Air Date: 10-7-2026

Today we trace the "Exxon Knew" story through a decade of our own archive, because that history is what the Supreme Court is weighing in Suncor v. Boulder in their first case this term. Exxon's scientists confirmed the climate science in the early eighties and the company chose to manufacture doubt. Communities like Boulder County have paid ever since and the question before the Supreme Court is whether any lawsuit like this will be allowed to go to trial.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we trace the "Exxon Knew" story through a decade of our own archive, because that history is what the Supreme Court is weighing in Suncor v. Boulder in their first case this term. Exxon's scientists confirmed the climate science in the early eighties and the company chose to manufacture doubt. Communities like Boulder County have paid ever since and the question before the Supreme Court is whether any lawsuit like this will be allowed to go to trial.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today, spanning episodes from the past decade, include

What A Day

On the Media

CounterSpin

Democracy Now!

The Thom Hartmann Program

and Downstream

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, The Industry's Playbook

Section B, Trump's Rollback and the Legal Fight to Stop It

Section C, Suncor v. Boulder and the Accountability Fight

And Section D, Nationalize It

And now, on to the show.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear arguments in a case involving a lawsuit by Boulder County, Colorado against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy.

Before we get to the Supreme Court case, what is Boulder County suing these companies for? 

All across the United States from Maine to Hawaii, dozens of state and local governments are right now suing major oil and gas companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, for deceiving the public about their fossil fuel products' role in the climate crisis, to hold them accountable for that deception, and to make them pay for the associated damages that they caused.

So the arguments in these cases are a lot like the lawsuits against tobacco companies or opioid manufacturers. These companies knew they were selling a harmful product, they lied to protect their profits, and now communities like Boulder are saying they need to be held accountable and pay for the damages that their deception has caused.

And, for Boulder, this question of who should pay for climate damages is not theoretical In 2021, part of Boulder County was hit by the Marshall Fire. It was the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. More than 1,000 homes were destroyed. And Boulder's lawsuit, which was filed in 2018, specifically names the increased risk of wildfires as one of the things the county needs to pay for and protect residents against going forward.

So I, I wanted to ask, 'cause you made a comparison that was really interesting to me, the comparison to lawsuits made against big tobacco and lawsuits made against Purdue Pharma and opioid manufacturers. Both of those entities, there's very, a very clear paper trail where both said, "Our products are not harmful."

What is Boulder, Colorado arguing is the similar element here? What did oil companies tell us that wasn't true? 

So thanks to whistleblowers, journalists, congressional investigations, we have a well-documented body of evidence that shows that companies like Exxon knew decades ago, as early as the 1970s, that in the words of one internal in- industry document, if we didn't stop using fossil fuels, it could lead to potentially catastrophic events But what did the companies do with this information?

We also have internal industry documents showing that they decided that rather than warn the public about the produ- the problem and help to steer the, nation toward a safer, cleaner energy future, instead they decided to lie, to deceive the public, to spread misinformation. And in doing so, they stole decades of time when we could have been doing more on climate change, and now communities like Boulder are paying the price for that deception.

Now, the reason this case is going before the Supreme Court is not because of Boulder County, it's because of the oil companies. Why are the oil companies arguing the Supreme Court needs to intervene here? 

As you might imagine, big oil companies are terrified of standing trial in these cases. They've argued in their own Supreme Court briefs that they're facing massive monetary liability in these lawsuits, and they are

If they're really held accountable to stop deceiving the public and pay for the damages that they've caused, they're staring at billions and billions of dollars in liability. The oil companies claim that by trying to make these companies pay for local climate damages, these communities are somehow, trying to actually set national climate policy, and that these cases are therefore preempted by federal law.

Of course, Boulder's lawsuit is trying to do no such thing, and a growing number of courts, including the Colorado Supreme Court, that have looked at this issue have rejected big oil's arguments. 

So given the makeup of the Supreme Court, which is, pretty conservative right now, is there any reason to think they won't just side with the energy companies in this case?

obviously a lot of people hear a case is going to the Supreme Court, and it raises alarm bells. but again, the US Supreme Court has turned down many previous requests to take up one of these lawsuits as they're making their way through the lower courts, as they're heading to trial. And the justices sat on the petition in this case for several months.

And when they finally agreed to take the case, we got a hint at what might have been going on between closed doors, and that was that the justices added a second question, which was Do we, the Supreme Court, even have jurisdiction, meaning the authority, to hear this case right now at this time before there's a final judgment?

And so there are really signs that the justices internally might have doubts that they should even be weighing in on this issue yet. But on that core issue of are these cases preempted by federal law, look, every state Supreme Court to rule on this to date, including the Colorado Supreme Court, has said no.

These cases are squarely about holding companies accountable for deceptive conduct, and that communities like Boulder should be allowed to proceed toward discovery and trial. 

Last spring, The Wall Street Journal reported on a meeting President Trump had with oil and gas executives at the White House.

What have those executives been lobbying for from the Trump administration? 

Yeah, so I think what's really telling is that Wall Street Journal story said one of the top concerns oil executives brought directly to President Trump in person were lawsuits exactly like Boulder's. So a month after that meeting where they asked President Trump, "Can you help us fight these lawsuits?"

Trump issued an executive order. He directed Attorney General Bondi to take all appropriate action to try to stop these lawsuits. The Justice Department actually sued two states, Michigan and Hawaii, that had said, "We're gonna file our own lawsuits against big oil companies." And the case against Michigan has been dismissed, but the one against Hawaii is still pending.

And perhaps the most consequential thing the Trump administration has done to date to help bail out big oil was to tell the Supreme Court, again, in an uninvited brief, a rare thing, "You should take up this Boulder case." 

Oil companies are also working with Republican members in Congress to create legislation that would shield them from lawsuits that hold them responsible for environmental damage.

What do we know about those efforts? 

Yeah, it's true. They are so terrified of facing any accountability. They're not content to just make their case in court and take their chances. They're actually going around the courts directly lobbying Congress for what's called the liability waiver. This would be essentially immunity from any laws or lawsuits that could hold them accountable.

The American Petroleum Institute , the biggest oil lobbying group, said that killing these types of lawsuits is their top priority for 2026. And a House Republican, Harriet Hageman from Wyoming, has said she's working with colleagues in the House and Senate to introduce a bill that would shield oil companies from having to face any type of legal liability.

It's been interesting because you would think, and I, I... when Trump came back into office, you had this idea, this is going to be boom times for the oil and gas industry. He's going to open up drilling in a host of environmental refuges. There's going to be, big oil and big gas are going to be the beneficiaries of this administration, and that hasn't really been true to the extent that I think a lot of oil companies probably expected in 2024.

And now we're in the midst of a war with Iran that is pushing gas prices up because even with domestic production, there's only so much that the United States can do if the Strait of Hormuz is closed. But I think the wider thing I think everyone should be thinking about is why are we so reliant on oil?

It seems like, to me, a worthwhile opportunity to be thinking, rethinking our relationship with big oil. 

Amen. And in fact, the reason we're still so reliant on oil and gas is because decades ago, big oil saw the writing on the wall, "Hey, if we don't do something, there's gonna be growing demands to transition to cleaner energy."

And so what did they do? They launched this unprecedented, consequential, massive deception campaign to spread climate denial and disinformation and stall the clean energy transition, which, if we had been further along right now without those decades of lies from oil and gas companies, we would not be perhaps in as big a mess as we are today.

Now climate damages are costing the United States somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars a year, and all those costs right now are falling on taxpayers, while the companies that knowingly caused the problem lied about it and continue to deceive the public, right? They pretend, "Hey, we're actually part of the energy transition," where they're not.

They're still doubling down on fossil fuels. And if big oil isn't held accountable for that, it's gonna continue to be communities and taxpayers that continue to pay all the costs of climate damages. 

this may be a bit of a shock. For a decade in the '70s and '80s, Exxon was at the forefront of scientific research on climate change, and its own scientists were sounding alarms. 

There was no questioning that the atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing, that atmospheric carbon dioxide was gonna change the climate in some fashion.

The question was how fast, how much, and, and what of, impacts would it have? 

That was Edward Garvey, a former Exxon climate researcher, in a video produced by Frontline with the Pulitzer Prize-winning website InsideClimate News. This week, that website launched a series documenting Exxon's white hat scientific research and then its sudden shift toward trivializing the growing scientific consensus on climate change.

Neela Banerjee, one of the reporters who produced the series for InsideClimate News, describes her aha moment. 

One day on a listserv, I got a transcript of a congressional hearing from 1979 that was about climate change, and I, I thought, "Oh, isn't this surprising?" So just on a lark, maybe because I was procrastinating or something, I looked up Exxon to see if anybody from Exxon was there, and then I found the name of a man.

His name was Henry Shaw. 

Shaw was leading the company's early efforts into carbon dioxide research. Before learning about him, InsideClimate News believed that the earliest Exxon had looked at the effects of CO2 was in the 1980s. 

And that was the thread that started to unravel this. As I started to Google Henry, I found a study that had been done about Exxon outfitting a supertanker with equipment to measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the ocean and in the atmosphere along the supertanker's route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf.

And the paper came out in 1982, but the work had been done in the late '70s. We started to pull together names, started to look at places where documents might be, archives and so on, and that's how it all came together. 

How far back does the company's interest in CO2 buildup go? 

There is a scientist named Jim Black who made a report to Exxon's management committee in July 1977 And the management committee is the top leadership of the company.

And he told them about the prevailing science at the time about carbon dioxide, that scientists think it's mainly from the combustion of fossil fuels, and if it keeps up at this rate, it will lead to a warming of the planet, and that could have very grave consequences for human society, things like drought and floods and, and so on 

To put that in perspective, it wasn't until 1988 that James Hansen of NASA alerted the world in testimony before Congress about the seriousness of this issue.

So Exxon- 

Right. we were stunned. There's this public Exxon that we know from 1990 onwards skeptical about, how certain the science is, calling for delays, and yet the documents that we've seen and the, and the people we've talked to describe a company where the approach to carbon dioxide and climate change was very neutral, very measured.

When one reads Jim Black's text, and you can do it on our website because we've uploaded that document to our first story, it's like any other scientist of the day. 

And while the company didn't at the time issue press releases and write in its annual reports about its gathering suspicions and fears about CO2, it also wasn't operating in secret.

Its scientists were publishing peer-reviewed papers publicly. 

Right. I think a lot of people want to make this appear to be an energy industry parallel of what happened in the tobacco industry. I'm not sure how far that parallel goes because Exxon, at the time that this research was being done, did not suppress any of this.

That was actually part of their strategy. They understood that farther down the road, if the science was accurate, which, they thought it w- it would be, that there would be limits placed on emissions from fossil fuels. So their strategy at that time was that we want to have a say in what those limits look like.

We wanna be taken seriously, and the best way to do that is to do peer-reviewed, irreproachable science. And so they backed conferences on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. They published in peer-reviewed papers. They, in fact, ended up shelving a major natural gas project, which is still mothballed today because the natural gas was mixed in with a lot of carbon dioxide, and they couldn't find a way to get rid of the carbon dioxide, and they weren't gonna vent it into the atmosphere.

This project off of, the coast of Indonesia came at a time when they actually were concerned that supplies were running dangerously low, and they still opted not to pursue the Indonesian project on CO2 grounds. It's hard to imagine we're speaking of a major oil company. 

I know. 

And then something changed.

The documentary evidence and interviews we have so far only extend to 1986, and part of the reason is that Exxon was involved in major layoffs through the '80s because- The oil price sank, and a lot of the scientists who were involved in climate research either left or were let go by the mid-'80s. And then in 1989, the Global Climate Coalition is formed by fossil fuel companies, and Exxon is one of the leading figures in this effort.

So something happened between '86 and '89, and we don't have that information. What we can surmise, though, is that there was a change in management, and the management through the '70s and mid-'80s had been looking at alternatives to crude oil. Some of them were carbon-based, like tar sands, but some of them were not.

And then you had management come in that were more focused on the core business and thought that Exxon should stick to oil. That was people like Lee Raymond, who went on to become chairman of Exxon. 

And Lee Raymond notoriously argued against the Kyoto Protocol and prevailed with the argument that, well, he said, quote, "Let's agree there's a lot we really don't know about how climate will change in the 21st century and beyond."

Which I guess is nominally true. There is a lot we don't know. But by the time he uttered those words, there was absolute scientific consensus that the temperatures were going up, that ice was melting, that sea levels were rising, and so forth. 

Yes. What Exxon did from the late '80s onward was that they hammered away at the uncertainty around various aspects of climate science, and they did not partake in arguments that a lot of deniers use, such as, it's natural cycles or sunspots or anything like that.

But instead, they just kept saying, "The science is too uncertain for us to make enormous and possibly very expensive shifts in the economy." So the uncertainty became this brake on climate action. The interesting thing is that in the late '70s, early '80s, Exxon scientists saw uncertainty as perfectly normal in evolving science and as an opportunity for research.

They actually rebutted climate models that showed that climate change would not be as bad as the prevailing models predicted. And then Exxon basically decided to take an entirely different path, and that's, that's why we called the series The Road Not Taken. If they had stayed on that road, things might be a bit different now, but they didn't.

we know that it's not just Exxon or Imperial in, in Canada. we know that other oil companies did, did research, but there's a reason to focus on Exxon because they were an industry leader. It wasn't just that they did some research. They really did ambitious research. 

That's absolutely right, and what these documents are, are revealing to us is, imagine where the world would be if Exxon had continued to pursue that research and embrace its own scientific understanding of climate change decades ago.

But as we know, rather than doing that, they pivoted antagonistically against the science and started funding decades of denial and deception, individuals and think tanks that they were pumping money into to confuse the public and policymakers about the importance of addressing climate change. 

And here's where the documents couldn't have them more exposed.

Exxon, of course, was a founding member of what was called the Global Climate Coalition, created in 1989. And the Global Climate Coalition, at the same time as they're giving a backgrounder to politicians and the media that says, "The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood," at the same time, they have an internal memo saying, "The scientific basis for the greenhouse effect is well established and cannot be denied."

So I guess what that moves me onto is the power of uncertainty when it comes to making regulations. of course, we can see that the industry is trying to sow uncertainty, but what about the part of regulators? Why were they so convinced by it? 

Well, yeah, you referenced the, the amount of misinformation that started to percolate out of groups like the Global Climate Coalition, and that particular inside memo you mentioned was written by a Mobil executive .

So you should definitely show, the beginnings, and that was the late eighties. It carried forward until the present. 

Mm-hmm. 

decades of groups like the Global Climate Coalition that have attempted to look like third-party experts or credible sources of information that were, in fact, knowingly spreading misinformation and, and creating doubt.

And that, again, goes in parallel with the tactics of the tobacco industry in evading accountability for its own deadly product and, and knowledge of cancer and, and other health effects from its products, which was to sow doubt. They, they knew that they could evade accountability or at least delay regulatory and public scrutiny by suggesting that there was doubt about the science.

So they created their own institutes that sounded credible. They created their own science that undermined what was known in the, in the peer-reviewed literature in the health community about the impacts. And the oil companies followed that playbook, to a T, and used the same tactics to suggest that, "Oh, well, we're not sure yet," 

"Let's study this further. Let's take time before regulatory action addresses this problem." So it's essentially the exact same tactic, and regulators and certainly policymakers bought it- 

Right ... 

unfortunately. Right. And that's led us to the situation we're in, where climate change is having very real impacts now.

we're seeing them presently, and- The delay that was caused by this deceptive campaign by Exxon and the Global Climate Coalition and other major oil companies is a real reason why we haven't addressed this aggressively. 

Right. And, and it is depressing the degree to which government deferred to industry, but it's also explicable at, to the extent that government often rely on industry for the science that they use to determine regulations.

You referred to the standard line, and if folks have been reading any reporting on this, they will know that it really doesn't matter who the industry spokesperson is. In every news story, you will read really an almost identical, almost Stepford-like line, which will be to say, "It's not credible," or, "It's preposterous to suggest that Exxon reached definitive conclusions decades before the world's experts and while climate science was in an early stage of development and then went out of their way to hide those conclusions from the public."

It's funny that they say, "Oh, golly, we're not experts. How could we have figured it out before the world's experts?" When in fact they were really doing the science that you would need to come to conclusions about this. 

It was incredible science. It really was. their monitoring equipment, their modeling It was spectacular, and it actually was, well, some of it was passed on to government agencies, who then picked up what they could given their limited budgets.

But Exxon was light years ahead on this issue, for sure. And so it's, it is telling now that their media spokespeople, they have a two-pronged strategy. Number one is to suggest that there was uncertainty and we didn't know, and number two is to attack the messenger. Any journalist that writes a story about this is immediately attacked, harassed, their editors are harassed.

I was frankly shocked at the antagonistic and hostile response that I received in doing due diligence, reaching out to Exxon for comment on these documents and this story. Alan Jeffers, their media spokesperson, immediately attacked me and, and my outlet and suggested we're not credible and, this is outrageous.

Well, how can you do this reporting? So, they're, they're very aggressive, and we've seen that over decades. Exxon's always been among the more prickly, when it comes to media covering their activities. And so I think that's an important lesson for other journalists looking at this.

Okay. A company or an industry intentionally sowing doubt, about a potentially catastrophic threat when they in fact know that there is little or no doubt. And then as the timeline shows us, as the reality, as the science becomes clearer, their denial gets bigger, and bigger and bigger.

That implies maybe sociopathy, maybe moral turpitude. It's a reason certainly that many people wanna support a, a death penalty for corporations. But what's the criminal violation here besides misleading advertising? What is the grounds that people are using to, to go after Exxon here?

