I think it’s wild that we allow companies to operate in a way that we know that they’re actively polluting our communities. We’re seeing impacts like cancer alley. We’re seeing climate change. We’re seeing all of these health and climate impacts, and they’re just given license to operate that like to just use our sky as a dumpster, and we’re the ones just now living in filth.

It is unethical, it is untenable, and we have to prevent things like that from happening. And in the case of methane, it’s such a polluting, intense gas that I hope people can understand more what it is really doing to the conversation on climate change.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, and I’ve got a great guest on the program, Saad Amer. Saad has been named as top 30 under 30, with Forbes magazine. He has done so many different things, an environmental justice expert. He has worked with a lot of different organizations, including the IPCC. Has been an expert reviewer for them, which everybody knows.

That’s the UN group, which runs the COP programs, the cop conferences. He’s been profiled in nature Vogue and the New York Times. Went to Harvard, founded justice environment and just doing great work out there in the community. Welcome to the program.

Hi Matt, thanks for having me. Super excited for the podcast.

Tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to the environmental space, and kind of what inspired you.

I mean, for me, I started my work when I was fairly young. I was very much inspired by, actually, my high school bio teacher, Mr. Murray. Shout out to Mr. Murray. Actually, I had him for my first period of my first day of class ever in high school, and we kind of just clicked, and we took a trip to some land nearby the school, and eventually would end up creating an entire organization around this land.

Our school actually lobbied to get that 100 acres permanently preserved through the local town and I developed a big educational program around it to bring out 1,000s of students from across New York State to the preserve to learn all about climate change, about ecosystem restoration, about pollution, all that good stuff. And really just loved being in nature and loved working with my local community. You know, I come from Long Island, and while there is nature, I also think people don’t take enough of a step back to appreciate nature and understand what life was like before it was so inhabited by people.

And you know, I sort of use this 100 acre preserve as a living laboratory to get people, students, in particular, to understand our connection to nature. And got to do a lot of scientific research at the Preserve as well with Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is part of the Department of Energy. It was one of those like, go, go, go, kind of high school kids. And I just really loved doing it. And honestly, it was fun because I dragged all my friends into this, so just hang out with my friends at the forest.

And Mr. Murray used to write me passes to cut class, so I just get to hang out in the forest instead of going to class. And he’s, like, one of the greatest people that I’ve ever known. And so just to hang out with Mr. Murray and my friends at the forest and, like, look at plants and go on hikes through the forest, and it was a lot of fun. So for me, that’s sort of where a lot of my work started.

Well, that’s such a great story, and certainly an inspiration to people who are teachers to say, hey, you can impact young students lives, and they go on and regenerate that knowledge and pay it forward to so many other people.

I mean, I think a good teacher can fundamentally alter the course of your entire life. And the thing is, most teachers are good. You know, you just have to give them a chance and connect with them. It’s the type of profession you don’t take lightly, and people don’t become teachers for the money, right? Like, we certainly could stand to pay teachers a lot more given all the incredible work that they do.

And I think everybody has that certain teacher in their life that has kind of touched them, that they sort of remember them having some sort of impact. And I was fortunate to have a few mr. Murray has even to this day, we I still see him, you know, is just one of those people that I can always go to for wisdom and for a sense of grounding. And I think teachers help you learn how to think, which is a really important skill, one that I think a lot of people are lacking these days.

And you know, it really can shift the course of your whole life. And that certainly was my experience, and I can’t even fathom how to ever repay mr. Murray for the impact that he’s had on. My own life, you know, and I can only imagine that so many other people feel the same way about their teachers, and I’m hoping that we’re able to pay them more and that they get a better place of respect in our society, because I think they’re very fundamental to everything.

Well, amen to that. And my brother and sister, who are both teachers in an underserved area of the South Side of Chicago, or probably can appreciate that. Tell us then, where did your journey take you next, and who inspired you beyond that.

