Are We the Real Fossil Fools?

Prefer to read? Check out the Audio Transcript

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Zachary Karabell: What is the best option to hold the world’s worst polluters accountable today?

 

Emily Atkin: Legal action reminiscent of the actions that held big tobacco accountable for killing millions of people.

 

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of the Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of the Progress Network. And What Could Go Right, as regular listeners know and as new listeners are about to find out, is our weekly podcast where we interview various and sundry folks who are united, not by any political views or common solutions to accepted problems, but rather by a sensibility that outrage and fear and hysteria. We don’t believe that the world is fine. We don’t think the world is great. We just think there’s a lot of fine things and great things happening all the time around us. 

 

That gets subsumed in a sea of despair and one area that has been particularly challenged of late is climate change activism. So we’re gonna talk to someone who writes a popular newsletter who is passionate and engaged and has her own perspective about how to best deal with this. Not just this issue i.e. climate change, but the political issue of how does one ensure that there remains political and collective will to do something about it.

 

So Emma, who are we going to talk to today?

 

Emma Varvaloucas: So today we are gonna talk to Emily Atkin. She’s a climate journalist, as you mentioned, and the founder of an independent newsletter called Heated, which focuses on climate accountability journalism. It might be a little bit different from the journalism that you’re used to reading about in mainstream media. She approaches climate change not as a science or environmental story, but actually a high stakes corruption, power and disinformation story. 

 

So, excited to talk to Emily about that. You can also find some of her writing in New York Times, Slate, the New Republic and other outlets. But today she’s here to talk to us on the What Could Go Right? Podcast. 

 

Are you ready?

 

Zachary Karabell: I’m ready. 

 

Emily Atkin, it is a pleasure to have you and to talk with you today about your work, about Heated, about the newsletter. So I guess first things first, what was your path into the work that you’re now doing?

 

Emily Atkin: I think a lot of people assume that my path went from being really concerned about the environment or being like a climate activist in some way. I think because of the nature of the type of journalism that I do, but actually my path was completely journalistic in nature. I went to college for journalism and it was sort of my dream to be a political reporter.

 

I kind of stumbled into environmental and climate reporting simply because it was where I could get a job. I wanted to be a political reporter. I wanted to cover campaigns and exciting stuff that, you know, 20 year olds want to cover. And that’s a very competitive field. And environmental and climate journalism was less competitive.

 

And I know it’s kind of like kind of cringey, but that’s, that’s the truth of how it happened and the not cringey part is that I eventually got what I wanted. I became a campaign and political reporter. I found that that area was actually not as meaningful or as interesting or urgent of a story than the climate crisis.

 

So I switched back. I switched back simply because the story of the climate crisis I thought was a more meaningful and better story as a journalist and one where there existed so much more need for reporters, so much more need for journalism. So what I’m passionate about and what brought me here is the, the need for journalism and society to educate people about the world’s biggest problems and empower them with the information they need to tackle those problems in a democracy, that’s what journalism is for. 

 

And so once you get into the political campaign reporting field, you’re like, nobody needs this. Nobody needs what we’re doing here. It was a big growing pain for me, but I’m, I’m happy to be back where I’ve been back now for, since Trump was elected the first time since 2016, I, I came back.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: You gave a short critique in which you said that some place that the media is failing when it comes to climate change and sort of standard bearing journalism is that they present climate change as something that, what is it we are doing and not something that is being done to us.

 

Emily Atkin: Something that’s happened to us rather than something that’s being done to us.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Okay. Let’s dive into that a little bit more. What do you mean by that?

 

Emily Atkin: I’ll just start it by saying that when you are in journalism and when you care a lot about journalism, you care a ton about your credibility and how you are perceived, because trust from your audience is your only currency. It is the only thing that allows you to keep doing this job. Right? And the one way that we’re taught that you can lose trust is by exaggerating or by being, you know, by, by overstating the facts, and one way that you can overstate the facts is to paint something in black and white. Paint somebody as a villain when maybe that’s not fair. Fairness, you wanna be really fair. 

 

And so I came in to journalism too, like I’m not immediately looking for like who’s to blame for climate change. My general understanding is that like climate change is happening all around us and it’s something that we all contribute to through our emissions, which is true. And I think that there’s still a tendency. In media today in order to seem as fair as possible to share blame for climate change. Because of that fact, which is true, we all do contribute to climate change.

 

The thing that I realized over time as a reporter, simply from just trying to understand my beat, was that the blame is not equal. There is an extremely disproportionate share of blame, both from the emissions themselves. The fossil fuel industry is responsible for, I think, up to 80% of global emissions in the world. So that’s a lot. So just on an emissions level, that’s where we are with the fossil fuel industry. 