That's a wonderful question. It's obviously reached the level of interest. We now have New York and California led the way with their attorneys general announcing investigations into Exxon's knowledge and what that might mean in terms of accountability for misleading the public and lawmakers. and then now there's seventeen other states that have announced that they're looking into it, and the US Virgin Islands has announced actions against at least two of the front groups or operative organizations that were spreading misinformation.

So we are now in a situation where accountability work is being done. I'm not an expert in the legal background on that, but I know that, that those attorneys general and others are looking into similar fraud and other actions that were taken against the tobacco companies for similar deception, and applying those legal structures to the oil industry to see whether or not there could be some point at which Exxon and others' knowledge of this problem and, and subsequent deception was fraudulent and led us to this disastrous climate situation we're in.

It speaks to the weakness of our legal apparatus that we have to go through FTC fraud charges to talk about, willfully withholding from the public information that could prevent catastrophe. And one of the things that your work has brought up is that there were then, as there are no doubt now, people inside industry saying the same thing.

You referred to the chemical engineer from Imperial Oil years ago. That was H.R. Holland, who was talking about harms and who also said, this has to be regulated. Industry isn't going to do this voluntarily. Part of the tragedy is all the folks even within the industry who tried to change its course and who were just unsuccessful in doing so.

Exactly. What is interesting as well that the company itself in one of the memos referred to its CO2 pollution as antisocial behavior. And this was decades ago. they knew... The engineers knew that this was a problem. And, and not only was it directly threatening their bottom line, their ability to continue to sell oil and to- Continue with their business model, which has been extremely oil-centric as opposed to energy-centric, which might be a solution to this problem.

They knew it was a big deal. They knew that pollution was bad. That same memo that I referenced earlier, that there is no doubt memo, it says technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases, and this was again nineteen eighty, but removal of only fifty percent of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation.

And that was just talking about CO2 pollution from power plants. But again, you see their immediate concern is this is going to cost us money. We don't want to spend the money to do this right. We just want to delay accountability and, and continue to do what we're doing. And that was what led them to the idea of deception instead of owning the science and, and doing the right thing.

what happened at the Exxon meeting's the same thing that's happened at every Exxon meeting since 1990.

There have now been upwards of 70 shareholder resolutions, put forward to do something about climate change. So, and most of them incredibly mild, merely give us a report about what you plan to somehow do someday to deal some direction with climate change. Every single one of them's been voted down.

that's why, the Rockefellers, whose family founded, the darn company, divested all their stock and, a- a- and gave up i- in trying to change that way a, a, a year or so ago, and instead joined this huge growing movement to demand real change. a- and I'll note that one very good piece of good news yesterday, while, Exxon was stonewalling and, and, and continuing its, time-honored traditions, University of Massachusetts became the largest public university system to divest from all fossil fuels, which was a very, powerful moment indeed in this big campaign.

I should add, too, that it's not just Exxon, though Exxon, because, as Anna says, we now know that they knew everything about climate change, that there's a, a, a particular, a particular horror in their story. But earlier this week at t- their annual meeting, the, the CEO of Shell said, e- explained that, we didn't wanna switch to renewables too quickly because that would, quote, imperil the dividends, unquote.

we're living in a world, as Amy, that's basically sliding out of control. 2016 is crashing every record we've ever had for high temperature. We're losing vast swaths of coral reef. We've got unprecedentedly large early-season fires burning in the boreal north, and this guy's w- thinks the thing that's in peril is his dividends?

That should tell you what you need to know. 

A- and Bill McKibben, could you say something about, the progress that the divestment movement has made and why you think divestment is likely to be a more, successful strategy, with Exxon and getting them to change, their, climate policy? 

Well, I d- I, I think that the real point of the divestment movement has been to withdraw social license from these fossil fuel companies and thereby reduce their political power.

The reason we haven't gotten anywhere on climate change for the 40 years that we've known about it is precisely because these guys wield so much political power. look, Exxon knew perfectly well that what Anna's grandfather was saying was correct. They set to work climate proofing all their own drilling rigs and other installations to account for the sea level rise they now knew was coming.

But at the same time, they set up this vast framework with others, of climate denial and deceit and disinformation. and they continue to, hand out, campaign checks to precisely the politicians that make sure nothing ever happens on these issues. So the, the point at this point is to use this divestment movement as a vehicle to get that across, and it is working.

It's not just or even mainly that there have been... It became the biggest divestment movement ever. I think at this point, we're closing in on, on $4 trillion worth of portfolios and endowments that have, divested. The point is that it's taken the basic message, the message that we have five times as much carbon in our reserves than we, any scientist thinks we could possibly burn, and it's gotten that through.

three or four years ago, that was people like me writing in, Rolling Stone. Now, it's the head of the World Bank, the head of the IMF, the governor of the Bank of England speaking to the world's insurance industry at Lloyd's of London. that message is getting through everywhere except Exxon, and its ilk.

Yesterday, s- Mr. Tillerson was boasting about how the company was going out and making new finds of oil in new places around the world. We have five times as much carbon in our reserves already as we can burn. The idea that we should celebrate the exploration for new hydrocarbons at this point goes past irony into some dark place that I don't really have a name for.

60,000 people were, ordered to evacuate from Spokane, Washington, just a little north of us here. We've got a million acres of forest land, that's on fire right now in Oregon.

France, Italy, Greece, Spain are all on fire right now. It's gotta be happening in Russia and China, we're just not getting the reports. And next summer or th- this winter, our time, it'll happen in the Southern hemisphere. What we're seeing is the, the drying out of the planet, as a result of climate change, and, and apparently the, one of the biggest factors that's really whacking us that nobody was anticipating are these heat domes.

They're basically high pressure systems with clear air that, that just sit there and, and let the sunlight through. No clouds, let the sun r- really 'cause it's a high pressure system, let the sunlight through, and boom. it just dries everything out, turns it tinder-dry, and then, the smallest spark and you've got a wildfire.

And the heat domes are happening for the same reason that the bomb cyclones were 15 years ago. When I was in r- r- Washington, DC, we had the first bomb cyclone. It was a brand-new phrase. What the hell is this? It's these wild winter storms that just stay in one place and just pound on you and get insanely cold, and why was that?

It was 'cause Arctic air was drooling down past or through or b- the jet stream. It was pushing the jet stream down to the point where instead of being, the jet stream normally running around Northern Canada, it was drooling all the way down to Texas and bringing freezing temperatures with it and freezing pipes and everything else.

Well, that same phenomena, again, because the jet stream has been weakened, is causing these heat domes to l- to stand in place for long periods of time 'cause the jet stream is what historically has been moving weather around the planet, and the jet stream is produced by the difference, the temperature differential between the arctic cold and the mid-latitude heat.

And when that differential is a big number, when there's a big difference between those two temperatures, when it's really cold up north and it's warmer in the center, then you've got a healthy jet stream. But what's happened is because the arctic is warming six times faster than, than we are here, this differential has collapsed, and the jet stream is no longer this strong, powerful river of air, at, at 60,000 feet that it used to be, and it's now just this kinda wandering, slowly moving thing that drools around and, and you end up with these heat domes.

Trump is insisting that hundreds of wildfires burning across the United States, Canada, and Europe are all the result of people not grooming their forests properly or not raking the forests the guy's an idiot, right? well, but he's not an idiot. He's a, he's a tool of the fossil fuel industry, which gave him millions, hundreds of millions of dollars and helped him get elected.

But the World Weather Attribution, this is a consortium of scientists, they say the extreme drought, the drought conditions, the humidity, the wind, all this stuff that is fanning these for- forest fires, and we've got it here. Yesterday here in, in Portland, the sun was orange. You couldn't breathe here There are five big lies that are being used on a, on a fairly regular basis by, mostly Republicans to, justify the theft of our public lands, the public lands that Teddy Roosevelt set aside.

Other presidents have as well. Obama set aside, I believe it was Bears Ears, and already Trump has taken a bite out of that. And so let's just review these lies. Ryan Busse is writing about this, on his Substack. Ryan Busse, R-Y-A-N-D-B-U-S-S-E.substack.com.

Number one, national monument designations were forced on us by DC bureaucrats with no public comment. This is a lie. the, just last month, for example, Mike Lee, the, right-wing guy out of Utah, the Republican senator, marched out this old lie, saying that it's happening under the 1906 Antiquities Act, after Trump rolled back monument designations for 3 million acres in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.

The reality is that more than 2.7 million comments were gathered before this decision was made, including statements from more than 300 Native American tribes, conservation groups, religious groups, many of them in Utah. So Mike Lee is just lying about his own, too, and about his own constituents. Lie number two, gotta drill, baby, drill in America because we need energy independence.

Ryan Zinke has been pushing this. He was Trump's first Interior Secretary, before he was, fired for corruption. And he started lying back in 2017 when he was the secretary. He said, "Today I took a s- action to sign a series of directors that put America on track to achieve the president's vision for energy independence."

Well, we reached energy independence during the Obama administration.We don't need that. Lie number three, log it or use it. Montana's Steve Daines, the, the Republican senator from Montana, is wearing this one out. He repeatedly, cites this, y- to push for a sixfold increase in logging on federal lands in Montana last year.

and what happened? Well, the Skillet Fire erupted in Montana on land that had been logged. Logged land is basically dead land, and it's covered with, the, the remnants of the trees, and they catch on fire real easily. So logging is not going to make your forests resistant to, to fire. Lie number four, you are locked out of your land by the elitists.

No one can hunt, fish, or graze livestock on national monuments or wilderness study areas. No, that's a lie. we, we subsidize hunting, fishing. this is one, Donald Trump said this just, last week. He said, "You can't go hunting, you can't go fishing, you can't do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it."

He's talking about Utah backcountries, but talking about public lands. It's a lie. Thankfully, the New York Times called him on it. They said, "But recreation has been allowed in Bears Ears since President Barack Obama designated the monument in 2016." See, it's, he took 3 million acres away from it to give to his donors, his drilling and mining donors, and logging donors.

And he said he's doing it because you can't use that. They won't let you. Well, it's a lie. It's just a complete lie. Lie number five, oil companies, mining companies, and grazers pay their fair share to profit from our public lands. Actually, no. Under the Big Beautiful Bill, oil companies pay 12 and a half percent royalties on public land, but on private land they typically pay about 25% royalties.

So your and my tax dollars are subsidizing the oil companies by giving them cheap, cheap, cheap oil. Grazers get a 95% discount on public lands compared to private lands. And the kicker is mining, since it's governed by the General Mining Act of 1872, w- the people who are mining stuff out of public lands, they don't have to pay the government, therefore us, a single penny.

It's time to nationalize the fossil fuel industry.

Now, I know the moment you say nationalize, everybody thinks, "Oh my God, Venezuela!" "Iran!" people don't think much about Norway, but that's, 

And... and all the, the... the... the one time that a Democrat actually said this out loud was back in 20... 2008. And it was during a hearing where the fossil fuel, executives, the CEOs were refusing to answer her question. And Maxine Waters, Representative Maxine Waters-- a Black woman with power, something Republicans hate and fear more than anything else they can imagine-- Maxine Waters basically came right out and said, "If you don't start giving me straight answers, we're going to start talking about nationalizing your industry." she used the word "socialize," but same thing. 

And, of course, Fox News went nuts. They melted down. In fact, there's a link to it over in... in the, in the op-ed at hartmannreport.com. But Fox News, and all the... all those on the right-- and frankly, Democrats-- who freaked out when Maxine Waters said this are either unaware of, or completely ignoring, the long history in this country of nationalizing industries that work against the national interest during a time of crisis. And if you don't think that this is a time of crisis, this climate crisis... well, I've got a tornado to sell you.

Or the fact that, hey, it's April 11th and it's snowed in Portland, Oregon. There's an inch of snow on the ground outside right now. It's probably down to a half inch, it's starting to melt, but it's never happened before last year. It was 116 degrees for three days in a row here. That's never happened before either. We're getting Phoenix weather alternating with north pole weather. it's just... So, if you don't think that we're in a climate crisis, you've... you're not paying attention. 

And in large part, this crisis has been brought about by the fact that the fossil fuel industry, for over 40 years, has been lying to us about the impact of their product on this crisis. And funding organizations that are out there lying about climate change, and denying climate change, and funding politicians... look at... 

Joe Biden had a plan, and the Democrats had a plan, to spend a half a trillion dollars, $500 billion, on greening the American economy, that really would have taken a good bite out of climate change. It would have reduced our carbon emissions substantially in this country over the next five or 10 years.

And it was defeated. It passed the house, it was defeated by every Republican in the United States Senate plus Joe Manchin-- who's taking money from the fossil fuel industry. In fact, he's the single largest recipient of fossil fuel industry money in the United States Senate.

This is an industry that is calling out for nationalization. 

40 years ago, literally 40 years ago, Jimmy Carter-- this was 1979, this was 43 years ago, actually-- Jimmy Carter declared a national crisis. And he said, he was going to propose legislation to create, quote, "This nation's first solar bank, which will house... help us achieve the crucial goal of 20% of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000." You've heard me play the clip over, and over, and again. 

And he, also, Jimmy Carter-- the part that's not in the clip that I... that I play for you so frequently-- is, he also wanted to create a program to sell bonds, essentially like war bonds. FDR did this during World War II: he created a... a... a nonprofit, a government agency that sold government bonds-- in other words, you could loan money to the federal government-- essentially sold, in today's dollars, billions of dollars worth of government bonds to fund an effort to... to... to invent synthetic rubber. This was during World War II. Because we were running out of rubber for tires for jet... fighter jets.

And it worked. And FDR did that. 

And... and so Jimmy Carter said "Just as a similar synthetic rubber... rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war." 

He proposed this in '79 and, it all came crashing down 42 years ago this coming January, when the fossil fuel industry's candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter in the White House, killed the Solar Bank and Bond Program, and even took Carter's solar panels off the roof of the White House. 

So, if there was ever an industry that merited nationalization right now, it's the fossil fuel industry.

But what's the history of this? 

During the crisis of World War I President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country's railroad, our phone companies, and our telegraph operators. He also nationalized the radio networks and all the radio stations in this country. They were returned to private ownership after the war, but he had nationalized them during the war. 

During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing. He nationalized the airplane manufacturers, he ... nationalized several gun manufacturer, he nationalized over 3,300 mines in the United States, he nationalized the nation's railroads, he nationalized dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Company, the Hughes Tool Company, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even Montgomery Ward, along with 17 foreign companies doing business in the United States.

After FDR died, Harry Truman came along, finished the war. He also nationalized the meat packing industry across the country, and the manana manana hang of... however you say it, Monongahela Railroad Company, and the nations steel mills and hundreds of rail companies. Nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it did take until 1965 to re-privatize all of them. 

Then came Richard Nixon. In the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, Richard Nixon oversaw the nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into a new government entity that was called the National Rail Passenger Corporation. Today we call it Amtrak. Richard Nixon did that. 

In '74, congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail. This is this, I believe this was under, Gerry Ford. It was called the Consolidated Rail Corporation. We called it Conrail. And it absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. This was nationalization, and they were government-held until 1987, when it was privatized. Privatizing Conrail was the third largest IPO, or... actually, at the time, it was the largest IPO in American history. 

In 1984, the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, and Ronald Reagan nationalized it. He bought eight... an 80% ownerships to share in the company. It wasn't privatized until 1991 by George Herbert Walker Bush, and was bought by Bank of America in '94. 

Also in the eighties, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the savings and loan industry, we saw SNLs crash all across the country as the guys running them made off with billions of dollars in their own private money bins.

And so Reagan and Congress created a... an umbrella agency, it was called the Resolution Trust Corporation, and they nationalized 747 of America's savings and loans. Assets over $400 billion. They helped were held as nationalized companies from 1987 until 1995, when they were reprivatized. Then... that was Reagan.

Then George W. Bush, when... when he was handed the white house by five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, the nation's airline security was entirely in private hands. After 9/11, Bush said, "Okay, that's it." And he nationalized airline... airline security across the United States. He put the entire industry out of business. He didn't even bother buying these companies up and nationalizing them. He just shut them down and replaced them with what we call the TSA today, the Transportation security administered. He also nationalized the nation's airlines, because they were in a crisis after 9/11. the air... he created this thing called the Air Transportation Stabilization Board, that ended up holding seven and a half million shares at U S Airways, 18 million shares of America West Airlines, three and a half million shares of Frontier Airlines, one and a half million shares of Trans Air, two, 2.38 million shares of World Airways. 

The Bush administration nationalized, in... the George W. Bush administration, again, nationalized the two largest mortgage lenders in the United States, when the crash happened in 2008. They... they... we nationalized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. They nationalized 77% share in AIG, 36% share Citigroup, 73% share in GMAC , and forced out GM's president Rick Wagoner , who was, just, doing a terrible job.

Obama came into office, and he nationalized GM and Chrysler. 

So, there's a long history of this. We could buy the three largest oil companies in the United States for less than a half a trillion dollars, about $500 billion. That's one quarter, or maybe one fifth of the cost of the Bush tax... or, of the Trump tax cuts for billionaires.For one fifth of what we paid to give tax cuts to billionaires, we could... we could take over these three large oil companies and then just run them, run them well, but stop all their funding of climate denial, and start their, their pure... seriously attending to the process of figuring out how to, how to shift themselves from being oil companies to being an energy companies.

this is not rocket science. I realize people are freaking out about the politics of it. "Oh my God, you're going to call... they're going to call the Democrats socialist!". Every president, since Eisenhower... Going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson has done this during times of crisis. And this is a crisis.

Right now we're living through a pretty important, significant weather event in Britain. I live on the South Coast. I think it last rained in Portsmouth on June the 26th. 