This was like a while ago, so you know, but after high school, I ended up getting into Harvard, where I studied environmental science and public policy, and I did a bunch of climate and sustainability work. While I was in college, sort of, I started doing a lot of bio type research. I ended up in French Polynesia, and the team that I was with, we discovered a new hybrid species.

And I loved working at the lab, but I felt I really wanted to expand and do stuff that was more on an ecosystem level and a societal level. And when I discovered this sort of intersection of how people are really impacting our planet, I felt there was so much more in that space, and I didn’t understand why economists weren’t talking more to policy makers, and why they weren’t talking more to scientists, and why there wasn’t a convergence across all of these different spaces.

And as an undergrad, I had the chance to work at Harvard’s office for sustainability, and ended up working on the university’s first sustainability plan, which was basically an outline for how, across all of Harvard’s schools, that’s the business school, the undergraduate institution, the Kennedy School, for government, the law school, etc, how to reduce the emissions, the water waste, the physical waste, all of these different components of sustainability across the university, which Harvard is a big place.

It’s sort of the largest institution in the City of Cambridge. And so really thinking through how to not only set those benchmarks and those goals, how to actually achieve them as an institution. And by the time I graduated, we actually reduced the emissions across the university by 30% and we were very much following many of the IPCC benchmarks.

And this sustainability plan was one of the first in the country and for universities. And so it was sort of a for me, in retrospect, the sort of experiments to and a playground to really understand sustainability and how these things actually get implemented in a real way, rather than some sort of conceptual policy agenda.

It’s like, how does this physically translate into energy reductions or into carbon sequestration or into renewables or whatever it is, you know, so it was quite a quite a long journey as an undergrad, but I was excited to work on all these different types of projects.

Well, that’s a fantastic experience. Where did you take it next to take that learning about creating sustainability plans into your day to day, work, life beyond that.

So right after I graduated, I moved to India. I was very interested in exploring how climate and sustainability was impacting the South Asian community. I am South Asian, and so I was very interested, in particular, of exploring that. And even as an undergrad, I did my senior research project on sustainability and energy systems in India.

So I was very excited to go there and really be on the ground. And I ended up in Darjeeling, which is in the northeast of India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, right on the border of India and Nepal. And I was working with a tree, which is the Ashoka trust for research in ecology and the environment, a really great Indian NGO that does a lot of work on biodiversity and sustainable development, and was working on a series of sustainability projects out in Darjeeling.

I was living in these remote villages, some of which, you know, didn’t have access to clean water or electricity. And so it was really working with these villages that were and are being inundated by the impacts of climate change. You know, we talk about how climate change impacts the most extreme communities, the most extremely and you don’t get much more extreme than the Himalayas. And so, you know, the weather patterns are in many ways destabilizing.

And out there in South Asia, there’s a monsoon season, which is the rainy season. And what we’re seeing as a result of climate change is though wet season is a lot wetter and the dry season is a lot drier, it’s actually what a lot of people have recently been describing in California as well. And you know, when you have those types of intense, extreme moments, it leads to so many ecological changes.

And there it was, in many ways, devastating the ability of the locals, of the villagers, to grow food, and one of the interventions that we were doing was to help the locals understand and. And change their agricultural practices to adapt to a climate changed world. You know, what can you grow when your topsoil is being washed away? Or what can you harvest when, because the forest is not as plush, all of the monkeys from the forest are coming in and raiding your fields.

There are so many different human wildlife interactions and ecological interactions that people simply don’t think about. And so I think it was such a powerful experience for me to just be on the ground in India, amongst these communities, to really physically see how climate change is manifesting in very real ways.

I had a guest on a while back, Leslie Field, who’s a professor at Stanford, and she is developing this material, silicon, which you can put on ice to prolong its viability so it doesn’t just melt, because, you know, the Himalayas are melting at a very fast rate. And she’s using it in a test project up in the Himalayas because of all that disastrous flooding in Pakistan, where, you know, a very big part of the country was flooded. I mean, it kind of didn’t get as much attention in the US, because our, you know, our news feeds are fairly narrow.

