In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with environmental activist, activist, writer, and environmentalist, Simone Pinnamaneni, to talk about her early career and how she got her start in the environmental movement. Simone talks about how she started her career, why she got into environmentalism, and why she thinks climate change is a big deal.
00:00:00.000And one of the great ironies of having the Green Party in the ruling coalition and in previous ruling coalitions is they have systematically dismantled a lot of the relatively low carbon sources of energy that the Germans have had, nuclear, natural gas, in favor of coal and especially lignite.
00:00:18.820So under the Greens, because of Green policy, we've seen an explosion that will last decades in German carbon emissions.
00:00:26.900So if you are in Germany and a little bit of electrons comes in from wind or solar that has to be fed into the system regardless of what the price point happens to be, and if you've got a lignite facility that you're leaving on because it takes more than 24 hours to spin that thing up and down, and when the sun goes down or the solar goes away, the lignite has to be there to keep the lights on, well, you don't count the electricity that it generates during the day.
00:00:54.140You only count the solar and wind. If you actually count what power is generated and what is used when it is used, you're talking only about 10% green.
00:01:04.740It is this level of disingenuousness, this level of not at all fighting for anything that you would actually be fighting for if you cared about the things you said you cared about.
00:01:13.460It makes me have such a high level of animosity towards the movement.
00:01:19.240Well, I love you, Simone, and I am excited for our topic today because it's where you started your career.
00:01:24.820Do you want to talk about your early career?
00:01:27.120Absolutely. Being raised in super progressive Silicon Valley, I was determined to save the world by doing the most obvious thing, saving the environment, because that's what really needs our help.
00:03:06.020Yeah. So I went to the Georgia Washington University because they had a good undergraduate business school.
00:03:10.480I didn't want to wait until graduate school.
00:03:11.860I thought that was a waste of time because academia, even then, even then I knew academia was a waste of time.
00:03:17.640And I created a sort of custom major using graduate classes in environmental business that they had.
00:03:24.560And then I started, I volunteered and interned at environmental nonprofits.
00:03:29.640I worked at the American Council of Renewable Energy.
00:03:32.380I worked at Earth Day Network, which is the nonprofit that basically administers Earth Day and Earth Day festivals,
00:03:37.780but then provides a year-round curriculum and all sorts of other stuff.
00:03:40.540I extensively interviewed with people who worked as environmental consultants or environmental specialists within organizations or who worked as lobbyists for the environment.
00:03:51.980And, of course, then I also took my classes.
00:03:55.280And the more I learned, the more I was like, oh, my God, this entire industry is a complete scam.
00:04:02.940The people that I interviewed who worked in the space basically said, I deeply care about this.
00:04:08.160Don't do this because my work makes absolutely no difference and I'm not making any difference.
00:04:12.340And then, of course, the most meaningful thing for me was studying historical geography, sorry, historical geology and learning that we are not the first organism to cause climate change,
00:04:28.280to significantly alter the climate of our planet, that many other organisms before us have done this.
00:04:34.700I mean, you can't study like the fossil record and like all of the past like errors of, you know, the natural climate and everything without discovering that.
00:04:44.860And so like learning that, too, was just like, wait a second, guys.
00:04:49.200The understanding was that climate change bad, humans unusual for causing this must stop it.
00:04:55.540And then what I had learned was, was climate change normal, humans not unique in doing this and can't stop it.
00:05:04.120Just like that was, it was, it was deeply different because if you do care about this problem, you know, you should be planning around it.
00:05:11.940And we don't see a lot of that, at least performatively, people are talking about how do we handle migratory crises?
00:05:18.080How do we, you know, how do we handle the fact that people are still buying coastal properties in a way that's going to lead to death and lots of destruction?
00:05:24.480You know, how do we, how do we prepare for the inevitable climate change that is going to happen?
00:05:29.820Simone, I want to, I want to pull on something you said.
00:05:33.540What specific parts of it do you feel are the most disingenuous?
00:05:37.760I'm assuming you think that like the earth is getting warmer and that like there is a lot of climate destruction happening and a lot of species are going extinct.
00:05:58.680They're not, they're not making the problem better.
00:06:00.780They are just raising money and getting attention and not really changing.
00:06:08.960That's the really important thing to know here is that the climate change industry is an industry and that the people in it, or at least from your, your interviews, when you were thinking of going into it, regretted their life choices, but they didn't feel they had any options left to them.
00:06:26.000Well, and then, so there, there were two, right?
00:06:27.440There were the ones that I interviewed who were like, don't go into this space.
00:06:30.080And then they're the ones that I worked with and they were more like one group of them.
00:06:36.480Like when I worked at the American council on renewable energy, these are people who are genuinely passionate about solar, but it was sort of like people who are really passionate about electric vehicles.
00:06:45.080They're not like, it's not that they're like, I'm saving the environment.
00:06:47.680They're like, no, Tesla's are so cool.
00:06:49.380Or like the battery pack is really amazing.
00:06:51.780Or like, you know, just here's this more efficient thing that I think we should really be rolling out.
00:06:56.660So they were basically just solar otaku and then they actually made a positive difference of the groups that you worked with.
00:07:03.860I mean, they, they were, yeah, of any, of everyone that I worked with, of everyone that I interviewed, I think the American council on renewable energy was effective at encouraging adoption and increasing education about, about solar power.
00:07:19.220Like they, they were, they were well-focused and they were doing something practical and actionable, but I don't think it was to save the environment.
00:07:25.860And I think it was because they were stoked about solar, you know, it was like, it was no different from like some American council on natural gas, you know, who were like, wow, natural gas is just such a great resource or fracking is amazing.