True. 

It might not rain again till August the 5th, which is about 40 days. 

Yes. Yeah. 

Why has that happened?

In all probability, I know, Okay. 

Yeah, yeah. 

This is when people say, "Well, it happened once in 1896," or- 

Yes. Yeah, and you can never say climate change causes one particular event. But if you remove yourself from all of that, it's, it's basic physics, and we're, we're putting a lot more energy into the atmosphere.

And if you do that, you change climate, you change weather patterns. And we've been knowingly doing this for a long time. this is nothing new. so if you go back to Fourier working on it in 1827, or Eunice Foote in 1849, and Tyndall in the early 1850s, and Arrhenius at the end of the 1800s. There's no...

It's nothing particularly new. I think some people think that this new thing called climate science. It's just physics. It's just chemistry. It's biology. It's what we've been doing post-Enlightenment, and people have been working on climate change for 150 or more years. so we have a really good understanding, which improves as time goes on, of, of how the science underpinning the climate and the weather works.

and we're putting... We know we're putting a lot more heat into the atmosphere, so there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere, and that means we get a lot more unpredictable, weather patterns and extreme climate situations, which is what we're witnessing, already witnessing around the globe.

But I think it's worth pointing out, a lot of people refer to this as the new normal. This is, this really misunderstands where we are. This is not a new normal. On average, this is the least extreme weather That I, you, and anyone else listening to this will ever live through. It's going to get worse and worse every single year until we stop burning fossil fuels.

Not reduce burning fossil fuels, stop burning fossil fuels. So celebrate this as our least extreme weather year that we're, we're gonna live through. Mm. It's going to get worse. 

We'll reflect back on the, the inclement and chilly days of, 32 degrees in London. 

Yes. 

Yeah. before we were growing mangoes and bananas.

Yeah. But to be, just to be clear, we, weather is what happens on top of a, a long-term climate signal. So we might still get a, a cold winter or next summer could be- 

Sure ... 

back to what we're typically used to. But on average, we are definitely seeing this significant trend now, at a global level.

Can you put some numbers in terms of, you said right at the top of the answer, we're putting lots of energy into the atmosphere. Yeah. So can you put some numbers on that? 

Well... 

In terms of CO2 emissions and- Yeah, 

CO2 emissions, right. Okay ... parts 

per million, et cetera. 

Yeah. Okay. So the reason we're w- how we're warming the climate, primarily how we're warming the climate, is we're significantly increasing the amount of carbon dioxide, but a- also other greenhouse gases from agriculture and so forth, and in- and, and industry.

We're increasing those in the atmosphere. And for those who like to play around with numbers, s- since the Industrial Revolution, we... At the Industrial Revolution, before we started burning fossil fuels, we were at, the unit we use is parts per million, we were at about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and now we're at about 430 parts per million.

That's happened almost overnight. And I think what's also important there, if you, if you were to plot out, the last 10,000 years or so, which is the time when, human society's really flourished, if you like, so it's when modern society has r- really developed. During that time, we've had an incredibly stama- stable climate, and temperature and carbon dioxide level, so hardly any fluctuation at all.

About 20 parts per million fluctuation in 10,000 years. Overnight, imagine in 10,000 years, the end of that little plot, you put 1850 was when we started burning fossil fuels. Between there and now, which would be basically a straight line up, we've gone from 280 to 430 parts per million. And the physics tells us, the scientists I was mentioning before, the physics tells us, as we put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we trap more warmth in the atmosphere, and I say other greenhouse gases as well.

and so that's, that's what we're doing. We've, we've increased this blanket, if you like, of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the, the concentration of it. That's trapping in, trapping in more warmth. And until we actually stop burning fossil fuels and pumping the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, till we stop, the levels of meat consumption, 'cause that has a major, greenhouse gas implication in terms of methane primarily.

Until we stop those things or, or at least stop fossil fuels and significantly reduce meat consumption, then the temperature will just keep going up. The parts per million will keep going up, and we'll get warmer and warmer and warmer. 

And methane is a, is a greenhouse gas alongside CO2. 

That's another very, very powerful greenhouse gas.

It doesn't last so long in the atmosphere. Yeah. Nowhere near as long as carbon dioxide. but it's very powerful. So in the short term, it's actually more, much more powerful per molecule than carbon dioxide. but it doesn't last as long. But if you're talking about this, we'll probably come onto this later.

If you're talking about this, the agreements that we have about what temperatures we want to hold below, 'cause we think above that is too dangerous, then methane plays a really important part in that timeframe, 'cause th- those temperatures we're, we're reaching already. So the short term is so important from a climate perspective.

So methane, methane emissions need to dramatically reduce, and we need to eliminate, carbon dioxide emissions- Yeah ... which is basically fossil fuels. 

And methane, obviously, as you said, comes from animal agriculture, but also it's a big part of fracking, which is one of the arguments 

against fracking. it, it does come...

Yeah, there's a lot of it from fracking, from the oil and gas industry more generally, from, also from coal as well. So the oil industry has a lot of methane. It puts a lot of methane emissions into the atmosphere. Fracking's particularly bad amongst the fossil fuels, but also there's a lot of methane that is produced naturally.

And as you warm up the climate- Yeah ... you increase the amount of what we might call natural, production of methane. So, s- so there are other issues. As you warm up the, the peat and the, and the tundra in, in, in, in Russia and so forth, you're gonna see large quantities, very, very large quantities of methane increasingly put into the atmosphere.

And also, as you heat up the oceans, the oceans have far more carbon dioxide in them than the atmosphere. Yeah. As you warm the oceans, just again, O-level physics will tell you that you can't hold as much carbon dioxide in it, in the oceans, and they will start putting that into the atmosphere. So at the moment, the oceans are a really important carbon dioxide sink, but that is looking that we're getting towards the point where those could turn from being a, a sink to a source of carbon dioxide.

Yeah. 

Which is almost too disturbing to contemplate. 

So there are people like Nigel Farage or, or the median Reform voter, and I hope they're watching this, and they'd be saying, "These people are catastrophists." But what you're saying is, if we get to two degrees or three degrees, and this is very well documented, there is a very p- Decent chance of this cascade of feedbacks where methane is emitted from Siberia, methane hydrate from the world's oceans, and all of a sudden- Yeah, yeah

we go from four to five to six. 

Well, certainly significant increases in temperature. And, I wouldn't say when you get to t- the, w- some scientists saying that's, we think that's occurring already. So we're starting to see s- there's some thought that we might be seeing early die back in some parts of the Amazon, possibly in some parts of the Congo, but the data's really poor on the Congo.

So we're starting to see certain collapses of key, s- sink structures around the planet, which are really, really important for keeping the balance. So we're starting to see that now. and some scientists think we've probably crossed some of those, what people refer to as tipping points, non-linearities in our fancy climate language.

But tipping points, we're starting to cross those now. But the problem with this is that, though science is, is very clear on the, on the, on the causes for all of this, the actual t- exact timeframes are always ... You, you mustn't put too much precision on them. Of course. and so some scientists think we're, we're just getting to that point now, as others think it'll be

It's a few more years away. But by and large, none of them are disagreeing. We are, we are putting this energy in the atmosphere, which is going to have the, which is gonna bring about these natural sets of feedbacks, which in the end make whatever we do almost irrelevant. the, the system will, will move to a new equilibrium.

It might move to a new equilibrium that we're not in, and probably be a damn sight better without us in some respects. we've, we've caused ... At least in post-Enlightenment, we've caused a lot of, climate issues, but also broader ecological issues. We haven't found a way yet, post-Enlightenment, of large populations of humans living in any harmony with, with this yeah, the, the natural processes of, of the planet.

and we are deeply reliant on those natural processes. We're, we're destroying our own home

We've just heard clips starting with

What A Day tracing how oil companies, terrified of billions in liability for decades of climate deception, are fighting the lawsuits that would make them, not taxpayers, pay for climate damage

On the Media in 2015 recounted how Exxon scientist Jim Black warned the company's top leadership in 1977 that fossil fuels would warm the planet, eleven years before NASA's famous testimony to Congress

CounterSpin in 2016 described how Exxon helped bankroll the Global Climate Coalition, which told lawmakers and reporters the science was unsettled while its own internal memo admitted it 'cannot be denied.'

Democracy Now! in 2016 made the case that divestment, nearing $4 trillion in 2016, works by stripping fossil fuel companies of the public standing and political power that blocked climate action for 40 years

The Hartmann Report in 2026 laid out five falsehoods Republicans use to justify seizing public lands

Thom Hartmann in 2022 also cited a century of nationalizations, from the railroads under Wilson to GM under Obama, as precedent for taking over the oil giants and turning them into clean energy producers

And Downstream in 2026 rejected the 'new normal' framing, warning that this is the least extreme weather we'll ever live through and it will worsen every year until we stop burning fossil fuels

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

We can only make this show with your support and that includes following us on all the platforms you use. Check out our link in bio right in the show notes for every place to follow us and every way to support us, including one-time donations.

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And here's a voice message we received after our last climate episode

Hey Jay and the rest of the Best of the Left team, it's Truman. I'm leaving this voice message in response to the most recent episode, titled Worse on Purpose, about the climate crisis and all of the consequences it's already having. In the episode, talked about the Spokane wildfires, and I actually have a first-hand, well, may- maybe second-hand account of the wildfires.

The reason I say second-hand is because I wasn't actually in Spokane. I was in Glacier National Park on a hiking trip, which for those who don't know, is very close to Spokane. It's up in northwestern Montana. So when we were flying in, we actually ha- didn't know they were happening, the wildfires. So when we came in, we were very surprised that the sky was orange, very smoky.

Couldn't really see anything, Uh, so when we touched down, definitely noticed that the air smelled bad, like walking into a room where people were smoking cigarettes, and it only got worse as we went outside and- it became hard to breathe.

It was irritating for the eyes, nose, lungs. It was, yeah, not, not a great experience. And I feel very bad for the workers on the tarmac or the car rental people who had to breathe that in pretty much all day, so and it was the worst air quality index I think you can get, so probably some long-term health impacts from that, so not great.

it actually had been my first time experiencing, wildfire. I don't live anywhere near where they usually happen, so it's kind of been an abstract idea for me until recently. still a great example of how, climate change and, related disasters can really affect everyone, not just the people who have their homes burned down, although, of course, they experience the worst of it.

But anyways, thank you for all that you do. Keep up the good work, thanks. Bye-bye.

Thanks for that message, Truman. I actually know exactly what he's talking about because just over 10 years ago, I took part in a trip to Glacier National Park as part of a climate hike fundraising event that listeners of this very podcast helped fund. When we landed in Kalispell, we also did not know to expect that we would be descending into a cloud of smoke that stayed with us for the 5 days we were there. That absolutely put climate change even more in the front of our minds than it already was for that event.

I've been asking some prompt questions on recent episodes to spark discussion, both here and on the social platforms, but as I tried to think about potential questions for today's topic, nothing specific felt right and maybe even tone deaf. So I thought it would be more fitting to just ask the open question. If there's anything you'd like to share about your experience with global warming, either from direct impacts or from your time spent trying to fight against it, gives us your thoughts. There's a good chance many of you have anger and grief related to our collective inaction to avert the climate crisis and those who actively tried to prevent action. It's good and healthy to get that out and share it. It's also good to hear those kinds of things from others. We're all in this together but we all too often experience and process the changes in the world individually.

So, if you would like to share, record a voice message or email us through our link in bio in the show notes.

Today, in lieu of a full commentary, I have a bit more behind-the-scenes information for you, which is helping to give me more time to do work behind the scenes.

What I wanted to tell you about today is about today's episode and about how some of the work we've been doing over the past few months helped it come into being. This episode is the second edition of what we're referring to as a "Deep Cuts" episode. Registered Trademark.

In the past, we have put out episodes that we call remixes, but they tend to be lightly modified versions of relatively recent episodes that had come out in the past few years or possibly a combination of material from a couple of episodes remixed into one. The deep cuts episodes are really a new format and require a completely different approach.

As part of the long-term reimagining of Best of the Left that I have been doing since the spring of this year, I came up with an idea to make better use of our now 20-year archive of news and progressive commentary. It's hard to wrap your mind around just how much data and information is contained in 20 years of podcast episodes, but I've always known from the beginning that the process of putting this show together, week after week, was slowly building something that simply couldn't exist otherwise.

I knew it was a waste to not make good use of our archive material, so I took time over the past few months, with the help of our Swiss Army knife producer Ben, to build a data system to accompany the audio archive.

For years now, we've been transcribing the podcast, but we've now gone back and begun transcribing all of the archives back to the beginning as well. Those transcripts, along with all of the information in the episode notes, have allowed us to create a sort of card catalog for the archive, indexing the topics we've covered, the sources we've used, and much more.

It's only with the use of this sort of data-rich card catalog that we were able to pull this episode together on the relatively narrow topic of Exxon's climate research and coverup, sourcing clips from episodes we produced over the course of more than a decade, without it being an enormous and lengthy research project.

So the result to you ends up being a little bit invisible because it's hard to know exactly what kind of work goes into the show. But the resulting deep dive episodes we're now able to create are something that is literally only possible for us to do with our archive and our newly organized data. I don't think anyone else in the world is capable of producing the kind of podcast episode you're listening to right now.

And, not to overstate our importance, it's worth noting that we've begun to be able to do these episodes, which excel at providing deep contextual information about current events, right at a moment when the people attempting to bury the past and install their own bizarro version of history are at full force.

In addition to all that, I've mentioned recently that I've been focusing my energies behind the scenes on relaunching our social media strategy, and I'm happy to say that that machine has been slowly coming to life. If you want to find everywhere to follow us, simply go to the link in bio that we always include in our show notes, which will take you to the full list of platforms where you can connect with us.

That's also where you'll find links to support us financially as we continue to struggle our way through this year after losing a large percentage of our ad dollars starting back in the spring.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, The Industry's Playbook

Followed by Section B, Trump's Rollback and the Legal Fight to Stop It

Section C, Suncor v. Boulder and the Accountability Fight

And Section D, Nationalize It

Back in 1946, , a group of industry executives... Now, keep in mind, 1946, this is even before I was born, and I'm an old fart.

1946, they formed a panel, this is a bunch of fossil fuel executives, called the Smoke and Fumes Committee

but the Center for Environmental, excuse me, the Ce- Center for In- International Environmental Law, CIEL, writes, and I quote, "But the research was not meant to be a public service. Rather, it was used by the committee to promote public skepticism of environmental science and environmental regulations the industry considered hasty, costly, and potentially unnecessary."

You get this in 1946. By the mid-1950s at the very latest, climate change was one of those issues. Initially, the Smoke and Fumes Committee of the fossil fuel industry executives was looking at things like asthma and cancer. But by the 1950s, they realized climate change was part of this. There was a research paper that was presented to the American Petroleum Institute, the API, the trade association for the fossil fuel industry, or at least for the oil part of it, by Stanford Research Institute in 1968.

This is how long these guys have known this stuff. This report, which was given to the American Petroleum Institute in 1968, just been released, says, and I quote, "Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climate change. If the earth's temperature increases significantly..."

Keep in mind, this was 1968. "If this, if the earth's temperature increases significantly, a number of events might be expected to occur, including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis. There seems to be no doubt the, that the potential damage to our environment could be severe."

So what did these people know? When did they know it, and what did they do about it? What they knew in the 1950s and '60s was that climate change was a very real probability as an outcome of burning more fossil fuels. They knew this. They knew it would be destructive. Okay? They knew it, and they knew it then.

Now, what did they do about it? Well, they started, funding climate denial think tanks. They started lobbying members of Congress. They started putting out, disinformation Over at the Huffington Post, the, associate editor of HuffPo Hawaii, writes, "In 1968, a pair of in- scientists," this is basically the same story, "wrote a report for the American Petroleum Institute.

They warned, 'Man is now ga- engaged in a v- vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the Earth, one that may be the cause of serious worldwide environmental changes.'" This was 1968. We've seen this movie before. We saw this with the tobacco industry, which kills a half a million Americans every year right up until 1998, as I recall, was the year I think the tobacco settlement was going, happened.

They were merrily going along their way saying, "Oh, there's, there's no, so no definite, no clear correlation, no proven scientific link between our product, between cigarettes and cancer. You can't prove that nicotine is addictive." You had, the, the 567, I've, forget the number, o- o- of the senior, the CEOs of the tobacco industry testify before Congress.

They all lied under oath. No consequences. They're rich white guys, but they all lied under oath. By the way, isn't that what they got Bill Clinton for? They impeached him for lying under oath? In any case, these guys were billionaire or multimillionaire, executives in the tobacco industry. We, so we've seen this with the tobacco industry.

We've seen this with the pesticide industry. We've seen this with the, we're seeing this now with the herbicide and the fungicide industry. I got other stories about that to share with you as we continue through this program. We've seen this before. Industry doesn't give a rat's ass about anything except the bottom line, and it's gotten a whole lot worse since Reagan changed the tax code so that CEOs are heavily incentivized to buy back, to have their corporation buy back their stock, to jack up their own, executive compensation

Many people know about the story of tobacco now, and what they didn't really realize, what we didn't realize before we wrote this book, was that the same strategies and tactics were being applied with climate change and other issues.

So the overall strategy is what we call doubt mongering. These folks sell doubt, and that title comes from a very famous, we could say infamous, tobacco industry memo in which one industry executive said, in his own words, "Doubt is our product." So the idea is sell doubt, manufacture doubt, create doubt in order to make people think that the science isn't really certain.

Because if the science weren't clear, then it might be rational for us to say, "Well, look, why, why should we change our whole economy in order to fix climate change if it's not really real? Why should we give up smoking? We like smoking. Why should we give it up if we don't know that it's, actually d- dangerous?"

