the press corps. The thing about the press corps is, first of all, the big media companies are is really about six companies that own all the big, profitable media companies, as opposed to 50 years ago when there was 50, and more. And so when they speak with one voice, that’s a really big, loud voice. And the other thing that I’ve come to, sadly realize is that fascism or being friendly to fascism is really profitable. I mean, the Fox News model is Case in point it’s the most profitable cable news channel. And for there’s one reason for that, it’s because it foments anger, it taps into bigotries and prejudices that people already believed to be true. It smears, the intentions of the minority voices, etc.
Alex Wise 27:49 John Stoehr – thank you so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
John Stoehr 27:54 You’re very welcome. Thank you.
Narrator 27:56 Tune in next week to hear the second part of our discussion with The Editorial Board’s John Stoehr.
Narrator 28:16 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Fela Kuti, Southern Avenue and the Four Tops. Check out our website at seachangeradio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcasts. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast John Stoehr on Critical Race Theory Pt. 1 appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
As millions of American families gather this week for their Thanksgiving feasts, we thought we’d take a peek behind the curtain at one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants while at the same time discussing food waste and insecurity. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Lara Gilmore, who along with her husband, chef and restaurateur Massimo Bottura, run the world-renowned Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. In addition to running a three-star Michelin restaurant, ranked the top restaurant in the world by Restaurant Magazine in 2016 and 2018, Bottura and Gilmore have created a unique template for feeding the needy through their nonprofit, Food For Soul. Based on the concept of the Italian refettorio, a place where monks gathered together to share their meals, Food For Soul has elevated the soup kitchen to a whole new level, cooking and serving delicious meals in warm, elegant environments.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Lara Gilmore 0:17 I think that the most important thing is we realized that food for sale was not only a platform and a refettorio to be able to give a meal to someone in need, but also a teaching platform for people to understand how to cook better at home and wasteless food
Narrator 0:36 As millions of American families gather this week for their Thanksgiving feasts, we thought we’d take a peek behind the curtain at one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants while at the same time discussing food waste and insecurity. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Lara Gilmore, who along with her husband, chef and restaurateur Massimo Bottura, run the world-renowned Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. In addition to running a three-star Michelin restaurant, ranked the top restaurant in the world by Restaurant Magazine in 2016 and 2018, Bottura and Gilmore have created a unique template for feeding the needy through their nonprofit, Food For Soul. Based on the concept of the Italian refettorio, a place where monks gathered together to share their meals, Food For Soul has elevated the soup kitchen to a whole new level, cooking and serving delicious meals in warm, elegant environments.
Alex Wise 1:53 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend Lara Gilmore. She is the co-founder and President of Food for Soul. She’s a partner in life and business with restauranteur Massimo Bottura. Their flagship restaurant is Osteria Francescana, one of the finest restaurants in the world in Modena, Italy. Lara, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Lara Gilmore 2:14 Hi, how are you Alex?
Alex Wise 2:17 It’s so good to have you on this is a real treat. I only wish we could eat some of your delicious food together. Lara is right now in your new restaurant with a lot of Ferrari artwork behind you explain a little bit about that.
Lara Gilmore 2:35 Well, I’m in I’m in Maranello, which is a town that is about 20 minute drive from Modena. We’re in the Emilia Romagna area of Italy, which is northern Central Italy. And in Maranello, there is one thing and one thing only. And that is Ferrari. Ferrari Enzo Ferrari moved his company from Madena to Maranello when he bought land here in 1943. And on this piece of land, which he then created all his factories and in the whole beautiful Ferrari car business. There was a farmhouse and he decided that that farmhouse was not going to be torn down. But it was going to become the Ferrari canteen for all the new workers who were coming to his business. And then in the 1950s the canteen was such a success it got turned into a restaurant for the public. And from the 1950s on it’s been a roaring place to celebrate Italian and Emilian food culture Lambrusco on ice, and also car culture. So when I, when my son when I talked about Madonna, we often describe it as the place of slow food and fast cars, slow food being parmesan reggiano cheese that needs to be aged for at least 24 months for it to be officially sold as Parmigiano Reggiano or prosciutto or any of the salumi that have their aging process as well all the way up to a Chitose amico, which really doesn’t get put in a bottle until it’s about 20 years old. So that’s the slow food. And then on the other side, we’re in the land of Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini, you know, incredible car companies that began at the turn of the century and have been innovative in Italy and engineering cavallino open this summer, and it’s a place to celebrate the slow food and the fast cars that defines this region.
Alex Wise 4:37 So I want to learn more about Food For Soul. But first, are you hungry yet? Just I actually have not even had my breakfast and yes, hearing about Salome’s and aged cheese and vinegar is definitely wetting my appetite but tell our listeners a little bit about your story of coming to Italy and falling in love and becoming restauranteur extraordinare.
Lara Gilmore 5:01 All right, well, I’m going to try to make a long story very short. When I did move to New York, I was a struggling artist and struggling to find any job at an art magazine. And I worked for a magazine called aperture, which is a photography magazine. And of course, you know, the salary was what it was. And I had to find a job on the side just to be able to pay my rent and my little East Village apartment, which was so small, you couldn’t even close the door of the bathroom. I walked into a little cafe on the corner of grand and Mercer, called Cafe Nona. And this is 1993. And it was run by a third generation Calabrian, who was looking for someone to be behind the bar, who knew how to make a cup of Chino, who could talk about wine, who could talk about Italy. And I had those that vocabulary, and I had that language, and I knew about Italy, and I could speak it. And I could tell stories of my trips I had taken since I started studying Italian back in 1985. And in walked my husband, pretty much the day I started working, and he was taking a sabbatical year from, from his restaurant in Montana, that he had opened nine years earlier back in 1986. And we met and we spoke and he told me that my cappuccinos were terrible every day and but he helped me make them better. And we joked around in Italian, and somehow that place became a place to make new friends and create a whole new community around Italian culture and life. And somehow in between that we fell in love. And he convinced me to move to Montana when he had to move back to Montana himself. And so I’ve been in Moderna ever since.
Alex Wise 6:42 And one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you not only because I can almost taste the delicious food that you and your husband present to people from all over the world, is that you have a different perspective about food than a lot of fine restaurants would I mean, it’s pretty all consuming to try to get one Michelin star as you mentioned, and now your three Michelin stars and routinely ranked the number one or two best restaurant in the world. But you were able to find the time to carve out this nonprofit Food For Soul. When we think of the sumptuousness of an of Osteria Francescana. The other end of the spectrum is food scarcity. And you and your husband did not turn a blind eye to that reality want to explain the mission of your organization?
Lara Gilmore 7:31 I will Alex, I just want to take one step back and mentioned that, like anything, we can always find time for anything in our lives we fit in time. But more important, I think was for us that we discovered this calling and this mission through our process. So are the 17 years that it took from when we opened our restaurant in 1995. To when we were able to be awarded those three star Michelin those three Michelin stars in 2012. Our whole obsession during those 17 years was about quality was about small producers was about communicating, you know the beauty of Italy and its stories through food. But we were completely focused on getting our Michelin stars. And once we got those stars, something so interesting happened. We realize that those stars really only had value because they had given us a voice and that people were listening to us and whether we were talking about a heroic farmer or butcher or cheese producer. We were making a difference. And six months into our three Michelin stars. There was an earthquake here in Emilia Romagna may 2012. And in May 2012. I’m not going to say it damaged our business as a restaurant. It damaged the town, economically, tourism emilia-romagna. But more than anything within days of the first earthquake, we found out that 450,000 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano had been destroyed, they had literally fallen off the shelves because of this earthquake. And at that moment, Massimo and I looked at each other and we said this is an opportunity for us to use our voice to use these three Michelin stars, to use our culinary skills to use our the quality of our ideas to create something that will create more awareness about this problem and to help these cheese makers survive to communicate that anywhere from around the world. If you buy Parmesan cheese in this moment, you’re supporting an industry that is in great difficulty. And so we did this through creating a recipe a recipe which Massimo took classic spaghetti ketchup paper and he transformed it into a result of ketchup paper. And instead of using pepper in Reno cheese, he used parmigiano and he shared this recipe virtually with Low food, and basically communicated this message. And the reaction was incredible. And no dairy farmer closed a no cheese maker had to, you know, shut its doors. And we realized that we a recipe can be a social gesture, and can be an act of solidarity. And from that moment on, we started looking at the world from a different point of view and started realizing that we could have a great impact of things that happened outside a restaurant, not only inside a restaurant. And so when Expo came along in 2015, and the theme was Feed the Planet Energy for Life. And lots of people were asking Massimo for a pop up restaurant, or to do some special dinner or this or that, and no one was asking him what he thought or what his ideas were about this theme, he realized that he needed to do something and act on his own accord. And that’s when we started this project, and this little seed of an idea was planted.
(music break) 11:04
Alex Wise 11:50 This is Alex Wise and Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Lara Gilmore. She is a partner in life and business with Massimo Bottura, their restaurant’s, Osteria Francescana, among others, and she’s the co founder and president of Food for Soul. So what exactly is the idea behind the refettorio concept? Why don’t you break that down for our listeners,
Lara Gilmore 12:12 So instead of doing an intervention in 2015, in a, you know, Expo fair, awesome, I wanted to leave a signature, a mark behind that had a little bit more lasting presence. And so he wanted to open up a soup kitchen, a community kitchen, with the inevitable waste that was going to be produced because of a fare like Expo, and the waste that we have in all of our cities coming out of supermarket surplus. And he wanted to do this with the chefs that were passing through from Expo chefs from all over the world. And the place that he would do this was in a refettorio. A refettorio is where monks would gather at the end of the day to have their meal together, and they would commune and then we’ll commute over breaking bread. Refettorio is an idea of a place where you are safe, where you can share what you’ve learned over the day, or the difficulties you’ve had, and you share it at the table with other people. And that meal is not just nourishing, because you need your calories and your energy to be brought back. But it’s nourishing because you break bread together. And so we based this soup kitchen on an idea that a soup kitchen should be a place where people can come that safe and beautiful and inspiring, and have a meal together and be served a meal. They don’t have to stand in line. They don’t have to be at a self service. And that those meals could be created during Expo by visiting chefs who are cooking surplus food that would come in from expo or from supermarkets surplus everyday wouldn’t wouldn’t know what kind of food would have in or who the chef would be. But the idea was to create a three course meal for people in need. And we immediately started working with an Italian association called Caritas, Ambrosiano, the Caritas based in Milan, we found an incredible space that was a theater from the 1920s in a 15 adjacent to a 15 century church, in a neighborhood just outside the periphery of Milan, that was kind of surrounded by train tracks, and it seemed to represent, you know, lives passing and going. And it was a neighborhood that was a little bit neglected a lot of immigrants a lot of poverty. And in the beginning, this neighborhood did not want absolutely a soup kitchen there. But by the end of six months, when we had been running this program, it was the volunteers and it was the neighborhood and the community around this project that actually convinced us that this small refettorio had legs and could become a model for future projects to come. And that’s when we found it food for so
Alex Wise 14:59 And It seems like so much of the concept is rooted in dignity for the needy, something that often gets overlooked. When we think about lending helping hand to our brothers and sisters, the idea of being served as is key there, I think, up until food for soul was founded, what were the standard models for feeding the hungry in Italy,
Lara Gilmore 15:25 When Massimo came up with this idea, I was totally terrorized by the idea that we were going to go and start a project that we really knew nothing about. It was not our world, I felt like, you know, a soup kitchen was so far away from what we were doing at Osteria Francescana. And all we knew was Osteria Francescana. But then we realized that all we needed to do was apply our most important pillars that built Osteria Francescana over those 20 years. And then if we apply those, to a model of a soup kitchen, maybe that soup kitchen could be as beautiful and successful, and as happy, a place as Osteria Francescana. And so those three pillars really are the power of beauty, the value of hospitality, and the quality of ideas. And they sound very abstract. But we’ve always given ourselves over to how much power beauty has to communicate simple messages. It’s a landscape for ideas in Francescana, whether we have a painting on a wall or a photograph, it helps give clues to what we’re doing in our restaurant. And why couldn’t that power of beauty also be applied to a soup kitchen? What does hospitality mean? Hospitality is more than 50% of your of who you are as a restaurant, it’s 60%. You know, if you’re treated with respect in a restaurant and welcomed into a restaurant, and served in a way that makes you feel part of something, that’s a restaurant, you want to go back to even if your meal wasn’t so great. And so hospitality is welcoming into an Italian way of living an Italian way of greeting people and respecting them from wherever they come from. It’s not if your plate is served perfectly synchronized and everyone’s plate goes on the table at the same time. It’s about the smile on someone’s face. It’s about their body gestures, their attitude, how they tell stories, it’s so much more. And then the third thing is the quality of ideas, which is really the idea that Osteria Francescana became one of us because of chefs working together, and creating dishes and building on stories and centuries and centuries of culinary heritage and trying to pull that forward. And those same chefs could apply those ideas to food that was going to be wasted, you know, how can we salvage this food? How can we take ingredients that are about to be expired or ugly. So supermarkets are not going to have them on their shelves anymore, that are imperfect, but that are perfectly edible, and transform them into something unwanted and ugly, into something absolutely healthy and delicious. For someone who needs a meal, you know, and so, we put all those three things together. And we said, let’s try to build a soup kitchen as if we’re building a beautiful restaurant. When we finished the renovations with so much help from so many people, you know Polytechnic of Milan 13 designers who design the different tables, other designers who are involved in the renovation of the space, we called on artists to come in there. So there’s so much synergy going on. In addition to the over 100 chefs that came to cook with us that space was more beautiful than Osteria Francescana. And I would say to people, I want to move my restaurant here. But if it wasn’t more beautiful than Osteria Francescana, we would have been hypocritical in our claims of what we were trying to do. Italy has incredible services for people in need, whether it’s looking for housing, whether it’s helping immigrants find jobs, giving up meals, but no one had ever thought of doing it in that way. No one had ever thought of taking it to that next level. And we all felt like Expo was an opportunity to bring things to the next level and to create new models.
Alex Wise 19:09 So how big is the food scarcity issue in Italy, Lara?
Lara Gilmore 19:13 This project wasn’t specific to Italy. We created an Italy because Expo was in Italy. But we didn’t create it because we saw terrible food stats in Italy. Italy is a country that wastes food like many first world countries do. And most of that waste happens surprisingly, not in industry. Not on the farms. Not even in the supermarkets, but in our homes. That’s where most of the food waste is happening. But basically, you know, there are incredible numbers out there. A third of the food production is wasted around the world. For whatever reason. Sometimes it’s food loss. Sometimes it’s food that’s being not, you know, stored properly or taken off shelves and thrown out in certain countries around the world. It’s is easier to burn food, take it off the shelves and burn it. It’s cheaper and more cost effective than to actually bring it to a food bank or donated to a soup kitchen. But we are, you know, creating food for twice the amount of people that we need to and yet we have so many people who are still out there who are food insecure. But I think that the most important thing is we realize that food for sale was not only a platform and a refettorio to be able to give a meal to someone in need, but also a teaching platform for people to understand how to cook better at home and waste less food
(Music Break) 20:54
Alex Wise 21:30 This is Alex Wise onSea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Lara Gilmore. She is a partner in life and business with Massimo Bottura, their restaurants, Osteria Francescana, among others, and she’s the co founder and president of Food for Soul. So Lara, we really haven’t dived into the food waste element of food for soul how you are able to get food that otherwise would be wasted and turn it into delicious meals for the needy.
Lara Gilmore 21:59 Right. So, beginning with Expo, we formed partnerships with different supermarkets around the city of Milan, and different people who are selling food in Expo. And we never work with cooked food. We only work with raw ingredients. And basically we set up a network where they could bring their surplus food to our refettorio. And that is the model that we have recreated wherever we’ve gone. After opening in 2015. In Milan 2016 We had an invitation to come to Rio and open a project in Rio. And once again, we established direct lines with food providers, supermarkets, Bodega farmers markets, whoever wanted to donate food rather than burning it or throwing it away, could donate it to Food for Soul to our refettorio in Rio Refettorio and then another one 2017 Refettorio Felix in London, and then 2018 Refettorio Paris, in the Church of the Midland, and so forth and so on. And every single project is unique because of the unique community that surrounds it. And the need in that community. And every partner that we work with is a little bit different.
Alex Wise 23:12 Could you explain like a typical partnership and how that might work? It I imagine it varies quite a bit, but I’m interested in the nuts and bolts on how that can unfold.
Lara Gilmore 23:24 So the, you know, we’re based in Modena, Italy, and we can’t be everywhere around the world. So we set up a model and we set up a way to to build and construct and apply our methods and our values. And then we partner with local partners so that our partner in Rio de Janeiro is gastro motiva, and they are a beautiful reality who are offering culinary programs teaching programs to people who otherwise would not be able to frequent culinary school as a way of getting out of the favelas as a way of addressing a need in the industry. And they partnered with us so that our refettorio project in Rio is not just serving the community of Lapa where it is located with a capacity of serving 100 meals an evening, but during the day, there’s an culinary program, teaching people how to cook and moving them on into the restaurant industry. In London, we have a completely different partner. We’ve partnered with st cupboards, which has been offering for 25 years, I lunch service to rough sleepers and people who are homeless adults in London, and not only offering them a lunch service, but laundry services and shower and help with jobs, applications and things like that in counseling. You know, we have other partners inside the church of the motherland and that project was led by an artist named Jr. and also an incredible travel agency called voyage du monde who wanting to give back and wanting to give back to the city of Paris. And together, we work to create a project there. Today we are working on actively a project in San Francisco. I know you’re based in San Francisco. And San Francisco is an incredible example of working with a partner called farming, hope. And farming hope has been working for the past couple of years in the San Francisco Bay area, to educate people who are interested in in the culinary arts, who maybe aren’t attuned to this transitional moment in their lives, or looking for a job opportunity, looking for a way to survive in life. And so we’ve put together teaching culinary skills with creating meals for people in need. And right now, we’re still looking for a home in San Francisco. But in the meantime, I’ve been working out of an X restaurant called Cora, which was a Mexican restaurant. And we have been creating meals community meals that have been delivered and picked up and an incredible amount of meals since November 2020.
Alex Wise 26:04 And do you count on the partners generally to handle funding for the enormous outlay that it requires to feed all these people? Or is this one of the pieces that food for soul brings to the table as well?
Lara Gilmore 26:20 Well, we work hand in hand, we do a lot of fundraising and food for sell. And we have ever since the pandemic we created what we call a community fund and have been fundraising for the community fund which offers support for all of our refettorio around the world, specifically in this moment when they had to pivot from housing guests and inviting them into a dining space but to pivot into delivery and to end having people pick up their food. And so all the expenses that went into packaging food and creating safe environments to work during this time of COVID and to be able to work when people needed food the most. And then we have specific kind of fundraisers, and fundraising campaigns individually run by our organizational partners inside every Refettorio Rio.
Alex Wise 27:07 It seems like such a great idea, Lara, that shouldn’t just be limited to your organization’s limited bandwidth. Have you been able to convince any, or, have you seen any uptake of a similar model in other parts of the of Italy or around the world where the refettorio model is being played out for the needy?
Lara Gilmore 27:29 Well, I think we’ve had a big influence in the dialogue that goes around how we feed people. We don’t feed 1000s and 1000s of people a day. We feed about 100 people a day. And we try to feed them with a certain kind of attention to detail and to communication and hospitality and, and building trust. And I think that that’s really important.
Alex Wise 27:55 Lara Gilmore, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Lara Gilmore 28:00 Thank you, Alex. I love being on Sea Change Radio!
Narrator 28:04 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by the Italian Music Pop Band, Jerry Vale and Chris Cornell. Check out our website at Sea Change Radio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Lara Gilmore: Food For Soul appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
In these times, small investors may feel uneasy, not to mention unsure of how to use their investment power conscientiously. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Dr. Raj Thamotheram, an expert in socially responsible investing, about how the field has changed over the years. We discuss billionaire investor Steve Schwarzman‘s recent comments blaming the energy crunch on the popularity of green investing, take a look at the global divestment movement, and talk about which advisors environmentally-conscious small investors should heed.
Narrator 0:02 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Raj Thamotheram 0:19 You wouldn’t leave markets to fight a war. You don’t leave markets to deal with public health crisis and you don’t need markets to handle what could become very soon an existential crisis for human civilization, it’s certainly going to result in much devastation. And we we’ve only just starting to see the very, very early signs of what’s coming down the tunnel.
Narrator 0:45 In these times, small investors may feel uneasy, not to mention unsure of how to use their investment power conscientiously. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Raj Thamotheram , an expert in socially responsible investing about how the field has changed over the years. We discuss billionaire investor Steve Schwarzman his recent comments blaming the energy crunch on the popularity of green investing. Take a look at the global divestment movement and talk about which advisors, environmentally conscious small investors should heed.
Alex Wise 1:41 I’m joined on Sea Change Radio by Raj Thamotheram. He is one of the pioneers of the Responsible Investment field in the UK. He’s a board director and senior advisor to several nonprofits in the space. Raj, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Raj Thamotheram 1:56 Thank you so much, Alex, I’m very pleased to be back.
Alex Wise 2:01 As I mentioned, you’re one of the earliest experts in the responsible investing field, it’s changed names many times. Why don’t you first summarize the arc? And the evolution of the space briefly if you can?
Raj Thamotheram 2:16 Well, that’s a great, great starter question. So in most countries, it started off as ethical or personal values or personal morals based thing. And so for example, in the USA, I think most people first heard about it in relation to apartheid South Africa and not investing in, in that that can also be extended to dealing with tobacco or any other sector or company that individuals don’t like. And from there, it morphed a bit as you as you were saying into something which was more institutional or retail as a product and then it became known as socially responsible investing where people start investment professionals start to look for good companies. Best in classes, the technical jargon, companies that are doing better, even if they’re in a dirty sector. So for example, without naming names, you can look for fossil fuel companies, which are trying to support the Paris agreement. And invest in those and disinvest or divest from companies who haven’t, that’s probably the most extreme example of of the challenge in terms of finding best in class. And then most recently, we’ve had a range of other players come into the sector who are looking for alpha for outperformance. So, people are trying to integrate non financial or extra financial data into their traditional investment performance processes defined a competitive advantage.
Alex Wise 4:16 And you’ve been a senior advisor at organizations like the university’s superannuation scheme, which is a large UK based pension fund. But that was a while ago. Get us up to date with how larger behemoths of of the investment world whether they be pension funds or hedge funds private equity, how are they adopting ESG into their vocabulary Raj?
Raj T. 4:45 Great question. When I joined the Responsible Investment field I was one of a relative relatively small number a handful of professionals in larger organization’s mind was a big pension fund called the university superannuation scheme. It’s the UK equivalent to Tia cref in the States. And from there, I went to be the head of ESG, or responsible investment at AXA, which is a very big global insurance based fund manager. Since that time, we’ve had organizations like BlackRock and State Street and private equity firms like KKR, all signing up to being members of an organization called the principles of responsible investment. So depending on how you classify between one in three, or even wanting to investment dollars, is now signed up to those principles. On paper, how in practice that gets executed is a very big question. There’s a there’s a lot of concern about greenwashing.
