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