Those floods were absolutely devastating. You know, a third of the country was underwater. And I remember I was speaking up at the UN about it. I took meetings at the White House about it. I was trying to do everything that I could raise awareness about this. And you look at a country like Pakistan, it’s one of the top 10 most populated countries in the world, compared to many other nations, a low carbon footprint, and even the same community out there in Darjeeling is facing the brunt of these climate change impacts, and yet, you see that they’re contributing not of substantive amount to the problem.

And that’s not to say they couldn’t reduce their emissions. Certainly, the nation of Pakistan could do a lot more on sustainability and energy. But you know, you look at this as a sort of environmental injustice issue as well, and it goes to show how much more we really need to do in this country, of these more carbon intensive countries as well, to help these communities that are actively facing the problems that are a result of everything that that we’re doing.

Kind of shifting gears into the political side of this. We had Donald Trump elected in November. Those of us who were, you know, rallying against him and thinking that the environmental issue would be a fairly important one, I felt like the Kamala Harris campaign just didn’t hit on it enough at the debates. She only got a minute of play, if that, and this was an issue that I think you know, could have been a differentiator.

Could have been something if spoken about in a persuasive, powerful way, could have woken people up. I mean, we’ve certainly had enough climate disasters, whether the hurricanes and Florida and North Carolina, to the wildfires in California, and many other things in between. I felt like it wasn’t communicated very effectively. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. I mean, I think the campaign could have done a lot more. I think climate change in 2020, was such a galvanizing issue, right? Like we saw sunrise, we saw the Sierra Club. We saw all of these major organizations coming together, kind of for the first time in such a substantive way, and just screaming and demanding that climate change be taken seriously, so much so that it became one of the four pillars of Joe Biden’s entire presidential campaign, right like it was right up there, along with the economy and along COVID relief, and this is right in the midst of the pandemic, right?

And so it was very clear and proven that climate change is an issue that people care about. And if you go all in on the issue, young people will not only vote for you, but also will galvanize and mobilize, right? Like I was out there organizing massive campaigns, we were texting millions of people, reaching out to millions of voters, and getting them to take action, right? But what we saw in this last presidential cycle was that that wasn’t the case, right?

I didn’t see the campaign go in very hard on climate change, and as a result, so many people were like, Wait, does she even care about this? Or what is the issue of this? Or is there a policy on this? And I think you can’t just rest on your laurels in a presidential campaign. You need to actively advocate for what you care about.

And I think because young people in particular didn’t feel that sense of connection on the issue of climate and because of many other controversial issues, a lot of young people didn’t galvanize, you know, and even for myself as an organizer in that space, a lot of my activism work is specifically around mobilizing voters on the issue of climate change, was significantly more difficult because I would reach out to people and they would be like, hey, well, didn’t we just hear something about fracking in that debate that sounds bad, you know, or because there wasn’t the sense of this all in green, New Deal, galvanized energy, I think a lot of people weren’t exactly sure, and so you lost a lot of people in the riff raff.

And those people could have otherwise not only voted, I’m sure many of them still did, but it’s not just about voting, right? You need to have a certain level of voter enthusiasm, because that’s what’s going to get people to actually talk and convert people in their own communities to be voters as well and to care about the issues that you care about.

But we didn’t have a strong enough force on that, on climate you know, and I think a lot of people were shocked at the election results we saw, you know, people like, Oh my god. So, so the house, the senate, the presidency, everything, everything went to the right. How could that be? And I was just like, well, even the left went to the right, right, like we weren’t messaging towards that sort of, like, liberal climate, whatever, like we saw the presidential campaign, try and go so far in the middle to appeal to those same people.

And so if everybody’s going to the right, I am confused how people are surprised that the results went so far to the right, because that’s what was being advertised, and that’s what people were promoting, you know, and meanwhile, so many of the people who care about more of these ideals, like climate change, I think we’re feeling forgotten. And even though there was a very clear difference of the presidential candidates, I don’t think that necessarily translated in the ways that they were hoping.

