You’re listening to A Climate Change with Matt Maddern. I’ve got a great guest coming on the program today, Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement, Aru Shiney-Ajay. And glad to have you on the program. Just to brief the listeners a little bit about the Sunrise Movement, it’s a 501C4 political action organization. And my understanding is the initial goal was to elect proponents renewable energy in the 2018 midterm elections.

And it’s kept on supporting people, candidates that are part of that and has been a proponent of the Green New Deal. So, you know, it’s great to have you on the program, Aru, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about, you know, your journey to get here.

Absolutely. Thanks, Matt, so much for having me on. I joined Sunrise back in 2017. I was 19 years old and I was coming fresh off of the 2016 elections I was going to college in Pennsylvania. And it felt really clear to me that if we were to have any real chance at stopping the climate crisis, we really needed to up the urgency of climate in our politics and that that could only really be done through mass movements.

So that’s what first drew me to Sunrise. And when I first went to the training, I think it was like June of 2017, it felt like the first time that a group of people who were my age, maybe a little older than me, were really taking responsibility for the scale of the climate crisis and really putting forward a plan, both in terms of policy and in terms of strategy, about how we could pass the type of sweeping legislation that we needed to face the crisis and decarbonize at the scale and speed that science and justice demanded.

So that’s what first drew me in. We have right now around 140 local chapters all across the country. They’re all volunteer run. They do everything from run local campaigns for more public transit or green affordable housing. They engage in local elections and then we are always running national campaigns as well, making sure that we’re pushing the federal government to actually think about the climate crisis at the scale needed.

I think that was maybe one of the silver linings of the 2016 election was that I feel like people started to wake up and say, hey, what can we do even though President Trump, then President Trump was not going to do anything himself to help the climate crisis? What could the states do? What could we do locally that would make a difference? I think that a lot of local and state action occurred during that period of time that was pretty amazing. So any particular things that Sunrise was a part of in those years.

I think one of the things we were pretty focused on was actually just not letting the federal government off the hook when it came to something, the climate crisis, that local and state action is incredibly important. But when you think about just how much work needs to be done to stop the climate crisis, that you need the coordination capacity and honestly the money that the federal government, especially the US federal government has access to.

So I would say our biggest focus in those years was really making sure that whoever was elected in 2020, as it ended up being Joe Biden, had a clear mandate to stop climate change and building the political support in order to enable that in the coming years. And of course, our local hubs were pretty involved in various local and state resolutions and pushing various politicians on climate. I think the biggest intervention that we really made is we changed the narrative around climate change. If you remember, if you’re following climate politics back in 2016, the big discussion was, do you choose jobs or do you choose climate? The idea that building clean energy would actually take away jobs from people who worked in fossil fuels.

And I think one of the things Sunrise was most effectively able to do is really intervene in that narrative and say, actually, building clean energy can create millions of good paying unionized jobs and it can lead to a more prosperous economy for this country. So I think that was the biggest intervention we made. There were also many local Green New Deal resolutions that passed, local climate emergency resolutions that passed, that were the work of our hubs and chapters across the country.

So I take it that there was some difference, there is some difference between what was outlined in the Green New Deal and what passed in the IRA in 2021, 2022. What do you see as the major differences between what you had proposed with the Green New Deal and what actually got passed with the IRA?

Yeah, I mean, think the first thing I’d say is that the Green New Deal was never conceptualized as a single bill. It was always conceptualized as a governing framework that would take many pieces of legislation at every level of government. So even though I think the IRA has far ways to go, we would always talk about it as we would need an appetizer bill with the Green New Deal. There would be a first bill that sort of kickstarted the economy and built the public appetite and the economic appetite to actually keep going in the clean energy revolution.

And I think that is part of what the IRA has set up, that it’s actually created a lot of incentives for people to move towards clean energy. I think what, there are several pieces that it hasn’t done. I think that we need to transition off of fossil fuels as fast as possible. And currently it’s using a lot of like carrot mechanisms to incentivize more and more renewable energy development, which is great. But we also do need to transition away from exporting fossil fuels and away from the increased drilling that we’re seeing right now, the US is drilling in record numbers.