00:07:35.440You know, it was just, that was, that was kind of the vibe.
00:07:37.720And then the Earth Day Network and like those types of people were a lot like many other environmentalists, professional environmentalists, essentially, that I worked with where it really wasn't about making a difference.
00:07:50.480It was about having this type of water bottle and eating this type of food and being vegan and essentially being a negative utilitarian, creating curriculum and sort of building people within your culture.
00:07:59.460And that makes sense for an organization like Earth Day Network because our number one activity is hosting these big festivals every year, you know, where like, you have bands playing and, you know.
00:08:08.780This was something from our childhood.
00:08:10.640People may not, I don't know if like young people like, like Gen Z, like has any fucking idea what Earth Day is.
00:08:19.020Like this used to be a thing, like on Nickelodeon, they'd take the day, like the whole week and it would be like Captain Planet and shit and like other.
00:08:25.300I think there are still Earth Day festivals, but again, it's that life, it felt more like, like goth festival, you know, like annual goth or Burning Man, right?
00:08:36.560Where like, you're just really into this community and you want other people to adopt it and know about it and you want to make it available to as many people as possible.
00:08:43.760So it definitely felt like a cultural lifestyle business and not a, I mean, of course, they still talked about how like it's so important to recycle.
00:08:51.280Did you have any specific moments where like it broke for you, where you're like, this is just not doing anything meaningful?
00:09:01.340No, but by the end of my freshman year, I think it was the end of my freshman year, I gave up.
00:09:05.460And then I started working at fashion magazines and chocolate factories and cupcake shops and medical device companies instead of.
00:09:13.740So I had a moment for me that was my big, what the fuck are we doing?
00:10:18.460I thought you were going to say no, and I was really intrigued by that.
00:10:21.200No, there's people who will do cutoffs and weird graphs, and there's ways you can argue with evidence that things are overstated.
00:10:28.100Like, do I think that we live in a world where I'm a climate scientist, and I published a study saying that humans are not the cause of climate change, that I am going to get fired?
00:10:38.880Which makes it very hard for me to objectively analyze the data that's out there.
00:10:44.640From the data I've looked at, it appears the answer is yes.
00:10:48.040Yeah, but also, like, another reason to not be so doubtful of that is that far less, we'll say, conspicuous species have done this in the past.
00:10:59.040Like, organisms have done this in the past.
00:11:14.940I think, yes, we should care a little, like, it matters, but it's not, like, this existential thing that matters more than, like, hundreds of thousands of humans starving to death every year.
00:11:24.760Well, I guess it depends on how tractable it is, right?
00:11:27.220That should determine how much you care.
00:11:30.660But we're going to ignore this for now.
00:11:33.120Like, when I look at all of the suffering in the world today, when I look at all of the various things, like getting off planet, X risks, everything like that, like, it matters that this is happening.
00:11:43.800It just is not, like, thing number one, or I don't think it should be on any, like, sane person's list.
00:11:51.340In fact, I think it should be even below preserving tracts of land and natural environments that are going to undergo change due to global warming if you want to preserve diversity.
00:12:02.720So, if I'm going to word this differently.
00:12:07.440I just don't know how practical it is to do that in the face of it.
00:12:10.020Your time and money is better spent buying rainforest to keep it from being cut down a la...
00:12:47.300We were living the environmentalist dream that we had been told we should be making all of these sacrifices for for so fucking long.
00:12:57.320It was like we were making all of these insane sacrifices that we had been told to make at a global scale.
00:13:05.080And for people who do not know this, that year, we barely met the incremental carbon reduction that was needed to make a meaningful dent in global warming.
00:13:21.260So I will word this in different words, okay?
00:13:24.140To prevent global warming, you know, if carbon's going, you know, like this, right?
00:13:28.840Like we need to, or suppose it's even a straight line, like we need to start going down, right?
00:13:36.000It did the one-year decrease it needed for that year, but we wouldn't need to have kept up COVID restrictions.
00:13:44.800We would need to literally double COVID restrictions every year for like a decade.
00:13:51.780So on top of everything we were doing, we needed to do all of that in terms of carbon reduction while still not going back out, still not commuting to work, still not using planes.
00:14:24.080Like we are being told you as a people can fix this.
00:14:28.480And then thing happens and we learned, oh shit.
00:14:31.660Like I think even environmentalists, when they were looking at that, that should have been this moment of like, oh shit.
00:14:37.400It's really stupid to fight global warming by telling people to make sacrifices in their daily lives.
00:14:43.260But I didn't see almost any environmentalists taking that away for this.
00:14:48.600It meant that if you're going to fight this, I guess you could do it with like carbon sequestration and stuff like that.
00:14:52.880But a lot of people are like, I would say, I would say now there's less, it seems, focus on, oh, everyone has to go and do these things.
00:15:02.380It's more, hey, governments, you need to change this.
00:15:04.680Hey, this infrastructure has to change.
00:15:07.080You know, this regulation has to change, which is smart because all this nonsense about like start, you know, start recycling when like recycling doesn't work because many municipalities just don't do it at all.
00:15:18.180Recycling is mostly a scam for people who don't know.
00:15:21.680I'm sure you can link to some video on it.
00:15:23.260But even speaking of that, there was an interesting study done on like lifestyle sacrifices that people were making of Gen Z's generation.
00:15:29.760And another thing is that it turns out, despite Greta Thornburg saying, you old people have sold our future, that Gen Z makes dramatically fewer lifestyle sacrifices to protect the environment than millennials or boomers do.
00:15:44.480The point being is that they just do a lot less.
00:15:46.720If you look at an environmentalist rally, I don't know if you guys have seen one recently.