In the early 1990s, Barbara and Joe found themselves on the front lines of the scientific debate over climate change in the U.S. as environmental lawyers for the state of Minnesota took on the coal industry in a landmark climate change trial. They faced off against a team of scientists who claimed that climate change was not even a problem at all. They were under oath, and the questions they were asked were about whether or not climate change is actually a problem. In this episode, Joe and Barbara talk about what they learned about climate change denial, and how they were able to expose the bias of the scientists who testified against them. They also talk about the role of corporate interests in pushing back against climate change, and what it really means to be a climate denier. This episode is brought to you by Merchants of Doubt, a podcast produced by Gimlet Media and edited by Joe Pesci. Please consider pledging a small monthly support of $1.00 or more per month to keep us on the airwaves. We'll be looking out for your support, and we'll make sure to bring you quality episodes with high-quality, high-interest episodes throughout the rest of the year. Thanks to our sponsor, Caff and our sponsors like VaynerMedia! in the future episodes will be much better quality and better sound quality than the ones you get on this week's episodes. - we promise you won't be able to tell the difference between what you're getting from us and what we're listening to on the pod. Music: "Goodbye" by The Good Fightin' and "goodbye". by The Badger and "Good Fight" by Mr. Goodbye. "Bye bye. by Sisyphus and Good Morning America by Ms. Goodbye. -- by LaCupid by Lizzie and Mr. Badby Mr. John Rocha by Pizzi by Mrs. Gooding by Ferg & Mr. Squibby by . by Bill Paquette (feat. & Ms. McElroy Thank you for listening to this podcast? Thanks for listening and supporting us, bye! by Joe and Joe? by You're a good friend of ours? - Thank you, Joe & Barbara? Thanks, Joe, Thank you! - Cheers, Cheers! Cheers.
00:00:06.000How did you get started on this and how did you get interested in the subject?
00:00:11.000I got interested in this subject through climate change, climate denial specifically.
00:00:16.000I'm an environmental attorney and back in the 1990s I worked for the state of Minnesota and we found ourselves very briefly sort of on the front lines of the scientific debate over climate change and the way that happened was The state had passed a law saying that utilities regulators should try to estimate the cost to the environment of generating electricity.
00:00:40.000We get most of our power from coal, or we did then.
00:00:47.000We looked at the traditional pollutants that we had regulated for a long time.
00:00:51.000And my client was the Pollution Control Agency, so I was familiar with those.
00:00:56.000What we also looked at, though, and I wasn't familiar with, was CO2 and its effect on climate change, because while that was a big issue globally, there was already a global treaty signed.
00:01:30.000Or if it did, it would be just Just a little, and we'd like it.
00:01:34.000And that all of those scientists, the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, those scientists that the rest of the world, including the U.S. government in the treaty signed by George H.W. Bush, The ones that they were relying on,
00:01:51.000those scientists were basically biased.
00:01:54.000They were biased because they were in it for the money somehow.
00:01:58.000They wanted research grants or they had some political agenda.
00:02:15.000One of the arguments, and you will still hear this sometimes, is that CO2 is a plant fertilizer, which is true, and therefore more CO2 makes the world a happier place for plants and therefore better for everybody else.
00:02:32.000To the point where one of the coal interests who were parties had put out a video saying that the earth was deficient in CO2. And by digging up the coal and burning it, we were correcting that.
00:02:49.000The other was, you know, it'll be mild, it'll be warm, the winters won't be as cold, and hey, this is Minnesota, so, you know, you guys are going to appreciate those warmer winters.
00:02:59.000So, yeah, there was a lot of crazy stuff that hasn't gone away.
00:03:04.000In fact, in many ways it's gotten a lot worse.
00:03:07.000But they were certainly enough to leave me shocked.
00:03:10.000Was that the first time you were ever aware that corporations do send in people to try to defuse arguments or pollute the waters?
00:03:19.000I don't think I was quite that naive, but I'd certainly never seen anything like this.
00:03:23.000I mean, these were people under oath, you know, and they were saying things that were pretty extreme, and many of which would just get a lot more extreme.
00:03:56.000If you have scientists and they come in and they say things that you know are not accurate or deceptive, how do you find out what their motivation is?
00:04:05.000Did you ask them if they've been paid?
00:04:08.000We're able to put some things in the record regarding how much money they had gotten from different fossil fuel interests over the years.
00:04:15.000So we definitely did point to that, argue about that.
00:04:19.000We didn't realize some of the witnesses had a much deeper history than we understood in science denial.
00:04:25.000One of the witnesses was a A pretty prominent scientist named Frederick Seitz, who has since died, but what we didn't know, what I didn't know when I cross-examined him, I mean, this was a shoestring operation, was that he had spent a lot of time actually consulting for the tobacco industry.
00:04:44.000So that would have been nice to bring up.
00:04:46.000We had talked about, just before the podcast, the film Merchants of Doubt, and that's how it kind of got into your work.
00:04:52.000That film touches on that, how people who worked for the tobacco industry eventually went to work to deny the man-made climate change.
00:05:02.000Well, in his case, he had actually been a physicist who was very involved in the Cold War weapons program.
00:05:08.000So he kind of came at it from that direction.
00:05:11.000And it wasn't until really he had retired from his main scientific and academic work that he was brought in to work for the The tobacco industry.
00:05:20.000But what happened was this handful of scientists profiled in that movie and in the book by the same name.
00:05:28.000They would also then work with these nonprofit groups, these free market groups that were strongly opposed to regulation of industries.
00:05:36.000And those same groups then would address lots of different issues from tobacco to ozone and now to climate change and really a lot of other Scientific issues as well for industries facing regulation.
00:05:50.000Someone should do a psychological profile of those people, particularly the tobacco people, because there's such a direct correlation between tobacco and cancer.
00:05:58.000The climate change thing, it's almost like, boy, it's so hard to track because it's so far in advance, and if you say that climate change isn't real, what deaths are caused?
00:06:28.000Let me just back up one second and then talk about that, just because I want to make it clear that while the link between smoking and cancer may seem entirely obvious, there's enough of a delay that opens up the opportunity for denial.
00:06:43.000The link between putting greenhouse gases in the air and dramatic climate change, that's actually as well-established as the links between smoking and cancer.
00:06:53.000It's just that it is a more complicated process, and there's potentially more of a delay, and it depends in large part on what humans do along the way.
00:07:03.000As far as psychologically profiling the tobacco companies, I mean, the tobacco executives, I won't presume to suggest this book does that, but I do write a lot about what these folks were saying, not just to the public, but to,
00:07:19.000you know, internally, we've got some internal documents and certain things that may have been public utterances, but were clearly just sort of part of their internal rationalization.
00:07:28.000And, for example, I start the book with a quote from the head of Philip Morris, who says, Who knows what you would do if you didn't smoke?
00:08:10.000Yeah, that was the question, and we never really did find that out.
00:08:13.000It's such a strange way to live your life, to be deceptive in a way that you know is going to – I mean, there's – I don't know how many people have gotten cancer from cigarettes, but it's probably millions.
00:09:31.000And so their mind starts to come up with reasons why it must be wrong.
00:09:35.000And their tribal instincts, which are never more than just a millimeter below the surface for pretty much any of us, but certainly in this case, get triggered.
00:09:45.000So they immediately think, well, these people accusing me must have an ulterior motive.
00:09:51.000They want money, they want power, they want attention, they've got some...
00:09:59.000And then the other part of that tribal dynamic is they start thinking about themselves and their truly lofty mission, which isn't just to sell a product, but something else.
00:10:22.000The slave trade had a complete rescue narrative.
00:10:26.000I'm talking about the British slave trade here because that was the first really intense campaign of industrial denial I could find.
00:10:35.000The British dominated the slave trade in the 1700s.
00:10:40.000And they faced a very powerful abolition movement at the end of that century, which was really going to the public and saying, look at how brutal this is.
00:10:55.000And the British were really responding because they, even though they dominated the slave trade, you know, they had this notion of themselves as civilized and promoting freedom and being very humane.
00:11:07.000So this was starting to really affect the industry.
00:11:09.000So the traders and the planters got together, they formed a slave lobby.