I think there’s a piece around just decarbonizing different industries, buildings, transportation, education. There’s like many different issues that continue to need a good amount of work in order to decarbonize them. And that goes hand in hand with actually making sure that the benefits of decarbonization actually go towards everyday people. The IRA has a lot of pieces that are about whether you can get tax credits for putting solar panels on your roof, and that’s fantastic. And there’s also, or like whether there’s more charging stations for EVs.

And also there’s a need for the government to actually build out the public infrastructure that makes sure that everyone can get access to these things. So for example, actually building public transit on a massive scale, building high speed rail that goes across the country so people don’t have to fly as much, so people don’t have to rely on their cars as much. That’s just one example of sort of the public infrastructure piece that I think is a little bit missing from the IRA.

And then the last thing I’d say is that I unfortunately think that we are already seeing the effects of climate change and we need to start preparing our towns and cities across the country to actually deal with them. So we are seeing hurricanes, wildfires, floods hit cities all across the country. They’re really intense. They’re beyond what anyone has seen before, you talk to anyone, even like rural farmers in Wyoming, and they will still tell you, yeah, the weather is different.

We’re seeing something different right now. And we need a really big investment in our infrastructure and in our government response capabilities if we’re going to be able to weather these things. So that looks like actually building resilient renewable electricity grids that can weather things like hurricanes, maybe like in California, putting them underground so they don’t get knocked down by fires. There’s like many, there’s like a million different little examples I list of what that would look like. But I think the IRA kickstarted things, but this has always been a decades long project and there’s much more to

What would you see as your top three or top five priorities legislatively if you were kind of the energy czar for the United States and could just enact some change quickly?

I think one, I would want to see green affordable housing being built. I think that there’s a clear housing crisis in this country and that means the effects of that are that people are suffering a lot from climate disasters more than they otherwise would be. Like you can see over and over again, people who live in trailer parks are the most affected by hurricanes, by floods. I think if we’re serious about protecting people from the effects of climate change, it actually means an overhaul to our housing policy.

And that also means installing solar panels, making sure that we have electric stoves, making sure that our homes actually run on renewable energy. The other reason I say this is that I think there’s something emotional and psychological that people need to see that green energy can make a difference in their life and can be reliable. And green housing policy is really a really good way to do that because it allows people to have very direct everyday relationship a positive experience of green energy.

And I think that helps build the political will to do bigger and bigger things. So I think I would list that as one, green housing policy. I think we need to overhaul our transportation system as well. The number of airline collapses we’ve seen in the last year to me points to the fact that extreme weather is just making it more and more dangerous to fly and more and more unreliable to fly. I think investing in both local and interstate rail systems is really necessary and overdue investment.

I think that’d be a really good policy. And then of course, I would talk about our need to transition away from fossil fuels. We often talk at Sunrise about actually investigating, having the Department of Justice investigate big oil for their crimes against humanity and their decades long deception of the public as to the effects of climate change. We also talk about the hundreds of billions of dollars the fossil fuel industry gets in subsidies.

One fact that I like to tell people is that if you cut fossil fuel subsidies and divided them out to everybody in the US, everybody would get $100 a year. That’s how much each of us is paying every year to the fossil fuel industry. So I think there are real ways that are both about phasing out fossil fuels, but also taking out the way that our government is literally propping up the drilling and the use of fossil fuels.

How do you believe the subsidies are occurring of these oil companies?

How do I believe they’re occurring? Like what mechanisms?

Yeah, what are the mechanisms for the subsidies?

I mean, a lot of the subsidies actually just come like even in the 2025 tax code or sorry, in Trump’s tax code laws, there are a lot of giveaways to subsidy to fossil fuel companies. And that’s something that the climate movement has talked about in 2025 is actually like rewriting corporate giveaways and making sure the fossil fuels aren’t allowed to get as much public money.

It’s also I believe a lot of it is calculated in terms of like lost externalities and like lawsuits that have been filed that like the amount that public dollars have to pay up after like oil and gas spills instead of like oil spills actually being taken, like being held to instead of companies being held responsible for their own spills. There’s a lot of just public money that goes into cleaning up the mistakes of oil and gas while the rest of us pay the price.

