Trump and his administration are kind of dinosaurs and not accepting the obvious, which is pretty shocking that we are now behind the UAE and Saudi Arabia in terms of climate change initiatives. You’re listening to a climate change this is your host, Matt Matern, I’ve got a great guest on the program. Pasha Madhavi. He’s an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara of political science.

He’s the co-founder of the 2035 initiative. He’s the Director of the Energy governance and political economy lab, non resident Fellow at the initiative for sustainable energy policy and author of power grab. So welcome to the program. Pacha.

It’s an honor to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Well, tell us a little bit about I always like to go back to origin stories of how did you kind of come upon the climate as being your issue. And you know, what was your journey?

Yeah, no, I love these because it also forces your own self to go back in time and keep thinking about things. You get somewhere, and you’re like, What was I thinking 30 years ago and and for me, it really didn’t start like 30 years ago or even a little bit more, because, you know, my interest kind of emerged as a kid, and it really is the story of two sides of my family. My father’s younger brother, my uncle, was a metals and commodity trader. He worked in Iran at the time the Soviet Union.

He taught me about like, the magic of all the things that we as humans extract from the ground, like how amazing it is that we can, we can do this stuff and what we can use it for. But on the other side, my mother’s two older brothers, so two more uncles. They were pioneers in solar thermal technology, and they taught me how you can tap into, kind of the seemingly endless supply of power from the sun.

So I became fascinated with the idea of what could be like an infinite fuel, like, how could we get energy from something and not have to put energy in to get it? And my uncles, you know, these engineers and business people, were like, You can’t do that. But I became fixated with this idea. In between them was kind of this untold story of how it’s also about politics and economics, and how that shapes how people use energy and natural resources.

And so when I went to college and later grad school, I learned how markets and governments, in short, what we call political economy, is as important, if not more important, than engineering or physics in determining how we as people humanity harnesses energy resources?

Yeah, certainly, we’ve got an example of it with the Carter administration back in the late 70s, saying, hey, because of the oil shocks and the oil embargo of the late 70s, we as the US want to shift away from oil and put solar panels on the roof of the White House, and was exploring all kinds of alternative fuels. And I recall reading that in the National Geographic as a teenager and thinking, Oh, this is really cool.

And then when Reagan came in, he took all the solar panels off, the White House shut down all the research on those areas, or lots of it, and we changed. We shifted back towards the focus on oil, oil, oil. And so that was a political decision, when it certainly would have been a wiser decision to start transitioning to a renewable fuel posture back at that point in time.

And it wasn’t, it wasn’t, as you said, all science. It was politics that drove the direction of the country, and we’re seeing that kind of type of shift right now. This is from the Biden administration to the current administration.

Oh, absolutely right. And in fact, this, this gets at another part of my, you know, my origin story too. Because, you know, in college, I was an economics major, and this is actually how I that was when I really started to get into the climate crisis in particular. So I took an economics class, and I thought it was going to be about globalization, and in fact, the title was globalization and its risks. It was taught by Professor Graciela chichilnisky at Columbia, and she’s still still teaching there.

And I thought it was going to be about trade and markets, but they were like, no, no, the biggest risk is climate change and how economic growth is leading straight towards catastrophic climate change. And this was a couple years before Al Gore kind of popularized the catastrophic climate change kind of phrase in Inconvenient Truth. And why do I raise this? Because, you know, then I thought, okay, maybe, maybe it’s not just the science, maybe it’s the economics.

But then it became clear that it wasn’t just the economics, either. It’s this intersection. In right of how economics can be used to study both energy and how we can avoid the climate crisis, but also the political story, which is, you know, as you know, with the Reagan example, like that, is as clear cut a political case as you can get, even if, as we see now, even if there are economic advantages to clean energy, there are certainly political ways to make those advantages disappear.

And so the policy and political process is really what drove me to become a political scientist, which is, you know, the hat I wear today.

Well, tell us a little bit about your work outside of the classroom, in terms of you founded the 2035 initiative. Tell us about that initiative and why you founded it, and how is it going.

So that’s been a really fun project that I’ve been able to lead with the two other co founders, Leah Stokes and Matern mildenberger, here at UCSB, in addition to 13 other faculty here that are, you know, interested in the politics and political science side, both climate and environmental regulations and things like that, we set this up to be kind of a think and do tank.

We wanted to merge the research that we were all doing, and I’ll say a little bit more about but some of the stuff that I’m doing in the, you know, oil and gas climate politics side, make that research accessible and directly informing kind of policy and the public broadly. And so we created this, this vessel to do that, to really make research have the kind of quick impact on both the policy process and just getting it out there and via public communication.

And so it’s a blend of things, really, of the very long time scales that we have when we do research as academics, and the short, you know, action needed items on any given policy issue or any given public matter.

And so how do we, how do we kind of find that, that happy medium, and that is, that is very much what we try to do. We’re about two years in, so we and as you can tell from our title, we have an end date. We really want to have tackle issues that are imminent. So between now and the year 2035.

So what are those goals?

We have a couple of pillars that we look at in particular and and, you know, we had started this by thinking of these, this three pillared approach. One of them is to think about, what are the kinds of politics and policies we need to address to ramp up clean energy if we’re thinking about clean energy taking over as a way to mitigate climate change, the other is thinking about policy pathways towards phasing out fossil fuels.

So those two are both especially focused on mitigation, and the third goal is thinking about adaptation and thinking about all of the issues related to the current and future climate impacts that we are facing. So what are the kinds of adaptation, style policies and things that governments can do, or should do or try to do to adapt and respond to climate change?

So that kind of that’s our guiding star, as it were, it’s this, you know, triangle sort of, and thinking about what our ultimate kind of aims and how our research fits in to this space.

I guess I, as you were talking, I was thinking of, what about reduction of energy usage and efficiency, and is that part of your strategy as well?