Alex Wise 6:08 Yes, I can’t help but think a lot of times when I hear the stats being bandied about that the ESG sector has gone from 150 billion to $2 trillion in the last how many years? I can’t help but think that that’s just that they’re moving the goalposts a lot, in many cases that these companies aren’t necessarily completely changing the way they do business. But the way we analyze, green investing has changed. Is that overly harsh?
Raj T. 6:44 So I’m gonna say yes or no, the concern is absolutely right. I have been talking about it for over 10 years, it’s one reason why I went independent and set up my own Think Tank, it’s much easier to see what you think when you’re when you’re not wearing an organizational hat. So where you’re absolutely right out, is that it’s very easy to slap a label of ESG on a fund, which isn’t very different from the funds that didn’t used to be called ESG. So you do a tiny bit of divestment. You take out tobacco here, you overweight companies, which have a good carbon footprint and suddenly, wham, bam, you’ve got a ESG fund. Well, actually, the real world value of that is pretty minimal with anything. So that’s one problem. The other problem is a lot of very big fund managers are doing what they do best, which is to push products. So on top of their normal business, they’ve added a new set of products called ESG. Products. Well, that’s a bit like, I don’t know having some extra salad, but at the same time stuffing yourself with high carb, fizzy drinks and unhealthy food doesn’t change the real impact of those organizations. And so I have some big questions about the greenwashing that’s allowed in the sector at the moment.
Alex Wise 8:24 Let’s turn to a specific player in the private equity space. Blackstone, you mentioned Black Rock I get confused about these a lot but they’re different. And Steve Schwarzman is one of the one of the leaders of the billionaire class as the head of Blackstone, there was an article in The New York Times which you pointed out to me and titled Why this billionaires worried about green investing. And Schwartzman I guess goes on to talk about the energy credit crunch and why this is concerning for supply chain issues and for the health of the global economy is ESG. The how is ESG related to Schwartzman concerns, are they valid?
Raj T. 9:10 You know, it’s it’s great when someone like Steve Schwarzman talks about these issues because it gets covered. And I was quite intrigued by that, by his concern that ESG investors were helping to cause the energy credit crunch partly because Blackstone is actually an ESG investor, it’s signed up to the PRA, the principles of responsible investment, so so I was sort of scratching my head and wondering, Is he saying he’s responsible for it or are the other ESG investors? And then the other thing that made me scratch my head because of the concerns I have about greenwash was was he actually saying that the sector ESG investors having impact in the with the fossil fuel companies or he See saying that there’s an energy crunch coming and those who kind of profited from the previous oil age are looking to someone to blame and hey whoa let’s try the environmentalists and the ESG investors because you know fundamentally is this an economics 101 problem that Saudi Arabian oil is cheaper than oil from listed private companies.
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Alex Wise 11:45 this is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Dr. Raj Thamotheram. He is an early pioneer in the responsible investing space. So, Raj, maybe we can take a step even further back though, and you can encapsulate Schwartzman ‘s actual concerns with ESG, which is kind of odd in that you mentioned that his firm just joined PRI, and PRI for our listeners, it stands for the UN’s principles for responsible investment. It’s an organization that incorporates ESG factors that’s environmental, social and corporate governance into investment decision making. Sorry,
Raj Thamotheram 12:29 I know Blackstone joined pra in I think July 2021. But some other very big private equity houses moved much earlier. KKR – Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts, a big US player joined in 2009. He also says that he’s concerned about political troubles. But I remember reading in January in New York Times as well, that after Donald Trump refused to accept the election results, Mr. Schwartzman avoided criticizing him. And then he says that he’s concerned about unhappy people. And I like that. But I haven’t seen much about Blackstone, talking about, say, the big vaccine inequity problem where we’ve had something like probably 10 to 19 million excess deaths globally. These, well, they’re not unhappy now. But these very unhappy families and communities, but I haven’t seen private equity players really take a lead in addressing this challenge. So so I’m scratching my head as to the real motives of people who talk about ESG. Being the cause of problems, my hunches, it’s better to listen to people who’ve been talking about these problems and coming up with solutions for much longer. So what He is quoted as saying in the New York Times, is that the concern that ESG investors have about the oil and gas sector is reducing the investment of the oil and gas sector in exploration and production. And frankly, I see no evidence of that happening. There is, I think, a good reason for expecting ESG investors to do that coming forward, particularly after Glasgow, particularly after the fact that governments have effectively tasked the finance industry with pushing decarbonisation. Mark Carney has been tasked with leading that process But that hasn’t started yet. And so any, any real, any real world changes that we’re seeing are really economic, its economic 101 stuff, it’s the price of oil, in some places is much cheaper. Companies are choosing not to invest in the expensive places.
Alex Wise 15:22 If you were to respond to Steve Schwarzman or somebody who’s linking the responsible investing movement to the energy credit crunch, you just mentioned how the market itself is kind of telling us that oil and gas is on its way out.
Raj Thamotheram 15:42 You know, areas gravity is gravity, you can lobby to make sure, gravity doesn’t look bad. But actually the sciences, the zones, climate change, is happening probably faster than the scientists even warned us about some years ago. And so why is investors wise companies are making a transition to a low carbon economy. And that’s really what private equity has, should be encouraging, because they say they have a long term perspective. And therefore, it’s absolutely critical that the companies they invest in, prove that they’re better suited to a low carbon future, a low energy future. So that’s what I would be expecting private equity houses to do to show that they have excellence and helping drive the transition to a low carbon economy.
Alex Wise 16:45 It’s kind of hard to take a Steve Schwarzman seriously, when who can imagine the kind of carbon footprint he might have, right?
Raj Thamotheram 16:54 You know, I think much less important than the personal carbon footprint of billionaires and it is very significant. Often. If you have your private yachts and private jets, you will have a big carbon footprint is the carbon footprint and the policy footprint of their organizations. And that’s what we I think, are legitimately able to question particularly if we’re customers of those investment firms, how are they using their influence in the companies they invest in? And how are they using their political influence. And this is particularly important in the states where rich and very rich people are major political donors. Because they can either be part of the solution to the climate crisis, or they’re going to be part of the problem. There’s not much middle ground. Today, given the crisis, and the polarization in the in the politics, I would say that we need to focus on the policy footprint, and the carbon footprint of these organizations. And when I say carbon footprint, I’m not talking about the green headquarters and the changing of lightbulbs in the HQ of these firms. I’m talking about the companies that they invest in, and the carbon footprint of the portfolio.
Alex Wise 18:25 And what’s your take on the divestment model led by Bill McKibbens of the world that are trying to get these larger pension funds, universities and organizations to divest themselves from the fossil fuel industry.
Raj Thamotheram 18:44 You know, at the start of my career, and you were very kind to call me a pioneer, I think you’re saying I’m old. But at the start of my career, I was committed advocate for assertive engagement and they later term this forceful stewardship, the idea that investors could ask and require companies to make the transition. Over the decades that I’ve been pushing this idea, I’ve come to realize that most investors will do everything they possibly can not to do that kind of stewardship. And either will do what I call slightly tongue in cheek tummy tickling, engagement or, or tea and biscuits engagement or might be coffee and cookies engagement in the states where you don’t really have any social change value, but you you go through the process. And in that context, I’ve come around to thinking given the emergency that actually, if that’s the alternative, then divestment is the right is the right option because The worst option is this non effective box taking constructive engagement approach. So either divest or be forceful stewards.
Alex Wise 20:11 So we’re seeing more severe weather as a result of the climate crisis. And then that leads to the energy crunch, I can’t think of a more tautological explanation for why we need to level the playing field, then the annual hurricanes that hit the Gulf of Mexico, let’s say.
Raj T. 20:33 Absolutely, spot on. We cannot allow human civilization to be put at risk because of ideological beliefs. And one ideological belief is the the assumption that the market left to itself will solve every problem under the sun. The market cannot deal with what isn’t priced in and we don’t have a carbon price. And so it’s going to be a very ineffective solution, it’s proven to be a very ineffective solution. It’s contributed the problem. The market does some things very well, particularly incremental improvements and efficiency improvements. It’s modular so that, but it doesn’t deal with systemic threats. We’ve seen that this year. And last year, through the pandemic, the countries which were ideologically, most committed to market forces, USA and UK have done the worst in the rich world. So we better receive these wake up signals were getting, and then adapt. That doesn’t mean we throw everything out with the bathwater, you know, the baby with the bathwater. But it does mean that we we can rely on market forces to deal with everything under the sun. Systemic threats, require government intervention, it’s this, it’s as obvious as saying governments are needed as saying that, you know, you wouldn’t leave markets to fight a war, you don’t leave markets to deal with a public health crisis. And you don’t need markets to handle what could become very soon an existential crisis for human civilization, it’s certainly going to result in much devastation. And we we’ve only just starting to see the very, very early signs of what’s coming down the tunnel letters.
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Alex Wise 23:23 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Dr. Raj Thamotheram. He is an early pioneer in the responsible investing space. So Raj, you write that we should listen mostly to the people who’ve been ahead of the curve for how best to thrive given the inevitable turbulence ahead. So beyond listening to you, who should we listen to then who who did you have in mind when you wrote that, Raj?
Raj T. 23:51 You know, I think there are some amazing minds in this field and we need to dig them dig out what they’ve told us and maybe they’ve got fed up telling us because everything is the same thing for the last five or 10 years. People like Jeremy Grantham, who’s a founder who is the founder of GMO Woolley. Mark Carney himself, former Bank of England Governor futurists like Alex Steffen political commentators like Martin Wolf from the ft. There are a range of very mainstream very well informed experts who understand the climate crisis. Probably the biggest thing we have to do is to just part ideological questioning of Science?
Alex Wise 25:01 And what would you recommend listeners who are just interested in putting their money in the right places? Where should they start to educate themselves and to become better, smarter stewards of not only the marketplace but of the planet?
Raj T. 25:21 It’s great question. And there’s an awful lot we can do. You know, it’s a bit like voting for a political leader, individual votes do matter, because the sum of all the votes matter.
Alex Wise 25:39 And that’s a good parallel, because when you’re an activist in the political realm, you try to get your votes to count more, you know, you want to have exponential impact. So how can somebody have exponential impact with their limited amount of dollars.
Raj T. 25:54 So I think that for most people, they will be investing in the stock market via their pension funds or via their insurance premiums. I’ll come in and come back to those individuals who are wealthy enough to have their own portfolios, but most people investor their pension funds, and I know having worked in a pension fund, that if enough members make it explicit that they want that pension fund to invest responsibly, and for the long term and take account of systemic risks that aren’t priced into the market, that will be more likely it will take time. It’s not, it’s not gonna one letter, one email isn’t gonna do it. But there is a there is a real awareness that this is happening and members supporting it is essential are essential. When I look at what’s happening in the North American context versus Europe, I see North American pension funds moving much more slowly than European pension funds. And since these are all equivalently trained professionals, I can only assume it’s politics and ideology that’s holding things back. For individuals who are rich enough to have a private relationship with a wealth manager. Well, that absolutely gives them customer rights. And I would argue responsibility to push that fund manager as to how they’re dealing with, for example, the climate change. Tell me about how my portfolio helps get us to a world where warming is kept to 1.5 degrees. If the fund manager or advisor can’t answer that question, then move your money
Alex Wise 27:56 Raj Thamotheram, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Raj T. 28:00 Thank you so much.
Narrator 28:16 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by George Benson, Jeff Buckley and The Flying Lizards. Check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Impact Investment Pioneer Raj Thamotheram appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously instilled optimism with his proclamation that, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He was speaking in relation to the long struggle for racial equity, but the words are also applicable to the advancement of civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Kevin Jennings, the CEO of Lamda Legal, one of the nation’s leading advocacy groups for the LGBTQ community. We look at some of the key legal battles unfolding in courtrooms around the country, discuss the political ramifications of social wedge issues, and examine the efficacy of hate crime legislation.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Kevin Jennings 0:18 They picked a convenient scapegoat that they can paint any way they want. Because most people don’t have tremendous knowledge about trans people, most non trans people, I should say, cisgender people, and they’re taking advantage of the fact that there hasn’t been the kind of education that needs to happen in our country around that issue to demonize and terrified people, even if it is based in myth, like the idea that somehow trans people are running around in bathrooms, assaulting people, which there’s no criminal evidence of any kind to support.
Narrator 0:49 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Famously instilled optimism with this proclamation that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. He was speaking in relation to the long struggle for racial equity. But the words are also applicable to the advancement of civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Kevin Jennings, the CEO of Lambda Legal, one of the nation’s leading advocacy groups for the LGBTQ community. We look at some of the key legal battles unfolding in courtrooms around the country, discuss the political ramifications of social wedge issues, and examine the efficacy of hate crime legislation.
Alex Wise 1:41 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Kevin Jennings. He’s the CEO of Lambda Legal. Kevin, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Kevin Jennings 1:49 It’s nice to be here with you, Alex. Thanks for having me on.
Alex Wise 1:52 So Lambda Legal is one of the foremost organizations of its kind to protect LGBTQ rights. Why don’t you tell us a brief history of the organization and what the mission of your organization is?
Kevin Jennings 2:08 Sure, Lambda Legal is actually America’s oldest LGBT rights organization. We were founded in 1973. And we work to achieve full legal and lived equality for all LGBTQ people and everyone living with HIV. We do this through three means what we’re most famous for is our impact litigation, where we bring lawsuits to make new law to protect the rights of LGBTQ people and everyone living with HIV. We have been doing this for almost 50 years. And one of the things that I think most listeners might be interested to learn is that most of the major advances for LGBTQ rights that have happened over the last 50 years have come through litigation, not legislation. For example, the right to marry which Lamba legal was co counsel before the Supreme Court and the Obergefell versus Hodges case in 2015, six years ago, was one through an impact litigation lawsuit that was heard by the Supreme Court, it was not passed by legislatures. So Lambda Legal has been a part of virtually every major advance for LGBTQ rights Since our founding in 1973, including such things as winning the rights of students to have college LGBT student groups, or to have high school based gay straight alliances, winning protections for students from being bullied or harassed because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity, getting so called sodomy laws thrown out of court by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional in 2003, or winning the right to marriage equality. As we look towards the future, what we’re really focused on is the fact that despite all the advances that have been made, there’s still many rights that LGBTQ people don’t have. It’s probably a surprise to many of our listeners to learn that there is no comprehensive civil rights laws that protect people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The Equality Act, which was first introduced into Congress in 1974, is still pending 47 years later. So we’re going to work to make sure that everyone in our community has protections, while also trying to stop those who are seeking a roll back the victories we’ve already won.
Alex Wise 4:13 And there’s been a recent victory. The US Passport Agency just marked its first passport with an X when it comes to the sex question on passports and Lambda Legal was intimately involved in that struggle. If you can summarize what that case was all about. That’d be great.
Kevin Jennings 4:31 Well, I think that one of the things that is important context for this is to realize that the next generation is revolutionizing the way we think about things like sexuality and gender. Many young people today do not subscribe to the idea that they should be male identified or female identified. They prefer to think of themselves as non binary existing outside of the traditional gender binary. And those folks have a right to have their identities reflected on their official Dock. So Lambda Legal brought a case several years ago on behalf of Dana Zzyym, a non binary American citizen who lived in Colorado, who wanted to have a passport that reflected their gender identity, which was neither male nor female. And we pursued that case through the courts and Wednesday, October 27, the Passport Agency has agreed to offer a third gender marker on passports so that people who do not identify themselves as either male or female will be able to have an identity document that accurately reflects their gender identity. So that is an example of the kind of new frontier of civil rights that is being pursued by Lambda Legal at this time. While we’re also working to protect people who are being denied equal treatment still based on sexual orientation. And example, that was a lawsuit we filed last week in Tennessee on behalf of Kelly Easter. Kelly Easter was a lesbian who is a realtor in Nashville. She read in the papers about all of the unaccompanied migrant children who don’t have homes here in America. And she applied to adopt one because she wanted to give one of these unaccompanied children a home. And she was denied the right to adopt that child by an adoption agency that was using federal funds taxpayer dollars, but said that she was an unfit mother because of her sexual orientation. Now, people should not be using taxpayer dollars to discriminate. That’s our belief that Lambda Legal. And we think that every child deserves a good quality home, such as the type that Kelly is seeking to provide to an unaccompanied refugee child. So we are now representing Kelly in court in Tennessee, suing for her right to provide a home to a child, which she was denied simply because she’s lesbian.
Alex Wise 6:54 And what’s the evidence of progress that you like to point to, you can see the arc of 10 to 15 years of marriage equality, culminating in a Supreme Court decision that allowed a lot of people to breathe more easily than ever before. Where’s the next legal fight that allies should and the community should be looking at?
Kevin Jennings 7:18 I think it’s hard for people to understand how incredibly different the world was when Lambda Legal was founded in 1973. In 1973, and 45, states same sex relationships were still a crime for which you could be put in prison. Homosexuality was still deemed a mental illness, which could get you institutionalized in a mental institution against your will, in 1973. hostility towards LGBT rights was so profound that here in New York where we began, literally the state turned down our application for charitable status because they felt we had no legitimate charitable purpose to exist. Lambda Legal was its own first client, we had to sue for our very right to exist in 1973. Now, we fought for 30 years against those laws that criminalize same sex relationships. And finally at the Supreme Court, and Lawrence vs. Texas, in 2003, we got those laws ruled unconstitutional and thrown out, then we fought for another 12 years to have those relationships not only not be illegal, but to be recognized under the law in America. And we won that in 2015 and Obergefell versus Hodges. So as somebody was born in 1963, when by the way, 49 states criminalize same sex relationships, and in case you’re curious, the only state that did not was Illinois, which had just repealed their law the year before I was born. The progress has been made since I was a small child is astounding. But it’s very important to recognize two things. First of all, as proud as we are of having one marriage equality, We’re under no illusion that for homeless LGBT youth, and 40% of all youth in this country who are homeless are LGBT, that their may need was the right to get married. There’s still enormous problems to be addressed, such as disproportionate rates of harassment and bullying in schools, disproportionate rates of homelessness, tremendous problems with discrimination against LGBT seniors when they seek senior housing, housing, employment, so on and so forth. There’s enormous challenges still to be made. Let’s not confuse marriage equality with equality. And the second thing is, the great thing about litigation is that it advances our rights. The bad thing about litigation is it can be overturned. And we’re now facing a much more hostile federal judiciary than we were when we won Obergefell in 2015 1/3 of the Supreme Court and 1/3 of the entire federal bench was appointed during his one term by Donald Trump. The highest number of judicial appointees admits during a single term by any president in American history. We have studied these people’s records, we know for a fact that many of them are deeply hostile to LGBT rights. And we are very concerned about efforts to rollback LGBT rights. In fact, it didn’t get noticed very much because it was the same week that Justice Ginsburg died. But the same way Justice Ginsburg died, Justice Alito, and Thomas on the Supreme Court issued an opinion inviting a challenge to Obergefell saying they wanted to fix quote, unquote, the decision on marriage equality. So we’re very aware that all the victories we’ve won are tentative and can be rolled back. And one of the ways in which our opponents of equality are trying to roll them back is through what they call religious exemptions. What they would like would be an exemption from obeying the law, non discrimination law, specifically, if it offends their religion. Now, I call that being asked to be granted a license to discriminate, because if we’re going to start saying that people don’t have to obey laws, because they disagree with their religion, are we really secular democracy? Are we on the road to becoming a theocracy? And that’s very, very, very disturbing to us at Lambda Legal, the fact that our opponents are basically have switched to the argument that they shouldn’t have to obey the law because they don’t like it based on their religion. If these suits succeed, and they are proceeding through the court system now and are headed for the Supreme Court, all of the non discrimination protections we’ve won will be vitiated, and will become essentially meaningless. Because if we start saying to people, you don’t have to obey a law, if you disagree with it based on your religion, we basically are making laws meaningless.
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Alex Wise 12:49 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Kevin Jennings, he’s the CEO of Lambda Legal. Let’s turn to the political sphere where we saw in the 80s, the Moral Majority using God guns and gays as their classic wedge issues. And as their Republican voter base has aged and become more of a fringe party in terms of their beliefs, we see that the numbers don’t really add up for them when it comes to issues regarding sexual orientation and gender identification. The country has evolved in many, many ways on that issue. I mean, the next generation, there’s a very small percentage of Americans that are that are as homophobic as their parents were let’s, let’s say, is the Republican strategy to create more and more wedge issues now it looks like transgender issues and gender non binary issues. And is it a winning strategy for them? And at what point do they decide to join the 21st century?
Kevin Jennings 13:59 Oh, that is a fantastic question. And I really want to give a kind of nuanced answer to it. I think first of all, the use of wedge issues has not gone away. It was in the 80s God’s guns and gays, it’s now God, guns and trans people. This year in state legislatures across the country, over 300 Anti LGBT bills were introduced. That’s a record high, by the way, in American history, and most of them targeted trans people. So having realized that the Shall we put it, the gay dog won’t hunt anymore. They’ve moved on to the trans dog. So it’s still the same tactic, which is to demonize people and to try to rile up your base and get them out to vote. While let’s put all this in the context of widespread voter suppression efforts, where there are new laws being enacted across the country that are designed to disenfranchise progressive voters like people of color, like young people who have As you pointed out, are much more likely to vote vote for pro LGBT candidates. So I think it’s a two prong strategy. Number one, let’s disenfranchise the people who are inclined to vote against us. And then number two, let’s rile up our base. So they do turn out and vote. I agree that the demographics are not on the side of the people who oppose equality. So that’s why they’re resorting to dirty tricks like trying to disenfranchise people, and why they’re engaging in these culture wars, because they’ve got to make sure that there are smaller and smaller base votes at higher and higher rates, so that they can continue to win elections. The final issue we have to address here is that America has a system, which through the Electoral College in the US Senate biases in favor of rural white people. The fact of the matter is, you know, California has over 50 times as many people as Wyoming yet they get the same number of Senate seats. That’s ridiculous. And one of the results of that is progressive people who tend to cluster in urban areas are tech are underrepresented in the Senate, and also underrepresented to some extent in the House of Representatives on the electoral college. So the votes of people in Wyoming literally count more than the votes of people in California. So there’s a variety of factors that work there, the fact that we have a system that is biased in favor of rural, largely white states, that is getting worse, because our opponents are trying to disenfranchise more and more people who tend to vote for progressive candidates. And there is a new boogeyman, if you will, in the forms of the trans community that is being used by our opponents to rile up their base, you put that perfect storm of things together. And you’re going to find people in office that do not represent the typical attitudes of the typical American, which as you pointed out, are more and more in favor of equality for pro LGBT people from rural white America.
Alex Wise 16:57 I could see the the effectiveness of some of these wedge issues where it’s appealing to somebody who has to homophobic, white male, let’s say who has to say, Well, I’m not one of them, I need to clarify that I’m different than them, like they can do what they want, but just stay out of my marriage or whatever. The quote unquote Gay Agenda might be that offends them. Does the trans communities issues that are being put forth in both the legal front and media front? Do they appeal to that same demographic as effectively? I don’t really know the data. I just want to know if it’s working. And if it is, like, how do we battle it?