Well, certainly, you think of air pollution and the cost of air pollution and not only the financial cost, but the health cost. For those of us who live in Los Angeles or lots of other major cities, there’s a tremendous cost that everybody pays for living in an environment that’s dirty and so many kids getting asthma and people dying early because of that.

Let’s see, there’s so much to talk about. guess maybe we could pivot to the Vice President Harris, and are you endorsing her?

So endorsements for us are a full membership vote. so we were like, we’ll be talking to our membership. We’ll be talking to our hubs. We’ll be seeing about an endorsement, regardless, we’re going to be doing a lot of work on the doors and on the ground to make sure that we keep Donald Trump out of office and get VP Harris elected. We’re running programs in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Arizona in particular in order to do that.

I think climate is a really critical issue this year and I think we’re pretty likely to, we’ve already seen some pretty intense wildfires and pretty intense heat waves. It’s also likely to be a bad hurricane season. I think climate is going to be a really critical issue in the election this year, especially as the fog gets closer and closer and particularly for young people. So we’re really focused on getting young people out to vote with the lens of climate.

Is Vice President Harris embracing the Green New Deal?

Well, she campaigned on it in 2019, was actually the first presidential candidate in 2019 to be talking about the Green New Deal. She hasn’t been talking about it on the campaign trail so far, but I think a lot of President Biden’s approach to stopping climate change was very informed by the Green New Deal. And I hope that we’re going to continue to see that with VP Harris, both in a approach that centers creating jobs, making the lives of working people better, and also investing in the communities that have been left behind.

So how do you see the congressional race is playing out in 2024?

I mean, I’m always crossing my fingers for a trifecta. Obviously that would be the dream if we’re hoping to pass the next suite of climate legislation. From the polling that I’ve seen, it’s certainly a lot more likely now than it has been in the past, but it’s still a pretty slim chance. I think no matter what our focus is being like, making sure

We are elevating the importance of climate this election because what we’ve seen is that it’s the issue next to abortion where Democrats have the highest margin of trust over Republicans. So if you actually talk about climate change, especially for like, it’s a wedge issue for a lot of voters where if they are reminded how much they care about it, then they’re more likely to swing in the direction of voting Democrats. So think for us, that’s the critical role we see and that can make a difference, especially in states like Arizona that are suffering a lot of heat waves.

I think we see hurricanes go up the East coast this year. I think it could also affect Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in general. So that’s really how we’re looking at the election is how do you use the issue of climate to make a key difference and swing people to get out there and vote? Because we do see a really stark difference, not just between Trump and Harris, but between the entire Republican Party.

Well, in terms of disinformation or just regarding the environment, what do you see as the messaging that is most difficult to deal with and clarify that is coming out from fossil fuel companies and polluters?

Yeah, I think one of the things I’ll say is that there’s this perception that we nipped climate denialism in the bud, but there is actually a really big propaganda campaign by the fossil fuel industry to both say that climate change isn’t happening or that if it is happening, there’s a lot of doubt about it being caused by humans. That’s not something we end up actually arguing with people on the day to day, but what you find is that even companies like TikTok actually reward that type of content, promote that type of content.

So it’s actually been growing on social media apps in the last few years. I think it’s incredibly dangerous. And one of the most dangerous parts about it is that it’s platformed over and over again by Republican politicians. mean, JD Vance is a great example of this. He’s someone who just four years ago was talking about how climate change was a problem, about how we needed to invest more in renewable energy.

And now he says things like he’s not sure if climate change is real or not, or whether it’s caused by humans. That is purely a talking point of the oil and gas industry. And it just comes out of donations and pressure that the oil and gas executives and lobbyists give to politicians to try and have them in their pockets.

Well, I’d actually say it’s worse than the oil and gas industry because I’ve seen most of the major CEOs of oil and gas companies have conceded that climate change is real and we need to do something about it. Now, they may not agree with how to go about doing it, but they have finally agreed that it is a problem that they have caused in through their policies. And it’s unfortunate that, you know, JD Vance and Trump are to the, you know, to the far side of that. Like they’re more denialist than the oil companies are. I mean, that’s just incredible.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s true. And it’s also important to take into account the role of public pressure that oil and gas companies have now faced decades of activists calling them out on their disinformation and their lives. And they are under pressure to actually show that they have a future in a renewable energy economy. then their executives do face some level of need to say things, especially in public, that back the fact that climate change is real, that it exists, that it’s being caused by their activities.