00:11:13.000They had a very organized campaign in response.
00:11:17.000There was a very powerful slave lobby.
00:11:20.000I mean, the thing about the slave trade was you had people invested in it from the royal family down to the local bakers to many members of parliament.
00:11:31.000I mean, it was a widely accepted, fully legitimate industry.
00:11:34.000So the abolitionists really had their work cut out for them.
00:11:39.000And they had all this evidence, the industry comes back, and they knew they couldn't just say, oh, it's not so brutal.
00:11:45.000They actually came back with this complete counter-narrative, which was, we are rescuing these people.
00:11:53.000The Africans are eager to be purchased.
00:11:56.000They actually try to market themselves as how fit they are for work.
00:12:00.000They enjoy that crossing across the Atlantic.
00:12:04.000They're singing, dancing, games of chance.
00:12:07.000And when they get to the plantations, it is incredibly comfortable.
00:12:17.000If they get sick, we take care of them, we feed them.
00:12:20.000And they're doing way better than those poor peasants back there in Britain or those poor miners or those people working in the new factories.
00:12:31.000And the next part of it was that they said that if they had left them in Africa, if you didn't continue this trade, all of these prisoners of war would be massacred, or they would be eaten by cannibals, or they would die of famine.
00:12:49.000And here's the really clever part of this, because if you believe that you are rescuing them, and if you persuade other people, I'm not suggesting the industry believe this, But if you can persuade people that you are rescuing them, the flip side of it is that abolition would doom them.
00:13:05.000You would be shutting the gates of mercy on mankind because, as one trader put it, the house of bondage is really the house of freedom to them.
00:13:17.000I may have misspoken that a little bit, but it was a truly Orwellian quote.
00:13:21.000And so that way you translate abolition into...
00:13:28.000Inhumanity, into brutality, and you portray the continued slave trade as a way to save these people.
00:13:35.000Oh, one quote was great, that if you were to free these slaves, and by the way, at this point, they weren't actually talking about freeing the existing slaves, just stopping the flow of new slaves.
00:13:44.000But one of the quotes was that freeing the slaves would be cramming liberty down the throats of people incapable of digesting it.
00:13:55.000So this was the first example that you found of industry that was working to try to distort the perceptions of reality so that they can continue what they're doing.
00:14:34.000And then they had an argument about basically failing to make a distinction between their industry and their interests and the whole country.
00:14:43.000Or rather, you know, kind of an early version of what's good for the country is good for GM and vice versa.
00:14:49.000They said if you abolish this trade, it means universal bankruptcy for the kingdom.
00:14:54.000It means Britain is not powerful anymore.
00:15:00.000It means in the sugar islands that the slaves will massacre the whites, exterminate the whites, or maybe make the whites slaves.
00:15:09.000So they basically just created this incredible slippery slope that any kind of reform or certainly abolition of this industry would be disastrous for the entire kingdom.
00:15:19.000So, how well documented is this in terms of the influencers?
00:16:53.000I did by the way though find one And now I don't remember if he was a plantation owner or something else who described the – called slavery, you know, basically a way to make people as happy as can be and called it the ideal of communism,
00:17:09.000which was funny because you don't even think of communism, of that debate as existing.
00:17:14.000This would have been in the 1800s now.
00:17:17.000But he was saying that the North is exploiting these workers, not taking care of them.
00:17:22.000But in the South, we take care of them.
00:17:30.000So, is this a pattern that existed before that?
00:17:34.000Like, is there any evidence that there was something?
00:17:37.000I mean, it seems like whenever people start to make money doing something, whenever a corporation, particularly a corporation, right, because there's this diffusion of responsibility in a large group of folks, and they have this, you know, this obligation to earn money for all the people that are involved in the corporation,
00:17:53.000so they start rationalizing their decisions and then twisting things around.
00:18:00.000Is this something that can be traced back before then?
00:18:02.000Is this a natural human trait, this kind of deception?
00:18:06.000Well, I can't specifically answer whether it can be traced before then because I didn't try to trace it.
00:18:11.000But I would not be at all surprised because I do think it's a natural human trait.
00:18:17.000I mean, one of the issues that I started to struggle with on this book was deciding to what extent are people lying and when are they actually deceiving themselves.
00:18:27.000And I realized early on there was just no way to write this book if I was going to try to parse that out and I also decided it doesn't matter that much because I think these are really very much intertwined and they're both equally destructive and they're both I think equally responsive to these kind of external circumstances that we create in corporations when we form corporations and we put them into a marketplace.
00:18:52.000So I do think it's part of human nature.
00:18:54.000I do think we've created this system that brings this out in people and really encourages it in so many ways.
00:19:12.000That science is still relatively new and kind of, you know, a little bit thin compared to the environmental science that I talk about, which is very, very deep.
00:19:22.000But we do know that when you diffuse responsibility, it makes it very easy for people not to feel responsible for the harm that's done.
00:19:31.000So if you've got a corporation, of course you have division of labor.
00:19:34.000You also have division of management from ownership.
00:19:37.000So if you're a lower worker and you're told to lie about something or cause some harm, Well, you're minding your own business and you let your boss take responsibility.
00:19:47.000If you're the boss, you're focused maybe on your employees and certainly on your shareholders.
00:19:55.000So if you're lying about something or causing harm, it doesn't necessarily feel like a personal selfish act of deception.
00:20:01.000It probably feels like an act of loyalty and responsibility to your shareholders.
00:20:07.000Your shareholders aren't going to care or know because, first of all, they're far away, usually.
00:20:13.000They don't really know what's going on.
00:20:15.000They have maybe just a temporary transactional interest in what's going on.
00:20:21.000They want to sell it quickly and make some money.
00:20:22.000So you don't really have anybody there who feels really responsible for this.
00:20:28.000There was a definition of the corporation from the early 20th century in something called the Cynics Dictionary.
00:20:35.000As an ingenious device for obtaining personal profit without personal responsibility.
00:20:42.000And, of course, that is exactly what we intend from corporations because we grant limited liability to the shareholders.
00:20:50.000And that's why it's that protection from risk that people are willing to pool their capital and that's sort of very key to the very idea of a corporation.
00:21:00.000And then, of course, the The focus on profits means that you're constantly focused on money and in the most short-term way, not even long-term profits, which would be a narrow enough focus.
00:21:15.000But then there's a lot of other things to add to it.
00:21:20.000By definition, certainly if you're in competitive markets, we want there to be competition.
00:21:24.000So that means you are already in a kind of tribal mindset.
00:21:29.000And you've got the ideology of the marketplace, which, you know, we can go back to Adam Smith, The Invisible Hand, and basically the notion that you can pursue your own self-interest and the marketplace will automatically convert that to public good.
00:21:44.000And that does work in a lot of cases and probably worked a lot better in the 1700s.
00:21:49.000But when you've got these enormous organizations that have incredible market power and these very new risky technologies often, it is much harder to be confident that that's going to work.
00:22:04.000And then more recently we've seen that idea that you don't have to worry about the social consequences of your commercial action.
00:22:14.000We had Milton Friedman in 1970 writing this very persuasive article saying that the only real objective, the only legitimate objective of a corporation is to maximize shareholder profit.
00:22:27.000And if they're talking about protecting the environment or doing any of these other things, That's socialism.
00:22:39.000And then it got more extreme in the 90s and in the 21st century, where you've got this strain of intense faith in market forces that was manifested by Alan Greenspan at the Fed by the Koch brothers.
00:22:57.000David Koch has passed away, so now Charles Koch.
00:23:01.000And the network of influence groups that he created, the think tanks, the free market groups, these different academic groups.
00:23:09.000So one of the things that I try to trace a little bit in the book is talking about the rise of The consumer movement and the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s and people saying, wait a minute, we need corporations to be aware of these problems and we need government to regulate corporations to make sure that our cars are safe and our ozone layer is not destroyed.
00:23:33.000But then starting in 1980 when Reagan is elected, you suddenly see those problems.
00:23:37.000Those concerns replaced with a concern over regulation and really a backlash that has come and gone, but basically intensified over the years.
00:23:47.000And now, of course, we have a situation where not only do we have a government unwilling to regulate, but we have one that is rolling back critical regulations that were put in place by previous administrations.