Kevin Jennings 17:40 In short, it is working and you know, one of the things that always love is, you know, you use the example of marriage equality. There’s a great bumper sticker going around for the a while that said, don’t like gay marriage, don’t marry somebody in the same sex. You know, my, my marriage is no threat to heterosexual person’s marriage. It’s just not. But to go back to the trans issue. You know, this is a historic pattern that we see cuts across so called minority groups. Supposedly Jews drank the blood of Christian children in the Passover Seder that was used to justify pogroms and you know, other persecution of Jews. Supposedly black men were after little white girls that was used to justify lynching. Supposedly gay people, recruited young people to be gay, and were pedophiles, that was used to justify discrimination against gay people. And the reason why this has worked historically is twofold. First of all, if you make people feel like in particular, their children are at risk, people become irrational very quickly. And number two, if you could take a group that people know fairly little about, you can make people believe anything about them. The reason why some of the anti lesbian and gay stuff doesn’t work anymore is because so many lesbian, gay, bisexual people have come out. Virtually everybody has an LGBT person in their family, in their workplace, in their neighborhood, in their school somewhere. They all know somebody who’s LGB that was not the case. When I was a child. There were very few out people now there’s millions of our people. Unfortunately, people are not as familiar and as not as comfortable as with trans people at this point, because the visibility has not been as high as that of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. And that makes it easy for opponents to demonize them. You know, there is never been a single case of a trans identified person assaulting someone in a bathroom that’s been brought to court. It’s a myth. But what happens here is you take people and I don’t like using words actually like homophobic or transphobic personally, because I think that if you take something that people are unfamiliar with, and you tell them that it’s bad, and they don’t know any better, they’re likely to go along. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessary. bigots that means they’re uninformed and uneducated.
Alex Wise 20:01 Nobody thinks they’re racist, right.
Kevin Jennings 20:05 And you know, what our opponents are taking advantage of is of the fact that many Americans don’t know many, if any trans people and don’t know much about trans people. So they’ve picked a convenient scapegoat that they can paint any way they want. Because most people don’t have tremendous knowledge about trans people, most non trans people, I should say, cisgender people, and they’re taking advantage of the fact that there hasn’t been the kind of education that needs to happen in our country around that issue, to demonize and terrify people, even if it is based in myth, like the idea that somehow trans people are running around in bathrooms, assaulting people, which there’s no criminal evidence of any kind to support.
Alex Wise 20:45 Let’s turn to a hate crime legislation, which has, many would say very noble beginnings. But when you combine it with a mass incarceration system, which is deeply flawed, the support of hate crime legislation becomes quite nuanced.
Kevin Jennings 21:03 I think that’s a really good and complicated question, Alex. Let me put this a little bit in context, because mass incarceration is a huge problem in America, which affects millions of people disproportionately, people of color. You know, what hate crimes have in common with mass and Carper car serration. They affect people who are disproportionately people of color. Now, to put a really clear point on this, the FBI reported 7554 incidents of hate crime bias attacks in 2020. So when you put that 7554 within the context of millions of people who’ve been in prison for say, marijuana offenses, we’re talking about hate crimes contributes in a negligible way to the larger problem mass incarceration. Now 62% of those incidents, the people victimized were people of color. So the reality is hate crimes. And by the way, 21% were LGBT people, those LGBT people and or people of color because some of the people being victimized, who are LGBT are also people of color, represent over 80% of all hate crimes incidents in America last year. So the people are being victimized by hate crimes are the same people being victimized by mass incarceration. Now, LM illegal, we understand the purpose of a hate crimes law. And that’s to have enhanced penalties for people who target someone simply because they’re the member of a group. And the result is they terrorized, not just that individual, but the entire group. You and I are old enough to remember the horrifying incident Matthew Shepard in 1998, when a gay college student was tied to a fence and beaten to death in Wyoming. That terrified everyone who is LGBT, not just Matthew Shepard and his family and the perps mind hate crimes laws is to create a deterrent, so that if you are targeting not just an individual, but an entire community, and everyone who belongs to that community, through your biased actions that should be recognized in the criminal justice system. Now, at Lambda Legal, we actually believe that we should consider more complicated reactions to hate crimes, such as civil penalties. And the use of things such as restorative justice, where people are asked to restore and repair the harm they have created through their actions. So we believe that the criminal justice system in America is fundamentally flawed, that it over penalizes poor people, people of color, which often are overlapping populations, LGBT people, we did a great report, just a few years ago called protected and served, which show that LGBT people were much more likely to be mistreated by the police and in the justice system. So the justice system systematically disadvantages people who are already disenfranchised. And we have an entire criminal justice initiative around correcting that. So the hate crimes laws that exist. Anyone who thinks that they are a comprehensive solution to the problem of hate crimes is really misguided. They are one piece and what needs to be a much more comprehensive effort, which really looks at the entire structure of our criminal justice system. And whether other means such as civil penalties or restorative justice practices can be used to redress when harm is done to a community.
Alex Wise 24:33 I guess one of the problems that springs up from the situation that you just laid out is that if you replaced hate crime legislation in our discussion with death penalties, we could see a political class that uses it in the same ham fisted way as a cudgel to say that they’re tough on crime when we don’t have a lot of data that points to death penalties, right reducing crime. People who who commit these crimes aren’t really thinking about the penalties when they’re committing them generally. So we know that the current punishment system is not effective in deterring it. I’m wholeheartedly behind restorative justice and the other civil penalties. But the current situation on a state by state basis tends to be very different. So with our comprehensive overhaul of our nation’s incarceration system, should there be hate crime legislations? As is on the books? Or do you think that we need to reform them? What is land lammed illegals position when it comes to advocating or for the expansion of hate crime legislation?
Kevin Jennings 25:46 Well, at this time, we’re not advocating for the expansion of hate crime legislation, because the current legislation does address LGBT issues, thanks to the Matthew Shepard Act, which was enacted under President Obama. So we’re not looking to see more and more criminalization occur. And I think there’s a three part answer to your question, Alex, I think first of all, we believe that hate crimes laws should be part of a larger panoply of efforts to reduce bias incidents in America, that needs to include education, it needs to include restorative justice, in these include civil penalties, we do not see hate crimes laws as the single the silver bullet, if you will, to solve the issue of bias crimes. Because as you’re pointing out, and this leads us to my second point, our entire criminal justice system is based on the idea of deterrence. Whether that works or not as an open question period, right? On any crime, many people commit crimes, knowing full well, they are committing a crime, and that they could be punished for doing so. So we need to start asking ourselves is our entire justice system based on a false premise? And, you know, I think that’s an open question. And I think the third thing that we need to look at here is, why does the United States, which has 5% of the world’s population have 22% of the world’s prison population. There’s something very wrong with our criminal justice system in America. And, you know, I think nibbling around the edges like repealing hate crimes laws, which as I pointed out, there are only 7500 reported incidents at the FBI last year. That’s not going to solve our larger problem here, which is that we incarcerate a percentage of our citizenry, unlike any other liberal democracy in the world, and we really need as a society to sit down and examine why that happens. Why we are so out of step with step with other liberal democracies, and to get at the root reasons that’s occurring. That goes well beyond the question of the death penalty or hate crimes laws in my opinion.
Alex Wise 27:54 Kevin Jennings, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Kevin Jennings 27:59 It’s really been a pleasure and a really thought provoking conversation, Alex, thank you.
Narrator 28:17 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by talking heads and Peter Tosh, check out our website at SeaChange Radio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings on the Fight For Equal Rights appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Are billionaire-backed philanthropies making the world a better place or are they pernicious sleeper cells? The answer may be one of those “both/and” situations rather than an “either/or.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we examine philanthropic giving with journalist Tim Schwab who investigates high-profile entities like the Gates Foundation, that are working for positive impact but funded by the billionaire class. We peel back the layers on these types of organizations with a particular eye toward their funding of independent media, and explore the question, “Are foundations vestiges of a colonialist mindset offering scraps from the master’s table or are actually important vessels for change?”
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Tim Schwab 0:17 I think it’s really hard for someone to make an argument that Bill Gates needs the kind of wealth that he has.
Narrator 0:28 Are billionaire-backed philanthropies making the world a better place or are they pernicious sleeper cells? The answer may be one of those “both/and” situations rather than an “either/or.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we examine philanthropic giving with journalist Tim Schwab who investigates high-profile entities like the Gates Foundation, that are working for positive impact but funded by the billionaire class. We peel back the layers on these types of organizations with a particular eye toward their funding of independent media, and explore the question, “Are foundations vestiges of a colonialist mindset offering scraps from the master’s table or are actually important vessels for change?”
Alex Wise 1:22 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tim Schwab. He’s a journalist and author. And his upcoming book is entitled The Good Billionaire. Tim, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Tim Schwab 1:32 Thanks for having me, Alex.
Alex Wise 1:34 Why don’t we first dive into how some of the bigger philanthropists have injected themselves into the media business in maybe not such a innocent way? You wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review recently entitled journalism’s gatekeepers?
Tim Schwab 1:53 Yeah. So um, this is a kind of perennial problem or paradox with the Gates Foundation, which has been the subject of a lot of my reporting. Almost all of my reporting on philanthropy is looking at the Gates Foundation because it is this the sort of height or the zenith of big philanthropy, it’s the largest philanthropy the most influential philanthropy. Everybody knows Bill Gates, he’s widely lionized for his good deeds. And for the billions of dollars he’s given away. But yeah, this perennial problem with the Gates Foundation, and a lot of other philanthropies, I imagine is that they fund so many groups, that it’s hard to get an independent assessment or analysis of, you know, what they’re doing and what the impacts are. And that’s also the case in the journalism surrounding the Gates Foundation, because part of its philanthropic giving is going into the fourth estate into newsrooms. And one of the things I’ve done in my reporting to the Foundation is to look back at all the charitable grants they’ve given, you know, we’re at the two decade mark, it’s definitely long overdue that we start to look back at what the foundation has really done and accomplished. There’s been so much forward looking journalism about its plans, its ambitions, its goals, the money it’s given away. But there has to be some accountability reporting the back end to look back. And in going through all the foundation’s grants, you can’t help but notice as a journalist as I am, how much money gates is putting into journalism. And so I tracked a quarter billion dollars, that’s $250 million. The foundation is given to, you know, not every single newsroom, but a lot of newsrooms, you can track money going to all this isn’t necessarily current, but over the years, they’ve given money to Al-Jazeera, ProPublica, BBC, The Guardian, there are regular reporters in the New York Times who have outside employment with the gates funded organization. It’s really kind of top to bottom, you know, even the top tier most prestigious newsrooms, you can find Gates Foundation funding. And, you know, the, in that article I wrote for Columbia Journalism Review. You know, I’m not saying that this, that the influence the Gates has is absolute, but there is I think it does kind of create a certain biases or blind spots and how journalists choose to report on the Gates Foundation. I think that’s one reason, for example, why there isn’t more investigative reporting on the Gates Foundation. Part of that is, with so many kind of juicy targets out there for a journalist to investigate. Why would you look askance at a billionaire who seems to be giving all of his money away? And I think that’s one reason but another reason is, well, maybe the Gates Foundation is funding your newsroom or funding a fellowship or a grant that you’re receiving to do your reporting project. So I think that money does have a real material impact on the journalistic discourse around the Gates Foundation. And I think that’s a big reason why there hasn’t been a more serious journalistic scrutiny of the Gates Foundation over the last two decades, most of the reporting is very descriptive. It’s on critical. It’s forward looking. And so the reporting I’ve done it’s some of the only investigative journalism that’s ever been published on the The Gates Foundation.
Alex Wise 5:13 Yes. I mean, I was thinking about that when you write a piece like this, would you have encountered some resistance to publishing it in a place like an NPR or Pro Publica, or Al Jazeera, etc?
Tim Schwab 5:29 I mean, now, maybe not those specific outlets? Well, NPR for sure. I mean, to answer your question in the general, absolutely. It’s extremely difficult, especially two years ago, when I started this project, it was extremely difficult to get editors interested in critical investigative reporting on the foundation…
Alex Wise 5:47 Maybe you can draw back the curtain and intimate any kind of off the record kind of conversations, you might have had any feedback you might have had in pitching this to places that rejected the idea.
Tim Schwab 5:58 So I got a fellowship to do this to do several big reporting pieces on the Gates Foundation, is this halfway prestigious fellowship. And so when you go to an editor and say, Hey, I’ve got this investigative stories that I’ve done, I’ve had this prestigious fellowship to do them, that’s going to get an editor’s attention. You know, as a freelancer, you send these pitches. And I would go to editors, and they were clearly interested because they saw, the bonafides, that I had the pitch letter, they saw the reporting that I had done. But one way or the other, I even had one outlet that took me out to coffee. That’s never happened to me, where you pitch an outlet and they say, we’re so interested, we want to meet you in person and take you out for lunch. The first time that’s ever happened to me. But if one way or the other, as you go down the line, it just wouldn’t work out. And I’m talking about these are outlets that have taken funding from the Gates Foundation, just one way or the other, it wouldn’t work out. So I think to this day, I’ve never published any anything about the Gates Foundation in an outlet, funded by the Gates Foundation, though I have tried for whatever that’s worth.
Alex Wise 7:07 And in the CJR piece, you have a quote from a NPR reporter, Pam Fesler, who says that NPR is funding from the Gates Foundation was not a factor in why or how we did this story about housing, and low income families, placing lower income families in wealthier neighborhoods and the research that was cited in that article. And that sounds reasonable enough, but as you mentioned, there are just hundreds of NPR stories that are mentioning the Gates Foundation, and it’s hard to find any that are critical. So I guess she may think that it’s not a factor, but you have to kind of work backwards and and then apply logic and say, well, could the converse be true? Is the Gates Foundation above reproach? Is there nothing here to criticize? And I want to dive into some of the other non media areas in a second, but that that kind of stood out to me is like, well, because we may like an organization like an NPR, a pro publica, of some of the best reporting out there, we may kind of drop our guard and not be as critical about what’s influencing their reporting.
Tim Schwab 8:21 Yeah. And I think that what we’re really talking about is a financial conflict of interest when with somebody who’s supposed to be independent, like a journalist, or a judge, or a scientist, or a politician who are supposed to serve the public who’s supposed to be independent, when they have a financial interest or financial tie that compromises that independence. And it’s just like, it’s such a non starter for NPR, which, when I looked at them, I think they had taken $17.5 million from the Gates Foundation had mentioned the Gates Foundation hundreds of times in their reporting, and overwhelmingly by very large margin. I mean, I didn’t do I didn’t look at every single article, to be fair to them. But it’s just so common for NPR to avoid criticism of the Gates Foundation. In that that example, you’re citing was sort of a case in point where you have a Gates funded project about housing. And all of the experts quoted in the article, I think, are a tie financially tied to the Gates Foundation. And then NPR itself is funded by the Gates Foundation. And so it just, it’s really hard for people who are inside that to really step outside of that and see the financial conflict of interest and the sort of bias and blind spot that’s at play. But I think these are this is a very real effect, and it’s not good for journalism. And you know, my own view is that I think we really need to reconsider as journalist taking funding from the Gates Foundation because of it because in various ways, I think it can distort not just what we know about the Gates Foundation, but what we know about a lot of public policy areas where the Gates Foundation works.
(Music Break)
Alex Wise 11:05 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to journalist and author Tim Schwab. So I should also disclose to listeners that beyond the host and producer of Sea Change Radio, I am a consultant in the philanthropy space. So I probably have my biases. But it’s one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, Tim was because I want to learn more about how these big foundations and big philanthropies influence the way we approach altruism in general. I was struck by the beginning of a piece you had in the nation about Doctors Without Borders being under fire. I hadn’t read about that maybe you can kind of summarize that kerfuffle for our listeners.
Tim Schwab 11:50 So there’s an ongoing complaint from 1000, current and former staff members of Doctors Without Borders. So I think people know this group, it’s a humanitarian group that gives out works on public health in poorest parts of the world, to very large organization. I think it’s like a billion dollar years, it has lots of employees, but it’s based in Europe, and a lot of current and former staff members are saying that that European base, that there’s a colonial gaze, and its work, where and there’s institutional racism that comes out of the way it’s organized, where you have a white, European centric leadership, that doesn’t treat like the employees out in the field, and these poor countries who are from these poor countries who are doing the same work, that they’re treated kind of as, like a second or third tier employees. So there’s been this kind of interesting, I mean, unfortunate, but hopefully productive movement within Doctors Without Borders to, to start to reckon with that institutional racism in the organization.
Alex Wise 12:58 So the criticism against Doctors Without Borders is that they’re Euro centric. But here in America, we have a for profit healthcare system. So wouldn’t it be even worse, looking at things through the American Health Care philanthropies where they’re tied to the for profit system, whether they like it or not?
Tim Schwab 13:18 Yeah, I mean, the criticism that Doctors Without Borders is facing though it’s more around an imbalance of power. And so whether it’s a US base or European based organization, they’re, you know, what this field of like humanitarianism and global health is pushing back against is this idea about white savior ism that comes out of this power imbalance that’s implicit in these fields, where you have, you know, a wealthy white nation, a wealthy white institution, NGO, that exists to serve the poor people of color in the world. It’s the same thing with the field of global health, maybe your listeners haven’t heard that term, we all know the term public health. And we think about the way that plays out with governments and regulators and private companies. But there’s also this global health, which is a field where, like doctors or borders of the Gates Foundation work, which is, again, it’s kind of defined around you have the haves and have nots, you have wealthy white universities and institutions that are trying to figure out how to improve public health in among the global poor and poor nations around the world. So all of these fields, they really are rooted in there’s a certain colonialism or Neo colonialism route, in the way that they’re practice. And so this article, though, that we’re talking about, that I wrote, that mentions the complaint against Doctors Without Borders, it’s trying to get into that space to talk about the kind of complaints but also this very rich, robust growing, you know, discourse and debate happening to push back on the colonial gaze throughout this work.
Alex Wise 15:05 Right, I guess the complaint could ultimately be that, you know, this Robin Hood mentality is deleterious to those who are most needy because it’s not just the rich helping the poor, it’s it’s funding the rich to help the poor.
Tim Schwab 15:22 Well, that certainly seems to be the Gates Foundation’s model. So you know, again, when I look back on all the grant money that the foundation’s given away, something like 30,000 grants, charitable grants over the last two decades, it’s $70 billion 90% of that money is going to the wealthiest, widest nations to this institutions, NGOs, universities, think tanks, companies based in the United States, and the United Kingdom and Switzerland. You know, you go to the Gates Foundation’s website, and you’re just inundated with these pictures of these, you know, young people, people of color people in Africa. But when you actually look at where the money flows, it’s as just as you said, Alex, is that’s that the Gates Foundation’s model is funding the rich to help the poor. And this gets at this model of colonialization, where you’re depending on experts in the wealthiest whitest nations to figure out solutions for the global poor. And now, that’s the opposite of that. opposite of that would be, you know, really empowering the global poor themselves to come up with their own solutions, and to not constantly be beset by this solution ism proffered by the Gates Foundation and everyone else.
Alex Wise 16:43 Let’s look at some of these solutions. Are the problems so deep in the model of a Gates Foundation that they can’t shift away from some of the more flawed parts of their of their business? What kind of solutions would you maybe suggest to them?
Tim Schwab 17:00 Well, I’ll offer some ideas. But I’ll put the caveat that, you know, I don’t want to fall into the trap that Bill Gates seems to have fallen into where it’s the idea that one person or one individual or one white man should have the power to come up with the solutions. I don’t think that’s the right model. So it’s not about Bill Gates having solutions or Tim Schwab having solutions. But I will say that globally, there is now a very robust call around COVID vaccines. There’s all this discussion now about vaccine inequity, and vaccine apartheid. This isn’t my idea. But this is the idea of more than 100 health ministries around the world and countless experts and activists in working in public health and global health who have called for structural changes in the pandemic response. So the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates are very keen champions of the sort of business as usual strategy in which a handful of pharmaceutical companies have monopoly patents over these COVID vaccines. And this model has really played out in predictable ways in the pandemic, in that, you know, Moderna and Pfizer have prioritized selling vaccines to the highest bidders in the richest markets. So what you know, a lot of activists now are calling for and governments also is waving the patents that they should not we’re in a global pandemic, the stakes are too high. We should waive the patents over COVID vaccines. We should compel the Pfizers and Modernas and Johnson and Johnsons of the world to share their vaccine technology, their know how do the tech transfer, to help scale up manufacturing all over the world so that, you know, in Sub-Saharan Africa, they can be producing their own vaccines and vaccinating their people themselves. That’s a very different model than the Gates Foundation, which is working with and through working very closely with and through Big Pharma to try and deliver solutions. It just has not worked in the pandemic. There were many activists in the front end of the pandemic, who said it wasn’t going to work. And so now again, it’s kind of accountability time.
(Music Break) 19:16
Alex Wise 20:19 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to author and journalist Tim Schwab. So not really looking for your solutions as much as how do we break this cycle? One of the more obvious ideas is to not allow billionaires to exist in the first place.
Tim Schwab 20:36 Yeah, absolutely. That’s the a really fundamental way to address some of these imbalances is I think it’s really hard for someone to make an argument that Bill Gates needs the kind of wealth that he has, it’s I think it’s $130 billion, his personal wealth, you know, why are we in it? Why do we organize our economy in our society, in our democracy, to ever allow somebody to have that kind of outsize wealth? And shouldn’t somebody with that kind of wealth be seen as a totem of, you know, economic and wealth inequality? How can somebody in that position lead this huge humanitarian foundation that is so laser focused on equity, it’s such a non sequitur, it does not follow for somebody with that much wealth, and how much power to be, you know, trying to lead social change in favor of equity. It’s such a contradiction. So I think you’re absolutely right, is we have to go all the way back to, you know, preventing people from acquiring such levels of concentrated wealth in the first place. And so I mean, now here we are, I mean, Bill Gates has already has this wealth, how do you address it? You know, there’s a wealth tax. And there was recently I don’t know that I can’t quote chapter and verse in the details, but just suffice it to say that there are ways that you know, creative ways that you could tax the wealth of the very richest people in the United States are the various richest people in the world. And that starts to chip away at their the fortunes that drive these these billionaire philanthropies.
Alex Wise 22:18 And through your research, Tim, do you find that there’s more of an acceptance of the billionaire class in America because of the political divide, where we have the Warren Buffett’s in the Bill Gates is on one side of the blue team. And then you have the Koch brothers on the on the red team. And so people who read the news, and the people who create the stories behind it, we can kind of just dismiss a lot of this, as you know, this, both sides do it. And both sides have their own billionaires in a country like Japan, which has much more of a a one party rule, the LDP, for many decades are some of the socialist countries and in Scandinavia, they also have billionaires. Are they viewed differently than in America by the mass media and by the populace?