Absolutely, so, you know, the efficiency part of the story, which is the topic that is, for whatever reason, the least sexy of anything, but is incredibly powerful, is baked into these first two pillars. So how do when we think about ramping up clean energy, a lot of the story is also about improving energy efficiency, right, trying to replace things or retrofit or do what we need to do to improve our basically productive use of energy, right?

So using energy more effectively, more efficiently, and so that would be also more cost effective. So that’s a big part of the first pillar, and it’s also a huge part of the second pillar, which is where, you know, I firmly fit in, and thinking about, you know, oil and gas in particular, and energy efficiency there means a lot a lot of things.

You know, big part of it is reducing the emissions that you get from the production process, trying to basically clamp down on any existing inefficiencies. If we’re continuing or as we continue to consume right and produce oil and gas, how do we improve efficiency on that side? So it is. It’s baked in there, but it always goes unnamed. But of course, it’s this huge part of the story.

Well as talking to a lot of smart folks or and. The last four years on the podcast, one of the topics that they bring up is the methane emissions and and the oil and gas industry are big emitters of methane, and the Trump administration has, I guess, gone in the direction of kind of reducing the regulations on the emissions of methane, and what are your thoughts there as to, are there ways to counteract that type of public policy shift?

Well, you’re talking to the right people. Matt, because you know, methane is a huge part of the story. You know, there’s some studies that suggest that, you know, human made methane emissions are responsible for 1/3 of the warming that we’re seeing today since the Industrial Revolution, right? And yet, it’s not, you know, the top of line thing we’re so focused on carbon dioxide.

And just as a you know, refresher for you know, your audience, who I’m sure already knows a lot of this stuff, listening to to the awesome interviews you’ve been doing that methane, the reason it’s a problem, you think about it atmospherically, it’s a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide and trapping heat over a 20 year time frame.

So it’s 80 times more potent. That’s a huge thing at the molecular level, so we’ve really got to do something about it. Now, oil and gas contributes roughly 1/3 of man made methane emissions, right? The rest is ag and landfills. So it plays a big role. It is often been called the low hanging fruit in the policy realm. Why? Well, one, it’s pretty much limited to just a, you know, a very small number, relatively speaking, of point sources.

It’s different than thinking about carbon dioxide that’s coming out of cars, airplanes, ships and so on. Right a lot of the sources can be tracked down. And there’s an element there of a concentration, which is an easier political problem. The second is that groups like the International Energy Agency like to project that half of the emissions, methane emissions that are going off unabated right now could be fixed, not only at no cost, they actually can be a net positive cost. In other words, capturing that methane is cost efficient, because you can then sell that methane.

Why? Because methane is the primary ingredient of natural gas. So if you capture it and find a buyer, not only have you solved the climate problem in terms of letting this thing not go up into the atmosphere, that’s really trapping a lot of heat, but you can sell it. So if half of the problem is is solvable from an economic standpoint, like, why aren’t we doing it, right?

So that’s why we get the low hanging fruit. We should be able to do it. We’re not doing it. So your point about Trump is the answer, right? Why aren’t we seeing action on methane? We’re seeing methane emissions keep rising even before the Trump administration came in, and you have these two political challenges, in particular monitoring, which we can come back to, because that’s a really, really important part of the problem.

And then enforcement, which is really about how you make regulations and try to effectively incentivize a reduction in emissions. So the story with Trump right now and his administration is that, you know, we had this methane fee in the inflation Reduction Act passed under the Biden administration, we also had Biden’s rules around around methane, the quad o rules, as they’re called, that were executive orders. Those two things, the methane waste emissions charge in the IRA and the quad o rules are basically two of the pieces that have been gutted very effectively by the Trump administration. And the waste emissions charge, which was within in the IRA, is one of the pieces that was cut relatively quickly. Now lots of the IRA is still there.

There’s a lot of Ira defense being played, but it couldn’t work here on the waste emissions charge, which basically said, if you’re emitting a lot of methane, you’re oil and gas producer, you have to pay a fee above a certain amount, right? And so kind of like a carbon tax, but just for methane. And of course, that fell by the wayside. Why did it fall by the wayside?

Well, the answer is really a story of kind of intra industry dynamics that larger firms were already quite supportive of this because they were doing it, they were reducing their methane emissions. But smaller firms, independents, shale producers, a lot of them, were not, and it was costly for them to do to go out in the field and figure out where the leaks were coming from, fix the leaks and so on.

So they adamantly pushed against it, and they ultimately won. So it was an interesting battle between the well known household names like Exxon, Chevron, Conoco and a lot of the smaller folks who you know weren’t doing the methane abatement work already. So they wanted this, this law gone. So that’s a bit of the political story.

Now, were they able to do that via legislation, or was that some other method of rule making?

Or, yeah, yeah. Because the quad o rules, these methane rules that Biden had passed, or rather issued via Executive Order, were done that way. Those were far easier to claw back. You know, those were easier to do via EO.

It’s an open question as to what is going to happen congressionally to the IRA, if they’re going to use, for example, right now, kind of the process of, you know, thinking about this via budget reconciliation or not, but there are ways to either physically remove it from the legislation, right, or tell the regulator to stop enforcing it, right and sustain Well, you know, the EPA was supposed to go after this. You don’t have to go after this.

So it’s an interesting interregnum period. But if there were a vote held, you know, we would see this. This would be one of the easiest things to cut away. And there have been congressional attempts to kind of chip away at the IRA, but we haven’t yet seen the big attempt to rip off the whole band aid, as it were.

So you also are the Director of Energy governance and political economy at lab. What is the work that you do there?

So a lot of the work we look at is within the context of the oil and gas sector. And we are thinking about how the intersection of economics and politics, how that intersection can tell us about the impacts of oil and gas, not just on government outcomes. So there’s the governance story, but also thinking about the climatic impacts, as well as thinking about the kind of loop, as it were, the effects on the economy and therefore those effects on politics.