And I guess then the question is, given the Trump win, and given the craziness that have been happening since he was sworn in, and Musk as right arm, and they are dismantling the federal bureaucracy, and certainly going after climate and going after trying to cut funds and impound funds for The IRA and installing a guy, Lee Zeldin, at EPA, who’s no friend of the climate.

Fun fact, my former congressman, Lee Zeldin, you know, not only my former congressman, actually, back when I was in high school, doing all of that environmental work, I would get invited to, you know, give different speeches in my community, and he was just a state senator at the time, but I have shared the stage with Congress at that time, State Senator Lee Zeldin several times.

And you know, I’ve lobbied at his office for environmental policies several times since then, some of which I was able to convince his office to adopt, but many of which is just so far gone, so far to the right, that we we’re seeing so many of these climate deniers being put in these very, very important positions, and it makes you question, you know, an institution like the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, like, what part of the environment are you protecting?

Because it’s, it’s not like you get disbanding the scientists. You’re removing all government pages on climate change, you’re installing people who have no record of really protecting the environment in any substantive way to lead the agency, you know, and that’s just the EPA, which is, of course, a big deal. But then you look at something like USAID, which was just defunded in a lot of ways, and the project that I was talking about in Darjeeling.

You know that nonprofit, actually, that project was on a multi million dollar USAID grant, right? So you think about those experiences for me that were so formative, and I think about the impact that that project had across the region, and the multiple scientific studies that came out as a result, and then those things just vanished now. Because why? You know, it doesn’t make sense.

And I think we’re doing so much active damage to our planet and to our communities and to international relations, and we’re seeing our government institutions which only exist because they have so much public trust, being dismantled, and people are questioning the entire institutions as a whole, and that will and is leading to so many problems.

Well, so given the set of circumstances we find ourselves in, what are your thoughts as to dealing with this? I know that one area of attack has kind of been through the courts, and the courts have shut down a number of Trump’s moves on this front though, Trump’s acolytes and Trump himself have kind of indicated they may disregard what the courts are going to say.

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But other than through the courts, what are your thoughts on mobilizing or taking effective action to either stop the Trump agenda or working around it in some way, shape or form. I kind of feel like maybe Tai Chi-ing, the Trump energy, may be more effective than the full frontal assault method.

I think it’s complicated, because so many things are happening. Happening, right? Like even just now, you mentioned several things that are happening, I mentioned several things that are happening, and that’s just the surface level of what is happening, right?

So it is so complicated that I think part of their strategy is to just put out a storm of stuff that the news, the public, can’t even grasp onto what’s happening, because so many negative things are all happening at the same time. It’s not just one story, it’s so many stories. And when everyone is advocating for their story to be the story, you ultimately end up with no story, and the end of that story is that they’re kind of just doing whatever they want, and we’re the ones suffering from the consequences.

So I think people need to be a lot smarter and a lot more strategic of the stories that we’re telling and of the things that we’re focusing on, climate, of course, is a winning issue, and is one of the things that not only we know is going to happen, but there’s a constant reminder somewhere in the world, right, whether it’s the wildfires that just devastated all of California or, You know, these like crazy storms that we’re having all across the country.

There’s constant news hooks to sort of form stories around and do the proper storytelling and galvanizing. I also think that when we look at everything that they’re doing, people seem to be surprised, right? Like they seem, I feel like there’s this consistent shock of like, oh my god, can you believe that we jumped out of the Paris accord? And I’m like, yeah, I can, because day one, they already did that, like in the last administration. Also they said they were gonna do that. Also, did nobody read Project 2025? We have the playbook, right?

Like, we can see, like, play by play, what the strategy is. And people are still acting mystified as to, how could this possibly happen, what’s going to happen next? It’s like, Dude, we have the playbook. Like, literally read it. And I think the sort of strategists haven’t come up with any sort of strategy. And I think when I look at the Democratic Party. I mean, I don’t think anyone is feeling any sense of unity across anything, because there hasn’t been any common messaging.