 

But then when you get into why haven’t we done anything about climate change despite knowing about it for decades, that’s where it really became clear to me that the fossil fuel industry and polluting industries outside of that as well, which we can get into, have contributed so much to the discourse of confusion around climate change, of policy delay, and just of the fact that we’re not doing anything.

 

So much evidence points in the direction of there is one industry that has over time, again and again, sowed confusion, doubt and policy delay and emissions that have enriched that industry to the point where I think it’s extremely fair to place blame on that industry to to place disproportionate blame.

 

So, and I just don’t see that as a standard bearer position in mainstream media. It’s one reason why I left to start my own publication was because I kind of realized that my dream of going to work for, let’s say, the New York Times or the Washington Post, if I was, were able to achieve that, I would be in fights with editors constantly about what is the position that we have on industry. On like, how, how are we gonna position ourselves to talk about who is the villain? And I just didn’t want to have that fight. I didn’t think I had time to have that fight based on the timelines that we have to make meaningful dent in emissions.

 

Zachary Karabell: Let’s say we accept your premise of it’s all about energy companies, as a doing to us, rather than it being done in a more passive sense. We still live in a world where we are embedded in carbon intensive industries and carbon intensive electricity grids, and you know, essentially a world where we have untold trillions of dollars that have been invested over time to create the modern world, much of which is fueled, pun intended ,by petroleum of one form or another. What are we supposed to do about that? Like even if, even if this is, has been done, right? You know, meaning we’re, we’re not gonna snap our fingers and suddenly become solar. Right?

 

Emily Atkin: No, but we’re not even in a position to snap our fingers and insert and become solar because we are not in a position where like the majority of the world accepts that the vast majority of our climate problem is because of fossil fuels. So I, I think it’s, I think it’s very interesting that when I point that out, it’s always like, well then what are we gonna do?

 

We can’t just snap our fingers and, and become solar powered. I’m like, I’m not saying that that’s what we need to do. I’m saying that we need to accept what the problem is. Of course there are other problems, right? I didn’t mention deforestation, I didn’t mention animal agriculture. There are other problems, but when you look at the evidence, the vast majority of the problem lies in fossil fuel production, and that is not being communicated.

 

The first step in effective action is to tackle a problem, is understanding what’s causing the problem. My argument is that media does not effectively communicate the problem.

 

Zachary Karabell: It is certainly true. That’s where people go and it’s certainly where I went as a question. Part of it is, you know, we talked earlier about there are some problems where the solution is relatively on, off and binary. So we, you know, we people use, and I think you’ve used the analogy of big tobacco and, you know, holding big tobacco liable as a way of reducing smoking pretty rapidly and pretty quickly, which was quite effective in most countries in the world, not just the United States. The, the rates of smoking have gone down in most places, not in China, but in other places. But you could stop smoking, you know, meaning it wasn’t a, like you had to have air filling your lungs that had nicotine in them, or else you died or ceased to exist. You could just stop smoking. 

 

So that one, you know, it is, was a problem with a solution. That had cost. I mean, it’s hard to stop smoking and people have withdrawal and you know, they’re dependent on nicotine. So it’s not just like a total snap of your fingers. And there are other problems like that. But it is the question of, on the one hand, you know, if you demonize an industry where the goal is to deconstruct that industry, tobacco has not been deconstructive, but we, the the general point holds as opposed to an industry where whatever transition we’re gonna have, we still need.

 

Emily Atkin: And it’s definitely, it’s certainly not a one-to-one comparison at all, particularly because like you just mentioned, it’s not like the big tobacco lawsuits were effective at dismantling the tobacco industry. Tobacco industry’s doing just fine. What I think the actual usefulness of tobacco, like litigation for fossil fuel companies and climate change is, is that I see it as one of the more potentially effective ways to accurately put a cost on carbon pollution.

 

Now there are other ways to put a cost on carbon pollution. Obviously carbon taxes, any, any price on carbon cap and trade, all of that. But this is a way to have that cost born by the industries that made us bear the cost for a long time did not factor in the actual cost of carbon pollution to the economy, to human life and to the planet.

 

For many years, despite knowing it had that cost, you know, fossil fuels have been artificially cheap for decades. And my argument is that fossil fuel companies have known about that and have expected the majority of us to bear that cost. The litigation seeks to recoup that cost. And the way I see it is that like when the cost of polluting from fossil fuels is accurately reflected in the economy, that’s when I think we’ll see like a natural market transformation to more renewable sources, because then it will be obvious how much cheaper those are. We have so many policies designed in the US designed to make fossil fuels cheaper than they actually are. And so I do see fossil fuel, litigation against fossil fuel companies to hold them accountable financially for climate change as one way to do that.