So a couple areas of interest here. I mean, one is, is trying to think about how oil and gas historically has impacted, you know, political institutions and so one kind of through line there is what some people call the resource curse, which is this idea that, you know, you have oil and gas that should be a great thing for your country, because you can extract it and sell it, and therefore you get more money. But it turns out that that’s not the case.

And not only that, you end up getting worse political outcomes, more instability, you know, weaker institutions, in some cases, more you know authoritarianism and things like that, and conflict. So that’s one area that we look at is, kind of, what are these impacts of of oil and gas and having oil and gas on, kind of the core political elements, the governance parts of things.

The other is thinking about, you know, the role of corporations, and this is split in between multinationals that are investor owned, as well as companies like state owned enterprises, like national oil companies, what are their roles in climate politics and policy, and what are the kinds of research that we can do to better elucidate those impacts?

And so that that’s a couple of the pieces that we that we do, but it’s all kind of framed within this perspective of this intersection between, you know, oil and gas, extractive resources, and kind of the Political Economy issues, how those things are affecting politics, how those things are affecting the economy.

It’s kind of fascinating. As you were first talking about this, I was thinking of Ecuador, which I think has sworn off, you know, drilling more wells for petroleum, and it’s kind of the reverse of the drill baby drill scenario.

And you know, you think of that as a bold move, and certainly a world leader. And then also, you were talking about, kind of the petro states, and, or at least that’s what came to mind when you were talking about national oil oil companies and I went to COP28 and surprise, surprise, the oil petro states were kind of on board with the idea that their products are causing global warming.

They didn’t seem to be fighting against that, which is kind of fascinating that the Trump administration is behind the petro states in terms of like, do you think that those Petro states would not, you know, would be accepting that their product is committing or causing global warming?

If it wasn’t, they certainly had the money to fight that, and yet they all seem to accept the reality of it, and Trump and his administration are kind of dinosaurs and not accepting the obvious, which is pretty shocking that we are now behind the UAE and Saudi Arabia in terms of climate change initiatives.

It’s a huge area, because you have very different rhetoric that national oil companies and these countries that are so reliant on fossil fuels. And I’ll talk a bit about national oil companies in a minute, because Ecuador is an interesting case on that too. It’s interesting how different the rhetoric can be between the US. US and these other countries, but you’ve also got a lot of variation within the countries that are producing fossil fuels and how they are tackling the problem.

So it’s worth stepping back a little bit to think about this issue, because, you know, we should, we should give a sense for the scale here of the problem, and also kind of who are the actors, as it were. So if we think about, I mentioned this term, kind of national oil companies a bunch of times. These are these state backed entities, government owned companies that are in charge of a country’s oil and gas production. And sometimes they go international.

These companies, NOCs, for short, national oil companies. They manage about half of the world’s global oil and gas production. They own about 60% of the world’s global reserves. The other thing is, the historic number of greenhouse gas emissions is kind of important to think about that since 1965 right around when most countries were nationalizing oil and gas, these NOCs account for 35% of all global cumulative emissions.

Like 35% that’s everything, including, you know, all other sectors, but you can trace back 35% of all global cumulative emissions to these national oil companies since 1965 and and yet they’re not household names. These are companies like Saudi Aramco, like the Abu Dhabi national oil company. He mentioned the UAE, Pemex in Mexico, and IOC in Iran, Gazprom, which has now become more of a household name, the state owned Gas Company of Russia.

So why do I mention these? But because, you know, at COP and in other places, these companies and their kind of connective tissues within the political system, the ministries of energy and so on, these companies have such a large role in a country’s finances in places that are rich in oil and gas, they are huge Employers in these countries.

And that’s a, you know, an interesting paradox, because oil and gas is not, you know, a Labor intensive industry. It is a capital intensive industry, but because of their, you know, size on multiple fronts, these national oil companies play a tremendous role in shaping politics in their home countries and abroad, at cops. So, you know, this is, you know, I wrote a book, and this is when you alluded to at the start, called power grab.

That was all about why we create, you know, leaders have created national oil companies in the first place, how they become instruments of political survival and things like that. And so, you know, these companies are, you know, sometimes the mouthpiece, sometimes the face to a lot of Petro states in international arenas, and they’re saying different things.

And so to get to your question, it’s kind of long and winding mode to get there, but because there’s a lot of complexity here, some of them see the writing on the wall, which is that if they continue to double down their country’s assets, right? This is investments, tax dollars and things like that into oil and gas that this is not a viable long term strategy for economic growth.

Part of that is just their own geological decline. Part of that is a sense that there is some longer term acceptance of a transition by some and so why as a country, would you put all of your chips into this particular bucket. Now, others don’t see it that way. And you know, Saudi Aramco, which is the state owned company of Saudi Arabia, sitting on, you know, one of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas.

They just don’t see the energy transition happening very quickly, if at all. They don’t see oil and gas really going anywhere, at least not for them. And so they want to be what people like David Victor call the last man pumping. They will continue to pump forever, until nobody will buy oil at any quantity. Why do they think they can do that?

Well, because they have really, really cheaply extractable oil. Costs them about $6 a barrel, even if you include shipping and processing and all that that’s really, really cheap, and they have a lot of it. And if you think about what the world may need in 2050, or 2070, or 2100, there’s still some more, you know, oil demand, they think they will be the suppliers, because they can do it cheaply.

So that’s like a economic story of comparative advantage. But the ones who don’t, you know, and they have to think about how not to strand their countries. This is a term that people like David Manley and James Cust have thought about, which is not to become a stranded nation. And because they are the stewards of their country’s resources, there is a sense of saying, Well, look, we can’t keep doing this forever.

We have got to do something else at some point. And so you have there a sense of, you know, the different perspectives, the different time horizons of different countries, the different sense of their competitive advantage. And now you start to get an understanding of why it’s such a weird kind of quilt, as it were.