There hasn’t been anything to tie on to. And I think people are feeling a lot of hopelessness in this moment, and that is never good when you’re trying to take action, you know, and particularly for the climate movement, I think it’s really important that we understand that, you know, it’s not just 1.5 degrees or two degrees, or, you know, these certain levels of warming, it’s every decimal change of a degree makes a fundamental change to our planet, right?

And so whatever scale of impact you can take and whatever emissions you can prevent are really important, right? And so if the federal government is a mess, or, you know, however you want to characterize it, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other modalities of action, right?

I think the corporate sector right now is going to become really important, as well as state and local based actions, right like what we just saw during the last administration was the passing of the inflation Reduction Act, which allocates $369 billion to climate and climate energy related projects and a lot of good environmental justice efforts as well.

And so I think it’s important for people to understand that that money is still on the table. Much of it has already been allocated to states. Some of it, there will be some tinkering, and people will try and stop it. But as that money is on the table, we have to be very strategic and think about how those things can materially be invested and implemented as fast as we possibly can, because the reality is, we cannot lose these next four years to inaction.

We cannot lose these next four years to climate hell, right? Like, if we just, you know, drill, baby, drill. These next four years we will see substantial, awful consequences to the fate of our planet. And so I encourage people to go super local. I encourage people to even go international. There are so many places across the world that can take action.

Of course, we still have to keep up the fight here in the US. We also need to think more thoroughly about how to be strategic and use our energies and our resources appropriately during this time, so people don’t immediately get burnt out.

It’s it’s bits what week two or three, and I already feel like people are burnt out and exhausted from the news cycle, like we have to think a little bit more strategically about how we tackle these next four years, if people are already burnt out before even four weeks.

Well, I think there’s a lot of things to comment upon which you said one, one of which is the last trump administration. One of the I thought Silver Linings was that state and local governments did take action, certainly in California, and I think it was about 17 other states signed on to the end of the internal combustion and engine in those states.

I mean, a massive change, and that is happening. And certainly I would see California and other states kind of continuing that process, and local governments stepping up, and that can make an enormous difference. Because even though red America is substantial, you know, blue America, it’s actually a larger driver of GNP than the red states, so that can make a substantial difference. And of course, there’s, there’s certainly blue islands, even within Texas and Florida and the like.

So there are places that local governments can make a difference, and I think that’s certainly a big opportunity for people to focus on those things. I’d say the second thing is that Trump is likely to crash certain things in a way that the policy the people wake up and say, Okay, we didn’t realize that you were going to do this, and that will create a groundswell of support against what he’s doing.

Now, some of that has happened, but not enough yet, but I do think that his policies will create so many problems that people will wake up. Now, that’s not exactly the, you know, the best way to go about it, like crash the car in order to wake up the occupants, but I kind of see that happening. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think there were a lot of promises made and they’re not being delivered. I was at the store yesterday and eggs, normal eggs, not the fancy, happy chickens, just like, you know, the normal eggs were $14 you know, like, and I’m in New York, you know, things are typically more expensive here, but that’s wild, you know. And so I think that a lot of people are coming to that realization, like you mentioned, of, oh, I wasn’t expecting this. I didn’t know about this.

And I think a lot of the policies, they’re not designed. One thing I think people need to realize is, if the government is actually being run by billionaires, like actual billionaires, right? Like, that’s what they do. They are, like the richest people, and they’ve made all of their money by scraping off little bits of money, of you and I every single day off of every single thing that we do, like sucking our ability to have savings and any decent type of life just to accumulate their own wealth.

What do you think their financial policies are going to be? It’s going to be the same thing that enrich them. And I think that is going to get to a tension point right, like when people can’t and don’t feel comfortable and can’t live normal lives. There’s going to be so much more tension, and I think the economic policies are going to have so many disastrous consequences. And we’re kind of just seeing things just being shouted out, just like tariffs. We’re going to have tariffs.

Why, where, what, and even you see, like the Prime Ministers of these other countries, like, Wait, what are you talking about? And not thinking through what the consequences of those things would even be, you know, those tariffs would ultimately fall down onto the consumer, onto us, those price increases, and that would have massive turbulence in our economy.