But if you look at the fact that they’re still lobbying to stop legislation that would change that and supporting politicians, like donating to politicians who are pretty actively spreading disinformation, donating to efforts that spread disinformation, if you end up following the money, I think it does end up being a pretty damning portrait of a sort of two-faced strategy where on the face, will paint themselves as extremely concerned, ready to shepherd the transition. And then if you follow the money, there’s still so much lobbying that goes towards both disinformation campaigns.

Yeah, I’m not in any way saying that the oil gas companies are goody two shoes. I’m just saying that Trump and JD Vance are even bigger liars than the oil and gas companies, which is really saying something like you really have to be, you know, maniacal to be lying about it. You know, quite frankly, the oil and gas companies should be hit with multi trillion dollar lawsuits, which a number of people I know are

Yeah, it’s really bad.

…are prosecuting some of those cases for the hurricane in Puerto Rico and for cities across the country that have been adversely affected by climate change. those cases are going forward and they’re getting some traction. I kind of want to pivot to something else, which is even though we are doing some good work here in the US and reducing emissions, not maybe as fast as we should be. There is some reduction. China and India and other countries across the world are not doing so, and China is building coal -fired power plants at a record pace. What do we do to engage those countries to change their policies?

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great question. And it gets to a lot of the negotiations that have happened in COPs for many years now. I think there’s a twofold piece here. One is that the US and much of the West have had a chance to develop and be able to get to a point where most people are at a standard of living, where we are able to shift to renewable energy and able to put a lot of money towards that. The reality is like people in many countries are just have that access.

And many governments are forced to make the extremely hard choice. And I’m not necessarily talking about China and India, who I think have a little bit more access to capital. But many governments are forced to make the extremely hard choice between energy access for their citizens and promoting of renewable energy, particularly in places where they don’t necessarily have the access to capital and resources to build out renewable energy at the scale needed.

So I think when you think about that, there is a need for global financing of renewable energy projects, particularly in countries in the third world, in the global south. So I think that’s a really essential part of it, that we actually need to see ourselves investing in those funds. I also think there are various economic policies that could help in terms of trade, actually incentivizing, saying, okay, we’re actually going to import clean energy products from other developed countries or other countries, maybe including BRICS countries as well.

So I think there’s a piece around trade that can incentivize that as well. But I do believe that when you look at the historical responsibility and the historical emissions of the US and a lot of other countries, there’s a need to put the resources needed behind helping other countries across the world decarbonize at the speed needed as well. And I think there’s different countries that need different treatment and policies around that as well.

Well, I guess because China is now overtaking the US as the world’s largest polluter and China is the number two economy in the world, they now can afford it. I think we should be taking a much harder line with them saying, hey, yeah, we will not import products that don’t meet our standards. And that that would help put a stop to their kind of raping and pillaging with burning all this coal. And yes, it’s a little bit hypocritical for us who’ve burnt a ton of coal in the past, we don’t have a choice here. Everybody’s got to work together to do this or else we’re all going down.

Yeah, totally. And I think what you said is right, that it depends on the amount of resources that countries have access to. So if a country does have access to a lot of resources, I think there is a need for trade policies that say we won’t import things that don’t meet our clean energy standards. But if a country doesn’t, then I think there’s a need for actual international investment in the ability to build resilient renewable electricity systems that can give people access to clean electricity.

Well, it should be doable and that the financing for clean energy should be as good or better than dirty energy because you can produce wind and solar at rates that are below coal and gas-fired plants at this point in time. So they should be able to have clean energy because it quite frankly pencils out economically and that’s the beauty of it now.

Yeah, I think that’s true. There’s also, and that’s a very exciting thing about the developments of the last few years. I think the need for investment remains because a lot of countries didn’t have the money in the first place to have dirty energy or clean energy.