 

But then also I think there’s a huge public perception benefit to litigation in that respect. As we were just talking about, like I don’t think that media in general has accurately characterized or accurately told the story of blame for fossil fuels. And so, you know, that’s what the big tobacco litigation did was really show the American public, like just how not only harmful cigarettes were, but how insidious the lying was, the profit seeking lying was. 

 

And like for me as a journalist, like go, you know, always going through all these internal oil company documents about how oil companies have known for many years about the climate harms of their products. It’s like I just want more people to understand that, and I find that litigation is a potential effective tool to do that.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: I found that pretty persuasive. Did, has anything happened on the litigation front? I mean, is there any movement towards the future that you’re dreaming of insofar as taking these companies to the course?

 

Emily Atkin: There are so many cases. I think there are like 800. Throughout the world, something like that. You’re, you’re gonna have to check me on that because that is just off the top of my dome right now. It’s tough to know. It’s like with international climate negotiations and you know, I know at some point we’re gonna talk about like what’s gonna happen now that Trump has pulled outta the Paris agreement.

 

It’s like, tough to say. There are a range of outcomes and there are just a range of so many lawsuits that it’s hard to say, but I know that there are a lot, and they’re not just in the United States. I think they’ve been more successful in in other countries, but.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, that was what my, the natural question that comes after that, right? Is that like if you’re saying what we need to change public perception about, for people to understand who the villains really are in this story, right? Is litigation. And if there are several hundred cases that are going worldwide, it doesn’t seem like there’s been the effect on public perception that you would be looking for, right?

 

So it’s like, why, why not?

 

Emily Atkin: That’s the question of my whole career as a climate journalist, why not? Why has the effect on public perception not worked? And what are the strategies that can actually work? I mean, I think one reason that there are so many cases that just have not gotten that type of attention is that it’s not like huge things have happened in those cases.

 

But when they do happen, they do get attention. Like there was a Hawaii judgment that allowed one of these cases to go forward. There was a lot of attention to that and the fossil fuel industry is pouring a lot of money into, into killing this lawsuit. And that’s like one of their pre priorities with the Trump administration is to, is to encourage them to, you know, use whatever power they can to quash some of these lawsuits because the industry is scared of them being successful.

 

The reason there are so many is that there are a bunch of legal strategies that different law firms and different cases are trying to see, like, how can we, how can we actually make this legal argument work to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damage? Particularly when it’s like hard to track.

 

It’s hard to track like what emissions from what company caused this flu? It’s not like with a long-term smoker, you can see that they smoked Marlboro Reds their whole life and now their lungs are black. Right? It’s, it’s a little more difficult to prove in a, in a legal sense, but I do know that some cases are making progress.

 

News Clip: The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Sunoco and other major oil companies attempting to halt. Honolulu’s climate lawsuit. Fossil fuel companies are accused of misleading the public about the dangers of climate change caused by their products leading to significant infrastructure and property damage.

 

Honolulu’s suit seeks unspecified monetary damages, citing rising sea levels, coastal erosion and extreme weather, such as heat waves stressing the electrical grid. The Hawaiian city’s case is part of a broader trend of state and local governments suing fossil fuel companies for their role in climate change.

 

The companies argue interstate emissions and commerce fall under federal jurisdiction, not state or local. 

 

Zachary Karabell: Shifting a little more meta gears, would you describe yourself as an activist?

 

Emily Atkin: No, I’m a journalist with stated values, right? Like, so the way that I see it is that I’m a journalist and I’m very transparent about the fact that I want. I cover climate change from the perspective of a person who wants to preserve a livable planet. I don’t pretend that I don’t have a personal stake in preserving a livable planet and a livable climate for many generations, right? 

 

And I do think that that’s another thing. The one reason that I am transparent about that is number one, because it’s difficult for me not to be transparent about that. It seems immoral for me to not be transparent about that. And number two, because I find journalism that is done without, you know, as if the person doing the reporting doesn’t really care whether or not we pass two degrees or not, kind of makes me feel like, why are you even doing this then? 

 

Like, I wanna provide information to people that, that want to see a good outcome for the planet. I think I find it akin to like, I cover an opioid crisis, right? I’m a reporter who covers the opioid crisis, and I think the opioid crisis is bad, and so I’m gonna approach my reporting with this, with knowing that like that the companies that know about these really harmful impacts and yet decide to push this drug anyway, that those people are villains.

 

And I find very often, just to take that comparison one step forward, that like it’s not widely, reporters who report critically on pharmaceutical companies and opioid companies are not, and who wanna see accountability and who think that accountability is deserved, are not like painted as activists as much as, say, I am for doing what I think is the exact same thing, but just for climate change.