00:24:01.000And, of course, influenced by these very corporations to do that.
00:24:06.000And, I mean, it gets kind of complicated here because if you think, for example, about Charles Koch and Koch Industries, it's based in oil refining.
00:24:14.000So that is very much based in the fossil fuel industry.
00:24:17.000But the Koch network is very ideological, passionately ideological.
00:24:24.000And they just happen to coincide with being in the fossil fuel industry.
00:24:29.000But you have a lot of other groups that have received money from oil companies, from the coal industry, so it gets kind of integrated.
00:24:37.000I do try to not treat them all the same in the book.
00:24:40.000I try to kind of differentiate, and you really do have a difference between the kind of Koch perspective, the coal industry perspective, the oil industry perspective, and then all of these little free market groups.
00:24:51.000Actually, they fit more on the Koch side.
00:24:53.000But they all seem to have one thing in common, that they're rationalizing and justifying their actions because they want to continue to make profits regardless of the impact on the environment or the people.
00:25:05.000And that's a weird thing about just the idea of a corporation itself.
00:25:10.000It's almost like a diabolical vehicle for allowing people to do things.
00:25:15.000You know, to be able to do something and say, hey, we're going to do this as a collective, and therefore no individuals are responsible for the results of the collective, particularly if you're not the one who gets to decide what gets done.
00:25:28.000You're just taking orders, and you're just doing your job, and your job is segmented, and it's all compartmentalized, so you're not dumping anything in the river, Bob.
00:25:45.000In fact, I suggest in the book that if you were a supervillain and you wanted to create a society that would ultimately destroy itself by imposing huge risks on each other and on the planet...
00:25:58.000You would probably create something that looks a lot like our current corporate dominated global economy in the sense of these organizations that amplify your self-interest, that diminish your sense of responsibility, that amplify all of your biases.
00:26:16.000You'd have a justifying ideology to make it all seem fine.
00:26:19.000You would have the responsibility so diffuse that nobody would really feel too badly about it.
00:26:26.000And you give these folks incredible political power, including constitutional rights.
00:26:32.000So that they could dominate your democracy, so that they could—basically, corporations can do whatever is legal.
00:28:02.000And so then you have folks like Teddy Roosevelt who are saying, wait a minute, this is a creation of law, and so we get to determine how much power it has.
00:28:13.000And he responded with the kind of trust-busting movements, breaking down some of the really big old trusts.
00:28:20.000And that was, you know, probably the first big pushback where the government said, wait a minute, you corporations are too powerful.
00:28:28.000We're going to try to reduce that power.
00:28:32.000And then I think the next big phase of that would have been in the Depression, where you have the New Deal coming in and saying, okay, banks...
00:28:43.000We're going to give workers more rights.
00:28:45.000We're going to create Social Security.
00:28:47.000We're going to do all kinds of things that diminish corporate power over the democracy.
00:28:52.000And then it happened again in the 60s and 70s.
00:28:55.000And what I think is that it might be about to happen again, given that there is now so much concern about corporate power You know, Citizens United, influence over our democracy, people worried about concentration of wealth at the very,
00:29:13.000very tippy-top, and obviously people worried that we are unable to deal with climate change.
00:29:19.000And another factor would be the power of social media corporations to influence elections, to influence public discourse.
00:29:28.000They seem to have kind of snuck in in a way that was really unexpected and people didn't see it coming.
00:29:38.000All of these chapters pretty much begin with some kind of a discovery and some industry races in there and takes advantage of it.
00:29:46.000I mean, even slavery, the discovery would have been the new world and this enormous commercial opportunity if you can just get the workers in there to grow the tobacco and the cotton and the sugar.
00:29:56.000But so you'd have the discovery, you have an industry springing up to take advantage of it and making a lot of money and changing social norms along the way.
00:30:48.000You don't even get your somewhat happy ending if the industry has become so powerful that it determines whether it gets regulated or not and it blocks those regulations.
00:31:00.000Well, that's what I was getting to is because that kind of seems where we're at now with corporations like Facebook.
00:31:16.000There's never been a corporation that...
00:31:18.000I mean, other corporations did their best to influence the market and influence regulations in a way that they can continue to profit, but this is a different thing, where they're literally influencing directly who becomes the person who runs the country.
00:32:18.000It's going to be hard to figure this out.
00:32:21.000But in addition to having their own denial about what harms they inadvertently unleash, they are vectors for the denial of other industries, right?
00:32:33.000And so that's one of the reasons climate denial, for example, is still going to be out there and deeply rooted for a long time, even though the oil industry, which played a huge role in building it up, has basically set up We accept the climate science.
00:32:50.000In fact, you know, ExxonMobil even says it accepts the Paris Agreement, which says that we have to limit warming to well below 2 degrees centigrade.
00:33:01.000A pretty dangerous amount of warming, but that's the target of this Paris Agreement, although it also says we're going to try to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
00:33:10.000Now, what that means is dramatically reducing our emissions first over the next 10 years.
00:33:16.000I mean, if you want to limit to 1.5 degrees, we're talking about cutting our emissions by 50%.
00:33:22.000That means pretty much We're cutting 50% of our fossil fuel use.
00:33:31.000But then you have to go for that more aggressive target to zero, net zero emissions by 2050. So we're talking essentially about this huge industry having to either completely transform itself Or go away within 30 years.
00:33:47.000And then, by the way, after that, you have to go into negative emissions, which means building a new industry that sucks carbon out of the air and buries it.
00:33:56.000We haven't even really begun to talk about that, but that's assumed what we're going to have to do because we have now delayed for 30 years, thanks in large part to fossil fuel denial.
00:34:07.000So you've got Exxon saying, yeah, yeah, we understand Paris and all that.
00:34:11.000But if you look at their own projections about what they think is going to happen, they put out these formal projections of how much oil will be consumed in the whole world and what our emissions are going to be.
00:34:22.000They still project emissions going up and then sort of leveling off until like 2040, by which time, in fact, they need to be very, very low.
00:34:31.000So it's kind of like the tobacco companies.
00:34:33.000The big tobacco companies are no longer denying the basic facts.
00:34:37.000They admit this product is addictive, and I've got a quote in the book from one executive saying, yeah, it kills about half of our lifetime smoking customers, our most loyal customers.
00:34:49.000So, but, you know, but despite having for decades said, if we really believed this was harmful, we wouldn't sell it.
00:34:57.000They're obviously continuing to sell it quite enthusiastically.
00:35:00.000And that's kind of where we are, I think, with the major oil companies.
00:35:38.000But, you know, fortunately, we really do have the technologies to, in fact, slash our emissions.
00:35:46.000What we don't have is the political will.
00:35:47.000But you could, I mean, it is not impossible to say in 10 years, we are going to have closed, certainly all of our gas plants and our natural gas plants will either have carbon capture or they will be closed.
00:35:58.000It's not impossible to say all of our cars Certainly all of our new cars are going to be electric and we can build an infrastructure.
00:36:08.000I mean, when people talk about the Green New Deal, sometimes that rhetoric includes World War II, and I think that's actually appropriate because we are talking about a massive change that is going to transform our economy and at the same time,
00:36:25.000hopefully, Address some of the inequalities that we already have in place.
00:36:29.000I mean, that's going to make it trickier, but most of the deals are, for example, very aware that we're going to be hurting coal miners, we're going to be hurting oil rig workers, and trying to put in place some ways that we can keep them from suffering, help them find other jobs,
00:36:46.000help their communities diversify and whatnot.
00:36:50.000If we are going to avoid what will be a multi-century catastrophe in terms of climate change, this is what we have to do.
00:36:59.000And it's hard for me to even say the word catastrophe because I know how people hear that.
00:37:04.000I know it sounds like a crazy exaggeration.
00:37:08.000Do you really think it does at this point?
00:37:10.000Well, I think it does to enough people that it is...
00:37:19.000Yeah, I mean, there's been so much pushback.
00:37:20.000Because if you pay attention to the people that when they give you the worst projections, the things that we should avoid...
00:37:25.000I mean, what I was getting at when I was talking about these oil executives still selling oil is that right now they have to.