You can’t just shout out tariffs just because you feel like it, you know, some weird power play, right? Like, it’s this weird power dynamic right now, and ultimately, the people who are left feeling powerless is us, is the people. And I think when people feel hopeless, they don’t take action. And that is sort of the name of the game. It is to try and extract our wealth and extract our energy and our hope so that we’re just left sort of listless and energyless and defenseless.

But I think the reality is we co sign our government, right, like we co sign all of these institutions. At the end of the day, all of these institutions exist because of us. They are comprised of us. And so if we change those institutions will have to change too, and I hope that people can wake up to that reality and galvanize quick enough so we can take action in response to all of this.

Well, certainly the types of cuts that they’re talking about making 2 trillion or 1 trillion, those are so draconian that it’s going to affect a lot of people. And I think cutting USA ID is certainly not good, but it’s a fraction. And people in middle America don’t see that effect immediately, but when they start chopping at popular programs like food stamps and the you know, you know that type of thing we’re going to start to see Americans, wait a second.

I didn’t. I didn’t agree that. I didn’t. I didn’t think you were going to chop the program that puts food on my table. That wasn’t part of what you said you were going to run on. So we’ll hopefully get some people pushing. Back at that point in time, but in the interim, who knows?

Yeah, I mean, and it’s also like, it should be questioned, like, when we cut things like social security, when we cut things like health care and Medicaid and Medicare, who is that benefiting? Right? Like it is such a small percentage of our overall budget already that cutting it.

Who does it benefit? It only stands to benefit these massive corporations that are going to benefit billions of dollars and provide less essential services right when we lose Medicaid. Who does that help? It only helps those healthcare companies that are already extracting billions of dollars of wealth. Right?

And what does that result in? It results in people being more sick and unhealthy, right? Like not having these social safety nets is having social safety nets are essential because they keep our society safe. It’s, it’s in the name, right? And without that, I think it would lead to so much instability in our population that people are not ready, our government is not ready to the handle the massive rebellion and distrust that would result from that.

Let me pivot for a minute here to kind of the social media world, where you certainly have a substantial following on social media. There are a lot of other people out there that you’ve worked with that have substantial followings, whether it’s Al Gore or AOC or Taylor Swift. We didn’t see those social networks which had a lot of followers.

You know, Taylor Swift being the biggest of the big with hundreds of millions of followers, and she endorsed Kamala Harris, and it didn’t seem to make a dent in the election. Is it that social media just isn’t getting through it’s a mile wide and an inch deep, or did she just not communicate it effectively? What do you see out of kind of social media going forward, are people actually watching it? Are they being persuaded by it in a substantial way?

I think one of the interesting things about social media is that it has the ability to let people create communities that are not bound by the physical right. And what I mean by that is like, even as a climate movement, so much of it came together because people could see what other people were posting that they didn’t even know they didn’t know the person, right?

So you could see a Greta Thunberg or an Al Gore or whatever, and see what they were posting and join those activities, right? And the same is true with elections, and I think the sort of large platform celebrity endorsement thing is important, and it reaches a lot of people, and particularly their fans. Care a lot. At the same time, we saw an obscene amount of funding go into campaigns on social media, right?

Like, I think a lot of people are thinking, oh, like, did social media do anything? And actually, I think these non traditional platforms shaped the discourse of the entire election. I mean, you saw President Trump on multiple YouTube channels and podcasts like he was just doing the circuits there. He wasn’t even going through traditional media.

So did Joel Rogan have more of an influence than Taylor Swift and others like you know her?

I think that they both had a lot of influence, but at the end of the day, we have been seeing so many people in our country feeling like particularly younger men, feeling underserved. And I think a lot of people, I think Trump, really understood how to tap into that insecurity and how to really mobilize people around a sense of like masculinity, that, to me, feels very forced and very fake and inauthentic, but I guess resonated with a lot of people.