And. You have the US. That’s, you know, one of the few countries that never nationalized. And so it’s never really thought about, you know, oil and gas in the context of a single entity that is the steward of a country’s natural resources. And so it just comes at it from a very, very different perspective.

Well, you know, we have a lot of different dynamics in play, and one of them is the rise of the electric vehicle and and China being able to produce them now at scale, at lower prices, and my understanding is that their consumption of oil in the transportation sector, for the first time, is going down after decades of increasing, kind of exponentially, which they were sucking up every barrel of extra oil that could be found.

Which kept prices going up, and now they’re kind of, you know, leveling off and maybe starting to decline, which, you know, could be huge, particularly if Europe and and the US are also going in This direction where there’ll be less oil used for transportation. It could drop the price of oil, which will hurt the marginal producers. And you know, maybe you could talk to us about where you see that going.

Oh, yeah, this is such a good point to raise, right? And this gets to the kind of nitty gritty of thinking about the kind of break even prices, or kind of the cost curve, as it were, for the global oil and gas industry. And if we’re starting to see a slowdown in Chinese demand and other Asian country demand, if we’re starting to see a ramp down in general, in consumption because of potential changes to the market, you’re thinking about tariffs and their impacts and coming up as we have the summer season coming up, so as the oil price goes down, because you’re going to maybe have continually high supply.

We had an announcement from OPEC earlier this week that was saying, Look, we want to go back to increasing we want to make up for production cuts and try to lots of anaerobic dynamics there as to why they might be thinking about increasing output, especially Saudi Arabia. What does that mean? You’ve got lots of supply and decreasing demand. So it doesn’t take more than econ 101, to suggest that the price may come down.

So who does that affect?

Well, kind of the biggest impacts are going to be actually felt by a lot of oil and gas companies here in the United States, where you think about shale producers, we think about producers in aging contexts like we are here in California. A lot of people don’t know that our history is very, very deeply intertwined with oil. We’ve been producing oil here for 140 years.

So a lot of our wells are not quite that old, but a lot of our wells are old, and so costs a lot more money to extract. So as you start to see $50 a barrel oil, right, right now, we’re about 6063, as you start to go down and down, right, that’s going to make it uneconomical for a lot of producers in the United States to produce, right? And that’s true of a lot of these national oil companies as well, companies that don’t sit on the cheapest reserves, places like Nigeria, places like Mexico, right?

I talked about Pemex. I mentioned them earlier. You know, what is their future going to be if we’re starting to see already some dents in demand. And if there’s a long term downturn in demand for oil and gas products, irrespective of a recession, but thinking about now the longer term energy transition, what are they going to do? Right? And so it’s a it becomes, then a very clear economic story. And it’s like, Well, do you produce and sell at a loss?

You just can’t do that for very long, unless you really think things are going to turn around again. Around again. But if you’re Saudi Arabia, you’re like, I’ll still be making money, which whether you got to come down really well for me to lose money. And same with, you know, the UAE, they’ll keep producing. And so that’s kind of a the story there.

And in the 80s, Saudi Arabia, whether intentionally or unintentionally, kind of crushed a lot of oil producers by tanking the price down to like 10 bucks a barrel. And it really, you it maybe caused the downfall of the Soviet Union, and it’s in its consequence. And they could kind of do the same thing to the Russian economy right now, because if they ramped up production and dropped the price of oil pretty dramatically.

The Russian budget would take such a hit, and the Russian economy would take such a hit that it would be pretty dramatically bad for Putin’s government, as well as for some other governments, like the Government of Venezuela and Iran and and others that are very, you know, based on their production of oil.

Oh, absolutely right. And that this is this interesting kind of this is where you start to merge both the markets thinking about, you know, break even prices and how that impacts companies. And then a thinking about it from a government’s perspective, what’s a government’s. Break Even price in terms of their commitments, of their expenditures. How do you run a country, right?

And so, you know, lots of people have tried to nail down the numbers right, like, what is the price of oil need to be for? You know, the Russian government to continue to, you know, make on its obligations or deliver its its promises. And you know, while there’s uncertainty in that number, you know, and it’s true that a lot of Russian oil can be produced cheaply. There’s lots of Russian oil. It can’t be produced cheaply, right?

And so it does put a squeeze on anyone who it can’t be cost competitive. And at a certain point you can’t win that fight with places like Saudi Arabia, because, you know, and the UAE and the other golf you’re just not gonna be able to compete, right? And so they have put that squeeze on before. And I’ll say the other thing, which is kind of an interesting story of that’s all too familiar, and this is where the resource curse comes back in, which is that these are the classic boom and bust cycles.

And it’s one thing for a boom and bust to affect an individual company, it can clear the marketplace, you know, companies that weren’t as efficient before, and then they regroup, and then they grow. When you talk about a country, you’re talking about the lives of millions of people, and playing that game is a gamble.

And this is where you try to get out of that trap and not pin your entire economy on something that already has natural boom and bust cycles, like the 80s, and the fact that so many countries, including the Soviet Union, were impacted by that, by that decision by Saudi and a few others to, you know, flood the markets with oil. So it’s, it’s worth, kind of pointing that out, and it’s a game that if you’re the leader of a country, you know, you really are gambling with people’s lives.

Well, certainly, a lot of the oil companies and the smaller ones in the shale space and in Texas, who are who’ve made tons of money, are upset with the Trump tariffs because it has lowered, you know, the heat of the US economy is and the world economy, which has lowered the price of oil. And so they are getting hit. And so they’re no longer kind of willing to go along with drill, baby drill, because the price of oil is going down. So you those are long term investments.

And if you feel like, hey, if I’m only going to make $60 a barrel. It may not be worth the investment to pump this oil at whatever cost it might be. Well, that’s absolutely right, yeah. And I guess, just kind of pivoting to your non resident fellowship at the initiative for sustainable energy policy, and tell us a little bit about the work that you’re doing there.