00:37:32.000I mean, I understand that there needs to be a shift, and I'm absolutely in favor of that, but if there was no oil right now, they just cut it all off.
00:38:38.000One of the things that's so weird about this whole debate for decades now...
00:38:43.000Is that you've got folks talking about how incredibly terrific markets are and how they can handle all these problems.
00:38:54.000And, you know, starting in the 90s or so, folks were saying, great, okay, let's put a price on carbon because otherwise the markets are totally blind.
00:39:02.000If you can pollute for completely for free, the market has no incentive to reduce polluting or to draw carbon out of the air and bury it.
00:39:10.000But the people who seem to have the most faith in the power of markets are the ones most opposed to putting a price on carbon.
00:39:17.000So the advances we might have made, and some states actually do have a price on carbon, but the advances we might have made more nationally and globally have been blocked by people who love markets.
00:39:29.000And here's another ironic part to this.
00:39:32.000The country who's like our main competitor and not incidentally a huge, huge polluter is China, ostensibly communist.
00:39:40.000They believe more in market power than the right wing of the Republican Party.
00:39:46.000They have put a price on carbon and they are using market forces to try to reduce pollution.
00:40:03.000But on this particular issue of how can the markets help us reduce pollution, they're using market forces to try to reduce their pollution, and we're still not.
00:40:12.000Another really divisive aspect of this is that it's become some sort of a left versus right ideological issue.
00:40:19.000Like there's a lot of people on the right that I've had conversations with people that really don't have any idea what they're talking about, where they instantly deny that climate change is a real issue.
00:40:28.000And when you press them on it, That's one of the benefits of having sort of long-form conversations is that if you're doing this on CNN and it's one of those talking head things where you only have seven minutes and there's three people shouting over each other, it's very hard to get to the heart of why do you believe this?
00:40:45.000But when you're talking over long podcasts, hours long, you get to these people and they'll adamantly deny that it's an issue, but they don't know why.
00:41:01.000If you're a right-wing pundit or a right-wing person and you're saying right-wing things, you're going to say, climate change is not our issue.
00:41:07.000What our issue right now is the economy.
00:41:09.000What we've got to do right now is support jobs and people.
00:41:11.000There's a lot of people that need to put food on the table.
00:41:13.000There's a lot of people that need to – and then they get this sort of ranting, raving, pro-economic standpoint, and it becomes a denial of environmental problems.
00:41:27.000I don't understand why anyone, like how can that not be a universal issue?
00:41:32.000How could anyone not want the world to be better for our grandchildren?
00:41:37.000How could anybody not want less pollution?
00:41:39.000But it becomes this thing where we have all these different categories that are left and right.
00:41:45.000And once you're on one side, you automatically seem to oppose those things that are in the other party's ideas.
00:41:54.000Well, in fact, there's one survey I cite in here that showed that climate change was the most polarized issue in the American political landscape, even more than abortion.
00:42:20.000I mean, it remains very polarized, and I don't think you can understand it.
00:42:25.000I don't think it makes sense from an ideological standpoint.
00:42:28.000I think it makes sense from a tribal standpoint that we have divided, and it feels good to believe the same things as the people you are affiliated with, and it's tense to not believe the same things.
00:42:57.000I mean, it's been ignored or downplayed.
00:43:17.000I don't know what happens now with COVID, with George Floyd.
00:43:27.000Obviously, there are other issues dominating the news right now.
00:43:30.000But I really hope we hang on to this issue as a critical one for the election and don't stop there because this is going to continue to require lots of pressure to make sure that we make the changes we need.
00:43:43.000Yeah, I don't think it's going to go away, I think, but other issues do come to the forefront.
00:43:47.000But what you said I think is really interesting is that it gives you comfort to agree with the other people that are in your party and your group.
00:43:53.000And that's something that is exacerbated by social media and manipulated by social media.
00:43:58.000And it's one of the weirder things about it is that A corporation could legally create hundreds, if not thousands, of fake pages and then use those.
00:44:11.000I'm sure you're aware of the Internet Research Agency from Russia that had an impact on the 2016 elections.
00:44:18.000And Renee DiResta did some pretty fascinating work on that, where she We did a deep dive into how these accounts, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or what have you, have been manipulated and how they use them, where in one point they had a pro-Texas group meet up at the exact same time as a pro-Muslim group on the exact same block.
00:44:48.000It was like they were moving pieces on a chessboard and they literally set up altercations.
00:44:53.000And you would imagine that, I mean, I don't know what these fossil fuel companies or any kind of company that's involved in anything that would be considered sketchy environmentally.
00:45:06.000I don't know how many manipulating sites they run or manipulative social media accounts they run, but I would imagine that's got to be part of the game plan.
00:45:16.000Because online discourse, it's so easy to throw monkey wrenches into the gears, to throw sand into the gas tank.
00:45:25.000It's so easy to sort of monkey with the numbers and change the ideas that are being discussed and change the narratives that it's just a way that you can sort of shift the public's interests and opinions on things.
00:45:42.000I mean, if you're willing to lie and manipulate, then you have obviously a huge advantage.
00:45:47.000But there's also just the basic human tendency that when we talk to people we already agree with, we tend to then become stronger in our opinions.
00:46:01.000So then you sort of weaponize that polarization, that tendency, and you've got an algorithm that says, well, if you like that video, how about this video?
00:46:59.000Because if you, I can't imagine, I'm not naive enough to imagine that what's happening with the internet research agencies in Russia is not happening here.
00:47:16.000I mean, that's an incredibly effective tool.
00:47:18.000And if you were going to use it to manipulate opinions on whether it's climate change or anything, pharmaceutical drug overdoses, whatever it is that you want to manipulate people with, I would imagine that that's a gigantic issue,
00:47:33.000but it's not something that really gets discussed in terms of passing legislation to prevent that stuff.
00:47:41.000Yeah, and hopefully it gets more and more discussed because it is very scary.
00:47:47.000I mean, it turns out we humans are easily manipulated and were easily manipulated even before social media.
00:47:53.000But now there is this incredibly sophisticated engine to drive us apart, to drive us...
00:48:00.000In the direction that those best at manipulating us want us to go.
00:49:21.000And now we have a very sophisticated machine to drive us in the direction of getting more pissed off.
00:49:27.000And that sophisticated machine is clearly using the same sort of deceptive tactics to try to diminish their responsibility for what they're doing.
00:49:46.000I mean, I think that if you are an executive, you know, your instinct is that you are doing fine and your instinct is that the other side is wrong and that psychological reflex then, you know, becomes a foundation for a corporate strategy.
00:50:02.000And then that corporate strategy becomes the basis of kind of its own new industry of public relations folks and advertising people and lawyers and think tanks who will promote that.
00:50:30.000I mean, I talk a little bit about, yeah, no, it's really not a factor.
00:50:34.000I mean, the most recent industry that I talk about, the two most recent industries are the fossil fuels denying climate change and also Wall Street denying the products and activities and hazards that led up to the financial crisis of 2008. That's a can of worms in and of itself,
00:50:58.000The vampire squid clamped to the face of humanity.
00:51:02.000Yeah, that's an immortal line, so his description of Goldman Sachs.
00:51:07.000Yeah, his work is fascinating and terrifying.
00:51:10.000And he's not a guy with a financial background, so he had to do a deep dive into all that stuff for years to sort of get a grip on how they do things and what they're doing.
00:51:20.000The idea that that is the backbone of our civilization in terms of our economic civilization is really crazy.
00:51:29.000And of course, that industry has become so much bigger as a percentage of GDP and so much more powerful without any evident social benefits as far as I can see.
00:51:38.000And I'm also not a person with a financial background.
00:51:41.000I came to this as an environmental lawyer.
00:51:45.000And not as a particularly naive person, but I have to say I was really astonished at the depth of the exploitation.
00:51:55.000It wasn't even like we think we're trying to do the right thing for our clients or we think we're trying to do the right thing for clients.
00:52:03.000You know, society, it was just this full-on take the money and run and exploitation.
00:52:10.000I mean, they have this cute little code on Wall Street that was prominent before the crisis.