Tim Schwab 23:11 Oh, that’s a really good question that I don’t know the answer to. But I mean, I’ll say in the US context, I mean, we do have this, you know, enlightened, and increasingly popular discourse around taxing the wealthy, and the threat that billionaires pose to democratic institutions. That is an important trend that I hope continues. But I also in my reporting, you know, this is the American context, I do feel like, we still are driven by these hero narratives, and a deep seated worship of wealth. And that somebody like Bill Gates is this kind of irresistible, heroic figure in that he invented this thing. And he made Microsoft and he made all this money doing it, you know, and at some deep seated level, I worry that we, we believe in the meritocracy of that, that he got what he deserved, because he was so clever, and so ambitious, and so entrepreneurial, but on and then on top of that, he’s somebody who’s going to the story, we’re told this isn’t true, but the story we’re told is that he’s given away all of his money to save the world, and he’s very effective at it. So I think that the combination of those two things, it just makes Bill Gates such an irresistible figure, and that’s why this the you know, the title of my, my forthcoming book is the good billionaire because, you know, up until the recent scandals, you know, involving Jeffrey Epstein and the allegations of womanizing. You know, Bill Gates was the perfect counterpoint any criticism of the billionaire class? This was a guy who could do no wrong, this unimpeachable force of good who was changing the world. Um, so maybe that comes Conversation is changing a little bit with, with some of the scandals that have come out with some of the failures that are emerging in his role in the COVID pandemic response. But, you know, don’t underestimate Bill Gates.
Alex Wise 25:13 Well, the new good billionaire that seems to be getting a whole bunch of very positive presses McKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex wife, who has a pretty admirable model of just trying to give away the enormous amounts of money as fast as she can, it seems like but there’s so much there to give away, it’s pretty hard to even fathom, maybe you can kind of give us a glimpse into the work that Miss Scott is doing?
Tim Schwab 25:46 Well, that means the really, I think the big difference that McKenzie Scott and her philanthropy is she’s kind of writing these No Strings Attached checks. Whereas the Gates Foundation, you know, there’s all they’re very carefully crafted, grants, charitable grants they give, to work on specific things that advance the Gates Foundation’s agenda, or McKenzie Scott’s, if you will. It’s not indiscriminate in any way. But she is writing checks to these groups, including groups that are working on social justice, that’s something you wouldn’t see the Gates Foundation do either. So it is a you could say it’s a more enlightened approach to billionaire philanthropy, but there’s still a welter of contradictions at the foundation of it, including the fact that, you know, McKenzie Scott again is getting richer over time, not poor. And that’s because Amazon stock is just growing so meteoric Lee. So she’s not
Alex Wise 26:38 So she’s not like selling her stock. That would be a pretty bold step to start shedding some of this wealth is if you don’t believe in the principles of investing in an Amazon Why don’t you put your money where your mouth is completely?
Tim Schwab 26:52 Yeah. And in this is the perennial contradiction in billionaire philanthropy is this idea of ill gotten gains, you know, what have been the harms of what are continued to be the harms of Amazon in terms of monopoly power in terms of worker rights, and you can just go down the list. And you know, if I haven’t looked at McKenzie Scott in a few months, but if all her wealth remains in Amazon stock, and she’s, you know, getting richer and richer over time, but then she’s plowing some amount of that back into, you know, good causes or good deeds. I mean, does that mean that model is just so back and forth, it’s just hard to really celebrate that as as a good thing, or in any way really a real model for social change, given the contradictions in it.
Alex Wise 27:39 The topic is one that causes a lot of people to think in a deeper way. And the work you do is really important, and it’s admirable, taking on some of the richest most powerful forces in the world and trying to peel away the veneer. Tim Schwab. Thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Tim Schwab 28:01 Thanks so much, Alex. Appreciate the time.
Narrator 28:17 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Eddie Harris, Solomon Burke and Bob Miller. Check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcasts. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others and tune into Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Tim Schwab: Charity and the Billionaire Class appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Two summers ago, calls to defund the police swept across the nation, spurred by high-profile incidents of police brutality against people of color. While the voices demanding this change may have quieted, with many Americans now calling for an increase in local police budgets, there’s a specific, particularly dangerous area of policing that could be eliminated quite easily: traffic stops. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk with independent reporter, Brett Simpson, about the long-standing use of police to arbitrate the rules of the road. We consider alternative models to road safety being attempted in this country and in Europe, examine how new technology could keep our roads safe without those roving fleets of lethally-armed traffic cops, and explore privacy issues related to these innovations.
Narrator 0:02 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Brett Simpson 0:27 Just a simple, common sense solution, like why do we need an armed officer trained with a warrior mindset to tell us that we need to update our license plate tags? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a confusing allocation of resources and it’s a source of violence that disproportionately affects black and brown people.
Narrator 0:56 Two summers ago, calls to defund the police swept across the nation, spurred by high profile incidents of police brutality against people of color. While the voices demanding this change may have quieted with many Americans now calling for an increase in local police budgets. There’s a specific particularly dangerous area of policing that could be eliminated quite easily. traffic stops. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk with independent reporter Brett Simpson, about the long standing use of police to arbitrate the rules of the road. We consider alternative models to road safety being attempted in this country and in Europe. Examine how new technology could keep our roads safe without those roving fleets of lethally armed traffic cops, and explore privacy issues related to these innovations.
Alex Wise 2:07 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by journalist Brett Simpson. Brett, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Brett Simpson 2:12 Thanks so much for having me, Alex,
Alex Wise 2:14 So you have a new piece in The Atlantic entitled Why cars don’t deserve the right of way, the simplest way to make roads safer and reduce police violence at the same time. It’s very interesting. And a concept that I’ve kind of wondered about as we have more and more high profile police violence episodes unfold on our TV screens. Inevitably, every year, almost every month, there’s some new video of police abuse and so much of it seems to be surrounding the traffic cop. Why don’t you explain why it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way in terms of our police force being our traffic cops.
Brett Simpson 2:57 Yeah, so this story centers around the city of Berkeley, which in July of 2020, you know, when there was this, you know, after following the, the killing of George Floyd there was across the nation, this movement toward rethinking and reimagining the police force and their prevalence in our lives. And the city of Berkeley was unusual in that, in its police reform, it really targeted the traffic cop. And in doing so, it actually really targeted police violence at its root. I mean, as we’ve seen, for so many black and brown drivers stops for minor infractions like a broken taillight or speeding too often turned deadly. You know, we have Philando Castille, Sandra Bland, and most recently, Dante Wright, those are all during police traffic stops, you know, in so many more. So I followed this initiative over the over the course of the year and the same time really looked into the history of traffic enforcement and how police power has really grown in concert with the prevalence of the automobile and the violence of the automobile on our streets.
Alex Wise 4:13 Yes, take us back 100 years, if you will, before the prevalence of the automobile and what role the Beat Cop might have had in a community versus that beat cop today driving around in on their motorcycle in their car and how they engage with the citizenry in a vastly different way.
Brett Simpson 4:34 Right. Yeah, this is this is a really interesting kind of historical point that many of us, I think, forget. And that is that or maybe don’t know, and that is that. Before the car, ordinary citizens rarely came in contact with law enforcement. And in fact, law enforcement budgets were much smaller. And police bureaus were, you know, maybe a little more disordered. They had reputations for being corrupt. This is something really well illustrated by historian Sarah SEO, who wrote a book in 2019 called policing the open road. And she traced the origins in the development of police power, as something that was really a response to this automobile that was tearing through the streets and in 1910s and 1920s. So just taking a taking us back to, you know, maybe the year 1900, you had citizens that had a really a really well negotiated relationship with each other on the street, where the street was a place of commerce of activity. Through you know, social interactions, you would see horses, you would see children, you would see cards, it was all a socially negotiated space, and one that, you know, police may or may not play a role in. But once the had these automobiles that were just bringing all of this speed and horsepower, they were wreaking havoc on the streets and police forces really stepped in to solve that problem and become that official that could help negotiate those power relationships. And that is something that actually started in Berkeley, the father of modern American policing, as he’s known now, August Fullmer, was Berkeley’s first police chief. And he was the first to put he was the first to put cops in cars. And that was part of his vision for this new kind of cop who was tasked with solving crimes. So that that origin story and the kind of the century of repercussions that August Fullmer, you may or may not have really seen coming was of interest to me as well. But here we have Berkeley, which reimagined policing 100 years ago with all of these consequences in response to the automobile, is now taking another shot at it and really looking to extricate the traffic cop.
Alex Wise 7:11 Let’s turn from August Fullmer’s solutions and look at a concerned citizen, if you will, Darrell Owens, who you spotlight in the piece and the solutions that he’s proposing to his city in Berkeley.
Brett Simpson 7:24 Yeah, so Darrell Owens, he’s really the member of a large coalition that is crosses, you know, many different disciplines, from climate and street safety activists, to racial justice advocates, who are all kind of looking at the same problem, which is that there’s something in our streets that’s broken. We see police everywhere, monitoring corners, giving tickets to people on their bikes, and yet our streets aren’t getting any safer. We still have pedestrian injuries, and just, you know, car accidents all the time. And so, Darrell, is something of a transportation nerd. And he was, you know, looking at the data and just seeing how, and he really, you know, he only rides public transportation, he, he rides his bike, and he’s seeing how cars are the root of both injury and violence for the ordinary, just ordinary people, but also, as a young black man, he’s he sees in his family and in his community, that cars are the source of interactions with the with the police.
Alex Wise 8:36 Why don’t you walk us through the proposals that he made to city council.
Brett Simpson 8:40 Yeah, so Daryl Owens, as part of this BerkDot coalition proposed shifting traffic enforcement, away from the police to unarmed department of transportation workers. So this is kind of saying the same people who may be enforced the rules of the road are the ones who design them and the ones who can kind of get at the root cause of the problems with the street. And so it’s a really kind of the way that Owens would characterize it, just a simple, common sense solution, like why do we need an armed officer trained with a warrior mindset to tell us that we need to update our license plate tags. It’s just it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a confusing allocation of resources, and it’s a source of violence that disproportionately affects black and brown people. And so, yeah, the proposal is kind of as part of a larger, a larger reimagining that eventually would furnish this Department of Transportation with workers who could target and redesign the highest injury corridors in the city and you know, it To do all of the really important transportation fixes that would hopefully reduce, at the same time the power of the automobile and the power of police in the city. Straight from 12th grade in the junior college.
(Music Break) 10:29
Alex Wise This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. And I’m speaking with independent reporter Brett Simpson. So Brett, I guess the people who would be against this change would say, well, technology has evolved where we can have speed cams, and we can update registration tags, etc. But that encroachment is also something that people fear. Where do we find that balance?
Brett Simpson 11:36 Yeah, this is something that I don’t even get to in my piece. But Mothers Against Drunk Driving did come out against the bill immediately. And I think that it is interesting to just acknowledge that cars are dangerous and drivers can be dangerous. And you know, we do need to address this danger. It’s really, you know, do we need an armed cop addressing this danger?
Alex Wise 11:59 What could a potential enforcement of drunk driving laws look like by removing officers? Is it possible?
Brett Simpson 12:08 Yeah, I think I think that’s a really thorny question. And it’s, for the for the vast majority of cases, whether it’s speeding enforcement doesn’t change driver behavior. I think that the model would be that if there is someone driving recklessly, in so many of these police reform measures, and a civilian enforcer would be able to escalate to a police officer, and maybe then a police officer does get involved in the most dangerous situations or you know, like a carjacking or, or a high speed chase, like all of those are things that can still be in the wheelhouse of the police force. And in fact, they’re, they’re essential, and they’re well trained, they’re trained for situations like that. They’re not necessary for situations where someone, you know, forgets to signal before they turn.
Alex Wise 13:00 And so much of our discussion up to now has been assuming that the officer citizen contact occurs in a urban setting, you know, where we have the option of bike lanes and public transportation and that police are checking for tags. But if you’re in a rural setting where there are less roads than almost every road is a freeway or a highway. And so the lines between highway patrol force and regular cops on the beat, it kind of becomes blurred, doesn’t it?
Brett Simpson 13:35 Yeah, that’s an interesting point. And I think to that, one thing that’s an opportunity that Berkeley sees is that because it’s a city, like you say, because it’s an urban core, it has a history of being a multimodal, incredibly walkable, dense space that a lot of suburban areas, you know, you don’t you don’t have the opportunity to walk to the grocery store, you have to put yourself at risk of interaction with law enforcement, just to carry out your day. And that’s kind of how we’ve been it goes into the history of you know, how we sort of chose to design our spaces in our areas is just favoring the vehicle. And in that was a choice and I think that it was it. Also I touched on in my article, it was really a choice paid for in furnished in part by wealthy automobile clubs and, you know, big auto and big tire, Firestone. All of these interests that were really set on entrenching the automobile in the American end in American society in the American mindset, and you know, whether it’s criminalizing jaywalking and jaywalking is actually a pejorative that, that was kind of crafted by the by these early like big auto propaganda interests. And it’s referring to a J seed, which is kind of like a piece of hay that they said that farmers would chew on. So the implication is that a truly cosmopolitan urban citizen knows to keep to the sidewalk, and only, only a jaywalker would make the perilous mistake of getting in the automobiles way. So I think it’s really interesting the way that these power dynamics also play out in, you know, rural or suburban areas where there’s just not much opportunity to do anything without getting in your car. And the American legal system has also made it permissible for the police to search your car without, without a warrant. And, and so you’re, you’re it’s this paradox where the symbol of freedom is also relinquishing power, and, and, and your personal freedoms, you know, the second that you get inside of it,
Alex Wise 16:28 Brett, you were just talking about the privacy issues surrounding vehicles. And it’s one of the places where Americans are most vulnerable to police, if not the most vulnerable is like when you’re in your car, you’re pretty much at the whim of, of law enforcement. But on the flip side, we have technology which is encroaching us in many ways. And the idea of having GPS devices in all of our cars where police force could track us might be able to keep us safer in an emergency. But a lot of people would be quite hesitant about introducing these kind of concepts. We can also look at other countries where speed cameras work, we saw we did a piece on Sea Change Radio a long time ago about gamification. And I think it was Sweden that instituted a lottery system. And everybody who drove across this strip of freeway, which had a lot of incidents of speeding, if they were under the speed limit, their license plate was registered into a national lottery, and every week or month or whatever, somebody would win somebody who was not speeding in this area. And they saw that the average speeds went significantly down in this area. So the point of that piece was that we can gamify things. And also we can have positive incentives for citizens to kind of engage in things as opposed to always being negative and fear based. But so we can look at technology working in some ways. But I can imagine trying to implement that in rural Alabama with speed cams, and having all your license plates registered into a lottery and it may not be met with such enthusiasm as it was in Sweden.
Brett Simpson 18:22 It’s really complicated thinking about you know, okay, if we don’t have police enforcing these laws, do we replace them with cameras, and then that opens up a whole set of privacy concerns and surveillance concerns that I think are absolutely merited. But I think that something that gets lost in all of those conversations, is the design of the road itself, and the way that we can mitigate danger by rethinking that.
Alex Wise 18:50 That’s very interesting. I hadn’t thought about that. But can you give us an example of what you’re thinking of in terms of the road design?
Brett Simpson 18:57 Yeah, so most American traffic engineering playbooks were devised for efficiency, not safety, they treat throughput as the goal in because traffic congestion was for so long considered the traffic problem, not safety. So for decades, we’ve placed an unrealistic responsibility on the individual driver and their behavior to override this incentive to just go faster. So take like a multiple Lane resident residential Boulevard, that wide straight lane. traffic engineers will tell you now they they coax us into higher speeds, they lull us into a sense of security. And, you know, it’s just counter intuitive design like like crosswalks across a right turn merge lane that are so dangerous, where engineers are kind of queuing up a collision course of their own devising, but the data bears out that if you narrow the road, you protect by claims Add medians, drivers will slow down. And that slowdown is key because a person hit by a car driving 30 miles per hour is twice as likely to die as when going 25 miles per hour.
Alex Wise 20:13 Right. And we’ve had recent discussions here in where I live in San Francisco about lowering the speed limit around the city from 25 to 20. And there’s data that shows that that can really make a big difference in terms of pedestrian and bike fatalities. From a driver standpoint, I, I just kind of go, the speed that feels natural. If you’ve been driving for as long as I have, and you get a feel for how fast you should be driving or shouldn’t be driving in certain areas. But the numbers actually do matter. And when you take millions and millions of miles, it adds up. Right?
Brett Simpson 20:49 Right. And traffic engineers will argue that that feeling that intuition that you’re describing, is designed into the street, and you are constantly taking in these signals that let you know how fast you should be going. And those signals we’ve, we’ve built the set of signals that is entirely at odds with what’s safest for the ordinary citizen. Hmm, one last point that I think goes back to this proposal in Berkeley like that, once we decide to accept personal blame for the violence built into our roads. Humans seem to be our best defense against it. And so we equip this increasingly organized motor, motorized and militarized force to fight back against us. And but we don’t really have to think of this as a human an individual behavior problem writ large at all, you know, maybe in individual cases.
Alex Wise 21:49 It’s a design and policy issue.
Brett Simpson Exactly.
(Music Break)
Alex Wise This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking with independent reporter Brett Simpson. So Brett, let’s look at it from the police standpoint, I always have heard and have thought that that’s got to be one of the most dangerous and frightening parts of being a cop is to have to come up to a car, you don’t know what you’re going to expect they could pull out a gun and shoot you that’s kind of the idea behind having armed police is that we have armed citizens as well. So they have to protect themselves and how do police unions and units? How have they addressed these new types of proposals to remove officers from face to face vehicular oriented interactions?
Brett Simpson 23:36 Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point. Because one one key counter argument is, you know, you take examples like Sweden and Norway and that have these you know, amazing numbers with, you know, not needing a traffic cop to enforce their safety. Yet, these not needing an armed traffic cop yet these countries also don’t have such an armed citizenry. And so this argument like well, if, if any, if any ordinary American might have a gun in their car, then you don’t you don’t know what to expect when you approach the window.
Alex Wise 24:17 So I guess the question is, should they be approaching the window in the first place?
Brett Simpson 24:21 Yeah, at the same time and I and I did speak with many officers, Berkeley and otherwise for this story didn’t make it into the in the piece but nobody likes being a traffic enforcer. You know, it’s kind of maybe not nobody, but it just kind of seemed to be the worst part of the job and when you any, any cop can can do that. And you know, or sometimes that will be there that will be there beat the rotation for a little while, and overwhelmingly they talk About It with a sense of dread. And also it’s sort of a distraction from their really essential duties that they’re performing in society, which is investigating and solving crimes, and really where they should be putting their energy.
Alex Wise 25:17 But I guess that there’s also a financial element, I imagine speaking towards the defund the police movements, we think about these militarized police forces and all their toys and gadgets. And then also the idea that there could be layoffs that maybe we don’t need as many police officers if we don’t have a fleet of traffic cops out there giving tickets.
Brett Simpson 25:40 Right. I mean, I think that when you get down to the nitty gritty, yeah, police budgets are, they’re often opaque, and there is the threat and the union, there’s a threat of downsizing and the unions get very defensive. But when you talk to, you know, like the mayor of Berkeley and Berkeley police chief, they are both hopeful that like, hey, this will make our police forces better, to save them time. Where they’re, they’re kind of overwhelmed by these by these requests, where they don’t want to be spending their time, you know, whether it is somebody having a, you know, a mental health crisis, as we’ve, we’ve seen examples in Oregon, you know, having civilian first responders to mental health crises in so many so many other cities beyond Portland. It’s really similar. It’s, you know, where it’s not about, you know, reducing headcount in police forces. It’s about how and where are these officers spending their time? And is there a better way to? Is there a better way to allocate that maybe if we start the conversation there with these Korean police forces, then that is a you know, a more maybe a more palatable conversation to the forces themselves. But yeah, it’s, it’s certainly, I think, a thorny issue.
Alex Wise 27:19 And one with race right at the center, if you think about the policy makers versus the vulnerable populations.
Brett Simpson 27:26 Right. And I think that, you know, the goal to reduce ordinary citizens interaction with the police, which overwhelmingly disproportionately affects communities of color, I think, is is a really great starting point for so many of these police reform proposals.
Alex Wise 27:48 Well, the piece is called “Why cars don’t deserve the right of way” it’s in the Atlantic. We’ll link to it at SeaChangeRadio.com. Brett Simpson, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Brett Simpson 27:59 Thank you so much, Alex.
Narrator 28:16 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by The Meters, The Bottle Rockets and The Clash. Check out our website at Sea Change Radio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcasts. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Solving America’s Traffic Cop Problem appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
For the past year and a half, we’ve been watching the numbers: Covid cases, ER beds, deaths, and, more recently, immunization rates. There’s another set of numbers, however, that has gotten less attention but is just as connected to this pandemic as any of these other figures: housing. The pandemic has been a huge test for our nation’s ability to house its residents, and so far we are failing miserably – experts estimate that 40 million Americans are vulnerable to losing their housing. The federal moratorium on evictions was lifted by the Supreme Court in September, and the vast majority of states have no protections in place to help people hold on to their homes. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Shamus Roller, the Executive Director of the National Housing Law Project, about housing challenges, evictions, and homelessness. We also discuss potential solutions to advance housing justice.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Shamus Roller 0:19 We’re under-funding these programs. So such a dramatic extent when you look at a lot of Western Europe where the there’s not really a problem with homelessness because they know, you know, like we do in this country that homelessness is very expensive. It’s much more expensive to leave somebody on the streets than it is to find them housing, but we just pay for it out of 10 different pockets.
Narrator 0:40 For the past year and a half, we’ve been watching the numbers, COVID cases, ER beds, deaths, and more recently, immunization rates. There’s another set of numbers. However, that’s gotten less attention, but it’s just as connected to this pandemic as any of these other figures, housing. The pandemic has been a huge test for our nation’s ability to house its residents. And so far, we’re failing miserably. Experts estimate that 40 million Americans are vulnerable to losing their housing. The Federal moratorium on evictions was lifted by the Supreme Court in September, and the vast majority of states have no protections in place to help people hold on to their homes. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Shamus Roller, the Executive Director of the National Housing Law Project about housing challenges, evictions and homelessness. We also discuss potential solutions to advance housing justice.
Alex Wise 1:47 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend and neighbor Shamus Roller. He’s the Executive Director of the National Housing Law Project. Shamus, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Shamus Roller 1:58 Great to be here with you, Alex.
Alex Wise 1:59 So explain the mission of your organization, the National Housing Law Project.
Shamus Roller 2:05 We’re a National Legal and advocacy Support Center. So we help Legal Aid attorneys and other advocates around the country, do housing law, protect tenants protect low income homeowners, and then we do a fair amount of advocacy at the federal level around housing law,
Alex Wise 2:20 What stimulated your interest in the issue of housing?
Shamus Roller 2:24 I started my career working on doing direct street outreach with homeless youth and adults. And so I was doing work on the streets helping people find access to services get basic first aid. So I really understood kind of what how do you end up being homeless? And what are the barriers to getting off the streets? What are the things that happened to people that that result in them being homeless? And so I really wanted to think about how do you? How do you deal with the upstream problems, and I went to law school, and I’ve been working on housing for my entire career.