 

And I, I dunno exactly why.

 

Zachary Karabell: I mean, you’re totally right that, I mean, if you think about the arc of modern journalism right throughout the 19th century, well into the 20th. Whatever we now call journalism was always deeply opinionated, meaning it came from a perspective that you knew. So you bought the paper that you know, supported where you were, and there was a whole panoply of spectrums that were represented in most countries in England, the United States, France, you name it. And then there’s kind of pretense of objectivity dominated, right? For much of the mid 20th century into the late, that we were just going to be, that journalism media, whatever one calls it was gonna be the Walter Cronkite or whatever, that we’re just going to report on what’s going on, we’re not gonna opine about it. But of course, that never really quite worked. And your point about the opioids is, you know, you get to be opinionated when, I don’t know when the cultural winds say that you get to be opinionated, but otherwise you have to be objective. And even when you’re opinionated, right, you have to seem like you’re being objective whilst obviously being opinionated, which is, I think what’s led to a good degree of distrust with the modern media, which is, you know, if you’re gonna have a point of view, state your point of view. Be transparent to point your point of view.

 

If you’re not gonna have a point of view, then don’t act like you, you know, just be clear about it.

 

Emily Atkin: I fell in love with the Walter Cronkite objective journalism. That’s what I wanted to do. Like I never thought I would be here doing this, doing this kind of journalism, but it’s just I am not being trustworthy or fair if I don’t state my clear desire to, to preserve a livable planet. Like I can’t, I, I, if I try to remain like neutral about it, then I’m actually being dishonest.

 

And so that’s sort of how that happened. To answer your previous question, again, like, I don’t consider myself an activist because it’s just not the core of what I’m, I’m trying to do on a day-to-day basis. I’m, I’m trying to like inform more than I’m trying to push people to do things. If the world decides that, despite what I’m saying, they don’t wanna do anything.

 

There’s nothing I can, there’s nothing I can do about that, but.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Since we are, we’re living in the Trump administration world now and, and everybody has a question, right, that you mentioned before, which is like, basically like what’s gonna happen now? To me it’s been very difficult to understand on like a mathematical level, like how much we are going to be pulled back by much more pro fossil fuels policy, particularly because, okay, yes, Trump pulled us outta the Paris Agreement, but now you have this like alliance of, I think it’s 24 states, saying we’re gonna keep the UN targets and reporting going. Bloomberg Philanthropies stepped in and said, yeah, we’re gonna make sure that this happens. Like there seems to be like the thing that kind of always pulls the United States through, which is like, yeah, the federal policy can move us in a certain direction, but it can’t hold certain states back from still, you know, walking the walk here.

 

So we’re recording this maybe two or three weeks into the new administration, so it’s early days, but what does it look like to you so far?

 

Emily Atkin: So the day that we are recording this, I don’t know if you guys saw, there was a deadline that passed today for countries to submit their emissions reductions plan under the Paris Agreement today. The United States did it, but they submitted the plan under the Biden administration. So the credibility of that plan is under question, right? China has not submitted the plan. EU has not submitted the plan. The majority of the large world’s largest emitters have not submitted their plan. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to, but they have missed the deadline. Right? And for me, it’s just sort of an indication of the UN climate negotiation process was never going particularly great.

 

And adding in the world’s largest historical emitter with the massive economy, so much money that can go towards climate financing, right? Removing them from that process. It seems like the, the air is, is leaking from the tires very quickly, and so I think what I’m most concerned about obviously is the financing aspect.

 

Losing the United States in climate financing, particularly for like small island developing nations, which are experiencing the brunt of climate change, but don’t have any responsibility or the capital to adapt. But yeah, I’m really not sure. I think today’s news about missing the deadlines doesn’t bode well, but again, it’s, I don’t like to make predictions about these things because I, I don’t know, I’m not in the room, you know?

 

Zachary Karabell: So on that question, the way the system has essentially been eroding, irrespective of whether or not the United States in the Paris envelope. Some of it, as you point to, is the climate financing issue, which is countries like Pakistan, just like pick, pick one of of a dozen or two dozen or three dozen where unless you’re getting the external capital to find alternative sources to literally fuel your society, you’re gonna use the resources you have, which are often coal, carbon, you know, they’re, they’re carbon intensive. There is another dimension to this, and I know you have strong feelings about, which is there has been a lot of moves for global corporations to essentially move toward a more sustainable direction.