00:52:20.000It's IBGYBG, which stands for I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone, which was the answer when somebody said, wait a minute, we're pumping all this risk into the system.
00:52:32.000This investment product is going to fail.
00:53:25.000We're so obvious that you can't believe that they were denying them.
00:53:29.000I mean, obviously when there's a housing bubble, it will burst and there was an obvious housing bubble.
00:53:35.000It was denied for a long, long time and that ultimately became the basis of all of this really toxic debt that got magically transformed into AAA investments.
00:53:45.000And it wasn't, I think, that the industry was denying that it was going to burst.
00:53:49.000They just felt they were going to get in and out before it burst, that they could pass the risk off to the next party before it happened.
00:54:00.000I mean, I put it all under the very broad category of denial.
00:54:04.000But actually, the head of J.P. Morgan later would testify to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Somehow, you know, we just missed the fact that housing prices don't go up forever.
00:54:17.000I don't think they really did miss that fact.
00:54:39.000You know, there's actually one anecdote in the book that I retold from a book that Mike Hudson wrote called The Monster.
00:54:46.000And he's talking about, first of all, we had this new breed of mortgage lenders, the folks who actually went out to sell the subprime mortgages to the low-income people who were often defrauded and certainly not the most sophisticated financial consumers.
00:55:03.000And this one particularly bad company was out there.
00:55:07.000And Lehman Brothers sent a vice president to visit with this company because they wanted to know how they were doing.
00:55:15.000And he writes back and says that this is a sweatshop.
00:55:20.000It is high pressure sales for people in a weak state.
00:55:24.000And it is a check your ethics at the door kind of business.
00:55:28.000And Lehman Brothers writes back and says, we in Enthusiastically welcome the opportunity to partner in your future growth and ended up then, in fact, partnering with them and financing these mortgages and then buying them back, packaging them up,
00:55:43.000selling them to investors, and then, of course, eventually becoming the biggest bankruptcy in history.
00:55:51.000Well, not Lehman Brothers, but the other ones did.
00:55:54.000What a crazy thing that they just sort of laid it out like that.
00:55:58.000Well, yeah, this is internal stuff that came out.
00:56:01.000But yeah, the fact that they were, you know, so happy to partner with an unethical business.
00:56:10.000And in fact, there's also a lot of evidence that Wall Street was just continuing to get the mortgage lenders to reduce their standards even lower.
00:56:19.000Because, you know, you started out with these very, very aggressive investments.
00:56:24.000These were lending companies and they were new and they wanted to get huge very quick and they were super aggressive.
00:56:29.000But they made so much money that the more traditional banks started following and doing what they had been doing.
00:56:36.000And so Wall Street gets involved and basically they're saying, you don't need documentation of income.
00:56:43.000And the banker would say, the lender would say, well, how do I know they're going to pay it back?
00:56:48.000And Wall Street would say, You don't need to worry about that.
00:56:51.000In fact, they didn't because Wall Street would buy it.
00:56:55.000The point wasn't, will this ever be paid back?
00:56:57.000The point was, is the interest rate on the surface of the mortgage high enough that we can package it into what looks like a lucrative investment?
00:57:06.000Of course, they would package lots and lots of these together and then slice and dice them and stack them.
00:57:12.000Keep rearranging them and essentially then threatened and corrupted and manipulated the ratings agencies so that they would give them AAA ratings so that your pension fund could buy it.
00:57:26.000That was one of the things that was so disturbing about Matt Taibbi's work.
00:57:29.000It's so sophisticated that it takes so long to understand how they're doing it and what they're doing that the average person that doesn't have a background in finance, as you get into it, or economics, if you get into it, it's like you have to start from scratch several times and go,
00:58:09.000Whereas numbers are these weird things where if your whole business model is predicated on increasing the amount of numbers that you earn...
00:58:19.000You can find ways, especially if other people are willing to go along with that, you can find ways to screw with those things.
00:58:26.000And that's the most disturbing thing about finances to me.
00:58:30.000Like the Bernie Madoff situation, for example.
00:58:53.000Well, you know, and I think any industry like finance that is incredibly complicated and abstract in that way that doesn't feel quite right but who really knows is one that is absolutely ripe for denial because the complexity means nobody really knows the risk.
00:59:10.000It also means the industry can and it did go to Congress and say, you don't get this, which was true.
00:59:17.000And so, okay, we're selling these derivatives and yeah, maybe they're super complicated and nobody knows what they are.
00:59:22.000But you regulators, hands off, we, you know, the market, we are self-disciplined.
00:59:28.000We, the industry, will not take crazy risks.
00:59:31.000And by the way, you should get rid of those depression-era laws so we can do some other stuff.
00:59:35.000And then eventually, of course, you have the financial crisis.
00:59:37.000But the abstract nature of all these numbers also means That whatever little bell might go off in somebody's head saying, this is going to hurt somebody, it's going to be muted.
00:59:48.000It's going to be ignored because it just feels so abstract.
00:59:53.000You sell this security to a pension fund and maybe way down the line it'll fail and maybe some people won't get to retire, but you don't know who they are and maybe that won't happen.
01:00:06.000I mean, the more abstract it is and, of course, the more globalized our economy becomes, The more distant the impacts, the harder to imagine they are and the easier to ignore and deny.
01:00:17.000And then you add in the fact that they're able to manipulate politicians.
01:00:59.000There's not a chance in hell she's going to do that.
01:01:02.000I mean, what do they say during those things that warrants a quarter of a million dollars or more?
01:01:07.000It's a shady system, and there's no motivation to shift it, change it.
01:01:15.000Well, there's no motivation for those who are benefiting from it, certainly those who have the most money and are able to manipulate it.
01:01:22.000I do think there's, I mean, if you were a politician and you were constantly raising money, I mean, I think many of them hate that and would love a system that didn't require them to be constantly doing that.
01:01:36.000And it isn't like the politicians who are raising money for the campaigns, they don't get to walk away with it.
01:01:41.000They're using that for their campaign.
01:01:43.000So I think there is motivation among the elected people not to have to keep doing this.
01:01:49.000But in the meantime, those who are benefiting from this and who can manipulate the system are going to resist any efforts to try to change it.
01:02:03.000Where you can say, look, we've got a clear path.
01:02:06.000You don't have to raise money anymore.
01:02:07.000Well, there are ways to whittle away at this, and it didn't used to be quite this bad.
01:02:12.000And certainly you can provide some additional public funding or require networks to give politicians time on the air, things that allow them to speak to the public, which is, of course, what this money is supposed to give them a chance to do.
01:02:28.000Without having to go to other people who have money to give them the money so that they can get access to the public.
01:02:34.000I mean, I think there are ways to do this.
01:02:36.000I wouldn't pretend to be an expert at all in campaign finance reform, but I think it is a field, and I think that the reforms of the past have been blocked or undone, and we can try to put some of those back in place.
01:02:49.000What you're doing with this book is essentially you have a magnifying glass on some of the worst aspects of human behavior.
01:04:11.000I meant to write a kind of let's all step back and look at this sort of book.
01:04:14.000But it just turns out you cannot write about infuriating topics without writing a kind of infuriating book.
01:04:20.000I do try to keep some perspective here and look at the good parts of this history, which is to say, in each case, you have members of the public, you have scientists, you have journalists, you have movement stepping up and confronting that denial,
01:04:37.000and eventually, in most cases, overcoming it.
01:04:42.000And, you know, we do have other segments of our society that are designed to try to not just pursue profit but to seek truth of scientists and journalists.
01:04:52.000And that doesn't mean they're not also trying to pursue profit sometimes or at least get paid for their work.
01:04:58.000But, you know, we do have systems in place that have successfully confronted this.
01:05:04.000So it's not like we're starting from scratch.
01:05:06.000We are just in a very big hole right now and particularly about climate change and particularly with so much corporate power over Congress and frankly the states as well.
01:05:18.000What subjects where you see there's actually progress been made?
01:05:25.000Well, you know, people have been fighting climate change on the state level, and we have done some things also federally for a long time over the years.
01:05:33.000I mean, many, many states have put in place climate targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
01:05:39.000Many have put in place renewable energy standards, which have been enormously successful in building up The wind industry, the solar industry, and those technologies as they deploy and improve have gotten so much cheaper.