So if you can create doubt, you can persuade people that we don't really know there's a problem, and therefore, we don't have to do anything about it. So the goal is to prevent action. So that's the overall strategy, and then the tactics include a variety of things, including some that you just said. A key tactic is to bring out supposed experts.

Sometimes they're real scientists, but more often they're not actually even scientists, but they basically play scientists on TV, people who pretend to be experts who challenge the scientific information to create the impression of a scientific debate. Sometimes these people are actually scientists, but they don't have training and credibility and expertise in the particular area.

But journalists and the public, we fall for this because we see these people, they're scientists. We think, "Oh, well, that's a famous scientist," and what we don't realize is that actually this person has never done research and is not an expert in the actual topic that he is talking about. And I say he because there's also a strange gender element of this story that it's almost always men, and that's an interesting, complicated question why that is that we didn't actually address in the book, but we could talk about if you're interested.

Yeah, one, one other specific area I'd love to touch on first is the idea, and this is a common thread between the arguments that were made around tobacco and what we're seeing now with climate change, is taking the approach of freedom and business freedom and economic freedom, right? There was a very strong movement when the, tobacco data started coming in and telling us, "Listen, smoking is just bad, and secondhand smoke is bad."

Restaurants and bars were coalesced with the idea that, "Hey, we're all going to lose business if, if all of a sudden you can't smoke in our locations." And there was this catalyzing of the economic freedom movement. I need the freedom to do what I want to do with my business. We're also seeing that with climate change and the fossil fuel industry 

Exactly.

So this is a crucial point, and this was a large part of what we tried to explain in the book. So another strategy is to make the argument that if we act on these problems, if we act to control climate change, if we act to protect people from the harms of tobacco, that this is a threat to our personal freedom.

And it's not just a threat to our freedom as individuals, but it's a threat to democracy, to the freedom of our country as a whole. Mm. And this is a really crucial part of the argument because it's used by the tobacco industry, and now by the fossil fuel industry, to try to make common cause with other allies, other people who might not otherwise necessarily have any vested interest in defending tobacco or fossil fuels.

So as you mentioned, the restaurant industry is a good example. in the case of the fossil fuel industry, they make common cause with think tanks, some of whom are initially independent, initially have nothing to do with fossil fuels. And this was the story we told in our book of one particular think tank, the George C.

Marshall Institute, which was originally created for issues that had absolutely nothing to do with climate change, had to do with national security. But these folks are deeply anti-communist. They worry that government intervention in the marketplace will be a threat to freedom, and so they make common cause with, ExxonMobil, who funds them heavily in the 1990s, and other regulated industries.

And they begin to make this argument that any regulation, any regulation at all, even a really reasonable one like trying to protect flight attendants from secondhand smoke, for example, or to protect children from the harms of secondhand smoke, they fight these regulations. And so you have a common cause being made with, on the one hand, industries that have an explicit vested economic interest in, in selling their product, and then other people who have a what we could say, more principled argument.

We may or may not agree with it, but it's not necessarily pure economic. There's a political argument, too. And these two come together- And this helps to explain why it's so powerful, because many Americans who might otherwise be suspicious of the tobacco industry and realize obviously they're trying to make money, or suspicious of ExxonMobil realize obviously they're trying to make money, but now it gets mingled with this argument about personal freedom that many of us are, are pretty sympathetic to.

And so it begins to sound, more reasonable than if we simply said, "Yes, I'm selling a product that's killing you," or, "I'm selling a product that's going to destroy the climate and, kill and displace millions of people." 

the basic thing is that they know, these fossil fuel corporations who don't want us to get down and solve climate change, to start implementing, real energy policy that cuts out fossil fuels, basically, they know that science is the engine that drives policy along, that, if we are not certain about whether the Hudson River is polluted, we won't do anything about it.

If we're not certain that climate change is caused by fossil fuel burning, we won't do anything about it. So they've funded their own echo chamber. They've cultivated, people who will say things that the companies themselves can't be caught dead saying, and Willie Soon is a perfect example of this.

he and his, his, ally there at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Sallie Baliunas, who retired suddenly in 2009, for years have denied ozone, the ozone hole. They've denied climate change. They say it's caused by sunspots or variations in the sun, that the warming we're seeing today is caused by something else.

And Exxon funded them. The Koch Foundation funded them, American Petroleum Institute, Southern Company, a huge utility based in Georgia, all funded Willie Soon to put this counter-narrative out that the science is uncertain or that there are other things to explain the warming that we're experiencing.

Talk to us a little bit about... Let, let's stick with Willie Soon because it's just a good example, a microcosm of so much of what's going on. Willie Soon- Right ... a solar physicist, as you mentioned, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He claims, all of the different things you talked about, including changes in temperature due, due merely to, to sunspots, just the, the natural cyclical, reality of the sun.

How is he funded specifically? In other words, y- we might have this idea in our heads that someone comes to him and says, "Listen, Willie, we need you to say these things. Here's some money." But that's not really the way it actually happens. 

No. No. In fact, it's more complicated than that. He actually believes what he's saying.

It's not like he, they are literally manufacturing doubt, or they are, finding a scientist and say, "Go lie for us." They have found scientists that think climate change isn't real, and then they have given them a megaphone, and they've given them funding. this, i- i- if, if you go back to a document that was leaked in 1998, there...

Now I'm getting some echo. I'm sorry. Good on your end? 

Yeah, we're fine. 

Oh, apologize. So i-i-in, in 1998, there was a document that was leaked to The New York Times that showed a multimillion-dollar plan to funnel money from, industry trade associations through front groups to basically media train scientists and give them venues to talk to insert uncertainty into the dialogue.

And they explicitly say, "Victory will be achieved when media, legislators, even science teachers believe there is uncertainty." Willie Soon was a direct conduit where they sent money straight to his institution to pay for his research, and the, the payback was Willie Soon publishing, peer-reviewed literature in the, in the scientific journals that would, generate some uncertainty.

So it's a, it's a, a, a feeder system that they developed. A, a network, of front groups being libertarian, anti-en- anti-environmental, anti-regulatory organizations and trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute. They run money through those groups, and they prop up these scientists in the public dialogue, so there are many 

of them- But then it would be, it would be too obvious if they just say, "Hey, we want you to say these things that you may not believe."

The, the, the smarter way to go about it is, "Fine. If only this tiny percentage share our views, let's exclusively fund those and make them prominent and known." 

That's exactly right, and what's fantastic about this new Exxon investigation that's rolled out over the past couple months through a group called Inside Climate News, an online, news source on climate change, and a group at Columbia School of Journalism working with the LA Times, they both have revealed old Exxon documents showing that Exxon knew much more about climate science than we previously knew they did, and then they went on to fund people like Willie Soon.

In one case, there's a document from the mid-'90s where Mobil Oil scientists are being, are briefing the entire industrial coalition, the Global Climate Coalition, which was this front group set up to block the Kyoto Protocol and block the UN process that's happening right now in Paris. they had a whole coalition to stop that.

Their own scientists said arguments like Willie Soon, sunspots, arguments that there's a, a divergence in the temperature record, they basically knock down each of those arguments and say they really don't hold water to explain the warming that we're seeing. And then they didn't include that in the final draft that went public of that document.

So this private conversation inside the industrial bloc, they knew these arguments didn't hold water. Exxon goes on to promote those same arguments in years subsequent. 

Let me ask you a little bit, Kert , and we're speaking with Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigation Center. Increasingly, we are seeing, from, from the the usual suspects, the talking point touted that, "Hey, everything's fine as far as ice melt," that we now see more ice than ever in the Arctic, for example.

have you investigated that? What's, what's going on with that, the resurgence of that talking point that we're hearing lately? 

Well, first of all, it's one of the biggest calamities, the meltdown of the, Greenland ice sheet and West Antarctic Ice Sheets. If they proceed as they are right now, we are in for a lot more sea level rise.

Right. It's where most of the ice that's above sea level on Earth is being stored right now. If they all... if all that melts, we get, like, 30 feet of sea level rise. It's a big deal. So cities like New York, Miami, Philadelphia, others are buried. the re- so that's the reason that they don't want that to be true or don't want that, the uptake of that risk to be seen in the public dialogue.

the, the resurgence is because it's getting worse, and also because there is increased press attention to it, and so the counter-narrative is rising up. 

And talk a little bit about where, the... they claim to have science on their side, right? They claim to say, "Hey, if w- if we just look at the volume of this ice, we have actually seen an increase."

And of course, what, what they would like to see follow from that is if there's more ice, clearly things aren't warming, everything's fine, look in the other direction. 

That's right. And it, there is no evidence that that is occurring in the north. In Antarctica, there was a study just a little while ago that showed more snowfall than they had previously measured in other parts of Antarctica that were adding ice incrementally.

But the scientists concluded it wouldn't, it wouldn't, balance out the ice that's being lost off of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is really the biggest chunk that's falling into the ocean on a regular basis. So ice is a big question. It's... You could call it an uncertainty, but all the news is bad.

So it's not a... y- the best way to think about this is the, the deniers characterize it as a house of cards argument, that if one piece of the scientific puzzle is missing, everything is... everything falls away. It's not true. The better way to look at it is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and yes, in all science, there is continuing exploration and fine point certainty.

But the bigger the picture gets, you, you know the picture before you're done with the puzzle, is the way to look at it. this is a picture of a pretty grim scene. Adding the other pieces are not gonna make that scene into some beautiful sunrise. So the, the argument that we are missing information and that's a reason not to act is completely destructive.

you realize when you watch enough Fox News that the part of the business model of Fox, part of the actual brilliance, and I say that fully, thinking it's brilliant, of Roger Ailes is, television news journalism is really expensive to produce because you have to go out and you have to find information, you have to create information, you have to send reporters, you have to do all this reporting.

Fox is interesting because part of their model is "We don't do that a lot. What we do is just stick two people in the studio and they yell at each other for a while." And that's, it, it's actually a brilliant profit model, right? It's much cheaper to s- stick two people in a studio. You gotta send them a car, you gotta set up a mic, whatever, but you basically have two people yell at each other.

So I started saying, "Where did these lies come from?" Who... Lies, we often talk about zombie lies. So in the zombie apocalypse, there's gonna be a patient zero. I, I started saying, "Who's the patient zero of these lies?" And I started tracing them back. And over and over and over again, I found that there was a group of individuals Who for profit, both financial and ideological, were at the center of creating lie after lie after lie you hear in the media.

And, and I'm very cautious in the book about what I define as a lie. A lie has to be something that is provably false. It can't just be a... It's not I disagree, it's not that they're conservative and they're wrong. It's something that's provably false. And over and over and over again, I found the same pattern of a group of people who invent the lie, who profit from it, commercially and ideologically, and actually those two things are intertwined, and, following this pattern of disseminating false information.

Ari Rabin-Havt is my guest here, and the book that has come out is Lies Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics. If you're just tuning into this show and you'd like to hear the whole thing, you can find all of it online at indeepradio.com. Let's talk about cognitive bias. Okay. And I, and I want to address the people who are listening who might hear what you're saying about Fox and say, as we established, you're liberal, I'm liberal, progressive.

But they can say, "Look, it's cognitive bias. You listen to Fox. You think you have the statistics in your favor that this is true. You think you can look up facts that say this is true." But what you're discussing is this mirrored world where everyone has a handle on their own facts. 

Well, that's exactly what by post-truth.

We've entered a world where liberals and conservatives, we don't just disagree on issues, right? We, we disagree on the actual facts. And this is, this is actually an important political development and one that is highly toxic. Because if I leave today, and on the way back to San Francisco, God forbid, we get into a car accident, right, and lawsuit goes to court, the judge will say before the trial begins, "Here are the stipulated facts.

You were driving, you were driving in this car, you were driving this car, and the cars hit each other. Now we'll decide who's at fault for said accident." Right? But in a court, there are stipulated facts. In political debates, we have entered a world where progressives believe one thing, conservatives believe another, and the basis of facts in an argument are so separated that you can't debate.

Think about the debate about climate change, right? It's not a debate to say, "I think the earth is warming," and somebody else says, "No, it's not," and another person says, "No, the earth is cooling." That's a debate about reading a thermometer. That's not a policy debate. And we've left, we've left that arena, and it's, it's intentional.

In the book, I directly quote one of the members of Lies Incorporated, one of the most notorious ones. His name's Richard Berman. And Richard Berman is a, is a, is I honestly, I say this about very few people, I actually truly believe him to be a sociopath. 

Well, in fact, if I can interject, the first thing you say is, "Richard Berman is a liar."

Yeah. That's how you open the 

book. He is. And Richard Berman, think about, an industry that you would classify as not a good group of people, tobacco, fast food, you name it. He is, the guy behind it. Sugar, he's worked for them. In the late '90s, he ran a campaign against Mothers Against Drunk Driving, to classify them as evil.

He's run campaigns to claim that pregnant women should eat more fish because mercury's totally cool. And I, and I wish I were joking about this, but he gave a presentation to a group of oil executives and, and, and energy executives, and it was a really telling presentation. He gets up on stage, and he says, he says, "Here's the thing.

My job is not to win. My job is to get us to a status quo because at the status quo, everything stays the same. So my job is to muddy the arguments and take us to a status quo." Because if we're, if we keep ourselves the same, we win. That's what the, that's the exact model of the tobacco industry. That's the exact model of the asbestos industry.

That's the exact model of all these industries that desperately were trying to hold on to financial power while, frankly, in the case of tobacco, killing people. 

Well, in fact, there's something in the book that I was surprised to read, and it really, it c- it countered what I've always believed to be true.

Yeah. I always thought that this idea of countering facts for your own gain was necessarily the gain of money. Yeah, it's not. Was necessarily about getting rich or staying rich or keeping your industry bringing in a steady income. But you say that's not necessarily 

it. Well, for industries it is. Right. but you think about the people involved, and I, I can't credit myself with this.

Naomi Oreskes, who's a brilliant Harvard professor, actually, sent me in this direction. She wrote a, a brilliant book about this, called Merchants of Doubt, which I heavily recommend the book. There's also a movie. You can watch the movie if you don't wanna see, if you wanna read the book. But, essentially she looked at, the climate denial industry, and she looked at the scientists involved, and we often think, and I thought this, th- they sold out for the money, right?

Those scientists who were in the climate denial movement, the tobacco scientists. She looked at both of them. By the way, a lot of those scientists are the same scientists. Same guys, actually. And she said, "Oh, those guys are just in it for the money." Turns out, not true. They were in it for ideological reasons.

If you, if you look at what they said, what they wrote, what... You're like, "What does tobacco and climate have to do with each other?" Well, these scientists were cold warriors. They were people who grew up a, a, a lot in, in terms of science, developing, satellites to, and missiles and other things for the defense industry, and they really truly believed what they were doing was saving the world from communism.

That was their, that's what they thought they were doing. They, and they were mission driven. And they came to believe that any regulatory, encroachment was a step towards communism, and therefore, any regulatory encroachment needed to be battled back. And you see actually this terminology f- flying around the climate denial world where, and this isn't something...

When progressives hear this, they're like, "Really?" what a lot of, the climate denial world calls, environmentalists now? They call them watermelons. Because you're green on the outside and red on the inside. Oh. I'm not... A- and it, it comes from that, th- that, that you see that channel through.

So you see these scientists. Now, the money's nice. Let's, let's be clear. It's not that they don't like the money. They, they like the money. you see o- one of the early tobacco scientists. This is interesting. why did he become a tobacco... This guy was a noted, noted scientist, National Academy of Sciences, et cetera, college president.

Why did he get involved in, with the tobacco industry? Well, he was a, he was a eugenicist, and he firmly believed that all human maladies were related to genetics, and if tobacco caused cancer, then genetics didn't cause cancer, and his whole life's work ro- was out the window. So he spent time with the tobacco industry trying to prove that lung cancer was a genetic cause.

Now, obviously we know, we know the facts of the situation is ev- they, it contributes, right? There are peop- George Burns can smoke till he's in his 90s and be totally fine, and other people are much more susceptible to cancer. There is a genetic factor, obviously. But he, he did it because he, at the time, he believed this was questioning his wife's life's work.

Now, did he like the money? Of course he liked the money. Did he like the ability that he had to hand out all these huge grants from the tobacco industry to other scientists? Of course he did. But it was about ideology, and it's that linkage. Money plus ideology is the sweet spot here. 

Next, Section B, Trump's Rollback and the Legal Fight to Stop It

This is almost Walmart coming in and, and basically saying "You guys, y- y- we're, we're gonna Bigfoot you in this town. We're gonna squash, the competitors, and in terms of our suppliers, we're either, you're gonna live or die based upon whether or not you meet our terms." It's, it, it feels that way to me, Sam.

I, I'm, maybe I'm, I'm jumping the gun a little bit, but I'm just... This is what I see. this is what I see. Everybody who's walking into the Trump administration, literally everybody, we could go down the list, Well, let's go down that list, because I- All right ... wonder, how does, what is the interplay?

If, if this is, y- and, and we can look at guys Pruitt, right? Who's in there- Right ... at the head of EPA. That's, that's an obvious one, right? And- This is a climate change denier who's gonna be the head of the EPA. And his co, the co-chair of his reelect campaign, I think in 2014, was Harold Hamm, who is- Exactly

a, a, a huge- Ha- Harold Hamm is the CEO of Continental. He was supposedly the pick for energy secretary before he said no. And, if you don't know, Continental Resources is the largest, actually it's the second-largest fracker in the Bakken in North Dakota. and Harold Hamm controls that company, and who did he pick to, to, to head up energy?

well, he picked, oops guy. Right. Rick Perry. And he's, from Texas, nothing but an oil lover. we could, we could go down the list. So there's, let me see how many more I can just think of off the top of my head. You talked about Pruitt at the EPA. Zinke, who's the interior secretary, is, is a big fan of, of drilling for coal, and oil on public lands.