So there is still that need to be like, okay, how do you make sure? And in terms of the infrastructure, the technology available, the patents that we’re using, who has access to them? I think there’s a lot of like different small pieces of policy that would help democratize access those technologies and push them out. I think that’s a type of, yeah, type of international policy we’re really in need of at the…

So any Republicans that are stepping up to phase out fossil fuels that you’re working with or aware of?

Not at the moment. What we do see though, is that even a caucus within the Republican Party are increasingly facing the reality of climate change and starting to push that we should be adapting to it. Whether it’s talking about building seawalls or making your home safer, I think there is some energy for that. There’s also some appetite for investing in renewable energy technology. So even though we haven’t seen people come out swinging against fossil fuels, I think, I think that movement is promising. I think it will only continue.

The reality is that the climate politics of the Republican party is decades out of date at this point. It is so out of date and it absolutely needs to change and it will change, I believe, because that’s just, we’re going to see the reality change in front of us and there’s no way to deny it at some point. So I believe that movements need to keep up the pressure in order to be able to actually shift the politics of the Republican party. And a lot of that comes towards comes by putting forward really bold agendas about what it means to stop climate change and popularizing them across the country.

So in terms of the IRA has put a lot of money into areas of the country that have typically voted Republican, have you seen any shift in the rhetoric in those areas that would, you know, seeing Republicans coming up for clean energy and clean vehicles and things like…

Unfortunately, we’ve seen less of it than I would have hoped for for two reasons. One is just that implementation takes time and IRA passed just two years ago. And it just actually takes time to get that money out the door, have people actually be spending it, have the projects be built, and then have people have them improve in their everyday lives. Like that’s often like a four to six year cycle minimum. And so we haven’t yet seen the full effects of that. The other reason is

Unfortunately, the way that partisan polarization plays out in today’s politics, a lot of Republican politicians go out of their way to claim credit for the investments that have happened, claim them under their own name, even if they didn’t even vote for them in the first place. So there’s not necessarily an understanding of like, yeah, these policies are passed by, you know, by Democrats looking for clean energy investments. It’s sort of just framed as like, I’m out here looking for you.

So. Look, I’m here looking out for you. And so I think that’s a, it’s a dangerous game to play, but I think one of the reasons why it’s important to keep a Democrat in office this fall is that if we don’t, then a lot of the money that has begun to be pushed out the door actually gets pulled back and doesn’t get fully implemented. gets yammed up in courts. It gets not granted by governments. The actual people in the agencies get, you know, maybe get changed. So I think there’s just a piece around implementation.

In addition to the need to pass more policies, there’s a piece around implementation that makes it important to ideally have a Democrat in the White House this fall.

Certainly, I think that that makes sense. I was just thinking that, well, in terms of implementation, one of the people that I’ve followed a bit is Mayor Rex Paris of Lancaster here in California, and he is the first net zero city. he convinced his entire Republican city council to go along with his plans to electrify their city and go net zero. And Rex Paris is a Republican himself.

But he did it based upon the economics of it and that, hey, this makes sense for us to go to solar and to wind and to, and he actually has, he got the developers to do green housing there years ago. He was rolling out greener, cleaner housing because it made sense and it was, and I think that that was kind of how the Republican party stood on, environmental issues maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago and somehow got completely co -opted by the energy companies around George W. Bush.

Yeah, I mean, have you heard of the no climate tax pledge? Is that something you’re familiar with? Maybe I’ll share a little. Yeah, in, in 20, I want to say 2011, or maybe it’s 2012, there was this pledge developed by the Koch brothers at the time called the no climate tax pledge. And it basically was an effort. It was a pledge saying I will not on any climate change legislation that spends any money for from the federal government. So basically.

No, I’m not.

It wasn’t actually about a climate tax. It was just about government spending in the name of climate change. And there was this huge lobbying effort and you actually saw dozens and dozens of legislators signed on, Republican legislators for the most part. I forget some of the most prominent names, but if you look it up, you’ll see like huge portions of the House Republican caucus at the time signed on.