01:05:52.000I mean, it's really much, much easier now to imagine getting rid of fossil fuels than it was, you know, 40 years ago when The industry first confronted this or when society first really started looking at this.
01:06:06.000And on the federal level, they've made major improvements.
01:06:10.000They've required efficiency standards, which have been really helpful for major appliances.
01:06:21.000So that's going to limit the progress exactly when it needs to be accelerated.
01:06:26.000So that's maybe not one of the good pieces of news you were asking about.
01:06:31.000We have – well, I mean, I think that's going to be largely the focus.
01:06:35.000And even though we have – Trump has said we're not going to be part of the Paris Agreement anymore, which, by the way, every other country in the world is a part of.
01:06:43.000There's a handful that haven't ratified it, but everybody else is part of it.
01:06:48.000Even though he said that, you have many states and many cities stepping forward and saying, well, we are still part of it and we are going to be working to reduce our emissions.
01:06:57.000So, you know, that's all very good news.
01:07:00.000The technology, we do have a deep bench of policy experience.
01:07:03.000We know a lot of good things that we can do that will work.
01:07:07.000And we have the rising concern, the youth movement, You know, all around the world, really, who are really stepping up and saying, enough, we have got to deal with this and we've got to deal with it now.
01:07:21.000And because you grown-ups have wasted 30 years, we've got to deal with it particularly aggressively.
01:07:27.000Now, you cover how many different subjects in this book?
01:07:31.000I cover eight different campaigns of denial.
01:07:33.000And it seems like, for you in particular, climate change is the most disturbing?
01:07:38.000Well, that's the one that threatens the future of human civilization and the one that I got started on, yeah.
01:07:45.000But yeah, I cover seven other industries, including slavery, radium.
01:08:11.000I mean, it was way more radioactive than uranium, and people didn't even know what radioactivity really meant, but there was this sort of aura of wizardry around it.
01:08:20.000And when they discovered it, they didn't...
01:08:24.000Well, the first thing they discovered, and they discovered this the hard way, was that it burned your flesh.
01:08:52.000We're going to put this radium next to a tumor and then we'll take it away and it'll shrink and we can use the same radium for the next tumor.
01:09:00.000They would put it, well, they somehow would refine it and distill it into, you know, tiny, tiny little amounts and then they would put it in a needle or put it in a vial or something and just position it near a tumor.
01:09:11.000It started out as ore and they had to refine it and refine it down, down, down, down, down.
01:09:17.000And so the governments at the time in Europe and also in the U.S. thought, great, here's this weird, crazy, valuable stuff.
01:09:25.000Maybe we should control this ore so we make sure it gets used to actually cure cancer.
01:09:30.000And in Europe, that's pretty much what they did.
01:09:54.000It was this classic sort of slippery slope argument, and somehow it succeeded.
01:09:59.000And so what happened was this mysterious and potent element became another commercial product to be exploited by this company, Standard Chemical.
01:10:10.000There were some others that later popped up.
01:10:11.000Standard Chemical was founded by this guy named Joe Flannery, and he had a background as His family were morticians, and then he went into industry, and then he was kind of a snake oil salesman, and he kind of failed, but he wanted with radium.
01:11:33.000And so they were giving this very toxic substance to people with low-level chronic problems.
01:11:41.000And then he actually formed his own medical journal, and he would have his doctors write up the results of this and put it in there and send it out to all the doctors.
01:11:52.000So, yeah, I mean, it was really pretty crazy, but he did succeed in launching this health fad where suddenly there were lots of products that contained radium.
01:12:04.000Now, some of them said they did but didn't, but many of them really did.
01:12:47.000They said this was for, as I recall, weak, discouraged men who wanted to perform the duties of a real man.
01:12:56.000So, yeah, and that was, you know, I I think what happens is if you're going to sell a quack product, you try to identify problems that people are kind of embarrassed about.
01:13:05.000So they're less likely to go to their doctor.
01:13:06.000They'll buy it out of the back of a magazine.
01:13:08.000And then if it doesn't work, they're not going to complain about it.
01:13:26.000Well, it pretty much fizzled out in the 30s, largely because one particularly prominent and wealthy individual could afford to poison himself very thoroughly by drinking these radium drinks every day.
01:13:48.000He had like holes between his sinuses and his mouth.
01:13:51.000This is actually what happened as well to a group of workers who were painting radium paint onto watch dials, which is actually a more well-known part of this history.
01:14:02.000A lot of young women were hired to paint radium onto watch dials.
01:14:35.000I mean, the industry got going in the mid-19-teens.
01:14:39.000This one man I was just talking about died in the early 30s, got lots of press, and that helped the health fad part of it go away.
01:14:47.000The worker exposure, the young women usually who were People disfigured and died from this.
01:14:54.000That part of the industry of radioactive paint lasted a bit longer into the 30s.
01:15:01.000When they began, they taught these women, young women, they might have been 15 when they got hired, they taught them to make a nice sharp point on their paintbrush with their lips and tongue.
01:15:13.000And because there was this health fat around radium, they told them that this would put a glow in their cheeks.
01:15:19.000And you've seen these pictures that they really had some change in their cheeks, but it wasn't a glow.
01:15:24.000And they told them it was good for them.
01:15:29.000So a lot of them, not all of them, I mean, so, you know, not everybody died, which made it easier for the industry to actually blame them.
01:15:37.000And later, the industry would say that these people with these horrendous disfiguring diseases, that they were suffering from a pre-existing condition, that this was somehow not the fault of radium, that they had hired people.
01:15:51.000Cripples and other people who weren't super strong because this was easy work.
01:15:56.000And when they got sick, everybody blamed them and they were being punished for their generosity of hiring these folks in the first place.
01:16:04.000And by the way, these women had radioactive breath at this point.
01:16:09.000I mean, so it's not like there was any doubt that they had radium lodged in their bones.
01:16:23.000Now, one thing about the radium industry is, you know, denials like that, blaming the victim, are appalling.
01:16:28.000But one of the things we did see is that the leaders of that industry, including the guy who invented that radioactive paint and including Joseph Flannery, died.
01:16:38.000And certainly the inventor of the paint died because of radium exposure.
01:16:48.000According to Time Magazine, his fingers had been removed.
01:16:51.000Nobody else covered that particularly gruesome detail, but then he died of anemia.
01:16:55.000These are all radium-induced ailments.
01:16:57.000Joseph Flannery, the guy who launched Standard Chemical, well, he had this great idea that he had all this radioactive waste, right?
01:17:03.000So he hired a botanist to find out if it could be a fertilizer.
01:17:07.000And then they published a report that you should, yeah, spread radioactive waste on your food crops because it's great.
01:17:15.000He actually had him spread waste on his own garden.
01:17:18.000And then six years later, Flannery died.
01:17:21.000And the industry didn't mention this, but his birth certificate, which I managed to dig up, mentioned that he had a contributing factor in his death of anemia, which is something that radium exposure causes.
01:18:01.000again, that there's this human characteristic that...
01:18:04.000This tendency, you start making money, you start justifying, you want to keep that money coming in, so you start justifying your actions, manipulating the facts, and just continuing to push out whatever it is that you're doing that's allowing you to earn this profit.
01:18:19.000Well, and, you know, one of the reasons I talk about Joe Flannery is that he's, I think, a really good example of a certain kind of person that we celebrate because they invent things and they make things happen and they build businesses,
01:18:38.000And we know from psychological studies that, you know, well, let me back up.
01:18:45.000There's a model when you think about how the mind works that governs a lot of this research that we've got a going system and a stopping system, an approach system and an inhibition system.
01:18:57.000One of the things that activates the approach system is power.
01:19:02.000And if you have an approach, an active approach system, you are focused on your goal.
01:19:11.000The inhibition part of the mind is more triggered by powerlessness and you're more focused on risk.
01:19:17.000So if you're focused on reward, you're not focused so much on risk.
01:19:21.000You're not focused so much on consequence for other people.
01:19:24.000And so, of course, that gets you hailed as a visionary, and Joseph Lannery was hailed as a visionary, and he did.