And, you know, I think all of those things combined to create a sense of culture, but I don’t think that there was a strong enough messaging from the Democratic Party to unify people around that. So, you know, even if you have some of these larger figures coming out, like AOC or Al Gore or whoever saying to go and vote, I think you can point people in the right direction, right?

But you can, what is it you can’t you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a drink, you know. So you can say, like, hey, like horses, here’s the water, but you know, if it doesn’t seem appetizing, people are not going to drink.

Yeah, it’s obviously impossible to kind of tease out what worked and what didn’t work exactly. There were millions of factors involved in it, but I guess I’d pivot again to the power of the people in and a lot of people I’ve spoken to experts have said, hey, it’s a fallacy to have the focus be on people changing their individual behavior, because it’s truly public policy that needs to change which will drive. The environmental progress we need.

I tend to think that certainly the power of the people to, say, boycott a product such as Tesla or what they’re doing. And you see, I’m seeing like statistics in various countries, Norway, Sweden, even in California and other places, people are buying less teslas. So, you know, maybe Musk gets the message that this behavior doesn’t play in in certain markets.

That could be very damaging to him in his pocket book, and that’s where he cares most. So maybe that’s the thing that we should be focusing on doing, is saying we don’t have to spend our money. And as Cesar Chavez said, every dollar we spend is a vote, so spending our dollars wisely may be the best votes that we have right now. Yeah. I mean, I think voting with your wallet is always a really important tool, and a lot of companies change their behavior as a result of what consumers think.

I think in the case of Elon and Tesla. It’s a bit more complicated, because even if he loses a bunch of Tesla sales, and it was talking with a friend yesterday who was like, I’m gonna sell my Tesla and I’m gonna, you know, get this new electric car and that, you know, and that’s all fine and good, but if he’s able to get like, a gajillion dollars in space contracts, you know, he can make up for that deficit. So I think there’s so much power up there that we need to be quite vigilant about where all of our money is going, because the next four years, it’s not coming back to us, right?

It’s it’s so much of it is going to be redirected to make billionaires, trillionaires, and that is a very scary position for the average person to be in. And at the same time, though, I do think that how we spend and what we spend changes what companies do right, like at the end of the day, their incentives are aligned to profit, right?

And if we can make products that are bad for the environment less profitable and make them understand that we care about sustainability and we care about carbon emissions, then, of course, they will change what their products are.

And I think a lot of companies are waking up to the fact that, like they can’t operate as normal in a climate changed world, right? Like you look at the insurance industry and how even in California or in Florida, insurance is either for fires and floods so exuberantly expensive or not even available in certain regions, right?

Like the idea of insurance is it’s meant to spread out risk across a zone, but when an entire zone is so risky and it’s essentially guaranteed that it will go up in flames in the case of California or underwater in the case of Florida, then they don’t have much of an incentive to ensure because they won’t make any money, they’ll lose money on that investment.

And so I think people have to become much wiser as to how our economy is changing, because these companies, they’re aware of climate change, right? But even still, we have to make them act faster, because if they act only in response to these things, then that means the climate will have already changed. We have to get them to act before these things even change.

Well, speaking of the insurance companies, they’re jacking up their premiums in places like Illinois. I have a family in Chicago, and their homeowners policies are going up paying for essentially, the wildfires in California and the floods in Florida and North Carolina and other places. So I would hope that that would start to wake people up. It hasn’t.

It certainly didn’t sufficiently wake them up in November, but there are opportunities going forward for people to wake up. I, I, for one, think that we need to take a lot more individual action to shift, as you said, that the power of companies to profit and that that will make them make change. And if companies start making changes, it’s less important that the government is making changes.

So if people are shifting to electric vehicles, then the companies start making them. We start putting the oil companies on their back foot because you’re using less oil. I mean, I saw that recently in China, they’re implementing the rollout of electric vehicles so quickly that their consumption of gasoline is going down for the first time. So I guess those are the types of things I think that we need to be focused on.