So that’s, that’s really was a critical shift where you saw, before you saw a much more economics based skepticism of clean energy of like, is this too expensive? Can we actually do it? And then after that, you saw a much more ideological opposition to clean energy, where people had actually just signed a pledge and were paid by lobbyists to say that they would never pass any legislation that spent any money to tackle climate change. And they held to…

Yeah, which…

Yeah, I can do…

Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that really shows the shift within the Republican party is something called the No Climate Tax Pledge. It began in, I want to say 2011 or 2012. It was this big push funded by the Koch brothers. And the pledge basically said that you wouldn’t vote for any legislation that spent money to stop climate change. So it wasn’t actually specifically about a climate tax.

It was just about climate legislation that spent money, which tends to be most climate legislation and most legislation in general. And there was this huge push to have people sign on to it. I want to say something like a third or maybe even more of the Republican House caucus at the time signed on. It was very prevalent.

Before that moment, you see a lot more opposition from the Republican Party to clean energy on more economic or more traditionally conservative grounds. Things like, is it too expensive? Will it actually be reliable? But after that, you see a much more ideological opposition. Like, I have signed this pledge that says I will always oppose this. This is a way that it takes away our freedoms and it’s a form of big government spending.

And you really see that opposition to clean energy get entrenched. So I think it’s important to trace that opposition from the Republican Party to that deliberate effort from oil and gas executives, in this case, the coke industries, to really not pass climate legislation.

Yeah, a few things about the Despicable Koch brothers. They, I think, had approximately a trillion dollars in assets that are fossil fuels, essentially. so they obviously had an economic interest in continuing to extract and exploit those fossil fuels.

I saw them on the ground or the effects of their organization in New Hampshire when I ran for president. I think it was what people for United for the American Way or some kind of American pie type name like that, you know, was was very prevalent in New Hampshire in conservative circles that they had infiltrated. had incredible data.

They they had, they had a database that was super powerful that they knew like every household and what they had for breakfast practically. And that was really, it was data that they would share with Republican candidates and of course their money as well. the nefarious web that they have woven is is something that probably most Americans are not really aware of.

Yeah, it’s incredibly dangerous.

Right, mean, it’s what people kind of don’t realize is how much influence the oil and gas industry and their lobbyists have had on daily American life. Because in some respects, it’s gotten less visible and more sophisticated and more nefarious as we go. You know, probably back 50, 70 years ago, it was less sophisticated. Now they’ve sharpened their knives and to levels that kind of make you cringe.

And I think you can see that not just in the legislature, but also in the judiciary as well. There’s like a whole effort to train conservative judges to be more ideologically opposed to stopping climate change in any way. And you’ve seen the efforts of that payoff in the Supreme Court’s recent rulings about West Virginia versus EPA, about the Chevron doctrine. So both of those were decisions that dramatically stripped back the the government’s ability to regulate pollutants. That’s not necessarily traditionally a conservative issue.

In fact, as you all probably know, the EPA was founded by a conservative president. But at the same time, there’s been this real effort to curb any ability to stop climate change, to say that fossil fuel companies shouldn’t be sued. And judges are being very specifically trained by groups like the Heritage Foundation in that ideology.

Well, your organization, I guess, started out with a goal to move the Overton window, which is, I guess, as I understand it, is taking something from unacceptable to radical to acceptable to sensible to popular to policy. How do you think your organization has done in that front and what?

What efforts do you think are necessary to move it further?

Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve been incredibly successful in some ways at putting climate at the top of the political agenda and actually passing climate legislation about intervening in the narrative that climate is always pitted against the economy or against jobs and actually saying, okay, climate can be a tool for job creation. So all of those have been really successful interventions. I think the next piece is reminding people that the job isn’t done, that we actually only have six years left to execute a mass scale decarbonization of our economy.

And that means changing many, many different parts of our society, whether it’s how we get around, whether it’s how the food that we eat is grown, whether it’s the jobs that we learn to take, so many pieces, whether it’s like how we power our homes, so many pieces of our society need to be shifted. And it’s going to take a whole of government, whole of society approach in order to do that.

I saw that Noam Chomsky had said he was proud of the work that Sunrise was doing. Did he specifically collaborate with you or have you ever?

I don’t believe we’ve ever specifically collaborated. didn’t know that, but it’s always lovely to hear when people are excited about

Yeah. Well, turning our attention to the possible VP contenders to run with Kamala Harris, since that’s top of the agenda in the next few days, I guess she’s going to be announcing something by Tuesday. So I think the top three contenders are Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Governor Walz of Minnesota.