01:19:32.000You know, he was bold, he was inventive, he worked hard, he built a business.
01:19:36.000He just didn't ask, you know, should we actually feed this cell-killing radioactive substance that fuses into people's bones permanently to people without any evidence of safety?
01:19:49.000Or should we just go for it and see how it works?
01:19:52.000And so, you know, that I think is troubling in the sense that you've got industry leaders who fit a certain psychological profile who rise to the tops of their industries precisely because they are reward-focused.
01:20:07.000But if they are not balanced out by other people whose job it is to say, what about the risks?
01:20:23.000No one really understood that kind of stuff in terms of what the general public probably didn't really know what radiation could do to you.
01:21:03.000Whenever I hear stories about that from the early 1900s, I always wonder, is something like that happening right now that they're going to look back on the year 2300 and go, what were they thinking back in 2020?
01:21:20.000We've unlocked some really powerful, potent force, and it's addictive, and people love it, and it's so exciting, and it's racing forward, and it's so new that nobody fully understands the risks yet.
01:21:32.000But I think that might be what, when people look back, they will think, how did these people let...
01:21:39.000How did they let it rip them to pieces like that?
01:21:42.000How did they let it destroy all of their trust in each other and their government and their experts and their academia so that nobody really could tell, or at least a big chunk of your population could not tell what was true and what was just somebody pandering to their tribal biases?
01:21:58.000Well, and also, what's it doing to our children?
01:22:44.000But I know a lot of people who are addicted.
01:22:47.000And they, you know, you'll see them some days and they're sweating, their faces pale, and you're like, what's going on, man?
01:22:54.000Oh, I'm involved in this Twitter thing, you know, somebody got mad at me about this, then I went back and forth about that, and next thing you know, my boss found out about it, and it's, oh, crap.
01:24:07.000People, certainly smarter than me, who understand this industry better, are going to have to pick it apart and try to think about how we really do directly address these problems.
01:24:17.000We obviously didn't evolve with social media in mind.
01:24:24.000Highly social creatures, huge portions of our brains are about looking around at our place within our tribe, looking at other tribes, and just dealing with all of the status issues and the comparison issues.
01:24:37.000And social media, of course, expands that dramatically.
01:24:40.000And it's just, I think, you're right, really hard for people to deal with.
01:24:44.000Well, we're seeing it so clearly right now because it's being exacerbated by social distancing.
01:24:49.000The fact that we're not around each other and there's less communication person to person, particularly with strangers or particularly people you have issues with.
01:24:58.000People aren't getting together and communicating face to face.
01:25:54.000Before we recognize the repercussions, I mean, Facebook is talking about making their own money.
01:25:58.000They're talking about making their own Bitcoin-type cryptocurrency.
01:26:03.000I mean, if that takes place, I mean, they're already manipulating things in some really weird ways.
01:26:07.000If they start having their own money on top of that, and then they can manipulate their own individual economy, like, what does that look like?
01:26:17.000No one even considered cryptocurrency 20 years ago.
01:26:20.000No one considered the impact of social media 10 years ago.
01:26:23.000What are we going to be looking at 30 years from now?
01:27:03.000It's kind of interesting if you compare that to much older science fiction that has a much more positive perspective.
01:27:09.000Often, not always, but at least there was often something that was positive.
01:27:14.000Although, I have to say a lot of that is stuff that was actually put together by corporations who were showing you the home of the future and all of their marvelous appliances.
01:28:49.000There was one aerosol company president, yeah, who suspected it was a KGB. But many industry leaders were talking about this being as an anti-capitalist crusade.
01:28:59.000And partly because this was the early 70s, so they had already faced...
01:29:03.000All of these, you know, demanding environmentalists saying, take the lead out of the gasoline and do all kinds of other things.
01:29:09.000And so they were starting to feel like attacked on all sides.
01:29:13.000And eventually, you know, so there was some denial there, mostly political.
01:29:21.000It got handled relatively quickly because actually it was like only 1976 when they said, okay, we're getting this stuff out of the hairspray, out of the deodorant.
01:30:18.000Nobody really even knew much about the ozone layer, and they certainly didn't know CFCs were going to wreck it.
01:30:23.000So it was a much, much less obvious risk.
01:30:26.000And then it wasn't until the 70s that scientists who were just sort of curious put this all together and realized, uh-oh, we are wrecking the ozone layer.
01:30:35.000And by 76, I think it was 76, the Ford administration said, okay, we're getting it out of the cans.
01:30:53.000And then I guess we were in the Carter administration, and they were going to start looking at the harder problem of how do you replace CFCs in refrigerators and air conditioners.
01:31:02.000And they were putting up a plan for that.
01:31:05.000But then Reagan got elected and the concerns of the 60s and 70s about how do we protect the environment were replaced by concerns about how do we avoid environmental regulations because they felt it was hurting business and so they basically dropped the ball on this completely and the corporations like DuPont,
01:31:27.000which was the top CFC maker, They had been working on substitutes, but once the pressure of regulation went away, they just dropped it.
01:31:36.000They didn't keep looking for substitutes, even though they had the same science telling them that there was a risk here, but they decided we're not going to have to worry about it.
01:31:45.000Then eventually the ozone hole is discovered and scientists are shocked because the models had predicted, you know, a gradual reduction in ozone and suddenly you've got this deep reduction in ozone and it covers like, you know, this huge space over Antarctica.
01:32:00.000One of the reasons NASA had not discovered this with their satellites was that they were expecting so much less that they had apparently programmed the computers to read huge readings like this as instrument error.
01:33:01.000It's an example where the product wasn't their core product.
01:33:04.000It was a little sliver of revenue that wasn't that lucrative.
01:33:07.000They could replace it with something that they could sell.
01:33:10.000And they were going to clearly get regulated anyway.
01:33:12.000So clearly the benefits of continued denial had sort of disappeared.
01:33:18.000So you can't count on evidence leading to the end of corporate denial.
01:33:23.000More typically you have a situation like tobacco and fossil fuels where even if it does lead to denial, they don't stop selling the product.
01:33:36.000And again, obviously oil companies can't just stop selling their product, but they can be part of a process for us all to figure out how we're going to replace it as quickly as possible.
01:33:45.000What efforts were done, if any, to regenerate ozone?
01:33:54.000I've not heard anybody talk about that.
01:33:56.000But we've always known that the CFCs take decades to get up to the atmosphere.
01:34:00.000So stopping emissions meant that the old stuff was still going up there and it was going to take decades to fix it.
01:34:07.000We do seem to have signs of healing now of the ozone layer.
01:34:10.000So it does seem like we have solved...
01:34:13.000Well, to solve this, we have stopped the harm and it's going to get better through natural circumstances.
01:34:18.000But, you know, I was talking about how people don't let us celebrate that as humanity at its best, you know, because we really did something very hard in the sense of figuring out the science, getting the nations of the world together, and getting rid of a product that had been really useful and valuable to us.
01:34:36.000But what happened immediately after that was this political backlash.
01:34:41.000Even when you had the chemical industry saying, yep, we're destroying the ozone layer, we're going to stop doing that, you had these right-wing groups, Fred Singer actually was one of the witnesses who was also in Merchants of Doubt, who goes and he gets to testify before Congress,
01:34:59.000he's a scientist, and he's saying that the mainstream science on which you have just based all of these decisions, you're being bamboozled, and they have an anti-capitalist agenda.
01:35:11.000And you had then, I think it was Tom DeLay, saying he doesn't listen to the Ozone Trends panel, all of those, you know, hundreds of scientists who've hammered out the data on these issues.
01:35:24.000And that was sort of the beginning, well, not the beginning because you could take it back to the 80s, but that was the next step in the rise of these science deniers who sort of had this all-purpose agenda that looked at lots of different things.
01:35:36.000And the funny thing was here, you know, you had the industry saying, no, we're fine with this accelerating the phase out.
01:35:48.000So, you know, the way I think about it is that industry for a long time fueled doubt.
01:35:54.000And to some extent, they also then funded groups with an ideological agenda who continue to push that doubt.
01:36:01.000And then some of those industries stopped denying the science, maybe because they were going to get sued or maybe because it was just time.