 

Now, they’ve done so sometimes in the face of EU regulations, meaning it, it makes more sense if you’re a global company to essentially adapt to the most stringent regulatory environment that you’re functioning in, particularly if it’s a large one. But some of it’s also just been driven by the economics of. If you can control your input costs more effectively over time, that’s kind of better for your business and it’s much harder to control your input costs when it’s oil, natural gas, you name it. Much easier to control your input costs when they’re renewable, and it’s also good to reduce your input costs ’cause it increases your profitability. 

 

I’m curious about your thoughts about that. I’m not sure that dynamic changes at all, whether or not Paris is in place.

 

Emily Atkin: I completely agree with you. I mean, I think a really hard truth that I know politically like Democrats have really been trying to push against is that doing what’s best for your business and doing what’s best for the climate are one and the same? I don’t think that’s true. At least not in the short term and not in the economy that that we’re currently in per, yeah.

 

Like perhaps for the long term doing what’s best for the climate is best financially because of the economic costs of climate change and because of the un tallied like the, the, what I was talking about before, like the price of using fossil fuels is incorrect, right, right now, but when, like particularly United States, when you have corporations legally have to act in the best interest of their short term of their shareholders in the short term and like, it’s like a hard reality that I don’t think politically is very convenient for messaging or anything like that. 

 

But I do think that, like I’ve written about this literally for years that like, I think the first time I wrote an essay about, this was maybe in 2017 for the New Republic or something, and it was called like Scientifically To Do What We Need To Do To, To Save The Planet.

 

Like to save the planet, like you’ll have to make sacrifices. And I think that some of those sacrifices come with capital losses. And there are people that will hear me say that and be like, no. Do not listen to her, and maybe I’m wrong, but that is, that is sort of what I see.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: This also speaks to the public perception thing, right? Is like capital losses. Yes. But also like. I think there’s a definitely a reason that people have not pushed the climate to the top of their political priority because it’s, when it’s sold as like, like you personally are gonna have to sacrifice, right?

 

Like it, this is gonna be a short term. It’s like the tariff discussion with Trump right now, right? Like short term pain for long-term gain. Everyone’s like, Hmm. Like no thanks. I live in Greece. One of my best friends here is Polish, her mother’s Polish. Very kind of like normal working class family and you know her. Kind of point of view on the climate discussions from Poland, right? Like, not, not the US, out of the US context completely is just like, well, back in the day they told us to switch from like wood to gas, and now they want us to switch from gas to something else. And like, don’t these people understand that like, I don’t have the money to like switch my whole house up like that. What, what do you do with that? I mean, it’s, it’s fair. I think that’s a fair point of view.

 

Emily Atkin: It’s like the number one reason to, why, like I try to focus my coverage on like those more systemic issues and like what, like an individual person is gonna do and like trying to think about how the company responsible can bear that cost versus the consumer bearing that cost. Look, the solutions to climate change that are laid out in the science are completely unreasonable.

 

It’s a large scale transformation of how the entire global economy works in a very short period of time. That is unreasonable. The consequences of not doing that are also deeply, deeply unreasonable. They’re just, they’re just more drawn out. It’s not, it wouldn’t be as like shocking in the next like couple years, right? 

 

So it’s choice. What I really want in general is for people to just be honest about that choice. What I see, like in US political discourse so much is this idea that like, we’re not going to do the radical, unreasonable thing. To, and by unreasonable I mean like, it’s just a lot, you know, to solve climate change and it’s gonna be fine.

 

Like, I want the admission that that’s not gonna be fine if we’re not going to do it. Okay. But admit and prepare for the fact that it’s, it’s gonna be bad. There are gonna be horrible consequences down the future that maybe you might not live to see. But you probably will. You know, that’s where I, I don’t think that, like, politicians in the US that advocate against rapid climate action are being honest. And, and that’s what I wanna see is that honesty about the cost of of inaction.

 

Zachary Karabell: You also though have the EU where there’s been much more public consensus and much more collective action to deal with climate change that then fades in the face of sort of immediacy, right? You had Germany being one of the leaders collectively as a society in terms of renewables and moving away from coal.

 

And, but what they did when they were moved, when they moved away from coal was to move more toward natural gas, which made them more dependent on Russia. And then in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, they shut down all their nuclear reactors. So they moved away from a, you know, a cleaner of fuel, became more dependent on natural gas. And then when that became imperiled, they started burning coal again because that, you know, that’s the only thing they had to replace the problem. It’s not entirely, at least in my view, a question of action versus inaction. There’s also just this kind of collective problem of the now versus the then, not just in the cynical way or the the, the capitalist way of we’re gonna take present profits over future costs, but in that kind of way, right? And that these things get incredibly thorny in the, in the details in a way that at least personally, ’cause I’ve been in this for a long time, you know, I increasingly believe that we might go on to a glide path of a less carbon intensive future for all sorts of reasons.