It’s a great group that was started by Johanna sirpolana, and I was actually, you know, a visiting faculty, a member during my sabbatical last spring at Johns Hopkins sais, which is in Washington, DC, you know, there I was, you know, working on a project, or, you know, two projects, really, that are centered around some of these issues.

One is kind of thinking about, you know, what are the strategies to reduce methane emissions among national oil companies? How can we think about, you know, the, you know, how can we interject politics into that? Or rather, political science into that?

And so I can talk a bit about that project a moment, and then the other is thinking about the corporate climate commitments and how corporations and oil and gas companies in particular, are pivoting or not pivoting to decarbonization and decarbonized solutions, and why they should do so, and if There are pressures, and how effective those pressures are.

So on the methane side, one thing that I did, and I’m continuing to do, in addition, you know, in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund EDF, is this project that’s called collaborative levers for methane abatement in national oil companies. And we go back to the challenge of like, well, how do we solve this low hanging fruit problem?

That’s not really low hanging fruit. And the, you know, the result of that, that research, which was, you know, in part, conducted by doing, you know, interviews, as well as analyzing oil and gas company plans and business plans and strategies, as well as trying to understand the role of civil society and a lot of these countries.

Part of the answer is that a coordinated and collaborative effort by banks who have their own commitments, that want to stop financing climate impacting assets, civil society groups in countries that want to reduce pollution consuming governments, which is an interesting story, we start to Get in the trade policy a little bit like the EU and I can talk about that example too, which is putting on a standard for imported oil and gas that has to reduce and be at a low threshold for methane intensity.

So that forces the seller to comply, otherwise they pay a penalty. And the other kind of important. Piece of collaboration here is within civil society, is the groups that help to monitor methane emissions. Because the other problem that’s lurking here is that it’s hard to track methane, and so now we’ve got lots of good remote sensing technologies that can do this, satellites, but also drones and planes and things like that. So if we can come together and think about, well, how do you knowing that one particular lever is not going to make the change for Saudi Aramco?

Well, what if you combine them and work together in coordination to apply this kind of both carrot and stick approach to maintain these high standards for kind of reduced methane intensity from oil and gas suppliers? So that’s something that came out of that, that endeavor, and working in continuing to do that, that work, the other is thinking about, you know, the investor owned companies.

And you know, one of the studies that that I did here within the lab, with one of my graduate students, Dennis Lomo, is trying to understand this rise of shareholder resolutions on oil and gas companies to create climate strategies effectively, was that impactful?

And what we find is no, not really. And we looked at all the resolutions, we kind of basically used some cool natural language processing to understand what a climate strategy was by looking at, you know, millions upon millions of words that oil and gas companies had filed as part of their annual reports to the SEC and tracked how there was or was not a shift in their climate strategies. And we found that pressure by shareholders doesn’t necessarily work. And this kind of opens the door to saying, Well, what, what would work right?

And if it’s not the shareholders story, what, what is going to be the thing that is going to move the needle. And, you know, that was the output of that research. That was the kind of, you know, the future research question like to talk about, and one of the answers, and maybe this segues into something else talk about, which is, well, if it’s not on the shareholder side, what’s the role that maybe litigation is going to play? How do we think about responsibility? How do we think about accountability if we’re not seeing the kinds of the levers we normally expect to move things be moving things?

Well, yeah, now you’re speaking my language with litigation. So that’s my background. So I mean, we’re currently litigating a case against Exxon and Torrance refinery, and so it’s been a long, long, hard fought case just coming back from the Ninth Circuit after a reversal of a trial court decision.

So, you know, I know the challenge is there, but I also feel like that is an area to push. I kind of think that something along the boycott strategy, which occurred recently with Tesla, and it caused their stock to tank. It’s caused their amount of vehicles being sold to tank, and they have to kind of listen to that. That is ultimately signal that they have to listen to.

And it happened relatively quickly, which I think gives some degree of optimism that if consumers band together, we can actually Cha cause corporate behavior to shift, but we have to act in unison. And you know, maybe you could talk about some low hanging fruit there that might be worth looking at.

So, you know, that is one of the areas that people had looked at, thinking about a divestment from oil and gas companies, and that is something that many had thought was going to be a lever you could pull to enact change at an oil and gas company. And so we did look at that to some extent, within some of these shareholder resolutions, because there were elements of that, because that’s the ultimate threat, right from a shareholder’s perspective.

I mean, we’ll get to consumers, but like, you know, we’re going to pull our money out until you do this, right? And so that element of it, the threat of it, does have an impact, because the financial side is tremendously important. Oil and gas companies are in a business that constantly necessitates in reinvestment and increased investment. You are fundamentally dealing with a non renewable asset. This gets back to, like my childhood ideas that, what is the infinite fuel?

Why? Because you dig this stuff up and you got to burn it now. You got to find more, right? So you’re constantly needing to finance your projects, and so if you squeeze on the financing side of things, that’s where there is some efficacy to be had, and that’s where the banking story is interesting.

And that applies both to the investor owned oil companies like Exxon and Chevron and Coco and the national oil companies, because they need financing too for a lot of their projects, and all kinds of different flavors of financing, because they’re also tied to a sovereign entity.

So the extent to which there is consumer pressure on financial actors, that is an avenue through which you could see the kinds of effective. Of pressure on an oil and gas company. Why do I raise that? Because I think it’s more it’s different than, you know, boycotting Tesla, because, you know, oftentimes what you have is this very fungible global oil market, and you’ve got, you know, if you boycott Exxon, that just means you’re going to probably buy from another supplier.

You’re also going to be more challenged to substitute that with something else, unless you decarbonize, right? And so that’s just a different part of the story. And so boycotting individual companies doesn’t have the same effectiveness, I would say, anywhere than you ask sector. But thinking about pressure on the financiers, now you’re starting to cook with electrons, as I think the new phrase should be, right?