He's the head of the interior department. Hmm. y- you get, Gary Cohn, who's coming in as the, the Council of National, of Economic Advisers. he's, he, they talk about him like he's a, a, a, a Goldman Sachs guy, and he is. He's president of Goldman Sachs. But m- many people don't know that he cut his teeth o- on the New York Mercantile Exchange, where I was, trading oil.

He's an oil guy. The secretary of the army coming in is Vinnie Viola. This is the secretary of the army. He cut his teeth standing right next to me in the, in the gasoline pits at the New York Mercantile Exchange. He's an oil trader. Carter Page, who's their big guy in, in, in Russia, who's part of their economic, their, their, their economic, their foreign policy group i- in the election.

He, he started, he was in Russia for, for years working as a, consultant to Gazprom, and started his own, hedge fund called, Global Energy Capital. you can go down the list one after the other of guys who, have not small connections, but the, the, the head of commerce, Ross- Right

Wilbur Ross. Wilbur Ross. One of his... He runs a hedge fund. One of his largest, investments is with Exco Resources. It's a natural gas company in the United States, and it's been a lousy investment for him. He'd love a chance to help make that a winner as opposed to a loser. So- Carl Icahn on his part, he's- Right

he's, he's got huge investments in, in, in an offshore company called Transocean and with copper mines in Indonesia. y- you just, you can't get away from it. It's all resources everywhere you look. And so what is the relationship between, opening up, all the lands, actually drilling more in this country, what is the relationship between that and the potential, glut that it produces with our international relations?

how, because it seems, to someone like me who's not as well-educated about this at all, it seems like those are, there's a little bit of tension there, right? if we're gonna keep producing, extraordinary amounts of, of oil domestically, how does that, implicate our relations with Russia or with, Saudi Arabia and whatnot?

Okay. Well, look, from my perspective and from most oil analysts' perspective, well, I wouldn't say most, but here's the point. This has been an outlier the last two years. Low energy prices, low natural resource prices, low copper prices, has been a real outlier. In general, since the turn of the century, we've been seeing a steady rise in the cost of natural resources, and most people, me particularly, but most people think that this has just been a bump in the road caused by various other financial factors and what has been a short-term overproduction, particularly in oil and gas, here in the United States.

But that fundamentally not only will change, but if you, if, if you gave me an hour, I could explain to you why it has to change. So prices that you're seeing now for gasoline, oil, natural gas, coal even, copper for sure, zinc, iron, all of these things, they're unnaturally low, and over the course of the next four or five years, in my view, triple all of them.

Triple. And, a- again, if you had an hour, I could prove that to you. Now, most analysts don't go there because they can't go there. They, they, they have an obligation to investors not to be wrong, so they can't make wild predictions. But if you talk to people who are inside, they know that these prices are unsustainable.

They know that they're headed up. The only question is how fast and how far. Right. So that, that's really where we are. We, we have a group of people inside the White House, coming into the White House, who understand that fundamental fact, that the prices that we're staring at for oil, gas, and other resources are unnaturally low, and they won't stay that way.

So what do you do to plan for that? So they're, this is basically, this is, they're basically using our government as a huge buying opportunity. Yeah. It's, look, this is, this is a corporatocracy we're building here. This is, if you thought, what's good for General Motors is good for the, the country, I, look, I'm wo- looking, I'm working on a long, long-form piece, which I hope will be picked up by somebody, but it's called The Exxon Presidency.

this is what this is going to be about. It's not gonna be talked about. They'll talk, they'll, like you say, they'll talk about the pee-pee jokes or whatever, and they'll, they'll, they'll talk about what, whatever mistakes, of, Ivanka, had when she was whatever.

Right. But this is the, these are the big, big issues that will affect us and affect the world globally, over the course of the next four years of Trump. It's about this, this damage, this impossible to turn back damage that will be done by this, singular mobilization of resources. 

Donald Trump, signed a slew of executive orders, paving the way to destroy virtually all of Barack Obama's climate change and environmental actions and executive orders. Here are some of the biggest changes that Trump has in store for us. The first is, paving the way to eliminate the Clean Power Plan.

So it's difficult to overstate how important the Clean Power Plan is in terms of, our commitment to reaching, the goals set by the Paris Climate Accord, to taking responsibility for the future change in, in, global temperatures. but here's what it is. The Clean Power Plan was a major EPA rule aiming to cut emissions from existing US power plants thirty-two percent below two thousand and five levels by twenty thirty.

Now, that is just a part of what's necessary for us to, cut our total carbon emissions enough to avoid catastrophic, climate change. But it's very important. It's a set of stringent, requirements for existing, power plants, and they are going to do what they can to destroy it based on this, executive order.

The next is also important, changing carbon standards for new coal plants. So Obama had fairly stringent regulations on existing power plants and even more stringent ones on new coal-fired power plants. it basically made it, economically unfeasible to create new coal, power plants, which is important, and it helped over the past few years to phase out something, something like fifteen thousand megawatts of, coal-powered electricity generation has gone away over the past couple of years.

It's one of the things, affecting that. Now, again, they can't just immediately get rid of those, but they can drastically change the requirements, change definitions in a way, getting rid of these regulations. the next is, methane emissions regulations. One of the best things that Obama did, for the environment was, changing the abilities of companies to just simply release, methane into the atmosphere.

Now, methane is, smaller by volume in terms of how much we emit, but its actual effect on, global climate change is even stronger per unit volume, and so they're going to potentially destroy that, make it easier for comp-companies to simply emit it. And, we actually saw in California not too long ago, a massive, methane leak, and you can see the damage that it does almost in real time, basically.

So here's a quote, and from one of the articles covering this in The New York Times. "Earlier this month, the EPA announced it was withdrawing a rule that required existing oil and gas well operators to provide information about methane emissions." So when you remove that rule, now they can emit all the methane they want, and they don't have to tell you about it.

So that's basically saying Have at it, Hoss. Yeah. Okay, I didn't plan that. It just worked. Yeah. isn't that amazing? This methane that is- We shouldn't even know ... that's even more damaging than carbon. They're "I don't wanna know. I don't wanna... Just, you, hey, are you making bud- money? You made an extra five bucks?

Who cares? Put all the methane you want into the air." Yeah. we, the American people need, don't need to know. What do we represent, the American people? No, we represent companies. No, actually, you represent the American people. That's what you're supposed to do. Yeah. You're supposed to find out on our behalf.

Hiding that information, great for the companies, bad for you. My recollection is that it's 86 times more damaging to the environment, but don't quote me on that. Look it up. Obama had set a re- a goal of reducing methane emissions 40% below 2012, levels by 2025, and they were gonna do different things to detect, plug leaks, and all of that.

God knows what's going to happen to that, that limit, in the next few years. the next is, changing the, calculations of the social cost of carbon. So this is really interesting. Doesn't get talked about much, but back in 2009, Obama's White House gathered a dozen agencies together and tried to assign a dollar value to the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide, taking into account scientific modeling on the damage caused by excess, Aspects of global warming, such as droughts and floods.

They settled on a central estimate of around $36 per ton in 2015, rising over time. It's expected that it's actually far more costly than that, but they were starting somewhere. They might well just get rid of that entirely thanks to this new, executive order by Donald Trump. Le- let me just jump in there, too.

I love that. I think that's a great idea because that's about the free market. Yeah. Now, I know Republicans go, "Oh, no, for the free market." No, you're not. You're a crony capitalist. You just wanna help these companies no matter how much it hurts everyone else. So if you create a product and it has a byproduct, you should pay for the cost of that byproduct.

You shouldn't f- force the public to pay for that cost. You shouldn't pay the whole world to pay for that cost. We didn't profit off your product. You did. So you should bear the actual cost of your product. Yeah, exactly. So, let's say it's your two neighbors real quick. One of them is making a lot of, of money from doing something on his property, but all of the junk from that, the pollution or whatever else, goes into your house, and he says, "I don't care.

That's gonna kill your kids," or whatever it is. Well, then you should pay thousands of dollars to clean it up. But wait, I didn't make any money off of it. You're the one who made the money, and you're making me pay the cost. It's yeah, so what? And the crony capitalist that is the Republican Party come in and go, "Well, that guy gave me campaign donations- Yeah

and you didn't. So you suffer the cost, and he takes all the profits." Yeah. That's not free market. It's also obviously not fair. If you make a product and it has a byproduct that costs a lot, you should pay that cost. Yeah, and in, in terms of pollution, that's a metaphor. It's also literally what's happening right now, and they want to double down on that.

next, they want to eliminate the moratorium on federal coal leasing. There's huge areas of the US with coal reserves that, had been being leased out to coal companies at basically far lower than market cost, subsidizing, the cost of, digging up this coal and then burning it. Obama stopped all of that.

He's put a moratorium on it. pre- for a period of a few years we're not gonna do it. Now they're simply gonna open that up, and that's one of the things that they can do basically today if they want. the next is, investigating anyth- anything that inhibits energy production. It is actually that broad.

Ridiculous. They want the, the, every one of these organizations to look at every rule, every regulation in any way that could inhibit energy production of any kind. That's the toddler-ish language they're using. And what it actually means is inhibit, the profits of our campaign contributors.

Exactly. We will not allow it. We have to remove all of those inhibitors. Yeah. And then you guys are gonna pay the cost, but hey, you never donated to Republicans, so that's your problem, not my problem. Exactly. And finally, two things that aren't in this. it doesn't say whether they're going to, to remove themselves from the par climate- Paris Climate Accords, and they haven't yet categorically taken away the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions, as an environmental pollutant.

Those are two of the big boys, and they might be coming. Okay. And, and finally, in this regard, let's just think this through for a second. As they explain in the beginning of the, of every article that covers this, this is about, as John laid out, the emissions for rules for power plants, limits on methane leaks, moratorium on federal coal leasing, use of social cost of carbons, et cetera.

Now, as you look at that entire list, does anyone think that the Republicans would ever make any of that stuff safer and say, "Okay, now corporations, you're gonna have to pay a little bit more here 'cause we don't want that poison in the air and 'cause it affects us all and it affects our children. Now, so let's, let's do a balancing act here.

Some of this stuff we're gonna do less regulation, some of this stuff we're gonna do more regulation 'cause we studied it." Mm-hmm. No one expects that. If you do, you're a fool, and of course, they never deliver that. All they ever do is less regulation, less cost on companies, more cost on you, every single time.

And including this case, every single rule that they pass was for less safety, less protection of consumers, and for more maximizing profit for the corporations that donated to them. 

this is Trump's attempt to undermine, climate policies, specifically Obama's climate policies, his regulations, and frankly his legacy when it comes to his, e- environmental legacy. But the entire performance yesterday was, was put forward as a way to, to bring coal jobs back, which as we discussed yesterday, ain't happening.

Ain't gonna happen since the world is now moving on from coal. And not because of some Obama war on coal, I wish we had such a, d- a war on coal, but because, but because natural gas is cheaper and cleaner when it comes to, to power plants. Coal cannot really compete on the free market, and the coal that is out there is increasingly mined by automation techniques that don't require as much manpower.

And oh yeah, then there's the renewable energy revolution in solar and wind that is resulting in hundreds of thousands of good jobs. And nonetheless, since this is the Fox News administration, essentially a presidential, a Fox News show in the guise of a president, they're pretending that somehow Trump's signature is going to bring back coal mining.

It's not. y- here's a, a quick montage of the EPA's administrator, Scott Pruitt, who hates the EPA, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who had no idea what the Energy Department did, and finally, Vice President Mike Pence, speaking before Trump's announcement and, and the signing of his so-called Energy Independence executive order yesterday at the, ironically enough, at the Environmental Protection Agency.

our nation can't run on pixie dust and hope, and the last eight years showed that. I can tell you the hallmark of a great president is one that takes decisive action, and that's exactly what our president did. The president with his signature on that executive order is gonna set in motion government reforms-

designed to continue promoting clean air and water for the American people. Coal jobs are the best jobs, and for some of our communities, coal jobs are the only jobs. This is a great day for energy independence and a growing American economy because the war on coal is over. Oh, thank God. Thank God that war is over.

Desi Doyen, coal jobs are the best jobs. Yes. Did you know that? 

And there are many, many more jobs in solar and wind than- Oh, yeah ... i- in coal. It's, I think the latest statistic that I saw based on the Department of Energy is, that renewable energy jobs outnumber fossil fuel jobs two to one these days. Oh, yeah, at least. And that's not because of regulations, it's because it's cheaper and it continues to fall in price even now being below coal in the cost of electricity generation.

And people like it better. And it was amazing in that, i- entire thing yesterday, Trump did not talk about... did not use the words climate, I don't think, at all. certainly not global warming. Oh, he didn't. he didn't... I don't think he mentioned solar. He didn't mention- He did not ... wind. I watched the whole thing.

Any of that stuff. He said nothing. None of them said anything. They kept talking about energy independence, but yet they cut out the growing sector of energy independence, which is homegrown wind and solar. Nonetheless, as we discussed yesterday, after seeing that, entire fine affair, and frankly after seeing the, the, the, the rest of the ways that Trump has tried and failed to do stuff like his Muslim ban, repealing and replacing the, the dreaded Obamacare, I gotta say, I am somewhat less alarmed by what they are trying to do here because they are not very good at it.

They are just not good. They don't know what they are doing. They think that the stuff they told them on Fox News is actually true, is actually the way the world works, and they are learning piece by piece, policy by policy, that that is not the case. also I am a little bit less worried today because, the folks who have been standing up against this administration, and, whether it's the public b- bor- or the courts, but here in particular we've got environmentalists and legal experts who suggest overturning these regulations that, as Trump is trying to do, these regulations that took years to put in place.

as based on existing legislation and in some cases court orders, going back years, that itself is going to take years and may end up preventing, these regulations from being, reversed. They may, be stopped by the courts entirely. And by way of just one more example of the, the difficulty the Tr- the Trump administration is likely to face in rolling back many of these regulations from the Obama era, and by the way, from before the Obama era, from, from the George W.

Bush era, frankly, Amanda Marcotte over at Salon, writes that the administration's claims about getting the EPA back to its core mission by rolling back regulations while at the same time, again, moving forward on energy production in the US is, as Marcotte describes it, a bunch of nonsense. She writes, "Instead, the executive order is another example of the Trump administration's ignoring basic facts in service of a right-wing ideology rooted mostly in a blind, irrational hatred of Obama.

Unfortunately for Trump," she says, "undoing cl- Obama's climate legacy will require more than a stroke of a pen. As Trump learned when he, when he signed a half-baked order meant to fulfill his Muslim travel ban promise, there were scores of lawyers at the ready for, to challenge his efforts. That's even more true when facing down environmental groups," she argues.

"To make things even harder for Trump, environmental lawyers are backed by a heavy amount of legal precedent that has established that the EPA is required to do its job, and that scientific evidence matters when it comes to environmental regulation." Not just, not just due to common sense, by the way, but it actually matters in a court of law.

All this executive order does, she says, is instruct federal agencies to reconsider existing rules. While there is no doubt that Pruitt would love to g- that's Scott Pruitt, the, the EPA administrator who hates the EPA. While there's no doubt that Pruitt would love to gut rules designed to combat climate change, there are legal restraints on what he can do.

And she gives, one example here. A, a 1946 law requires courts to, quote, "Hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions that are found to be arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law." Th- therefore, she quotes, Vera Pardee , a senior, counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, saying that Pruitt's justifications for rewriting Obama-era rules must be, quote, "Reasonable, non-arbitrary, non-capricious e- explanations as to why the reams and reams of scientific material gathered by the EPA under Obama to justify these rules somehow no longer apply."

Because the new president says so? That doesn't count. Yeah, that's not good enough. 

To understand what the endangerment finding is, we must take a step back to 2007, when a Supreme Court ruling changed how the US viewed pollution regulation

Good morning, and, thank you all very much for being here today. Today's hearing will focus on the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts versus EPA, both within the Bush administration and within Congress. In 1998, in response to an inquiry by then Representative Tom DeLay, the Clinton administration's Environmental Protection Agency said that it believed that the Clean Air Act provided it with the authority to regulate carbon dioxide.

One year later, a group of environmental and other advocacy organizations petitioned the EPA to use this authority to set greenhouse gas standards for cars. But it wasn't until 2003, when the Bush administration had already embarked on a course of denial, delay, and dismissal of the risk of climate change and the need to address it, that the EPA repudiated the Clinton administration's conclusion that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that could be regulated, and denied the petition.

That petition became the case known as Massachusetts versus EPA. 

The voice you're hearing is Ed Markey, a Democrat known for progressive policies and a leading voice on climate change in the US Congress, who served as the US representative for Massachusetts 7th congressional district from 1976 to 2013.

In June 2007, two months after the Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court ruling, the House Select Committee held a hearing led by Markey exploring the ruling's implications. Until the 2007 ruling, the Bush administration continued to dismiss what by then was already undisputable scientific evidence of the dangers of carbon dioxide for human health and the planet, asserting that it lacked authority to regulate carbon dioxide, and that voluntary regulations would be sufficient.

The Supreme Court ruling changed that. In a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that under the plain meaning of the Clean Air Act, carbon dioxide is a pollutant. What that meant was that the EPA now had the duty to regulate this pollutant, as long as it could determine the emissions of carbon dioxide endanger public health and welfare.

That decision was important because, number one, it found that at least states have standing to sue when it comes to climate change issues. It found that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and it said that the EPA cannot decline to regulate based just on policy issues.