 

Fewer people, more technology. You know, Andy McAfee has written a lot about this, that higher tech societies do, in fact, reduce their carbon emissions for obvious reasons. But then in some sense, other than these larger forces that may mitigate us against whatever temperature we’re getting up to that, it seems to me rather impossible that we’re gonna meet any particular goal.

 

Emily Atkin: I think that there would be a lot of obstacles to a clean energy transition. If there were no sustained effort to delay the transition, you know, through disinformation policy delay, X, Y, Z, like, I think that it would still be really hard. And still might like not, even if we didn’t have all the controlled opposition to an energy transition, we’re all working towards it.

 

I don’t think it would be easy. I think there’d be, you know, a Germany situation. There would be wars, there would be, there would be things that would prevent us from doing it, right? I think it would be hard without, without any of it. But I think that that controlled opposition is making it so much harder and it’s impossible.

 

And because of how much there is. It’s like so impossible to untangle. What is just failing because it’s like really hard to do and what’s failing because people are making it fail, you know? And, and when and how different would the climate situation be if we didn’t have such controlled opposition to an energy transition. Like that, to me is a, is like an equally important question as asking the questions is like, why didn’t Germany’s energy transition work, and what lessons can we actually learn from like the technical question there.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Maybe you can help us peek under the hood a little bit about, you know, you mentioned the policy delay, you mentioned disinformation. I think people are aware of what you’re talking about generally. They’re probably aware of some of the like really kind of top of mind examples of that. But I wonder if you give us some other examples of things that people like might not be as aware of.

 

Like I, I had a moment when I was looking at your Substack. You had this post about an Ohio congressman who’s like very well known in Buddhist circles because he’s like a mindfulness proponent. And the article was about like he’s a paid fossil fuel shill. And I was like, what? Not Tim Ryan, not Tim Ryan! 

 

So I used to work in Buddhist media, which does exist for those who don’t know. And Tim Ryan is one of the only people from politics that kinda like crosses over into the Buddhist sphere because he’s a big mindfulness proponent. He wrote a whole book about it a few years back, so it was a little bit for me like, oh my God, Santa Claus isn’t real. But anyway, it had the effect of like, wow, there’s a lot of stuff going on underneath the hood here that I think people are not aware of. And that’s what I was trying to get at about like what are some of the things that you wish people, like were under reported stories that you wish people knew about much more?

 

Emily Atkin: I had no idea. Tim Ryan was a mindfulness proponent.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: He was, I don’t know if he still is. Yeah, but he was.

 

Zachary Karabell: You guys have learned to say something from each other today. Emma’s learned one of her heroes is a corporate show, and, and Emily’s learned that, that a corporate shill is a good meditator.

 

Emily Atkin: Yeah, who knew? You know. 

 

Zachary Karabell: I’m not claiming he is a corporate shill. I’m just, I’m just saying that.

 

Emily Atkin: He’s paid like over $200,000 a year from a gas lobbying group specifically to promote gas as a climate solution. So, and generally, like what you’re saying that you didn’t know is that when he is on MSNBC talking about what Democrats need to do and he is talking about how they need to embrace gas and how it’s a good fossil fuel and it’s good for the climate, it’s, there’s no chyron underneath his name that says paid gas spokesperson, it just says former congressperson. And so that’s stuff that like, you know, I think it’s important to tell people about, Hey, when you see this guy, they’re not disclosing it to you. 

 

You know, we’re recording a couple weeks out from when this will air, but like today, February 12th, like I published an article about Harold Hamm. I think that’s a story that, the reason I publish the story is because I think people should know about it, is that so many of the people and policies that have been put through from the Trump administration on oil and gas in particular are on like the to-do list of this billionaire who has been sitting by Trump’s side for literally since his first inauguration.

 

You know Harold Hamm is the CEO of Continental Resources, big fracking company, billionaire. You know, he organized this fundraiser where Trump infamously said, you know, you should raise, oil executives should raise a billion dollars for me, and I will dismantle every regulation, environmental regulation that the Biden administration put forward.

 

That was organized by Harold Hamm. Harold Hamm handpicked Doug Bergham, the interior secretary. That was his, that was his pick. That was his recommendation. They’re close personal friends, right? Doug Bergham leases land from Harold Hamm’s Co, harold Hamm’s Company for fracking. Right. And Chris Wright, the Department of Energy secretary was Harold Hamm’s number one pick. Right? And then these are the two agencies that that really control a lot of the, a lot of the energy policy, a lot of the fossil fuel policy in the United States. 

 

So I think like the, the story that is being missed or that at least the story that is perhaps under-reported and that I would love to see more is the same story you see sort of going on with the, the media doing a great job covering the tech billionaire oligarchy and how the Trump administration’s policies are somewhat controlled by, you know, billionaires who have a, a profit incentive.