Any any one of them that you’re particularly backing or not backing?

Well, I’m a born and raised Minnesotan. I’ve lived here for years of my life and that’s where I am right now. So I’ve got to say I’m a little partial to Governor Tim Waltz. I think he’s passed a lot of great legislation in Minnesota and obviously a lot of progressive organizations and progressive legislators played huge parts in that as well.

I think one of the things I really admire about Governor Waltz is that he’s able to take visionary policies and put them in really understandable, really intuitive terms. And I think that’s the type of person who would really help VP Harris win this year and actually defend progressive policies and do the type of work needed to stop the climate crisis.

Now, all three of those, you know, the two governors and Senator Mark Kelly have all backed Israel and all supported the arrest of pro -Palestinian protesters on certain situations where there were problems. But has your organization thought that Governor Shapiro was, you know, the worst on those issues, worse than Governor Walz or Mark Kelly?

There is a history of Governor Shapiro just making comments about protesters around Palestine that have been particularly strong and I think incited particularly strong reactions on campuses. So we were definitely worried about electorally, whether that would weaken the coalition that is carrying, hopefully carrying VP Harris to victory this year.

I also think that if you look at Shapiro’s record on other progressive policies, including school vouchers, supporting school vouchers rather than public schools and supporting fracking. There are other ways as well, in which, in my opinion, he’s a less strong progressive.

Well now, VP Harris is supporting fracking herself, having kind of flipped on that issue, and I assume to win in Pennsylvania, because there’s a lot of fracking that goes on in Pennsylvania, and it’s kind of a cottage industry there. So do you give him and Josh Shapiro as well as Kamala Harris a pass on that one? Because that’s what it’s going to take to win

One thing, one saying that we say and summarize sometimes as politicians are like weather veins and our job as movements is to change the weather. I think the reality is we need to move to a place where the majority of this country is actually opposed to the extraction of more fossil fuels. And unfortunately, the president and our politics can’t be too out of step with where the public is. Otherwise there will be backlash. There’s plenty of ways in which climate policy is incredibly popular like building more renewable energy, like regulating oil and gas companies, like ending subsidies, like investigating the ways that they have lied to people. All of those are really popular policies.

So what I’m hoping to see VP Harris do in the coming months is actually, sure, maybe she needed to walk this back in order to think about electability in Pennsylvania, but it’s absolutely essential that she’s actually campaigning on the many popular climate policies that the majority of people do support.

And in the meantime, it’s the job of social movements to actually change the conditions in which he’s campaigning and make sure that politicians of the future see that the majority of people do actually oppose fossil fuels and do actually oppose extraction.

Just wanted to ask you a couple questions before we jump off. One is about methane and that my scientist friends keep telling me how important methane is and how it’s 80 times more destructive to the atmosphere than CO2. Is there any particular action that advocating for and the Sunrise Movement is advocating for regarding methane.

There aren’t specific policies that we’re advocating for right now. I think some of the things that we need to into account as we think about methane emissions include the amount of trash that we create and the way that landfills can create enormous amounts of methane gas and also, of course, the emissions from our mass scale agricultural process and that we will need to be investing a lot more in less methane intensive, less cow intensive ways to feed this country. So I think those are two ways that we think about, there’s a lot of different efforts that we’ll need to undertake and there aren’t specific policies that we’re advocating.

Yeah, you mentioned food as being an issue. They didn’t make your top three, but what policies regarding food would you be advocating for?

I think there’s just a need for more sustainable forms of agriculture. So less mono -cropping, like huge amounts of our land are just actually used to feed animals. Huge amounts of our food goes to waste throughout the system, throughout the food system. I think there’s ways that we could grow agriculture in a lot more sustainable practices in a ways that we could rotate different crops.

They grow more healthfully, they grow more abundantly and also decrease the amount of pure energy that we’re putting in towards meat production that people don’t even, yeah, people don’t even eat all the meat that we don’t even eat all the meat that we produce or need it. So I think there’s like a shift in that as well.