There's a statutory duty to evaluate under a specific provision of the Clean Air Act whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or the welfare with respect to new motor vehicles. So basically, you had the Supreme Court back in 2007 telling the EPA, "Look, this is an air pollutant, okay?

We've looked at the text of the Clean Air Act, and carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases are air pollutants, and there's this statutory duty to decide whether there's, endangerment to the public health or welfare. And now you need to go through a process. You need to go through a reasoned regulatory process to come up with a scientific justification for regulating or not these pollutants."

And so that set into motion the process for adjudicating y- or deciding, the endangerment issue 

The process under the Obama administration led in 2009 to what became known as the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. The EPA found that the current and projected concentrations of six well-mixed greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the three most known ones, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, threatened the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

The EPA also found that the combined emissions of these greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution that threatens public health and welfare. These findings per se did not directly translate into any requirement on industry or other entities, but they became a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles and other sectors.

That became the legal foundation for most federal climate change regulation under the Clean Air Act, and there was a a cascading impact. you quickly get greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks. It led to a power plant carbon dioxide rule, the Clean Power Plan. It led to oil and methane regulations, and it led to some greenhouse gas permitting under the Clean Air Act, something called a tailoring rule.

Interestingly, many of these programs, probably all of them, have been challenged, and some of them have been subject to some modification by courts. But what you saw was that the endangerment finding did create this cascading impact of regulation of climate change by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. So it was this foundational trigger that continued over time to create new programs for regulating greenhouse 

gases.

And I personally, as I look back at it, I think it was groundbreaking because there was so much congressional stalemate over climate change legislation, and this was a way to break through that And it's also something that I think was important in that the way the court decided Mass v. EPA, and then following the endangerment finding, this became a statu- a fixed statutory duty, really, and something that didn't just change with, political change and political wins.

It became part of the program, as it were. And that was 20 years ago. I also think that had an impact on how the federal government viewed climate change and other administrative agencies, how they considered impacts of climate-related risk. you, you saw different agencies incorporating that into their decision-making process.

And of course, there's been an impact on industry as they've complied with these programs and relied on these programs in terms of making changes in, in their business and production and so forth. So there's been, it's been a pretty big impact

Trump shouldn't be seen in isolation, that there's a whole series of right-wing populist, counter-revolutions going on around the planet, and that they all have a really worrying environmental aspect.

How much is Trump's anti-environmentalist policies, how much are those policies, outliers of the Republican Party? 'Cause I wanna make sure the people understand that, that, y- I want, want, wanna make sure the people understand if this is an aberration or if this is something systemic within the Republican Party.

No, I think it's really something systemic. In fact, if you look at, all the appointees who he's been lining up in the week and a half or so since I wrote my, blog post for Verso, they just are such industry hacks and longtime Republican, tools that, he's, he's really putting in place a whole branch of the Republican Party which is ideologically committed to climate denial and to furthering the interests of fossil capitalism.

So, why do you believe hopes in the market correcting for green energy, why do you believe those hopes are misguided? Why can't the market correct for consumer demand, assuming consumers' demand being more green energy? And, and i- is the problem with the market not being able to correct itself because the consumers aren't demanding that green energy?

Yeah, that's a, that's a complicated point. just actually a day or two ago, there was a piece in The New York Times saying, that the market is driving things in the right way. and we continue to see this perspective, and there are lots of important, people with, with big voices, including former Vice President Al Gore, who talk in these kinds of terms.

And there is some reality to that. because of the boom, in, Fracking, right? the u-- the country is really awash in gas and, oil produced by fracking at the moment. And that surfeit of production is really responsible for making coal economically non-viable, right? So it's definitely true that on a economic basis, coal is not competitive at the moment.

But, what I try and do in the, piece that I posted on the Verso site is to say, first of all, the assumption that there's some inherent direction is, to-- that, that's market-led is misplaced because we need to think about the market in global terms, right? it's, it's a planet and a planetary cl- climate emergency that we're looking at.

And if we think about what's happening on a planetary level rather than just within the United States, And you can think about, for instance, countries like India where there's, a real perceived need to drive industrialization by, intense coal, production.

And, while at the moment there's a surfeit of, liquid natural gas in the United States that makes coal non-competitive, and consequently, you can find people saying, current energy sources are not that intensive, right, in terms of their g-greenhouse gas emissions. We've been shifting to less intensive forms of energy.

and it's objectively true that natural gas is less intensive than, coal. Nonetheless, we have, we have a lot of production of that. methane is being produced, and you just have to be very careful about this narrative which Al Gore and other ecological modernizers have, that the market is gonna, lead us in this wonderful direction, and that therefore, we don't really need to worry about Trump.

that the Trump and whatever his administration and all the, flunkies of, the big oil, corporations like Scott Pruitt, who he's nominated to be EPA administrator. we don't really need to worry about what any of them do because the underlying economic dynamics are, driving us in this wonderful direction.

And that needs to be challenged, and we need to be really clear about how we need to fight back. Politically. whenever I post something about climate change online, Ashley, y- you can count on somebody saying that the real problem is overpopulation. In your opinion, what do people miss in their understanding of the challenges that this planet faces when they s- think that the real problem is overpopulation, not climate change?

Oh my goodness, overpopulation. well, there, there have been currents, Malthusian currents within the environmental movement in the past. But I think we really need to push back against that and see that, in fact, as part of precisely the xenophobic, anti-immigrant, white supremacist, racist movements that Trump unfortunately has really brought to prominence in national discourse and politics today.

it's about the distribution of resources rather than about any specific amount of people, right? we live still on a planet that has many resources, and if we steward them and use them correctly, they could certainly support the number of people that we have. but, if we allow capitalism, which is this system which is based on infinite expansion, to run rampant, then we're gonna end up in serious, hot water, and that, of course, is precisely what Tr- the Trump administration is proposing to do.

his, pledges, are all to take out every possible s- stop and allow fossil capitalism to develop as much as possible. So in my piece, I really argue that we have to, keep fighting the kinds of fights that we saw unfolding, in recent months at Standing Rock and over the last week actually.

the victory there has been so, so wonderful and so positive. It may be rolled back in a few months once Trump comes to office, but, nonetheless, I think it's really important, politically and symbolically that people are standing up to fossil capitalism and fighting, against the creation of this infrastructure.

And, speaking of something like Standing Rock, one of the things that Trump has talked about, in his tweets and his, his platform is that this is gonna be about energy independence and creating many jobs for Americans. Well, first of all, it's not gonna create a huge number of jobs, right?

We're not getting back kinda deep pit coal mines that are gonna employ hundreds of thousands of people in West Virginia. The technology has moved on, and they're using mountaintop removal there, so it employs relatively, few people. But the idea of energy independence, which Trump is touting as part of his populist nationalism, is also a complete fiction.

a lot of the pipelines that are being ship natural gas and fracked crude out of the country, right? Because we have too much production of that stuff here. So, big corporations wanna shift, shift the stuff and, transport it internationally and take it to places like Europe, 

So they're pr- Putting people in direct danger all over the place and doing it not in any way to, support energy independence, as they call it, of this country. And one thing I've been thinking about just recently, I don't know if you've heard about this, Chuck, but there's this totally insane plan to build a pipeline, right next to a nuclear power plant, one of the oldest nuclear power plants in the country, which is only 30 miles north of New York City.

And they're gonna put this pipeline within a couple of hundreds of feet of the nuclear power plant. And you couldn't think of a more insane plan if, if you tried. 

I've been trying to figure out what explains climate change denialism. Do you think that Trump's climate change denialism allows him to give his supporters something other than bipartisan globalization to blame for their work and, or their working and living conditions? How much do you think dismissing climate change alleviates any conversation or criticism of globalization, of continuing economic growth as a driving policy force?

I think that climate change denialism, I think Naomi, Naomi Klein really hits it, nails it when she says that this is about, having your pockets lined by the fossil fuel industry. The only thing I would add to that, as I say in my, my blog piece, it's not like Donald Trump is, is stupid or bad at science.

he, he's getting paid very handsomely, and, certainly if you look at pe- people like Scott Pruitt, he has been deeply enmeshed in the fossil fuel industry. in twenty fourteen, a New York Times investigation, in fact, found that he was writing memorandums on letterhead that came directly from the fossil fuel industry.

So they're basically just writing the legislation that he was trying to get passed in Oklahoma that was, pushing off attempts to regulate oil and gas. The only thing I would, add to Naomi Klein's analysis is just that a lot of that denialism, I think, picks up on the legacy of the Cold War, and resonates with these fears, which people sometimes have of entities like the United Nations coming in and taking over and robbing us of democracy.

so, given the way in which democracy's been hollowed out in this country and taken over, and, eviscerated, I can see why those kinds of fears are, are real and, why these kinds of claims might res- resonate. But of course, they're totally misplaced, and the people who are really gutting democracy are the precisely the folks who, Trump is bringing to Washington, right?

He promised to drain the swamp of Washington. It's such an ironic metaphor because, of course, his policies are going to massively exacerbate climate change, including sea level rise. So he's, he's actually bringing the swamp to DC in the most literal way, as well as, of course, metaphorically by bringing, fossil fuel corporations and allowing them to take over the government essentially.

Now, Section C, Suncor v. Boulder and the Accountability Fight

Can you give an audience, some notion of how oil and gas industry has been deceptive to the public, and especially as relates to the dangers of their products over the last decades?

sure, I'd be glad to. So, these are the most interesting claims in this lawsuit, right? The claims that the fossil fuel defendants knowingly contributed to climate change while misleading the public about its impacts. these are allegations that they knowingly contributed to harms in Colorado through their production, promotion, and marketing of fossil fuel products while actively misrepresenting or concealing the risks of those products.

So the essential elements of this kind of a claim is that there has to be a false statement, that is a statement that is deliberately or recklessly false assertion of fact. There has to be an intent to deceive. right, the knowing falsehood has to be intended to deceive the recipient of the message, and then there has to be reliance.

The other party has to rely upon those misrepresentations when taking action. Now just to be clear, nobody has proven any of this, right? The issue before the Supreme Court is whether a Colorado court can hear these allegations that the company's violations of Colorado Consumer Protection Law caused harms in Colorado.

So right now we're dealing in the world of, allegations rather than anything that has been proven. But there's a lot of evidence, to support these allegations that the company's knowingly and intentionally engaged in deceptive conduct. just some examples, some brief examples of the factual underpinnings of these allegations.

in 1982, Exxon had internally concluded that, and I'm gonna quote here, "There was a clear scientific consensus," unquote, regarding the climactic effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. So in 1982, Exxon was t- already talking about significant sea level rise, melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, severe disruptions to agriculture, and, actually they predicted a 3.1, C in- increase in global mean temperature by 2090, which is pretty much the track that we're on if we don't take, events...

we don't take action pretty soon. Six years later in 1988, they nevertheless produced an internal memo outlining a company strategy for sowing confusion and emphasizing uncertainty. And I just wanna emphasize how long ago that was. Ronald Reagan was president. East and West Germany were separate countries.

in 1982, when Exxon's internal documents showed that climate change was occurring, that was the year that Raiders of the Lost Ark won five Academy Awards. in 1988, when Exxon, created this, internally wrote down this strategy to undercut the scientific consensus that they knew existed about climate change, that was the year that smoking was banned on domestic airline flights.

And I mention that in particular because as Professor Naomi Oreskes has demonstrated in her really thoroughly researched and fascinating book, Merchants of Doubt, the fossil fuel industry adopted a very similar strategy to that developed by the cigarette industry to manufacture uncertainty about a scientific consensus in order to stave off, regulation.

So that long ago is when the companies in turn that are being sued in this case had definitive evidence about the way that their products and conduct were harming the earth, its people, and ecosystems. And that long ago is when they adopted a strategy to mislead the public about the harms of their products.

and I could give you many more examples, but in the interest of time, I'm not going to. but I just wanna emphasize, so the lawsuit alleges that despite their own internal knowledge about a scientific consensus regarding the likelihood of, catastrophic climate change, and they were using the word catastrophic internally, the defendants in this lawsuit adopted public communications intentionally designed to, exaggerate uncertainty, to downplay the severe harms caused by fossil fuels, and to expand fossil fuel production and to finance third parties to spread these messages while they were simultaneously also taking precautions to protect their own infrastructure from the impacts of climate change 

it's...

I, I spent a lot of time in, in climate work, and it's always horrifying to learn something new, that they knew about the 3.1C since the 1980s. that just shocked me right there. I guess that's telling on my part. But, you also, you mentioned again the int- the, the not just internally, but using third parties to essentially mislead the public.

That sounds not dissimilar to me, for instance, what has happened with the opioids, for instance. 

Mm-hmm. 

yeah, Monsanto is coming into the... Or I'm sorry, Monsanto is not the, the exact one, but we can, we can touch on that as well. with the opioid cases, for instance, using McKinsey as a way to spread that, or the tobacco industry.

or is anyone on this chat willing to s- talk a little more about that?

so I don't wanna go too far over my skis in terms of what I actually know, and I have not been following the o- opioid crisis except through the newspaper. haven't really been following the litigation very closely. But, the... this, this is a tried and true strategy to manipulate public opinion on a host of topics, right?

Not only to, spread one's own message, but to, to create or to co-opt what seem like trusted third parties to amplify that message is a, is a tactic that we've seen a lot, and it is a tactic that has resulted in, in the past and, and in other contexts in liability

So just to give a bit of background here, Boulder's lawsuit, which was filed in Colorado State Court in twenty eighteen, argues that Exxon and Suncor concealed and misrepresented to the public what they knew about the damage burning fossil fuels would cause to the climate, and that the companies should pay for the resulting climate costs local governments now face This is one of dozens of lawsuits across the United States brought by state and local governments and tribes that say oil companies deceived the public about their products, and the cases could make those companies pay billions of dollars in damages.

a number of these cases are already in the pretrial discovery process, where the parties can get more evidence and documents to make their case. Boulder's has been allowed by the Colorado Supreme Court to start making its way toward trial, but Exxon and Suncor have appealed that ruling up to the US Supreme Court, and they want the case stopped.

so I just wanna note that while we likely won't have time to cover this today, the company's effort to get the Supreme Court to step in here is also part of a much wider set of strategies playing out right now by the industry and its allies, including the Trump administration and members of Congress, to stop the cases from moving forward, and even to obtain complete legal immunity for fossil fuel companies from climate lawsuits.

I have a new explainer laying out all those strategies, which cites a lot of Leslie's excellent reporting and would flag those broader efforts as an important realm for future coverage and future conversations, if we don't get to it today. So there's lots to talk about, lots of nuance here to dig into.

lastly, just wanna point out at the top that this case and others like it are really born out of the crucial investigative reporting from Inside Climate News, Columbia Journalism Review, and The LA Times a decade ago that first uncovered what Exxon scientists knew about climate change, when they knew it, and what they did with that knowledge.

since then, a lot of additional journalistic investigations have been cited in these cases. Reporters are continuing to dig out more internal industry documents. Just this week, Jeff Dembeky at DeSmog put out a great investigation about Suncor's role in spreading doubt about climate science. so I think journalism has a huge role to play in making this moment and the stakes here visible and understandable for readers and audiences right now.

So first, we're gonna walk through the local costs of climate change in Colorado and what's at stake locally. Ishan, to help us do that, let's start with some context. What are the types of climate costs and impacts that Colorado communities are facing right now? What should people outside of Colorado know about what the climate crisis looks like for communities across the state?

Yeah. Thanks, Emily. so this year was an exceptionally bad drought year. if we're taking this year as an example of years moving forward, which hopefully it's not as bad, but, Colorado had a record low snowpack this year. And when that happens, there's, a cascade of downstream impacts.

So not only did we have record low snowpack, we also had a scorching March, and that resulted in record low stream flow across a lot of our, rivers, especially some that feed into the Colorado River. And that resulted in, actually, a physical supply crunch for a lot of mountain towns for, the availability of drinking water.

It led to, Colorado has a really complicated system, the whole West does, of western water law and who gets water first. That led to a lot of things that haven't happened in many years, like, some farming and ranching operations, getting called out of priority, which means they didn't get all the water they were entitled to.

and it led to a lot of towns also really considering, how to get their drinking water. So drought this year was, like, a huge, front-of-mind thing. we don't have a great sense yet of what this year's snowpack will be. we're hoping that it's a lot better, but it'll take a few seasons of amazing snowpack to get rid of those, issues we faced this year.

So that's one. So drought, definitely top of mind. wildfires, that's been huge for the last few years. since Boulder first filed its original complaint, in 2018, we had the Marshall Fire. So that was at the end of 2021. And that fire really changed how a lot of people in Colorado think about, what a wildfire can look like.

It was a fast-moving, fire through grassland that eventually became the state's most destructive. over 1,000 structures destroyed. very costly in terms of property damage and insurance payouts. And so that impact and that, the threat of these fast-moving fires that start in areas that are a little more rural but then transition to kind of urban blazes, that's something that's top of mind now.

so that w- that, that's been happening, and this, this season we also had kind of a terrible wildfire season as well. There were these huge blazes, in Pueblo, which is a little bit south. Ouray, it's near Telluride. and after a wildfire happens, you often get a burn scar, and that gets a lot of flooding afterwards.

So those are just some of the things that, happened this year that communities are taking account of. I, I will say when Boulder first filed their complaint, they, they had a report that came out around the same time, and a very conservative estimate of, some of the cost of adaptation, in a medium-to-high scenario climate impact.

Put those costs at around $96 million to, $157 million through 2050. So that was in 2018, and those numbers have almost certainly grown, and they only, encompass a fraction of those costs. And one thing I wanna say about Boulder real quick, so that's where I live. Boulder the city, can feel very suburban at times.