 

And that these, these policies aren’t actually for like the little guy. It’s the same thing going on with energy policy in the US. There are clear strings from what Trump is doing just to like billionaire fossil fuel executives. I think it’s so important to tell that story in order to, like, you really wanna make people care about climate change, make them understand that these energy policies are not actually happening like on behalf of the little guy. You know, it’s, they’re happening on behalf of profit seeking oil CEOs. Let’s keep our eye on the oligarchical ball.

 

Zachary Karabell: You do use a lot of pungent language. You kind of name it, shame it, claim it, and I think there’s a big defense to be made of calling certain people villains, calling certain people greedy. You know, kind of using pungent language to really grab people’s attention to say, Hey, there’s, there’s problems here. There’s an alternative argument, which is that that language just creates constant contest. Sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses, but it creates a climate of contest. And I guess maybe just speak about that for a moment and, and look, it’s perfectly fair to say this is a contest and the way you make changes, you mobilize people and you mobilize their passions. And I get that. 

 

So if you wanna articulate that, that’s absolutely cool. I’m also just speaking from the perspective of, we are often at least Progress Network is often coming from a place of that language can also be a problem. So what, what are your thoughts about that?

 

Emily Atkin: Lot of thoughts about it and I think it’s completely valid and I operate the way I do, understanding that it won’t work for everybody. Though I advocate for more naming, shaming, being blunt in media because I think it’s just factually appropriate, I recognize that it’s not going to work for everybody and that like, and I love this about media, that it’s not uniform. There is something for everybody. There are effective ways to message to different people. I think one thing that’s like climate solutions like learning about climate solutions has taught me in general is that there’s no one way to do anything and like trying to fit everybody in one box to fix this massive problem is not gonna do it.

 

So what I do is for a certain type of person, they are not gonna feel advocated for or they’re not gonna trust you unless you are calling it like it is, unless you’re using that type of language where they feel where, you know, pe especially people who are affected by climate change, who like understand, you know, their house burned down in a wildfire, right? Et cetera, et cetera. 

 

That moderation language to try to appeal to people who you know, are just turned off by, it is offensive. It’s not true. It’s not true. It doesn’t ring true to them. And speaking the way that I do rings true to me. It’s, it’s just like who I am. It’s much, it’s much easier for me trying to tone it down to like appeal and be more professional, it’s just, it’s just not who I am and like many people from my past can attest to that. You know, like I trying to like be in the, trying to cover the state, the state capitol. You had to have like a certain dress code, a certain demeanor to be, you know, interviewing the, interviewing the lawmakers, and it just like didn’t really work for me.

 

I get it, it doesn’t work for everybody, but I think that it works for far more people than we’ve potentially as an industry journalistically given it credit for.

 

Zachary Karabell: That was a great articulation of why and what the utility is. So I want to thank you for that, thank you for your time. Again, everyone should go check out Heated. Sign up, read it, engage, learn.

 

So thank you. 

 

Emily Atkin: Thank you for having me. It’s a great conversation.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Thank you Emily. 

 

That was a very interesting conversation about climate change and the villains behind the climate change story. I was very taken by Emily’s point that for whatever reason, when you’d write about climate with the fossil fuel companies as villains in mind, you are tagged as an activist or even just running about climate generally. Right? You’re kind of like tagged as an activist when there are other stories where you wouldn’t necessarily get that kind of reputation or a moniker. You know, if you talk about big tech with big tech as the villains, you wouldn’t necessarily be painted as an activist or back in the day if you were to write about big tobacco and everything that they’re doing, or with opioid crisis, you wouldn’t necessarily be looked at as an activist, but with climate you would.

 

So that made me a lot more open-minded about naming and shaming the fossil fuel villains, I have to say.

 

Zachary Karabell: I remain more skeptical about that as a, as an effective strategy in today’s political climate. It’s interesting that obviously now we have the whole rumblings on, I guess we should call it the left of the Democratic Party between AOC and Bernie Sanders doing their tour of the country trying to rally up support for whether it’s the resistance of Trump or just a reinvigorated Democratic Party. And things like climate and, and economic populism that is directed at large corporations is very much a part of that message, right? 

 

I just am skeptical that that’s the right tactic. It’s clearly the right tactic for a swath of 20, 30 somethings. It’s clearly the right tactic for that percentage of the United States that either identifies with or feels compatible with the progressive movement, and that’s a real movement, right?