People like to say, Now we’re cooking with gas and like no no electrons make you much hotter. So that’s probably the area where I would think there’s, there’s more low hanging fruit for those kinds of movements.

And we have seen that. We have seen a lot of financiers kind of try to stick to that, even though there’s a changing landscape to ESG and the changing landscape to what you want to brand as green, there’s still a sense of, Well, you know, we want to finance things that have long term viability, and especially if you’re a big institutional holder and you’re thinking about long time horizons, that’s where climate can can start to have, can start to resonate with some of the core thinking.

Well, I guess part of this just boils down to economics. And can alternative energy beat fossil fuels on the playing field in economics, in just pure economic terms, and to a certain extent, it is with solar and wind producing electricity at lower rates than coal and natural gas.

The question is, will the Trump administration quash those efforts to allow them to compete and tilt the playing field towards coal and towards natural gas?

So it’ll make it more difficult to to have the wind and solar industries win, and also, will these tariffs on that affect solar and wind projects? Will they tank a lot of projects that could go forward, you know? And I guess, related to the IRA will the will these tariffs affect all the nascent American companies that are trying to be competitors in the production of solar energy manufacture and wind energy manufacturing, which are kind of reliant upon Chinese products to kind of make their finished product. That’s a lot. But you know, you know, you could probably go on for an hour with that one.

But no, I mean, you know now a lot of people will say that, indeed, for a lot of these clean energy applications that you know, building a new power plant, for example, building a new renewable power plant, like a solar plus battery, is cheaper, right? Than building a new coal plant. It’s also faster than building a new gas plant.

Right now we’ve got a really long gas turbine backup, so if you want to put new power on the grid, you might have a better shot at doing so by going solar plus battery than going gas. Right because of the impacts, not just tariffs, but also thinking about the gas turbine marketplace. So you know that there’s, there is truth to that in terms of the cost of energy.

The other thing, though, that always, you know, this is the thing that drives me nuts, is that if you’re a company, and you have to think about a long term kind of economic, you know, business plan, and you want to make sure that you have a lot of certainty over your energy costs, right?

Why would you stick with a fuel that has remarkably known volatility, like, like I was saying before, booms and busts are, you know, central to the oil and gas industry. They have been for over a century, over a century and a half, right? I mean, the days of the early oil industry and price volatility is something else, but this is a commodity, when we think about fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, that has a lot of volatility, if you can lock in something that doesn’t have that volatility, why wouldn’t you do that?

And that is an economic argument for renewables. And the one thing we haven’t talked about so far, is geothermal, and that’s this interesting space right now where you have a lot of appetite by the Trump administration, because of Chris Wright, the head of the DOE and Trump himself, kind of advertising for, or really pushing for next generation geothermal. Why is this a big area? Well, it has a lot of things that are adjacent to the oil and gas skill set.

There are a lot of actual sites, old oil and gas wells that you can use for geothermal energy storage. And this is the kind of thing, electricity wise, that can be appealing to the rise of kind of data centers that are going to need lots of energy going forward, right?

Thinking about again, longer term business plans. So why wouldn’t you try to lock into something like that, rather than try to hook yourself to natural gas, which has this known price volatility. So the volatility is an important piece of it, on top of all the stuff you were saying before, Matt, which I which I agree with, which is that in a lot of acquisitions, it’s just cheaper to not use fossil fuels, and even if you try to unlevel the playing field, it’s still cheaper, right?

And so there’s lots of advantages, because we have dramatically improved our ability to generate electricity from renewable sources, but there are going to be hiccups along the way. And you know, we’ve got lots of issues on the supply chain, for example, we’ve also got interconnection queue issues. So it’s like, you build a new solar plant, How many will you connect it? There’s all of that that still needs to be needs to be addressed, but that’s just as true for other new plants as well.

So the playing field issue is a big one, but the thing that is sadly going away right is that the playing field is not level right already. And the kind of remarkable amount of subsidy that has gone to the oil and gas industry is something that, you know, politicians love to ignore, but if you if you start to remove those, then you can really see how truly level the playing field is in favor of renewables.

So that that’s a whole other can of worms, but it’s an important note for people thinking about, well, it’s not just like, you know, this product is not subsidized. It is indeed, and that’s a story, not just here, but kind of globally.

Well, you seen some pushback as to ESG policies and and a lot of the big companies are kind of scrubbing that off their their websites and to be in alignment with the current administration. So kind of where do you see that going, particularly with the the mega companies, the mag seven type companies that had pretty, I guess you’d say, progressive environmental policies and trying to go greener. Where do you see that headed?

And and, and can corporate America to the and corporations across the globe clean up their supply chains so they’re not using products from dirty industries? It is a thing, right?

And is something that we are seeing with kind of the withdrawal of a lot of companies, you know, from some earlier commitments that had been made because of the backlash to ESG, but a big part of it is just thinking about, well, what are the smart strategies a company can make thinking long term, right? And so part of that story is, you know, again, back to these economics, what are the kinds of things you can do to try to reduce your long term costs.

The other is kind of the, you know, a lot of companies that are consumer facing, I think, still have a sense of a reputational benefit that comes from cleaning up supply chains. And a lot of companies still do that. You know, it’s interesting. We had this, this climate disclosure rule that the SEC proposed under the Biden administration that got scratched basically by the Trump administration. It’s been formally killed, basically pulled back that would have had companies just disclose their climate impacts so that other companies could know.

Right To your point like, well, what’s the dirty part of my supply chain? What’s a clean part? That rule had huge amounts of support from all companies across so many different sectors, obviously big opposition from oil and gas and coal. And part of it’s just, hey, look, I want to clean up my supply chain for lots of my own reasons, to maintain market share, to be, you know, have a good brand reputation, maybe to improve my efficiency, whatever the reason may be.

And so you saw, still like a corporate appetite for doing so. But now the regulations being pulled back, you’re going to have to see this happening in kind of a one to 1b, to B, or business to business, kind of conversations which are happening, which are going to continue to happen, but it gets harder without the coordinated effort that government can provide.