You have these, beautiful mountains in the background. But that's just one part of Boulder County. Boulder County stretches into the foothills. It abuts Forest Service land. There's subalpine lakes. And it also goes into these kind of, suburban areas with a lot of grassland as well. So Boulder County's climate impacts are actually pretty varied, from more mountainous to more, prairie-like.

So that's just... Those are just a few examples. I could, I could go on and on about how our utilities are responding, what those costs are. But, yeah, this year was a, e-especially for water, was a real wake-up, call for a lot of people. 

in terms of the, impacts that communities, marginalized communities and, and communities generally are already facing. So in your opening, Brian, you already mentioned the extreme heat that the mid-Atlantic is facing.

And what you didn't tell us, which I'm sure you're well aware of, the nature, the heterogeneous nature of extreme heat. So you mentioned the 90 something degree temperature, and then the 105 degree real feel. If you're positioned in an urban heat island, we know oftentimes those communities can be 10, 15 degrees hotter.

So when your meteorologist comes on and says, "Today in city X, it's 87 degrees," that's just one weather station reading. 95 degrees, 102 degrees. We know if you're living in an area that's replete with impervious surface, buildings, highways, et cetera, your temperature, as I said, can be substantially a dozen or more degrees warmer.

So extreme heat is one, one impact, and I'll talk momentarily about how that gets imposed differently, across, racial and socioeconomic communities. Think about the wildfire onslaught that we've seen. Wildfires have existed probably since there have been forests that have been in existence.

But what we're seeing, same thing with super storms, flooding. The propensity of wildfires, floods, heat waves, extreme heat, these things are gonna happen a lot more intensely, and they're happening a lot more frequently. or they can happen a lot more frequently as a consequence of climate change. And then when you start to talk about the inordinate or disproportionate impacts that, communities, racially marginalized communities face, like Black American folks, folks around the globe, positioned a- across the Global South, let's think about that for a second.

So somebody on the call may be thinking, man, if it's 87 degrees, everybody feels that the same. we all feel 99 degrees the same. Except we don't. As I said, we know that the heat islands are disproportionately centered in racially marginalized communities, at least in the US. But then you also have to stack that or think about that within the context of, overlapping preexisting health conditions.

a lot of times, at least in the US, African American communities are positioned next to, idling facilities, industry which causes asthma rates or other respiratory illness communities, or other respiratory illness within these communities. So if you look at that preexisting health framework, couple that with the inundation of particulate matter from a wildfire, you're gonna be in pretty bad shape.

Same thing when you're talking about that mid-Atlantic heat wave. If you're making $170,000 a year, that $400 electricity bill is a inconvenience. If you're living below the poverty line, if you're living in a low-income household, you're gonna have to make some serious decisions. Am I cooling my home this month or am I eating?

same thing in the wintertime, that increased propensity to, to, adjust the thermostat due to altering, seasonal conditions. So these aren't just geographic issues. We know that these are economic issues. And unfortunately, on top of that, we know that oftentimes raci- historical racism has been a catalyst as to who's feeling the pain most intensely today

Segwaying on that, what are the measures that local and states governments are being forced to take, or at least trying to take, to adapt to these changing circumstances? And who, who ultimately is the... Who is left with the bill? That's, that's the real question. 

So who's left with the bill? I'll answer that.

You do. Anytime government, unless there's a framework in place where, you have Superfund type legislation, ultimately, you're going, you as a taxpayer are gonna pay these things, at least from an economic standpoint. From a human health standpoint, just go back to what I said a minute or two ago, those who are least able to afford to adapt, to mobilize, to migrate to maybe cooler areas or areas where they're not on the front lines of, flooding or super storms, those people are gonna pay the inordinate, price.

But to go back to your initial question in terms of what are state and local governments doing, we're seeing the, the, the lapse of federal leadership and the rescinding of so much, provocative climate justice, climate and environmental justice language and legislation or, maybe not legislation, but policy.

We're seeing state and local governments pick up the gap, gaps, excuse me. Places like New York State, its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act was a, a precursor to the Biden administration's Justice 40 initiative. we see states like Maryland and California creating GIS tools to support, in the, the rescission or the pulling back of, EJSCREEN, which was a fabulous, environmental justice tool on the, federal level.

we see many states creating their own version of GIS, support tools for local governments. And then within states and local governments, specific sectors, transportation sector, agricultural sector, you're seeing plans disseminate from those individual entities. what is the climate action plan in, in relation to a state's forestry, in, in relation to a state's transportation and mobilization, strategies?

So you see an assortment of ways the states have really, picked up the slack in this time of, what I call a national lobotomy in terms of climate consciousness. but we know that states and local governments alone aren't enough. We need strong federal actors, just to pick up the gaps where states just literally don't have the power, to go about that business.

Thank you. Rob, turning back a little bit more to the specifics of the suit, the oil and gas industry has made the argument that these lawsuits should be preempted by federal law. Can you give an explanation of what preemption is, and why it may be desirable in some cases? Like, how does preemption work?

Sure. Preemption is a doctrine that, that is, derived from the US Constitution, and in particular from a provision called the Supremacy Clause, which basically says that federal law is the supreme law of the land, and if there's a conflict between state and federal law, federal law takes priority. The Supreme Court has interpreted, the Supremacy Clause to create different kinds of preemption.

One, version of preemption is called field preemption, in which basically Congress, by passing a statute, decides that it wants a particular field of regulation to be entirely within the realm of the federal government and not to be supplemented in any manner by state or local regulation. A second form of preemption is called conflict preemption, where federal law would supersede state law if it is impossible to comply with both federal and state law at the same time, or if implementation of state law would interfere with federal purposes as reflected in congressional statutes Now sometimes preemption would be desirable.

Imagine, for example, that one is thinking about regulation of electric outlets, things that you plug your devices into, and suppose that all fifty states had the authority to require different kinds of electrical outlets so that if you live in Maryland or Virginia and go on vacation to California and try and plug your, iPhone into an outlet in California, it might not work if California's version of regulation of outlets is different from Maryland's or Virginia's.

Another example would be automobile manufacturing. So there are very few situations in which Congress has decided to preempt state environmental regulation, but there are a couple. One of them, involves regulation of emissions from motor vehicles, cars, trucks and buses. And what Congress decided when it passed the Clean Air Act was that it wanted to preempt state regulation of auto emissions, with one exception.

The reason to preempt was that it didn't want auto manufacturers to have to manufacture a different line of cars that would then have to market in all fifty states. That would create pretty chaotic results for the auto manufacturers. The one exception was California, which has a long history of regulating auto emissions, and Congress decided that it, it wanted to preserve California's ability, to regulate more stringently than the federal government, number one, because of California's history, leadership in the area.

Number two, because of the historic extreme pollution conditions in certain portions of California. Number three, so that California c-could s-kind of serve as a, a laboratory of experimentation, and if it tried to do something the federal government was not doing, and it worked well, then the federal government could decide to adopt California's version of, auto emission regulation.

Yet another example, occurs under the federal pesticide statute where Congress decided that it did not want to allow states to adopt different requirements for labels that were put on pesticides. Again, if that were the case that all fifty states could adopt their own version of pesticide labeling, pesticide manufacturers would have to develop product lines with different labels that it would then have to market in each of the fifty states, which would be, be craot-- chaotic.

And so Congress said basically one label, the one demanded by EPA, states can't adopt anything that, that conflicts with those EPA requirements

And Finally, Section D, Nationalize It

The Trump administration seems to be moving towards giving support to coal as an industry in the United States. Of course, supporting the coal companies, making them more profitable than they have been in the past, cannot be explained in those terms because then it looks like what it is. So instead, great breast-beating is happening about helping coal workers, coal miners, and they indeed have gotten the short end of the stick for many, many decades and deserve support.

But of course, as any thinking person would understand, supporting the coal miners is different from supporting the coal mining companies. What coal miners need is a healthy alternative, a good job, a decent income that would be less threatening to their health and welfare, and that could be provided by local, state, or federal authorities if there were really the commitment to do that.

It is not necessary to support the coal company with profits in order to help the coal miner. But that's a detail I won't go into at this moment. What I want to do is deal with one of the arguments made about why we should continue to rely on coal, particularly for generating electricity, and I should remind everyone that about forty percent of the world's electricity is produced by burning coal.

The problem with burning coal is that it is very bad for the atmosphere, for the air, for our lungs, for our health, for global warming. You name it, bad news We can and should switch to other forms of energy generation that do not have these bad consequences. That would employ people. That's really not a problem.

The solar energy industry in the United States today, which only accounts for 1% of all electricity, already employs more people than the coal business in the United States does. So if you were actually concerned about jobs, you would move more into solar energy, for example, than you do now because it would provide more jobs there than would be lost if solar replaced coal, and the same is true for wind end- energy and so on in terms of jobs.

But the real reason, again, is health, the health of the planet, the health of the people who live on it. Well, the argument is made coal is profitable, and therefore it should be supported because it's profit. The argument here seems to be, for those who do the logic, that profit is to be taken as a sign that something should be done.

In other words, if something's profitable, well, then it justifies its existence. If something is more profitable than something else, you should do the more profitable business because somehow higher profit is taken to mean that something is more socially valued, more socially useful, et cetera, and it is that argument I want to confront and to refute, and the way to do that is really simple, and I'm going to use coal as an example.

How do you calculate the profit of the coal business? In the same way that you do any other business. You look at the revenues, what's earned when you sell coal, and you subtract the costs of getting the coal out of the ground, of processing it to whatever degree you have to, and shipping it to the customer.

You subtract the costs The ones I mentioned from the revenue, and you get the profit, and that allows you to calculate what your rate of profit is. What's wrong with this calculation? Well, the answer is really quite simple. In a capitalist system, you are not required to count the actual costs of doing something like mining coal.

You're only required to count the costs you actually have to pay for as the coal company. Very simple example. If mining coal in a community cuts short the average lifespan of an adult coal miner, say by four years, compared to people who do other kinds of work, you might, as a society, say, "Well, that's an enormous cost, the cost of a shortened life."

Those extra four years could have brought all kinds of pleasure to that person had he or she lived, to their families who needed them. They might have earned all kinds of income in that period. All of that was lost. All of that is a cost, but it is not a cost in our capitalist system that the coal company has to cover, and so the coal company doesn't count it as a cost.

Well, here's the punchline. If you added to coal company costs, the real costs that are a burden to the real people who do the coal mining, who breathe the air that results from coal mining, who suffer the climatic damage that flows from coal mining, if the coal companies had to count those costs, it would have eaten up all of their profits.

Then they would have to admit that the coal business, if you actually count all of its costs, is a losing proposition. Please keep that in mind the next time anyone tells you that because any industry, coal or anything else, is profitable, that that should be taken as proof or evidence that it's a worthwhile activity, that it is something society wants or needs or benefits from.

The real question you always should ask, what costs were counted and what costs were not counted? Because the not counted could change the conclusion 100%.

markets are created by states. They're a product of state policy at different levels. The United States has all of these different market creating mechanisms and international institutions where the US has a huge sway over things like trade policy that play out in forums like the World Trade Organization. Markets do not exist without states, and that's the big lie that a lot of companies, including the fossil fuel industry, try to say. 

The fossil fuel companies in particular are hugely dependent on massive amounts of subsidies. In the US, we pour roughly $20 billion a year at the state and federal level into the fossil fuel industry directly, and they cannot exist as they currently do without that support. They just will not exist. As much as 50% of oil developments are unprofitable without subsidies. 

So it's not as if the markets are just doing their thing and the state have an obligation to intervene, it's that the states are creating markets actively, constantly. They're co-creating them, as some people who've studied this more deeply than I do would say. 

So I think state policy is essential, and I think one of the failures of the... well, one of the successes of neo-liberalism, I would say, is in really limiting what we think states can and should do. And so state policy can be a hugely beneficial thing in people's lives, can be something which drives transformative changes. But there's a deep deep pessimism about that, including from Democrats, including from very progressive Democrats, about what the scope of the state is. 

People have compared, the American Jobs Plan until The New Deal, which is laughable. The New Deal, for all of its flaws and contradictions, really took a very expansive view of state power, both in cracking down on corporate power, making big moves around things like antitrust, but also in just creating a welfare state virtually from scratch. That's the scale of thing we need to do, not just we need big investment, not just that we need better regulations, but that we actually have to have a conversation about how the state itself needs to change and respond to meet this crisis, which requires the state to do things that it has not done before. 

We haven't euthanized one of the most powerful industries on Earth in recent memory, and that is the challenge at hand, is to dismantle the fossil fuel industry, and capitalism is very deeply bound up in that. 

That's more what I'm getting at, the limits of this current policy regime. We can call it the Biden policy regime, but a big part of that is essentially far conservative judiciary. At what point would the most effective intervention come? Is it changing this entire policy regime that's been built up over the decades?

Yeah, it demands a lot more creative thinking about what the state can do. 

Are we talking nationalization here? Come on, hit us with it, we're not afraid. 

Yeah. I think that's the type of thing that asks me on the table, and I talk about it in the book. Nationalizing the fossil fuel industry, which should be a pretty straightforward proposal. So far as they have shown absolutely no willingness or interest and meeting this crisis, and dramatically changing their business model or just screwing people over, firing tens of thousands of people, raking in support from the US government. 

Things like public ownership of electric utilities, which have been part and parcel of all of the same sorts of climate denial that the fossil fuel industry has participated in over the years. A federal job guarantee, which has been a historic demand of movements dating back decades. It was core to the Democratic party's platform until 1980, and it's just off the table. The idea of hiring people directly is a foreign weird concept to quote unquote progressive policymakers. 

Unless it's hiring them to be in the military to go and grab oil from elsewhere. 

Exactly. The US military is the closest thing we have to a federal job guarantee. Those are a couple of things that I draw out in the book, but the comparisons to FDR and LBJ are just so--are really absurd.

So what are the real life impediments? Politically speaking, I think we can all frame out the arguments that are going to be thrown out there against, "oh my gosh, this is socialism. Don't take over the industry, blah, blah, blah," but just assuming a world where nobody cared because there was actually enough narrative work done to make the scope of the crisis clear to people involved, it feels like the the unspoken part of these conversations is the amount of money in terms of lobbying efforts and purchase influence that is going on on a bipartisan basis. What you talk a lot about in some of the early chapters and the degree to which so much of our legislation, our rulemaking... PAYGO, which is a Nancy Pelosi special, is significant, a major obstacle to environmental reforms. 

A lot of these other built-in... What was it, EE11 blah blah blah... The environmental rule that makes us that you have to do a cost benefit analysis for any regulation. So you have to show... It has to be basically profitable, it has to not hurt profit to do something that's socially beneficial... Is nuts. You can sprinkle a little bit of carcinogens so long as I can prove to you the value of producing this carcinogen is more valuable than the lives that are lost or harmed as a consequence, which we all know is something that is very, very difficult to measure.

And it's so deep. the amount of fossil fuel money just sloshing around Washington and state capitals around the country is just immense. There's so much money, but it's not only that whenever a climate bill comes up, that ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute and all of these bad actors pour money into lobbying efforts, into advertising campaigns, and to fighting those measures themselves, it's that they've done this work dating back 70-80 years, and as a part of this bigger business conservative movement to really ensconce minority rule at every level of government, including things like the mandate for leadership that the Heritage Foundation gave to Ronald Reagan in his first week in office, this thick book of policies that they wanted him to introduce, and he took up two thirds of them. He took up an enormous amount of what was essentially an organizing project. 

Kimberly Phillips-Fein's book, Invisible Handsreally makes this clear, that there's this long thoroughgoing effort among the biggest companies in the United States to congretize this stuff and to law so that even if public opinion shift, even if we know the climate policy is popular, we know that a green new deal is popular, and we have a political system which is really bad at translating public opinion into law, into policy change. And that's not an easy problem to fix. The US Senate is not an easy problem to fix.

I don't want to make it seem like dealing with climate change is easy, but it really does root back to these very, very anti-democratic institutions that surmount so many barriers to doing the bare minimum of what's needed. 

So you do have to fight against the realistic perception, the not incorrect perception, that the government's ability to be effective has been neutered, and also make the case that we can make it better and then it can work better than the private industry. Republicans are wily and they're very good at this. 

Matt, I've heard you go back and forth about whether or not the word nationalization is accurate in terms of what has happened in the past, namely in 2008, but do you have any thoughts, from a messaging perspective, if that's something we should take head on and say, actually the government can do good things here, all these historical precedents. Remember how much you love the Tennessee Valley Authority, grandpa. Or you think, given the sensitivity around that word, we should just stealth do it and stealth advocate for it the way it was done in 2008 and basically wrap it and Obama and say your favorite guy did it, let's try this again. It's a crisis. 

Messaging's always tough, and in reality your opponents are going to use the word anyway so it's not like you're going to be able to escape it. With TVA, I think that's a really good example, and that's a different case because we're talking about building an institution from scratch and people do love that.

It's really funny, as much as people... the S word, socialism and nationalization, those things can be real hot button for some people, but in polling, and I think even just in general, the actual socialist institutions we have, meaning our state owned enterprises and public utilities, and stuff like that, you don't see a whole lot of heat about that. People really get heated about the welfare state and, cultural issues, I don't mean to demean those, but whatever, what people put in that bucket, but people love the post office. In Tennessee, they love TVA. In fact, Obama tried to privatize TVA and it was state Republicans that made it impossible for him to do that. I don't know if they love Amtrak so much. 

Well Joe Biden does, maybe that can be, [inaudible]. 