Alex Wise 2:53 Before we dive into some of the solutions, let’s outline some of the problems that you and your colleagues at the National Housing Law Project handle on a daily basis. First let’s let’s talk about evictions, because I imagine that is, is a pretty big palette to work with right there.
Shamus Roller 3:09 Yeah, that’s been a lot of COVID. In particular, the last 18 months of my life has been thinking about how to evictions play into the COVID pandemic that we’re in right now. So there’s quite a bit of very good data at this point showing that the higher levels of evictions here community have the higher level of COVID transmission you have because the result of eviction is almost always that you move into substandard housing, or you move into double love conditions, where you’re around more people where there’s higher likelihood of transmission of COVID, and the longer term effects of evictions can be homelessness as well for a part of the population. So I’ve been working so much on how emergency rental assistance works, some of the federal funding programs that are helping people prevent evictions to pay back the rent that they owe to their landlords and to stay housed in this difficult time.
Alex Wise 4:01 I went to the Tenement Museum in New York City over the summer and saw how people lived at the turn of the 19th century in these slums and for the working poor – the immigrant population of New York generally. I didn’t realize that the rents in a lot of these very low income areas were just as high, if not higher than the than standard rental or the non-ghettoized, if you will, housing at the at the time, because of redlining. These people just had no other option. And so the business proposition for the the slumlord was just to churn through as many tenants as you could just get out of there, and then if they were behind in their rent, then the landlord didn’t have to fix stuff. So we’re in a different age now where people can’t explicitly be discriminated against in terms of their housing, but a lot of the same business practices are alive today, aren’t they?
Shamus Roller 5:40 If you look back at some of the segregation throughout the United States, what you’ll find is predominantly African American communities, the rent levels were oftentimes higher because the areas of city that they could live in were so small in comparison, and that meant that the rent levels tended to go up, you look at oftentimes that bigger houses have been segmented into apartments, not because the families couldn’t afford to rent a house, it was because the rents were so high in those in those neighborhoods. And you find this, I think, plays out to this day that a lot of the housing problems that we have segregation at their base, and which, you know, what was once racial segregation is now or we’re not going to allow apartment buildings to be built, we’re going to have requirements that you have to have a quarter acre of property around your house in order to build that are going to prevent duplexes, we’re going to do all these things to make sure that the no one who’s a working class or poor can live in the communities. And so that underlies, I think, a huge part of what we’re dealing with in the housing crisis in the United States.
Alex Wise 6:44 And one thing that I don’t think a lot of people think of is the trickle-down effect of an eviction in a community, maybe speak to the exponential effect, that kicking one family out of one unit has on many, many people around that same neighborhood, we think of it as just, oh, that person couldn’t afford it. So they’re gone. But it’s not so simple, is it?
Shamus Roller 7:07 It’s not so simple. I think first, it’s important to think about, you know, that also that people are getting kicked out for not that much money, right, which is that oftentimes an eviction is over less than $1,000. across the country. In many cases. That’s the majority of evictions in many jurisdictions. So it’s a small amount of money, but that eviction, if you do the most, the demographic factor that most likely predicts that you’re going to be evicted is that you have small children. And so that means that your kids are going to have to find a new school system, often, it means that you’re going to live in overcrowded condition, you’re gonna move in with family or friends, their higher rates of suicide, higher mental health related issues, after evictions, COVID is so clearly demonstrated that link between between eviction and poor health outcomes. And so what we’re doing is spinning a family kind of into this time of uncertainty of instability, for that eviction. And I guess my public policy urge is that, that fixing that problem is pretty inexpensive in comparison to other public policy interventions that we do that we can protect the stability of families and of individuals by stopping evictions, which is this moment that that creates huge instability in their lives.
Alex Wise 8:24 Maybe you can speak to some of the some of the work that your organization does, and how state local and national policies inform your work in terms of the eviction issue alone.
Shamus Roller 8:38 Yeah. So one that we work on is that so many tenants are unrepresented in eviction court, oftentimes an eviction court hearing will be seconds long people will get evicted in such a short period of time. So we really push for access to a lawyer during that proceeding is really important, and you have access to counsel in San Francisco. But overall, the estimation is about 3% of tenants facing an eviction are represented by an attorney. Well over 80% of all landlords are represented, but also that the eviction process is this is the fastest civil procedure, it happens so quickly. It’s not how you imagine if you watch law and order how it proceeds. You know, when you probably don’t have a lawyer, you don’t get to present evidence, you oftentimes don’t really get to question the landlord over what you’re getting evicted around. It’s just a very fast process. It’s designed really to evict people not to adjudicate the differences between two parties. And so we think about, like, how do you you know, how do you change that dynamic a little bit? How do you make sure that you have a basic level of due process and some of that is, well, you know, how quickly can a landlord start an eviction proceeding around you? How quickly does that process happen? But also then how do we make sure that tenants get access to rental assistance money if they hit a bump in the road, how do we ensure that there’s affordable housing overall.
Alex Wise 10:05 So if you can kind of cut a swath through a few different states that you do work in go from the deep south, very red state where there may not have a lot of tenant protections built in on a state level, and how those tenants might fare versus somebody who lives in, let’s say, San Francisco with more progressive state and local government. And then is there anything that the federal government can do on these in terms of protecting people from evictions.
Shamus Roller 10:39 In most states in this country, you could be sexually harassed by your landlord, they could evict you for no reason. And then they could steal your security deposit, and there’s almost nothing you can do about it. That’s the state of how landlord tenant law works. In most of the contrary, you know, where we were working on a case in Virginia, where we had a landlord that was renting predominantly African American women and racially and sexually harassing them, and we just really dug through the law to try and figure out how do we, you know, how do we hold this guy accountable? And there was nothing that we could find that we felt like we could bring a case together on? I mean, that’s the sort of state of things for many renters around this country.
Alex Wise 11:19 Was that problem with Virginia State law in particular? Or was that more endemic of just the overarching policy in this country?
Shamus Roller 11:28 No, it’s really endemic of overarching policy in the United States about how we handle things in eviction court and housing court is just that, you know, it’s really tilted in favor of the landlords and this idea that, you know, the good, they get to do what they want within that property. And I just don’t think that that, that balance is, is really skewed in favor of landlords and doesn’t serve us as a country anymore, in thinking about how to do housing policy. And you find places like Oregon, which have really reformed their laws, and have much stronger protections for tenants. And I think that’s where the rest of the country needs to go.
Alex Wise 12:06 You had another example before I interrupted you was that Oregon?
Shamus Roller 12:10 Or is it you know, in San Francisco as well, San Francisco has rent control, it has just cause just cause means that the landlord has to have a reason to evict you. And I think you’d find some people that were frustrated certainly landlords who are frustrated on the way San Francisco works, but the idea that tenants might have some level of security and some idea about what their rent is going to be and they know they’re not going to be evicted for no reason i think that that is a that’s a place we need to be as a country for renters and for the economy to function in the way that it should given the challenges that we face.
Music Break 12:56
Alex Wise 13:46 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. And I’m speaking to the Executive Director of the National Housing Law Project, Shamus Roller. So Shamus, give us a snapshot of some of the more popular policies that you and your colleagues see going through state by state to protect tenants from eviction. And some of the flaws in these so called solutions, where are we falling short, there could be some very well meaning policymakers who are out there getting behind policy that clearly is not putting us on the path forward.
Shamus Roller 14:22 One of the areas that we work on quite a bit is nuisance and crime free ordinances. And what those are is, you might have a small city and you see this in rural areas quite a bit, where the where they require landlords to evict people or they will find them if there are too many 911 calls, or if there are reports of criminal activity on the property. And what that results in in practice is often that you have domestic violence survivors who are calling 911 for help who get evicted from their apartments. You see people who are victims of crimes, being evicted because They are being targeted by somebody. And you see real discrimination in some of the crime free ordinances where they prevent landlords from renting to people who have criminal histories of any kind, that then has huge sort of racial implications. And there’s not a lot of data that says that somebody with a criminal record is in any worse than it than I am, for that matter. And so those I think, are some of the ways and often those those ordinances are really used in in communities that have other racist policies as well. And they’re used as a way to keep African Americans in particular out of those communities. And so there’s a huge amount of sort of those, those crime free and nuisance ordinances around the country that are having this effect of, of really undermining stability of families.
Alex Wise 15:48 What are some of the solutions that your organization is advocating for? And maybe if you can point to some of the countries that are doing it better than the United States and housing their citizens in a safe, humane fashion?
Shamus Roller 16:04 Well, you’ve I think that there’s interesting stuff going on at the federal government right now you’ve got this reconciliation infrastructure package, and that has close to, you know, the $300 billion, perhaps in for housing. And so the federal government has stepped out of the housing market in many ways compared to the 1970s. And that’s part of the reason why we have homelessness in this country. You know, we sort of imagined that homelessness is a not not a solvable problem. But it really only existed in the form of modern homelessness since the 70s, since we disinvested in federal housing programs, and we kind of failed that our effort to do community based treatment for people with mental health issues. And those are the two things combined created the problem that we’re dealing with across the country. So we need the federal government to step back in. But we also need to pay attention to the legal conditions in which people are tenants and people are homeowners. And I think that that requires that’s a lot of what we work on it as an organization. So rental assistance, investments in federal housing. But also we need to reform eviction courts, which are in the underlying law, which are really I think anybody who looked at them would be surprised that something like that exists still in the United States.
Alex Wise 17:21 And maybe you can speak to some of the issues of the intersection between climate change and homelessness that come across your desk on a daily basis, I imagine.
Shamus Roller 17:35 I think most of your listeners would tend to think about eviction is primarily an issue that affects poor people. But I want to think of evictions and the landlord tenant law underlying it is a is something that affects all of us. And that at different points in our lives, we’re many of us, almost all of us are renters, and some of us will be homeowners. But if we really want people to move into cities, many of those people have got to be renters. But that’s got to be being a renter has got to be a better thing, it’s got to be something more desirable, in order for cities to grow in which the way we need them to, to and part of that is reforming landlord tenant law. The thing that is a bummer about being a renter is, is that you you don’t know when your rents gonna go up. And you know that you can be displaced by their landlord for basically any reason. And we need to change that. So that renting has more stability to it. And that benefits all of us it benefits the economy. But it’s really crucial, I think, to meet our sustainability goals, and to make cities more livable places to be.
Alex Wise 18:36 And just from a utility standpoint, I imagine there’s a lot of opportunity in terms of infrastructure and getting more cooperative solar installations so that multi dwelling units have clean, affordable energy. utility bills are not an insignificant issue for a lot of these people facing eviction, I imagine.
Shamus Roller 18:59 Yeah, people get evicted all the time. For you know, they’re always balancing that rent payment. And the utility payment is less of a problem here in in San Francisco where the weather’s nice all the time. But if you’re in a very hot place, you’re in a very cold place, your utility bills can be you know, 50% of what your rent is. And so the that combination is is a difficult one and doing solar, doing energy efficiency is much easier to do in a multifamily development, right? If you’ve got 20 units, or 60 units or 100 units, it’s much easier to do solar and to manage those improvements. You’re also just using so much less energy. You know, if you’re not, you know, if you’re sharing those walls with somebody else, the efficiency level and sort of climate change reduction that you get from moving into a city is pretty high overall. It’s not just one thing, but to help make cities more desirable as a crucial piece to all of us.
Alex Wise 20:42 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Shamus Roller is the executive director of the National Housing Law Project. So Shamus, we’re talking about evictions earlier, we haven’t really addressed the landlords and they’re not only predatory, there are a lot of good landlords out there. And they also hold a lot of important lobbying power in this country. What are some of the problems that landlords face in the current environment? And what are some of the solutions that you see in helping them along with the tenants?
Shamus Roller 21:19 COVID is really revealed how many good landlords are out there. I mean, the reason we’re not facing so many evictions is certainly in part to the fact that there are many, especially small landlords that have been working with their tenants that have been forgiving rent that have been working out repayment plans. And that’s been crucial to protecting all of us in the midst of the pandemic. One of the challenges that we see moving forward, it’s just the corporatization of the real estate market. You have real estate investment trusts, you have, you know, huge groups like BlackRock who’ve been moving into the residential real estate market. And what they have tried to do in many cases is squeeze whatever extra dollars there are out of that process. And so part of that is lower staffing levels. Sometimes that is trying to, you know, simplify the property management, one of the ways that they simplify property management is they just have a thing we, we file an eviction lawsuit every time somebody five days late on rent, or whatever their process is that resulting in really bad outcomes around evictions, and just bad outcomes for tenants as a whole in many of those properties. And the other thing you see across the country is the D eviction courts are oftentimes filled with evictions from a handful landlords that most landlords don’t file very many evictions. And then there is a small percentage of the landlord community which files evictions all the time. And sometimes they file what are called serial evictions in which they are essentially using the eviction court as a way to get tenants to pay the money that they owe. So they’re just filing eviction after eviction against a single tenant.
Alex Wise 22:59 And then what’s the best way to combat these abusive landlords and their practices in terms of policy?
Shamus Roller 23:05 One, you need to slow down the process a little bit, and you need to make it more expensive for landlords to file evictions. But you also need what we have now is an emergency Rental Assistance Program at the national level. That is had some real challenges in getting up and started during COVID. But ideally, the way that works is it’s there to help tenants who, you know, can’t make that half a month’s rent that they’re behind on. And that’s going to help landlords as well emergency rental assistance because evicting a tenant, having a an apartment that sits empty is an expensive proposition for landlords, I think that there’s a way to reduce evictions to give tenants better due process in that system. But also, that’s going to make more money for landlords over the long term. And I think that’s the grand bargain that we’ve got to strike in this country around this, which is that, you know, renting needs to be a better proposition per tenants. And we can make sure that landlords do just fine as part of it.
Alex Wise 24:03 Speaking towards the emergency efforts that the government is taking both state and federal level during a pandemic, how can federal lawmakers or people in charge of government assistance programs on a state level as well how can they work with the most needy and vulnerable populations better to try to communicate and allow them to kind of budget some of these potential credits and assistance programs, it must be hard to access them, especially when a lot of them don’t have access to the internet.
Shamus Roller 24:37 So the biggest housing program at the national level is the Housing Choice Voucher Program previously called the section eight voucher program. And that program serves about one quarter of the people nationally who are eligible for it. And in big cities in particular, the waiting list to get a voucher can be 10 years.
Alex Wise 24:58 What does the voucher entail and why would it take longer to get this voucher than to become a US citizen?
Shamus Roller 25:04 So what the voucher is, you know, it essentially, when you have a Housing Choice Voucher, you can go to any landlord, they’ll take it and you’re gonna pay 1/3 of what your income is in rent. And the federal government’s gonna make up the rest of it, you know, vouchers are a great solution for people who are, who are really on that edge, right? Who are really struggling and struggling on a regular basis, right to help them make sure that they can, that they can make their rent every month. And it’s a great it’s a great program, but it’s so oversubscribed that, you know, it can take a year is 10 years to get a voucher. And in some places because of preferences. If you don’t fit in one of the preferences, you’re probably never going to get off that waiting list.
Alex Wise 25:44 So obviously, the idea for renter vouchers is a popular one – too popular, but should we just subsidize it more? Or is there a different way to skin this cat?
Shamus Roller 25:56 I mean, if I were to offer you up, like how are we gonna solve the housing problem the United States I mean, one is the federal government, it’s got to be a bigger player, the vouchers is one way or other federal subsidies around housing programs, you have to you got to undermine the challenge around getting housing bill at the local level, and the sort of racist sounding practices that we have across the country is got to be part of this. Three, you’ve got to reform landlord tenant law, so it protects renters a little bit better than it does right now. is got to be a piece of of how that works in practice. But I think really, it’s from the federal government standpoint, money is a huge piece, because the budget of HUD was so much higher in the 70s, you know, accounting for inflation. And, you know, we’re under funding these programs. So such a dramatic extent, when you look at a lot of Western Europe, where there’s not really a problem with homelessness, because they know, you know, like we do in this country that homelessness is very expensive, it’s much more expensive to leave somebody on the streets than it is to find them housing, but we just pay for it on our 10 different pockets with a little bit from health care a little bit from social services, you know, a little bit from the state a little bit from local government a little bit in policing, that we don’t really take into consideration how expensive that that end outcome really is for us.
Alex Wise 27:11 And how can listeners help the National Housing Law Project and its efforts?
Shamus Roller 27:16 Well, one, I mean, I think reaching out to Congress right now and talking about the importance of investing in housing is the first thing I’d love for you all to do. We’ll happily take your donations, but I’d love for you to get more involved in local advocacy around around housing policy around supporting low income renters and also to make sure that we we challenge some of the, you know, those policies that are creating more segregation in our country because that’s also underneath so much of this is a history of racism, and segregation that’s underlying the policies that are that are really now hurting all of us. And creating the high housing costs that we’re dealing with.
Alex Wise 27:55 Shamus Roller is the executive director of the National Housing Law Project. Shamus, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Shamus Roller Thanks, Alex.
Narrator You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our Intro Music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex wise. Additional music by Larry Coryell Paul Simon and Greg Allman, check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others. and tune in to see Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Shamus Roller on Housing Justice appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Maine state representative Seth Berry about the shortcomings of his state’s power grid and recent efforts to create a consumer-owned model that is less reliant on fossil fuels. We look at the monopolistic nature of public utilities in Maine and several other states, examine some possible solutions to the problem, and get a glimpse into the political power brokers deciding who will keep the lights on Down East for decades to come.
Narrator 0:02 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex wise.
Seth Berry 0:21 Any critical infrastructure, which is a natural monopoly, like our grid has got to be of buying for the people. And it’s got to be nonprofit, it just it doesn’t work otherwise.
Narrator 0:33 This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Maine state representative Seth Berry, about the shortcomings of his state’s power grid, and recent efforts to create a consumer owned model that’s less reliant on fossil fuels. We look at the monopolistic nature of public utilities in Maine and several other states examined some possible solutions to the problem and get a glimpse into the political power brokers deciding who will keep the lights on down east for decades to come.
Alex Wise 1:21 I’m joined now on seachange radio by my friend Seth Berry, he is a state representative in Maine. He is vice president of a biotech firm that deals in aquaculture, called kennebec River bio sciences. And he is also a board member of the our power movement. Seth, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.
Seth Berry It’s great to be with you. Good to see you again.
Alex Wise Yes, so you continue to fight the good fight there in the great state of Maine. First, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the our power movement, it’s it’s a pretty cool idea. And people can go to our power main.org to check it out. That’s right, they sure can. And our power is an organization, which we started a little over a year ago and actually grew out of a previous organization that we had founded called main power for main people our power and again, it is our power main.org is working to make main the first state in the nation to get to 100% renewables and adjust transition. So we want to make that transition fully. No fudging the numbers with you know, creative accounting. And that’s a problem in greenhouse gas accounting sometimes. And also, we want to do it in a way that’s affordable so that all Mainers are able to participate in that transition, the way that we hope to get there is by creating a consumer owned utility. So that the future electrical grid, which is a monopoly, we will all be depending on no matter where you are in the country in a decarbonized future, so that that grid is not for profit, and is of by and for the people that it serves. So give us a snapshot of the current electrical grid or grids in Maine and how the our power movement hopes to inject itself into that matrix? Yeah, great, great question. So the current electrical grid in Maine is the least reliable in the nation. That means we have the worst outages, specifically, the most frequent outages in the nation and the second longest outages in the nation. And that’s for several years running. We also have a very high costs associated with that grid. So the average electricity customer here in Maine is paying the 10th highest rates overall in the entire nation. And then customer satisfaction, which is another good metric to look at is the lowest in the nation, bar none. And you coming from the PG&E service territory, we’ll appreciate that pg&e is actually ranked better than our largest consumer, our largest utility here, which is called Central Maine power. CMP serves most Mainers there’s a second largest electrical utility called versant. And then a number of small, very well run consumer owned utilities that serve part, you know, the remainder of the state. It’s only they only serve about 5% of the load. They do serve many municipalities, but most of those are quite rural. So again, CMP inversing, together the two large utilities are giving us the 10th highest rates, the worst reliability and the very worst customer satisfaction. Clearly mean is poised for change. mean people are fed up with the situation that they find themselves in. And as we look to decarbonize, we will be depending on this grid, this electrical grid for literally everything, you know, all of our future energy needs. So it’s a problem. And it’s one that we hope to solve.
Alex Wise 5:00 So in California, one of the main dissatisfactions that people are finding is that their operators, electrical wires have contributed to burning down half the state. So that hasn’t been ideal. That’s a good way to kind of lose Yelp stars for sure. What is the mix for CMP? And versus grid in terms of fossil fuel and clean energy mix? And what are some of the root causes, in your estimation of the shortfalls of these two operators? Yeah, yeah. Well, first, just as an aside on PG&E, you know, killing 100 people and, you know, pleading guilty to felonies and going bankrupt twice in the last, you know, 20 years, that’ll do it.
Alex Wise Yeah, you know, that that’ll lose the, the Yelp stars, for sure.
Seth Berry 6:07 And by the way, like, again, like they rank higher in customer satisfaction than our utility here. So that’s an accomplishment, you know, for our utility to do worse than PG&E, I think. You asked about the mix here. The mix here is, first of all, it’s not provided by these utilities, we have a separate and competitive supply market. In other words, we’re restructured state, because of our very high rates, like many other states, with high rates, we did restructure we required the utilities to sell off their generation plants and that, you know, it’s been, it’s not without controversy, but I think by and large, it’s actually been a success. We do have in the supply. The typical mix is largely hydro, biomass, some wind and a lot of natural gas. Maine is doing better in getting to renewables through some of that legacy, stuff like Hydro and biomass that I mentioned, you know, burning woodchips, largely for the production of energy, which somewhat controversially is considered renewable here. I think you know that that’s probably a debatable point. But it is considered renewable and zero emissions remain. The, the companies have really stood in the way however, of more decentralized solutions and solutions that reduce the need to build out the grid. One of the unique problems with investor owned utilities across this country is that we have a rigged regulatory system, which requires that they be given the double digit guaranteed profit based on their investments in, in in capital infrastructure. So if if any utility in this country, that’s for profit, invest, you know, $100,000, in, you know, towards a new substation, or renovated substation, or for that matter, you know, a bunch of new poles and wires to replace older ones, they’re guaranteed a profit. So they’re always looking to overbuild the grid, they’re always looking to gold plate, the grid, and the grid of the future is, is is not overbuilt, it is it is in fact, much more efficient than that. It involves a lot of two way or multi directional flow, your hot water heater, your electric vehicle, your heat pump, can be called upon as a resource in the grid of the future, and can be turned off at times of peak demand, you know, remotely. There’s a lot more it involved in the grid of the future. And there’s a lot more efficiency. And there’s also a lot of distributed renewables like rooftop solar, in the grid of the future. So they are opposing or standing in the way of that transition, which we require to decarbonize rapidly and equitably. And I emphasize equitably because the affordability is critical if we’re if we’re all going to get there. Right now rooftop solar are largely things that the wealthy have and others don’t. So these folks are the they’re the you know, the crossing the traffic cop at the intersection between, you know, where we are now and where we hope to be. And they are monopoly, and they’re working within a rigged system. So that’s what we propose to fix.