So I think you’re still going to see that. You’ve still got lots of companies that are committed to doing so. The tariff story is going to make that much more complicated, but in some cases, it might make it easier, because lots of things that we might have sourced from abroad may not have adhered to a high standard that we have here.

So buying American could help in that respect. But in a lot of cases, it’s about efficiently producing something that if it takes us more energy to produce, well, that’s not that’s not better for the climate and environment. So it is a mixed bag on that front, but I’m still optimistic on kind of the element of how a lot of corporations can continue to commit to some of these goals that just have to call them by another name. But there’s still an advantage to the bottom line to a long term future for their companies.

I feel like that’s another role that consumers have to play. And as Cesar Chavez said, every dollar that we spend is a vote. So if we are voting with our dollars for cleaner products, then that’s that is a positive. And. And of course, $1 not spent on a dirty product is also a vote. So we have that opportunity.

I wanted to talk to you a bit about hydrogen and hydrogen drilling, because they’ve hit some hydrogen fines in various places around the world, that it’s a clean source of energy. The oil companies kind of semi like hydrogen? Because, like you said, it’s a bit of a drilled product, and there are hydrogen hubs being created by the IRA, and a lot of those are in red states.

What are you seeing and hearing on on the hydrogen front, hydrogen is a very controversial issue within especially thinking about, you know, the the role of oil and gas companies in the transition and and I say that because the way that a lot of the the rules are laid out right now is that they allow for so many different kinds of hydrogen. It’s, it’s the joke of the rainbow that we have blue hydrogen, green hydrogen, gray hydrogen, and so on. I guess it’s a different kind of rainbow.

But you know, for oil and gas companies, hydrogen is effectively a lifeline for continued gas production. Because, you know, when you think about Blue hydrogen, which is made from, effectively, you know, gas, right, natural gas, which we talked about methane, and all the issues related to methane, if you switch from a oil and gas company to a hydrogen company that’s built largely on gas, that may not actually be an improvement for the climate, and especially if you’re thinking about the short term greenhouse gas impact, it could be worse.

Right? Thinking about methane leaks, leaks and things like that. That’s something that’s come up a lot in conversations with, you know, folks that are in the national oil company space, because a lot of national oil companies are thinking about hydrogen. You know, Saudi has been thinking a lot about hydrogen. The UAE has been thinking about hydrogen, you know, Kuwait, to some extent.

So it’s, there’s a side of it, which means it’s just a lifeline. And so the challenge there is that, are the subsidies that are being given by the government going to gas made hydrogen, right, blue hydrogen, or gray hydrogen, or are they going only to hydrogen that’s kind of green hydrogen, right, made solely from, you know, green sources.

And it’s, you know, it’s not clear under this administration that you’re going to see a whole lot of pressure for just the green hydrogen. So it is a challenge, and it’s tied in with carbon markets to some extent, because people can get carbon credits from producing hydrogen. It’s tied to carbon capture because they often go hand in hand, these kinds of carbon capture based products, or product lines.

So it’s a tricky one to say the least. And I think until we sort that out what kinds of hydrogen are going to be supported more often than not, what we’re going to see is just this kind of pathway to continued gas extraction, in particular, natural gas extraction,

I guess I’m kind of still a proponent of hydrogen as a fuel source, and that I’ve had two hydrogen cars, so I’m kind of like, you know, thinking that hopefully it will get economically feasible to use it, because then you don’t have battery issues and and the exhaust is, H2O, so, oh yeah, the end product, right?

That’s the thing, right, if we think about and so now the question becomes, how do you produce hydrogen that is ultimately clean? And like you said, the consumption of it, I think we have a lot of good use cases for right, that is a clean fuel, and it’s just a matter of where we’re getting it from. And I think you can, right?

You have to design the policies that say, Hey, you can’t use this as as a way to just keep producing your gas. If you’re going to sell hydrogen and get the subsidy to make it the most cost effective, you’re going to have to produce it in this way, right? And so that that, I think, is the need Right. And, and that’s something, you know, states can certainly try to grapple with, right? We have these laboratories of democracy, you know, in our country of 50 states.

So there are states that can try to play with this. And California, I know, has been thinking about updates to, you know, the low carbon fuel standard and other kinds of of things that our state can do on this issue, because there have been hydrogen hubs proposed here, right?

And our state, and there are lots of, again, positive use cases. It’s just the question of, how do you make sure the supply chain is nice and clean and going to be climate helpful.

Let’s kind of focus back down to, you know, the listener level, as to what listeners can do to really make an impact. What are the maybe three to five things that you you would advise are kind of high impact activities that everyday people can do.

You know, I think the first, I mean, this is a great, great way to, great way to think about things. And especially, you know, me as a political scientist, I think the really number one impact for individuals is in the policy process, in the political process, to participate in politics, to, you know, vote for the.

Kinds of climate forward parties, candidates at the hyper local level, at the federal level, right that voting and volunteering for campaigns and all of the different elements of the political participation spectrum are some of the most important things you can do as an individual, because the policy at the end of the day has such a big impact.

And so the you know, thinking about shaping the political shaping the policy process via elections, right is going to be can have a tremendous impact. And and that is hard, because we think about, well, my vote, one vote doesn’t matter. And it’s like, you know, look, your vote does matter, and your organization of many votes can matter, and you’re campaigning for people who may not be voting and may not be registered to vote, that stuff matters a lot.

And so that, to me is, you know, items number one, two and three. And in fact, I’m borrowing a lot of this from from my good friend and colleague here, Leah Stokes, who’s written a lot about this, which is that this is go this goes far beyond the individual level changes.

Like, yes, it’s good to, you know, reduce your consumption. It’s good to improve your energy efficiency, weatherizing your home, for example, electrification of your home, you know, solar plus battery, all of that’s important too. But because of the huge impact that politics has, that can play a much bigger role. It also, you know, it speaks to moving the blame a little bit. It’s not any individual’s fault for, you know, a lot of the climate issues that we are facing.