Joe loves that. There's this Amtrak station named after Joe. And people, public utilities, you get maybe some back and forth depending on how you feel about yours personally, but public production doesn't really face the same it doesn't really set off the right as much. The rank and file right-wingers, they're upset about critical race theory and trans rights and stuff like that, they're not really banging the table for privatizing the postal service or something like that.

When it comes to taking over existing entities, I do think there's at least a way to talk about it like you were hitting at, where, especially if they're in need of assistance, you could hit upon, "look, if we're going to give you taxpayer money, you got to give the taxpayers a good deal," or something like that. We're going to ask of you the same thing that a private financer would ask of you. A privatee financer is not giving you money equivalent to 30% of your equity stake with no voting rights. So why does the public have to do that? 

I think there's a reasonable way to draw on equivalence there and say, look, we're not going to get ripped off. We're going to get the same deal that a private investor would get here, and if you were in this dire financial situation and you were about to collapse, they would ask for a lot, and they certainly would ask to be in the driver's seat.

I want to put a fine point on how possible this is, because as I try to make these lists, as I'm doing right now, of common pushbacks from liberals, it's that things that are obviously good, but which haven't been very publicly considered by the politicians that they admire and they think of as #goodpeople, they tend to do this "just world" hypothesis thing, where you try to make sense of that cognitive dissonance by saying, "well, it must just not be possible. It must be out of reach. If Obama didn't do it, and he's a real mench, it must just not be possible." 

There's a part of your paper, Johanna, that talks about executive action. What could be done right now? What kind of moves could Joe Biden make in this moment that could start us along the right path? 

That's a really good question. I think that, one, there are ways for him to start constraining the industry, and working to end subsidies that he has control over; implementing, when it's right, import or export bans. These things that are actually going to make the the fossil fuel industry cringe. He has some power over stopping drilling, and so that actually could potentially put them in a situation in which they're clamoring for that government receivership. 

That's the opposite of what's happening. All of the incentives right now are for him to drill more and to subsidize more because people are paying so much at the pump. 

But then that's where we can bring in some of the... I think it's a combination of demand side and supply side. So the supply is okay, we can't work with people at the pump, what we need to do is ramp up our production of renewable energy as quickly as possible. Start transforming those systems as we're winding down the oil and gas industry, so that we are no longer dependent on this volatile commodity, oil and gas. 

Also, we already have things like the strategic petroleum reserve that they have unleashed, that Biden has the control over. Are there ways for us to actually extend that so that we're managing our oil and gas production in a way that actually is relevant to geopolitics and to the climate goals as well?

The first thing we have to confront when we think about inflation is energy prices. Now, energy prices are in a special category because of the climate crisis. In my view, fossil fuel energy prices shouldn't be brought down. They have to be brought up, if anything, in order for us to facilitate, accelerate the transition out of fossil fuel dependency.

So what do we do when you have energy prices skyrocketing? People's livelihoods are being significantly hurt. Should you lower fossil fuel energy prices? The alternative has been presented in Congress: a Windfall Profits Tax. That is, you have energy prices remaining high, but you tax the profits of the oil companies and you redistribute the revenue back to the American people.

So if we look at energy prices today, even relative to pre-COVID, relative to pre-COVID, so we are not talking about the lockdown and anything that had to do with that, the average gasoline price today at $4.70 a gallon is about twice as high as it was pre-COVID. So the oil companies are making gigantic monopolistic profits. Those profits need to be taxed away. And if we did that, every person in the country on average, every person in the country would be getting about $125. So a family of four would be getting about $500 to cover their increased gasoline prices.

When we talk about the Windfall Profits Tax, which has been proposed in Congress and I strongly favor, it does raise a broader question is, if we're gonna tax the so-called excess profits of oil companies, how do we define excess profits?

Under what circumstances should oil companies be making money when the way they make money is by destroying the planet? So any profits by the oil companies, in my view, and any logical framework should be recognized as excess profits, 'cause there shouldn't be any profits. In which case the Federal Reserve could buy the assets of the oil companies, just like they bought the assets of all other kinds of Wall Street firms, and deliver a nationalized oil industry that could then manage a green transition in an orderly fashion.

So what companies should be nationalized, the way the government took over a bankrupting General Motors and near-bankrupting Chrysler a number of years ago? They owned a majority share the stock. So, you would nationalize ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, the three bigger ones. Tell us how that would work apart from the difficulties on Capitol Hill?

Well, again, the simple model is exactly what the Fed did during the COVID crisis, in general. The Fed just bought financial assets. They bought stocks, they bought bonds owned by Wall Street firms. In this case, they could just buy majority ownership of these three oil giants. And, I calculated, this is from about a couple months ago, the cost would probably be lower now, given that the market's gone down, but according to my calculations, they could buy majority ownership for about 400 billion, which is 1/10th - 1/10th - of what the Fed pumped into Wall Street in 18 months during the COVID crisis. So this is not actually any outrageous proposition. As you just noted, Ralph, the government bought majority ownership of General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG, the insurance giant. They bailed out Goldman Sachs in 2008-2009. So this is certainly within the realm of feasibility and it's within the realm of the technical tools available from the Fed. 

And then what would happen? Let's assume that the three big oil giants were nationalized. There's still a lot of non-nationalized oil companies who can engage in frollicks and detours. How do you deal with that? And basically two questions: what would the government do once it nationalized? It would be the owners of these three giant oil companies. And how would it deal with the rest of the oil, gas, coal economy, which is bent on maximizing short term profits? Nevermind the effect on climate disruption or anything else? 

Well, I didn't mean to set it as a principle that they should only buy the three giants. I did that just by way of illustration. Yeah, you could buy all the rest of the companies. The other companies are much smaller so that the federal government could nationalize the entire fossil fuel industry. my calculation was the three giants at 400 billion. You could do the whole shebang for less than 800 billion. And so that, I wasn't establishing that, Oh, we just get rid of the three big ones and the others get to do whatever they want. The basic point being that once the government controls these giant fossil fuel companies, then we can have an orderly transition in which, yes, we keep fossil fuel prices high. The revenues from selling the fossil fuels would be transferred automatically back to the American people. Meanwhile, at the same time, they would be investing in accelerating the growth of the clean energy infrastructure.

What did you make of President Obama's speech on Monday, here at the UN Climate Summit? 

Well, we have to decide, are, are these people stupid, or, or are they just uninformed? Are they badly advised? I think that he really believes he's doing something. he wants to have a legacy, a, a, a, a legacy having done something in the climate problem.

But what he's proposing is totally ineffectual. there are some small things that are talked about here. the fact that they may have a fund for investment, invest more in, in, clean energies. but these are, these are minor things. As long as fossil fuels are dirt cheap, people will keep burning them.

So why don't you talk, Dr. James Hansen, about what you're endorsing, a carbon tax. Yeah. What does it mean? What does it look like? 

Yeah. It should be an across the board carbon fee, and in a democracy, it's going to, it should, the money should be given to the public. Just give an equal amount to every... You collect the money from the fossil fuel companies.

The rate would go up over time, but the money should be distributed 100% to the public, an equal amount to every legal resident. The- 

Is Alaska an example of this? 

Well, Alaska's giving, fossil fuel money to the public, and of course, they like that. So it's, it, it shows how much the public does like getting a monthly check.

But, what this would do, those people who do better than average in limiting their fossil fuel use would make money. Wealthy people, people who fly around the world a lot and have big houses, they would pay more in increased prices than they would get in their monthly dividend. 

Explain what you mean.

Well, because, we're, we're giving all of the money. You collect money from fossil fuel companies and you distribute it equally to all residents. So the one who does better than average in limiting his fossil fuel use will get more in the dividend than he pays in increased prices. And 

how do what their fossil fuel use is?

Well, it's, they don't have to... Nobody has to think about this. They know, they will just look at prices. Of course, the, the price at the pump is obvious, and, the electricity bill will be obvious. It, it, this will, this will move, industry and businesses to develop no carbon and low carbon, energies and products that use little fossil fuels.

In fact, the economic study shows that United States, after 10 years, emissions would be reduced 30%, because you've got the economy forcing you in the right direction. But as long as you just leave fossil fuels cheap, you're not gonna fundamentally change things. 

It's not only that fossil fuels are kept cheap.

The, not only US government, governments around the world subsidize- 

Yeah ... 

the fossil fuel industry- 

Yeah ... 

far more- Yeah ... than any renewables. 

Yeah. Well, that's right, on a total basis. Per unit energy, they're subsidizing renewables more, but that's okay. The, we shouldn't be subsidizing any of them.

Let this carbon price ride. That will favor renewables. It will favor energy efficiency. It will favor nuclear power. It will favor anything that is carbon-free. That's the way we should do it, and that's the way conservatives would accept it. This is a revenue neutral approach which does not make the government bigger.

And I've talked to some leading conservatives and, who understand that this is not a hoax. The climate change is not a hoax, and they are, are willing to accept this concept of a revenue neutral carbon fee. 

Dr. James Hansen, would you like to weigh in on the presidential election in the United States on the issue of climate change?

Yeah. Well, there's some nutcases who claim that it's all a hoax, and that's absurd. and I think most of the public recognizes that.

You may get a, a fraction of one party that is, that likes that point of view. But, the majority of the public realizes that's nonsense. But I haven't seen any, candidate, liberal or conservative, who is proposing what is actually needed, and that's making the price of fossil fuels honest, but not taking the money to make the government bigger.

Instead, give it to the public. 

What about the Democrats? 

I was saying, I, I haven't seen any, politician, Democrat or Republican, who has proposed a revenue neutral carbon fee. There's an organization, Citizens Climate Lobby, which has been doubling in size each year the last several years, which is beginning to be heard.

In fact, Democrats, Bernie Sanders and, Barbara Boxer proposed a bill that was basically a fee and dividend, except the government was gonna take 40% of the money, and that makes it, it's not gonna work. first of all, conservatives are never gonna accept that. that, that's makes it a tax, and, a tax depresses the economy.

A carbon fee and dividend actually spurs the economy because i- there is some income redistribution. The, the low income people will tend to have a better chance to come out ahead in this case, and they tend to spend the money when they get their dividend. 

Dr. James Hansen, you talked about the potential collapse of the West An- Antarctic ice sheet.

What would that mean? 

Well, that's, it would mean several meters of sea level rise. That's the biggest threat that climate change has in store for us because it would mean that all coastal cities would become dysfunctional, and the economic consequences of that are incalculable. And, the number of, refugees that you would have, 100 million people in Bangladesh, which most of them would be, have to find someplace to go.

Right. So i- it's, it's something, it's hard to imagine how we can have a, a governable world if we let the Antarctic ice sheet collapse. 

The coastal cities, for example, in the United States, if climate change isn't curbed, what would happen? 

Well, just, just look at, New York City, for example. If you had a sea level rise of several meters, you cannot protect these cities.

It's not, it's simply not practical to build to 

several meters. What about building high sea walls? 

well, for, for a very small area, you may be able to do that, but then still that's, when you get storms, you'll get, water overthrown over the sea walls. It's just not practical. We need to keep a sea level relatively stable or we have economic consequences that are 

enormous.

And how 

do you do that? You do that by phasing down emissions rapidly, at least a few percent per year. And the only way that will happen is if we have, a carbon fee because otherwise, somebody's gonna keep burning it. These countries are, saying, "Okay, we're gonna reduce our emissions 30%," but what does that do?

When the price remains cheap, somebody else will burn it. That just makes the price even cheaper if the, if it's less dear. So you have to make the fossil fuel price honest. 

That’s why today I’m making the largest investment ever — $2.3 billion — to help communities across the country build infrastructure that’s designed to withstand the full range of disasters we’ve been seeing up to today — extreme heat, drought, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes. Right now there are millions of people suffering from extreme heat at home. So my team is also working with the states to deploy $385 million right now. For the first time, states will be able to use federal funds to pay for air conditioners in homes, set up community cooling centers in schools, where people can get through these extreme heat crises. …

Not a single Republican in Congress stepped up to support my climate plan. Not one. So let me be clear: Climate change is an emergency. And in the coming weeks, I’m going to use the power I have as president to turn these words into formal, official government actions through the appropriate proclamations, executive orders and regulatory power that a president possesses. And when it comes to fighting the climate change — climate change, I will not take no for an answer.

national climate emergency. Its significance?

Yes. So, President Biden did not declare a climate emergency yesterday. We absolutely need him to do that. It is an incredible rallying cry if President Biden can actually articulate that we are in a climate emergency and unleash all the tools in his toolbox as the president to really combat the crisis in front of us. The other part of the climate emergency declaration is that it signals to the entire world and Americans that President Biden is no longer going to have a confused or slow-walked climate policy, that he is going to have an all-hands-on-deck approach to the suffering that we are all experiencing right now across the world.

And Jean, could you outline what are the measures that Biden could take in the event that he does declare an emergency?

Absolutely. So, the Biden administration, if they declare a climate emergency, actually unlocks additional emergency powers, as well as ordinary powers, to deal with the climate emergency. Some of the emergency powers are very powerful tools to turn off the spigot for fossil fuels. One of them would be to reinstate our crude oil export ban, which has allowed the fracking and explosion of oil in the Permian Basin. Another is to actually stop offshore drilling right now that is happening in the ocean. And finally, another power would allow him to stop the hundreds of billions of dollars every year that private corporations, like BlackRock, like all of our private banks, are sending abroad to build fossil fuel plants and poisoning and endangering communities there.

it's been an extraordinary few years for the climate justice movement.

to be here in New York, in the fall is very emotional for us because we were on the streets with almost half a million people in the People's Climate March. And, and what that made that moment, so extraordinary was the diversity and the connecting-the-dots feeling of the movement these days.

You have frontline communities, whether on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction, or on the frontlines of pollution. And, marginalized communities, we know that the, the impacts of climate change and industrialization are racialized. They're, they're people, of, of economic- without economic means are much more vulnerable.

And you see these communities coming together and connecting causes and naming the system at the heart of it. It's happening around the world. And what's really exciting nowadays, I think, is that we're starting to see not just the no to the, to these damaging projects and to this logic of extraction, extraction of wealth as well as extraction of resources, but we're seeing more and more of the yes.

So look at the divestment movement, which has exploded in three years. 

But it's not just the no to the fossil fuel, stocks and bonds. It's the yes in terms of redirecting and reinvesting that money in community cooperatives, in, in, in renewable energy.

And we're seeing this, and we see it throughout the film, the communities on front, on the frontlines of the 

no. Explain those communities that you cover. 

Well, so we went, so for instance, we went to, to, to northern Greece in the middle of this, horrific economic assault, of the austerity being imposed on Greece, which is being used in a, as an excuse to open up all these new dirty projects.

They're talking about drilling for oil in the Aegean and Ionian Sea, some of the most storied oceans, in, in history. And there's this massive goldmine, proposed, and starting to be developed by a Canadian company, in a very beautiful, area of northern Greece, and there's this extraordinary community resistance to it.

People in a fairly conservative part of the world who are not activists, who are not lefties, who start to see what's being done in the name of this economic model and, and, and, and the excuses 

being- Fits very much in with your previous book, Yeah ... The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi.

Well, the truth is I s- I see this book, and this project as a sequel, to, to, to, The Shock Doctrine because, that book begins and ends with Hurricane Katrina. and, it, that we are... what we are seeing is what climate change looks like when you have an economic system that, systematically, fuels inequality, ever wider inequality, often along racial lines, and we know what it looks like.

It looks like Katrina, right? if you had money and, resources, you were able to get out of the city, call your insurance company. but if you needed a functional state, you were out of luck. First of all, because the levees were neglected. Second of all, because there was no evacuation. There was, the FEMA couldn't find the Superdome for five days.

the story. but then what happened next, right? The, the, the disaster capitalism complex, as I called it in that book, descends on the city to privatize the school system, to get rid of public housing and replace it with condominiums, to decide not to open Charity Hospital that serves the city's poor.

so y- this book is an attempt to think about how do we respond to crisis collectively in a way that reduces inequality, that builds a fair soc- society that is democratic instead of this incredibly anti-democratic process that I describe in The Shock Doctrine. Look, climate change is the biggest shock of all.

It hits us with shock after shock after shock, whether it's a hurricane, whether it's the endless drought in California. And, Amy I was really, it, it takes a lot to shock me because I've been immersed in this stuff for a long time. But I didn't realize that a third of California's firefighters are prison inmates being paid, $2 a-d- an hour to fight California's

Yeah, and i-i- for Cal Fire, it's apparently half of the firefighters. So this is incredibly dangerous work. They're being paid $2 an hour. A- or ... And if they're not actively fighting fires, some of them are being paid less than $2 a day. And it turns out that there are forces in California that are resisting prison reform measures that would lower California's prison population because they're worried about the impact of their firefighter supply.

This is what it looks like to try to deal with climate change within an economic context of what around the world is called neoliberalism, relentless austerity, which, one of the impacts of relentless austerity is increased incarceration through, locking up and locking out the people who are losing within this economic system.

So that's why we're calling for looking at the root causes of what's, of, of what is driving climate change and, and also using climate change as a catalyst to build a fair economic system. And what we show in the film is that people are doing this very organically. As they're fighting the fossil fuel projects, they're fighting for energy democracy, community-controlled renewable energy that keeps resources in the community so they can pay for services.

That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The Hartmann Report

The David Pakman Show

In Deep with Angie Coiro

The Majority Report

The Young Turks

The BradCast

Climate Court Voices

This Is Hell!

The Center for Progressive Reform

Covering Climate Now

Economic Update

Bad Faith

The Ralph Nader Radio Hour

and Democracy Now!

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show. Thanks to Ben, our Swiss Army Knife fixer behind the scenes. And thanks to those of you who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.