So in terms of the IRA and other actions that the Biden administration has taken regarding food policy and farm policy, have you seen anything, have you seen a major shift in that area over the Biden administration?

I haven’t seen a major shift, no. I think that’s like one of the, I mentioned earlier that there is a lot more work to do that it would take a whole society approach. And I think that’s certainly one of the ways in which it’s going to take a whole society approach that we’re going to need to shift huge parts of our food system.

Well, say things like “Meatless Mondays” and things of that nature that start to move the needle towards eating less meat. Is the Sunrise Movement involved in any of those types of campaigns?

I think the way that we look at it is that it needs to be a societal shift, not necessarily an individual one. And that a lot of efforts that can fall into shaming people for eating meat, they pale in comparison to the amount of influence that say the agricultural lobby, the Farm Bureau, or like the fossil fuel lobby have in influencing our politics and in popularizing their products.

You know, I don’t disagree with any of those campaigns, but we don’t engage in them. We look at it much more as a structural shift that needs to happen.

Well, how would the structural shift happen to have people eat less meat? mean, the government can’t tell people you can’t eat meat anymore, could it?

No, absolutely not. I don’t think that’d be very popular or very effective either. I mean, I think a lot of it just comes from the fact that like with fossil fuels, there are lobbies that really make huge efforts to stop laws from being changed to popularize their products. I don’t know if you. I was young during the Got Milk campaign. I don’t know if you guys remember that at all where there was this huge effort to just get kids to drink a lot of milk. And it talked a lot about the health effects of milk.

And more stuff has come out recently as an example that shows like, you know, some of that is actually limited and you don’t need to drink as much milk as the Got Milk campaign might have perhaps implied. And I think it’s things like that that you can point to where these at the end of the day are pretty huge industries that are subsidized by the government, that are propped up by the government, that run huge advertising campaigns when you take away that power and stop that sort of like, yeah, that almost propaganda-like push, that you do see people actually pretty naturally turning to other alternatives, partially because they’re cheaper, partially because they might feel healthier, partially people already are looking for ways to be more ethical in terms of their climate consumption.

So I don’t think it’s regulated by the government at all. I think it’s about actually tackling the amount of industry power that stops laws from being passed that actually change our farming practices and that also tend to push out, you know, sometimes misinformation, sometimes just advertising a mix of both about their products in ways that can come at a cost to the climate.

I guess I come from the school of thought that I do think that individual choices and action, certainly on a mass scale, could force producers to shift their behavior, just like consumers, to the extent they are demanding organic products, then would put the pesticide companies out of business if we all demanded to eat organic food.

I think that also has a role when it’s a more concerted boycott campaign, perhaps. So I think that, but you know, I’m not saying that that doesn’t have a role, but I think it takes a lot of organized effort in order to shift in that direction.

Indeed. Just shifting to the election here coming up in 90 some days, I guess, what is it that you’re going to be working on most and what kind of support can our listeners reach out and help to get involved with what you’re doing?

Absolutely. I would love if anyone listening to this wants to get involved with Sunrise, you can just go to our website, sunrisemovement .org, and you can join a hub near you or you can start a hub near you. Our hubs are all volunteer-led, they’re youth -led, and we run local campaigns and we run national campaigns that force politicians to take the crisis seriously and actually pass the type of sweeping climate legislation that will improve our lives.

We do that through elections, through knocking on our doors, through talking to people, and through direct action. So we would love to have you join us. We need all types of support. We need volunteers. We need donations. We need people willing to talk to their friends. So if that’s not you, sign.

Well, thank you so much, Aru. Greatly appreciate having you on the show. Aru Shiney-Ajay, Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement. You guys are doing tremendous work out there, and keep it up. Just check out their website at sunrisemovement.org, it and follow them and get involved. I I think that’s the main thing that, Aru, that I really appreciate about the work that you’re doing is having people engage. And in our democratic process, we have to do that. If we want to complain about the quality of our government, then I think you need to work as hard as you complain so that you have, you know.

If you don’t do anything to change things, then don’t complain about the way that it is. I think that we’ve got a lot of work to do. got 90 days to do it. So everybody get on board and let’s roll up our sleeves and win this one.

Thanks, Matt. I’m right there with you.

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