And we’ve thought talked so much about, you know, the oil and gas sector, about methane emissions. We’ve talked about the climate impacts of national oil companies. And, you know, this is not a problem that individuals, because of their habits, have created. We know that.

And so how do we push for the kinds of policies and changes that that can try to tackle the head of the problem, rather than all, each individually, trying to undertake what can be sometimes painful, you know, shifts in behavior, but engaging in the political process, that’s something that we can be doing. We should be doing whatever your you know, perspective may be, but getting more engaged can be kind of the big, big, big thing.

Then the last thing I’ll say is like, you know, again, I’m a teacher, so there’s education. And you know, education is a big part of it, getting interested in the energy systems, learning about some of the newer products that are out there, the newer techniques that are out there, just starting to find the energy realm to be interesting, I think, can be vastly rewarding. It’s something that is really cool.

Me, as a parent of two little kids, I talk about energy all the time. There’s little energy books and getting kids involved in understanding, you know, the energy system is important so we understand what’s going on, and we know what kind of things we’re facing and how to tackle it, and all the different, you know, flavors of pizza and ice cream that we can use to to solve this issue.

And so education is a big, big part of the story, and something that anybody can do try to get involved in something and learn more about it, and try to get more interested in how we produce and consume energy as humans. And then you can start to, like I was saying at the top of our program, like you could start to get fascinated by the wonder of how humans have harnessed energy, and it is pretty amazing. And the more you learn about it, I think the more you can get plugged in.

Well, I really appreciate it. And before we go, I wanted to ask you one last question about like, who would you put up on your Mount Rushmore of climate change heroes that you know have been stars to you.

There’s a personal one I mentioned my, you know, professor that really got me into this, Graciela Chichilnisky. She was so huge in getting me involved in this space and fought this fight, you know, very early on. So she’s a big one for me. You know, my advisor as a PhD student, who really got me thinking more deeply about, you know, the challenges of oil and gas for governance. So Michael Ross is his name. He’s a prophet UCLA. He’s certainly up there.

And then, you know, I was a college student when Al Gore was was starting to, you know, really make the strong push towards, you know, climate communication. So Al Gore is still somebody that, that I think of is, is up there. And then two others that, you know, more recently.

One is my colleague, you know, Leah Stokes, who really has done a fantastic job in communicating the climate issues, and Katherine Hayhoe, who has done a phenomenal job in communicating climate science to people. So you know, those five, even though Mount Rushmore has four, there’s there’s, that’s kind of it for me, a lot of it’s personal, and some of it’s, it’s broader in scope.

Well, we had Katherine Hayhoe on the program a while back, and it was great to have a chance to chat with her. And yeah, I listened to that episode. Yeah, it was a good one. I had a chance to, you know, shake hands with Al Gore in at COP28 and in Dubai. And I felt like he gave such a forceful presentation of on the climate.

I felt like, geez, if we had more. Communication of this, of this type, certainly when he ran for president, I think he would have won had he been that sharp on the stump. And then I think just in politics in general, I did not feel that Kamala Harris really made the case for the environment in running for office. I think it was one of those things that wasn’t polling that well, so they just decided not to touch it.

You know, you’ve struck on something that’s become kind of the word of the day these days, which is authenticity. And I think it’s interesting that what you said about Al Gore in particular, like it’s wild that he wasn’t being his authentic self, I think, in that campaign, in in 2000 and you know, if he had stuck to that, and I have heard him speak many times.

I’ve met him personally, shook his hand when I was a professor at Georgetown and and he has a remarkable ability to communicate with people. He has a preaching style, form of both kind of tone and rhetoric. And if it was that Al Gore, I think it would have been a whole different story. And, you know, his Climate Reality Project right now, and his way of how he’s training, you know, the next generation of climate communicators like he could have been authentic to himself.

And I think that would have been a great thing. And so authenticity is something that I think we’re valuing a lot more now, and rather than the, you know, curated management consultant kind of platform that I think, you know, unfortunately, you know, Vice President Harris got, got pigeonholed into, not to mention the very short campaign.

But, you know, authenticity, there’s something to be said about that, and that resonates with voters a little bit too much advertising, Madison Avenue stuff, versus just give us the straight scoop and really speak from your heart. And I didn’t like, you know, we didn’t hear enough of that about the climate. And there’s a very good case to be made, and it just wasn’t being made.

Exactly. And there are so many cases that could be made that are local, so many cases that, you know, hit at the heart of many communities and problems that people are facing themselves, with respect to climate issues or I mean, there’s so many ways to make this be something that you can, you know, as a politician, talk to people about that resonates with voters, and you just Have to not manicure it. It has to be, you know, meeting people where there are and that kind of thing, and drawing on your own experiences.

And it’s something that has resonated well for lots of politicians, we think about this internationally that have done this well. But, yeah, it’s interesting. It’ll be interesting to see the next few years how campaigns shake out and how people may become less beholden to the Madison Avenue style of political campaigning.

You know, we certainly hope that out of the ashes rises of Phoenix and in a good way. So thank you so much for being on the show. Love you know, follow you going forward and tell the audience how they can connect with you and support the work that you’re doing.

Absolutely and I really appreciate this again, Matt, and all the work that you’re doing, this is the climate communication, right? I mean, this is a key part of it, folks who want to find me, you know, i@pashamadavi.com our initiative is at 2035, initiative. So 2035, initiative.

All one word.com, and then I have my lab as well, and you can look at the website, and I’m on blue sky for those interested, i@pashamodavi.com so you know lots of places to find me on the internet for the folks that are interested and happy to connect with anybody in your audience.

Okay, Well, thank you so much, and kudos to you for the great work that you’re doing. And look forward to collaborating with you as we move forward, likewise.

Thanks a lot, Matt, thank you.

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