01:36:09.000But the groups that they have funded now sort of outflank them on the issue.
01:36:14.000And for example, Exxon used to fund, ExxonMobil used to fund this little crazy little group called the Heartland Institute.
01:36:23.000And they stopped doing that quite a long time ago.
01:36:27.000This institute kept just getting more and more extreme on this issue.
01:36:31.000And recently they had a dispute between ExxonMobil and the Heartland Institute and the Heartland's leader called ExxonMobil part of the anti-energy global warming movement.
01:36:50.000Part of an anti-energy, global warming movement?
01:36:53.000Now, it's possible that this was all kind of staged to make Exxon look good, but I think they have just created a monster, and that monster is going to keep going around out there, and it keeps getting a lot of money.
01:37:05.000The problem is we don't necessarily know who's funding these groups anymore.
01:37:09.000For a long time, Exxon funded a lot of climate denier groups.
01:37:12.000They got a lot of public pushback and pressure.
01:37:15.000They stopped funding the most extreme ones, not all of them.
01:37:19.000Then the Koch brothers started funding, their foundation started funding a lot of these groups.
01:37:26.000Then we saw a lot of the funding of these groups going underground into these dark money organizations like Donors Trust that promise anonymity so that if you want to fund AAP. It's a politically sensitive issue.
01:37:40.000So these, you know, the more extreme groups get a lot of money from these dark money organizations and therefore there's even deeper anonymity and no accountability.
01:37:52.000That's some 4D chess if Exxon was doing that.
01:37:55.000If they're sitting there going, look, I know what we can do.
01:37:58.000Let's get someone to call us a bunch of hippies.
01:38:12.000If you're Exxon and you don't actually want to do anything, you spin off the denial into other groups that will actually stop things.
01:38:20.000I mean, this little group, Heartland, I mean, this extreme edge of these advocacy groups, they're deeply involved in the Trump administration.
01:38:28.000I mean, it's not like they're just out there howling in the wilderness.
01:38:34.000So if you can back off like Exxon, especially ExxonMobil, especially if you're being sued and you've got angry shareholders and you've got the SEC, you have a lot of reason and you have angry European countries that are taking this more seriously and you're multinational.
01:38:50.000You have a lot of reason to kind of keep your mouth shut and maybe say the right things.
01:38:54.000But you can indeed still benefit from the denial you have spun off into the world that is in fact, say, rolling back the fuel efficiency standards.
01:39:04.000I don't know what ExxonMobil has said about that, but clearly the more inefficient our cars, the more oil gets burned.
01:39:11.000Are there tactics and is there like a school of thought that goes along with these sort of strategies?
01:39:33.000Or is it just a natural factor in the way human beings react to profitability and denial of responsibility?
01:39:42.000I think it certainly starts there with it being a natural reaction.
01:39:45.000But I think then what happens is industries learn from the previous industry.
01:39:50.000Tobacco taught everybody how to do this, certainly everybody in the modern era.
01:39:55.000And then, of course, you do have this industry of groups that serve multiple industries.
01:40:01.000So you can be a group that sets up front groups.
01:40:05.000And I quote one here, the man named Rick Berman, who has a company that sets up front groups for industries that are facing regulation.
01:40:13.000And he promises them complete anonymity.
01:40:16.000And the irony here is that he was talking to a group of oil and gas executives and saying, hey, we can give you complete anonymity.
01:40:22.000And some were saying things like, well, you know, you're telling us we should really be attacking people's character and reducing their credibility, and I'm not so sure I like that.
01:40:29.000And he says, hey, you can either – how do you phrase it?
01:41:32.000And then basically you have sort of a tie in their minds, but you win every tie because you have preserved the status quo.
01:41:40.000So that kind of a strategy, that's, you know, it's pretty sophisticated in the sense that it was an insight that really helps lots of industries with science denial.
01:41:52.000But it was also a pretty obvious lesson from watching the tobacco industry, but really nobody's put it to use the way the fossil fuel industry has done around climate change.
01:42:05.000There's a playbook and there's an industry that will help you run those plays and also keep you hidden while you're running those plays so you don't have to be visible to your shareholders, to your consumers, to politicians.
01:42:19.000If this was an operating system, we would abandon it and bring in a new one, right?
01:42:23.000Like if this was Windows 95 or something.
01:42:27.000We might be better able to predict how it will crash us.
01:42:41.000Yeah, unfortunately, this is an operating system that takes on a life of its own and has its own desire to perpetuate itself.
01:42:48.000Maybe this is where, you know, the future of all operating systems.
01:42:52.000I mean, you know, if you think about sort of, again, back to the comic books, back to the novels, back to Frankenstein, our creations tend to want to live, and they tend to want to turn on us, and corporations are our creation.
01:44:01.000And because I was looking at this as a social phenomenon, I didn't want cases where a company was just keeping a secret and it got discovered.
01:44:10.000I wanted cases where there was a sustained campaign of denial over time.
01:44:15.000Which of course gave me lots of source material to look at.
01:44:19.000But also because that changes the way people think about things, not just the primary question of like, do cigarettes cause cancer?
01:44:29.000But larger questions of, can I trust my government?
01:45:11.000I mean, they were basically spreading a known poison over all of our living surfaces, knowing that it would eventually crumble, knowing that it accumulates slowly and poisons people.
01:45:41.000I mean, it was strong and now, of course, we think of it as these old, old buildings and so we think of it as crumbling, but it did a pretty good job as a paint, if you didn't count the human impact.
01:45:55.000Did you get any pushback or did you ever get contacted by any of these different industries that you're covering?
01:46:02.000And were you concerned at all about that while you were writing these things?
01:46:21.000They ended up moving on to other products.
01:46:24.000Well, they sold it overseas for a long time, but then they also made a lot of other things.
01:46:28.000So they still exist, even though their product was banned.
01:46:30.000Their only product at the time that they were started was banned in this country.
01:46:34.000And I called them up and said, so I'm writing this book about corporate denial.
01:46:38.000And just wondering, you know, if you'd like to talk to me about lidded gas and just hear silence on the other side of the phone and then they would transfer me to somebody else and I would try it again and get silence and, you know, then it would get disconnected and it became pretty clear to me at the beginning that...
01:46:55.000It wasn't going to be all that helpful for me to ask people, so tell me about what you're in denial of.
01:47:02.000Because I didn't think that was going to work very well.
01:47:06.000And also because my focus was the public debate and how did it affect society.
01:47:10.000That's what I ended up focusing on the most.
01:47:12.000So, you know, I wasn't worried about the industries as I was writing this.
01:47:17.000I'm a little worried now, but I mean, really, I'm just quoting them.
01:47:20.000So at this point, I don't feel like I'm at a particular risk.
01:47:24.000Well, just, I mean, not even risk, but has there been a reaction by these corporations?
01:47:33.000Yeah, because their whole thing is about denial, right?
01:47:35.000So I would imagine you put out a book about industrial strength denial, you would get some denial about The book about denial.
01:47:45.000But, you know, I've picked such big industries and these campaigns are so old that there's nothing particularly newsworthy about saying that, you know, tobacco companies used to deny that smoking caused cancer or that the fossil fuel industry raised all kinds of doubts and denied climate change.
01:47:59.000Was there any controversy about the subject matter and the topics?
01:48:04.000Like, were there any ones that you considered not adding?
01:48:23.000But I don't want to draw a direct moral equivalency between selling human beings where the harm is so immediate and obvious and selling these other products.
01:48:33.000I mean, it is a different sort of situation.
01:48:37.000But the denials were so fascinating and appalling and revealing that I ended up deciding to include it.
01:48:45.000I was nervous about doing the financial chapter just because that took me out of my comfort zone and forced me to learn about collateralized debt obligations and things like that.
01:48:56.000But again, that turned out to be such a fascinating topic that I'm very glad I ended up researching it and writing about it.
01:49:03.000Well, listen, I'm glad you wrote this book.
01:49:06.000And like I said, this is a subject that's always been bizarrely fascinating and compelling to me since Merchants of Doubt.
01:49:15.000And I just think it is such a weird aspect of human beings.
01:49:21.000The power of a corporation, the deniability, what they're able to do and how they're able to continue doing it.