Alex Wise 10:00 So if I had a CMP or Versant spokesperson on with us right now, what would they point to as some of the reasons for their shortcomings? I mean, Maine is a pretty rural state, but it’s not the largest physical state in the Union by any stretch of the imagination. I did hear at least that there wasn’t a huge reliance on coal in there. But where would they be pointing the blame for their shortfalls?
Seth Berry If they point the blame anywhere except at themselves, you know, that they blame they like to blame trees, you know, don’t talk back and they do say, it’s true that Maine has a lot of trees, how does that hinder their operation, they get knocked down and that causes outages, right? So, so trees, trees get blown over. But and that is true. However, the state with the best reliability in the nation, the shortest and least frequent outages is Nebraska, Nebraska also happens to be the only state with no trees in a very few trees. But what Nebraska does have is what Nebraska does have is, is a lot of tornadoes. And that wreaks havoc, as you might imagine with electrical infrastructure, they still managed to have the best reliability in the nation, and they’re very rural. And when you’re when you’re rural, you’re you have a lot of lines of wire, you know, wire poles and wires per customer, the grid is is much more expensive per customer. And so that has cost implications as well as reliability implications. Again, Nebraska, you know, is the is the most reliable state, they’re obviously also one of the cheapest states in the nation. So, you know, we can we can learn from this. And there are other places around the country that that, likewise are doing more with less, they tend to be the places that are nonprofit and that are that are governed of by and for the people they serve. Speaking of the government there, I mean, contrast, main politics and how it relates to the state’s electric grid versus let’s take a Nebraska while we’re on that subject. Sure. Yeah, the politics of Maine are fascinating. We, we had a little mini Trump before Trump was even elected guy named Paula page. He is he’s famous, right? You heard of him even out and on the left coast. So Paul was basically. Yeah, the page was he likes to say he was Trump before Trump was Trump. And you know, he was elected in 2010 in the big you know, the red tide of the Tea Party 2010 election, the midterm elections and Republicans. The Tea Party principally took not only the governorship but also the main house and the main senate so that the whole the whole trifecta flipped in that year here in Maine. And we entered a you know, a dark ages of sorts, we had a really tough time, especially in those first two years where they had the trifecta, we then took back the house and senate but LePage was reelected in 2014 and remain governor for eight long, dark years. But we do we’ve done a lot of incredible things here because the voters are open to them and I think of many things that were done through the ballot question like California we have direct democracy I don’t think Nebraska has that we can put something on the ballot directly so we enacted the the first and best Clean Election system in the country by by ballot question we enacted the first bottle bill with you know redemption back in the 70s to get the bottles beverage containers off the streets and the in the rural roads. We enacted rank choice voting first in the nation to do that on a statewide basis back in 2016 we enacted a tax on the wealthy we enacted minimum wage you know and to do that in spite of you know very conservative results like what we saw Paula LePage is pretty interesting.
(Music Break)
Alex Wise This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to Maine state representative Seth Berry. He is also on the board of our power, our power main.org and a VP at Kennebec River biosciences. So what are some of the solutions that our power main is trying to set forth?
Seth Berry 14:53 Our power is laser focused on making Maine the first state in the nation to make and adjust transition to 100%. Local and renewables for our power. And the way that we do that is by creating a pine tree power company, a nonprofit, independently operated, democratically governed utility, which will serve as a true partner in that transition. You know, as I mentioned, over my 13 years of experience in the legislature primarily working on energy and telecom policies, we’ve seen these two large for profit utilities again and again, not only fail their customers but also stand in the way of good policy they have opposed net metering, you know, for rooftop solar, and actually succeeded in Rolling that back under the the pager ministration they opposed efficiency, they’ve tried to ram through a very expensive, very destructive, large transmission line to connect us to hydro resources to the north in Quebec, rather than encouraging, you know, local, more local Maine based solutions. And again, they’re all about this, this very centralized overbuilt gold plated grid, which is really not the efficient and affordable grid that we need in the future. As a result, we have seen in this state, an energy burden for our lower income consumers, which is off the charts, it is one of the highest in the nation, the average person at the federal poverty level, maybe a single mother trying to support a couple kids, she might be making $16,000 a year, she’s spending on average $4,000 a year on her energy costs alone. As we switch to all clean energy, we need to make sure we don’t lose, you know, leave people like her behind. Likewise, we have many, many factories and a lot of industry where the jobs are really dependent on low energy costs. So we believe that this the shift to a consumer utility will address that need by cutting costs. Our projections are that by creating the primary power company and buying out the existing consumer utilities, we can save $9 billion over the first 30 years alone. In California, that might not be as much but here in Maine, with only 1.3 million people, that’s a lot of money. So we can reduce costs, as we make the transition, also have local democratic governance and utility that’s really responsive to the imperatives of the moment. Give us a better idea of the solar profile of Maine obviously, it’s one of them more northern states, but I can see its residents being able to benefit greatly from the freedom that residential solar can provide, especially when the grid operators are falling short in terms of customer service and reliability issues. If you can walk us through some of the rebates and what the penetration rates are currently and how our power hopes to stimulate residential solar market in Maine. Sure, yeah. So you know, most people are pretty familiar with the concept of net metering. It’s really the original way of dealing with with rooftop solar where, you know, if the sun is shining, and you’re, you know, your dishwashers not running lights are off, you might be running your meter backwards part of the time, right so so the the idea of net metering is you know, you, you can run your meter backwards, and then you get your bank those credits and you can use them any time during the year. You never get a check. You might pay a small monthly amount for the privilege of being connected to the grid. But you’re not making money on it. You’re just breaking even that idea of net metering is something that investor on utilities, whether it’s PG&E where you are or Central Maine power where I am, have opposed and have fought against across the country, it’s been a huge Flashpoint in the battle over our clean energy future. And what’s really going on it’s a proxy war for who will control the energy of the future, who is in charge of that energy. You know, when we decarbonize when we switch to electrical vehicles and electric heat pumps and you know, and literally electrify everything, the utilities want to own it all. They want to own everything and they want to protect their profits they’ve got they’ve got hotels and monopolies on boardwalk and Park Place on you know, Pennsylvania Avenue, you know, all the way around the Monopoly board of our grid right now and they want to keep every one of those because you know, when you and I land on the square, they want us to pay full boat. We’ve already gone forward here in Maine with a good deal of community solar, making that net metering, available through virtual net metering to customers across the country. But we had to do that. And, you know, over and above the objections of our utility and it was only because democrats took a trifecta in the House, the Senate and the governorship starting in 2018, that we were able to do that. Now, the utilities be working hard to roll that back, and we need to protect it, we also need to move forward with more efficiency, more solutions, like demand aggregation. And offshore wind is a huge opportunity here in Maine, as it is in Northern California as well.
Alex Wise 20:33 Listening to you describe some of the politics of Maine, and talking about the solar industry brings to mind a piece we did five years ago or so with Tim Dickinson, investigative reporter for Rolling Stone who’s talking about the Florida solar issues and how the state legislature there is really in bed with the public utilities and had put in these crazy laws prohibiting individuals from leasing solar panels. So like Florida, which has a really, I think the second best solar profile in the country in terms of Sun was not even in the top 10 in terms of penetration rates for solar, largely because people had to just buy their panels, they couldn’t release them, which has been one of leasing has been one of the real sparks for soldiers popularity around the country. So if you can kind of take us behind the scenes and shed some light on the political infighting, corruption and what is keeping the main grid from being more efficient, and how the political system is has been a hindrance along the way.
Seth Berry 22:03 Yeah, well, I love it that you brought up Florida because it is a great example of where this incredible opportunity and solar and the industry just owns the State House, you know, and it’s a classic problem. The investor on utility industry has done an excellent job of gaming the system around the country over the last 100 years, in fact, 120 years arguably in the early 1900s, they lobbied for and successfully created public utility Commission’s around the country you know, people think these utility public utility Commission’s are there to regulate the utilities there. That’s theoretically true, but they’re what they really do is balance the needs of the investors for profit with the needs of the customers, and that’s if they’re doing their job well, more often than not, they’re just responding, they’re captured regulators, and they’re responding to what, you know, whatever the industry is, is looking for. And they justify this crazy for profit monopoly system that we have, you know, with respect to the captured regulator, you know, and that’s really, I think, the way you’re getting out with your question. We do see that in Maine as well. And it’s, it’s often a psychological capture, it’s not even that people are, you know, on the, you know, on the take, and they’re, like literally corrupt, it’s just that they are, they drink the Kool Aid, because these very nice silver tongued lobbyists and lawyers for the utilities are in the committee rooms of the legislature, and in the Public Utility Commission hearings, you know, very friendly, very, you know, very well behaved or polite, you know, they talk they ask about your kids and, you know, and they, they form relationships and and, you know, pretty soon you’re going out to lunch together, and then you know, they’re also super smart and and so when they when they say that something is a good idea in energy policy. The the legislators often respond, and it’s, it’s typically that they take republicans for granted. And, you know, the republicans just do whatever they say. And they, and then they, they get enough Democrats, they only need a handful. You know, even when there’s a democratic majority, they can usually get what they want, by just getting, you know, all the republicans and a handful of Democrats to go along with them. So that’s the kind of regulatory capture that we typically see. It’s sometimes it’s more blatant, you know, we’ve seen examples around the country of people being bought off, you know, the Speaker of the House in Illinois, not long ago, for example, it was, you know, found to be on the take and actually lost his job. You know, utilities will hire people to pretend to be, you know, grassroots activists and they’re, they’re literally actors. You know, we’ve seen that sort of thing happen, but more often than not, it’s just good old fashioned, loitering and lobbying and you know, being present. Throughout the committee processes where the average person just doesn’t, I mean they don’t even speak the language never mind have the time to go and you know, spend the whole the whole week in a committee room is a very esoteric topic too. That closes people off as well. So you know, what, that’s, that’s really the biggest issue, Alex, you know, it’s not as sexy as you know, as like bribery and corruption. But I think that’s the most pervasive reason that we do have this problem here in Maine. There are also absolutely, you know, political campaigns of political contributions that are a factor here. Our legislature has a great Clean Election system, but a lot of folks still run traditionally and take, you know, donations from our utilities. The Clean Election system really hasn’t worked for the governor’s office. And people always run traditionally for that, if they went, you know, our current governor or the previous governor, every governor that I’ve that, you know, that in Maine history has asked for, and received corporate donations, including from our utilities. So, the interesting thing about about me in politics, and I think this is true across the country, is that the utilities have really, always had a stranglehold on the democratic process, you know, literally every our hospitals, you know, it’s crazy to have this owned and controlled by a for profit monopoly, which by the way, is a foreign for profit monopoly. It’s not even, you know, US based in the case of Maine anymore. So, you know, what I like to ask people is, would you, would you want to turn over the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines to a foreign for profit monopoly, you know, and then, quote, unquote, regulate it? You know, would that make sense to try to own and control our military? You know, I don’t think so. I don’t think you would either. Now, what about our public schools? Would it make sense to turn over our public schools completely to a foreign for profit monopoly and, you know, try to regulate that and make that work? Probably not. Our hospitals, our fire stations, you know, our roads and bridges, you know, that this is any critical infrastructure, which is a natural monopoly, like our grid has got to be of buying for the people. And it’s got to be nonprofit, it just, it doesn’t work otherwise, and we will not decarbonize. We will not successfully decarbonize if Maine and California and Nebraska and Florida, don’t have consumer ownership of utilities.
Alex Wise Well, folks can go to ourpowermaine.org to get involved. And thanks again for the terrific work you’re doing for your constituents there in Maine. Seth Berry, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Seth Berry 28:03 My pleasure, Alex.
Narrator 28:16 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our Intro Music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Raul De Souza and Roger Miller. Check out our website at SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcasts. Visit our archives there to hear it all McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Seth Berry: Maine Monopoly appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
It’s a familiar theme from television, the movies, and literature: city folk, sick of the hustle and bustle of urban life, decamping to a bucolic existence closer to the land. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to food and agriculture reporter Beth Hoffman, whose new book entitled “Bet The Farm” chronicles her recent transition from San Francisco to raising cattle at her husband’s family farm in Iowa. We discuss the challenges they’ve faced working to transform Whippoorwill Creek Farm into a more environmentally friendly business, take a look at the grass-fed beef industry, and examine the economics of being an American independent farmer in the 21st century.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Beth Hoffman 0:20 Cattle can be horrific for the environment because they use a ton of resources to produce them out here in much smaller numbers over quite a lot of land where they’re rotated daily. The cattle play a positive role in the environment here as opposed to just taking resources from them.
Narrator 0:46 It’s a familiar theme from television, the movies and literature, city folk sick of the hustle and bustle of urban life, decamping to a bucolic existence closer to the land. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to food and agriculture reporter Beth Hoffman, whose new book entitled bet the farm Chronicles her recent transition from San Francisco to raising cattle at her husband’s family farm in Iowa. We discussed the challenges they’ve faced working to transform whip or will Creek farm into a more environmentally friendly business. Take a look at the grass fed beef industry and examine the economics of being an American independent farmer in the 21st century.
Alex Wise 1:47 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend Beth Hoffman. She is a food and agriculture reporter and the author of the new book bet the farm the dollars and cents of growing food in America. Beth, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Beth Hoffman 2:00 Thanks, Alex.
Alex Wise 2:02 So Beth, you recently a couple years ago left San Francisco we were in the same neighborhood basically. And now you live in Iowa and are a farmer. And you’ve just wrote this book. Explain what motivated this move.
Beth Hoffman 2:19 Well, my husband grew up here. He’s an Iowa farm boy, and he always wanted to move back here. So after reporting on agriculture for 25 years, it wasn’t a ridiculous thing for us to move. But we came out here to Iowa about three years ago, and we raise grass finished beef, and we have goats and hay. And it’s about an hour’s drive from Des Moines.
Alex Wise 2:45 And this is a large farm, right? relatively, but how does it stack up compared to your neighbors? I was shocked to read that 55% of Iowa is already rented in in terms of farmland, we think of this rolling empty space in rural America, but it’s quite different. rural America is occupied in many ways, isn’t it?
Beth Hoffman 3:09 Yeah. So our farmers 530 acres, we purchased another 40 acres that’s around where we live. Now it’s to about two miles from the farm. That average farm size in Iowa is about 350 acres. And I think that a lot of people who live in cities think that farms are owned by corporations, but they’re not generally generally speaking. Well, it’s 98% of farms are family owned. You know, I think an average farm in Iowa is is a little bit smaller than ours.
Alex Wise 3:45 So with “Bet the Farm” you’re trying to take on your own story, but also, at the same time tell the story of farming in America. It’s very effective. Why don’t you walk us through what motivated you to write the book while you’re taking on this enormous task of farming? And what you learned along the way in terms of your own research that you hadn’t maybe discovered about farming in America from 25 years of food and agriculture reporting?
Beth Hoffman 4:11 Yeah, you know, it was really interesting that I had reported on agriculture all that time, but and a lot about sustainability about environmental issues, about equity and race issues, which are play a role in this book as well. But I felt like really I had never heard about the economic issues of farms that they seem to be framed in the media as like short term things. So we hear we hear about, you know, trade wars with China and that’s affecting a farmers today or how Brazil has a lot of soybeans and so the price of soybeans is low this year, but I hadn’t really ever gotten the memo that it was chronic, generation after generation. I’m struggling to make a profit on farm. So, for example, in 2019, the median income on a farm so there’s 2 million farms in America, the median meaning half of them made less than $300. So that means a million of America’s farms made less than $300. In a year when the prices of corn and soybeans, for example, commodities was low, but there were a lot of government subsidies, there was a market facilitation program that Trump gave, you know, literally millions and millions and millions of dollars to farms. And so that was kind of a good year, and so on 2019, that $300 was positive for the first time in like five years, most farms live right on that border of survival. So that really shocked me as a reporter that I had never heard of this, that I just, I mean, maybe it’s, it’s out there, but I hadn’t really understood that deeply. And as a farmer, it was just, it was crushing, you know, to think like, Okay, great, we get to go out there we we have access to land. So we have the privilege, the wealth to come out. And to do this, and to really work to restore the land to regenerate the environment, all of that, but at kind of a huge cost to us, and possibly losing, you know, anything we had any of our reserves we might have for retirement?
Alex Wise 6:38 Well, let’s take a step back and get to the part where you in the book are just starting out negotiating with your father in law, Leroy, who, who farmed this land for many decades, and did it in the more traditional modern method, using the non organic farming methods that corporate America has kind of funneled a lot of farmers into into doing it just it makes a lot more sense in terms of scale for some people, and you were trying to do it in a more regenerative organic fashion. Why don’t you kind of give us a peek into what that transition has been like?
Beth Hoffman 7:22 This is one of the reasons why I wrote the book. I think that agriculture, particularly Midwestern agriculture, particularly commodity agriculture, like people who grow corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, I think it’s very misunderstood by much of the American public. I think that there’s an there’s a mythology about it, that it’s, there’s just corporate owned and agribusiness driven. It does play a role. I don’t want to say that agribusiness is not involved. They certainly are. But a lot of the things that have happened over the years have been adopted by farmers, because it does make some sense. And I think this is a key point that especially people who would like agriculture to go in a more sustainable way, they have to understand that this is not it’s not a matter of like farmers having been brainwashed over the years. It’s it’s because it is actually less labor intensive. And they have less weeds. So you don’t have to have a ton of people working on a farm anymore. And your yields are higher and higher and higher.
Alex Wise 8:37 Yes, it seemed like the weeds were one of the sticking points for your father in law saying you guys have no idea how much work you’re going to have to do just to get these weeds out. That was something I hadn’t thought of. How do you overcome what your father in law warned you about without just breaking your back pulling weeds up?
Beth Hoffman 8:56 Exactly. I mean, that’s one of the things we will have to think about is that and that’s what Leroy said to us. You know, there was a moment in our, in our discussions where, you know, he said, Well, what do you want to do on the farm? And I said, Well, you know, I think we probably want to grow organics, we want to grow food grade things so that people can eat them, not just animals. And he went out and he brought back this hole that had been just the blade of it was like maybe an inch long at this point. And he said, You know, this is what organic agriculture means. Meaning that he had as as a kid as a, as a whatever before he started using GMO seeds and chemicals and all of this, that it was they worked themselves down with a hole that’s tiny, it’s barely not even there anymore. Because that’s what kind of labor it took to get rid of weeds in your field. That that’s a reality. And that’s one of the biggest reasons why organic agriculture isn’t adopted across the board is is that it’s a lot of labor. And many places like here, we don’t have people to work on farms, there’s just not the population of people who could come out and pick vegetables and fight weeds. I mean, the weeds in our garden are amazing. Like I’ve never seen anything like it when you have fertile soil and you have water like we have in the Midwest. It equals a lot of weeds. So when you say things like that to people out here, I’m going to grow organically, which we did. And we are moving in that direction. That’s the response they think of like fields full of weeds and that your weeds are now coming into my field. And taking over I’ve heard I’ve heard our neighbors talk about other people that way. So it’s a very difficult thing. It’s also difficult to transition because if you go to organics, for example, it takes three years before you can be certified organic. So exactly what are you doing in the meantime, you would have much lower yields that wouldn’t be compensated by a higher price. So like John’s dad couldn’t ever really make that change because he wouldn’t have been able to not pay off debt which is what everybody has in those interim years.
(Music Break) 11:33
Alex Wise 12:42 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to food and agricultural reporter and author Beth Hoffman. Her new book is “Bet The Farm: the dollars and cents of growing food in America.” So Beth, you were talking about the transition from a non-organic farm to organically growing food and crops in Iowa. You said it takes three years to get certified. You mentioned the labor but what does that certification process mean in terms of the bureaucracy. It must be fairly weighty.
Beth Hoffman 13:16 Yeah, I mean to just give you know, organic farmers kudos for a minute. I mean, organic does mean something it’s one of the few things in the supermarket that actually mean something legally, as opposed to like naturally raised or whatever sort of other claims you find on labels. Organic is actually a certification process. That means that you you certify basically that your land has been chemical free for a certain amount of years. You have to keep meticulous notes over the years and while you’re certified to keep the certification so we are not using chemicals on our farm but we are also likely not going to certify ourselves as organic so we can’t use that term because we don’t have that certification.
Alex Wise 14:10 Well what would be the financial incentive for you to do it? Would you be able to charge a lot more or would you have different buyers of your product etc.
Beth Hoffman 14:20 Yeah, you have definitely different buyers who you know are interested in organics, there is a higher price that comes for it but then let’s you know back up and remember that there is more labor, organic or even grass finished I guess we can speak about that. So we are keeping our cattle here on the land for their whole lives. So the way that John’s father did it was the cattle work here as an as you see cattle all around the US just grazing on, you know, whatever hillside, you pass by The vast majority of that is younger calves that are grazing with their moms until they are weaned at about nine months. And then those cattle then go to likely feedlots they just either are brought to auction houses or you have some kind of a deal where they just go straight to feedlots that are nearby. There’s very, very few places to sell cattle. So this has been a huge problem in this country that actually is right now in the in the news about them trying to get the the large processors to be much more transparent about how they’re setting prices and what they purchase, and so on and so forth.
Alex Wise 15:50 Yes. And you started this process of preparing cattle for the beef market, right as the pandemic was hitting, and we heard about the meatpacking industry hitting these snags and issues related to COVID and other supply chain issues. If you can recap the journey you had to go on to just get these beef cattle processed it was it’s pretty labyrinthian.
Beth Hoffman 16:17 Yes. So in the book, I there’s a whole chapter about this saga. But we we had our beef and we made this decision that we did not want to sell our beef at the auction house at nine months that we were going to keep them on farm and raise them on grass their whole lives. So they be grass finished, as opposed to just grass fed. All cows are really fed grass for a good portion of their life.
Alex Wise 16:48 And does that grass finishing designation get to the market? Because you just generally, consumers just see grass fed beef. But is that something that a consumer who wants to be environmentally conscious and wants a certain type of beef? Should they be looking for grass finishing? Or is this just not something that is designated on a package?
Beth Hoffman 17:12 Well, I’ve seen I’m using the term grass finished because I’ve actually seen beef marketed as grass fed, and then gone to the website. And their description of that is is that cattle have access to grass. But that’s not all they’re fed.
Alex Wise 17:31 Oh, is that almost like the cage-free chickens who are have the ability to go fly around if they want, but they’ve been raised in a pen and so they’re gonna stay in that pen?