Yeah, and I hope people can see that. You know, so much of this climate revolution is already happening, right? Like the things you described in China, we’re seeing that happening so much in all countries, developing countries all across the world, is the price of solar is so much cheaper than it was a decade ago.

The conversation has fundamentally changed, and I think these oil companies are scared. They’re afraid of us. They’re like genuinely scared of our power and of how these systems. Are changing, and they’re going all in on our current government, because it’s a last ditch effort for them to maintain the economic order that they have and the power that they have. But it’s inevitable that things change. They have to change a lot faster if we’re going to be able to deal with climate.

Well, I see that. You know, the oil companies are more pro environment than the Trump administration. So that just kind of says how out there the Trump administration is that they, the big oil companies, recognize climate change is real, and have made efforts to reduce their methane admissions.

You know, Exxon Oil Company emits a lot less methane than some of these small producers in Texas that are Trump’s biggest supporters, because they don’t want to clean up their operations. They want to do it on the cheap and emit a lot of methane to pollute.

I think it’s wild that we allow companies to operate in a way that we know, like we know, that they’re actively polluting our communities. You know, we’re seeing impacts like cancer alley. We’re seeing climate change. We’re seeing all of these health and climate impacts, and they’re just given license to operate that like to just use our sky as a dumpster, and we’re the ones just now living in filth.

You know, it is unethical, it is untenable, and we have to prevent things like that from happening. And in the case of methane, it’s such a polluting, intense gas that I hope people can understand more what it is really doing to the conversation on climate change.

Well, something that recently has come to my attention, maybe I should have been following this more carefully. I believe it’s nitrous oxide is 260 times more powerful than CO2, and a lot of it is being emitted from plants that in ways that could be cleaned up.

And some plants, some industrial processes have cleaned it up and are not emitting we gotta put more pressure on the industries that haven’t cleaned up to to do that as well. Kind of as wrapping up the show, I wanted to focus on what you’re doing, how people can get involved with what you’re doing, focusing on the next year to come, and things that we can all work on.

Yeah. I mean, one thing that I’m doing is keeping myself educated and trying to be vigilant about everything that’s going on. And I share a lot about, oh, what those things are, you know. And so I encourage people you can find me on social media and, you know, join those conversations. I think for me, a lot of the next couple of years is we still have to keep an eye out for the midterms.

We shouldn’t lose sight of what that looks like. I’m hoping that we can run better, more strategic campaigns and also have younger, more diverse candidates that really care about these issues, and I think that will inspire a massive wave of action, and hope we saw it happen in 2018 I think we’re going to see it happen again in 2026 and so I think we really need to have all hands on deck these next couple of years and do whatever we can to make sure that we can protect our institutions before they all crumble.

Yeah, the 2026 elections are less than two years away, and so it’s kind of off to the races right now of getting viable candidates and people who are going to be strong in whatever districts they’re running in to win. Because certainly, taking back the House could put a break on the worst excesses of the Trump administration, for sure.

Yeah, and I mean, this is the moment to highlight all the crazy things that are happening. You know, like, there are so many alternate, crazy, maniacal congress people across the country, and it’s like, Yo, pay attention. You know, they just got rid of all of your rights. Y

ou know, they got rid of your EPA, they got rid of the World Health Organization, they got rid of all these things that we rely on. And it doesn’t have to be this way, right? Like things aren’t supposed to be this way. It can easily change, but we have to be active participants in it, and we can’t lose hope in our ability to change the system.

Well, on that upbeat note, I think we’ll, we’ll wrap this episode up, but really a pleasure to have you on the program side, and it’s something that we’ll be following you in years to come, and certainly like to collaborate with you, because I think the work that you’re doing is great, and it’s something that we need to have young people more energized. It seemed like the Harris campaign just didn’t quite set the young people on fire with enthusiasm.

We set the world on fire, just not the hearts of the people.

Yeah, we set. We set California on fire, but we couldn’t set people’s hearts aflame with passion for the environment, but we’ll get it done this time we got this well, let’s go out there and do it.

Thank you again for being on the show, and good luck in all your future endeavors.

Thank you.

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