 

But we live in a, as we know, a complicated roiling democracy where I’m not sure that the, the tactics of minority resistance to something or minority passion driving change, which clearly worked for the Tea Party and it worked in many ways for MAGA. I’m more skeptical that that actually works on the left, meaning it’s a more fractious group. It’s not as authoritarian, it’s not as hierarchical, even if you don’t think that most of the right is not authoritarian, but it does tend to be more hierarchical, meaning we’re gonna follow a message. And I, I don’t know that that message works as well on the left, even if it galvanizes passion in the moment.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t know. I think it’s different strokes for different folks, right? Like, I think for some people, like they’ll be brought into the climate argument with that kind of, uh, verve and passion and other people, it’ll be a different kind of message, but it’s a little bit like regardless of how you got on the wagon, if you’re on the wagon. You’re on the wagon, so let’s go.

 

Zachary Karabell: Ooh, I like that. It doesn’t matter how you get on the wagon. If you’re on the wagon, let’s go. That’s a good one.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: I was also gonna say, what are you trying to say about 30 somethings? Zach? You know?

 

Zachary Karabell: It’s a demographic observation, not a judgment.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: it’s curious to me that it’s like the millennial Bernie Bros, right? Like where is Gen Z going? Are there Gen Z Bernie Bros?

 

Zachary Karabell: I mean, apparently not to the same degree. And this was definitely true in 2016. I mean, it’s something 80% of Bernie support in 2016 were people under 30, which is wild, right? ‘Cause he’s an octogenarian, you know, guy from New England. It does beg the question of, well, where? Where’s everyone from like 40 to 80, you know, rallying for Bernie, but they don’t seem to be doing so with the same level of passion.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t know. I think it’s this larger question of where the Democratic Party goes from here. You know, if if the, the options for the resistance are Bernie and AOC, again, like you said, it’s gonna work for some people, it’s definitely not gonna work for others.

 

Zachary Karabell: Look, Emily was great and she, she answered those questions, which we somewhat gently challenged her on of this is who I am and this is what I do and this is real to me. And that, I mean, that’s a completely unassailably honorable answer of she is just following her own vision, view, passion, and and that’s important.

 

I mean, I’m not, I’m saying that that’s an understatement. We should all be doing that to some degree, and she clearly is. So that’s, this is not a comment on one person’s passion or even a group’s passion. It’s more, to me the question of what is both tactically and strategically likely to engender change over the long term.

 

And we can, we, you know, we, you and I have argued about this on the show, not necessarily with each other, but with other guests of the difference between reform and revolution, you know, between radical and how does progress happen, right? Is it a sharp break from the past? Is it a gradual evolution from the past and occasionally a devolution, you know, the two steps forward, one step back?

 

So I think that’s part of the debate as well, like what is most likely to create change in a constructive way?

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

 

Zachary Karabell: We had a good discussion with Emily about that, right? There was also that meta discussion of like, what is what’s most effective?

 

And her answer was, look, this is who I am and this is what I do. That’s totally fair, but we also, it is also totally fair to then step back and go, is that actually the most likely mass way to create change, particularly around climate change, which has had, you know, in many ways as a movement in, in the United States, less so in Europe, has somewhat lost its way politically, hasn’t necessarily lost its toy culturally.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Although I’m sure Emily would, here, she would say that a large part of the reason why maybe that movement has not gone to the places we wish it would is because it’s being knee capped by the, the very people that, you know, you would think are kneecapping it. So there’s that. 

 

I mean, I tend, I tend to, to fall on the side of like, I think that trying to pull people into this like abundance agenda, agenda to use, you know, the, the buzzword of, of the month right now with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and just kind of sell people on like how much better their lives could be. I was riding my e-bike home yesterday here in the Netherlands, and then a, a bus passed me on the left. It was an electric bus that was like nearly silent, and I was like, oh, yes, this is the future. I would like to be in this future. You know, I try to sell people on that vision, I think works very well for me and maybe others of my ilk, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction we’re going in the United States as far as messaging and so.

 

Zachary Karabell: The problem is all you and your ilk. I’d like maybe one day you can introduce us to your ilk. We can have your ilk on the show. Today on What Could Go Right, we’re joined by Emma and her ilk. Sounds like the name of a new Gen Z band. 

 

Oh and we will obviously continue these discussions. Please send us your thoughts, your comments, your tired, your poor, your hungry. Little Emma Lazarus, just thrown in there for good measure. Thank you to the Podglomerate for producing to the folks at the Progress Network for doing the dirty work, not the climate dirty work, not carbon dirty work, just the dirty work of dredging up details that other people don’t, and sign up for our newsletter What Could Go Right? We’ve conveniently titled everything the same just for simplicity and confusion sake. 

 

Go to theprogressnetwork.org and check it out, and we will be back with you next week. Thanks.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone. See you next week.