Beth Hoffman 17:42 Correct. It’s exactly the same. So you know, you have chickens in these in these huge confinement facilities, you know, like turkeys or whatever, and they have the doors open. So if they can find the door, they could go out there and fly around and whatever, technically cage free, right, technically, but same thing. So I’ve seen I’ve seen a company do that say it’s grass fed. And then it says they have access to it, but they’re feeding them other things. So it’s like, you know, it’s like having a kid who’s you know, hanging around on the couch, would they rather have an apple are they gonna eat that candy bar, many of them will choose the candy bar if no one’s overseeing it. And that’s kind of corn to cattle is like candy, they love it. It’s not very good for them in mass. And
Alex Wise 18:31 I learned from your book that that’s not a new feeding strategy. It goes back to the 1600s in this country, at least when we were feeding Indian corn to cattle out of marble them and fatten them up quicker. I thought this was kind of a 20th century feedlot innovation, but it has much deeper roots.
Beth Hoffman 18:52 Yes, yeah. So that’s one of those kind of misunderstandings that I really wanted to explain was the history of this country and of agriculture is not so different from how things are today. So we were a country that produced commodities, like corn, and cattle from our very, very roots are very beginning. And that we were made as a colony. And so that was colonies. The purpose of colonies really is to produce mass raw materials for the Empire, which is what we did. So anyway, our beef is grass finished, and we rotationally graze which means that we move the cattle daily so we are trying to minimize the impact of the cattle on the land. Because they’re you know, big giant beings that trample things and compact soil and so we keep them I’m where they are for about a day. So this again, it’s a lot of it’s a lot of labor, and they end up being on the farm then till they’re about, let’s say 24 months is about an average time so if they’re here much longer than they are if we were to sell them to the feedlot break your back.
(music break)
Alex Wise 21:06 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to food and agricultural reporter and author Beth Hoffman, her new book is “Bet the Farm: the dollars and cents of growing food in America.” So we’re talking about how you handle the cattle at your farm in Iowa, Beth, what’s the ratio of like crops to cattle in terms of your work and your output?
Beth Hoffman 21:29 Well, we we got rid of all of the row cropping. So john and i made the decision that we just didn’t want to be in the commodity game at all. We don’t, we don’t want to be dependent upon people setting the price for us, we want our products to be sold at a price that covers our production costs. So that means that we’ve decided to be to work in kind of the more niche markets people would call it, where we are providing beef directly to consumers or to wholesalers that, that so grass finished beef.
Alex Wise 22:09 So all these 570 acres are going to be devoted to these 5200 cattle at any given time. Is that kind of the rotation that you will have or is it – Am I missing something?
Beth Hoffman 22:22 Well, we also hay so we can sell the hay off the farm or we can custom graze more cattle on our farm over the winter. So that means that we can bring on other people’s cattle, charge them sort of a daily rental fee and for the cost of the hay but we keep the nutrients from the hay on the farm. We also have goats, we have 12 right now, they’re not quite rabbits, but goats produce offspring in numbers so we will expand that number quickly. They’ll also be for meat. There’ll be meat goats, but they are amazing for the landscape.
Alex Wise 23:06
So from a sustainability standpoint, how has your opinion changed in terms of beef consumption in this country you you mentioned in the book how you have to buy into the system that produces these eat more beef ads just like you know the Got Milk and the avocado thing. It’s it’s part of these trade union deals but the checkoff that’s gone and these checkoff systems where you’re basically paying for something that you may not actually it’s not kind of in line with your own farms vision, like you don’t believe people need to eat more beef, you believe that they need to eat better beef unless so maybe you can kind of square from a sustainability standpoint, how you’re able to approach something that can be very deleterious to the environment when we look at like industrial feedlots. And the way beef is produced in such enormous volume in this country and then approach it from a more sustainable perspective at whipper will Creek farm
Beth Hoffman 24:09 You know, the fact of the matter of farms and of healthy soil is is that you need you need fertilizer, you need manure. If it’s not manure, it’s often a synthetically created for fertilizer, but that’s part of how you grow things. That’s a key element of the whole system. So having livestock is kind of crucial for the system. In general, cattle produced in a place like California, or Colorado, we have very little water, it becomes a huge problem because they they do they drink a lot of water. They’re huge animals. Water is used to grow corn if you have them on a feedlot or soybeans in the processing, so on and so forth. So the sustainability That level, cattle can be horrific for the environment, because they use a ton of resources to produce them out here in much smaller numbers over quite a lot of land where they’re rotated dare Lee, we have no irrigation systems of any kind in this area. It didn’t rain as much as we’d like this summer, but it it rained. And it’s very green and lush. So we don’t as opposed to again in California where even even people who are growing organically or whatever, they are still irrigating fields, because you wouldn’t have grass, if you didn’t have irrigation there, that becomes a lot different. So. So the sustainability of what we do on the farm here, the cattle play a positive role in the environment here as opposed to just taking resources from them. But yes, it means that there’s a lot less cattle, if you have them on pasture for their entire lives, you’re not fattening them quickly and rushing them through the system. That means you have a whole lot less so john and i are advocates of people eating a lot less meat, it might be more expensive. It’s certainly not in line we don’t pay for food, what we pay, you know, you would pay in other countries you we don’t blink an eye at paying for phones or for whatever kinds of things in our lives, new shirts, whatever. It’s, it’s paying a little bit more, eating a whole lot less of meats of all kinds. I will add that for me things like fish. That’s a really difficult one to understand anything about what you’re eating. So to understand what the fish stocks would be like in a particular place at a particular time, how it was fished, how it was processed it all of that kind of stuff to me is is so complicated. And knowing where your cattle comes from your beef, your chicken, it’s it to me is a bit easier to understand and to pick something that is much better, but I would always advocate and I eat much less meat than I did previously. So now I think that it’s much better to eat less.
Alex Wise 27:42 You mentioned Whippoorwill Creek Farms, merchandise and people want to learn more about the farm. It’s Iowa dash farm.com and the book is called “Bet the Farm: the dollars and cents of growing food in America.” Beth Hoffman – Beth, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Beth Hoffman 28:01 Thanks, Alex. I enjoyed it.
Narrator 28:04 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our Intro Music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Dr. John Elvis Presley and Steely Dan. Check out our website at Sea Change Radio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcasts. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, many others and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio. I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Beth Hoffman: Betting The Farm appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
The next time you’re doing a load of laundry, take a second and think about all that goes into cleaning your clothes. You’ve probably contemplated the water and electricity this activity consumes, but if you’re like most Americans and you use liquid detergent, there’s also a lot plastic and gasoline involved, as well. This week on Sea Change Radio, we talk to Brad Liski, the CEO and co-founder of Tru Earth, a company that has pioneered a better way to clean clothes. The company’s unique paper-thin cleaning strips involve zero plastic packaging, and weigh nearly nothing in comparison to liquid detergents (which, incidentally, comprise 80% water). This means no plastic waste as well as a lot less fuel required to transport product around the globe. We learn about the Tru Earth product, talk about slow progress toward environmental responsibility in the conventional laundry detergent industry, and discuss the need for a plumbing infrastructure that enables effective water re-use.
Narrator 0:01 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Brad Liski 0:17 I dream, actually Alex, of a day where all the major CPG firms – all the major consumer packaged good firms – that are the big creators of detergent, turn off their laundry jug assembly lines and switch to this method.
Alex Wise 0:44 Next time you’re doing a load of laundry, take a second and think about all that goes into cleaning your clothes. You’ve probably contemplated the water and electricity this activity consumes. But if you’re like most Americans, and you use liquid detergent, there’s also a lot of plastic and gasoline involved as well. This week on seachange radio, we talked to Brad litski, the CEO and co founder of Tru Earth, a company that’s pioneered a better way to clean clothes. The company’s unique paper thin cleaning strips involve zero plastic packaging, and weigh nearly nothing in comparison to liquid detergents, which incidentally, comprise 80% water. This means no plastic waste, as well as a lot less fuel required to transport around the globe. We learn about the true worth product, talk about slow progress toward environmental responsibility in the conventional laundry detergent industry, and discuss the need for a plumbing infrastructure that enables effective water reuse. I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Brad Liski. He’s the CEO and co founder of Tru Earth. Brad, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Brad Liski 2:04 I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alex Wise 2:06 So this is a really cool idea. Why don’t you first explain the basic products that Tru Earth makes for our listeners?
Brad Liski 2:15 Yeah, so the hero product, if you will for the movement that’s kind of gone. viral is a eco strip laundry detergent. So it’s essentially, instead of a liquid or a powder, laundry detergent, it’s in a in a small compact load controlled strip. And you just literally throw that strip into the laundry. And you’re done. No overdosing no mass at made it something extremely easy. That used to be a pain.
Alex Wise 2:44 And how did you hit upon this idea? I mean, it’s almost like the washing version of the dryer sheet, if you will.
Alex Wise 2:51 Yeah. And you know, and that’s the funny thing about it, because it was actually an extended family member. And he invested in the in the patent holder, several years ago when they had a laundry detergent. And he’s the one that reached out, but I didn’t really get it. I didn’t understand what a laundry sheet was. And I did exactly like you is like is it a dryer sheet like I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. And they struggled explaining it, which was probably why they’re having troubles. But I grew up in an eco conscious household. And I still couldn’t understand how an entire jug of laundry detergent could possibly fit in packaging the size of an iPhone. But he convinced me to try it. So I brought some in get my partners. So we decided, let’s give it a roll and see if it actually works. And all three of us, including her spouses concluded that stuff actually works. And that was one of those. Okay, so what we did, Alex was we put it through our we had at the time a very tested and proven system of launching products. And we wanted to get 150 strangers to subscribe in the first 30 days. And we ended up with 1500. And we’re like, Okay, this is exceeded anything we’ve ever done before. This is more than just a cool product.
Alex Wise 4:09 And it is a really cool product, though. So I’ve been using it and have not noticed any difference in terms of our clothes being any less clean by any means. I haven’t put a through a really well soiled load yet, but it feels like it works just as well as liquid. Let’s talk about the environmental problem that liquid and powdered traditional laundry detergents create and what solution to earth and these type of laundry sheets are presenting.
Brad Liski 4:46 Yeah, that’s it’s a good point. Alex is that you know one of the major problems with laundry detergent, as a whole is literally the plastic drug that it comes in. And the 80% of the water that has been trapped transported around. And the amount of pollution that is created in transporting these heavy jugs is absolutely unnecessary now. And even though these containers are recyclable, as we know, only 9% of plastic is actually recycled. So meaning 91% of that is heading to the landfill or an ocean. And then the next problem is the amount of active ingredients. So as you said, you know, it cleans clothes. So most detergents are filled with a lot more chemicals way more than we need to actually clean our clothes. And no fault is that are us as consumers we demanded perfection. So the CPG CPG firms, they’ve overdosed that detergent,
Alex Wise CPG – That’s consumer packaging, sorry, right?
Brad Liski 5:46 So the consumer packaged goods firms, so the big creators of, of detergents and cleaners in the world, they’ve done what we’ve asked them to and they’ve overdosed the detergent. So we get that once in a blue moon blood stain. You know, I don’t know about you, but I don’t I don’t bleed on my clothes a lot. Or do I go skidding across the grass. But you know, once that wash cycle finishes, those chemicals are going, you know, from the machine and we washed away down your drain through into the waterways, the streams, lakes and oceans. So what we’ve tried to focus on was, let’s get the detergent to be the right amount to clean your clothes, let’s do the job it’s supposed to do. And if you get that heavy load, well then put another half a sheet or another sheet. That’s the winner in this.
Alex Wise 6:34 So I didn’t realize that liquid detergent is 80% water which he just mentioned. That’s that’s a stunning amount. That also probably means an awful lot of waste in terms of transportation I imagine and fuels that accompanies that transportation.
Brad Liski 6:52 Absolutely that you know we take a look at because the products we have right now have that smaller eco footprint than the liquids or the powders, the ingredients they’re also you know chosen with that environment. Mine the phosphate and paraben free data dyes are bleaches vegan, hypoallergenic and rarely biodegradable. But when we talk about zero waste packaging, and the lightweight that reduction of transportation, fuel consumption, the global warming carbon emissions are reduced by 94%. Compared to the liquids and powder that’s that’s just one of those really, why aren’t we just doing this everywhere?
Alex Wise 7:29 You mentioned how the traditional detergents are kind of overkill. Why don’t you explain what true Earth is made out of and what people will be putting against their skin through the transitive property once they wash their clothes in it?
Brad Liski 7:44 Yeah, no, I’m definitely not the chemist in our in our company, which is, which is good. That’s good for everybody on the earth that I’m not the chemist.
Alex Wise 7:52 But you were talking about bloodstains. Like for example, anytime we have stains in our house on anything, we treat it with a little mixture of dish soap, and baking soda and hydrogen peroxide and we mix that together and then we let it set but like I know that there’s these instant spray on stain removers, which are a wildly popular segment of the consumer packaged goods industry. And they always come with tons of scent, and they seem wasteful and they don’t work as well as that little home remedy that we use.
Brad Liski 8:24 That is absolutely true. And even that scent attack, you know, will will recommend or people or change makers or customers they’ve said they’ve told us the hacks where you just take you know a little centimeter by centimeter quarter inch by quarter inch square of this strip, and you just put it on the stain and it just actively breaks that stain down so you don’t need that heavy duty cleaner. But yes, you know, as far as what I love about what we’ve got going is that we put all of our ingredients on the website. So those people that were completely transparent, or even our material safety data sheets are there for our scented and unscented but making sure that we’re our enemy right now is plastic. We’re attacking plastic and attacking carbon emissions. And then we’ll continue to now go inside the formula and attack the formula as well. But what’s good about it is that we’re all focused on making sure that whatever cleaners we have in it are there but they’re not more than are needed. And that we’re always looking for improvement on anything that there is
Alex Wise 9:32 So I interrupted you and you said you weren’t a chemist, but you mentioned that your ingredients for Tru Earth, the laundry detergent is on your website, but maybe you can just walk us through the basic ingredient list.
Brad Liski 9:44 Sure. So there’s vegetable glycerin in there, which is derived from from soy. We have a starch which is the binding agent. Potassium sulfate i think is in there. We’ve got some coconut propylene, which is coconut oil based, so biodegradable Of course, and then sodium glucan, eight. Lauro dimethyl. And then of course the sulphonic acids, the C 14 sixteens. And I think glycerin and some glucoside. And then the fragrance oils in the fragrance free. There’s nothing there’s no no sense whatsoever.
Alex Wise 10:29 And the C 14 and C 16. those the ones that are kind of the secret sauce for cleaning or what are the key ingredients for removing dirt?
Brad Liski 10:40 That is right, yeah, yeah, you see 1416 alkine, hydroxide hydroxy sorry, sodium salts, biodegradable surfactants those are active cleaning agents. And then a little bit of the the biodegradable non ionic surfactant in there as well. Plant derived, of course.
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Alex Wise 11:39 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to the CEO and co-founder of Tru Earth Brad Liski. So, Brad, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your company. You’re Canadian based? You’re a small company still, relatively. What’s your vision for the arc of this company? And maybe kind of give us a behind the scenes look at how Tru Earth operates?
Brad Liski 12:01 Yeah, absolutely. Our mission is actually our critical cause, which is to make true lasting change that helps save the planet. And our current battle, as you said, is to eradicate that plastic from from landfills and oceans. But what we’ve realized in we launched only in April of 2019. So we got two and a half years under our belt. But we’re now in 65 countries are a midsize firm and continue to grow to little over 230 employees. And from there, the vision is to continue to bring products that help our changemakers our customers make the changes they want to make and in the household. So we’re focused on the laundry room, the kitchen and the bathroom, and trying to offer this solution. Because of that transportation reduction that we have to get out. We all have to get that carbon emission, this product can span the globe, way more environmentally than others.
Alex Wise 13:03 Now explain how we haven’t gotten to costs and how much it costs a consumer to use your product. Why don’t you kind of do an apples to apples comparison, on the true Earth, laundry detergent strips versus let’s say, tide?
Brad Liski 13:22 Yeah, so when the pandemic hit, we moved to a annual supply of detergent, which is a 384 load. It’s about the size, it’s a box about the size of a wine bottle for the entire year. And the cost of that is less than your Tide Pod. If you’re buying, you know any other options, you go on a subscription. And basically for $13 a month…
Alex Wise 13:45 …before you say Tide Pod, all I know about Tide Pod is that people eat them. I’ve never bought them. So if you can kind of just compare it to like a jug of liquid.
Brad Liski 13:56 So the jug of liquid you’re looking at it is a premium over your jug in the describe load over load basis. But because I don’t know about you, but I’ve been fired from laundry like eight times in my life, because I pour too much in that machine. So when the net result of what you’re yielding out of that container, were right in line. So because the RS are dose controlled, I can’t get fired anymore, because I know that I turned the strip off and that’s one load. So I can’t mess up and send too many suds into the, into the machine.
Alex Wise 14:27 So you have free shipping included. I interrupted the cost breakdown for a consumer when you continue.
Brad Liski 14:34 Yeah, so especially in that subscription, where it’s $13 a month for the average family of four. So that’s the 32 loads. We don’t really realize but we do about eight loads a week as a family of four. And so we’ve predetermined that or tried to match with it, but you can do once every two months or once every three months or or more loads if you’ve got a bigger family. But once you take in the fact that it’s being delivered in your mailbox, the same savings is real compared to going to the store buying that jug carrying that jug home, bring it or getting it delivered.
Alex Wise 15:08 So I have to confess that even though I’m using a similar product, my wife found a competitor, initially, and that was the one that she signed up for. I think it’s like Earth Breeze or something. But as I did research into this, I found that you guys were the first to create this. And so I wanted to have you on the show. Why don’t you explain the competitive landscape and what’s keeping like a Procter and Gamble from getting into this, it might be a bad thing for Tru Earth, but it could be a good thing for the planet if more and more of these companies shift away from the very inefficient liquids and powders.
Brad Liski 15:47 Yeah, 100%. You know, yes, we’re seeing many knockoffs and they’re all coming from overseas and grabbing the bandwagon because we got to the cool little product now so many small drop-shippers are, you know, trying to profit from it. And I dream actually Alex have a day where all the major CPG firms all the major consumer packaged good firms that are the big creators of detergent, turn off their laundry jug assembly lines and switch to this method. That won’t be bad news for us that we didn’t get in this to make a billion dollar corporation. We got in this to disrupt. And for us to have real sustainability in this segment, we need the big firms to join in. That is what we would be proud to call Legacy In my mind, the consumer smart now. And finally, they can make a choice that is easy, economical and eco friendly. Bring it I want it not from I bring it from a competitive bring it because the planet needs it right now. We need to switch Time to wake up.
Alex Wise 16:51 So you mentioned that the laundry detergent was just one piece of the Tru Earth product line. What else do you guys make?
Brad Liski 17:00 Right now we have a multi surface cleaner, disinfecting multi surface cleaner. That’s in Canada, and getting approvals into the us soon. We have everything from dryer balls to produce bags to metal straws to makeup wipe removers, we’re going to continue to focus on you know, not only the suite of products we have now. But the plan launch is coming this year, we made a pledge to provide our customers those true changemakers. With those the products, they need to make a substantial impact on the health of the world. They’re relying on us, there’s over half a million of them that are buying direct and many more that are buying through retail locations. And we’re making that change, we’re filling that pipeline and relying on us to do that. And from our perspective, it’s very exciting times ahead, because we just love to disrupt and we’re disrupting the multi surface cleaner.
Alex Wise 17:55 And maybe you can kind of outline how that might be different than what you might buy at a big supermarket.
Brad Liski 18:03 It’s the exact same technology that created the laundry detergent sheet, in that it comes in a four by four sheet and you roll it up and put it in your water bottle, mix it with water and you’ve got a disinfected multi surface cleaner. So and inside the envelope that you know 32 loads of laundry detergent would come with the same size, you get 16 doses for lockers is not really loads 16 doses of the detergent or probably the cleaner, which is the equivalent of three spray bottles. So in an envelope in your mailbox, three spray bottles, so you’re saving all three of those plastics. And that is that plastic bottle that we talked about. There’s over 645 billion plastic household containers being disposed of in landfills each year.
Alex Wise 18:50 Wow. So with that laundry subscription, you have the same technology, but in a slightly different form. That’s kind of set aside for a spray bottle. And then you can just use that on surfaces.
Brad Liski 19:06 Yeah, so it’s completely different formula. It’s a different type of cleaner. And it’s designed for exactly that surfaces.
Alex Wise 19:12 So it’s a different formula. It’s not the same?
Brad Liski 19:15 Yeah, it’s the same manufacturing process, not the same chemical composition.
Alex Wise 19:21 Got it, but it comes in paper type form. That’s right. That’s really cool. And so when for example, I would buy a jug of simple green and concentrate and that might last me a year like because I would water it down and put it into the existing plastic bottles. And that’s a fairly environmentally friendly way to do it versus buying the each each plastic bottle already. Yes. Already diluted. So buying it in concentrate feels like oh, I’m being environmentally friendly, but compared to what the true Earth solution is. It’s it’s night and day.
Brad Liski 19:57 Yeah, I know it’s not quite night and day because you do In a great job, because that’s a big step, right you’re taking, you know, three, three to 10 of those little plastic containers now you’re only making one plastic container. So that’s that’s a win put that into one category. The bigger win is to now let’s get it in a paper envelope. And let’s have zero plastic. So you know, it’s evening and night.
Alex Wise 20:19 I love it. Well, one thing that we do in my house and I want to be more of an evangelist for this, and I have a soapbox, no pun intended to stand on for this is greywater systems. And we have a system that pumps up from our basement where our laundry is up to our garden, and we have a little reusable wine barrel that 60 gallons that that keeps all of our, our gray water in there and then we can water our garden with it. Now obviously the true Earth laundry detergent is eco friendly enough to use in grey water systems but maybe you can kind of address the insanity of our current plumbing systems where we’re using lots and lots of fresh water and not reusing that water just to clean clothes.
Brad Liski 21:06 Right and without question so yes to the to the first part is that all the truth products or septic safe and greywater systems safe. So it’s, it’s a great solution on that. And you’re saving on that overdosing of those chemicals into that gray water and you’re trying to combat against. But yeah, the tremendous amount of water that we’re wasting as a as a planet is, is ridiculous. And I was I was guilty 100% when I when I’d overdosed by and just if I stick in that laundry room, let alone every other room. And I put too much soap in that that washing machine, and the washing machine would get too many bubbles and then we’d have to rinse it three times to get it right. And then we had to clean it. Because had too much soap in it. All that stuff starts to take a chip away at that big problem that we’re up against.
Alex Wise 22:01 But we’re all guilty in some ways, but so much of it is not personal decisions that you make at the grocery store. But a lot of it is infrastructure. I mean, how did we create a system where potable water is being used for our waste in the bathroom? I mean showers and bathtubs when we don’t reuse this water? Well, you know, you see, the fifth largest economy in the world in California is going through a pretty stark era of desertification where every summer there’s wildfires and we’re in what many call the pirate scene and yet we’re using water very carelessly.
Brad Liski 22:41 Absolutely and i don’t i don’t know you know that the human nature behind why we have to do it but it stems from that same reason of our need for perfection in our in our in our desire not to be inconvenienced. You know, when we had a water This was just an example we had a water shortage out here a couple of years ago and my in laws, and we couldn’t water any of the grasses or couldn’t do anything. And they were having their, their I think it was their 50th wedding anniversary in their backyard and they wanted to have green grass. So what they did was they captured all their own gray water at their sink, as they wouldn’t go they just keep it in pails. And they take it outside and put it on their on their lawn because there’s no other way to capture it. So and they were the only they had the green lawn in order to have their pictures taken on a green lawn. We’re just not willing to do that for most of us. So you know, I applaud anyone for to go that extra step to put that system in, if you can, and the push on the municipalities to make a change. We laughed out here because they painted fishes on all of our storm drains. Because people didn’t understand that the storm drain went right into the river system, there was no filtration system. So they had the pain of fish on the storm drain. So that we as consumers would stop pouring, washing our peat brushes, or pouring oil, Balinese star brands. I think one of my attacks that we want to we want to focus on and I get the privilege of mentoring at University of British Columbia and climate solutions and, and so people are trying to invent some things to attack micro plastics. That’s where we want to reinvest some of our profits. And we need to attack these micro plastics. We need to capture those in one way or another we have to stop this.
Alex Wise 24:30 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio and I’m speaking to the CEO and co-founder of Tru Earth, Brad Liski. So there was this trend in the laundry detergent industry with these microbeads that dissolved quote unquote dissolving microbeads that looked like a real kind of neat-o toy almost but it was like it’s a toy and it cleans your clothes. But it also is not very kind to aquatic life. But there’s been a real shift in the industry to Get away from these microplastics these microbeads correct
Brad Liski 25:03 Yeah there is i think i think it was one of those things that people thought and then they didn’t think a little bit farther into and you know, there’s better ways of dealing with the microplastics I don’t you know, I can’t divulge some of the stuff that’s coming out of the out of the labs here. But there are things coming there are solutions coming what I’m working on is how do I get in the house it’s one thing to deal with it at a at a municipal level. But that takes so much time there’s so much political movement that has to be to make those changes where if I can get it to the to the change maker, the person who’s actually making a difference right now, then then the government will should you know come election time come with, but right now, unfortunately, the pressures put on us.
Alex Wise 25:50 Talking about the micro beads that came out as a product as somebody who follows the consumer packaged goods industry closely I imagine Are there any new products on the horizon we should look out for that are going to be like the wine coolers of the laundry detergent industry.
Brad Liski 26:07 It is not an industry that changed much like it really didn’t the pod was the latest invention. And in this sector, it was it was a sleeper, it was ripe for disruption. And but there’s innovations coming that way you’re seeing the innovation going the other way. Cold water attacks, right so we’re trying to the bigger firms are trying to to attack the cold water, which is great.
Alex Wise 26:34 Yeah, I’ve noticed that I’ve heard ads for the bigger companies saying you know, you should use it in cold water and save X amount on your in your hot water bill and be good for the planet. So this is I remember all temperature cheer When I was a kid was like, this was like, some innovation. So this is not a new innovation. It’s just a new way for the social impact division of a multinational to say, Hey, you know, we’re, we should on Earth, this new segment of eco conscious consumers.
Brad Liski 27:05 Yeah, it’s a framing that, you know, I don’t I don’t cast a stone at it. I do, but I don’t, you know, they’re trying to frame it to way that people understand that they don’t need to use the hot water. And I get that, because that that’s hard to do. Because it has been around for a long time. But it’s not innovation. It’s just a different framework of it, and doing what they have to do to combat. You know, I think the only solution is to just shut the plastic lines down. We don’t need it anymore. It’s like, the wagons don’t need to be made anymore. We’ve made a car. So let’s go. Let’s make that change.
Alex Wise 27:39 Well, I’ve never had such an in depth discussion about laundry detergent and I and I found it fascinating. The company is Tru Earth – T-R-U Earth, folks can go to Tru.earth to find it. Brad Liski is the CEO and co-founder. Brad, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Brad Liski Alex, it was a pleasure. It was a lot of fun. Anytime.
Narrator You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio, our intro music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Freddie Hubbard and Alvin Youngblood Hart, check out our website at Sea Change Radio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear for Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others. and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
This article and podcast Tru Earth CEO Brad Liski: Detergent Insurgent appeared first on Sea Change Radio.
Globally suicide accounts for about 20% of all gun-related deaths. But in the United States, the country with the highest per-capita civilian gun ownership, over 60% of deaths from firearms are suicides. What accounts for this disparity? And why do efforts at gun reform continue to fail in this country? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with an attorney leading the charge for smarter, saner gun laws in the U.S. Robyn Thomas is the Executive Director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. We take a look at trends over the past few years, examine disputes over the interpretation of the Second Amendment, and discuss the persistent political standstill which seems immune to tragedy.
Narrator 0:02 This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.
Robyn Thomas 0:17 Look at the average family or community in Texas. They’re not so concerned about having access to assault weapons what they’d rather have is their children safe at school. And if the messaging is done right in a way that people understand this isn’t a choice between all or nothing. This isn’t about, can you have guns or no guns? It’s about can we implement the kinds of common sense regulations that will make our children safer and doesn’t change people’s ability to go hunting or sports shooting or whatever it is, that’s really important to them.
Narrator 0:47 Globally, suicide accounts for about 20% of all gun related deaths. But in the United States, the country with the highest per capita civilian gun ownership, over 60% of deaths from firearms are suicides. what accounts for this disparity? And why do efforts at gun reform continue to fail in this country? This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with an attorney leading the charge for smarter saner gun laws in the US. Robyn Thomas is the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. We take a look at trends over the past few years, examined disputes over the interpretation of the Second Amendment and discuss the persistent political standstill, which seems immune to tragedy.
Alex Wise 1:57 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by my friend Robyn Thomas. She is the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Robyn, welcome to Sea Change Radio.
Robyn Thomas 2:06 Thank you so much for having me, Alex.
Alex Wise 2:08 So explain what the mission of the Giffords Law Center is, and maybe the evolution of the organization. It’s a fairly newly dubbed nonprofit, correct?
Robyn Thomas 2:19 Yeah, the origin story goes back about 28 years, in early July of 1993, there was a mass shooting at a law firm in downtown San Francisco, the law firm of pet and Martin. And following that tragedy, the legal community in the city of San Francisco, many of whom had lost friends and colleagues decided to get together and do something about gun violence. So they formed what was then called the legal community against violence. And the mission was to corral and inspire the involvement of the legal community in the United States to help and to support the movement to reduce and prevent gun violence. Initially, they focused on what was then a federal assault weapon ban, which they succeeded in helping to pass in 1994, unfortunately, that sunset, and expired in 2004, and was not renewed, but they did have early success in accomplishing what they set out to do. And once they accomplish that, they turn their attention mostly to California laws, and then eventually to other national laws to try and create a model here in California, of what comprehensive thoughtful gun regulation could look like. I’ll skip over some of the early work that they did in the successes they had, California has the strongest gun laws in the country, in large part due to the work that was done by the organization over the last now almost 30 years. And it really has created a model that other states have then stepped up to rapidly try and replicate and and adopt. Later on as there were opportunities. Other states will look to California for inspiration. So we rebranded as the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and in about 20 I want to say mark and Gabby formed, sorry, Senator Mark Kelly, and former representative Gabby Giffords formed in about 2012. So Gabby was as many people listening will remember, there was an attempted assassination against her at a Congress on your corner event in jail on January 8 2011. She spent most of the next year in very intensive surgery and recovery and, you know, rehab just developing again hurt the ability to walk and sort of function. And in late 2012, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened December 14 2012. And following that event, Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords decided to launch an organization to try and do something about gun violence on the premise that, you know, Gabby had a unique voice and was a unique ambassador for the issue based on her experience. So that was in 20. 13 and I met Mark Kelly at an event I should say, Senator Mark Kelly, although he wasn’t the senator then at an event for gun violence, soon after that, so it was maybe in about 2014. And we decided that, because they were mostly focused on politics, their highest talents and skills and knowledge and connections in the world really had to do with their desire to move the politics of this issue to make it the case that politicians could lead on this issue that, you know, for many, many years, this was a very third rail issue politically, and those that spoke out in favor of gun policy reform often drew the wrath of the NRA, who would go target them basically, and made it very hard to convince politicians to be champions on this issue. So Mark and Gaby set out to change that dynamic to basically ensure that we could find champions on this issue that they would get supported publicly that they would get financial support that they would have an incentive to speak up on this issue. And in doing so to balance the scales a bit, and make it an issue that politicians could vote their conscience on, instead of voting out of fear of being lobbied against by the NRA. So they were doing a lot of political work. And we had already by then, for more than 20 years, been the lead national leading policy experts on gun policy reform. So what we did was we partnered, and we started to work together on a variety of projects, we would do the legal and policy and analysis, you know, domestic violence and guns, and it would have a set of policy solutions that went along with it. And they would take these reports, and then take them out and use them to educate legislators to push for change to use the might of their voice and their sort of lobbying and political weight to try and make things happen based on our recommendations. And it was very successful, it was kind of a perfect collaboration.
Alex Wise 6:54 Is gun violence up in the last 18 months? And if so, what does the Giffords Law Center attribute that to – what are we seeing that is moving the needle?
Robyn Thomas 7:04 So when you see the last 18 months, we’re talking about basically in the time of COVID, gun violence over the last three years has been steadily increasing. So it was down it was very, very high in the in the 80s. And early 90s. It took a pretty significant reduction, it was down to about 30 is still far too many, but down to about 3030 to 33,000 deaths a year more than 100,000 shootings for quite some time, it was sort of stayed pretty steady. And in the last few years, it’s gone up quite a bit. We were up to about 38,000 shootings last year or so. Or not shootings, deaths, which led which translated into about 120,000 shootings, those numbers are up. And interestingly, mass shootings were down not down in the smaller numbers. But the high fatality mass shootings, actually were down in the last 18 months. Not surprisingly, because of COVID. there just weren’t a lot of mass gatherings, which is often unfortunately, where that happens. The reason why gun violence was significantly up in the last two years has to do with a few things, I think, mostly COVID related. One is suicide. So the largest portion of gun deaths in America is actually suicides to about two thirds. So with something like COVID, where people are isolated where they’re facing a lot greater stress, we know mental health issues were exacerbated by COVID for so many people, and because suicide is an impulsive act, and when guns are present, extremely lethal, we saw an increase there also saw an increase in domestic violence incidents, many of them unfortunately, which lead to fatalities. So with predominantly women, who are the victims of this stuck at home, not able to get the help they need or the support, they need to maybe leave an abusive situation we saw an increase in domestic violence fatalities. Same thing with children and accidents. You had children who would normally be at school all day, home all day stuck in the house with I think it’s about 2 million homes which have loaded unsecured weapons with children in the home. So there was a greater increase of accidents with children. We are seeing an increase now in community violence, shootings, you know, the community violence work, which really focuses on the population, young men of color make up about 6% of the population and represent about 50% of homicides, the best, most effective way of tackling that issue. And that kind of gun violence is through community based violence intervention programs like ceasefire in Oakland and advanced peace and other cities here in California. And some people know about, you know, other types of programs Cure Violence, there’s all these different models of Violence Intervention. Well, a lot of them rely upon street outreach workers to get involved in the community and help with these interventions. And in a time of COVID, many of these programs weren’t able to operate. So we also saw an increase in community violence. So really, while mass shootings are the ones that get the the news that get the coverage that people know about. And remember, that makes up a tiny, tiny percentage of that number of shootings and math and deaths. And all of the other areas outside of mass shootings were up quite a bit the last 18 months.
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Alex Wise 11:10 this is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Robyn Thomas. She’s the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. So Robyn, let’s turn to the political sphere and look at guns in the us right now in terms of policy, focusing on background checks, it looks for a little while before the election of Joe Biden that Republicans may be a little more flexible in terms of background checks, there was a little bit of momentum before the election, can you kind of catch us up to where things have gone on both sides of the aisle and your hopes for some kind of federal action on background checks that’s significant and satisfies you and your colleagues at the Gifford center.
Robyn Thomas 12:00 So we’ve been optimistic about background checks for a while now, mostly because 92% of the American public supports universal background checks, we kind of half joke, you can’t get 92% of Americans to agree on anything, not even ice cream and puppies. And yet we agree on this. So our assumption was okay, if 92% of Americans want this, obviously, it’s going to happen. We actually did get it passed HR-8 got through the House in 2018, I believe.
Alex Wise 12:30 And what exactly is HR-8, sorry,
Robyn Thomas 12:33 HR-8 is the bipartisan background checks act. And it basically fills the gaps because now you have a background check required on the sale of a gun if you buy it from a federally licensed firearms dealer. But if you buy a gun online, if you buy a gun at a private sale or at a gun show from a licensed dealer, then there’s no background check required by federal law. So about 21 states give or take have passed state laws that fill some of that they either require a background check on online sales or gun shows or in California, we cry, we require a background check on every sale and transfer of a gun. So there’s been some movement to fill that gap but not at the federal level. So what HR eight would do would be to require all gun sales to be you know, conducted with a background check. Now there are exceptions for for family, immediate family members or loans for hunting, things that you know, I think are important to gun owners that it not be sort of overly cumbersome. But really it would capture almost all of the unregulated sales now going on without background checks. So we got through the house, it passed the House resoundingly with bipartisan support, I believe there were eight Republicans who voted for that bill. So it got through, and then it went over to the Senate side, and proceeded to languish there. And we believe that once the senate came back with the majority now it’s 5050 split. But really, it’s a majority, and very strong support from President Biden, that this is something that we could get done. And we’ve been aggressively talking about how important this is as a way to make progress. And I actually testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee in 2019, around this bill, and then I testified in front of the senate again this year in march around this bill and other legislation. And unfortunately, it hasn’t even been brought to a vote and it still sits there in the Senate. I would like to believe we have 50 votes for it at least because it is something that is so popularly supported. But with filibuster rules. 50 votes isn’t enough right now. So you really do need to get closer to 60 in order to get much accomplished on legislation like this. So it is sitting there and we are optimistic that first of all, it can be bipartisan in the same way that it was in the house, and that it’s something we have to continue pushing for because it is something the American people really care about. I mean when when they So people coming out from voting in the last election, gun violence was at the top of the list, it was one of the top three issues that people were most concerned about. So we know this has become a voting issue for people. And that in many places, if legislators don’t stand up on this, they face consequences.
Alex Wise 15:17 And at the crux of the issue is the second amendment. It’s an age old discussion. We have a Supreme Court that is six to three conservative right now. So it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any progressive change from the judicial branch on that count. What are kind of are your greatest fears for what the court can do to kind of reverse some of the work that you and your colleagues do and on the flip side, what are some of the ways that we can work around this court? And it’s very narrow interpretation of the Second Amendment and as a kind of a sidebar that maybe you can kind of clarify your organization’s reading of the Second Amendment.
Robyn Thomas 16:00 Yeah, you can’t talk about guns without talking about the Second Amendment, which reads for people who don’t know, a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed for many years for 200 years or more after the founding of our country. courts, pretty much unanimously held that the Second Amendment doesn’t involve a private right to gun ownership. It involves a militia related, right, basically what we call a collective right. And it was never accepted as a valid response to prohibiting gun regulation. Well, in 2008, the Supreme Court took up a case called Heller, Heller versus DC, and it was a challenge to Washington DC is almost complete ban on private gun ownership, which have been in place for about 30 years. And unfortunately, for the first time in history, the Supreme Court held that you do in fact, have a private right to own a firearm. And that decision was very, very narrow, it said, you have a private right to own a handgun in your home for self defense, which is what was prohibited by DC law. It was frustrating because it really was a complete overturning of precedent without actually acknowledging that it made out as if this was always the case when it was for the first time identified in 2008. It was upsetting, and we knew it was going to lead to an avalanche of litigation against gun laws across the country, which it did. But it was a very narrow, narrow decision, it did not answer a lot of questions about what else the Second Amendment does or doesn’t do. In fact, Scalia penned the opinion. And he actually wrote about how the decision was not intended to cast out on other long standing prohibitions and, you know, public safety issues. Since then there’s only been one other Second Amendment case taken up by the court and I serpo, which was a case in New York, your Gosh, year or two ago, COVID time, but essentially challenged a law in New York City having to do with your ability to transport guns in your car. It was basically mooted by the court on procedural grounds. So nothing came out of that the court has a case right now. So the court has a case that’s being heard on November 3, also in New York City case. And then we’ll be probably the decision out sometime in the spring, usually it comes out the very last week of term. So the end of June. So you will be seeing a Supreme Court decision on gun policy next June. We are very afraid of this case, because of the court makeup. And what this case does is it challenges concealed carry permitting. So in New York City has a very restrictive concealed carry permitting system, you have to be able to show good cause, why you need to carry a loaded concealed weapon in public to get a permit in New York City. And in order to get it you have to be someone who I don’t know, carries a lot of cash and jewelry around at night or has had, you know, your life threatened or something that really explains why you might need this weapon. And they’re very rarely granted these these permits in New York City. And for anyone who spent any time in Time Square. You know why? It’s just simply not something that would make sense in a city like that. Well, that permitting system has been challenged. It’s up to the Supreme Court. And we’re concerned that this decision could affect concealed carry permitting. And really the broader question of what is your second amendment right outside the home? That is not something the Court has said anything about now, we believe the court can issue a really narrow opinion here, which really focuses on New York City’s law, and how that law might not withstand scrutiny. But some minor adjustments might be good enough. But it could be a broad opinion, which would really call into question concealed carry permitting systems across the country and many states don’t even have them anymore. It’s been targeted by the gun lobby to really do what they could to weaken permitting. In many states. You don’t even need a permit at all to carry a loaded concealed weapon in public. So we are nervous about this court. It’s an issue we’ve been concerned about. We’re certainly concerned about other I mean, there’s so little federal regulation on the books, so We’re really talking about state regulation states, like California have all kinds of really innovative and effective regulations that the gun lobby is. I mean, there’s so many lawsuits moving through the federal courts in California challenging all of our gun laws, because they’re just hoping and waiting for a chance to get these laws in front of the court. And it could be anything. It could be regulations on assault weapons, it could which are completely prohibited in the state of California or large capacity, ammunition magazines or safe storage laws or any number of other regulations that are very effective at reducing and preventing gun violence is why California has one of the lowest gun death rates in the country.
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Alex Wise 21:44 This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Robyn Thomas. She’s the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. So I know the Gifford center, you’re not an arm of the Democratic Party. You’re not politically affiliated, and yet, this issue of gun violence has become so blue and red. What can unmoored the Republican Party from its current recalcitrance? Is it the money of the gun lobby? Is it the base and its interpretation of the second amendment that people who like guns will vote for republicans Generally, we always have a sandy hook type event and think, well, this is they can’t possibly not move now. But they never move. Is there any hope that some issue or some election will conform the winds of change in this country?
Robyn Thomas 22:36 I am actually happy to say the winds are changing. So I think back to your comment about what is it that holds such sway? Yes, it’s money. Yes, it’s they’re very, very active single issue base. And it’s also, you know, this belief that there isn’t a strong enough voice on the other side. And that has really changed dramatically in the last 10 years. I mean, I have seen radical change on this issue since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, not just in terms of the 300 laws we’ve helped pass at the state level since since that tragedy, but also at terms of the number of political candidates willing to champion this issue in their campaigns. I mean, 10 years ago, you’d be hard pressed to find candidates who would talk about gun policy in their campaign, because it didn’t earn them enough friends, and it made them a lot of enemies. And that has changed. I mean, I can even say, from a personal perspective. You know, when I would tell people what I do before Sandy Hook, they just sort of roll their eyes and after Sandy Hook, people would do teary eyed and be hugging me because they were so upset about what’s happening in this country. So there really was, I think, a pretty big shift after Sandy Hook, and again, after Parkland, and after some of these other sort of horrific public shootings, where it sort of creates an awakening. You know, the big difference I think on this is sort of those, those collar counties, all of these places where you have, you know, suburban seats, which may be red and maybe blue, but seem to be trending toward an issue towards this issue. So you know, say in like, you know, suburban Texas, you have districts that have like always voted red or have always voted for candidates who have a certain conservative position. And that’s changing a lot. I mean, part of its the demographics, but part of it is also on this issue, that you know, the soccer moms care now, whatever their political affiliation, this is something their kid having a lockdown drill at school is more important to them than a lot of other issues that they’re that they’re thinking about when they vote, and it is creating a shift. So I think, you know, we’re seeing we endorse something like 300 candidates the gifford’s arm of the organization in the last cycle, and I think more than 200 of them 250 of them one, including President Biden, who has been very assertive on this issue. There’s never been a president who ran for office on his on the platform. He And one has been outstanding and his administration, you know, they haven’t been able to do as much as we hoped. But certainly they seem to be listening. And that’s a lot more than we can say for, you know, almost any previous administration.
Alex Wise 25:13 And you mentioned Texas, Robyn, I can’t help but think that a state like Texas, which is so long been considered, deeply read, which is now we realize much more in play. And it could be a real test for how strong gun rights are in red America, we see the El Paso shooting, and then former congressman Beto O’Rourke came out with a strong denouncement of Texas, his current gun laws. And when he ran for Senate, he fell short against Ted Cruz, but he took what many considered to be a third rail position, if you will. If he does run for governor against Abbott, it’d be interesting to see if that could actually flip conventional wisdom on its head.
Robyn Thomas 26:03 Yeah, I mean, one of the things I love about Beto is that he seems to really speak his truth. You know, when he states his position on something like guns, I don’t feel like he’s standing there carefully calibrating what he knows, someone told him after focus group testing, he needs to say in order to get X number of votes, he’s actually wrote, he seems to me from what I can gather watching him that he’s actually speaking from the heart that this is something that he believes in. And I think it would be fascinating if he were to win the governor spot, because I think for the most part, people agree with him. I mean, you know whether he won or didn’t win against Cruz because of that issue or another as was hard to say. Cruz obviously has a lot of name recognition and has been in power a long time. But I think the people in Texas for the most part, the average Texan is comfortable with swith, some amount of gun regulation that’s not in place. Now, like I said, if you look at the average family or community in Texas, they’re not so concerned about having access to assault weapons, what they’d rather have is their children safe at school. And if the messaging is done, right, in a way that people understand this isn’t a choice between all or nothing. This isn’t about, can you have guns or no guns, it’s about can we implement the kinds of common sense regulations that will make our children safer and doesn’t change people’s ability to go hunting or sport shooting, or whatever it is, that’s really important to them. It’s about regulations that help us keep guns out of the hands of the most dangerous people. And that helps us keep the most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous people. So for me, it’s always a question about where can we meet in the middle? You know, Texas isn’t going to have laws, maybe like California, at least not anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take steps there to make it a safer place. And I think that’s what people are clamoring for.
Alex Wise 27:52 She’s the executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Robyn Thomas. Robyn, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.
Robyn Thomas 28:01 Thanks for having me, Alex. It’s been great.
Narrator 28:17 You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our Intro Music is by Sanford Lewis and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by The Clash, Nouvelle Vague and The Breeders, check out our website at seachangeradio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast. Visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben, Van Jones, Paul Hawken, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week, as we continue making connections for Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.
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